ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

A few of us were chatting last evening at the pub, and before I go any further, allow me to observe how wonderful it is to have such a pub for relaxation over tasty beers and meaningful words.

For me, the experience these past few nights has been like one of those caper flicks when the gang comes back together for a final heist, and of course my personal preference is that this long-awaited reunion of the like-minded, once launched, lasts a very long time.

Profuse thanks to those of you who’ve dropped into Pints&union for a beer, a cocktail, a bite, or just to look around. Joe Phillips and his staff still have sawdust in their nostrils, and there are dozens of details in need of attention; however, the results thus far have been overwhelmingly positive.

Now comes the long march forward in the general direction of a legacy, and as much as one might like to speed this process of timelessness, it simply can’t be done.

It’s like watching a tree grow or a barrel of bourbon age. Human nature must be allowed to take its course, and at some indeterminate point down the road, the fledgling notion is declared a valued tradition, and deserves it. If you have to ask when this will occur, it’s possible you’ll never understand it.

The same can be said about building a community. These things take sweat, patience and time – hence last evening’s conversation.

There’ll always be gossip, intrigue and strangeness; we’re humans, after all, but it seems to me that at present the downtown New Albany food, drink and dining community hasn’t ever been closer. This also might be said of the independent business community as a whole.

This is critical, because as I’ve noted on numerous occasions in the past, and as Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said, independent businesses in a setting like downtown New Albany must hang together – or most assuredly, we all will hang separately.

New Albany is a city of 37,000, and a Louisville metropolitan neighborhood; it is not a tourist destination in itself, although thoughtful strategy and tactics can leverage the advantages and minimize the shortcomings.

Food, drinking and dining options make up one economic and cultural segment of many pertaining to the city as a whole, and yet their concentration downtown is a marketable asset in a way Summit Springs cannot ever be.

In this context, food and drink establishments are obliged to be the guardians of their own reputations, and since the collective entity wields vastly more influence than its components, we need to work together.

Despite the potholes, I remain bullish about the prospects for unity.

Pints … and union. Joe picked that name for a reason.

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I’m the first to admit that my transition from center of attention to cog in a machine is a bit weird.

But it’s also gratifying to occupy a place in the shadows to play rhythm guitar and take an occasional lead vocal on one of my previous hit songs, like the ever-popular “Our Beers with the Retirees at the Roman Brewery in Oudenaarde, 1998.”

Boy, was that a memorable afternoon.

There were something like 18 of us riding a motorcoach in Belgium, traveling between breweries as a dress rehearsal for later “beer travel” group trips I organized between 1999 and 2004.

I’d arranged for a stop in Oudenaarde, East Flanders. Just outside of the town center in a locale called Mater, there’s a brewery called Roman, established in 1545 and operated by the same family since 1600; currently, the 14th or 15th generation is at the helm.

Roman gave us a fine tour, then we adjourned to the tasting hall for samples -- except the samples, normally a few ounces, proved to be full pours of various house ales, many of them of higher octane. I was told my group could get a beer each on the house, after which they were asked to pay (in the end, all efforts at payment were rebuffed).

The seating area was large and ornate in an early 20th-century manner, and numerous senior citizens were chatting, drinking and playing cards. The atmosphere was sedate and restrained, then suddenly a type of Belgian polka music started playing loudly from the sound system. The pensioners rose and formed a line, and raucous dancing spontaneously began.

There were more women than men among the seniors, and more guys than gals in our group, and as they circled the room we were pulled into the scrum and paired on the basis of opposite sex. Soon a large pair of female panties appeared -- ritualistically, it would seem -- and eventually it landed on the head of one of my friends.

This went on for 10-15 minutes, then just as abruptly as it began, the music stopped. So did the dancing. Smiling, the older folks returned to their tables to gather their belongings, and it was obvious that our time at Roman had concluded as well. The two groups made for their respective buses.

I’ll never forget what happened next. Quite a few of the senior citizens loitered near the doorway, and as we went past, they thanked us in variable English for visiting Belgium and enjoying “their” beer. What’s more, almost all of them appended heartfelt thanks for America’s help in getting their country back from the Nazis in World War II.

It was tremendously moving, and I’m unashamed to admit there were tears in my eyes as we climbed aboard the motor coach. I certainly wasn’t alone.

As I noted already, pints … and union.

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Obviously, it’s difficult imagining a scene like this today, in the here and now. Two decades on, and it is 73 years since war’s end. The war is no longer an active memory, which is a contributing factor for the deterioration of the post-war world order, which has been unfolding since Reaganism and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There’s always a precarious balance between tradition for the sake of tradition, and tradition from an imperative of merit. Societal change surely must come, but can the Roman brewery please stay intact, brewing a delicious variant of the East Flanders brown, and welcoming busloads of elderly natives and visiting Louisvillians alike?

