In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?

Posted on April 27, 2021 by admin

President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill aims to fix much that is ailing in America, and its sheer size is drawing predictable—and short-sighted—fire from Republicans in Congress. The nation has a great deal of aging infrastructure, which will eventually pose a massive challenge to economic development. But the American Jobs Plan also takes aim at a growing, urgent, and critical need for infrastructure to cope with the impacts of climate change. These affect many kinds of infrastructure, including transportation, water, wastewater, and energy and communications systems. There is nothing patriotic, it seems to me, in being so oppositional as to allow our nation to deteriorate, Texas-style, in the face of changing climate conditions. There is also nothing about what happened in Texas with frozen energy systems that contradicts “global warming.” The research clearly shows that climate instability, including seemingly less predictable winter storms, is part of the overall impact of a generally warming climate. Nobody but a charlatan ever promised that climate change would be a simple topic.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book by a former Toronto mayor about what cities are doing about climate change. Later, I reviewed Doug Farr’s elaborate tome on how the design professions are providing solutions to climate challenges in new forms of housing and urban development. In addition, a year ago, I reviewed a new Planning Advisory Service Report by the American Planning Association on planning for infrastructure resilience. I remain committed to highlighting resources for planners, public officials, and interested citizens on issues of climate resilience.

In this post, I feature a new book on community solutions to climate resilience. In Harm’s Way, by John Cleveland and Peter Plastrik, provides a set of detailed ideas for building climate resilience in our communities. In my view, its dominant values in contributing to the discussion of climate change and community adaptation center on two crucial issues: first, how to finance investments in climate resilience, and second, how to build the policy foundations for managing retreat from the most vulnerable coastal areas as a means of avoiding major “natural” disasters. The two co-authors bring interesting backgrounds for such discussion. Cleveland is executive director of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and a member of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, a group of business and civic leaders supporting the Boston Climate Action Plan. Plastrik is vice-president of INC and co-author of an Island Press book on networking for social change.

The Biden plan faces a challenging uphill climb toward passage in Congress. The money it promises for what it offers to do is heavily dependent on changes in corporate taxation that may face daunting opposition in Congress. In any case, even passage of the plan does not necessarily mean that every valuable potential investment at the local level in more resilient infrastructure will be assured of adequate funding, nor does it mean that local leaders will always agree with federal priorities for their own communities. The struggle to implement the plan will face years of challenges. In short, this is an important time for the vital discussion by Cleveland and Plastrik on how we can best find the money for essential investments in climate resilience.

Financing climate resilience is essentially an exercise in risk management. The first ingredient in successful risk management is recognition of the problem, which at a national scale has been a political football because of right-wing denial that a problem exists. For four years, this denial was centered in the White House, but the nation clearly chose a sea change on climate policy in the 2020 election. But that does not mean that nothing was happening outside the Trump administration—far from it. Local financial innovations were afoot in numerous American communities, including large cities like Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Indeed, networks of such cities have been exploring avenues for fostering climate-related investments. The issue in many cases, because local governments seldom have large stores of cash awaiting brilliant ideas, is hunting for money in the financial markets. In many ways, the hunt for climate-resilient investments is a race against time for cities that may face climate-related disasters that may cost far more in damages than the investments they are contemplating to prevent such outcomes. Misalignments between resources and needs are commonplace, the environmental burdens of climate change, particularly on low-income and minority neighborhoods, are often enormous, and public revenue is often insufficient to address the problem. The authors thus focus on the need for innovations in climate resilience finance to meet this challenge. Given the likelihood that at least some of the Biden plan will require some level of local and state matching funds, this issue will remain potent. The authors outline a range of tools for creating these new financial structures. This task is far from impossible, however. Bond-rating firms and others are already recognizing the inherent risks involved in ignoring climate change. Why not invest on the positive side through mitigation and adaptation?

Case studies are always helpful in making clear that some community, somewhere, is at least testing solutions, many of them proving successful. The authors outline a playbook for paying for climate resilience, using eight examples in which communities have generated local revenue, imposed land-use costs on unwise development, leveraged development opportunities to achieve climate resilience, and pursued equity, among other options. Local governments in fact have a range of regulatory tools and incentives they use to leverage many other decisions by businesses and residents, many of the options, such as floodplain management rules, are already common. What is needed is the imagination for new ideas on how to use those tools, as well as accessible guidance on how well those ideas are working and under what circumstances. One city highlighted in this chapter is Norfolk, Virginia, a low-lying city on the Atlantic coast that faces a future laden with nuisance flooding due to sea level rise. Its system of four color-coded zones indicates relative levels of safety or vulnerability as a means of directing redevelopment to safer areas while demarcating those in need of protection. Zoning may not seem like a financial issue, but it is a quintessential financial tool in dictating what sort of development is permissible in what location, thus channeling investment to those areas the city deems acceptable for certain purposes. The problem is that the power of zoning has not always been used with a vivid awareness of the environmental hazards that are tied to urban geography.

In the U.S. system, municipalities are creations of the states, which establish the rules under which cities operate. Notwithstanding the magnitude of federal largesse, it is thus also fitting that the book contains a chapter on how states can help communities invest in climate resilience. States can serve as both barriers to and intentional supporters of local innovations in financing climate resilience.

Collapsed houses after Hurricane Sandy on the Jersey shore. The results of climate-driven disasters are seldom pretty.

In the end, however, all of this depends to some degree on political will, a subject addressed in a final chapter on managed retreat under the caption, “Can it happen here?” Communities have long shied away from open discussion of retreat from the shoreline or highly volatile riverfronts. Seashore land has historically been some of the most valuable real estate in the nation, and not only because it can become a haven for rich owners of second homes, but because beaches attract tourism and harbors attract economic development and transportation infrastructure. What public official wants to say no to new shoreline development, let alone talk of managing retreat from existing settlements? Yet the sheer long-term cost of such reluctance to lead with courage is something I discussed in another book review early last year. The Geography of Risk was a book that detailed wave after wave of catastrophic destruction on the New Jersey barrier islands as a result of investments by entrenched real estate interests that resisted risk-based land-use reforms.

But Cleveland and Plastrik insist that retreat will happen, and the question is not if, but when, and under what circumstances. Basically, they say, in coastal areas threatened by climate change and sea level rise, retreat will be driven either by disasters, or by the market, or by plans. In the first instance, nature itself will make decisions that force painful choices that we cannot control. In the second, recognizing the inherent dangers of such stubborn persistence, market forces will withdraw investment from areas that are no longer viable as a result of climate change, with major losses for those who either lack the means to move or who fail to read the tea leaves. The final choice, plan-driven retreat, is the only one that allows the community some degree of sovereignty in the matter, deliberating about the direction of retreat, the means of financing it, and ways of mitigating financial consequences for those involved. The problem is finding articulate, visionary leadership that can lead the community to its moment of truth.

Jim Schwab

Acting in Good Faith

Posted on April 13, 2021 by admin

How does one portray the life of a man whose ultimate fate was a hanging at the hands of the Gestapo, with just four weeks left until the German surrender in World War II? Even an experienced professional actor might find that role daunting. I played that role last Friday evening in what amounted to my amateur acting debut, complicated by a Zoom platform in what we all hope are the latter stages of a pandemic. I’m certainly accustomed to being on a stage in front of an audience as a public speaker, but in those situations, I am speaking for myself. Portraying a historical figure of the magnitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a very different matter.

The collective performance of volunteers mostly from Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in Chicago occurred on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution in 1945, at the Flossenburg concentration camp near the German border with Czechosolvakia. One suspects the SS, whose Judge Otto Thorbeck condemned him to die the day before the hanging, must have been in a hurry. Just two weeks later, American troops liberated the camp.

Script cover for “The Beams Are Creaking”

My intent in discussing this in a blog post is not to review the play, The Beams Are Creaking, by Douglas Anderson, but to reflect on what I learned from taking on this role in the first place. It is also the case that several rehearsals—and rereading the script a few times—occupied enough of my time to explain my hiatus from blog writing in recent weeks. It was only as we practiced our parts that I began to realize what I was trying to accomplish, but I was hooked. The play begins in 1933, with Bonhoeffer returning from the United States to Germany at the dawn of the Nazi rise to power. There are several biographies of Bonhoeffer, the most notable probably being that written by his close associate, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, originally published in Germany in 1967, and later translated into English.

The necessary brevity of a play, if done well (and this is), condenses essential points and makes them more visible not only to the audience, but to the actors as well. I quickly realized from the full scope of the script that Bonhoeffer was not entirely the same man in 1945 that he was at the outset of the drama, when a streak of naivete about the German future still shaped his outlook. Born in 1906 in what is now Poland, Bonhoeffer returned from America with decided impressions about the injustice perpetrated on the American Negro, but not disposed to compare their situation with the plight of Jews in Germany, in part because he simply did not believe that Germany could succumb to the appeal of Adolf Hitler. Confronted early in the first act by Hans von Dohnanyi with the possibility of the Nazis gaining power, Bonhoeffer simply replies, “It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen in Germany.” By now, of course, the most observant among us are aware of a few too many historical developments that “could not happen” but did.

Photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reproduced from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was soon disabused of his initial perspective, particularly when he dares to give a radio speech implicitly criticizing the Fuhrer. The Nazis silenced the radio station before he could finish. And that is the first of many steps that lead him steadily, inexorably, into a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—a conspiracy that failed with dire consequences for those involved. When the play ends, he is sitting in Tegel prison, but Gestapo agents have come to transfer him to Flossenburg, which all around him know to be a death sentence.

The challenge for me in playing Bonhoeffer was to transfer to a Zoom screen that sense of the gradual but inevitable shift from a 27-year-old idealist, steeped in faith as a trained theologian and pastor, to a 39-year-old man who has come to terms with the deepest meaning of faith at the darkest moments in anyone’s life.

