What is the truth we find in The Onion's very funny post "'There Is Beauty In Decay,’ Says Head Of Federal Highway Administration While Surveying Nation’s Crumbling Roads"? The fact is this: The world around you will make no sense if you do not understand or recognize the fundamental economic changes that have occurred over the past 40 years. Many speak about maintaining our infrastructure with little idea of the kind of post-War economy that built is no longer in existence.

The system we have at present is useless when it comes to projects that do not offer returns in the near future. Every part and point of our current economy is structured for the protection and inflation of asset values. This is why after the crash of 2008, the money spent on the exotic quantified easing program (the government bought nearly $4 trillion worth of bonds not to support the real economy but the fictions of the stock market) far surpassed that directed toward classical countercyclical fiscal expenditure ($832 billion).

The proper maintenance of, say, our huge highway system, 90 percent of which was paid for by the government, demands reverting to the kind of state and Keynesian (or backdoor socialist) policies that made it possible. Yes, Eisenhower was a Republican, but he was not a neoliberal (the form of governance that dominates our times—Greece, Flint, housing bubbles, so on). And sadly, without a cultural revolution along the lines of Bernie Sanders (and there is a part of me that believes such a revolution will not happen without a catastrophe of the scale of World War Two), that is not happening anytime soon. The best we can do with our crumbling infrastructure is indeed to enjoy the beautiful ways it's decaying.

Last note: It is curious that the Talking Heads's "Nothing But Flowers" was released in the years neoliberal governance was established...