Strange days indeed in Greensboro, with the City Council set to polygraph itself to find an alleged leaker. Not good on many levels, although it does make a newspaper columnist's job easy...
Let's play truth or polygraphs
by Edward Cone
News & Record 4-30-06
Good morning, and welcome to Theater of the Absurd, the reality game show starring your Greensboro City Council!
This week's challenge is called Polygraph Follies. Each council member will be hooked up to a lie detector and asked if he or she was the one who leaked a consultant's report about former police Chief David Wray to the News & Record.
The stakes are high, the issues important, the voters watching ... what better time for some stunt politics! Bring on the polygraph, say eight council members.
Wait, hold on ... only eight? One of our contestants says she won't play this game! Councilwoman T. Dianne Bellamy-Small is refusing to join the fun. Even sincere assurances that these machines are guaranteed to be at least as accurate as the average carnival fortune-teller or North Carolina lottery ad won't make her change her mind.
Now all of the other council members are pointing at her and whispering behind her back. OK, they were doing that already.
Bellamy-Small seems to be talking to someone in the audience ... is it someone from the Pulpit Forum?
Oh, this is exciting, I think she's about to stand up and say, "I did what I allegedly did because it was right, and the public has the right to know, and even my working relationship with my council colleagues has to take a back seat to that, and I'm willing to bear the consequences of my actions, whatever they may be."
No, never mind, she was just adjusting her chair.
OK, back to the game. Our contestants are playing for the sum of $5,000. But here's the twist: The money comes from the taxpayers and goes straight to the polygraph operator from Raleigh!
As the council members prepare to make a case, in essence, that they can only be trusted to tell the truth if their statements are uttered while they are strapped to an electronic [barnyard epithet deleted] detector, let's turn to our readers at home for suggestions on our wildcard round.
Here's one from Roch Smith Jr., left as a comment at John Robinson's blog: "I say we throw them all in a lake, the one that floats is guilty." Great idea, Roch, but Greensboro's official trial-by-water lake is still filling up behind the Randleman Dam, and we may be headed for a drought. What else?
Ah, from Robinson the blogging editor himself, a proposal that we imagine other topics to consider once the council is hooked up to the polygraph machine.
Folks, I think we have a winner!
Questions about Project Homestead alone could fill an entire episode of our program, if not a whole season. And of course the Wray fray is hardly finished, so there is room to improvise there, too. Tax rates, bond slates, why my leaves are always the last to get picked up...I think this series could be a hit for years to come.
Remember, copyright restrictions dictate that any taped reproduction of this program is strictly prohibited.
Unless conducted in secret by members of the Greensboro Police Department.
Theater of the Absurd, indeed.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
http://edcone.typepad.com/wordup/2006/04/truth_or_polygr.html
