Maxinista: Rough

news, reasonable rumor, & comment

re the clique that stole the Local
by Sniper

The rough thing about the events of the last six months is the tiny number of ding-dongs who've been able to bring the Chestnut Hill Local to its knees, belching and expectorating like VP Cheney trying to explain away his shotgun accident: you've got awful little Sanjiv Jain, the wannabe new Snowden-on-the-Hill; Pam "Ding-Dong" Waters, a Virginia Bell (vintage stripper) lookalike, who's actually a Mt. Airy housewife and interior decorator; Tia Burke, the one-time McDonalds grease empire battler and lawyer, now transformed into a Jain groupie (she stands up at public meetings whenever little Sanji begins to bray (as if ready to smite his hecklers!); Nancy Berger, the proofreader-turned-Maximum Leader; Joe Pie, the Creature From the Black Saloon; George Parry, a one-time serious lawyer, currently twisted around Maxinista's um, pinkie… and then there's M herself, reddish-haired, determined, seductively articulate, looking a little like a rumpled Laura Bush in a minister's collar.

Somehow they've changed all the rules, ignored the board of directors, and, word has it, take their cues from some mysterious trustees determined to subvert the CHCA to the CHBA (Hi, Bob Previdi!), an old battle that goes back to the 60s, apparently. The idea here is Hoover/Coolidge Republicanism -- "The Business of America is Business!" -- and damn anybody who doesn't get off on maxing profits plus pushing positive community spin… journalism, poor frail creature that it's become, should get out of the way! Who wants to read real stories, like what's behind the Commerce Bank fiasco? Behind the loopy mismanagement of CHCA funds? The silent coup that forced Jim Sturdivant to resign or risk puking on his shoes, acceding to demotion as a staff writer? ("Jim writes so well! We just wanted him to write more!," barked Bergie last fall). The cowardly appeasement of SuperBrat Snowden (hereafter "SBS"), waster of his grandmom's providence, real estate dilettante extraordinaire, proprietor of empty venues up and down the Avenue… Only a bunch of Luddites who still read for content & style could be interested in such stuff, poor fools… So when you get a couple of them on the CHCA board, like Lawrence Walsh and Martha Haley, you demonize them and get them to resign… (And they, for some reason, go along with it!)

Ah, Chestnut Hill. Still hung up on your cobblestones and historical trash cans… afraid to engage the hard facts that Germantown and Mt. Airy are pushing you for liebesraum. That the WASP dream-ideal is kind of Bing Crosby-ish in this era of Kanye West and Ludacris… How did you elect Maxinista three times?

All her ideas belonged to Maurice "the Collar" McCarthy: that overt "rudeness" -- good reporting -- is next to Godlessness; that P.R. trumps substance every time; that nothing can't be won in Chestnut Hill with a minimum show of old-line wardleader smarts -- ring 'dem doorbells, since voter pluralities are often no more than 175 to 300 bodies. But now she's gone too far. Her Kitchen Cabinet (the Executive Committee), refuses to allow CHCA's books to be read even by legitimate board members (Mark Keintz and Chris Kemezis, working both sides of the street as usual, collaborate). She won't reveal the sad truth about the failures of the last Holiday House Tour drive, or the flop of the Black & White Gala. She's packed the Local with nincompoops, who allow propaganda like January 12th's "For the record… the truth" to lie by omission (Sturdivant wasn't the victim of a silent coup, he quit! Sturdi quit, I tell you! And so did Mishak!). She assigns the minimally-employed -- Boynton, Pie, Berger -- to hobble those remaining members of the Local staff who actually know what they're doing. She brokers a deal where mortal political enemies Lawrence Walsh and George Parry are supposed to simultaneously resign from the CHCA, but only Walsh is extruded.

Bad blood. Bad blood, I tell you. Max's feckless brother Nolan, for example, now safely ensconced as a gofer in Councilman Frank Rizzo Jr.'s office by Stewart Graham, CHCA's Karl Rove (and reportedly the secret conduit for the mysterious trustees' political orders) -- is such a hapless fool his (Nolan's) car was recently towed by the Parking Authority for "abandonment". Joe Pie, Max's and Parry's hit man, is reportedly the reason a well-liked McNally's bartender just quit and went to work at Fatty's in Wyndmoor… maybe that's why Pie's wife Anne, his only source of income, prevailed on her pal Maxinista to set Joe up at the Local to harass the helpless staff! Get him out of the bar! Among other things, apparently, Joe was bad for business…