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The City Council did not make bad choices last night — just wrong ones, quite wrong ones — for appointments to 2 city commissions, Civil Service, and Parks and Recreation.
The reason for their very personal gaffe is not a mystery, just an exasperation. The result of their tilted voting — the overt snubbing of the candidates Tom Camarella and Karlo Silbiger — was as predictable as the Gregorian calendar or, in my case, ex-wives.
For those of us who believe in a meritocracy, the Council’s near-unanimous, insensitive, unreasonable decision to punish the overwhelmingly qualified Mr. Camarella and Mr. Silbiger for Parks and Rec is the latest evidence of the dastardly fallout from The Gary Silbiger Curse.
One is his son, one is his dearest friend.
Both wasted their gas driving to City Hall. They may as well have given speeches announcing, “Just kidding. I don’t really want a seat on your stinking commissions.”
Behind the Twin Turndowns
It is the conviction of Council members, past and present, that the senior Mr. Silbiger, the Vice Mayor of Culver City, has so poisoned the political air they breathe at City Hall that no one who is suspected of intimately associating with him should be granted the privilege of recognition.
Neither Mr. Camarella, who is in his early 60s, nor Mr. Silbiger, who is 25 years old, has enough years left to stand around and wait for one mold-busting, courageous City Councilman to safely drive each one’s candidacy through the Culver City equivalent of the Gaza Strip.
Were I Karlo Silbiger, I would have gone home last night, packed my belongings and moved, immediately, to a more serious activist community that would appreciate my skills, Santa Monica, the South Bay, West Hollywood.
Why should this brilliantly gifted thinker/activist stand in the middle of a ring like a comatose prizefighter and keep absorbing body blows because he is the son of a colleague whom the voters on the dais don’t like?
The situation is scarcely different for Mr. Camarella.
How Many ‘No’s’ Are Enough?
But the company both men keep singed them — for life.
You think I exaggerate?
Karlo Silbiger has been rejected more times than an ugly girl at a school dance in braille. It is worse for Mr. Camarella. He has been treated like a smelly piece of dirt by City Councils throughout 6 years of hopelessly chasing commission appointments.
The two of them aren’t just pretty faces.
They have earned their stature. Between them, they comprehend more about Culver City politics, the machinations of the community, making a community work, the wider legislative process, the players in this community, the exact rhythm of this community, than all of their competition rolled together.
Karlo Silbiger, I would offer, owned the strongest mind in Council Chambers last night. But he may as well have spit in the ocean — that would have roiled the waters more than any of his words did.
Digging at the Truth
Upon reflection, the keener minds on the City Council won’t resist these arguments. These are not indecipherable insights.
If you observe the City Council on a vaguely regular basis, you will note that there is a gap roughly the breadth of the Grand Canyon Jr. between Vice Mayor Silbiger and most of his colleagues. Every meeting. After 6 years, it is more automatic than Get Well — Just Not Too Fast cards from former wives
Why this condition exists is for another day. Human nature is not going to reverse itself because a couple of fellows in a Westside enclave are being grossly maltreated.
Mr. Camarella’s personality may not be flawlessly sculpted. But his overt commitment to making Culver City prosper is.
I share these thoughts not with the expectation of changing one hair of reality, but rather in the interest of candor.
