New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Speaking personally, this sentence stands out: "We hate having to be the mask police."
No kidding. If local and state government possessed an iota of cojones, and they don't, then we'd have a bit of help via enforced mandates, and not have to take time from our own work to apply the government's toothless edicts for it.
But that's the reality of two-party political cowardice.
The Rover's testimony is first, and then a link to a very useful article titled, "Why the libertarians are foolish about face masks."
Business was pretty good today despite the weather, and we saw a lot of regulars, including some we hadn’t seen since the shutdown....a great day, right?
No. Today sucked.
Numerous guests ignored posted mask policy (including seating themselves without masks and creating a scene when asked to leave), and many refused to comply with polite requests to wear the masks when staff approached to serve them.
This isn’t about people who forget to put the masks on...we truly appreciate all of you who are trying to learn the new normal!
We’re talking about people who are openly defiant. Who stuff the mask into a pocket or zip it into a purse. Who laugh and say they’ll “try.”
We hate having to be the mask police. It’s exhausting (and costly...one table walked out cursing at us, and without paying for their drinks). But we are trying to protect the health of our staff and guests.
What’s really upsetting, though, is the complete lack of concern for the health of the people trying to serve you. It’s demoralizing and dehumanizing, and it’s really hurts.
We love the restaurant business, but this is soul crushing. And it has us wondering why we are working so hard to keep going.
There is an incident recounted on local social media that may or may not be true, but it perfectly captures the attitude we encountered so many times today:
A woman enters an empty coffee shop, and, when asked by the barista to put on a mask, she replies:
“Why? There’s no one here”
The article's from the Financial Times, and you may not be able to read it without registering. In the event, allow my sole excerpt to tell the tale.
Wearing coverings is finally mandatory in England in shops as well as on public transport
Wearing a mask is an act of trust. It does not protect you — it protects others, and their masks protect you. The effect is likely to be small, but it is a sign of shared endeavour, an essential part of getting through this crisis. Just as no one is an atheist in a foxhole, no one is a libertarian in a pandemic.
Lately I'm reminded of why I declined to attend my 40th high school reunion in 2018. Maybe I'm finally ready to be honest about it, even if I'm cognizant of it not mattering, in the least, either way.
For one thing, I was busy.
Pints&union was in the run-up to opening on August 1, and there were things that needed to be done. It made me very nervous, because you'll recall at the time that I'd been out of the food and drink game for three years. Getting back into it at an advanced age took effort, more mental than physical, and obviously none of us are as spry as we used to be.
But while it was a valid consideration, it's only a part of it.
Another aspect was lingering annoyance with 2013, when it was my great pleasure to host a portion of the reunion at Bank Street Brewhouse.
It transpired that one of my actual friends from high school arrived loaded (literally or figuratively) for bear, spent the evening complaining about mixed drink prices (at a brewery), harassing my staff (one of whom came to me and said if my "friend" didn't leave him alone, he'd have to begin throwing punches) and being an all-purpose tool.
My 'friend" embarrassed me greatly, and then, as it happened, the very same guy proved to be an avid, unapologetic MAGA-ite, which leads us to the third and most important factor in my (admittedly entirely personal) disaffection, this being the presidential election results in 2016.
In short, via the helpful medium of Facebook, I had a front row seat to observe the extent to which certain of my former classmates as yet were on the same wavelength as me in political terms, and which ones had gulped down the Trump Kool-Aid and become raging reactionaries, white supremacists, religion-obsessed theocrats, and, in short, stranded way out in right field somewhere.
And yet it wasn't anger with this state of affairs that convinced me to avoid the reunion party in 2018. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I disagree with them, it doesn't mean any more than that -- a disagreement.
Rather, it was sadness.
Granted, the high school experience is vastly overrated; it was far more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying rose-colored revisionism to an epic degree to celebrate those years.
This being said, I look back on various people and phases with satisfaction and affection, hence the melancholy gripping me in 2018. I didn't show up because I'd prefer to remember them the way they were, not grapple internally with what they'd become.
It's as simple as that.
In high school most of the kids were apolitical, many times politically incorrect, mostly sharing the same goal of making sense of adolescence and trying to figure out what would come next, out in the real world.
I'd rather remember them -- us -- this way.
I don't even hold a grudge against the high school (and college) friend who made life miserable for me that evening at BSB in 2013. It's who he is, and actually, it's what he always was, an asshole, which is what drew us together in the beginning because I was, too.
We remain "friends" on Facebook, but I don't follow him, thus sparing me from an endless series of auto-erotic Trump mash notes, conspiracy memes and "all lives matter" bromides.
Unfollow, but remain "friends." It's mental health for our time, and maybe 2023 will be different.
I've got blisters on my "unfollow" fingers; it was time to eliminate the social media "friends" who can't do any better than post one fabricated, lying, propaganda meme after another. This has included a few people for whom I feel genuine affection and consider to be friends in the real world, not the pretend on-line world. I understand that some of them are scared; others didn't have a strong grip when things were good. What's changed is my willingness to tolerate their blathering.
As K. stated so well, it's about my own sanity and survival. I usually could brush it off prior to COVID, but now these people no longer are just harmless loonies; they're advocating harm at every turn -- whether pandemic obliviousness, or white supremacy, or virulent superstition.
For all my reputation as an extremist, no one has persisted as long as I have in the effort to cling to a middle ground as it pertains to talking with people who hold differing beliefs. But they're becoming toxic zombies to me, and while I dislike having jettison dysfunctional ballast to protect myself, here we are.
A physician friend is featured in two videos embedded below. For those readers who know me, further foreshadowing is unnecessary. If you don't me, I don't feel like explaining, at least yet. At this precise moment, I'm not sure what to say, so I won't say anything. If it's possible to be shocked, unsurprised and saddened all at the same time, then those are my coordinates. I'll need to work my way through cognitive dissonance, all the while trying to retain the example of Shimon Peres in the recent article at The Atlantic.