This struggle for almost anyone involves a powerful mixture of personal circumstances and challenges and some sort of deep faith that undergirds the transition that his life undergoes. One key turning point, midway through the play, involves the planned emigration of his sister, Sabine, and her Jewish husband Gerhard, to escape the coming Holocaust. In the play, this is the point when, having been approached by others who are involved in the plot against Hitler, he decides, “I will be a conspirator.” This is not a line that I shouted from the rooftop; it was one that I delivered with a heavy heart, realizing what will likely be demanded of Bonhoeffer in the coming years.

The second and final act opens later with Bonhoeffer in prison, chatting with a friendly guard, musing over his role as a thorn in the side of the Gestapo. The middle of the act consists of a monologue, Bonhoeffer with a mop talking to the floor, articulating his frustration with the official church in Germany, its betrayal of principles and purpose, ultimately concluding that it has driven the thinking man from the church because, “It honesty doesn’t know what to say to him.” One might call it a sense of despair, but it is also a lonely note of defiance.

One cannot gainsay the role of faith in Bonhoeffer’s life and how it affected his decisions. For a 39-year-old man facing death, he left behind some of the most meaningful spiritual writings of the 20^th century, including his letters from prison, but also the classic The Cost of Discipleship, which begins with the theologically famous line, “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Bonhoeffer was not about to lie to anyone about the high cost of confronting evil power.

That is the background. What did I learn from this volunteer dramatic effort? First, there was the challenge of presenting this on Zoom, as pandemic restrictions made a live stage presentation problematic. We practiced on Zoom, which was never designed for presenting plays, and learned to work with its limitations. These included the need for all of us to wait at strategic points to deliver our lines until Nancy Goede, pastor of Augustana, who conceived of this operation in the first place, secured the licensing rights to present it, and acquired the scripts for all of us, could produce sound effects (such as knocking on a door or a phone ringing) at points where that otherwise would have been a background stage noise. On Zoom, however, our talking would have filtered out such sounds, so we had to master the timing to allow those sounds to occur. There are scenes where the historical context emerges from radio announcements, and certain people had to provide those, speaking into makeshift microphones of the era, and so forth. In many ways, despite the visual presence on Zoom, our production resembled an old theater of the radio, and with a story set in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps that aided the dramatic impact. But taking all the emotional impact of the story I mention above, and framing it within Zoom, was an interesting challenge and ate up a significant amount of time in rehearsals.

Given that almost no one had the spare time to learn every line by heart, this was “Readers Theater,” in which people used the script during the performance. However, to increase the impact of Bonhoeffer’s presence, I mastered the art of essentially hiding the script below the screen, that is, out of sight of the webcam, while also anticipating lines that I could deliver without even looking at it. On stage, all of this would have been impossible, but then Zoom made other things impossible, such as Bonhoeffer hugging or kissing his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, when she visits him in prison. Live theater online involves its own fair share of compromises.

I would love to provide some photos here of the performance, but licensing rights prohibited recording. I have chosen to make do with other approaches to make this more visually interesting.

Me, as Bonhoeffer, in “studio” in clerical garb for scene with Hermann Goering and Bishop Ludwig Muller

In addition to the invisible but important influence of people like the pastor, I must mention that no performance like this operates without serious teamwork. Much of what I did gained from the adroit counterplay of other actors. Dan Friedrich, who played multiple roles, was a remarkably cynical Hermann Goering, making very effective use of Goering’s perverse sense of humor, as in a meeting between himself, Bonhoeffer, and Bishop Muller of the German national church. When Bonhoeffer offers to show that his opposition movement has some 6,000 pastors objecting to some new Nazi policy declarations, Goering laughs it off by noting ominously that “we already know who they are.” Both my role and Dan’s demanded an effective foil on the other side. I learned how to use such foils to the benefit of the portrayal of my own character. On

Theresa Fuchs in downtown Chicago

the other hand, Theresa Fuchs, a visitor from Germany working at the Goethe-Institut, played a very convincing and sincere Maria. Her soft German-accented English lent an air of linguistic reality to the play, but more importantly, she also schooled the rest of the cast on the proper pronunciation of German names (though it didn’t always take, as one might expect).

Andrea Holliday

Dan Friedrich played both sides: General Hermann Goering and the anti-Nazi conspirator Schlabrendorff. That is, when not also playing an American correspondent at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

As for Dan, a software developer who has a serious sideline hobby in comedy improv, he can take credit for introducing us to Andrea Holliday, who provided the narration where Zoom made certain stage effects either difficult or impossible.

In the end, this experience taught me a deeper respect than I already had for what professional and even community theater actors attempt to do all the time. It involves investing some of your own emotional energy in the portrayal of the character, and in the case of a character like Bonhoeffer, some significant willingness to try to achieve an understanding of that person’s world view and faith. Frankly, after this 2 ½-hour online presentation was over, I felt a significant need to unwind and recover from what I had just done. Acting is a unique artistic enterprise in the way it demands that you embrace another person’s perspective, especially when that person is a historic figure, rather than the product of a creative author’s mind. It stretches one’s mind and heart in special ways.

Jim Schwab

P.S.: For a blog perspective on the presentation by Pastor Nancy Goede’s husband, Jim Vondracek, click here.

Climate Solutions, Off the Shelf

Posted on March 10, 2021 by admin

About six weeks ago, as the Biden administration was first asserting its priorities regarding climate change and the environment, I reviewed a book about the positive actions already being taken by cities around the world in addressing the climate crisis. The important takeaway was that, while climate policy languished or moved backwards under the Trump administration, cities and their mayors had not waited for national governments to act. They had instead taken the initiative.

But city governments are not alone. Architects, planners, engineers, and even developers have innovated in their own ways. In late 2019, Chicago architect Douglas Farr provided me with a copy of his book, Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future, and I promised to review it. It is a sizeable, oversize, 400-page tome, but don’t let that intimidate you, even if I got sidetracked for numerous reasons and only a year later decided to devour the book from cover to cover. That is not necessary for everyone. The book functions much like an encyclopedia, reference work, or anthology. Farr solicited specialized contributions from numerous practitioners and experts. Pick a chapter, pick your favorite subtopic, or dive in randomly. You won’t fail to learn something, as I did, despite my general familiarity with Farr’s subject matter.

My timing in finally reviewing the book has proven fortuitous, in a way. It allows me to expand the message of the review of David Miller’s Solved, a much shorter book by a single author. Miller essentially is a success storyteller; Farr is a documenter. Both serve a purpose.

For 650,000 years, global carbon dioxide emissions have never been above the read line. They are now. All graphics courtesy of Farr Associates

Farr starts his book with a “Where We Are” section that includes color-coded maps documenting the huge disparities around the world in longevity (50-59 years in much of Africa, 70-79 in the U.S., above 80 in Japan, Australia, Canada, and Europe, in poverty, gender inequality, and so forth. A simple chart of global CO₂levels demonstrates that, within our lifetimes, we have nearly doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to levels not seen in the last 650,000 years. A parade of such graphics makes clear that ours is a planet on a collision course with natural reality.

The Bullitt Center. Copyright Nic Lenoux for the Bullitt Center.

But such searing images also clarify the importance of examples of what can be done. Farr leads us to the specific example in Seattle of the Bullitt Center, which he terms the “most sustainable office building in the world.” Composting toilets use an average of two tablespoons of water per use. There are no parking spaces, but there is 243 square meters of rooftop green space. The Bullitt Center earned designation as one of the first eight buildings to achieve full certification under the Living Building Challenge, and the first office building.

But no one in Seattle wants it to retain such titles. They would rather see new buildings and new developments claim new titles and surpass the Bullitt Center’s achievements as we move toward an entire new sustainable society. Farr takes us from “our default world” to “our preferred future,” with a procession of examples of how this can be done, then leads readers to a theory of change that discusses how we make change happen, over what timelines, and how we can step on the gas with “acceleration strategies” to make practical impacts on climate change happen more quickly.

But it is in the final section, “The Practice of Change,” which dominates more than half the book, where Farr enlists a variety of expert contributors to share the methods and designs that will carry us forward to reduce climate impacts and ultimately create a more livable society. This is not just about innovative building design but about human relationships. Mary Nelson, president and CEO emeritus of Chicago’s Bethel New Life Inc., and one of the pioneers of Chicago neighborhood change whom I most admire, discusses how we build strong relationships between people and place (spoiler alert: it involves hard work). Others describe the value of participatory art in communities or the need to transform public spaces into welcoming places (Fred Kent, president, Project for Public Spaces). Get the point? Architectural or planning solutions that have no human connection of involvement beyond an elite are dead letters in promoting real social change that will have any impact on our climate crisis. It’s all about us, whether the subject is local food culture, local planning checkups, ore re-envisioning underutilized space to promote equitable prosperity. Every single example has its champion in this book, someone who has worked on solutions and involved people in finding answers.

For a moment, I’d like to focus on contributions by two colleagues with whom I have worked, David Fields and Tom Price, to make the point. Fields is a veteran transportation planner now working in Houston as the city’s chief transportation planner, who discusses how elements of the urban setting such as residential density and mixed land uses that put homes within walking distance of retail, or put homes above ground-floor retail, can reduce vehicle trips by up to 90 percent, thus helping to reverse the tremendous negative impact of the automobile on the world’s climate, to say nothing of air quality. Price, on the other hand, is a civil engineer, instructs us on how to use “every project as an opportunity to process rainwater and stormwater,” while demanding beauty through improved design. His articles remind me of a lesson I learned years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, through a project in New Orleans called the Dutch Dialogues, in which the American Planning Association and others engaged with Dutch planners and engineers to promulgate the idea of seeing water not as the enemy but as a resource for enhancing urban quality of life. We need to find ways to help move water elegantly through the city instead of constantly finding ways to bury it, hide it, or divert it.

