Third Largest City In The State Run By Volunteers (Staff Recommends Approval): Mayor Wants A Happy Medium, But There's This Blogging Stuff Going On...

The thurd largest city in the Great State of Missouri is run by volunteers: a volunteer mayor and a volunteer city council. Thanks to Jackehammer for these excerpts from the Mayor's State of "The City" talk.

"The challenges that this community is facing in trying to get the community to support things have increased many fold.

I (will) probably not make any friends right here, but I'll tell you that our friends in the media don't support the community like they used to. I think I am qualified to say that, not only as a person that's worked as a journalist and as an editor, but also as a person that's worked in public life.

It's not like it used to be, there's not the depth, there's not the scope, there's not the understanding on the part of the media, on the topics that they're covering. On top of that, we have this internet thing that's going on now, with this blogging stuff, where people used to, if you wanted to say something, you had to put your name to it, now, there's this anonymous character assassination that is encouraged in order to sell newspapers or other media outlets. It makes it very difficult to get your message out.

People in this room can tell you questions that a person from the media will ask you about some person in this town that everybody here has known of for years and the person who's charged with covering that has never heard of them.

How do you get a message out to the public, to the people that you're elected to represent if you no longer have a medium to do it with? It's a big challenge, and how do you get, with the amount of time and effort that it takes these days to deal with these issues, to get qualified people to step up to serve? You know, the only thing I'm banking on, and I'm betting on Springfield because this town has always been a town that when you presented a challenge, rose to it...." - Mayor Carlson, from his state of the city report, June 5, 2008.

How do you get a message out to the public if you don't have a medium to do it with? I think I am going to grab a cold one, pour it in a styrofoam cup and sit on the back porch and watch my grandson skateboard while I mull over that question. Vance Randolph probably had a pretty good start towards answering the Mayor's question when he quoted the Ozark oldtimer who lived down by Pineville: "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."Madame Marie was a fortune teller. Many, many years ago, up in Iowa, Madame Marie, while telling a woman her fortune, got to laughing uncontrollably. The woman's husband burst into Madame Marie's trailer and proceeded to strike Madame Marie repeatedly in the nose. "Why are you striking me?", screamed Madame Marie! The husband said his father always told him to strike a happy medium.

Madame Marie was a contemporary of Madame Murl. Below is an early picture of Madame Murl and some of her friends sitting outside her trailer and chit chatting. The picture was probably taken in Iowa in the 1930s. Madame Murl's banners, which are almost identical to Madame Marie's, are now in the possession of Madame Murl's namesake.