For political buffs in our town, the two hottest nights of the season are at hand. On Monday night — Don Pedersen’s first day as the new Police Chief — the City Council skirmish between Mayor Gary Silbiger and Vice Mayor Alan Corlin over the Culver City seat on the Light Rail Committee should yield a scrapbook moment. Ditto for the sparks to be caused by City Atty. Carol Schwab’s report on how she believes Charter Reform should be implemented. Somewhere in that scramble of data ought to be a disputed strategy for retaining Jerry Fulwood as chief executive. By Tuesday night, Chief Pedersen may have installed a temporary traffic light in front of Lin Howe School to accommodate the sea of humanity anticipated for the School Board meeting. The main event is a sizzling debate over salaries and raises for members of the Teachers Union contrasted with the fat raises that have been suggested for School District managers.
87 Shopping Days Left
An observer of the immensely self-assured School Board never will go broke betting that the gentleladies and gentlemen of the School Board are acting deviously, out of self-interest. They don’t seem to run out of cunning. Their sense of timing is one good tick off. They give chutzpah a bad name. They never tire of waiting until everyone in the room has gone home before tippy-toeing toward the door, softly slipping embarrassing news underneath it, then tippy-toeing away. This off-kilter Board would have tried to teach Ray Charles sign language. They might have whispered in Helen Keller’s left ear. They would wear shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flops to see the Queen. Some members of the School Board melt into mush every time they see Dr. Laura McGaughey. She has eighty-seven days left as Superintendent of the School District before she “retires,” meaning the philanthropists on the School Board have eighty-seven shopping days left to shovel more raises into her bank account. Go, team. They are behaving like the starry-eyed teenage boy who falls into puppy love — alone.
You Are Unwelcome
Senors y Senoras: The overridingly important reason that many marchers in Monday’s pro-illegal immigration rallies are unambiguously unwelcome in my country is that they boastfully reject the quintessential American value. When their well-oiled anti-American organizers/manipulators tell them to proclaim, in English, there is no difference between illegal and legal immigration, the pathetic marchers who obey thereby forfeit any potential claim to future citizenship. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” may be too subtle for the mobs of under-educated illegals who have thronged the Mexican border in recent years. It is, however, a critical line of demarcation for anyone wishing to become a citizen of the United States. Analagously, if a prospective convert to Catholicism would say that he believed in all precepts except the doctrine of Jesus, he probably would be rejected for enrollment. The coarseness of the character of the marchers who proudly shout the fairy-like accusation of alikeness is not to be under-estimated. This is not show business. These fiercely anti-independent thinking shouters truly embrace the crudities that they bellow. This would explain one phenomenon of our time, how fifty-five percent of the deeply misunderstood gentlemen residing temporarily within the bowels of the County Jail came to be illegal immigrants. I submit that this alone would be justification for constructing the proposed seven-hundred mile wall along the bottom of the United States.
Weighing Brotman Loan
Perhaps if we sit down together, we can deduce a proper answer to the Brotman Medical Center’s rebuffed request of City Hall for a $5 million loan. When the subject was placed on the Redevelopment Agency’s agenda once again for last night, I was reminded of the predicament of the working-class gentleman who strode into a new car agency. He needed to purchase a new model, he said, because he lived in a fashionable neighborhood, and how would it look to keep parking his eighteen-year-old Toyota in the driveway? If granted the loan, he promised that he would try to pay it back. He could not guarantee repayment but he would try. That was good enough, said the agency. And our friend was escorted outdoors to select his car. This approximates Brotman’s position. Realistically, the hospital has little going for it, materially. Tourists are tempted to boo the condition of the campus when they drive by. But the hospital has two civically important bullets in its gun when it walks into City Hall demanding terms that would get you and me laughed into the street. Brotman is one of Culver City’s oldest enterprises, and it provides a critical service that none of our town’s many restaurants, bars, service stations or car agencies provide: They rehabilitate and heal, more or less.
Yer Outta Here
One of the enduring mysteries of the City Council for the past four years has been the isolation of Gary Silbiger. The seeming freeze-out broke long enough last Monday night for the lady and gentlemen of the Council to elect him Mayor for the next year. The gesture came from a common-sense determination that he deserved the honor — albeit, by his patience, by his longevity, not, it was indicated, out of sheer merit. As the most casual reader of thefrontpageonline.com may know, philosophically I disagree with almost every breath that Mr. Silbiger draws, practically down to the way that he spells his name. His vision of life is aggressively at the far terminus from mine. All of that, however, is separate from the present discussion. When you were in school, you may have noticed the kid in the corner of the schoolyard whom others did not play with. Or the guy in your homeroom who knew many answers, but, somehow, rarely was called on. That is Mr. Silbiger. Searching my memory bank, the isolation of Mr. Silbiger — equally by all of his colleagues — was established so early, so permanently, in such a nuanced manner that it was immediately viewed as the norm. Him, you talk to. But him over there, you don’t. The disposition of a supposed equal was so subtle, had such a normative feel, that I believe this is the first time in four years I have commented on it.
