Andy Hall leaves City Hall and a raft of unanswered questions behind him

Summary: After just seven months of a three-year city manager contract, Andy Hall is leaving Cathedral City for Imperial Beach.  His sudden departure has engendered much speculation.  Did embattled mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa engineer his departure?  Did he antagonize a non-DeRosa Council majority?  Does he know of some great disaster about to befall the city?  Or did he just decide to take himself out of the knife fight that is our municipal politics during this 10th bitter winter of the reign of Kathleen Joan DeRosa?  Given City Hall’s penchant for secrecy, and given DeRosa’s well-known status as an information-management control freak, residents may never know the whys and wherefores behind Andy Hall’s departure, at least not until DeRosa decides it is in her best political interest to disclose the truth, or some spun version of it that advances her interests.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant in politics, and the mayor’s office needs a healthy dose of it; it is infected. 

By: Paul S Marchand

The sudden departure of Cathedral City city manager Andy Hall, just seven months into a three-year contract, certainly has the city abuzz with speculation.  For perhaps the first —--and hopefully the only--- time in my public life, I find myself agreeing with embattled Cathedral City mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, that Mr. Hall’s departure, while shocking, may not be entirely surprising.

While Mr. Hall may be playing his cards very close to the vest, there is nonetheless much speculation in the community about the whys and wherefores of his sudden exit.  Given Cathedral City’s penchant for cultivating a culture of secrecy and stonewalling, the public may never know what motivated Andy Hall to take the city manager’s job in Imperial Beach.

Was there a falling out between the city manager and the incumbent mayor?  It’s an open secret that Kathleen Joan DeRosa does not like to take “no” for an answer, and prefers to surround herself with compliant yes-people.  Did Andy Hall prove less tractable than Donald Bradley, his more compliant predecessor as city manager, ?  Did he say “no” once too often to a mayor with a strongly monarchical conceit of herself?  Was he advised by DeRosa or her loyalists in City Hall or on the Council that he should start putting out resumes?

Or did Mr. Hall have a falling out with other members of the Council?  Did he do, say, or fail to do or say something expected of him by majority of the council members?  Is it possible that there might have been three votes to hand him his walking papers?

Did Mr. Hall had advance knowledge of some significant shit-storm about to befall Cathedral City, and choose to flee while the getting was good, taking flight lest he be consumed?  “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  Is it possible that Desert Sun dirt-digger and shit-stirrer Tamara Sone had targeted him for the same kind of hatchet work she has been obsessively eager to perform against Greg Pettis?

Or is it simply possible that Andy Hall got fed up with a municipal politics that at least one local resident has likened to a knife fight?  Did Mr. Hall, at the last, simply have too much integrity --- unlike Desert Hot Springs city manager Rick Daniels, who is also leaving his job--- to allow himself to be drawn into the vortex of the political infighting and nastiness that has characterized Cathedral City’s municipal government during the nine bitter winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s reign?

At this stage, there are certainly more questions than answers, and it is unlikely that Cathedral City residents will get any answers anytime soon.  I noted earlier that Cathedral City has tended for years to cultivate a municipal culture of secrecy, stonewalling, evasion, and nondisclosure.  No doubt the mayor, the Administrative Services Director, and the city Clerk will seek to deploy over Andy Hall’s departure the same cloak of secrecy they have so often deployed in the past, employing threats and intimidation to prevent the truth from getting out.

As much as it’s been an open secret that Kathleen Joan DeRosa doesn’t like to take “no” for an answer, it’s also been an open secret that she is a compulsive information-management control freak.  She has a reputation for assiduously cultivating the print and broadcast media in our Valley, losing no opportunity to try to get favorable ink or airtime for herself.  Indeed, her obsessive need for publicity expressed itself in her tacky, but successful effort to obtrude herself into the Desert Sun’s coverage of the unfortunate death of photographer Ken Rambo earlier this week.  DeRosa’s penchant for publicity-seeking runs exactly contrary to her equally strong desire to control in the minutest degree any information about Cathedral City and about what is actually going on in City Hall.  What happened with Andy Hall in City Hall will remain concealed from a curious public unless and until it is in Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s political interest for her to allow the truth, or some politically useful spin on it, to be disseminated.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis once observed, in sum and substance, that sunlight is the best disinfectant.  It’s time for some sunlight to pierce the dark veils of secrecy in City Hall, so that the people of Cathedral City can have a clearer understanding of what their hired help have been doing behind that veil.  For there is an infection in the mayor’s office that demands a healthy, prophylactic dose of sunlight.

