Whatever you’re doing is what it is
The boomerang of empire goes woosh
Hello everyone! Back from my and Katie’s big road trip to Key West and I’ve had a few days to settle in and catch up on the nightmare of real non-vacation life.
On Sunday, I’ll get back to my regularly posting schedule, featuring a deep dive on the Human Rights Commission annual meeting with the cops on Monday. I watched most of it and there are some wooof moments.
For today, the table of contents: Rape allegation, Foucault’s boomerang, rental registry foolishness, Spectrum contract, book club update, Key West travel essay, Walking Dead, other odds and ends.
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Whatever you’re doing is what it is
A few days ago, a Worcester woman made a public and credible rape allegation against local bar owner Sean Woods. Her name is Shea David and she did so in a series of Instagram stories.
I’m nowhere near prepared to write a substantive piece on this situation and I won’t try to today. But I don’t want to let that stop me from saying something. It’s out in public now, and it’s credible, and it doesn’t appear Shea is the only one with a story to tell about Woods.
Taking the step of coming forward in public, as Shea did, is an act of tremendous bravery for which there is very high risk and very low reward. What it accomplishes, however, is just as important. It’s a beachhead that breaks through a certain silence that tends to swirl around a dangerous, well-connected person. We can talk about it in the open now, because of Shea, and we should be having these conversations in the open.
In my personal circle and social media feeds, that conversation has been happening in a major way. If nothing more comes of this than the current conversation, it’s still productive. In her Instagram stories the other day, a friend of mine put it in a way that’s really stuck with me. She said:
“Just wanted to say to all my friends in Worcester—If you’ve ever wondered what you would do in a situation like this where multiple women are speaking out about a prominent community member... it’s happening right now and whatever you’re doing is what it is.”
I can imagine a lot of you may be looking for more specifics on this situation and the allegations. Right now, I have enough background information that I feel entirely comfortable writing that the allegation is credible. But, for the time being, I’ll have to leave it there.
If you have any information to share about this, me and the Worcester Community Media Foundation team have a submission form that’s 100 percent confidential. Drop us a line.
The boomerang of empire goes woosh!
The police crackdowns on campus Palestine organizing across the country lately have left us in a nakedly mask-off moment about the realities of American empire. And meanwhile the same naked transparency–except exponentially more so–is unfolding in Rafah.
While I obviously have nothing to report on any specific demonstration, I do know a bit more than your average dirtbag about social theory. And while I’m probably preaching to the choir for a good number of you, I do want to take a minute to explain how neatly the recent news has fallen into a concept that turned my world around when I first encountered it in an anthropology class (shout out Prof. Doreen Lee if you’re reading this!). It’s called Foucault’s Boomerang.
Put simply as I can: Foucault’s Boomerang Theory is the idea that what an empire does to the people of its far-off colonies will eventually and inevitably boomerang back to the people in the center of the empire. Tactics the “center” (America) develops to dominate the “periphery” (the Middle East, Africa, South/Central America) will come back home. This has a lot to do with policing, of course, but it also extends to media, government, social services–even our common collective understandings: what’s society, the state, citizenship? What do we expect power to look like? To want from us? How do we stay out of the trouble it presents us? Why do people have to sleep outside?
French social theorist Michel Foucault coined the term at a 1976 lecture titled “Society must be defended.” He said:
It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.
There’s nowhere on earth more firmly at the “center” than an Ivy League school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and we just saw the NYPD mobilize against students there in a way more akin to the long tradition of quelling slave rebellion than the much shorter tradition of managing a peaceful protest led by harmless and coddled children of good status and influence as is their right to do in this great and free country. Same goes for Emerson and UCLA and elsewhere. The “college student” represents the grand promise of America. The best and brightest, they say. Our future leaders, they say. That all became irrelevant with remarkable ease and speed for the police and the media and the government. The boomerang inched a little closer back to the hand that threw it. It continues to do so.
In this context, it makes a good deal of sense that American police officials have for decades taken trips to Israel to learn about “counter-terrorism” policing strategies, which they then employ back in their home cities. Worcester is one of these cities! From a 2017 WoMag article:
Worcester Police Chief Steven Sargent was one of 18 Massachusetts law enforcement officials to take a 7-day trip to Israel to learn counter-terrorism policing strategies formed by the national police there.