Watch the People Off-Stage
When I dropped off my weekly bundle of dirty clothes the other morning with my Farsi-speaking dry cleaner, he told me I could not pick up my order at the regular time. “Our Hispanics are taking the day off,” he announced. My loosely wired liberal friends, supposedly out of power, will score a giant victory in America’s culture wars on Monday when every city turns its private looney bins upside down and tells what falls out to march in the massively organized demonstrations to win full rights for illegal immigrants. Future readers of American history books will wonder why the smart people in this country never saw such an obvious ploy flying toward our frozen faces — like a squishy lemon meringue pie with a bomb embedded in it. For once, the screaming bald-headed lesbians may be right in hollering “Date rape.” The protest marches are the largest single date rape in modern history. What is not to understand? Imagine walking down Culver Boulevard on Monday morning with your spouse. You see a holdup man approaching. You elbow your wife in the ribs and giggle. It’s a joke, isn’t it? Steadily, the gunman draws closer. From two feet away, he squeezes the trigger. The bullet disintegrates inside you. You are lying on the sidewalk, staring at the sky, desperately mumbling, “I was sure he never would shoot.” Pal, you are in the identical position for Monday’s all-day, all-country demonstrations.
Its Kuehl To Be Gay
Having sprung from the slower thinking corner of my family, it only recently has occurred to me why most gay people are not married, well-organized publicity to the contrary. The most militant — which feels like fifty million but actually may be five thousand — don’t have room in their busy lives to spend evenings before a crackling fire with their fellow wives and their fellow husbands. They are off to their twenty-five-year-old phony propaganda wars, pal. Since the faux rights wars started, “rights” and “tolerance” have entered our lexicon as buzz words. But actually they are gay community euphemisms for “domination.” Everyday a new battle is to be won, a new group of the unsuspecting and the well-meaning to be indoctrinated. Never is it too early or too late in a day for the militant machos to step down into the filthy but necessary trenches to educate the unenlightened about how morally necessary it is to fight for their rights in a world that hates them. They will not consider their war won until the suggestion of one wit is adopted: Name every city in California West Hollywood. Today it is the turn of state Sen. Sheila (Bad Penny) Kuehl (D-Santa Monica, naturally) to rant. Keep an eye on Senate Bill 1437, which she has introduced in Sacramento.
On Being Unfair to Vera
Watching the bowers of colorful flowers being thrown toward Mayor Albert Vera at the start of the City Council meeting on Monday night, it was obvious this outpouring would be the primary or secondary angle in my Tuesday morning edition. Retirement parties are for backslapping, not backstabbing. Aren’t they? For all of the love letters that have been inspired by Mr. Vera’s well, well-documented charity during the last fourteen years of public life, the generally unreported truth is that a matching volume of anti-Vera invective reposes in the shadows of the community’s neighborhoods.
His long political career in this town and his social conscience have only been written about fawningly. They only passed the taste test if you are on a sugar diet. Puppy dogs don’t have press this good. The incurious authors of the Legends of Vera have been intellectually consistent journalists who have swooned at the sight of him. This was grossly unfair to Mr. Vera. The more hot air the image jockeys pumped into his reputation, the more they cemented the Mayor’s impenetrable status as an icon for eternity. The storyline was that God may have had critics, Mr. Vera did not. By the time Mr. Vera took the final plunge into retirement this week, God had to ask him for permission to sit. After all, admirers said, “this is Albert’s world.”
The truth about Mr. Vera – more complex than most residents of this town — lies somewhere south of what is accepted as unchallengeable dogma. Most of the people who trooped to the podium to express their extraordinary gratitude for his service to Culver City probably would risk their own safety to shield Mr. Vera from peril. That was no plastic parade of the praise-minded. They believe, down to the bottom rung in their hearts. Need any man live longer once he has heard such gold authentically bestowed upon him?
Ludlow The Missing Pieces
I am intrigued by what remains hidden about Martin Ludlow’s downfall from public life for diverting union funds. The story is full of fig leaves. I am disappointed by how meekly the young, formerly promising former Los Angeles City Councilman has been allowed to walk away from a spectacularly busted career without an explanation. Just too pat. He is of the wrong color and the wrong ideology to be pressed by the Los Angeles Times, and there is no one else. Left dangling are penetrating questions about the context in which he stabbed his career in the back. The answer is a tightly guarded mystery.
I Believe, and You Better
On Thursday of last week — three days before Easter and on the first day of Passover — the thoughtful people who run the Julian Dixon Library staged a
pleasant, and I trust harmless, event.
For Christian boys and girls, there was an Easter egg hunt, and Jewish children were invited to search for the afikoman, as they probably had done the night before at home.
You have your beliefs, and I have mine — separately, please. Let us keep the lines straight. I don’t want to pray in your church, and you don’t want to pray in my synagogue.
A couple of Sundays ago, when the father of a dear friend was buried, many of his Christian pals came for his funeral. The man next to me asked if he should don a yarmulke. If you wish, I said, but it isn’t necessary. (He didn’t.)