Whether the subject is community theater, transportation, or architectural styles that build housing affordability and reduced heating and cooling demands to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the overall point is not only repetitive but cumulative: For many of the challenges that climate change poses to our communities, we already know the answers if we are willing to explore the most innovative, effective, and creative approaches that others have already used. Yes, we have a new administration willing to rejoin the Paris climate accord and invest in solutions to climate change. That is important, as we need to push envelopes constantly and with urgency. But we dare not ignore the answers that are all around us in the innovations that are already helping our communities adapt to a carbon-neutral, democratic, more equitable future. They embody the lessons that, through replication, will accelerate our shift to a green future that eases the existential climate crisis of our planet.

The sweet-spot scale in action in Oslo, Norway. Copyright Jason F. McLennan.

Perhaps two points in Farr’s book, side by side, will help illuminate the point. One is a segment by Jason F. McLennan, founder of the Living Building Challenge. He defines something he calls the “sweet spot” in the sustainable urban fabric, buildings between four and eight stories high. These are buildings not so high as to isolate people on upper floors from fellow human beings at ground level. The building is also not so tall that reliance on energy-consuming elevators drives high energy demand for the building merely to function. There is a place for taller buildings, but the combination of density and manageable energy demand with the potential to minimize demands on the environment exists in that “sweet spot.” Subsequent examples in the same section

The sweet spot defined. Modified by Farr with permission from Jason F. McLennan.

proceed to elaborate on ways we already know to produce affordable, carbon-neutral housing. At the end of the book, in contrast, Farr makes his plea, in large part to fellow architects, to “end the race to build the world’s tallest building,” detailing the negative effects of such edifices on public health, safety, and welfare, and ending with a quote from Sherrilyn Kenyon, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Indeed. That is the fundamental point of stranded carbon, that is, leaving fossil fuels unburned, in the ground, and shifting to a renewable energy economy.

Much of the secret of achieving this goal lies in knowing when to stop doing the wrong things and how to enable our society to do more of the green things. This being merely a blog post, I cannot attempt to share all the specific points Farr and his contributors make concerning street design, building envelopes, solar power, social equity, and commitment to environmental health. But I can urge you to seek out his book, in a library, online, or in a bookstore, to find the examples you need for the situation your own community faces in crafting a more sustainable future. This is the activist’s and practitioner’s manual to help get you started. Let’s all engage in some creative thinking and problem solving.

Jim Schwab

When Narcissism Trumps All

Posted on January 31, 2021 by admin

Within the last week, I finished reading a nearly 800-page biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, which may raise the question of why I took the trouble. I started only after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to concede and persisted in disseminating the fiction that the election had somehow been stolen. It struck me that there might be some noteworthy parallels in personality traits, or psychology, with one of the great monsters of European history. There are. Not that I am a psychologist or even play one on television. But as voters, we all judge presidential character to one degree or another. It is often a significant factor in the public debate in election years.

In his detailed but highly readable 1998 biography, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alan Schom notes that, in the end, after numerous avoidable wars, Bonaparte, aka Emperor Napoleon, left behind nearly three million dead Europeans. Most were soldiers, but hundreds of thousands of civilians were also killed. Equally large numbers were displaced as hundreds of towns and villages were burned to the ground, amid other rapine and destruction.

I want to note here that, for comparison, I have read several volumes of recent vintage exploring the Trump psyche, family background, and political behavior, including:

Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump
Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch
A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston

In addition, in comparing Trump with previous U.S. presidents, I am aided by the serendipitous circumstance that, in 1997, I undertook what became a 15-year quest to read at least one biography of every U.S. president, starting sequentially with George Washington. (The sequential aspect ceased as I read second and even third biographies of some presidents, such as Lincoln, Madison, Wilson, and others.) Thus, I do not speak loosely in saying that Trump is decidedly unique in certain respects.

But back to Napoleon.

The destruction I noted above is bad enough, but what became supremely clear to me was how little Napoleon seemed to care. I was reminded of a scene early in Leo Tolstoy’s classic, War and Peace, in which Napoleon, dressed in a Polish peasant soldier’s uniform to escape notice from the Russians, surveys the landscape on the other side of the Niemen River as he prepares for his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. As he does so, some cavalry soldiers plunge into the river to demonstrate their courage to the great leader but end up drowning. Tolstoy drily observes that their demise attracted little notice from the emperor.

Not like he really cared, Tolstoy seems to be telling us. Somewhat like Donald Trump slipping away to the White House to view the mayhem on television while his followers, incited by his outlandish rhetoric, ransack the Capitol and some people are killed. Zealots can pay an extraordinarily high price for failing to realize that their self-centered messiah in fact has a heart of stone.

But Napoleon was far worse than that, I learned from Schom. Throughout a decade and a half of senseless wars, in which hundreds of thousands of young French men were conscripted into his army, Napoleon never bothered to authorize a fully operational military medical service to take care of the sick and wounded. Tens of thousands died from appalling field hospital conditions, if they were in any hospital at all. It was just not one of the emperor’s priorities. As Schom notes, “With the same cold, calculating ruthlessness, Napoleon ignored the dead and wounded, and despite the pleas of the army’s chief surgeon, Dr. Dominique Larrey, year after year refused to create a permanent army medical corps.”

Medical supplies tended to be skimpy or nonexistent, and at the Battle of Wagram, Schom notes, “9,000 or so casualties were all but abandoned by Napoleon.” By the time he fled from Russia, having started with an army of more than 600,000, he left behind 400,000 dead soldiers and perhaps 100,000 prisoners in the hands of the Russian empire. Little more than a rump force made it back to Paris with him. His downfall came little more than a year later, leading to his exile in Elba, followed by his return, final defeat, and exile to St. Helena, where he died of arsenic poisoning, most likely at the hands of a trusted associate.

Beware how you choose your champions.

Americans, until recently, have seldom had to confront the consequences of such narcissistic leadership devoid of any capacity for empathy. Presidents of both parties have typically been humbled by the responsibilities they have assumed, and despite mistakes and bad judgment in many cases, have been aware at some level of the cost their decisions have imposed on American soldiers and civilians alike. Remorse has often driven them to seek to remedy the situation. But we have just outlived the experience of a president capable of separating children from their parents at the border without even the most fundamental understanding of the causes of migration from poor nations in Latin America, nor any plan for how someday to reunite them. We have witnessed a presidency in which, as I write, almost 440,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 (exceeding American deaths in World War II) while the nation’s leader ridiculed people for wearing masks and suggested drinking cleaning fluids, all while suppressing the input of capable scientists, but has yet to express any serious regrets for the sorrowful outcome. After all, someone else caused the problem—Obama, the Chinese, Democratic governors, whoever. Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte, from start to finish, is replete with examples of the French leader blaming everyone around him for every catastrophe while failing to accept responsibility. The routine is drearily familiar.

Both men have also exhibited an outsized capacity for surrounding themselves with sycophants and turning at least part of the state apparatus into a family enterprise. We are familiar these days with the coterie of Ivanka Trump, Eric, Donald Jr., and Jared Kushner all playing prominent roles in the White House for which they were profoundly unqualified. Napoleon made kings and princes of his family members, but unlike Trump, often found them incompetent after having installed them. He was also infamous not only for looting the treasure of conquered nations but also of France itself. In his quest to blockade British commerce, he virtually impoverished an entire continent with the “Continental System,” while forcing subordinate states to support the costs of his wars.

The key difference between the two men in this respect is not their cupidity, but their timing. Napoleon rose to power within a nascent French republic that was struggling to establish stable institutions following the insanity of the French Revolution and its wild swings of the political pendulum. He was able to install himself as First Consul through a coup d’etat. He then installed his brother Lucien as Minister of the Interior, a post that put him in charge of the election machinery for a plebiscite to affirm Napoleon’s reorganization of the government. Schom reports that some five million French citizens voted, only 1.5 million for the new constitution, but Lucien remedied the problem by simply stealing the election, reporting more than 3 million positive votes and only 1,562 opposed. Napoleon made this possible by shutting down critical press outlets. He repeated this feat in a later plebiscite that established him as emperor in 1804.

Storming of the Capitol. Image from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol.

If Trump had any serious knowledge of history, he might have envied this Napoleonic sleight of hand, but it is certainly clear that he kept his followers on a short leash of credulity by ranting endlessly about “fake news.” The dangers of this credulity, including the impact of the Q Anon conspiracy phenomenon, became perilously apparent on January 6. Fortunately, the inherent stability of the federal government of the United States after nearly two and a half centuries of tradition and loyalty to democratic principles made the American state far less vulnerable than the French state at the end of the eighteenth century. We were able to move Donald Trump out of the White House, but a cost we have never before experienced with the singular exception of the Civil War.

The single huge difference between the two men is the one that is probably most significant. Napoleon was especially dangerous because, unlike Trump, who was born in the lap of luxury and escaped military service during the Vietnam war because of deferments, he rose from obscurity in Corsica when his father procured a royal scholarship for his education at the Royal Military School, followed by strict military training at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Napoleon was nothing if not a military leader, sometimes a reckless one, with artillery training and a solid knowledge of mathematics. Trump was largely an indifferent student and one who later lacked an understanding of military culture and operations. Pentagon professionals, aware that their oath prohibited them from following unlawful orders, often took umbrage at Trump’s attempts to override their judgment and concerns. Many retired and former officers spoke out, their numbers growing as time wore on. This standoff between authoritarianism and patriotic tradition may have spared us much further tragedy.

I would prefer not to have found a need to produce this short essay. Trump is at least out of office, though what further mischief he may foment remains to be seen. The critical lesson is for the American people to think much harder about the nature of democratic leadership. We need to become much more discerning of the character traits of the people we elevate as leaders. With many Republicans still clinging to a virulent defense of Trump, and Senators and others clearly prepared to assume his mantle and claim his base for their own, this issue remains volatile. The fate of the world’s most powerful democratic republic hangs in the balance.

