Mamdani fields nearly 200 influencers same week Council calls his 'sweeping' Legionnaires' fix a vow that fell short

…(cont) I'm sorry, I want to look at that word again before I go anywhere else with it. "Sweeping" is the only word set apart like that in the whole item. Everything around it — the outbreak, the summer, the Council's own review saying the reforms fall short — comes to us straight, the way a wire story tells you what happened. Just the one word got the marks. Somebody said it, and the paper thought it was worth holding separate. I keep coming back to that.

Now the next page. September the third — the very next day by my notebook, not a week later, not a season later — is the item about the roster. Nearly two hundred people, the item says, fielded on social media to carry the mayor's message forward. Nearly two hundred. I wrote the number twice because I didn't believe my own handwriting the first time.

I keep going back and forth between these two pages, and I know that's a habit and not a virtue, but that's what the notebook is for — it holds still so I don't have to. One page, one word, "sweeping," about a fix the Council says fell short. The very next page, nearly two hundred people, about carrying a message. I want to be fair here — the item doesn't say the roster is carrying that particular word. It says they're carrying the message. I don't know if those are the same cargo. I only know both trucks left the dock on consecutive days.

You want to see what nearly two hundred looks like, out where I live — not the number, the weight of it. I've got a garage that holds one car, and the car's got a fan belt that complains before it agrees to turn over, and some mornings it takes two of us — me and the dog, who doesn't help, he just supervises — to get it running. Two of us is a project. Two hundred is a workforce. You'd need a lot to park a workforce like that. The mayor, this week, apparently has one. The outbreak, per the Council's own account, still doesn't have its fix. I know how that sounds, laid out like that. I keep laying it out anyway, because the notebook keeps handing me the two pages in that order.

One more thing, since the notebook's still open. The Council's item is dated the second. The roster item is dated the third. Same week — one calendar page apart. I wrote that down too, in case anybody wants to check whether "same week" is doing real work here, or whether it's just where the two pages happened to fall.

Excuse me — before you head out — one more look at the word, since it's underlined twice in my own handwriting and I don't remember doing that twice. I'm sorry, I keep going back to this. The Council reviewed the mayor's response to Legionnaires' and says the reforms behind it fell short. The vow itself, the one on record, was for reforms described, in the printed account, as "sweeping." Was that word written for the fix the Council says still hasn't shown up, or for the nearly two hundred people who showed up instead, this week, to carry the word "sweeping."