Evanjekylls

Paris: About to be born again?

For those unbrainwashed readers who might not know who Scott Rawlings is, he is the envangelical (or “evanjekyll” to use the local pronunciation) pastor of Christ’s Community Church, in Portsmouth, Ohio, and his shtick is the holy-hip-hick. If you want to know why slick glib evangelical preachers are distrusted as much as used car salesmen and lawyers, consider the case of the Reverend Rawlings, and check out his collected wit and wisdom in Hear It Now! and also in his monthly column in the CCC newspaper.

In the May 2007 issue of the Scioto Citizen, the right-wing political-religious newspaper he publishes as an insert to the Christian Citizen USA, and is sending to Scioto County residents at bulk rate through the U.S. Mail, Rawlings joined Chief Police Horner and councilman Marty Mohr in calling for a crackdown on the internet and the “mean-spirited, even evil people [bloggers] who abuse our constitutional rights.” Constitutional rights? Based on the wit and wisdom of Pastor Rawlings in Hear Me Now!, which I quoted in an earlier blog, I doubt very much that he has either the knowledge or intelligence that would enable him to understand the Constitution well enough to lecture anybody about it.

The reason America’s Founding Fathers wanted a separation of church and state when they drew up the Constitution was that they understood from their knowledge of European history and of English ecclesiastical history in particular, the potential threat to human liberty that exists when the church and state are virtually one. When there is an official state religion, those with different beliefs become targets. It doesn’t matter much whether that religion is Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant, or Islamic, because if any group thinks they are God’s chosen people, if any group thinks their opponents are “evil” and agents of the devil, it doesn’t make much difference what else they believe, the results are the same: the loss of liberties and perhaps of life for those who are considered enemies of god and agents of the devil.

The Devil In Massachusetts

Why is Massachusetts the most liberal state in the United States? Because it began as the most intolerant religious colony in America and has been trying to atone for that embarrassing legacy ever since. When religious fundamentalists have complete control of a society, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, they do not hesitate to humiliate, harass, imprison, or behead their opponents. The New England Puritans were the Taliban of their time. For lesser offenses, they put people in stocks. They made adulteresses wear the letter “A” and drunkards the letter “D.”They clipped the ears off and cut out the tongues of those who persisted in believing something different from them. They hanged Quakers who would not leave the colony. Those suspected of witchcraft but who would not confess to being in league with the devil were crushed to death. If you admitted you were in league with the devil and promised you would stop, you were set free. If you were a person of deep conviction and valued truth more than life, and continued to maintain your innocence, you were crushed to death. You became a victim of a witch hunt. A witch hunt is what Horner, Mohr, and our hip hick holy parson are trying to stir up against those “evil” people who dare to write blogs and who dare to come to city council meetings and ask questions the politicians not only don’t want to answer but don’t want to hear.

Progress in western civilization can be measured by the degree to which the stranglehold of religious fanatics on government and public institutions has been broken. One of the great days in American history was when the free-thinking Ben Franklin fled from Boston and headed to Philadelphia. Boston in the early 1700s was still in the grip of Puritanism and controlled by England. Philadelphia, which became known as the City of Brotherly Love, was where the liberal beliefs of the Quakers prevailed. When religious fanatics completely control government the results have been catastrophic. Look at what the faith-based Bush administration has done not only to this country but to the Middle East. Many thousands of deaths, renditions, torture, and at home trashing the Constitution. Look what’s happened to the principle of justice in the U.S. Dept. of Justice, which is infiltrated by graduates of the kooky Pat Robertson’s Regent Law School, whose professed purpose is to “provide Christian leadership to change the world.” Sure, like they are changing Iraq. Monica Goodling, one of Regent’s graduates who was appointed to an important position in the Justice Dept., took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in an attempt to avoid testifying before a congressional committee. Are graduates of Regent U. are going to Christianize the world, by subverting justice?

Rawlings in the May Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen gnashed his teeth over how many people read local blogs. “It is amazing,” he complained, “the number of people who read and often believe what is written . . .” Really! They not only read but they believe what these evil bloggers write? Amazing! Where do they think they are? In America? There is no law against my writing and others reading River Vices. Not yet anyway.

Rawlings in the May Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen rails against Imus in the Morning, but not against Anus in the Morning (Steve Hayes), against Dan Rather but not against Bill O’Reilly, against Katie Couric but not against Ann Coulter. He rails against the “convicted felons” who he claims almost took over the city of Portsmouth, but not against the crooked right-wing politicians, his Bible-thumping, lapel-flag-flaunting ideological cousins, who did take over the executive branch of the U.S. government but whose corruption, greed, and incompetence have already made a number of them, with more to come, “convicted felons.” He also rails against Rosie O’Donnell. If part of his hatred of Rosie O’Donnell is that she’s a lesbian, what is Cheney’s daughter? At least O’Donnell has not made a mockery of God’s law and the laws of creation by unnaturally inseminating herself, or isn’t that the way evangelicals would look at if her father was a Democrat?

Why is it that a right-wing Republican lesbian doesn’t quality for Rawlings’s hate list but Rosie O’Donnell does? The reason is that Christ’s Community Church’s real business is not righteousness but right-wing politics. I don’t watch Couric, so I don’t understand Rawlings’ rage about her or why she is on his hate list. Does she expose her pubic hair in public and shave her head, the way the Bush-backing Britney Spears did? Does she videotape her blow jobs as Paris Hilton did? Incidentally, it appears Paris Hilton is on the verge of being born again. That’s the way celebrity sluts and ex-felons recycle themselves and their careers, by being born again. Like Chuck Colson. In the lawbreaking footsteps of Oliver North, will Paris Hilton hit the lecture circuit, maybe speaking at the CCC and being interviewed in the Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen?

The Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen reflects the views of the radical right of the Ohio Republican Party and of defeated gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell in particular. One of the issues the desperate Blackwell campaign resorted to was accusing his liberal Democratic opponent Ted Strickland and his wife of being homosexuals. The Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen published a cartoon with that message just before last November’s election. And then, in the May issue of Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen, the sanctimonious Rawlings wrote, “Bloggers have written harmful things when they know it to be either partially or totally untrue.” “Partially or totally untrue.” Are the stories Ohio evangelicals and the Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen spread about the Stricklands’ sexual orientation partially or totally true? If so, where is either the total or partial truth of this charge? One of the incriminating circumstances about the Stricklands that Ohio evangelicals whispered about was “They do not have children.” Bob Dole and his wife Elizabeth have been married for thirty-five years but have no children. They have had separate careers, both professionally and politically. Have they been accused of being homosexuals in the Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen? If not, why not? Because they are both conservative Republicans. That two-faced evangelical Christians should condemn anybody sexually is preposterous, given their own track record. Historically, many of these holier-than-thou folks have turned out to be hornier than thou, and greedy to boot.

The O’Falafel Factor

Why doesn’t Rawlings condemn the remarkable number of pious patriot wingnuts who turn out to be horny creeps? I am thinking not only of the evangelical Rev. Ted Haggard with his male prostitute boyfriend and Republican congressman Mark Foley and his passion for pages. I am also thinking of Catholic Bill O’Reilly. A female producer of the O’Reilly Factor show charged him with harassing her by talking frequently about “phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of virginity, and other sexual fantasies.” She accused O’Reilly of having an obsession with falafel (chick peas ground up into a ball) and using it to rouse her sexually. He was accused of telling her, “So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda’ kissing your neck from behind . . . and then I would take the other hand with the falafel thing and I'd just put it on your pussy but you’d have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business . . .” Is this the O’Falafel Factor? The producer’s case against O’Reilly was settled out of court, which presumably cost the Fox network or some insurance company plenty. Never has falafel cost so much. If the falafel ever hits the fan at the CCC, you’ll probably read about it first on some blog.

