OUR LADY OF CHAOS VISITS THE DETROIT CITY COUNCIL

I loved this photo so much that I took it home and put it in my diary for posterity. With that said, it took me most of a week to figure out what I was looking at, there on the front page of the Detroit Free Press, April 15th, 2008. It headed up an article describing the ongoing efforts of the Detroit City Council to force Kwame Kilpatrick, our disgraced mayor, out of office. This is more of the curious new brand of moral outrage you see in our nation's government -- apparently it's local as well as state and national. A guy spends YEARS misappropriating funds from one of the most economically devastated cities in the country, and nobody bats an eye. In fact, he gets re-elected by a landslide. Then he lies about a text message on a cellphone, and everyone wants his head on a stick.

I was, at first, merely delighted by the zaniness of the photo. My supervisor saw it and said it looked to her like a support-group meeting for the mentally ill. The secretary in our department said it looked like Kwame was about to cry. In any case it's a terrific historical keepsake.

The truth eventually revealed itself unto me: This is clearly a visit from the goddess Discordia, captured on film and published for all to see. I hear this incident made the national news, too. When I really thought about it I could see a clear connection between this moment and The Doctrine Of The Original Snub from the Principia. For you not familiar with that august document, look up the Greek myth about how Eris started the Trojan War with her golden apple. I'm sure you'll find it right in Bullfinch.

Where is Discordia in this photograph? Well, she announced herself by somehow getting a Detroit City Councilwoman to show up to the meeting in a ruffly yellow fairy-princess costume and a tiara, for crying out loud. I'm not sure which would have been funnier: if they'd left the caption the way it is, or if they'd taken off that last sentence, leaving Collins' outfit completely unexplained.

With any luck, we'll get some interesting results out of this new snubbing of Mayor Kwame.