District politics have always been known for a certain degree of madness. But when it comes to insane, idiotic publicity stunts, ex-mayor and current city council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) totally outdid himself last week.
On Friday, Barry assembled the city’s craziest citizens in a Southeast D.C. parking lot to unveil a two-story hunk of metal; an invention called a “gasifier.” It’s billed as a heavy-duty incinerator that can purify sewage and waste into pollution-free energy. Supposedly, the only by-products of the process are distilled water and nontoxic ash.
It sounds like something from the latter Back to the Future movies, with its own insane professor to boot???an indigenous New Zealander named Simon Romana, the inventor. No major university backed the R&D that created the gasifier, just Romana and his patrons: a few Native American and Canadian tribes and Windell R. King, Sr., a man who made a fortune manufacturing cigarettes.
Does the machine work? We may never know. Neither Barry nor his motley group of partners was allowed to turn on the machine because the ex-mayor got into a shouting match with the Pastor at the Church across the street from the demonstration site, Willie F. Wilson. The whole scene was caught on Channel 4 TV, as Wilson told Barry to watch his mouth and Barry threatened to have Wilson’s church’s nonprofit status investigated.
But Barry and Wilson have worked together on numerous projects in the past?including the recent Millions More March, from which Wilson was accused of excluding gays and lesbians?and both were big in the civil rights movement. What caused the blowup? Apparently, Willie simply did not like how the machine took up spaces in a lot where his congregation usually parks. So, in a very clearly logical manner, a truce was struck, and the machine could stay … but would not be turned on.
Was this simply a farce to save everyone present the embarrassment of turning on a contraption that probably did not work anyway? We may never know.
But much of the city seems intent on humoring Barry. A WASA spokesperson told the Washington Post that the gasifier’s technology was “worth looking into.” Some sewage plants, according to the Post, already use a similar technology, but Romana claimed his machine burns hotter and cleaner because of his “magic” secret, which is, we guess, too secret for him to show us.
We, for one, call on the city to stop taking Marion Barry so seriously, and for the media to start ignoring him when he makes such blatant and foolish attempts to get attention for its own sake, rather than dealing with the city’s real issues. Maybe someone could use that million-dollar hulk for scrap.
