Curmie Is Voting for Not Trump

Yeah, Curmie could support these guys if necessary

People lie.  Politicians lie more than the average person.  Kamala Harris is a politician, and not a particularly honest one, even in comparison to other pols.  Curmie will still vote for her, however.  No, he doesn’t think she’s very accomplished, smart, or consistent.  He thinks she would be a pretty bad POTUS, in fact.  But she’s running against Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance), and Curmie is on the record that he’d vote for the Sauron/Voldemort ticket before he’d vote for them. 

Those fictional villains may be evil, but at least they’re sane, and that makes them at least moderately predictable.  They could construct complete sentences, even paragraphs.  Neither of them ever taped a maxipad to their ear to cover a quite possibly non-existent wound.  They probably even pay their bills, and they certainly wouldn’t publicly contemplate the prodigiousness of a deceased golfer’s penis.

Those on the right will no doubt call Curmie Trump-deranged.  Fine.  He’s been called worse.  Is it likely that a second Trump presidency would destroy the democratic (lower-case “d”) principles on which the nation was founded?  “Likely,” no; “plausible,” yes.  And that’s sufficiently terrifying, thank you.  Should we “vote like it’s Germany in 1932”?  Well, actually, yes.

In Peter Nichols’s brilliant play [A Day in the Death of] Joe Egg, busy-bodies Freddie and Pam refer frequently to people who are PLU: People Like Us.  The MAGA playbook is all about blaming literally everything that ever goes wrong on folks who are Not-PLU: immigrants (even legal ones), Muslims, BIPOCs, LGBTQs, the poor, educators… women.  The legitimacy of these people’s ideas is never considered; it is enough that they are Other.  Indeed, Trump’s positions on issues (has he actually said anything of substance on anything in the last year?) are irrelevant.  He’s the cult leader—a more dangerous one than Sun yung Moon, Jim Jones, or David Koresh—and that’s enough for his flock.

But this essay isn’t about the manifold ways in which Donald Trump is unfit for office.  It’s about one in particular.  Yes, all politicians lie.  But most, even the slimiest ones like Mitch McConnell, do so only to advance their particular perspective: they exaggerate their own accomplishments, actively and consciously misinterpret their opponents’ votes or rhetoric, and otherwise prevaricate their way to what they hope will be a political victory for their side. 

Trump is different.  He’s reckless and ultimately cruel in his dishonesty.  He railed against the Central Park Five long after DNA evidence proved their innocence.  He blathered on about how Barack Obama was supposedly born in Kenya.  Even these escapades, however, pale in comparison to his recent antics in the aftermath of the two hurricanes that battered the southeast.  Despite the testimony of the governors of the affected states, most of whom are Republicans, that the Biden administration and FEMA have been doing an extraordinary job under the circumstances, Cult45 is out there claiming the response was delayed (it wasn’t), and inadequate (given the enormity of the devastation, it could not be otherwise, but that, of course, wasn’t what he meant).

As a private citizen, he inserted himself into the spotlight, getting in the way of people (FEMA, relief organizations, actual volunteers) who were trying to do something to help.  He even riled up the yahoos to believe that FEMA was actually the enemy, to the extent that some operations had to be curtailed when workers feared for their safety!  The problem isn’t that Trump said outrageous, false things: as Jerome Kern wrote (sort of), fish gotta swim, liars gotta lie.  It’s not that he’s mendacious, hubristic, sociopathic, or narcissistic, even by politicians’ standards.  It’s not (just) that he’s a convicted felon.  It’s not that he was rather stupid already before devolving into a babbling ignoramus we see on the campaign trail. 

We’ve all witnessed that cognitive decline, too.  Even major Republicans are calling him “unhinged” and “dangerous.”  That’s just the ones who have joined in the chorus recently, not the host of military leaders, cabinet members, staffers, and (oh, yeah) his Vice President who endorsed Harris or at the very least made their lack of endorsement of Trump public weeks or months ago.

