Codger’s column: Serious series
Codger and Crone are critical consumers of current content.
Their top three shows are “Silent Witness,” a British crime procedural in its 27th season; the over-the-top dramedy “Kamala vs. The Man With No Shame”; and “Three-For-All,” a local political snit-com that follows three residents of a small town as they campaign for a Town Board seat.
Without these diversions, Codger and Crone would be left to marinate in their plague year, mourning for Cur II, suffering the don’t-call-them chigger bites, and recovering from an excess of COVID.
Much of “Silent Witness” involved a team of forensic pathologists dissecting corpses (Codger and Crone sometimes watch this with dinner), which provides clues to their demise. It’s delicious pop science.
Such attention to detail is not required of the other two shows, which take broader strokes, especially “Kamala vs. The Man With No Shame,” a national obsession that is scheduled to end in early November.
Hopefully.
It is so focused on the personalities of its leading players and how they represent factions in America that it has become almost impossible to sustain meaningful discussions. There’s no common ground. Too often when an attention-getting issue does arise, say, something absurd like rumors of immigrants stealing and eating pets, it blots out all reason.
And instead of dismissing it as the parody of a Saturday Night Live parody or investigating it as Russian Psych warfare, the advocacy media actually considers it. Even after the rumormongers admit it is bogus.
There would seem to be more possibility for rationality in “Three-For-All,” the local show in which an ex-cop, a retired businessman/preservationist, and a community activist/musical comedy impresario vie for the swing vote on a Town Board that has been stalled all year by disagreements and 2-2 results.
But there has been little humor here, much sniping, accusations of ads with artificial intelligence photos, and a growing discontent with the lack of progress in such areas as water quality and housing.
Codger wonders if last week’s pickers protest at a packed Town Board work session was an expression of that frustration. The pickers are mostly robust, middle-aged and older men whom Codger calls “the bareleggers” for the shorts they seem to favor in all weather short of blizzards.
They congregate at the Recycling Center where they pick through the glass-can-plastic bins, the Goody Pile, and the construction, demolition and metals area where they forage for materials they can use for their personal projects or even cart off to sell for scrap.
Codger, who has contributed to the Recycling Center since residents were allowed to call it the Dump, has mixed feelings about this 40-year practice. On the one hand, it is in the spirit of recycling — re-using cast-off objects — but on the other hand, it siphons off a revenue stream for all taxpayers.
Two months ago, a partially filled 100-pound propane tank was discovered in the so-called C&D area. Highway Supervisor and Public Works Commissioner Ken Lewis, Jr. closed down the site to pickers as a danger zone.
Protests mounted despite reports of a compromise in which materials would be sorted by workers and deposited for controlled salvage in a carefully monitored area. Pickers demanded a return to previous ways. “We want it the way it was,” said one resident at last week’s packed protest.
Codger thought their anger seemed personal; they were being denied access to something that belonged to them. It was “a slap at the middle class,” according to a picker. Lewis, the son of two of Shelter Island’s most revered public servants, was characterized as egotistical and entitled.
The pickers’ sense of betrayal by the town was often sentimental and convoluted, but easy to understand. Shelter Island’s long history of unreliable enforcement has become something to rely on. At one point, shiny vests for pickers and the signing of liability claim deferrals was common.
Whatever happened to that? One picker suggested the example of Menhaden Lane, a favorite swimming area; its designation as a non-bathing beach is never enforced. Can’t we just close our eyes to the C&D, too?
Codger sensed something poignant in the pickers’ protest, a symbolic call to turn back the clock, to try to retrieve something meaningful being taken away from Island life.
When Codger talked to him two days later, Superintendent Lewis sounded too harried to deal with such pop philosophy. His workers were being routinely insulted and residents were calling for his job. At the moment, he insisted, liability was his only concern.
Especially on a night when he was cooking, a town controversy was not the show Codger wanted to eat with. And who knows what outrage “Kamala vs. The Man With No Shame” might dump on the screen.
Pick Britbox. The corpses of “Silent Witness” never show up at the Goody Pile.