Ernest Hemingway famously accepted a challenge to write a short story in six words. He wrote "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
One of the iconic lines of cinema history was Faye Dunaway's admission to Jack Nicholson in Chinatown: "She's my sister and my daughter."
We don't have this kind of conciseness, this surgical incisiveness, this distillation and condensation of form and content, in our current little BP issues. We have to rely on juxtapositions.
Here's what we have: Our Mayor, Noah Jacobs, has oft repeated a phrase he likes. He likes to say "it's more important that it be done right than that it be done quickly." Sometimes when he says this, there seems to be an effort to delay something he seems not to favor, but the sentiment isn't all bad. If you take it out of context, it has a kind of reasonableness and wisdom to it. It's centering. It's more important to do something right than to do it quickly. Yes, I think he's right about that, if the choice is between doing it right and just doing it quickly, and sloppily, and imprecisely, and wrong.
At last week's Commission meeting, there was a misunderstanding about something. The matter was the possibility of a Charter Review Committee. There was some disagreement as to whether we needed one, and further discussion about how such a Committee, if it were formed, would be constituted. The central question at that moment was how many people would be on the Committee, and how would they be chosen.
There was confusion in the discussion. I read the transcript of the conversation among Commissioners, and the Village Attorney, and there was alternating mention of entertaining a vote only on the amendment specifying the number of people on such a Committee, and entertaining a vote on the entire amended Ordinance. It is fair to say that a given person could have thought the vote was for one thing, or for the other.
This ambiguity was not fully realized until after the vote was taken, and the Mayor and Commissioners learned that the amended Ordinance had passed. One of those Commissioners, Roxy Ross, protested, and she asked for a separation of the issues and a revote on the Ordinance by itself. She was one who admitted understanding that only the amendment had been voted on.
The Mayor, in what is his now very characteristic fashion, refused to clarify and revote the issue, and one of his suggestions to Commissioner Ross was that a revote could have no consequence. He suggested that she had voted against the motion taken, and all she could do is vote no on the Ordinance overall, thus adding nothing to the dynamic.
What he failed to consider is that if the Ordinance was voted separately, there would be separate discussion about it. There had been no discussion at all of the content of the Ordinance when the matter was composition of a hypothetical Committee. Separate discussion could have done one of three things. It could have done nothing, and left each Commissioner feeling as he or she did at the outset. It could have changed the minds of Commissioners opposed to the Committee, and perhaps turned a 4-1 vote in favor into a 5-0 vote in favor. (More consensus isn't a bad thing, is it?) Or it could have caused Commissioners who had originally favored the Committee to conclude it was not a good idea after all, resulting in defeat of the proposed Committee instead of acceptance of it. ("Twelve Angry Men?")
But none of that happened, because the Mayor was so delighted to have gotten the conclusion he wanted, that he jettisoned democracy, fairness, and even civility. No one could tell this story better than the Mayor himself told it:
Jacobs: "As it stands we now have to vote on the Ordinance itself, is that correct?"
Attorney Hearn: "No. There was a motion made as I understood to pass the Ordinance, and there was an offer to amend it and accepted by the second."
Jacobs: "So what you are telling me is that the Ordinance passed? Beautiful."
The Mayor himself thought the vote had only been for the composition, but he was so happy that the Attorney "understood" differently, that he quickly seized the chance to declare his Ordinance passed. Fairness, respect, decency, the value in doing things right instead of doing them quickly? Not this time, buddy. As they say in sports, where the only thing that matters is winning, you never take points off the board.
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