The County-blot

Mayor Robert Quaiff is expected to announce shortly what has been rumoured for weeks: that the County’s silhouette map (pictured on this page) has been accepted onto the shortlist for the new 2016 edition of the Rorschach Inkblot Test.

The announcement goes a long way to making up for the County’s disappointment in losing its fight to have Swamp College Road made a property on the board of the new Rural Monopoly edition due out this fall. “We put our hearts and souls into that one,” sighed one County official.

The Rorschach test has been in use for decades as a method of personality assessment. Subjects are handed a series of 10 cards, five coloured and five uncoloured, each containing a symmetrical inkblot of an amorphous shape. They are then asked to describe what the shapes bring to mind. The first shape, for example, looks to most people like a butterfly, bat or moth. If a subject responds that it reminds him or her of his or her mother brandishing an axe, the interviewer may begin to suspect the subject was exposed to some sort of early trauma in that relationship.

Thanks to the internet, the existing test has become too familiar: many know how to game the system and deliver appropriately innocuous answers. Hence the need to develop new shapes with different qualities. The County-blot for example, is not a perfect inkblot—its left and right halves are not mirror images of one another—but it was chosen deliberately in order that subjects could “step outside their comfort zone” with their impressions.

The Rorschach people put out an international call for submissions. County staff aren’t saying who came up with the idea for the County-blot, noting simply that it was an obvious winner from the get-go and that everyone will benefit from the exposure; although some councillors are said to be worried that the County will be invaded by axe-wielding mothers, or people fleeing their axe-wielding mothers.

County officials did toy with the idea of asking visitors entering the County to take the County-blot test so they could be directed appropriately— like to a special obssessivecompulsive section on the Sandbanks beach, or a B&B catering to kleptomaniacs—but the modelling of the concept indicated that it would be difficult to assign a value to some of the variables.

But what about County residents who take the test? Won’t they just look at the Countyblot and say “It’s a map of the County, of course: look, you can make out Northport, East Lake and Cressy quite clearly!”? The inital reaction of a tester might be to mark the subject as lacking imagination. Of course, the Rorschach people have thought about this, and will press those familiar with the County a little further. A person who says it shows an idyllic place where everybody will get along perfectly once the issue of council size is settled, might be noted as being a cockeyed optimist. A person who seizes the opportunity to crack a joke about the Leafs learning a thing or two from the Dukes could be seen as seriously xenophobic. And a person who says it brings to mind a large land mass with an infrastructure too vast for its population to support could be earmarked as deeply depressed.

On to the more interesting question: what does the County-blot conjure up for you? Actually, that’s not fair. Since I brought the subject up, I should share my own response with you. So, my top five uninhibited reactions, in the order they came to me, are:

1. A Cossack dancing with recently exploded headgear.

2. A witch on a broom riding through a cloud.

3. A badly bent and rusted antique plough.

4. A man trying to spear a genie after he has let it out of the bottle.

5. A flying pig carrying a man in its talons.

The Rorschach people haven’t given me the expected normal range of answers to the County-blot, but I can just see the psychologists going over my responses with an initial hearty chuckle, and then a growing sense of alarm:

Answer no. 1: Damaged headgear may indicate mental problems. Cossack figure (as opposed to RCMP figure) may signify difficulties with loyalty.

Answer no. 2: Witch and cloud may suggest difficulties relating to opposite gender.

Answer no. 3: Out of date reference may demonstrate problems with treatment of ancestors.

Answer no. 4: Spearing genie suggests problems with guilt over dark secrets not kept.

Answer no. 5: Everybody knows flying pigs have trotters not talons. Indicates difficulty accepting reality. And why a man yet again: is there some sort of lack of female affinity problem here?

Any way you slice it, I’m stuck. Maybe I should ask you to hold off with your responses. In fact, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to send in that submission in the first place. Perhaps I’ll go and talk to those Rorschach people. Has anyone’s mother got an axe I can borrow?

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca