Annual Dinner on the Grounds at the Drury Family Cemetery in Burnt Fort, Georgia. The kinswomen between whom I stand are in their nineties.


Sequel to the Board Meeting of January 8

Message to Board Lawyer Tom Gonzalez:

Tom, your fusillade of lawyer speak Thursday night contained circumlocutions, evasions, stonewalling, equivocating, prevaricating, shucking and jiving, and just flat-out lying.

You did the ambulance-chasing arm of the legal brotherhood proud.

I wish you would stop huffing and puffing about your alienation from me because I said unkind things about friends of yours. I have said unkind things about a lot of people. You are going to have to be less delicate and name this person whom I have injured with my scorpion tongue. Don’t expect me to apologize. I will, however, try to think up a wittier insult.

If your injured buddy were that wretched Linda Saul Sena from the City Council, forget my going easy on her. As soon as I can conjure another zinger for La Linda, I will put in on the airwaves. Saul-Sena’s fault for which I zap her is that she skipped not once but twice her promise to meet with a rape victim mistreated by the Tampa police.

Saul Sena promised rape victim Bobbie Joyce Ward to meet with her from the podium of Tiger Bay once and another time in Saul Sena’s backyard on Davis Islands, at a reception for Phyllis Busansky when she ran against dauphin Bilirakis for the legislature.

One sees on the Web that you gave a whopping contribution to Bilirakis along with largesse to others of the villainous party that works to strip abortion rights from women and have them return to barefoot-and-pregnant status so that they can't go to law school, etc.

Any woman in office who lies to a rape victim mistreated by the police and stands her up twice gets my vitriol. Such elected officials exacerbate the trauma of the victim’s rape. So to hell with Linda Saul if that’s whom you refer to. Saul Sena in my judgment is a blight on womankind. If that torques your sense of chivalry to our lying, cruel, rape-victim-abusing Linda, that’s tough.

I don’t believe your asseveration that you don’t read my blog. It’s first on your reading list is my guess. It beats out the National Inquirer with you. You vilified two blogs in your board tirade. I suspect you read both. The other possibilities are Suzy Creamsheese’s Wall, Sisyphus, The Rock That Keeps on Rolling, and Goader.

We are the only blogs that speak truth to power in Tampa, so we must be the blogs that get your splenetic anti-blog outbursts but to which you are addicted.

One is amazed that a lawyer who was hip deep in the legal crucifixion of Doug Erwin would demonstrate such prissy ethics about who gets excoriated on a local blog. One has the right to suspect (a) duplicity and/or (b) schizophrenia.

You won’t send me the Erwin files as you should according to the Florida sunshine law so that I can satisfy myself whether it was you who pressed the dopey board and even dopier Superintendent Lennard to crucify that poor man in the courtroom for revealing waste in the building racket that the school system runs. They should have given him a medal.

I strongly suspect that you did the deed of helping to maul Erwin. I also infer that you have the selective ethics to have done that dirty job and will now prettify it up with legal linguistic deodorant while having the fantods about unkind remarks about the likes of Saul Sena.

Your participation in suckering Bart Birdsall into thinking that you would get Abu-Ghraib Kipley to produce a letter setting his mind at rest about the ordeal of the false charges Elia and Kipley cooked up against him demonstrates your duplicitous cruelty toward somebody at the bottom of the food chain. That pyramid of power starts with ROSSAC at the top and ends with personnel who labor at the lower reaches of the hierarchy in the schools. In the ROSSAC book of sicko ethics, nobody is important in the school system—not teachers, not students, not staff—except the denizens of ROSSAC. All the other people who labor in the school system are but the slaves doing the grunt work to build the pyramid of ROSSAC's and the board’s narcissistic self-importance.

In the fourteen years that you have adorned you seat in the half-moon circle of power in the board room, you have been slack in your performance. You haven’t even taught the board such simple civilities of parliamentary language as not to say “I want to make a motion” instead of “I move that.” This gaucherie makes the board members sound like the Beverly Hillbillies of parliamentary language.

