Is Valerie Amezcua Still “Smart?”

Santa Ana’s worst (though also second-best) Mayor since the quarter-century of Miguel Pulido, Valerie Amezcua, recently celebrated her own smartitude by counseling that when bad people are coming for you the best thing to do is to keep your head low and hope that they home in on one of the other tasty nuggets in the flock. (I think that this is a second cousin once removed to the “if you’re being sexually assaulted, don’t struggle and you’ll come out fine” approach to keeping oneself alive, predicated on a similar wish-fulfillment fallacy of maintaining self-protection after violence begins.)

Amezcua’s advice may be brilliant, but in retrospect it also turns out to have been a little bit ill-timed. Suddenly Trump’s popularity has popped like a festering pimple as anti ICE sentiment builds and many Californians have proudly embraced the Resistance. Amezcua’s sage advice, at this moment, comes across like the last yawp from a Vichy leader in postwar France who was not really prepared for the fall of the Nazis. Whoops!

Journalistic integrity suggests that I check to see what public comments Amezcua may have made in the past 24 hours, when the last NO KINGS DAY! protest in Greater LA — in Anaheim, because Santa Ana didn’t have one, Amezcually enough — ended and President Trump was sitting forlorn and bored in the gallery of honor asthe $15 Million “Happy Birthday Army (and Vichy President)” Parade in D.C. staggered by. I’ll do a quick search:

Hey! This, from June 11, is not bad at all! But it’s also not keeping one’s head down. Does this means that she is … no longer smart?

Santa Ana was of course beset by ICE raids despite the smartness of its Mayor days before NO KINGS DAY. which also calls that smartness into doubt.

This nice piece by ABC7 News on June 12 has an interview and accompanying story with Amezcua in which she went after Santa Ana Councilmember and political opponent Johnathan Hernandez, accusing him of being pro-property destruction, and essentially dismissing the usefulness of protest altogether:

“I’m not about photo ops. I’m not going to stand up and raise my arm and give my Chicano fist pump because it makes me look good. I don’t represent just one group of the community.”

[Giving readers a moment here to mull over whether a “Chicano fist pump” would make her look good.]

“I’m not going to go out in the streets and scream at law enforcement. I’m not going to go scream at the National Guard, ‘get out of my city.’ It doesn’t accomplish anything,”

The story continues: “On Facebook, [Amezcua] called the protests pure violence and destruction of the city and businesses. However, no reports of major damage have been reported besides graffiti and broken glass to federal buildings.”

Uh-oh. Is that broken glass — which Orange Juice Blog officially does not support — what she meant by “violence”?

“I’m not going to separate, well, it’s the federal building. It’s still a place of business and it’s the federal building where people work, innocent people work in there,” Mayor Amezcua said.

Johnathan Hernandez noted that businesses were not being destroyed: “Businesses are respected by the community. The community protested peacefully. I know there are outliers and people who don’t come from our community that attempted to agitate our peaceful protests.”

Also, the mayor stated that some elected officials, like Councilmember Hernandez, condoned the destruction which he denied. This was bullsh — well, instead of editorializing, let’s just quote Hernandez directly: “It’s absolutely reckless and it’s baseless,” he said.

If Amezcua had any basis for these allegations, they did not survive the trip to Google.

The reporter ends with a couple of pungent observations:

“Tensions will remain high in the city of Santa Ana as long as these ICE raids continue. Residents will have a chance to talk to city officials directly during their next city council meeting on June 17.

Emphasis added! And that meeting is tomorrow, June 17! I think that people have enough recent experience with making signs that that can send a message to Amezcua and — as signs have two sides (but don’t block others’ view!) — to the local media.

Given Trump’s newly announced War on Democratic-Led Cities, Amezcua’s belief that she could just play-possum through this period of our nation’s travails is many things: maybe a little quaint and charming, more likely sort of pathetic, demeaning, and absurd. But “smart”? It may be down here somewhere in this pile of adjectives. Presumably she can just keep digging until she finds it. Or maybe she could just leave office in favor of someone with both judgment and dignity.

But that’s likely hoping too much. Hey, wait a minute: Trump is saying he wants to go after Democratic-led cities! Maybe Amezcua could save Santa Ana by announcing that she’s switching to the Republican party and swearing fealty to Trump! What a smart gambit that would be!