Understanding how dissonance operates reveals a few practical lessons for overcoming it, starting by exafarm-near-me/">mining the two dissonant cognitions and keeping them separate. We call this the “Shimon Peres solution.” Peres, Israel’s former prime farm-near-me/">minister, was angered by his friend Ronald Reagan’s disastrous official visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where members of the Waffen SS were buried. When asked how he felt about Reagan’s decision to go there, Peres could have reduced dissonance in one of the two most common ways: thrown out the friendship or farm-near-me/">minimized the seriousness of the friend’s action. He did neither. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.” Peres’s message conveys the importance of staying with the dissonance, avoiding easy knee-jerk responses.
I'm not sure I can.
From April 29:
From July 13:
As for how this intersection of Christianity and medical science makes me feel, that's easy. It makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable.
I'm using songs to title my posts. They may or may not bear relevance to the subject matter therein. It amuses me; for how long, I don't know.
It took only two pandemic-delayed months, and now the Confidentials finally have their bicycles back from the shop.
My battle-hardened Trek model dates to 1999, and Diana’s to 2005. Neither of us has been in the saddle for a long while, and our two-wheeled conveyances frankly have been shamelessly neglected, left to molder in back of the garage since Obama’s first term along with a pile of dry-rotted, heat-warped and mostly useless accessories.
But functionality has returned, and with it quite a few of my ghosts have come back to call. I’ll have more to say about them in a moment.
It has been eight years since I put appreciable mileage on the bicycle, with the final peak in odometer terms coming in 2010, my 50th birthday year, when I recorded approximately 3,650 miles without ever exceeding 30 in a single day.
Not at all coincidentally, 2010 was the year when Bank Street Brewhouse (founded in 2009) devolved into a perpetual stalemate of small business trench warfare. In retrospect, pinned in place of my own lamentable accord at BSB, and realizing that European travel was out of the question, I devoted a portion of most days to riding my bike to forget, in search of stress relief before returning to the intensive care unit called "work."
I was still riding in late November, 2010, trying to reach 6,000 kilometers. One morning late in the month while walking I slipped on some black ice in the parking lot opposite BSB and suffered a big quadriceps tear in my left leg, which was purple for months afterward. 5,875 km would have to do. It took until June of 2011 before I even considered riding again.
By then the biking spark had been greatly extinguished, most likely from sheer burnout after almost 15 years of riding so much, along with the lingering leg injury and never-ending frustrations at BSB. There was a short-lived comeback attempt in 2012, and then I became a walker instead – and this phase lasted eight years.
What’s more, the period of 2010-2012 was when Kevin Richards and I weren’t seeing very much of each other. Kevin, who sadly died of a brain tumor in 2016, was my original bicycling muse. He had personal and professional issues of his own at the time, and I was preoccupied with the tumultuous business expansion -- and my responsibility for it.
For whatever reason, our paths diverged.
Unfortunately I didn’t ever think to consider the impact of Kevin’s temporary absence until later, when it became permanent. In 2011 and 2012, Kevin wasn’t riding his bicycle much, either, but if we had been in closer proximity, we’d have shamed each other into getting out there.
We didn’t go for a ride together for the last six years of his life, closer to seven. I have few regrets, but this is one of them. A very, very big one.
---
It’s a story I’ve told before, but humor me.
I helped get Kevin into better beer. He was instrumental in getting me into the seat of a two-wheeler.
In 1996 it had been twenty years since high school, when my teenage bicycling career came to a close once I had a dependable car to drive. Horrible, exceedingly American, and true.
But in 1996 I bought a cheap bike with big knobby tires and started tooling around New Albany. Gradually a collection of pub-going cyclists found each other, and I upgraded to the current Trek, swapping the mountain bike tires for hybrids because Kevin properly commanded it.
One late summer's day in 1999, Kevin and I rode to the top of the Knobs via Corydon Pike's switchbacks. We stopped for a sag at Polly’s Freeze, the venerable ice cream haven. Light bulbs belatedly became illuminated and an earnest discussion began. Might we dare biking in Europe, where it was standard operating procedure -- and heaven forbid – maybe quaff a few fine ales in the process?
So the planning began. We booked hotels at three beer-oriented urban venues in Belgium, along with rental bikes for day trips radiating from each stop. Faxes (!) and e-mails were sent, and the itinerary came into shape. As the calendar turned to June, 2000, there were five of us ready to make the journey, and it proved to be a classic.
A beercycling group was born, and as many as 15 of us in all took part in a total of seven European trips in nine years, with the last occurring in 2008. Kevin was along for four of the seven, and without his tutoring, I'd have lacked the confidence to "lead" the other ones, although in fact all of these trips were genuine group efforts.
Kevin and I conceived, orchestrated and performed those beercycling trips together, and while the cast revolved, each time out we functioned as a band of brothers (and on a couple of occasions, sisters). I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kevin’s bicycling advocacy changed my life. My European travel instincts were joyfully reborn in 2000.
During previous journeys to the continent, I'd dodged bicyclists while walking between train stations, never stopping to consider how much fun it might be to ride myself -- actually, never stopping to consider that I could do it. Kevin patiently taught me about the art of the possible on two wheels, with or without panniers. It wouldn’t have been possible without him.
By 2003, I was able to take my bike apart, pack it in a hard shell case, reassemble it, ride it all the way from Frankfurt to Vienna (meeting friends along the way), and get bike and me home without incident after almost a month on the road. As a humanities major with almost no technical aptitude, I've never been more proud of myself, and eternally grateful to Kevin for showing me how.
