A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
Last night in Cincinnati, drummer Steven Adler reunited with Guns N’ Roses during the band’s Not in This Lifetime Tour. While this is wonderful news for GNR fans, allow me to strike a discordant note and ask the most obvious question: Where the hell is Izzy Stradlin? Surely you realize that “Patience” is his song – not Axl’s, not Slash’s, but Izzy’s.
We need a resolution, don’t we?
Speaking of reunions, there goes Dwyane Wade, weary of global warming’s Heat, back to Chicago from whence he came to the NBA via Marquette – that’s a Catholic school, but let’s put our secularism front and center by casting a surreptitious glance to Sodom & Gomorrah by the Bay, otherwise known as San Francisco, right across the bridge from Oakland, where the Golden State Warriors just stole Kevin Durant from those poor cowpunchers in Oklahoma City.
There ought to be a law, except a resolution would be even more delightful.
If we really want to talk about vast sums better spent, there’s the pathetic Noah’s Ark fiasco in Kentucky. How the shameless Aussie charlatan Ken Ham ever got through the border I’ll never understand, so maybe Donald Trump’s right, and we need a wall to keep theocratic fascists from infiltrating the Commonwealth’s already enfeebled treasury.
Might we resolve to keep the dinosaurs in pre-history, where they belong?
Of course, had America built Drumpf’s immigration wall 150 years ago, when it really mattered, neither his family nor the Buschs would have come here from Germany, and we’d be spared the spectacle of international corporate threesome copulation between Americans, Brazilians and Belgians, because it’s not Zika we fear, but multinational brewing monopolies like AB-InBev.
A resolution would put a stop to it, right? No more Bud Light at municipal events … viva localismus.
But seriously, international news – do we really want to go there? Alas, we must, so let’s begin with a moment of silence for our kinfolk of the special relationship, the Brits. First, the collapse of Oasis, then sporting humiliation at the feet of Iceland. There was also a news item about something called Brexit, which appears to be a brand of salt and vinegar crisps.
So it is resolved: Liam and Noel are urged to come together over a pint of lager, some cigarettes and alcohol, and sort it out.
Let me tell you, Tony Blair could use a few pints of Scotch right about now, because according to the Chilcot report, the former British prime minister was as much George W. Bush’s fawning poodle during the catastrophic war in Iraq as we knew all along, even before the report’s 2.3 million words examined every last sinew and corpuscle in the lapdog’s vigorously wagging tail.
We don’t want to change the world, though a resolution would be all right.
Thirteen years ago, the U.S.-led coalition saw to it that Saddam Hussein was toppled and executed, for which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Trump is newly annoyed, given that his old drinking buddy Saddam enjoyed great success in forestalling foreign terrorism by waging domestic terrorism against his own people. Sounds like a post-it note waiting to happen.
As well as a resolution, this one honoring Saddam’s anti-terrorism prowess, but stopping short of whiskey. Saddam didn’t drink whiskey. It made him mean.
While we’re on the topic of one-way, no-choice politics, can someone explain to me exactly why it matters that Hillary Rodham Clinton used a private e-mail server while working as Secretary of State? After all, Mayor Jeff Gahan does it, too, and he didn’t post an address for his city e-mail account until he’d been in office for four years – precisely the same period of time Clinton spent as SOS.
Seeing as we Americans are SOL when it comes to choosing between Clinton and Trump, a resolution asserting this conundrum absolutely must be drafted.
Come to think of it, Bush and Blair helped destabilize considerable tracts of the planet, and Clinton oversaw keeping them chaotic, which tells us that unrest must be profitable for the global economic order.
A resolution supporting the planet’s neoliberal elites, anyone?
However, the biggest problem with this ongoing upheaval is that terrorism seems to thrive amid the fissures. Consequently, in the brief period of time elapsing since the Pulse massacre, several hundred persons have been killed in places like Iraq, Nigeria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia – but hell, they’re only Muslims, and they brought it on themselves when they refused to sit at the back of the Ark.
Can we spare a resolution for them, even though they’re infidels?
Here in America, there were 990 deaths by police shooting in 2015, with another 500 or so this year. Surely the majority of these were justified, and I’m not here to argue cops, robbers and meth heads, only to observe that once again during the past week, there have been unarmed African-Americans shot by police, most recently in Minneapolis, and all the usual dog whistles and code words are being sprayed like projectile vomit across the wasteland of social media.
A resolution of solidarity … with … nah, never mind. It wouldn’t play here. We’re immune from that shit, aren’t we? It simply doesn’t happen in New Gahania.
It’s also been two months since an elderly woman was struck and killed by a driver at the intersection of Spring and Vincennes, and still no word from officialdom as to what actually happened.
I won’t even bother asking for a resolution about streets, because the closer we get to home – nearer the grassroots, which might seem to be the most fertile ground for genuine action, as opposed to non-binding resolutions, but doesn't ever work this way unless some team wins a championship, or on those rare occasions when propriety supports the politicization of tragedy – the more we seem eager to focus on far-off horizons, forever in search of symbolic gestures.
When the traffic’s still too fast, and all we really want to do is cross the street safely, we deserve those symbolic gestures – good and hard.
So resolved by this Common Council of the city of New Albany, Indiana?
I’ve resolved not to hold my breath.
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June 30: ON THE AVENUES: Irv Stumler screams, "We don't deserve two-way streets!"
June 23: ON THE AVENUES: There's no business like no business -- and it's none of your business.
June 16: ON THE AVENUES: When the engineer uttered that scandalous word aloud, it was like Christmas in June.
June 9: ON THE AVENUES: High atop Summit Springs with friends (and relatives) in low places.
June 2: ON THE AVENUES: A few beers at Vladimir’s local in Ostrava in June, 1989.
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