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Fiction/Stories
October 2000
160 pages
ISBN 0-88984-215-9
$17.95
Self-Loathing Stymies Council
Paul GlennonCouncil met again last night in a
last-ditch attempt to come to terms with the municipal self-loathing
problem. Despite submissions from staff, the provincial
government and community groups, council could not resolve the
troublesome issue. `We've done a lot of soul-searching, but
everyone's so firmly entrenched, it's difficult to make any
progress. Unless something changes we're at an impasse,'
said Mayor Nolan Plunge after the meeting.
Little was achieved by the night's disputations. It was a
night like too many others before it. No viable alternatives to
busing or dumping of despair emerged, but these initiatives
remain confounded by not-in-my-backyard attitudes and fears
that a municipal self-loathing dump would depress local property
values. Outside council chambers one long-time resident
complained that, `This has been going on for so long.
They've done study after study and nobody's done anything about
it. It's sickening. We're all really just fed up with the
whole thing.'
At times the council chamber looked like it was hosting a
shouting match rather than a debate on the Sisyphean nature of
human existence. Many seemed satisfied with finding someone to
blame. Some representatives accused the media of exacerbating the
problem by magnifying the look of the other. One resident blamed
the death of God, another the dissolution of role and identity.
Most blamed themselves, but Mayor Plunge took his share of
criticism. Perennial mayoral opponent Ann Opellung accused the
mayor of grandstanding. Mayor Plunge, who campaigned last year on
a ticket designed to appeal to voter apathy said that his own
self-loathing was `a Nessus's shirt' that he wore every
day. He reacted bitterly when Opellung countered it was more like
the emperor's new clothes. `That's the worst of it,'
the mayor responded sombrely, `Our self-loathing is so self-important,
so fashionable, so farcical, it only makes us more
loathsome.' His confession seemed to settle the meeting down
a bit, and opened the discussion for new ideas.
Conservatives on the council made a call for old-fashioned
stoicism and self-reliance. Even while they
acknowledged that this urge was nostalgic and embodied an
outmoded positivistic view of the self, they felt it was
important to do something - anything. Mayor Plunge refused to be
moved from his morass. `I don't want to do something just
for the sake of doing something. Nor do I just want to spend our
way out of the crisis. There must be a plan, a purpose.'
But neither he nor anyone else in the room was able to
supply this purpose. Though travel and personal journeys were put
forward, there was no broad support for this solution.
`Really, it's just exporting the problem,' explained
local ennui activist Pol Nolngen. `If the self is a burden
in your laundry room or in the staff cafeteria, it will be just
as much of a burden in Benares or Fort Lauderdale.'
Reacting to a suggestion that the business community take
a more active role in the problem, a representative of the board
of trade quoted figures from other jurisdictions where
corporate sponsorship of self-loathing has been tried
unsuccessfully. He showed a graph that demonstrated that
corporations already contribute significantly to the economy of
nausea and claimed that the market should be allowed to sort
itself out. `So far we've looked on it as a problem. I
suggest we try to see self-loathing as an opportunity.'
Staff took advantage of the reflective mood that followed
this comment to table their own proposal, but opposition to the
so-called Annihilation of Consciousness plan was vocal. Members
of a group calling themselves the Coalition for Persistence
in the Face of Absurdity shouted down the distraught town planner
when he protested that their petition was received after the
deadline for public submissions. In the ensuing debate, a
representative of the local Synchytic Religious Foundation read a
letter signed by the bishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese,
the United Church moderator and the head of the rabbinical
college expressing the hope that `by looking to a higher
meaning beyond the temporal and the individual we might see some
hope of a way ahead.' This presentation was met with jeers,
snickers and mock retching noises. As the debate descended into
chaos, one resident even blamed the landscape, lamenting that the
monotony and monoculture of lawns perpetuated a culture of
sameness and dissatisfaction. He was dismissed by most present as
a crank and fined for violating the pathetic fallacy bylaw.
It was early morning when the meeting finally broke up.
Nothing was really resolved. Council, staff and attendees merely
exhausted themselves with recriminations, unspoken hopes, false
ideals and recollections of past failures. Councillors postponed
the conclusion with points of order and routine business. Many
waited for a rumoured appearance by the Norwegian performance art
troupe Deus Ex Machina (literally `Zeus's former
Mechanic'). When it became clear that this much vaunted
comic relief was not going to materialize, a final motion was
passed to revisit the issue at the next meeting, the meeting
dissolved, and the attendees drifted home to their beds and no
doubt fitful sleep.