UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

NEW SPECIMENS OLD SPECIMENS THE SCIENTIST MY LOG CONTACT ME
2002-02-28 - 8:04 a.m.

MORE FUN THAN CHICAGO

I like people but I don�t expect all that much from them. If I weren�t cynical before spending years and years as a public defender, I wouldn�t last. No one can work with heartbreak day in and day out and also handle a sense of betrayal of life�s proper order. I�ve seen people try. Those people leave the office within three years.

Still, once in a while, I�m caught off-guard. I still can be surprised at the stupidity of people. Of late, that surprise rarely occurs at work. I�m much more likely to feel it when I read the newspaper. Even there, however, the bar for surprise by stupidity is high. Gary Condit didn�t make it over. I expect that people will do amazingly self-destructive things when trying to cover up peccadilloes. The more wrong they think their actions deep down, the crazier the lengths to which they will go to justify themselves and the greater their denials.

No, to impress me with your stupidity, you have to do something really wild. You have to do something like what Milwaukee County Supervisor Kathy Arciszewski did. You have to ask for a declaration of martial law based upon people circulating recall petitions against the county executive and the county board after a pension scandal. You have to ask for a declaration of martial law based upon people holding peaceful rallies at high school auditoriums and public libraries. You have to ask for a declaration of martial law based upon people peacefully exercising their rights under the law and you have to do it on the basis �that the community didn�t thrust the county executive and legislative body.�

All that is enough for me to register �surprising stupidity� on my impress-me meter but Supervisor Arciszewski did better. She made it all the way to the �amazing stupidity� level. Making the call to our county sheriff at three o�clock in the morning was not enough to do it although I do feel for the sheriff. I can just hear his wife. �Is there something seriously wrong, dear?� she might have asked with concern. �No,� he probably replied. �It�s just some crazy county supervisor who wants me to declare martial law. I told her I�d sleep on it and, if we�re lucky, we�ll both forget this call in the morning.� Unfortunately, she did not forget about it and she did show up in his office at 7 a.m. the next morning where he told her �it's not in the constitutional authority of sheriff to do that.�

What made the whole thing amazing is how the information came out. The sheriff didn�t say anything. He just quietly retired with his much-too-large pension before anyone could figure out any way to reduce the pension offer. No, Supervisor Arciszewski told the public of this call. She told about it at a meeting that she called to soothe the voters of her district. Recall petitions against her are circulating and she wanted to slow the movement to oust her from office. She really and truly believed that revealing this bizarre and un-democratic behavior would win her points with the very people who were holding the rallies and circulating the petitions. She believed that revealing this strange telephone call would cause those who were deciding whether to join the recall group to flock to her cause.

Traditional wisdom has it that Milwaukee politics is dull, clean, and boring compared with our close neighbor, Chicago. Heck, at this moment, we�re having more political fun than Chicago. When it comes to stupidity of elected official we can compete with the best of them.

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