Utopia and the Necessity of Town Council: A Christmas Reflection

“Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who loved her father very much.”

At a December 8 meeting of the Town Council with a light agenda, two and a half years of observation crystallized, pointing directly to Ever After, a 1998 film that approaches a beloved fairytale with realistic eyes and a light touch, in which the Cinderella character’s copy of Thomas More’s Utopia is thrown symbolically into the fire. Her understanding of geopolitics is maturing as the wicked stepsister who threw the book into the hearth is the very reason that a utopian society will never materialize.

Like the 2007 loan package in which true legal tender was mixed with faulty companions, Thomas More’s book combines gems of wisdom with at best a satirical vision of communal living where private property is not recognized. This can only lead to a crash. And indeed, the realistic Cinderella must lose everything before she can shrug her naivete and approach the politics of the hearth as well as the state with an understanding that the reality of evil precludes an untrammeled market.

A whisper amid the craze for Titanic, the film Ever After raises questions about government and how it can be properly imagined as democratic. Observing the Town Council for over two years, the Royal Examiner has concluded that the council is a necessary mechanism for advancing free markets, privatization where possible, and deregulation when austerity measures are not warranted. This cuts to the core of the neoliberal agenda, dating back to the post-WWII years, when it was articulated before it flowered in the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the eighties. Its philosophy conceives of every individual as human capital and a potential source of profit for the state.

Of course, any governmental endeavor will be tainted by the humanity of the individuals who comprise it, and the Royal Examiner has certainly seen clay feet. However, the overall profit far outweighs the inherent flaws. Many tangents present themselves: the brake pedal on economic development, the protection of roads, and the provision of services, but the queen who is sovereign over all these concerns is property rights. Inherent in that is the public-private partnership and the dialectic between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and every president who came after him about how large government is supposed to be.

Utopia will never exist because property rights will eternally be a jealously guarded concern. The financial crisis, followed by the recession, illustrates the problem of evil and the lengths to which some people will go when given the opportunity. In a neoliberal framework, the council is the best option for establishing speed limits in response to any change, giving the public time to react. This keeps a small group of people from running roughshod over the community.

Through debates over urban agriculture, foresight regarding water supply, enforcement of vehicular responsibility in school zones, the granting of special-use permits, budgetary restraint, and numerous other concerns, the council labors in all instances to ensure that property and the lives behind it are respected. Because of the clay feet, many might ask: Who needs them? The real question is: Where would we be without them?

Is it really in our best interest to surrender power to the untrammeled market forces that generate, among other things, numerous, unnecessary vape shops? It is a rhetorical question, but one well worth considering, nevertheless. The Town Council is the brake pedal that decreases the speed of those political actors. It really is the councilman’s job to say, based on land use, “No, that use is not appropriate at that location.” This prevents bad actors from purchasing large tracts of real estate and using them by right for whatever nefarious purpose they deem appropriate.

The wicked stepsister stands for this force of wastefulness and disrespect for property. She is what Thatcher would have called “the enemy within” and what Camille Paglia, the author of a blockbuster work of cultural analysis, Sexual Personae, would identify as the pagan force of nature that is always eager to eat the state alive. This is a political actor who loves to be worshipped, highlighting what Saint Augustine explained in The City of God: a demon will allow himself to be worshipped. At the same time, an angel will always redirect the attention to the proper authority. This battle between angels and demons is as old as Beowulf, in which one state renders a service to another by eradicating a pest. Thus, when a public actor is rightfully praised for more than having an opinion, the praise looks like Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene poem, capturing and commending Elizabeth’s legacy of public servanthood.

What economist Adam Smith called “the invisible hand” has been at work from Troy to Rome to London and finally Washington, D.C. As the state shifts in the historical metanarrative from empire to empire, it also changes at the local level as turnover occurs in bodies such as the Town Council. Time is the ultimate agent of democracy, preventing any group from ever attaining unlimited power. Although the logic of the twentieth century may never be evident, perhaps we are left with the keyword “neoliberal” and the assurance that there is a reward for the righteous on this earth.