He recently returned, and told Worcester Magazine much of the seminar focused on social media monitoring – how to properly observe platforms and "pick up on tells," said Sargent. The national police in Israel works closely with the military and other partners in monitoring terrorism, he said.
"It's about gathering intelligence, working together, putting systems in place," said Sargent.
Luckily, we haven’t had a Columbia or UCLA-style incident here in Worcester, but we saw on June 6, 2020 what the WPD learned!! Those “counter terrorism” tactics were deployed with much gusto against some three dozen kids on Main Street. No reason to think they won’t pull out that force march squad again if they have to. They were celebrated for it, if you’ll remember. By most everyone around here.
Anyway. I’d like to go on longer about Foucault’s boomerang but I need to get a dang post out before mid week. Maybe sometime soon.
I’m glad to hear the demonstration at Worcester State on Friday went well. Wish I could have been there.
There’s another Palestine solidarity demonstration, this time of the Mother’s Day variety, coming up on Sunday, 4 p.m. at Winslow Peace Park.
And I’d suggest getting signed up for this if you’re interested! Racism Free WPS is great.
“I expect the committee to do their job”
Tucked into the four-hour council meeting last night there was a 30 second moment that said more about this weird little governing body than the other 14,370 painful seconds.
Councilor George Russell had an order on the agenda intended weaken the rental registry for the benefit of landlords. Being a landlord/realtor himself I don’t know how this isn’t a conflict of interest but anyway... This is the rental registry the cranks have been so mad about for the past couple months—the one he voted for in 2022, mind you—and it read like this...
If you’re coming to the rental registry “issue” cold, I don’t have it in me to explain it right now. It’s stupid. Here’s a post from the other week that’ll catch you up: Is city council just a weird reality TV show?
Russell’s order, naturally, sparked an hour or so of hemming and hawing and slights and personal attacks. We’ll get to some highlights in a minute. The really interesting moment comes when they finally vote on it.
Bringing the discussion to a close, Mayor Joe Petty indicated he was ready to vote yes on sending Russell’s order to the Standing Committee on Economic Development. He said “I expect the committee to do their job and come back with a recommendation.”
All seems to fall in line with the expected 8-3 vote in favor like every other vote. Bergman votes yes. Colorio votes yes. Haxhiaj votes no. King votes no. It’s 2-2. Then Candy Mero-Carlson, chairwoman of economic development, who not five minutes previous said she wanted the order in her committee, votes no. 2-3. And Petty glares at her. And he doesn’t stop glaring as the role call continues. Nguyen votes no. 2-4. Ojeda: no. 2-5. Pacillo: no. 2-6. Russell, of course, votes yes. 3-6. But then Toomey votes no. 3-7. Then the mayor, who not 30 seconds earlier said he’d be voting yes, votes no. Final vote: 3-8 against. The rental registry stays as is.
It’s incredible. You just have to watch it.
Petty clearly didn’t expect Mero-Carlson to vote no. But did Mero-Carlson? I don’t think she did either! I think she might have made an accident—a telling one, once you look at how the discussion went down.
It being his order, Russell spoke first. And it was tame. Then Mero-Carlson spoke second. Her first comment was “I’d like this to go into ED (economic development, her subcommittee) as well.” Remember: she voted against sending it to ED.
Then, Haxhiaj stood up to say what all normal people watching this drama unfold over the past few months have been thinking.
“I cannot express how frustrating it is that we’re doing everything and anything possible at this moment in time to chip away at a policy that is a bare minimum to protect the health and safety of our most vulnerable residents.”
She read a letter of support for the registry from the fire chief.
Russell for a second time. He’s more heated now. But nothing worth noting. Then Bergman gets up and makes this insane bad faith argument...
Candy gets up for a second time and now she’s visibly angry. It’s personal. She’s talking directly to Haxhiaj without saying so.
“I feel compelled to rise again because the sheer notion this committee made a decision to go against the city manager or the fire department I find extremely offensive.”
Haxhiaj never said that, of course. She just said Russell’s order would weaken the ordinance. It was an articulate and clear argument. Mero-Carlson didn’t take it that way, though. She made it about her, which crank city councilors are great at doing. Her voice was cracking by the end.
“Nobody is trying to minimize and nobody is trying to weaken anything. We’re trying to get to the point where we can do right by the residents here in the city of Worcester and adopt this rental registry that we have.”
