Editorials

“This is the story of a thousand people drinking Shirley Temples and smoking candy cigarettes, and they all think they’re in a back room with their Scotch and cigars.” 

Today’s exemplary text, spoken by an unnamed cynic, is from a new book by Phillip Nobel, Sixteen Acres, Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. It refers to something called 21st Century Town Meetings, organized by a well-meaning non-profit called AmericaSpeaks, whose uplifting charter can be found on the Internet.  

Martin Filler includes the quote in a dispiriting piece in the latest New York Review about four books which try to explain what’s been going on—and hasn’t been going on—with the Ground Zero site. The bottom line seems to be, in the prophetic words of Ada Louise Huxable written less than a week after the World Trade Center was bombed, that the debate has led to a “solution” in which “principle is lost and an epic opportunity is squandered.”  

One such town meeting was put on by some well-meaning organization, perhaps AmericaSpeaks, in the Morrison Room on the UC campus not too long after the bombing. The room was filled, standing room only, with articulate and creative people, many of whom had wonderful ideas about what to do with the site. We got into a very stimulating discussion with San Francisco landscape architect Topher Delany, who has designed some successful memorial gardens in places like hospitals. Excellent ideas, deeply relevant, were exchanged, along with business cards. Nothing came of it. Nothing ever comes of meetings like this, as the anonymous cynic knows well. 

Such assemblies have become the 21st century’s substitute for real democracy. Jesse Unruh, once speaker of the California Assembly, used to say that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Now “town meetings,” “charettes,” “scoping sessions,” “workshops” and “task forces” have become the soy milk of politics, a more accessible metaphor for Berkeley types than Shirley Temples and Scotch. They look a lot like the real thing, satisfying a lot of people that they’re taking part in the political process, but in the end what used to be called “the interests” always get what they want. 

The struggle over Berkeley’s Seagate Building is a good local example. Many well-meaning (there’s that word again) citizens labored for years over the Downtown Plan, which among other things created design standards for downtown Berkeley. Many more labored over the General Plan, which among other things was supposed to limit building height. The final design, which flouts the rules for both, was shamelessly promoted by the staff of the Planning Department of the City of Berkeley and by Mayor Bates, who met privately with Seagate’s builders for more than an hour on at least one occasion, but seems to have discussed only the weather and the pennant race. Citizen activists appealed, and were ignored. It’s easy to be deaf to the voice of the people when serious money is on the table. 

Or how about UC’s Long Range Development Plans? The public is given a limited subset of UC’s agenda to chew over, and while they’re at the table the real action is going on elsewhere. It’s pretty clear now that there’s some kind of big deal being cooked up by the conjunction of the University of California, which owns the valuable bayfront acreage known the Richmond Field Station, and Simeon Properties, which owns the adjacent parcel now known as Campus Bay. It’s also obvious that these two parties have been colluding in some way to try to duck supervision of cleanup of the two polluted sites by the state Division of Toxic Substances Control, which makes a good faith effort to get citizen input. And residents who have been going to the meetings which are supposed to be discussions of UC Berkeley’s long range development plans were never even told about the bay site projects. Nor, for that matter, were they told about the lavish new football stadium being snuck in under the rubric of “rehabilitating” the old one. (If it goes through as planned the team will have to change its name from the Bears to the Trojan Horses.)  

On the national level, pro-democracy activists (yes, we have them, just like they do in Ukraine) see a ray of hope in the election of Howard Dean as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Dean’s presidential campaign had many of the trappings of a genuine citizen effort, and the fact that it was eventually squelched by the DNC’s official candidate led even cynics to think that it might have been for real. Does Dean’s ascendancy to DNC chair mean that there might be power for citizen activists at last?  

Or does it mean that Dean has decided that if you can’t beat the establishment you might as well join it? The big success of the Dean campaign was raising money, which is why he got the DNC job. Citizen meetings (or “meet-ups”) which give grass-roots people the chance to express their opinions are a great fundraising device, but do participants get a real chance to influence public policy? Are participants just drinking Shirley Temples and smoking candy cigarettes? We’ll have to wait and see what the “new” DNC does. 

—Becky O’Malley›