Speaking of hypocrites, does anyone else remember the pious Republican Billy James Hargis, the Tulsa evangelical and globe trotting anti-Communist crusader, who toured the Free World back in the 1950s and 1960s, with a teen-aged choir known as the All-American Kids? According to Wikipedia, Hargis is considered to be a father of the Religious Right. “Hargis preached continually on the evils of sex education, communism, Catholicism, and liberalism and urged the return of prayer and Bible reading to public schools long before the modern Religious Right.” (Quoted from Wikipedia.) When two of Hargis’s All-American kids got married and confessed to each other on their honeymoon that they had both been sexually seduced as kids by Hargis, it turned out they were not the only kids Hargis had deflowered, and that was the end of Hargis’s big-time operation, though he continued to publish the Christian Crusade Newspaper, which should not to be confused with Rawlings’s Christian Citizen USA: Scioto Citizen. Surely, if Hargis had lived into the age of the internet, he would have denounced bloggers just as he at the same time might have been prowling in chat rooms and on MySpace, preying sexually on teenagers when he was not praying with them. Billy James Hargis II inherited his father’s ministry, and carries it on, the way a son might any family business, a not uncommon inheritance among Republican Evangelical ministries and Mafia families.

The Axe

“I predict the axe will sooner or later fall on the fear mongering bloggers,” Rawlings wrote in the May Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen. “I pray that it will be sooner.” This is not idle axe talk. This is prayerful axe talk. When they are not fantasizing about falafel, religious fanatics fantasize about chopping off the heads of the enemies of God. Beheading is the Muslim fundamentalists’ favorite way of killing infidels, as opposed to the Christians’ burning heretics at the stake. Axing infidels has been going on for a long time. The Taliban in the Middle East consider it such a holy obligation to behead God’s enemies that they will do it even if all they have at hand is a jackknife. In Portsmouth, evangelicals will have to settle for fantasies of cutting off the heads of evil bloggers.

I do not know whether the rumors of Rawling’s extramarital affairs are, to quote his curious phrase, “either partially or totally untrue.” I had not heard those rumors until John Welton mentioned them in his blog, but I have heard the rumors about the cash cow that Christ’s Community Church represents to Rawlings. The Christ’s Community property, owned by Rawlings is officially valued by the County Auditor at $2,348,330, making it a virtual den of equity. Of course, the $2.3 million price tag on the CCC building is chicken feed compared to the kind of real estate that convicted felon televangelist Jim Bakker accumulated. Just recently, I read that Bakker is at it again, with a new TV ministry, minus Tammy and the mascara, but with a new younger wife. He is asking for forgiveness for his sexual and financial misdeeds and praying for a fresh start in the highly competitive salvation business. I also read that James Dale Guckert, alias Jeff Gannon (see photo below), a right-wing blogger who was given passes to attend presidential press conferences, had recently resurfaced in Washington. He participated in National Prayer Day, with bowed head, representing the International Bible Reading Association. I don’t know if he’s bothering to ask for forgiveness. It was not the mainstream media, incidentally, but what Rawlings would consider “evil” “dirt-digging” bloggers who first discovered that in addition to being given access to White House press conferences in order to toss softball questions to the president and press secretary, Gannon was also a $200 an hour prostitute with his own call-boy website: hotmilitarystud.com.

Evangelical Male Prostitute

It was also bloggers who recently outed Eric Linden, a Columbus, Ohio, native and an online pornographer who used to strut his stuff on a now deep-sixed website called BedroomAcrobat.com. In a Garden of Eden scene (see below) from a video shown at the new $27 million dollar Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky, Linden played the part of Adam. A report on the front page of the June Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen had the following ironic headline: “Creation Museum Opening Bigger than Organizers Expected.” Given Linden’s pornographic experience, and the proclivities of some evangelicals, can we be sure no pun was intended?

Adam: Acrobat in Bedroom?

Is Linden evil? Is Gannon evil? Is Haggard evil? Is Mark Foley evil? Is O’Reilly evil? Was Hargis evil? Apparently not by Rawlings double-standard, according to which to even begin to qualify as evil you must be a liberal. The old adage about an evangelical being born every minute needs to be updated: there’s an evangelical born every second.

Like the window of the empty Marting department store, Rawlings latches on to every worthy cause he can find, from vandalized graveyards to the war on drugs. The June Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen focuses on the drug war and includes a photo of Chief of Police Horner. I suggest that any sincere war on drugs in Portsmouth should begin with a public apology from Chief Horner and his son for his son’s drug activities in Portsmouth. What Chief Horner has done instead of apologizing is claim that bloggers have crucified his family by making public not only that his son was convicted for drug activities but that he also has had his conviction expunged from public records. For revelations such as these, which would otherwise be unreported, and for seeking the recall of elected or appointed officials, Horner has condemned bloggers and political activists as “domestic terrorists.” What does Horner or Rawlings have to say about a Portsmouth City Councilman renting the automobile that a young female addict in his employ was arrested in for transporting drugs from Columbus to Portsmouth? So far the city government has been much better at waging war on its critics than on drugs.

The Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen advertises that “Christ’s Community Church exists to Evangelize the Lost, Edify the Saved, Minister to the Needy, and be a Conscience in the Community.” I say that Christ’s Community Church exists to Provide a Comfortable Living for the Rawlings Family, to Support the Right-wing of the Ohio Republican Party, to Brainwash the Ignorant and the Naïve of Southern Ohio, and to Fearmonger about Devils, Death and Damnation. The Christian Citizen USA/ Scioto Citizen sends unsolicited copies through the U.S. Mail to people who never asked for it but who do wonder who is financing this operation. I am one of the growing number of people on their mailing list. I do not send River Vices to anyone; it is there on the internet for those who want to take the trouble to find it. If you have read this far it is because you are a free citizen in a country and in a county where hypocritical religious fanatics and corrupt politicians don’t yet determine what you can read and write on the internet. Don’t take that freedom for granted. Beware of the evangelicals of the type that Rawlings represents. Imagine living in country where the only news you got was from publications like the Christian Citizen USA/Scioto Citizen. Lord help us!

Midsummer Madness

Look Deeper or Deep End?

         It is only the end of May, but it feels like mid-summer madness. The Chamber of Commerce has just awarded the Hatchers the Outstanding Citizen Award, Donnie R. Lee, the pastor who gave the invocation at the Portsmouth City Council meeting last April, has been busted for child pornography, and a computer virus who calls himself Look Deeper spoke at the last council meeting and allied himself with Chief of Police Horner and those other creatures of darkness who are trying their damnedest to remove councilman Bob Mollette from the City Council.

