ON THE AVENUES: There’s enough toxicity and naysaying to go around.

ON THE AVENUES: There’s enough toxicity and naysaying to go around.

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

Let’s conjecture for a moment.

Early one morning, over inky espresso and delightfully smoky kippers, you delve with appropriate trepidation into the moldering remnants of the once mighty Louisville Courier-Journal, and soon find this quote in a Dale Moss column on downtown New Albany’s ongoing revitalization effort.

“We're just keeping the naysayers in check.”

All things considered, Dale’s article last week was appreciated. It offered a balanced perspective, with chosen interviewees expressing qualified positives, and also pointed to what remains to be done. Revitalization was characterized as fragile and only 50% complete, an assessment that might be overly optimistic.

But a full week later, I continue to be struck by the interviewee’s linkage of achievement with keeping “naysayers in check,” prompting me to consider exactly who the naysayers are in this context. There was a time when the identity of the naysayers seemed axiomatic to me.

To live in New Albany is to be compelled forever and always to look at positive developments with a shrug, knowing that local Limbaughs are praying for failure, and to listen to their self-flagellating admonitions of futility, powerlessness and begrudgery:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even try.

Which ideas and activities do the naysayers advise us to shun? Virtually all of them, especially any that suggest a departure from established thought and practice, even if it can be demonstrated that the “way we’ve always done it” never worked.

I wrote these words in 2009, with the Potty Police, Citizens Faux Accountability and Freedom to Screech in mind, although similar sentiments would have been just as valid if expressed at any time since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. When it comes to modern times, New Albany has been a world capital of naysaying since before times were modern.

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All those wasted years! A city steadily denuded of youthful vigor, with creativity dipping toward a palpable nadir, and the extractive logic of the exurb at its zenith, opting for decay management as the political and cultural order of the day, as epitomized by the flight of the educated and the reign of the slumlord.

Lacking any constructive platform for reform, New Albany’s civic inferiority complex was stoked to fever pitch amid the anguished wails of those stuck irrevocably in the past, watching angrily as the modern world eroded their eternally unbuttressed claims of privilege, and defining themselves solely by their tax rates to the exclusion of any deeper conception of morality or citizenship.

Lately, I’ve found myself skipping through a looking glass, seemingly occupying space outside the ranks of two oppositional local worldviews. To illustrate this directional point with a spectrum, as opposed to speculum, consider a familiar national example.

Virtually all Republicans approaching life from the “right” (even if it seldom is) currently oppose Barack Obama in knee-jerk uniformity, although “goose-step” is a more accurate descriptor of their body language.

Meanwhile, Obama’s descent to the depths of the center has satisfied few and accomplished little, save for alienating the Democratic Party’s leftist cadres. Their annoyance with the POTUS can be termed as (loyal?) opposition from the left, although it is difficult to imagine them abandoning Obama entirely given the nature of the fascistic threat from the right.

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In like fashion, the tendency of New Albany and Floyd County “conservative” right-wingers, including most Republicans as well as a majority of so-called Democrats, to support positions designed to starve civil/secular society until its emaciated frame can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub and replaced with patriotic superstition, all but ensures my consistent opposition from the left.

But merely opposing the right from the left does not situate me in the center. In recent months, I find myself well to the left of those nominally opposing the traditional rightist naysayers, with the predictable result of opprobrium being heaped squarely upon me.

In fact, some agitated observers have included me among the naysaying opposition when it comes to the holy crusade that is downtown revitalization, primarily owing to my genetic inability to slavishly adhere to their scriptural pablum.

Hence those strange charges of “toxicity,” and of letting the side down by asking far too many questions of the small cadre that fancies itself as leading the charge – but, you see, it is the very fact of this cadre’s small size, over-representation, aspirations toward monopolistic decision-making and periodic dullness of wit which makes my questions necessary.

Consider this: If I’m somehow naysaying from my isolated perch on the far left, how are we to characterize the bizarre pronouncements of right-leaning “centrist” councilman Bob Caesar? After all, when facing hard facts about the advantages of two-way traffic downtown, he accused me of anti-establishment tendencies (remember, we’re talking about traffic patterns, not marijuana legalization), and dismissed modernity with instinctive New Albanian disdain.

In other words, it (two way traffic) just can’t be done here – and I'm a fool to even try.

I’m told by certain youthful conciliators, whom I appreciate, that details do not matter, seeing as we’re all pursuing the same future goals, and yet for the skeptic in me, it is greater transparency, not less – it is more shareholders, not fewer – that produces confidence in the thematic togetherness being espoused.

I continue to believe that “we” can get it done, insofar as “we” is defined in as wide a participatory sense as possible. Conversely, supposedly shared goals are not being furthered by the emerging tendency to populate the darkened edifices of planning and decision-making with the very same people, again and again, over and over.

This is not the way to be inclusive, or to garner a multiplicity of viewpoints, or to ensure that new ways of thinking are brought to the table, and hence it hardly can be termed naysaying to point to it and ask: “Why?”

New Albany could be a veritable laboratory for out-of the-box, new ways of dealing with old problems, but one must break eggs to make omelets, and this seems abhorrent to the blindfolded centrists. It doesn’t surprise me to see the right’s selfish, tea party-besotted heels dug into the floodplain, but it’s tragic that others seem determined to emulate the right’s bad tactics to perpetuate the tiredness of their own outdated writ, and to discredit those who advocate a more dispersed method of calculating the city’s needs.

Maybe more people would become involved if they felt there was a chance of their voices being heard. As always, the solution is transparency, inclusivity and a willingness to shift a paradigm even if it gives the genuine naysayers heartburn.