REWIND: Take my city – please? (2010)

A group of New Albany business owners were discussing the uncanny tendency of councilmen Dan Coffey and Steve Price to vote against proposals that stand to improve the very neighborhoods they represent, and the eternally bizarre way their constituents reward them for warding off the threat of progress. One person said, "It's because they're invested in failure, not success." That's very, very true. A culture of losing perpetuates losing, and dire predictions must prove to be dire, lest Nostraccino be proven false. The following was published in the pre-OSIN Tribune on February 25, 2010.

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BEER MONEY: Take my city – please?

By ROGER BAYLOR, Local Columnist

The English language is rich in words that convey varied shades of meaning. For instance, consider the notion of defeatism.

According to Merriam-Webster, it means “an attitude of accepting, expecting, or being resigned to defeat,” and dates to the end of World War One. During wartime, defeatism might doom any entity, whether an individual or a nation, to collapse at the hands of the enemy. What if defeatism were to extend beyond resignation, to the point where defeatists actually begin collaborating?

We might refer to collaborators as traitors, a term personified in American history by the person of Benedict Arnold, a homespun turncoat now synonymous with villainy and treason. Back in Europe, the era of the Second World War spawned two floridly suggestive terms in a similar vein.

One is “fifth column,” defined as “a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group, such as a nation from within, to the aid of an external enemy” (Wikipedia). The other, which also suggests equal elements of active participation in bringing about defeat, and eager cooperation with a victorious enemy, is “Quisling.”

Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian military officer and fascist politician, took the opportunity of Nazi Germany’s 1940 invasion to subvert resistance, and with Norway’s fate sealed, to form a government in concert with the occupiers. In reality, Quisling was a mere puppet with almost no power beyond that exercised by foreign military might through a credo of violence.

Whether confronting a defeatist, Benedict Arnold, traitor, collaborator, turncoat, fifth columnist, villain, puppet or Quisling, the amateur psychologist in all of us is tempted to explore inner psychological motives when asking, “Why?”

There isn’t a single answer. The other side offered a better deal, and the slighted Benedict jumped. Many residents of Berlin, subjected to horrific daily bombing raids, concluded that the war was lost, and sought to end it sooner rather than later. At least some Norwegians held the same views as Quisling, and saw him as a savior.

However, I believe that each of these words in its own nuanced and distinctive way incorporates an element of willfully surrendered autonomy, dignity or freedom of choice to a force outside one’s control. Undoubtedly, in each case, an obligation is severed, ties that bind shattered, and faith broken. Yes, treason may be the only way out, in the sense of preserving one’s life.

But what kind of life is that?

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Recently I was skimming the local blogosphere and reading an angry discussion of sewers, rates, bonds and various suggestions that are anatomically incorrect. Interestingly, one anonymous commentator counseled surrender.

“If you can possibly comprehend such an idea as most New Albanians have, we WANT the Bondholders to come after us; we WANT the State to step in; WE WANT the EPA to stop our nightmare. We'll take one or all three; simply show citizens where and what and why about our money! It is not we want New Albany to fail; we want an end to corruption in NA -- or at least what MOST FEEL is corruption.”

Seeing as I’m not hooked on a feeling, I disagree.

If we as citizens and elected representatives of this city fail to face our legal obligations with regard to bondholders by financing and maintaining the sewer utility, we will default, and our affairs inevitably will be run by higher authorities.

Once engaged, these authorities will not be interested in show trials stemming from “feelings” of corruption, or revenge for past slights, or our various daily pleas of stupidity, poverty and degradation, which we routinely cite as reasons for not facing our municipal problems, as though we as a community are whimpering mutts groveling lest another round of beatings commences.

In fact, should this day of capitulation come, our civic autonomy will be severely curtailed, and for a long, long time. We’ll not be leaving our rooms for supper until the mess is tidied.

Amazingly, others among us believe that the best way of coping with the sewer utility’s financial crisis is to take every last cent of the city’s economic development money, both now and for decades into the future, and use it as a subsidy for today’s rates. My 3rd district councilman, Steve Price, suggested exactly this approach, aloud, last week.

That’s penny- AND pound-foolish. I trust that most rational people can see the unmitigated folly in using future development resources to avoid paying what it actually costs to flush our toilets now, and will be puzzled at how anyone would suggest crippling his own habitat.

That’s because it makes sense only as culture war. The Price Plan would have the effect of “protecting” today’s low-income, fixed-income residents by ensuring that they remain precisely where they are, forever, by striking a blow to any hope of future economic progress, which at long last will ensure that all New Albanians exist at the same egalitarian level of impoverishment.

Price enjoys using the word “Communist” to describe anything he disagrees with, including me, but I submit that his plan to gut the city’s economic future, taken in concert with the idea that outside control of the city is a better idea than self-rule, combine to create just as communistic a system as I ever witnessed in Eastern European countries during the Cold War.

Outside entities would govern us, society would be leveled, and a small group of ideological (as opposed to fiscal) elites would call the local shots.

Is Price’s regressive “vision” yours, too?