Having Lunch With Satan

A couple years ago, I took a Laguna Beach Planning Commissioner to lunch to brief her about some new regulations that concerned my clients. She brought Roger Von Butow with her. Bummer.

Von Butow shook my hand and said, "My friends asked me why I was having lunch with Satan."

Funny. I felt I was doing the same thing. Von Butow is one of the craziest of green crazies in our neck of the woods. He shows up at various city council and county supervisor meetings, verbally abusing anyone who cuts the least bit of slack on enviro-nazism. Try to get one ten-gazillionth part per liter allowed if the regs say only nine-gazillionth ppl, and Von Butow will be on your neck like a pit bull.

So today he popped up in the OCRegister with a column, "Death of green movement greatly exaggerated." His point:

Who are those flaming, left-wing liberal, poster child leaders who got us into this mess anyway? Maybe a trip down memory lane would be amusing. Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, the first conservation president, was a friend of John (Sierra Club) Muir and initiated the bureaus of Forestry and Reclamation. TR was the godfather of the national parks system. Republican President Richard Nixon signed the federal Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the California version of NEPA, the California Environmental Quality Act.

I see. Since some laws moved by Republican presidents have been exploited beyond anything they could ever imagine towards ends they would never endorse, we are supposed to roll over and gleefully strap on our Birkenstocks with traipse through the tidepools with Roger.

Sorry. I'll keep pushing for those 10 ppl.

There's a sweet contrast in the OCReg by one of my favorite columnists, Steve Greenhut, who's on another of his rants about those who, like Von Butow, think they know what's right for us.

Greenhut's got New Urbanism in the sights of his cheat-seeking missile. As he puts it:

Whenever some ideologue claims to offer the most important thing since sliced bread and then promises to reorder my life around it, we should all get nervous.

Summing up:

In Portland, Ore., the city where Smart Growthers have had control of the government for years, the hip neighborhoods "seem to have everything in new urban design and comfort," reported the New York Times last month. "Everything except children. ... Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families."

The New Urbanists claim to want to give our lives meaning by creating superior urban forms of living, yet they miss the most meaningful things in life because they emphasize architecture over people. Like all totalitarians, they assume that what they prefer is so good and noble that they have the moral right to impose it on everybody else.

The rest of us need to take notice now, so there is still time to oppose it.