MAX ROYLE "MUSINGS" ON CITY of ST.AUGUSTINE BEACH WEBSITE RAISE QUESTIONS

http://staugbch.com/documents/newsletter/17/mr03.pdf



MUSINGS
And now it’s time to wax poetical: “Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table/Let us go through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells/Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent/To lead you to an overwhelming question/Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/Let us go and make our visit.” From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by American poet, T.S. Eliot, 1912.
Wonderful imagery and rhythm in a memorable poem—words that draw you into the magical realm of the imagination. It was words such as these that accompanied me on long day trips in a Jeep over dusty roads in Karnataka state, India, when I was working there as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1968-69 on a school kitchen building project. What else was there to do to pass the time and occupy the mind except to read and memorize poetry, and use such words as Eliot’s as doors that opened one to a mental/emotional state far removed from the gritty, stark reality of an exterior, material world of rocky, treeless hills and long stretches of bumpy road, sometimes unpaved, where often no other persons and vehicles were to be seen, and you might have thought that you and the Jeep’s driver were the only living beings on some remote and nameless planet. These road trips were made long before the advent of Sirius XM satellite radio, and for India, before the days when the country may have had any AM radio stations. This may have been why the Indian-made Jeep I travelled aboard didn’t have the standard radio common to all American-made passenger vehicles.
For my Indian driver and me there were miles of travel five days a week from Bangalore to villages, some of them so remote and off any kind of grid that to visit them was a journey back to an ancient time before the invention of anything but hand tools and wooden ploughs; to a time when human and animal power performed such basic tasks as threshing rice and drawing water from deep wells; villages where the houses were made of mud, dried cow dung and thatch, or stone quarried from nearby pits, and where the only modern “machines” might be the wrist watches some of the village men wore and the Jeep in which my driver and I arrived, sometimes accompanied by the district inspector of schools as our guide. Yet even such remote villages had learned through the rural “telegraph” about the school kitchen project that was funded by the rupees India paid the United States for the surplus milk powder and bulgur wheat that were donated for primary and middle school feeding programs throughout the country. These rupees, owned by our government, could be spent only in India on development projects.
The accident happened late in the afternoon in a town southeast of Bangalore. I was deep into memorizing a William Wordsworth poem when the driver so abruptly stopped the doorless Jeep that I was almost flung out of it. Seat belts weren’t standard or even optional equipment at that time. My driver, his eyes wide in fright, told me he had hit someone and I must stay in the Jeep. “Not leave,” he told me several times, gesturing with his hands. Nor did he leave.
The main roads through Indian towns and cities were congested masses of pedestrians and all kinds of vehicles, from people-pulled carts to bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, cars, buses and huge trucks with
springs sagging under heavy loads. Except in major cities, sidewalks and traffic signals didn’t exist. To get through the chaos, a vehicle’s horn was as important as its brakes. I often marveled at the intricate ballet of Indian street life: pedestrians moving out of the way of vehicles, drivers yielding at the last possible split second the right-of-way to each other. This ballet didn’t mean that Indian roads were safe. Far from that. The country had an extraordinarily high vehicle accident and death rate.
A small girl, perhaps 10 or so, had darted across the road and our Jeep, fortunately moving slowly because of the swirl of people and vehicles, had hit her. A crowd quickly formed around the Jeep. Peace Corps/India had a standing rule: If an American staff member driving a vehicle hit someone, the member was not to stop, but immediately drive to the nearest police station. The reason? Foreigners involved in accidents had been yanked from their vehicles and beaten to death by an enraged mob.
I remember an odd sense of detachment, as if the scene before me was on film and my driver and I weren’t part of a reality that had the potential to become quickly and lethally violent. My calmness may have been caused by a foolish sense of invulnerability, or by the words lingering in my mind of the Wordsworth poem (ironically titled “Intimations of Immortality”) that I had been memorizing when the accident happened; or, more likely the cause was the crowd itself. There was an animated buzz of voices, to be sure, but no angry shouts, no scowling faces or raised fists. Instead, the people seemed at that moment merely intensely curious, as if their focus was on the question, what had happened? not on the quest of exacting revenge on me, who, because of skin and hair color, was very obviously the foreigner, “the other,” the one who didn’t belong and thus could easily be blamed for any real or imagined mistake. And that I wasn’t the driver may have also helped. If he were at fault for the accident, he still looked like all the men in the crowd: black hair, brown skin. He was someone who clearly “belonged.”
Police authorities arrived quickly, because the accident had happened near the city’s railroad station, where there was a police outpost. A phalanx of officers hustled the driver and me through the crowd and to an office in the station, where I saw India’s dark side. A fat, sweaty man identified himself as a doctor and said he would need money before he looked at the little girl. I brushed off his blatant attempt at bribery and angrily told him he would be paid. He then, with an infuriatingly dismissive, arrogant wave of his hand, said “What does it matter to you? She [the little girl] is only the daughter of a sweeper.” That brief comment summarized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of discrimination based on the dictates of caste, which could forever define a person and severely limit opportunities for an education and a better life. Cleaning streets, public floors and toilets, the tasks of a sweeper, were, next to the tanning of animal skins, among the lowest of occupations in India’s hereditary caste system. Thus, the life of a sweeper’s daughter was to be considered insignificant.
It wasn’t, of course. The Peace Corps did pay for her medical care; she had fortunately been only bruised, thanks to my driver’s quick reaction. Money was also given to her father, an appropriate gesture, because it recognized him as the head of the family that felt emotional pain because of the accident.
Afterwards, although I continued reading and memorizing poetry during those long rides, it was with the realization that lovely patterns of words were but flimsy, illusionary buffers to a reality that could become starkly and dangerously grim in a split second.


