Case of a Man Born Wrong

Ari L. NoonanSports

      And you thought miracles ended with the Bible?
      Next Monday afternoon, the County Supervisors have scheduled a vote on ending cancer. Tuesday, they are voting on ending gang violence.
      Is there no limit to the curative powers of these liberals who have been singularly blessed?
      Dear God, why couldn’t you have situated me in Mexico, broke, abandoned by my family and homeless? Soon as the County Supervisors heard about me, my problems would have been resolved.
      Last year, the imaginative angels at the United Nations announced a plan to end poverty throughout the world.
      I feel better already.
      The only worries left in my saddlebags are whether Measure V will triumph at the polls on Tuesday and determining which two candidates for the City Council will carry the most appeal for voters.
      Even if you have read the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Breeze and the Daily News every day this week, you still may wonder about the specificity of the master plan.
      Feh.
      Details are for technocrats, spoilsports  and worrywarts, my boy.
      As Mayor Wrong noted, we have $150 million to play with. Let others worry about the blueprints.       That is why you hire underlings. Or illegals.
 
Plan? Plan? We Have No Plan 
 
      The genius of this spectacular scam is that there ain’t no plan. Even a dumb high school football coach in Ocala, Iowa, goes into a Friday night game with at least a sketched outline of what he wants his players to do when they do have the ball and when they don’t have the ball.
      Los Angeles must have won a dispensation from Cardinal Wrong.   
      Already yesterday, Mayor Wrong was complaining that the $150 million was inadequate.
      I don’t know if gangbangers read the Los Angeles Times. But every day of the  week, Mayor Wrong and his fellow thinkers give gangbangers daring new ideas by telling reporters how they are gaming the system.
      And the public, which thinks it is so sophisticated, never catches on.
      With straight faces, Mayor Wrong and the gang — and I do mean gang —from City Hall inspected more than two hundred plans yesterday for solving homelessness in Los Angeles.
      Hidden among these gems of gibberish is a heretofore undisclosed plot for secretly, painlessly throwing a rope around the necks of ninety thousand unhoused wretches and yanking them inside, no matter how loudly or violently they resist.
      You may not know you want to be saved, pal, but you are going to be.
      Do you have any idea how many editions of the Times the Mayor and the boys can make the Cure Homelessness scam work?
      They are brilliant.
      Consider this: More than two hundred plans need to be sifted through.
      Mayor Wrong says there is no way the miracle can happen unless the County and the city of Los Angeles collaborate.
      Genius that he is, he is promoting a summit conference of all eighty-eight cities in the County.
      Stay with me. You know how much trouble you and your friends have finding a Saturday night to go out when you all have an opening.
      Picture eighty-eight city managers saying, “Two years from Thursday, I have an opening between three and four p.m.” “I am sorry, Freddie,” says another city manager. “My meeting that day will run until four-thirty. I will see if I can change it, and I’ll call you back in six months..”
      Now it is a few years later, and all eighty-eight Elmer Fudds are in the same room, except for three of them who called in sick, two who were arrested and five who had accidents along the way.
 
Speaking of Former Close Relatives
 
      So seventy-eight are in the room, seventy-eight from different backgrounds, different cultures, with different priorities.
      I can’t get seventy-eight of my ex-wives to agree on a common place for dinner, let alone bringing seventy-eight city managers around.
      When last I checked, City Hall in Culver City was in no mood to raze the two vulnerable mobile home parks on Grandview Boulevard, put the one hundred residents up at the Ritz while they build affordable housing on site, and then move the residents back in at the same address.
      If Culver City is not going to do that for one hundred decent, self-supporting legal residents, what makes anyone think the Los Angeles Eighty-Eight will agree, on a foggy future date, to put up housing for people who don’t want to be housed and don’t even know that today is Friday?
      Ah, being liberal means never having to say you are specific.
      As a devout, church-going liberal, Mayor Wrong knows that the game is about money, not arcane allocation strategies that they wouldn’t understand out in the neighborhoods anyway.
      Money buys you time. For a role model, look at Roger Snoble and the rest of the money-milking mavens at the MTA. They are making fat careers out of light rail schemes.
      Thousands of people, upper tier and obscure, are available for blame if the darned Cure Homelessness plan doesn’t stay on track. Besides, long before the $150 million account runs dry, Mayor Wrong will be on his way to Sacramento, Washington or both simultaneously.

      County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, often the unchallenged winner of the Worst Los Angeles Politician of the Year award, will face serious competition this season.