First, let me offer my regrets that I haven't seen this thread until this morning. Of late, a lot of my time has, by necessity, been spent at employment-related sites, and the rancor, polarization and partisanship displayed there would make the formative days of the Amtrak forum (which I often cite as a fine job of moderation and development) look tame.
Let's be honest, as well, and admit that a lot of us here have strong political/ideological beliefs, and the railroad, by its very nature, cannot avoid being swept into that controversy.
To summarize my take, it might be a good idea to point out that journalism, like any other field of endeavor, has a history. A perusal of early issues of Railway Age, for example, reinforces the point that at the turn of the Twentieth Century, no journalist of any stature would deviate from the religious and nationalistic mainstream of the day.
I would cite the emergence of opinion leaders like Mencken, Lippmann and some of the leading members of Franklin Roosevelt's inner circle as key players in the breakaway from a journalistic consensus still geared to an America not fully urbanized, industrialized, and secular.
After World War II, the "mainstream media" as we knew it in the 1960's continued to evolve. While it rightfully divorced itself from the last vestiges of the former consensus, and embraced the policies of equal human rights and freedom of expression, and made a great impact among the young and better-educated, it also came to be viewed as overly friendly to the broad-spectrum left-of-center ideology embodied in the Democratic Party's reconciliation with a campus-spawned radicalism.
And this, in turn, led to the emergence of a number of conservative strains, everything from the Libertarian movement, similarly spawned on campus, to the theocratic doctrines of the Religious Right, some of which gained an equal footing with what had previously billed itself as the only game in town.
And the polarization grew, and in the process, due to its espousal of the sacrifice of individual mobiliy (freedom) for supposed common benefit, the HSR option, by its very nature, became linked to the thinking of a lot of the people on the speaker's left. while the few remaining major railroads revived themselves (with a rare example of well-placed public sector participation) but also came to see themselves as highly-visible targets for an Administration clearly viewed as linked to a hostile ideology.
Somewhere, under all this mess, lies an opportunity to return the entire rail industry, both passenger and freight, to a pre-eminent position, but the nature of the industry will make this very difficult to achieve without upsetting any number of components which are still working very well. Hopefully, this can be accomplished in a manner similar to the technological/information boom in the wake of the AT&T breakup.
But all but the youngest of our membership are liklely to see only the early stages of that great story; and the woods are full of tigers (and more than a few squirrels) with other ideas.
Last edited by 2nd trick op on Wed Mar 17, 2010 11:14 pm, edited 7 times in total.
What a revoltin' development this is! (William Bendix)
