Summary: Cathedral City’s municipal culture tends to be characterized by cronyism. City Hall would prefer to select an unqualified but congenial replacement for our late city clerk over a qualified candidate who won’t take part in a cozy, good old boy dynamic that doesn’t much care for transparency, good government, or keeping the system honest. Our “leaders,” as sky-clad and inadequate as they are, do not propose to be asked to reflect on their performance by anybody.
Neither, apparently, does the American public at large, which has gone into paroxysms over V.V. Putin’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, taking exception to American exceptionalism. While Putin may be an asshole, even assholes sometimes strike nerves. Has a prideful, unthinking belligerence overtaken the kind of thoughtful introspection so beautifully expressed in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address? Does it take a hypocrital Russian thug to ask the kinds of questions we have grown fearful of addressing?
By: Paul S. Marchand
Crony Culture in Cat City
Last night, the Cathedral City city council chose a new city clerk to fill out the unexpired term of the late Pat Hammers. Of the two candidates available to them, they unanimously chose Gary Howell, the less qualified candidate.
The candidate they did choose, however, is an old crony, long associated with and thus acceptable to all of the warring factions of a dysfunctional city council. The chosen candidate is a dependable supporter of the current dispensation in Cathedral City, and can safely be relied upon not to ask embarrassing questions, not to insist on too much transparency in a municipality that makes a virtual fetish of secrecy, and not to work too hard at keeping the system honest.
Full disclosure, I was the unsuccessful candidate. Clearly, better qualifications notwithstanding, I was not congenial either to Maximum Leader Kathleen Joan DeRosa or “Leader of the Opposition” Gregory Pettis. I made it clear that I would be willing to ask unsettling questions, to insist on transparency, and to keep the system honest. These are not the goals and policies of what has become one of the most sadly dysfunctional city councils in the Coachella Valley.
Cathedral City’s municipal culture is one of tergiversation, secrecy, complacency, and constant infighting. It may be as well that the Council unanimously chose an old crony; to participate in such a municipal culture is inevitably to become complicit in its enormities, and that is not a complicity which, upon due and conscientious reflection, I wish to take up.
I have been a strong critic of the way in which Cathedral City has been disserved both by the Maximum Leader and by the “Opposition.” Nonetheless, because I believed that the “Opposition” had more to offer than the Maximum Leader, I had been more inclined to give that “Opposition” the benefit of some doubt. That is no longer the case. Given that neither side on the council has demonstrated the slightest capacity for doing much more than sniping at the other, both sides have now lost whatever support they might have had from me; a plague on both their ramshackle houses.
Speaking of ramshackle, I can’t help but wonder what, if anything, Cathedral City can really offer to the inhabitants of Thousand Palms. Though I had initially supported the idea of annexing Thousand Palms to Cathedral City, the council’s missteps of late, particularly its astonishing failure to keep the Date Palm interchange project moving forward in a timely manner, has caused me some anguished reconsideration of the utility of trying to bring Thousand Palms into Cathedral City. Given the all-too-apparent difficulty this Council seems to have governing our existing city, can the inhabitants of Thousand Palms expect any future better than to be treated as second-class citizens in their own decaying neighborhoods?
Can the inhabitants of Thousand Palms have any confidence whatsoever that their interests will be taken care of by the existing city government of Cathedral City?
Can any of us in fact have any confidence whatsoever that our needs and concerns will be adequately addressed by the current council?
Sadly, I’ve been here before. From 2001 to 2007, I represented Cathedral City on the board of trustees of the Coachella Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District. The “Bug Board” as it is commonly known, was, at the time, a group of good old boys largely controlled by Then-General Manager Donald Gomsi and counsel Lisa Copeland. Because my suggestions for reform and transparency were not congenial to the cranky old white guys who made up the District’s governing board, they engaged in an active effort to convince the Maximum Leader and her then-allies on the city Council to get rid of me when I came up for reappointment to the Bug Board in 2007. Contributions flowed to DeRosa’s campaign, and the quid pro quo was glaringly obvious. DeRosa and her allies replaced me with --- no surprise at all--- their good friend and crony Gary Howell.
