Fort Bragg’s Monday evening City Council meeting started off as a dazzling affair. It ended up in a shocking true life confession of the lust for power. Beats any soap opera going.
The meeting began at 6:00 as usual, but from 5:00 on, the insiders had been conducting a celebration for Fort Bragg’s volunteers. When those of us who had not actually volunteered to do anything over the course of the year started trickling in, we discovered there was still cake left over and good coffee. Councilman Dave Turner graciously suggested that they give me a piece of undeserved cake on the premise that I volunteer my opinion. The City Council was unusually well dressed. City Clerk June Lemos was stunning. It was a kind of seasonal return to the rigor of the political arena after City Council vacations and the trips to Japan. They were dressed to the nines, filled with cake and ready to go.
Lots had had happened since the last meeting. While the City Council was vacationing in Scotland and eating sushi in Japan, the Fort Bragg Planning Commission had been rolled, got irate about it, and gone to the press. The people of the city had been dumbfounded as a vulgarly corrupt Hostility House blew past community complaints, intense City Council pressure and a complaint by the Development Department challenging the HH’s use permit. It looked like the end of the line for the shelter, but the social worker elite ducked the punch. Hostility House went home happy after blowing up Planning Commission deliberations with a drop-in Marin lawyer who rode roughshod over the Commission and produced a deal that changed exactly nothing for the homeless or the community. He reduced the complaints of the many into so much wastepaper. Then in short order the city received an immaculately written, superbly reasoned 40-page appeal to the City Council of the Planning Department’s cooked up deal. The email version of the appeal had 43 (!) attachments. Citizen activists were not going to lie down for a trumped up whitewash. They want to meet Robert ‘The Epstein’ Epstein on his own turf (Crazykids), at law. They believe in themselves and their right to self government. Should be interesting because The Epstein also believes in The Epstein.
All of that happened while the council was on vacation. The appeal comes up at the Oct. 3 meeting. The City Council is directly in the headlights. But not this week.
This week was supposed to be a cakewalk.
The consent calendar sailed by like a paper airplane and the council moved on to general business. It was supposed to be so easy, a mere resolution to have the City Manager to polish up the proposed code of civility. Being against civility in general is a hard case to make. Somehow I was maneuvered into taking that position. I am still wondering how it happened.
Government on earth cannot exist without public participation. Every political power from kings to city councils requires that the public be present at official moments as visible sanction of their authority. It would be much simpler for the City Council or any governing board or body to rule by edict from the privacy of their offices, but it would look so bad.
If our City Council acted without the participation of the public, it would be a statement that they don’t need us, don’t work for us, and don’t give a damn — none of which is true. Therefore our elected representatives do the the important policy making of the city at meetings in which the public is invited to listen and make fiercely proscribed comments and remarks.
I don’t oppose civility and in particular not at City Council meetings. I do not think that having a code automatically impinges upon the First Amendment. Unfortunately, at Monday night’s meeting I worried out loud that it would. I was provoked.
On reflection however, I realize that Mayor Lindy Peters is right — the City Council is there to conduct business and it has to have rules.
Codes are sometimes very useful in human affairs. They can be appropriate in a wide range of circumstances. There is the Code of Hammurabi that was so helpful to so many. There is the Journalist's Creed. There is the International Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation. There is the rule of St. Benedict and the Five Pillars of Islam. There is the Cricket Code of Conduct. All are codes. I suppose the City Council will not be harmed by having one.
And yet I advocated from the podium that they ought to reject this code of civility. What, you are no doubt asking, is my problem? I was undone by Simon Smith’s comments before that because it is such a crummy little code. It is the kind of patronizing thing that a too sweet kindergarten teacher would extol in chalk to little ones.
Pay attention
Listen
Be inclusive
Don’t gossip
Show respect
Be agreeable
Apologize
Give constructive criticism
Take responsibility
Tell the truth as you know it.
That’s a code? For what grade level?
I was concerned not because they were suggesting formalizing protocol and striving for a greater harmony of reasoning within our community deliberations. I was annoyed because the things that they demanded in this code of civility fell so far short of what civility really is. Civility is not servility. And neither courtesy nor reasoned dissent is a child’s game. The City Council is an adult place where we are expected to pay attention. Personally, I have never seen anything else.
We do not always have to apologize like a child who cannot be presumed to understand the big adult world. We listen not because it is written up somewhere on a big screen, but because we are Americans with a profound history of participation in democratic processes. The code presumes that we must be restrained from inclinations that none of us have, and given guidance none of us needs.
These are admonitions you would give to a child. I think that parameters of courtesy might be established that are more authentic and adult than this kindergarten list. But Mayor Peters and City Manager Linda Ruffing were all for it as a means of enforcing classroom order. These government types are patronizing without any intention of being so. It is in their DNA.
I kept this view to myself as Linda read the list with nauseating pseudo empathy for those whom she cannot prevent herself from seeing as ignorant folk being instructed in the basics.
My problem with the code of civility was that it seemed to be insinuating what we should think by limiting how we could say what we were saying. I got over it.
But imagine my amazement when a resounding eloquent thundering rejection of the proposed Code of Civility emanated from those who had first proposed it, blasting all expectation and blowing minds like birthday candles. Simon Smith had arisen in wrath.
Simon and I have never been introduced socially but I know that she speaks before the council on occasion. I have noticed that she manages to be both glib and trite simultaneously as some people are ambidextrous. This time she thundered with heartfelt passion.
Simon Smith admitted that when she first heard about the code of civility she had been quite excited and enthusiastic that this unruly and unreliable electorate of ours was at last going to have their collective face slapped up by a little official restraint. Good deal. Then apparently she read the code that they proposed.
WTF?, she mused. Up she went unto the council in a passion of outrage to defend the podium from the Orcs.
I told you, she told the council, I don’t like to waste time and here you are. Frankly it shows a lack of interest. I see that you were not paying any attention when I personally volunteered to provide Fort Bragg a real code of conduct. Don’t you remember that I told you I have been “extensively” involved in drafting codes of conduct for all sorts of agencies or companies or something? A real code ain’t no joke. It conveys power, it puts the right people in charge. It describes in detail what forms of behavior are not acceptable, uses clear examples of unacceptable behaviors and includes a transparent discussion of consequences.
You could hear her savoring the word consequences. Then rising to her finale she told us, Hey people, Heather Hayer and two cops were killed by white supremacists and they did not have a code of civility either.
Off she went like a tiny choo-choo puffing steam.
I would like to dismiss Ms. Smith’s remarks. She will never get to impose penalties or impose sanctions on those she does not agree with, however much she might want to. I guess she gets to do it in her professional work, but it isn’t happening in Fort Bragg.
She can be as angry as she wishes that the City Council fired the City Manager. They did it legally. She can wish until hell freezes over that she can somehow put a stop to all this opposition and debate and argument and upset. We are going to do it anyway. She can try to put us back in the political correctness box but she cannot succeed.
Simon Smith is an apologist and participant in the local Go Party and a partisan of Linda Ruffing. But she is much more than that. She is the Soviet party boss, the commandant of the prison camp. She is the true believer who hides the lust for authority behind contrived sympathy until the party gains control. She is the relentless manipulator for power. She is Lenin or Hitler or Pol Pot in their salad days. She knows what she wants and she knows damn well she is going to have to take it away from you. She is the apostle of political correctness and she knows the power of that phrase as the innocent will never know it.
Simon Smith is what you get when you lose the power to govern yourselves and what do you know? At our own City Council meeting in little Fort Bragg, she is right there waiting.
Democracy dies in darkness