Our partnership was mutually reinforcing. We’d pause by a river, and I’d prattle on about a doomed revolutionary revolt in a neighboring town. Then Kevin would explain the hydraulics of the locks and dam we were observing. I’d score a brewery visit, and he’d calmly repair a spoke. Kevin had his life, and I had mine. Not all our interests intersected. When they did, life was great fun.
---
About those ghosts.
We brought our refurbished bicycles home yesterday, and as I rooted through the dusty gear untouched since before Kevin's death, it quickly became an emotional ordeal just filling the garbage can. His fingerprints are everywhere, stepping out of every shadow.
I’d only recently remarked to a friend that returning to the Public House can sometimes be challenging for me because of the ghosts; she asked if the ghosts haunt me, and I said no, not that. They accompany me. At times their presence is heavy enough to give me pause. It’s not so much individuals as the accumulated weight of the past. Most of the time my ghosts keep a socially respectful distance.
Then there’s yesterday.
Back in late 2015, maybe early 2016, during the period of my business divorce, I’d still be at the pub here and there and see Kevin, always in the usual “gee” spot, and eventually we started chatting about riding again. He’d been doing it. I needed to restart. We’d get the band back together, maybe even do Europe again.
It wasn’t to be, and there'll come a time when I accept it.
At some point after America’s COVID-19 pariah status finally dissipates, we’ll be in Europe somewhere (hopefully Belgium), rent bikes and say goodbye to Kevin again, preferably with a toast of Rochefort 10 Belgian Trappist ale, but I’ll be damned if I try to drink two of them and keep riding, as Kevin would have.
He was just showing off, and I loved him for it.
---
It isn’t the 60th birthday I’d have chosen, but it’s the one I’ll get on Monday, and that’s all right with me.
2020 has been the stuff of proliferating nightmares, and it’s easy to sense the pain, stupidity and avarice of the dipshits multiplying all around us.
D.I. Fred Thursday of British television’s Endeavor has advice, as he explained to D.C. Endeavor Morse early in the show’s run.
Morse: How do you do it? Leave it at the front door?
Thursday: 'Cause I have to. Case like this will tear a heart right out of a man. Find something worth defending.
Morse: I thought I had! Found something.
Thursday: Music? I suppose music is as good as anything. Go home. Put your best record on. Loud as it'll play.
And with every note, you remember: That's something the darkness couldn't take from you.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos aren't obscenely wealthy because they work harder but because their corporate empires drain society's resources – and we'd all be better off without them.
... In an interview the other day, I was asked why we should care about Jeff Bezos’ wealth if it makes everyone else better off. But the extreme inequalities generated by modern capitalism are making obvious something that Marxists have known for decades: the super-rich generate their wealth at the expense of workers, the planet and society as a whole.
In a rational and fair society, the vast resources of a tiny elite would be put to use solving our social problems.
The conservative response to COVID-19 has been defined by its heterogeneity: a blur of contradictory recriminations, confirmation biases, and conspiracy peddling.
... All told, there has been no coherent response to the COVID crisis from the right. But when it comes to conservative ideology, incoherence is a feature, not a bug. Where liberals fantasize that precedent and logic are binding forces in our political life—that there exists some epistemological authority that will arbitrate facts and fiction, punish those who’ve contradicted themselves, and reward those who have not—conservatives have long since abandoned such notions. Reactionary thought, as Corey Robin has argued, is dynamic and mutable by nature, responsive to minute changes in the political weather, sensitive to every threat to order and hierarchy, primed to spring into action to meet the discursive necessities of the moment.
Like many, I experienced acute frustration at Trump’s tweets in support of protests to “liberate” states from the onerous lockdowns he and his medical advisers have counseled. But it doesn’t matter. Contradiction is no obstacle. There is no New York Times bombshell or Mueller indictment or impeachment article coming to right the wrongs of Trump’s hypocrisy, no scorekeeper, no manager. There is only power, those who wield it, and those who are subject to it. This, at least, our gun-toting libertarian friends in Michigan understand. It will take wielding our own sort of power to escape this crisis with our communities intact and safe. What form that power could take, I don’t yet know ...
"A renewed global focus on racism is highlighting a violent colonial history that generated riches for Belgians but death and misery for Congolese."
Later that month:
King Philippe of Belgium on Tuesday expressed his “deepest regrets” for his country’s brutal past in a letter to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the first public acknowledgment from a member of the Belgian royal family of the devastating human and financial toll during eight decades of colonization.
The king’s letter, issued on the 60th anniversary of Congo’s independence, acknowledged the historical legacy and pointed out continuing issues of racism and discrimination, though it stopped short of the apology that some, including the United Nations, had asked for.
Among the legacies of Belgium's colonial experience called rightly into question is the "official" museum in Brussels, which has struggled to rebrand in recent years.
In Congo itself, it's perhaps surprising that there'd be a city with 100 surviving Art Deco structures. We harbor so many misconceptions about Africa. One is size; Congo is 3.5 times larger than Texas, and that's huge. It is striking, and also slightly puzzling, that some people in Bukavu view the legacy of these buildings as something worthy of protection. Maybe they view it in the context of cultural education. In spite of what I've been told the past few days, history is important.
In Bukavu, beautiful buildings have an ugly colonial history. But locals want to save them.
... Bukavu has more than 100 Art Deco buildings. Walking through its streets, you see geometric lines, chevron motifs, stepped rectangles, curved walls with cylindrical roofs. But most of these structures, with the notable exception of the Cathedral, are now dusty and beginning to crumble. “People used to call this city the ‘Switzerland of Congo,’” says Pierre Mpemba, 55, a local historian. “We were known for all these beautiful buildings. But that’s disappearing.”
Too often, this architectural history is forgotten in a city that outsiders associate with endangered gorillas, Africa’s First World War, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege, and the ongoing presence of humanitarian agencies and UN peacekeepers.
