The Mayor of Candor Lied

"The Mayor of Candor Lied" is a song written and sung by Harry Chapin. It was released on his 1976 album On the Road to Kingdom Come. The song tells the story of a poor farm boy anxious to marry the daughter of the town's mayor, even if he must go so far as to blackmail the mayor to get his way.

Plot

Set in "the little town of Candor" (possibly referring to Candor, NY, though more likely playing on the other meaning of the word; frank honesty), the narrator introduces himself by stating that his father is a farmer and that his mother is "a neighbor who goes visiting around." However, none of that seems to bother the narrator as his focus is on the mayor's daughter, Coleen. The mayor is against the courtship of the two and plans to see his daughter married "to a better man than a boy with farmer's hands."

One day, the narrator decides to work things out with the mayor. He searches for him at his home and office with no success, only to discover the mayor out in the countryside having an affair with the narrator's mother. The narrator becomes angry with the mayor and decides to blackmail him by stating that he will keep this incident a secret to protect him in his upcoming re-election as long as the mayor promises to let him be with Coleen. The Mayor agrees, reasoning that "this piper must be paid."

One month later, the mayor is re-elected, and to celebrate, he decides to take his family (including Coleen) on a "month-long foreign vacation." The narrator waits for their return; when they finally do return, Coleen is not with them. The mayor states that Coleen decided to stay to finish her schooling and tells the narrator that he will no longer be seeing his daughter. In an ironic twist, the mayor also reveals his long-kept secret—in that he is, in fact, the narrator's real father ("Of course, dear son, where do you think you came from in the first place?") and that they are "two of a kind."

Chorus

The song's chorus is heard three times throughout the song, and in shortened form two more times. The first two times the chorus is heard, it foreshadows the song's ending with the revelation that the mayor's daughter may be traveling overseas:

The Mayor of Candor lied
When he offered me his only daughter
The Mayor of Candor tried
To take her across the water
What a thing to do to a young man in love
What a thing to do to your daughter.
gollark: Go(lang) = bad.
gollark: ``` [...] MIPS is short for Millions of Instructions Per Second. It is a measure for the computation speed of a processor. Like most such measures, it is more often abused than used properly (it is very difficult to justly compare MIPS for different kinds of computers). BogoMips are Linus's own invention. The linux kernel version 0.99.11 (dated 11 July 1993) needed a timing loop (the time is too short and/or needs to be too exact for a non-busy-loop method of waiting), which must be calibrated to the processor speed of the machine. Hence, the kernel measures at boot time how fast a certain kind of busy loop runs on a computer. "Bogo" comes from "bogus", i.e, something which is a fake. Hence, the BogoMips value gives some indication of the processor speed, but it is way too unscientific to be called anything but BogoMips. The reasons (there are two) it is printed during boot-up is that a) it is slightly useful for debugging and for checking that the computer[’]s caches and turbo button work, and b) Linus loves to chuckle when he sees confused people on the news. [...]```I was wondering what BogoMIPS was, and wikipedia had this.
gollark: ```Architecture: x86_64CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bitByte Order: Little EndianCPU(s): 8On-line CPU(s) list: 0-7Thread(s) per core: 2Core(s) per socket: 4Socket(s): 1NUMA node(s): 1Vendor ID: GenuineIntelCPU family: 6Model: 42Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31240 @ 3.30GHzStepping: 7CPU MHz: 1610.407CPU max MHz: 3700.0000CPU min MHz: 1600.0000BogoMIPS: 6587.46Virtualization: VT-xL1d cache: 32KL1i cache: 32KL2 cache: 256KL3 cache: 8192KNUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-7Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm pti tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid xsaveopt dtherm ida arat pln pts```
gollark: I think it's a server thing.
gollark: My slightly newer SomethingOrOther 5000 does too.
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