All Politics is Local, even when thinking about Iraq

I don't write about Iraq and the "War on Terror" because it's not about placemaking directly. It is in terms of how we set and address national priorities. And it is because of how we use energy in this country, and how maintaining access to cheap oil fuels both sprawl and our foreign policy--as President Carter says in an op-ed, "Arctic Folly," We cannot drill our way to energy security or lower gasoline prices as long as our nation sits on just 3 percent of world oil reserves yet accounts for 25 percent of all oil consumption.

Today's "Over the Hedge" comic strip by Michael Fry and T. Lewis.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine has an amazing piece, "Taking Stock of the Forever War," about , on the fourth anniversary of 9/11/2001. There is a statement in the article that resonates on a number of levels, even in terms of domestic issues:

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in "ridding the world of evil." We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions.

I think this point can be expanded more broadly in terms of placemaking and revitalizing center cities to something like this "instead of addressing the real issues in revitalization, we stubbornly insist on policies and developments defined not by frank appraisal but by the obsessions of the growth machine."

Projects such as baseball stadiums result, while expanding the transit infrastructure, while proposed, goes unfunded.