BEER MONEY: New Albany Is A State of Mind (2009).

As noted in today's previous post, my two-years-and-five-month run as a guest columnist at the pre-merger New Albany Tribune began in 2009. This was the very first column, which ran on January 10. The photo was my official newspaper photo, as attached here to a 2010 column about something I'm no longer allowed to address openly, hence the "redacted" discretion. 

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New Albany Is A State of Mind

You might recall that roughly 2,500 years ago, there lived the Greek philosopher called Socrates, a man whose dogged pursuit of knowledge endeared him to succeeding generations of admirers, although not to his fellow Athenians. In fact, most of his neighbors considered him not only an annoyance, but a heretic, too, and if there’s anything to be gleaned from reading history, it’s that there’s always time enough for a priest to throw another heretic on the fire.

So goes the eternal tyranny of the majority, and yet thanks to Plato’s writings, we now recognize Socrates as a peerless moral and social critic. Appropriately, he has been honored by the tag of gadfly, a term for describing “people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or just being an irritant.”

That’s my kind of guy, although naturally gadflies are detested by small, non-expandable minds of the sort that are the norm in human societies the world over, and who assign themselves the task of protecting the status quo whether or not it is sensible.

Accordingly, you can picture the scene in the agora, with Socrates and his small band of youthful followers avidly questioning accepted beliefs, while the “little people” of Athens hover nearby, muttering, and eavesdropping on the dialogues.

These many centuries later, I can almost hear the anonymous bellow from behind the adjacent stone wall, followed by the pitter-patter of fleeing sandals:

“Hey, Socrates, if you aren’t happy here, then why don’t you get the hell out and leave us alone?”

Socrates stayed, of course, and was made to pay dearly for it. During a period of political upheaval, he was put on trial and convicted of corrupting the morals of Athenian youth. Offered the opportunity to devise his own punishment, the philosopher wryly suggested that his “sentence” include a regular monetary stipend and free meals for life.

Instead, the humorless judges gave Socrates the choice of exile or death, and he opted for the latter, drinking the hemlock, cementing his martyrdom, and proving that in ancient Greece as in modern-day America, folks don’t take kindly to having their premises examined, not to mention taxed … but let’s leave Their Man Mitch’s properties and proprieties out of it, shall we?

---

And so there I was, cradling a craft-brewed pint of beer within the cozy confines of Connor’s Place and reflecting on the dubious merits of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” when suddenly that nagging, familiar existential question reared up and bit me … again.

“New Albany is a state of mind … but whose?

Numerous other pressing questions have come and gone since I was a youngster growing up in Georgetown, experiencing the sort of small town ambience remembered with warm fuzziness primarily by those who never actually lived through the crushing boredom of it all, queries like, “Where can we get served?” and “Is it really cheating if the teacher doesn’t catch you?”

But nowadays the tough questions keep getting harder to answer, like this one:

Have you ever been standing in the supermarket, trying to fathom the industrial process bakeries use to remove the flavor and texture from white bread in order to make it marketable to the terminally fearful among us, when suddenly a remarkably obese woman down the aisle starts screaming obscenities at her own helpless children, and you realize that all this prattle about free people making informed choices to suit their individual needs must be coming from those who’ve never driven an automobile through New Albany’s decaying streets, artfully dodging listless vagrants, texting drivers and the occasional neglected, doomed dog or cat?

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In 2008, Barack Obama enunciated “change” and “hope” as electoral mantras, and predictably, local voters went big for Obama’s befuddled Republican opponent. Therein lies a glimpse of New Albany’s personalized 800-lb gorilla, and the civic psychosis that so degrades our future prospects as a city. It is our persistent failure to muster any degree of comprehension as to what is occurring in the larger world outside the municipal devil we know, and to imagine another way of life.

As an example, consider the simple notion of riding a bicycle in an urban setting. Doing so in New Albany can be profoundly dangerous, in part because of the gaping potholes, and more importantly, as previously observed, because local drivers are notoriously unskilled and inattentive. However, the problem goes beyond an absence of empathy.

Numerous New Albanian drivers actually can’t imagine riding a bicycle, and moreover, they can’t imagine life outside the confines of an automobile – and if they can’t imagine something, how on earth could anyone else?

To them, anyone who is able to imagine biking and also to achieve it must be mistaken or defective, and poses a vague threat. Any person riding a bicycle surely must be too poor to afford a car, or is restricted to biking owing to mental illness, a DUI conviction, bad personal credit or contrarian tendencies.

In other words, a heretic. Do I hear the sound of flicking Bics?

In this and related matters, the New Albany Syndrome is a very real and self-defeating malady, and one of my goals in life is to somehow locate the source of the dysfunction and drive a stake composed of equal parts modernity and rationality straight through its heart so that future generations just might enjoy a better place to live and work.

Socrates had it right: The unexamined life is not worth living … and the examination begins now.

