WORDS TO SWEAT BY

Nope, I’m not talking about exercise. I might need it and know it would be good for me, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m speaking of words like “investigation.” Or the even equally deplorable, “accountability.”

For a guy like me who has more skeletons than he has closet space, all such words inspire is way too much sweat. So much that I can’t even get enough air conditioning to avoid the beads forming on my forehead.

Alright, I know I could feel less concerned about such words if I would try to do things morally and without ever bending a law. But I do walk a tightrope in that regard. Tell the truth about how much I suck as a Mayor and the reality that our city’s government is totally overpopulated with hopelessly inept personnel or, OR avoid it and make it seem like we are okay.

You see there is more at stake than my little butt. Alright I admit it isn’t quite that little, but in any case if I told the truth then there would be all kinds of employees who would face having their small and petty bureaucratic worlds of red tape threatened.

And to be honest, at least as honest as I can manage, I just don’t have the heart to ruin that many lives. Some of these people worked for the city before I became Mayor. So their incompetent productive and function was stumbling away at the job and I could hardly get rid of them afterwards. That is the difficulty when they are already on the job and nobody ever made the effort to deal with the problem.

So the plain fact is I’m stuck with a silly and dysfunctional city government that sometimes actually manages to do something right. Which means I could either take some radical action that would fix the problem and then lead to an investigation on why it wasn’t fixed in the first place or leave it alone and dressed it up with illusion.

My way, albeit the coward’s way I suppose, keeps our little city’s illusion of being functional in tact. The voters may notice the occasional blunder, but overall they never learn just how utterly hopeless and beyond any degree of improvement resides in the tentacles of local government power and function. Hey that’s not bad, I’ll have to remember that to insert in some speech.

Meanwhile I faithfully provide a nice and wonderful fairy tale to the citizens of my city. I’m happy, they’re happy and the employees are happy. As they say “ignorance is bliss.” And in my city we’ve got about as much bliss in that regard as anyone could possible want!

As far as I’m concerned that is a form of utopia and as long as nobody looks below the surface it functions. And you can be sure that I do everything I can to make sure they don’t. Plus spend all my energy doing what I can to keep those darn “sweaty” words fro ever becoming more than a theory to talk about, but never actually act on. That is as close as I ma able to come to heaven and still not have to have wings or tell the truth!