We knew he was amoral, too.  But he seems to have morphed from someone who didn’t care about anyone but himself into someone who consciously and intentionally hurts others: a progression from amorality to hard-core immorality, if you will.  Were he to win the upcoming election, he will only get worse.  And the best-case scenario would be that he would be replaced by J.D. Vance, who is nearly as arrogant, just as hypocritical, and probably even more Fascistic. 

It is possible—unlikely, but possible—that Vance actually believes in the crap that comes out of his mouth.  The difference is that Trump cares only about himself, whereas Vance might actually believe in a cause: a cause which ought to terrify us all.  Indeed, he may be even scarier for that reason.  The good news is that for whatever reason, Trump has groupies and Vance does not. 

Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate.  Her detractors say that her entire campaign is based on not being Trump.  That’s unfair—although far from impressive, she’s been far more detailed and coherent than her opponent about virtually anything you can mention—but even if it were true, being Not Trump is good enough for Curmie.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

The great 20th-century philosopher,
Forrest Gump

Curmie comes by his sobriquet honestly, and there are times he just needs to vent against the raging stupidity of humanity in general. So here are a few items prompting Curmie to scream into the void. In no particular order… 

#1. This ad for Bounty. The premise is that the couple has just won the lottery, but in the excitement hubby knocks over his drink (soda? juice?), and it threatens to soil (de-legitimize?) the winning ticket. So it’s important that they have a really good paper towel, you see? 

Erm… no. It doesn’t matter how good your paper towel is if the spill will have done its damage before you can grab a sheet from the roll under the sink (or wherever). You want to protect that lottery ticket? Pick the damned thing up before the liquid can get there! Then you can mop up the spill. Anyone who does otherwise is apparently stupid enough to use the product in question. 

#2. Facebook. Gentle Reader, if you know Curmie personally, you know that he’s the president of a national organization.  In that capacity (and as an admin of the Facebook page), he announced that the deadline for applications for a rather hefty scholarship had been extended for a couple of weeks, and he posted a link to the page on the organization’s website from which the application can be downloaded. 

The next morning, Facebook’s algorithm proved itself even stupider than humans (well, not stupider than the particular humans who programmed it) by proclaiming the post “spam” and threatening dire consequences should Curmie similarly misbehave in the future. Of course, virtually everyone Curmie knows has been thrown into FB jail for alleged but usually imaginary offenses against their Divinely Inspired (i.e., Total Bullshit) “community standards.” 

Like a lot of other folks, Curmie has a history with Facebook, as you can see here and here, for example. My favorite Facebook story, though, had nothing to do with me: it’s the saga of the sexy onions from a year and half ago. Sigh. 

#3. FEMA Follies. FEMA has been an enduring punchline if not always a national embarrassment since Heckuva Job Brownie didn’t do a heckuva job. But most of their failures have been simple incompetence. This one is different: it’s fraud (not theirs, necessarily), and it damned well better be treated as such. After a September storm caused extensive damage in western Alaska, FEMA stepped in to help out. So far, so good, right? 

Alas, no, Gentle Reader. When residents sought out documents in such native languages as Yup’ik or Inupiaq, they encountered some… ahem… “translations” that were, shall we say, less than useful. When Monty Python riffs on horrible translations, it’s at least moderately funny (even if it isn’t one of Curmie’s favorite bits). When it happens in real life, it’s less amusing, and unless you think there’s a legitimate reason to say “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny” in an official government document, we’ve got a problem here. 

Whoever put together the faux translations seems to have used languages that aren’t indigenous to the area, trotted out a decades-old Russian text, and otherwise just fucked around, obviously thinking this whole business was a colossal joke. Those weren’t the exact words of Gary Holton, a University of Hawaii at Manoa linguistics professor and a former director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. What he did say was “They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense”; he called the final product a “word salad.” 

FEMA fired Accent on Languages, the company that “translated” the documents. Of course, anything less than a lawsuit and a prosecution for fraud is insufficient. Meanwhile, of course, Jeremy Zidek, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, claims that the mistranslations did not create delays or problems. It is unclear whether Zidek can see Russia from his house. What is undeniable is that if he were Pinocchio, he couldn’t see the end of his nose without a telescope. 