An hour ago I sat down and started writing, and the preceding spilled out. I’ll be 58 tomorrow, and the contents of my noggin seem to be caught between two perspectives: whether the genuinely important parts of my life have already occurred, or are yet to emerge.

I’m aware that nostalgia is in many ways a feeling of longing for the never-was, and the seeming simplicity of the past is a trick by the brain to relieve us from the burden of reliving the less appealing bits.

My hope is for this dichotomy between past and future to serve as dynamic tension, keeping my head in the game as the pub evolves. It’s never altogether clear, and this is why we simply have to keep moving. A few pints and some union sound appealing to me right about now.

Pints&union. The name wasn't an accident.

To me, it's a design for life.

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Recent columns:

July 26: ON THE AVENUES: Maybe, just maybe, you really can go home again.

July 19: ON THE AVENUES: Confusion, exile, ignobility and resistance amid various other Chronicles of New Gahania.

July 12: ON THE AVENUES: Thanks to Joe Phillips, there'll be pints, union and good times downtown.

July 5: ON THE AVENUES: For Deaf Gahan and the Reisz Five, their luxury city hall will prove to be a Pyrrhic victory.

Yglesias: "Bill Clinton should have resigned. What he did to Monica Lewinsky was wrong, and he should have paid the price."

I'm excising a few hundred words, but you're encouraged to click through and read the essay in its entirety. "Thought-provoking" may be a cliche, but it certainly describes this essay.

Bill Clinton should have resigned, by Matthew Yglesias (Vox)

What he did to Monica Lewinsky was wrong, and he should have paid the price.

Many years ago, when I was a high school student making my first visit to Washington for a two-week summer camp for weird politics dorks, the dominant news story was then-President Bill Clinton’s August 17, 1998, admission that despite earlier denials, he “did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”

“In fact,” Clinton conceded, “it was wrong,” and it “constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.”

In the days before the admission, there was considerable conviction in the chattering classes that the allegations, if true, would end up leading to Clinton’s resignation. That proved to be incorrect. Clinton was not shamed into resigning, and senior leaders of the Democratic Party did not pressure him into resigning.

At the time I, like most Americans, was glad to see Clinton prevail and regarded the whole sordid matter as primarily the fault of congressional Republicans’ excessive scandal-mongering. Now, looking back after the election of Donald Trump, the revelations of massive sexual harassment scandals at Fox News, the stories about Harvey Weinstein and others in the entertainment industry, and the stories about Roy Moore’s pursuit of sexual relationships with teenagers, I think we got it wrong. We argued about perjury and adultery and the meaning of the word “is.” Republicans prosecuted a bad case against a president they’d been investigating for years.

What we should have talked about was men abusing their social and economic power over younger and less powerful women.

The United States, and perhaps the broader English-speaking world, is currently undergoing a much-needed accountability moment in which each wave of stories emboldens more people to come forward and more institutions to rethink their practices. Looking back, the 1998 revelation that the president of the United States carried on an affair with an intern could have been that moment ...

Skipping to the conclusion. The author was a "sophisticated high schooler," although I was 38 years old, and made exactly the same Euro/Mitterand argument numerous times from behind the Public House's bar. Problem is: apples versus oranges.

We can’t change the past, but we should be clear about it

Building a firm line around that kind of activity would give any organization a stronger, healthier culture. Our expectations for the conduct of the president of the United States should be high, and we should treat men’s abuse of authority over younger female subordinates for sexual purposes as a serious, endemic social problem, not a private marital issue between the boss and his wife.

My guess is that in the years to come, most left-of-center people born in the 1980s will say that if they’d been old enough to have a view on the matter back in 1998, they would have favored pressuring Clinton to resign. I hope that is the case, at least. Most young Democrats backed Bernie Sanders over Clinton in 2016 and are accustomed as a result to the idea of an emotionally and intellectually hostile attitude toward “the Clintons.”

Unfortunately for me, I’m a little too old to get away with claiming to have had no opinion on this at the time. My version of a sophisticated high schooler’s take on the matter was that the American media should get over its bourgeois morality hang-ups and be more like the French, where François Mitterrand’s wife and his longtime mistress grieved together at his funeral.

As a married 30-something father, I’ve come around to a less “worldly” view of infidelity. As a co-founder of Vox, I’d never in a million years want us to be the kind of place where men in senior roles can get away with the kind of misconduct that we’ve seen is all too common in our industry and in so many others.

Most of all, as a citizen I’ve come to see that the scandal was never about infidelity or perjury — or at least, it shouldn’t have been. It was about power in the workplace and its use. The policy case that Democrats needed Clinton in office was weak, and the message that driving him from office would have sent would have been profound and welcome. That this view was not commonplace at the time shows that we did not, as a society, give the most important part of the story the weight it deserved.

As the current accountability moment grows, we ought to recognize and admit that we had a chance to do this almost 20 years ago — potentially sparing countless young women a wide range of unpleasant and discriminatory experiences, or at a minimum reducing their frequency and severity. And we blew it.