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.
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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.
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