The Weekly Screed (#530)

“… It Takes a Train to Cry”
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — I cannot begin to understand why — in the name of Casey Jones — Republicans hate trains. Did none of them ever have a Lionel layout in the basement? Has not one of them ever sat frozen with foreboding in the movies as the train in “Shadow of a Doubt” blacks out the sun and brings into Young Charlie’s little town her charming, murdering uncle? Such a cool scene. How could you not love this stuff?

OK, I admit. I go back a long way with trainlove. My grandpa, Swede, worked 50 years for the Milwaukee Road. Every year, he got a free trip — always all the way across the state, to Milwaukee, to attend, ironically, the auto show. Once, he took me along. I sat by the window, glimpsing strange people living their lives in towns whose names I’d never heard of, whose existence strained my imagination, as I discovered for the first time, at speeds up to 50 miles an hour, how breathtakingly huge the world is.

But maybe the greatest ride of my life was a train trip to Chicago, with my eighth-grade class from the Franklin School. In Chicago, we hit all the obligatory museums. But the train was the thing. I suspect we all behaved quite well. But there was this sense that we’d been set totally free. On the train, we were cut off from every restraint by which we’d always lived. I roamed from car to car, talked with kids I barely knew, hobnobbed and socialized like Cary Grant flirting with Eva Marie Saint in “North By Northwest.”

Wow! Parentless and pubescent on the Empire Builder to the Hog Butcher for the World, the City of the Big Shoulders! How could you not love that?

Ever since the Golden Spike, trains have defined the American character. They’re the freight-handler of our beliefs, our dreams and our romance. The first full-reel silent film made in the USA was “The Great Train Robbery.” Produced by Thomas Edison!

The first really American song ever composed (ultimately in more than 80 different versions) was “John Henry.” Of course, it’s a railroad song, about the grim, dangerous and heroic digging of the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Line. The second really American song was, coincidentally, a riverboat song, called “Stagger Lee.” We didn’t get around to airplane songs ‘til Peter, Paul & Mary, just about a century later.

I grew up hating the New York Yankees, mainly because they were the one team featured, every damn Saturday, on the “CBS Game of the Week.” But I tuned in anyway, for Dizzy Dean, the color guy next to PeeWee Reese, in hopes that he’d sing my favorite all-time train song — which, of course, has about five hundred different verses.

“… Oh, listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar,
“As she glides along the woodland, o’er the hills and by the shore.
“Hear the mighty roar of the engines and the lonesome hobo’s call;
“You’re trave’lin’ through the jungle, on the Wabash Cannonball…”

The Cannonball was an imaginary train, based — some say — on the Ireland, Jerusalem, Australian & Southern Michigan Line built by Paul Bunyan’s brother, Cal. This juggernaut, 700 cars long, was so fast it reached its destination an hour before it left the station. And today? Still cannonballing along, out into space and across the galaxy.

I laugh. I cry. I sing along. I fantasize! What’s wrong with Republicans?

There’s not one worthwhile musician in the history of the USA who hasn’t sung a train song. Jimmy Rodgers, the great bluegrass artist known as “the singing brakeman,” crooned almost nothing but train songs. The Monkees had “Last Train to Clarksville.” The Beatles had “Day-Tripper.” Elvis sang “Mystery Train.” Coltrane? “Blue Train.” And the Stones? Well, they recorded “Silver Train,” but listen again to “Going Home.” If that ain’t a train song, nothing is.” Johnny Cash? Are you kidding? And… there isn’t a self-respecting fiddler on earth who hasn’t cut his teeth on “Orange Blossom Special.”

Whenever I have some annoying tune stuck in my head, repeating endlessly, my antidote is Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” from, ironically, “Highway 61 Revisited.” I sing (off-key) the train song and I’m cured.

“… Oh, don’t the moon look good, mama, shinin’ through the trees,
“And don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flaggin; down the double-E…”

How could even a cheapskate Tea Party scold not love this stuff?

And yet, just since the election, three governors, Kasich in Ohio, Walker in Wisconsin and Scott in Florida, have sent back billions of federal bucks, killing thousands of local jobs, that were intended for high-speed rail projects. High speed-rail — notwithstanding that it runs on electricity — is a gas! Send these guys on the Eurostar from Paris to London, through the Tunnel. Or put them on the Helvetian Cannonball from Geneva to Interlachen. Or pack them into the shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagoya, where, suddenly, out the window, Mount Fuji fills the sky in godly symmetry.

How could even a GOP bean-counter with a permanent cob up his ass not break down at all the wonders passing by — at 180 mph — as he dines on haute cuisine?

Another governor, Chris Christie, killed a new rail tunnel from New Jersey to the Big Apple — even though, after centuries, train service between Jersey and Manhattan barely exists. Chris says, hey, just catch a bus to Camden at the Port Authority on 42nd Street. The Port Authority? The pimp, pickpocket, hooker and white slavery capital of North America? Chris? Why not just ship every terminal patient on earth to the lowest level of Dante’s Hell in hopes of catching the elevator to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Purgatory?

Has Gov. Chris never once watched that scene in “Casablanca,” in the Gare de Lyon, in the rain, as Rick reads Ilsa’s “Dear John” letter: “… I cannot go with you or ever see you again… Just believe that I love you.”

Oh, Ingrid, yes. I love you. I only wish John Boehner did, too!

The Republicans somehow believe we can live full, rich, romantic lives without this sort of stuff. They think we can’t afford trains, not the Orient Express, the Silver Streak nor the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. They want us to give up everything that trains, for 140 years, have evoked in our wildest dreams of wanderlust and adventure.

C’mon, you tightwads and killjoys! C’mon Paul Ryan! We need this stuff.

You guys never heard of the Little Engine That Could?