After reading this I wrote:

From: Ed Slavin
To: comrobrien ; comugeorge ; commengland ; comsgsnodgrass ; commkostka ; jpwilson
Sent: Sat, Mar 4, 2017 9:31 pm
Subject: Please check on SAB City Manager Max Royle's rambling "MUSINGS" on the City of St. Augustine Beach website tonight

Dear Mayor O'Brien, Vice Mayor George, Commissioners Snodgrass, England and Kostka and Mr. Wilson:

1. Please read "Max's corner, " St. Augustine Beach City Manager Max Royle's "MUSINGS" on the City of St. Augustine Beach website tonight, part of a "newsletter," http://staugbch.com/documents/newsletter/17/201703.pdf, ;distributed as a paid Facebook ad tonight, stating:

http://staugbch.com/documents/newsletter/17/mr03.pdf

MUSINGS
And now it’s time to wax poetical: “Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table/Let us go through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells/Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent/To lead you to an overwhelming question/Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/Let us go and make our visit.” From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by American poet, T.S. Eliot, 1912.
Wonderful imagery and rhythm in a memorable poem—words that draw you into the magical realm of the imagination. It was words such as these that accompanied me on long day trips in a Jeep over dusty roads in Karnataka state, India, when I was working there as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1968-69 on a school kitchen building project. What else was there to do to pass the time and occupy the mind except to read and memorize poetry, and use such words as Eliot’s as doors that opened one to a mental/emotional state far removed from the gritty, stark reality of an exterior, material world of rocky, treeless hills and long stretches of bumpy road, sometimes unpaved, where often no other persons and vehicles were to be seen, and you might have thought that you and the Jeep’s driver were the only living beings on some remote and nameless planet. These road trips were made long before the advent of Sirius XM satellite radio, and for India, before the days when the country may have had any AM radio stations. This may have been why the Indian-made Jeep I travelled aboard didn’t have the standard radio common to all American-made passenger vehicles.
For my Indian driver and me there were miles of travel five days a week from Bangalore to villages, some of them so remote and off any kind of grid that to visit them was a journey back to an ancient time before the invention of anything but hand tools and wooden ploughs; to a time when human and animal power performed such basic tasks as threshing rice and drawing water from deep wells; villages where the houses were made of mud, dried cow dung and thatch, or stone quarried from nearby pits, and where the only modern “machines” might be the wrist watches some of the village men wore and the Jeep in which my driver and I arrived, sometimes accompanied by the district inspector of schools as our guide. Yet even such remote villages had learned through the rural “telegraph” about the school kitchen project that was funded by the rupees India paid the United States for the surplus milk powder and bulgur wheat that were donated for primary and middle school feeding programs throughout the country. These rupees, owned by our government, could be spent only in India on development projects.
The accident happened late in the afternoon in a town southeast of Bangalore. I was deep into memorizing a William Wordsworth poem when the driver so abruptly stopped the doorless Jeep that I was almost flung out of it. Seat belts weren’t standard or even optional equipment at that time. My driver, his eyes wide in fright, told me he had hit someone and I must stay in the Jeep. “Not leave,” he told me several times, gesturing with his hands. Nor did he leave.
The main roads through Indian towns and cities were congested masses of pedestrians and all kinds of vehicles, from people-pulled carts to bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, cars, buses and huge trucks with