Jim Schwab

Practical Approaches to Climate Change

Posted on January 28, 2021 by admin

One of the more remarkable facets of the political debate over climate change is the almost knee-jerk rejection among conservative skeptics of the science is that they abandon the same can-do spirit of capitalism that they would otherwise adopt when defending the ability of the private sector to solve other problems. Confronted with the necessity of worldwide action to reduce the global disturbances that are driving increased weather volatility and more powerful disasters, they suddenly are filled with doubt about the ability of either public or private sectors, or both together, to successfully shift our energy consumption to less carbon-intensive solutions. They become, in short, the “cannot-do” crowd. Suddenly, there are massive technological and economic obstacles to converting the world economy to solar energy, wind power, geothermal, and just about any energy solution that does not involve fossil fuels.

They suddenly cease to be the advocates of practical problem solving. They must then cover this logical inconsistency by insisting that there is no problem to solve. When science demonstrates otherwise, massive volumes of science such as reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Climate Assessment, and numerous other sources, walls of doubt are constructed that soon take on dimensions of absurdity. I even had one relative tell me that scientists find evidence of climate change because that is what funders want, and if we only stopped funding the research, perhaps the truth would emerge. He was not joking.

With a spate of executive orders on climate having been issued by President Joseph Biden’s White House since taking office, this seems like an ideal time to highlight a book I recently completed that focuses on practical solutions. I had intended to read and review Solved: How the World’s Great Cities Are Fixing the Climate Crisis (University of Toronto Press, 2020) before the holidays, but perhaps now, with the Biden inauguration behind us, is the best time to introduce this work by David Miller, former mayor of Toronto, the largest city in Canada.

Biden’s executive orders focus, of course, on federal actions he can take immediately without Congress, such as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and reinstating EO 13690, an Obama executive order that established the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which President Trump had rescinded in 2017. I am glad to see this guidance reestablished.

David Miller, former mayor of Toronto. Photo borrowed from Wikipedia.

But there is a much larger point that I wish to make by highlighting Miller’s book. It is that many of the solutions this nation and world so badly need as a means of reversing the deleterious impacts of climate change not only already exist but are actively being pursued or implemented by cities throughout the world. Municipal governments have in many cases become the can-do laboratories, often with the help of private-sector partners who are also committed to creating a sustainable economy, without necessarily waiting for more sluggish national governments to act. We do, of course, want the U.S. and other national governments to act because what they do matters. But the blueprint for solving many climate challenges with infrastructure initiatives is readily available.

Miller’s book follows a standard formula of briefly introducing us to what various cities, including Toronto, have been doing over the past two decades to reduce their carbon footprints while making urban areas more appealing and convenient places to live. In separate chapters describing creative local initiatives around energy and electricity; existing and new buildings; public transportation; personal and other transportation; and waste management, Miller walks us through major projects undertaken in a variety of cities around the world.

But he starts with a chapter about the importance of plans and why they matter, for which the answer in part is that they demonstrate commitment on the part of city leadership to articulate climate challenges and then outline solutions with target dates for meaningful accomplishments. He notes that, in a two-week period in April 2019, Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver all launched climate plans “whose ambitions matched the requirements of science” but also, in the first two cases, recognized that climate change is “inherently unjust” and that “issues of equity and inclusion must be addressed by the plan if it is to succeed.” The importance of cities is that planning is integral to the role of city governments, which manage numerous functions that are both close to the ground and require integrated strategies to ensure that the work moves forward in a cohesive fashion. As an example, he cities the need in Toronto at one point to alter a particular bylaw to ensure the issuance of permits for solar thermal heating installations. Attention to details of a highly practical nature is the essence of success. They are what cities do, or should, anyway.

That attention to detail, however, can help create a roadmap for federal and state or provincial initiatives, which is one reason that presidents like Biden often recruit mayors for cabinet and other programmatic positions where such practical experience can help shape success at a larger scale. They are not the only people who can provide a practical perspective, and not all do, but those who have experimented in addressing practical climate-related problems can be valuable problem solvers.

In the arena of energy, Miller cites the example of Austin, Texas, which plans by 2022 to end the use of coal for electric power production, but needs energy that is “flexible, reliable, and predictable,” which has meant expanding renewable sources but also looking at storage mechanisms ranging from batteries to thermal storage to compressed air. Subsidies and incentives for residential homeowners support installation of rooftop solar energy, but Austin Energy is also helping the city meet its goal of 65 percent generation from renewables by 2025 with industrial-scale solar installations and wind energy. Municipal utilities such as that in Los Angeles have additional latitude to help cities meet such commitments.

Cities vary, as does the mixture of their greenhouse gas emissions. In a city as dense as New York, for example, transportation becomes a smaller proportional contributor because so many people rely on mass transit or simply walk. Buildings, on the other hand, which are often massive consumers of electricity and natural gas, contribute 73 percent of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 21 percent for transportation and 5 percent for waste. But building upgrades such as more efficient water heaters, heating systems, and insulation make a huge difference. Miller details how New York, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, tapped market forces, including disclosure and training to make inefficiencies more visible, and mandates through permitting systems, to drive positive change. The goal, he says, is net zero emissions by 2050 and a 40 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

One could go on with numerous examples from the transportation and waste management sectors, and Miller does, but the point is that, despite the need to reverse much of the negative policy direction of the Trump years and set bold climate goals for the future, many of the solutions already exist. In many cases, national governments, including the U.S. federal government, can closely study what their cities are already accomplishing, or have accomplished, and adapt those solutions to a larger scale, making the results and their feasibility clearer and more visible.

Still, this is not subject matter for Pollyanna types, but for pragmatists willing to roll up their sleeves. As Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, home of the Paris Climate Accord, notes in her afterword, “We have shown the world the potential for city-based action to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions and get the world on track to halve emissions by 2030. However, we must be realistic: our goals will take significant time and effort to achieve.”

No better time to start than now. That part, at least, seems perfectly clear to the new Biden administration. Little more than a week into his term, they seem to be moving quickly.

Jim Schwab

Charting a Path to Sustainability

Posted on November 23, 2020 by admin

A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future.

But they are only trying because the right to map out an alternative future is still ours. The capacity to imagine a different future is one of the defining characteristics of a society that is capable of renewal, resilience, and sustainability. It is vitally important that civic leaders, academics, and authors help us clarify the truth of our past and map out paths to a better future. And, presidential transitions notwithstanding, it can and should happen below the national level, to help states and communities explore their unique history and their opportunities.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce readers to Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, the work of Charles E. Connerly, who by next summer will be retiring as professor and the director of the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, recently renamed the School of Planning and Public Affairs after Connerly’s successful push to incorporate a Master’s in Public Affairs to the program’s offerings. Connerly has been at Iowa since 2008 since migrating back to his Midwestern roots after a long tenure at Florida State University in Tallahassee. As a matter of full disclosure, he was also responsible for hiring me as an adjunct assistant professor to teach one course each fall that has come to be known as Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. His many years at Florida State, working alongside Robert Deyle, a colleague who worked with me on disaster issues as far back as the 1990s, made him supremely aware of the importance of addressing hazards in the planning process. I was hired in the immediate aftermath of the massive 2008 floods in Iowa.

Connerly (in gray jacket) during a 2014 field trip of post-flood redevelopment in Cedar Rapids.

Connerly is truly a comprehensive thinker in the best planning tradition, and this book shows it. While I am certain, because of publishing schedules, that he had completed his manuscript before the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over the Memorial Day weekend, his book is incredibly timely in the fall of 2020 because of his focus on the history of racial and ethnic disparities in Iowa. In fact, Chapter 4 is simply titled, “Why Is Iowa So White?”

Indeed, that is a very good question. It is not just a matter of Iowa being farm country. After growing up in the Cleveland metro area in Ohio, then moving to Iowa in January 1979 before ultimately enrolling in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I remember being struck by the apparent lack of diversity, especially outside the handful of cities above, say, 50,000 people. There is, after all, industry in these cities, and industry has often attracted multiracial work forces. Unless, that is, political and social forces intervene to prevent such an outcome. Most people, however, never notice such forces at work and never learn about them in school. History can be very silent about such matters unless diligent researchers insist on exposing that legacy to sunshine, aka “the best disinfectant.”

Connerly digs deep on this topic, all the way back to antebellum Iowa politics. Sitting just north of Missouri, a slave-holding border state, Iowa was both a frontier of the Underground Railroad and a harbor of typical northern mixed feelings about African Americans. In 1850, Iowa was no less than 99.8 percent white, and did not dip below 99 percent, Connerly notes, until 1970. Since then, there has been a substantial growth in minority populations. But African Americans have historically been concentrated in just four urban counties. All that said, it was also the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2008 that launched Barack Obama on a streaking path to the presidency. What accounts for this paradoxical history?

From the early days of statehood, Iowa suffered from a typical northern moral conflict between supporting emancipation and not particularly wanting too many blacks in the neighborhood. That is not putting too fine a point on the matter. Connerly notes that before the Civil War, Iowa had enacted laws banning blacks from the state. The territory avoided enacting such black codes to win statehood, but once that was achieved, Iowa legislators had no problem backtracking on the issue. The bottom line was that Iowans, overall, opposed slavery but did not necessarily favor civil rights for freed slaves.

That changed somewhat after the Civil War, with Radical Republicans pushing through changes that liberalized matters considerably, but it was only following World War II and through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that serious, permanent change began to occur. By that time, however, previous history had done its work in making African Americans largely feel unwelcome. Iowa stayed overwhelmingly white, but not entirely by accident. At the same time, the state has been receptive to refugees, for example, after the Vietnam war, and remarkably progressive on some other issues. Northwest Iowa elected the remarkably ignorant Steve King to Congress, but Republicans themselves dethroned him in this year’s June primary.

