Human Shields Are Back in Style — in Culver City, Would You Believe?

In horse-racing parlance, this is the Daily Double, a slicker-than-deer-guts-on-a-doorknob combo that always seems to somehow pay off when most crucially needed.

The journalists’ exhausted horses are panting from riding to his rescue so often.

The C.C.P.S. is comprised of the three weekly newspapers in our town.

Did You See Anything?

Although they report for work most days, they neither hear nor see evil by the wily Mr. Vera, even when his magical machinations are performed before their wondering eyes.

(You may remember the punchline about the cheating husband who asked: “Are you going to believe me or your lyin’ eyes?”)

More than many residents in our town, Mr. Vera — regarded by the C.C. P.S. as the shrewdest self-promoter its beleaguered members ever have met — is deserving of sympathy.

Do They Go Together?

Shrewdness and honesty, as those of us over the age of 10 painfully have learned, do not always live in the same town.

Just before and just after he turned 70 years old awhile back — birthdays are another state secret — Mr. Vera was visited by traumatizing personal setbacks of the worst kind. They would have floored a man of less strength.

Line of Succession

He always ached for his son “Junior,” now 42 years old, to join him in business at the family market. The plan called for Junior to assume eventual control of the market and the rest of the Vera empire.

Junior, whose often sweet temperament is the opposite of his father’s, always wanted to be a policeman.

The twain of these two career clashes never is likely to meet.

Family Tragedies

Death of the most devastating kind has visited the Vera family. No amount of solace on earth ever will ameliorate the loss of one’s child.

I am not sure if Mr. Vera, whose health is on the margins, ever has recovered from the tragic death of his elder son a year and a half ago.

But our subject today, rather than the intensely private and personal is the intensely public and personal.

Updated Medicine Man?

In the old days of 120 years ago, the object of affection of the un-insightful members of the Culver City Protectionist Society used to be known as a medicine man.

Due to the mercurial pace at which civilization has progressed in the last one century and a fifth, such unvarnished seductivity these days is described in the following classy manner:

“C’mon, Murgatroyd, you are jerking my chain.”

Credibility Damaged

For corroboration of the elixir served up at the most opportune times by Mr. Vera — now you see it, now you don’t —I refer you to a story that appeared here 14 months ago, “Vera Really Can Keep a Secret,” from Jan. 20, 2006.

On that occasion, Mr. Vera’s precious credibility absorbed a staggering hit with everybody in town — except the dues-paying members of the Culver City Protectionist Society.

This and subsequent problems with candor (“I will definitely run for re-election,” “I will definitely not run for re-election”) lead me to suspect that, at a point in his career, P.T. Barnum must have published a weekly in Culver City.

I Never Saw Nuthin’

The perceptive ladies and gentlemen of the competing journals in this community are among the steadiest readers of thefrontpageonline.com.

Even a child — as Ed McMahon cunningly used to say when he was Johnny Carson’s sidekick — could discern what has been going on the last couple weeks within the Vera empire.

The Amen Chorus

The C.C. P.S. has been perceived to be in Mr. Vera’s hip pocket roughly from the day he became a public figure in Culver City until this morning.

Last week, when I covered the most recent court hearing involving Mr. Vera’s son, I was joined by another Culver City journalist.

Shall We Count Again, Boys?

He wondered aloud where the other two newspapers were. He only missed by one. Is this what is meant by hip-pocket journalism?

Perhaps if the weeklies merge, they may prove that three wrongs can make a right.