The perils Of Pauline-Aguirre

April 04, 2008 6:00 PM

By Daniel Coffey

The movie genre of "The Perils of Pauline" and its ilk thrilled movie goers of yesteryear, drawing them back time and time again to spend their hard-earned nickels to watch the latest round of black and white celluloid chases, pratfalls, bound women lying across train tracks, white hats and black mustaches, all signifying otherworld extremes of the struggle between good and evil.

 

 

The cliffhanger became a standard. Music was added to heighten the meaning of ordinary conduct, which might otherwise seem prosaic, boring and even silly.

As formula-movie fantasy, audiences have accepted exaggerated contrivances for decades, but as a pattern for conducting the ordinary official city business of a municipal corporation created to provide vital public services, it's a disaster.

In San Diego, City Attorney Mike Aguirre is acting out scripts of his serialized, weekly "Perils of Pauline-Aguirre." Each installment more exaggerated, hair-raising and chilling than the last, each to enthrall the public in his self-

styled messianic, reformer fantasy. His basic formula: create a problem where little or none exists, conflate unrelated facts, or exaggerate circumstances beyond any reasonable bounds, and then call for a cure.

Aguirre recently acknowledged to Herb Kline and others that he uses exaggerated words to manipulate people into noticing one or more issues he deems crucial. That the gravity of his words bears no relation to the true harm seems not to worry him in the least, summoning up the boy who cried wolf.

In human society, words have meaning, signify scale and scope, and are trusted to convey real relations between symbol and reality. Aguirre breaks that relation and plunges his audiences into a world of heroic deeds, political dragons, endangered generations of children and the greatest challenges faced by anyone anywhere in order to gain and keep the attention of San Diegans for his own sense of self-importance.

For the past four years, Aguirre has been telling an episodic, now repetitious, story of pending or imminent disaster capable of disrupting life as we know it. Featured figures in these scripts include the mayor, the police chief, the district attorney, the sheriff, the head of Development Services, the previous mayor, the city council, lobbyists, the power company, the water purveyors, businesses of every description, the people who control squirrels by using poison, the courts, the judges, the appellate courts and finally anyone who does not agree with his dramatic conclusions drawn from a weekend review of one report or another coupled with some phone calls.

For example, Pauline-Aguirre shouts to the sky that San Diego has suffered "the largest municipal securities fraud case in US history," juxtaposed against a $15,000 SEC administrative fine and no individual charges. Police Chief Lansdowne, according to Pauline-Aguirre, is wildly corrupt, obstructing justice, and should be fired because he allegedly refused to serve Aguirre's search warrant, juxtaposed against the fact that Lansdowne was told by Aguirre not to serve that same search warrant.

Bankruptcy is imminent pronounces Pauline-Aguirre, but some how the city continues to meet its obligations and pay for Aguirre's exorbitant legal fees, including to defend against his sexual discrimination and the like.

Missing from the script, but far more hair-raising: the McGuigan case, a $178 million loss by Aguirre due to his own direct and astonishing incompetence; the pension case valued at $900 million, lost because Aguirre sued the wrong parties, missed the one- and four-year statute of limitations, and sued on a case previously reduced to a final judgment. Every loss, no matter its hopelessness, is appealed with a "win" just around the corner. His record to date teaches that Aguirre's appeals hold out an unrealistic hope for victory and are designed to buy him political cover.

For reasons truly only known to Mr. Aguirre, everything he does must be big, important and dramatic, or Pauline-Aguirre would not be involved. It must be big, big, big, or it commands little attention. It must pop, pop, pop or it's ignored as dull, difficult and mundane bureaucratic work. No mere municipal matters for him, though traditionally, city business is a mind-numbing effort to approve projects, pay bills, raise money, settle disputes and make people happy who otherwise prefer a day at the beach.

San Diegans and the courts have recently been invited by yet another group of scriptwriters to care deeply whether councilmen Scott Peters and Brian Maienschein have "practiced law" as attorneys while working for seven years as lawmakers and approving all the city's legal matters, but to ignore that as a judge, candidate Goldsmith is not technically counted a member of the bar and as such has also not "practiced law" for nine years. Who cares?

Hollywood benefits from action, diversions and drama, but San Diego has suffered such political ploys long enough. I'm ready for a reality show!

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