Look Out Boys! The Über Spinster Lets Down Her Hair
by P.D. Lesko
I read it, and I laughed. Out loud. I read it again, and laughed even more. I kept reading. Sometimes, I get bored and quit in the middle. Other times, reading this stuff is like taking flax seed oil. It’s good for me, so I do it. This time, however, I was reading because I wanted to see what float was going to come next in the parade. Here’s a snippet:
One problem with our current city council is that a majority of them don’t appear to believe in basic, actual democracy. You know, the ordinary garden-variety kind where you have, say, a bunch of people sitting around a table, and they need to reach a consensus about who will be the chair of a committee. And somebody says, Hey let’s just vote on it! Let’s elect someone! Let’s get Margie, she’s been here the longest! Let’s elect Margie!
Who posted it? You’ll never guess. Oh, alright, go ahead. Guess. If someone had just shown me this snippet, I would have ventured to say, well, it had come from a piece posted to A2Politico. “One problem with our current city council is that a majority of them don’t appear to believe in basic, actual democracy?”
“Excellent!” as Bill and Ted might say during the course of some adventure.
Here’s another snippet:
Teall herself appeared to bristle at the suggestion that they should vote on who would be chair, saying that she was concerned about the precedent it would set.
As near as I can tell, that precedent would be democracy.
“As near as I can tell, that precedent would be democracy?” This writer is never going to get an invite to Margie Teall’s house for dinner again. Unless, of course, Marvellous Margie is open to a little friendly joshing about her despotic tendencies.
Alright, I don’t want to keep you in suspense. The author of these excerpts is David Askins, reporter, editor, comment approver and now, it would appear, smart-ass-in-training political writer at the AnnArborChronicle.com. It’s one thing to Tweet smart-ass comments about how First Ward Council member Sandi Smith eats, or to exchange Tweets with the AnnArbor.com government reporter about how boring or badly run City Council meetings are, but it’s quite another to write that a bunch of people who steer advertising your way don’t actually believe in democracy—even if it happens to be the truth. Current Council members spend as much time on Twitter as they do on actual democracy. Using Twitter to mock them to your other Twitter friends is like laughing behind their backs. It’s fun, but making fun of people like that is, well, prissy.
To openly deride Margie Teall’s crazy statement that electing a chair of a City Council committee would set a bad precedent is not the kind of thing the City Council crowd expects from the AAChronicle.com; Ann Arbor County Commissioner Leah Gunn kvells via comments at word-for-word coverage of meetings posted by Askins and his wife Mary Morgan. However, Gunn ran Teall’s last City Council campaign, and would change Margie’s diapers, if it were necessary.
Seriously, though, making fun of your Facebook friends like this can be dangerous. Writing that the majority of Ann Arbor City Council members “don’t appear to believe in basic, actual democracy” is like writing that the Emperor appears to have no clothes. He’s naked, yo! He’s been naked for a long time. Welcome to reporting that there is widespread nudity twice monthly at City Hall in the City Council chambers.
Maybe David Askins has caught the “snark” bug that seems to be going around the Ann Arbor media scene. First it was former Second Ward Council member Joan Lowenstein trying to poke fun of “old,” “stingy,” “conservative,” Ann Arbor voters in The Ann. She got the stuffing knocked out of her in the comment section of AnnArbor.com (which had quickly posted a piece about the whoop-la for some quick page views). Now, it’s the journalistic uber Spinster of the local media scene letting lose on the City Council members.
This could be yet another sign that the Hieftje Hive is in serious trouble, politically. The kids who’d been making fun of Council members behind their backs are now making fun of them to their faces.
Then again, when sharks smell blood, they circle.
Hey, I’m a card carrying member of the Democratic Party, I voted for the Greenbelt tax, gave money to the Ecology Center, liked the idea that tax dollars go to the ‘arts’, I didn’t give a hoot about a Conference Center or if the Argo Dam was bulldozed and hadn’t made my mind up on the Germantown saga. And even voted for the Mayor more than once over the past decade. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but watching the out and out lies spread about the Argo Dam condition, seeing the behind closed doors process for the Library Parking Lot mess, the arrogance from Council on the Germantown outcry over destroying century old houses, and the other bs that happened in rapid succession (the parkland ‘lease’ to the U of M while the Mayor gets hired to ‘lecture’, seeing the lack of an open and transparent process that gave us the million dollar urinal water fountain, and then the insulting Council email fiasco) I, like thousands of others in this city, just got FED UP. The key is OPEN and TRANSPARENT. DEMOCRACY. At some point, the Mayor and his buddies on Council just stop caring about being Open and Democratic. That’s why the Mayor’s buddies are getting picked off Council one by one, it’s why people are standing up outraged by the actions over the past few years and it’s why there’s a backlash. People are fed up. Fed up with arrogance, fed up with wasted tax dollars going to strobe lights, fed up with Greenbelt dollars that pay someone to raise chickens twenty miles away while we give parkland to the University of Michigan. It’s not surprising the Mayor, who supports Rick Snyder’s anti-democracy Emergency Manager process, wouldn’t be comfortable with democracy, or the FOIA process or open and transparent government. He shouldn’t be surprised either, by the blowback from those of us who do.