The description of Fresno that Rick offers, from the experiences he has had with the City and County, and its various bureaucracies is one of excruciating horror at having to deal with Soviet-level corruption at every level. It's clear the city is in an advanced state of rot, a ward of both of the State and Federal government, both in terms of feeding money and muscle to the entrenched Powers that Be, but also giving it that Platonic embodiment of inertia that keeps things chugging along in the same old form.
Most of his experience is through his girlfriend, who is hip deep in drama involving one such local bureaucracy, with which she had had long doings over many years---the local Unified School District. But the now the drama has spread out to involve the legal system as well, and the collision of the great bureaucracies that inhabit it.
I wish I could go into detail about the horror, but it's personal and on-going.
I did however enjoy Rick's girlfriend's story about some of her recent experiences with her class of young children. It seems the Unified School District made all the teachers and children come back early for school this fall. The purpose was to attend a giant Citywide rally at which the mayor would speak.
The teachers were directed to bring their entire classes to the rally. They were take the kids on buses, and then transferred to shuttles and brought to a large plaza. They were to be at the giant rally organized by school and class. The teachers were supposed to tell the children to wear the same color t-shirt, so all the class would look the same.
The rally was ghastly, she said. None of the teachers wanted to be there. They all detested having to do it, just to be a prop for the mayor.
The rally was opened by some kind of musical performance by a woman. Then the mayor, also a woman, came on stage and spoke. In front of the entire city school popular, arrayed in rainbows of t-shirts in front of her, the very first thing that came out of her mouth was to comment on she had know the musical performer back in college.
Then the mayor made a joke.
"And if I know her, I can tell you that the performance you just saw was probably chemical enhanced somehow."
Jaws wide open in the audience. Stunned silence. The mayor just kept going on.
The next morning the local newspaper reported that the rally was a bit hit with the teachers, who liked the idea of it very much.
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