Gahan Doublespeak Blues (Husqvarna Mix): Say goodbye to your trees, Mt. Tabor Road residents, because it's time again to "improve the tree canopy" by flattening a few hundred of them.

Develop New Albany welcomes Summit Springs
to the donor list.

Team Gahan has developed its own peculiar localized variant of Newspeak, with inflections borne of hunker-down-low bunker origins.

 ... George Orwell explains that Newspeak usage follows most of the English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning.

In Orwell's novel 1984, the term "doublethink" is introduced; when paired with Newspeak, the result is "doublespeak," defined here by political economist Edward S. Herman.

What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.

The drill has become familiar by now.

For instance, to "improve housing conditions and supportive services" means earmarking half of public housing units for demolition without a coherent plan for rehousing.

Tireless "efforts to improve the tree canopy" means flashing a nice stock photo like this ...

... as scrubbed-clean Disneyesque cover for lubing up the chainsaws to facilitate tree removal, clearcutting and deforestation. Perhaps the finest example of Gahan's skills at doublespeak occurred in 2016, when hundreds of trees were cleared to build a "greenway" safe for speeding motorists.

Residents of Mt. Tabor Road were informed yesterday (December 7) that lumbering begins on Monday, December 11.

Oddly, the fliers were stuck in mailboxes sans stamps, which I'd been told was strictly illegal during my run for mayor in 2016. The Board of Works already had picked and grinned its way through approval for the latest round of destroying the tree canopy to save it.

ASK THE BORED: It's Mt. Tabor Road's turn to be pillaged as our lumberjack fetishist mayor readies another round of clear-cutting -- for the sake of the cars, of course.

It's been four months since the mayor triumphantly announced what amounts to a survey of previously sawed stumps; having felled hundreds and perhaps thousands of trees during the course of his Ceausescu-esque TIF and Green(!)way projects, he'd now prove there was the beginning of the precursor to an embryonic "master" plan to reforest the city by 2065 or so ...

It can't be denied that Jeff Gahan is remaking the city in his own image. What could possibly go wrong when mendacity, narcissism and mediocrity are chief characteristics of the model?