A Disquisition on Architecture

Graceful porticos adorn an Arlington street.

A Large-Scale Disagreement
As Massive Houses Prompt Protests, Arlington Proposes Limits

By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 31, 2005; Page A01

In Arlington, plans for a palatial, 12,500-square-foot house on Pershing Drive call for a basement ballroom with bar, an indoor swimming pool, a hot tub, five bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a library and a prayer room. The house would be 4 1/2 times the size of the average home on the block.

[snip]

Driving Arlington's efforts to curb the influx of giant houses are residents worried about construction that they find at odds with the scale and character of their neighborhoods, said County Board Chairman Jay Fisette (D).

"We know we can't legislate good taste or good architecture," Fisette said. "The modifications we've been talking about will keep the worst projects from being viable."

[S]ome critics of the proposal say they suspect that much of the discontent springs from a culture clash between longtime residents of Arlington and new, richer arrivals, many of them wealthy immigrants.

"They flat out don't like these rich people moving in and building big houses. It's a bunch of old liberals, and they've just got to give up," said Terry Showman, a developer who builds homes in the county. (Emphasis mine.)

Full story here.

Let's examine that last sentence again, shall we?

Mr. Showman, "a developer who builds homes in the county," which is a polite way of saying "a land-raping greedhead Jabba the Hutt who would happily crush his own toddler with a Lincoln Fucking Navigator if he thought it might put 32 cents into his greasy, piss-stained pocket," has the utter baldfaced carney-grifter gall to frame this as a "class war" issue, as if the nouveaux-riches buttboys who rode to Washington on the coattails of their miserable smirking Deke President for the purpose of gutting the Treasury and impoverishing future generations had even the dimmest glimmer of a chance of being thwarted in their plans to erect hideously vulgar tributes to their own villainy by something so quaint, so idealistic, so awww-shucks-ain't-that-cute as motherfucking zoning laws.

According to an online History of Zoning Laws, "The[ir] objective is to provide for the greater benefit of the community by curtailing the freedom and rights of individual property owners." "The greater benefit of the community" being defined in this case thus: that your right to behave like a dookie-chucking silverbacked gorilla by adding on six vernacular-raping stories to a Pershing Drive Cape Cod so you can have a library and a Texas-shaped indoor hot tub and a motherfucking prayer room, ends approximately at that point at which your fucking warthog of a Hummer 2 eternally blocks the sunlight from your neighbors' rose bushes.

Now, is that a liberal idea, Mr. Showman? Is that some kind of fuzzy-idealist, Woodstock-Nation, War-on-Poverty, Permissive-Doctor-Spock, baby-coddling, Hanoi-Jane-ing, Nixon-toppling tree-hugger notion, the idea that we have a right to protect our neighborhoods from your self-regarding vulgarity, your miserable chest-pounding King-Kong cock-waving?

Well, actually, no, Mr. Showman. No, it isn't. Actually, Mr. Showman, cities have arrogated unto themselves the right to declare what buildings may and may not be constructed in them since, well, since that dope-smoking hippie punk Charles II and his rad-lib Yippie henchman Christopher Wren rebuilt London after a little fire they had there a few years ago. You know. Back when we still had an Enlightenment.

"Bunch of old liberals..." There's no hell hot enough for you, you fat sack of greasy shit. You blot. We are through being polite.