On masturbating school board presidents and jailbird mayors
In Detroit we’ve got this bad habit of fretting over what everyone else thinks about us, as if who we are as a community depends on the judgment of others who may not have ever even been to this community except through the headlines. This habit usually kicks into high gear whenever another news story breaks highlighting yet another bizarre example of our dysfunction, such as a functionally illiterate president of the school board (now former president) who first decided maybe he should step down after it became public that he was playing with himself in a one-on-one business meeting with the superintendent – and then decided to try and retract that decision and keep his job. Or the equally bizarre example of another school board member who characterized his former colleague as a “young man” who just strayed a wee bit from the path of righteousness for an unsupervised moment and should have been given a second chance. Or the example of a former mayor, already in prison for one set of charges, now indicted on 19 counts of mail and wire fraud – for starters.
So then the question becomes, what do Detroiters think of Detroit right about now? Because we’re the ones that have to deal with this shit, up close and way too damned personal, day after day after day.
