New Albany's "little people" find their savior, at least for the next five minutes.

Things that make you go “hmmmm” … from the new Diggin’ in the Dirt blog:

—Lt. Governor Becky Skillman got to see Mansion Row Friday afternoon (July 1) during a meet-and-greet for the Republican Party faithful at the Admiral Bicknell Inn. Thanks for the yummy leftover hors d'oeuvres, VA. I love that olive spread.

VA is Valla Ann Bolovschak, owner and innkeeper at the Admiral Bicknell bed and breakfast, and, we’re told, a Bush/Cheney stalwart of long standing.

Under normal circumstances, this information would not be noteworthy, but according to anonymous spokespersons for New Albany’s self-styled “little people,” i.e., disgruntled home owning white Democrats, Valla Ann has arrived in New Albany just in time to lead these supposedly “oppressed” taxpayers on a Norquist-inspired Fatwah against the 21st century.

Uh huh.

Is it just us, or have Early Times sales skyrocketed lately?

Speaking as a fellow businessperson, NA Confidential finds much to like about Valla Ann, and we genuinely respect what she has done to make her home one of the anchors of Mansion Row.

We’ll leave it to others to helpfully explicate the less salutary aspects of Valla Ann’s long-running and very public feud with the Democrat who currently occupies City Hall, noting sadly that her affiliation with the GOP unfortunately runs counter to many of NA Confidential’s personal positions in politics and culture, thus complicating objectivity in such matters.

However, the woefully counter-productive perversity of her new legion of fans is another topic entirely, and one that we can’t help skewering.

By giddily throwing themselves at the feet of a card-carrying Republican, whose party (in explicit national platform terms) is institutionally committed to starving the city to feed the exurb, New Albany’s “mad as hell,” anti-progressive, lunatic fringe seriously undermines its cherished and utterly false self-image as the criminally neglected “little people.”

Actually, this is just as well, since the term “little people” in this context bears no more descriptive meaning than “new and improved” on a jug of generic laundry detergent.

Quite simply, if you’re a home owning white person in New Albany, you’re a “little person” in the same way that George W. Bush is just another chainsaw-toting Texan.

New Albany’s real “little people” are renters at or below the poverty line, underemployed or unemployed, many of them Black and Latino, and few of whom possess the luxury of Internet access to complain of their being downtrodden and ignored.

Few of them are demanding to take “back” their city, because they had little part in it to begin with.

Wildly and disproportionately privileged by comparison with the city’s genuine “little people,” a snarling sub-strata of disaffected, white, middle class, home owning Democrats now turns to a recently arrived Republican to save them from themselves, with arms open and hosannas fully audible, and while this turn of events provides ample grist for examinations into the degradation of the human condition in New Albany, circa ’05, it remains that garbage trucks in high summer have a more favorable aroma than hypocrisy of this malodorous variety.

It is beyond dispute that New Albanians traditionally are their own worst enemies, consistently dismissing palliative measures and bizarrely drawing solace from their own semi-literate depths of futility. One would hope that at some point this recurring cycle of pain would become tiresome to them, but it remains that the truly dysfunctional have no hope of getting better until they want to do so.

The “little people” won’t get any bigger until they stop whimpering and desperately seeking a "leader," shed the populist drivel that thrills them, and start thinking critically about the world that lies outside.

To persist in doing otherwise is to continue being used by those who know better … and to be discarded, yet again, when the usefulness of the “little people” comes to an inevitable end.