May 1, 2002

 
 
 
 
 

Our Lady of Ever-expanding Mystery

by Bruce Jackson
 
 

The Common Council dumbs down
On April 2, the Buffalo Common Council unanimously passed a resolution presented by Councilman Charley Fischer endorsing the proposed 700-foot-high anti-choice Catholic shrine proposed for Buffalo's waterfront. The structure is called "The Arch of Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and International Shrine of the Holy Innocents."

I wrote an article about this resolution for the April 7 issue of Buffalo Report, "Buffalo, City of Lousy Art." The article said the Common Council had no business backing a religious fund-raising and construction campaign and that that it was inappropriate to have the city's largest physical structure represent the interests of one religious group only.

In addition, the models on the home page of the people raising money for proposed statuary were so ungainly (imagine looking at the Buffalo shoreline from Canada through a 700-foot-high pagoda gate) I proposed a Buffalo Report design competition for a companion piece to honor all those religious and anti-religious groups excluded by this parochial erection.

Our readers suggest
That produced several interesting and a few really creative letters. One of my favorites was from Miriam Sedita:

I really enjoyed the report by Bruce Jackson concerning the Golden Arch of Mary's Triumph.  Do you know what the triumph was?  If it was giving birth to her child and not aborting it, I demand an Arch too as I as did the same!  No really, the report was wonderful and showed the absurd reasoning of the Council that is supposed to represent their area and all the people.  Something like this requires a ballot vote.  It is my opinion that the money this thing will cost could be better used as grants to unwed mothers to help them further their education, pay for daycare, etc. until the can get on their feet.  I realize some women will continue to abort as a birth control but the golden arch will not persuade them or anyone to become pro-life.  This arch belongs on Church grounds where the worshiper can admire it themselves and claim miraculous healings from it.

I digress - my idea for a companion is a 700 foot statue of the Hindu goddess with multiple breasts and arms.  A religious symbol for every religion can be attached as a pasty to each breast and in the arms could be tiny statues of each bishop who has covered up molestations and rapes of children by those priests under them.  Hope you like my idea.

I also liked the comments by and suggestions from Reine Hauser:

The religious aspect of the proposed arch bothers me, too. Especially in light of the recent problems the Catholic Church has been having with child molestation, the timing for this couldn't have been worse. So I propose several alternatives, all of which are more ecumenical, not to mention more representative of Buffalo.

 1) The Krispy Kreme Arch:  Half of a donut sticking above ground. Glazed or frosted varieties are equally appropriate.  WNY is quickly becoming donut central; why not celebrate that fact?

 2) An enormous sculpture of Lance Diamond.  The sequins could also act as a mini lighthouse for boaters.

 3) You know, they COULD just build the damn Signature Span and be done with it! Isn't that close enough to an arch, and over the water.... Maybe the Catholic Church could help pay for it....

 4) Speaking of existing structures, how about the Grain Elevator of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary  and International Crawdaddy's of the Holy Innocents?

The Common Council writes back
The most vigorous respondent to the article was one Kenneth Kerr, an employee of the Common Council who has now written me maybe a dozen times (some of those emails were in response to my asking him what he was talking about).

Kerr said he wasn't writing as a representative of the Council, but since all of his emails but one were written between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays, had a Buffalo City Hall government email address, and identified him as "North District - Leg. Asst," he was either dissembling or goofing off on the job, either of which should probably be brought to the attention of his employers.

I tried to spur him into clarification."Of course you speak for council members," I wrote. "Why don't you have the guts to say it?"

"Your assumption is absurd," he wrote back.

So Kerr's role will remain, as Geoffrey Rush's character famously said in Shakespeare in Love, "a mystery." But it is not the only mystery centering around the proposed waterfront erection, and it is not the most important one. Read on.

Kerr had seen my article when it was reprinted in Riverside Review. His main point seemed to be that the Common Council wasn't really endorsing the 700-foot-high-anti-Choice-pro-Life-Catholic-Shrine that the unanimously-passed resolution supported. That may seem a bit contradictory, so to be fair I'll give you what he wrote:

Mr. Jackson,
I recently read your commentary in the Riverside Review and noticed an inaccuracy. I am attaching the actual resolution passed by the Common Council. It makes no mention of supporting a 700 foot monument or of supporting the Pro-life movement. Please take particular note of the 4th Whereas that reads:

Whereas: The Association has pledged its cooperation with City officials and civic leaders, toward ensuring that the shrine is built according to high standards of architectural beauty and integrity, so as to fitting complement and enhance the City's skyline, and to Buffalo's treasure of renowned   architectural attractions; and

While, I do not speak for any of the Councilmembers (nor would I care to misrepresent them as a whole as you have chosen to), I have a feeling that a good number would concur that a 700 foot pagoda would not fit the description of something that is "built  according to high standards of architectural beauty and integrity, so as to fitting complement and enhance the City's skyline".

Distortion of the facts to strengthen ones [sic] position smacks of intolerance.

Intolerance, integrity, and whereas
I'd hate to be an intolerant person, so I looked at the entire resolution again. It had five "whereas" clauses. The first said the Common Council endorsed the idea of freedom of speech. No gainsaying that, I say. The second, third, and fourth "whereas" clauses referred to and expressed approval of "the proposed shrine." The fifth "whereas" clause is the one in Kenneth Kerr's letter.

