It is, of course, not coincidental that the most extravagantly remunerated body of politicians in Los Angeles, the four liberals and token conservative who form the County Board of Supervisors, are elected for life.
Just like the Supreme Court.
Not quite as prestigious and not officially for life, merely a technicality.
Four boys and a girl who operate with a swagger that allows their tushes to tag both walls of a corridor simultaneously.
Slouching toward antique-hood, the You Can’t Touch Me Sups all have told their spouses not to expect them home before their 85th birthday.
Except for a smattering of nerds and other unemployed Democrat gadflies, the community pays more attention to the flowers on Ms. Monroe’s grave than to the daily doings of the Supervisors.
Accustomed to the limelight, occasionally they hunger for badly needed media attention.
We Were Watching
Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas is a worthy, charming member of the Sups’ On gang most, not all, of the time.
Sadly, here came a chest-pounding Look at Me moment.
Born either of boredom or a thirst for attention, Mr. Ridley-Thomas clanked a remarkably vacuous, unworthy note this week.
Unworthy of his general seriousness.
His office, blushingly, I presume, dispatched a red, white and blue press release Monday afternoon that included a recorded trumpet blare:
Seventy years ago, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted itself onto the wrong side of history. A month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when federal officials were weighing a plan to forcibly detain Japanese Americans, the Board voted unanimously to urge President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proceed with internment.
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, and 120,000 people of Japanese descent – nearly one-third of whom were from Los Angeles County – were held in camps for up to three years.
At 10:30 a.m., June 6, at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas will seek to address a historic wrong; he will introduce a motion to repeal the Board’s 1942 resolution on internment.
My gosh, Mr. Supervisor.
Since you noisily executed this brave act, I feel almost unjustifiably rewarded.
Tonight I will tell my wife to fling open the front and back doors of our home before we go to sleep.
We are safe, dear world. We fear no one.
Superman Is Reborn
We also will turn on the engines of both her car and mine. Let ‘em run, in full view, all night to show we are protected by our dear government, baby.
We want the whole darned world to see that we are safer than, shiver, shiver, we were before your rewrite of history.
Why, Mr. Supervisor, did you do this?
Internment was yet another heartless, inartful, immoral move by Mr. Roosevelt.
At the next Sups On time, why not enliven the session by donning masks, and going ‘round the table soliciting deliberated opinions from other Bowls of Sup about the Magna Carta?
Roll up the script from your Magna Carta discussion, secure it with a ribbon, tuck the roll into a rusty tin cup and thrust it into the desperate grasp of the first homeless chap you encounter on Los Angeles Street.
That is what it is worth.
Unless there is an untold dimension of pathos to your recision of the resolution, the act mars the dignity of your office.
However, had you committed the same act minus the acres of auto-promoted fanfare, I would have written the opposite essay.
