Mayor Mum Wrongfoot checking in. I wanted to clear up something. There are several issues that have been bugging me of late. I’ve noticed that the coverage of my administration is getting rather, oh I dunno, a bit hostile. What did I ever do to you to deserve such unapologetic animus? Whatever happened to the days when the press and pols donned their finest linens (even better than the ones taken out for Christmas dinner) and played squash together at the nearest Ivy League club?
Depending on how long you’ve been on the political beat, you may have heard stories of lubricated evenings where solid members of the press corps helped prop up a certain slurring candidate so he wouldn’t keep dozing off into his dessert plate. And this was well after Chappaquiddick.
Aren’t we supposed to be pals? I don’t see the problem here. It’s only a conflict of interest if you’re interested in such things. Consider it the original status quo. One of you people wrote a scathing editorial about the quality of the city’s streets. In it, this would-be-poet extends a rather tired metaphor that analogizes my administration’s decay with the crumbling of our many sidewalks. How is that fair? After consulting census data for estimated body mass index, it seems my constituents are among the largest in the nation. I didn’t seek them out. However, when this city was built, people were much smaller, much lighter. The heavy hoofing of the populace can’t be ignored as a contributing factor in the area’s infrastructure decline. We’re big people, there’s no denying that. I’ve called for cushions and rubberized streets with goose down curbs, but as you can imagine, that’s an expensive undertaking, not to mention one that lacks waterproofing.
There was even a front page story of me receiving a brown lunch bag from an unidentified person under a lone streetlight at a strange hour. It’s no secret I don’t cook or even prepare my lunch. My personal chef was out of town and I had to exit the mayor’s residence for food. I heard commentators refer to the bag as a bribe when it was probably a half-eaten sandwich. Depending on the quality of the meat, that could still be considered a bribe.
From now on, I’m changing the way things operate here at city hall. Behind you, esteemed members of the press, are some old friends of mine who will be filling in for you indefinitely. I’ve taken a good deal of time and a great deal of trouble to roust childhood friends from their former employers to come cover me. Look, I’m just like you in that I want things to be easier. So my new rule is that I can only be covered by dear friends, people who helped me arrange different sets of wooden blocks or designed a Lionel train set or two. You may be wondering where this leaves you and your publications. I'm not sure. You're free to cover the coverage, of course. But I won’t be granting any interviews to anyone who didn’t bathe with me as a five-year-old, exchanging rubber duckies as a means of kindergarten currency.
I can’t trust you people to tell things straight to our plus-sized populace. So who’s gonna break it to them? That’s if they haven’t broken the park benches yet.
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