#4. Well, it’s Missouri. What do you expect? Apologies to anyone offended by Curmie’s allowing his inner Kansan to sneak out for a second, there. But seriously, are there no actual problems in the Show-Me State that merit the attention of the legislature? Apparently not, because the male GOP majority has decided that policing their female colleagues’ accoutrement is of paramount importance. (Note: to be fair, this absurdity was introduced by a Republican woman). 

It’s those arms, you see. They’re almost as distracting to the pseud-prude crowd as (gasp!) high school girls’ shoulders. Exactly what problem is allegedly being solved here is not entirely clear. What is, is that state reps Raychel Proudie and Ashley Aune err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole in declaring this measure “ridiculous.” 

#5. California Capers, Exhibit A. Curmie hasn’t voted for a politician in years; it’s always been lesser-of-two-evils time (or, perhaps more accurately, the evil of two lessers). In other words, the Loony Left is as scary as the Jewish Space Lasers crowd on the right. There are two discrete issues here: what is a sensible, ethical, and pragmatic choice on the one hand, and what is politically efficacious on the other. Needless to say, if an action is so problematic in terms of the former criterion that it offends the sensibilities of any rational person, then there is a price to be paid in terms of the latter. 

There are, in short, a lot of people like Curmie—not in political philosophy, perhaps, but in voting for the candidates of Political Party X simply because they’re not quite as nauseating as those of Political Party Y. Nothing makes the right happier, therefore, than someone on the left not merely doing something the average person would regard as transcendently stupid (because it is), but bragging about it. And if the idiots in question are from California, the right-wing ideologues are in something very much akin to ecstasy. 

Naturally, the Bay Area Woke Folk are happy to oblige. A San Francisco panel has recommended the following for each of its black residents who meet any two of eight criteria in light of “decades of harm they have experienced”: a one-time payment of $5 million (yes, apiece!), plus wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households. Yes, really. The cost would be equal to approximately the city’s total budget for three and a half years… oh, did I mention they’re already running in the red? 

If you’re looking for how actual racists can get elected, look no further, because this proposal, presented with straight faces, apparently, makes anyone even remotely associated with the left look like an utter idiot. Frankly, Curmie resents it. 

Have at least some black SF residents experienced prejudice during their lifetimes? No doubt. To the tune of $5,000,000 apiece? It is remotely possible that a few have, but Curmie would need to see some proof. In fact, because of affirmative action set-asides and similar programs, one could make a case that the average black San Franciscan has already been compensated more than they deserve. 

It’s also telling that other groups who have certainly been the victims of prejudice—there are no doubt some life-long American citizens now living in the city who were interned during WWII simply because of their Japanese descent, for example—go unrecompensed in this proposal. 

There are no words that can adequately express the level of disdain Curmie holds for anyone supporting this ludicrous and almost certainly unconstitutional recommendation. 

#6: California Capers, Exhibit B. If there is one more step past “California” to really float the boat of the right, it’s adding in… “university.” After all, that’s where all those commie pinko weirdos are indoctrinating our precious babies with such seditious ideas as “other people have different experiences and therefore different perspectives.” 

Right on cue, the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California has decided not merely to fulfill the right wing’s stereotype of academics, particularly of those in the social sciences, but to surpass in idiocy even that tortured misrepresentation. Wanna guess what word they’ve decided to drop from their active vocabulary? Go on, guess… If you said “field,” Gentle Reader, you’ve either already ready about this story, or you’re wasting your time reading this blog: you should be crafting B-movie plots with diabolical villains named Professor Psychoto and Dr. Deviance. 

Yes, because, you see, “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” The acceptable word is now “practicum,” by the way, a reasonable enough synonym for the meaning of “field” most appropriate to the study of social work… but having little in common with the definition associated with the work undertaken by slaves. 

