There will be pie some place bye and bye

A bit of local history:

On Tuesday, March 30, 1999 Robert Irwin Greenberg pressed/shoved a lemon pie into the face of a 65-year woman by a stairway at our Capitol building. Senator Carol Flynn, a Mpls. DFLer, was uninjured, although it is probable that her dignity and aplomb suffered. Greenberg purportedly did this as protest against a proposed routing [since implemented] of Highway 55 near Minnehaha Falls which Native Americans had opposed saying that it threatened a sacred spring. Being a man of conviction Greenberg even used a vegan pie which cost him or somebody $18.

He was sentenced to sixty days in the Ramsey County Workhouse during which the taxpayers fed him according to his special diet.

Senator Flynn later retired from the Senate.

On May 22, 2001 Payne Phalen District Five Planning Council voted 7 to 6 to hire to hire Greenberg as Executive Director [ED]. Although the hiring committee had neglected to mention this detail of the applicant’s history, some directors [including this writer and future Maplewood City Manager Greg Copeland who had learned that there was still a restraining order keeping the candidate for ED from the Capitol Complex] had already learned of the history and raised questions. The minutes note that Directors Copeland, Sammons, and Wilson requested that their votes against be made part of the record. I really wondered back then how well somebody with such a history could work with elected leaders the way that people who work for District Councils need to. I did suspect that there were organizations for which Mr. Greenberg could provide excellent leadership, but District Councils cannot be so confrontational. To borrow religious metaphor, they are more pastors than evangelists, more priests than prophets.

Despite the closeness of the vote Mr. Greenberg indicated that he would accept the job offer.

On May 23, 2001 the Saint Paul City Council, on motion of Councilmember Chris Coleman [himself the son of a state Senator], suspended the rules and revoked all city funding for the District Council. It is my belief that this action, coming late in a meeting under suspension of the rules and without notice given to anybody, is likely the biggest singe assault on our Citizen Participation system by the City Council in the 30-plus-year history of the CP system, bigger than the defunding of Greater East Side Community Council in 1985 [which did come through the committee process with public testimony accepted and grounds given – albeit the grounds given were ridiculous and disingenuous -- or the recent force merger in District 13. Others may disagree and are welcome to comment.

Within a short time, the offer to hire Greenberg was withdrawn and with the help of the late Councilmember Jim Reiter city funding restored. The late Paul Gilliland was hired shortly after as interim Executive Director.

I do not know what happened to either Senator Flynn or Robert Greenberg. Councilmember Coleman now has a different city job. I do wish them both well.

So what brought all of this up?

Well, it is really tangential, but it does involve a pie. From Alison Go of US News and World Report:

A Tom Friedman pie-in-the-face update: One of the Brown University students who hurled green whipped cream at the New York Times columnist last month has been suspended for the fall semester, the Brown Daily Herald reports.

According to the student, the university found her actions to be in violation of its standards of student conduct, which say that protest is not acceptable "when it obstructs the basic exchange of ideas" and which prohibit "directly or indirectly preventing a speaker from speaking—even for a brief period of time—(and) seizing control of a public forum for one's own purposes."

Although both incident show sanction taken against the one making the assault, it is not much of a connection, but it got me thinking about the Greenberg-Flynn incident and the District Council incident which followed.

I haven’t posted much on our Citizen Participation [CP] system even though I have been involved in it for a long time. Maybe that is why I haven’t posted much on it, since I cannot claim an unaffected perspective.

But I do invite your comments on our CP system or on pie-throwing or pie-planting as means of communication. And do the pies need to meet the dietary restrictions of thrower or target or both?

History note: Greenberg was probably supporting the right side when he assaulted Senator Flynn, but there were problems with the way he did it. I remember posting somewhere probably in 1999 or 2000 about the ridiculousness of a federal judge ruling on whether the springs about to be destroyed for Highway 55 were sacred to the Mendota Mdewakanton. The ruling [simplified by a law layperson] was that since nobody was still living when the spring became sacred that nobody could prove that the springs were sacred. I compared it to a judge in Israel looking at a highway that would remove the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and having to make a ruling on whether the site was sacred to Christians. We need to be very careful when we try to evaluate somebody else’s religious ideas. It’s kind of like draft boards attempting to prove whether somebody was a religious conscientious objector or not. I don’t know if that post is available anywhere now or not. It is probably lost in cyberspace someplace.

LINKS:

The US News article can be found at

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2008/5/22/at-brown-friedman-pie-thrower-suspended.html

I have to admit that looking at the grammar of this post that there might have been another reason not to hire him. Robert Greenberg’s account of the pie incident can be found at

http://members.aol.com/noreroute/bobsay.htm

Capitol City Cacophony contemporary comment on the District Five- Greenberg matter can be found by scrolling down about two-thirds of the way at

http://www.geocities.com/minnmusic/boosandbravos.html