NEWS . Man Overboard!

The Malaise

It's the omnipresent funk that seems to drag this city backward even as it crawls ahead.


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Published: May 26, 2010

No, I didn't vote — but my excuse is entertaining: My old polling location in West Philly had a sign out front telling me I was supposed to vote somewhere else — but not where that somewhere else was. Thanks to errant WiFi, I found my new location online. But I got to the new address just after 8 p.m. — and the polls, the division election judge told me, were closed.

Why couldn't they have posted the new address? I protested. A Magic Marker would have done the trick.

In response, Division Judge Catherine Blunt called me a racist and threatened to get the police if I didn't leave immediately. When I didn't, she grabbed two nearby policemen who, to their credit, let me stay: "Freedom of speech," shrugged one.

I don't blame Miss Blunt. I blame the Philly Malaise, that omnipresent funk that seems to drag this city backward even as it crawls ahead. Our elections, for example, are overseen by the often-lugubrious three-person crew known as the City Commissioners. Philadelphia is the only one of the country's 10 largest cities to still have elected officials running local elections.

Does it stop there? It does not. Two more massive city functions — property and parking — have been run by giant political patronage megabots: the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT) and the Philadelphia Parking Authority, respectively. Our city government has no appetite to end its DROP retirement plan — as Ralph Cipriano revealed [Cover Story, "The Billion Dollar Boondoggle," April 22], it's essentially an open scam at this point. Lobbyists, who faced no disclosure laws, invaded our budget process; our Council, treating the public like dollar-store customers, priced a property tax hike at 9.99 percent instead of the 12.1 percent that would have balanced our budget to the mayor's satisfaction — leading him to threaten cuts to libraries and homeless services.

After decades of planning, our waterfront's only new attraction, so far? A casino. Our resident opinionator on bicycling? Stu. Freaking. Bykofsky.

That, friends, is malaise.

But wait! The BRT was just vanquished in the polls; Council gave preliminary approval to lobbying and other ethics reforms; the Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby was awesome. Hope is not lost: In fact, I think this city will make it.

But damn that malaise, damn it.

Isaiah Thompson will not abandon hope. E-mail him at isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net.