Look, if you want to argue that people ought to be circumspect about how to employ words with multiple meanings, one of which is offensive, Curmie gets it.  But it takes a contortion of mythic proportions to get to anything actually problematic about “field.” 

Ultimately, Curmie feels compelled to warn you, Gentle Reader, to watch where you step when you walk through that practicum, as there is an incredible amount of bullshit out there.

Updates and Expansions

Time to re-visit and update some older posts:

LeBron James.

Last July 10, one of three stories I talked about was the fact that LeBron James was “tak[ing] his talents to South Beach,” abandoning the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat in search of riches and a championship (in that order, although of course he’d never say so).

My assessment at the time: “while he is unquestionably an outstanding athlete, he just flat gets outplayed (or matched by those of considerably lesser talent) when it matters most.” The finals aren’t over yet, and the Heat, trailing 3-2 as I write this, could still emerge victorious, but it won’t matter in terms of James’s legacy: he still choked when it counted. His Larry Bird numbers for the series have averaged a little under 359. (I wrote last spring, “A good score, one you’d expect consistently from a star player, is 500. A really good game, the kind you’d expect not infrequently from a superstar, is 750. A put-the-team-on-his-back-and-carry-them number is 1000.”)

James’s best game was a 600 in game 1, the only time he’s broken 500. He didn’t crack 200 in either of the losses in Dallas. His direct opposite number, i.e. the starting small forward for the Mavs, Shawn Marion has averaged a 382, including two games over 500. The plus/minus numbers for the series: James -12, Marion +10. Shawn Marion is a good basketball player, but he’s nobody’s superstar, and he has flat outplayed LeBron James. The Mavs’ best player, Dirk Novitzki, has averaged over 593, with his only sub-500 game a 359 when he was running a high fever; his plus/minus is +44. Even more compelling evidence comes from Mark Stein of ESPN:

In what NBA statisticians recognize as "clutch time," which equates to the final five minutes of regulation or overtime with the score within five points either way, Nowitzki has 26 points on 8-for-13 shooting from the field and 9-for-9 accuracy at the line.

LeBron? After leading the league in this category through the first three rounds of the playoffs and finally chipping away at the skepticism about his ability to close, James has zero points on 0-for-7 shooting and is still waiting for his first "clutch time" trip to the line.

So let’s cut the nonsense about LeBron James being a superstar. If the Heat win, it will be because of Dwyane Wade, who has averaged a 740 (in a stat that privileges post players), and whose worst game, a 605 in game 1, was better than James’s best.

Tony Kushner.

As predicted here on May 7, Tony Kushner did indeed receive an honorary degree from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice last weekend. I can find no evidence, however, to support my prediction that “on June 3, John Jay’s graduation day, Mr. [Benno] Schmidt [chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees] and Mr. Kushner will be joining hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.’”

There was a good deal of misrepresentation of the Board’s initial action to deny the degree: as I suggested on May 17, charges that academic freedom had been violated were tossed about with more fervor than accuracy. But there did seem to be some conception that a playwright’s political views ought not to determine the legitimacy of his candidacy for an honor, and that the legitimate function of Trustees is not to advance political agendas or to interfere in the day to day operations of a university. This is not to say that Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld didn’t have his supporters: the New York Times reports that there was “a small group of protesters” at the John Jay graduation ceremony, and I suspect that the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page wasn’t the only one to get its share of conflicting commentary.

H.S.

I am pleased to report that the news is spreading about the cheerleader kicked off the squad for refusing to cheer for her rapist by name, discussed here on May 13. I’ve engaged in a handful of Facebook debates with friends of friends. I doubt that I’ve convinced anyone, but perhaps I successfully encouraged someone to make a contribution or sign the petition. Somebody is doing something right, as the legal fund now tops $15,000 and there are nearly 68,000 signatures on the petition. There’s no justice to be achieved here, but there is support and communion, which are far better than the alternative. Sign. Give.

Kathy Hochul.

