REPRINT: "Class conflict": A fool's game, and perpetuated by the same.

Originally published on January 8, 2006. See also Lies, bicycles and the SOLNA spitwad cesspool, published earlier today.

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I was chatting Friday evening with a longtime customer, and eventually our talk turned to local matters.

“You realize where it’s headed – class warfare,” he observed, citing the differences in cognitive perception between the worldviews and methodology embodied by NAC and Volunteer Hoosier, and those espoused at the venomous spitwad blogyard (SOLNA).

“That’s their trump card, not mine,” I responded, “and they’ve not hesitated to play it, especially from the Gang of Four’s side of the council table.”

“Maybe so,” he continued, “but you have to understand that there’s a certain type of person in this city who’ll always be like Laura and (councilman) Price, counting nickels and dimes, and never comprehending things like public investment and the idea that you have to spend money to make money.”

For a definition of “class conflict,” which appears to be a more accepted term in academic circles than “class warfare,” I turned to the free encyclopedia:

Class conflict is both the friction that accompanies social relationships between members or groups of different social classes and the underlying tensions or antagonisms which exist in society.

To what extent are economic imperatives and income considerations implied in this definition?

Very little, I believe. If there is a “class conflict” in New Albany, it is one deriving from social mores and personal assumptions about life that go far deeper than simpler considerations of dollars and cents.

These notions of “class” are self-adhesive in nature, and do not stem from economic constraints, owing to the simple fact that the public debate about the future of New Albany is being conducted almost entirely by blog habitués who are white job-holders who own their own homes and vehicles, and who cannot be considered economically underprivileged by any rational standard of the term.

So, for once, it really isn’t about the money, and if Laura Oates tells you that it is, here’s the question to ask to determine whether she is fibbing.

Are her lips moving?

Consider the profound irony at SOLNA, where the same die-hard advocates of municipal frugality who only recently were willing to increase the monthly sanitation fee to $3.00 a month per household if it meant “saving” the jobs of sanitation workers -- the latter now gainfully employed by a private contractor -- now issue shrill protests as they speculate an increase of $1.00.

Apparently the furor was about “preserving” an unexamined “way of life,” one that probably never existed, and maintaining the comfort of the status quo, and only as a last resort, about the best way to go about collecting garbage.

Imagine that.

A friend once asked me that if by some miracle, all the demands made by this city’s obstructionist minority were met overnight, and they were arise the following morning with nothing left to oppose – would they at last be satisfied?

No, I told him, because their demons are lodged internally, and these have nothing to do with the complexities of external reality. Rather, it’s all in the manner of one’s self-definition, and the “class conflict” that ensues has far more to do with cognitive dissonance than with a structured program of “change.”

As John Lennon sang, "one thing you can't hide, is when you're crippled inside."

Verily, in the year that just ended, we witnessed numerous manifestations of this variety of “class conflict” in New Albany, none more so than in the debate over the Scribner Place downtown redevelopment project, the first phase of which calls for the building of a YMCA and indoor swimming pool.

While in the beginning, a few of the project opponents (as quoted in SOLNA or during the public speaking portion of various public meetings) were able to couch their opposition in terms of numerology, ledgers and finances – in our view generally deploying errant equations, but at least attempting to muster semi-coherent and reality-based arguments – a far better barometer of their real feelings on the matter could be glimpsed as time passed and the their arguments failed, to be found in off-hand comments, body language and anonymous blog postings, most of them taking this form:

As New Albanians, we’re far too uneducated, degraded and ignorant to be able to construct such a facility, and if somehow it is built in spite of our ineptitude, most people wouldn’t use it, and those that do aren’t the type of person we much like, anyway.

If this is “class conflict,” it is one firmly seated in the realm of social self-perception, not the numerical world of bookkeeping, audits and budgets.

Of course, the aforementioned Great Sanitation Debate of 2005 breathed new life into this thoroughly jaundiced perspective, leading directly to numerous, contrived comparisons between the honest nobility of the sanitation worker and the book-smart, snotty pretentiousness of the future Scribner Place patron.

Indeed, the theatrical icons of our local “disgruntled deprivation” socio-political movement, ranging from the ravings of “Concern Taxpayer” to the McCartheyesque blathering of CM Dan Coffey, have elevated to an art form the curious proposition that their own abysmal failures and persistent inadequacies should be taken as unquestioned proof that all members of the community share a genetic predisposition to underachievement.

That such self-loathing is so sadly indicative of raging inferiority complexes, chemical imbalances or just plain envy would be obvious to all in a community that seriously valued education, reading, thinking … and success.

That such views become the basis for a Kool-Aid swilling, political self-abnegation sect that is given the time of day by more than a half-dozen people in New Albany is a red flag, four-alarm clue that we do, in fact, have a problem with “class conflict,” and the problem can be clearly and unambiguously traced to its source and practitioners ... and not to those seeking to lift the common denominator rather than enshrine as gospel the current one.

Actually, I’ve covered this ground previously: “Overt anti-intellectualism? Well, that would explain CM Price's votes against the interests of his own district.”

To paraphrase McKitrick’s reading of Hofstadter, “the relation between the way politicians like Dan Coffey and Steve Price behave, in politics and other realms of effort, and the use they make of their minds,” is of central importance for the future of New Albany.

It remains that the best way to make such self-limiting considerations of one’s “station in life” redundant – to kill once and for all the “we can’t” message to our children -- is to work tirelessly for the enhancement of educational opportunities for all members of the community, and to reap the benefits of such an active engagement from those improved employment and economic possibilities that proceed from it.

Anything else is an excuse for failure, like SOLNA itself, and is to be considered, and rejected, accordingly.

See today's Volunteer Hoosier for more: Apology: Abject.

It was all a joke. Good one, Laura. I bow to you. Your latest posting makes it clear that you've been pulling our leg all this time. That you have enabled the sub-literate to excrete their addled versions of reality must have been, all along, part of your master plan.