Editorial: Goodman ‘art’ brings city shame

Tuesday, June 25, 2002 | 8:49 a.m.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman was invited to create a work of art to promote the opening of a downtown gallery. He happily obliged with a drawing titled "Hale and Hardy," showing two homeless men with a work-for-food sign. When the gallery owner saw it, he did the equivalent of pinching himself to make sure he wasn't hallucinating. He called the mayor's office to ask: Are you sure? The mayor, known for verbally assaulting the homeless, passed up this last chance to retain the dignity of his office. Unwilling to engage in censorship, the owner put 25 copies of Goodman's drawing on sale for $275 apiece, but nevertheless told the Sun, "We thought people would get the wrong idea, that we're rednecks."

Some people will fault the gallery, no doubt, but the fault lies with Goodman for being so misinformed and so unenlightened as to engage in such a demeaning antic when the issue of homelessness cries out for serious leadership. Under Goodman for the past three years, homelessness in Las Vegas has grown and city services have shrunk. At City Hall, browbeating and name calling, and now an infantile drawing, have replaced the policies that showed promise under the previous administration.

For Goodman, his drawing shows homelessness for what he believes it largely is -- a social problem brought on by healthy people leeching off society simply because they are too lazy to work. For us, however, the drawing shows the mayor for what he is in this case -- an embarrassment to the city. Goodman's drawing is on the same level as the homeless exploitation video recently released, whose producers have been reviled in Congress and elsewhere for their callousness. If the two Las Vegans who created the video, and a website to hawk it, provided a link to Goodman's office, it wouldn't surprise us.

We thought Goodman had hit bottom on the homeless issue last summer when he suggested they be rounded up and forcibly removed to the abandoned state prison in Jean. We were embarrassed last fall when he had to apologize to Salt Lake City for accusing officials there of sending their homeless people here. We were embarrassed in January by his State of the City message, in which he said homeless people are rapists, robbers and murderers. Now it's Goodman's turn to be embarrassed, for becoming a caricature of himself.