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Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices and Cathedral City, California.  He served two terms on the city Council there, and is not unfamiliar with the antics and actions of the incumbent mayor.  The views set forth herein are his own, and not those of any entity or organization, and are not intended as legal advice.

LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ: Reflections on Bastille Day.

Summary: On Bastille Day, it is appropriate to celebrate a common American/French revolutionary heritage.  Our two revolutions have set a standard for, and made a tour of, the world, establishing revolutionary democracy as the default political ordering of most of the planet.  Yet here in the United States, American rightists, Beltway Bourbons in the worst sense of that phrase, have waged war against the Jeffersonian proclamation that “all men are created equal.”  Yet our American and French Revolutions have a better reputation beyond our borders and outside the French Hexagon than they do in their homelands.  Like the traitors who supported Vichy France and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, many American rightists would happily destroy America’s middle and working classes, binding then in chains of debt-servitude and grinding them into the dust.  There was a good reason the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, and on this day when France, the Francophone world, and America, celebrate the Revolution, we should remember our commitment to the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and to those hallowed words of the Declaration of Independence that assure us of our fundamental equality.  A toutes les gloires de la France, et vive la Révolution française.

By: Paul S. Marchand

A toutes les gloires de la France. 

On Bastille Day, we celebrate a revolutionary heritage, a common gift of America and France to the world.

224 years ago today, on July 14, 1789, Parisian revolutionary insurgents, moved by a trend of revolutionary events, events themselves engendered by the conduct of the slow-moving train wreck France’s ancien régime Bourbon dynasty had become, stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress on the right bank of the Seine.

Originally constructed during the 14th century, the Bastille had served as a royal prison since the early part of the 1400s.  By 1789, the aging fortress had become a detested symbol of French royal absolutism.  To this day, the storming of the Bastille has been regarded as one of the turning points of the events which led to the French Revolution --- and to the overthrow of the ancien régime and the Bourbon dynasty.

Today, Bastille Day is France’s official national day, commemorated and celebrated by one of the last -- and only -- significant, all-arms, muscle-flexing military parades in the West.  The Bastille Day parade represents the granddaddy of all of the vulgar, kitschy military extravaganzas regularly played out in such East-Bloc capitals as Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang, but because it celebrates a great revolution of liberty, it gets a pass.

Bastille Day is quintessentially the French Revolutionary day, and we who honor the republican revolutionary tradition which has made democracy the default political ordering of the nations of the world should stop for a moment and remember just how critical the role of the French and American revolutions has been in the progress of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

More than 50 years ago, a journalist at an international conference asked Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai his views on the French Revolution.  Zhou, who had been educated in France, and who had imbibed some of the perfect ancien régime courtesy of French society, to say nothing of the elegant Confucian courtesy of Qing China, urbanely answered the journalist’s inquiry with the suave assurance that it was “too early to tell.”

Half a century later, as we Americans still struggle to think out the implications of our own revolution, we know that for us it is no longer too early to tell.

Our American Revolution, insofar is it has inspired copycat revolutions including the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, and other revolutions around the world, has made a tour of the world and upset ancien régimes on every continent.  Beyond our borders, and outside the Hexagon that is France, our common revolutionary heritage has changed our world beyond all measure.  Outside of the United States, the American Revolution has been an inspiring success

Yet, here at home, the American right often shudders at the implications of what an authentic American revolution might be.  The idea that a revolution might actually demand a commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity, leaves many American rightists ice cold, and engenders in them a poisonous hatred of the French Republic, its revolutionary heritage, and its revolutionary mission.  In that, the American right resembles nothing so much as the French traitors and collaborators who supported Vichy France and cooperated with the Nazi occupation during World War II.

