Mr./Mrs./Ms. Candidate: Just in time for the filing period, here are my modified rules of voting engagement.

This rumination has been a long time gestating. Am I just joking ... or not? Is it an early sign of bibulist’s dementia? Even I'm having trouble deciding, but at present, I'm comfortable with the notion of being clear and open about the current state of my thoughts. We’re told that voting is supposed to be a matter of conscience, and in the past, I've claimed status as a conscientious objector, but as we approach the next electoral milestone in this city’s cluttered history, anything short of perfect honesty would be remiss. In the absence of genuine choice, options are few.

Have a wonderful day.

----

What was that? You're running for office, and you'd like my support?

Damned glad you asked. It's going to be a (insert cliche here) this election season, isn't it? Brutal, unrelenting and vicious ... which reminds me, I have something to tell you. But first, a digression.

It isn’t that difficult to understand why election cycles bring out some of the worst manifestations of latent human savagery, and to grasp these venomous expressions of the heart of darkness lurking somewhere within us all, it’s barely relevant that we as voters are rarely offered anything that remotely resembles a choice.

Indeed, ideological differences originating in the intellect aren’t what motivate otherwise placid and normally harmless individuals to become virulent, fire-breathing instruments conveying Dr. Thompson’s fabled fear and loathing. The subconscious roots of the ailment extend far deeper than that, reaching into base impulses of tribal mysticism that are expressed as “us against you,” not “our ideas and platforms against yours.”

It is by no means helpful that the cynical power-sharing accord brokered more than a century ago by America’s two-party system has rendered numerous Americans functionally impotent with regard to concepts of non-partisan achievement.

Just as basic training in the armed services is structured to instill a core set of conditioned responses that can be summoned from the depths of the subconscious decades after the instructional experience has concluded, political party identification acts as a self-defining urge apart from conscious reasoning and is intended to bypass external considerations. One doesn’t “think,” but instead “reacts,” as a Democrat or a Republican, customarily owing to a process of socialization that took place in childhood, and in some extreme cases, the womb.

Given that New Albany remains a veritable Amazon Basin of abundant, aberrant (sometimes abhorrent) sociopolitical species, it comes as little surprise that we’ve managed to do more than our fair bit in rendering null and void the concept of non-partisanship.

At this point in our city’s history, the most merciful thing to do would be to eradicate non-partisanship entirely, and to hasten our reorganization into armed camps. A demilitarized slumlord zone could be left under the protection of both sides, so as to encourage the continued economic boons of multiple-family rental properties, methamphetamine production and petty thievery. We'll also need a food court of burger joints. Otherwise, it’s off to the mattresses.

These all too probable musings aside, the current situation strongly suggests that one risks senseless redundancy to so much as attempt a sincere disclaimer of local non-partisanship.

Such a disclaimer might bear a shred of meaning only if one or the other of our two major local political parties possessed an action platform pertaining to distinctly local issues. Since neither does, and since both have in effect abdicated the game in terms of coherence and relevance, partisanship has been rendered moot in terms of ideological significance. A party member is no more than a clan member, a club member, or perhaps a Sam’s Club member, spouting the dogma “little progress at the lowest price.”

And this brings us, full circle, back to the ghostlike non-platforms that we’re about to be relentlessly insulted with as the 2007 election season rounds into full fury.

Consequently, and speaking here only for me -- as one who considers himself a small but sometimes annoyingly loud component of a genuine constituency that is working to bring about change and to offer a vision of the city’s future, while remaining grimly realistic about the willingness of ordinary people to play ball with the devil they know to the exclusion of ideas that strike them as incomprehensible and just plain crazy with a decidedly "progressive" taint -- I’m ready to publicly offer my conditions to vote for you, the candidate.

As the most immediate example, though hardly the only applicable one, it is widely known that I regard the city council tenure of Steve Price as a nadir for my 3rd council district. I am absolutely positive that the district and the city need better if we’re ever going to escape the leaden grip of the self-defeating, self-perpetuating, underachieving and anti-intellectual New Albany Syndrome.

