Watching the wheels go round and round.

Bluegill wrote these words yesterday:

The City Council, as a body, does not recognize logical argument. The lesson reinforced last night is that it's all politics and one-upmanship. Facts do not matter. They'll claim one thing when it's politically advantageous. They'll completely contradict that claim with a straight face when that's advantageous. There is nothing else.

A city council member recently suggested that my perceptions of the current aggregation are utterly mistaken. According to him, and contrary to the popular view, each of the members works very, very hard.

It took me a day or so to digest this. Certainly there have been conspicuous examples of newly elected council persons publicly confessing to ignorance as to the requirements of the job, and seeking to postpone decisions because he or she hadn't had time to consider information that unpaid community activists already knew by heart, word for word.

However, such examples don't necessarily imply that hard work is not taking place, and so I'll concede that many council members are working hard. But are they working smart?

Consider the lowly hamster spnning the wheel in his cage. As the revolutions per minute mount, it is obvious that he is working hard -- damned hard. At the same time, all the impressively hard work yields nothing in terms of concrete, comprehensive results, with the possible exception of a heightened pulse for the unfortunate animal, who remains trapped inside a cage.

Perhaps if he worked smarter, the hamster would be able to escape and go on holiday in the Bahamas ... or replace the bad water heater in his rental hole.

Simply stated, hard work sans context is a chimera unless it is directed toward a goal, structured toward results, and capable of producing a substantive yield. The current council's legislative record after fourteen months in one of sidestepping substantive issues while seeking the convey the notion that much hard work has occurred when it comes to smaller, unnecessary ones: Smoking bans, "adult cabaret" ordinances, novelty lighters, and the like.

This is why I have made the charge that as a body, it is intellectually lazy, something that pertains to cognitive habits of thought, not the speed with which one of them can dig a sewage trench to nowhere with a teaspoon made of plastic.

The fact that it took our city clerk, an obvious victim of Coffeyist sadism, forty minutes to read the adult cabaret ordinance aloud is the most obvious red flag suggesting that a council member -- an one of them -- with even the slightest interest in issues pertaining to freedom of speech and expression might ask one or two questions about it, ranging beyond the purely technical consideration of fee structures and distance between paying customer and pastie-clad dancer, and yet nine members sat passively throughout, apparently having determined to speed through ROCK's act of theocratic will as quickly as humanly possible and move on to the business of ignoring all the other daily threats to the well-being of children and families.

Afterwards, I asked four separate council persons whether they were aware that ROCK's fundamental argument, that children and families must be protected from the "threat" of an adult cabaret by any and all means, was precisely the same argument prefacing the establishment of Prohibition, with demon alcohol substituted for sex-crazed breasts. Each council member said nope, never really thought about it, and besides, if it upset me so much, why didn't I say something aloud about it during public speaking time?

That's where they'll be when the theocrats come gunning for the rest of us.

Apart from my having written about it again, again, and again, in places like this that are available to any literate adult, consider that on previous occasions, many of these same council members advanced the bizarre view that their right to be heard trumped the public's, because only they had deigned to undertake courageous runs for public office.

Now, presumably cowered by the presence of ROCK's vote-withholding lobby in the gallery, and unwilling to ask questions of their own, they point at me (at us) and say that it our responsibility to raise relevant points about legislation.

Well, which is it? And how many votes from ROCK's residential base in the exurb would be withheld, seeing as people like Mr. /Pastor Wickens don't even reside within the city limits?

I'll stop now. Being the conscience for the conscience-deprived is exceedingly hard work ... and smart work, too. My brain hurts.

Are we serving beer yet?