Skating by on the vibes
Brett Iarrobino on what to do with these DINOs
What’s up what’s uuuup. I’m working on a very interesting feature story I hope to have ready for a nice long Sunday read—we’ll see. Perhaps a long Monday read. In the meantime, I’m giving myself a bit of a writing break. In today’s post, Brett Iarrobino will be doing most of the heavy lifting with a thought-provoking piece about what to do with all the normal liberal voters who look at Trump aghast and see nothing wrong with Joe & Co.
Also, thank you to everyone who wrote in with nice things to say about my last one: “There’s a white boat coming up the river.” Seems it landed harder than most—encouraging, given the subject matter. By the way, update on that: It came out a few days ago that Israel has a whole unit dedicated to generating fake news that makes the journalists they kill look just enough like terrorists. It’s called the “Legitimization Cell.” Jesus fuckin’ Christ.
Aside: There’s a neat fundraiser for Gaza hosted by Flower Crown Farm and some cool local vendors including my lovely lady Katie Nowicki check it out!
Anyway, I did really bust ass on that last one, fighting the tide all the while. I appreciate all the moral support! Election Squad Thursday night was a huge morale boost too. What a fun time. Been feeling good ever since! Coincidentally it’s where I met Brett in person for the first time. Always a trip to know someone only by their writing then meet them. But in the course of a few days? That’s what Election Squad is all about baby. Stay tuned for the September date!
Occurred to me today that what you’re really paying for here is not so much the writing, though that is the “main draw.” You’re also paying for someone in your community, with a relevant skillset and who shares your values, to have the time to read every article, watch every council meeting, file public records requests, interview people, chase down leads that go nowhere, search archives, record, edit, and produce a podcast, put on events, come up with merch ideas, commission them, order the stuff, list it, package it, mail it, do a Twitch stream every week, work on a book proposal, a narrative podcast, and a street paper, develop, line edit, publish local journalism work from a growing list of other writers ... and also turn stupid council quotes into silly songs lol new one up! *Robot voice*: “Water Lawnmower.”
And to do one more thing (that the city should be doing): provide full reference transcripts for City Council meetings. Find Tuesday’s here. That’s a paid-only feature, by the way! You will have to pay the troll toll to see it. Please think about it thank you!
Now to the Weekly Index, then to Brett! After, a few words from me on the council meeting and other such things.
Weekly Index
Worcester was deemed by some clickbait study or another to be the hardest-to-pronounce city in the state. ⩫ The Free Press (yes, that one) put out a feature story about Worcester and the Ukrainian sister city we apparently have. It’s about the lessons we’re learning from war-torn Kherson regarding an unreliable federal government. Weird one! ⩫ Newly released body camera footage shows rough treatment of a young mother at Eureka Street by WPD officers. (Crowd control methods courtesy of the IDF, you may remember.) ⩫ The Council met for five-ish hours on Tuesday, accomplishing little, some members getting very mad in the process. Moe Bergman was especially heated about a legal ruling that landlords can’t vote on rent control measures (clip). A few days later, Kate Toomey had a public freakout by way of a late-night Twitter rant riddled with misinformation about a mundane sprinkler ordinance she’s obstructing for the sake of an obviously corrupt personal relationship. ⩫ Workers at a small pho place on Green Street, Pho Hien Vuong, shut it down with a work stoppage, and plan to open their own spot. ⩫ On Wednesday, a candidates forum was held for at-large council and District E school committee races, set for a preliminary in two weeks. Satya Mitra apparently said he was still deciding on his pronouns, whereas Charles Luster is apparently resolute in the belief he doesn’t have any. ⩫ A 491-unit luxury apartment big-box project for Grafton Street got city approval. ⩫ This Week in Worcester released an exhaustively reported comparison of DOJ investigations in Minneapolis and Worcester, throwing the absurdity of our political culture into stark relief. ⩫ The city stepped on the same rake for the third time, losing an appeal in the sewer lawsuit with Holden that brought the bill up to a total of nearly $30 million, more than double the original $14 million sum owed when they first lost in 2022. The mayor has since vowed to appeal again, despite the court-ordered interest rate of 12 percent annually. ⩫ GreyStar, one of the many large corporate landlords caught fixing rent prices with the RealPage software, settled a DOJ lawsuit and promised to stop using “anti-competitive algorithms.” GreyStar owns Alta on the Row, the snazzy new “luxury” complex sited for maximum exposure to highway exhaust. ⩫ The city’s on-staff doctor complained to the Telegram about a ”politicized” Board of Health after two former city councilors sided with a small business owner in his failed bid for a tobacco permit. ⩫ On Friday morning, a US Marshal shot a man on Strathmore Street.
