And, Well, That Was That

It was all over in 20 minutes. In the end, everything of relevance was said long before the action kicked off at the City Council meeting on Tuesday night.

The only person who got gavel-banged by Council President Cariddi was an older dude who took his time to thank the Council for "not allowing these people" (and here I'd assume he's talking about people who want to impeach the President) "to spread their hatred". I was half expecting him to tell those dirty hippies to get off his lawn, from the tone of it.

It took longer for them to take roll call and pledge allegiance than to get through the agenda and into Concerns, where Councilor Bloom disabused any "Bush haters" present of the idea of abusing the "right" of open forum (which he later backtracked to a "privilege"). His argument: if we begin opening up the scope of open forum to allow national and international political issues, he asked, "where will it end"?

Ah, the old slippery slope. I'll leave it to the reader to perform their own analysis of that rhetorical technique at the Wikipedia entry for it.

Then the curtain went up on open forum, and the proverbial little child led them. Young Max May read a very short statement saying that he thinks the President should be impeached. He was gone in less time than it takes Jon Lovitz to emote a sandwich ad.

Then a feisty senior named Rosemarie told the City Council that she signed the Buddington/May petition and that she "doesn't think it's fair to have a president that doesnt care about the small people." Earnest, fair, and yet wildly off base. She lost me when it sounded like she was blaming George W. Bush for the churches in town having to close. Wow. We're talking about a man who can be accused of a lot of wacky things, most assuredly, but come on. He's not Satan*.

Then Mr. "I Hate Haters" from the second paragraph gave his impassioned summary of the Standard Right Wing Defense of Administration Policy™, and it was over. The end. Twenty minutes of glorious local cable television.

My initial takeaways on the whole affair:

• The two agenda items were disposed of in five minutes and the correspondence in two. If nobody were there for open forum, the whole meeting would have been done in less time than it takes me to finish a cup of coffee. This is the time that the Council is so zealously protecting? I know some meetings run long, but it really didn't seem like there was a whole lot else going on tonight. Ten minutes of debate on President Bush would have at least made it worth the gas to drive downtown.
  
  
• The Council really missed an opportunity to come off as champions of free speech by putting the resolution up for debate. Instead, they stood firm as guardians of the City's agenda in the face of an unpopular political statement. Fair enough, but you could have gotten style points for the grace to let everybody have their say.
  
  
• Having said that, the Council exercised good judgment in holding open forum and showed no evidence that they would not have allowed Dr. May or Mr. Buddington to speak. No taser guns were fired. And the riot helmets stayed...um, wherever they keep the riot helmets.
  
  
• I was surprised that neither Eric nor Peter did speak, though. I invite either gentleman to leave a comment here explaining the thought process behind the strategy they executed at the meeting. Were they pulling their punches, or was something else going on?

In the end, l'Affaire May/Buddington did rouse the public to engage in a good old-fashioned political debate. Turns out that only some of it was the debate about impeachment. The rest, thanks to the Law of Unintended Consequences, was about the state of Participatory Democracy here on Main Street, USA, 2006. Still pretty ugly, but should live to carry on another day.

* Probably.