The hits kept coming, until they didn't: "But what about Howard Sprague?"

Remember caption contests?

This one originally was a BEER MONEY column for the pre-merger Tribune, to be greeted by dozens of yokels picketing the newspaper in protest of multi-syllable words. It was titled "After Andy, the deluge," and was published on July 23, 2009. Following is the retitled version from the blog, updated on Jul9 19, 2012. Note that 3rd district councilman Price lost to Greg Phipps in the 2011 "Democratic" primary, with Phipps going on to win the seat in the general election. Also note that mangled syntax aside, and in retrospect, Price's point about jail overcrowding was spot on.

Regime change ... when, exactly?

---

ON THE AVENUES: But what about Howard Sprague?

(2012 Preface: After publishing the original version of this column a couple weeks back, I decided to go back through and update it for the year 2012. Part of the reason for doing so is that it is almost impossible for me to remain satisfied with something previously written. Another is that there always are new readers. And, finally, I like to make ON THE AVENUES the court of record).

When confused and uncertain, we generally recoil from the challenges of the future, reverting instead to comforting visions of one or the other redemptive halcyons from a past viewed with rose-tinted hindsight, and accordingly, cultural mythology tends to supplant rational thought, not buttress it.

This being a presidential election year, we can expect reams of historical revisionism masquerading as irrefutable argumentation. America’s Christian theocracy is particularly adept at such pipe-dream panaceas, its televangelistic hawkers mounting gleaming Chinese-made soapboxes to beseech us: Turn back the hands of time, all the way to a state of being that never existed in the first place … and don’t forget your checkbook, sinner.

Nostalgia is a vehicle powered by the warm fuzzies of selective memory. There’s nothing necessarily wrong about that, at least until comfortable reveries are mistaken for public policy, which brings us to an otherwise forgotten New Albany city council meeting that took place three years ago.

During a brief and typically ephemeral discussion of community policing “wants and needs,” the since deposed 3rd district councilman Steve Price launched into a meandering tangent addressing his views of modern methods of law enforcement. Of course, untangling Price’s stream-of consciousness syntax was a constant challenge throughout his eight years of chronic council underachievement, but at the time, his point was relatively clear.

He was lamenting the disappearance of old-fashioned, user-friendly civic drunk tanks, those helpful domiciles formerly providing wayward inebriates a warm place to sleep and voluminous black coffee before releasing them into waiting streets (and revolving barstools) the following morning.

Price concluded that nowadays, such pitiably harmless transgressors actually are compelled to pay their way out of jail; lacking cash, their incarceration contributes to the overcrowding problem therein. His former council colleague Jack Messer, a full-time police officer, asked Price to explain how the city might better handle such time and space continuums, and Price responded with this bit of sage advice:

"We need to do things like Andy used to do 'em."

---

So, to which person named Andy was the ex-councilman referring?

Was it Andy Warhol? That’s unlikely, because the Ruthenian-American pop artist certainly was too avant-garde for a down-home devotee of Dave Ramsey.

Maybe Andy Kaufman, the late and lamented inter-gender wrestling champion and performance artist? Obviously, too ironic.

Andy Roddick? He’s too athletic for New Albany, and in the wrong sport.

Andy Dick? Too clever by half.

Andy Capp? Too impenetrably English.

Andy Garcia? Too confusingly ethnic.

No, it’s none of the above, because given Price’s preferred homilies, paranoiac utterances and ceaseless non sequiturs, there could be only one answer.

He meant the fictional Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, as played on television by the late comedian Andy Griffith in his eponymous show, which was produced back in the Golden Age of Post-War Faux-Paneled Imperial America, a time period coinciding with Price’s blissful youth and visions of Otis Campbell’s nightly resting place dancing soothingly in his head.

I recalled Price’s words in the wake of the iconic Griffith’s recent passing, as otherwise sensible people immediately focused their attention on hazy objects depicted in the nation’s rear view mirror and advocated a “return” to the Mayberry ethos, which would provide workable solutions to the pressing problems of our troubled times, while recapturing lost innocence, albeit it for the small price of forgetting everything we’ve learned since kindergarten.

