Amidst the roaring applause and knowing glances at the Lamont table at the "Speaker's Lunch" held at the Annual AWC Meeting in Spokane this week, years of preparation and planning were finally realized as the obviously qualified and extremely capable individual, Mike McCarty, was rocketed into the upper echelons of power within that organization - and finally Lamont's "Manchurian Candidate' was in a position where the town's plans for State domination could be realized at last. Although largely unknown or forgotten by most people with actual lives, Mr. McCarty, in an all-too-common gesture of grace and pity for the underdog, visited Lamont earlier this year to see for himself if a town so small and without obvious resources and management talent could indeed exist in the modern world - and because he felt that it was too easy for organizations like the AWC to focus on the larger entities at the expense of the smaller ones. So, Mike decided to pay Lamont a visit (which was, by the way, the biggest, most exciting event in Lamont since that unfortunate Mt. St. Helen's volcano eruption buried the town under tons of ash in the 1980's!!) to see what was what, after all. (cut and paste link to see previous story on Mike's visit to Lamont - http://lamont-wa.blogspot.com/2009/02/local-mayor-faces-own-worst-fears-in.html?showComment=1234226760000 )Soon after Mike entered the Lamont Town Hall last February (and determined that the building doesn't even have a bathroom - which was unfortunate indeed after that long drive from Olympia!), Mike was lulled into a false sense of security with coffee and freshly baked "muffins" provided by Betty Stone (AKA - Comrade Betty) - a long time Councilperson and fellow counter-revolutionary. "Well, as soon as his defenses were down and we managed to give the impression that we were normal, our brainwashing techniques began in earnest" said an unnamed official close to the plot. "Before he knew it, he was surrounded by 5-6 heifers that were trained to moo constantly and breathe that warm, sweet breath into his face for hours on end. The noise (and humidity!!) can be overwhelming and serves to disorient 'City Folk" and thus make them putty in the hands of a skilled brainwasher! Nine times out of ten the average man will suffer a psychological breakdown at this point and will do and/or believe whatever we say - but Mike, unfortunately, was made of sterner stuff, so we had to resort to the unthinkable - farm/ranch aroma therapy. Needless to say, after several hours of this unsettling concoction of barn floor, chicken coop, and cattle shoot - to say nothing of the distinct odor of the ranch hands themselves, Mike's defenses were reduced to rubble and our indoctrination program could proceed unimpeded."
Once a person is properly prepared for brainwashing, the standard practice is to start off slow, so the Mayor began by repeating "Lamont has a larger population than Sprague" until Mike numbly repeated the phrase - although without any obvious conviction. As the hours progressed, increasingly more far-fetched concepts were slipped into Mike's subconscious like "Lamont has high-speed internet connectivity" and "Lamont citizens often shower more than once per week". These obvious falsehoods were harder to digest - but at this point the constant mooing (to say nothing of the warm, moist breath in his face) - coupled with the typical smells that the average farmer faces every day were so unsettling that Mike would agree to just about anything in order to breathe fresh air again and return to someplace where banjo music isn't always playing in the background. (no one has ever figured out where this creepy banjo music originates from, but it is present at almost every bizarre and inexplicable event in the town - kind of like the London fog in a Sherlock Holmes novel or something) "That is when I knew that all we had to do was bide our time (of which Lamont has an abundance) and Mike's obvious talents and professionalism would catapult him (and thus Lamont) into the very bosom of power within the State itself" said the Mayor, fiendishly rubbing his hands together like a demented sorcerer over some crystal ball or something. "Ahh, I just love it when a plan comes together!!" he said triumphantly while gazing fondly at the framed picture of Chairman Mao (the father of cattle-based brainwashing techniques) that so proudly hangs over the computer in the Town Hall.
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