     If you fail to understand this, you fail to understand a fundamental fact of Portsmouth politics: Bob Mollette is the most serious obstacle to the continued control and corruption of this city by the Chamber of Commerce and its Frankenstein creation, the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership. As long as Mollette is on the city council, representing not just the Third Ward but also integrity and efficiency in government, he stands as an embarrassing reminder of what the present city government might be if it had a few more people who could not be bought. Mollette asks questions no other council member would dare ask. He digs deeper into issues and problems than any other council member is willing or able to do. Be sure to visit his website to see what I mean. His opposition to the city’s purchase of the Marting building, which has cost him and his wife Teresa many hours and potentially many thousands of dollars in legal fees, is one of most heroic civic acts of the last quarter of a century. His pressure on the city government to televise city council meetings is the only thing that gives us hope that the city government will stop blaming citizens for creating disturbances when it is members of the city council who create the disturbances by insulting and gaveling down any concerned citizen who dares to criticize any member of city government. At the present time, Bob Mollette is all that stands in the way of the complete control of the city government by the well-heeled con artists who have contempt for representative government and for the intelligence of the average citizen.

     Because Mollette represents all that is best in local government, the over-privileged are determined to drive him from office, an office he was elected to, and then they will appoint someone in his place who will do their bidding, like Howard Baughman, Jerrold Albrecht, and most recently Mike Mearan, who were all first appointed rather than elected to office. The over-privileged are using the media – the newspapers and station WNXT, and specifically disk jockey Steve Hayes – to campaign against Mollette. Since he as a public official is above reproach, attacks against him usually take the form of attacking his wife, Teresa, who is very active in the community and has created an extremely valuable and informative website, Portsmouthcitizens.info, which brings sunshine into the darkest depths of city government. It is Teresa Mollette, who obviously does not know what a woman’s place is, who serves as the surrogate Mollette for those who want to remove her husband from office.

Deja Vu

     The campaign against Bob Mollette should be put in a historical context, for this is not the first time the over-privileged of Portsmouth have found themselves in the unusual position of having someone on city council who dares to act as if he or she is not there to act on their behalf. Back in 1980, there was not one but three councilmen, Andrew Clausing, Mark Price, and Harold Daub, who dared to defy the over-privileged, who had the rest of the city council and the city manager, Barry Feldman, in their pocket. To remove the three councilmen from office, the Portsmouth Daily Times, the local radio stations, and the Chamber of Commerce conducted a campaign of vilification and intimidation that had support from almost every public agency in the community, including the school system. School children were enlisted in the unholy crusade to remove the three from office. The whole community was incited against the three, who were accused of standing maliciously in the way of progress by not agreeing to a proposed mall, which the three councilmen believed was a scam perpetrated against Portsmouth by the over-privileged, who had no intention of allowing any business competitors within city limits. (Just think of Neal Hatcher for the most recent example of the mall scam.) When it comes to the means that were employed – the rallies, the parades, the constant drumbeat in the media – the only parallels to the 1980 campaign against Clausing, Price, and Daub that I can think of are the witch trials in Salem and the Ku Klux Klan rallies that took place in most Southern and some Northern states, including Ohio, in the century following the Civil War. That one of people involved in the 1980 campaign was Jo Ann Aeh, whose husband had ties to the Ku Klux Klan, may be one of the things that brings that organization to mind. If there is one thing the Klan can do it’s organize a rally. Aeh got her start in Portsmouth politics in that 1980 Ku Klux Klan-like campaign and so did Ann Sydnor, both of whom have been on the public payroll ever since.

     One important difference between the 1980 campaign against the three councilmen and this one against Mollette is that the over-privileged no longer have the kind of monopoly over information and images that they once did. The Daily Times, the Community Common, and now the Scioto Voice still listen to their master’s voice, which is to say the Chamber of Commerce, but there are other voices now on other avenues of communication that were undreamed of back in 1980. There are blogs and chat rooms and email exchanges where concerned and, yes, angry citizens can express their views and where thousands of readers can find an alternative to the kiss-ass editorials and slanted stories of local newspapers. Times have changed. The Times is a shadow of its former self, and the radio stations are far less influential politically than they once were. Local telewannabe pastor Scott Rawlings says he is amazed at how many people read blogs and how much they believe what they read. When the alternative is reading and believing the kind of Taliban-like political nonsense Rawlings publishes in his newspaper, is it any surprise that the unbrainwashed would look elsewhere for information and ideas?

Deep End

     It remains to be seen where Look Deeper will end up, but right now he is smack dab in the middle of the madness, flailing and emailing, telephoning and jawboning, appearing at meetings to make disjointed charges of the plots against him and of the defamations of his character by his various enemies, but particularly by the Mollettes, though I don’t think Bob Mollette has ever said a word about him. I have heard that someone, not the Mollettes, has brought charges of harassment against him because of a flood of unwelcome phone calls and emails. I have also heard that Look Deeper is being encouraged in his attacks on the Mollettes by members of the city government. It is possible Look Deeper is getting aid and comfort from city officials, and that he is allying himself with Chief Horner in treating the Mollettes and others as “domestic terrorists.” But Look Deeper’s problems go deeper than that. When I first met him about four years ago, he already seemed to be handicapped by some personality disorder. I am not a psychiatrist, but my undergraduate minor was abnormal psychology and I worked while I was an undergraduate in a public and later in a private mental hospital as a psychiatric aide. I think I was able to see that Look Deeper was someone who had problems relating to people in a social context. He has a desperate need to connect to others, but because his computer skills are so much more developed than his social skills, he preferred to relate to others electronically, through emails and the internet, rather than interpersonally.

     He started a blog and urged people, including me, to read it, but it was a failure because very few found it interesting. Then he turned to chat rooms, where people relate to each other anonymously and often aggressively. He took the name Look Deeper, which was his parasitical capitalizing on Doug Deepe, a legendary name in local blogs. Not having been able to make a name for himself, he took advantage of a name that was well known, implying that he was even better at investigative reporting, looked deeper, than Doug Deepe. Being the squirrelly character that he is, at first he tried to keep his personal identity secret, but he was eventually outed and most people now know who he is, even if they wished they didn’t. People who do him the courtesy of exchanging emails with or talking to him discover that he delusionally hears only what he wants to hear and responds only to what he thinks he heard. He begins by flattering but ends up by infuriating people.

     His account in the long disjointed document he is currently widely circulating electronically of what took place at the May 12, 2007 meeting of the CCG is an example of one of his delusional renditions of reality. “On May 12th, I attended a CCG Meeting. The CCG President Robert Forrey expressed his views that he never wanted the CCG to be on the internet foruras [sic] in the first place. I assume for the very reasons I brought to this CCG meeting.” He assumed! In other words, he assumed I was as bonkers as he was on the subject of Teresa Mollette, who was working the night of the meeting so couldn’t defend herself. What I said at the meeting was that I thought the CCG Roundtable was a very useful forum, and I would hate to see it disappear, but that from the start I had been opposed to the CCG sponsoring any forum. He assumed my statement meant I agreed with him about Teresa Mollette.

     Look Deeper succeeded in disrupting the May 12 meeting by turning it into a compulsive tirade against Teresa Mollette, with whom he was obviously obsessed. Somewhat in exasperation, I told him that Teresa Mollette was not the problem: he was the problem because he was not letting us conduct our meeting. I decided afterwards that as long as I was acting president of the CCG that was the last CCG meeting he was going to disrupt. I am concerned not just about following the agenda of the meeting but about the safety of those who attend the meetings. Look Deeper is so much more disturbed than he was three of four years ago that I wonder what he’s going to be like in another three or four years, or even three or four months.

