Checking In On The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufunk

We’ve been noticing lately that things have been rather quiet on the mayoral controversy front. In the last few months of 2008, it seemed like we saw a daily story about how crazy Mayor Funkhouser and the supremely voluntary Gloria Squitiro were. When the mayor wasn’t banishing his less loyal colleagues, it seemed, he was barnstorming the media networks or costing the city money with his ill-timed comments. But now? Now things are relatively calm. Which leads us to ask, of course: has the mayor finally wised up?

The knock against the mayor has never been that he didn’t care about the city’s problems — it’s that he was so blinded by devotion to his wife that he allowed everything else to become secondary. We’re the last people to criticize anyone for loving a spouse; if anything, the world needs more marriage dedication like the mayor’s. But what the mayor failed to remember is that elected officials have a duty to separate public life from private life, and he became especially ignorant of that crucial need at the worst time: when his private life began to hinder his capability in office. Now, though, he seems to finally be learning what needs to happen.

So maybe it’s time to forgive and forget? Perhaps. We’ll believe that things are totally smooth when talk of lawsuits doesn’t seem to supercede talk of city business. But we’ll give credit where credit is due and say this: it’s nice to have a break, however brief, from the daily storm of Mammygate. Maybe someday we’ll be able to look back on the first part of Funk’s term and laugh about this. We’ll remind the mayor of his erratic behavior during this period and he’ll laugh and quote Eliot: “That is not what I meant at all/That is not it, at all.”