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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

All the Sh*t that’s not fit to print

The Charlestown Poopline! Special Edition.
By Regina DeAngelo
It's now called "The Poopline"
[A version of this ran in the Westerly Sun on August 29. Like many Charlestown letters to the editor, it did not appear in their electronic version, so there is no link. This is Regina's original]

Like many of my neighbors in Charlestown, I read the official town newsletter called The Pipeline.

The Pipeline calls itself "A Municipal Informational Newsletter."

It used to inform its citizens of useful facts: things like hurricane preparedness; town phone numbers; annual beach-sticker fees.

In June, the town council published and mass-mailed Volume 17 Number 2, a "Special Edition" of The Pipeline.

Whoa, I thought.  A special edition!  That means something is up! Something important. Like an emergency or something.

Instead, what I received -- what the trusting populace received -- was a fear-mongering piece of agit-prop about how hard the sky would fall if something happened.  About what would happen if possible changes were made to the funding formula that supports our Chariho school district, creating an Armageddon otherwise known as a single taxing district, which would result in OUR TAXES GOING UP!

Here's what's weird about this:


  1. Nobody introduced legislation to create a "single taxing district (STD)."
  2. None of the Chariho Town Councils discussed it (and they'd be the ones to discuss it.)
  3. Nobody voted for it.
  4. There is no “single-taxing district.” Nor is it likely there will ever be one.
  5. As a result of this non-thing, our taxes are not going up.
Then who is spreading this rumor?


According to our (formerly) trusted Pipeline, a mysterious body calling itself the "Charlestown Ad Hoc Chariho Withdrawal Committee" has taken the authority to inform us, via SPECIAL EDITION, that it is AGAINST any and all possibilities of a single taxing district, no matter how remote, imagined, dreamed or gossiped.

That's like me and my friends, one evening over beers, forming a committee and tossing out a press release that reads
Dude! If, Like, Taxes Go Up, Like, in Charlestown, We Will Not Hesitate to…Riot in the Streets!  Yeah, Riot! In the Streets! And You Should Too!
Grab Pitchforks animated GIFOur press release would go on to show charts illustrating how, should our drunken delusion reach such heights of logic, our taxes could go up, should something like, I don't know, some reconsideration of school district-funding or packs of rabid Sasquatches come rampaging through town in the night… well. That Would Be Insupportable, and our Ad Hoc Committee Would Not Stand for It, and Neither Should You! -- written entirely in the subjunctive mood.

That's what this "Special Edition" of our once-trusted Pipeline was: a fear-mongering propaganda piece about an imagined tax consequence of an imagined scenario in which an imagined single "taxing district" were to be created. In the imagination of this mysterious Ad Hoc Withdrawal Committee.

This is the kind of propaganda our Town Council is feeding its citizens under the guise of official publication.

Why? Because elections are coming, and any politician, from rural town councilor on up to United States House of Representatives, knows that when it has no real issues to run on, it's time to light those trusty fear-torches so they're blazing bright in the hearts and minds of voters come November.

Which is why the more informed populace of Charlestown now refers to our once-trusted Town newsletter as "The Poopline." Which is why between now and November we'll all be watching our incumbents (and their "Ad Hoc Committees") carefully should they try to again misinform its citizens under the guise of official, taxpayer-funded, town-government publications.