Squirrel-sniffer’s Weblog

Hugo’s Campaign; a memoir of corruption and fatalism.

20 March, 2010 at 3:08 am (Uncategorized) (controversy, election, st andrews, the Man)

Writing this, listening to Pearl Jam, I think this piece is going to be cathartic to some extent and may read bitterly, just a warning. Also, i’m writing this now, but wont post it until after polls close tomorrow, on the off-chance that the union read this and get uppity. So, this will read as present, despite actually being past. Don’t worry, i am not writing in present tense (except there, to be ironic), as i dislike present tense for general prose.
This is definitely the low part of the campaign, the point at which I should be enjoying the “calm before the storm.” Only there will be no storm at this point and the calm is the kind of calm that is felt after a death.
Hugo’s campaign started a good month or so ago, but not formally. For a while it was Nat and I joking that Hugo should run for Association President, egging him on to ask about applying and coming up with fanciful ideas for publicity stunts and poster designs. Strangely the elections seem to be run around essay time, so our time was limited by the work. I don’t know how seriously dedicated I was at the beginning, but after the main part of the campaign I feel far more dedicated to Hugo as a candidate than I thought I would have been.
When Hugo went to apply he looked at the sabbatical options and decided that President would be a bit ambitious. Let me explain, we joked that Hugo could get it, but he seriously thought he had a chance. In retrospect, I should have taken him more seriously when I realised that he was set on getting elected for something.
After a while of indecision, Hugo went in for Director of Representation, which only had two other candidates, Siena Parker and Ted something-or-other. Later some guy called Terry arrived on the scene, but from our perspective this was a minor alteration of the dynamic.
One evening a week or so before the election we decided to have a mind-showering session (I think that’s a more interesting way of saying: “Brain Storming”), during which Dylan texted Peter an idea that was to drag the whole campaign to its knees.  He suggested that since Hugo’s campaign was essentially a joke, why not have spoof facts about Hugo? I thought that is was a good idea, regardless of the intention. I didn’t see Hugo’s campaign as a joke, I just saw it as light hearted. This might be why I now feel loyal to Hugo’s campaign, because what I set out enjoying as light hearted has now become horribly serious. This isn’t a transition I enjoyed, mainly because I wasn’t prepared for it and never really had this in mind. Oh well.
The first move was to work out Hugo’s policies. Hugo’s a very politically minded individual, so he did have some idea of what to focus on. Hugo is also a member of the Labour Society of St Andrews, and by chance the president of the Labour Society had been thinking about running, but had dropped out for various reasons. Hugo decided it would be easier if he just asked this guy, Nick Roxborough, for his policies, to save some time, or at least to get him started. Nick agreed to meet Hugo to talk to him, and as campaign manager I went along, with Nat too. To cut this part of the story short I’ll try to sum it up in three non-Joycean sentences. First, Nick was being very self righteous to Hugo, berating him for knowing nothing at every single policy he mentioned. Second, he claimed he had to stay neutral and wasn’t going to give Hugo any policies. My “final sentence” will be invested in telling you that I might rant a bit beyond my three sentences here. I was rather sick of Nick bullying Hugo, so I ate a miniature Mars bar, threw the wrapper in the bin and sauntered over to Nick, speaking for the first time during the meeting, and interrupting him mid-sentence. I said simply “you’re essentially telling Hugo that any information he gets must be one sided.” I then explained that if he was to stay neutral, and unbiased, and he couldn’t, therefore, give Hugo the information Hugo wanted, then it followed that to get information Hugo would have to go to one sided sources. I then asked him two questions: “why can’t you unbiasedly give Hugo information, if you insist he knows nothing and requires to know something,” and secondly, “what’s the difference between knowledge and policy?” I knew that he could perfectly argue not to give Hugo policies based on the fact that policies where exactly the kind of one-sided information I was accusing Nick of perpetuating through implied endorsement. Instead, he pointed to the two and half policy ideas he’d given Hugo, and asked:
“what’s this then?”
I replied that he should continue giving them to Hugo then. He said:
“I don’t have to stand for this,” put in his earphones and left. It’s not until I think about it now that I realise that it might not have been a good move to go in the first place, let alone argue with him. That meeting was probably the root of the troubles. A prelude to disaster.
So, after dealing with various essays we had a bit of free time, so we designed some really eye catching posters with the spoof facts on them. However, on printing and posting them around town we hit a snag. We had walked around town and seen an irritating thing; Siena Parker had been chalking spoof facts of her own around town! We thought she had stolen our idea, but upon finding her Facebook group about it we discovered she had founded her group about 12 hours before ours. The strangest part, personally, was her fact: “Siena is the seventh Horcrux,” which was one of my ideas that we had disregarded. Now, it appears that Siena also discovered this coincidence, because she mentioned it to the student council, who preside over the elections. I wonder, now, if we had been first to complain, would none of this happened? Sadly we didn’t, and Hugo was told there would be meeting about this issue the next day.
