Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project.Ĭontemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.Īmerica went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.Ĭalifornia has not built a major dam in 40 years. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns - and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism.
We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements. Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?Ĭalifornia’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled.
The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno - and not yet a foot of track laid. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.ĭoes anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?Ĭalifornians tried to build a high-speed rail line. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions. Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around.