Which residents, Candy? The renters in unsafe apartments or your landlord friends who don’t want to pay $25 and get their apartments inspected once every five years? Which residents?! Anyway, the registry was adopted two years ago. Nevertheless...
“I look forward to our next meeting for the economic development for this rental registry,” Mero-Carlson said, but that’s not how she voted. “And I look forward at the next meeting coming out with a rental registry that we all can live with and hopefully it is something that works for all of our residents here in the city.”
Why’d she vote no, you think? I really think she got so worked up over Etel’s comments she thought she was voting no to her. Like as a person. Just like Bergman’s weird and evil drone analogy, Mero-Carlson made a fool of herself in trying to dunk on progressives.
More of these moments please! Stay mad, my lovely cranks.
Ten more years of Spectrum
City Manager Eric Batista is going against the recommendation of his Cable Advisory Committee—and, let’s be honest, the opinion of pretty much every resident—to renew the city’s cable contract with Spectrum for 10 years. Hope he’s at least getting an all inclusive out of this.
He told us so not via the council or even a press release but rather on his Substack newsletter (very funny he deactivated the public subscriber count on the subscribe page wonder why). Screenshotting instead of quoting the meat of the post because the stock image of clickers makes me chuckle.
In response, Cable Advisory Chairman John Keough has filed for a city council item to get them to weigh in. It’ll be on next week’s agenda most likely. The council doesn’t have the power to do anything about it, but Keough still wants them on the record. Since the council doesn’t have the power to do much at all, and doesn’t even use the power they actually have, why not.
Mea culpa time: Most people’s problems with Spectrum, mine included, revolve around the internet service, not the cable service. When the Cable Advisory Committee voted against extending the contract in March, I think many people (also myself included) thought the contract included internet. Apparently it doesn’t. Per Batista:
To be clear, the license agreement is for cable television services only and is not related to internet or phone service at all.
I really don’t care about the cable deal at all. Don’t even have cable. So when Batista says breaking the deal with Spectrum would be more trouble than it’s worth, I’m not mad about it.
What I am a little miffed about however is the fact the Cable Advisory Committee apparently wasn’t consulted in any way before Batista made the decision. They found out, like all of us, via his Substack. After putting in some four years of work. Per This Week In Worcester:
In the podcast, Keough said that committee members received no notification from Batista’s office prior to his blog post announcement. The committee began its work in 2020, though its members have changed during that time.
This is exactly how it went down with municipal broadband. Remember when Batista decided to let us all know via a radio interview that municipal broadband wasn’t going to happen? From a post of mine last year:
In no uncertain terms and with language that suggests he knows full well that he’s beyond reproach, Batista went on the radio last Thursday and declared the idea of municipal broadband “very impossible.”
“I have desires to do something like that but it, it, it would be very impossible for us to do that. So right now that’s not the direction the city’s going towards,” he said.
Translation: Not gunna happen! It’s been determined. Conversations were had. With who? That’s not your concern. If I say it’s impossible, it is. End of story.
This terse public spiking of the idea came after a $250,000 feasibility study on municipal broadband and the formation of a broadband task force and the report was never issued. Similarly, Batista’s current Substack spiking comes after two consultants were retained. Lighting money on fire in very opaque and undemocratic fashion. That’s the Worcester way, baby.
Next WCU Local 69 Book Club: May 23!
Book club meeting #2 will be on Thursday, May 23! Same IRL place (Rewind/Cordella’s Coffee, 116 June St) and same digital place (WCT3k Twitch page). Same start time! 7 p.m. But this time we’re gonna have a coffee hour starting at 6 p.m. so we can all get settled in and chat more informally and get some high quality coffee. If you haven’t been to Cordella’s yet, do yourself a favor and get down there!
We’ll be discussing chapters two and three of Eight Hours For What We Will! I wrote up some takeaways from the first meeting—a surprisingly great discussion! And I was expecting it to be great!
If you missed it, you can still catch up. Here’s the stream from meeting #1. The audio video quality was not bad but could be better. Will try to improve for meeting 2! Not too late to sign up if you haven't. Fill out this form!
More information, like a link to buy bookmarks and download scans of the next chapters on the Rewind Video Club Patreon page.
Ok travel essay time!