Democrat Kathy Hochul not only won the special election in the New York 26th, she did so with relative ease. As I predicted on the morning of the race, May 24, apologists for the loser bellowed full-throatedly about how their candidate really did marvelously well: since the loser in question was the Republican, Jane Corwin, the ululation was from the right. Here’s my prediction: “And his [Jack Davis’s] presence will be blamed for a Republican defeat, should there be one.” Right on cue, Karl Rove sniffed after the election that “Absent Mr. Davis as a spoiler—he got 9% of the vote—Democrats would never have made a serious bid for this district, nor won if they did.” Rove points out that Davis spent $3 million of his own money, and that Hochul “won a plurality (47%) of the votes, not a majority, getting only one percentage point more than Barack Obama as he was losing the district in 2008. Not exactly a compelling performance.”

Karl Rove is not stupid, but he is certainly disingenuous: he leaves out the part about Jane Corwin’s self-funding to the tune of $2.76 million, or the $1.36 million contributed to Corwin’s campaign by the likes of Rove’s own American Crossroads (nearly $700,000). Mr. Rove would like to have it both ways: if the Democrats wouldn’t have “made a serious bid” in the absence of a candidate who didn’t break double-digits, then it should be a safe seat for Republicans. Despite substantially outspending Hochul, Corwin couldn’t win a district in which the GOP has a 7 point enrollment advantage and which subsequently-disgraced Congressman Chris Lee won by 51 points less than seven months earlier. Oh, and by the way, Karl, the Dems did OK in that 2008 election: doing “only” one point better (as a percentage of the total) in a three-way race than Barack Obama did in a de facto two-way race is a result the Democrats will take 10 times out of 10.

Let me also repeat the point I made the day of the election:

Davis is indeed the largely liberal “fraud” the national Tea Party claims him to be. But let’s look at the ramifications of that statement. In an informed electorate, that would mean that his third-party candidacy would draw votes from Hochul, not Corwin. That the GOP is screaming foul can be taken as proof that the Republicans (rightly) regard a significant percentage of Tea Partiers as completely uninformed and/or stupid. Only someone who didn’t know the candidates would vote for Davis over Corwin thinking he was the more conservative choice.

Finally, there’s there Republican push-back about “Mediscare” tactics, accusing the Democrats in general and Hochul in particular of trying to terrify people with horror stories about what would happen if Paul Ryan’s budget were actually to be enacted. The only reasonable conclusion is not that Hochul misrepresented GOP ideology (she didn’t, at least not substantively, as far as I can tell—not that the truth matters much to anyone on the right or to many on the left). Rather, given the re-election tactics of Bush-Cheney, and subsequently the totally fabricated “death panel” and “Obama is a socialist” arguments, it would seem that the Republican hierarchy is staking their claim that purely emotional, fact-free scare tactics, especially about healthcare, are their exclusive purview: Hochul’s crime wasn’t perjury, but copyright violation.

Anthony Weiner.

Of course, there wouldn’t have been a special election if Chris Lee hadn’t been the Craigslist Creeper… which brings us to the unfortunately named Anthony Weiner, whose escapades on Twitter are tawdry and pathetic at best. Political leaders and pundits are calling on the Congressman to resign: every Republican you can think of (curiously enough, many of these people were strangely silent about David Vitter when he actually committed—and admitted to—a sex-related crime), but also a growing list of Democrats: former DNC chair Tim Kaine, Pennsylvania Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz, former PA governor Ed Rendell, and a steady trickle of others until the big announcement today that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz are joining the chorus.

Everyone, in other words, thinks Weiner should resign. Everyone, that is, except Mr. Weiner himself and the Congressman’s constituents, who are in pragmatic terms the only ones who matter until there is a House Ethics Committee hearing and/or criminal charges. (At present, at least, the former is likely to lead to some form of censure but not expulsion; the latter seems to be a non-starter.) And polls show that whereas the city of New York as a whole is roughly evenly divided, with a plurality thinking Rep. Weiner should step down (N.B., another poll taken the same day had very different results), voters in the New York 9th want him to stay by a pretty convincing 56-33%. That bodes well for the Congressman’s ability to stick it out (if you’ll pardon the expression) for a while at least. And, really, the way politics works these days, if he survives one election after the scandal, the sexting issue disappears unless he chooses to run for a different office (a majority of NYC Democrats don’t want him to run for mayor, for example). Or until he does it again. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Jack Scott.

