Springfield, Vt., will host the premier of “The Simpsons Movie.” How could Mayor Sid Leiken allow this to happen? How could we, collectively as residents of the Willamette Valley, as Oregonians, allow this to happen?
I was crushed when I heard the news…third place. What a travesty. Like all good Democrats, when something like this happens, I blame those we elected.
I don’t live in Springfield, so I did not vote for Mayor Leiken, but as a Eugene resident he was my Springfield mayor, and I hold him accountable for this horrible loss of face.
While lamenting this loss I started musing about hypothetical Springfield mayors and how they would have gotten Springfield, Ore., to host the premier and go down in history as The Springfield.
Sure, a real-life mayor has a lot to deal with that has nothing to do with a cartoon movie, but given the once-in-a-lifetime chance to earn the title of “Simpsons’ Hometown,” you’ve got to do it up like it really matters.
Clint Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel-By-The-Sea, Calif., for a couple years in the 1980s, so he offers a great starting point for this voyage through the hypothetical.
Given the low-key reputation of Carmel-By-The-Sea, I doubt Clint had to deal with any of the punks and hard-asses that his characters have had to outwit, outgun and otherwise get the better of.
The police blotter in the local weekly paper, the Carmel Pine Cone, lists complaints such as dogs pooping in yards and rundown cars driving through town. The headline to one of this week’s top stories is, “Cat rescuer chastised for trespassing.”
I bet our Springfield police and mayor have never paid mind to such infractions and concerns, and if they ever start, I’m sure that the docket will be filled in an hour or two, leaving crank bakers and thieves to their own devices.
But let’s say that Mr. Eastwood was given the opportunity to run our Springfield, with the challenge of helping it win national recognition as the closest real-world equivalent to America’s favorite trashy cartoon city. I rest assured that Clint would rise to the occasion.
He would wander into town on horseback and in a couple minutes I’m sure he would have no trouble finding someone in Springfield to start a fistfight with. Later, a kind individual would inform him that someone he beat the crap out of was the brother of the feared tyrant who was bent on keeping Springfield down and out of the running in the Simpsons contest.
Eager to make a buck and do the morally right thing at the same time, he would take on a whole small army of well-armed and angry men. Of course Clint would emerge victorious and all the survivors would be free to vote our Springfield into the pop culture history books.
Not everybody would take such a violent approach. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr. would have taken a different path to lead us to our dream.
I expect he would have given a rousing speech about the visible injustice that would be done not only to Springfield, Oregon, not only to the “The Simpsons,” but to the entire nation and its moral fabric if we were to stand by and allow such amoral bias to occur.
He would have advocated nonviolent direct action, like a sit-in at the television station or a march down Main Street and a rally in front of New Max’s Tavern.
The city would have ground to a halt and everyone would have realized the gravity of the situation. The online poll would have been overwhelmed with votes and our Springfield would carry its head high, proud of itself and its place in the world.
Some mayoral solutions, however, would be much less involved, or at least much less publicly apparent.
Paris Hilton would have linked free clips of her video to the voting page and the more you voted for our Springfield, the more video you would be able to see.
J. Edgar Hoover would have placed surveillance on everyone he even vaguely suspected of supporting one of those other Springfields. Phone tapping, quiet raids and eventually soft-spoken visits to those suspected agitators would have brought the population in line.
I’m sure Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security, has taken a few notes from the Hoover playbook and would look after our well-being in much the same way.
If Dick Cheney didn’t want to organize an invasion, completely destroy the city and then rebuild it as a more democratic and free Springfield, he may just offer to take each one of the non-supporters out hunting.
Hillary Clinton would try to ignore how she supported Cheney and tell you just to vote for our Springfield because you should.
And if it were up to Jimmy Hoffa, though it’s probably all he could do, I think he would have even gotten himself dug up in our Springfield just to get a few more votes.
Alas none of this will come to pass. There will be no next time in this Simpsons contest, so we’ll have to pretend that we’re happy with third place and move on with what we have – our pride and our shame.