The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Mayor of CrazyTown, U.S.A.

Posted on | September 17, 2022 | Comments Off on The Mayor of CrazyTown, U.S.A.

Politico has a lengthy feature about the political turmoil in “America’s Blackest City.” South Fulton didn’t even exist as a municipality until 2016 when the unincorporated area south of Atlanta in Fulton County decided that it should become its own city. From the beginning, South Fulton had problems, due to its lack of a commercial tax base, but then last year, the election for mayor was won by khalid kamau — no capital letters, because capitalization is racist or something — who is an avowed socialist whose express goal is to turn South Fulton into a “real-life Wakanda.”

Everybody else on the city council in “America’s Blackest City” has denounced the mayor, and Politico does readers the excellent service of quoting verbatim a recent speech by the mayor:

Flanked by an ally in a shirt that blared “Black on Purpose” and a street activist wearing pink hair, pink tights and black tactical gear, kamau then delivered an unprecedented broadside against no small share of the government of this city he was elected to lead.
“I am here today because sometimes you gotta fight your people to fight for your people. Seven months ago, I was elected the city of South Fulton’s second mayor. I ran on a platform here in the Blackest city in America that we should be Black on purpose, period. Being Black on purpose isn’t just about policymaking. It is about rethinking how we do government for the benefit of the people, with a platform and an agenda written not by me, but by all of you. We won an election decisively, with 60 percent of the vote, in every district of this city, across every demographic. Some folks, some folks say I’m a young mayor — I’m 45, but I’ll take it — and in doing so, they have attributed my difficulties with this council to a lack of maturity. But it’s a lie. And even more problematic, it’s an inconvenient excuse to avoid how dysfunctional this city council has been.” . . .
“Being Black on purpose is acknowledging that we have been conditioned as a people to be crabs in a barrel. That’s what you see happening. That’s the behavior you see happening on council. It’s a crabs-in-a-barrel mentality. But what we should be asking is: Who put us in this barrel? A crab’s natural habitat is the ocean. When you see me getting busy, when you see me swinging in this barrel, I’m not pushing against the other crabs. I’m pushing against the barrel to knock it over and get us back into the ocean,” he said. “I’m gonna close by saying this. I want to apologize in advance to the citizens of the city of South Fulton for the months of negative press coverage that are sure to follow this conference. I promise I would not take such drastic measures if I thought there were any other way to move forward. But I also promise you this: A more noble city lies on the other side of these troubled waters. Do not fall victim to the post-traumatic slave narrative that Black people cannot rightly govern.”

Ah, it’s “the post-traumatic slave narrative,” you see.

Quoting the mayor at such length serves to confirm one basic fact: He’s deranged, demented, daft, wacky, cracked, bonkers, nuttier than squirrel farts, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

The fact that he got 60% of the vote in South Fulton — well, I don’t know what that says about “the post-traumatic slave narrative,” but it doesn’t bode well for the community’s future prospects. In that respect, South Fulton is like many other places (e.g., Chicago) that have elected mayors who are not quite so blatantly crazy as Mayor Lower-Case Letters, but still crazy enough to utterly wreck everything. When people elect a lunatic like khalid kamau, they are rendering a verdict on themselves, because what kind of people would choose to be governed by such a kook?

By the way, the mayor has kept his campaign promise to move into the Camelot Condominiums off Old National Highway, where he pays $800 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. A local TV station speaks of “the dilapidated Camelot Condominiums [which] have become notorious as one of metro Atlanta’s most run-down housing units,” but guess what? About 50 years ago — in the late 1960s and early 1970s — this was an apartment complex that was actually a fashionable place to live, with lots of stewardesses who worked out of nearby Hartsfield Airport and other hip young “swingers.” Gosh, I wonder what changed . . .




 

Category: Georgia

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