GROUP THINK FOOLS? by Boutris Wittfogel

The fool possesses a cherished attribute the ability to say what is needed to those that need to hear it when no one else dares.  Cultures around the world revere the fool.  The Aztecs devoted a week to the worship of Huehuecoyotl, the sacred role of revealing the truth by treating it as irreverently as the gods do.  The Turkish hold an annual festival for Nasr-ed-Din Hodja who wept at the sight of his homely king.  This universal appreciation is evident in religion too.  Saint Genesius of Rome is the patron saint of clowns and traditional Jewish weddings include the humorous songs of the badkhn (that is the correct spelling) warning the bride of the faults of her husband to be. 

All wise fools face the same obstacle: group think.  Some fools use humor, others mock, some sing, while still others feign foolishness. According to legend, it was the court jester who mocked the emperor into abandoning plans to paint the Great Wall of China.  It is not difficult to visualize the Emperor's bureaucrats nodding their heads in approval of the Great Painting Plan and using the catchy buzz words of the day to reassure their leader.  

Signs of institutional Group Think abound in the California water world.  It is preposterous that the State Water Resources Control Board is still fiddling around with "biological objectives" for streams and rivers.  Your "crazy" Uncle Earl will tell you, the "objective" is simple, let fish and things swim in the river.  Yet there is a "stakeholder" group for developing "biological objectives."  

Why has the State Water Board been throwing gobs of money and attention at salinity for more than three decades but has nothing to show for it, other than a stakeholder group?  "Managing" salinity with hand waving, stakeholder meetings and buzzwords is as ludicrous as painting the largest wall in the world.

Why, 27 years after the selenium poisoning of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, will the water board not have a TMDL for Selenium until 2019?  Twenty-seven years?  Really?  I can only imagine the "selenium TMDL" management meetings and the perfunctory calls to do something immediately, Governor William J. Le Petomane would be proud. And why do some Western San Joaquin Valley water districts still get to dump their selenium-tainted agriculture waste water into the lower San Joaquin River?  Was the Kesterson debacle insufficient to convince people of the dangers of selenium food chain poisoning?  

Money, power, influence, ignorance (see earlier letter) only partially explain this strange state of institutional paralysis; Group Think explains the rest.   The inertia of Group Think is a mighty force vulnerable to exploitation by attorneys, consultants, and those who excel at selling the virtues of a painted Great Wall to impressionable middle managers eager to lap up the Kool-Aid.  But, the realities of life within a captured government bureaucracy aside, it is hard to believe that everyone on the State Water Board or its staff is willing to endorse painting and repainting the Great Wall.  Surely, there must be some true to the legacy of the court jester- irreverence of the "truth."   How long can the Emperor go naked before the Court courtiers figure it out?