     Look Deeper has been called Look Creepier and Deep Shit, but I think of him as Deep End, for he is someone who has gone over the edge. How did he get there? He appears to be programmed, like a computer virus, to insinuate himself into social groups, primarily by electronic means, to create havoc. He doesn’t do it maliciously, because he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t see himself as a virus. He sees himself as a seer, as someone who has the spiritual gift of looking deeply into things. He’s the Dalai Lama of Moe’s Forum. But the cruel truth is he’s just another computer nut. Instead of engaging in constructive political action either in Portsmouth or Westerville, he sits on his ass, in another area code, far-far away, complaining about Doug Deepe, the Mollettes, and everyone else who has rejected his delusional take on reality.

     If Bob Mollette, simply by acting rationally and ethically, can drive some people bananas, think of what another councilman like him could add to city government. It begins to help me understand why, back in 1980, Portsmouth went berserk with the caskets and the parading school children and the denunciations from the press and pulpit when it had not one, not two, but three members of council who would not act like rubber stamps. As next November’s election draws near, watch for a flood of dirty tricks against some candidates, like the health hazard citation against Wayne Nichols. Above all, watch for ever more desperate attempts by the over-privileged and their political pawns to drive Bob Mollette from city government, using every weapon at their disposal, including a virus.

For more on Look Deeper, click here.

Rich White Trash Talk

Cat's-paw Catnapping?

As I approach my twentieth year of living in Portsmouth, I thought I had outlived the capacity to be shocked by what those who control this city politically will do to hold on to power, but the story that appeared in the Portsmouth Daily Times (PDT), on primary election day (May 8) about Wayne Nichols, proved I still have something to learn. Wayne Nichols is a candidate for Portsmouth City Council from the Fourth Ward. He is also a recycler, or what used to be called a junk man. His alleged offense is that he has too much recyclable material on his premises, at 2018 8th St. The PDT reports that “The city first received a complaint of trash and vermin on Nichols’ property at 2018 Eighth St., beside Star Cleaners on March 6.”

Nichols' house: Is this a public health hazard?

The PDT article continues, “Inspectors visited Nichols’ house six days later and found recyclables [emphasis added], scrap wood, scrap metal, etc., in Nichols’s yard and on his porch.” Now notice, “the trash and vermin” someone complained to the city has morphed into recyclable material. The point is, one man’s trash is another man’s recyclable material. The Portsmouth Health Dept. subsequently gave Nichols a final deadline for cleaning up his premises. The deadline was May 8, which just happened to be the day of the primary election in which Nichols was a candidate. Is it just coincidental that Nichols had announced his candidacy for the council seat before March 6, when the complaint against him was made? Is it just a coincidence that the PDT published this story on election day, even though it had not reached Nichols to get his side of the story? Is it unfair to suspect that the PDT published this story on election day because it knows if it is going to continue good relations with the Chamber of Commerce and the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership it better continue to find ways to show it is grateful? (Remember what the Chamber of Commerce did when Rick Greene, a former editor of the PDT, did not toe the line?) What better way to show gratefulness than sabotaging whatever chance Nichols might have had of being elected than portraying him as the “White Trash Candidate.” Is it just a coincidence that, in unusual display of judicial activism, city health official Peggy Burton determined that Nichols’s last request for more time was an act of defiance? Is it unfair to suspect that a city official, such as a health inspector, especially in Portsmouth, might be acting politically in carrying out his or her responsibilities? Is it just a coincidence that the elderly councilman Nichols is running against is Jerrold Albrecht, who was appointed, not elected, to Portsmouth City Council, and who has been a cat's-paw for those who control the city, the same people who will do anything to see that he stays on the council?

Typical Hatcher property

Like Mayor Kalb, councilman Albrecht appears at times to take catnaps during council meetings. So, it is not surprising that Albrecht, waking up, occasionally appears confused about which way to vote, but his buddy councilman Mohr helpfully reminds him of how he is supposed to vote on any given issue. Because Albrecht is of advanced age, his chances of finishing a four-year term on council are probably less than fifty-fifty, although health experts say taking naps during the day is a good way to achieve longevity, so maybe the odds of him finishing a term are better than fifty-fifty. While no one would wish Mr. Albrecht to become incapacitated, the powers-that-be will be quite ready with another candidate for the city council to appoint as his replacement.

I am not taking a position on whether Nichols should or should not be on city council. I am not saying I would like to have him as a neighbor. I am saying he has every right to run for city council, but it appears the city and the PDT are working together to see that he doesn’t get elected. Nichols’ most serious offense, I believe, is not his procrastination in cleaning up his premises but rather his attending city council meetings and speaking up in those periods set aside for citizens to address the city council, periods that councilman Mohr has tried to restrict and do away with. Though he is disabled, a veteran, a homeowner, and someone concerned about the city, Nichols, in addition to being cast as “The White Trash Candidate,” probably qualifies as one of those “domestic terrorists” Police Chief Horner has warned against. And what is the fine for Nichols’ offense, which was serious enough to make the front page of the PDT? $25! That’s less than City Council President Howard Baughman was fined by the state for election violations. (Baughman, it should be remembered, like Albrecht, and like our First Ward councilman Mike Mearan, was originally appointed to the city council. That’s how some of our worst council members first get their foot in city council chambers, by being appointed by the rest of the city council, some of whom themselves were originally appointees. Appointed public officials are very prolific and reproduce like cockroaches. It’s a vicious cycle and it will probably continue until the current four-year term for council members is reduced to two.

Why was Nichols cited when Portsmouth has so many much worse houses that could be cited by the Health Dept. Most of the property Neal Hatcher acquires becomes condemnable if it already isn’t when he acquires it, and it just sits for years getting worse. It makes you wonder why Nichols gets a deadline of election day to clean up his property while those violators Bob Mollette has called the city’s attention to are ignored.

One of many houses Mollette asked action on

I think what this whole Nichols’ business amounts to is no more than Rich White Trash Talk on the part of the city and PDT.

SOGP: IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!

The birth of the SOGP, 1991

The SOGP has been in the news lately. An article appeared in the Portsmouth Daily Times (21 April 2007), in which chairman C.B. Hermann said SOGP members must work “behind the scenes” and “must maintain secrecy at times because of the nature of business they conduct.” Hermann added, the SOGP “worked behind the scenes [emphasis added] to foster the premise that if we could bring jobs to the area, it would help the local economy.” Andy Glockner of Glockner Motors put it less elegantly, “We [SOGP] just want to be recognized as the back office that’s here for economic development to support the chamber, the murals and any other entity in a way to create the financing or be the front person.” Not a lawyer or a PR person, Glockner unintentionally spilled the beans. “Back office” and “front person” says all that needs to be said about how the SOGP operates – in secret and as a front. It is a private corporation, yet from its back room offices in the publicly funded Welcome Center, just one of its pork projects, the SOGP meets in secret and makes decisions that determine what happens in Portsmouth, economically and politically.

The kind of jobs the SOGP are after are not industrial jobs. Herrmann said, “it’s doubtful a Honda or Toyota plant will come to the area. Therefore, SOGP concentrates on attracting smaller businesses.” In response to Hermann’s comment, Robert Madison wrote a letter-to-the-editor, saying, “In reviewing the history of the organization [SOGP], it looks like it started with the best of intentions. But maybe through the years it has lost its mission. Instead of selling water, maybe it’s time to think bigger and go for the Honda or Toyota plant and bring real jobs to Scioto County.” Madison’s letter asks an extremely important question about the Portsmouth area, maybe the single most important question: Why has Portsmouth been in the economic doldrums for so long?

