1 July—As if the Borough of Litchfield (BOL) weren’t already sick enough, the autocrats who self-righteously mismanage the snotty, dysfunctional, totally useless square-mile dictatorship have been recklessly indulging their depravity by nurturing incest among the BOL’s ruling elite.

Royalty and aristocracy are notoriously incestuous. But the BOL politburo certainly isn’t royal and is notoriously autocratic rather than aristocratic.

So as of last night’s special meeting of the Borough of Litchfield Board of Warden and Burgesses (BOLBOWAB), the spouses of three disgracefully all-powerful burgesses sit on the dreaded, disgracefully all-powerful Hysteric District Commission, a.k.a. Litchfield Taste Police (LTP). And the daughter of a taste policewoman is now the paid clerk of both the BOLBOWAB and the LTP.

Incest, thy name is Litchfield.

You wonder why the BOL acting warden convened a special meeting when everything transacted at it could have waited for the regular meeting scheduled for 12 July and still given the BOLBOWAB and LTP plenty of time to plot a strategy—behind the scenes, of course—to be uncooperative (as usual) with the Board of Selectmen (BOS) at a joint meeting scheduled for 19 July.

The burgess conscripted last night to fill the vacancy created when a burgess had the good sense to move out of the BOL had, to my knowledge, never attended a BOLBOWAB (and possibly BOL) meeting nor expressed any interest in BOL affairs. But her husband has been perhaps the most active and therefore most objectionable member of the LTP for a long, long time. And that made her the perfect good soldier to be combed out of the woodwork to occupy a seat and vote the party line without questioning anything.

That poor thing was chosen last night over a man who has expressed an interest in serving on the BOLBOWAB for some time and has regularly attended meetings and spoken on issues, but was passed over for a vacant seat a couple of months ago. Because he couldn’t be counted on to vote the party line. Easy as that.

The BOL naturally brings to mind the PRC, the People’s Republic of China, a.k.a. Red China. Yesterday was the 25^th anniversary of Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China. Terrible move, to be sure (as people with foresight had predicted before 1997), because China has flagrantly violated virtually all the terms of the agreement. With impunity. Yet dictator Xi Jinping (who is always pictured smiling) insists that what China is doing to poor Hong Kong is “essential for safeguarding [its] long-term stability and security.”

And China’s recent electoral “reforms” ensure that only “patriots” can run for office in Hong Kong. Does that sound like the Forbidden City or does that sound like the Borough of Litchfield?