Six years later, we seem to have come full circle as the Council has opted to go down the route of the Bug Board, by reinforcing a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” City Hall culture that incentivizes mediocrity, incompetence, and a disturbing appearance of corruption.
Yet, at some point, reform happens. It will either happen because this Council has a “Road to Damascus” experience and comes to understand that Cathedral City cannot continue as it has done, or it will come because the electorate has a “road to Damascus” moment, at which something like scales falls from their eyes (Acts 9:18) and the electorate sees clearly that Cathedral City has not been well served by its current crop of cronies and time servers. Either way, the Council needs to stop behaving like the leadership of the last days of the Ottoman Empire and instead heed the muted rumble of approaching events. Time is short; 2014 is just months away, and it may not be as easy to bamboozle the electorate as it has been in years past.
Bad Vlad: Putin Tugs America’s Tail
Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has published an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he takes some exception to the idea of American exceptionalism.
The response from the American public has been remarkably bipartisan. It is also been sulfurous.
Nonetheless, it sometimes takes a thuggish, homophobic asshole like V.V. Putin to ask the kinds of questions we often don’t like to hear. It’s uncomfortable when “Adam-zad - the Bear that walks like a Man” has the effrontery to suggest that perhaps we need not look so pious after all, and that we may in fact be sky-clad emperors with no clothes.
At the risk of being attacked as a contrarian, or even having my patriotism questioned by knuckle draggers, I daresay that the sulfurous reaction to gospodin Putin’s pinprick on the subject of American “exceptionalism” suggests that he may have struck a nerve.
We Americans have been embracing the idea that we are somehow exceptional since John Winthrop first spoke of the incipient Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay as “a city that cannot be hid.” We have a uniquely providential view of our own history. For white America, our history is summed up in the Exodus narrative of God’s chosen people going into the Promised Land and forcing out the Canaanites. For black America, that same Exodus narrative has been read to emphasize the mighty acts by which God humbled the arrogant pretensions of Pharoah, led the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage, and set them on the road to the Promised Land.
Either way, the narrative of our history has been presented in a uniquely Constantinopolitan light; if Constantinople was “the God-guarded city” on a hill that could not be hid, so too has America been characterized as a uniquely God-guarded “city on a hill.” To characterize America that way is to insist that somehow America has been set apart for the fulfillment of some divine purpose. To urge that America has been set apart for such an enterprise is automatically to accept the proposition that we are far too special and far too unique to be subject to the accountabilities of ordinary nations.
Invoking American “exceptionalism” can thus call forth a kind of unthinking, prideful belligerence that rejects the very idea of conscientious introspection. Such a rejection of the idea that we should hold ourselves to strict account seems to underlie the head-exploding response to gospodin Putin’s criticism of our exceptionalistic view of ourselves as above criticism. Still, it is a view from which Abraham Lincoln would have recoiled in horror, as even a first- approximation reading of his masterful, compassionate second inaugural address demonstrates.
Of course, as I suggested, Vladimir Putin is by no means the best messenger for such a message. But one must wonder whether our reaction would have been so thunderous had the op-ed in question carried the byline of, say, British PM David Cameron, or Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, or even of former Australian PM Kevin Rudd. Criticism from other English-speaking countries seems more acceptable, perhaps because we and other English-speaking countries tend to share a common set of values and heritages.
Nonetheless, as hypocritical as Putin’s finger-wagging may be, a basic respect for intellectual honesty ought to militate against rejecting out of hand what Vladimir Vladimirovich has said. For if even a priest in a state of sin can validly celebrate the Sacraments of our redemption, even a major-league douchebag can sometimes ask the right question. Once in a while, as my Texas grandmother used to say, blind hog finds an acorn.
