The Curious Case of ‘Lilly Boyd,’ mysterious Sale backer

While you all catch up with your faxes and phone calls to conclusively drive a stake into the heart of the Tainted Sale of our Fairgrounds, let me try to add a little contour to the issue by engaging with my opponents, the defenders of the Sale.

Only problem is – and this is a big problem for an argumentative chap like me – nobody actually will admit to favoring the Sale.   Apparently it’s not a position that anybody can proudly defend.  You have your Matt Cunninghams professing indifference and weakly ridiculing sale opponents, your bitter Fair Board members flinging darts as they desert their sinking ship while claiming all they ever wanted to do was “save the Fair” in their own way.

The closest we’ve come to someone who wants to debate us is a mysterious creature calling him/herself “Lilly Boyd” (dramatized above as Martian Spy Girl from Mars Attacks) who appeared briefly on our Facebook page, operating from a friendless, phantom home page, to call us “evil” and valiantly defend the Fair Board’s plot in multiple lengthy comments.  So, lacking any other partner in debate, I will try to deal with his/her main points, which are essentially the same as Matt’s and the disgruntled Board members’, and seem to boil down to these:

1. We Are Meanies.

It’s really kind of pathetic, but you hear it all the time from public figures who do reprehensible things, public figures and their friends and apologists, once they get caught:  Can’t we all just get along, look to the future not the past, not play the Blame Game?  Remember Tom DeLay’s phrase “the politics of personal destruction?”  That was real rich coming from him, just as it is now coming from Dave Ellis and cronies.  So now we have “Lilly Boyd” accusing us sale opponents of a “smear campaign” and Cunningham shedding tears over the “pitchfork treatment” and “PR black eye” that the poor well-meaning board has suffered.  The Fringer Mr. Peabody derided Cunningham’s laments appropriately yesterday.

But I really don’t doubt their sincerity.  I mean, the sincerity of their self-pity and sense of entitlement to endless credulity and benefit of the doubt.  The same sorts of people who felt that they deserved hundreds of front-row concert tickets and lobster dinners, and feel like any half-baked plans they come up with for our public property are by definition so unimpeachable that it’s just an unnecessary hassle to have to discuss them in public, who believe without even questioning that laws are only made for lesser beings than them, would also fully expect the rest of us nobodies to treat them with the utmost deference and credit them with the noblest of intentions.

But that’s not how it works, not now, not ever.  You want a job in the public trust like Fair Board member, first of all you need a thick skin, and second of all you need to go the extra mile to show that all your actions are on the up and up.  Everything we have accused the Board and CEO Beazley of is either factually true and proven, or else very reasonably suspected thanks to their chronic and kneejerk secrecy.  And to shed these crocodile tears over the “feelings” of a master cutthroat campaigner like Dave Ellis is comedy material.

2. We Are “Special Interests.”

Yes, somehow, the whole vast coalition who banded together so quickly to oppose the sale of the Fairgrounds, the coalition Gus summarizes as “neighbors concerned with traffic and noise… fair vendors hammered financially by increased rents, competition and contracts that had been revised upwards after they had first been mailed out… city officials with a long history of lawsuits against the Fair Board… permanent and temporary employees with their jobs at risk… outraged members of the public who could see that burdening the Fairgrounds with debt would push out anything that remained of the Fair’s simpler agricultural, blue-ribbon heritage… and of course,those damned horse people, small business owners, middle class riders, all the local high school and college equestrian teams, all fighting to save their very last affordable space… environmental folks… students and trustees at neighboring Coastline Community College…” THOSE are SPECIAL INTERESTS.

But six members of the Fair Board who secretly form themselves into a nonprofit Foundation in order to sell the Fairgrounds to themselves are NOT a special interest.

`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

3. We’re all just the puppets of Jeff Teller & Tel Phil

Another thing you see a lot when you’re dealing with simple-minded folk (whether malevolent and sociopathic or not.)  They always tend to see ONE VILLAIN underlying everything that doesn’t go exactly their way.  For the Fair Board and their elusive handful of sympathizers, that all-powerful villain is Jeff Teller, who with his family runs the very successful OC Marketplace through his company Tel Phil and has undeniably done a lot to Derail the Sale, including hiring crack public relations firm Faubel and Associates.

But giving Teller all the credit is really irritating to all the folks who have been fighting the sale since months before he came on the scene.  Still it’s a constant refrain from Cunningham, “Lilly Boyd,” and the Board members themselves, as the Daily Pilot notes (regarding Ellis & Dykema) “Both blamed him for rallying the owners of the Equestrian Center, the local employees’ union and swap meet vendors against the foundation.”  The rest of us bridle, having rallied ourselves quite well thank you, and Teller himself responds:

“I was not involved in the creation nor was I responsible for [the foundation’s] demise,” Teller said Wednesday.  He said that from the beginning his sole concern was preserving the marketplace, which under a new owner could be thrown out with only 90 days notice.  “No sale in my opinion was a safe sale. We were very concerned that there was no guarantee that the foundation was going to be the winning bidder,” Teller said. “They may have had the greatest intentions in the world but if they were not the highest bidder … everyone was put at risk.”  Teller had little to say about the foundation’s crumbling.  “Does it surprise me? It surprises me it took as long as it did.”

4. We Attack the Fair “Staff.”

Have you noticed a pattern in all these lame quasi-arguments?  Whining about being unfairly attacked, labeling your legions of foes and critics “special interests,” and tracking all opposition to the machinations of one great villainous puppet master.  Yep, it’s all fallbacks of the Bush-era GOP, as is this:  Remember how if you tried to criticize the War in Iraq they would accuse you of not supporting the troops, even of stabbing them in the back?  Well, just so does “Lilly” accuse us of attacking “the Fair staff” when we criticize the Board and CEO Beazley. She’s done that repeatedly, and what a dishonest manipulative tactic!  Especially when most of the staff, well actually probably all of the staff, totally supports our efforts to derail the sale. But  “Lilly” or whoever is feeding her lines knows what’s best for them better than they do though.  Laughable.

5. “Fine, wait & see what happens to you guys NOW!”

And there’s always a threat or curse at the end, whether it’s Cunningham’s “After funding a ‘Derail the Sale’ campaign that has subjected the OC Fair Board directors to a hail of abuse, it will be interesting to see if Tel Phil Enterprises approaches the Fair Board for yet another rent reduction — and how such a request will be received,”or Dave Ellis’ memorable  “I hope the state retains ownership of the fairgrounds and we give everyone on the grounds enough government to choke a horse.”  “Lilly” made some threats and curses of her own, although they have now been deleted from the Derail the Sale page (something I wouldn’t have done, but was certainly not unjust as a week earlier “Lilly” had been urging the Save the Fair folks to delete anti-Sale comments there.)

Well… THAT was sort of a waste.  Because if you noticed, the one thing missing from any of these five arguments was any positive case for the Sale to proceed.  We can only conclude that there is no such case.  So – back to your calls, letters, and faxes, Derailers, we are closing in on victory but we’re not quite there yet!

Derail the Sale.