From BEER MONEY at the Tribune to ON THE AVENUES at NAC -- how my weekly column came to be.

In response to an inquiry, here's a repeat (26 December 2016) of the story about how ON THE AVENUES came to be. NA Confidential is winding down and will soon cease operations in the current format, although there'll be an archive at my new web site, currently under construction.

ON THE AVENUES will reappear at the next joint, so stay tuned.

---
 

NA Confidential was born in October, 2004. Almost 11,000 posts later, the experience sometimes verges on the coherent, but at the start I had little idea how to proceed, beyond writing for posterity about what was happening right here in New Albany.

Consequently, after five years of beating the bushes, my big break beckoned as 2008 drew to a close.

New Tribune guest columnist in January. (December 8, 2008)

Last Friday afternoon I met with Steve Kozarovich, publisher of the New Albany Tribune, and agreed to write a 900-word column on a weekly basis, beginning Thursday, January 8, and running on Thursdays thereafter. It is a (modest) for-pay gig, joining paid columns I write biweekly for LEO and quarterly for Food and Dining magazine.

This announcement is provided as a courtesy to the publisher, who now has the opportunity to begin fielding complaints before the column actually appears.

From January 2009 until February 2011, I met 111 consecutive "Beer Money" column deadlines at $40 a pop, then decided to run for city council, necessitating a suspension of my weekly Tribune contribution.

Today's last Tribune column for a while: "Let’s all say ‘yes’ for change." (February 17, 2011)

 ... And so, here's the finale ... for now. I expect to be back (a) after a primary loss, or (b) after a general election loss, or (c) after a general election victory. After all, there is a precedent for public officials (Ed Clere) writing a weekly column, is there not?

BAYLOR: Let’s all say ‘yes’ for change

This will be my last column in The Tribune for a while, and there’s a reason for the hiatus.

I've decided to take a dram of my own medicine and file to run for city council in the coming primary — yes, as a Democrat, and for an at-large seat.

Because this very newspaper has a policy against permitting its columnists to conduct campaigns in print, and actually enforces it more often than the city’s own long neglected codes, I must return temporarily to the realm of the blogosphere.

And in the blogosphere I was destined to remain, because concurrent with my hiatus, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. cashiered Kozarovich and combined our local newspapers into a new entity, the News and Tribune. It was to be headquartered in Jeffersonville, instituting a Clark County-centric focus that has become steadily more annoying to New Albanians during the years since, and it caused my column to walk the plank.

This just in: Merger kills a newspaper column. (May 23, 2011)

Damn, I knew I should have actually won that election ... then I could still have a newspaper column, just like Ed Clere, although I'm told that the beer column idea is still on the table for the Spectrum section.

The now departed Coach K used the word "hiatus" prior to my council bid. I had to fetch a thesaurus to know what he meant. Now, somewhere, he and Lucy Van Pelt are holding the football aloft and laughing.

Just my luck. Who'd have known that Linus's older sister worked for the Retirement Systems of Alabama?

Is it time to go underground, yet?

To Matt Nash: It's all yours now. Torture the troglodytes often, will you ... and try to give us some New Albany news, okay? The Clark County stuff's already getting old.

Right now, the regular columnist spots are full. I can't pick up anyone else and still get in letters, cheers and jeers and any editorials in a timely manner.

I still had to drop another columnist (McDonald) on top of when you and Kelley Curran decided to run for office because space became less available after the merger. I'm also trying to keep a balance between Clark County folks like Dodd and Harbeson and Floyd County writers like Amy and Nash. And, of course, I have a freelancer/stringer budget to worry about.

It's possible a spot would open up in the future and I'll let you know if that happens.

Shea Van Hoy

I spent a few months licking wounds and plotting revenge against the perpetrators, then realized there was much yet to say and write. The answer was to DIY, in this blog forum.

The newspaper's dead and buried, so welcome to electronica. (May 26, 2011)

Beginning last week, my Thursday column was reinstituted in this space. The column ran in the News and Tribune from January 2009 until February 2011, when it went on "hiatus" during my run for council. Earlier this week, I learned that the hiatus had been transformed into permanent absence owing to changes in the newspaper's structure.

This just in: Merger kills a newspaper column.

As a writer, deadlines have a wonderful way of concentrating thought, and so it is my desire to get back into the weekly column habit. This blog's the place for it until something else comes along.

Furthermore, conceding that the newspaper's current staff will disagree with me, the consolidation of two editions into one of the same size inevitably will have the effect of reducing coverage of New Albany (and to an extent, Floyd County) affairs. Stated simply, New Albany has lost its newspaper.

"Our newspaper is dead -- long live the Internet", or something like that.

For the time being, and perhaps for a long time to come, this blog is more important than ever before. While I don't have the time to transform NAC into a comprehensive news and commentary entity, repositioning my weekly column and moving it from Thursday newsprint to Thursday bandwidth is attainable, so that's how we'll start the ball rolling. In conjunction with social media, it's enough for now. I am aware of like-minded ideas for on-line publishing in the community, and will continue monitoring these in the hope that something comes to fruition.

