Eisenhower — the Republican president Obama most resembles in policy terms — made a name for himself early in his career by leading a convoy across the country by road. Experiences on that nearly-impassable and unnavigable American highway system informed the eye that studied Germany’s authobahns in the wake of victory. The Interstate Highway System named in the general’s honor is the result.
Eisenhower understood the utility of easy mobility to both defense and commerce. What makes sense for the National Guard also makes sense for trucks and passenger vehicles: good roads, well-maintained. We forget this at our peril, and it’s a lesson you learn quickly in planning games.
Sim City, for example, requires you to solve all manner of disasters while growing a city as large and prosperous as possible. The game requires you to collect taxes, issue bonds, build roads, set zones, and supply services: water, power, schools, hospitals, police, fire…the roads are the first thing to go when you cut back, and road department heads are the first to scream bloody murder at the tiniest nick in their budget.
Roads and infrastructure make civilization possible. They make it possible to transport persons, ideas, and things across geographic space — both human and physical. The more free the communication, the more powerful the country. It is that simple: if you value America as a place to live, then you already value communication and knowledge. You just don’t know it.
The Civilization series, on the other hand, is potentially a culture warrior’s wet dream — a chance to hold a Samuel Huntington circle-jerk of clashing civilizations. Past versions have given each civilization distinct cultural advantages, but players quickly discover that victory is more about access to resources…and good cities.
The reason is that most everything worth having in this world happens in a city because that is where most of us live. Cities are what good roads and rails and waterways connect. And lately, things have taken a turn for the worse with the financial state of major American cities. That story involves the usual suspects:
As U.S. cities and towns wrestle with financial problems, investors are finding a new way to profit on their misery: by buying derivatives that essentially bet municipalities will default.
These so-called credit default swaps are basically insurance contracts that have long been available to protect holders of corporate bonds against default. They became available a few years ago for municipal debt, allowing investors to short sell—or bet against—countless cities, towns and bridges, and more than a dozen states, including California, Michigan and New York.
Now cities, like countries, are in hock to ruinous refinancing sold to them by the very Wall Street firms that sold them the ruinous arrangements:
Since it struck the deal, the school system has paid $115 million in interest and other fees, at least $25 million more than it originally anticipated.To avoid mounting expenses, the Denver schools are looking to renegotiate the deal. But to unwind it all, the schools would have to pay the banks $81 million in termination fees, or about 19 percent of its $420 million payroll.
Urban America has once again been sold out by disaster capital in a scene straight out of Atlas Shrugged. The results threaten recovery — but a national plan for cities might be just the thing to talk about in 2011, anyway. Need I remind the reader of the ugly business of urban blight, and how it fueled the reactionaries during the rise of conservatism?
But there is one more thing about cities and roads and civilizations: no matter their level of sophistication, they are technology-driven. A player who discourages science rarely wins a game of Civilization because it is so integral to cities and what they produce. So much more with real cities.
One Sim City scenario brought to real life is Detroit, a city built by automakers who then lost their technological edge. Unemployment, a history of ghettoization, and malign neglect have led that city to empty out — and have forced planners to rethink their plan. They are demolishing empty houses and returning space to green:
So there is such a thing as creative destruction; but Wall Street isn’t creating anything (except money). City planning keeps cities from becoming chaotic, disorganized, technologically backwards places. Municipal workers, teachers, police, firefighters, clerks and managers on the unemployment line are a Randian goal because the city doesn’t function without them.
Remember, the libertarian-conservative alliance of the last 30 years was premised on shrinking government to bathtub-drowning size and the disestablishment of science and expertise. Not only is ignorance a strength in this philosophy, the freedoms of a living wage and the protective powers of well-funded government (city, state, or national) are redefined as “slavery.”
There is a relationship between the state of the roads, the state of the city, and the state of the union. It is the elevation of the needs of individuals — really, individuals with power and wealth — above the needs of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands with neither power or wealth.
For many conservatives actually do want to see America fail — altogether or in patches — so they can refashion it after the mirages of their Malthusian fantasies. I say “fantasies” deliberately here because the authoritarian-right is heavily characterized by this Schumpeterian mythology of erasure and renewal; it especially appeals to the apocalyptic set, who — as we’ve seen — are the very last people we want in charge of anything.
Regressive politics are bad for science, cities, and civilizations. What they often describe as a path to freedom is actually a highway to Mogadishu — one that Wall Street appears ready to pave.
Brother Bill, please lead the chorus:
