As a cum laude graduate of cussin,’ here’s my take on the Durham City Council outburst | Opinion
Laws really are like sausages: you don’t want to see either being made.
After what happened in Durham City Council chambers recently, you don’t want to hear them, either.
Council member DeDreana Freeman unleashed a fusillade of F-bombs on council member Mark-Anthony Middleton recently after a resolution was introduced to censure council member Monique Holsey-Hyman.
Holsey-Hyman is accused of, among other things, using city staffers to work on her election campaign. Holsey-Hyman denies the charges, and Freeman objected to the censure resolution — loudly and profanely.
I am not here to judge Holsey-Hyman’s ethics or the strength of the case against her. That’s what investigations are for.
I am, though, here to judge the strength of Freeman’s #$%@&* performance in assailing Middleton for going along with it.
Remember in the movie “Arthur,” when the stuffy manservant Hobson archly tells a woman “Usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature”?
To hear words like the ones Freeman aimed at Middleton, one must usually go behind a bowling alley or a poolroom.
Or hang around me when I was younger.
As a teenager, I achieved a distinction that no one else in Rockingham, to my knowledge, ever has: I went to jail for cussing somebody out.
I was 16 and used four-letter and 12-letter words the way Van Gogh used paint: I was truly a virtuoso of vulgarity.
The charge on the warrant sworn out against me was “verbal assault,” and when I muttered to the judge that I didn’t know there was such a charge, he gave me an unsympathetic look that conveyed “You know it now, Slick.”
The night I spent in jail for cussin’ makes me, in my mind, a cum laude graduate of the art form and uniquely qualified to judge the quality of others’ performance in the medium. To wit: Freeman earned high marks for enthusiasm, but lost points because her attack lacked variety or the gradual build-up good verbal assaults need. In short, she brought out the @#$#%& heavy artillery too quickly.
To professionals, that’s an unpardonable breach of epithet etiquette.
I sought comment from Mayor Elaine O’Neal, who can be seen exasperatedly trying to quell the contentious tete-a-tete. Through her assistant, O’Neal said: “Tell him my comment is ‘No comment.’”
Who could blame her? That confrontation redounded to the glory of no one.
I also reached out to former mayor Bill Bell, who has spent decades being an unassailably articulate ambassador for Durham city and county.
“It was unfortunate,” Bell said, “but it happened. I’ve been chair of the county commissioners and the city council, and my priority was always to listen so I could make an informed decision. People are going to have disagreements, but there’s a way to handle them in a professional manner,” he said. “That incident doesn’t define Durham. I hope lessons were learned and that it doesn’t happen again.
“One thing about Durham,” he said, is “we give people platforms to be heard, whether they’re elected officials or citizens.”
Yes, indeed.
Many Durham residents from the 1990s recall when its contentious, cantankerous school board meetings were must-see TV, when CNN seemingly opened a Bull City bureau to beam to the world the monthly hostilities between parents and board members.
Few were the Durham residents of that period who didn’t receive phone calls from friends around the country asking “What’s going on in Durham?”
What was going on was passion, expressed by parents who cared about the education their children received.
Never was there the kind of vulgarity we heard recently, though.
Good thing, too, because neither children, nor anyone else, needs that kind of education.
Barry Saunders is a member of the Editorial Board and founder of thesaundersreport.com.