Are we as exceptional as we think we are? Many of us, I among them, hope so, but the proof of our exceptionalism will lie in the extent to which we can engage in careful, self-critical analysis. If all we can do is bluster about the badness of gospodin Putin, we may well have proven his point, and that is not an item of satisfaction I would like to give to Adam-zad - the Bear that walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century and more go that we should make no truce.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, a fact he finds somewhat embarrassing. He believes in asking hard questions and in keeping the system open, honest, and transparent --- all attributes which make him uncongenial to City Hall political operators. He is perfectly willing to declare that our “leaders” are sky-clad and inadequate, and he makes no truce with Adam-zad - the bear that walks like a man. The views set forth herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
PARADOXES WITHIN PARADOXES: The “Good Enough” Solution to the Syrian Question Is Best.
Summary: As the Syrian Crisis unfolds, it starts to resemble both a weird, 21st-century “remake” of Barbara Tuchman’s classic The Guns of August, married to an odd set of nested paradoxes. We seem caught between the possibility of hostilities and a diplomatic resolution which nobody will find terribly satisfactory. Any peaceful resolution of the Syrian Question will probably depend upon continuing to tolerate for the time being the presence of a noisome dictator. There are no perfect outcomes, and not a lot of even good outcomes. The best we can hope for is a least bad outcome, as we embrace the consolations of sometimes Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s philosophy that “good enough is best.”
By: Paul S. Marchand
Watching the so-called Syrian Crisis unfold is somewhat akin to living through a weird, 21st-century “remake” of the late Barbara Tuchman’s now classic The Guns of August. We all have a sense that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against other Syrians represents something that is simply “not done.” Assad’s crossing of a so-called red line has been treated by the United States as something akin to Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914.
In making a case to the American public for unilateral military intervention against the Assad regime, President Obama has attempted to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s advice of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. As the President has sought to build up support for a so-called surgical strike against Syria, the world has seen much of the same kind of diplomatic maneuvering that consumed the month of July, 1914. The intervention of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov --- apparently in response to an off-the-cuff remark from Secretary of State John Kerry at a media availability --- seems to have led to some sort of “road to Damascus” volte-face from the Syrians, who have now acknowledged their possession of chemical weapons and have ventilated, through the Russian Foreign Ministry, a proposal to surrender their chemical weapons inventory to international control.
This was where events stood this evening when the President addressed the nation. Mr. Obama’s remarks were, in all honesty, somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, the President disclaimed any intention of acting as “the world’s policeman,” or of putting American “boots on the ground” in Syria, but he certainly retained in his text some distinct emphasis on the idea that the Syrians --- and their backers in the Kremlin--- had only been brought to their expressed willingness to make concessions by the presence of “credible [American] military force.” Clearly, the Presidential text was overtaken by today’s events.
Still, we may credit the president with not having made the terrible mistake Austria-Hungary made at the end of July, 1914. In that earlier crisis, Vienna had delivered to the Serbian government, which it held responsible for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a stringent ultimatum, to which a reply from Serbia was demanded within 48 hours. The Serbs complied with the 48-hour deadline in a document that essentially conceded all of Austria-Hungary’s demands. Indeed, so complete was Serbia’s capitulation that German Emperor Wilhelm II declared that Serbia’s reply had “remove[ed] all cause for war.”
To the extent that Damascus’s response to the Russian démarche appears to represent a significant climbdown by the Assad regime, the Obama administration would have appeared far too bellicose for its own good had it not expressed a willingness to delay military action and a Congressional vote pending further talks. Not for this administration, then, the senile belligerence of Vienna, or the hell-bent-for-war rejection by the George W. Bush administration of Iraqi diplomatic efforts to stave off the US invasion of a decade ago. This administration, at least for the time being, appears to agree that talking is better than shooting. As Winston Churchill once put it: “jaw jaw is better than war war.”
At all events, however any talks may go forward, we must acknowledge that in the current diplomatic dance over Syria, there remain paradoxes within paradoxes within paradoxes.
