Enjoy!

From:  High Plains Tango by Robert James Waller

(pages 308 – 310)

The old man chewed his over-easy eggs, took a sip of coffee, and continued.  “Their main forum for handling opposition of any kind is an exercise in phony democracy called the public hearing.  I went to one of these meetings once when they was thinking about putting a big dam across the Little Sal.  See, plans are made by bureaucrats, engineers, and selected movers and shakers.  After everything’s already been decided, a public hearing is called for the purpose of what’s gracefully labeled ‘soliciting citizen input.’

“But the big thinkers don’t really want input from citizens.  If common folks had too much input and asked hard questions about who really stands to benefit from dams and highways, the things might never get built.  The hearing is just a slick way of getting people to think they’ve had some say, which they have, except their input has nothing to do with the final output and therefore is of no value, not to mention being useless. 

“The planners know this, so it’s kind of a delicate balancing act to con people into thinking they’ve had a voice in the matter without letting ’em screw up the big dreams.  That’s why the local leaders sit in the audience at these hearings and pretend they’re just regular citizens.  They’re also watching for any real troublemakers so they can identify them and report them to the main propeller heads, who are from out of town.

And I can tell you, Carlisle McMillan got their attention right away, because Carlisle, unlike most of the sheep, is not cowed by anybody, seems to me.  More than that, he absolutely hates experts.  And understand, experts are the key to the entire scam of the type we’re talking about here.  At the hearings, ordinary people ask sort of simple questions, like ‘Couldn’t Denver find another source of water rather damming up the Little Sal and pumping all the way from the high plains to the eastern slope?  It’s a pretty good fishing river, and some of us would hate to see it spoiled.’

“At that point, the suits go into high gear.  It’s all been intricately choreographed, ’cause there’s too much profit riding on this to leave anything to chance.  The moderator of the hearing says something like ‘I’ll turn that question over to our expert, Larry Software, a PhD in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technocracy with two thousand years of experience in such matters, a staff of four hundred and sixty graduates of Ivy League schools and a computer bigger’n this town.’

“Dr. Larry, who’s at the front of the room, has about twenty volumes bound with plastic spirals within arm’s reach.  These are collectively called "The Report". 

Expert Larry rises, puts his hand on the stack, and says, ‘I hope all of you have had time to read and consider "The Report".  On pages one sixteen through two ninety of volume twelve is the benefit-cost analysis for the project.   Of course, in volume’s fifteen and sixteen, along with some useful notes in the two- volume  appendix to The Report, is our multiple-criteria decision model, in which we have included our set of alternatives, our prioritized criteria, and the utility weights we have assigned to these criteria, along with estimated outcomes of each alternative in light of the criteria.  Oh yes, you may also have noticed our discount rate justification in volume 11.  Using all of this, we ran one hundred and eighty-two million simulations on our giant Crawdad 290FXZ computer, constantly adjusting and testing our probability estimates and examining the model’s sensitivity to parameter changes.  Clearly, the only feasible alternative is to dam the bejesus out of the Little Sal so the people of Denver can have all the water they need for car washing and theme parks.’”

Do we have the political will to affect real change?