Death Wish

September 27, 2004
John Tierney's piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine ("The Autonomist Manifesto") can only be interpreted as a sign that this country is really in trouble. When the newspaper of record promotes the idea that suburban sprawl is a great thing, you can conclude that America has a death wish.

Tierney invokes the ideas of two libertarian crazies currently functioning as chief shills for the status quo: Randall O'Toole and Peter Huber. O'Toole, of the one-man Thoreau Institute, has been inveighing against railroads and the New Urbanism in recent years. He regards motoring as the ultimate libertarian right and public good and any attempt to modify America's extreme car dependency as an "elitist" plot.

Huber, author of the remarkably snotty and idiotic book Hard Green, argues that virtually all modern ecological activism and policy have been not just a waste of time but have produced only negative results. Huber writes: "We discern no ineluctable tie at all between nature's decline and humanity's."

That the New York Times would pimp for the positions of these two assholes demonstrates our culture's desperate determination to resist change that circumstances will impose on us whether we like it or not. After all, Tierney, O'Toole, and Huber's notions about the wonderfulness of our entropic lifestyle are based on the assumption that it can continue. Events, meanwhile, clearly show that the price of prolonging our sick dependency on cars and the oil they require will be the blood of American soldiers shed in the sands of Iraq and other oil-rich places we are compelled to secure and defend.

My own sense of things is that the American public is deeply conflicted over the choice we face -- to live differently or to struggle to maintain the previous investment in our drive-in utopia -- and the Times article indicates that the public will fail to resolve this internal conflict. The result will be a descent into economic hardship and political turbulence here in the US. We will flail and convulse instead of getting our house in order. America will have a long and costly tantrum, and we will emerge from it a lesser nation isolated in our hemisphere.

Comments

[aj]

Looks like it's time to play Follow The Funding again.

O'Toole is one of those people linked to the Coors-Family- funded Independence Institute -- his 'Center for the American Dream,' explicitly all about automotive mobility and home ownership, is linked to them and hosted at the same site.

The trustees are like a who's who of Colorado conservatives including right-wing talk radio hosts, contributors to GOP Senate campaigns (one in particular, Jessica Corry's, using the issue of 'property rights' and 'zoning' -- although paradoxically she does quote an anti-WalMart push as a 'success'--but I read that as a code word for anti-Smart Growth measures.), real-estate types, NRA lobby loons as the head of research...it goes on and on.

But make no mistake -- this institute is like any number of GOP 'culture war' carpetbaggers that take soft money to produce lame-duck 'research' that dupes the credible and distracts from the real issues.

As a commenter on Planetizen said in regards to their rather strident conference held in Washington earlier this year, these people play off other people's fears to gain power -- a common thread of most GOP culture war movements whose real goal is to keep the status quo - and profits - in place. (If you don't drive, the terrorists win!)

These people are distracting from the genuine issues and their sophistry ought rightly ought to be ignored, but the fact is, like most GOP outfits they are better organized. I wish there was a Carville and Begala war room type operation for Peak Oil and Smart Growth - it really needs one.

[RL]

Since when is publishing a piece about contemporary issues in public policy 'pimping' and 'promoting?'

Other than printing the thoughts of others, who happen to disagree with yours, what has the New York Times done to deserve your distain?

And you, superciliously calling the author of Hard Green "snotty" is a textbook example of irony.

[aj]

RL, it's entirely warranted because they, like their GOP funders, have stepped over the line of honest civic debate and have stooped into ad-hominem attack territory.

It would be one thing to do a well-reasoned critique of aspects of Smart Growth or New Urbanism free of slant or sophistry, but it's entirely another thing when, at a Washington conference last year organized by the Center for the American Dream, the pro-Smart/New Urbanist side was subjected to various epithets straight from the Ann Coulter playbook:

"quacks"
"smart growth wackos"
"evil bastards"
"a bunch of eggheads"
"a bunch of lying jerks"
"damnable liars"
"pointy-headed intellectual fascists" (this was by far the most repeated moniker)
"pointy-headed intellectual bastards" (pointy-headed was a big theme...)
"a bunch of commies"
"the bad guys"
"busy-bodies advocating latte towns"
and my personal favorite...
"a bunch of elitist, volvo-driving, brie-cheese eating blowhards"

...as noted by Chris Cooper of the American Planning Association.

http://www.planetizen.com/oped/cmt_item.php?id=990

[Kevin Carson]

There's a link posted to the article at Reason Hit&Run today, with a very engaging comment thread. Some very astute comments by joe, an urban planner who lives in Boston. You should check it out.

[Justin Henderson]

As if the substance of Tierney's piece were not infuriating enough, his smarmy, low-rent-Dave-Barry tone made me want to vomit across my keyboard.

