The Dog Days of Summer
Budget boredom, fake it till you break it, and a hint of housekeeping.
Now that summer is fully upon us, I presume a great many of you are away on vacation—safe and happy travels to those who are. To those who aren’t, I at least hope you’ve achieved that much-needed restorative detachment that is the hallmark of this delightful time of year. In keeping with the season, this post will be a tad more informal than usual. Rather than plunge into 2000 words of palace intrigue (there is plenty of that in the offing), this installment will be a slightly pithier pastiche of political themes and current events with a touch of housekeeping thrown in toward the end. Nothing too heavy, but still interesting, I hope.
Capital Workshop Punishment
I’m quite pleased to report that I tuned into the city’s most recent capital workshop, all 210 minutes of it. I say pleased because I can’t help but feel a tinge of survivor’s pride, that odd sense of accomplishment one feels for having survived something harrowing, like a plane crash or being struck by lightning. To be fair, I didn’t exactly approach it with dread, and not because I have an affinity for listening to hours of monotonous droning over superimposed spreadsheets, but because I figured that a meeting dedicated entirely to the question of how our city spends money would prove somewhat revelatory in the context of a commission fiercely divided over how our city spends money. For Ariel and Castro, who have made useful political hay out of the suspicion that high-ranking city officials have been mismanaging city coffers at best and pilfering them at worst, the workshop represented an ideal forum in which to make their case, and so I expected some amount of intrigue and tension at the very least.
Anyway, you probably know where this is going. The prince and princess of parsimony, who during their coordinated campaigns frequently came within millimeters of explicitly accusing the administration of cooking the books, laid a big fat goose egg at the workshop—no fireworks, no smoking guns, nothing but a palpable sense of ignorance and ennui. And you can add indifference to the mix for Castro, who I’m fairly certain never once opened her mouth. Ariel, for his part, was hardly better, his only memorable contribution coming in the form of a brief, if pointless, repartee over pickleball, in which he reprimanded Lago for supposedly insulting sweaty old people. As a sweaty old person, myself, let me state for the record that I was not offended. I was, however, bored.
On the bright side, although dreadfully underwhelming and difficult to endure, the workshop wasn’t entirely inconsequential, for it supplied fresh evidence in support of what is becoming an increasingly popular sentiment among many in the community, namely that our newest commissioners are all hat and no cattle, a pair of self-serving solutions in search of a problem.
Fake it till you break it
I trust that by now I’ve sufficiently conveyed both the nature and scale of my disappointment with Ariel Fernandez, and I fear that to go much further would run the risk of taking this newsletter into dead-horse territory. But I do want to make something clear, while I stand by my assertion that Ariel’s early failures are in large measure the product of impulse and ego, there is more to the story than mere psychology. Indeed, it’s hard to ignore the fact that each of Ariel’s early blunders involved political nonstarters. Firing the manager, stopping the Mobility Hub, exposing Watergate levels of corruption and coverup at City Hall—none of these were very likely to happen. They are all relics of a gratuitously strident campaign, rah-rah pipe dreams that were wonderful for rousing and mobilizing an impassioned base, but dead on arrival as actual political objectives.
Ariel, therefore, faces two existentially significant challenges. One is a slate of campaign promises that have virtually no hope of success, and the other is his dead albatross of a personality that will for the foreseeable future preclude any form of meaningful truce or compromise with his adversaries. I think on some level Ariel knows this and is therefore pursuing the only strategy currently available to him: fake it till you break it.
If I’m right, Ariel will never concede on the core issues. He will maintain that the manager is incompetent, that the administration is rife with corruption, and that every project disfavored by his base is a world-ending boondoggle. He’ll stick to the narrative publicly while doing everything he can to actualize it privately. He’ll skulk around City Hall every day like a monomaniacal Karen, dropping in on meetings unannounced and uninvited. He’ll continue digging up dirt on enemies like he’s still writing for Gables Insider. He’ll take credit for others’ successes while ignoring his own failures. He’ll smile and take selfies with employees in the morning and complain that they are overpaid in the afternoon. He’ll psychologically waterboard his enemies in hopes that they’ll confess to sins they didn’t commit. And with any luck, a few of them will break. They’ll say “enough of this crap, I didn’t sign up for this.” They’ll pack their belongings and head for the nearest exit while taking their pensions with them. And Ariel will not think twice about spinning it. He’ll say, “There, you see, I was right all along. The rats are fleeing, the roaches are scurrying, the purifying light of my truth cleanses all.” He’ll fake it till he breaks it.
Rip’ed from the headlines
As I trust many of you have heard, Rip Holmes is at it once again. The linked article explains it well, but to summarize as succinctly as possible: Rip Holmes filed a police complaint against Ariel for allegedly “defrauding" him during the April election. Rip claims that Ariel tricked him into switching races at the last minute in order to keep Lago off the ballot and therefore suppress voter turnout. The fraud, in Rip’s eyes, stems from Ariel falsely signaling support for the Mobility Hub, a project Rip claims is necessary for his “survival.”
Look, my dear readers, you’re a smart set. I don’t need to tell you that as actionable complaints go, this ranks just below calling the police because McDonald’s took too long making your Chicken McNuggets. We shouldn’t bet on this going anywhere.
But as much as deception in politics falls short of a crime, there is something to this story. For starters, Rip’s account is eminently believable. There’s just no way he made it up. While intelligent, Rip has what you could call an unconventional relationship with reality. If all of this had sprung from his imagination, you could rest assured it would have involved space lizards or CIA mind-control devices. I’m not kidding.
Moreover, the juxtaposition is just too delicious to ignore. Ariel goes to great lengths to maintain that gee-golly Mr. Rodgers persona of his, so to watch Rip Holmes, of all people, slice through that facade like a hot knife through butter is nothing if not entertaining. Will this complaint go anywhere? Um, probably not. Will it hurt Ariel politically? I haven’t a clue.
Castro Part Deux
Speaking of clueless, I haven’t forgotten about Melissa Castro. A second post is indeed in the works. In fact, I had originally intended to publish part two immediately after the first post, but then a handful of dutiful readers brought some interesting information to my attention, information that I’m obliged to vet and digest. And although by no means do I fancy myself an investigative journalist—digging just isn’t my thing—I will neither ignore nor credulously believe any random information that crosses my path. Diligence where diligence is due.
Rules of Engagement
Finally, and while we’re looking ahead, I want to make another thing abundantly clear: politicians and other public figures will always be fair game within this newsletter. They way I see it, politics is a contact sport, one every public servant implicitly signs up for. I am not, however, interested in bystanders and civilians. So don’t expect to see much here about your fellow residents. That said, I will most likely carve out an exception for political activists, those unelected citizens who nonetheless inject themselves into every issue, every battle, every aspect of the political sphere as though they are some kind of de facto representative of the people. Those people, and the forces that empower them, are fair game.
Anyway, that’s all I have. For now.