urbanthoreau.com

As someone who regularly testifies before city committees/commissions/council, I routinely get lectured by well-meaning allies, friends, family, etc. that I need to tone it down. Be nice to the politicians. Soothe them. Don’t call a spade a spade. Don’t testify as to how they are doing us and our environment grievous harm. They might get offended.

And call you crazy.

My favorite spade-caller, Glenn Greenwald smashes this sort of limp thinking in his great Salon.com column today.

I’ve also been following with great interest the saga of Harry Markopolos, the whistle-blower of the Madoff ponzi scheme. He drafted up report after report, going back a decade, which pieced together enough evidence to prove the ponzi-ed nature of Madoff’s scam. He did it on his own time; as a volunteer citizen watchdog. But the paid regulators paid him no mind. He irritated them.

He was crazy.

(They said.)

And crazy, irritating people can’t possibly be right. Why? Because they are crazy & irritating.

But Markopolos was right.

Yet all the smart, detail-oriented, professionally decorous people ignored him, from the regulators to the dying mainstream media (DMSM) followed their circular reasoning (crazy + irritating = wrong; therefore crazy + irritating = wrong) and rolled us right off the financial cliff.

Locally, we’ve got Brenda Konkel irritating The Serious Powerbrokers, The Decorous Business Magnates, The Politicians Who Soothe Our Egos. She calls them down for their corruption. She lambastes the regulators for their laziniess. She is doing a wonderful service for the health of our body politic. But she is very much up against it with a Mayor who is very accommodating to developers’ illegal behavior (but who is very adept at Decorousness. Projecting Pleasing Images. Seriousness.). She is up against a pliant city council. And the regulators, who are supposed to help advise the council and mayor, don’t even understand the very laws they have been hired to enforce.

That’s you Mr. City Attorney, Esq.

Taken together, the Madoff-Markopolos affair, along with Greenwald’s analysis and Brenda’s activism in defense of ethics & law (i.e., justice!) captures so much of what keeps driving us over the cliff, after cliff, after cliff. We allow money mongers, warmongers, legal slouches at the regulatory switch (yes you Mr. City Attorney, Esq.) and hate mongers to drive us into financial ruin, immoral & unnecessary wars, and uncivilized social policies because they have become so adept at serving our vanity and its demands that the the messenger be Polite. Nice. Decorous. Serious. The nicer and more pleasing–and Serious–the messenger is to our ego, the more likely we are to follow. Off a cliff.

Just ask Mayor Pave. He’s been led off many a cliff, most of them paved, at the advice of Very Serious City Department Chiefs.

Including you

Mr. City Attorney, Esq.

Meanwhile, anyone who calls these Very Serious People on their paving, their wars, their financial recklessness, their ignorance of the laws they were hired to enforce (yeah, you, Mr. City Attorney), or their illegal backroom deals (way to go, Mayor Pave!) is marginalized. Thrown out of office. Labeled ‘crazy.’ Or irritating. Or worse.

Truth is irrelevant. Appeals to our vanity: everything.

That’s it: Anyone who doesn’t soothe my ego must be wrong. Because my ego is more important than the truth.