There's got to be a morning after.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was a cheesy disaster flick about a capsized luxury liner and the efforts of survivors to escape hell, upside down.

In 1973, Maureen McGovern's performance of "The Morning After" (also known as The Song from the Poseidon Adventure) was a hit and spent two weeks at number one.



This morning's lesson: When disaster strikes, escape is the first priority. Only after safety is assured can one look back and suffer the hangover's full effect.

My personal hero and favored dissident Václav Havel understood this dynamic. Two full decades elapsed from the thwarted hopes of the Prague Spring through the Velvet Revolution's ultimate dismantling of a failed regime.

Havel wrote, “There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”

In the throes of my hangover, I return to Havel for solace.

He was the most infuriating of politicians, yet the most beguiling. It was hard to get a straight answer from a man who in the middle of a sentence about the evils of communism would change the subject to the lyrics of John Lennon or ask about the meaning of life — and seem genuinely interested in an answer. And how many in the political world could admit simply that (in the act of) exercising power ‘I appear more and more like an asshole.’ Unlike most others, Havel could fall back on his original career to explain the futility of many political lives.

How wonderful by comparison to be a writer. You write something in a couple of weeks and it is here for the ages. What will remain when the presidents and prime ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, most likely inaccurate.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: In Havel, I trust.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: In Havel, I trust.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I'm not ill, but I need a personal day. Two Food & Dining column deadlines are approaching, and 1,001 minor tasks keep nipping at my writing time, so it's rerun week at OTA. 

This column originally was published on May 7, 2015. It came to mind recently when I watched a video about the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland. 

In the video, a recent interview with Lech Wałęsa (he's now 74) was juxtaposed with archival footage and views of the Lenin Shipyard today. The latter are sad, given that the once sprawling birthplace of Solidarity has been reduced to almost nothing -- Jeff Boat puns are not intended -- and Poland itself currently is gripped by a reactionary sociopolitical phase. 

Looking back, the devoutly Roman Catholic ex-president Wałęsa is convinced that God placed him on earth for one purpose, and one alone: to topple the Communist regime in Poland. He is proud to have accomplished this mission, and as for what came afterward (read: an unsuccessful political career), well, it can be discussed some other time. 

My first reaction was to compare these thoughts with the career of Ulysses S. Grant, a man who possessed the ideal qualities to win the Civil War, but not to navigate the political realities of the Oval Office. 

Then the post-Communist experiences of Havel seemed a better analogy. Coming from very different backgrounds (Wałęsa was an electrician and Havel an intellectual), they shared an ability to resist authoritarianism, though not to be effective national leaders amid the scrum of new beginnings. 

As a polemicist, I may resemble that remark. It might even be a tad too close for comfort. Then again, the ruling clique has yet to be overthrown. Shall we check back in November of 2019?

---

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
-- Vaclav Havel

Considering that the late Vaclav Havel is a longtime personal hero, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for you to learn I have been profoundly moved in the aftermath of reading Havel: A Life, a biography of the Czech playwright, dissident and president, written by Michael Zantovsky.

Zantovsky was a personal friend and sometimes confidant of Havel, but the book cannot be classified as hagiography. It’s a “warts and all” sketch of a man’s exceedingly complicated inner world and public persona. More than half of Havel’s life was lived during his country’s Communist period – and much of that time he was a marked man and presumed “enemy” of the state. Then, in a supreme irony, he served multiple terms as president.

This largely symbolic post seems to have strained Havel’s abilities as much or more than surviving outlaw status in a dictatorship.

Born during the interwar period when Czechoslovakia seemed to be emerging as a model for capitalist democracy, Havel was a child of privilege, and as such, his economic class rendered him a societal pariah when the workers’ paradise was forcibly installed after 1948. He was made to feel that he didn’t “fit,” and while capable of addressing the dichotomy intellectually, there were lifelong feelings of guilt.

Still, Havel assuaged them in various ways, and managed to find a foothold. Excluded from university owing to his origins, he served a hitch in the military and then became a stagehand, ushering him into Prague’s theatrical milieu precisely at a point where the usual governmental restrictions on free expression were softened just enough for him to begin writing slyly subversive and anarchic plays (the “theater of the absurd”), and making a name for himself – not just inside Czechoslovakia, but in Western Europe, which became of inestimable importance later, when he most needed the money and contacts.