Beginning in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, Art Deco symbolized modernism, the technological future, the “machine age.” All clean and curved lines, geometric shapes, bright colors and glamour, the style was meant to signal wealth and sophistication. As it spread from Europe to places that Europeans colonized, it also symbolized and beautified imperial domination, according to scholars such as Swati Chattopadyay in the Routeledge Companion to Art Deco ...
My posts are being titled after songs. There may or may not be any connection with the content. After 14,988 blog posts, a little freshening up might help.
The Blue Green Mouse says that in response to the news of American Queen Steamboat Company's layoffs, City Hall has authorized a $50,000 HWC Engineering study to explain what the hell American Queen Steamboat Company even is to being with.
Narrator: A foundation of the downtown economy, that's all.
The American Queen Steamboat Company said in a Kentucky WARN notice that it will permanently lay off approximately 250 workers for two of its vessels, American Queen and American Empress. The first layoffs are slated to start by or near Sept. 24, according to the WARN notice.
WARN is short for the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988, which requires this sort of notice.
Look, everyone -- Mayor Greg Fischer is becoming famous for incompetence all over the world!
Bourbonism know longer means what you thought it did, but it raises an interesting point, because if Louisville becomes known for less savory conditions than an $8,000 bourbon flight at the new Churchill Downs steakhouse, and the mayor becomes a liability v.v. tourism, does he quit then?
... Now, there are calls for Louisville’s mayor, Greg Fischer, to resign, amid anger over the city’s reaction to protesters, the failure to fire police officers and a feeling that it took Breonna Taylor becoming a household name to get the city to start taking things seriously.
In a speech on Thursday, Fischer said he was “incredibly frustrated with the slow pace of justice in Breonna’s case”. He also announced that in future officer-involved shootings in the city, the Kentucky state police would be tasked with investigating instead of the LMPD investigating itself.
“Why does it take influencers waging a social media campaign for the mayor to step up?” said Drake. “That’s ridiculous. That shouldn’t be the case. You’re the leader. The fish rots from the head. And as the leader you did not lead this city, you failed this city.”
For those protesting, things in Louisville have to change and justice has to be served.
“There is no back to normal because black people have never known normal in Louisville,” said (Hannah) Drake.
My posts are being titled after songs. There may or may not be any connection with the content. After 14,986 blog posts, a little freshening up might help. ---
... For those who’ve always found their third spaces in eateries and watering holes, the months since have been challenging. There was, and remains, a palpable sense of confusion and loss – for a lifestyle, yes, although not only that – existing alongside similar sentiments pertaining to the pandemic in general.
Speaking only for my own household, it was not difficult to organize grocery pickups, head into the kitchen and begin cooking, augmented by occasional curbside carryouts. But something big had gone missing.
I believe this is true. Something Marty Rosen wrote in his column two weeks ago keeps coming back to me.
... There were times, early in my adult life, when cooking was normal – and dining in a restaurant was a rare and special thing. If people were flush, we might dine out once a week – and always based on a keen awareness of price, value, and quality. When I was a kid, it was a memorable treat to go to the Dizzy Whizz (well, really, it still is). Going to a sit-down restaurant was a strange and exotic experience. Even when I reached adulthood, dining at any “serious” restaurant – a place that took reservations, perhaps, or a place that had a wine list (gasp) was a rare and intimidating thing.
We'll eventually return to a version of what we had before. I'm doubtful it will be the same, though. It may be heresy to say this given my line of work, but I've greatly enjoyed cooking at home the past few pandemic months. The times we've gone the curbside carryout route have felt special. When we sit down in a restaurant again, some day, it's going to involve a great deal of gratitude.
For at least a few days, my posts are going to be identified by song titles. These will not necessarily have anything to do with the content of the post. However, this one does.
This version of "Jumpin' Punkins" is included in a 3-disc compilation, "The Blanton-Webster Band", which was released in 1990. Of course, it's digitized now. I've owned these CDs since around 1995, listening to them literally hundreds of times (again last week), and still I hear new bits. The period was Duke Ellington's creative zenith, almost every song is essential, and I'll always look to music, art and literature for inspiration in whatever business I'm pursuing.
Other people read spread sheets. Fuck that.
Mercer Ellington wrote Jumpin’ Punkins (1941) after being asked by his father, Duke, to join the band as a writer. It is believed that even though Mercer composed several compositions during this two-year period, Duke actually arranged this chart for the Ellington Orchestra himself. This accounts for the near perfect adherence to many stylistic concepts of harmony and voicing used by Duke during this period. This composition also contains the swing feel and style of many other Ellington Orchestra recordings of this time. The parallel voicing of the chromatic clarinet and baritone sax melodies are very refarm-near-me/">miniscent of many Duke Ellington compositions. The 32 bar form with a 20 bar interlude has blues and dance feel as its major focus. Still, the main emphasis of this composition is to showcase the greatness of the individual performers in the Ellington Orchestra including Duke Ellington on piano, Harry Carney on baritone sax, Jimmy Blanton on bass, Barney Bigard on clarinet, and Sonny Greer on drums. It seems obvious that this composition was specifically written for the dance era because of the traditional dance swing rhythms employed throughout, yet it is also a great vehicle for soloists.
Fast forward to now, and Joe Dunman on well-mannered left-wing protest movements (again at Twitter: @JoeDunman).
