Today's Tribune column: "One track minds and derailments."

Here's the link (will be inserted when the article in on-line)

Once upon a time in New Albany, there lived an offbeat, duck-tailed mayoral hopeful. At this late date, his precise identity isn’t important, so I’m arbitrarily dubbing him the Manchurian Candidate.

The Manchurian Candidate lost resoundingly in the primary and then abruptly disappeared, briefly re-emerging a few years later as perpetrator in an unfortunate scandal, a disgrace that ultimately rendered him tantamount to our local Eleanor Rigby, redolent with sad imagery of man’s futile existence on earth.

Before all of that depressing existentialism, the Manchurian Candidate was asked by the Tribune what he intended to do if elected mayor, and his reply remains so quintessentially New Albanian that it deserves enshrinement somewhere amid the approaching bicentennial’s historical detritus:

“Return square dancing to downtown.”

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It’s an amazing answer. The hapless Manchurian Candidate did not promise to bring square dancing to downtown, but to return it, meaning that it had been there once before. When? Why did square dancing leave downtown? Who took it, and where did it go? Were the city fathers of the era blind to the toll that square dancing’s removal exacted on downtown’s prospects? Was square dancing’s absence the final nail in downtown, or a mere harbinger of further losses to come?

Sadly, we have no solid answers to these and other queries, and a quarter century later, the significance of square dancing to downtown redevelopment remains frustratingly elusive. The Manchurian Candidate surely had his own reasons, which like the ill-fated Rigby’s were taken to his grave, although I persist in believing that he painstakingly recorded his thoughts in the form of a coded, handwritten tract left hidden in the floorboards of his house, and subsequently lost to posterity when his home was bulldozed to make way for a strip mall festooned with tacky vinyl fleur-de-lys.

But there is a darker interpretation of the Manchurian Candidate’s downtown square dancing solution, for it may well have manifested the symptoms of a condition known as monomania:

Monomania is a condition in which the sufferer is so focused on one idea or emotion that it is impossible to function normally … people who exhibit monomaniacal attributes become so focused with a single emotion or concept that the majority of their waking hours are devoted to this single subject. In most cases, paranoia is increasingly present …

The Manchurian Candidate’s monomania may have caused him to focus exclusively on square dancing as his chosen panacea. Undoubtedly he was sincere, and saw the issue in plain, simple black and white, without the pesky shades of gray that confound certainty. Square dancing made the Manchurian Candidate feel good; therefore, it would help all others feel good, too. It was self-evident, and any further argumentation would have been a waste of prime square dancing time.

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Caution is merited before we chuckle at the Manchurian Candidate’s odd legacy, because his monomania epitomizes one of the most enduring features of New Albanian political culture, this being a lockstep tendency to focus attention on only one personal obsession to the exclusion of all others, thus providing the means for local politicians to keep the only campaign promise that ever really mattered to them:

“I vow to accomplish as little as possible, to the greatest dramatic effect come re-election, while forever pointing to the failures of the past as an inexhaustible excuse for underachievement.”

As a stellar example of this political monomania, look no further than our Common Council, where by tradition virtually nothing is expected of incoming members save the solemn commitment to use one exculpatory phrase, if necessary recording it on their wrists with a flaming red Sharpie:

“It’s all the fault of the sewers.”

Now you can see the truth. The Manchurian Candidate knowingly violated this central precept of New Albany’s moribund political culture. Subversive and untamed, he refrained from enumerating the reasons why the sewers forever act as the impediment to forward progress, hinting instead at what might be accomplished through the saving grace of square dancing, and while this may have constituted his own monomaniacal, naïve fixation, it possesses the singular virtue of expounding a positive rather than wallowing in the negative.

Accordingly, the Manchurian Candidate had to be shut down – and you’ll notice that square dancing has yet to return to downtown.

Unsurprisingly, certain of our current council haven’t neglected their statutory duties to blame the sewers whenever Pavlov’s bell rings.

At the underachieving body’s special paving meeting on May 28, Dan Coffey referenced past sewer misadventures as cause for mistrust of city hall’s request for paving funds, and then Steve Price added a delightful new twist to the prevailing dysfunction by insisting that any such appropriation come with an ironclad assurance that not one cent of the money will be spent on two-way street conversions.

Never mind that neither sewers nor two-way street conversions were ever any aspect of the paving debate, because the point of this conjoined rearguard action against modernity is that rationality needn’t apply in New Albany, because facts count less than the dictates of political monomania.

Either it’s the fault of the sewers, or a conspiracy of “them people,” but whatever the final calculation, the most important job of all is to affix blame elsewhere, thwart the city’s progress and stroke the senseless Luddite bloc.

Might square dancing have improved downtown and softened the narrow monomania of our congenital obstructionists? What did the Manchurian Candidate know?

May he rest in peace.