CARTHAGO DALENDA EST
Dear Diary: Despite the intermittently obscure ramblings that I feel I must tender to mercies of Posterity and the snickers and gestures of those who read, but do not understand -- and to those who only hear bad summaries from those who read but who do not understand -- my goal here is to carry on in the thankless task I have set myself.
I have decided that at least in the upcoming elections I shall not run again.
First, I would have to actually care about the people I would represent. In general, I can summarize my feelings on that matter with a cartoon popular with my fellow workers back in the day when I was a lowly clerk at an obscure Federal agency:
every day in every way
forces me to add
to the unfortunately long
list of people who can
just kiss my fat ass
This ought not to be taken to mean that I hate everyone, that I love no one, that I am an emotionally nonhuman sociopath, that I think everyone's out to get me (though not all, clearly enough are), or even that I'm not getting paid enough to critique finely-considered master plans, or even rank populist idiocy. There are some things that nobody can pay anyone enough to do, so I guess I have to do them for free.
Noblesse Oblige, as the French used to say: "Nobility has its obligations". Even the worst aristocrat in the most benighted backwoods shithole has to understand, even if you are universally despised there is still the obligation to work for the commonwealth and happiness of the masses. If the only way you can do that is to hire extra troops to go out and kick some ass, then that is what you do. If all you need to do is sit back and watch a record harvest come in, year after year as if never would there be a bad year or string of bad years, you can do that too.
But the difference between a good ruler and a bad ruler may simply be that the good ruler has good advisors and the bad ruler hasn't got anything but bad advice, and the worst of bad advice is bad advice that sounds good. For those who understand things best when they are an illustrative fable, rather than short declarative sentences, please see the Hans Christian Andersen story about the Emperor's New Clothes.
As for me, I shall try to limit my remarks to the type that can be understood by people who can't be made to understand with anything other than simple declarative sentences, whether the reason for that is that they have insufficient English, or have severe memory deficits that disable them from understanding grammar more complex than simple declarative sentences, or who perhaps have some other cognitive disorder that makes them incapable of comprehending allegory, analogy, metaphor, or even simile.
The Chinese master philosopher Confucius once told a very good, and hilarious, parable, very instructive in fact. But even Jesus the Nazirene found it too long and so in his phrasing it became "there are none so blind as those who would not see".
Yet even though "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink", it would be inhumane when living in a desert to not bother to take the horse to water, even if he's a mean horse that likes to bite and kick you.
Cato the Elder, a Roman stateman and a great orator, finished most of his speeches with the statement "Carthago Dalenda Est", or, "Carthage must be destroyed".
Carthage, of course, was Rome's great rival, and Carthage and Rome initially got along about as well as did the USA and Mexico, which is to say, not infrequently the robust trade and diplomatic niceties broke down when one side or the other launched either a trade war or outright military hostilities.
Eventually, Rome took Cato seriously on at least a few occasions, going so far at one time as to sow tons of salt into the fields of Carthage to destroy agriculture. Considering that the soldiers of the immense Roman legions were paid in salt, this was one of the most expensive military actions in recorded history, in terms of currency expended irrecoverably.
Eventually, a bit after the Goths sacked the city of Rome and brought the Roman Empire of the West down into the Dark Ages, the Vandals had their kingdom's capital at Carthage.
The Vandals, it might be noted, stood in the same relationship to Rome (or Carthage for that matter) as the Mexican Drug Cartels of the lawless northern regions of Mexico stand to the central government of the City of Mexico, DF.
And through the Romans never did quite get over the sack of Rome, now and then they used to send out punitive raids against the Vandals, who mostly didn't care all that much. Sure, the Romans might wipe out an entire regiment. That did nothing about the whole nation of Vandals, who almost all raised all of their children to be warriors, or the mothers of many warriors.
And in recent days, not unlike in the Roman days, US forces went after the Vandals moving huge amounts of sincerely destructive methamphetamine from "superlabs" in Mexico to hopeless losers in the various major cities of the US. It's a start, but just a drop in the bucket, and there's more where they came from. Yet for now there are 303 less narcotraficantes of "La Familia" running around loose in the USA holding together the vast and far-reaching tentacles of the real government of Mexico, the transnational crime cartels.