The following was originally posted in the new “guest pieces” section, which is web-only so as to avoid spamming inboxes. (If you want to write for Worcester Sucks, send a line to billshaner AT substack DOT com.) It’s a thoughtful examination of the city’s weird disconnect between national and local politics: how people can support local DINOs like Petty, Toomey, Bergman, etc., and show up at anti-ICE protests holding signs about the evils of the Trump administration. It’s one of the most pressing questions in front of us ahead of the November election. Brett did a great job presenting it!
Sound off with a hell yeah if you agree!
Read it first of course. But then sound off. Do be sounding off.
How Do We Make the Anti-Petty Case to Well-Meaning Liberals?
By Brett Iarrobino
A funny little thing happened to me at a Worcester Common protest. This past May, I attended “Hands Off Worcester Mothers,” a demonstration quickly organized by Mass 50501 in response to the illegal ICE abduction on Eureka Street, where the agents were protected and assisted by the Worcester Police Department. It was a well-attended event, considering the kidnapping had unfolded just three days prior. Several other demonstrations cropped up throughout those three days, all of them urging our community to show up against the nationwide fascism that had finally trickled into our backyard. I went in with a similar mindset, knowing that every neighbor counts in moments like these, that the more people who stood out on a hot Mother’s Day afternoon against the unjust disappearance of vulnerable people, the better.
But it’s election season in Worcester, and my mind was also thinking about who we’d soon vote into City Hall, the building that looms behind the speakers at every Worcester Common protest. It’s August now, and we are less than 100 days from November 4. Worcester Sucks regulars know how these dots connect: The tragedy on Eureka Street, one that ripped apart a Worcester family and saw our city’s cops throw a teen girl to the pavement, is at best ignored and at worst exacerbated by the majority of our city council and the city manager they confirmed to the position. How do multiple protests get off the ground in such short spans of time, rallying dozens or hundreds of Worcester citizens to a righteous cause, yet we are still saddled with a majority of elected officials who are too afraid to do anything about it?
As I thought about Eric Batista’s press release commending WPD’s presence and his outright lie that there was no collusion between the department and ICE, I began a chant at the Common. It was as much a warning to the chair of the council that handpicked Batista’s ascension to the city manager role as it was an invitation for every Worcester resident repulsed by Eureka Street to turn their outrage into action. To my pleasant surprise, it picked up quite a bit of steam: “VOTE PETTY OUT! VOTE PETTY OUT! VOTE PETTY OUT!” It rippled through the crowd, briefly getting in the way of a speaker (sorry, 50501) and causing a white woman in her 60s or 70s standing right in front of me to shoot back some serious daggers.
I had a feeling my chant would ruffle feathers—anyone who’s served fourteen consecutive terms of governance in a small pond like ours would surely have a wide sphere of influence. And something told me that there was a Venn diagram between that circle and the crowds that frequently show up to rage against an abuse of power at the national level, one they believe is perpetrated exclusively by the far right. Sure enough, after the chant ran its course, this attendee staring at me set down her anti-ICE sign to inform me that she happens to know and like Mayor Petty. She said she finds him to be a great guy; she knows for a fact that he is “in fumes” over what the Trump Administration is up to, and he actually adopted children from China. (It’s not immediately clear what this had to do with the conversation, but she felt compelled to throw it in there, so why do her the disservice of a misquote?)
I could dedicate the rest of this column to debunking the blatant silliness of this protester’s claim—that our mayor’s displeasure with ICE and raising of non-white children somehow absolves him of his complicity in the police department’s misconduct—but that’s not the point of my writing this. I’m more compelled to note that this lady represents a significant contingent of community members who—silly adoption anecdotes aside—are entirely worth engaging as we work to reimagine our municipal government into one that truly cares for its populace. I have no doubt that she and I both want very similar things for our community and country. She also, after all, dragged herself out into 80-degree weather on Mother’s Day to decry our neighbors being dragged off the street. Like me, she is probably also disturbed by the Trump administration’s reinstatements of Muslim bans, their obsession with trans people’s passports, and all the other weird fixations that come with twenty-first-century fascism.