First, we must understand that Syria is not Libya. US military efforts against Muammar Qaddafi were essentially in the nature (as an old Chinese proverb has it) of “giving the falling wall a push.” Qaddafi’s ramshackle regime ultimately collapsed of its own contradictions and inconsistencies. Syria, on the other hand, is ruled by a family dictatorship that has perfected over many years the infrastructure and apparatus of ironfisted control. Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, was easily the most brutal dictator in the Middle East. Writing in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York Times reporter (and quondam Iraq War cheerleader) Thomas Friedman once observed that Hafez Assad played by so-called Hama Rules: the ruthless use of overwhelming force to crush even the slightest dissent. Friedman coined the phrase “Hama Rules” to refer to the so-called Hama massacre of February, 1982, when Syrian forces swept into the city of Hama to crush an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood. An estimated 40,000 were slain by Hafez Assad’s security forces. From then until now, the Assad family has never been afraid to play by Hama Rules.
But if the Assad family remains willing to play by Hama Rules, using chemical agents to suppress dissent, it also remains uniquely poised to insulate itself from accountability. Any US intervention in the Civil War now raging in Syria would inevitably be spun by the Assad family, by its water carriers, and by the Kremlin as an American assault upon the so-called Arab Nation. It may be paradoxical that Arab dictators who have historically looked to the United States as either a convenient prop or a useful enemy find this country so integral to the maintenance of their regimes, but it remains so. Bashar Assad won’t go because we ask him to, or even because we tell him to; Bashar Assad will go the way so many Baathist dictators have gone. He will go in a coup; he will either go out at gunpoint into a cushy exile or he will go down in a hail of bullets, presumably taking the rest of his family with him; it is the Baathist way.
Indeed, for Bashar Assad’s minority, Alawite government, the best possible guarantee of its continued existence may well be the enmity of the United States. If Sergei Viktorovich’s plan produces some kind of non-military resolution, under which the Assad regime agrees to turn over its chemical assets, presumably to the United Nations, the regime will necessarily have to remain in place and retain sufficient power to ensure the successful implementation of any kind of negotiated settlement. For the United States, the paradox of Syria may be that to secure the elimination of the dictator’s arsenal, we may find ourselves obliged to tolerate for the time being the continued presence of the dictator.
And Americans on both the left and the right should be considerate in their utterance as the parties attempt to resolve this issue short of hostilities. Americans on the right do their cause no favors by lionizing Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose malodorous reputation has only gotten worse as a result of the mindless pursuit and persecution of Russia’s queerfolk by Putin’s government and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. American conservatives like Newt Gingrich, who appear to have forgotten that politics should end at the water’s edge, need to moderate their transports and discontinue their unhelpful, partisan attacks on the President. When significant foreign-policy issues are implicated, critics on the American right need to understand that their constant sniping at the President has completely undermined whatever international credibility they once possessed.
By the same token, left-wing critics of the President need to examine their own rhetoric, critically assessing whether their words have a tendency to send signals of encouragement to the Assad regime. There is something more than a little disturbing about seeing protest signs reading “hands off Syria.” Are the carriers of such signs adopting and advocating the Syrian/Bashar Assad point of view, or --- to be charitable--- are they simply intemperate in their choice of words? Too many of our friends on the so-called progressive side of the aisle often appear disturbingly eager to allow the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sadly, there are no perfect solutions to what has happened in Syria.
Yet, if there are no perfect solutions, or even terribly good solutions, to the Syrian Question, some solution must nonetheless be found. Certainly, under the circumstances, we should not adopt the George W. Bush administration’s preference for reaching the military option first. The President was probably wise to pull back from the threshold of unilateral military action. In this case, military intervention should be very much a “reach me last” option. Nonetheless, pace my friends on the left, we cannot afford to categorically foreclose any military option. Paradoxically, it may prove to be in the national interest of the United States that the Syrians shoot first.
