The Winter of my Disinterest

I’ll begin with a heartfelt thanks to Nicolas Cabrera (who’s now an official Aesop’s Gables Contributor™) for holding down the fort while I sat shiva the other week. He is already proving a worthwhile addition to this newsletter.

No one died, by the way. No person, that is. I was mourning a different kind of loss—the loss of my sense of purpose, the end of my raison d’être.

Ariel, as you’ve heard, is not seeking reelection. (For the record, I will not be seeking the title of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, so that’s two of us walking away from equally realistic ambitions.)

All kidding aside, I’m not down at all, even if this newsletter just lost its bête noire. In fact, I'm having a tremendously difficult time summoning anything that even resembles passion here. Bizarrely, after three years of alternately longing for and dreading our collective breakup with Ariel Fernandez, the day finally arrives and all I can muster is…meh 🤷‍♀️. I suspect that's because his decision not to run was a mere formality, because who are we kidding, the guy threw in the towel over a year ago.

Indeed, I was having a bit of fun in the lead-up to all this. The intrigue I was stirring was, in part, reverse psychology. Ariel has a reliable habit of doing the precise opposite of whatever I advise in these pages, so a few well-placed nudges struck me as the surest way to keep him on course for the nearest exit. And in part, well, I simply wanted to enjoy myself at his expense. But the truth is that every real Gables Insider already knew Ariel was precluded from running, and for three rather significant reasons. None of them, for the record, has anything to do with his and Kirk's latest cosplay adventure in which two chronically unemployed rejects pose as geopolitical power brokers and liberators of Cuba.

First, his wife’s judicial campaign, which foreclosed on Ariel’s political future far more completely than most appreciated. And do not make the mistake of thinking any of this was part of some grand original plan. Ariel did not run to be a one-term commissioner. He did not plan on gracefully stepping aside after four years so his wife could chase her own ambitions. He ran to climb the status ladder, rung by rung, as far as it would carry him. Monica is running now not because that was the design all along, but because Ariel shit the bed. He proved, conclusively, that he could not be trusted to satisfy the Fernandez household’s maniacal thirst for status and social ascension. She gave her husband well over a decade to get it done, and all he managed to do was sully their name. Her run for circuit court judge is, in essence, her way of telling him look, dumbass, you had your chance and blew it, now it’s my turn.

Second, the rumors that Ariel received a stern talking-to from the State Attorney are a good deal more credible than I first assumed. The more I look into it, the more it appears he really was handed a soft ultimatum—walk away from public office and the heat dissipates, stay, and all bets are off.

Third and finally, it’s hard to keep a job that you’ve already quit, and Ariel definitely quit last summer. What little time he bothered to spend at City Hall since his election dwindled to near zero the instant he lost control of the commission, and getting outed as the man behind those phishing emails only sealed it. Ariel was never interested in the hard, unglamorous work of governance. What he wanted was total control so that he could consolidate power, fatten his paycheck, and treat a commission seat as a launchpad to an even higher office. The dais was never the final destination. And the moment it became clear the climb was over, that no higher office was coming and the majority had slipped from his grasp, every last pretense of public service quickly vanished. That’s precisely when the calendar filled up with everything but the job, e.g. the pilgrimages to the Vatican, the pointless trips to DC, the book “publishing,” and the countless other forms of LARPing. He’d already moved on to the next destined-to-fail scam, and what remained of his commitment to public service shrank to the absolute minimum required to keep cashing his municipal paycheck.

Yeah, I'll admit it, I always assumed the end of the Ariel era would beget a passionate exegesis on my part, a final and exhaustive autopsy of the worst commissioner in the city's history. But I just don't have it in me, and neither does anyone else. Even the Gazette phoned in its announcement of his decision not to run via a post that earned exactly one comment from one lonely and bored malcontent. Not even the KFC echo chamber could be bothered. And there is something almost perfectly fitting in that. The same guy who spent every waking hour scheming toward a coronation gets, in the end, an exit barely anyone notices. No bang, no eulogy, not even a decent outrage. Just a shrug and an empty comment section, which is precisely the send-off someone as feckless and irrelevant as Ariel deserves.

The best part of all this? Aesop's Gables can finally raise its "Mission Accomplished" banner and move on. I'll be the first to confess that I was every bit as tired of writing about KFC as you must have been of reading about them. Yes, I'm well aware Dr. Castro is technically running for reelection (although someone needs to tell her she’s running against Nestor Menendez, not Vince Lago). She’s also not going to win. A few short months from now she’ll lose, and lose decisively, and slink back into the complete irrelevance that is her natural and richly deserved state. I’ve been waiting a long while for the chance to recalibrate this newsletter toward what actually matters, like substantive issues, serious policy, and, dare I say, the occasional feel-good story.

Nicolas coming aboard as a regular contributor is the first step in that process, and he won’t be the last. More voices are set to join the team in the weeks and months ahead. In fact, we have a new writer debuting right here next week, one who brings a perspective on the Fernandez era unlike anything you've read in these pages before. I can assure you, no one alive is as industrious or as…efficient. Stay tuned.