The second-largest city in New England is full of these well-intentioned voters. They simultaneously send one of the most reliably progressive representatives to Congress every fall and are represented by the likes of Petty and Mo Bergman, two city councilors who are ostensibly Democrats on paper but entirely indifferent to state-sanctioned kidnapping. Effective reporting documents our city’s turnout issue each election cycle, but equal attention is owed to the fact that every year, hundreds of liberal and left-leaning voters not only vote, but are also duped by recognizable career politicians, unaware that they are more sympathetic to the will of the national environment, wealthy developers, and the overzealous crank neighbors who all thrive off their indifference. It’s a shame Petty is not as great a leader as he is a politician. By schmoozing through Pride events and saying the right things to disenfranchised groups, our mayor sustains a tenure not unlike many of the national Democrats who have been rightfully lit up these past six months for their relentlessly feeble response to Democratic backsliding and human rights violations. What could our next local election look like if the same collection of protesters who gathered at City Hall to denounce Trump’s actions were made aware of how often our city government does nothing or denies its collusion with the very same practices that assembled their dissent to begin with?
About four hours from Worcester, in New York City, a political newcomer just bucked the system by reaching out and engaging a new coalition of voters who felt disaffected by the status quo and sought out meaningful change in their everyday governance. Zohran Mamdani continues to play it smart, linking the worn and well-known faces of his competition with Trump and his billionaire friends, reminding voters that the national atrocities they see on the news every day stem from the same political influences who would much rather see him fail.
It’s one of many lessons Worcester could stand to learn from this success story: All those people who show up to tell off ICE should be informed how, exactly, our city manager and his elected supporters condone ICE’s presence. Every time the subject of the election arises, you’ll read here that just 1,000 new voters are needed to reposition our municipality into one that represents care and progress. The good news is that those 1,000 voters are already here; they could live across the street from you, above or below your floor, and they’re all plenty fired up by the outcome of last November. They congregate at the Common every time something has obviously gone wrong. The time has come to assemble some talking points and encourage them to conceptualize the throughline between our federal government’s cruelty and our municipal government’s disinterest in any meaningful challenge to it.
I tried this approach already with my newfound protest friend; after letting the woman who approached me finish her rant, I reassured her that while I was certain Petty was indeed a very nice guy, my conviction remained that he and most of his colleagues were unfit to meet this moment. I told her about Batista’s absurd Eureka Street statement, riddled with falsehoods. I told her that Petty was among the majority of councilors who had thrust Batista into the city manager position despite their insistence they would do a robust, competitive search to fill the role (they didn’t). And while I don’t think my status as a protest rando was strong enough alone to reshape the version of Petty she’s friends with, this person listened to everything I had to say.
While the ease of feeling smug and satisfied in the face of this neighbor was tempting, it would be a disservice to the movement we’re trying to build not to loop her in on what I know and what informs my vote in our city. The mayor’s thousands of biennial votes don’t come out of thin air, and I am sure many of the voters who provide them will continue to show up at the Common, ready to bemoan the actions of the executive branch and to be braver than the leaders they’re voting for. If you ride for Worcester Sucks as I do, surely you are also stocked with well-reported voting records and City Hall press releases that are the perfect receipts to bring up in conversations similar to the one I had at this rally. How nice of a silver lining would it be to see our city change for the better in the face of all else that is changing for the worse? We should all do our part to get out there, find a neighbor who is both compassionate and ready to listen, and invite them into this vision we’re trying to build. With only 77 days until November 4, and just 14 days until the September 2 preliminary, I hope another anti-Petty chant picks up steam near me. I also hope another well-meaning Petty supporter incredulously asks me why I’m chanting it.
Brett Iarrobino is a teacher in Worcester Public Schools and a co-founder of the Worcester Writers’ Collective. Send a line to worcesterwriterscollective@gmail.com to learn more.
