Part 2 of 3: Boys
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (After); Hendrik Hondius I (Print made by); Three Fools of Carnival; three fools playing with their fool's baubles. 1642
Originally posted on Facebook on Sunday, August 18 2024
Councilor McGrogan:
It’s been a while since we spoke, and much has happened in the real world, although, as evidenced by your comments in the Friday paper, nothing has changed with you.
We need you to catch up. This week you told the News “All she has to do is apologize and then I can make all this go away.” That’s not news. That’s what you were saying months ago. Here’s the real news, Councillor:
You guys lost on Tuesday (August 13 2024).
Clark is again the most powerful member of Council. You are second and Dumanowski is dead last, so you can stop demanding apologies anytime. That’s not where this is going; that’s not how this will end.
Hirsch and Dumanowski have been totally discredited. They told the rest of you that it was perfectly fine to make decisions in dark hallways and retroactively approve them, as long as the people making them were rich old white men. They were wrong. It’s 2024, finally, here in Medicine Hat, and it’s time for those two old boys to get the hell out of City Hall. The rest of you followed those two into a maze of corruption and deceit, and when the Mayor tried repeatedly to show you the way out, y’all just doubled down on the stupid.
Wow, that’s harsh, isn’t it? Do you think I owe someone an apology?
Councilor, I have an unfinished essay that begins “Ramona Robins, simultaneously Council’s greatest asset and its biggest disappointment...” I have an unpublished cartoon that Meghan assures me will make Allison Knodel cry if I put it online. I have the outline of a short story in which the Dumanowski character is introduced as “McGrogan’s Minister of Propaganda”. I have thousands more words that haven’t gelled into essay form because I can’t decide whether they make you or me look worse.
Councilor McGrogan, listen, please: come September, I want to be posting about pastries and theater tickets and school fundraisers. To the hopefully limited extent that I have to post about politics I hope it is provincial, not this tragic local dramedy that you refuse to let go of. Please, call a meeting, lift the sanctions. Now. Do it right now.
Think on this: You have no principle left to stand on. If you say Council is standing up for its abused employee, we know that employee is a schemer and a liar. If you say you are bound by Kingsgate to punish, we know Kingsgate lies in tatters. If you say you have to wait on due process, we know your gang of cutthroats has treated due process with contempt. Transparency and accountability? Your Minister of Propaganda composed and mansplained a remarkably long and poisonous speech on the topic - all in defense of a schemer and a liar. Or maybe integrity? Y’all made a decision and y’all are gonna be mans enough to stand by it until the judge makes their ruling? If that’s how you want to define integrity, you’ve already missed the boat, because the judge has already accepted the definition of integrity as “Everything Linnsie Clark has done since you forced the vote to shut her up on Aug 21, 2023.” She has beaten you on all fronts, Councillor.
There is only one thing that stops you from calling the meeting, now, to end the sanctions and restore the Mayor, and that is the need to preserve the reputations of you three Boys, and that is the plain truth.
The women don’t care. If you called them all up right now and said “Let’s get a quorum and vote her back in” they’d all say “Hell yeah, about time, let’s end this.” It’s only you, Hirsch and Dumanowski that are in the way.
It’s called “himpathy”*, a new-ish term that encompasses the need our society has to blame the victim (a woman) and defend the assailant (a man or men). You know this is a tale as old as time: three white dudes assault a lone female. The universe then springs into action to shame the woman, question her integrity, demand her accountability, scrutinize her, and strip her of every resource she needs to survive and rebuild. At the same time, the men are coddled, defended, sympathized with, elevated, listened to, promoted, interviewed and protected.
This is a damning indication of how highly society values the reputations of privileged white men, and of how ready society is to toss women to the wolves if it means the slightest mark on the honor of a man of status.
That is where we stand now, Councillor McGrogan. The City of Medicine Hat, the city’s employees, its citizens, and the female members of council are all sitting here waiting and knowing what has to be done: the Mayor must be reinstated. Why not today? One reason only: because we’re all hostage to the egos of you three Old Boys.
*read Kate Manne, Down Girl”
