Do you still believe in us human beings?
Nick Cave, superintendent evaluation, boogie for boobies and a little bit of hot dog fever
Hey everyone! Welcome to another Worcester Sucks on a dreary Worcester day.
Have some new folks here due to the cop getting stuck video and an equally stupid tweet. Welcome! If you like what you read, your 1.5 Dunkies a month would be much appreciated.
Nick Cave on hope—the superintendent evaluation—boogie 4 boobies—the final hot dog—mea culpable—brought to light
“Hopefulness is not a neutral position.”
Nick Cave was on Steven Colbert recently, and he put to words something I’ve tried and failed to many a time in this newsletter.
He read a letter from a fan, the gist being how do I not despair? “Following the last few years, I feel more empty and more cynical than ever,” said the letter writer.
“Do you still believe in us human beings?”
(20 minutes in; link should start you at the right moment)
Cave read his response:
Much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line.
It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastating to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, and to understand that the world was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that this is so.
Nick Cave has long been a favorite of mine. To hear him say that cynicism is easy and sincere hope is hard won, as he did in that interview, struck a deep chord. The range over his career, from The Birthday Party to Grinderman to his solo stuff, shows an artist capable of capturing both angry, nihilistic cynicism (No Pussy Blues) and tender, life affirming sincerity (Sorrow’s Child).
He was on the show to promote his upcoming album, Wild God. The most recent single, “Long Dark Night,” falls in the latter category.
The last chorus:
Maybe a long dark night is coming down
Maybe a long dark night, my precious one
Maybe a long dark night is rolling around my head
I think you’d have to be crazy right now to not have that long dark night rolling around your head. Buoyed as the mood may be of late by the Harris Walz vibe shift, it’s an artificial, fleeting thing. A mask we’ve all allowed the world to wear for a moment, content to have all the violence and the cruelty disappear from sight. But it’s still there. There’s no masking that long dark night for too long.
The brilliance of the song is in the ‘maybe.’ It’s a question left unanswered in the verses. Cave doesn’t say whether the long dark night is coming, because he doesn’t know. None of us does.
In the interview, reading that letter, he provides a way to sit with that uncertainty. To choose hope in the face of that long dark night is an adversarial act. It’s the warrior emotion. The weapon used to fight off the night, if even for the time being. Even if the night is inevitable. You resolve yourself to live in the daylight as fully as you can while it’s available, and not temper the fullness of it against the ambient recognition of the long night to come.
In this context, the smallest, simplest acts become revolutionary. To sing your son a song is to rail against the night.
Without having the words for it—or good ones, at least—it’s the way I’ve approached this newsletter. It’s the way I think about participating in local politics. It’s how I bring myself to care about such a thing, so often trivial and boring and petty and stupid. While it’s all of those things, it’s also a rare arena in which giving a shit matters. Where the hope you invest has a chance of return, however small. Changing Worcester politics won’t accomplish any more in the grand scheme than singing your son a song. It poses no threat to the long dark night. But to simply try is a radical act. An expression of the warrior emotion.
To allow yourself to feel real love for your community—to have hope for its inhabitants, to care enough to defend them—is to fight off an all-too-common cynicism. In our increasingly atomized world, it’s an act of liberation. It’s one way of making the bold declaration that Cave closed his letter with: The world is worth believing in. The small act of trying to make your city a better place to live can lead you to that large realization. With any luck, it inspires others. A city provides a broad vocabulary for believing in the world. Broader than a family or a religious community or a neighborhood, but still grounded in a concrete reality. Not so abstract as a state or a nation.
There’s a collective, deeply entrenched cynicism in America that that prohibits the idea of caring about a stranger. At the same time, it facilitates hatred of a stranger. That hatred is easily stoked, manipulated, misdirected. It makes money and provides power for those who do the stoking. For the rest, it obscures that power, the oppression it exerts. It makes hope appear juvenile and naive. To care about a stranger is, in this context, a radical act.
