Self-Loathing Stymies Council

Council 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.