Whatever may have been the case with its predecessor, the Portsmouth Area Community Improvement Corporation, the SGOP did not start with the best, but with the worst of intentions. Considering who was behind it, how could it have been otherwise? What Johnson and his crowd created in the SOGP is not just a glorified Chamber of Commerce, it is a transmogrified Chamber of Commerce, a monster that rules Scioto County the way Frankenstein did Transylvania. The SOGP has, working “behind the scenes,” in Hermann’s phrase, debased local government by making a mockery of competition between the two main political parties. You can’t tell the Democratic whores from the Republican whores. Local government has become the preserve of the incompetent, the criminally inclined, the near comatose, and the unemployables (it is the wives of the unemployables who hold down the jobs, in the public sector).

Those in control of the SOGP, like Clayton Johnson and his buddy Neil Hatcher, have made fortunes in Portsmouth not in spite but because of the economic doldrums the city has been in for the last half century. The worse things are in Portsmouth, the better it is for the SOGP, because they control most of the pork that comes into our economically depressed area in the form of government grants and loans. They not only control the pork, they also control local government and are able, with the collusion of politicians who can be bought for the price of a John Street whore, to monopolize and manipulate whatever local business opportunities there are. Because there is no real competition for the Johnsons and the Hatchers, they can’t lose. Imagine a team that has no opponents. They can really rack up the points. Neil Hatcher should have lost his shirt in his dumb plan to build a huge shopping mall on the site of the demolished Selby factory, and he would have lost his shirt if the game he was playing in was not only not just fixed but in which there was no opposing team. The city will bail Hatcher out by buying his virtually worthless mall property at his price, to build a sport’s complex, just as the city bought the worthless Marting’s building, at Clayton Johnson’s price, to convert to a city hall.

There are Community Improvement Corporations (CICs) all over Ohio. That other CICs may have turned into the Frankenstein monster that the SOGP has is quite possible. But the few that I have looked into, such as the one in Chillicothe, do not appear to be scam operations. To quote from earlier River Vices postings, “It has happened gradually and unobtrusively, without most people being aware of it, but over the last half century, important functions of Portsmouth local government have been privatized. The result is that we now have a powerful shadow government, the origin of which can be traced back to 1964. In March 1964, the Portsmouth City Council made a momentous decision. In a resolution, numbered unlucky #13, the council turned much of the economic control of the city over to a private ‘non-profit’ corporation named the Portsmouth Area Community Improvement Corporation (PACIC). In Resolution #13, the Portsmouth City Council granted PACIC an extraordinarily broad mandate. The extraordinary mandate of this private corporation, consisting mainly of businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, was no less than ‘To promote the health, safety, morals and general welfare of the inhabitants of the community . . .’ In the following year, 1965, the Ohio state legislature passed a law allowing municipalities to designate community improvement corporations, such as PACIC, as their agent. As if PACIC hadn’t already been granted extraordinary power in Resolution #13, the Portsmouth City Council passed another resolution (#30), designating PACIC as the city’s official agent, or legal representative. PACIC eventually morphed into the SOGP.”

They are trying to stifle and intimidate critics, but over the years a handful of courageous souls have stood up to the SOGP and its predecessor. There was the “Unbribed Trio” of Clausing, Price, and Daub, back in 1980. Prof. Larry Essman told me he first got involved in the reform movement as early as 1974 when he was Asst. Auditor and realized the PACIC was not interested in having Toyota or anyone else build in the Portsmouth area. I have heard the same story from others, such as Rich Noel, who discovered as a result of involvement in area development discussions that the PACIC and SOGP were always more interested in excluding than attracting new businesses. New businesses and industries were the last thing they wanted because that meant competition. Glockner did not want competitors in vehicles, Marting’s did not want competition in retail sales. Councilman Bob Mollette, the only city official in the present government truly representing the citizens, wrote in a letter to city council that this is an unacceptable situation. “I believe the relationship with the SOGP, if considered an authorized agency that represents our city, must be accountable and transparent.”

Through their political puppets, the SOGP is trying its damnedest to drive Mollette from city council as the PACIC drove out Clausing, Price, and Daub back in 1980. Through their political puppets, the SOGP is trying to stop citizens from speaking at city council meetings, labeling them as Domestic Terrorists. As for transparency and accountability, sunshine and democracy, those are not on the bipartisan Frankenstein SOGP’s agenda.

Imus, Anus, and Janus

Anus in the Morning

In New York, at WFAN, they had Imus in the Morning. In Portsmouth, at WNXT, we’ve got Anus in the Morning. Imus, the aging wannabe rapper, is now paying for his potty mouth. Anus in the Morning, the aging wannabe rock star, continues to defecate through his. I’ve heard and read over the years about him, and how controversial he is, but I’ve actually only listened to him once. Somebody who had been in the business told me shock jocks have to be megalomaniacs. A shock jock, according to one online source, is “a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disk jockey) who attracts attention using humor that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive.” Imus used “nappy-headed hos” to describe the Rutgers ladies basketball team, and a significant number of Americans heard about it, were offended by it, and Imus is history.

But Anus in the Morning, a minor-league more muted Imus, is still with us, because advertisers on his show, like SOMC, unlike the advertisers on Imus in the Morning, do not have to worry about a backlash. This after all is Portsmouth. What advertiser is going to raise hell if Anus is occasionally offensive or spouting political opinions in the morning? He is doing his job, which is to see that things don’t change in Portsmouth, that the same old crowd gets away with the same old shit, and that Portsmouth politics remain the same-old sham. Covering for those who run Portsmouth and criticizing “domestic terrorists” in the local reform movement are among Anus’s responsibilities, which is why he periodically attacks the most serious threat to the political status quo, Ward Three councilman Bob Mollette. Just as there are franchise players on sports teams, somebody you can build an organization around, Mollette is a franchise player in local politics: he is someone you could build an honest government around, so naturally Anus in the Morning is going to try to discredit him. One way he tries to discredit Mollette is by criticizing his public service blog. Compare Mollette’s blog with Anus in the Morning’s narcissistic MySpace site and you will get an idea of the totally different universes they live in. In contrast to Mollette, who is truly community oriented, Anus in the Morning – with his hobbies and his music and his online friends and his dogs – is so into himself, so wrapped up in himself, so, like, totally in touch with himself, that he is in constant danger of disappearing up his own you know what.

I mentioned earlier that I listened only once to Anus in the Morning. That was the morning of October 16, 2006, which was the opening of the U.S. Grant Bridge, a bridge that cost many millions more than it was supposed to and because of delays took longer to build than the Golden Gate Bridge. Not wanting to miss the historic opening of the bridge, but figuring that it too might have fallen behind schedule, I tuned in to WNXT on the morning of October 16 to see if I could get an update. Maybe the newsman at WNXT would be providing coverage. What I got instead was Anus in the Morning. If memory serves me, he was broadcasting from the Ramada Inn with his female sidekick – is Misty her name? She was broadcasting from inside while Anus was outside, close to the inaction. Then Anus returned inside, bursting with so much joie de vivre that he was about as much fun as a one-man River Day Parade. Misty asked what was going on outside, and Anus replied, as best I can recall, that “Bob Huff was outside giving people the finger.” Misty was at a loss for words. Or was Misty just confused and not sure what she had just heard? I know I wasn’t sure I heard it right.

Huff, waving or giving the finger?

