Alias Smith and Jones

This is a story I started today - it is in raw form so I would appreciate suggestions.

SMITH and JONES

The pursuit of honesty is my quest. Perhaps that is why I am intrigued by politics so much. I like a challenge. On a local level, politics is all about being known. Most people, myself included, are more likely to vote for a candidate that they know something about. Whether I vote for Smith or Jones for town mayor largely depends upon two factors -

1) What I know about Smith
2) What I know about Jones

If I don’t know anything about either one then I am either a complete idiot or an uninformed idiot. I believe that modern politics is based upon the assumption that most voters are both.
In Taoism, there is the concept of the clean slate which means that in every moment of life a human being has the potential to be unaffected by both past and future, A sort of being in the NOW. It is a worthy goal.
In politics, a clean slate refers to having no skeletons in the closet which means that a candidate has no dirty laundry which means that the researcher looking for either skeletons or dirty laundry has not done their job because their is always something to find. These researchers are known as campaign managers (or if the candidate has enough money to hire more than one full time staff person, assistant campaign managers).
Back to my example of Smith and Jones running for the position of mayor of Bumville which is unusual because no one ever ran for the position of Bumville (most ran from it). It has long been considered a truth in the local politics of Bumville that no one in their right mind wanted to be mayor of Bumville. The first mayor of Bumville, Joe the wino, was in fact certifibly insane (4 out of five doctors who tested Joe certified this, the fifth who was also insane, saw nothing wrong with him. This fifth doctor later became Bumville’s second mayor after Joe, in the midst of a three month bender, fell down, saw God, realized he was mayor and in a moment of lucidity ran away.)
Most mayors after Dr. Strange (the second mayor) were appointed by a group of civic leaders who tended to pick ‘the person not at the meeting’ as the new mayor. This is why for the last twelve years the civic leaders meeting to pick the next mayor
has been attended by the entire population of Bumville. This is also why for the last twelve years the mayor of Bumville has been citizen of Nicetown (our sister city just to the North of us, the town on the other side of the railroad tracks). The current mayor of Bumville, Cissy Wetrock, a stripper at Bumville’s adult X club, recently discovered that she was the mayor of Bumville and had been for the last eleven years. Cissy threatened to leave town if she was not reliefed of this position which caused no end of angst with the civic leaders who told her that she had to take the matter up with the mayor because only the mayor had the authority to remove the mayor from office which is strange because the mayor of Bumville does not have an office.
Cissy was not a lawyer, but being a graduate of Hartfort Community College she was no dummy either. Cissy came up with a plan in the wink of an eye. The said eye wink was at an Native American patron who after twelve consectutive lap dances and seven Long Island Ice teas, promised Cissy he would build a casino in Bumville. Soon word that there was going to be a casino in Bumville spread faster than Herpes at an orgy. Almost overnight (actually it was five in the morning) two new people appeared in town, both of whom wanted to be mayor. The present mayor Cissy became engaged to (and with) the Native American patron (aka Clarence Bad Eagle) and moved out of state (via Clarence’s eighteen wheeler), leaving the town with the obligation of choosing a new mayor. And a here-to-fore unprecedented situation of needing an election to make that choice.
It was decided that the town would piggy back on the national election and the town’s voters would write in whoever they wanted for mayor. It also was decided that since many if not all of the town’s citizens had trouble writing in any way shape or form the candidates would be voted by using a certain color crayon. Mr. Jones chose the color violet (or purple if you had a box with only 8 cryons in it) and Mr. Smith would be known by the color orange or brown if no orange was available). Now Bumville would have to wait until November to get a new mayor.
In the next few days, it was decided that Bumville would also have to have a vice-mayor whose job it was to either bring vice to Bumville or get more vice to come to Bumville. Surprisingly, the idea of a casino coming to Bumville made Bumville attractive to vice. Mr. Jones chose a housewife from Albertville named Florence Prudence to be his candidate for vice mayor. Mr. Smith chose a businessman from a Vegas family named Sammy (the Chiwahwah) Costellinoczck. Since no one could pronounce Sammy’s last name he was refered to as the ‘man’.
It was here that I entered the story. As beat reporter for the Nicetown Noisy Shopper, it was my job to report on what was not boring in Nicetown (which is nothing). So most of my stories were about Bumville and how wonderful it is that we in Nicetown don’t live like they do in Bumville. But now it seemed that Bumville would have something special (a casino) and Nicetownites were in an uproar. It was up to me to find the rotten apples, the worms inside of them and expose them all so that the citizens of Nicetown would feel superior again.
(End of part one)