The recent discussion of the propriety of the mayor’s reliance on the United Nations, ICLEI and similar “foreign bodies” politic for Green NR and other city laws involves some of the most interesting and perceptive considerations of local government, citizen activism and such as I have ever read in the local press.
The fact is, that in spite of the long-standing existence of a daily newspaper, numerous weeklies and bimonthlies, blog-accommodations of several web portals and radio and TV, I have seen no more perceptive or in-depth analysis of our lives in New Rochelle than INSERT COPY HERE
the post about our mayor by Bob Cox and the commentary that followed it. This is the true value of TOTS – the most sophisticated intellectual forum in town and probably the rest of the county and state.
And Democrats and liberals who ignore it or dismiss it out-of-hand do so to their own detriment (and you know that many of them read it but do not admit of it!).
Not only is it informed, but for the most part, discussions between parties are conducted in a reasonably civil manner; even the eruptions that occasionally break out between the greatest partisans of the left or right seem to lack the inter-personal vitriol that one sees elsewhere.
That being said, I appreciate the consideration finally being given to the incumbent mayor’s obsessive devotion to ICLEI, the United Nations, Move-On, George Soros himself and other one-world encrusted ideals, individuals and organizations too numerous to mention. One wants to say his actions are “inexplicable,” but in fact, I think his motives are fairly easy to comprehend.
The mayor has found a mechanism to distract the population from attention to his singularly ineffective, unsuccessful and positively deleterious reign over the once-grand CIty of New Rochelle. In short, his adherence to these weird and often foreign concepts can best be explained as a means to CHANGE THE SUBJECT in the “municipal conversation.” With all the fuss over the constitution of his green task force and its consequent report, usually informed observers of the political scene are given leave to ignore the perilous economic state of the city, the atrocious condition of its highways, byways, overpasses, sidewalks, curbs and other incidents of infrastructure and the oppressive mechanism of taxes, fees, excises and imposts that have been thrust upon us by two successive mayors of the same political stripe! It’s that simple.
How else to explain the seeming popularity of the Green-governing construct? Normally independent and serious observers of government and society who populate our city seem to have not read the thing – else we might have read or heard cries over the intrusiveness and bullying nature of the legislation from homes and apartment buildings that literally teem with lawyers, bankers, medical practitioners, real-estate owners/developers/speculators, professional writers and thinkers, professors at local colleges, public-school teachers and administrators, etc.
It is almost as if Obama’s “Affordable Health Care” thing were channeled down to our sleepy hamlet through the person of our mayor. Remember how then-Speaker Pelosi assured a reporter that she would read the legislation after it had been passed? In a similar manner, our credulous professional classes, who usually study their mail correspondence, newspapers, books, utility bills and even restaurant menus with the intensity of WW II code-breakers seem to have placed their brains in a state of suspended-animation in the consideration of local political matters.
The mayor’s green initiatives provide such residents with an excuse to ignore his administrative failings while providing an innocuous “something” that they can support to show that they are involved and are participating in the life of our municipality. The awards, proclamations, statues and plaques that are announced and promoted pictorially in the pages of the local fan-press are the physical manifestation of such image creation. And the engorgement of this worthless press agentry by our highly-educated “chattering classes” resident throughout the city and concentrated in our most prosperous wards is the means by which people who should know better escape the feelings of guilt that should attach to such evasions of civic responsibility.
It is especially apt for Bob to quote the fantasy-figure Yoda in his exegesis of the mayor’s anthology of utterances and public pronouncements. Perhaps it is best to look to the heavens or to popular and science fiction, or to Hollywood for explanation of this poseur’s liberty from the judgment of economic law and common sense.
