Machiavelli and the Whetstone

(For Edmundo)

            All during the month of September, the Whetstone has been in overdrive, its banks filled with a milky brew so thick with silt, sand, and stuff that it hardly looks like water at all. It looks as if it were sucking the eternally grey skies down between its broken banks, down to the Connecticut where some fiend inhales all our trout, minnows and frogs. No longer a brook, the Whetstone is a rip in the landscape we can barely control.

            And yet control it we have. Commanding a fleet of oversized bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks, the National Guard has shored up its banks with rocks, the smallest of which is the size of a couch. Day after day, barn-sized trucks haul the rocks up Route 9 and dump them down the bank to an enormous waiting backhoe, which picks up each one and lays it in place like an obsessive-compulsive Tyrannosaurus Rex. Day after day, the riverbank morphs from disorderly mud and wanton debris to a pile of neatly-arranged boulders, capable of channeling these fiendish waters. When the next tropical storm passes through, surely these new improved banks will contain its fearsome flow.

            But will our improvements always need to be so violent? Normally when there is a backhoe in a stream, the citizens of Vermont call foul. “What are those massive caterpillar tracks doing to the turtle beds and frog hideaways? What are those couch-size rocks doing to soft places where deer bend to drink and muskrats break the surface?” Under normal circumstances the Whetstone Brook would be a protected thoroughfare, where backhoes and excavators need permission to enter. But these times are anything but normal.

            Five hundred years ago, when the times were anything but normal, Niccolo Machiavelli compared fortune to “an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other; every one flees before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it.” The job of the ruler, he argued, was to anticipate flooding and build up the banks, channeling the raging waters with canals and dykes. You may be in power now, cautioned Machiavelli, but if you haven’t made the necessary provisions, you’ll be swept away the next time the waters rise.

            While Machiavelli didn’t persuade the young Lorenzo di Medici to hire him, his thoughts on fortune and river engineering still inform twenty-first-century politics. The neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration, many of whom studied Machiavelli under the tutelage of Leo Strauss, thought that the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq would act as dykes and channels, controlling the violent force of anti-American terrorism. So excited were they at the prospect of using their Big Earth-Moving Equipment, they forgot Machiavelli’s cardinal rule about the economy of violence: be cruel early and all at once; then slowly measure out benefits. Where the author of the Prince offered cautionary tales about using violent political tactics, the neo-cons saw another opportunity to use Haliburton’s Toys.

            But here in flood-ravaged Windham County, these Really Big Toys are stemming the violence from future downpours. All these backhoes and dump trucks and war-sized excavators are making Flat Street safe from Fortune’s high waters. No longer naïve about the Whetstone’s flirtations, we’ve got her disciplined and contained. Not a threat, but hardly a place to go fishing. One wonders whether this cruel invasion of the stream can be ameliorated with slow and steady benefits. What would induce the trout to return?

            Machiavelli made a name for himself because he got the medieval world to wake up and realize that Catholicism alone could not guarantee the state’s preservation. He replaced the Holy Roman Empire’s God with a fickle fortune, designed to induce anxiety in any ruler. Playing to the machismo of the times, Machiavelli described fortune as a woman, “if you wish to master her, it is necessary to conquer her by force.” Young princes would have an advantage, he suggested,  “because they are less cautious, fiercer, and master her with greater audacity.” Don’t be hesitant when it comes to reigning in misfortune, just plunge into the torrents and beat her down with a backhoe. It’s makes for heady political reading, but what does it say about river ecology?

Buried in all that nonsense about fortune and her desire to be dominated is a recommendation that the wise prince seize the opportunities in these uncertain times. Machiavelli recommends that he “introduce a new system that would do honor to himself and good to the mass of the people.” And while the young Medici didn’t avail himself of the opportunity, addled as he was with visions of what he could do to Lady Fortune, maybe here in Vermont we can take advantage of these circumstances.

Rather than dominate the river to within an inch of her life, maybe there’s a new system we could develop that would do honor to ourselves and the mass of river creatures that rely on these steams in good times and bad. Fortune may be “the ruler of half our actions,” as Machiavelli said, but the other half is to be “governed by us.” How we respond to misfortune, tells us a lot about our relationship to life. Perhaps in this twenty-first century we can co-exist with bad fortune, as we’ve learned to co-exist with women. Not by dominating them with force but by endowing them with civil liberties, such as protecting flood plains from development. Perhaps our new system might channel the energy of churning waters without permanently destroying river life.