The Anaconda.....

“In your last column,” asked a respected businessman I barely know, “who is the falconer/snake handler?”
I told him what I think, implicating our former city manager, and was relieved when he said “I think so, too.” He added “He should be prosecuted,” and seem gratified when I replied “We’re still looking for a way.”
Other people stopped me to talk last week, mostly about the park. “I finally got over to look at it,” said one long-time friend “and I see what you mean.  It used to be so beautiful....” It’s past beauty was the most common remark. Of course, now it’s in the demolition phase; the park may be beautiful in some people’s eyes when they finish reshaping it.  But it will be smaller, less open and accessible, far less natural, and appropriate for a smaller range of people.
As you may have read last week, not everyone agrees with me that’s a bad thing.  “We need a middle class back in Lindsay,” many cry, as if we don’t have one. We do, and most of the people singing that song are middle class. The problem (for them) is that it is no longer the dominant class.  For those of us who share other values and have different socio-economic realities, that could be good.  But it’s hard to get that discussion on the table.
What keeps me writing and researching is the definite sense that this middle-class dream has been pursued, not only against the interests of working class folks, but also unlawfully. I see small lies in the grant applications, catch contradictory statements coming from staff, note serious misrepresentations on plans and negative declarations of environmental impact. Then there’s the closed, unresponsive city council with its defective procedures and sleights of hand.  What’s lying below, driving all this?
In conversation with one of the organizers who broke open the Bell scandal, Steven Mecum was given this analogy. “You’re digging, making public records requests, and you keep reaching in this hole and bringing up dirt that doesn’t add up to anything.  But if you keep digging, suddenly you’re going to find the anaconda.”
Steven’s lawsuit against the city originated when his public records requests were suddenly stonewalled by Rich Wilkinson right before he became permanent city manager. The requests had to do with property transactions, which is the same point where others’ requests also have been blockaded. I think the anaconda lives under the category “land.”
The falconer came from a Yeats poem I found years ago in Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. It begins something like “Circling, circling in a widening gyre/the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...” I sense right now this is what the City fears most: the falcon escaping, things falling apart.  
But the poem ends something like “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, now slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” I think it’s the anaconda. I think not long after Y2K a rough beast slithered into Lindsay and took over. Whether that was our former city manager himself, or whether he was simply the snake handler, we may never know - unless we keep digging.