Vol.24.2: THE AMERICAN AD-HOC-RACY

©2005 UrbisMedia

(Paraphrase)   “You know, sometimes when people get freedom they do crazy things with it.”Donald Rumsfeld at press briefing after the looting and anarchy in the capture of Baghdad

  “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon . . . into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile.” Condolezza Rice in the 9-11 Commission Hearings

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,” George W. Bush to Diane Sawyer on hurricane Katrina

Before spending some thirty years teaching grad students about city planning and urbanism I was for several years I was a professional urban planner.   Planning, I used to tell my students in the very first lecture in planning theory, is one way in which we might define ourselves as being “human.” This was not hubris about my field.   What I meant was this:   we humans are the only creatures in creation who have a sense of our future (and its limit).   Second, we seem to be the only ones that have goals for our future.   And third, we seem to be the only ones who try to make that future meet those goals.

Put another way, we humans are rationalists.   We use our brains and minds to try to understand the world, life, human behavior.   Call it being “scientific” if you will.   We try to acquire knowledge about what we want to act upon to try to shape our future.   If you know that action x causes result y, you can choose (or avoid) action x.   Choice , what we call thenormative side of planning, is also something that defines what makes us human.   Choosing actions is how we try to shape our lives, our environment, our future, to our goals and desires.   We engage in this sort of action when we are planning a picnic, our education, or our finances.   When we act as a city, a society, planning is more complicated because there are multiple (and differing) values involved.   But the process is essentially the same.

That is where politics intersects with planning.   Politics helps to choose among those values.   Since you can’t plan without choosing, planning is inherently a “political” (small “p”) act.   [Are you still with me here?]   So you can see how planning and politics can fit together. Something like this.

All of this together is what we call planning.   But here’s the main point of bringing all this up – it is rational , it is not based on belief, or just outright supposition .   It is based on knowledge   about the world, not how we would wish it to be.    

Take another look at those quotes above. They are not quotes about people who act rationally:   Rice denies that the plane scenario pre-dated 9-11 (not true); Rumsfeld flat out admits that he had no idea how de-Saddamized Iraqis might behave (Gen.Shinseki told him he needed twice the number of troops to control it, so he canned Shinseki); and Bush is flat wrong and making his excuse (the scientific models and articles have been around for years, even television documentaries showing burst levees).   These are things these “leaders” want us tobelieve , but they are not true.   If they indeed did not know the truth of what they said that isnon-rational behavior.   If the knew those statements not to be true, then they are lying, to themselves and us.   Actions taken on such untruths are what we call   irrational behavior .  

I allege that they know the truth, and so these people place PR (what you can make peoplebelieve is true ) over truth.   Political power can run for a long time on what you can make people believe .   Perception is often the result of deception.   That woman from Colorado whobelieves her son fighting in Iraq is protecting her from being forced to “wear a burkha” is not acting on knowledge, but her misapprehension plays into the administration’s politics.

Bush’s denial of knowledge, his irrationality, are becoming legendary.   Global warming, which might be implicated in the severity of hurricane Katrina—it is a very complicated interaction of variables—is “not yet proven” to Bush.   “Intelligent Design,” a smokescreen for “creationism” that was cocked up in some   Christian fundamentalist back room, deserves, according to Bush, to be “taught along with evolution” in the nation’s classrooms.   And moral beliefs trump applied knowledge in his opposition to stem cell research based on human embryos.

Since even the Second Law of Thermodynamics might not hold in another dimension, no knowledge is completely perfect.   But to act without knowledge, or worse, in defiance of it, is ad-hoc-ery, and stupidity.   This administration has bowdlerized scientific reports on the environment and on pharmaceuticals   to satisfy the profit interests of corporations.   When knowledge gets in the way of political interest, they “redact” it.

There is one other element of planning that is very much in our face these days.   These people are in office mainly because they have convinced enough voters that they can keep America safe and secure.   They have made enough believers out of enough voters to maintain their power.   But, more and more, they are being seen for the fools they really are.   Winging it with counterintuitive policies makes us less safe in the world.   And now, in our own country, they demonstrate an almost criminally negligent lassitude and indecisiveness.   Where was the rational, coordinated, contingency plan for an act of nature we knew to be dangerously imminent, whose course could be followed in the Doppler views on the Weather Channel?

This administration, already exposed for its incompetence and myopia in waging what it has mis-targeted as a “global war on terrorism” that is wrapped up in a wasteful and deadly preemptive strike against Iraq, now dithers and fusses while the citizens it is pledged to protect die in filth and for lack of sustenance.   Unable, or unwilling to drop supplies to its stranded citizens, the government were inexplicably incapable of going where news helicopters seemed to go with relative ease.   Meanwhile, a veritable imbecile placed as the head of FEMA told news reporters he was waiting for “official reports” from his people days after news footage indisputably showed the breadth and depth of the disaster. If America ever needed proof of the placement of belief and political calculus over solid information and scientific knowledge they now have it in the words and falsehoods of their “leaders.”  

At this writing it was announced that Gideons International was sending 40,000 bibles to New Orleans where many thousands remain stranded and in peril (wouldn’t just regular toilet paper do?).   This is the sort of mentality that keeps fools in power.   This is the sort of mentality that rather than employ intelligence and knowledge alleges that “ God is at work, and we are called by Him to Serve His Will. There was a purpose for Katrina, let us not fail to fulfill our duties.” [http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/] Don’t they ever wonder why God give us brains?   Is it only to be religious fatalists?   Are all those people in New Orleans and Mississippi supposed to be dead?

It is true that “the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry”; but those who choose to only pray are naked and helpless before the Category 5 winds of change.

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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.4.2005)