To the editor:
After reading the City of Caribou’s puffy press-release piece in the May, 11, 2016 edition of the Aroostook Republican (Caribou Region Business section), which was entitled: “Caribou gets kudos in national surveys”, I had to muster all of my will power in order to resist the overwhelming urge to jump on my bicycle and pedal down to the local fireworks emporium in order to purchase a battery of spiffy new skyrockets, preferably ones that would display the Caribou City Seal when they exploded (ka-boom!).
Alas pragmatism overcame my enthusiasm and I settled for doing my work and my chores as I cheerily chanted, “sis boom bah”, for the rest of the day and into the night. In fact, I fell asleep envisioning the city seal and had a dream that I actually lived in the smiley-faced place described by the outlandish claims that were being maintained by those meaningless surveys with their skewed pseudo-data.
So, I asked myself: “Why does the City of Caribou’s ministry of propaganda persist in churning out the exaggerated claims of all of those meaningless surveys”? Well, the way I see it is that any decent cheerleading squad, which is worthy of the name, is going to say practically anything that will motivate their team to victory regardless of their team’s actual chances of winning. Cheerleaders, by their very nature, must suspend their disbelief.
The pre-Socratic Athenian philosopher, Anaxagoras (c. 510 – c. 428 B.C.), is reputed to have asserted that: “Snow is congealed water, water is black and, therefore, snow is black”. Furthermore, “According to Cicero, Anaxagoras said that snow did not even seem white to him because he knew that the water from which it was congealed was black”.
Does this philosophical balderdash sound familiar to you? The cheery, sis-boom-bah press releases of the City of Caribou’s don’t have to be fact-based; they only have to be factish, and these factitious press releases of the city appear to reside in some grey area between pulp fiction and a disingenuous memoir.
Such blatant blather has a colorful tradition: Think of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Iraqi Minister of Information, “Baghdad Bob” and his ridiculously ‘true’ predictions about how Iraq was winning the war. The nickname Baghdad Bob now denotes someone who confidently declares to be true what everyone else can see to be false. Think of the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and of Baghdad Bob’s American counterpart “Mister Mission- Accomplished”, or think of Emperor Obama’s oxymoronic “Affordable Care Act”.
Does the City of Caribou’s kudos cult really believe in the bilge that they are spewing in their silly self-promoting press releases? Perhaps they have already followed the White Rabbit down the hole, when they concoct such eyewash or maybe the Mad Hatter edits their puffy press releases for them. “Go ask Alice: I think she’ll know.
It’s high time that our city hall cheerleaders started playing it real for a change! Our local Lollipop Guild should stop pretending that everything is just about pitch-perfect here in Munchkin Land. They should be addressing Caribou’s high taxes and its bloated budgets, its population decline, its low per capita income, its over-valued real estate assessments, which, in combination with the low market values for real estate, result in the inability of most homeowners to sell their home and are the leading cause of Caribou’s rampant home foreclosures.
To a certainty, our city government can’t spend its way into prosperity, but it can destroy our community with excessively and unnecessarily high taxes on its property and with excessively high property evaluations that are way above the market value.