To want to make the roads in your city safer is to care about a stranger. To want better treatment for the unhoused is to care about a stranger. To want a school system that values every student is to care about a stranger. To want housing that people can afford. To want fewer people in jail. To want less surveillance. To want less money spent on police and more spent on the social safety net.
What we call “city issues” are really “caring about a stranger” issues. But the opposite is also true. To fight a proposed homeless shelter, to defend the character of the neighborhood against in-law apartments, to temper affordable housing policy for the benefit of developers, to push back against road infrastructure changes, to demand more encampment sweeps and more surveillance tools, to strike down a proposal for a sanctioned encampment site—these are expressions of cynicism. They are ways of saying that you do not, nor should have to, care about a stranger.
So the city becomes a natural front line in this struggle between cynicism and hope. To view it this way, even the most mundane local issue has real stakes. And local issues, given they’re mundane and out of the way, aren’t easily slotted into the corporate media narratives that comprise “politics.” Absent that spectacle, and the easy, resentment-based narratives it supplies “both sides,” the reality of politics and power are easier to see. That’s where local news has historically failed, in my opinion. That’s really what I’ve been trying to correct in the way I approach this work.
Today, I’m reporting on the school committee evaluation of the superintendent that happened Thursday night. But, at the same time, I’m reporting on the ongoing battle between hope and cynicism. I’m making a case: Rachel Monárrez and Maureen Binienda are exceptionally clear avatars. They are stand-ins for a Worcester that might be able to start caring about strangers and a Worcester that historically hasn’t. It’s bigger than progressive vs crank or new versus old. The core conflict is whether this city is finally brave enough to hope.
So on to the evaluation.
“I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
Monárrez’s score was a good one, despite it being transparently weighed down by Binienda and her two loyalists on the board, Diana Biancheria and Kathi Roy.
In a more formal process than in the city manager’s yearly review, school committee members fill out a narrow rubric on a set of specific topics. On each topic, there are four possible scores—unsatisfactory, needs improvement, proficient, exemplary. Overall, Monárrez scored “proficient.” Frustratingly, we won’t know for at least a week how each member scored the superintendent. The mayor delivered the results as a summary. As if it was scientific polling data and not a forum for politics. But it doesn’t take a genius to suss out who was scoring her low and who was scoring her high. Monárrez netted a “proficient” despite the Binienda block’s concerted effort to weigh it down.
To go over the summary evaluation in detail would be arduous and it’s beside the point I’m trying to make. Here’s a good example of what most of the categories looked like, just so you get the idea.
Three “needs improvement” was a common theme throughout. Hmmm wonder who the three were.
After the mayor delivered the summary score, the school committee members all spoke about why they graded her the way they did, while the public watched on without knowing how they graded. Silly. But the dynamic was obvious. High praise from six members, criticism from the three members who’ve positioned themselves as an opposition party.
The difference between the district under Monárrez as opposed to Binienda was a heavy theme throughout—something Binienda’s antagonistic presence on the board forces to the surface. It is very unusual to have a former superintendent on the school committee, and even weirder that they’re unabashedly antagonistic, and weirder still that they got the most votes by a mile.
Sue Mailman addressed that elephant in the room in the most direct way I’ve observed:
“It is also highly unusual that we sit on a body where a person who was not renewed is on our body. It has not happened statewide. I think there’s a lot of scuttlebutt in other places but we don’t necessarily acknowledge to this superintendent that it is a highly unusual situation and it is—it could be, I guess, in some world, a place where we might imagine a former superintendent saying yes we want to keep going with our kids—clearly, members of the public, members of this body, members of the newspaper see what’s going on here.”
Binienda kept her comments surprisingly short. But Diana Biancheria did not. Speaking right after Mailman directly called out the Binienda Block, Biancheria’s comments amounted to a temper tantrum. “I think it’s a very interesting evening,” she began.
“This is an evaluation report on our superintendent. Whether she’s been here and arrived two years ago, five years ago, 30 years ago. Um, the point is, everybody has a job. Superintendent has a job. School committee has a job. Right now our job is the evaluation of the superintendent. It includes goals. It includes setting the goals, monitoring the goals.”
