By Joel Thurtell
There’s a thing in architecture called perspective. Look at a five-story building by itself, without comparison to other structures, and it looks big. Stand beside it, and it seems gigantic.
Build a 60-story tower next to it, and look again.
It seems tiny.
Now, think about Kwamegate. Until last weekend, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s racy text messages were the biggest story Detroit had seen in decades. The scandal towered over other news stories. The Detroit Free Press caught hizzoner making what he thought were private electronic comments to his chief of staff and erstwhile paramour, remarks that contradicted his and her sworn testimony in an $8.4 million lawsuit.
Last weekend, we got perspective. We learned, thanks apparently to a Justice Department leak, that the FBI is looking at four Detroit City Council members for heavy-duty corruption. They’re suspected of selling their votes for small amounts of money in a sludge-processing deal worth $47 million to a Houston contractor called Synagro Technologies. Graft seems to have been rampant in the Coleman A. Young Building.
But so far, Kwame hasn’t been implicated. The Wayne County prosecutor’s perjury charges against him now look pretty puny next to the influence-peddling felony charges that could come out of this probe.
Suddenly, next to Sludgegate, Kwamegate looks like a little trash can sitting next to a mountain of garbage.
Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal, after all.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