Prior to white settlement and the rise of modern agriculture, much of the Iowa landscape enjoyed by Indians consisted of prairie. Photo by Suzan Erem

Connerly writes that African Americans were not the only minorities to feel the impact of 19^th-century American racism. Before European settlement, which took place in earnest only after Iowa became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, fourteen Native American nations had, over millennia, occupied some part of what became Iowa. Before the 1800s, their interaction with Europeans was largely through trade, but eventually their land ended up in the hands of white settlers. The short answer as to how that happened is simple: “We took it from them.” Today, only the Mesquaki settlement in Tama remains as a reminder of the formerly dominant Native American presence.

The Hispanic presence, and that of various Asian minorities, is a product of more recent history, some of it involving the evolution of labor relations, particularly in agriculture and meat processing plants, but today there is a distinct, but distinctly disadvantaged, Hispanic presence. It is no accident that earlier this year, some of the most intense controversy over coronavirus spread in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota involved minority workers in the meat-packing industry and deficiencies in safety protocols among the companies involved. In a whole chapter dealing with labor issues over time in both the food and agricultural equipment industries, one can see the steady decline of leverage among white-dominated labor unions and the rise of cheap labor and mass production within the industry as it is today. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these social and economic changes have had profound impacts on, and implications for, the future of Iowa’s economy and society. Iowa did not shift from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and 2020 without some massive strains within the body politic. How those tensions are resolved will go a long way toward determining whether Iowa can chart a successful path to a sustainable future, as Connerly’s book suggests. Iowans will have serious work ahead in improving social equity while adjusting to a changing demographic makeup across the state.

But I do not wish to create the impression that the book is strictly focused on such demographic issues, as important and critical as they are. It is important to notice that Connerly has tied together the issues of environmental health, fairness, and prosperity in his title. His larger point is that all these questions are inextricably related. To quote some planners I have known, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Connerly takes us on a detailed, well-documented tour not only of Iowa’s demographic history, but of its environmental and economic history as well. Iowa clearly entered statehood as a predominantly rural, agricultural state, though not necessarily producing the corn and soybeans that predominate now. Originally, in fact, it grew more wheat, but trends shifted to corn and hogs. But the state is still heavily dependent on agriculture, with 43 percent of its 2015 manufacturing centered on either food processing or machinery used in agricultural production. These two gave rise in the twentieth century to some powerful unions representing workers who were largely able to achieve a blue-collar version of middle-class prosperity. Hogs, supported by state laws exempting agriculture from county zoning laws, gave rise to the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the past 40 years, and the meat-packing industry itself became more concentrated and able to mechanize increasingly and replace high-wage jobs with lower-wage mass production and weaker unions. The people working in the newer factories are definitely more racially diverse but definitely not more empowered and definitely paid less. The growing inequities have resulted in a shrinking middle class.

One factor that distinguished the Iowa packing plants prior to the major, union-busting shifts of the 1970s and 1980s was that the plants were closer to the farms, and thus, unlike larger plants in Chicago and Kansas City, bought animals directly from farmers. Connerly maps out the consequences in urban development for Iowa, namely, that Iowa never developed the metropolitan magnets of neighboring states like Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois because of the dominance of the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City, and instead has a number of smaller cities, the largest being Des Moines, which has about 215,000 people, though the entire metro area is about three times that size. Smaller cities have mostly grown around agriculture-related industries.

All this has had significant consequences not only for quality of life but the quality of the environment, with water quality problems arising from rural land use issues such as CAFOs, soil erosion, and nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Connerly’s final chapter asks whether Iowa truly is the “best state in the nation,” a title bestowed in 2018 by U.S. News and World Report. As a former Iowan, I do not offer this review as a way of trashing the state, nor does Connerly offer his book in that spirit, but the question is an opportunity to explore the complexity of a state that too many elsewhere see as simply white and rural. Iowa, with the right policies, the right incentives, and the right opportunities, has the potential to create a healthy environment and economy, but it must examine current trends and determine how to reverse those that are moving the state in the wrong direction. The last chapter is a succinct compendium of recommendations for moving Iowa toward a growing middle class, a healthier environment with better recreational opportunities, and a progressive approach toward making agriculture more ecologically sound and resilient in the face of natural hazards, most notably, floods.

Testing facility of the Iowa Flood Center, 2019.

The state has created some interesting mechanisms for doing this, but has a stubborn habit in recent years of shooting itself in the foot. In 1987, the legislature wisely passed the Groundwater Protection Act, which created the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, which has done remarkable research on establishing a balance between economic and environmental needs in agricultural practices. Yet, in recent years, the legislature has significantly limited state funding for the center at the behest of corporate agricultural interests. In 2010, following the devastating floods in 2008, the legislature funded creation of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which has become a model in advancing flood prediction and mitigation that other states are considering copying, yet some question the need for continued funding. It is almost as if Iowa wants to replicate the larger national battle between science and an increasingly poisonous distrust of “experts.” Would it not be better to marshal and support the best intellectual resources Iowa can muster for an assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead?

Connerly points out, in contrast, how Iowa could take the lead in solving problems like climate change and excessive nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin that leads to both groundwater contamination locally and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. This last chapter is the biggest single reason to read the book, but its logic is only fully clear after reading the thorough research that precedes it.

My final comment is that it may seem that this is a book that is primarily or perhaps solely relevant to Iowans. I think that conclusion, however, would be short-sighted. While I am profoundly aware of the many books others have produced about other states, regions, and metropolitan areas across the U.S., I think it is vitally important that other scholars across the nation undertake similar efforts to assess the path to sustainability for their own states, regions, and cities. We could sorely use such a book in Illinois, and the same is probably true for every neighboring state. As I suggested at the outset, it is not enough to chart a new national path. We need these serious explorations at subnational levels as well. In that sense, I believe Connerly has done a major service for the Hawkeye state. I’d like to see more such books.

Jim Schwab

Weep for America, but Build Leadership

Posted on June 4, 2020 by admin

I weep for my neighborhood. I weep for Chicago.

I weep for the state of criminal justice in America when a police officer, hand in his pocket, a look of utter indifference on his face, feels the sense of impunity that empowers him to kneel on a black man’s neck in broad daylight for more than eight minutes until he dies.

I cheer for America’s resilient sense of justice when bystanders train their cell phone cameras on this officer and refuse to back down in documenting injustice while they plead for the man’s life.

These mixed feelings have haunted me for more than a week now, as events have evolved across the nation. I am glad that the state of Minnesota has arrested and charged officer Derek Chauvin for murder, not out of a desire for revenge but because justice demands it. The sense of impunity that allowed him to ignore bystanders’ pleas to remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck must be the first casualty in this crisis. Serious police department reform is a necessity. As I write this, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has announced that the other three officers at the scene have been charged with aiding and abetting the crime.

But America also faces some serious lessons in civic leadership, from top to bottom. At the White House, for at least a few more months, we are stuck with a president who, facing the second major crisis of his final year in office after failing to prepare for or respond effectively to a pandemic, now is fanning the flames of hatred while throwing matches on the fire. Emerging from his protective bunker in the White House, he used National Park Service police to clear his path of peaceful protesters for the mere purpose of standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, without invitation or permission to use it as a camera prop, to hold a Bible high while threatening violence against protesters and insulting the governors and mayors who have done the real hard work to bring calm to their communities. It is thankless work, lie-awake-at-night work, very unlike the simple-minded task of tweeting empty threats to violate the Constitution. Most presidents, while asserting their proper authority, have sought to unite the country. Trump prefers to drive a wedge with the help of a Bible he does not understand and seldom if ever reads.

Amidst this dearth of national leadership, there is a shortage of leadership on the streets that reflects both deep anger and a failure of our society to create a sense that everyone has a stake in the success and prosperity of our communities. And, to be sure, there are criminal elements that are only too happy to take advantage of these gaps in equity and leadership. That is where we find ourselves now, today, this week, this summer, this year, while still seeking to recover economically, medically, and emotionally from the toll of a coronavirus pandemic whose toll in America now exceeds 100,000 lives, and counting.

As most readers of this blog know, I live in Chicago. Over the weekend and into Monday evening, at bedtime, I could hear the sirens and fire trucks and helicopters in the distance and know that not all was well. I could see on local television channels the coverage of looting that damaged familiar areas of the city, as well as protests against police brutality. But I had not left the house, for a variety of reasons. However, it became clear that Wicker Park, an area less than a mile from us, was struck by looters Sunday evening, leaving windows smashed and property damaged. Small business owners have been waiting patiently, amid considerable financial angst, for the promised partial reopening from the pandemic on June 3, a few days after many state restrictions were lifted on May 29. And then this.

On Tuesday, after both a telemedicine meeting at 2 p.m., following up on my recent hospitalization, and a team meeting for a planning consulting proposal at 3 p.m., I decided it was time to find out what had happened. I walked down North Avenue to the six-way corner of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, the nerve center of Wicker Park, an area that gentrified in the 1980s and 1990s but retains an artsy demeanor, with independent bookshops, cafes, and art stores. I chose not to drive or even bicycle because being on foot seemed to me the best way to absorb a full sense of our tragedy and dilemma, even though I knew Wicker Park was far from being the most hard-hit area in the city. Those questionable labels belong to the downtown, temporarily cordoned off to all but essential workers, with many Chicago River bridges raised to prevent access, and to the South and West Sides, predominantly black areas where the torching of stores often exacerbated the food desert that had only recently been ameliorated with the opening of new grocery stores. One owner of Subway shops saw all six of his stores on the South Side destroyed.

