Ah, the foolish delusions of youth.
Displaying the guileless eagerness of a fresh military recruit going into battle for the very first time, I began attending New Albany city council meetings in 2005, concurrently submitting to engagement in all sorts of grassroots public meetings.
After a few months thrashing through this stinking, fetid swamp, my only goal in life became finding a nice, dry branch to hang on to.
My persistence in indulging this gavel-pounding, head-throbbing, BDSM-like fetish for social dysfunction subsequently extended far past the point when most normal people would have been forcibly loaded onto the padded taxi for a no-expenses-paid visit to Fantasy Island.
It’s a testament to my sheer, stubborn cantankerousness that I never became one of the zombie drones, although not unlike formaldehyde, copious quantities of beverage alcohol certainly helped preserve my sanity.
Then in 2019, lest the gateway martinis lead me down a path to heroin, I withdrew from the fray. After 15 years, I finally reached a sensible conclusion that as long as undemocratic Democrats ruled the municipal roost, there’d never be improvement. Rehabilitation proceeds apace.
But those outlandish nightmares of King Larry Kochert ogling my leotards?
They’ll last forever.
One lesson from this era of trauma and self-harm also stays with me, because whenever Floyd County politicians belonging to either major political party suddenly cite an alarming lack of information as a reason to delay acting, even when the vital information deemed essential has reposed for weeks and maybe months atop a case of Bud Light Kumquat-A-Rita in their dens—in Bob Caesar’s case, immediately adjacent to the “missing” crate containing his Bicentennial Commission financial records—it invariably leads to two closely related outcomes.
Their sleeves are being tugged by self-appointed pillars (read: fixers) of the community … and as a result, an embarrassing retrograde maneuver is in the offing. Given my pre-retirement history of gleefully exposing the dismal antics of New Albany's DemoDisneyDixiecrats, currently extinct beyond city limits, many heads will be nodding in anticipation of the usual verbiage directed against Adam’s Ants.
Not this time.
Instead, let’s take a journey to the other side of the aisle, and consider our information-deprived county commissioners, Republicans all: Shawn Carruthers, John Schellenberger and Tim Kamer.
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Dear reader, unless you’re a complete imbecile, you've grasped with clarity and certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic has entered a particularly gruesome stage as the holiday season approaches.
Consider the self-inflicted wounds of Indiana’s governor, Eric Holcomb. After more than seven months of futility spent trying to thread the GOP’s culture-wide needle of pandemic denial, even as his predecessor Mike Pence stood off to the side, maskless, breathing vapid scripture into his eyeglasses, Holcomb opened, then partially closed, and finally conceded his own impotence in declaring a new color-coded system to put COVID mitigation measures into the hands of local county officials.
Just think how much Holcomb’s late autumn devolution might have helped had it been implemented in April. Perhaps he was frightened by the Libertarian insurgency in the gubernatorial race. Pence might have been distracted by the need to find a new job. None of it would matter if not for the potential for a worse pandemic than we already experienced, and presently are witnessing.
Now, in November, for all intents and purposes, COVID-era devolution means that local unelected county officials are being charged with formulating and enforcing policies pertaining to the pandemic.
There’s the rub.
With the vast majority of Indiana’s elected Republicans, as well as a far larger percentage of minority Democrats than you might imagine, all unwilling to risk leadership during an election-year public health crisis, but yearning to preserve their electoral viability for future pandering, the magical solution is to put unpopular decisions in the hands of folks like Dr. Thomas Harris, chief of the Floyd County Health Department.
Frequent readers will recall the infamous "Pour Gate" scandal in 2013 (
see here for a full account), when Dr. Harris sought to exceed his agency’s statutory limitations and was wrestled to the ground and repelled by a holy coalition of Hoosiers. Obviously, Dr. Harris and I are not bosom buddies, and quite likely won’t ever be.
However, 2013 and 2020 are one hundred and seven years apart.
It was reported last week that Dr. Harris has been approved to serve another term by the health department board, a decision customarily "certified" by the three Floyd County Commissioners (as noted, all are Republican).
However, the certification was tabled, with Kamer, the least experienced commissioner, stepping forward as de facto spokesman to cite the telltale absence of critical information. Carruthers and Schellenberger merely confined themselves to disinterested nods, and transparency crawled off to die.
The optics of the unanticipated delay couldn’t be much worse for the commissioners, given that earlier in the week Dr. Harris has announced tighter pandemic restrictions on restaurants and bars, still more timid than those taken in surrounding states, and yet a step in the right direction.
Unless, of course, you’re among the whack-jobs who still deny the efficacy of
any pandemic restrictions, or the existence of COVID itself. Whether the three commissioners do or don’t embrace science is a question we can’t answer, although their haste in stalling Dr. Harris’s reappointment seems to me an irrefutable clue. After all, one of them is the Republican Party’s county chairman.
Scuttlebutt meanwhile suggests their arms are being twisted by Republican grandees besotted with lunatic fringe Kool-Aid and evangelical Christianity; perhaps Dr. Harris failed to properly fill out the Right to Life questionnaire, or forgot to put a MAGA sign in his yard.
Or, as my friend Occam suggests, it’s exactly as it seems, and local Republicans are terrified lest they be viewed as surrendering to nasty masked liberals who worship George Soros.
Freedom! Liberty! Mass infections and an early death to grandma!
Well, you know, the stock market
rules.
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As many of you are aware, I’m employed part-time by a restaurant, and have another part-time job writing about restaurants. When Dr. Harris usurped his department's power in 2013, I spent two years fighting against him, and winning, because he was wrong—and quite a few Republicans agreed, and did the heavy lifting required.
However, I fully support the measures announced last week by Dr. Harris to address the pandemic’s spread. They’re something, as opposed to nothing, and also necessary, as opposed to Disney World.
In point of fact, Harris’s actions during a single day last week shot this unelected official straight to the top of the local leadership board, seeing as leadership from
elected officeholders has been even more AWOL than usual since March.
Yes, city council passed a toothless resolution, and two weeks ago, the mayor attached his name to a ludicrously belated social media pronouncement divulging his lightbulb-above-noggin recognition of the pandemic, and urging citizens to mask up and distance themselves. News travels slowly into the shadowy bowels of the bunker, and it only took hundreds of days, but better late than never.
We needn't elaborate as to what local elected Republicans have done concerning COVID, since as Billy Preston once reminded us, nothing from nothing leaves … nothing.
Dr. Harris exercised a semblance of leadership, and his Republican handlers immediately hung him out to dry. It isn’t a coincidence. They inhabit a political belief system that would have exiled Dr. Anthony Fauci before Memorial Day if not checked. Many of them are entangled in religious superstition that would have been right at home in Spain during the Inquisition. We stream music via weird and mysterious invisible waves; they spin 78-rpm discs coated with shellac.
Dear reader, if you espouse human reason, and respect the veracity of the scientific method, I suggest you query the commissioners as to what sort of petty game they're playing, and who is issuing their marching orders. Their phone numbers are
here, although not their e-mail addresses.
Not surprising, is it?
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