Today, Dec. 12, is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a sacred day for Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics, but you probably know that if you live in Anaheim or SanTana.
Exactly ten years ago, or rather, ten years ago YESTERDAY, Theresa Smith held a candlelight vigil in memory of her son Caesar Cruz who was killed by five Anaheim policemen exactly four years before THAT. Naturally it featured the popular Virgen de Guadalupe candles. Over a dozen young men, mostly Latino and mostly unarmed, had been killed by Anaheim police in those four years, and their families frequently created shrines with candles to commemorate their untimely deaths.
On the NEXT day, Thursday Dec. 12, 2013, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe ten years ago, Anaheim Chamber of Commerce-funded blogger Matt Cunningham (then running the “Anaheim Blog”) was walking by Anaheim City Hall, when (according to his account) he saw a burnt-up, torn-up teddy bear on the pavement, and INSPIRATION STRUCK HIM!
Matt went and bought a couple of candles – including a Guadalupe one – placed them by the teddy bear in a parody of Latino customs, and took a couple pictures of it. He then posted them on his “Anaheim Blog,” accompanied by a couple of invented quotes from his usual political enemies, believing this to be hilarious political satire. For example:
“Dr. Jose F. Moreno called for a series of community meetings to discuss the impact of this violence on an inclusive roster of stakeholders and for the formation of a city task force to explore ways to increase teddy bear participation in Anaheim municipal government, suggesting this tragedy could have been prevented if the city council were elected from single-member districts.”
Thing is, almost nobody saw Matt’s awful post for FOUR LONG DAYS, as his blog didn’t have many readers back then. A few anonymous commenters cackled at Matt’s great, edgy humor. Our friend David Zenger warned Matt that the post was likely to create huge blowback. And journalist Gabriel San Roman, typically, called Matt a racist, to which Matt predictably trotted out his Mexican-American wife Laura as a response. (I’ve wondered, idly, what Laura thought of her husband’s teddy bear prank.)
But on the following Monday, Dec. 16, the shit hit the fan – Zenger told ME about the post, and Gabriel told Donna Acevedo (who’s now my wife, and whose son had also recently been killed by Anaheim police.) When Donna saw Matt’s post her first reaction was to vomit, then burst into tears, then beg him to take it down, by phone call and blog comment. Matt kept responding that it was humor and she shouldn’t take it so seriously, and refused to publish her comments. When she finally started cussing him out he DID publish that to make her look bad.
Meanwhile I wrote this piece about the whole thing (also critical of a recent Liberal OC piece that was supposed to be humorous) called “Chmielewski and Cunningham have a bit of fun, at the expense of Anaheim and Humanity.” Lotsa good comments there. I was the first to write about it, at 3:30 pm. Matt began getting so many complaints and criticisms that he took his post down around 6pm. Then the Voice of OC wrote about it at 10pm. Then the outrage went national, with outlets like the Huffington Post crediting The Voice rather than the Orange Juice. (Story of a blogger’s life.)
Outrage was universal; there were protests. Matt had to try different apologies, as the first one was like “sorry nobody got the joke, leftists have no sense of humor,” before he was forced to do a longer more flowery one. But you still feel like he never got how offensive and UNfunny it was, like some dumb dog that gets punished for doing something bad that he doesn’t understand, and just gets more sullen and surly. One upshot was that Matt never tried to be funny again in public, at least as far as I’ve noticed.
Many including Donna wanted to lay the responsibility at the Chamber folks who paid Matt to blog, and she frequently chided about this at Chamber head (the now prison-bound) Todd Ament when she’d see him at meetings. But they continued to pay Matt to blog their Chamber line, probably up to this very day, although with all the FBI busts his Anaheim blogging has lost some momentum, and now we know that his paymasters, whom we used to call the kleptocracy, called THEMSELVES “The Cabal,” which seems perfectly fitting.
Still it’s been a good long decade of Matt singing the praises of Harry Sidhu and Jordan Brandman, the corrupt Angels Stadium deal, and hotel subsidies, while tirelessly trashing Jose Moreno, “leftists” in Anaheim nonprofits and school boards, and measures meant to help working people like 2018’s Measure L. They even put his wife Laura in charge of Anaheim First, and then later the Anaheim Chamber itself, after Matt’s bosses Todd Ament and Harry Sidhu were busted for their corruption.
More recently Matt has found greener pastures at his “OC Independent,” where he is paid by the Santa Ana police union to trash the progressive majority on that city’s council, and apparently the far-right OC Board of Education which pays him to jeremiad against “Critical Race Theory” and gay-friendly curricula. His latest piece which we discussed here rails against calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. “Comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted” remains Matt’s dependable calling card.
And that image of the burnt-up, torn-up Teddy Bear surrounded by candles remains the most memorable portrait of not only Matt Cunningham’s attitude toward the oppressed, but that of those who choose to pay him – police unions, anti-public education zealots, and the Anaheim Cabal.
That is all. Back to work…
Mattress Cunningham & Dan Clumsy, Chamber of Commerce and the “cabal” in general, are all Discredited, a disgrace to the city and to the history, of those who lost their lives too law enforcement for no apparent reason other than the “color of authority”!
“One upshot was that Matt never tried to be funny again in public, at least as far as I’ve noticed.”
Back in the early days of OC Blog he appeared to be a decent sort of person with even a bit of a sense of humor. He asked me to write posts.
Then something really changed and he started defending people like the odious Mike Carona. How’d that work out.
Now maybe he always desired to be the pet scribe to big monied and political interests. I don’t know. But he really began the shill side shuffle after getting the $200 per hour courtesy of the First Five Commission; or to be more precise courtesy of Supervisor Big Bill Campbell, himself a sort of mish-mash of Dorothy Day and Father Coughlin.
And humor is hard. Like tight-rope walking it should be left to people who know how to do it.
I don’t know, Vern: learning that it came on the say of the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe sort of does make the stunt a little funnier. Mostly because now it calls forth images of Matt spending eternity impaled throat to asshole on a spit and being roasted by demons, with the pole getting in the way of his being able to explain clearly why the bit was funny.
And before our Trash Dwellers retort with something about my going to Hell, being Jewish I’d go to Jewish Hell where — and this pretty much my actual understanding of it — we will all float around moping with regret about our choices in life. This feels reasonably fair to me. In other words, a lot like our time on Earth, minus the streaming services.