The urologist with whom I spoke during the 2 p.m. appointment had recently moved to a high-rise near his downtown office in the Northwestern Memorial Hospital complex. I asked him about the situation. “It’s terrible,” he said flatly, then noted that he had walked down Michigan Avenue, and “it felt like Detroit.” Anyone who has spent time on the usually vibrant Magnificent Mile until recently knows what a stunning statement that is. Buildings are boarded up, many were looted, some were torched. At a recent mayoral press conference, the city buildings commissioner noted that her department was reaching out to the owners of at least 180 damaged buildings citywide to provide support for rebuilding. It may go without saying, but the damage harms not only the business owners, but employees who had fervently been hoping to return to work, many of them black, Latino, or Asian.

The walk down North Avenue was more routine than jarring, interrupted only by pedestrians passing in the opposite direction, some with dogs on leashes, some wearing masks, some not. It was at the six-way intersection that I began to see the impact of the past weekend. As I made the wide-right turn onto Milwaukee Avenue, it became clear that perhaps 80 percent of the businesses in the next half-mile southward toward Division St. were boarded up. Many businesses may have done so proactively, seeing the damage to others and wanting to avoid a similar fate on a subsequent night. Others, like Ragstock, had been attacked over the weekend, with windows smashed, merchandise stolen or destroyed, and equipment ransacked. It was hard to tell which was which, but the overall effect was that of significant lost opportunity and delayed reopening of a vital commercial district on Chicago’s North Side. For those that had been attacked and looted, the work of restoration could easily delay reopening by weeks.

Nonetheless, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who toured the affected areas on Tuesday (June 2), reported that the overwhelming reaction of business owners when she asked about possible delays in reopening was to encourage her to move forward, which she is now doing. Not everyone is pleased because of the induced inequality of opportunity, with consequent job losses and lost incomes, due to the damages that were inflicted. The only way forward is to assist with cleanup and rebuilding, not to put everything on hold.

Nor would everyone be pleased with my focus on this question. There are many who would argue that the rioting is an expression of frustration and powerlessness, and for some, I am sure, that is true. As Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page notes, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, explained riots in the 1960s by saying, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” He was not condoning such activity but trying to impress upon white Americans that racial justice cannot forever be denied or delayed without serious social consequences.

A small crowd gathers in front of Walgreen’s in late afternoon for a peaceful protest.

But it is important to raise the issue of how the protests against police violence can and did, in some cases, go awry. One factor is the pent-up frustration of which King wrote. Another is the deliberate attempts by those of ill will to take advantage of unrest to advance their own purposes, which may be criminal or manipulative. The latter category would include all manner of provocative agents either seeking to undermine the protests by discrediting them or by bending and twisting them to the will of extremists who would not easily carry the day in an open, democratic discussion of protest goals.

It has never been hard to find examples of either motive. At 70, I am a veteran of the 1960s and 1970s who has joined his own fair share of marches for the environment, to oppose war, or for civil rights. I can easily remember learning, in my college years, how to identify agents provocateurs of any political stripe who would seek opportunities to redirect a discussion or a protest toward unfortunate ends. And I also know that it was the spiritual strength of leaders like King, or Nelson Mandela, or Mohandas Gandhi that helped to maintain a discipline of purpose in countless demonstrations and protests around the world. Gandhi used the Hindi word “satyagraha,” meaning “spirit power,” which he said gave otherwise beaten-down people a sense of self-respect, purpose, and moral strength. Christians may find such solace in the Holy Spirit, but the concept has its own universality.

Why do I raise this issue? Because, clearly, we need a way to move beyond the stigma of riots and looting to maintain the dignity of the cause for which George Floyd’s needless death has become a catalyst. We need a way to channel the power of the protests to make the provocateurs and the criminals unwelcome, and to harness the anger of those wayward souls easily led astray. That requires the sense of purpose that spirit power unleashes in making leaders of those who have felt left behind. It requires instilling vision.

Make no mistake. I am proud of the political leadership provided at this time in Illinois by both Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot, as well as many others in lesser posts, as well as some mayors and governors elsewhere. But the leadership needed to save and redirect the protests will not come from politicians. It will come from neighborhood leaders like Jahmal Cole, with the sense of humility that comes of building movements from the ground up, and thus understanding how to reach and relate to people where it matters. Cole spoke at Mayor Lightfoot’s press conference last Sunday (May 31), along with clergy and other civic leaders, but his impassioned speech reappeared on the op-ed page of the Chicago Tribune two days later, under the headline, “Looting isn’t the answer, but organizing is.” He distinguishes between mobilizing people and organizing them, making the powerful case that organizing is the true hard work, with fundamentals, or basic rules. Leadership does not just happen. It is trained, but it also grows organically from heart-felt commitment.

Cole closes with a “message to the cops,” stating that a badge “gives you a platform that will elevate your true character.” It will either amplify your wickedness or amplify your platform to do good. Perhaps it can be said that, in a much less formal way, joining a movement can do the same. Every protester faces a moral choice. We need leaders who redirect wayward energy and identify and exclude evil intent. They will not succeed in every instance. Many instances of crime and looting will be out of their control and depend far more on police response and readiness. But their efforts will nonetheless help our nation reframe the debate over racial injustice.

Jim Schwab

Inside the Hospital in the Time of Coronavirus

Posted on May 13, 2020 by admin

It started last Thursday evening after dinner. By 8 p.m., suffering shivers and chills and fatigue, I retreated to bed, unsure what was affecting me but hoping a solid night of sleep might provide some respite. I was near the end of two busy weeks. The previous week, I had been deeply involved in a huge experiment by the American Planning Association, which it called NPC20 @Home, a three-day online professional conference that would replace its canceled National Planning Conference, which would have taken place in Houston April 25-28. Instead, on opening day, April 29, I was moderating a session with three speakers[i] on “Demanding Equity: Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” We had rehearsed our approach, and it came off seamlessly before more than 1,600 participants, which made all of us very happy.

The following Monday, as chair of APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I led our annual business meeting, which also had gone online after the NPC was canceled. With the support of our executive committee, particularly Christine Caggiano, our secretary-treasurer, who played the Wizard of Oz for our Zoom controls, it too had been a remarkable success with attendance spread across four time zones. So it went through Thursday, when two other speakers[ii] and I presented a webinar for APA’s Michigan chapter on the 2020 update of APA’s Hazard Mitigation Policy Guide. That was over by mid-afternoon; we patted ourselves on the back, and I went on to other business, such as a blog post that remains unfinished. I will get to it, I hope.

It was only as the evening progressed that I sensed something was wrong.

My wife, Jean, began to share fears that I was the latest victim of coronavirus. She, of course, was simply reacting to visible symptoms and venting her worst fears. But as the night wore on, my intuition led me in other directions, and I was unwilling to succumb to simple answers. Only I could experience and report all of my symptoms, which included a few trips to the bathroom, and it reminded me too much of previous experiences with prostatitis. In April 2012, on a flight to Los Angeles, I experienced chills and fever somewhere over the Rockies. Chicago to Los Angeles is about a four-hour flight, so I had to endure two hours of personal deterioration before landing at LAX, where I struggled to hold myself together as I grabbed my luggage and found a taxi to the hotel, where I could check in for that year’s National Planning Conference at the nearby convention center. At the hotel, I was already sweating as I checked in and found my room, where I remained for the evening, under bed covers, skipping nearly every event at which I was expected.

I was basically a physical wreck throughout the five-day conference, but, on the advice of my primary physician, found my way to a nearby urgent care center, where I was diagnosed with prostatitis, an infection of the prostate gland that can, under the worst conditions, kill the patient, as my urologist in Chicago later explained. I will say it was one of the worst experiences of illness in my entire life, and people who saw me when I made an occasional appearance outside my room uniformly commented on how awful I looked, and asked what was wrong.

Thursday night was nowhere near that bad, but still, it reminded me symptomatically of that experience.

Yet, by Friday morning, I thought I had perhaps gotten past it all. I felt reasonably okay, ate breakfast, dressed, and joined an online faculty meeting for the School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) at the University of Iowa, where I teach a course on disaster planning. Our discussion with the dean of the Graduate College, John Keller, focused on what might happen with on-campus instruction this coming fall, a question for which the answer was indeterminate.

Somewhere in the middle of that discussion, the malaise began to reassert itself, and I felt weak and tired. I sent a chat note to Charles Connerly, the director of SURP, saying that if I disappeared from the Zoom screen, it was because I was not well. Less than an hour into the meeting, I did exactly that, and went upstairs to our bedroom to rest. My wife noticed that my fever was not abating and worried that I needed medical attention. By noon, she insisted on taking me to the emergency room at nearby St. Mary’s Presence Hospital, and I gave in, not because I had resisted the idea but because I needed to muster the energy to get up and do it.

At the hospital door, a small group of security and admitting staff sought to ensure that I was arriving as a patient as I exited the passenger door of our car. I explained the situation. My wife and grandson could not join me because, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and with most of the hospital devoted to such patients, no visitors are permitted. They had to wait in the car or go home, which they eventually did after picking up take-out lunch at a nearby Wendy’s. Once inside and admitted, I was on my own.

The first step by the nursing staff was to administer a COVID-19 test, putting swabs deep into my nasal cavity; it later proved negative. However, my temperature was 100.6° F. They did a battery of other tests based on my symptoms and concluded over the next few hours, as I sat in an ER unit, that I was suffering from a urinary tract infection (UTI). How I acquired it, I will probably never know, just as I never learned how I acquired prostatitis. All that matters is the treatment. I learned, to my deep disappointment, that I would be kept overnight for monitoring because of my history of prostate issues, which has included an almost fruitless search for evidence of cancer. I say “almost” because elevated PSA scores triggered the search nearly a decade ago, before the incident in Los Angeles, and on one occasion a fusion biopsy discovered a tiny sliver of affected tissue. But that finding has never occurred in all the years since. As a result, no treatment has been necessary. But still, caution was apparently in order when a UTI materialized.

