My Jewish readers should recognize the title of this post. It’s a truncation of the Hebrew saying, "Ma nishtana halaila hazeh mikol haleilot?” which translates to “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Originally associated with Passover, today it’s often used colloquially to point out that something unsurprising has happened.
It goes something like this:
You: “Dr. Castro just drunk-posted yet another one of her Sippy Cup Soliloquies on Instagram.”
Me: “Ma nishtana.”
I find this expression coming to mind with increasing frequency these days, particularly in the context of city commission meetings. For every time that oh-so-august body convenes, it invariably self-immolates in a blaze of puerile dysfunction as soon as the first spark flies off certain commissioners’ easily dented pride.
Thus my dilemma. On one hand, I feel burdened by a kind of Darwinian duty, as though I owe it to science to study KFC’s miraculously evolved capacity for exquisitely honed dumbassery. As if our local environment somehow began selecting for narcissism, incompetence, and idiocy, and suddenly a new species called KFC emerged. As though City Hall is my Galápagos and turgid grifters with dark triad personality traits are my flightless cormorants.
On the other hand, there are only so many times one can write the same post. There are only so many ways to assert that Ariel is a sociopath, Castro is a dunce, and Kirk is a fraud. At some point, the evidence piles up and a hypothesis becomes a law. Just as you don’t need an apple to fall on your head every day to remind you that gravity exists, you don’t need 2,000 words from me every week to remind you that KFC is an unmitigated disaster. All of which is to say that while I’m not sure at which point KFC’s toxicity entered dog-bites-man territory, I’m pretty sure we’re well past it.
It’s why, as I’ve been saying for several weeks now, I’m going to take a more passive approach to the study and exposition of KFC’s garden-variety buffoonery—a luxury I am now afforded thanks to the diligence and creativity of some very bright and talented people with whom I will likely be working more closely moving forward. The predictable yet still captivating examples of KFC's antics will continue to be chronicled and shared, albeit in a more efficient form, like the video montage featured above.
This will free up the bandwidth I need in order to finally explore much deeper questions, to probe the troubling undercurrents that are steering not just Gables politics, but politics throughout South Florida in a decidedly dangerous direction. Sure, KFC's antics provide a ready source of outrage and dark humor, but they are ultimately just symptoms of a more pervasive malaise afflicting the region.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy today’s featured entertainment, which I present to you with the following preface: I watched both September 26th meetings from which this video is derived, yet somehow I did not catch a key revelation until its creator pointed it out to me in an email.
It seems I got hung up on the absurd idea that KFC, who allegedly work so hard that they needed to double their pay on the sly, need to hire more assistants because they somehow can’t quite keep up with the massive workload that comes with being a city commissioner—a part-time job that happens to be their only job.
In my defense, the sheer absurdity of this is a distraction in itself, especially when you look at a mere portion of each elected official’s workload and productivity empirically:
Based on emails alone, Lago's workload isn't just heavier than Ariel's (13.8K sent from Lago vs a paltry 224 from Ariel), it's heavier than all of KFC’s combined. Nine times heavier. Yet in their infinite wisdom, they wanted to fire his assistant and hire new ones for themselves.
Imagine what would happen if we compared their actual accomplishments.
Yet, somehow, that’s not the most egregious part. The most appalling moment of all, the revelation I missed, is when Ariel, who mere seconds before bragging about how he “put the city first” because he and KFC allowed Lago to keep his assistant, threatened to reconsider the motion and eliminate the position out of pure spite. He even switched from the royal "we" to the more blunt "I," proclaiming "we kept the position in your office" in one breath and "if you like, I can do a motion to reconsider and remove it" in the next.
But that’s Ariel for you. If you make him even the slightest bit angry, the vindictive monster inside him emerges and his better judgment all but disappears.
He’s the Irritable Hulk.
One moment he's patting himself on the back for the magnanimous act of allowing the mayor to keep his assistant, characterizing it as "putting the city first." The very next, he's threatening to axe that same position because he felt the mayor was being a touch too snotty for his liking. In other words, he's happy to put the city first, so long as you don't piss him off, in which case screw the city because there are heads that need a-rollin'!
Mind you, there's a flesh-and-blood human being attached to that position, an actual person who's devoted over a decade to serving this city. But what can you expect? When the Irritable Hulk emerges, innocent people become mere meat bags, human-shaped weapons that can be hurled at one’s perceived enemies.
Many thanks to the talented content creator who makes posts like this possible. And to the rest of you, just know that if you don't get an essay from me the next time KFC does something characteristically dumb, craven, farcical, malicious, ham-fisted, buffoonish, vindictive, asinine, self-sabotaging, or breathtakingly obtuse, it's not necessarily because I missed it or no longer care. It's simply because at this point, what else can I say besides ma nishtana?
Ma Nishtana