And that… sort of… brings us to the ongoing saga of Cordova, AL, mayor Jack Scott’s refusal to allow FEMA single-wide trailers into his tornado-devastated town, discussed here on June 2. Well, no single-wide trailers except the ones like the one his office is in. The connection to Weiner? A great line from “reality5000” cited by Julie Clark on the al.com website this Thursday: “In other words, the Mayor’s mantra is ‘Don't do as I do, do as I say’ as he stands in front of the trailers he brought in. That is about like Anthony Weiner telling you to keep your clothes on and behave.”

There would appear to be a number of easy solutions, none of which the politicians can wrap their heads around. How difficult is it, after all, to say: “Look, we know you need short-term help, but we’re concerned that these trailers will be here forever. So we’re going to grant a waiver for 24 months. That should be enough time to get you back on your feet. After that, you’ll be in violation of town ordinances, and you’ll be subject to fines, forfeiture, and even possibly arrest.” That Scott won’t sign off on such a plan suggests that he’s suspicious of the town’s willingness to back him up down the road—maybe he fears (accurately, one hopes) that someone else will be mayor by then. Either that, or he’s a fool, a charlatan, or the most hard-hearted bastard you’ll ever meet.

Curiously enough, there are those who support the mayor—I think we can take as given that they’re the lucky folks whose homes weren’t destroyed: it’s a little easier for them to get all hoity-toity about long-term property values. Anybody wanna bet these people all show up at the Baptist Church on Sunday mornings and don’t recognize themselves as the Pharisees the preacher is railing against?

The Haitian Minimum Wage.

Finally, we now have a link to the full story in The Nation by Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives on the attempt to raise the minimum wage in Haiti to 62¢ an hour and the conniption thrown by not only the US textile industry, whom we expect to make Uriah Heep look cuddly by comparison, but also by the US Embassy, whom we do not.

I mean, seriously, the new Haitian minimum wage would still be 8%, yes, 8% of the American minimum wage. And we’re supposed to believe scumbags like chargé d’affaires Thomas C. Tighe that “an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down”? This guy deserves to be choked to death on the Hanes underwear he really represents—it surer than hell isn’t in American interests to have a neighbor so destitute, not to mention justifiably angry. Not to mention the fundamental question: where are they going to go? You got somebody someplace who’ll work for less, assholes?

The key point here remains, however, that this is the US government behaving in this despicable manner. The greed and amorality of Levi Strauss, Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom are, of course, manifest. That they would be supported in their arrogance, their acquisitiveness, and their extortion by the American government, especially by representatives of a Democratic President, is beyond unconscionable.

You know you're in trouble when the competent public officials are from FEMA

It is one of those truisms that isn’t necessarily true that disasters bring out the good side of people. The idea is that something in that moment reaches past our differences and touches us as humans. Sometimes it’s an exercise in shared responsibility with a shared benefit: the entire town turning out to sandbag the river, for example. But often it’s an after-the-fact offer of assistance: some clothes to wear, food to eat, a place to stay. Frequently the helping hand comes from an organization dedicated to that purpose: the Red Cross , Doctors without Borders, Partners in Health, or a host of other charities from the local to the international level. Much of the time the aid comes from individual people, near or far, who just want to help.

And sometimes… sometimes the assistance comes from the government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hasn’t had a very good reputation since Hurricane Katrina: their response to that disaster was slow, haphazard, and generally incompetent. Whether they’re as blazingly inept as they were in the Bush years under the hopelessly unqualified Michael D. Brown (a.k.a. “Heckuva Job Brownie”) hasn’t really been determined: there hasn’t been another crisis on the scale of Katrina since then; even the BP oil spill wasn’t, on land, comparable. My read on this latter incident is that the government’s response was slow, inadequate, and compromised by lack of coordination and a readiness to abrogate their responsibilities in order to keep things friendly with a multinational corporation. And their recent decision to attempt to reclaim as much as $600 million given to Katrina victims might be both fiscally and ethically responsible, but it is also a public relations nightmare and a reminder of the poor decision-making that apparently exacerbated an existing problem by over-compensating and awarding all that money to begin with.

