I scratched my head last week when San Diego County’s Board of Five (or you may know them by one of their other handles like “The Gang That Couldn’t Say No To Back Country Development,” “The Cast of That Seventies Show Minus The Ethnic Guy Now All Grown Up And Republican,” or their street name, “Cinco Blancos”) said a close “nyet” to the Merry Merriam Quite Contrarian ( to existing density, traffic flow, environmental impact and fire safety plans) Mountain proposal. I mean, what’s another 2,700 rural houses after the last three decades of wilderness-conquering expansion?
Sure, the Merriam Mountain project violated the General Plan. Sure it raised the hackles of the local yokels who thought that rural meant rural and not suburban on its way to mid-city urban. When has that mattered a pallet of building materials in theis county? So when the 3:2 thumbs down came down, bringing the Mountain down with it, you could have knocked me over with an 18kt Golden Door Charm available from the Golden Door Boutique (a steal for only $780).
So you can imagine my surprise when I read that it wasn’t the locals that brought down the mountain. It wasn’t the General Plan or safety concerns that kept them from paving paradise. The tipping point in the debate was the fact that the spa of spas of the hoity and the toity, owned by the Blackstone Group, the equity company of equity companies for the wellest heeled of the wellest heeled (You know the Blackstone Group—the place retired Bushes go to get really, really rich and not the paltry rich being an oilman or President of the United States makes you?) was in a snit about so many common rabble moving in within a shiatsu massage of their hallowed grounds.
Whodda thunk it?
So now local grannies can stitch samplers for all our kitchen walls with the new San Diego Golden (Door) Rule: “Mega-Equity Money Does On To Smaller Developer Money as Smaller Developer Money does on to Neighborhood Interests.”
And that, class, concludes our Easter Weekend Moral Philosophy Session.
Political Lunacy 