Vibes-Based Homelessness Policy
It was in the news today that Trump is trying to open a Chicago franchise of the policing rebrand he first prototyped in DC. Local Dems get riled up and bam, you got yourself another culture war news cycle. J.B. Pritzker Claps Back. Etc., etc. Trump stays right in the center of it all. He remains the Main Character as the morning shows and the late-night shows all eagerly take the bait. The man is good at what he does.
Like everything else, it’s a spectacle almost entirely contained in the realm of media. Crime gets no better, no worse. Cops do nothing all that different. A few choice dramatic clips and the rest is stuff like this...
In the process, though, it advances the slow ongoing blending of municipal police, military, and private contractors. It blurs the lines, and you could argue that’s the real point. The “boots on the ground” have been blurring those lines for decades, what with the fusion centers, law enforcement councils, DoD purchase and sale agreements—the whole history of the Department of Homeland Security, for that matter. Trump is just bringing it out into the light in a way that makes Dems squeamish and plays well on Fox.
So you can see a possible timeline emerge here where Trump goes from Democrat City to Democrat City, threatening to do a DC to ’em, a nonstop culture war tour predicated on our most widely held belief across the political spectrum: that you shouldn’t have to personally look at or be near or god forbid interact with an unhoused person. That being in that position is a crime, actually. And the perpetrator ought to be banished from our line of sight. Sent anywhere, just not where they happen to be. What makes the news are the disagreements over how to achieve that reality. The polite authoritarians versus the frothing ones. As always, they share the same unstated goal.
It strikes me that Worcester is a city primed for this rhetoric to land. A few news items from just this week serve the point. But first, I want to talk about “crime” more generally.
In a recent Forever Wars post, Spencer Ackerman provides an interesting framing. He quotes Roman General Pompey Magnus and then he quotes a far-right Harvard Law professor named Adrian Vermeule, gleefully pointing out that throwing crime statistics back at Trump misses something more important.
Vermeule hailed Trump’s actions in the guise of dispassionately analyzing a disconnect between Trump’s supporters and his opposition: “[S]ome people are talking about crime in the strict legal sense, and some are talking about pervasive social disorder which does not necessarily result in any ‘crime’ in the strict legal sense.”
Quit quoting “‘crime’ in the strict legal sense” to those who want to bring the sword to “pervasive social disorder.” Vermeule, a law professor, knows that when you disregard “crime in the strict legal sense” as the criterion for enforcement, grand new vistas of violence against “disordered” social populations open.
“Grand new vistas of violence” is an encompassing turn of phrase for Trump 2.0. It calls to mind Trump’s giddy description of Gaza as “prime real estate,” for one. It is also the animating factor behind the recent announcement that the National Guard will be tasked with “area beautification,” as Ackerman reports, noting the little-discussed fact that another word for it is “encampment sweeps” and it’s something police departments around the country do every damn day of the week.
As in DC, crime and homelessness are technically down in Worcester. But those facts didn’t stop Moe Bergman from publicly, and quite heatedly, claiming the opposite at the last city council meeting.
In the time I’ve been on the council, I haven’t seen the unsheltered population get less. I've seen it get more. [sic]
He said he’s “asked people in departments” for a breakdown of the percentage of unhoused people “from here” versus “the towns.” “And the responses I’ve got over the last year, anywhere from 50 to 65 percent,” he said. No one does any surveying for this, so whoever he talked to was just chucking bullshit numbers out. Which he in turn read into the public record. But with this caveat for credibility:
These are people that work in those departments. I’m not going to mention them by name, they’re not random people that I just search out to get an answer I want to hear.
Toomey did it too. Actually, she said, “The numbers I’ve heard have been 70 percent of the people are not from Worcester in the community.” (Crazy sentence, lol.) She added her own anecdote to the slop pile.
I’ve dealt with people that have come down from Maine that were put on a train. ‘Oh, go to Worcester. We’ll buy you a ticket. Go to Worcester. They’ll take care of you.’
Ok, sure Kate!
Long story short: It’s just vibes. This entire narrative around “the towns” is a mundane bit of vibes-based fascistic scapegoating. It lands with people around here! They’re all repeating it back and forth at each other, to the point they’ve convinced themselves of the truth of it. And worse, that this supposed truth matters in any way. Because it doesn’t. It’s just a way to wash your hands of the thing.
