Didn’t Led Zeppelin do a song about it?
A terrific metaphor from Daniel Jakult of Red Sweater Software:
Say you live in a village that just happens to be situated under a large dam. If the dam breaks, the village dies. If the dam stays, the village lives. Half the village is convinced the damn needs renovation. There are small cracks and a tiny amount of water is leaking through. Some experts say the small cracks are indicative of a larger problem, and eventually they will turn to large cracks, before giving way completely and flooding the town. Others say it’s poppycock, and the dam is strong as ever.
So the village is left with two choices. Fix the dam, perhaps at unwarranted expense, or leave the cracks and hope for the best. When it comes to consequences like wiping out the village, I believe giving the benefit of the doubt to the worried half is worth your consideration.
(Posted using MarsEdit, which Daniel now owns and updates.)
It should be pretty obvious what the topic is, I hope. But this is the most elegant way of putting it that I’ve seen for a while. Very like the Stern analysis, really.
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November 7th, 2007 at 9:06 am
The LZ connection puts a slightly different take on it but it’s a good metaphor for what’s likely to happen. Lizzie Douglas (Memphis Minnie) and Kansas Joe MCoy wrote the song two years after the Mississippi Floods of 1927:
“Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.”
Many plantation workers quit the Delta for places like Chicago, but a load of them were forced at gunpoint to keep putting sandbags on the levees even though it was clear they were about to break.
The irony was that two centuries of levee building made the floods far worse than they would have been - patching up the system to make it seem to work (that is prevent small floods from disrupting agriculture in the Delta) just led to a catastrophic collapse later on.
The original’s available at archive.org BTW.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Thanks, Chris - nice historical detail. I did know that LZ didn’t write the lyrics (though note that Naomi Klein apparently didn’t, or doesn’t, judging by a piece she wrote not long after the New Orleans floods).
I have to say that, legal conditions in Queens’ Speeches aside, I think we’re building levees rather than diverting rivers at present, to extend the metaphor.