Carthago Dalenda Est.
Moving right along, in terms of other things that need to be destroyed, let me write briefly about the current building of the Aspen Hill Library.
I must reiterate that I was living here when it was built, and in fact watched it being built.
My dad once told me about how his folks in Kansas dealt with a highly variable water supply from the "crick" that ran by the farm. A "crick" is a river in rainy weather, a ditch in droughts, and in between those extremes it runs a small and fairly steady -- though usually muddy -- stream of water.
The Kansas farmers could have drilled wells, but in that part of Kansas, the first thing a drill would hit would be the so-called "Hardman Seep", a shallow but very broad layer of oil. Then you could drill through about 500 feet of limestone and hit the Ogallala Aquifer and access an underground lake spanning half of the continent, but that was expensive and a lot of work.
So, the Kansas farmers would go down into the flood plain of the creek, and dig a fairly large and shallow pit, and in some places they'd dig it about as deep as they could go without striking oil. Then they'd line the bottom with clay, and fill it the rest of the way with sand and chunk gravel, and cover it over. While the stream itself wasn't allowed to feed it, the stream fed the water table, which generally remained even in the dry seasons. The water table would permeate into these covered pits, cleaned by the earth around the pits, and clear cool fresh water would fill these "accumulator wells", and be stored below the frost line and be covered against dry-season evaporation. Year round, there would be a lot of water in very predictable quantities.
Back when they were building the Aspen Hill Library, Dad said something like "Hmmph, back in Kansas we would have called that basement an accumulator well". I asked him what he meant, and he pointed out the lay of the land, and told me that little story about how the Kansas farmers made sure they always had plenty of clean water.
Dad used to get on the nerves of some folks, because he'd walk right over to folks and start talking to them, ask them what they were doing, and he'd tell them something about him being just a simple Kansas farmboy, and of course most of these "damn fool Easterners" didn't have the slightest idea of what that meant to almost anyone who served in WWII.
And then the old man would tell them some long drawn-out story, such as the one about how the Kansas farmers assured themselves of an uninterruptable water supply.
That was his non-confrontational way of telling the guys building the Library that they were building a guaranteed wet basement of epic proportions and that it would plague them for as long as rain fell on the earth in these parts.
They didn't listed to him then, and they're not about to listen to me now. But even if you can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink, it's inhumane in a desert to not lead that horse to water, even if he's a mean horse that likes to bite and kick.
Attempting to make any improvements whatsoever to the Aspen Hill Library at the present site will only be throwing bad money after good, for a building that is over 40 years old and was designed with a half-life of 40 years, and with perfectly good architecture for a well-drained location having been built smack in the middle of a "crick".
Regardless of the weather, and regardless of the time of year, they have to pump about 60 gallons of water out of the basement of the Aspen Hill Library.
They're throwing bad money after good.
And coming soon, I will tell all about where to build the new Aspen Hill Library, in such a way and in such a place and for such reasons as should remove all debate about the Wheaton Library and the plans to move and rebuild it as the cornerstone of the Wheaton Central Business District.
I'll also tell you, soon, about where to put a huge new Police Substation for the Fourth District, as well as other public-sector facilities, and it will all fit right in with one of the really few actually grand and actually visionary Grand Visions of the Planning Board.
Moving right along to the Planning Board, there is significant resistance mounting -- in a year with elections coming that will place at risk the position of every elected County official and all of the jobs that they control -- to what many see as a policy of robbing the extant County residents to pay to attract new residents.
Washington Post reporter Miranda Spivack -- who by writing this article proves that it's actually possible that the Post may have hired a sane journalist at long last -- covers the issues fairly deeply in her article Hurdles to Montgomery 'smart growth' option: Some say proposal fails to go far enough, and others consider it unrealistic, Spivack, Miranda S, Washington Post, October 22, 2009.