---

Unfortunately, Price never has been alone in suggesting that a city like New Albany in the milieu of the Internet, crystal meth, iPhones, EPA sewage treatment decrees and state-imposed starvation budgets can be governed according to lessons learned from a television series originally broadcast in black and white, featuring a folksy sheriff in a rural town, with a switchboard operator listening on party lines, and a habitual vandal whose repertoire does not extend beyond rocks thrown at picture windows.

Like so many others, I watched The Andy Griffith Show as a child, but then something happened to me. 

I grew up. 

Four decades have passed since the series went off the air, and in light of experience, I see Mayberry a bit differently. 

Sheriff Taylor’s town didn’t boast much in the way of ethnic and religious diversity, did it? In fact, it was the era of enforced segregation in the South, and there wasn’t an African-American or Hispanic to be seen. 

Most of the women depicted on the series were in the kitchen frying chicken or baking peach cobbler, and Helen Crump’s job as schoolteacher was about the highest point on the professional ladder for a female. Suffrage might have been bragged about, but was it truly universal?

Do you really think any of those toilets led to a sewage treatment system? Rather, think of leaky pipes emptying into yonder creek, and maybe a septic tank or three. Television news was a monopoly of three major networks, newspapers toed a Democratic or Republican line, and American foreign policy strove to support “our” murderous tinhorn dictators so as to forestall Communist-installed versions of the same.

And then, there’s the demographic reality we always neglect in places like Mayberry in the 1960’s: Young and talented people left town in droves, as soon as they possibly could, leaving older citizens and second-raters to navigate a decline into irrelevance, something that should be all too obvious to New Albanians surveying the local scene in 2012.

Mayberry was, and is, an entertaining place, but like Andy Taylor himself, it was, and it remains, entirely imaginary. If pressed, we might find other useful role models from the era: Rooster Cogburn, Captain Kirk and maybe even Puff the Magic Dragon.

But seriously, in the year 2012 – how does any of it help us?

ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART TWO: Inkem binkem notamus rex, protect us all from the city (still) with the hex (2014).

ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART TWO: Inkem binkem notamus rex, protect us all from the city (still) with the hex (2014).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Back in April, 2014, there was a precursor to the current unpleasantness. Doug England's bizarre plan to hand the mayor's office to Irv Stumler had ignominiously failed, and now Jeff Gahan was poised to interfere with Irv's municipal flowery ashtrays. There was a bad moon rising, and so most of us did the sensible thing and just stayed drunk.

---

"You know what I think I'm going to do? I'm going to go home, have me a little nap, and then go on over to Thelma Lou's and watch a little TV. Yeah, I believe that's what I'll do. Home. A nap. Then over to Thelma Lou's for TV. Yep, that's the plan. Home. Little nap.”
-- Barney Fife (The Andy Griffith Show)

Absurdity describes a quality of harebrained preposterousness, and arguably, it is rooted in real-world empirical judgments. Surrealism embraces a more unearthly, dreamlike weirdness of the sort that emanates from Colorado now that marijuana is legal there.

So, was Tuesday afternoon in New Albany merely absurd, or did it ascend to the rarified level of surreal?

Or both?

To even begin making a determination, one must parse a few pansies. It was only a few weeks ago that volunteers under the aegis of Keep New Albany Clean and Green were out and about, tidying the flower planters placed in recent years by the organization on downtown street corners.

Full disclosure dictates personal honesty: I’ve had plenty of issues with the planters, even as I appreciate and respect the good intentions of the organization. In the first place, the planters have tended to look like (and be used as) ashtrays. Moreover, as an ambulatory adult who walks downtown on a daily basis, I’ve found it annoying to be forced to reach an arm’s length over the planters to click the street crossing button.

What’s more, it has been obvious to many (apart from Clean and Green itself), and for quite some time, that those among us most in need of a signal’s assistance in crossing New Albany’s almost entirely unregulated streets – namely those in wheelchairs, the handicapped, the elderly and children – were being more than merely inconvenienced by the positioning of the planters, at least some of which effectively blocked any reasonable ease of use.

