I’d wager a significant portion of my meager paycheck that Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz gets a lot of dumb letters, and I’m talking about a breed of dumb that goes beyond simply misspelling his humdinger of a last name. I’m talking about the kind of dumb that inspires one to carry a gerbil-wheel with one before the entire city council, with more than 50 people waiting in line behind you to address the body, and talk about “nibbling on nuts.” (You have to page down to around 5:50 in Kristin’s notes to catch this Will Sandstrom classic — though I guess his tirade is more a case of “stark raving mad” than “dumb”).

Anyway, if most of us got the kind of letters he does on a regular basis, I imagine we would get into the habit of just chucking most of them in the trash. But not Cieslewicz, apparently. In his latest blog post, his honor the Mayor lampoons the most frequent occupants of his inbox, complaints about Madison’s parking enforcement.

“I am just writing to inform you of the world’s worst injustice which took place in your gulag of a city not too long ago. As a result of this travesty, I have plans to bring Madison to its knees. Let me explain. (Here there are typically three pages of single spaced detail on the person’s every move for the two hours preceding and following the moment of ticketing.)

As you can clearly see from my brief recounting of events, I was wrongly fined by your overzealous officers. If my ticket is not dismissed immediately along with an apology copied to the media, my employer and my mother, I will destroy Madison’s economy by never returning to your city to spend so much as a dime. Moreover, I will tell all my friends here in Toledo and in the greater Toledo area never to set foot in your fascist city…”

I couldn’t help but throw my head back and laugh upon reading this, for several reasons. Firstly, the Mayor once told me he has staffers who check his blog posts prior to their posting and weed out some of the more undiplomatic ones — but admits that, “every once in a while I sneak one past the censors.”

This is clearly one of the latter. As much as people as cracked as me may have enjoyed his candor in this case, somewhere someone is reading it and getting offended right now.

But even funnier to me is the striking similarity the mayor’s fictitious letter of complaint bears to one of my more vehement rants of all time relating to a parking ticket I received after mistakenly parking my motorcycle in a partially unoccupied handicapped stall outside city hall.

“Ignorance of the law is no defense against it, I get that. Not seeing the sign is a mistake anyone can make, albeit a one-hundred dollar mistake in the City-of-the-Perpetually-Offended. And if I had in some way inconvenienced someone who had a deserved right to that spot, I would take a deep breath, clutch my manhood in one hand and my wallet in the other and pay the fine without complaining.

But WHO in HELL was I inconveniencing by using up the remaining three feet of that parallel parking spot? When I emerged from that horrid meeting three and a half hours later, the same gray van was parked in front of me, so it’s not like any passing disabled motorist even got the impression the spot was claimed. And what other use was there for the remaining space I took up? After all, I find it highly unlikely a paraplegic motorcyclist was going to come along and park there…“

And it goes on to get more outlandish and ridiculous from there, though the exaggerated hyperbole was intentional.

So yes, it’s easy and even popular to complain about Madison’s parking enforcement — I’m certainly no trailblazer when it comes to my views on parking or traffic tickets. I salute the mayor for unflinchingly dishing the BS right back, but hope he understands that it CAN get tough to make a living that pays very little and often takes one into the “danger zone” of Madison parking downtown.

I’ve literally paid hundreds of dollars into Madison’s city budget through parking tickets — not quite a thousand, but certainly in the ballpark of five hundred. Some of them I deserved, some of them were questionable. Either way, it gets overwhelming, and if no one’s going to name a wing in city hall after me for my generous financial contributions, the least I can do is waste some public official’s time with an incoherent letter.

Of course, if Mayor Cieslewicz dismantled the entire parking enforcement division, he could be rid of the complaint letters altogether. It’s a plan I’d like to implement, and I figure if the mayor gets to take an occasional crack at being a wiseass, I should get a shot at running the city every once in a while.

I think it’s fair to call me a self-hating journalist. For two years, I hosted a radio show that made a weekly routine of satirically pointing out the shortcomings of the Modern American Mediascape, in spite of the fact that I was working professionally as a newspaper reporter for half that time. Even now, I stay very well aware of the media’s shortcomings, and my own. There are plenty of both to go around, and the only way I know to fix them involves, first, being very cognizant of them.

We’re still trying to figure out that second step though.

Yet in spite of everything the Modern American Mediascape lacks right now, and the endless democratic potential a mass medium like the internet presents, I can’t help but be increasingly alarmed by the precipitous decline in advertising and subscription revenues being felt across the board by the traditional media and the resulting staffing cuts and business failures. I’m not just saying this because my already meager paycheck is threatened, either.

One of the criticisms myself and others have levelled since Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz started keeping a blog is that his entries have often seemed little more than press releases about city policy written in the first person. I stopped reading after a couple posts, but when we were chatting about the sweeping layoffs in the media lately at a press conference Friday, Channel 3’s Jessica Arp told me to check out Mayor Cieslewicz’s most recent entry.

I’ll post it here, as the city is not yet archiving the mayor’s blog. I do think, though, he makes some very poignant and heartfelt points about the danger this systematic dismantling of the media poses to our society.

I can think of few people in the city of Madison who could have bigger beefs with the media than Mayor Cieslewicz right now, and while I may criticize, I give him all the props in the world for these sentiments. While his job could conceivably be a whole lot easier if the media were to simply vanish into the vacuum, he’s big enough to recognize that with it would go democracy as we know it.

And if more people shared the mayor’s sentiments on this topic, “fixing” the Modern American Mediascape would be a whole lot easier. Thank you, Mayor Cieslewicz, for finally letting a bit of the man behind the tie shine through.