I dunno what you guys are talking about, but the pairing of ‘visible turgidity’ and ‘tips of tongues’ is making my pants tight.

Alec: It’s not our fault that you were built in a Hell crafted by man’s own hands.

I suspect that unforgiving geography dotted with absurd, emerald-green golf oases is deeply relevant to his understanding of man’s relationship with nature.

I’d argue that anyone with a soul here is raised to love the dam and learns to hate the golf course. Noonan, whose career just screams ‘traditional family values’, probably went the other way around and the converse. The difference is between massive and purposeful environmental disruption for the public good and massive, purposeful environmental and public-resource disruption for the good of a few wealthy men.

And I swear I’m not the father.

LOOK AT ME I’M ALEC

HUUH SMOKING IS SYMBOLIC OF MAN’S VICTORY OVER NATURE

PFFT PPFT HKKKKK LUNG CANCER

Not even a gratuitous “Dirty hippies hate America!”

A bad sign for Mr. Noonan.

A very bad sign.

I think colorized Noonan needs a brighter red lipstick.

And a clown nose.

Why does do this man’s chin(s) look like testicles?

Funny you should mention that because as it happens his testicles look like Confederate Yankee’s chin. That is to say they are absent.

Hmmm. Could it be he’s actually one of these?

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&svnum=10&hl=en&q=ballchinian

Interesting Alec. I usually see things that way as well. Interesting digression.

You remember the Yangtse River dolphin going extinct? How we were supposed to be sad about that? Can’t pull it off, or the part where I’m supposed to be bothered by the loss of the local environment. We’ll set aside for a moment that the Yangtse’s flooding and pestilence are villainous elements of local history going as far back as the history itself; I just can’t hate a dam.

Djur and I had a long argument, and not just the fake kind we use for intros at our blog, about the same subject. Hoover Dam is a very good reason to have an unshakable baseline positivism, the impression that man can destroy and reshape the environment in his image, because it’s one of the final products of Modern-era America – before we got pomo and monetarist, subjecting everything to dumb hedonistic calculi and producing locally optimal solutions that throw the whole system into Hell. Boulder/Hoover was built at tremendous expense and at large cost of labor, and it wasn’t contracted out in the ‘competitive’ fashion we seem to like now, but – gasp – built by a federal program designed to create a strong, lasting dam on the Colorado.

As a result of the dam, we have this lake, Lake Mead, you might have heard of – the largest man-made lake in the world, last I checked (which isn’t recent enough to make me right – I’m semi-sure that the Three Gorges floodlake is probably bigger). It watered vast swaths of the Southwest, made agriculture remotely possible, and its massive volume flow made electricity available to the common man without filling the valleys with stinking coal smoke.

Now, because of people like Noonan – people who take that positivist impulse and use it as an apology for rapine greed – Lake Mead is going dry, southern Nevada is in a permanent drought and our golf courses remain as green and pristine as ever, taking up twice the fucking residential water supply and making sure nothing the city mandates for residential water use will ever matter worth a tinker’s damn. And the dam in and of itself does have its drawbacks – for instance, the Colorado don’t flow into the gulf no more, and sometimes it doesn’t even flow into Mexico. It’s destroyed a major ecosystem and that’s unfortunate. If I hadn’t been raised around a dam, I wouldn’t like that one bit.

But the positivist baseline for me is that people can get together and change the world for the better, and sometimes are pretty much obligated to do so. The Three Gorges Dam will damage the environment horribly, but the equivalent level of power generation with China’s local coal supply would turn the Yellow Sea into a naval moonscape even faster than it’s already becoming one. And the profits from it are going into the capitalist-apparatchik class – but then again, so do the profits from everything in the People’s Republic.

I love dams, conceptually. I think nowadays they’re just a nuisance, because we are not the men we were when Boulder was built; we will not spend money to make things last, we try and cut corners however we can. The most horrifying experience of my life was watching this triumphalist-toned Science Channel documentary about these engineers making a bypass for Boulder’s over-the-top highway – the traffic it gets is more than anyone wants, and we want to be able to lock it down in response to threats. So they hire these people to put up a bridge on the Arizona side, through a canyon.

It’s a major architectural feat and they hire the lowest bidder. And it shows; to cut costs, they do their mixing, molding, and drying on site – you know, on the windswept outskirts of a canyon, because the loathsome fucker who won the bid evidently thinks springing for a tarpaulin or a 100-mile truck from better country would break the budget. And then they do the most profoundly terrifying thing I’ve ever seen: separate the bridge-builders into two camps and work them in competition to each other. So each side starts doing things to ‘speed up’, like, you know, adding meshing with concrete justification extensively because their pylon pieces aren’t perfect (!!!) and generally half-assing beyond belief to rush the other side to the middle of the canyon.

I felt like I was sitting helpless watching the next major bridge collapse, and the jocko fuckers were pleased with themselves. It was a breathtaking saga of incompetence by the lowest bidder, but that last part – that it’s cheap – is all that matters to us. If Boulder had been built now, it’d have cost a fifth as much, taken three times as long, would have had to go down for repairs three times, wouldn’t have made it into the black during the Carter Administration (or ever, for that matter), and would, of course, have been privatized to ward off public-sector inefficiency. I mean, personally, I’d happily pay another $20 in taxes to avoid dying in a fucking bridge collapse, but hey, I was never any good at economics.

I think I agree with the sentiment Noonan is expressing here. But the point is, he’s gotten it out of a basic and overarching contempt for civil society, and if it were up to him he’d go back in time and force the builders of Boulder to contract it out to the private sector. After all, it’d be more efficient that way. And certainly, if there’s anything that distinguishes man from beasts and gives us the right to change the environment as we see fit, it is our efficiency.

/looksism