The CCA: Political party … or cult?

Part 2 of “CCA rhetoric versus reality”

By Neniu Sciu
Click here for Part 1

I have a confession to make.

I’ve been calling the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) a political party, but I’ve since seen the error of my ways. I’d say I’ve seen the light, but we have a dark-sky ordinance.

I was wrong, and the CCA is right. The CCA is not a political party.

They’re a cult.

In hindsight, I should have figured it out much sooner. They are, after all, a secret society. They don’t even list an address or phone number anywhere on their website. They say they hold monthly meetings but don’t say when or where. They state that they have no mechanism by which to become a member, and yet somehow people get secretly inducted into the organization. 

One theory holds that if you’re overheard spouting off in the Mini-Super about hot-button issues like open space, or “civility,” or mulch, or shingles (the kind you put on your house, not the disease), Tom Gentz will pull up in one of his Porsches and you’ll be blindfolded and driven off to the secret CCA hideout, which is believed to be somewhere in the Great Swamp, and forced to undergo secret rituals, after which, like a Stepford Wife, you’ll be reborn as a CCA-hole.

CCA cultists ritualistically proclaim their own purity. According to them, they are the only thing standing between Charlestown’s unspoiled rural serenity and those dastardly despoilers, The Developers.

They have a holy scripture, namely their platform, to which all their candidates for town government offices must proclaim fealty. They’ve sought to embed the arcane rules of the cult into town ordinances, for example, regarding the depth and color of mulch. Yet they also sell “indulgences” allowing those in their good graces to be “forgiven” from having to follow the onerous rules they expect the rest of us to follow.

They insist on total control and will brook no dissent among their members; prior to taking votes, they hold secret ballots to determine whether they have a “consensus” first. Those who espouse “dissident” beliefs, for example, favoring wind energy, have been purged as “heretics” (i.e., Marge Frank, Richard Hosp, Candi Dunn, Greg Avedisian, and Forrester Safford, who were endorsed by the CCA … until they weren’t).

They fear outsiders (mostly Democrats) and refuse to associate with them. They claim to be persecuted, either by the “cyberbullies” of the “hate blog,” which they believe is controlled by Democrats/bullies, or by the jackbooted thugs of the state government intruding upon our rural paradise. And they use their claims of persecution as an organizing and mobilization tool. 

Witness the increasingly paranoid tone of their campaign mailings, in which they felt compelled to refute mysterious “fictions” they’d supposedly been accused of by unnamed “cyberbullies,” culminating in their final mailing in which they desperately proclaimed that if more “fiction” emerged between then and the election, they’d “try to answer with facts at their website.” Try, mind you, because of course the CCA website is as a general rule a fact-free zone. If the CCA says it’ll be a sunny day, I make sure to carry my umbrella.

But where they really reveal themselves as a cult is in their secretiveness. For instance, the location of their election night parties is always a closely guarded secret. The cultists are given a phone number to call to find out where to gather, and the uninitiated are strictly excluded.

It all fits.

Plus, like any good cult, the CCA has a mystical belief in an earlier, ideal time that they yearn to return to. Though there does appear to be a lack of unanimity in their view of the Promised Land. 

If the radical environmental wing of the cult had its way, they’d tear up all the asphalt in town along with all trappings of modern civilization, whereas the Del Boca Vista retirement community wing likes its mod cons and is mainly concerned with suspending the town in amber and gating it against outsiders. Could this eventually lead to a schism? Only time will tell …