What we knew and when we knew it By the Guy on the 13th Floor This spring Buffalo police launched a major offensive against parking on Elmwood as a labor action. Except they didn’t call it a labor action. Things began to run amok when their ostensible boss, the mayor, decided instead of fighting the action to pretend it was part of a larger zero-tolerance policy (more on that later). So instead of negotiation with the powers that be to ease up on the ticket writing in exchange for whatever it was they wanted, the powers decided to pat them on the back and say, “Don’t forget the jaywalkers while you’re at it.” We’ve seen this before. In Iraq. Remember back when we all kinda thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but he didn’t? Saddam pretended he did have the weapons. Sure, sometimes he’d say he didn’t, but he’d say it while wearing a gas mask. Just like on Elmwood Avenue, things ran amok from there. OK, this has nothing to do with WNY politics, but we were all reminded about Saddam’s zany behavior this spring when the New York Times ran a multi-part series about the start of the war. While some may view a war resulting in tens of thousands of deaths which promises to go on forever starting on an oops-I-guess-we-were-wrong-about-the-weapons premise to be tragic, there were downright hilarious parts. Sorta like a tragicomedy. The funniest episode reported in the Times was about how the CIA couldn’t find Saddam in a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room with the lights on. This happened when everyone’s favorite dictator gave a speech on Iraqi television. The CIA’s conclusion? It wasn’t him. The man giving the speech was a double. And how was this conclusion reached? Because the man giving the speech wore glasses. Saddam doesn’t wear glasses. Can’t be him. After reading this, the plausibility of the whole Superman/Clark Kent thing suddenly made sense to me for the first time. And, by the way, that’s a true story. And, by the other way, it was Saddam. Anyway, back to “zero tolerance.” There’s an Iraqi war parallel here, too. In this case, the Brown Administration was taking the role of Baghdad Bob, the former Saddam crony who would go on the television every night to say his side was winning the war even as marines hoisted the American flag about twenty feet behind him. We knew he was lying. He knew we knew he was lying. We knew he knew we knew he was lying. And so on. That’s the fun of it! So when Mayor Brown unveiled “zero tolerance,” we knew this was a “clever” ploy to pretend he had a handle on the police action by claiming it as his own all along. He knew we knew. We knew he knew we knew. Etc., etc., etc. Which brings us to the Common Council’s hearing on public school parents’ concerns. You remember: the hearing nobody showed up for. One council member suggested the problem was that no chips and salsa were offered. That’s the one. While there’s some humor value in the episode, the richest vein of real irony can be mined in the Buffalo News’s reaction to it. Days after the incident, the Queen City’s answer to the Times ran an editorial shaming all the parents who didn’t show up. Who did they think would read the editorial? If parents either didn’t know despite multiple advertisements in, like, the newspaper, or didn’t care, what in the world would lead the editorial writers to think the parents would read their knuckle-rapping? Besides, knuckle-rapping is a Catholic school thing, and these are public school parents. (You also know there wouldn’t have been an editorial if say, twenty of the school district’s 70,000 parents showed up, even though twenty would have been the statistical equivalent of none.) So in this case, the News’s editorial writers knew that the missing parents wouldn’t know. And the missing parents simply didn’t know. Very different than the Baghdad Bob zero-tolerance policy approach. Speaking of Buffalo politics mirroring international incidents, St. Patrick’s Day saw Buffalo politics become an international incident. Somehow, and you have to admire the man’s mojo, somehow Congressman Brian Higgins managed to convince Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams to spend St. Patrick’s Day in Buffalo this year. He built the event up to culminate in a big speech at the Irish Center. But as the hour approached and the crowd began to swell, a distraught-looking Higgins moved to the microphone to announce that Adams was detained at Dulles Airport because he’s on a terrorist watch list. So far, so good. If Ted Kennedy can make the list (he’s been detained three times), you can imagine Gerry Adams finding a place there, too. Only later was it revealed that Adams was detained at the airport after he spent hours in the White House that very day. Quick as these guys are, don’t you think you’d detain the suspected terrorist before he walks into the President’s home and hangs out with him there? Maybe the Transportation Security Administration folks figured Higgins doesn’t have Dick Cheney around to protect him. And do you think they know who Gerry Adams is? Of course not. Here’s a case of us knowing, them not knowing, us knowing they don’t know, but nobody being able to make any sense of the sequence of events. OK—one more variation on the theme: about the same time all this was going on, rumors began circulating that County Executive Joel Giambra was seriously considering a run against Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. There’s a lot of “don’t knows” here. Time for a Donald Rumsfeld explanation: “There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.” Exactly. Giambra seems not to know that his political career has reached about the same point in its trajectory as Saddam’s. No, Joel won’t likely be executed, but given a choice between the Butcher of Baghdad and the Butcher of the Budget, Erie County voters would … well, maybe Saddam is the one guy who would lose to Joel in an election. Louise Slaughter, on the other hand, wouldn’t (and she’s not even a guy). This is no great compliment to Slaughter. You know how almost any elected official loses a hypothetical matchup versus “none of the above?” That’s Louse Slaughter in Erie County. Nobody knows who she is. She’s a Rochester politician with a Kentucky accent who spends all her time in Washington. She represents part of Erie County because Sheldon Silver had it out for John LaFalce during the redistricting process. You’d think she could someday face a real threat from Erie County, so you have to imagine she’s on her knees praying that Giambra runs. She probably has her people calling in. You can imagine Bruce Fisher reporting, “Mr. County Executive, we had another twenty-five calls urging you to run for Congress again today. Strangely, they all came from area codes 585 and 202.” So in this case, we all know Joel can’t win but he doesn’t know we know. And we also don’t know Slaughter, though, if pressed, we’d guess that she’s the guy who pinned the Iron Sheik back in 1987. Now you know. The Guy on the 13th Floor actually went to that hearing for parents hosted by the Common Council. Hundreds of people were there, actually. It’s just that none of them were Buffalo public school parents. They were all there for the show. Since going on public access TV, the Council has developed a large live audience made up of groupies, wannabes, and guys walking into open buildings to get out of the cold. Our Guy was of the latter category. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top