Bully for the Circumlocution Office.
What? You don’t know what that is? Why, it is the famous office first created by Charles Dickens in his novel Little Dorrit in which nothing ever happens except for mountains of papers being shuffled about by people who are incapable of doing anything productive.
Oh? You didn’t know we had one? Well we do; it is commonly called the city government. To quote Mr. Dickens: “No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.”
Case in point: having a California company collect the sewer tax. I am sure that this can be remedied in time by spending untold amounts of money collected from the hapless taxpayers. The Circumlocution Office’s thus-executed plan will surely be worthy of the name and will certainly be even more complicated, impossible, and expensive.
I heartily commend Chapter 10 of Litte Dorrit to you. After you have read it, you will understand everything that can be understood about all of this.
William H. Barger