As promised at the end of my last piece, (really encouraging it resonated with a lot of people thank you to everyone who said so) I’m taking the description in a different, extended direction tonight. The passage below was written in a moment of deep frustration, staring at an empty document after a council meeting that was so stupid it was hard to describe. It serves, I think, as a statement of intent. Not just for the current episode, though it works perfect for that too, but as an attempt to lay out a more productive path for our engagement, attention, energy, patience. The productive discourse at the local level does not lie in the realm of argument. It is not a contest of ideas because we’re dealing with an anti-idea opposition. And we cheapen ourselves and our movement by engaging in a good faith contest of ideas, by believing that it’s a democratic institution we’re dealing with that can be shamed into reform. What we really need to do is adopt a framework that starts with the basic fact these people are fools. And openly discuss how we go about circumnavigating them—rendering them, as Chris said in this episode, politically irrelevant. So here it is... after the requisite plugs.
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What can you say about the meeting this week I haven’t already said?
The same dipshits were dipshits. They filled six hours with mean, petty invective. They debased themselves with asinine legal arguments, the thought of explaining any of them is physically painful. A resolution a normal council would have passed in five minutes devolved in the petulant hands of these old guard councilors to a bonfire of vanities.
The people in control of this board are just not serious. They have built a culture that rewards unserious people. Kate Toomey is not the highest vote getter despite her pet-like fealty to the police, reactionary anti-progressive political stances cut from an otherwise incoherent tapestry of dislocated beliefs, her insistence on believing she’s the only one who can Google Articles and so feels the need to read them into the record. (She read the entire FAQ on immigration on the Worcester PD website then looked up from her phone with an expression that said “case closed.” But she made no case at all. The only thing she proved was that she didn’t understand the material. Nevertheless, she maintained a posture of indignance, holding the item then taking it back after slight pressure from an ally. Then voting for it. Embarrassing.) She is the highest vote getter because of those things. She reaps the rewards of a political culture that incentivizes low-rent cronyism. A social circle built around the institution that trims itself like a Bonsai tree around a narrow rhetoric crafted by cynical real estate and police power brokers. She swims effortlessly in the current of that feedback loop.
You and I do not. Khrystian and Etel do not. We are punished and worn down. The weapon Toomey et al wield best is the one they are the least conscious of: their own unseriousness. The narcissism to get up there every week and genuinely believe that no one sees through your shit. The sheer force of will it takes to impose a willful misunderstanding as a legitimate argument. It’s not enough to not do your homework. You need to sniff out those who do and punish them for having dared. No no no, they say every week, we don’t do actual thinking here. That’s not the way things are done. Like any good ape they know a club by the weight of it in their hand. You don’t need to know what it’s made of to swing it. And all their handlers expect is that they swing it hard and feel no shame when it makes contact.
Councilor Moe Bergman accused Khrystian King of electioneering with the anti-ICE resolution. On the same agenda, he advocated for buying the police another drone for an expanded drone program. Just cuz! Certainly not because the police unions tend to decide elections in this city.
He voted against King’s resolution saying he won’t vote on “a hypothetical.” He then offered multiple hypothetical situations as justification for another police drone. On this drone proposal, coming a month before the election, apropos nothing, Bergman offered a hypothetical situation...
Can you imagine currently the way it exists now that there’s an emergency somewhere and a police officer has to get in a car at one end of the city and fight traffic all the way to the other end of the city to perhaps stop a child from being kidnapped or or a domestic situation for a woman getting stabbed and now you could have the opportunity to have a drone get right out there and relay information immediately?
You see what I’m getting at... There was a lot of it. What can you say? Hypocrisy is dead and yada yada yada. Tiresome.
Listen. If I haven’t already convinced you these people are fools I don’t think I can. No reason the rest of us should suffer through it.
Donna Colorio at least had the courage to vote against it without giving a reason. Moe Bergman could learn a thing or two. You only made it worse for yourself, bud. Unless what you’re really after is world-building yourself a victimhood narrative. If that’s the case, mission accomplished. Of course that would be a baseless accusation that I, personally, would never make. The accusation being, again, that councilor Moe Bergman uses his time on the council floor to construct a paranoid ongoing fiction in which he is the protagonist and defacto victim. And that in pursuit of a compelling fiction he makes bad faith interpretations and willfully misunderstands the policy proposals of his perceived enemies. To use a lawyerly word that would be causal inference if someone were to accuse Bergman of doing all that. Causal inference is an activity I would never engage in. I would simply never reason inductively after many years of watching the man speak at city council meetings that the first and perhaps sole objective of Bergman’s time in public life categorically must be—because of what that time has yielded, and what it hasn’t, in other words the “Effect”—racking up a list of perceived grievances used for self-victimization purposes.
It’s pathetic is what it is. I’m tired of letting these people embarrass me, embarrass you, embarrass the city. They need to be put in a position to answer these questions plainly: Why do you demand my respect but do nothing to win it? Why do you remain in politics when you do not have a political vision? Why are you so embarrassing? That’s where we need to start. We do not need to suffer these fools with our earnestness. They are not going to return the favor. They cannot be shamed because they lack shame. The only logic they understand is the logic of the cudgel.
So, what is our cudgel? If your answer includes winning any argument on practical merit or morality or justice, start over. You’re at the wrong tree trunk, they’re not up there. If it includes their entitlements or narcissism, now we’re getting warmer. If we can withhold their ability to feel special, they’ll finally come to the bargaining table or, even better, get bored and quit. The police unions, it’s dawning on me now, have known that for a long time. They know how to sniff out a mark, I’ll give them that.
Some links and such from the episode:
Hubie Dubie Picture Show at Hunchback Gallery Oct. 12!
Toomey proposes drones to respond to 911 calls
That’s when Randy Chavoor, a retired Worcester Fire Department district chief, shared his own family’s story regarding the rattling. His late grandmother, Victoria Chavoor, owned the home on Douglas Street in 1950. He said a plumber solved the mystery of the shaking years later.
“According to my cousin, someone put a washing-machine motor inside the wall,” Chavoor said in the 2018 article. “She’s 99% sure, though she doesn’t want to get anyone in trouble, that it was the first-floor person, who wanted to buy the house from our grandmother. There was some type of motor, he evidently put power to it, and it was enough to shake the whole house.”
A story about a haunted rattling would be just the thing to get the price down.
The story was confirmed by Chavoor’s cousin, who asked that her name not be printed.
∿Intro music: original composition “Bleep Boop V” by Bill Shaner 10.7.25
∿Outro music: Amyl and the Sniffers, “Shake Ya”
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