10 October 2006

Above the Law

We are all wringing our hands about the pesky North Koreans this morning, which is a favorable change from wringing our hands over pesky Congressmen pedophiles. The truth about the Korean blast will not be known to the public for a while. The test appears to be smaller than one would expect from these things, and may have been a partial failure, or success, depending on how you look at these things.

There might even be another one, if some sources are to be believed, or even that the whole thing was faked, like our Lunar Landings. At the moment, even the most deranged opinion must be analyzed. The situation will become clearer in time. The fact that the Dear Leader's people flouted international law is what has pushed the international community into such a dither.

What is to be done? Endless crippling sanctions? Will the Chinese countenance regime change, now with at least partially effective nuclear devices? Will the US and Japan deploy naval forces to check each ship that calls in Korea? Will it drag on as long as the uneasy Armistice that stopped the fighting a half century ago?

Wasn't it the endless and expensive enforcement of the “No fly” zones that made the invasion of Iraq so appealing to those in the Administration? It went on for a decade, and was draining the Pentagon operations accounts. There are those who say that was a factor in the decision-making.

I don't have any definitive knowledge about that, though I remember the muttering about the endless military operation. I do know that there isn't an easy way to deal with heavily armed people who consider themselves above the law.

With four weeks left before Election Day, polling indicates that Congressman Foley's pedophile peccadilloes are weakening the Republicans. Voters are apparently being alienated from their elected officials, who do not seem to follow the same rules of behavior as average Americans. The electorate has the sense that members of Congress consider themselves above the law.

I wish sometimes that I lived in some magical land where there is no law, and no need for it. I was looking at a link to a somewhat amusing home video the other day- passing links to one another serves as communication in this late phase of the Republic- and was startled to hear that the two young men who originated the video sharing were paid $1.6 Billion for their enterprise by the Google monks.

The video service is called YouTube, and was started in a garage last year. My eyes rolled. If I ever have an idea a thousandth as good, I would buy a piece of property somewhere far away from here and dig a deep moat against the lawless.

Even that approach is getting problematic. While I fulminate at injustice from the ramparts at Big Pink, the rest of the population that works in and around the capital continues to sprawl to all points of the compass. Fairfax County is adjacent to Arlington, and is a place I used to live.

The split-level house was precisely eighteen miles away from the five-sided building where I worked. In human terms, that was just over a three hour jog from door to door, though I only did that once. The sprawl continued past my door, right over the Civil War fields of conflict at Chantilly and Ox Hill.

At one of the malls not far from the house there is a postage-stamp sized island of greenery surrounded by asphalt parking. There is a granite monument in the shrubs that informs you, if you happen to get out of the car, that in the desperate fighting at that spot two general officers were killed. The townhouses look down all around, and it is quite impossible to imagine anything more lethal than the morning Washington Post hitting anything.

The sprawl and the asphalt continued west, leaping over the core of the Bull Run battlefields that were purchased as parks long ago. Disney wanted to build a theme park right next door, with animatronic soldiers and horses and plenty of parking.

They lost that battle, but the farms continued to be sold off, and the town homes continued to rise up out of the green fields. I had business out past Dulles International, which used to be in the country. I pulled off the interstate an hour west of town a few weeks ago at a place called Haymarket. It was a farming hamlet at a road junction, or at least it had been. I found myself trapped in traffic fiercer than Fairfax, giant dump trucks and Volvos and SUVs all piled up against one another.

I am no eco-loon. I believe in the law, and right of property owners to do what they must. The aging farmers view their land as a loamy 401k retirement fund, and that is their right. In consequence, I found myself giving to an organization dedicated to purchasing land at market rate and placing it into conservancy, or donating it to the Park Service and held in trust for the future.

It was all legal and above-board. The Trust competed with the developers at their own game. They identified significant historical places, sought matching funds, and where they could, bought the farms before they could be transformed forever.

Let me stipulate that the Trust cannot compete with all the developers everywhere, so our small successes are hardly a bulwark against construction. We might be able to save a few sight-lines, so someone in some distant time could imagine what it might have been like.

Some of the most threatened land is now all the way out at Harper's Ferry, where the two Virginias collide with Maryland across the river. John Brown's ghost walks there, among others, and it is a place worth seeing.

The place is historic because of the river, which once was the highway to the interior. There are several significant sites on the hills around the little valley town. The Trust bought one of them last year, after years of nail-biting litigation. I had contributed a couple bucks, and when the property at School House Ridge was deeded over to the Park Service, I breathed a sigh of relief and got back to worrying about terrorists, Koreans and pederasts, in about that order.

Priorities.

So you can imagine how I felt when I found out that developers had shown up on the School House Ridge property early on Saturday two weeks ago. They brought bulldozers and giant ditching machines, three lawyers and an off-duty county cop. They drove over the stake that marked the boundary of the Park, and commenced trenching a 45-foot wide swath for a quarter mile.

They had no permit, but they apparently felt they were running out of time. If they got the sewer pipe in, it would permit the development of parcels within the limits of the park, thousands of them. There was too much at stake to worry about the law, so the bulldozers were protected by a flying wedge of pet lawyers.

I don't know where the Rangers were, or the real cops. The developers timed this all for a weekend with a major event commemorating the Civil Rights movement in the park. Officials were distracted. The 'dozers plowed and dug right through Saturday night and all day Sunday. By the time a Judge could be found to issue an injunction on Monday morning, the trenching was complete, the land violated, and the sewer pipe was laid.

There was nothing anyone could do about it, since the developers are as powerful as the North Koreans. I wrote an e-mail to the Secretary of the Interior, since he is the only one in this mess who is not above the law, though I am not sure. Here is how it went:

“Dear Mr. Secretary,

I just want to take a moment to register my outrage at the recent illegal intrusion onto national park land by developers on School House Ridge near Harper's Ferry.

As a contributor to one of the preservation organizations active there, I have a keen interest in preserving our past for the future. As a sometime resident of Fairfax County, I can testify to the shocking practices of developers who, upon discovery of historic remains and relics, bulldozed as fast as they could to destroy them before historians could examine and catalog them.

They didn't want the bother, or risk slowing down their rapacious building.

The School House Ridge incident of 03 October 2006 is even more breathtaking, since the land had been acquired and donated to the Federal Government. Legally, I might add.

The facts of the matter are as breathtaking as the arrogance of the developers. The intrusion casts doubt on your ability to protect public land. Where were the Rangers? Busy elsewhere, they were, and too few in number to stop the bulldozers grinding up our land.

Those responsible must be punished to the greatest extent of the law to demonstrate that greed and contempt will not be rewarded.

Victor Socotra
Big Pink. #515
Arlington VA  22203
703-555-1212”

I doubt if it will do any good, and the houses that will be filling the sewer pipe will be rising soon. It is amazing what you can do, if you are above the law.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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