REWIND: Unrecognizable to a Scribner (2009).

When I referred in jest to an early Scribner slumlord, my reward was a letter to the editor from a vigilant Daughters of the American Revolution member. But it never was about the personal mores of early inhabitants, was it? The essay dates from June 25, 2009.

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BEER MONEY: Unrecognizable to a Scribner.

By ROGER BAYLOR, Local Columnist

Successful coping in New Albany requires which of the following skills?

A. Appreciating the subtle nuances of irony, as when a city council that serially wastes economic development monies on sewer rate subsidies earnestly debates using more of the same monies for extra police manpower – and the only thing missing is any semblance of consensus as to the nature and practice of economic, as opposed to petty political, development.

B. Appreciating the plainly surreal, as when the amount of economic development money annually squandered on politically-motivated sewer rate subsidies would pay for far more police manpower than even the police have ever requested.

C. Appreciating progressive ale, as when copious draughts are absolutely required to make sense of an elected, self-blindfolded entity ruling on matters of economic development when it is quarterbacked (1/32nd-backed?) by a council president, Dan Coffey, who habitually opposes economic development in his own electoral district.

D. Appreciating them all, as with a corn liquor chaser.

If you picked “D”, then go to Fairview Cemetery, glance at the tombstones, and ponder: Where did it all go wrong?

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It’s time to throw a slab of barbecued bologna between two slices of clammy white bread, check the mountains on your blue-cold can of Coors Light, and crank up the Victrola with some red-hot Benny Goodman, because New Albany’s bicentennial is fast approaching, and assuming that Steve Price doesn’t lead the fight against celebrating it (too few nickels and dimes in grandma’s cookie jar), here are some bicentennial basics.

In 2013, it will be 200 years since the Scribner brothers washed ashore at the Falls of the Ohio, surveyed the wilderness and concluded that this riverbank would be a fine locale for commemorating their hometown back east … and the city of Albany in New York has never forgiven its wayward sons for the ensuing guilt by association.

The Scribners built the city’s first proper structure in 1814, and the Scribner House was soon followed by two cheaply built rental quadplexes up on the future East 15th, which Joel Scribner promptly flipped. Pocketing the proceeds, he skipped on his bar tab at Ye Olde Luddite Inn, thumbed his nose at the hapless code enforcement officer, and fled town for a redeye steamboat ride to New Harmony for the hottest craps tables this side of the Louisiana Purchase.

Okay, that’s imagined, but it made you pause, didn’t it?

The point is that while New Albany’s earliest settlers may or may not have been angels, they succeeded at city building, something that eludes many present-day citizens and their underachieving political kingpins.

Early inhabitants of New Albany seemed to genuinely believe that progress was possible in their lifetimes. If not, would they have ventured into the fledgling republic’s sprawling interior, staked claims to the largely uncharted, and taken daily risks far graver than those ever contemplated by the air-conditioned obstructionists of today?

Clearly, New Albany’s founders thought it feasible to construct a city, sustain it, and prosper in the process. Stranger still, they did just that, plotting, building and improving an urban foundation that a full two centuries later is capable of serving as a blueprint for efficient, civilized living in a modern world beset with challenges.

An entire city is ripe for adaptive reuse, if only we could transcend New Albany’s sizeable municipal inferiority complex. This bizarre and enduring aversion to science, knowledge and modernity is the polar opposite of our ancestors’ obvious grit and determination to evolve and not devolve. When did we begin settling for the penny-wise, pound foolish lowest common denominator?

Today’s rant isn’t about tax rates, free enterprise, “don’t tread on me” or Ayn Rand’s positivist philosophy. It’s about paralytic dissenters, Lilliputian naysayers and the corrosion wrought by the knee-jerk instinct of voters to anoint oblivious ward heelers whose only discernable platform is abject surrender to the debilitating defilements of urban decay management.

As local political parties stand predictably mute, these second-raters wail, thrash and moan: “We can’t … we shouldn’t … we won’t,” with this mantra of futility and despair endorsed by a minority of sullen voters who find inexplicable solace in civic regress. Given the landslide accorded hereabouts to the fossilized John McCain last year, perhaps this isn’t a surprise, although people residing outside the city limits understand, as the brilliant national columnist Frank Rich explained recently in the New York Times:

“A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover (Barack) Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.”

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By the narrowest of margins last week, the city council passed a resolution approving the use of economic development monies to hire more police officers.

We need them. Generation after generation of citizens and their nanny ward heelers, both Democratic and Republican, have consistently ignored socio-economic root causes of crime, preferring to sustain a parasitic, short-term slumlord culture by means of perpetual non-enforcement rather than enable a long-term ownership society based on the rule of law.

While America experiences change, New Albany’s political class counts its spare change and snarls. If New Albany’s founders were to check back on the state of their creation, this glorification of regression is surely what would confuse them the most.