I’ve mentioned it, both to Clean and Green and city officials, and have found little evident traction, generally being looked at (yet again) as a space alien, primarily because there isn’t a single member of either city government or Clean and Green who has even the slightest grasp of the theory and practice of walkability, and as one might expect, even fewer are willing to learn.

But I digress.

For weeks, and perhaps even months, Clean and Green has petitioned the Board of Public Works to grant it permission to place even more of these saucer-like planters downtown, and the board has continually dragged its feet, pleading for more time to amass the single item most often missing from the collective hard drives of city officials – namely, crucial information.

Apparently Tuesday was the time of denouement, during which the needed information abruptly materialized, and a conclusion finally was reached: Not only was Clean and Green precluded from expanding the planter program, but the planters currently in use would have to go, lock, stock and petunia.

Thus ensued a textbook illustration of the city’s innate, enduring, politicized dysfunction; with any semblance of compromise yanked inelegantly from the table, a Keystone Kops movie abruptly broke out, the city moving with uncommon, absurd and perhaps even surreal speed to remove the offending planters, while Clean and Green’s own volunteers were racing just as quickly to move their dirt bowls out of the way, or collect them altogether, before the other side got to them first.

That’s right. They’re adults … at least in a chronological sense.

Predictably, the city has since re-circled its wagons and imposed the usual embargo on clear rationales and public explanations, and of course, Clean and Green has taken to the Court of Facebook to decry the death of private-public partnerships – except in truth, the organization’s work has never been a public-private partnership in any coherent, readily transparent way.

Because that’s not the way we do things New Mayberry.

---

Rather, the “partnership” dates (what slipshod stop-gap mechanism doesn’t?) from England Doug and Carl Ford Maalox’s calculated electoral jury-rigging in 2010/11, back when Irv Stumler was declared overnight to be Hizzoner’s anointed successor.

With the Urban Enterprise Association’s till set for emptying, Stumler’s Clean and Green would then function as a source of elder-think beautification monies that the dynamic duo couldn’t or wouldn’t find elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the current Gahan administration, which seems to believe (how would we ever know for sure?) that the only way to think outside a self-imposed economic development box and actually do something (anything) to incentivize entrepreneurial activities downtown is to convince the Horseshoe Foundation to give away millions of dollars for use in a county that rejected the casino – not once, but twice – has decided to seize upon the street corner planters to publicly humiliate Clean and Green, a prime mover of which is Jerry Finn … who has his hand on the Horseshoe spigot.

Talk about winning friends and influencing people … so why bother writing fiction when reality keeps handing you pre-written comic opera scripts?

In other cities, there are economic plans, creativity and empowerment. People read books, and parking ordinances are enforced uniformly. Vital improvements occur without deforestation, and farmers markets somehow operate successfully atop the asphalt of parking lots.

But in New Albany, we rerun old Andy Griffith episodes on imaginary Bicentennial Park drive-in screens, dating from the collective childhood of a leadership caste that imagines itself comfortably ensconced in Floyd’s familiarly comfy chair, with sideburns trimmed and tonic dutifully splashed, and as such, Deputy Fife said it best -- and he never even lived here.

All I'm saying is that there are some things beyond the ken of mortal man that shouldn't be tampered with. We don't know everything, Andy. There's plenty going on right now in the Twilight Zone that we don't know anything about and I think we ought to stay clear.

Jeff Speck has no idea what he’s gotten himself into, does he?

---

September 29: ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART ONE: Chocolate covered frozen banana republic, or "understanding" Harvest Homecoming, our peculiar institution (2014).

September 22: ON THE AVENUES: On two-way streets, a modest proposal for the consideration of my disoriented one-way counterpart.

September 15: ON THE AVENUES Now for my next amazing conversion trick (KABOOM!!!) – look at those pretty windows on Schmitt Furniture.

September 8: ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

ON THE AVENUES: What about Howard Sprague?