All the while, Havel cultivated a wide range of friendships in the intelligentsia, including rebels, misfits, scholars and even the stray apparatchik. In 1968 came the Prague Spring, a thawing which held hope that there might be “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia. Leonid Brezhnev thought otherwise, and for the next two decades, the country became mired in a debilitating process derisively known as normalization.

Consumer production was increased even as the fundamental deficiencies of a primitively industrialized economy, one chained to the Soviet Union, went unaddressed. Free thought was suppressed. The inevitable result was stagnation and despair, addressed through sausages, beer and maybe a yearly holiday on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. One could live, albeit without thinking.

Havel the star playwright now became Havel, the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He was harassed and frequently imprisoned, and yet managed to formulate a doctrine of principled dissent, focusing on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level.

Examining society’s daily psychological assumptions, Havel theorized that Communism was a trauma primarily virulent at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, despoiling the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers.

Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality, as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda, subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.

---

Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: “Civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up. It was a gently scolding and passive resistance, carefully calculated to avoid open conflict, and subsequently it was assisted immeasurably by one of those historical quirks that seem irrelevant at the time, in 1975, as buried within a non-binding international conference called the Helsinki Accords.

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "Leonid Brezhnev had looked forward, Anatoly Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."

To summarize, the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, desperately desired the recognition of borders reshaped by World War II, and a seemingly insignificant appendage to the Helsinki Accords pertaining to human rights and freedoms was tolerated as a mere talking point for Western campaigners.

In fact, in a strange and perhaps legalistic way, the Czechoslovak government (and other Warsaw Pact nations) provided moral legitimacy to internal opposition by signing the Helsinki Accords. Granted, it did not mean opponents would avoid persecution, but in 1977, Havel and a small band of courageous dissidents wrote a document known as Charter 77, and then undertook the informal organization of a civic initiative known by the same name.

Charter 77 was hounded mercilessly by the Communist regime. Still, the very fact that Czechoslovakia had accepted human rights responsibilities intensified human rights scrutiny outside the Soviet zone, and ensured continued publicity for the opposition, which could be weakened, although not squelched entirely.

During the 1980s, as Communism’s intrinsic structural flaws began afflicting the entire Bloc, Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the USSR would have to divest itself of economically draining responsibilities to Eastern Europe to survive (of course even then, it didn’t). Without the formerly perpetual Soviet guarantee of support, Czechoslovaka’s regime lapsed into a state of terminal illness.

In 1989, when push came to largely peaceful shove, the government collapsed in what is now known as the Velvet Revolution. Just eight months following his final incarceration, Havel became president of the country, embarking on a period of recovery still ongoing, more than three years following Havel’s death – or as the post-Communist adage puts it: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.”

New Albany resembles that remark, doesn’t it?

---

Whenver I think about New Albany’s “battered city” syndrome, as our friend Gina always referred to it, Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society come to mind.

Admittedly, 25 years later, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland, except that sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and he excelled at that.

In good times or bad, New Albany’s Battered City Syndrome is still on display, as manifested by secrecy, mistrust, inertia and contempt, especially on the part of those who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness, which provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.

From the subsequent vacuum oozes the lowest-common-denominator politics of fear-mongering. Once not so long ago, during a heated council debate, the spluttering 1st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s most detested target: “Them people.” In reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people do, but this alone doesn’t scratch the ward-heeler’s itch. A truly civilized, functional city has no need for Dan Coffey, and he knows it.

Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and vituperation, and get on with the process of building a civil society – a civil city – with a sustainable, inter-related foundation that prefaces future progress.

Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Let’s talk.

Meanwhile, I heartily recommend Zantovsky’s biography. Ultimately, much went wrong for Havel following the Velvet Revolution, although the author notes that Havel remained invariably courteous and polite, even when dealing with his oppressors, whether Communist or parliamentarian.

I’ll have to work on this.

---

Recent columns:

April 5: ON THE AVENUES: New Albany's downtown food and dining scene is solid ... for now.

