Celebrity pages

This morning's T-P wasted most of the front page and 2,000 words to suggest that unstable yuppie councilwoman Head and her continuous crusade against poor people in New Orleans is deserving of admiration for the "blunt" style with which she delivers it.

We've been having some difficulty trying to decide whether or not Ms. Head is this generation's Jackie Clarkson or Peggy Wilson but, honestly, when I read this kind of paranoid shit,

Head's language occasionally has a razor-wire quality. She calls some among those leading the effort to recall her "poverty pimps" who exploit positions of influence in poor communities for their own purposes.

"You have to have sheep to have a shepherd, " she said. "For a poverty pimp to be able to be relevant and have power, you have to have people who don't necessarily think for themselves and who listen to their rhetoric and their hyperbole."

I lean more and more toward describing her as Glenn Beck in a skirt. I know we have a problem with institutionalized corruption in this town. But Head's classist pomposity is not the answer.

Update: I'm already getting some push back for taking the poor communicator out of context again. That was the sexy quote. But there were more subtle moments I could have concentrated on.

She obviously thinks a great deal of herself, for instance:

"Had I not won, I promise you, we would not be living in this city, " Head said. "Because it would've said everything about New Orleans if we would've re-elected the person that I defeated. There'd be no point in being here, because New Orleans really would be just smoke and mirrors."

It's a typical attitude among Head's professional, competitive type. Here it is again.

"It's hard when I'm dealing in a world where the bar is very, very low, " she said.

"It's horribly frustrating. Because I came from a place (practicing law) where things worked really, really well. And I was the one trying to keep up. And now nothing works, and it's very frustrating. . . . It's a different environment."

She's obviously very judgmental of people who don't meet her arbitrary standard. Head's pushy unsympathetic style is emblematic of the Yuppie ethic. People who support her are exactly the same sort of people who thought we needed a "head-cracking" recovery czar like Ed Blakely.

Impatient, self-absorbed megalomaniacs like Blakely and Head are the opposite of what New Orleans needs from its political leadership. But it's unsurprising to find the paper continue to celebrate her the way it does in this article.