One treat of living in my ward of the Bella Vista section is that our polling place is in the Fleisher Art Memorial, part of which was once a Romanesque church. November elections occur just after the Dia de los Muertos festivities, so the back of the chapel where polling takes place is decorated with figures and altar decor from that ritual celebration.
Today the looming characters lent an especially surreal atmosphere to the otherwise mundane selections of a new district attorney and comptroller and making judicial retention choices. For me the comically ghoulish faces of the marionettes gigantes suggested a morbid commentary on at least two front.
One, the current absurdity of the country’s national leadership and two, that we were voting to replace a district attorney who only recently began a prison sentence for bribery and fraud. When he took office in 2010 he proclaimed a new era of cleanliness for the office. Astoundingly, the city got the extreme opposite.
