[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]A parallel drama is unfolding in our town that can be an instructive life lesson for high school students and their elders:
When you believe you are correct, plant your feet so strongly you leave an imprint in the grass, and do not budge until you are ready.
Even though Gary Mandell, the producer, and Don Pedersen, the police chief, have fairly high profiles in Culver City, they do not know each other.
But fate is welding them together.
Both are fighting for their professional lives this very day, and into the foreseeable future.
The City Council is their oxygen tent, the bosses of both men whose jobs have been threatened because — here is where it gets murky.
Four members of the police union, 80 percent of the board of the Police Officers Assn., form the heart and the brains of the rebellion against Mr. Pedersen. They want him gone badly, but I have heard mostly stuttering when I ask why.
Is it any wonder then that maybe no more than 1 percent of the community — who are related to members of the Police Dept. — are backing their revolution?
Just One Dandy Reason
These are not the old days when cops sounded like Gene Robinson of the Washington Post, whom we discussed yesterday. Mr. Robinson and oldtime cops have and had trouble speaking. They grunted as if they forgot to remove their toothbrush after brushing. Or they brushed with the south end.
For all of their shiny education in the Culver City Police Dept., not one of these chaps, to date, has articulated a remotely compelling reason why the Council should dump a perfectly useful police chief.
When asked, their tongues behave like my shoelaces.
There may be good reason — but you would think in the 10 or 11 months they have been throwing around mental furniture as if the pieces were ping-pong balls, one of them could have formulated a reason saleable to the community.
It seems they have whiffed.
Mr. Pedersen, different from all of his predecessors and noticeably more principled, said he only will leave his job when he wants to, not when an angry employee starts waving bye-bye.
Mr. Mandell’s predicament is similar. The Council’s junior advisors for entertainment, five ladies with ambitions of their own, we are told, unloaded last week on the 11-year producer of the Summer Music Festival as if he were the town tramp. Or the police chief. Plainly the ladies never heard of Rodney Dangerfield. (Maybe his corpse can be induced to appear next July in the Courtyard of City Hall.)
Fortunately for Culver City’s reputation, the ladies are just recommenders not decision-makers.
The ladies have been saying for sometime, “There is something about Gary Mandell we don’t like. We can’t say what it is. But we really don’t like whatever it is we can’t remember because we are so darned wrought up.”
All of the ladies brought shopping bags to the last meeting of the Cultural Affairs Commission. They thought that would be cool because they planned to sack Mr. Mandell.
They may get their way. Murgatroyd knows they have been trying long enough, and even ladies with misplaced values are entitled to a spot of occasional relief.
Like Mr. Pedersen, Mr. Mandell does his job extremely well and has no intention of bowing down and backing away.
Both gentlemen have been at their craft around three decades.
We aren’t talking hip-hop bimbos here but gentlemen of distinction who deserve more respect than some mad, mad people with personal agendas have shown them.