March 29: ON THE AVENUES: Al Knable doesn’t lie, but the local Democratic Party is a flood-plain Pinocchio. Let’s censure it at the ballot box.

March 22: ON THE AVENUES: Remembering Max Allen, bartender extraordinaire.

March 15: ON THE AVENUES: The books I've been reading during the winter months.

Back by popular demand: “Never trust anyone wearing a suit.”

I don't hate on men (or women) just because they wear suits.

It's just that one's fundamental humanity need not be reflected by the price of his or her clothing. Many very intelligent people wear t-shirts. Perhaps they do it as a conscious blow against ostentatiousness, although there's always the possibility that jeans are more comfortable.

Come to think of it, as someone who hasn't endured a suit since 2009 ...

... how do I even know the meaning of a word like ostentatiousness? Is it a fluke? Can one even be a wordplay poseur while swaddled in a hoodie?

Why ask why?

Because it's a great time for a repost, that's why. From 2015 by way of 2011, here's "Suit yourself. Plaid?"

---

It's 2015, and I'm reading a biography of Václav Havel: Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky.

The secret police also came for the philosopher Jan Patocka, Havel’s fellow Charter 77 spokesman. Patocka did not survive interrogation, and Havel dedicated what became his most famous text to his older friend’s memory. “The Power of the Powerless” tells the story of a greengrocer who every morning obligingly puts the sign “Workers of the World Unite” in his shop window. Of course neither the greengrocer nor the passers-by believe the sign. Even the Communist regime no longer believes the sign. Yet everyone goes on pretending. Pretending is in the greengrocer’s interest, for it allows him to live in peace. If one day he were to take down the sign, he would be harassed, perhaps arrested. And yet, Havel points out, if one day all the greengrocers were to refuse to hang their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution. Therefore the powerless greengrocer is not so powerless; on the contrary, he is responsible and therefore guilty: By failing to “live in truth,” he makes it possible for the system to continue.

Rather like New Albany persisting in pretending that its Democrats really are, although we're not entirely powerless. They can be voted out.

In 2011, during my unsuccessful city council campaign, I offered this opinion of suits -- the clothing. Looking at the photos in Zantovsky's fine book, Havel always seems more natural when dressed as an artist, playwright and dissident. In point of fact, I do own a suit. Since losing weight, it's too large, and so a trip to Sew Fitting is in order -- which is not to say I cherish the thought of wearing it.

---

A Candidate’s Progress (11): Suit yourself. Plaid? 

(April 19, 2011)

The Woodstock festival took place in 1969, when I was only nine years old -- too young to completely understand what was occurring in America amid the generational upheavals depicted nightly on the tube, and yet capable of registering their impact in my evolving consciousness.

Something was happening, and not unlike Bob Dylan’s musical Mr. Jones, I didn’t know what it was. But it was exciting, if for no other reason than an older generation’s (read: those of my parents’ age) often expressed annoyance and exasperation with it.

One of the mantras of a turbulent period devoted to letting it all hang out struck me at the time as enduringly valid advice: “Never trust anyone wearing a suit.”

Obviously, the powers that be – the wielders of capital, the exploiters of the proletariat – all wore suits, and insofar as the middle and lower classes inevitably imitated the mores of their wealthier “betters,” it was a form of unwitting obeisance better avoided than indulged.

Bizarrely, here was a topic on which both the Baby Boom hippies and my Great Depression father should have been able to agree, had it not been for his inability to move past the length of their hair and listen to what they actually were saying.

If my dad owned a suit, it was reserved for weddings and funerals, and worn grudgingly even then. He was a working man’s populist to the very core, and usually as suspicious of moneyed elites and polite society as any bandana-wearing revolutionary. In a different country than the United States, one with more than two political parties to channel belief, his course in life might have been profoundly altered.

However, like so many others, in striving arduously for his sought after place in a middle class perhaps already doomed, even in the late 1960’s, he was inexorably steered by those very same besuited powerbrokers into emulating them by craving a modicum of their material trappings.

In fairness, a vast majority of the rebelling hippies at Woodstock eventually discarded their own youthful principles, taking the same materialistic path, but diverging from my father’s way in one very important sense: The Baby Boomers aged and became steadily more selfish, to the point that they’re now refusing to pay taxes.