---
I'm a broken record on this but any serious reading about coups, uprisings, riots, and assassinations through global history will make you really appreciate how polite and patient American left-wing protest movements really are. Modern right-wing protest movements, on the other hand, are bloody as hell. Spree killings, assassinations, bombings, beatings, you name it. The anti-abortion movement alone is an endless string of violent behavior. An incomplete list of victims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence That doesn't mean there's been NO left-wing violence, of course. There's been some. But compare the damage a crowd of thousands can do to what amount of damage they've actually done and it's really striking how passive they are. The thousands of people now showing up nightly in Portland could very easily and very quickly take and destroy that federal building. Instead they play endless games of chemical weapons tag with a couple dozen goons in riot gear. It is estimated that 500k people showed up to the Women's March in DC in early 2017. Do you know what 500k people can't do? Nothing. They can do anything they want, if they work together in even the loosest possible way. Instead, signs and slogans, and everybody went home. Mayors Wheeler and Frey and Fischer still walk freely around their cities with the barest security if any at all. They don't fear retaliation from demonstrators, and rightly so, because demonstrators have shown no interest in extra-institutional forms of justice. Historically speaking, this is really something. Hell, lynchings were (and perhaps still are) a regular occurrence in America. Violent mob justice is part of our culture. And yet, protesters' demands are limited to institutional calls for action. Arrest the cops! Defund them! Of course the counter-rhetoric paints protesters as lawless and destructive in cartoonish ways. But if the protesters were as violent as they've been portrayed, there probably wouldn't be any cops left to arrest. No departments to defund. No mayors left to resign.
---
(for the next few days, I'll be titling my posts after songs. That should confuse them even more)
It took laborious behind-the-scenes lobbying to convince New Albany's city council Democrats to approve a toothless face covering/mask resolution, an eloquent statement of abdication. This done, a committee of customary suspects was appointed to consider a "heavier" ordinance, and all involved -- including the mayor, who'd also done precisely zilch -- breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing of substance had occurred, and responsibility was deferred.
(As an aside, now I'm hoping that maybe, just maybe, they'll return to the ordinance idea. They might.)
But, still: The score begins Nothing 1, Something 0.
Then, after President Trump emerged from his Twitter war room in a state of consciousness suitable to tepidly support the wearing of face coverings/masks, Governor Eric Holcomb, a Republican, decreed a statewide mandate for Indiana, to begin a week after his announcement, this delay coming because -- well, there's all the time in the world, I suppose.
Nothing 1, Something 0, but with a runner on base.
Then, after standing by for weeks, Dr. Thomas Harris read the governor's proclamation and belatedly discovered the effectiveness of face coverings/masks, issuing his own Floyd County Health Department writ mandating masks to take effect three days in advance of Holcomb's order.
Nothing 1, Something 0, but with another runner on base.
Today, Holcomb signed an executive order mandating face coverings/masks, but without any semblance of an enforcement mechanism. Subsequently it was revealed that Harris's order also is absent any teeth, and what the hell, it didn't matter anyway, because both the sheriff (Frank Loop, R) and the police chief (Todd Bailey, D) -- in agreement for the first time in living memory -- conceded their shared disinterest in enforcing ANY such law.
Let's see -- double play, then a runner picked off; Nothing comes to bat and blasts home runs on two straight pitches.
Nothing 3, Something 0. Game over. Pandemic very much NOT over.
I ask, again: if politicians are not going to muster the simple courage demanded of them by their oaths, and expend the necessary political capital to help the populace stay safe DURING A PANDEMIC, then when, exactly, do they feel that the proper time might actually be?
This is why I detest the two-party system with every last fiber of my being.
Our elected officials from both parties have combined to incessantly politicize public health during this crisis, and to hand us a document written in invisible ink. But I must say in utter candor that the GOP, in charge of "governing" throughout the state, bears more of the sad burden of ignominy.
Let's call the non-outcome Triple Secret Probation.
Better yet, why not refer to it as a DEAD LETTER. After all, their combined non-efforts will lead to Hoosiers ... that's right, dying.
(for the next few days, I'll be titling my posts after songs. That should confuse them even more)
The Democrats, says President Trump, are going to destroy the suburbs ... so what, exactly, does destroying the suburbs entail?
Think: zoning.
Taken at face value, this is a bizarre policy choice for the Republican Party, both in its pre-2016 social conservatism and free-marketism and in its post-2016 Trumpian populism. Upzoning — allowing construction of buildings with more units or more nonresidential units than was previously permitted in a given area — seems like it should fit the GOP agenda.
It's a move toward greater economic freedom and stronger property rights. It can lower housing prices and make homeownership more accessible, especially for young couples who struggle to afford both home and kids. (A brief dig through the archives of the conservative Heritage Foundation turns up years of praise for Houston's unusual lack of zoning restrictions on exactly these grounds, and The American Conservative regularly publishes arguments for upzoning, including advocacy for doing away with single-family zoning altogether.) Also, having a granny flat means you might actually live with your granny, who can pass along familial traditions and help with childcare, a very attractive option amid pandemic. Surely this is the kind of pro-family, even pro-natalist policy Republicans ought to like. Why is Trump railing against it?
Because polls show the suburbs losing interest in Trump.
In those remarks and an even shorter comment on the subject three days prior, Trump singled out an Obama-era rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which Biden supports and which Trump promised to repeal. That repeal arrived Thursday. The adfarm-near-me/">ministration characterizes it as a strike for freedom, federalism, and family. It is none of those things.
AFFH didn't "force" municipalities to do anything, as some conservatives have alleged. It mainly set conditions on some federal housing and transportation subsidies. (Suburbia is very subsidy-dependent.) It told local governments that to receive cash from Washington, they'd have to meet certain requirements, most notably ending single-family zoning. But single-family zoning isn't the creature of local self-governance Trump suggests. It originated significantly because of a previous set of conditions for different federal subsidies — subsidies, in fact, introduced by the archetypical Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministration: the New Deal-era White House of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
We've been talking about suburban subsidies for as long as the NA Confidential blog has existed. Take it away, Charles Marohn.
"[S]ingle-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt adfarm-near-me/">ministration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance," explains Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, a new urbanism advocacy organization. "So, [AFFH said,] suburban governments, you won't get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then," he continues. "And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?"
It makes no sense.
Ah, but there's even more to it.