This having been said, it should come as no surprise that I’ll not be voting for CM Price in his probable re-election bid. In fact, I'd sooner vote for the villainous neo-con troll Dick Cheney, the blessedly deceased dude who invented Miller Lite, or even one of Auntie V's many and varied personalities.

However, contrary to past habits, I’ll not necessarily vote against CM Price by voting for his opponent UNLESS his opponent provides a clear, coherent platform that addresses my concerns and the concerns of my neighborhood. It’s as simple as that.

Precisely because my expectations of job performance from CM Price are low, there's no chance of disappointment on my part. Conversely, I absolutely must demand more of those who may decide to run against him, because my expectations of he/she/them are accordingly higher, and it logically follows that my risk of crushing disappointment correspondingly far greater.

Therefore, lacking a potential challenger’s clear public articulation of intent and of discernable content -- no back room deals for me -- I propose to sit on my hands come Election Day if these strategies and goals are not forthcoming. Expediently selling out to the least objectionable bidder no longer fits into my grand scheme of ethical voting conduct. Now, the stakes are raised. You must earn my support against the primeval empire, both within the 3rd council district and as applicable to citywide races.

Mr./Mrs./Ms. Candidate, henceforth the two of us working together shall be a two-way street, and as we know, two-way streets are something that New Albany desperately needs to restore to working order, along with the notion that every once in a while, if only once in a generation, an election should be about a competition between ideas. I've been making my ideas clear for quite some time, so it’s entirely up to you, the candidate, to make the first move and to throw me some red meat. Higher standards begin right here, and at this instant.

It is revealing that as I write, CM Price has (only recently) set up a campaign kiosk in the blogosphere and is busy doing just that. We can't really call his product "ideas" -- not yet -- and what clear notions manage to sneak through his borrowed talking points and vapid homilies can be surreal in an acid-trip-like, Timothy Leary sort of way ... and though what CM Price is doing with his blog isn't even necessary given the blissful ignorance of his Coup de'Geriatrique constituency, he seems to recognize the importance of at least trying to say something.

And for that, I give him public credit. There are others with a far longer presence in the blogosphere who have not attempted -- not yet -- what CM Price now purports to do.

To repeat: I speak here as an individual.

Almost certainly my closest associates won't agree with me, and at any rate, my influence is severely limited, or so I’m told by the nay-saying cadre that continues to fear such unlikely contingencies. I fully understand that my purely figurative ballot fee of an idea or three -- no more, lest we confuse and frighten Joe Six Pack -- to punch your ticket may be far too high for prospective partisan office holders to proffer considering the long, dreary New Albanian history of offering absolutely nothing and usually delivering even less.

Mr./Mrs./Ms. candidate, please understand that my demands are less about you than about me, specifically, about my not wanting to feel ashamed and dirty any longer when it comes time to cast my vote. However, if you act soon to secure my support, it -- I -- we -- may be of some help acting together to displace those dreadfully simplistic remnant of discredited old ways that continue to retard progress in New Albany.

It’s all the more reason to illustrate very soon that you have a program, a plan and a platform.

If not – if you don’t, or you won’t, or you can’t – well, in truth, guerilla warfare becomes addictive after a while, and in the end, the council's obstructionists ultimately will dissolve and fade away, anyhow, whether one, two or all of them are re-elected this time around. Together, we can speed their departure. Apart, we're in for more long years of inactivity, excuses and non-business as usual. Make no mistake: I'm confident we'll win in the end. It'll just take longer.

But this year, "for a change," it's all about me.

Dear readers -- my fellow New Albanians -- in closing, it occurs to me that a former roommate’s telephone answering machine message used to be, “You know what to do and when to do it.”

Ditto. Let’s hear it, candidate(s). The sooner, the better. What’s it going to be?

(tick tock, tick tock, tick tock)