“Empowerment zone,” huh [“EZ Does It,” March 3]. Dollars dangled from D.C., PC buzzwords jam the PR lines downtown, the people come running with fists up and hands out, acronyms fly in alphabet flurries as the scramble for control commences.
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Thirty years since the War on Poverty began, the programmatic vogues come and go. The names change, the alignments of power shift around new players, but it’s still the same standoff on the payoff. “Community Development” is liberalism’s Battle of Verdun–typists in the trenches huddled over tomes, bodies on salary thrown into the fray, papers fly amid noise and bombast, costly surges and retreats in carnage, and no ground is gained. As they say in France, “Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.” (The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.)
But durn if they ain’t right about one thing: All the Do-Gooder Guvmint programs have not worked very well, if at all. The standard of performance sucks. While the retro-honkies use this to discredit the whole idea of social remedies through public action, it is only a failure of means: The Libs keep stumbling on the “administrative fix”–the fallacy that real-world problems are magically solved by paper-pushing agencies with fancy names. Change is not a white-collar job.
I look at community development like a carpenter: YapFlap doesn’t get the wall up. It takes knowledge of materials and process, skills and cooperation with the right tools, and ya gotta bend over and do it. Otherwise it’ll never stand. Polemics are lazy and distracting; orthodoxies on all sides just get in the way–bloated pretenses upon half answers to dumb questions on false premises. With all the conceptual pollution, who’s gonna know a clear idea or a good solution if they saw one?
Scott Addison
