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| “. . . the Albrecht-Gampp combination appear to be clowns by comparison.” |
Marting Brick is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
Marting Brick is
falling down,
My fair lady.
On January 26, 2013, a report appeared
in the Portsmouth Daily (except Monday) Times on bricks falling from the Marting building onto the
property of the American Savings Bank (ASB). The anthropologist and linguist Levi
Strauss hypothesized that one of the reasons humans
developed language was to deceive.
Deception is important in human
activities, especially politics and business. The Portsmouth Daily Times (PDT) is a business
and practices deception, especially since it is a failing business whose days
are numbered.
“Portsmouth boy” reporter Frank Lewis has spun quite a deceptive tale
about Marting bricks. It is deceptive, at least in regard to intentions, as much
in what he left out as what he put in. The following sentence appears
near the end of Lewis’s tale: “The city purchased the
building in May of 2002, and has done nothing with the building, allowing it to
fall into deep disrepair.” This clearly makes it sound as if the city is the
culprit where the Marting building is concerned. The city is not guiltless but is far less
guilty than the Marting Foundation and the mastermind behind the Foundation,
Clayton Johnson.
What Lewis left out of his tale was that the “purchase” of the Marting building was a swindle made
possible by the conniving of two willing tools—then-mayor Greg Bauer and then-city council president Jim Kalb. But the perpetrator and the orchestrator of the Marting swindle was Clayton Johnson, the brains of the Marting Foundation. Having
wrung every dollar it could from the crumbling bricks of the Marting building, the
Marting Foundation then foisted the
building off on the taxpayers of
Portsmouth who paid about five times more for the bricks than they were worth.
In fact, the bricks were not worth anything. They were worst than worthless: they
were a tax liability and a potentially
large expense since the leaking asbestos building would need to be torn down at
the Foundation’s expense.
Is Clayton Johnson mentioned even once by Lewis? No. Not one PDT reporter
or editor has ever criticized Johnson,
and if anyone had he or she would have
been out of a job pronto. But the Johnson era is definitely now over. He’s
retired and spending most of his time in the scalawag heaven of Hilton Head. And
now that Hatcher has turned into a
public benefactor, with a public athletic complex named after him, could his
rapacious career as a developer be drawing to a close?
What Lewis reveals in his Falling Bricks tale is
that we are now living in the beginning of the Gampp-Albrecht era. Gampp is portrayed in Lewis’s tale as the
good guy, concerned not only about the well-being of bank property but also of the good citizens of Portsmouth who might he clobbered by a falling brick. “Yes I know it’s a once in
a million chance that someone could be walking down the alley and a brick could
fall and hit them in the head,” Gampp told Lewis, “but it is there.” He explained further, “So we want to make sure that we don’t have damage caused to our
structure, and we want to be appropriately compensated if something does
happen. But, beyond that, our concern was then, and still is, we don’t want to
risk the safety or health of anyone, and our concern is, that as bricks start
falling out of that building, we don’t want to see anyone get hurt.” Is it possible that Gampp, a banker, is more concerned about people than profits? Or is Lewis’s tale confirmation of Levi Strauss’s
suspicion that language evolved to deceive?
Lewis’s tale is not really about
bricks. You have been deceived if you
think it is. His tale is not about the Marting building, either, not really. It
is about the Municipal Building, or more specifically the land on which the
Municipal Building rests. The last paragraph of Lewis’s tale drags in the the Municipal Building by the eaves. “Meanwhile, the city
remains in a building on property considered by some as the most valuable piece
of property in downtown Portsmouth with no solid plans for where they will
house government offices in the future. All the while, bricks continue to fall
from the Marting’s Fifth Street building, a brick at a time, with still no
remedy in sight.”
The developer
Jeff Albrecht has been lusting for the land under the Municipal Building for at least fifteen years. What Albrecht wants to do is tear
down the Municipal Building, and Gampp is abetting him by hyping the danger of falling
Marting bricks, suggesting by analogy that the Municipal Building is falling down and should be
bulldozed as soon as possible, if not sooner. Intelligent people will not be fooled by the stupid deception. If Marting brick is falling down, so is the IQ of the crooks in control of the
city. I could never have imagined I
would one day look back nostalgically on the Johnson-Hatcher era, but the Albrecht-Gampp combination appear to be clowns by comparison.
