Editor\'s Essays Articles

As I prepare to walk out the door at mid-day to the Exchange Club’s community forum for School Board candidates, I am nagged by an old problem.

Communal apathy.

This probably should be filed under the rubric, What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came?

And you wonder why I thank God twice each morning for not making me a liberal?

So many liberals who hold influential positions in this country seem genetically disposed to obey three distinct values:

Chronic seething anger.

And they feel obligated to generate a fresh lineup of newly discovered “victims” daily.

Hours after covering the bizarre ending to last Thursday night’s School Board Candidates Forum, sponsored by the Culver City Homeowners Assn., Diane and I left on a six-hour journey to the Bay Area.

I had to scoot over in my seat to make room for my mind where a large question mark loomed.

Through Santa Barbara, Los Olivos, San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Atascadero, Salinas, Castroville and Santa Cruz, I wondered what fallout there would be back home from the candidate Steve Gourley’s brash performance the night before.

Special-needs adults — the slang term for them is “liberals” — remind you of the town drunk.

He grits his teeth until the enamel cracks.

He knots his shoes together.

He convinces a friend to blindfold him and to handcuff him to a huge mahogany desk the size of Rosie O’Donnell.

Being an inventive type, though, our friend wiggles free. He hobbles out the front door, rolls down the short set of carpeted steps from his porch, and pogo-sticks his way all the way down the block to the corner bar.

With sadness, I see by the morning newspaper that Barry Tunick, our favorite correspondent and most persistent critic several years ago, has died at the age of 72.

He was my idea of how the proto-typical Culver City activist should conduct himself — chasing down and confronting City Hall officials with accurate data and tough talk.

Culver City mamas, I beg you, do not let your sons or daughters grow up to be consultants.

Ugh, to be succinct.

Encourage them to be criminals, valets for terrorists, blindfolded spacewalkers, even panhandlers. But please, please, not consultants.

I was thinking of — and pining away for —hot-air nights in Baltimore while I was driving away from yesterday’s lunch-hour interview with Steve Gourley, the School Board candidate.

The sitdown with Mr. Gourley completed a round of in-depth interviews with all five School Board candidates for the Nov. 6 election.

Flatly, I believe it is the strongest lineup of candidates Culver City ever has fielded — for City Hall or the School Board.

On the same morning that the overhyped Al Gore, America’s favorite inflatable buffoon, is celebrating his devalued Nobel “Peace” Prize by going polar bear hunting, the most fascinating debate in Congress is whether America should officially label the 1915 Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.

As surely as Culver City’s most recent police chiefs have skidded out of town with reddened faces and fat bank accounts, the slaughter happened.

A certain relative, who shall go unidentified for the sake of what passes for family peace, telephoned my father in a stern mood last Friday morning.

In yet another confirmation of my belief that persons who never have been married should not hold positions of authority, Mr. or Ms. Un-named Relative came down like thunder on Pop.

Since I plan to sit in on the Culver City Democratic Club meeting tonight, and it might be embarrassing to wear a brown paper bag over my head when Diane Rosenberg extends the club’s welcome at the door of the Rotunda Room, perhaps I should take three steps back and render a more circumspect opinion this morning.

“Community Benefits,” the sweet-sounding bait City Hall is dangling beneath the noses of developers who want to exceed the city’s downsized height and density limits, may be the worst dream-up since the Edsel was introduced 50 years ago by Ford.