But what to call this new column?

Later this morning, my Thursday column will reappear here. The old "Beer Money" tag, which referred to the limited usefulness of the bare farthings grudgingly paid by the Retirement Systems of Alabama to guest columnists in publications like One Southern Indiana Newspaper, no longer makes sense, seeing as remuneration has completely disappeared.

Instead, my new Thursday column will openly hearken back to the long-departed days of independent, truly local journalism in New Albany: "On the Avenues." Some of you will know what I mean by this. Look for the Green Mouse to make appearances, too.

In the days of my youth, back when the Tribune actually mattered, a lifer named Jack Powers was the staff do-it-all. He covered the social and political waterfronts in his column, "On the Avenues," with the help of an all-purpose editorial source and assistant, the so-called Green Mouse.

My column honors these quaint and mostly forgotten aspects of local journalism in New Albany.

An annual reminder (2019): Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

In 2018 the annual renewal of Veterans Day was auspicious because it marked the 100th anniversary of the Great War's end. Since the conflict's centenary in 2014, there have been 100-year memories of battles and events, from the Masurian Lakes through Meuse-Argonne.

Why is this important?

Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not only those from the now wholly passed World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 30th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall began falling. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did -- well, maybe so. I believe future historians will refer to the period of 1912-1989 as the "77 Years' War," or perhaps tack on another decade and pronounce the 87 Years' War as concluding with the bombardment of Belgrade by NATO.

Speaking for myself, America's Civil War has been a fascination since childhood, and had I hazarded a guess back in 2010 or so, it would have been that the Civil War's sesquicentennial (observed during the years 2011 - 2015) would have gripped me.

To an extent it did, but I should have known better. Europe has been an obsession for thirty-five years of my adult life.

What's more, there's an immediacy. My grandfather was drafted into the Army circa 1918, but fortunately never left the continental United States before WWI ended. His son, who was my father, volunteered and joined the Marines in 1942, spending three years in the Pacific theater of operations.

I didn't do anything, apart from studying their experiences and visiting the European locales neither of them ever saw.

Lessons from history 100 years after the Armistice (The Economist)

The guns fell silent a century ago

 ... National chauvinisms live on despite the Somme. Anti-Semitism lives on despite the Holocaust. Societies’ capacity to imagine collapse and barbarism in visceral terms fades with time. All Europeans can do is be vigilant and humble before these forces, dip their oars into the waves of history when possible, hold tight to their humanity and be grateful that their continent’s past and present are now broadly in harmony, the former educating and civilising the latter, for now at least. Like train lines running together in a wood.

Having visited Gdansk in Poland in 2018, these reflections seem particularly relevant.

For millions of Europeans, the war did not end in 1918, by Natalie Nougayrède (The Guardian)

Our narrative of the armistice is not the only one. In the east conflict continued, fuelled by the crumbling of empires

 ... For one thing, 1918 as the date of the end of the conflict only holds true for the western front. In the east of Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states all meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars.

Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009. I repeat it annually.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

Ten years ago today, my guest columnist slot at the New Albany Tribune was just beginning.

Sept. 30, 2010. Dalby needed a thesaurus.

No sooner than I'd finished a tweet about the newspaper's unvarying roster of older white male guest columnists than I started laughing from the belly up, because once upon a time I was one of them.

In fact, today is the 10th anniversary of my announcement in this space, which is reprinted below. My first column in the now defunct New Albany Tribune appeared in January, 2009.

From the very beginning, I referred to it as "Beer Money," followed by the title of the specific piece. Regrettably, the newspaper never found the humor in these words. "Beer Money" was Bluegill's suggestion, one made after I griped about the pay scale, and he observed that it still was enough pocket change to buy beer.

My gig as a columnist lasted until early 2011. When I filed to run for city council at-large, the column was put on hiatus; Kozarovich made it clear that if I lost, the column would return, and I did, but it didn't.

In the interim, the Tribune's merger with the Evening News had occurred. Kozarovich departed, and the new management wasn't entirely honest with me in terms of future writing prospects, but that's an instance of water under the proverbial bridge. Still, while few in number, my grudges are carefully crafted to last decades.

What the declining newspaper needs at present is a more diverse roster of columnists. It doesn't need any more old white guys like me. We need black, Hispanic, LGBTQIA+ and youthful voices. I don't expect innovation to happen, because upper management at the newspaper is milquetoast, direly committed to the flavorless pablum of low common denominators.

They play a prevent defense when what's needed is a full-court press. Me thinks I'll stay right where I am, giving the pot an occasional stir and doing what the merged newspaper can't ... or won't.