Moral of the story is wear your seatbelts
Saw a kid holding a scoped .22 rifle on the side of 821 southbound outside Miami on a sunny Monday afternoon. His dad was next to him pointing into the canal running along the side of the highway and the kid looked about ready to pull the trigger on something floating in there. He was aiming down but he wasn’t aiming all that down. Some 50 feet from us I’d say. Gun aimed straight across the road really.
After a few double takes and big laugh about it I spent the following minutes replaying the mental video clip of a muzzle flash then the shattering of a window pane to the right of me, the crack of which being the last thing I heard before the big black nothing.
Few days later the folks in the greater Miami media market would watch a segment on the TV about how investigators found the cause of that massive pile up on 821 the other day–a Massachusetts driver pulled out of the wreckage at the front of the ordeal with a gunshot wound to the head. No foul play suspected, the authorities would say. These things happen of course. Moral of the story is wear your seatbelts.
About this time we were finishing up our front-to-back Bone Valley listen. A narrative podcast, it intimately details a wrongful murder conviction in central Florida. Highly worth a listen. The most revealing part of the show was not the whodunnit but rather the state of Florida’s stubborn refusal to admit they got it wrong. It reminded me of a story arc from The Shield we were watching the night previous. A detective who pushed for reopening old cases with botched legal proceedings and wrongful convictions was punished severely by a department more concerned with conviction numbers than the truth. A little fictional glimpse of the crime manufacturing theory I’ve put forward in these digital pages. In Bone Valley it was like looking at that same story from the side of the punishers. There’s a quote I want to share from a man who tried to confess to a murder that would have overturned a wrongful life sentence but the prosecutor refused to believe him:
I don’t think it’s that they don’t believe me. They don’t want to bring that all out back under cover. I think there’s probably more stuff… and they just never went looking. Because if you were going to open up those cases you’d have to really investigate that prosecutor … They just trying to cover it up. Because all it is, it’s gonna open more doors and open more doors.
This resonated with my experience covering the WPD. When you dig into stories like Natale Cosenza’s wrongful conviction it really paints a picture of detectives and prosecutors who don’t care so much whether they’ve got the right man so long as they’ve got a man.
After we got through the zipping and weaving on one of the several 10-lane highways surrounding Miami and the ring of congested sprawl around it we finally arrived at the part of the drive that made the road trip worth it. We passed the Last Chance Saloon–where folks once unloaded their various contraband ahead of a border guard checkpoint installed there for a brief moment in the 1980s, before Key West seceded from the union as the Conch Republic to put an end to it–and headed down Route 1 away from the mainland and toward the peculiar and trashy and beautiful Florida Keys.
No more kids with guns on the side of the road this time. Rather the image burned in my mind is a sunburned bright pink Middle Age White in khakis and an unbuttoned shirt walking down the shoulder of the road opposite traffic at a pace that suggested he was still a bit drunk from the night previous.
A thing I didn’t expect was just how long that stretch of road runs before it runs out in the New-Orleans-meets-Hampton-Beach vacation oasis that is Key West. It takes some two hours of crawling along Route 1 to get from the Last Chance Saloon through Key Largo and Long Key and Islamorada etc etc until you hit Key West. All manner of marinas and roadside seafood shacks and several small and deeply sketchy airports I’m sure have been made use of by the CIA a time or two for some off-the-books cargo plane trips if you know what I mean. Then there’s Fat Albert, the massive white spy balloon employed by Homeland Security, tethered to a military truck on Cudjoe Key. Katie called it the goldfish in the sky. Nefarious and shadowy military gear mixed with beachside kitsch is the Key West aesthetic. Awww look at that goldfish in the sky wonder what it does up there ah well we’ll never really know I guess. Anyway. Why are there F-35s in pairs constantly flying overhead? What is that 50-story tower inside the military base all about? Who knows and anyway my coconut drink needs refilling and these conch fritters aren’t going to eat themselves. Along the “seven-mile highway” that connects the lower Keys to the rest of the big reef are sections of a long-abandoned prior highway that are crumbling into the bright green water beneath it. Whole sections of it were missing, making long portions unconnected and unaccessible. I’d later find out that they’re left that way in part to make it easier to send “rafters” back whence they came.
