Section: Croton-on-Hudson A Satirical Report to the People
February 7, 2007
A Satirical Report on Croton's Feb. 5 Village Board Meeting
“Not much fun” was humorist Dorothy Parker’s answer to a bartender’s question, “What are you having?” That response also could be used to describe Croton residents’ reactions to the performance of what has become Croton’s Little Theater Company—the hackneyed, moth-eaten group that braved the cold to turn out and give another listless presentation of golden oldies at Monday night’s meeting of Croton’s board of trustees. In the eyes of this critic, it was no Ziegfeld production.
Not only did not much fun result from the show they put on, not much light was cast on an issue of crucial importance to the village. Exhibiting their usual feelings of superiority to those who do not share their political philosophy, they all played dual roles—except Croton’s diva, Madame Maria Cudequest, who always folds her tent and departs after her star turn. As predicted by Crotonblog (see: “Desperate Campaign to “Pack” Monday Night’s Croton Village Board Meeting”), when not onstage and performing, they served as their own noisy little claque—taking in each other’s wash, applauding loudly and approvingly at each performer’s solo reading. Despite the noisy little group’s efforts to generate loud applause, the sound level barely reached what might be heard from a pair of ham-handed attendees applauding at a convention of Turkish bath masseurs.
This was no memorable routine by a group of enthusiastic fresh-faced young players. Rather, it was another boring replay by the same tired group mouthing lines so familiar those watching at home could have said them as they were being read. So regularly does this hectoring crowd make a travesty of board meetings by reading from prepared scripts and lecturing patient, long-suffering village board members that Crotonblog now refers to them as “the usual suspects,” the classic phrase from the film Casablanca, Verily, their tactic is that of dripping water that can wear away a stone. Sensing the lackluster, repetitive tone of the evening, Trustee Tom Brennan simply could not resist playing enthusiastic ringmaster, injecting his own self-promoting comments after each player’s soliloquy. Heaven help us if we are to be subjected at village board meetings to another month of the Brennan brand of electioneering on steroids.
Amid the old familiar faces was one faded has-been performer resurrected from the past for an unbilled solo: Charles W. Trendell, 69 (see video clip below). For a change, a Barrymore not in his cups, he is more putty-nosed vaudeville clown than seasoned actor. All he needed was the baggy pants and the bladder and the slapstick to bring back memories of the old Minsky days. His chief claim to fame is that he served one term as trustee a quarter-century ago before voters got wise to him and turned him out to pasture. Carried away by his own sense of self-importance, he rambled on, wagging an accusatory finger, libeling Democratic trustees and charging them with accepting bribes. Mayor Dr. Gregory Schmidt, as he had done all evening, sat passively at the center of the horseshoe-shaped dais. Never once did he reach for his gavel to control the forced applause nor did he caution Mr. Trendell about his defamatory remarks. Such is the loose rein exercised by our illustrious Bürgermeister.
The Croton Little Theater Company players presented an end-of-days scenario they claim is taking place because of the village’s reasoned attempt to protect itself from unexpected turns of events arising from litigation now in progress. To them, Croton is already awash in noxious fumes and coated with dust containing every contaminant and poison known to science. Residents, it seems, are also at risk from every disease and condition that affects mankind, ranging from asthma to yellow jaundice. In their eyes, the village is already so contaminated as to be barely habitable, if not uninhabitable. To spice up the threat, they also threw in a couple of rumors and some urban legends for good measure. Example: Contaminated automobiles are the Typhoid Marys of Croton.
These scare tactics are identical with the scare tactics the Republicans have used nationally since 9/11 to retain their stranglehold on the government. As the November election showed, fear tactics have lost their usefulness to guarantee reelection of Republican candidates. Having recited their litany of alleged pollutants and impurities already coating surfaces of the village, they then raised the specter of falling real estate values, proving that their mock anxiety about health issues is merely a cloak for their real concerns: the dollar value of their homes. Yet by their wild, irresponsible allegations—unsubstantiated charges that would never be permitted to be uttered in a court of law—they have already done irreparable damage to real estate values in the village.
