Day: August 24, 2009

Planning since Daniel Burnham

I helped with this book, in editing and research. It’s

“Beyond Burnham: An Illustrated History of Planning for the Chicago Region,” [in which] authors Joseph Schwieterman and Alan Mammoser trace the fits and starts of regional planning since 1909, giving overdue credit to the brave souls who dared swim against the prevailing tides of profit and parochialism.

It brings “brutal honesty” to the material, says op-ed reviewer John McCarron in today’s Chi Trib.

“Beyond Burnham” all but admits that regional planning since Burnham has been, with a few key exceptions, a lost cause. When World War II ended and pent-up demand for housing burst upon the land, those who favored a more orderly pattern of development — one that would have preserved open space and clustered new homes and stores closer to commuter rail corridors — were easily brushed aside.

For many reasons, it was not easy to sell metropolitan planning:

Today’s raucous “town hall” meetings on health-care reform may seem unprecedented, until one reads about public hearings in the 1960s where reps of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission got told a thing or two by Adeline Dropka and the Save Our Suburbs coalition.

While chronicling this history of political conflict, the book also offers “a trove of regional trivia.”

Who knew that the first suburbs to cash in on federal transportation funds were conservative Winnetka and Glencoe? They clouted $1.5 million in 1938 to lower the North Western (now Metra/Union Pacific) railway tracks and eliminate 10 grade crossings.

It’s due out tomorrow from Lake Forest College Press. Amazon has it as a “pre-order” for $13.57.

Holy mother the state will decide

How would a monster put this?

Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel’s brother and one of Obama’s health-care advisors, wrote in a January 2009 white paper that health care should be rationed in a way that “promot[es] and reward[s] social usefulness.” He said age could play a factor in determining who can and cannot access health-care resources.

What’s more:

Emanuel also wrote, “[S]ervices provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens [in the body politic] are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

And the maximum leader?

Obama addressed this too, saying, “Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. … And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”

Did someone say “death panel”?

It’s a brave, brave, brave new world we are looking at.

In Salon, Camille Paglia makes much the same point, praising Sarah Palin for her “shrewdly timed metaphor,” which “spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral.”

As for sharp views of both Salon —

“a pretentious word for a beer and wine guzzle and gum flap”

— and Paglia —

“openly gay yet not given to strident agenda netting . . . a former Catholic who respects the beauty, mystery and majesty of the Faith . . . a feminist who never allows simple-minded association to grab for the broad brush and repaint the house”

— see the well-stocked mind and intellectual pointillism of Pat Hickey, who supplies a dated but fetching image for the former:

abraham bosse salon de dames

Sen. Rockefeller puts it clearly enough:

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said in March that as part of responsible healthcare reform people must recognize they would not be able to get every treatment they wanted. The government would use a cost-benefit analysis to determine treatment options.

The government, yes.

Erick Erickson sums it up:

It is an inevitable fact of life that the more the government outlays to keep you alive, the more your life becomes subject to a cost/benefit analysis.

That would be Holy Mother.