So I was talking to a neighbor last week, and she mentioned there was an opening on the Free Burma Committee.

"The what?" I asked.

"The Free Burma Committee," she told me. "A while ago the city passed a law mandating support for a Free Burma, and so they established this committee to make sure the city stayed in compliance with the law."

"What?"

"Look it up in the survival guide," she told me.

The Takoma Park Business Directory & Survival Guide is published every year (in both English and Spanish, of course) by a local preschool. A local cooperative preschool, which means the parents teach the classes. Sounds kinda crunchy, I know...because it is. I can't make of that too much, since Max goes to a co-op in Silver Spring. Well, yeah, maybe I can make fun of it. But they're cheaper (relatively, when you understand that a dollar in D.C. will buy you five dollars of anything in, say, Wichita) and anyway, it's fun to play with a bunch of kids for a morning every couple of weeks.

So I opened up the snazzy orange book and discovered that, in fact, Takoma Park does have a Free Burma Committee. The Survival Guide describes it much the way my neighbor did:

The seven-member committee is charged with overseeing implementation of and adherence to the Free Burma Act.

"Implementation of and adherence to"? Sounds vaguely totalitarian to me. But then, when you tell anyone in the D.C. area that you live in Takoma Park, they kinda roll their eyes and say things like, "Oh, that explains it!"

Among other things, Takoma Park has been called the Berkeley of the East Coast, Trotsky to Montgomery County's Lenin and, by people who have relocated from my old corner of the New South, the Carrboro of the North. Any and all of these epithets are, to some extent, accurate enough. Takoma Park is nothing if not earnestly progressive--in intent, if not in fact.

To be fair, there are lots more committees chartered by the city: the usual ones on the arts, tenants rights, public safety, etc. Oh, and of course, the Tree Commission (which is charged with acting like the Lorax and speaking for the trees) and the Nuclear-Free Takoma Park Committee.

Of course.

I don't really buy into the whole committee thing, but it doesn't bother me. Pure bleeding hearts make me cringe a bit, but since I can identify with them--to a point--they don't bother me much, either. We didn't choose to live in Takoma Park because of the politics of the city and the vast majority of its residents, but I can tell you that we weren't scared off when we heard "the truth" about Takoma Park. The folks here are my kinda crazies.

That sort of logic seems to have an appeal to lots of people in this country. In fact, that kind of thinking perpetuates the two-party system. Instead of fracturing off into myriad special-interest parties (like, say, Israel) or even three or four-party systems (like most parliamentary democracies), we're stuck with two. Because morons like me decide we can live with certain excesses. If Americans weren't such a tolerant people, we'd be like the Italians and bring down the government every year, repeatedly electing porn stars and convicted felons.

Ain't tolerance a bitch?

Hey, when it comes to accepting the political aberrances of your brethren, conservatives are just as tolerant as liberals. I mean, it's possible (in theory) that the Republican ticket in 2008 might be adulterer Rudy Giuliani and born-again Catholic Sam Brownback. That there's one big tent, boys.

I like big tents. I even like circuses--yeesh, better not say that too loud around here. The animal rights people might set up a committee to denounce me or something.

But I just smile whenever someone makes a crack about my city. It's fruit and nut central, and that's just fine with me. 'Cause, you know, they're my kind of fruits and nuts.

Jon Worley did not apply for the opening on the committee. But he is pondering asking the city to establish a Better Beer Bureau.