[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Twice in the last five days, I have been face-to-face with purveyors of faux victimology, last Friday at state Sen. Curren Price’s promotion to guarantee “women and minority” contracts when building California’s speculative high speed rail and again at last night’s School Board meeting.
If you ever have seen my funny looking hands or even funnier looking feet, and you are a liberal, your obligatory opening thought upon first sighting would be, “Poor shlmiel — now there goes my idea of a victim.”
If your assignment involves covering politics or labor unions, Commandment No. 1 to remain in good standing inside both groups holds that the term “victim” must be included in alternating sentences. Otherwise, your membership card will be revoked before nightfall.
At Sen. Price’s event, I was surprised and disappointed to see that the three sponsors were the legislative Black Caucus, the legislative Latino Caucus and the legislative Asian Pacific Islander Caucus. The first two groups specialize in playing long-faced victims wherever they roam, singing “Woe, Woe Your Boat, and Woe Is Me.”
But I still think the “Asian Pacific Islander” line was thrown in for yucks. No such group, is there? Asians know that victimhood is a fraudulent claim. Asians are successful because they are ambitious. They don’t need, nor will they accept, phony crutches.
Getting Board Yet?
As for last night’s ill-scripted School Board meeting, for different reasons, Teachers Union President David Mielke, and Board members Steve Gourley and Karlo Silbiger — three people of whom I am fond — all should go out the door and come back in to deliver more temperate remarks.
Let’s start with willful ignorance. Egalitarianism, which has poisoned two of the world’s three great religions — Islam has escaped, so far — is the cursed legacy of unionism. Everybody is equal. Everybody looks the same. Everybody works equally hard. Everybody deserves the same pay. No union member is lazy. No union member ever merits demotion, no matter how poor his record. You should not be promoted unless I am because I am your equal, pal. I imagine reality television shows were created for this crowd.
Mr. Mielke has been shlepping the notion for weeks, or perhaps months, that administrators in the District Office — all two of them would fit on my knees — should have their positions downgraded and their salaries slashed. That way, suffering is spread out evenly (there is that miserable concept again) across the education community.
If you are serenely sitting out in a meadow, alone, on a sunny summer afternoon, ask yourself what confounded sense that makes.
Mr. Mielke also promotes another shlmiel theory: No administrator should make more than the highest paid teacher. I have a more creative idea: Call President Dithers and tell him we are sending all Culver City administrators to Libya after dinner tonight to fight on whichever side hates them less.
The Difference Between Less and More
Despite protestations, Ms. Jaffe’s package is less than her predecessor’s, an unheard of development these days, and a decidedly non-union concept.
Mr. Silbiger appears to have committed the kind of gaffe that commonly is made by the junior member of a team eager to demonstrate his superior qualifications. In his zeal to prove that new Super Patti Jaffe is ‘way overpaid, he dug and sought to include among her “outsized” remunerations five categories that are subtracted from all employees’ paychecks before they ever see them, like Workers’ Comp and pension payments. It was not clear to me, however, whether Mr. Silbiger accepted Board President Scott Zeidman’s correction of this mistake.
Finally, if Mr. Gourley were to be named our Ambassador to Libya tonight, the Obama non-war would be over before you awaken in the morning. The Libyan shooters on both sides would be overwhelmed, utterly mesmerized by the harshest rhetoric they ever have heard.
Even if he was right in every accusation he made against Mr. Mielke, he was far too bombastic and personal. He is more colorful than the next 15 Board members cumulatively. I will miss him next winter. But last night he took acerbity too far.