ON THE AVENUES: What about Howard Sprague?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(After publishing the original version of this column a couple weeks back, I decided to go back through and update it for the year 2012. Part of the reason for doing so is that it is almost impossible for me to remain satisfied with something previously written. Another is that there always are new readers. And, finally, I like to make On the Avenues the court of record. Apologies for the repetitions, which I realize bear a resemblance to summer reruns)

When confused and uncertain, we generally recoil from the challenges of the future, reverting instead to comforting visions of one or the other redemptive halcyons from a past viewed with rose-tinted hindsight, and accordingly, cultural mythology tends to supplant rational thought, not buttress it.

This being a presidential election year, we can expect reams of historical revisionism masquerading as irrefutable argumentation. America’s Christian theocracy is particularly adept at such pipe-dream panaceas, its televangelistic hawkers mounting gleaming Chinese-made soapboxes to beseech us: Turn back the hands of time, all the way to a state of being that never existed in the first place … and don’t forget your checkbook, sinner.

Nostalgia is a vehicle powered by the warm fuzzies of selective memory. There’s nothing necessarily wrong about that, at least until comfortable reveries are mistaken for public policy, which brings us to an otherwise forgotten New Albany city council meeting that took place three years ago.

During a brief and typically ephemeral discussion of community policing “wants and needs,” the since deposed 3rd district councilman Steve Price launched into a meandering tangent addressing his views of modern methods of law enforcement. Of course, untangling Price’s stream-of consciousness syntax was a constant challenge throughout his eight years of chronic council underachievement, but at the time, his point was relatively clear.

He was lamenting the disappearance of old-fashioned, user-friendly civic drunk tanks, those helpful domiciles formerly providing wayward inebriates a warm place to sleep and voluminous black coffee before releasing them into waiting streets (and revolving barstools) the following morning.

Price concluded that nowadays, such pitiably harmless transgressors actually are compelled to pay their way out of jail; lacking cash, their incarceration contributes to the overcrowding problem therein. His former council colleague Jack Messer, a full-time police officer, asked Price to explain how the city might better handle such time and space continuums, and Price responded with this bit of sage advice:

"We need to do things like Andy used to do 'em."

---

So, to which person named Andy was the ex-councilman referring?

Was it Andy Warhol? That’s unlikely, because the Ruthenian-American pop artist certainly was too avant-garde for a down-home devotee of Dave Ramsey.

Maybe Andy Kaufman, the late and lamented inter-gender wrestling champion and performance artist? Obviously, too ironic.

Andy Roddick? He’s too athletic for New Albany, and in the wrong sport.

Andy Dick? Too clever by half.

Andy Capp? Too impenetrably English.

Andy Garcia? Too confusingly ethnic.

No, it’s none of the above, because given Price’s preferred homilies, paranoiac utterances and ceaseless non sequiturs, there could be only one answer.

He meant the fictional Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, as played on television by the late comedian Andy Griffith in his eponymous show, which was produced back in the Golden Age of Post-War Faux-Paneled Imperial America, a time period coinciding with Price’s blissful youth and visions of Otis Campbell’s nightly resting place dancing soothingly in his head.

I recalled Price’s words in the wake of the iconic Griffith’s recent passing, as otherwise sensible people immediately focused their attention on hazy objects depicted in the nation’s rear view mirror and advocated a “return” to the Mayberry ethos, which would provide workable solutions to the pressing problems of our troubled times, while recapturing lost innocence, albeit it for the small price of forgetting everything we’ve learned since kindergarten.

---

Unfortunately, Price never has been alone in suggesting that a city like New Albany in the milieu of the Internet, crystal meth, iPhones, EPA sewage treatment decrees and state-imposed starvation budgets can be governed according to lessons learned from a television series originally broadcast in black and white, featuring a folksy sheriff in a rural town, with a switchboard operator listening on party lines, and a habitual vandal whose repertoire does not extend beyond rocks thrown at picture windows.

Like so many others, I watched The Andy Griffith Show as a child, but then something happened to me. I grew up. Four decades have passed since the series went off the air, and in light of experience, I see Mayberry a bit differently.

