What I do want to nudge you to consider is this: everything you are passionate about at the national level has a local analog that needs your attention. -- Charles Marohn (
Strong Towns; "
It's All Local Now")
No, there haven't been any columns lately, and very few posts. This is to be considered a status report.
As confided previously, this blog is being allowed to wither on the vine. There's a place and time for everything, and 15,000+ posts during 16 years are enough. This particular soapbox is being dismantled. Another will be erected elsewhere, although it will not be entirely the same. ON THE AVENUES will make the transition. Beyond that, I'm unsure.
It is an oft-told story, but worth a quick rehash. NA Confidential arose from my deep frustration with the (seeming) pointlessness of political involvement at the "macro" level of nation state. Hours, days, and years arguing about what should happen "up there," but no real way to be heard or to influence the outcome. It's actually easier that way; it absolves the individual from doing anything about it except talk.
This was in 2004, and as the presidential contest approached (W's re-election would be a bitter disappointment), I decided to look out the front door, down the three-lane, one-way racetrack running past our house, and see what could be done at the grassroots "micro" level.
As noted, this change of focus played out over an unexpectedly lengthy period. Here's something I wrote at Fb yesterday, as we await confirmation that Trump has been dumped:
I thought this would be an excellent time to announce a return to active local participation, much like the Dick Nixon account at Twitter, given that I feel little different than I did in 2004 when W's re-election turned my interest toward the street outside.
Then it occurred to me that it took 13 years of local participation to turn this one-way street to two ways. That's right: 13 years.
Furthermore, since I'm not a Republican and am still effectively blackballed (blackmailed?) into silence by reigning DemoDisneyDixiecrats -- whose stripes haven't changed since Tuesday -- there's no pathway available to me to do much of anything apart from coded commentary, a nice reading list, plenty of alcohol and the occasional sausage.
Okay, so be it; consequently, the new web site will be called Expatriate in Place, or Open Air Exile, or something like that.
I'll be delighted when Trump departs. But it's the same unforgivingly stupid Nawbany outside these four walls.
It appears Joe Biden will win the election, but I'm not "celebrating" one damn thing beyond the singular and profound relief afforded by NOT being compelled to listen to Donald Trump's nonsensical, narcissistic bleating and babbling every single day of my life.
I have almost no confidence that the Democratic Party, as currently configured, can do much of anything positive in the years to come. My position has been, and remains, that in spite of differing appearances, our two major political parties are conjoined in their duopoly. If they both can’t be vaporized at once, one must collapse and the other will soon follow.
And I don’t care which one goes first.
Consequently, I have as little interest now, as in 2004, in wasting time debating broad macro topics with no conceivable way of being heard. But locally, the pillars of the community have me effectively blockaded, scourged and blacklisted, primarily because of the past 16 years I've spent reminding them of their tendency to be utterly without clothes (politically and in terms of consciousness, not -- heaven forbid -- in the sense of public nudity).
They're all in favor of truth, until the truth is they're undereducated, incompetent, and in many instances outright venal. It shatters their self-delusions, and they get touchy (but not feely). Tough shit, although I'll concede there's a price to be paid when you're the one spotted holding a ball-peen hammer.
What happens next? I don't know, and neither do you.
History has shown, time and again, that absolute certainty is a fool's errand. The pandemic already has proven that everything we take for granted and flip overnight into an entirely different reality.
So I plan to be loitering around the perimeter for while, working my two jobs, scanning the landscape, and forever mindful of the year 2015, when the incumbent mayor tried ineffectually to
take a swipe at me: "Roger’s never done anything in a positive manner to help the city of New Albany.”
In 2017, I explained
why he's completely full of shit in making this assertion, because he never spent a single day in his life being entrepreneurial with his own money, and I mention his haplessly ignorant words now only because they're a powerful reminder that there are numerous ways outside ruling elites, social cliques and "the HWC fix is in" to be involved, accomplish things, make a difference and agitate for change.
One of my favorite W.C. Fields stories may or may not be true, but it's a good one about the comedian on his deathbed.
As the end approached, on that Christmas Day in 1946, an old writer-friend named Gene Fowler entered the hospital room and there was Fields, a self-admitted agnostic, thumbing through a Bible.
“What are you doing, Bill?” asked the incredulous Fowler.
“I’m looking for loopholes,” Fields whispered.
Pretty much. NAC can die, because it will make the dipshits happy, and as such, it's my loving gift to them.
Me? I'm looking for loopholes.
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