Home Editor's Essays If Employee Is Black or Gay, Pity the Poor Hemmed-in Executive

If Employee Is Black or Gay, Pity the Poor Hemmed-in Executive

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While sitting next to Myrna Rivera Cote, the Superintendent of the School District, yesterday morning at Culver City High School, I was pondering my presently vexing situation.

It is common, I am told, to executives who are launching an ambitious new enterprise:

As the face of my organization:


Should I hire the mature, color-coordinated David Brewer? Remember that the outgoing Superintendent of LAUSD said famously, “But I’m black. You can’t fire me.”


Or should I tap Seth Hetherington of West Hollywood? Mr. Hetherington probably will not make any respectable history books for thinking up tomorrow’s ingenious nationwide promotion, “Day Without a Gay,” when all gay ladies and gents have been counseled to call in sick to their employers to protest Prop. 8.


This conundrum can age a sensible person. Should I hire a black man, even a fat one, whom I never will be able to fire?

Or should I hire a homosexual, knowing that any day of the week, he is liable to call in gay?

With even more of President-elect Baloney Obama’s slippery Illinois friends in jail today than yesterday, good help truly has become elusive for sensible people.


Is He Related to Anything?

For someone who values a hearty chuckle, the outgoing Mr. Brewer — the adjective is unrelated to his personality as his job is unrelated to his talent — is impossible to ignore.

To repeat, I was sitting beside Myrna Cote yesterday.

The Super is attractive, as noted here previously. She is smart, as noted here previously. Her competence is unassailable. She is a 30-plus-year educator with a resume judged to be in the sterling realm, also as asserted before.

She has worked for LAUSD most of her career. My research shows that she never wore a mask or a brown paper bag over her head to work. Her identity never was a secret. She wasn’t worried about being mistaken for yet another overstimulated Culver City Muslim radical.


Why Didn’t She Rate?

When Mayor I Love Me’s stooges on the LAUSD School Board went fishing — instead of shopping — for a new Super two years ago, Myrna Cote was quite available. They looked right past her even though she has enough ethnic strains in her family background to evoke a typically inauthentic tear in the corner of a liberal’s always-damp middle eye.

Being emotionally choked lefties themselves, the LAUSD School Board played the Obama card. Where can we find a cartoon Super? they wondered. All of them climbed into a leaky rowboat, rowed toward a swamp, and they fished out the roundest Naval officer they could find, Admiral David L. Brewer, off the ocean floor.

Admiral Brewer may not have been able to spell c-l-a-s-s-r-o-o-m without cue cards. But, by thunder, he possessed the most precious gift of all to a liberal: He looked black.

And so now the color-coordinated School Board stooges find themselves sidling down alleys in horrific neighborhoods after dark, out of view, dipping into garbage cans, hoping to find a few dollars we sensible people have thrown away, to meet the incompetent Admiral Brewer’s race-flavored buyout demand of $500,000. For that kind of money, he couldn’t play second base for the Dodgers. Perhaps he could be second base.


A’s for Culver City

Meanwhile, since Myrna Cote arrived in Culver City, the School District no longer has to powder its nose when visitors knock. The schools are always presentable. She has restored whatever prestige had ebbed. She has placed the community’s schools on stronger footing than anyone has detected in years.

Meanwhile, the unembarrassable LAUSD School Board doesn’t acknowledge that it committed a monstrous gaffe in hiring the funniest admiral since “McHale’s Navy.” After all, Mr. Brewer, a black, is handing off to Ramon Cortines, a Hispanic, a liberal’s idea of a smooth transfer of power.