A Knight in Dragonland

I had just finished a very good dinner, and I just about lost it when I read that comparison.

“I disapprove of what you say,” the French philosopher Voltaire is reputed to have said, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Had Voltaire uttered the first line of that famous quote at a District 303 Board meeting, that radical might never have been allowed to complete his sentence.

Jim Mangan is no Voltaire. There is no comparison. The grandiose exaggerations that routinely spout from Mike Noyes’s mouth are frankly ridiculous.

However, I will be honest and say that Noyes actually makes a few good points in today’s column, although his tone “shines” with its usual condescension. No matter how gleeful I was at the richly deserved smackdown Jim Mangan received at the last 303 board meeting, I think the other board members did more harm than good to their cause by not allowing Mangan to speak. The same goes for the 108 board in their tabling of discussion regarding a district consolidation study. Noyes voices the party line of the Citizens for Pekin School Consolidation and takes both boards to task for these events in his column.

I think I know what they were doing. Both boards were distancing themselves from the slanderous and deceitful tactics of Jim Mangan and his ugly, nasty campaign to discredit the good people working in District 108. However, silencing him with a parliamentary tactic and tabling a consolidation study clearly desired by the people of Pekin just plays right into the anti-establishment hyperbole of the Citizens for Pekin School Consolidation. They portray themselves as the persecuted hero fighting “the Man” to let the will of the people be heard. It’s a total load of nonsense, but the 108 & 303 boards played right into it by shutting Mangan down and tabling a consolidation study.

Let the man speak. His numbers are worthless, since only a referendum will determine the tax rate for any combined school district. Let him dig his political grave with his own nasty mouth.

Pursue the consolidation study. Let Don White and Paula Davis show the taxpayers of Pekin how many thousands of dollars it’s going to cost just to figure this thing out. Let them find out how much money we’re going to waste on something that will do NOTHING to improve the quality of education in Pekin and may not save any money. Let them accumulate the figures that will shoot Jim Mangan’s numbers to pieces.

I still think that consolidation is a waste of time. We should be focused on helping the students of Pekin, and consolidation does nothing to address their needs. However, if consolidation does eventually go through, I think the greatest poetic justice Jim Mangan could receive would be to deny him any place in the governance of the new district because he has so alienated Pekin voters with his nasty, slanderous rhetoric. That would be truly just desserts.