And it went like that, sputtering along, for several minutes. At no time did she do the “job” she alluded to. It was an airing of atmospheric grievance. Like so: “It has come to light over the past few weeks that we should just sit and say ‘okay this is great. This works wonderful, and everything is okay. That’s not how it gets done.” ???
Kathi Roy’s comments were tame by comparison. But she was transparently phony, taking on an “I’m just trying my best” affect. “I’m very worried about the littles and the reading,” she said.
When it came time for Monárrez to speak, she used that opportunity to directly call out the Binienda Block in a way that I found surprising but edifying:
“I don’t understand why we would want to continue to paint our schools as a place where it is unsafe for children to learn or for staff to work. I feel like it really disregards the hard work the staff is doing every day. I don't understand why that continues to be a conversation at this level.”
Then a line that drew applause from the room:
“I don’t know why we would continue to talk about our schools, our children, and our staff in a way that is not positive and in many ways, not accurate of what’s going on in schools. I’m there all the time. I just, I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t understand why we talk about children that way.”
In Worcester politics, it’s pretty unusual to hear officials speak directly to the interpersonal tensions. It’s always just under the surface, apparent to those who know they exist but painfully obscured in vague rhetoric. It’s baked into the culture that what you really mean is not what you say. I remember distinctly how bizarre it sounded when I first started covering Worcester government. It’s very weird.
Mailman and Monárrez both crossed that strange, unspoken line. Doing so was a moral choice. It was more important for them to tell the truth than to play the agreed-upon rhetorical game. That seemingly small decision was a major violation of the norms of Worcester politics. It was an expression of the core conflict. To challenge a weird tradition in service of telling the truth is a hopeful act. A great example of the adversarial nature of hope that Cave described.
That’s likely why it sent Biancheria into a floundering fit. As a career political lackey, she knows the rules. She is indebted to those rules. It probably shocks and angers her to hear someone break them. On some level, it may have forced her to confront her own cynicism. And I’m sure that was uncomfortable.
With only three votes on a nine-member board, the Binienda Block only has the power to be annoying. They can, and often have, attempted to smear Monárrez and gin up controversy. The majority easily shuts it down every time and Monárrez reliably makes Binienda and her pet controversies look silly.
Monárrez also called that out directly.
“I’m going to be honest there were some critiques that leave me a little perplexed,” she said.
She referenced the failed push to cut administrative salaries from the Binienda Block during the budget approval process, and said she had difficulty squaring that with the criticism in one member’s evaluation that there’s no director or assistant director of teaching and learning.
“That’s perplexing to me. I don’t know what to do with that information.”
While we won’t know for sure which member made that criticism (the individual evaluations aren’t public yet, frustratingly), Binienda is a safe guess! Will follow up when we have those documents.
The scary thing—the thing we really have to grapple with and take seriously—is that we have no idea how stuff like this plays to the surprisingly large base of people who put Binienda on the school committee. To a reasonable person watching a given meeting, it’s hard to see Binienda as anything other than a bitter antagonist with a personal beef. But she’s always been like that, and most voters probably don’t watch a single meeting or particularly care about the school district. And she has Ray Mariano, a loyalist with an opinion column in the newspaper who is allowed to use it on her behalf whenever he wants to.
Binienda got more votes than anyone, even the mayor, in the last election. That’s crazy. And that is not likely to change. She will get that amount of votes every time she runs no matter what. So the question is how to outperform her in the next election. And despite the fact I just spent a lot of time thoughtfully critiquing, you can’t outperform her with thoughtful critique. You aren’t peeling off voters with reasonable arguments. She has a name, a “from here” status that runs deep, and a large patronage network earned by running the district like a jobs cartel. Her path to power is cynicism manifest. There’s no hope in her politics. She doesn’t even try to hide the fact she’s there to sabotage Monárrez.
None of that matters at all to the people who voted for her. They will vote for her until the housing market lets them move out of the home they bought in the 80s or they die. The only chance we have is turning out new voters. And we’ve never been able to do that in a significant way. Not in this century. We have to try something we’ve never tried before. It needs to be bigger and weirder, and we need to think very seriously about how to introduce good ideas to people conditioned to dismiss anything that smacks of hope as woke bullshit.