One statistical number ran like a thread through their unfounded allegations: the specter of “20,000 trucks rumbling through the village annually,” spewing death and destruction everywhere. The authority of and source for this monstrous number was never cited. Nevertheless, speaker after speaker repeated the ominous mantra-like phrase. It still rings in Crotonblog’s ears like a Buddhist chant. Om mani padme um. Twenty thousand trucks a year. Om mani padme um. Twenty thousand trucks a year.
Crotonblog barely scraped through mathematics at school, but retained enough common sense and skepticism to detect that this astronomical number of 20,000 trucks a year had a strong odor of baloney. A few simple calculations enabled Crotonblog to convert it into a realistic number: Assuming continuous operation at 1A Croton Point Avenue from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays and deducting only for national holidays, 20,000 trucks a year translates into one truck entering 1A Croton Point Avenue, being unloaded and exiting every six minutes! What masterful scheduling and process control that would take. Yet the Croton Little Theater Company players want you to believe their unbelievably fanciful number of 20,000 trucks a year has validity. Even auto manufacturers Toyota and Honda, known for their carefully timed scheduled delivery of automobile components to their assembly plants, cannot boast of such quick delivery turnarounds.
And so Crotonblog is compelled to ask the Croton Little Theater Company: If your astronomical numbers have been so blatantly inflated, how can you expect residents to give credence to your other unfounded allegations? In the guise of citizen participation at a village board meeting, Croton was subjected to nothing short of an electioneering event staged by the desperate Republican Party. For their appalling takeover of Monday night’s meeting, these abysmally bad actors should be prevented from ever again using the Stanley H. Kellerhouse Municipal Building as a stage for such shabby theatrics. They should be banned from repeatedly wasting the valuable time of village officers and residents at village board meetings. If they want to engage in electioneering, let them pull up their socks, get some new material and put together an election platform that is free of fear, hokum and deception. But whatever platform they come up with, it should be presented as street theater—not on village property masquerading as honest comment.
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November 26, 2006
Earnest Testimonies of Faith at Croton Village Board Session—A Satirical Report
At last Monday night’s village board meeting, the Stanley H. Kellerhouse Municipal Building was briefly transformed into the eastern seaboard equivalent of the famous Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California. But it did not feature an Hour of Power such as the one for which the Rev. Robert H. Schuller is famous. Instead, it was more like an Hour of Pusillanimity, highlighted by a few interludes of exhortation to blind faith in the Surface Transportation Board (STB) by Pastor Schmidt—oops, sorry—Mayor Dr. Gregory J. Schmidt, 50. Nor was an audience present in numbers anything like the thousands who fill the Crystal Cathedral’s seats. It was merely the usual suspects who had been rounded up in the otherwise empty meeting room. Four one-issue, die-hard stalwarts represented the total public attendance at the meeting, demonstrating the stifling effect their bi-monthly rants have on the body politic. They included Robert O. Wintermeier, 68, Susan W. Konig, 44, Joann Minett, 41, and an unidentified woman whose name was not revealed and who did not speak.
Three of the four faithful congregants in attendance gave testimony denouncing sin, as well as all who favor negotiations. Their now-familiar catechism has paraphrased King Henry II’s twelfth-century lament about Archbishop Thomas Becket to this bleat: “Will no one rid us of this meddlesome railroad?” Despite the poor attendance, Mayor Schmidt exhorted the faithful—all four of them—plus any bored watchers on TV or the Internet, to join him in his expression of faith that the STB will see the blessed light of day, and rule in Croton’s favor. In his hortatory homily on faith, the Mayor did everything except break into a soft-shoe routine and a few choruses of You’ve Gotta Have Faith, parodying the hit song from the Broadway musical Damn Yankees.
