BY JOSH RESNEK
The mayor wore his nice guy, concerned persona at Monday evening’s meeting of the School Committee.
He was as fully involved in the meeting as the fire department when responding to a two-alarm fire.
His questions were like convoluted Victorian pleasantries exchanged by collegial people all wanting to say thank you to one another when all was said and done.
When Superintendent of Schools Priya Tahiliani made mention of Christmas festivities to be carried on at the various public schools, the mayor seemed to genuflect and to demure by offering up his own Christmas celebrations for the School Department to take advantage of.
One school committee member called the mayor’s idea “brilliant.”
Mind you, she didn’t say the mayor is brilliant, but rather, that his idea to share festivities during this singularly odd upcoming season was the stuff of an Einstein or a Freud.
The mayor was as down to earth and easy-going as a Hollywood actor playing the role of a recovering gangster during the School Committee Zoom meeting Monday night.
This is exactly the picture of himself the mayor wants to portray before he is given the right to vote, to promise jobs, to fire those against him, and to require contributions from nearly everyone he can touch who is employed by the School Department.
His greatest ambition, which he covered up with the expertise of an Army Ranger camouflaging a tank to protect it from incoming fire, is to ride the new superintendent out of the city unless he gets exactly what he wants from her, all of the time.
Will he be allowed to do this?
Yes.
The School Committee will ultimately acquiesce to whatever the mayor wants whenever he wants it.
To do otherwise places too many relatives and friends with city jobs in a compromised position.
The mayor quite often is not who he appears to be.
He is an actor. He plays on his own stage. Everyone around him is a court jester, like in Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Everything the mayor does is for himself, for his bank account, for his twisted political imperatives which are based on control and indifference to what is right or wrong when he wants something.
The mayor we watched and listened to Monday night is the same guy who doesn’t want to employ Black people, Brazilians, Spanish speaking, or Haitians in city government and who likes to talk about diversity and transparency.
I was also left wonder, what is that new white bracelet he was wearing?
I saw it when he was talking with his hands. He loves talking with his hands.
If only those hands could talk.