The Banality of Carl

Board of Education member unleashes a stream of obscenities on reporter. No that's not a typo. This is Buffalo. 

When the local Brahmin decided they'd had enough of being embarrassed by Buffalo Schools Superintendent Pamela Brown a year or so ago, they emptied out their golf bags and scrounged up close to half a million dollars, a Cohiba, some Benadryl spray and a dozen or so naked lady golf tees. Robert Gioia kept the tees and the spray and gave the cigar to fellow Brahmin Robert Wilmers. They put the rest in a paper envelope and wrote "To Get Rid of Negress" on it.  None of them or their other elite caste players wanted to have their names associated bribing a public school Superintendent into leaving town so they did their best to keep it hush hush. But Buffalo is a small town and sure enough it leaked that Gioia and Wilmers were looking to save the dignity of Buffalo the way rich men always do, with a bribe. Surely the idea was somewhere circling their privileged imaginations that she really should be grateful they were being nice since we all know the wealthy and powerful have other ways to impose their will on the small folk. When he wrote Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold didn't call their ilk "Barbarians" by mistake. 

Odd that these well to do local gentry should find a black woman's performance as chief of schools such a source of humiliation. On paper she could show some improvements in small areas. Her public persona left something to be desired, she wasn't terribly convincing in her manner and she tended to be invisible quite a bit of the time. Yet her predecessor James Williams, also black but to his advantage, a male, went so far on one occasion as to tell reporters he'd like to take BTF guy Phil Rumore out in an alley and kick his ass. Williams student attendance stats were abysmal since he fired all the attendance teachers, morale was never worse, he jumped from scandal to scandal and graduation rates of the black males he claimed he was here to rescue actually dropped. Yet this embarrassed nobody with an address on Nottingham Terrace, Rumsey Place or Spaulding Lake. Nobody heard a peep from the elites. They were busy hosting John McCain fundraisers for $15K a plate and lurking behind their tall hedges. They declared themselves the de facto protectors of public education's reputation in the case of Pamela Brown though, and quickly scraped up the brown parachute cash to get her the hell out of here. Maybe this was some kind of PTSD response to the Williams regime and maybe they were trying to make up for not speaking up as he poisoned the wells and burned crops and villages to the ground in between stiffing dopey ass Chris Jacobs with dinner bills at The Chop House. Who really knows? These self appointed guardians of Public Ed and the City's fine reputation tried to use their money to unseat a democratically appointed school official because they found her distasteful and wanted her gone.

I'll skip the Paladino emails for now and the death threat to Fred Decker. We can try to overlook the obscenely boorish public performance Paladino put on at Dinosaur BBQ when he crossed paths with blogger Alan Bedenko. Even if we ignore these fiascos Paladino can be seen on WGRZ TV unleashing a string of F-bombs on their reporter as he's walking into the Board of Ed meeting. Also in the frame we notice a guy who acts as Paladino's muscle in public places, the guy who hit one local education activist from behind on a sidewalk outside City Hall. In the WGRZ clip  goonadino is festooned in a loud tropical shirt and some kind of oversized straw hat. He appears to have wandered away from a senior citizen community theatre production of South Pacific. True to goon form he makes physical contact with the reporter blocking the path to Paladino who has hurried ahead to dodge the questioner. So a guy who unleashes streams of profanity in public gatherings like the one at Dinosaur BBQ and again as he's entering a Board of Ed meeting where he is an actual member of the board is somehow NOT a significant source of embarrassment to our local Brahmin that any of them will deign to address the matter?

It's been noted by Aaron at DailyPublic.com that we we seem to have no end of prominent personae in WNY who simply refuse to address the RINO in the room. Maybe you'd rather call him a rogue elephant but the idea is the same -- the guy is out of control and has no business sitting on a school board acting as he does. We're getting crickets from the Brahmin. Maybe if he was a woman they'd take a run at him. I haven't even heard from Phil Rumore about the damn Asians remark. Our fearless Dumbocrats that NYSUT loves to wine and dine aren't saying squat. Pannepinto? Ryan? Deeley? Anybody home? More crickets. Shucks I haven't even heard from that man of the people Sam Radford come to think of it. Where is the outrage Sam? Do your financial and political prospects hinge like so many others on not pissing off Carl, even if it means ignoring his racist outbursts?

 The only thing necessary for the triumph of Carl is for good men to do nothing. Yeah I know wasn't that clever? Fact is we've either got a lot of good people doing nothing or we'd better take a closer look at who we're calling "good people."