Still, we’re better off with them than without them. A glance at their website shows that they’ve rendered assistance in over 2/3 of the states of the union recently (a quick glance suggests that “recently” means in the last 18 months or so). And I think we could rest assured that if there were any significant problems, the good folks at Fox News would be happy to tell us how incompetent the Obama administration is. So, even if there are, shall we say, more effectively run agencies, any small-town mayor is going to be thrilled to see FEMA coming if his municipality has been devastated by back-to-back tornadoes, right? Make that virtually any small-town mayor.

Meet Jack Scott, mayor of Cordova, Alabama, population (as of July 2009) 2,263, located about 35 miles northwest of Birmingham. Cordova is a poor community, with an estimated household income of only $24,774, or about 61% of the average for Alabama, itself not the most affluent of states. Even more strikingly, the “estimated median house or condo value” is less than 37% of the mean for Alabama, let alone for the nation. I can’t say I’ve ever been to Cordova, but I’ve certainly been to or through dozens of places a whole lot like it in the American South. No one, at least no one from the outside, is going to confuse the town with paradise, but I’m willing to bet that there a lot of good, hard-working people there.

In late April, two different tornadoes hit the town on the same day, leaving four people dead and two separate swaths of destruction. There are some folks who have been living in tents for the several weeks since the double-header natural disaster. Not surprisingly, FEMA showed up on the scene, with emergency housing in the form of trailers for those displaced by the effects of a 170 mph twister. And Mayor Scott, sworn (one presumes) to work for the betterment of all Cordovans, chased them away. Apparently Cordova has a three-year-old law on the books prohibiting single-wide trailers, which is what FEMA had to offer. (Note: other sources, for example Val Walton of the Birmingham News, say the law has been around for over a half century, but unenforced.)

True, existing trailers were grandfathered in when the ordinance was passed, and true, the AP reports that “the Cordova Police Department, a pharmacy, a bank and City Hall all have moved into similar trailers since the storm.” Ah, but you see “the city can use small trailers because it's for the common good.” Not only that, but these are short-term measures: “It’s temporary and we know it’s temporary.” That would be unlike the emergency housing offered by FEMA, which is… erm… temporary (although, to be fair, some people have been living in so-called short-term FEMA trailers since Hurricane Katrina nearly six years ago). Tents are so much more aesthetically pleasing than single-wide trailers, don't you think? Now, double-wides... that's a whole different story.

Mayor Scott sees no need to make an exception for residents, just because a sizeable segment of the population has been rendered homeless through literally no fault of their own. After all, the mayor’s house is still fine. And the guys who come by on Wednesdays for poker and beer weren’t affected, so I really wish these whiners would shut up and let us get on with our game. Besides, he’s concerned about keeping those ridiculously low property values from falling off the scale altogether. Or, of course, he could be an arrogant old white guy who, as one resident puts it, “wants to clean all the trash out. He doesn't like lower-class people.”

Whatever the case, it’s clear that Cordova will never emerge from the Dark Ages as long as Scott is in power. As John Archibald of the Birmingham News points out, some Cordova residents were hoping the new Interstate 22 highway would help turn the town into a bedroom community for Birmingham, a move that actually would raise property values, quite likely in a big hurry (admittedly, not without a down-side). But who wants to move to a town with a certifiable douchebag as a mayor?

There is apparently a compromise in the works, although Scott seems to be clinging to his rulebook and screaming maniacally in the face of common sense. For his sake, though, he’d better find a solution in a big ol’ hurry. He’s already being mocked by Taiwanese animators. He’s now about one step away from being a term in the Urban Dictionary. Ask Rick Santorum how that worked out for him.