---

New Tribune guest columnist in January. (December 8, 2008)

Last Friday afternoon I met with Steve Kozarovich, publisher of the New Albany Tribune, and agreed to write a 900-word column on a weekly basis, beginning Thursday, January 8, and running on Thursdays thereafter. It is a (modest) for-pay gig, joining paid columns I write biweekly for LEO and quarterly for Food and Dining magazine.

This announcement is provided as a courtesy to the publisher, who now has the opportunity to begin fielding complaints before the column actually appears.

The column will be of general interest, including beer, travel, local events, and plenty of atheistic, progressive, left-wing rabble rousing. It seems the advent of Barack Obama is the perfect time to torment the local yokels in such a fashion. If there aren't periodic letters of outrage emanating from Greenville and Dewey Heights, then I'll not have been doing my job.

I've been writing as much as possible lately, both here and at my other blogs. Part of the reason is the possibility of the column assignment. It's like going into training and building up seldom-used muscles for the task ahead, and similar to spending a year learning to communicate with bankers and others whose dialects are unfamiliar.

After all, there's still a brewery to build. More on that later in the week.

To know me well is to know that the art of communicating through the written word is dear to my heart, and throughout my life, the ability to write has constituted perhaps my most fundamental link to the world outside my consciousness.

There have been written successes and disappointments along the way, but the compulsion has become far clearer to me this past year, as I've actively engaged my upbringing and can see now that my commitment to education and knowledge was a reaction to a blue-collar father whose ability to express emotion was limited primarily to anger and annoyance. My way of rebelling was to become good at the things he wasn't (writing is one) while remaining true to the indignation.

I laughed while writing that, by the way. Like my father before me, expressing irritation has never been a problem for me.

During what has amounted to a professional career in beer, I may have become infamous in other fields, yet writing remains the prime defense mechanisms of choice, and a means of articulating and explaining myself when the spoken word fails.

And, while there has been a love-hate relationship with myself and the newspaper these many years, I can state without hesitation that had the Tribune not improved recently, I wouldn't even consider doing this.

Wish me luck. More importantly, wish me improved work habits. I'm going to need them. When the columns begin flowing, I'll come up with a way to link or reprint them here or elsewhere. Also note that your ideas are appreciated. Ideas hatched here are fair game for exploration and improvisation at newspaper column length.

It's going to be fun.

An annual reminder: Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

In 2018, the annual renewal of Veterans Day is auspicious because it's the 100th anniversary of the Great War's end. Since the conflict's centenary in 2014, there have been 100-year memories of battles and events, from the Masurian Lakes through Meuse-Argonne.

Why is this important?

Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not only those from the now wholly passed World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 29th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall fell. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did -- well, maybe.

I believe future historians will refer to the period of 1912-1989 as the "77 Years' War," or perhaps tack on another decade and pronounce the 87 Years' War as concluding with the bombardment of Belgrade by NATO.

Speaking for myself, America's Civil War has been a fascination since childhood, and had I hazarded a guess back in 2010 or so, it would have been that the Civil War's sesquicentennial (observed during the years 2011 - 2015) would have gripped me.

To an extent it did, but I should have known better. Europe has been an obsession for thirty-five years of my adult life.

What's more, there's an immediacy. My grandfather was drafted into the Army circa 1918, but fortunately never left the continental United States before WWI ended. His son, who was my father, volunteered and joined the Marines in 1942, spending three years in the Pacific theater of operations.

I didn't do anything, apart from studying their experiences and visiting the European locales neither of them ever saw.

Lessons from history 100 years after the Armistice (The Economist)

The guns fell silent a century ago

 ... National chauvinisms live on despite the Somme. Anti-Semitism lives on despite the Holocaust. Societies’ capacity to imagine collapse and barbarism in visceral terms fades with time. All Europeans can do is be vigilant and humble before these forces, dip their oars into the waves of history when possible, hold tight to their humanity and be grateful that their continent’s past and present are now broadly in harmony, the former educating and civilising the latter, for now at least. Like train lines running together in a wood.

Having just returned from a visit to Gdansk in Poland, these reflections seem particularly relevant.

For millions of Europeans, the war did not end in 1918, by Natalie Nougayrède (The Guardian)

Our narrative of the armistice is not the only one. In the east conflict continued, fuelled by the crumbling of empires

 ... For one thing, 1918 as the date of the end of the conflict only holds true for the western front. In the east of Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states all meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars.

Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009. I repeat it annually.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

An annual reminder: Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

The annual renewal of Veterans Day reminds us that 2017 is the 99th anniversary of the Great War's end. The conflict's centenary was in 2014, and throughout 2017 there have been 100-year memories of horrific battles like Passchendaele and the Caporetto.

Why is this important? Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not just the World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 28th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall fell. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did -- well, maybe. There's the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s to consider, and now that the religious division of Ireland is back in the news as a result of Brexit ...