Of course, if a diplomatic solution is found, nobody has to shoot at all, and we would be foolish to throw unnecessary, gratuitous obstacles in the way of such an outcome. Still, the Syrian Question remains a set of nested paradoxes out of which we will be lucky to find a least bad solution, embracing as we do the consolations of Soviet naval mastermind Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov’s philosophy that, in the end, “good enough is best.”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity with which he is associated. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice. In the end, good enough usually is best.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Watching the so-called Syrian Crisis unfold is somewhat akin to living through a weird, 21st-century “remake” of the late Barbara Tuchman’s now classic The Guns of August. We all have a sense that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against other Syrians represents something that is simply “not done.” Assad’s crossing of a so-called red line has been treated by the United States as something akin to Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914.
In making a case to the American public for unilateral military intervention against the Assad regime, President Obama has attempted to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s advice of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. As the President has sought to build up support for a so-called surgical strike against Syria, the world has seen much of the same kind of diplomatic maneuvering that consumed the month of July, 1914. The intervention of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov --- apparently in response to an off-the-cuff remark from Secretary of State John Kerry at a media availability --- seems to have led to some sort of “road to Damascus” volte-face from the Syrians, who have now acknowledged their possession of chemical weapons and have ventilated, through the Russian Foreign Ministry, a proposal to surrender their chemical weapons inventory to international control.
This was where events stood this evening when the President addressed the nation. Mr. Obama’s remarks were, in all honesty, somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, the President disclaimed any intention of acting as “the world’s policeman,” or of putting American “boots on the ground” in Syria, but he certainly retained in his text some distinct emphasis on the idea that the Syrians --- and their backers in the Kremlin--- had only been brought to their expressed willingness to make concessions by the presence of “credible [American] military force.” Clearly, the Presidential text was overtaken by today’s events.
Still, we may credit the president with not having made the terrible mistake Austria-Hungary made at the end of July, 1914. In that earlier crisis, Vienna had delivered to the Serbian government, which it held responsible for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a stringent ultimatum, to which a reply from Serbia was demanded within 48 hours. The Serbs complied with the 48-hour deadline in a document that essentially conceded all of Austria-Hungary’s demands. Indeed, so complete was Serbia’s capitulation that German Emperor Wilhelm II declared that Serbia’s reply had “remove[ed] all cause for war.”
To the extent that Damascus’s response to the Russian démarche appears to represent a significant climbdown by the Assad regime, the Obama administration would have appeared far too bellicose for its own good had it not expressed a willingness to delay military action and a Congressional vote pending further talks. Not for this administration, then, the senile belligerence of Vienna, or the hell-bent-for-war rejection by the George W. Bush administration of Iraqi diplomatic efforts to stave off the US invasion of a decade ago. This administration, at least for the time being, appears to agree that talking is better than shooting. As Winston Churchill once put it: “jaw jaw is better than war war.”
At all events, however any talks may go forward, we must acknowledge that in the current diplomatic dance over Syria, there remain paradoxes within paradoxes within paradoxes.
First, we must understand that Syria is not Libya. US military efforts against Muammar Qaddafi were essentially in the nature (as an old Chinese proverb has it) of “giving the falling wall a push.” Qaddafi’s ramshackle regime ultimately collapsed of its own contradictions and inconsistencies. Syria, on the other hand, is ruled by a family dictatorship that has perfected over many years the infrastructure and apparatus of ironfisted control. Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, was easily the most brutal dictator in the Middle East. Writing in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York Times reporter (and quondam Iraq War cheerleader) Thomas Friedman once observed that Hafez Assad played by so-called Hama Rules: the ruthless use of overwhelming force to crush even the slightest dissent. Friedman coined the phrase “Hama Rules” to refer to the so-called Hama massacre of February, 1982, when Syrian forces swept into the city of Hama to crush an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood. An estimated 40,000 were slain by Hafez Assad’s security forces. From then until now, the Assad family has never been afraid to play by Hama Rules.
