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Sadly, the Gary Silbiger Medicine Man Carnival Sideshow is scheduled to resume at Monday night’s City Council meeting.
With the bitter neighborly dispute over whether or what kind of building should be put up at 4043 Irving Pl. headlining the agenda, the Vice Mayor will claim his place in the sunshine for a few hours.
A very large and unhappy crowd is anticipated, and if Mr. Silbiger follows his script of the last 6 1/2 years, we will see a rerun of Amateur Night.
Instead of conducting himself as a reasonably dignified, twice-elected political leader of Culver City, the Vice Mayor will play shamelessly to the crowd.
He won’t quite stroll through the audience and kiss every person on the cheek. But with the unconscious, mechanical flourish of a veteran performer, he will elaborately thank every person who endured the hardship of driving through Culver City streets at the dinner hour just to reach City Hall and file into Council Chambers — as if he were drawing a fat bonus for every crowd that exceeds 20 persons.
Tune Your Ears to Me
Then he will lecture his City Council colleagues. When the Vice Mayor starts to rant and ramble, you time him with a calendar, not a clock.
Treating his colleagues as if he is the daddy and they are the children, he will preach about how these fine hardworking, underpaid, underappreciated residents have interrupted their busy lives to travel to City Hall and loudly declare their opinions. His admonition will go like this: The Council, by golly, should do whatever The People want. They are The People. The People are our bosses. The People elected us.
If The People wanted to burn down City Hall, then the Vice Mayor would volunteer to purchase the matches.
Whatever Lola Wants
The Vice Mayor does not believe in a filtering process or in consultative dialogue with his Council colleagues. What The People want, The People will get — only as long as it coincides with his view.
He takes seriously the radical residents who screamed at the Council a couple of weeks ago that if the Council did not obey them, then by golly, The People would unelect them by whatever means necessary.
Mr. Silbiger has been unable to answer the question that if The People are the boss, why waste time electing five stooges to the City Council?
It has occurred that this newspaper probably should hire a Silbiger Editor to chart the balmy ideas and borderline silly arguments the Vice Mayor bursts through the bushes to make most Monday evenings in Council Chambers.
Write Fast, Pal
Except the Silbiger Editor would have to be ambidextrous, writing simultaneously with both hands just to stay even with the Vice Mayor.
What will be this week’s golden pearl? That the Council meetings be moved to that hard-to-find impoverished Culver City neighborhood so that poor people won’t have to foolishly burn gas by driving to Council meetings?
I wonder if the boys at City Hall have considered charging admission just to hear the Vice Mayor declaim for an hour before the Council meetings.
He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t react. He just keeps flying fast as he can, running straight ahead with his non-mainstream ideas as if there were no one else in the room.
Squeezing Through an Opening
Nearly every week, he serves up a broken-glass complaint to rail about. Last Monday’s blue-plate special was a dandy. The idea has been smoldering in Mr. Silbiger’s mind ever since his friend and philosophical ally, Chris Armenta, was elected to the Council last April.
For the first time, Mr. Silbiger had a reliable soulmate to second his schemes. He didn’t waste time plotting details.
Mere minutes after Mr. Armenta was elected, Mr. Silbiger popped up and said to his unsurprised colleagues, “Hey, fellows, I have a terrific idea. Instead of requiring three votes to get an item on the agenda, why not reduce it to two?”
It has been Council policy that three of the five members must assent to have an off-the-wall idea placed on the agenda to keep the number of outright nutty topics to a minimum.
The Silbiger scheme was taken under advisement. It has been baking in the City Hall oven for seven months, an unusually long delay but probably a deserved one since the attempt at railroading is so blatant. Last Monday, the Vice Mayor exploded over the delay. My ears turned red, they were so embarrassed.
City Manager Jerry Fulwood assured him that the topic was scheduled for the Jan. 28 agenda. Let’s just say Mr. Silbiger did not take the news well.
Idea Man and Peers’ Response
About once a month he goes off on a wild tangent. Last month, the Vice Mayor almost went verbally haywire over the necessity of bringing in the whole darned community to determine what kind of person the next City Manager should be.
His colleagues rolled their eyes as the Vice Mayor ranted. When the agenda item was called last Monday, one person came to the podium. A second person belatedly asked to speak.
Mr. Silbiger did not flinch at the community’s spectacular lack of interest.
This is a typical communal reaction to the Vice Mayor’s crackpot notions.
Was the Vice Mayor disappointed? Are you kidding? He did not even notice. He reacted as if 500 people had spoken out. How do you work, effectively, with a mind that dense?
Observing Mr. Silbiger on the dais is like watching a car speeding down the Autobahn at 125 miles an hour while terrified rabbits, cats and other undersized animals either get clipped or scamper for cover.
Meanwhile, the one-track driver, Mr. Silbiger, continues on his merry way, oblivious to either the damage he is causing or the bizarre reactions to his, let us say unique, suggestions.
