In fairness to Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, he does not look at all excited about the ceremony he presided over on January 12, for which he’s since been roundly derided. On YouTube you can see he’s wearing sneakers with his rumpled suit and a blank expression of boredom. Clearly he’s not seeing this as a great moment in his city’s history, such as the opening of the nation’s first successful plastics factory, in 1872, or the births of Philip Roth and Frankie Valli.
While the featured speaker, a slender woman draped in the sort of saffron robes favored by Hindu monks, burbles on about the karmic serendipity that has brought the gritty New Jersey metropolis together with her exotic-sounding homeland of Kailasa as “sister cities,” Baraka scrolls and taps assiduously on his cell phone.