Without knowing exactly who Bob Huff was, I knew he was part of the Establishment. Somebody took a picture of Huff that morning, a white-haired gent smiling like a politician and waving his left hand at whoever was passing by. He wasn’t giving anyone the finger in the photo, but it would have been so easy for him to just turn his hand over and lift that finger. I learned later Huff was the head of the Chamber of Commerce. So there was Anus on this momentous day of Portsmouth’s history, the day when some hoped Portsmouth’s economic revival was about to begin, a day when schoolchildren and almost every dignitary in town was preparing to walk across the bridge, and there was Anus telling Misty and WNXT’s listeners that the head of the Chamber of Commerce was outside giving people the finger.

An obscene pagan gesture

Those listeners familiar with Anus’s repartee may have understood right away that he was just kidding. Huff wasn’t really giving citizens the bird. It was just Anus’s way of adding a little irreverent levity to the proceedings. You never know what Anus would say next. Goosing up the program, so to speak. “It was the reason many listeners tuned in,” Weston Kosova wrote about Don Imus in Newsweek. “What was he going to say next?” How are you going to keep your listeners tuned in, especially in the morning, for god’s sake, if some of those listeners are cool cats, like Anus, if you don’t keep the wisecracks coming, if you don’t keep them wondering what he's going to say next? Hell, the last thing Anus wants anyone to think when they tune in to WNXT is that they were listening to Zeke Mullins. Zeke had never played with “an old time rock and roll band called The TroubleMakers.” Zeke had never lived “in a secluded and most beautiful area of the Wayne National Forest in Southern Ohio.” I am quoting from Anus’s MySpace website. Zeke Mullins wouldn’t have a MySpace website in a million years.

Maybe Huff was not giving people the finger and maybe Anus never said he was. Maybe . . . But wait a second. If you have any consciousness you can still call your own, or if your unconscious is not totally brain dead, there’s probably more in this finger business than meets the eye. Holding up the middle finger is an ancient obscene gesture, substituting for the erect penis, and was used widely as an insult in pagan cultures. Wikipedia says giving the finger is shorthand for “Fuck you!” It is especially insulting to a male, because there is only one way for a male to be fucked – unnaturally – so it is the ultimate insult, the ultimate degradation, for a male, to be given the finger because a fucked male is no better than a female. Males who have never been in combat, or played football, need to find ways to prove their manhood, and giving the finger makes them feel like one of the guys. Witness the callow George W. Bush giving the finger in the following YouTube clip. Even though he loves to dress in camouflage fatigues, rub elbows with fighting men, and go quail hunting, Vice President Cheney is not willing or able to go as far as Dubya and give the finger. Never having served in the military, not even in the National Guard, as Dubya has, Cheney, the father of an artificially inseminated lesbian daughter, has to settle for telling Senator Leahy of Vermont, on the Senate floor, “Go fuck yourself!” That’s not quite the same thing, is it, as “Fuck you!”? No, “Go fuck yourself” is more like artificial insemination.

But isn’t that what the “Fuck you!” crew in Washington is doing, like their two-bit counterparts in Portsmouth? Aren’t they always giving the citizens the finger? Aren’t our local Castrati giving the people the finger and saying “Fuck you” when they filch $2 million from the city for an empty department store and then won’t give the money back when the sale is ruled illegal? Aren’t our local Castrati giving the people the finger and saying “Fuck you” when they appoint to the City Council a local lawyer with a reputation for involvement with prostitutes and drugs? Aren’t the Castrati making that finger even more obscene whey they get that same councilman appointed chair of a committee that is going to decide where the new city building will be, in spite of the fact that that same councilman was and remained the lawyer for the absentee landlord whose property the Building Committee ending up recommending as the site for the new city building? Aren’t our local Castrati giving the people the finger and saying “Fuck you” when they appoint the wife of a former disgraced mayor to run that inglorious Porksmouth pork project known as the Welcome Center, a job for which she is about as qualified as her husband had been to be mayor, before he was recalled from office by a 2 to 1 margin? I could give other examples, but I need to move on to my final point.

On April 14, Anus in the Morning attempted to cover his ass when he, as the front page of the Daily Times put it, “weighed in on Imus firing.” Weighed in? That such an intellectual lightweight could weigh in on anything would be news. “I think it will be like the Janet Jackson incident was for television,” Anus told the reporter interviewing him, referring to the Imus mess. No, Anus, you don’t want to go there, you cluck, because by using Janet Jackson, who is a breast baring black woman as your example, you are implying that what Imus said is true: black women are “hos.” But Anus was only just beginning to show what a ninny he is. Because he then goes on to predict in the interview that Imus would not be fired. Waxing indignant, he gets in even deeper, saying Imus “should have been fired a long time ago,” but he does not fail to point out, name-dropper that he is, that he had once met Imus way back when. What an ass-kissing encounter that must have been. Some of the hundreds of politicians, authors, and entertainers who appeared on Imus's show to further their career, were quick to criticize or denounce him once he was fired by CBS and NBC.

Janus

The highlight of the Daily Times interview is this quote by Anus in the Morning: “Imus didn’t attack political figures. He attacked a whole team of children actually.” Having hung around MySpace for as long as he has, Anus appears to have trouble distinguishing children from young adults. These are not children. They are young women. They are in college, not grade school. They are old enough to vote and to serve in the military. But Anus of course wants to hold himself up as a defender of helpless children, as he holds himself up as the St. Francis of abandoned dogs on his MySpace website. Children are sometimes stalked on MySpace by sexual predators. If Anus wants to defend anyone, defend those children, get outraged about them, not 18 to 21 year-old young women who can handle themselves without his patronizing assistance. Anus closes the interview by admitting he sometimes makes “comments” about political figures, including Portsmouth City Council. Oh, really? “But I don’t do it to be mean-spirited as a way to take somebody out, " he says. "I’ve never meant to harm anyone.” No, of course not. Anus is not like Imus, you see. Anus is not now nor ever has been a shock jock. Anus is like the Roman god Janus. He is two-faced.

If you should happen to hear a newscaster on WNXT say at noon, “It has been three hours since Anus in the Morning was last seen. He was sitting right here at WNXT, doing his show, when he disappeared, without a trace. It is a complete mystery and even Misty, who was sitting right next to him, is mystified. Where did he go to? What is going to happen to those dogs at his forest retreat? Chief Horner has not ruled out the possibility that domestic terrorists had something to do with his disappearance.” If you should happened to hear that newscast, do not exclude the possibility that what actually happened was that Anus fucked himself and disappeared up you know where.

The Castrati

City Solicitor sitting on his ass, as usual

H. L. Mencken was an acerbic newspaper reporter (he wrote for the Baltimore Sun); a lexicographer (he created a dictionary); and a neologist (he made up words, as I just did with neologist). Baltimore not being too far from Washington, D.C., Mencken occasionally turned his wit and wisdom on the boobs in Washington.

Recent posts by John Welton on David “I get no respect” Malone and on Mike “I’m addicted to pussy” Mearan reminded me what a collection of characters we have in the Portsmouth city government and how much like a Mencken Welton has been in exposing not only the corruption but also the comic opera quality of local politics. Imagine, if you will, that one of the television networks creates a new series called The Castrati, now that The Sopranos is about call it quits, and imagine it being stocked with the kind of boobs we are all too familiar with in Portsmouth.