In addition to being heavily subsidized in both construction and ongoing maintenance, much of suburbia was shaped by 20th-century housing and highway policies that implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly functioned to segregate American homes. "White flight" was not merely an organic movement of private prejudice and social fashion. It was in no small part engineered by federal policies, as Richard Rothstein has meticulously documented in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
"To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford," Rothstein writes. Some of this was classism, he notes, but some of it was done with "open racial intent."
This, might we suggest, is the underlying reason for the suburb hubbub.
The Obama adfarm-near-me/">ministration's AFFH rule focused on the residue of that deliberate segregation, and Trump's critique of it hasn't untangled the issue of federal manipulation of local policies from the issue of racist zoning. That makes it plausible to see his talk of single-family zoning as the bastion of suburban integrity as implicitly part of an older tradition of state-enforced racism. It's not unreasonable to wonder if being "invaded by negroes" is what Trump means when he deplores watching a "beautiful suburb ... go to hell."
If you have not previously read Marohn's articles about the Growth Ponzi Scheme, as published at Strong Towns, then now is the ideal time.
The underpinnings of the current financial crisis lie in a living arrangement—the American pattern of development—that does not financially support itself.
If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth.
Our national economy is "all in" on the suburban experiment. We cannot sustain the trajectory we are on, but we've gone too far down the path to turn back.
How did we build such an amazing place before the home mortgage interest deduction? How did we accomplish this before zoning? What created this place before we had state and federal subsidies of local water and sewer systems? We began writing about the Growth Ponzi Scheme in 2011 with a prominent series of articles that outlined the way American cities, towns and neighborhoods were growing themselves into insolvency. Since then, the Growth Ponzi Scheme has been discussed in numerous publications. The term, as we've defined it, continues to be widely used and cited.
I like the idea of beginning the column with music. Thank you for the idea, Charles P. Pierce.
Meanwhile, they hath stolen my damn thunder.
I'd been preparing a sermon about the path of the righteous masked man, and how it is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil unmasked men.
Then these Republicans went and canceled me.
First it was Indiana’s Governor Eric Holcomb, followed by the Floyd County Health Department chief Dr. Thomas Harris.
Holcomb’s statewide mask mandate starts on Monday, but once the potential for heat from the home office in Indy was reduced, Dr. Tom at long last implemented a must-mask decree here, to begin tomorrow (Friday, July 24).
Enquiring minds want to know: What on earth took Dr. Tom so long?
Back in 2013 he was willing to fight for two entire YEARS for the health department’s inalienable “right” to regulate breweries pouring cups of beer at outdoor events.
... On July 1, 2015, when a "beer bill" authored by Rep. Ed Clere officially becomes state law, it will be demonstrated for a third (and we trust final) time that the FCHD and its head, Dr. Tom Harris, were mistaken all along.
The new law is clear and explicit, as based on the two preceding legal precedents, both hitherto ignored by the FCHD.
All thanks to Ed Clere. His hard work in compelling local government functionaries to obey their own laws will not be forgotten, especially by me.
I digress, of course, but not before adding an important addendum.
The preceding events occurred between 2013 and 2015. They’re minor in relative terms compared with a pandemic, and yet it behooves me to note that when conditions, facts and realities on the ground change, we’re obliged to change with them.
Ask me a year ago what I thought about masks, and I’d likely to have shrugged and described them as comical. Now I’m not laughing.
Let’s be clear about these mask mandates.
They are an unqualified good.
---
The available evidence has long since convinced all but the most strident of dogma-driven refuseniks that we are in the midst of a coronavirus public health emergency. Sorry, Ayn Randians; the coronavirus itself has proven to be notoriously indifferent to the philosophy of objectivism.
Reputable scientific opinion existing outside our partisan propaganda silos is consistent and persuasive; COVID-19 is not the customary seasonal flu, and we’ve thoroughly botched our response to it.
The pandemic is not “going away” on its own, and if we can yet muster a coherent collective response, perhaps lives can be saved and post-COVID after-effects on personal health reduced.
Truth is truth. I needn’t have mentioned one of the worst novelists in recent American history to support the point.
Moreover, it serves no purpose to refer to the stock market, presidential elections, the purported expertise of rogue orthodontists who have found a link between Chinese viruses and the Trilateral Commission, or the way that social media renders both libtards and fascists into evil incarnate depending on the way the light bounces from mirrors none of us seem interested in using any longer.
As for the bizarre and almost purely American-derived "issue" of face masks, I support their use. Block, mute and unfriend to your heart's content. I’m satisfied with the testimony of trained medical authorities possessing long years of experience. Masks strike me as helpful and courteous in a time of pandemic. You and I can work together to keep a percentage of spray particles to ourselves. It's not a panacea; nothing is. It helps, and that's good.
Early on, as the merits of masks in spaces where social distance is harder to achieve became increasingly obvious, I noticed how few of the denizens of downtown New Albany were wearing them. Among them were many folks who in one way or another are “official,” or somehow consider themselves among the societal vanguard in some dimension – indie biz advocates, city employees and retail personnel, as examples.
It’s gotten gradually better since.
However, what I thought to myself at the time is that being part of any solution, great or small, implies the acceptance of holding yourself to whatever standards you’re touting. The old-school terminology is being a “role model,” and being a role model means bad actors need not apply.
If I go for a walk in the neighborhood when no one else is out, or am inside my own car, those are low-intensity examples. I’ll have my mask with me, just in case it is needed. But when I’m downtown, where many more people are out and about; if my employer’s admirable sense of professionalism and conscience precluded him from reopening his pub until he could make it as safe an experience as humanly possible, then it’s incumbent on me to wear the mask.
You know, being a positive role model.
That’s been easy, because wearing a mask isn’t political unless you’ve no better way to squander misspent brain cells. It’s about courtesy and public health in an uncommon period. A mask doesn’t violate my manhood or cause me to grow wool and go “baaahh.” I don’t have a finely waxed Rollie Fingers handlebar mustache to display in the hope of causing the fairer sex to swoon. Masks are fine with me, for no other reason than a way of pitching in.
