REWIND: Muh-muh-muh-my thesaurus (December 17, 2009).

In today's benumbed America, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, just baffle them with a work ethic. Here's a News and Tribune column from 2009, once again topical in a time of bile and masks.

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BEER MONEY: Muh-muh-muh-my thesaurus.

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

Five years ago, I began publishing an Internet blog called NA Confidential. Given my meek proclivities for expressing typically understated, mild opinions, I found blogging to be a perfectly wonderful venue for self-expression.

Not unexpectedly, I also found that blogging inspires passionate reactions on the part of readers. In the five years since NAC’s founding, I’ve been amply exposed to the rough and tumble world of Internet discourse, much of which is only slightly less violent than YouTube videos of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Judging from the venom that oozes from the information superhighway’s more poorly maintained turn lanes, one might conclude that all of its denizens are terminally angry and innately maladjusted, but while it’s undeniable that ticking time bombs abound (look first for those who write entirely in capital letters), I believe the phenomenon is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

That’s because so many of the enraged lifters of pudgy middle finger lifters opt to express their terminal anguish while masked, choosing the sheltering cowardice of anonymity instead of the integrity afforded by unflinching exposure to the light. In short, they give flights to malicious thoughts while hooded that they’d never, ever say to you while seated across the table.

Much like your brand new puppy, these anonymous character assassins simply haven’t yet been trained, but unfortunately, cute little Fideaux has a statistically better chance of being taught to refrain from soiling the carpet than his “mad as hell” human owner.

Nevertheless, I am able to appreciate finely crafted rebukes even when they seep from anonymous sources. One of my perennial favorites went straight for the liver:

“We acknowledge, of course, that (Roger's) skewed sense of self is most likely the result of the continuous consumption of his beverage of trade.”

Continuous?

I hardly resemble that remark, although the merits of practice still make for ultimate perfection, and three decades of continuing education in the world’s barrooms and beer emporiums have taught me that there are far worse states of human existence than those brought about by intoxication with alcohol.

After all, Adolf Hitler was pretty much the teetotaler, wasn’t he?

Be that as it may, when it came time to answer my camouflaged critic, I recalled Hitler’s arch-enemy, Winston Churchill, and his response to a woman who accused the bibulous British Prime Minster of being drunk.

“But I shall be sober in the morning and you, madam, will still be ugly.”

Here’s the genderless paraphrasing: I shall regain sobriety, but you will remain anonymous, a condition far more wretched than mere ugliness, because while ugliness denotes an appearance, anonymity is an alibi for disappearance.

As an aside, permit me to marvel at the quintessential Englishness of Churchill’s rejoinder. Indeed, from William Shakespeare through Samuel Johnson, and recalling “Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis as well as the ascendency of Dudley Moore’s drunken cinematic Arthur, our English cousins have an innate way of expressing themselves when it comes to alcohol.

Accordingly, Churchill summarized the entire topic of my “skewed sense of self” with a sentence I wish I’d written:

“I take a lot more out of drink that it takes out of me.”

Anonymously or otherwise, during 2009 some Tribune readers have berated Coach K (Steve Kozarovich) for his decision to place me atop this traditional newsprint soapbox, but as I noted in my very first column, Socrates is the one to blame.

In fact, most of his neighbors considered (Socrates) not only an annoyance, but a heretic, too, and if there’s anything to be gleaned from reading history, it’s that there’s always time enough for a priest to throw another heretic on the fire.


So goes the eternal tyranny of the majority, and yet thanks to Plato’s writings, we now recognize Socrates as a peerless moral and social critic. Appropriately, he has been honored by the tag of gadfly, a term for describing “people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or just being an irritant.”

As gadfly, I’m not remotely worthy of comparison with the master, and yet I deeply appreciate the opportunity to write this column and to ply my favored hobby of poking sticks through the bars of the Open Air Museum’s numerous self-limiting cages.

The predictable venom duly generated by this sort of serial prodding, whether in the newspaper or on my blog, is both extremely funny, and also serves as definitive proof that the agitation is fully necessary.

Meanwhile, during the past year, amid a full slate of problems and unresolved difficulties, there has been slow and incremental progress in New Albany toward toppling that 800-lb gorilla still ensconced high atop the Elsby Building.

This petulant gorilla (I like to call him King Larry, not King Kong) symbolizes the city’s ingrained, ages-old defeatism, and the tendency of the city's own residents to insist, usually anonymously, that progress is impossible, and that there’s no choice except to squat, benumbed, in 19th-century alluvial mud as the calendar pages inexorably turn forward.

Pfui. I simply refuse to accept the bile and animus of the city’s frightened, discredited wannabeens, and in 2010, I suggest that you reject it, too.

If this constitutes an expression of raging, uncontrolled ego on my part – on all our parts – then so be it, because life’s simply too short to heed anonymous dispensers of insults, emanating from those who perpetually mistake their own feelings of inadequacy and discomfort for universal conditions. It’s time they became part of the solution, and that’s impossible without shedding their masks.

Needless to say, selective samplings of my “beverage of trade” will continue, for quality control purposes only. The higher the alcohol content, the longer the words.