Week in Review: a world elsewhere

Despising, / For you, the city, thus [we] turn [our] back

We—each and only ever being Clovis¹—raise our ax and unburden you from what has been. Innocent and decent people—and here, for the first and final time, we really mean those small-D decent—are being dragged into the mud of our peculiar sty, and we are jealous of our infamy. No, you accusatory jesters of the City Manager’s² royal court, you do not know yourselves, let alone others: guess away in vain.

But before we delve deeper into obscurity, from which we can only launch ever-more energetic assaults, we have a few final words for those whose Decorum knows no limits: we have had it up to here with the gaslighting concerning the problem of “civility” in our local politics. Since the library days, no one in local politics has been more slanderously reviled than Mayor Pro Tem Paladino, the most candid and conscientious man in our wretched City Hall. Accessing only our working memory, we recall his being rebuked as disingenuous by the fence-straddling Socha, called on to resign by Stuchell, cited as fomenting a negative culture by resigning City Staff, accused of encouraging citizen engagement (gasp!) by the City Manager³, stalked and photographed by Penny Swan’s “Just the Facts” outfit, told he has blood on his hands by LGBT fanatics, called a Nazi by many, blamed for the resignation of anyone and everyone who is self-righteously offended by his intelligence and interest in policy and institutional structure—it is a wonder that anyone could endure such “Team Building” tactics.

And no one has handled “Team Building” better. As our neurotic six-figure City Manager⁴ apparently uses taxpayer time to form a political coalition in partnership with other pedantic scolds, we wonder all the more at Paladino’s man-bunned level-headedness. He rarely complains; he never speechifies; he never preens, as his colleagues do, flailing their arms and uttering platitudes in affected somber tones for the camera.⁵

Those of you, dear readers, who think Paladino is the problem with city government are the dupes, the useful idiots, the projecting puppets of the City Manager,⁶ who appears—though of course we have no proof!—to be orchestrating a campaign to marginalize and defenestrate the only elected official in recent memory whose effective and well-informed government has increased transparency and citizen engagement.

In light of the above, we therefore recede with our most corrosive commentary into the darker corners of the internet—so that the self-serving unity discourse pastors of Facebook do not wander unwittingly into our maw, as beneficial as such exchanges may be for them. Make no mistake, you Decent readers: it’s not us, it’s you. We tried—with our contrived terminology and rhetorical sallies about public officials and their public speeches—we tried to shield you, you self-styled visionaries and self-loving bourgeois, from our inverting ways. And yet you charged to the defense of public constipation. So: though our Substack may become baptized in the fetid waters of neutral Decency, this Holy Week we affirm our God-given duty to wield our inDecorous and altogether unCivil powers against the Very Decent public men of this town, and we aspire, in the spirit of Lenten penance, to cull those of our readers who are possessed of too fragile a constitution; we write for our friends. If you want to play rough, you know where to find us.

P.S. We are taking Holy Week off, and will resume our Decorous coverage (and begin inDecorous X activity) after Easter.

1. How dare you enact such an erasure!—Fauxglin.

2. The City Manager makes $200,000 and does not live in Hillsdale.

3. The City Manager makes $200,000 and does not live in Hillsdale.

4. The City Manager makes $200,000 and does not live in Hillsdale.

5. Alternatively, some appear to have checked out entirely.

6. The City Manager makes $200,000 and does not live in Hillsdale.