The big cheese on The Castrati would be an unelected official, the Chief of Police, whose War on Drugs would be such a flop that his own son would be dealing drugs in a restaurant directly across the street from the police station. And a chop-shop about a half mile away from the police station would be dealing oxycontin on the side without the Chief having a clue. Since the Chief’s War on Drugs is not going well, the Chief, following the lead from higher ups in the federal government, would declare war on domestic terrorists, by which he means local citizen activists, many of them elderly, who wage successful campaigns to recall incompetent and corrupt city officials, and who write blogs critical of those incompetent and corrupt city officials.

The City Solicitor

Giving the city a black eye

Abetting the Chief, and anyone else in city government who wants to pull a fast one, is the City Solicitor, the city slicker on The Castrati. If some ex-felon or unemployed dummy wants to run for city council, even though he doesn’t live in the ward he wants to run in, and even though he wants to run as a write-in and skip the bother of running a campaign, the City Solicitor will be there to offer one of his off-the-wall interpretations of the city charter. The motto that sits on his desk, which he is seldom behind, is not “The Buck Stops Here” but rather “Anything is Possible.” When the city faces legal action, the City Solicitor hires a real lawyer from Cincinnati or Columbus, because being city solicitor is only a part-time job, paying only $50,000 a year, and he has other more important things to attend to, like his digs in sacred Indian burial sites, or like his sitting on his ass in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Sitting on his ass is something he gets a lot of practice at the other 364 days of the year. In fact, there is no other character on The Castrati who is better at sitting on his ass than the City Solicitor, though there are those who would argue that the City Auditor is not far behind when it comes to sitting on his behind.

The Philandering Preacher

The City Clerk

The City Clerk is a lifer, having found employment in city government as a young virgin, and has been at it ever since, doing everything she can to frustrate those citizens looking for answers to questions and mutilating petitions that would put people and issues on the ballot that her employers don’t approve of. It is like she practices the clitoral circumcision of democracy. Her aversion to the Sunshine Laws is so strong that she often sits in her office in the dark, except when the city council gets together before city council meetings to conduct important business. She is all work and no play, except on Halloween when she puts on a white hood and goes trick or treating.

The Good Samaritan

Of those characters on The Castrati, perhaps the most colorful is the lawyer who represents the First Ward and who is known as The Good Samaritan. Among drug-addicted prostitutes in Portsmouth, The Good Samaritan is viewed as a saint. He is always there to give a gal a lift in his stretch limousine and find them a place to sleep or rent them a sub-compact in a family emergency. If the mother of a drug-addicted prostitute gets ill, you can be sure the Good Samaritan will be there with a rented Aveo with unlimited mileage and enough oxycontin to see her through her ordeal. But his good works for addicted prostitutes don’t stop there. On Thanksgiving he distributes Papa John Street Pizza, with all the toppings, to all the poor prostitutes in Portsmouth.

President of City Council

Council President entering 2300-year-old dept. store

The President of the city council on The Castrati, who, when he is not committing campaign violations, warns unwelcome visitors to council meetings that they must not criticize any city official by name or they will be ejected from the chambers by the Chief of Police. Having flunked out of college, the President of the City Council has more education than anyone else on the council and he is determined to maintain draconian decorum and parliamentary order, being unaware (because he watches American Idol, not PBS) that members of the British House of Commons call each other names and boo and hiss loudly when they don’t like what someone who has the floor might be saying. “A little learning is a dangerous thing” is what needs to remembered where the President of Council is concerned. He is like the future El Presidente in some banana republic, a furniture salesman who dreams of being the Top Banana some day.

The President’s right-hand man, the Vice President of City Council, is the Hired Goon of City Government. His role is to try to create a riot at council meetings so the Chief of Police can declare a state of emergency and arrest everybody who comes to council meetings as domestic terrorists.

His Honor the Clueless Mayor

The clueless Mayor in Kentucky

The Top Banana on The Castrati is the clueless Mayor. Like the Philandering Preacher from Ward Two, the Mayor is concerned above all that he is not shown proper respect. He spends much of his time brooding over not driving the kind of prestigious city vehicle and not being paid the kind of salary a man in his position should be rewarded with. The Mayor suffered from this same lack of respect for years when he worked as a clerk at a local supermarket. Restocking shelves and punching a cash register was as much responsibility as the supermarket ever dared entrust him with. The supermarket, of course, being in the private sector, is prejudiced against employees of limited intelligence and ability. Since those same prejudices do not exist in city government, the Mayor is understandably miffed about being discrminated against.

The 2300-Year-Old Department Store

The ongoing plot line of The Castrati is to get the city government to move its offices to an empty department store that is estimated to be 2300 years old and that has been empty for about 130 years. The City Solicitor, an expert on pre-Columbian civilizations, believes the department store was originally a temple where young virgins were sacrificed to the God of Lotteries, a god the Mayor reportedly worships in Kentucky. The City Solicitor speculates that the ancient civilization disappeared after it ran out of virgins. The City Solicitor assures critics of the building that neither menstrual blood nor asbestos is any longer a problem in the building.

The two men who run Portsmouth and control the City Council, The Lawyer and The Developer, sold the ancient structure to the city for 2$ million. When that sale was declared illegal by the courts, The Lawyer refused to give the $2 million he had cheated the city out of, saying he would not give the money back because he didn’t trust the city government do the right thing with it. The only right thing to do with the money, The Laywer said, was use it to convert the 2300-year-old department store to a city hall. The Sopranos is about to go off the air, but The Castrati has a long run ahead of it, if only we can get the city government to allow it to be televised so we can see what is going to happen to The 2300-Year-Old Department Store.

The Goon and the Good Samaritan

The Goon

Last night’s City Council meeting was one for the books. A resident of the Sixth Ward reportedly told councilman Marty Mohr afterwards that he was an embarrassment to the ward. Mohr is not only an embarrassment to the Sixth Ward, he is an embarrassment to the city. He is not only an embarrassment to the Sixth Ward and the city, he is an embarrassment, or should be, to his family. He is not only an embarrassment to the Sixth Ward, to the city, and to his family, he is an embarrassment to our species. He is downright pre-hominid. He is a goon. The primary meaning of goon is “a stupid person.” But it is the secondary meaning of goon that particularly applies: “a man hired to terrorize or intimidate opponents.” That is Mohr’s role on the city council: to intimidate opponents by accusing them of being terrorists, to snarl and sneer at them, to call them crap. At the close of last night’s meeting, he tried his best to insult, intimidate, and humiliate Bob Mollette, who represents a higher form of hominid, a civilized, respectful male who doesn’t need to prove his manhood by snarling and gnashing his teeth or having sex with some woman other than his wife. In terms of evolution, Mollette is about 250,000 years beyond Mohr. When the minutes of last night’s meeting are printed, Mollette’s report to the council – informed, respectful, and conciliatory – should be compared with Mohr’s attempt to provoke Mollette and the citizens in attendance into getting down to his grunt level and exchanging insults and provoking physical violence. He might have succeeded in inciting the audience, which was furious at his provocative performance, but fortunately Mollette set an example of civilized behavior. Had Mollette blown his top, I think some citizens might have too. And then chief Horner would have been like a pig in shit, dealing with these “domestic terrorists.” He would like nothing better than throw some of them in the hoosegow.