It’s true that various economic theorists of the Narcissism as Economic Dishevelment have proven wonderfully capable of deconstructing the concept of “community” completely and putting it out of existence, and yet when I look outside, that’s what I see. A community. I don’t accept the foolishness of the selfish. I trust my own two eyes, and I believe in being a good actor as opposed to a soul-sapping malignancy with skeletons in the closet.
Maybe you had a different sort of upbringing, and if so, my sincerest condolences.
---
Holcomb’s and Harris’ mask directives surely pleased the ever-calculating grandees of the Floyd County Democratic Party. If the three-percenter anti-mask jihadists run amok, Democrats can blame the Republicans. If tantrum-prone adult snowflakes suddenly get the memo and decide to mask up, the Democrats can point to their toothless city council resolution and claim to have gotten there first.
Come what may, we should try not to forget that since the pandemic shutdown was launched on March 16, municipal Democrats have controlled all levers of local governance. They have a city council majority and hold the mayor’s office. Their appointees populate every board that matters and others that don't. Seldom before has so much power been held by so few at the apex of the pyramid.
If they have no intention whatever of using this power, would they mind if I borrowed it for the weekend?
There are literally dozens of proactive measures Democrats might have implemented these past five months to address the pandemic, but apart from an early and short-lived meal subsidy for displaced restaurant workers, signage for curbside parking and city anchor sticker logos slapped crookedly on canisters of hand sanitizer produced at Starlight Distillery, very little has been said or done except for irregular social media requests for the citizenry to be nice and behave itself.
In noting these facts, I’m foregoing polemics. No, really -- I am. Go to the News and Tribune web site, perform a few simple searches, and see so for yourself. Here in New Albany, agoraphobia and detachment remain the political orders of the day, both in sickness and health.
You're advised to believe me when I say that this time around, because of the way a pandemic fundamentally changes the nature of the playing field, I thought maybe for once ... just once ... local Democrats would rally the cadres and rise to the occasion.
I thought wrong, and it’s very depressing. Lucy pulled back the football. The crickets have chirped. The sound of pins dropping is like thunder, and somewhere, a lonely mutt bays at the indignity of it all.
Come November, Donald Trump will yet again win the city, almost surely by at least a 15% margin, probably more, illustrating that quite a few theoretical “Democrats” who voted for the incumbent mayor in 2019 will (again) opt for an abominable failure of a president in 2020.
How do they sleep at night, these "democrats"? It's been eight years; still, hope springs eternal. I cling to that most faint of pulses, the one suggesting that there'll come a time when they actually remember what it means to be democratic.
---
While we’re on the topic of institutional memory, did you know that National Cognitive Dissonance Day is the oldest public holiday in the United States?
It has been running 24/7/365 since July 4, 1776 (or thereabouts), when the clever rhetorical hocus pocus contrived by wealthy slave owners and wealthy rum trade merchants working together to pontificate about human rights in theory, while acting to enshrine property rights in reality, made lasting hypocrites out of us all.
I've likely said this before, but it bears repeating.
When the pandemic's lock-down doo-doo hit the fan blades, many in the local food and drink business were either catatonic (and understandably so; my empathy for them abounds), or, bizarrely, eager to dismiss hundreds of years of scientific achievement at the drop of a narcissistic and self-serving cap (purely inexcusable, then as now).
That's when the LEE Initiative made the biggest pivot of all and organized in a remarkably short time to help people who were in need.
What a concept.
Joe Phillips followed suit at Pints&union. He put people before profit and ran toward the fire. He converted the business into The Lee Initiative's relief outpost in SoIN. He ran himself ragged during the "business as usual" down time. He wasn't coming in every day and asking whether he was getting the credit and publicity. He did what was right, when it was needed.
Now Joe is doing it again, in conjunction with Steven Cavanaugh, our new general manager. Pints&union has safety protocols and socially-distanced indoor occupancy. We are enforcing safety, and our patrons get it. They know it's better to err on the side of caution during a public health emergency than to be the agent of dysfunction. We know better than to relax, but so far, it's going well.
Speaking personally, it is a joy to be an employee in an atmosphere like this, one of integrity and respect.
Here's what Joe had to say about it in a recent Edible Kentucky & Southern Indiana magazine article.
When the COVID-19 quarantine shut down local restaurants in March, we were devastated and silent. We all knew it was coming, but to know it’s knocking at your door is a very different reality than watching others face it on social media or television. We were shell-shocked for two days—then realized we needed to get back to work, somehow.
Knowing our perishable food would go bad, we donated it to our workers who were suddenly out of work. We needed a sense of purpose; we needed to give back to the workers who have been providing hospitality to our communities every day for years.
Chef Edward Lee and Lindsey Ofcacek, founders of the LEE Initiative, gave us that opportunity with the Restaurant Workers Relief Program. Thanks to a donation from Maker’s Mark Distillery, we gathered essential household items and served hot meals to feed laid off restaurant workers and their families every day. There are no words to fully describe what it felt like to experience the gratitude of the many service workers who received support and love during this scary time. With additional donations, we joined forces with 610 Magnolia, Lee’s flagship Louisville restaurant, to serve Louisville industry workers while still keeping tabs on the people we served in New Albany, Indiana. The streets were empty but our hearts were full, serving over 200 people per week. The program expanded to 18 other cities in the U.S., providing over 275,000 meals.
Moving forward, we are working with the LEE Initiative’s Restaurant Reboot Relief Program, a $1 million commitment to purchase produce from local farmers for restaurants to create more sustainable food supply chains. Restaurants that have hosted restaurant-worker relief centers will receive the food and help select other local restaurants to participate.