Thus, future historians might refer to the period of 1912-1989 as the "77 Years' War," or perhaps tack on another decade and pronounce the 87 Years' War as concluding with the bombardment of Belgrade by NATO. Most of us will be gone by then, anyway.

Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

Gahan and Coffey Together Forever, Part 7: Hot toadstools and cold cappuccino (29 January 2009).

LAST: Gahan and Coffey Together Forever, Part 6: Let's hear it from the council: Can taxpayers speak openly during their time, or does the Wizard decide who is heard? (24 January 2009).

In my fifth Tribune column, I introduced the general public to the spasmodic violence of Dan Coffey's violent Copperhead Shake. It did not create an uproar, primarily because most people already knew that Cappuccino is the reaaw deal.

Elsewhere upon publication, I noted in passing ...

As for the Coffey Agonistes piece today, all I ask is that anyone planning on attending Monday’s city council meeting ... please bring a video camera.

As stated previously, I plan on using the full five minutes of my non-agenda speaking time to offer a heartfelt homily on something or the other as yet undetermined. It will tug the heart, tease the brain, induce laughter in the gallery and offer the council president the irresistable opportunity to gavel me away from the podium and exact his revenge. It would be nice to have such a moment captured on film and displayed prominently on this page.

In fact, for so long as Coffey’s latest outrage goes publicly unaddressed by his trembling political peers, I suggest that as many of us as possible attend and be prepared to speak. After all, there’s no such thing as too much information, is there?

Eight years have passed.

Has anything changed, Pat?

---

Hot toadstools and cold cappuccino.

29 January 2009

Truth is stranger than fact.
-- Grandpa Jones, “Hee Haw”

During the first city council conclave of 2009, Dan Coffey was elected as president against token opposition, which is to say none, these vital matters commonly being determined in back rooms that formerly were smoky, before the health fascist jihads of the present era, and with words like “democratic” and “contested” seldom required as modifiers.

Coffey represents the 1st council district, which he congenitally insists is ignored by the city’s power elite. Unsurprisingly, he has never explained why nine dynamic years in office have not brought about certifiable gains to his neighborhood. This strange absence of progress may have something to do with Coffey’s own council-side manner … but I digress.

As president, Coffey succeeds 6th district councilman Jeff Gahan, himself a three-time wielder of the magic gavel, and to whom Coffey was joined at the political hip for much of the latter half of 2008, presumably owing to an alliance of expedience on the part of otherwise disparate political entities, both transparently desirous of a larger stage upon which to perform, sharing a stubborn impatience with those who display the impudence to object, and harboring the potentially catastrophic belief that one can manipulate the other.

In essence, Coffey is council president because Gahan finds it useful, and while Gahan perhaps believes that Coffey genuinely has something to offer the city, he may also have acquiesced with Machiavellian intent to position Coffey for a damaging fall. Either way, the events of Thursday, January 15 are sufficient for us to question both Coffey’s suitability for office and Gahan’s political judgment.

Considering Coffey’s boorish and unstable behavior at the conclusion of the meeting, first inside the council chamber and then later at a local licensed establishment, the admonition recently scrawled above the decaying urinals at the Luddite Bar & Grill is sufficiently prescient to apply to Gahan:

“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

---

Full disclosure compels me to proudly acknowledge that both Mark Cassidy and Jeff Gillenwater are longtime friends, the latter joining me and others as plaintiffs in the redistricting case mentioned here. Furthermore, it should be noted that I did not personally witness the events described, although I’ve spoken to individuals (other than the preceding) who were there.

That said, it is hardly in keeping with established council protocol for Coffey to imperiously jeer and then abruptly terminate the well-intentioned efforts of a fellow citizen – a fellow taxpayer, no less – to address the council during the public speaking period allotted for comments on non-agenda items, a periodically entertaining feature added to the biweekly agenda for the express purpose of giving people the opportunity to, yes, address the council.

Hectored citizen Cassidy came before the council and waited patiently for the opportunity to read a prepared statement and ask a simple question: Does the current legislative aggregation have any intention of doing its Constitutional duty to draw fair electoral districts by lawfully redistricting for the first time since 1992?

Cassidy, a non-partisan volunteer on the redistricting committee formed by the council last year at the behest of a federal court judge annoyed by the council’s sloth, politely endeavored to ask this question, but Coffey – whose job description presumably includes an obligation to uphold procedure and decorum – argued with Cassidy and gaveled him down, reverting to the serial distemper that Coffey oddly believes his fellow New Albanians should view as statesmanlike.

----

But flagrant abuses of authority are seldom confused with statesmanship, and now we must contemplate the latest in a series of red flags warning New Albanians that the voices emanating from Coffey’s interior political world plainly render him unfit for office.

Coffey inhabits an eerie Hieronymus Bosch landscape filled with mysterious conspiracies, withheld information and unfathomable daily slights emanating from people and ideas he cannot begin to grasp, and he comprehends only two poles of reference: Himself, and the enemy – or “them people.”

