PPACA: An Apocalyptic Historical Allegory

History has to live with what was here,

clutching and close to fumbling all we had––

it is so dull and gruesome how we die,

unlike writing, life never finishes.

-Robert Lowell, from History

In Eastern Idaho, a remote and disused island on the sea of the American geographical consciousness, is a place called Teton Canyon. Through this canyon runs a river of modest but serious size, called Teton River. At a certain spot, a short walk from US-20, sits a massive earthen mound, dotted with prairie weeds and hermetic pines, towering hundreds of feet above the canyon floor and providing a willful bank for the river. This spot is called Teton Dam.

Like the pleasant ruins of a tiny Babel, it persists as a reminder of the arrogance of engineers, the impatience of bureaucrats, the credulity of workmen. Indeed the short story of the Teton Dam, it seems to me, would not be out of place in the catalog of as great and distinct a writer as Wendell Berry: though the basalt bedrock was predicted to be too porous a foundation, though fissures big as caves developed as it was erected, construction persisted. Around about noon on June 5, 1976, as the reservoir was filling for the first time, the entire right-third of the dam collapsed.

So it stands today, the remaining two thirds of the Teton Dam, a strange monument to the eleven human and thirteen thousand bovine lives lost in the flood created by its failure. It has never been repaired; there has never been any serious proposal for its reconstruction; no dam has been built elsewhere on the river to replicate its intended function.

Perhaps it has never been rebuilt or replaced because its design was never a sound one, or because it was from the first more a child of a consuming industrial ambition than an attempt to meet an exigent material need. Maybe its crippled edifice looms today just as it did thirty-seven years ago simply because it can be easily ignored and readily forgotten. Thousands of miles from the nation’s capitol and hundreds from the nearest city, it is but a minor and remote mark upon the record of the Bureau of Reclamation (a minor and remote wing of the Department of the Interior, itself an adopted child of the Department of Defense).

In an age where the cult is the State, such an end, it seems to me, is the best we may hope for once we have lent our gold and our faith to such magnanimous czars.