But if the Assad family remains willing to play by Hama Rules, using chemical agents to suppress dissent, it also remains uniquely poised to insulate itself from accountability. Any US intervention in the Civil War now raging in Syria would inevitably be spun by the Assad family, by its water carriers, and by the Kremlin as an American assault upon the so-called Arab Nation. It may be paradoxical that Arab dictators who have historically looked to the United States as either a convenient prop or a useful enemy find this country so integral to the maintenance of their regimes, but it remains so. Bashar Assad won’t go because we ask him to, or even because we tell him to; Bashar Assad will go the way so many Baathist dictators have gone. He will go in a coup; he will either go out at gunpoint into a cushy exile or he will go down in a hail of bullets, presumably taking the rest of his family with him; it is the Baathist way.
Indeed, for Bashar Assad’s minority, Alawite government, the best possible guarantee of its continued existence may well be the enmity of the United States. If Sergei Viktorovich’s plan produces some kind of non-military resolution, under which the Assad regime agrees to turn over its chemical assets, presumably to the United Nations, the regime will necessarily have to remain in place and retain sufficient power to ensure the successful implementation of any kind of negotiated settlement. For the United States, the paradox of Syria may be that to secure the elimination of the dictator’s arsenal, we may find ourselves obliged to tolerate for the time being the continued presence of the dictator.
And Americans on both the left and the right should be considerate in their utterance as the parties attempt to resolve this issue short of hostilities. Americans on the right do their cause no favors by lionizing Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose malodorous reputation has only gotten worse as a result of the mindless pursuit and persecution of Russia’s queerfolk by Putin’s government and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. American conservatives like Newt Gingrich, who appear to have forgotten that politics should end at the water’s edge, need to moderate their transports and discontinue their unhelpful, partisan attacks on the President. When significant foreign-policy issues are implicated, critics on the American right need to understand that their constant sniping at the President has completely undermined whatever international credibility they once possessed.
By the same token, left-wing critics of the President need to examine their own rhetoric, critically assessing whether their words have a tendency to send signals of encouragement to the Assad regime. There is something more than a little disturbing about seeing protest signs reading “hands off Syria.” Are the carriers of such signs adopting and advocating the Syrian/Bashar Assad point of view, or --- to be charitable--- are they simply intemperate in their choice of words? Too many of our friends on the so-called progressive side of the aisle often appear disturbingly eager to allow the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sadly, there are no perfect solutions to what has happened in Syria.
Yet, if there are no perfect solutions, or even terribly good solutions, to the Syrian Question, some solution must nonetheless be found. Certainly, under the circumstances, we should not adopt the George W. Bush administration’s preference for reaching the military option first. The President was probably wise to pull back from the threshold of unilateral military action. In this case, military intervention should be very much a “reach me last” option. Nonetheless, pace my friends on the left, we cannot afford to categorically foreclose any military option. Paradoxically, it may prove to be in the national interest of the United States that the Syrians shoot first.
Of course, if a diplomatic solution is found, nobody has to shoot at all, and we would be foolish to throw unnecessary, gratuitous obstacles in the way of such an outcome. Still, the Syrian Question remains a set of nested paradoxes out of which we will be lucky to find a least bad solution, embracing as we do the consolations of Soviet naval mastermind Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov’s philosophy that, in the end, “good enough is best.”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity with which he is associated. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice. In the end, good enough usually is best.
Monday, September 9, 2013
AL HOOK: AN APPRECIATION
By: Paul S. Marchand
There was a memorial service last Saturday for Alfred Hook, who died last month at the age of 91. Al and his wife Annie, who died in 2003, were paragons of volunteer civic involvement here in Cathedral City. There was nary a civic function at which Al and Annie, and later Al alone, were not present as volunteers.
When I first entered public office as a city councilmember, my Council predecessor and dear friend Sarah DiGrandi took me aside and advised me that Al and Annie were people I needed to get to know. She was absolutely right.