For example,
[Montgomery Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson] proposes changing the county's Annual Growth Policy, which is updated every two years, to make development easier in areas where growth policy now discourages it because of congestion. His plan, under debate by the County Council, would reward developers who build near transit and create walkable, bikeable communities by giving them discounts and allowing them to avoid the usual requirements to fix congested roads nearby or make improvements so their developments don't add to traffic.
Simply being willing to point out this glaring insanity -- I suspect Alzheimers -- would tend to indicate something like the presence of journalistic integrity not overpowered by either blatant Union shilling and partisan propaganda or an incipient career in Architecture and Urban Planning.
Hanson says:
"Knowing that the population and tastes are changing in terms of what people want in living style, we think it makes a lot of sense to move from a system that has been historically based on what you can't do, based on capacity of mainly roads, to a system that focuses on what you ought to do and where you ought to do it," Hanson said one recent day as he prepared for another marathon session with the County Council committee reviewing the Annual Growth Policy.
Ah, we appear to be talking about one side of one issue, and another side of another generally-unrelated issue, don't we, Mr Hanson?
It's difficult at the best of times to sort out from the double-talk of a politician the word-salad of encroaching senility, but this is one of the best demonstrations I've seen of why you have to keep a close eye on the mental processes of "grey eminences" such as Mr Hanson. Otherwise, you wind up with excesses such as the conferral of "visiting professor Emeritus" titles on Kurt Vonnegut Jr, who in later years tended to be sheparded into classrooms and not allowed to speak to his students and fans, because if he opened his mouth everyone would know that however strangely sane his mad works of literature had been in the crazy times in which he was a cutting-edge young writer, in his dotage he was in fact just batshit crazy.
As to Mr Hanson's statement, there is no question that the County ought to address the issue of what ought to be built where, and for what reasons one ought to build a certain way in certain types of places.
Yet there absolutely has to be a limit on when something can be built, and there absolutely have to be prerequisites to any building.
Or, to deconstruct the impermissible conflations of the evidently demented (or perhaps just very tricksy), "just because high-density transit-centric mixed-use walkable development is good, doesn't mean you can build it without pre-existing transit, adequate roads, sufficient water and sanitary sewer, and plenty of schools, libraries, medical facilities, and buses".
The only excuse for building a "science city" and claiming that it's "transit centric" when there can't possibly be sufficient transit actually operating there for at least 15 years, is to admit that you're lying by omision or are simply failing to think it through (or are batshit crazy or senile). The only excuse for building massive work-residence hubs with no public schools is immensely elitist and insulting to the public school, because that excuse is "oh, we don't need to build public schools there because all of the rich-intelligentsia scientific professionals will be sending their kids to Private Schools elsewhere".
See? There are a lot of implications -- dirty implications -- that are covered over by Mr Hanson's thoughtless and flippant remark, in the same way that a house-cat buries a stinky lump of excreted former tuna guts under sand in a litter-box.
As far as the cat is concerned, "out of sight, out of mind", but the owner knows better. They're the one that is going to have to clean up the litter-box, once it's so full of crap that there isn't any room for any more.
Moving right along once again, we have to note that it's not all about Mr Hanson or how he seems to think that most voters are too stupid to recognize a conflation of unrelated concepts.
County Council President Phil Andrews (of Gaithersburg, already congested and doomed to impassibility if the present proposals for the Gaithersburg West Master Plan are passed) says:
For the foreseeable future, most people in Montgomery County will continue to drive [...] I believe it is a critical measure of the quality of life, and it is a crucial one for many of our residents.
Of course, that doesn't begin to cover the simmering outrage beginning to percolate upwards from those of us who already live here -- an outrage which I assure everyone I intend to stoke until it boils over and burns anyone trying to keep a lid on it -- that the County seems to want to "earmark" all kinds of money towards one end, the end of throwing as much money as possible at Future Development in the model most profitable to Big Developers, at the expense of throwing any money at all in upgrading or mantaining infrastructure on the parts of the County that are already built out and long-settled.
In the words of the County Council rep for Potomac and Bethesda, Roger Berliner:
[Constituents ...] feel threatened by this county's embrace of smart growth and new urbanism [...] fed by a belief that a lifestyle of a suburban community is not respected and should not be respected."
