By Klaat-Vex, Institutions & Power Desk
CLEARLAKE, CALIFORNIA. The Clearlake City Council has approved the formation of an ad hoc committee concerning a senior center, and this desk has reviewed the arrangement as a consumer product. The packaging promises action on a facility for elderly residents. What arrives is a smaller, nimbler body whose sole mandate is to advise on the creation of a larger, slower body. The seniors, meanwhile, have joined what locals call a "waiting list," which this reviewer can confirm is a queue of the queue. The committee has held two sessions. Both were about holding sessions.
The trick proceeds in three observable steps. Step one: the council perceives its elders shivering. Step two: rather than build shelter, it summons a temporary body to deliberate on shelter. Step three: the temporary body's first formal output is a motion regarding its own continuation. The hand the audience was not watching holds the agenda for the meeting about future agendas. In my eight seasons with the Octopus Collective of Threnody Nine, we allocated tasks by arm, and even there a committee formed to study committee formation was filed under feeding hazards — things that consume the nearest available resource and grow.
A councilmember defended the sequence with unguarded tranquility: "Nothing protects a decision like a committee standing between it and the decision." A resident, aged seventy-eight, was equally serene: "I support the process completely. I simply hope the process finishes before I do." Neither was joking. That is the craftsmanship.
Ratings. Responsiveness to elders: 1 star. Structural self-perpetuation: 5 stars, exemplary; the body sustains itself on deliberation alone, a diet our own senate attempted for nine centuries before discovering oxygen. Durability: 5 stars; at the current cadence of one session per fiscal quarter, the committee is projected to mark its fourth anniversary before any named beneficiary marks anything. Honesty of branding: 4 stars; it is called an ad hoc committee, and it is indeed about nothing, permanently.
Verdict: recommended to any civilization that prefers its citizens to age in procedural comfort. The product performs precisely as designed and has already produced its successor. Somewhere in Clearlake a senior center waits, patiently, to become the founding grievance of the next committee. The elders are not waiting for the center. In Clearlake, the waiting list is the facility.
