Any observations about Nutter’s use of mild profanity in his public address concerning the DHS saga — and the local media’s seeming willingness to play along? Last night, Action News ran a clip in which he said both that he was “pissed off” and that, were he the father of a child in DHS’s care, he “would kick their ass myself” (or something like that). This second statement was aired on KYW radio this morning as well. It’s curious to me on both counts – that the mayor of a major city would choose to communicate his emtions that way (especially this mayor, who is, well, a little nebbishy), and that his choice of words would pass right through the broadcast outlets. Just a thought. I’ll totally leave you alone now.

No, no, it’s cool. You bring up a lot of good questions. And actually, we have a bunch of thoughts about this.

OK, first things first: The DHS mess is an atrocity. Just awful. And when the system fails so very brutally at protecting the weakest among us — in this case, a kid with cerebral palsy who literally could not care for herself — the usual words of outrage do not apply. Especially when you consider that “outrage” is the axis the news cycle turns on, often about things that are simply not worthy of it: We’re thinking about the Obama New Yorker cover, we’re thinking any number of fearmongering local TV news items (SALMONELLA! AAAGHHHH!!!), we’re thinking pretty much anything that comes out of that shrew Nancy Grace’s mouth.

So there’s that. To get through to a media saturated with Missing White Girls and Tainted Vegetables and a World Where It’s Racist To Say That The Guys On Dollar Bills Don’t Look Like You, The Dude could have, and did, use a little profanity just to cut through all of this Godawful bullshit that he’s competing for screen time with. For this, he gets a pass — as well as prime time on all the local media outlets. That’s fucked, but so are they. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

But there’s other things in play here, too. One is that he really, really does need that vacation. While you can certainly take at face value Nutter’s remarks in which he was speaking as a father, there’s a subtext here that he’s not mentioning. And it’s this: How frustrated must this new Mayor, who rode in on a wave of progressive thinking at large in the populace, be when confronted with the mouth-breathing, lazy, ignorant rank and file who fill up this city’s agencies? And before we go further, yes, it’s wrong categorize everyone who works for a city agency in this way, as there is always that one person who basically carries the weight of the whole department and has ulcers and is always completely freaked out that [insert agency here] is on the verge of a citywide crisis of one stripe or another. That person exists. But that person is not enough. And this whole first year of the Nutter admin has been almost entirely about cleaning house.

But here’s the problem: You can only clean it up so much. So when you hear Nutter cursing, it is not just out of pure, raw, justified outrage that such a thing can happen, it’s also out of frustration that the game of Whac-A-Mole he’s found himself in cannot possibly stem the twin tides of death and national embarrassment that the City of Philadelphia has been swimming in longer than anyone can remember.

So let the man curse. He speaks for all of us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pm.