In case the Astute Reader (as if there were one) doesn't know it, I am all over all of the "New Urbanism" blogs covering the region, and I see this myself, time and time again: the people flogging the blogosphere for "urban development" outright hate cars and people who drive them.
There's this sort of pathology working there, as best I can tell.
Look, I have lived in various cities and in all of those cities I have driven as necessary and have taken mass-transit as possible.
In Houston, when I was first there, they had loads of parking all over the place, and almost no buses, and none that ran on a real and predictable schedule. Later, that changed... but the city is still so large that for probably the majority of people, it's just not possible to get to anyplace other than work, maybe, without a car.
In Denver, in the mid-1990s, they had a really pretty good bus system, not that they actually needed it in most places. Still, for those making the long trek from Aurora to downtown Denver, the bus made sense and the bus was there. Yet if you wanted to go almost anywhere off of Colfax Avenue, a car was more than useful, and during the frequent blizzards, you had to be actually crazy to walk anywhere when the situation called for 4-wheel drive.
Here in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area were are very well served by almost as much mass-transit as is possible. And there are limits to how much mass-transit you can have.
Two years ago, speaking with the Bethesda Chevy-Chase Chamber of Commerce, evidently I convinced someone I was an idiot when they were talking up the White Flint expansion plan and wanted comparable overdevelopment along the Red Line metrorail line in their area of operations.
I asked them, "so, are there adequate mass-transit facilities?"
And they responded through their teeth, "we have five Metro Stations!"
I was taken aback by the anger. But it didn't answer the totality of the question I asked.
Those five stations are all on one line that was completed in the 1980s with an actual half-life of about 30 years and with a predicted half-life of 45 years based on far more aggressive maintenance and renovation than has actually occurred. The Red Line is running at or beyond capacity and far in excess of planned ridership, especially at those five stations.
Without really significant improvements in line capacity, adding more stations to that line does nothing to improve line capacity. If anything, it assures more beyond-expected ridership, and excess ridership invariably assures less opportunity, and higher costs, for maintenance and upgrades of the line.
And the Planning Board and their barking-dog New Urbanist pups want to quadruple the traffic, with no expansion of line capacity, and have all of that line traffic come online exactly at the half-life point where there's a 75 percent chance of cascade failure? The timing is about as silly as possible. Put a half million people on the train, and then put the train out of service -- in whole or in part -- for the next decade. I submit that this can't make sense to anyone who is not on drugs (legal or otherwise).
Reporter Miranda Spivak shows excellent aim when she hits the nail on the head:
The Planning Board has tried to make improving transit an ironclad guarantee for much new development. In July, when the board approved a proposed science city spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University, members were adamant that the development could not be built unless the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway bus or rail system is funded and built. Funding transit, however, is up to federal, state and local lawmakers who are struggling with large budget shortfalls, so the Planning Board can advocate it but can't create it.
Thus, the Planning Board is attempting to move forward in creating a potential clusterfuck of epic proportion potentially ruining the lives of tens of thousands of people, by promoting development utterly dependent and predicated upon a service over which they have absolutely no provenance nor control.
According to County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett, "The proposed 2009 Growth Policy includes assumptions and directions that I believe could significantly impair the quality of life in Montgomery County [...]"
I couldn't agree more.
And one of these fine days, when I'm feeling a bit more like sharing -- with Dear Diary, the Astute Reader, and anyone who happens to stumble onto this blog -- just how "mental" I am, I may have to write a little scenario in which these proposed Giant Beehives of Humanity become Vast Cemeteries of the Doomed.
I'll preview that with some remarks from the UN World Water Assessment Programme (2003) report Water for people, water for life: Executive summary:
The logic of urbanization is clear--those countries that urbanized most in the past forty years are generally those with the largest economic growth. Urban areas, generally, provide the economic resources to install water supply and sanitation, but they also concentrate wastes. Where good waste management is lacking, urban areas are among the world's most life-threatening environments (UNWWAP, 2003, p. 15).
More to come?
About the Library? About the Beehiving of Montgomery?
Could be...
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