Monday, August 20, 2007

The Garbage Strike Conspiracy, Act III

WhenSpinStartsToStink
Lotusland


Let's say you were running a PR campaign out of, I dunno, some kind of combat rock-type boiler room that was designed to help a cabal of civic politicians break a union during a strike.

What would your main strategy, aside from selectively releasing public poll results, be?

Hypothetically speaking, of course?

Would it be to get the public all riled up so that they would start demanding that the Pols actually do something?

Of course not.

Instead, you would very likely do your best to have the media run stories about how everything is actually going remarkably well and that the city managers (who you would also make clear are being run off their feet working 144 hours a week) are doing a fantastic job of keeping things ship-shape.

And you would also probably want to stroke the public a little and thank them for doing their part as well.

Of course, on the flip side, it would be very important to throw a story or two at the Newscycle Monster that made it very, very clear that there would be dire consequences for any member of the public who started taking things into their own hands by actually getting some of their huge, and increasingly stinky, piles of garbage out of their houses and into public places where the managers would have to deal with it.

And even worse, where the press might see it.

****

So, having said all that, here is something that is not hypothetical......

I couldn't help but notice, while riding to work along King Edward this morning, that, when I hit the Creme de la Creme belt (ie. between Granville and Arbutus), all manner of refuse suddenly started appearing on the wide, grassy, very public, median.

Gosh.

I certainly hope that a few bad apples living in that decidedly financially unchallenged part of town aren't ignoring what the City and the media are telling them to do.

After all, a thing like that could cause all the Spin to crash to the ground with a screeching halt.

And we sure wouldn't want to see something like that happen.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

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