The one reservation, of course, is that most of the hospital by May 8 was occupied by COVID-19 patients. One floor was reserved for non-COVID patients requiring hospitalization, and by 9:30 p.m., that is where I was sent. In the meantime, as evening approached, the attending nurse, Jesse, offered the use of his cell phone so that I could call my wife and ask her to bring my cell phone, my Nook e-reader, reading glasses, and power cords to help me escape boredom. He could see that, with nothing to do during long spells when nothing needed to be done (I already had an IV in my arm for a broad-spectrum antibiotic), I was becoming slightly stir crazy. Jean obliged by delivering the goods to the ER door, where Jesse retrieved them. My Nook contains dozens of books. They would relieve my anxiety and let me feel connected to friends and family, so that we could discuss what was happening.

One situation that disturbed me early in the evening was that I had promised to be part of two online events from 5 to 6 p.m. The first was to host the Zoom “room” for HMDR as part of a much larger invitation for members of any APA divisions to participate in a virtual Divisions Happy Hour. Given that HMDR has more than 1,500 members, and APA now has 22 divisions and eight “interest groups,” the number of registrants may have been rather large, but I never had time to check. It was surely in the hundreds, though once they were dispersed to their own groups, each division may have had a few dozen attendees, at most. At the same time, SURP was hosting an online happy hour event for John Fuller, a 41-year veteran professor of the planning school who is retiring at the end of the spring semester. I had arranged to migrate between the two events by having two other executive officers of HMDR, Caggiano and Stacy Wright, our chair-elect, take over when I moved from the APA event to the University of Iowa event. John, in his early days, had hired me as a graduate research assistant when I entered the program, supported my career for its entirety, and played a role in my being hired as an adjunct professor at Iowa in 2008. Before Jean brought my iPhone, I felt guilty about my inability to let anyone know why I was not attending, even though I could do nothing about it. Once armed with the phone, I called Connerly to explain my absence at the university event, and he promised to inform John and Kathy Fuller. I also emailed Caggiano and Wright to let them know why I had not shown up. They assured me the event had gone well. My evening would have felt much worse if I had not been able to make those contacts.

I later learned that my two daughters had unwisely come to the hospital seeking information on my condition, which they could have attempted more safely by calling. One was put off by the cold response she got from the staff at the door, but I told her the staff had bigger concerns than her hurt feelings. It could instead be a lesson in using better judgment. She had also questioned Jean about why she took me to the hospital at all because she had come to understand that no one these days comes out alive. That is clearly not true, but probably not uncommon mythology among the public.

At one point while still in ER, I heard a PA announcement barking “Code Joy!” three times, followed by the opening bars of the theme song from Rocky. I wondered what that was about but could only make lame guesses. Later, from a nurse in my room, I learned it was a celebration of a patient who was being released from the COVID wards—someone who had fought the virus and won. Before I left the hospital, this happened five times. It became a reassuring indication that people do, indeed, fight the virus and win—every day. And not just every day somewhere, but every day in the same hospital. Five times in three days while I was there. I will surely never know who they were, but good luck to all, and God bless every one of them. The Great Virus is not invincible.

As noted, late that evening, I was wheeled out of ER, through the halls and onto an elevator, and up to the eighth floor, the only remaining non-COVID section of the hospital. After being tested for vitals, I quickly fell asleep. The next morning, I awoke early, around 5:30 a.m., and began a routine that would last for nearly two days. I would alternate between using my cell phone for a small number of e-mail and text messages, and occasional calls with relatives, watching one news channel or another, reading, and taking naps. With an IV in my arm and heart monitors on my chest, I could hardly be more adventurous.

The biggest commitment was to finish reading The Great Influenza, by John Barry, a 2004 book about the 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions around the world at the end of World War I. That may seem a gruesome topic for someone in the hospital, but I had read three-fourths of the book before becoming ill, and I wanted to finish. Also, I approach such information more clinically, trying to understand what mistakes were made, what changes resulted, and how people were affected, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn so much so quickly. By noon Sunday, I finished, even perusing the photo sections and some of the author’s acknowledgments. Certainly, I could not have been reading history more relevant to our current dilemma.

My selfie in a hospital bed. Nobody said such photos would be beautiful.

Then I was faced with the question of what to read next. I had no assurance that I was going home that day, although it was possible. The hospital had received the lab results by late Saturday evening, and they indicated nothing unusual or troubling that would make mine a difficult case. But there was some question of how soon an infectious disease specialist and the doctor would sign off on my release. At that point, it felt that the real issue was more bureaucratic logjam than substantive, and I began to voice some urgency both to the overnight nurse, Klaudia, and the day nurse who followed, Katorina, that I did not wish to waste space if my staying no longer served a legitimate purpose. They could only reassure me that it would happen sooner or later, but I must say that both were extremely attentive and remarkably pleasant, even when it was obvious how restive I had become about the need to be released. Given the pressures surrounding them, they seemed like angels.

It was Mother’s Day, after all, and I was also feeling regret about not only missing the Friday happy hour events, one to honor a long-time friend and colleague, but now draining the pleasure out of a day that should have been spent honoring Jean. It did not seem fair that my unexpected illness should rob her of this honor. I had planned to grill steaks and baked potatoes to accompany a lush salad for her dinner, but could do none of that. I could only wait.

I made an unusual choice of my next book—a 1950s theological essay, Your God Is Too Small, by J.B. Phillips. Despite its dated gender language in the introduction, it is remarkably lucid and straightforward in explaining how we “box” God into small roles in our lives because we cannot bring ourselves to understand God’s vastness and yet God’s importance to the minute details of our lives at the same time. There was something vaguely soothing about the message, given the situation. I did not finish the book in the hospital. That task still awaits. But I put a large dent in it.

Suddenly, around 6 p.m., Katorina came to the room to provide some medicine and the news that the doctor was authorizing my release, with the understanding that I should call to set up a follow-up telemedicine appointment with him a week later. Within the space of a half-hour, the nurse removed all the equipment hanging from my arm and chest; I changed clothes, packed up my limited belongings, signed the release papers, and she was walking me to the elevator, down to the lobby, and to the front door, where Jean had been alerted to find me. She arrived within minutes. Yes, non-COVID patients are also leaving hospitals these days, though far fewer than used to be the case. Non-essential surgeries, in many places including Chicago, have been pushed aside because those ill from coronavirus need the beds. But, clearly, they too often leave and return home, just as I was doing.

I took it easy on Monday. I was still a little light on energy, so I spent much of the day reading a few newspapers that had accumulated in my absence, but I had no special ambitions and no appointments. I did cook that steak dinner as a reward for Jean’s patience and a delayed Mother’s Day. But in the evening, I had difficulty sleeping because tension in my neck and shoulders, probably the result of stiffness induced by a lack of motion with all the equipment attached to my body in the hospital, was causing a mild headache. At Jean’s urging, I took two pain pills and a sleeping pill, but then she applied some massage to bring the congested energy around my neck down my spine to my legs and feet, and I felt some relief. In the end, I managed to sleep until 6:30, which is late for me, but very good in this instance. It was refreshing.

On the trail in Humboldt Park, a day and a half after release.

I have spent part of Tuesday composing this story, but part of it further releasing that pent-up energy by hopping on my bicycle and riding it to Humboldt Park, a 700-acre expanse of municipal open space just half a mile from our home. I wandered down one path after another, past lakes and lagoons and trees in the open air of a Chicago spring morning. I had written part of this before I left. I felt more energized to complete it when I came back, once I had eaten lunch. I learned you can enjoy nature much more when you have missed it for a few days. I can only imagine the restless agony of missing it for much, much longer.

Jim Schwab

[i] Shannon van Zandt, Texas A&M; Marccus Hendricks, Univ. of Maryland; and Chrishelle Palay, HOME Coalition, Houston.

[ii] Pete Parkinson and Kara Drane, who were also co-authors of the updated guide along with George Homewood, David Gattis, and myself.

Costly Coastal Arrogance

Posted on February 13, 2020 by admin

In the days shortly after World War II, writes Gilbert M. Gaul in The Geography of Risk, Morris Shapiro and his family were busy building their own version of Levittown, the famed suburban tract housing development of Long Island, on a barrier island in southern New Jersey known as Long Beach Island. The place had largely been the preserve of fishing villages in earlier years, but Shapiro had a vision, one he passed along to his son, Herbert, in due time.

Shapiro drained and built on what we now call wetlands, but in the 1940s, environmental values were a weak reed for resisting the onslaught of developers who believed in the next big real estate trend and the willingness of small villages to grow with them. And so, Morris persuaded Herbert to buy land around Barnegat Bay, and the few hunters and watermen who understood the value of salt marsh in preserving wildlife habitat were pushed aside. The suburbanization of the Jersey Shore soon took hold.

Nature heals its own wounds when the landscape is healthy, but damage to the built environment can be another matter altogether. Gaul details the impacts of the Ash Wednesday storm that struck the New Jersey coast in the spring of 1962, providing the nation with its first television-era glimpse of disasters yet to come and the high costs of having compromised the protective dunes and wetlands and installed thousands of bungalows on a narrow, highly vulnerable strip of land along the sea. “Nearly all the 5,361 homes on Long Beach Island . . . were damaged,” Gaul tells us, “including 1,000 that were severely impaired and 600 that were destroyed.”

As always, the immediate focus was on rebuilding, with urgent reminders from legislators and others of the economic value of shoreline development (but not its costs). In the face of that Category 5 juggernaut, Gov. Richard Hughes bravely proposed a six-month moratorium on new development, supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and a ban on rebuilding along a 100-foot buffer along the beach. Looking back, it seems visionary for its time in anticipating the problems that would otherwise follow, and it attracted precisely the blowback we have come to expect. Federal support for rebuilding came from the Kennedy administration, and the long drift toward increased federal responsibility for recovery was underway.

