[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Third in a series

Re “The Buildup for Lacey – Bang. Bang. Bang.”

The controversial federally mandated notion of prison realignment – a vaguely worded concept describing the transfer of thousands of criminals from dreary, overcrowded prisons to more congenial county jails – was billed as the theme of last Friday’s Urban Issues Breakfast Forum, a monthly gathering accenting the black perspective on headlines of the day.

[img]1563|left|Jackie Lacey||no_popup[/img]Master of ceremonies/Forum CEO Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad loves to rattle pans when he talks.

This is not merely a facet of his excitable personality and a gimmick to magnetize attention but because he believes what he is preaching – out there toward the terminus of a left-wing branch. He talks about how his people have been radically wronged.

Often but not always collegial, he could set an entire monastery ablaze with his rhetoric were he to be served the wrong fork.

If you never have heard the fiery Dr. Samad ruminate, he reminds some of Prof. Cornel West. The cerebrally abstract Dr. (?) West, whose hair is an ideal metaphor for his cluttered, angry mind, has sailed through a series of Ivy League professorships, intimidating as he goes, without ever demonstrating he could solve two-plus-two or spell h-i-s-t-o-r-y.

No such doubts exist about Dr. Samad. He may teach calculus on one hand, advanced geometry on the other, simultaneously explaining Middle Ages Persian agricultural history, in Farsi, to Mexican farmworkers as he boots a soccer ball leftward with his right foot.

What a Change of Pace and Grace

Last Friday morning, he started a bonfire under his fully primed audience in the runup to introducing the featured speaker, Jackie Lacey, senior deputy district attorney for the County. She was not idly strolling the boulevard when she happened upon Dr. Samad’s program. A candidate to succeed her boss, County D.A. Steve Cooley, next March, Ms. Lacey turned out to be a dream attraction, an eminently sensible thinker who would pitch Dr. Samad’s pans, ladylike, through the closest window, given the opportunity.

Convinced that blacks and Latinos are jailed at wildly disproportionate rates compared to the white majority, Dr. Samad promised raw meat to an aroused, politically starved crowd to satisfy their desire to belch across the room.

Instead, the genteel Ms. Lacey, only and entirely, served them dainty cups of tea during her 22-minute talk that we will analyze next time.

(To be continued)