Worse, you have never bothered to instruct the board on its members' patriotic obligation to foster free speech so that when such as adulterous chair Falliero gavels a speaker down for an anticipated slander to herself, a more patriotic board member will call point of order and remind the chair of free speech.

Free speech includes the right to slander. The one who considers him- or herself maligned can sue but can't shut up free speech. This obligation to foster free speech applies especially to board members, who took an oath of office to protect the Constitution. The First Amendment is an absolute right. Nobody can abridge it. Not once have I observed you as an officer of the court defend it and check the ignorance of the board in its members' abridging the First Amendment in blunders of protocol.

I have never got an answer to my public-information question to the public-affairs office of whether you warned the board in writing after reviewing the contracts that one infers Valdez presented you for review of the school that had several sections collapse.

I suspect you didn’t write this warning for the board. I suspect that you have grown weary of the duties of board attorney and let such picayune annoyances slide.

If you didn’t warn the board in writing of the dangers that required catastrophic insurance, that’s an immediate reason for your firing. If you did write the warning that the board needed catastrophic insurance and if its members ignored the warning, then they should hang their heads in shame and issue a formal apology to the snookered taxpayers. La Belle Dame sans Merci Falliero had a hissy about how angry she was about the situation, but I didn’t hear her or anyone on the board ask you about a warning in writing outlining the danger.

I have heard you leap to defend the highly problematic no-bid gravy-train awards that the board has allowed the administration to indulge in all the days of your service to the board. I also infer the reason for your energetic defense of these taxpayer-cheating no bids is that you got your job with a no bid cupcake from Dr. Lennard, unchecked by the board, of course. You have kept it for fourteen years without your legal colleagues’ having had the chance to bid on it. I judge that you should quit this ill-gotten job however tardily now and give the board a chance to advertise the lawyer job coincident with its assertion that it practices equal opportunity.

Then all the area lawyers will have the 14-year-delayed opportunity to apply for the board-lawyer job and compete for it belatedly. Belated is better than no competition at all, which is what you got and walked away with like a Cheshire cat without acknowledging your snagging the job without competition was unfair and probably violated Title VII.

In your verbal avalanche, I was able to rescue this precious phrase from the legal logorrhea: Of the promised pamphlet to protect themselves for teachers’ going into the Professional Standards gauntlet, you said these magic words: “In fact, it [the pamphlet for teachers] is done.”

Don’t try to wiggle out of the fact that you said this sentence. It’s on the magic tape.

So produce that pamphlet that you promised me and Bart, Tom. The teachers need it. They needed it three years ago when you promised it. I want this product in my hands. You said you “don’t work for Ms. De Cesare.” Yes you do. You work for me and all the citizens who pay taxes. For our money, we expect you to uphold the law in your board position and to protect us citizens’ rights. The board’s rights are subsumed under citizens' rights and the board's rights must harmonize with citizens' rights.

Citizens come first in a democracy, not bureaucrats, although the board’s and Ms. Elia’s behavior would say otherwise.

So let me have your pamphlet masterpiece: the long-awaited pamphlet outlining teachers’ self-protection maneuvers if they land in Professional Standards—probably on another of Ms. Elia’s cooked-up charges because they have sinned against the holy ghost of her amour propre by suggesting that things are not right in ROSSACland.

Where and when will you be having your book signing for the pamphlet? I will be there to get your autograph.

I presently read a new publication of Dante’s Inferno A bunch of poets got together—none of whom I know—and have translated a stanza each. I am meeting old friends of literature in hell again and have been on the lookout for a slot in a circle of hell that fits your crimes and misdemeanors.

I plan to consult Cerberus on this matter. Dante has that big bowser talking up a storm. He can be heard from one circle of hell to another. I shall say, "Stop that yapping for God's sake, Cerberus, and let me tell you about this Tom fellow. I want you to tell me where we should put him."

I deliver a Parthian call for you firing or resignation. As one of my role models Lady Macbeth says, “Stand not on the order of your going. / But go at once.”

lee drury de cesare

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