Think about a person in your life who doesn’t know anything about local politics and doesn’t give a shit. What could you offer that person that’s genuinely compelling? What will convince them that caring is actually worth it? That’s the only question right now. Put another way: What brings them out of cynicism to confront hope?
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Boogie 4 Boobies
My wonderful girlfriend is throwing a very sick party / breast cancer fundraiser on Oct. 5. It’s gunna be a big dance party with the Glitter Boys. If you don’t know the Glitter Boys, you just need to see them for yourself. Tasteful, high energy, vintage DJing—real records on real turntables, and fantastic outfits. It will be a really good time.
Get your dancing shoes polished and get your tickets here. This is gunna be a big time party.
The Final Hot Dog
We sang “The Final Hot Dog” to the tune of “The Final Countdown” as we strolled between puddles in the Ralph’s parking lot to try our sixth hot dog of the day, at Mama Roux.
We got the very last two Mama Roux Chef Jonathan Demoga made on Saturday. He estimated they were the 699th and 700th. One was a creamed corn dog and the other was an absolutely brilliant and insane Indian chili dog, with a curry meat sauce, three chutneys, and fried chickpeas. They were crazy. I remarked upon my first bite that it was the best god damn hot dog I’ve ever had in my fuckin whole life.
Predictably, Mama Roux took the top dog trophy for a third year in a row. He scored a 42 out of 50 aggregate score. But it was close, with Wooden Bar coming in second at 40. Wooden Bar, a newcomer (and fantastic restaurant) put on an impressive showing with a szechuan chili dog and a take on a pig in a blanket with a mustard cream sauce. The “Good Boi Treat” cocktail on offer was seriously good as well.
It was a great time had by all. Best thing that happens in Worcester. Demoga, the reigning champ with trophy in hand, took the mic and looked out at the crowd brimming with confidence and he said “whoever you think you are, I am.” So sick.
I echo the sentiment in terms of Worcester journalism by the way. If you come for the king best not miss.
Mea Culpable
Speaking of misses, I want to quickly apologize to my readers at the Worcester Public Library for a throw-away line at the end in my last column:
Did something happen at the library? I think everyone needs to calm down just a little bit.
The attack was very serious and, I’m sure, very scary. And I hope the staff member who was attacked recovers and finds themself able to shake it off.
The “everyone needs to calm down” sentiment was directed not at librarians but at the people using the incident to hoot and holler for more severe punishment of unhoused people found guilty of existing. Stuff like this comment on a townie Facebook post that Neal McNamara dug up.
A few more sentences and I would have gotten there, but I didn’t take the time and I’m sorry about that. So here’s Matt Noe saying what I wanted to say better than I could or did:
Brought to Light
Lastly, reader Seanie D left a comment on my piece about Holy Cross and the CIA last Sunday about a comic book I’d never heard of.
So I read it and man is it good. (Most of it is available for free here.) In the foreword, there’s something to chew on in light of my reporting on Holy Cross grad Edward Bennett Williams:
“The Institute's investigation revealed the existence of a decadelong "off-the-shelf, stand-alone, self-financing, private covert operations Enterprise," described by Lt. Col. Oliver North in his congressional testimony as the "dream of CIA Director William Casey."
In my piece last Sunday, I went over the relationship Williams had with Casey.
Williams was also close with William Casey, another CIA director: “Casey preferred this nonbureaucratic approach to problem solving. Williams was the CIA director's own ‘off-the-shelf' legal troubleshooter.”
The author suggests that “suspicion arises” that Casey used Williams for more than that. Did Casey tell Williams about Iran Contra, for instance? Well, Richard Helms said no. So that’s where the biographer leaves it. I’m gunna go ahead and say, emphatically: of course he fuckin’ knew about Iran Contra.
Hmmm sounds an awful lot like Williams might have been a member of this “Enterprise.”
Ok that’s all for today! I’ll be back with more on Thursday. Bye bye!