I attended the Dunwich Republican Town Committee (DRTC) meeting last night and it was all aflutter with excitement about prospects for electoral victory. Enormous dissatisfaction with taxation and economic hardship along with blatant partisan power grabs by the Democrats both locally and at the state level had convinced many of the committee members that this was the moment when the tide would turn and Dunwich would be delivered from the Democrats and a new order would prevail.
Needless to say, I sat in the back benches and kept quiet. The report to the committee on elections stressed that victory would be assured if we could just get our candidates through the approval process this week. All that was needed was the Selectman Interview and the fee payment. The committee responded with hearty applause and the candidates were welcomed to the floor to say a few words. These four men were new to the community but enthusiastic about taking their places as selectmen and guiding Dunwich to a new day. Their spokesman displayed their application paperwork with attached checks and more applause broke out. This further enthused the spokesman and he went on to say that the interview was scheduled to take place at this meeting and the interviewer would be the First Selectman. The spokesman read from a card and had some difficulty with the First Selectman’s name, “Cuh Thu Luh or something? Must be Samoan I guess.”
Silence descended on the crowd and I shrank even lower in my seat and edged over to the emergency exit. At that moment First Selectman Cthulhu squeezed his bulk through the bulging auditorium double doors and ponderously plodded up to the dais. Without a word he snatched up the application forms from the candidate spokesman in one hand and with his other arm he funneled the candidates into his mouth and noisily chewed, crunched, mumbled and swallowed the screaming men down his voracious gullet. After one fairly loud and malodorous belch he turned around and plodded back out of the auditorium. As he reached the doors his booming voice was heard to say, “I’ll have these checks deposited in the Dunwich Rainy-Day Fund later today.” This latter reference was slightly insulting. The Rainy-Day Fund was the First Selectman’s euphemism for his whiskey allowance account.
The rest of the meeting was slightly more subdued. It was agreed by one and all, that electoral gains were probably not in the cards for 2022 but that the steering committee would go to work immediately drafting a strongly worded rebuke against the First Selectman for interfering in the internal affairs of the DRTC. It was also unanimously decided not to publicly distribute this rebuke but maintain it as an attachment to the meeting minutes and password protect it. After smelling salts and sedatives had been distributed to the women members and some of the less stalwart men a motion was passed to concentrate all of the committee’s time and energy to making the Labor Day Jamboree the best goldarned jamboree the town had ever had. It was also agreed unanimously that future meeting would be held in a venue that lacked double doors.