The Venezuelans constantly condescend to Leslie and her co-workers and treat all the women as sexual servants. In the episode "Sister City," representatives from the parks department of the Venezuelan city of Boraqua visit Pawnee. When Dexhart is revealed as a liar, he still refuses to resign.Įven with all the irrationalities and inefficiencies of democracy, the show clearly prefers it to more authoritarian forms of government. This forces Leslie to drop her pants on live television and allow the show's host to inspect her posterior, proving that no such mole exists. To prove the relationship is real, Dexhart claims Leslie has a mole on her buttocks. Dexhart perpetuates the rumor because being connected to Leslie is far more wholesome than the true stories about him. In the middle of the second season, the town is swept up in city councilman Bill Dexhart's multiple sexcapades, the most recent of which involves getting it on with four nurses and a woman whose husband was having a liver transplant in a hospital closet while his love child was being delivered.Īfter Leslie meets with the councilman for completely innocent purposes, members of Pawnee's press, such as it is, immediately allege that the two are having an affair. Mencken's quip that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." The press and the people are frequently kooks and universally obsessed with scandals. Pawnee's government reflects Pawnee's population. In the world of Parks and Recreation, even the most innocuous government agencies frequently turn out to be bastions of pure evil. This kind of behavior turns out to be common among the town's librarians, leading Leslie and Ron to conclude that though Tammy is a "grade A bitch," the worst thing about her is that she works for the library.
After some initial hostility, Tammy and Ron rekindle their relationship, but we soon learn that Tammy is manipulating Ron just for the fun of it. Tammy agrees to relinquish the library's claim on the lot in exchange for Leslie setting up a meeting with Ron. Leslie meets with Tammy-an act that Ron describes as staring "into the eye of Satan's butthole"-in an attempt to reach a compromise. There is a longstanding feud between the library and the parks department, in part because Ron's ex-wife Tammy runs it. In one particularly entertaining episode, the library attempts to claim the lot for a new branch. This seemingly simple endeavor is stymied time and again by angry residents, endless red tape, and interagency turf wars. Leslie spends the bulk of the first two seasons on a crusade to fill in a government-owned pit created by a failed condominium development and turn it into a new park.
Leslie so enjoys her role as a bureaucratic busybody that she finds interfering in Ron's personal life "rewarding." Yet the show convincingly humanizes both characters, and strongly suggests that while Leslie's heart is in the right place, Ron's dim view of government is more realistic. Ron seems to have entered government service as a saboteur, and he embraces his libertarianism to a degree that would make most anarcho-capitalists quake. She enjoys running public meetings where citizens shout at her about how she and the parks department "suck," which she delusionally describes as "people caring loudly at me."īoth characters are caricatures. Swanson's foil is Leslie Knope, the department's deputy director played by Amy Poehler, who finds nothing nobler than public service. Cheese? Who gives a fourth grader a land mine to protect her property? It's the majestically mustachioed Ron Swanson, the libertarian director of the parks department of Pawnee, Indiana, played by Nick Offerman on NBC's critically acclaimed comedy Parks and Recreation, now entering its fourth season. Who orders all the bacon and eggs in a restaurant, believes that child labor laws are ruining the country, and thinks public parks should be sold to Chuck E.
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