When I heard about this, the first thing I thought was PUBLICITY! What could be better for our campaign than a dispute about slogans that the presiding student council was getting involved in? However, at the meeting, despite making it clear that we had come up with this idea independently, our right to use “Hugo Facts” was taken away, despite the fact that our focus was not the Hugo facts, but rather the slogan “Personal, not Political.” They also told us to take down my post on Hugo’s group about the meeting. This was probably a fair move, but thinking about it now, it was probably a sneaky way of letting us know that they are watching our Facebook group.
Last night were the sabbatical debates, which Hugo dragged Nat and I to. As we left to go I received a text from Dylan saying that he’d put up an amusing wall-post on the Facebook group. I immediately thought, “oh no, what now?” but with the debates going on I forgot all about it. The debates were horrendously boring until Hugo took centre stage. The format was formal looking, but the control was awful. The crowd sat on an elevated stand, whilst the candidates were placed behind mic stands and a table. The current association president, Andrew “nasty nickname censored” Keenan, was sitting with Matthew Guest and some girl from the campaigns management, at another table, off to the right, with a MacBook and gavel. I think that’s how you spell gavel, basically the mallet to call order, although as the debate went on he used it rather flippantly.
To sum up the debate, Siena bullied Hugo throughout, interrupting him, asking if he had any original policies and if he was even serious. Hugo said it was very rude of her to ask.
For the entirety of the debate he was told not to interrupt Siena and was cut off by Andrew Keenan. However, despite this, it did make Siena and Ted look like horrible people, whilst Hugo came out as the honest, passionate underdog.
We were happy until Hugo rushed into the cottage exclaiming, out of breath, about some comment that needed deleting. It turned out that Dylan had posted some insult about Siena on the group page, and there was to be yet another meeting the next day about it. We immediately deleted the comment, but left Dylan’s status as he’d written it earlier (“Siena is a whiny little turd”), as we didn’t think that they could see it, or do anything about it.
Today I had a lot of positive feedback from people asking if Hugo was really serious, because if so he seemed like the best candidate. Most people said that they liked the fact that Hugo was honest, enigmatic, eccentric and bizarre.
Sadly this is the only positive part of the story; they decided at the meeting to disallow any more publicity that Hugo paid for. Apparently, despite our deleting the comment, they said that one of us (i.e. The campaign team) had “liked” Dylan’s comment. Neither of us had, but Nat had “liked” Dylan’s status. Now, it seems fair to me to request that we remove offensive material from the Hugo group, but to censor people’s Facebook statuses, and, even worse, ban publicity because of a Facebook status, is just terrible. Nat argued with Andrew Keenan about it, but he was resolute, and said that if we wanted to file an appeal we could, but it wouldn’t be processed until Monday (at which point Nat asked why he’d even suggest such an idea).
I think, as a conclusion, I have realised that Facebook holds more power than I previously thought. Also, I’m disillusioned with the union, and I’m glad the elections are tomorrow. Since Andrew Keenan isn’t re-standing perhaps we’ll have a less biased association next year.
I know that not everything I did was right, some of it was underhanded or stupid, but nothing we did merited the punishment dished out so readily. From the off, perhaps as early as that formal email sent to Hugo from Nick Roxborough about the meeting we had with him, this campaign has had to fight against injustice, bias and undemocratic conduct. I have to admit that the formality of that email made me suspicious that Nick had blank copied it to someone else; however, surely that would be a non-neutral thing to do?
Finally, after publicity was banned, I came up with an idea that might yet save the campaign. Last night, after being accused of insincerity, Nat thought that a poster of the Joker, from Batman, with a caption reading “I am serious” would make a good campaign. The discontinuation of our publicity was a huge set back, but we had the idea of dressing Hugo up as the Joker tomorrow, and have him walking around town. I also came up with the idea of writing: “HUGO DoR” (DoR = Director of Representation) in permanent marker on a couple of decks of playing cards and handing those out to people, since we can’t print flyers due to the ban.
Perhaps there is hope. In the beginning I took Hugo’s campaign probably too light heartedly, but thanks to all the bureaucratic nonsense that I’ve had to put up with I feel a sense of camaraderie with Hugo and his campaign. Even if I didn’t take it seriously for myself, I feel invested in Hugo’s cause, and now I hope Hugo wins, just to show Andrew Keenan up.
As a point of information, Andrew Keenan is probably a nice enough guy, but he’s acted in a rather unsympathetic and biased manner, so that’s why he bears the brunt of my anger. Also, it’s almost certainly not all his doing, he’s just association president, and as the face of the council that heavily audited our campaign, he’s the only person I can moan about.
Anywho, thanks for reading this, I don’t think I’ve written anything as substantial as this in ages, and I certainly haven’t written anything as interesting lately.

Oh, i’ve also included a few posters we designed for Hugo – i think they were rather good.

News just in! Results are out, Re-open nominations got 78, Terry got around 100, Hugo got over 200, Ted got 700 and Siena was the winner with over 1000. Not bad for a week’s campaign; also, I’m glad we beat someone, 200 isn’t too bad, it’s about 10% of votes.