By Joel Thurtell
My mistake.
Dave Bing must be mayor of Kalamazoo.
Or maybe Traverse City.
Now that I think of it, Ironwood in the far-off Upper Peninsula is more likely.
He can’t possibly be mayor of Detroit, which is what I erroneously thought he was.
If Dave Bing were mayor of Detroit, he’d have known that Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians have been on strike for 21 weeks.
He’d have known that striking DSO musicians are picketing Orchestra Hall on Woodward not too terribly far from the mayor’s office.
And knowing of the musicians’ strike, he would not have been so callous as to schedule a major speech in Orchestra Hall, thus requiring him not only to cross the picket line, but to issue an incredibly lame excuse for doing so.
Musicians, he argued, were too late asking him to find another venue. It would be logistically impossible so soon before yesterday’s speech (February 22, 2011) to move his State of the City address.
No mayor of Detroit with an ounce of compassion for the human beings who make up our wonderful Detroit orchestra would have dreamed of setting foot in Orchestra Hall.
No true mayor of Detroit would have needed a request from musicians to understand that he’d be speaking in a place that is under moral siege.
A real mayor of Detroit would have known intuitively that to go to Orchestra Hall, crossing the picket line, would be a poke in the eye to the striking musicians and a grand show of support to the DSO board and managers whose financial shenanigans have placed the orchestra’s future in dire straits.
A true mayor of Detroit would simply not have conceived of such a brazenly contemptuous sneer at working people.
That’s why I think Dave Bing must be mayor of some other town — any place but Detroit.
