I’m not a ninja.
I’m not an open book but I presume anyone who visits this blog with some regularity does it to find out what’s going on, in my head at leas, if not in the Duluth School District. Therefore, I’m puzzled that some people bend over backward NOT to read what I have to say. Oh, I understand that fragile egos may quail at the prospect of my saying something unflattering about the ego’s possessor but really. Folks who run for public office should have egos big enough to take a few knocks. That’s what the Federal Judge said about himself when presiding over the first inconclusive hearing of Art’s suit last week.
I am vigilant about defending myself from accusations when they are made in print. I can even address a whisper campaign by at least offering my own interpretation of events here in the blog. Some things said about me have been nasty enough for me to label them character assassination. The first beneficiary of such a bashing was our current Chair Judy Seliga-Punyko who defeated me three days after a scurrilous attack on me was put on every front porch in Duluth. I’ve always presumed that she had nothing to do with that. I wish I could say the same of other similar attacks like those on Art Johnston.
What prompts me to write this now is a stray comment in an opinion piece today about incivility that takes for granted that Art Johnston’s suit is based on Art’s incivility. Trust me, if that’s all it had been Judge Davis would have dismissed it out of hand last Tuesday. The writer was from Superior, Wisconsin, so I’ll cut him a little slack for his ignorance.
I’ll give you an example I find humorous if a little pathetic about the degree to which my fellow board members misunderestimate my blog.
I’ve mentioned Tim Davis in several posts. Mern knew him before me because Tim transferred into East High about ten years ago from Chicago before Mike retired. I saw Mern go out to greet Tim at the last school board meeting and put his arm around Tim in an avuncular manner. Tim told me later that he had scheduled a meeting with Mike.
When the meeting was over I sauntered out of Old Central with Art and Tim and we kibitzed a bit as Mern and Bill Westholm departed the building from a different exit. As I left my trio (actually there were four of us) to walk around the building to the car park on the Eastern side Mike walked over and told me earnestly that someone else who had read my blog told Mike of a warning that he should not talk to Tim. I was taken aback and said I had no objections to such a conversation. Then I told him I never wrote any such thing and that I would be sure to compile a list of all the people I disapproved of his talking to. I said that in good humor because it was so silly.
Who knows how Mike’s informant got that garbled message. On reflection it might have been my post in which I described a series of email Tim got from someone warning Tim not to talk to me. That was almost certainly in response to my blog as well which had mentioned Rosie Loeffler-Kemp’s patronizing treatment of Tim.
Judy Seliga told me in my one on one with her that she didn’t want me to blog. At three or more closed meetings I’ve had other members broadly hint that what was being discussed could not be made public. Of course, I was censured in December for my gaff disclosing Central property’s firesale price. But I believe in transparency and am not afraid of it myself. I’ve always enjoyed a joke on myself and was once advised by the Trib’s Jim Heffernan not to be so self deprecatory as it seemed to him to be an impediment to winning over voters. But my idol Lincoln did the same and I’m just following in his footsteps.
I am sensitive to the power of my blog to injure the egos of those I must work with. After the year I’ve had, however, I’m far less concerned about it. Right now this blog is all about shining a Klieg light on it no matter who ends up in its glare.
As for the evil Art Johnston, a few days ago in a phone conversation he paused to wax rhapsodically about the first vireo of the season that he saw at his bird feeder. On Cinco de Mayo I had supper with him and Jane and their new foster child. Yeah, he can rant at a school board meeting when he is deprived of public data, or when the two of us are denied the Parliamentary protections our Code of Ethics requires, or he’s investigated for phony charges that are spread all over the media to make uninformed folks like today’s op ed writer despise him.
