The Going-away party

From 1981 to 1983 Oklahoma hosted the biggest public scandal in U.S. history, in terms of number of cases. The State’s county commissioners had been stealing county tax revenues to the tune of U.S. 240 million annually. For more than twenty years, commissioners had been rigging road and bridge repair contracts, and “paying” for non-existent supplies and materials in order to supplement their modest salaries. While for some the supplementatic was correspondingly modest, others were living egregiously thigh on the hog. For years no one seemed to notice, but by 1983 a massive federal investigation had lead to the indictment of more than 240 commissioners and material suppliers. “The going away party” takes Oklahoma’s well-known county commissioner scandal as its starting point and point of departure. It is not an analysis of regional, social or political conditions; instead it describes, or circumscribes, the surface values of these condition as they are reflected in the ubiquitous “Good O1’Boy” system. We wanted to play with the way language frames one’s consideration of moral and ethical issues. Language in this context recasts patent moral and ethical bankruptcy in comfortable “down-home” terms of social acceptability and even necessity. “ He didn’t do anything that didn’t need bein’ done”, or “...he was just doin’ a deal. It’s no like he did anything that hadn’t been done a hundred times before and all the time. His crime was that he just got caught.” Them metacommunicative operative underlying much of this cocktail conversation is one of self-exoneration.