The similarities between the 2005 session and the potlatch, that well-known custom of the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest , are striking. The host of a potlatch would assemble guests in order to shower them with gifts. The guests, who couldn’t refuse the invitation, were obligated to reciprocate with a greater amount than they had received. In this way, the gift-giving reinforced the status and wealth of the giver.

The only obvious difference between the General Assembly and the Kwakiutl Indians is that Virginia legislators don’t give away their own wealth – they have yours and mine to distribute.

Most observers opined in January that this year's conclave of the political tribes promised to be exciting. Greater-than-expected revenues presented the chance to give away more than had been anticipated. At first, the Elephant clan and the Donkey clan traded blame/credit for “surplus,” but that quickly yielded to figuring out how to dispense it. Members of the Cement sub-clan had been especially hopeful that they would receive it, as they are the ones who dig the rocks out of their hiding places in the earth, crush them, then mix them in a liquid and pour the concoction in ribbons across the Commonwealth. Some say this pleases the Spirit of the Rocks, which must be continually appeased.

The skeptical reader may object to this analysis. He/she may well assert that highway construction is not some outlandish tribal display. It is a rational activity. After all, roads are built by highway engineers, highly trained people who drive large trucks and didn’t flunk undergraduate math.

While these are impressive credentials, I must insist that that we remember that engineers do not actually make the decisions about where to build the roads. Those decisions are made by those who have the money to pay for the highways. The talk in around the General Assembly did not center on technical aspects of highways such as, say, whether the Commonwealth should be building them to higher standards in order to reduce maintenance costs. The talk was about money.

Well, the skeptic may counter, money is a rational matter. Money is numbers, numbers have to compute, and that is the essence of rationality. 

Fair enough, but let’s look at the numbers and also think about what they mean. This year’s “surplus” was pegged by Gov. Mark R. Warner at $824 million. Because of Virginia uses a two-year and not a one-year budget, the entire budget wasn’t up for discussion. That underlying getting and spending comes to about $15 billion a year, so the predicted fracas was over about one-seventeenth of what was being spent. More than small change, but not a major transformation, either.

Oratory about big bucks did precede the session. For example, the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance (NVTA) asserted that “unmet needs” in transportation required the expenditure of an additional $1.7 billion every year for the foreseeable future for the bi-state territory centered on Washington, of which the Commonwealth’s share comes to $750 million. Steve Baril, a candidate for the Elephant nomination for Attorney General, opined in January ("A Marshall Plan for Transportation") that the bill for “unmet needs” statewide amounted to about $1 billion, which should be unquestioningly raised from every source in sight to build more highways. The same theme was echoed by a number of business-oriented spokespeople and groups. There was almost complete uniformity in framing the question as one of “unmet needs” and dollars. The issue was seldom expressed as commuting time in particular places, the kinds of trips that make sense on super-highways, or the relation of property values to highway construction. 

So, do numbers introduce rationality into public discussion, or so they represent more bellowing to attract attention in the verbal and visual storm that we call modern communications? A billion here, a billion there, lots of zeroes, traffic that sucks, what’s the citizen to make of it? For those trained to the task, numbers introduce precision and nail down identifiable realities. But how about those who have a personal and practical sense of numbers but are not used to dealing with numbers bigger than those they encounter and manage on a daily basis?

The Virginia Lottery seems to think that $1 million is a figure that dazzles people. “(Surrey Man Wins $1 Million in Millionaire Party II Scratch Game!”) For a lot of us, the price of just our house is so large that we settle for thinking of it as a monthly payment. The monthly payment is manageable.  In contrast, the entire mortgage is so big a number that it feels out of reach. 

This perceptual shift is the More Than I Can Imagine Having at One Time Effect, (MTICI, for short, and pronounced em-tiki). Because of the limits of practical experience, for a lot of us, zeroes cease to have meaning above a particular level. They turn into an undifferentiated blur, and thus, the difference between $1 billion ($1,000,000,000) and $10 billion ($10,000,000,000) has no meaning because both figures are too large to pin to anything tangible. Therefore, the budget numbers become something like “ Virginia regularly spends MTICI and this year there was an extra MTICI; the highway guys wanted MTICI and more on top of that ….” How is a body to tell a met need from an unmet one? Who keeps the list? Who figures this stuff out? 

So, was the public included when the Assembly and the Governor agreed to say the surplus was $848 million (most of it went to transportation, one way or another), with over $410 million of that added to what was already there for highways ($3.1 billion combining the HMO and TT Funds, with $986 billion for acquiring right-of-way and building new roads)? Or does this kind of inundation just leave people stupefied? As we have seen, due to the MTICI effect, it may boil down to “Virginia spends more than I can imagine. This year the pols had an additional amount bigger than I can imagine. It doesn’t matter in any practical sense because it’s all more than I can imagine.” Very large numbers are not public discourse.

The General Assembly huffed and puffed, finally (mostly) agreed with the Governor, and announced it had done great things. But the session didn’t generate much excitement, after all. It ended with a whimper. No sound of popping champagne corks around Capitol Square . The never-at-a-loss-for-words Steve Haner, speaking for the state Chamber of Commerce, dismissed the results of the trials and tribulations of session by noting that the “additional funding amounts to one canteen of water on a hot day in the desert – it won’t get us far and we need to find the well.”

Lessee, assuming he’s talking about new construction only, that’s $141 million added to the $900 million that was already there, so if roughly $150 million is one canteen, (maybe a new budgetary measure! Not so many zeroes!!) that would be an already existing count of six canteens, plus one more for a total of seven. So the caravan has folded its tents and is moving on, with about seven canteens of water and in search of the well. The fall election campaign has begun in March in Virginia, the state of the Perpetual Campaign.

We will be treated to more bluster, more political muscle-flexing, and more efforts to astound and amaze us bumpkins. Potlatches, too, were accompanied by fervid oratory. Potlatch was deeply ingrained in the life of the Native Americans of the Northwest. This combination of yard sale and Monopoly game somehow provided a sense of community as well as chances to travel around the region. When the cycle got to the point where the big man had more stuff than he could store, he would use the occasion to both overshadow any rivals and break the chain of obligation by holding a celebration to destroy the otter skins, copper plates, and Hudson Bay Co. blankets that had accumulated. Then the cycle could begin again.

Nature’s bounty was so plentiful and so readily available, and the population was so small, that the society could bear it. However, both Canadian and US authorities were apprehensive about what happened, at this point, to the slaves that got traded. Rumors of sacrifice and cannibalism were never confirmed, but they weren’t quieted, either. So the authorities did everything they could to stamp out the practice. They also wanted to get the people to hang onto their own property and use it for a better life.

-- March 28, 2005

Note: If you are interested in developing better information about how infrastructure policies and practices affect property values, send a note to josephfreeman@msn.com attention of Property Dynamics, a project that will be getting underway this summer. For more on the potlatch,  see Helen Cordere, Fighting with Property (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950) and Abraham Rosman and Paula G. Rubel, Feasting with Mine Enemy (Prospect Heights, Ill.:Waveland Press, 1971) these are industrial strength anthropology. For a nicely illustrated account, see Alson Jonaitis (ed.) Chiefly Feasts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).

-- March 18, 2005