Accordingly, the story resumes after meeting’s end with Coffey's verbal and physical harassment of another, entirely different citizen in Studio's, the fine downtown eatery and bar on Main Street.

There, surrounded by witnesses numbering at least one fellow council member and various other public officials as well as ordinary pub patrons, Coffey initiated a heated discussion with Gillenwater that ended with Coffey aggressively grabbing Gillenwater by the shoulders and vowing to be “like a copperhead” and to “strike when you least expect it.”

In case you’re wondering, here is the definition of assault:

A crime that occurs when one person tries to physically harm another in a way that makes the person under attack feel immediately threatened. Actual physical contact is not necessary; threatening gestures that would alarm any reasonable person can constitute an assault.

It is incredible, shameful and indefensible. New Albany’s council president refused to permit a citizen to speak during the time allotted for it, and then both verbally and physically accosted another citizen in a public place. Is there any better example of the New Albany Syndrome than Dan Coffey’s skewed perspective of “leadership,” as manifested by these lamentable outbursts?

Aren’t they primal screams, not the sagacious deliberations of a paid public servant?

Can any member of the council excuse Coffey’s bad acting?

Can any of them deny that he continues to make New Albany the laughing stock of the region, thwarting the efforts of so many people to invest in the city’s future and revitalize the municipality?

Can any council member refute that Coffey’s most recent meltdown tars each and every one of them with the same degrading brush?

How can Coffey’s fellow council persons sleep at night knowing that they have empowered him with an office that he is unable to exercise responsibly?

I’m thinking of one of them in particular.

--

NEXT: Gahan and Coffey Together Forever, Part 8: Open thread: City council meeting of Monday, February 2 (3 February 2009).

From BEER MONEY at the Tribune to ON THE AVENUES at NAC -- how my weekly column came to be.

NA Confidential was born in October, 2004. Almost 11,000 posts later, the experience sometimes verges on the coherent, but at the start I had little idea how to proceed, beyond writing for posterity about what was happening right here in New Albany.

Consequently, after five years of beating the bushes, my big break beckoned as 2008 drew to a close.

New Tribune guest columnist in January. (December 8, 2008)

Last Friday afternoon I met with Steve Kozarovich, publisher of the New Albany Tribune, and agreed to write a 900-word column on a weekly basis, beginning Thursday, January 8, and running on Thursdays thereafter. It is a (modest) for-pay gig, joining paid columns I write biweekly for LEO and quarterly for Food and Dining magazine.

This announcement is provided as a courtesy to the publisher, who now has the opportunity to begin fielding complaints before the column actually appears.

From January 2009 until February 2011, I met 111 consecutive "Beer Money" column deadlines at $40 a pop, then decided to run for city council, necessitating a suspension of my weeklyTribunecontribution.

Today's last Tribune column for a while: "Let’s all say ‘yes’ for change." (February 17, 2011)

 ... And so, here's the finale ... for now. I expect to be back (a) after a primary loss, or (b) after a general election loss, or (c) after a general election victory. After all, there is a Clere Channel precedent for public officials writing a weekly column, is there not?

BAYLOR: Let’s all say ‘yes’ for change

This will be my last column in The Tribune for a while, and there’s a reason for the hiatus.

I've decided to take a dram of my own medicine and file to run for city council in the coming primary — yes, as a Democrat, and for an at-large seat.

Because this very newspaper has a policy against permitting its columnists to conduct campaigns in print, and actually enforces it more often than the city’s own long neglected codes, I must return temporarily to the realm of the blogosphere.

And in the blogosphere I was destined to remain, because concurrent with my hiatus, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. cashiered Kozarovich and combined our local newspapers into a new entity, the News and Tribune. It was to be headquartered in Jeffersonville, instituting a Clark County-centric focus that has become steadily more annoying to New Albanians during the years since, and it caused my column to walk the plank.

This just in: Merger kills a newspaper column. (May 23, 2011)

Damn, I knew I should have actually won that election ... then I could still have a newspaper column, just like Parson Clere, although I'm told that the beer column idea is still on the table for the Spectrum section.

The now departed Coach K used the word "hiatus" prior to my council bid. I had to fetch a thesaurus to know what he meant. Now, somewhere, he and Lucy Van Pelt are holding the football aloft and laughing.

Just my luck. Who'd have known that Linus's older sister worked for the Retirement Systems of Alabama?

Is it time to go underground, yet?

To Matt Nash: It's all yours now. Torture the troglodytes often, will you ... and try to give us some New Albany news, okay? The Clark County stuff's already getting old.

Right now, the regular columnist spots are full. I can't pick up anyone else and still get in letters, cheers and jeers and any editorials in a timely manner.

I still had to drop another columnist (McDonald) on top of when you and Kelley Curran decided to run for office because space became less available after the merger. I'm also trying to keep a balance between Clark County folks like Dodd and Harbeson and Floyd County writers like Amy and Nash. And, of course, I have a freelancer/stringer budget to worry about.