Sheriff Taylor’s town didn’t boast much in the way of ethnic and religious diversity, did it? In fact, it was the era of enforced segregation in the South, and there wasn’t an African-American or Hispanic to be seen. Most of the women depicted on the series were in the kitchen frying chicken or baking peach cobbler, and Helen Crump’s job as schoolteacher was about the highest point on the professional ladder for a female. Suffrage might have been bragged about, but was it truly universal?

Do you really think any of those toilets led to a sewage treatment system? Rather, think of leaky pipes emptying into yonder creek, and maybe a septic tank or three. Television news was a monopoly of three major networks, newspapers toed a Democratic or Republican line, and American foreign policy strove to support “our” murderous tinhorn dictators so as to forestall Communist-installed versions of the same.

And then, there’s the demographic reality we always neglect in places like Mayberry in the 1960’s: Young and talented people left town in droves, as soon as they possibly could, leaving older citizens and second-raters to navigate a decline into irrelevance, something that should be all too obvious to New Albanians surveying the local scene in 2012.

Mayberry was, and is, an entertaining place, but like Andy Taylor himself, it was, and it remains, entirely imaginary. If pressed, we might find other useful role models from the era: Rooster Cogburn, Captain Kirk and maybe even Puff the Magic Dragon.

But seriously, in the year 2012 – how does any of it help us?

On the topic of Mayberry.

I won't belabor the point, seeing as I liked Andy Griffith, too, and his passing is much regretted. It's just that if you can look past the understandable nostalgia, Mayberry simply isn't an economic development strategy ... except, perhaps, for buying local. The column originally appeared in the newspaper on July 23, 2009.

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BEER MONEY: After Andy, the deluge.

By ROGER BAYLOR, Local Columnist

“When confused and uncertain, we often recoil from the challenges of the future, reverting instead to comforting visions of one or the other redemptive halcyons from a past viewed with rose-tinted hindsight … Cultural mythology is aimed at supplanting rational thought, not buttressing it.”

I first wrote these words in January, describing Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana’s (ROCK’s) ongoing tent revival, wherein the lawyer/preacher on the soapbox beseeches us to turn back the hands of time, all the way to a state of being that never existed in the first place. It’s another pipe-dream panacea that we’re assured can be recaptured if only we forget everything we’ve learned since kindergarten.

No matter, because I’m not here today to rattle the cages of ROCK’s dues-paying moral guardians. Rather, it’s time to consider an entirely different golden age – parallel reality, if you will – possessing an ethos ostensibly capable of providing workable solutions to the pressing problems of contemporary times.

Who knows the Way?

Why, the saintly Andy, of course.

---

At the July 6 city council meeting, during a brief and typically ephemeral discussion of community policing “wants and needs,” 3rd district councilman Steve Price launched into a strange tangent addressing contemporary methods of law enforcement.

Untangling Price’s stream-of consciousness syntax to the best of my ability, it sounded like he was lamenting the disappearance of old-fashioned, user-friendly drunk tanks, those helpful domiciles that used to provide inebriates a warm place to sleep and voluminous black coffee before releasing them into waiting streets (and barstools) the following morning.

Price concluded that nowadays, such harmless transgressors actually have to pay their way out of jail; lacking the cash, they contribute to the overcrowding problem there. His council colleague (and full-time police officer), Jack Messer, asked Price to explain how the city might better handle such time and space continuums, and Price responded with this bit of advice:

"We need to do things like Andy used to do 'em."

---

To which Andy was the councilman referring?

Andy Warhol? That’s unlikely, because the Ruthenian-American pop artist certainly was too avant-garde for a devotee of Dave Ramsey.

To Andy Kaufman, the late and lamented inter-gender wrestling champion and performance artist? Obviously, too weird.

Andy Roddick? Too athletic for New Albany, and in the wrong sport.

Andy Dick? Too clever by half.

Andy Capp? Too impenetrably English.

Andy Garcia? Too confusingly ethnic.

