The Tribune’s Tucker tackles city council “etiquette,” leaves it to NAC to name a name.

There’s an old story, perhaps apocryphal, in which former Soviet kingpin Nikita Khrushchev reminisces about his early revolutionary days, and specifically the time that his band of proselytizing Bolsheviks set up shop somewhere in the middle of the endless Russian countryside in an effort to instruct the peasantry in the modern ways of the New Soviet Man, circa 1925.

Spying the traditional outdoor pit toilet, Khrushchev’s vanguard determined to introduce the concept of modern plumbing to the steppe, installing a familiar commode so that users might be seated while they worked – and presumably supplying copies of Pravda for use as “reading” material, although village illiteracy may have precluded such naivety and led to other, non-propagandistic solutions.

At any rate, the experiment was short-lived, as within a very brief time the sparkling throne was fouled beyond redemption by visitors who continued to approach the task in the only way they knew – squatting, albeit while balancing precariously atop the newfangled porcelain arrival.

According to Khrushchev, this was the moment he finally understood the immensity of the educational task that lay before the conquering Communists – and became cynical about the prospects for its success.

The newfangled gadget was removed, and the hole in the ground restored to its previous status.

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Meanwhile, in the Sunday edition of the Tribune, Publisher John Tucker again contributes a thoughtful column, this time on the timely topics of respect, dignity and decorum, and how it is unlikely that anyone might confuse these concepts with a typical evening spent observing a New Albany City Council meeting.

If and when the column is archived, we’ll point you in the proper direction.

Reflecting on his very first council meeting on February 6, Tucker accurately conveys the standard flavor of the carnival atmosphere, noting “irresponsible statements … hurled by our elected officials in a public meeting” and the “blame game (being) played with great zeal,” and he points his rhetorically accurate finger at the council itself, choosing the tactful course of regarding the body in its collective form during the scolding:

At the beginning of the meeting, a sheet of paper was handed out to the public on how to behave while observing or speaking to the council. Evidently this is a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” Because it wasn’t the public who could have learned a lesson on etiquette, it was the council.

However, in truth, John’s net is cast a bit too widely.

Why not place the largest share of the opprobrium precisely where it belongs, on the ward-heeling shoulders of the 1st District’s Dan “Wizard of Westside” Coffey?

Unlike his council brethren, CM Coffey consistently calibrates his public demeanor at each and every council meeting so as to achieve the maximum of disorder and confusion, consciously deploying limitless verbiage utterly bereft of meaning, ritualistic straw man beheadings and unceasing preening and posturing as substitutes for the qualities of genuine “leadership” that John is understandably shocked to see almost completely missing from the Feb. 6 proceedings.

It should be added that Council President Jeff Gahan continues to make efforts to run the council meetings in a responsible manner, and has largely succeeded in reining in the lynch mob mentality that pervades the SOLNA-fed worldview of public communications as a violent soapbox for malice, self-aggrandizement and outright character assassination while still allowing the responsible, non-Brambleberry portion of the public to have its say before the city’s elected representatives.

But John squarely nails the fundamental problem with a clarity that increasingly seems exclusively reserved for those who have come to New Albany from elsewhere, and consequently aren’t carrying the suffocating psychological baggage hauled like truckloads of rotting, moldy furniture to the negotiating table by locals who demand their address to be annotated in the past tense:

Certainly there needs to be accountability for mistakes made, but the way the council conducted itself only made the observer feel frightened for New Albany’s future. That’s because the future, and what we were going to do about it, really wasn’t discussed – only that there was a problem that was so bad that no one wanted to take responsibility for it.

In a nutshell, that’s the New Albany Syndrome in all its futility and virulence, and if we expect to see thinking in the future tense emanating from the vicinity of the small-time ward heeler -- one determined above all else to remain in a position where people must pay some degree of attention to ravings that otherwise would be dismissed as the desperate palaver of the congenital underachiever – then, like Khrushchev, we probably deserve to be disappointed.

However, we need not be cynical -- just yet.

Those in the community who “can” simply must work harder and more efficiently to counteract the willful obstructionism of the ones who, like the Siamese Councilmen and the anonymous SOLNA graffiti artists, cannot.

John Tucker’s testimony yesterday is a hopeful sign that the Tribune will take its rightful place in the ranks of those who can make New Albany a better place for all its residents -- not merely the disaffected, disgruntled and dysfunctional who can scream obscenities the loudest.

By the way, anyone seen the keys to Councilman Cappuccino’s public toilet?

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(Photo credit: The Tribune)