I wish I could watch the latest farce playing out in New Orleans politics and crack some really great jokes about it. That’s kind of my job, to give utter absurdity the treatment it deserves.
I would love to find the perfect metaphor for the fact that the New Orleans City Council just voted to change the locks and evict Mayor LaToya Cantrell from the city-owned Upper Pontalba apartment she seems to have used in ways that previous mayors have not (that we know of anyway) — although it would be hard to top the obvious image of city workers dragging her furniture out onto Jackson Square, as WVUE-TV’s relentless Lee Zurik does a standup and tourists upload the only-in-New-Orleans scene to their social media.
I’ve been thinking that my late colleague James Gill would know what to say, and that it would include expressions like “pish tosh” — a phrase he actually used to characterize Cantrell’s lame excuses for her posh publicly funded travel during a previous scandal. James could always come up with stuff like that.
Me, I’m not so original, so I tend to fall back on pop culture references. The one that comes to mind this time is the classic line from “Singing in the Rain:” Dignity. Always dignity.
In the movie, Gene Kelly’s silent film star claims a highfalutin past, while a backdrop of clips reveals his real background as not Shakespearean but vaudevillian.
With Cantrell, the unreliable narrator is her press office, which put out a series of weird statements seeking not just to sanitize the tawdry story but to insist that only the mayor’s word can be trusted and that her actions are above reproach.
“Any statements or sources-say reports are again not accurate and not a fair representation regarding the Office of Mayor, and not a respectful decorum towards the hard work and dedicated efforts of Mayor Cantrell,” one read.
OK then.
“Respectful decorum” notwithstanding, to say that Cantrell brought the latest indignity on herself is to state the obvious.
The council voted back in August to take Cantrell’s Pontalba privileges away after Zurik aired surveillance footage showing the mayor spending time in the apartment with a member of her security team, sometimes when he was getting paid but not assigned to her detail.
The council voted to reclaim the apartment and rent it out, a move that drew Cantrell’s veto, which council members overrode.
Sadly, the story didn’t end there. The French Market Corp. has not been able to get Cantrell’s key back and has not renovated the apartment or put it on the market. Cantrell’s office says that the city agency has its own key and that her actions aren’t an impediment. But the mayor, in all her petulance, apparently wouldn’t just hand over her key.
So it fell to the council to act again, led by Vice President JP Morrell, who declared upon taking the latest vote last week that "you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. ... That’s why we’re here today." It should be said that Morrell too has a petulant side, but in this case, you really can’t blame him for being exasperated.
The bigger picture here is that this isn’t an isolated incident.
A year after surviving a badly flubbed recall effort, Cantrell is still doing the things that alienated so many constituents in the first place — jetting off to national and international meetings while appearing indifferent to serious problems back home, perennial ones like her administration’s failure to keep catch basins clear to prevent flooding and new ones like the dismal state of the city’s low barrier shelter for unhoused people, which was supposed to be one of her major initiatives.
All this and more on top of an active federal investigation into her dealings.
Back when the recall effort fell apart, I suggested that the mayor take it as a warning — and an opportunity for a reset. Instead, she’s still going on junkets, still refusing to engage in serious questions, still telling us that all is well when we can see with our own eyes that it’s not.
Which brings me back to my wish that I could channel my old friend James.
Back when I was getting started in the column biz, I sought out his advice. One thing he said that surprised me was that some situations are simply so ridiculous that you really can’t parody them.
At the time, I couldn’t imagine a scenario that would leave the great James Gill without a biting quip, but that’s where I am with our mayor right now — even when faced with this latest gift.