But: Recalling councilman’s Price’s preferred homilies, nostalgic utterances and ceaseless non sequiturs, it’s a safe bet that he was fondly recalling the law enforcement techniques of Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, as played on television by comedian Andy Griffith in his eponymous show, which was produced back in the Golden Age of Post-War Imperial America, a time period coinciding with Price’s blissful youth and visions of Otis Campbell’s nightly resting place dancing soothingly in his head.

---

My councilman’s Mayberry fixation comes as little surprise, paralleling as it does so many instances of his confusion about the modern world’s inherent complexities and his recurring preference for simplistic slogans instead of thoughtful considerations as we seek solutions.

Unfortunately, Price isn’t alone in suggesting that running a city of 37,000 people in the age of the Internet, crystal meth, iPhones, EPA sewage treatment decrees and state-imposed starvation budgets requires little more than traveling backwards in time to derive lessons from a television series originally broadcast in black and white, featuring a folksy sheriff in a town far smaller than New Albany, a switchboard operator listening in on party lines, and a town vandal whose repertoire does not extend beyond rocks thrown at picture windows.

I also watched The Andy Griffith Show as a child, but then something happened to me. I grew up. Four decades have passed since the series went off the air, and in light of experience, I see Mayberry a bit differently than my councilman does.

Sheriff Taylor’s town didn’t boast much in the way of ethnic and religious diversity, did it? In fact, it was the era of enforced segregation in the South, and there wasn’t a Hispanic to be seen. Most of the women depicted on the series were in the kitchen frying chicken or baking peach cobbler, and Helen Crump’s job as schoolteacher was about the highest point on the professional ladder for a female. Suffrage might have been bragged about, but was it truly universal?

Do you really think any of those toilets led to a sewage treatment system? Think pipes emptying into yonder creek, and maybe a septic tank or three. Television news was a monopoly of three major networks, newspapers toed a Democratic or Republican line, and American foreign policy strove to support “our” murderous tinhorn dictators so as to forestall Communist versions of the same.

And then, there’s the part we always forget about places like Mayberry in the 1960’s: Young and talented people left towns like those in droves, and as soon as they possibly could, leaving older citizens and second-raters to navigate the demographic decline into irrelevance, something that should be all too obvious to New Albanians today.

Mayberry was, and is, an entertaining place, but like Andy Taylor himself, it was, and is, entirely imaginary. I’m sure we can find a place in Councilman Price’s throwback public policy manual for role models like Rooster Cogburn, Captain Kirk and maybe even Puff the Magic Dragon.

But seriously, in the year 2009 – how does that help us?

REWIND: After Andy, the deluge (2009).

When asked whether this Tribune column from July 23, 2009, should be reprinted, Councilman Price voted "no".

On May 3, when voters from the 3rd council district are asked whether Price should non-serve another non-term, they will vote "no", too ... and the travesty of intentional non-representation finally will cease.

---

BEER MONEY: After Andy, the deluge.

By ROGER BAYLOR, Local Columnist

“When confused and uncertain, we often recoil from the challenges of the future, reverting instead to comforting visions of one or the other redemptive halcyons from a past viewed with rose-tinted hindsight … Cultural mythology is aimed at supplanting rational thought, not buttressing it.”

I first wrote these words in January, describing Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana’s (ROCK’s) ongoing tent revival, wherein the lawyer/preacher on the soapbox beseeches us to turn back the hands of time, all the way to a state of being that never existed in the first place. It’s another pipe-dream panacea that we’re assured can be recaptured if only we forget everything we’ve learned since kindergarten.

No matter, because I’m not here today to rattle the cages of ROCK’s dues-paying moral guardians. Rather, it’s time to consider an entirely different golden age – parallel reality, if you will – possessing an ethos ostensibly capable of providing workable solutions to the pressing problems of contemporary times.

Who knows the Way?

Why, the saintly Andy, of course.

---

At the July 6 city council meeting, during a brief and typically ephemeral discussion of community policing “wants and needs,” 3rd district councilman Steve Price launched into a strange tangent addressing contemporary methods of law enforcement.