Up until Mohr’s failed effort to start a riot, the meeting had been unusually peaceful and collegial. It seemed people were determined to avoid the animosity of the previous meeting. Compliments and sweetness flowed like sugar at John Simon’s Sorghum Festival. The most touching moment was when an elderly gentleman addressed the council and said that in the forty-six years he and his wife had lived in the Third Ward he had never known a councilman as helpful, decent, and considerate as Bob Mollette. But it was not only Bob Mollette who was praised. Praise was heaped by others on Kevin Johnson, on the Portsmouth Daily Times, and especially on First Ward councilman Mike Mearan, who has earned a reputation as Portsmouth’s Good Samaritan. When there are some underprivileged kids in need of the price of admission or some attractive young ladies needing a sub-compact to visit their sick mothers, know that Mike is there to lend a helping hand. A rumor is circulating about Mearan being pulled over by police in Knoxville, who found drugs in his car. Mike handled that rumor well at the meeting by pointing out, if I heard him correctly, without his ever mentioning drugs, that he had not been in Tennessee since the state fair last year. Instead of wrapping himself in the flag, as those cornered politicians in Washington are doing, Mike wore a bright red Ohio State tee shirt to the meeting. Go Bucks!

Mike Mearan: Good Samaritan

Unfortunately for Mearan, Marty Mohr came to his defense in his tirade at the end of the meeting, and if anybody in the council chamber or listening on the radio hadn’t known that it was Mearan who was the councilman rumored to have been found with drugs in Tennessee, then they sure did after Mohr got through defending him. By publicly defending, or fingering, Mearan as the councilman who is subject of the drug rumors, Mohr was raising the stakes. Prove it! That was Mohr’s sneering challenge to those who are spreading the rumor about Mearan being stopped for drugs. Now there are those who may take up Mohr’s challenge and prove Mearan was found in possession of drugs, all because Mohr had publicized the rumor. But to revise Claude Raines’ famous line in the movie Casablanca, “I am shocked, shocked to hear Mike Mearan’s name associated with drugs!” Recall that this is the same Mike Mearan who hired Heather Hren to be the stenographer for the Building Committee, the same Mike Mearan who rented a subcompact in which Heather Wren was arrested for transporting Oxycontin from Columbus to Portsmouth, the same Mike Mearan who said he was sure Heather Wren did not take drugs after she had been busted for possession of drugs, the same Mike Mearan who was photographed with Heather Wren at their outing to the Fair in Lucasville after she had been busted, the same Mike Mearan who acted shocked shocked after Heather Hren was arrested for purse snatching and admitted that she was a drug addict. To hear the Good Samaritan Mearan’s side of the story, Heather Hren was just another one of the many young women he has helped out over the years, but one who proved unworthy of his trust and kindness.

The Goon and the Good Samaritan are just two of the cast of characters who make up our incredibly colorful city government. If only we had a Damon Runyon or Meredith Wilson to create a Portsmouth version of Guys and Dolls or The Music Man, if only someone would write a play or musical featuring our Keystone Cop, our Doofus Mayor, our Smarmy Council President, our Sleazy City Solicitor, our Ku Klux City Clerk. The only other city that could possibly compete with us for crooked and incompetent politicians is Washington D.C. How is the Bush Administration ever going to make it through another year and a half? Hell, how is the City Council going to make it through to next November? If somebody doesn’t muzzle the goon, or put a damper on the Good Samaritan, there’s going to be a lot more trouble in our drug-ridden River City.

"I am shocked, shocked to hear Mearan’s name associated with drugs."

Monday Night Fights

Painting by George Bellows

“It may have been Monday,” Jeff Barron wrote in the Daily Times (3-13-07), “but Portsmouth City Council staged its version of Friday Night Fights last night.” For those of you who might not be fight fans, ESPN2 televises Tuesday Night, Wednesday Night, and Friday Night Fights. In Portsmouth, it’s a little different: the Fights, billed as City Council meetings, take place the second and fourth Monday of each month, and they don’t get televised. In addressing the council members about their unprofessional behavior at the 3-12-07 meeting, Eileen Perry told them an unpleasant truth, which is that the reason council meetings are not on television is that the council probably does not want them on television.

Why doesn’t the Portsmouth city government want the council meetings on television? Why does the city government continue to drag its feet when many cities in Ohio, some much smaller than Portsmouth, have been uninterruptedly televising city council meetings for years? Waverly, with a population of only 4,433, has been televising their council meetings for so long that somebody I spoke to in the Waverly mayor’s office said she had lost track of the years. Ironton, with half of Portsmouth’s population, televises their council meetings. Chillicothe, a city with a population about the same as Portsmouth’s, televises their council meetings on two channels. Two to Portsmouth’s none!

So how come Portsmouth does not televise its council meetings? Older citizens claim they were televised way back when. But why no longer? How come Waverly, Ironton, Chillicothe and hundreds of other Ohio communities can televise their council meetings but Portsmouth can’t? A Time-Warner official in northern Ohio told me it’s not hard to televise meetings and it’s done all the time. There is an exception – Portsmouth.

Eileen Perry’s explanation of why they are not televised is one I would agree with: the meetings are probably not televised because the city government does not want them televised. The Portsmouth city government prefers to operate in the dark, out of the public’s eye. The council meetings are broadcast on a local radio station, but listeners know how difficult it sometime is to hear on that transmission. For example, during the 3-12-07 meeting, I am told, technical difficulties rendered the first part of the broadcast unintelligible.

One of the things the Portsmouth city government does not want the public to hear or see is how five or six members of city government gang up on the one city council member who has no strings attached to him, the one city council member who is not a puppet: I refer, of course, to Bob Mollette, who represents the Third Ward. Mollette is ganged up on because, among other reasons, he has waged a tireless campaign for openness in government. As part of that campaign, he has called more than once for televised council meetings. In a letter to the City Council (2-27-06), Mollette urged the city to televise council meetings to citizens on a tape-delay. The Council Minutes (1-10-05) state that Councilman Mollette had “reported having spoken with Mr. Gangly with Adelphia and was told by him that as far as getting Council meetings on cable that could be done if he is supplied with a VHS tape and would play it as many times Council deems. He said he felt this to be an idea for consideration in order to reach more people.”

I talked recently to Mollette, who told me Adelphia Cable had been ready and willing to participate in this exercise of open government, at no cost to the city, but the city found ways to make it not happen. On one occasion, Adelphia was fifteen minutes away from broadcasting a taped meeting when it was canceled. Mollette suspected Adelphia got a call from the powers-that-be to cancel the telecast. Time-Warner has since replaced Adelphia, and Time-Warner is willing and able to televise the meetings, but Time-Warner will discover, if it hasn’t already, that Portsmouth is not like other Ohio cities. Portsmouth discourages, not facilitates, televised council meetings. Mollette told me a modest sum was appropriated for television taping in last year’s budget, but that nothing has been done about it.

The city must televise the council hearings so that the citizens of Portsmouth can see for themselves who the temperate, hardworking, and honest people in city government are, and who the foul-mouthed, devious, and lazy ones are, who the watchdogs are and who the lapdawgs are. They will also see who the citizens are who faithfully attend these meetings, and who avail themselves of the right to speak to the council, a right that was nearly abridged last year at the urging of Councilman Marty Mohr. If council meetings are really Monday Night Fights, the public has a right to watch them in the safety of their own living rooms, instead of being insulted live by the mayor and others, or being frisked by police before entering.

In a recent letter to council president Howard Baughman, dated March 20, 2007, Mollette called again for transparency in local government, saying, “I still believe the best opportunity to inform the public exists with replaying City Council meetings on Time Warner Cable Television.” If the Monday Night Fights are going to continue at city council meetings, they should be telecast. The public has a right to see one man who is fighting for good government and who is taking on a tag-team of palookas who know the fight is fixed and want to keep it that way.