Ride the San Bernardino to Los Angeles Metrolink line someday. Get a cup of coffee. Sit at the top of one of the cars and look out the window. Don’t read your book or use your laptop or cell phone or whatever you brought. Just look out the window.

What you see might startle you. Perhaps your reaction will be to quickly forget about it, think about nicer things. Ride the same stretch of the Metrolink a few more times – etch the images in your memory. Then, ride other Metrolink routes. Riverside to Orange County, Orange County to Los Angeles, and when you think you’re ready go Los Angeles to Lancaster on the Antelope Valley line.

What you’ll find is this: The United States is dead. The dream, the thought, the promise, they are all dead. There is no longer any shred of reality in the U.S. to match the idea of the U.S. If you operate under the premise that ours was founded as a land of ideas, of responsibility, of beauty, of dreams, then you’ll have to admit that those things no longer exist. They’ve been slowly replaced by new ideals: cheap, fast, hugely profitable and then abandoned.

Riding the Metrolink around Southern California gives you the ability to see a lot of territory at once and so be able to make some good generalizations. It’s not like riding in your car down the freeway. There you’re hemmed in by the freeway’s walls. On the train you can sit up high and see everything up close. It enables you to see quickly the many fads that have rolled over America like a wave.

The first thing that jumps out is the swimming pools. Everyone has one and none of them seem to be used, many of them are empty. Fifteen to twenty years ago some marketing genius created the need, hucksters sold people on them (”Your property values will double!”) and they were installed.

That’s just the surface though. And you can see a lot of surface as you ride the Metrolink: destroyed suburbs, dead farmland (the small amount left), jails, landfills, boarded-up businesses, and a lot trash, everywhere you look the detritus of people’s daily lives piles up.

It’s funny. As you ride around you can’t shake the feeling that you’re riding through some other country after a decade or two of war has ravaged the population. Eastern Europe looks better than this – that is not hyperbole.

After the Metrolink trip take a day or so and drive around Orange County and Los Angeles County. Look for redemption, something in the surrounding culture that will make the desolation you’ve just witnessed seem justified, or at least explainable.

Once you’re done looking at the regular malls, the strip malls, the chain restaurants and grocery stores, the liquor stores and convenience stores, the cul-de-sacs and suburban developments, the beach developments, the dirty pollution-tainted beaches, the non-existent park system, the un-ending concrete and asphalt you’ll quickly realize that what you saw on the Metrolink wasn’t an anomaly. It was the truth. And it was it staring you right in the eyes, pleading.