Untangling Price’s stream-of consciousness syntax to the best of my ability, it sounded like he was lamenting the disappearance of old-fashioned, user-friendly drunk tanks, those helpful domiciles that used to provide inebriates a warm place to sleep and voluminous black coffee before releasing them into waiting streets (and barstools) the following morning.

Price concluded that nowadays, such harmless transgressors actually have to pay their way out of jail; lacking the cash, they contribute to the overcrowding problem there. His council colleague (and full-time police officer), Jack Messer, asked Price to explain how the city might better handle such time and space continuums, and Price responded with this bit of advice:

"We need to do things like Andy used to do 'em."

---

To which Andy was the councilman referring?

Andy Warhol? That’s unlikely, because the Ruthenian-American pop artist certainly was too avant-garde for a devotee of Dave Ramsey.

To Andy Kaufman, the late and lamented inter-gender wrestling champion and performance artist? Obviously, too weird.

Andy Roddick? Too athletic for New Albany, and in the wrong sport.

Andy Dick? Too clever by half.

Andy Capp? Too impenetrably English.

Andy Garcia? Too confusingly ethnic.

But: Recalling councilman’s Price’s preferred homilies, nostalgic utterances and ceaseless non sequiturs, it’s a safe bet that he was fondly recalling the law enforcement techniques of Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, as played on television by comedian Andy Griffith in his eponymous show, which was produced back in the Golden Age of Post-War Imperial America, a time period coinciding with Price’s blissful youth and visions of Otis Campbell’s nightly resting place dancing soothingly in his head.

---

My councilman’s Mayberry fixation comes as little surprise, paralleling as it does so many instances of his confusion about the modern world’s inherent complexities and his recurring preference for simplistic slogans instead of thoughtful considerations as we seek solutions.

Unfortunately, Price isn’t alone in suggesting that running a city of 37,000 people in the age of the Internet, crystal meth, iPhones, EPA sewage treatment decrees and state-imposed starvation budgets requires little more than traveling backwards in time to derive lessons from a television series originally broadcast in black and white, featuring a folksy sheriff in a town far smaller than New Albany, a switchboard operator listening in on party lines, and a town vandal whose repertoire does not extend beyond rocks thrown at picture windows.

I also watched The Andy Griffith Show as a child, but then something happened to me. I grew up. Four decades have passed since the series went off the air, and in light of experience, I see Mayberry a bit differently than my councilman does.

Sheriff Taylor’s town didn’t boast much in the way of ethnic and religious diversity, did it? In fact, it was the era of enforced segregation in the South, and there wasn’t a Hispanic to be seen. Most of the women depicted on the series were in the kitchen frying chicken or baking peach cobbler, and Helen Crump’s job as schoolteacher was about the highest point on the professional ladder for a female. Suffrage might have been bragged about, but was it truly universal?

Do you really think any of those toilets led to a sewage treatment system? Think pipes emptying into yonder creek, and maybe a septic tank or three. Television news was a monopoly of three major networks, newspapers toed a Democratic or Republican line, and American foreign policy strove to support “our” murderous tinhorn dictators so as to forestall Communist versions of the same.

And then, there’s the part we always forget about places like Mayberry in the 1960’s: Young and talented people left towns like those in droves, and as soon as they possibly could, leaving older citizens and second-raters to navigate the demographic decline into irrelevance, something that should be all too obvious to New Albanians today.

Mayberry was, and is, an entertaining place, but like Andy Taylor himself, it was, and is, entirely imaginary. I’m sure we can find a place in Councilman Price’s throwback public policy manual for role models like Rooster Cogburn, Captain Kirk and maybe even Puff the Magic Dragon.

But seriously, in the year 2009 – how does that help us?

Today's Tribune column: "After Andy, the deluge."

BAYLOR: After Andy, the deluge.

I also watched “The Andy Griffith Show” as a child, but then something happened to me. I grew up. Four decades have passed since the series went off the air, and in light of experience, I see Mayberry a bit differently than my councilman does.