Our Santa's wishlist? For Fitzy to shut the hell up

What's ol' Fitzy up to today? Looks like a list of stuff he'd like to see happen to Stockton. This should be good.

Did he get that downtown housing thing in there even though we debunked the myth that there's no affordable downtown housing yesterday? Yep, that's in there.

Did he make sweeping generalizations in which he fanatasizes about a mythical, well-run, financially-competent government that hasn't been seen in the wild...well, ever? Yep, that's there too. That wish will come true right after Bigfoot and the Chupacabra get married.

Did he...hey! Wait a minute! That's our idea jackass! That's right, apparently when he's not searching our site for his e-mail address (which actually happened BTW), he's lifting our ideas and general tone of this site. Let's compare, shall we?

On Sept. 30th, we said this:

"Book events at the Fox/Bob Hope that people under the age of 40 (but over the age of 15) want to see

"The booking of the Bob Hope Theatre has always been fucking horrible. ...If there's one complaint we have about the booking of any event downtown, it's that there's next to nothing geared towards the college-aged resident. Which is funny since there's 2 fucking colleges in town. And if there's one thing college kids cum all over themselves for, it's indie bands that don't get much mainstream radio play."

And here's Fitzy today:

"Five: exciting rock 'n' roll and other entertainment at Stockton Arena and the Bob Hope Theatre. Declare arena management in breach of contract. If that will not fly, buy them out."

Sure, ours is kind of long winded (surprised? Yeah, me neither), but the general theme is the same. Book better acts. Unfortunatly Fitzy's solution of buying out IFG's contract probably wouldn't work, and it would probably make things worse. Don't get me wrong, IFG's done a fucking horrible job, but buying them off would only piss more people off. Especially because of the budget problems. Also because, let's face it, Stockton isn't an easy sell. As Duke explained in this post, blame for the shittiness of the events booked so far should be passed around to everyfuckingbody.

Of course this couldn't be a Fitzy Wish List without a mention of his hopes and dreams for downtown as a whole, not just our struggling entertainment venues. Again, from today:

"Six: Democratize downtown revitalization. Balance high-end attractions with some down-home Delta fun: burger huts and mai tai bars on the waterfront. What regular people like.

Many feel elitist redevelopment left them out. This political mistake jeopardizes revival's support."

First, we're going to ignore reccommending the democratization thing so soon after the referrendum fiasco. But God damn the rest of that sounds familiar. It's also especially hilarious coming from a guy who said this less than a month ago:

"One way to (raise income) is to offer coastal employers and high wage earners a downtown with amenities they demand."

So we should cater to the common man who's been disenfranchised by the city's blatant cashgrab attempt to pander to the elitists while at the same time continuing to pander to those elitists?

Now normally we would be stoked that we've apparently chnaged the opinion of one of downtown's biggest apologists (because that's tooootally what happened here), but Fitzy's flip-flopping reminded us of the whole reason we started ragging on him to begin with.

The word "elitist" has been thrown around a lot lately. Mostly in that damn election (and Fitzy's column today. Hooray for currently popular buzz words!), but it applies here too. The reason we rag on Fitzy is because we can't relate to him. At all. Which is sad because we have so much in common. We're both lifelong Stockton residents, we've both seen the city change significantly over the years, and we both pine for a competently run Stockton (even if we are ridiculously cynical about it). Yet with all that in common, we're both very different cats.

As Fitzy's said himself, Stockton's not a town with a very high average income. While we don't know what Fitzy's income is, one would guess it's probably a little higher than most Stockton residents. While that's not inherently a bad thing, it's helped seperate him from the common working man. Men like us, men like your neighbors, men like the guy working 3 jobs just so he can afford his mortgage. Fitzy sees a guy working three jobs and sees a story about the economy and how one man works through it. We see it as reality (because some of us here actually do work multiple jobs, not because of mortgages though).

Fitzy can't relate to us anymore because he isn't one of us. A good metro columnist should appeal to the average citizens of the city he covers. Fitz hasn't done that in a long time. Sure, if presented with this arguement he'd probably spout off a bunch of bullshit about all the e-mail he gets and the awards he's won and how we don't know anything about the average Stocktonian. But it would be just that, bullshit.

We are the average Stocktonian. Living paycheck to paycheck trying to make rent while still having something resembling a social life. Fitzy writes 3 columns a week and can't even keep which side of the downtown fence he's on straight. His blatant fellating of the downtown he said himself we're disenfranchaised with shows just how out of touch he is. By throwing his full support downtown he pretty much threw his own public image behind it. It failed, miserably. Perhaps irreparably Which is what this flipflopping really is, public image repair. And not even a very good attempt at it.