Gaul goes on to detail the long tale of Jim Mancini, both developer and mayor of Long Beach Island, and cheerleader in chief for the coastal towns and what they saw as their inevitable growth. Still, governors and environmental officials in New Jersey were periodically game for a new try at restraining a situation where local officials controlled building and zoning while state taxpayers provided millions of dollars to repair storm damage and infrastructure. Gov. Brendan Byrne was next in 1979, starting with a conference on the future of the New Jersey shore, followed by initiatives from the state Department of Environmental Protection and the introduction of the Dune and Shorefront Protection Act in the legislature.

Predictably, the mayors rebelled, led by Mancini, who organized 1,500 protesters to attend a July 1980 hearing at the St. Francis Community Center in Brant Beach. Robert Hollenbeck, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, essentially presided over an ambush in which he was repeatedly shouted down by angry homeowners. Once again, the opportunity to take a creative regulatory approach to controlling shoreline damage was driven into wholesale political retreat. By the time Superstorm Sandy delivered its legendary hit in October 2012, it was all over but the shouting. The administration of Gov. Chris Christie was not about to seriously challenge the home rule prerogatives that dominate the politically fragmented landscape of New Jersey township government. The tough questions would have to wait.

What Gaul outlines in New Jersey, of course, has occurred in other forms in other places from the Carolinas to Florida to Texas over the subsequent decades. Gaul takes us to all these locations as the book progresses. What we have seen, time and again, are the costly consequences of a pattern of coastal development that has placed increasing quantities of homes and properties in harm’s way, then begged or even demanded that states and the federal government rescue the storm-damaged communities even as they fight bitterly against regulatory measures aimed at reducing future costs by restricting unwise development.

Of course, by now there are many residents caught in the middle. But surely, it is not impossible to sympathize with their plight and be willing to assist those who seek alternatives, while refusing to continue subsidizing unwise new development or bailing out those who refuse to accept the reality of the risks they have assumed. What is clear is that tough decisions await, and the public does not have endless resources. Wiser development and rebuilding decisions are imperative.

Not surprisingly, Gaul, a veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter, is a New Jersey native. But he is also an astute historian and researcher who writes with a well-informed passion that brings us, in the end, to the fateful season of 2017—the year of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria—and then 2018, when all looked calm on the meteorological front until Florence took its toll in North Carolina, followed by Category 5 Michael in the Florida Panhandle. Climate change, inducing hurricanes that become slow-moving rain bombs that flood cities like Houston, is still “not a thing” in the Trump White House. Neither, for the most part, are buyouts of repetitively flooded homes, even as the nation desperately needs to find ways to live more resiliently in the face of the risks it has embedded on its coastal landscapes.

But the costs keep climbing, and it is not impossible to imagine a serious political reckoning under a different administration with a more realistic handle on the stakes involved, which run into the trillions of dollars. It is not impossible, for instance, to imagine a $250 billion disaster if a catastrophic hurricane took direct aim at one of Florida’s major cities. For that reason alone, Gaul’s book may be worth a read. We need to improve the quality and depth of the conversation around issues with such drastic fiscal impact.

Jim Schwab

Now Is the Time

Posted on January 21, 2020 by admin

In the mid-1960s, before the advent of the personal computer, when a manual typewriter was the state of the art in original document production, I took a high school typing course in which I learned the QWERTY keyboard and how to manipulate my fingers to put words on paper more rapidly. There were some curious practice exercises that people used to gain such mastery, memorized phrases that one might type repeatedly in order to build digital agility. One of them was this gem:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

Even as I wrote this now, I did not make it to the end of the sentence without a stumble. Unlike my teenage days, however, I now can simply back up and overwrite mistakes or even just rely on Microsoft Word’s spell-correct functions to fix things for me. How the world has changed. In those days, I had to laboriously apply White-Out to the page. (Millennials can be excused for looking up that brand name.)

In the woke 2020s, of course, it is perfectly appropriate to change the wording of that exercise to “all good men and women” or even “all good people.” And indeed, many of the people I will call on in this essay are women in positions of power in the United States Congress, most notably the U.S. Senate. Of the 53 Republican Senators, nine are women. That is more than enough to tip any vote in that body.

I mention this typing exercise because it always made me wonder, “when is now?” What is the crisis that would trigger this aid from all good people, and what would that aid be? In recent weeks, it has become very clear to me that now is now, and the aid is that of people with enough courage and conscience to develop a clear-eyed vision of the challenge posed by the current President of the United States. The Senate trial of the impeachment charges brought against him started this afternoon.

As sometimes happens, one can see some of the ground shifting beneath the feet of those who assumed they could respond from a position of power without response to the evidence or the larger issues surrounding the case. It has happened before, and the shifting of the ground was the fundamental reason in 1974 for the resignation of President Richard Nixon before his case ever came to trial. It is taking longer in this case simply because President Trump has thrown up one obstacle after another to prevent any witnesses from the Executive Branch, and any documents, from reaching public view. Arguing that the House should spend endless months challenging assertions of executive privilege in order to bring its case, the President and all his henchmen seem determined to run out the clock before the 2020 election. Wisely, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not fall for this travesty and insisted on moving forward before Trump’s campaign could summon interference in another election.

The game now, in the Senate, is to claim that the House cannot bring witnesses that it failed to summon during its impeachment investigation, even though most could not be subpoenaed in a timely fashion because of White House obstruction. Despite that, a parade of good men and women, mostly civil servants and career diplomats, made their way to the House of Representatives to testify both for closed-door depositions and open hearings because now was their time to come to the aid of their country. For that, most were reviled publicly by the President himself. We have never seen such a shameful display of executive arrogance before in American history.

The House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, in the last two hours as I write this, did a masterful job, in my opinion, of highlighting the hypocrisy of Trump’s allies claiming that the House should have heard from witnesses whom Trump himself barred from testifying. As the public begins to focus more closely on this point, the ground may shift some more—if not in changing votes in the Senate on the rules of the trial, then quite possibly in November when voters decide how much hypocrisy and unfairness they can stomach before they rebel.

Look, I am not a lawyer, so I am not attempting to present legal and constitutional arguments here, but as a very well-informed citizen, I am more than entitled to introduce some moral and intellectual perspective. The Republican approach in both houses of Congress has struck me as a competition to produce the best imitation of Sgt. Schultz from the silly 1960s television show, Hogan’s Heroes, which featured some ingenious Allied prisoners of war in a German stalag during World War II. Schultz was known for turning a blind eye when Col. Hogan engaged in some forbidden antics, always using the stock line, “I see nothing,” enunciated with a heavy German accent.

But it may also be a grand imitation of the three wise monkeys of Japanese legend, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil, each of whom participated in a charade to avoid seeing the obvious. After all, if President Trump insists his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelenskiy was “perfect,” then there must be no reason to examine the evidence, right? So, let’s hear the arguments first in the Senate trial, and decide later whether we wish to view documents or hear from witnesses. If it weren’t such tragic farce, it might make for good material for a Saturday Night Live skit. But sometimes, the truth is so baldly scary that any potential humor associated with it fades into the shadows.

I say that because the evidence is mounting that Trump simply does not understand, or does not wish to understand, that presidential power is not and never has been unlimited under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. No previous president has assumed that he was entitled simply to do whatever he wanted. Respect for the U.S. Constitution, to which each swore an oath to “protect and defend,” and a sense of patriotic honor about protecting democracy itself, restrained their worst impulses. Until now.

It so happened that, over the recent holidays, I discovered and read a short biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Radical Integrity: The Story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), the German Lutheran pastor who in the 1930s and 1940s undertook to oppose the rise of Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, he was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler in the waning days of the war. With just a month left before Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Nazi authorities, with an eye to avenging any opposition to Hitler, executed him at Flossenburg prison. To this day, he is regarded as a religious and patriotic martyr for standing up to tyranny under the Nazi regime. He knew the consequences he faced, and he was not deterred. I have long known about Bonhoeffer but had not read his story in depth. The short, popularized version by Michael Van Dyke resulted in my tracking down (through colleague Allison Hardin as I was recovering from surgery) the full 1,000-page biography from 1970 by close Bonhoeffer associate and seminarian Eberhard Bethge (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography). I aim to read it in full in the coming months.

I mention it because, in staring down the intimidation practiced by Donald Trump, the relentless shredding of opponents’ reputations, the ignorance of history accompanied by thirst for power that characterizes his presidency, and the inability to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, error under any circumstances, no one is asking anyone in Congress to put his or her life on the line in the way that Bonhoeffer and similar principled critics of tyranny were willing to do. They may fear losing a Republican primary as a result of Trump ginning up his base, but there is life after politics, and certainly life after a single defeat by the followers of a president who is likely to be a spent force in American politics within five years. The question is one of having sufficient courage and integrity to challenge this march toward authoritarianism while it still matters. Political self-preservation in the short term is a very myopic goal. Abraham Lincoln lost re-election to the U.S. House because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War, only to resurface a dozen years later as one of the greatest presidents in American history.

But alas, it appears that when the time comes for someone to write the story of the 53 Republican Senators in the 116^th Congress, they may need to reverse the title of President John F. Kennedy’s famous book and call theirs Profiles in Cowardice. But we shall see. There is always the opportunity for a miracle of conscience. Some good people may yet come to the aid of their country.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Category Archives: Books

In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?

Climate Solutions, Off the Shelf

When Narcissism Trumps All

Practical Approaches to Climate Change

Charting a Path to Sustainability

Weep for America, but Build Leadership

Inside the Hospital in the Time of Coronavirus

Costly Coastal Arrogance

Now Is the Time