The Oklahoma City Council may not have expected the third degree or Spanish Inquisition when it opened the floor to let citizens speak at its regular Dec. 21 meeting.
But then again, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
After a presentation over the proposed routes and hub location for Oklahoma City’s planned streetcar system, several City Council members had questions and comments on the issue. One of those who addressed the City Council on the matter was Mark Gibbs, a board member on the MAPS 3 Modern Streetcar Subcommittee and secretary of the board for Urban Neighbors, the downtown neighborhood association.
Gibbs, who has addressed the council in the past because of his role on the MAPS 3 subcommittee, speaks with a British accent.
The accent was too much to bear for one member of the audience, Oklahoma City resident and former candidate for county commissioner Fannie Bates, who decided to first address the obvious British invasion when the time came to allow citizens to address the council.
“Before I say what I got up here to say, I’d like to say that I’m really tired of coming to these meetings and seeing somebody with an English accent or an Australian accent that knows nothing about our culture getting up here and telling us what they think we ought to do,” Bates told the council. “They don’t know anything about our history. They just sound silly. I hope you don’t think that because someone has an English accent that they know more than us Okies do.”
Bates went on to say that it was not right to charge non-Greater Oklahoma City Chamber members $75 to attend the annual State of the City event, and that many Chamber businessmen who will attend the event don’t live in Oklahoma City, but during the day run payday loan services, bars, liquor stores and “arcades that teach our kids how to kill cops and steal cars” before going home to Nichols Hills and Edmond at night.
“We’ve got problems in Oklahoma City,” Bates said. “Real problems that these people with an English accent don’t know anything about.”
Perhaps Bates is right. The problems of British railways have been well documented in Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot Sketch,” with people headed toward pet shops in Bolton, and then inexplicably winding up in Ipswitch.