For in every community, there are those stalwart citizens who can be relied upon to do much of the unsung, unglamorous work that helps enhance the quality of community life. Like the so-called Greatest Generation that fought in World War II, these stalwart citizens and do what they do without a lot of expectation of recognition; there is a kind of holy humility to the volunteer work undertaken by the Annie and Al Hooks of the world.
For Al himself was a member of that Greatest Generation that fought and won the Second World War, and which is now slipping into eternity at the rate of roughly a thousand a day. This Greatest Generation, which did so much to save the world, came home from war and with surprising humility and modesty resumed civilian life, its exploits largely unheralded and unsung. In his volunteer work in Cathedral City, Al Hook embodied the Greatest Generation’s self-effacing ethic of service.
The idea of the self-effacing righteous one who serves and saves is not without precedent or parallel. In Jewish mysticism, the so-called Tzadikim Nistarim, or hidden righteous ones, are believed to be 36 special individuals for whose sake the world continues. Similarly, in the Eighteenth Chapter of Genesis, Abraham the patriarch extracts a promise from God that despite its depravities, God would turn his wrath away from Sodom if ten righteous persons could be found there.
We may never know whether Al Hook was among the world-saving 36, or even one of that salvific quorum of ten on whose putative behalf Abraham was willing to stand up even to God. What we do know is that during his time in our community, Al Hook, in his own unspectacular, self-effacing way, reminded us that there is a special, even holy, dignity in the giving of time, toil, and talent in the service of that community.
Yet, in every community, there are those few for whose sake and by whose effort the Commonwealth continues. Al was one of them, and I shall miss him.
May he rest in peace, and angels speed him to that rest.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a city Council member. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended to constitute legal advice, and should not be so construed.
There was a memorial service last Saturday for Alfred Hook, who died last month at the age of 91. Al and his wife Annie, who died in 2003, were paragons of volunteer civic involvement here in Cathedral City. There was nary a civic function at which Al and Annie, and later Al alone, were not present as volunteers.
When I first entered public office as a city councilmember, my Council predecessor and dear friend Sarah DiGrandi took me aside and advised me that Al and Annie were people I needed to get to know. She was absolutely right.
For in every community, there are those stalwart citizens who can be relied upon to do much of the unsung, unglamorous work that helps enhance the quality of community life. Like the so-called Greatest Generation that fought in World War II, these stalwart citizens and do what they do without a lot of expectation of recognition; there is a kind of holy humility to the volunteer work undertaken by the Annie and Al Hooks of the world.
For Al himself was a member of that Greatest Generation that fought and won the Second World War, and which is now slipping into eternity at the rate of roughly a thousand a day. This Greatest Generation, which did so much to save the world, came home from war and with surprising humility and modesty resumed civilian life, its exploits largely unheralded and unsung. In his volunteer work in Cathedral City, Al Hook embodied the Greatest Generation’s self-effacing ethic of service.
The idea of the self-effacing righteous one who serves and saves is not without precedent or parallel. In Jewish mysticism, the so-called Tzadikim Nistarim, or hidden righteous ones, are believed to be 36 special individuals for whose sake the world continues. Similarly, in the Eighteenth Chapter of Genesis, Abraham the patriarch extracts a promise from God that despite its depravities, God would turn his wrath away from Sodom if ten righteous persons could be found there.
We may never know whether Al Hook was among the world-saving 36, or even one of that salvific quorum of ten on whose putative behalf Abraham was willing to stand up even to God. What we do know is that during his time in our community, Al Hook, in his own unspectacular, self-effacing way, reminded us that there is a special, even holy, dignity in the giving of time, toil, and talent in the service of that community.
Yet, in every community, there are those few for whose sake and by whose effort the Commonwealth continues. Al was one of them, and I shall miss him.
May he rest in peace, and angels speed him to that rest.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a city Council member. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended to constitute legal advice, and should not be so construed.
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