Shitty Manager

Derek Allen, Portsmouth Shitty Manager

     
       A friend forwarded to me the above photo of Portsmouth City Manager Derek Allen from Allen's Facebook page. The first question I asked myself in looking at the photo was why would anyone put such an unflattering image of himself on Facebook, or anywhere else for that matter. I had already written about the City Manager on my blog River Vices, including another unflattering photo of him, a selfie (see below), so I knew that Derek Allen doesn’t see himself in photos of himself as some others see him, as a kind of human blob. 

       But the photo above requires further explanation. If I am recalling correctly, Allen, with the help of Portsmouth Daily Times reporter Frank Lewis, publicized a complaint somebody had made about how casually Allen dressed at city council meetings. Now among the many complaints constituents could make about our city manager, casual clothing has got to rank at the very bottom in terms of importance. A tie and suit jacket are no longer expected at city council meetings as they might have been in the previous century. Only a fuss-budget would object to the city manager’s informal clothes. Being the clever politician that he mistakenly thinks he is, Allen may have seized upon this criticism because he knew that residents of Portsmouth, who are casual in dress, grammar, and manners to a fault, would sympathize with him. They would feel, rightly, he has much more important things to be concerned about as city manager than wearing a suit and tie at city council meetings where there are often more public officials present than members of the public itself.

       I suspect that the reason Allen  posted the above blotto looking photo of himself in suit and tie on Facebook was to make fun not of himself and the way he is dressed, but of anyone who complains about his casual dress. The photo is apparently meant to be a sarcastic response to anyone who wants him to wear a suit and tie. He thinks he’s being clever in coming up with this way of responding to a fussbudget. What he doesn’t realize, because he is not half as clever as he thinks, is that he  looks smugly stupid, as well as a candidate for cardiac arrest. What he was possibly trying to suggest in  this photo was that his critics were being picky in complaining about his casual dress. He was trying with the collusion of Frank Lewis, to distract the public from the fact that there are a lot of things he could and should be criticized for. A more appropriate title for him than city manager, based on his job performance in Portsmouth and elsewhere, would be shitty manager. As I have pointed out on an earlier post on River Vices, Allen’s resumé shows he can't hold a job very long and his criminal record shows a conviction for perjury in his most previous public employment, in Piqua, Ohio, where he continues, as a carpetbagger, to make his home. Yes, the primary residence of the Portsmouth city manager is in Piqua, which is 152 miles from Portsmouth, a drive Google estimates at taking over 2 1/2  hours. He of course doesn’t make the three hundred mile commute daily. He rents an apartment in Portsmouth from a notorious wheeling and dealing Portsmouth real estate operator. Is this someone the chief executive officer of a city should be renting from? Just how many days in any given week is Allen actually in Portsmouth, and just how much does he pay for rent? Is there such a thing as a sweetheart rent for city managers? With the help of a conniving city councilman, Kevin W. Johnson, Allen's conviction for perjury was apparently not made public until after he was hired as city manager.

       In talking to a number of voters in Portsmouth recently about another matter, I got the impression that Allen’s days as city manager will end  before long. He made a bad impression from the start. Unlike a mayor, a city manager can be removed  at any time by a majority vote of the city council. That's a lot simpler than it took to recall a mayor under the previous form of city government. 

       Pinned to  the bulletin board in the upper right hand corner of the photo above of the bloated Allen is a hazy likeness of the Statue of Liberty. At the base of the Statue, many of us learned as early as grade school, is an inscription of a famous poem by Emma Lazarus:

                                        Give me your tired, your poor,
                                        Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
                                        The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
                                        Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
                                        I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

With deep apologies to Lazarus, I have written a parody of her poem with Derek Allen in mind:

                                        Give me your fired, your perjured,

                                        Your Portsmouth Shitty Manager who’s half crazy,

                                        But so nattily-dressed, so self assured,

                                        A supine carpetbagger who’s so darn lazy
                                       That all I can say is “Oops-a-daisy.

The Lazarus poem commemorates freedom. My parody denigrates incompetency, perjury, and selfies.

A Selfie of the Shitty Manager