Kochert’s political “danse macabre”: Should we shimmy to it?

At the scene of the degradation on Thursday, and then a second time on Friday at NA Confidential, I reminded an utterly oblivious city council president Larry Kochert that his barely concealed and apparently uncontrollable bias, reflected in a transparently conniving reluctance as presiding officer to exert reasonable control over his own meetings, has the damaging effect of enabling and perpetuating the council’s chronic pattern of unprofessional dysfunction.

Following a weekend’s reflection, I remain entirely confident that a vast majority of sensible people (whoa -- not so fast, David “non-city-resident” Huckleberry; the axe you’re grinding is bigger than Paul Bunyan’s), would, if queried, look upon Thursday evening’s spectacle with the same disgust, and reach precisely the same conclusion, as I did.

Given my certainty that ordinary and honest citizens of New Albany are likely to concur in this purely objective judgment, I nonetheless find myself slightly perplexed, although perhaps not yet troubled, by the blogger’s role in the politically motivated charade last week.

Specifically: Balancing our obligation as citizens to shine a bright and relentless light on the chronic flaws of the council’s obstructionist element, are we not also assisting in its enablement by rewarding misbehavior with much desired attention?

Let’s consider an example close to home.

For more than three years, I’ve observed the phenomenon of CM Price’s steady, alarming regression into what can only be properly understood as self-caricature. The more NAC explicates in painstaking detail Price’s myriad inadequacies as an office holder, all the more loudly and persistently he publicly flaunts these shortcomings, in the process managing nothing less than his transformation into something far more virulent and closely resembling our satiric renderings than he was before we commenced our efforts to expose these compelling reasons to vote against him.

Obviously, as a ward-heeling politician, Price must mobilize his core constituency of like-(in effect, non-) minded Luddites, but beyond that understandable imperative, and the blatant pandering it implies, it would seem that persistently shining our relentless light on his considerable dysfunction has simply inspired further pride in dysfunction – with self-defeating and corrosive effects for a community that must somehow escape Price’s and his ilk's blinders, brake pads and homilies if it is to succeed in rejuvenating itself.

Readers, what do you think? By giving the dysfunctional the attention they crave and providing them a stage upon which to posture, are we merely enhancing the collateral damage to the city?

If so, what’s the solution?

That is, the solution beyond showing them the door in May?