PREVIEW: Hiram Gill

Speaker 1 I'm holding the mic with one hand because of this setup, and so I'm snapping into the microphone.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're doing the stand-up comedian thing of like when you're about to get real with it, you throw the leather jacket onto the mic stand.

Speaker 1 And then, wait, no, order of operations, you snap the mic off of the mic stand, then you throw the leather jacket onto the mic stand.

Speaker 1 I'm actually stomping around my wife's childhood bedroom for this episode.

Speaker 1 Doing this in the wrong order and just sort of like coming out for my sort of bad boy of comedy tour after I've been canceled and I throw my leather jacket over the mic stand, muffling the microphone instantly and I have to sort of reach under it to get under there and do my bits.

Speaker 1 So who's been on a plane lately?

Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to No Gods, No Mayors, the podcast about how the mayoralty is a role for cranks and other interesting people. I am your mayor for this episode, November Kelly.

Speaker 1 I am joined by my friends and deputy mayors Matthew Lubchansky and Riley Quinn. Hello.
Hello. I was recently on an airplane and the food was actually surprisingly good.

Speaker 1 So that's my stand-up comedy. Great.
That's my open air.

Speaker 1 How's that? Is that good? Should we leave that in?

Speaker 2 Maybe that's why stand-up comedy is not good anymore is airplane food got good and it's no longer motivated.

Speaker 1 It's a little tastier. It was a primarily sort of, it was in dialogue with the airline food industry, you know, know, and now they've lost that.

Speaker 1 People can't afford cars anymore, so they're no longer parking in a driveway nor driving on a parkway.

Speaker 2 That's true, but you can't do that with an Uber because they're just always driving.

Speaker 1 And no one watches baseball anymore, so no one cares who's on first. Anyway, this episode is kind of a loose sequel to my last one, which I did about a guy called Soapy Smith.

Speaker 1 And we are going to T-Girl Mecca itself, Seattle, Washington.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 even before transitioning was a thing, Seattle benefited from another huge influx of industry essential to the, not just the American economy, but also the American national spirit.

Speaker 1 And before transitioning, before that was transitioning, that was mining. Oh.

Speaker 1 In the very late 1890s, gold is found in Alaska. That precipitates the Klondike gold rush.
which is a part of the Sophie Smith narrative, right?

Speaker 1 Like that guy, he was the sort of like crime boss of Denver. He had to go to Alaska, found a town there, and get shot.
Spoilers for that episode.

Speaker 1 Seattle. Spoilers for the distant past.
Yeah. Seattle was in the position that Soapy Smith wanted to be, where it could kind of take advantage of the Klondike gold rush.

Speaker 1 And so today we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about some other things through the prism of a Seattle mayor, the Grover Cleveland of Seattle, mr.

Speaker 1 two non-consecutive terms himself, Hiram Gill or high gill. All right.

Speaker 2 Nova, can I just say one thing?

Speaker 2 You've included on the notes here one of my favorite forms of art in all of history, which is a political cartoon where the longer you look at it, the more labels you see on things. For example,

Speaker 2 I've noticed that a man I assume to be Hiram Gill is standing on a sort of step a ziggurat, if you will.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's standing on chichen eats for some reason in the middle of the ocean. Yes, he is.

Speaker 2 And yes, obviously, the steps of the step pyramid are labeled. They're labeled, if I may, civic indecency on the bottom.
From the bottom, from the bottom.

Speaker 1 On the bottom to the top.

Speaker 2 Civic indecency, open gambling, thuggery, graft, and whoppy. And we can explain that in a second.
That's when your pussy's wet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can.

Speaker 1 Are you saying we can explain that in a second? Because I have put in bold in the notes. I am going to explain the whoppy thing.

Speaker 2 I just want to draw attention to the fact that if you look closely, you'll see also there's a tidal wave behind him labeled recall election.

Speaker 1 My favorite bit is on his hat.

Speaker 2 Yes, I was going to get to the hat. There's a feather in the hat.
Would you like to say what it says, Maddie, please?

Speaker 1 It says the Times? What does that mean?

Speaker 1 He also has his own name labeled on his shoe.

Speaker 1 He is labeled Gil, and he is smoking his characteristic corncob pipe. Just in case you didn't know, this is

Speaker 2 the mayor who wears the Times as a feather in his cap is about to get recalled away from his wappy graft.

Speaker 1 Sitting back

Speaker 1 from the drawing table, just like, I think I've nailed this one.

Speaker 1 I'm so good at cartooning. I will say as a cartoonist myself and a former political cartoonist,

Speaker 1 this really does convey exactly what you want, which is that his precious whoppy is about to get washed away.

Speaker 1 We will talk about his precious whoppy.

Speaker 2 The feather in his cap won't save him from this recall election.

Speaker 2 I hate ambiguity, which is why I love political cartoons.

Speaker 1 It's a beautiful piece of art, which I'm going to spend the next hour and a half explaining to you. But first, we have a segment on this show that we have labeled conveniently Municipal Roundup.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was responsible for our item this week.

