Monday, May 3, 2010

It’s not flood control. It’s economic development, stupid!

Another gem forwarded to us. Can you guess WHO the author is?

Remember - VOTE for Adrian Murray and John Basham for the Tarrant Regional Water District!

From Henderson Street, drive down White Settlement Road....

What do you see? Degringolade! Ozymandias! A colossal wreck of cold, naked, bare concrete slabs, sullen and mute testimony to the power of Queen Earmark and King Eminent Domain. Where once stood long-established, thriving, profitable, tax-paying, free enterprise firms, now you see the sneer of cold command of those in control, to wit, the denial of the sanctity of private property.

What’s yours is ours!

How to explain it? Simple. A towering ego and obdurate and obstinate obsession of the Trinity Uptowners -- damn the cost to property owners, taxpayers, history and heritage -- to obliterate the picturesque Clear Fork-West Fork confluence once patronized by Indian, dragoon and pioneer.

Obliterate for what purpose? To build a developer’s Fantasy Island, replete with canals and a polluted Town Lake . And a gambling casino? Looking at the slabs, I think of Percy Byshee Shelley’s mournful and lugubrious sonnet:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell what its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Round the decay of that colossal wreck, cold, naked and bare,
White Settlement Road stretches far away.

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