Maybe I’m simply in a good mood today, but I thought the mayor’s State of the City speech last night wasn’t too bad. Then again, when you have the type of people that we have on the City Council, anybody looks like a thoughtful, dynamic speaker by comparison.

There’s always a theme in Kwame Kilpatrick’s speeches, and this year’s was the idea of The Next Detroit, the city’s newest era. He laid the groundwork for that by noting that Detroit has had all sorts of historical phases, from its French Outpost phase to its Manufacturing Center phase to Industrial Giant phase. Though he didn’t get into the part of the city’s history known as the Frantic Fleeing of the White People, nor the current historical era known as the Feral Dogs in the Open Prairies phase.

He did acknowledge — as implied by his proposals — some underlying conditions of life in the city, like the fact that the city is crawling with homeless crazy people, that shooting each other is a sport here, that the city workforce is infested with absentee deadwood, and that people have been bailing the city for 50 years because of all of the above.

Some people were surprised at the 30 percent absenteeism rate he cited for parts of the city’s workforce, though anyone who’s held a city job knows he left out the percentage who routinely show up drunk or stoned, or those who show up stupid and are there because they’re related to someone higher up.

Most importantly, the mayor noted that, as a city, “we have flavor.” So does rancid meat. Flavor in this context can include schizophrenics on the People Mover, hobos whose favorite toilet is the back entrance to the Farwell Building and residents who can’t spell the name of the city they live in. We need less flavor and more bland, tasteless fiber in the form of people who can read and show up to work every day after showering. In other words, we need a citizenry that doesn’t have rock-bottom expectations of themselves and their city.

Is Kwame getting better or did that drinking binge last weekend alter my brain chemistry irrevocably? Doesn’t matter. The council is still the council, and they didn’t grow brains or professionalism overnight. They’re still driving full-speed towards inadvertently handing the city over to the state. Let the obstructionism begin anew!