It's possible a spot would open up in the future and I'll let you know if that happens.

Shea Van Hoy

I spent a few months licking wounds and plotting revenge against the perpetrators, then realized there was much yet to say and write. The answer was to DIY, in this blog forum.

The newspaper's dead and buried, so welcome to electronica. (May 26, 2011)

Beginning last week, my Thursday column was reinstituted in this space. The column ran in the News and Tribune from January 2009 until February 2011, when it went on "hiatus" during my run for council. Earlier this week, I learned that the hiatus had been transformed into permanent absence owing to changes in the newspaper's structure.

This just in: Merger kills a newspaper column.

As a writer, deadlines have a wonderful way of concentrating thought, and so it is my desire to get back into the weekly column habit. This blog's the place for it until something else comes along.

Furthermore, conceding that the newspaper's current staff will disagree with me, the consolidation of two editions into one of the same size inevitably will have the effect of reducing coverage of New Albany (and to an extent, Floyd County) affairs. Stated simply, New Albany has lost its newspaper.

"Our newspaper is dead -- long live the Internet", or something like that.

For the time being, and perhaps for a long time to come, this blog is more important than ever before. While I don't have the time to transform NAC into a comprehensive news and commentary entity, repositioning my weekly column and moving it from Thursday newsprint to Thursday bandwidth is attainable, so that's how we'll start the ball rolling. In conjunction with social media, it's enough for now. I am aware of like-minded ideas for on-line publishing in the community, and will continue monitoring these in the hope that something comes to fruition.

But what to call this new column?

Later this morning, my Thursday column will reappear here. The old "Beer Money" tag, which referred to the limited usefulness of the bare farthings grudgingly paid by the Retirement Systems of Alabama to guest columnists in publications like One Southern Indiana Newspaper, no longer makes sense, seeing as remuneration has completely disappeared.

Instead, my new Thursday column will openly hearken back to the long-departed days of independent, truly local journalism in New Albany: "On the Avenues." Some of you will know what I mean by this. Look for the Green Mouse to make appearances, too.

In the days of my youth, back when the Tribune actually mattered, a lifer named Jack Powers was the staff do-it-all. He covered the social and political waterfronts in his column, On the Avenues, with the help of an all-purpose editorial source and assistant, the so-called Green Mouse.

My column honors these quaint and mostly forgotten aspects of local journalism in New Albany.

Next: The Top Ten ON THE AVENUES columns of 2016.

An annual reminder: Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

The annual renewal of Veterans Day reminds us that 2016 is the 98th anniversary of the Great War's end. The conflict's centenary was in 2014, and throughout 2016 there have been 100-year memories of horrific battles like Verdun and the Somme.

Why is this important? Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not just the World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 27th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall fell. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did, although recent events suggest that it's still being contested.

Still, my guess is that future historians will refer to this period as the 1912-1989 "77 Years' War," and be done with it. Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

ON THE AVENUES: His nose knows tolls and polls (2010).

ON THE AVENUES: His nose knows tolls and polls (2010).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Let's turn back that forever unforgiving stuck-in-the-70s New Albany alarm clock to October 21, 2010, and the following essay from the time of my employment (yes, they actually paid a few farthings) as pre-merger New Albany Tribune columnist. It has never appeared here previously.

Surveying the 2010 bridge tolling contestants, we see that Dalby, Price, Garry, Daniels and Grooms have long since swapped jobs, the latter now afflicting us with Chamber of Commerce envy in his second term as state senator, but either Chuck Freiberger or Jeff Gahan is going to take care of this in 2018 -- right?

Kerry Stemler, prime architect of the approaching bridge toll regime, remains in place as a well-groomed, obsequious and venerated regional figure of the country club set. His toll fetish is about to come to glorious fruition, but before this happens there'll be another potentially momentous event.

As readers already know, I'm a member of the current Leadership Southern Indiana class, and on the 19th is Economy & Commercial Enterprise Day. In the morning, we'll be touring the Port of Indiana, and one of our guides will be none other than Stemler, the gray eminence himself.

I'm giddy. Positively giddy. Now, back to the future, yet again.

---

His nose knows tolls and polls.

October 21, 2010

Doublethink: A simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas (Orwell).
-- Merriam Webster Dictionary

One Southern Indiana’s well-tailored chairman, Michael Dalby, stood before New Albany’s city council, a fractious and generally dysfunctional entity, one nonetheless transformed for the occasion into a veritable firing line of incisive questioning.

Huh? Evidently I’d missed a turn near Albuquerque.

At stake was payment to 1Si for vague economic development “services” previously rendered, for which Dalby advanced colorfully apocryphal claims, none accompanied by the slightest documentation, to the overall effect that without 1Si, New Albanians would be living in yurts on the Mongolian steppe, subsisting on fermented mare’s milk and, for entertainment, watching beetles copulate.

