BERLIN, MD — Purnell B. Jarvis, Jr., candidate for Mayor of Berlin and a man who can tell black ducks from mallards at 300 yards at dawn, said today that the Town's latest brainstorm is the most embarrassing thing he's ever seen Berlin politicians promote, worse than when Zack sold the chicken plant at a loss without having a proper survey to know what he was selling.

Jarvis knows a real Christmas from a plastic one bought at the Ocean City outlet mall. He warns that stringing up extra tinsel to attract Hallmark is not really about "holiday cheer", it's about paving more marsh and farms to sell more shitty townhouses, which will then drive up prices further, erode our culture, and force more locals into Powellville trailers.

"Ever notice how West Ocean City townhouses show up in downtown Berlin on those real estate websites?" asked Purnell, "It ain't no accident. Next thing you know, we're gonna have a exit number on the Jersey Turnpike."

"Here's how it works, folks. Developers cultivate and capitalize on cool. They tell you it's patriotic feel good about your town, but it's not. It's really about you being their useful idiot. In New York, the developers rent apartments cheap to artists, who come, do their thing, and make the area cool. Then they kick the artists out and sell high to venture capital assholes. In Austin, the developers bought the music festivals, advertised them in LA and Chicago as some sort of magical Texas musical lifestyle, and soon half of California bid up every last efficiency apartment trying to move there."

"Same thing is going on here in Berlin, at a smaller scale: The politicians serve developer money by promoting Berlin like a fantasy postcard, a hallmark illusion. Don't be fooled, it's not about you, it's to attract come heres to buy townhouses and keep turning marshes into parking lots. If you think Hallmark fake-town is a good idea, I've got bad news for you, you're being used like chum in a crabpot."

Jarvis did not mince words about what Hallmark movies really are: They're a sugar cookie with a script and emotions made of high fructose corn syrup. He said they are 90-minute advertisements for fake towns where nobody has a real job, the diner waitress is always one page away from a book deal, and the handsome stranger comes back and falls in love with a woman who owns a bakery but never gets flour on her sweater. The whole thing is filmed in July in Canada, the snow is made of soap. It's a pile of tedious bullshit.

Are we the kind of people who think Long John Silvers fish sticks and a Chinese-made fake lobster pot on the porch at a beach house rental is real local culture? No. But those sorta folks will love the movie. 'These folks,' Jarvis said, 'don't know what corn pone is, much less how to make it. All the while the developers laugh at the foolish Berliners poisoning their own community, make bank, and buy another retirement home in the Bahamas.'

"This Hallmark idea is nonsense, plain and simple. We don't need it, it doesn't do us any good. We already have a real downtown, and we have people who can still run a trotline and pick a crab without checking their phone. We got men who can clean a deer before sunrise and women who can run a church committee and a charter boat in the same afternoon. And somebody thinks we need a sugar coated plastic movie that most people couldn't bear to watch even while folding laundry?"

Meanwhile, the drainage still backs up worse than a creek at low tide, the code is still older than his daddy's hunting coat, and the misguided planning department is out there with a tape measure making sure nobody's wreath hangs a quarter inch too low.

While the Town Council is busy imagining Berlin as a snow-globe version of itself, the people who actually keep this place alive are out there pulling crab pots, prepping their combines, cleaning out broiler houses, cleaning rooms in Ocean City, fixing air conditioners, and trying to keep the marsh from swallowing their trailers. They do not need a fake snow machine or a made-up Christmas festival to feel like something real. They already know what the wind off the bay smells like in December, and it is not the same as a canned cinnamon scented candle.

"So if you see me looking a little green around the gills, it is not the oysters. It is the secondhand embarrassment. Because a real town does not audition to be a background extra in the worst sort of cheesy made-for-TV movie. A real town knows who it is. And Berlin is better than a Hallmark Christmas town the same way a bushel of Number Ones is better than a bag of frozen imitation crab."

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