Key West itself was a lot bigger and more city-like than I’d expected. Our Airbnb was just off Duval Street—the “main drag” of the beach community. It wasn’t five minutes on our first walk down that drag that we saw a fight break out between a local-looking cyclist and a clearly vacationing motorcycle man with wife in tow on his souped up and freshly polished touring Harley. The motorcycle man was riding the cyclist’s ass down the narrow stretch. The cyclist got off his bike and stopped traffic and started yelling at the motorcycle man. A brief fist fight ensued which resulted in the cyclist’s bike and basket full of clothes getting dumped in a puddle as the motorcycle-man-with-wife drove off. Katie’s dad Tom has a nice camera and caught a fantastic picture of it.
It was the first glimpse of an undercurrent of local-vs-tourist tension that permeated the whole vibe of the place. Later that night we’d walk past a near empty bar with entertainment supplied by one of the many acoustic guitar guys playing Jimmy Buffett songs in the many ocean-themed restaurants. Between songs some woman at the bar yelled out some sort of request in a sloppy fashion and the acoustic guitar guy leaned into the mic. “Three for three on requests,” he said, annoyed and angry. “One more and I’m packing up and going to Wendy’s.”
Anyway shortly after the fight a Cybertruck with four drunks in the bed of it cruised down the street past a few roosters and hens and gawking tourists. In a gaudy town somehow the gaudiness of that truck stood out. (You see the pictures of the guy who got one stuck in the sand in Nantucket?)
While down there I was reminded of something I’d once heard. Ralph of Ralph’s had at one point planned to open Ralph’s II in Key West but it never happened. I thought it was a weird place to choose when I heard that story the first time but I don’t anymore. Besides Worcester, Key West is the most Ralph’s place I’ve ever seen. If anything, Key West is a hub of seriously cool and eccentric bars. I’m gunna try to see if I can track down the full story of the Ralphs II that never was this week.
I’ll leave it there. Wish I had more time to do travel writing, I really like it. Here are some more serious and thoughtful travel essays I’ve written in the past.
May 31, 2023 | There’s a lightness of spirit in that
Oct. 14., 2020 | The desert is dead and beautiful and still
I think I have to budget some time this year for more of these... if I can find it.
Walkable Dead
It takes an apocalyptic nightmare to bring downtown back to life, I guess!
The Walking Dead film set pictures were all great and the production company couldn’t have chosen a better downtown to turn into a post-apocalyptic wasteland if you ask me. My favorite part is the NYC subway station planted on Main Street. Here’s a great one by the Telegram’s Allan Jung. One of my favorite local photographers.
It’s like awwwww imagine if Worcester was a real city?
Would personally deal with a few real life zombies if we brought the trolleys back at least. Look at this goddamn map from 1902:
I don’t need to tell you that our light rail infrastructure does not look like that anymore! In fact this Walking Dead bonanza bringing downtown to life is actually getting in the way of what meager rail infrastructure we already have! Union Station shut down today from 10 a.m. to midnight.
God that map is annoying to look at, isn’t it?
Odds and ends
Thank you for reading everyone! Asking for some cash yet again.
New WPS In Brief dropped yesterday featuring a great budget deficit breakdown! I love having Aislinn and this column on board the Worcester Sucks team!!
Interesting tidbit from a recent Telegram article on the Supreme Court homelessness case I’ve been beating you over the head about:
A spokesperson for the City of Worcester said the city would not comment on any hypothetical verdict in the Grants Pass case, and the city did not make any representative available for an interview.
According to the spokesperson, the only rule the city has on the books related to pitching encampments and sleeping in public spaces is a fine for erecting a booth, tent, sleeping tent, sleeping bag, inflatable rides, stall, camper, motorhome or other sleeping structure in any park or playground without a permit from Parks & Recreation.
The rule also forbids use of a tent unless it is stake-less or without the written permission of Parks & Recreation. Violators can face a noncriminal disposition fine. The fine system is structured as follows: $25 for a first offense, $50 for a second offense and $100 for third and subsequent offenses.
I always thought it was just blanket trespassing charges, which are still bad. But this is worse!
Gary Rosen continuing the safe injection site crusade god bless him: “Worcester health official Rosen urges legislative action on overdose prevention laws”
Mezcal moving over to the old 99 by the post office
Who could have foreseen this? “Food assistance: Demand at food pantries spikes as rents increase and wages do not”
And, related: “For those in Mass. emergency shelters, the new 9-month clock is already ticking”
Lastly, rest in peace Steve Albini.