Kwamikaze

Kwame Kilpatrick is the former mayor of Detroit, a much maligned city that I love and will always love. He and this whole sorry mess has a long, but fascinating back story. Net net, he was removed from office and went to jail. Got out, moved to Texas and was ordered, under a plea deal to which he agreed, to pay the city restitution. Six grand a month. He unilaterraly decided to pay $6 a month instead. Got hauled back into court. He has hidden assests and done lots of dirty things with dirty money from dirty people given to him for dirty reasons. The first hearing was last month, adjourned until yesterday, testimony yesterday and today and then adjourned again until Dec 7th because he has a business meeting in Texas.

A long time ago I stopped defending Detroit because it makes me sound like a fool. I have come to see Kwame as pure entertainment, high art. His shenanigans are a cottage industry, Youtube parody songs, coffee cups and t-shirts with his mugshot, great headlines in the two Detroit dailies, etc. I have one of the cups. He's a joke, a bad one and frankly one the city deserves as they voted for him twice and after the first term it was pretty clear what he was about. But he was "the hip hop mayor, the maya playa (his affair with his COS a big component of all this), Yawl's Boy" (as his equally crooked Congresssman mother famously callled him) and the D loves big personalities.

But that these hearings on whether or not he violated terms of his probation are something else, something not at all funny. I've been watching them on-line. A completely unprepared ADA and a jugdge who at best seems like an inept subsititute teacher trying and failing to control an unruly class and at worst seems like he's in on the fix. WHY has this clear cut matter been allowed to drag on over three months? Something is rotten in the state of Michigan and this time it's something more than the dead stripper the Kwamster left in his wake. That is a whole seperate issue which will hopefully be brought to light in the fullness of time.

Watching Detroit flounder and fail is worse than watching New Orleans go under. Katrina was an act of nature. This destruction has been wrought by one man while people who should have known better stood by and did nothing. But Detroit isn't being mourned the way NO was, not by anyone other than me.