Speaker 1 Item. Sam.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry that I'm going to have to ask you for another musical interlude, but I would like a subsection of Municipal Roundup called Municipal Loveline for when mayors get in romantic relationships with mayors.

Speaker 1 And forever. The mayor for mayor is honestly so beautiful.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 One day Sam's going to snap. He's going to get on a plane with a gun.

Speaker 1 He'll be right to do it is the thing. We love Sam and also we support his justified murder of us.

Speaker 2 When Sam John wicks all of us because we've asked for one too many difficult to interpret musical cues, not a jury in the world is going to convict him.

Speaker 1 I once saw him kill three people with a musical sting.

Speaker 2 He killed three men in the bar with a xylophone.

Speaker 1 I was going to say it was killed by a calliope.

Speaker 1 You asked for the musical interlude, and then none of us put in some time for the musical interlude. So the musical interlude will happen now.

Speaker 1 Even though this wasn't meant to be,

Speaker 1 it's going to break my heart to watch you leave.

Speaker 1 But I will never let you.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 Incredible. Amazing work as a wave file.

Speaker 1 Frankly, it could have just been a WAV file of Sam flatly detailing how he's going to murder all of us. And that would, again, be justified.

Speaker 2 It's like we're going to be the first three people in the world who know each other to be murdered with a theremin, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 And the noise it makes is incredible.

Speaker 2 I was working on the pod late one night.

Speaker 1 So, the headline.

Speaker 1 Song for November 14th. Yeah.
Yeah, Thanksgiving. The spookiest holiday of the year.

Speaker 1 All Saints Day, mom. Sorry.

Speaker 2 Your Thanksgiving, Maddie. Not mine.

Speaker 1 Municipal Love Line. Yes.
Is that what you decided to call it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, municipal love line. Anyway, the headline.
Build a Blasio's girlfriend out at a South Tucson Mayor, mom of two, Roxana Valenzuela.

Speaker 1 I enjoyed this. It was the friend of the show, Noah, who sent this in.
Thank you, Noah.

Speaker 2 Friend of the show.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Noah. Friend of the show with a W, not pronounced wrongly.
No.

Speaker 1 That would have derailed us for me.

Speaker 2 So Bill de Blasio's girlfriend. I like the syntactic ambiguity here, which is like Bill de Blasio's girlfriend has been outed as the South Tucson mayor.
Like his known girlfriend is outed as a mayor.

Speaker 1 I think there's so much pressure to like for mayors to out themselves. And really, I think that

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 that's a personal decision. I don't I don't think Gawker should have outed

Speaker 1 Roxanna Venezuela as the mayor of Tucson. No, no, no.
Golden.

Speaker 2 Maddie, Maddie, not Tucson, South Tucson. Huge difference.

Speaker 1 Oh, so sorry. So sorry.
I assume that's a city south of Tucson.

Speaker 2 No, it's a city surrounded by Tucson. That's a single square mile.
that exists as a tax protest.

Speaker 1 It's a city of London, but for Tucson, fantastic. This is where historically the Queen of Tucson lived.

Speaker 1 I'm Lord Mayor of Tucson.

Speaker 2 It's a bit more like Tucson's Vernon.

Speaker 1 So it's full of decaying batteries.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 it's full of car dealerships who arranged a tax protest against Tucson.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's beautiful. Decaying car batteries.

Speaker 1 But so she's dating Bill de Blasio. Good for her.

Speaker 1 Good for her.

Speaker 2 I don't think they might be dating. I think she thinks she's dating Bill de Blasio.
Bill de Blasio seems to not.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of speculation that the relationship is one-sided, but I actually want to talk about her as the mayor of South Tucson because there is actually something there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do you think the other mayors are like you don't count as a mayor at the mayor's club?

Speaker 1 And that's why Bill de Blasio is sort of like, oh my god, you're not really a mayor because you're only the mayor from Cardoubi.

Speaker 1 My mayor-for-mayor relationship, except my other mayor, is kind of an embarrassing mayor. Yeah, it's got a municipal power gap.
Oh,

Speaker 2 South Tucson, Arizona is one square mile. It's a fully, it's a full enclave of Tucson, which has been at war with it since like

Speaker 2 1936.

Speaker 1 Someday this war is going to end.

Speaker 2 Someday a real rain's going to come and wash away the car dealerships.

Speaker 1 Just watching the Tucson Air Force going over to bombard South Tucson again. And they keep missing because it's too small.

Speaker 2 So it's basically in 1936, like Tucson were like, hey, we should probably just continue expanding the city because we're growing.

Speaker 2 And so there was this area south of Tucson's city limits, but like auto, like car dealerships mostly, like car dealership owners who were living south of Sixth Avenue enjoyed not paying like all of the business taxes imposed by Tucson to pay for public services in Tucson.

Speaker 2 So they emergency incorporated as a town so Tucson couldn't annex them.

Speaker 1 That's incredible.

Speaker 2 And then they were like having like sort of small-time Chinatown style water wars for the next like 30 years.