To listen to American rightists, one would think that the French Revolution was the most awful political development in history.  Hard-right pundit-wretch Ben Shapiro was attacked the French Revolution as having “viciously” “introduced democracy.”  French readers of Shapiro’s fulminations quite rightly wondered how this arrogant young American columnist could have embraced such shameful, anti-French, anti-democratic, neo-Vichy sentiments.

Indeed, the views and conduct of much of the American right are such as to justify characterizing it as I have done in the past: as “Beltway Bourbons.”  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who was perhaps the ultimate survivor of the French Revolutionary era, once acidly eviscerated the Bourbons as having “forgotten nothing and learned nothing.”  Certainly, American conservatives seem to fit Talleyrand description perfectly.  They have indeed lost touch with American history and with America’s revolutionary heritage.

The American right’s war against America’s middle class --- against the very people upon whom our national survival depends --- bears a  curious resemblance to the efforts of the French ancien régime to hold onto power during the mid-to late 1780s, and certainly suggests the American right neither accepts nor believes in the Jeffersonian proposition that “all men are created equal.”  For example, by removing food stamps from their recent farm bill, Congressional Republicans have adopted in their fullest and foulest form the mentalities and values of the pre-revolutionary French nobility: what does it matter if the working poor and destitute starve? 

Of the Parisian poor, Marie Antoinette is said apocryphally to have declared “let them eat cake.”  It would be more accurate to remember the similarly inciendary 1862 declaration of Andrew Myrick, sometime Indian agent among the Santee Sioux, who when informed that his charges were starving, dismissed their plight by casually consigning them to starvation, saying “let them eat grass,” or, in the alternative, Myrick declared, they could eat their own shit

Further example: by allowing student loan interest rates to double, and by imposing ferocious and draconian penalties upon those who are not able to muster the wherewithal to repay, Congressional Republicans and the American right have demonstrated their indifference to the danger of creating a permanent debt-bound underclass.  Yet, in France at the end of the 1780s, the permanent debt-bound underclass dared to raise its hand against the nobility and the wealthy and the hierarchy of the church.    

That thudding sound which soon echoed out from Revolutionary Paris to the provinces was the sound of aristocratic heads landing in baskets -- heads which had thought to bind in chains of permanent indebtedness a bourgeoisie upon whose economic prosperity the security of France depended.

It might also be useful to recall that when the Santee Sioux, goaded beyond endurance, finally rose, the first white they killed was Andrew Myrick, whose mouth they stuffed with the grass he had so dismissively told them to eat.


A short, what we have seen in the last generation in this country --- as middle-class wages have stagnated, and as the share of the national economy controlled or possessed by the wealthiest one percent among us has increased to almost obscene degree --- has been a process by which the have-mores have sought to grind the middle-class into permanent poverty.  As George W. Bush so infamously declared at the 2000 Alfred E. Smith Memorial dinner, “"This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base".  Since then, the Republican Party has been at the service of the right wing war of the haves and the have-mores against America’s have-nots, against the everyday working stiffs whose ill-compensated labor is the lifeblood of our economy.

On this Bastille Day, we may conclude that the American right have been some Karl Marx’s best disciples.  Buying fully and fearfully into a Marxian class-war analysis, the American right has been waging a nasty, preemptive class war against those who may not be as wealthy as they; the object of this preemptive class war has been nothing less than to undo once and for all Thomas Jefferson’s ringing statement of our national faith that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and to create a permanent class structure in the United States that not only socializes risk and privatizes reward, but which also makes social mobility a thing of the past.

The victory of the Parisians over the defenders of the Bastille goes a long way toward establishing the proposition that the Rights of Man and the Citizen are not to be bought, sold, or bartered away in the interests of the most well-connected and well-off among us.  That is the lesson we ought to remember on Bastille Day. 

Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

A toutes les gloires de la France.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California.  He has a name that would not be out of place in any French phonebook.  The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.