How minivan patronage ever became "cute" and Randall O'Toole's bizarre prattlings ever fell under Barry's sterile, Isn't-that-sumpthin'? worldview, I guess only dipshits like Tierney could ever know.

But it revealed a lot--too much--when Tierney noted that New Urbanists were the philosophical heirs of Corbusier. Namely, how surface was his research. It's like saying that, because they were both pre-20th Century Europeans, Newton was the ancestor ideological ancestor of Marx. Somebody who doesn't know ass from front can easily glaze his eyes over a statement so backward and wrong. Frighteningly, the Times seems to enjoy that sort of reader reaction.

[Justin Henderson]

Still, I have to note the foolishness of linking Tierney's or O'Toole's work to the GOP. Tierney writes in the New York Times, for chrissakes. And O'Toole's craven nonsense exceeds the bounds of party politics. Wendell Cox, maybe, but O'Toole? He's closer to unfrozen caveman than Tom Delay.

[Glen]

Mr. Kunstler, please get a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The image of Irving R. Levine will then be complete.

Thank you and have a nice day. :-0

[Matt edens]

Hmmm, as annoying as this is, I have to say I find a fair number of "smart growth" advocates as annoying as Jim finds many environmentalists. Starting the terminology - if you're going to toss around terms like "smart" growth and "master" planning, don't be frickin shocked when some people suggest that sounds elitist.

And, frankly, I don't get to keyed up over the greenfield fights - I live in the inner city and have enough problems to contend with - and often find myself arguing with the very same knuckleheads who worry so much about sprawl (Jim's bit about his experience with Saratoga's "Open Space Project" - been there, done that...). And Tierney did make one very valid point related to that:

"Their goal of restoring old-fashioned city neighborhoods sounds noble, but those old neighborhoods and their transit systems were not built by planners at regional authorities imposing their visions of how people should live and travel. They were built by housing developers and private streetcar and subway companies responding to their customers' desires in an era when politicians were content to guide development with fairly simple zoning codes"

Frankly, I think the sprawl busters lay far too much blame on the developers and not enough on the planners (although I give Jim a good bit of credit calling the profession out). After all suburbia didn't crawl from the primordial muck of it's own accord. There was some "higher power" who gave it form (and I don't mean God...).

[Randall Ghent]

This is what I sent off as a letter to the NYT Magazine today...

DETROIT VS. VENICE

In extolling the virtues of car culture [The Autonomist Manifesto, Sept. 26], John Tierney's false populism relies on a cabal of discredited libertarian ideologues, while branding all critics as elitist. It's a no-brainer that people choose to drive in a world built for and around the car. In terms of convenience, it's entirely predictable that the alternatives will fall behind when they are tacked on as an afterthought to a car-based system. But reluctant drivers such as Tierney might do better than to call their enslavement "autonomy."
The real issue is whether compact and lively carfree communities can offer a viable future alternative, with an improved quality of life, sense of place and sense of community. Just as smoking and non-smoking sections in a restaurant offer practical alternatives for both persuasions, why not offer carfree and car-dominated neighborhoods side by side, and let the public choose? Let us judge how well Detroit stacks up to Venice. Only then will we find where true autonomy lies.

Randall Ghent
World Carfree Network
Prague, Czech Republic

[Laurence Aurbach]

"Their goal of restoring old-fashioned city neighborhoods sounds noble, but those old neighborhoods and their transit systems were not built by planners at regional authorities imposing their visions of how people should live and travel."

Right, I guess Baron Haussmann was just sitting in a smoke-filled room playing cards or something, not executing a citywide reconstruction plan of Paris. And the McMillan commission that created the modern Mall in Washington D.C. and its regional system of parks and parkways -- they didn't create anything that's really valued by Americans, did they? Or Charles Eliot's Boston Metropolitan Park System in the 1890s?

In fact, most of the dearly loved historic towns and cities in the world were built using some design and planning rules. That's true whether you're talking about the Greco-Roman colonies of the first millenium BC, to the Islamic and Mediterranean cities of the first century AD, to the medieval bastides of western Europe, to the Nolens and Unwins of 20th century America. The rules were simpler than what we have today, but they were definite and determinative.

If you want to believe that planning is inherently evil, and that great urban places developed absolutely spontaneously, you can go ahead and ignore the evidence of history.

[BG]

Laurence Aurbach has a point. Planning is per se neither good nor bad. Like just about everything else, it varies. Robert Moses's destruction of neighborhoods was bad. The grid plan in Manhattan, however, is a very good thing indeed: it is predictable, easy to get around, and because of these factors it makes Manhattan the ideal city for commerce. Moreover, planning is not a 20th-century innovation, and earlier times were hardly devoid of it. Manhattan's grid was laid out not in 1900, not in 1875, not in 1850, but in the famous Commissioners' Plan of 1811.

To get back to the main point of this discussion, however: America's car culture is unsustainable on a global scale, and therefore SOMETHING has to give.