And no one, not a single person, will draw the connection between what the police do on a routine basis and the escalation of that vibe. Years of routine camp sweeps have created a situation in which homelessness looks a lot worse than it is because people don’t have anywhere they can be except for public spaces. Where these people have to see them. Again: It’s the seeing that’s the problem for these ghouls.
In this next quote, Moe Bergman talks about the existence of homelessness as if it’s the weather, not the manmade political reality it so obviously is.
At the end of the day, the supply of housing for the unsheltered in this city will never meet the demand. Let me repeat that. The supply of housing in this city for the unsheltered will never meet the demand. And that’s why it goes up every single year, because the supply in the surrounding towns, and Oxford may be an exception, but the majority of towns around here aren't, do not provide for their community.
Not a word of that is true, based on anything, or helpful. But when he says it, he means it. He is so mad.
Our last relevant news item of the segment comes courtesy of the Telegram... “Different worlds: Outside Polar Park, the struggles of Worcester’s homeless in plain sight.” The article is long, and while the voices of some unhoused people are included, they appear in the middle—buttressed on both sides by a volley of complaints from all corners about being made to see, walk past, god forbid speak to one of these people.
The sun was shining. A beloved former Boston Red Sox player with a winning personality and a beaming smile was signing free autographs and taking pictures with fans. It was a beautiful day for a baseball game.
A stone’s throw away, in the Green Street tunnel, it was a different story altogether.
The tunnel, and a stretch of Francis J. McGrath Boulevard that connects to it, has for much of the season served as a homeless encampment, with refuse, garbage and human waste littering the sidewalk.
Refuse and garbage! Oh my. A few lines down, Craig Semon quotes a retiree who drives people back and forth across the no man’s land he depicts, graciously affording anonymity for the following anecdote.
A retiree driving a family back to their car in a golf cart purposely drove through a red light at Francis J. McGrath Boulevard to exit the tunnel as soon as possible.
“I don’t want the kids to see that,” the golf cart driver explained to a reporter sitting in the front passenger seat as he hit the gas.
The first unhoused person quoted in the story lavishes praise on the “kindness” of the city. Without irony or acknowledgement, the next quote, from another unhoused person, is “Anywhere else we go, younger people are attacking us.”
Next there’s a section dedicated entirely to police-reported data on the rise of officer-initiated incidents (meaning no 911 call or 311 complaint) over the past few years in the area. No word at all about whether there’s actually a causal effect going on between police going out of their way to hassle unhoused people and unhoused people congregating in the most unambiguously public spaces in that same area.
Not a single word! Just a slew of raw, uncontextualized data there for the reader to interpret as evidence of some natural phenomenon. An unfortunate weather event for the baseball-going public to endure. Dark clouds on the horizon of an otherwise sunny day. And the cops sent in to make sure it never, ever rains on them as it rains on “the less fortunate,” what with their refuse and garbage.
The “human waste” vaguely stated.
Odds and Ends
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One more plug for the raffle Katie’s doing in support of Gaza.
** FOURTH RAFFLE ** This is a very big set of gifted items from our greater Worcester community❤️. Please swipe to see what this bundle includes, from stained glass and tattoo work by @katienowicki, to handcrafted jewelry by @bare.jewelry_ , to an organic CSA share from @rattlerootfarm, to Dave Leidel’s handmade inlaid cutting board work.
We will continue in our support of our friend @husein_alzaq2 of Many Lands Mutual Aid, sending half the funds raised directly to him and his team. We’ll send the second half to @palestinian.shahd , remarkable young woman, poet, writer, and translator. It is our privilege and honor to send what little we can to Shahd, in support of her work, her voice and her life.
Venmo @flowercrown508 $10 for one raffle ticket and $5 for each additional ticket. (7488 if last 4 digits are required) Leave your email address and a watermelon emoji in the notes. We’ll close this raffle one week from today. Please donate as generously as you are able! Thank you!
The guy did it again! These Worcester drone pics are out of control.
Fred Nathan is now a cable access host. I repeat. Fred Nathan is now a cable access talk show host.
Ruth Zakarin has a good piece up about the lasting damaged caused by ICE and WPD at Eureka Street.
We still need to figure out who the hell these people are….
So weird man. Good or bad? Hard to tell. Anyway lastly here’s a very cool song for the road. Synth lines for daaaaays.
Ok talk REAL soon! Maybe even tomorrow!
Tremendous.