Susan Konig, November 20, 2006, Village of Croton-on-Hudson meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Impatient with the slow grinding of the mills of village government, a sweatshirt-clad Ms. Konig finessed the Mayor’s brief mention of the Metro Enviro site into a foot-in-the door comment on agenda items, and then overstayed her leave, reluctant to give up the comfort of the microphone. Wondering aloud why the village should talk with an entity it is fighting in court, she apparently is unaware that the first question judges ask attorneys representing both adversarial parties in a suit is whether efforts have been made at settlement of the dispute. She kept on bottomfishing for additional subjects to naively wonder about, looking and sounding more and more like someone considering whether she should run for elective office as “Ms. Suburban Mom.” May Heaven forfend such a calamitous turn of events (see: “A Fiction Stranger than Fiction by Susan Konig”).
Robert O. Wintermeier, November 20, 2006, Village of Croton-on-Hudson meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Mr. Wintermeier then parlayed her intrusive spot into an excuse for his own specialty: cleverly creating doubt in people’s minds. Citing “alarms e-mails” sent to him expressing concerns about rail cars, he claimed that he makes a practice of regularly inspecting them and reported that they now contained a mysterious “beige substance” (see: “Gypsum Transloading Begins at 1A Croton Point Avenue”). Raising the question of what this mysterious material being transloaded into rail cars at the site could be and suggesting that something nefarious was going on, he said significantly, “I’ve been told that gypsum is white.” Having planted a seed of doubt, he then left the microphone, but reappeared for a repeat performance during citizen participation on non-agenda items. This time he sought reassurance that the village will be able to know exactly how much money is being spent on attorneys’ fees for “negotiations,” a dirty word for some. Satisfied that these amounts, if any, will be earmarked on attorneys’ future invoices, he again left the microphone, but not before invoking a blessing on everybody in authority for now exercising due diligence (see: “The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Brennan”). Opponents of intercourse with “the enemy” are intent on keeping track of such expenditures, however small. In the meantime, the accoutrements of the former skate park sit forlornly exposed to the elements, so unwanted they couldn’t even elicit a two-cent bid on e-Bay as firewood—a wasteful white elephant whose short-lived existence no one has yet been held accountable for (see: “Croton Skate Park Ramps & Retired Fire Truck in Auction on Ebay”).
Joann Minett, November 20, 2006, Village of Croton-on-Hudson meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Ms. Minett, who was having a bad hair day and sometimes seems to be speaking in tongues, approached the microphone and initially began a probing cross-examination of Trustees Gallelli and Kane. Eventually, the Mayor gently admonished her, pointing out that the period known as citizen participation was meant to be an opportunity for citizens to address the board, not to undress it (see: “Mayor Schmidt Don’t Get No Respect”). It took some effort, however, to convince Ms. Minett to abjure her heretical contention that the hated Metro Enviro site (now referred to in Schmidtspeak as “1A Croton Point Avenue”) is “at the edge of the river.” It isn’t. Yet even after having been shown the error of her ways, she muttered, “I don’t feel that that’s true.” Sticking to her guns, she insisted that it was at the edge of the river, no matter what anybody said about its location. Mulish recalcitrance and resistance to correction in obdurate adherents is the cross politicians must occasionally bear to gain votes. She concluded her spiel by assuring everybody that, like the Mayor, she had supreme faith in the STB. One could almost hear the strains of the pop classic song I Believe rising to a crescendo in the background.
Communal blind faith in the three-member Surface Transportation Board ignores the reality that the STB, like its predecessor agency the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was not created to oversee the further dismantling of the nation’s dwindling rail network but rather to preserve its remaining trackage to prevent additional gravitation to monster truck traffic. It also happens that all three of the present STB members were nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by Republican-controlled Senates, although one member was required by law to be of another party.
Lately, Trustee Brennan has taken to expounding his homely contrarian “philosophy” on every issue and exposing his lack of knowledge. No matter how much he may disparage the Buffalo Southern Railroad’s two locomotives, the truth of the matter is that all a railroad must have to be considered a railroad is trackage of any length connected to a mainline railroad. The very fact that, at this very moment, the Buffalo Southern Railroad is performing all the functions of an operating railroad over the former Metro Enviro spur track should tell the citizens of Croton all they need to know about the probable outcome of Croton’s latest foray into the expensive world of litigious adventurism. The Las Vegas gamblers’ wisdom, “Quit while you’re winning” was never truer.
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