Eventually Steve Price zeroed in, embracing the campaign issue that seemingly came from nowhere this summer, but really didn’t, and asked (I’m paraphrasing): How can the current council financially support an organization that advocates tolling existing bridges to pay for the colossal Ohio River Bridges Project?

A well-rehearsed Dalby did not hesitate.

"We are not in favor of tolls. Nobody is in favor of tolls. That's not something we want to see happen."

A tremor ominously rumbled in all directions, and half a world away, a game of yak polo halted abruptly as the riders reached for their furiously stuttering BS Meters.

Back here in New Albany, after a hyper-kinetic bout of Duck Duck Goose, our council members approved a reduced stipend for 1Si and sent Dalby back to his executive suite. If I were Kay Garry, I’d stop payment on the check.

---

I say this because Dalby’s miraculous election eve conversion to tender, merciful concern for the pocketbooks of Southern Indiana plebeians doesn’t just strain one’s credulity.

It splits, breaks, smashes, mangles, incinerates, lacerates and spits in the very eye of credulity. Let’s avoid that other nasty “L” word, and say merely that Liberties with the truth are being taken. As such, kindly permit me to provide the sort of forensic evidence generally lacking when 1Si’s dampened palm comes at you, outstretched.

Here’s Michael Dalby in a press release that was quoted on April 15, 2010, in “The Ville Voice” on-line blog. His memo extols the virtues of the ORBP, and devotes hundreds of words to buffing and polishing the act of tolling, just in case a stray, ordinary soul in Kentuckiana might somehow notice that tolls were being considered as a financing option.

“We support the process that has been put in place by both Kentucky and Indiana – the formation of the Bi-State Authority – and giving them the ability to review any and all funding options … If viable funding options emerge that don’t include tolling, we fully support that approach. Nobody wants to pay tolls. However, if including high-speed electronic tolling is the only way to fund the project and get it built in a timely manner, then we will accept a funding solution that includes tolling.”

It is doublethink, writ large. Dalby now asks us to believe simultaneously in two contradictory ideas: That 1Si is “not in favor” of tolls and also “supports the process” of the unelected Bi-State Authority, which has the unimpeded power to levy tolls on existing bridges to finance the monstrosity of the ORBP.

And from whom does this unimpeded authority’s unelected power derive? From Indiana’s and Kentucky’s elected officials, foremost among them Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who clearly indicated his bridges project position in a video interview with the Courier-Journal (August 25, 2010):

“I don’t think anybody’s got even a wildly unrealistic plan that doesn't involve tolls."

To enforce discipline as Bi-State Authority capo to the governor’s folksy star turn as Hoosier Godfather, Daniels previously anointed local businessman, 1Si shadow government stalwart and Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana theocratic apologist Kerry Stemler.

While customarily operating on the hazy periphery preferred by traditional regional power elites, Stemler appears in daylight every now and then to utter fearsome non-negotiable bromides, as in his most recent public pronouncement on tolling in a Tribune article by Braden Lammers on October 9, 2010:

“I’ve studied this long enough. Tolling, for this to get built, will be a part of the project.”

No wonder the equestrian athletes in Arvaikheer tugged at their mustaches as the word “tilt” lit up their bovine manure detection devices.

Daniels says, “Tolls.”

Stemler says, “Tolls.”

The Bi-State Authority appointed by politicos to make tolling decisions without that minor, nagging democratic principle of polling, say, “Tolls.”

1Si’s Dalby says, “No tolls” and “Tolls,” simultaneously, and expects us to buy it. Doddering old Geppetto, among others, knows exactly what’s about to happen. But what about the Jeffersonville councilman, Ron “Profiles in Abstention” Grooms?

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Grooms, also a candidate for District 46 Indiana Senate, gave us a valuable pre-election glimpse of his legislative prowess last Monday.

On colleague Keith Fetz’s compromise resolution, revised to specify the council’s opposition to tolls on existing bridges, as opposed to future tolls on freshly built ORBP bridges, Grooms heroically … abstained. The resolution passed.

On a motion requesting that the Jeffersonville city council attorney convey to One Southern Indiana the council’s concern with 1Si's partisan endorsements, and to request clarification of such political skullduggery in light of the council's annual $30,000 support level, Grooms courageously ... abstained once more, and the motion also passed.

Perhaps Grooms discerned a troubling conflict of interest in questioning the same ham-fisted political action committee that endorsed him. Fortunately for voters, divestment from 1Si and its hand-picked slate of candidates is a simple, elegant solution to doublethink in all its banality.

Isn’t there an election soon?

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September 29: ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART THREE: Survey says … Irv’s street grid agitprop won’t be putting Diogenes out of work any time soon.

September 29: ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART TWO: Inkem binkem notamus rex, protect us all from the city (still) with the hex (2014).

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.