This remains a trying time for all of us. I have witnessed firsthand amazing beauty from great loss. I have seen open doors and hearts, open minds and people united for a greater sense of purpose. We look forward to enduring this time, coming out stronger together.
Be well,
Joe Phillips, Owner Pints & Union Restaurant
114 East Market St.
New Albany, IN 47150
812.913.4647
Learn more about The LEE Initiative Restaurant Relief Program, Restaurant Reboot Relief Program, McAtee Community Kitchen, Restaurant Regrow Program and Women Chefs Program.
The southernmost point of Florida I've ever reached is Orlando; we were there for a reunion and I didn't get anywhere close to Disney-anything.
In fact, the only time I've ever visited a beach in Florida was 1983 (I think) in Pensacola. The past six to eight weeks I've looked on with fascination and a sizable element of horror as quite a few people I know have made it a point to hit the beach in Florida at precisely the same time as COVID cases began exponentially increasing there.
I'll now spend months, perhaps years, wondering just what the fuck these people were thinking, or if they were thinking at all.
But none of this has anything to do with Miami, a city I'm fairly confident will never make it to my bucket list.
Trieste ... now there's a seaside city that appeals to me.
Miami’s bleak future on the front line of climate change
... It is this almost gauche dramatic irony that sits at the heart of Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe, a new book by the journalist Mario Alejandro Ariza. A nearly lifelong Miamian who has spent years reporting on the city’s political and environmental troubles, Ariza sets out at the start of the book to draft a kind of reported prognosis for his hometown, knowing full well that the final result won’t be encouraging. In the course of his investigation, he bops around from court hearings to mangrove forests to nonprofit offices, consulting with dozens of different experts and advocates to get a sense of just how much time the city has left. The conclusions are about what you would expect: the city is going to fall apart, the poor are going to get hit hardest, and things are going to get very grim if the federal government doesn’t step in to help.
snip
... As he sketches out the myriad threats to the Magic City’s survival, what Ariza shows most convincingly is that Miami is utterly unique, the product of a world-historical combination of bad decisions. What will make life in the city unsustainable over the next century is not a rise in sea levels or an uptick in ocean temperatures but the spatial and social dynamics of Miami itself. The climate crisis, in other words, has merely exposed the rot that was already there.
The factors contributing to Miami’s near-term collapse are so numerous that it would be futile to list them all here, and indeed Ariza himself struggles to fit it all in over three hundred pages, zipping from flawed septic systems to threatened ecosystems to racist urban planning. Ultimately, the city’s original sin is the fact that it was ever built ...
Does it even matter which one? They all look and write the same.
Now that I have your attention, perhaps the ugliest of the 1960s-era bank buildings downtown, most of which were erected atop lots made vacant by the bulldozing of 19th-century architectural gems -- this being what the Warren Nash generation regarded as "progress," and why they shouldn't be trusted -- soon will be emptied.
Just look at all that space wasted for storing cars, as opposed to productive economic-enhancement possibilities. Daniel Suddeath explains and interviews a local rock star for good measure. (But they're not really rock stars, are they?)
Today's article appeared at Jacobin about a year later, and the topic still fascinates me.
No Scrubs ... an interview, by Meagan Day, with Kristen R. Ghodsee (Jacobin)
In her new book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee recounts a popular joke that’s told in many East European languages:
In the middle of the night a woman screams and jumps out of bed, eyes filled with terror. Her startled husband watches her rush into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. She then dashes to the kitchen and inspects the inside of the refrigerator. Finally she flings open a window and gazes out onto the street below their apartment. She takes a deep breath and returns to bed.
“What’s wrong with you?” her husband says. “What happened?”
“I had a terrible nightmare,” she says. “I dreamed that we had the medicine we needed, that our refrigerator was full of food, and that the streets outside were safe and clean.”
“How is that a nightmare?”
The woman shakes her head and shudders. “I thought the Communists were back in power.”
Hundreds of millions of living Eastern Europeans, including many who abhorred the political reality behind the Iron Curtain, report that their basic standard of living was higher under authoritarian socialism than under contemporary free-market capitalism. Taking a cue from them, Ghodsee’s book starts from the premise that some aspects of life were better under twentieth-century state socialism than they are today, even as others were worse. Appreciating the bad parts doesn’t require ignoring the good parts, her thinking goes. One can acknowledge simultaneously the horrors of the secret police and the comforts of a strong social safety net.
One of the most positive features of state socialism, Ghodsee argues, is that it gave women economic independence from men ...
... This zippy little book argues that not only is unregulated capitalism bad in itself, it is also disproportionately bad for women.
The US academic Kristen Ghodsee has lived in several eastern European countries so she doesn’t wear rose-tinted spectacles, acknowledging that Albania and Romania have always been awful places for women, but she seeks with great brio and nuance to lay out what some socialist states achieved for women.
At heart this is about what happens when women are no longer economically dependent on men and childcare is collectivised ...
NA Confidential's mask-free policy on reader comments.
NA Confidential believes in a higher bar than is customary in the blogosphere, and follows a disclosure policy with respect to reader comments.
First, you must be registered with blogger.com according to the procedures specified. This is required not as a means of directing traffic to blogger.com, but to reduce the lamentable instances of flaming and personal attacks on the part of the anonymous.
Second, although pen names are perfectly acceptable, senior editor Roger A. Baylor must be informed of your identity, and according to your preference, it will be kept confidential.
To reiterate, I insist upon this solely to lessen the frequency of malicious anonymity, which unfortunately plagues certain other blogs hereabouts.
You may e-mail Roger at the address given within his profile and explain who you are. Failure to comply means that your comments probably will be deleted -- although the final decision remains ours.
Thanks for reading, and please consider becoming a part of the community here, one that is respectful of the prerequisites of civilized discourse, and that seeks to engage visitors in substantive dialogue.