It seemed to me simple-minded sophistry, or worse, to say they Council hadn't voted to endorse the 700-foot erection when the resolution said again and again that the Council endorsed "the proposed shrine" and there weren't any other designs but that 700-foot one out there. So I wrote back to Kerr:

You gotta read English if you're going to pass resolutions. I don't know who you work for, but if your boss voted for this piece of silliness he voted for the design those guys had, not for some abstract piece of beauty that they'd subsequently come up with. Can't have it both ways: can't kiss them and then say we didn't do it. And you shouldn't write letters like that, using your public and official email address if you don't expect to see them in print.

There were some more emails, after which I asked him to send me a full copy of the resolution so I could be sure we were talking about the same thing. I had gotten my text from the web site of the people collecting money for the 700-foot shrine, so who knows what miraculous transformations might have occurred along the way?

He sent it, and, I must admit, I didn't look at it because by then I had gotten bored with this whole thing: lousy City Hall prose, lousy religious architecture, lousy City Hall denial of lousy City Hall prose. Bah.

But then on April 29 Kerr wrote again:

As you requested I have forwarded to you a copy of the actual "Shrine" resolution that was voted on by the Common Council. As of today I see no correction on your web site regarding the glaring differences between the resolution that you have told your readers was before the Council and the real resolution.

Is this because the actual resolution makes no mention of supporting a 700 foot monument or of supporting the Pro-life movement, and as such it doesn't give you sufficient fodder to unjustly attack to Common Council on this issue?

I remind you of, and urge that you share with your readers the following from the resolution:

   He quoted that section again, rambled on about some other stuff, then concluded:

You have been given the real resolution - A continued distortion of the facts to strengthen your position may indicate of a lack of integrity.

Oh boy: last time it was my tolerance that was in question and now it was my integrity. I had no choice: I went to his prior email and read the entire resolution. And this is where things got really weird.

The magically missing Whereas
Remember I said the resolution unanimously passed by a vote of 13-0 had five "whereas" sections? The resolution Kerr sent me had only four. The section that was missing was the most offensively ideological. It went:

WHEREAS the proposed shrine would also encourage increased respect for human life, including prior to the birth of the individual, a value much needed in the present day notwithstanding that there are differing opinions on the issue of "pro-life" versus "pro-choice"; and

Where had it gone? Had it never really been there? Was the text distributed by the people raising money for the shrine a phoney?

I immediately wrote Kerr and asked what he knew about it. How come there were two versions of the same resolution, one with and one without that very touchy paragraph?

The ordinarily voluble rapid-response Kenneth Kerr fell silent. There was no answer to my question.

I went back to the page on the web site of the people raising money for the 700-foot shrine where they'd quoted the full text of the Common Council resolution with its five "whereas" sections and had bragged that the vote had been unanimous at 13-0.

That page now includes only four "whereas" sections – the offensive and ideological "value much needed in the present day nothwithstanding" whereas has disappeared. And the vote previously reported at 13-0 is now reported at 12-0.

How did it go from 13 to 12? Where did the middle "whereas" section go?

Silence at the source
A week or so ago, I asked Common Council President James Pitts, "How could you have voted for a resolution that dumb?" and Pitts replied, "I didn't vote for it. I was on vacation when they did that." So I knew there couldn't have been 13 Common Council members present to vote on Charley Fisher's resolution.

I wrote to Lawrence D. Behr, Executive Director of the Association for the Arch of Triumph. He runs the planning, money-gathering and web site operations. I asked if he could tell me how the middle passage disappeared and the number went from 13 to 12 and when the changes might have taken place.

He replied:

When I first was advised that the Res had passed I asked Charley Fisher if it had changed any from the last draft we had reviewed, and he mistakenly told me it had not. I learned that the vote was unanimous, so I assumed 13-0.

A couple weeks later I picked up a copy of the Res and found that the parag about respect for life had NOT made it to the end, and later still Charley told me that Council President Pitts was away and that the vote was thus 12-0.  I made the changes about a week ago.

Any more Q's, just call or email me!

I had one more. "Did you write that resolution?"

"It was a collaborative effort," he wrote back.

Curiouser and curiouser

"Curiouser and  curiouser!" Cried Alice (she was so much surprised that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).

So we're left with a piece of really lousy civil legislation and a bunch of troublesome questions:

—What text did the Common Council actually pass—the one with four "whereas" clauses or the one with five?

—If five, who cut the most ideological clause of all, and when, and why?

—If four, how did that ideological clause first find its way on to and then off of the web site of The Association for the Arch of Triumph?

—Why would the Common Council pass a resolution specifically endorsing a specific religious project and then have a staff member send out letter after letter saying that's not what the Common Council was doing at all?

—If the resolution the Common Council says it passed turns out not to be the resolution the Common Council in fact passed, how can we ever know what really goes on down there in those chambers at City Hall?

—Why did the rapid email hitter Kenneth Kerr fall silent when I asked him how the text opposing the lawful pro-Choice option was subtracted from Charley Fisher's resolution?

And, most important of all, What business does the Buffalo Common Council have passing under its own name—whoever wrote them for whichever councilperson introduced them—resolutions designed to bring fiscal support to specific religious organizations attempting to change social policy and New York law? The City's finances are in the sewer. The mayor is off dancing with casino developers. This is no time to focus on zygotes.
 
 

 

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