springs sagging under heavy loads. Except in major cities, sidewalks and traffic signals didn’t exist. To get through the chaos, a vehicle’s horn was as important as its brakes. I often marveled at the intricate ballet of Indian street life: pedestrians moving out of the way of vehicles, drivers yielding at the last possible split second the right-of-way to each other. This ballet didn’t mean that Indian roads were safe. Far from that. The country had an extraordinarily high vehicle accident and death rate.
A small girl, perhaps 10 or so, had darted across the road and our Jeep, fortunately moving slowly because of the swirl of people and vehicles, had hit her. A crowd quickly formed around the Jeep. Peace Corps/India had a standing rule: If an American staff member driving a vehicle hit someone, the member was not to stop, but immediately drive to the nearest police station. The reason? Foreigners involved in accidents had been yanked from their vehicles and beaten to death by an enraged mob.
I remember an odd sense of detachment, as if the scene before me was on film and my driver and I weren’t part of a reality that had the potential to become quickly and lethally violent. My calmness may have been caused by a foolish sense of invulnerability, or by the words lingering in my mind of the Wordsworth poem (ironically titled “Intimations of Immortality”) that I had been memorizing when the accident happened; or, more likely the cause was the crowd itself. There was an animated buzz of voices, to be sure, but no angry shouts, no scowling faces or raised fists. Instead, the people seemed at that moment merely intensely curious, as if their focus was on the question, what had happened? not on the quest of exacting revenge on me, who, because of skin and hair color, was very obviously the foreigner, “the other,” the one who didn’t belong and thus could easily be blamed for any real or imagined mistake. And that I wasn’t the driver may have also helped. If he were at fault for the accident, he still looked like all the men in the crowd: black hair, brown skin. He was someone who clearly “belonged.”
Police authorities arrived quickly, because the accident had happened near the city’s railroad station, where there was a police outpost. A phalanx of officers hustled the driver and me through the crowd and to an office in the station, where I saw India’s dark side. A fat, sweaty man identified himself as a doctor and said he would need money before he looked at the little girl. I brushed off his blatant attempt at bribery and angrily told him he would be paid. He then, with an infuriatingly dismissive, arrogant wave of his hand, said “What does it matter to you? She [the little girl] is only the daughter of a sweeper.” That brief comment summarized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of discrimination based on the dictates of caste, which could forever define a person and severely limit opportunities for an education and a better life. Cleaning streets, public floors and toilets, the tasks of a sweeper, were, next to the tanning of animal skins, among the lowest of occupations in India’s hereditary caste system. Thus, the life of a sweeper’s daughter was to be considered insignificant.
It wasn’t, of course. The Peace Corps did pay for her medical care; she had fortunately been only bruised, thanks to my driver’s quick reaction. Money was also given to her father, an appropriate gesture, because it recognized him as the head of the family that felt emotional pain because of the accident.
Afterwards, although I continued reading and memorizing poetry during those long rides, it was with the realization that lovely patterns of words were but flimsy, illusionary buffers to a reality that could become starkly and dangerously grim in a split second.

2. Is Mr. Royle's 1254-word document in any way related to the business of the City of St. Augustine Beach, Florida?

3. Is it a good time for Mr. Royle to resign, to retire and to begin his life's next chapter by writing his memoirs?

4. If so, will you please direct a national search for the next St. Augustine Beach City Manager, after his employment status is resolved?

Thank you.

With kindest regards, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Ed Slavin
904-377-4998
www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com
www.edslavin.com