Paul Revere slept, and Atlas didn’t shrug. We’re invaded and infiltrated, and patriots are working too hard to support their families to intervene.

The Massachusetts-based Goody Clancy firm was hired by the City of Asheville for $170,000 to help citizens collectively vision their Master Plan; more correctly, to help the citizens who don’t have anything to do but smoke pot and attend eight hours of meetings on weekends, impose their vision of utopia on the working class. By contrast, the working class was too busy working their second jobs so they could subsidize the visions of the Master Planning Class.

The meeting tonight was informational. City Councilman Dr. Carl Mumpower, a master of words who still believes in freedom, “sent his regrets.” The meeting ran 15-20% overtime, just as attendance at the first meeting exceeded expectations by 50%. Not to worry, these folks can be trusted with planning an entire city.

Some of the highlights included local arts enthusiast Kitty Love “channeling” Maia (sp?) the Dressmaker. Maia wanted to be artistic. She needed business cards, marketing, accountants, web design, and a whole lot of other things that prevented her from designing dresses. [On the flip-side, in the world of working people, if the boss doesn’t know how to do web design, she says, “Hey, Leslee. When you get some time, can you crack the html code and do this?” Poor Leslee doesn’t get to be as creative as she would like because she works and then volunteers trying to stop Richard Florida’s Creative Class from making slaves out of those of us who, because we choose to pay our own way through life, are assumed to want to pay the way for the growing number of drifters who still think life is kindergarten. My utopian notion is that every head of household tries to work at least one job so everybody can have some creative time.]

“Homogeneity is our enemy,” the planners were told in the public forum, but “homogeneity” was construed to be synonymous with chain stores. “Keep Asheville weird,” was their mandate, and “diversity” popped up every third word. But, one must be careful to apply the double-standard correctly. Diversity does not apply to people wanting to make tall buildings, nor to people who want to drive their own cars. They obviously had not yet heard what Asheville thinks about requiring New Urbanist zero-setbacks for new construction. Master Planner David Dixon said citizens will have a chance to define appropriate heights for buildings tomorrow, and held up as a model city one that didn’t want cars so it turned all its garages into affordable housing.

Money is no object. Developers can be extorted. City council can tell them to build two fewer stories or fund affordable housing off the profits from the top two stories, stated presenter Mary Means. Dixon informed the crowd that 5-10 market-rate housing units would be needed to subsidize one unit of affordable housing. Means said there was all kinds of (obviously magic) money available from federal grants.

Architectural historian Harry Weiss owned up to contributing, “We need more leadership and more followership,” to the dialogue in the first planning session. He urged those present to drag and coerce their friends to the meeting tomorrow, and then be good proselyters. [Sorry. I signed the Libertarian pledge.] Much was said about “managing” the media to frame the planning process properly. [I’ll be d$%^#d if anybody tries to “manage” what I put in the press. Go ahead. Make my day. I’m going to an early grave to support the “artistic” class, anyway.]

Strangely, on one PowerPoint slide was the phrase, “Agency That Endures.” I had found truth in all the utopian dreaming. Free agency will endure. If you clamp it and squeeze it, it will still find its way, but it won’t be so pretty as if you would have let it flow.

And so to my liberty-loving friends who will not be at the meeting tomorrow, I am honored that you deem me capable to be a St. Jean d’Arc to face a couple hundred Commie dupes all by myself and bring liberty back to the wealth-redistributing dictatorship that will happen here if we let it. If you think this plan will die on the shelf, be it known that the planners want to form a “pursuit group,” to make sure that doesn’t happen. They want us to gear up for the challenges that will make the gutsy initiatives leading up to the hyper-regulation of Portland look small in comparison. Perhaps the crowning insult was when the presenters asked the crowd to “get up early” to get to the five-hour planning session that starts at 10:00am tomorrow. Lunch is already subsidized by the taxpayers of Asheville. Are you sure you don’t want to claim your fair share?