Meanwhile, to the end, my father retained his agrarian communal instincts. Somewhere else, he might have been one hell of a socialist. We’ll never know, and that’s a shame.

---

Resolved: Never trust anyone wearing a suit?

Never?

Ever?

No, not really. It is not a matter of trust, and I trust plenty of people who wear suits. Conversely, I seldom ever wear one, because I don’t have to. Comfort, personal preference and an active desire to enjoy what I do and not feel constrained by unnecessary adornments have conspired to result in an absence of suits in my closet. You’re free to dress as you please – or as you must. Just leave me out of it, please.

While it is true that for a brief period during Junior High School, I took an active interest in dressing according to society’s restrictive expectations, a candid assessment of acne-laden adolescent gawkiness led me to realize that a life of high fashion was not my likely destiny.

So be it. Know thyself; when you dispense with redundant fantasies of a GQ modeling gig, you’re free to use your entire brain, unbound by convention, custom and prejudice. It’s almost as liberating as Woodstock, and there are times when it still infuriates the unreconstructed Nixon generation.

That makes me very, very happy.

---

There are many reasons why the craft beer milieu “suits” me as a job and avocation, and one of them is the casual nature of its dress code, which “suitably” contrasts with assumptions about the genre’s dynamic, expansive business success.

Huh? Say what? Growth nationwide … during a recession … and seemingly none of you wear appropriate business attire so as to buff and fluff the share holders? How on earth is that possible?

It’s because it matters far less what we look like than how we conjure our performance in the marketplace, and besides, if we had conformed to the expectations of what fuddy-duddies believe beer should be, there’d be no craft beer business at all.

Craft beer creates interest where there was none. It adaptively reuses, and leaps ahead of habit. It is vibrant, evolutionary and exciting. How many rock stars wear suits on a regular basis? Aside from Bryan Ferry and perhaps David Bowie ...

I dress casually for the requirements of my job, just the same as those bankers and lawyers with whom I transact company affairs, and who, at their first opportunity, gleefully change into shorts and a t-shirt to come drink some of the craft beer that’s brewed thanks to all of our labors, suited or otherwise. The wonderful part of my career is that I can dress the same way working, drinking, or all of the above. It simply does not matter what I wear, nor should it.

A college professor friend, himself a veteran of the Age of Aquarius (and who may be reading this essay), used to greet unsuspecting new sociology students in the guise of a custodian. With the class still awaiting the arrival of the instructor, he’d enter the room clad in work overalls, lope around, dust a shelf and empty the trash can -- and then begin talking about sociology.

You can imagine the students’ collective reaction, gleaned entirely from conditioned responses to mere appearance, as opposed to content: Who does that lowly janitor think he is talking to us about sociology? What could he possibly know? As it always turned out, he knew quite a lot – if the listener chose to look past the hair, beard and coveralls.

Given that I entered the race for at-large city council as an outspoken contrarian already thoroughly loathed by those discredited Dixiecrats pretending to be Democrats, it is perhaps inevitable that the oldest of these perpetually irrelevant fogies will criticize me for not looking the part of a politician, whatever that means, even while they excuse the typically slovenly appearance of their antebellum, regressive darling, Steve Price.

It is hypocrisy, but I do not begrudge it. They wouldn’t vote for me under any conceivable circumstance, whether I’m clothed in an Armani suit, Newt Gingrich’s loincloth, a hoop skirt or medieval armament, so why does it matter, apart from another opportunity to remind myself that while I might age, I won’t let my attitudes grow old and stodgy like them?

For the rest of you, those capable of discerning thoughts and ideas, we’ve been having a marvelous discussion for quite a few years, and we’ll continue to do so – win, lose or draw.

If you’ll kindly excuse me, I have a load of “These Machines Kill Fascists” t-shirts to wash. One of them needs to be clean and tidy for my next public appearance, at IUS on Friday evening. Hope to see you there.

(Note: A few minor corrections have been made. Your words never seem to read quite the same when time has elapsed.)

ON THE AVENUES: My 2015 in books and reading.

ON THE AVENUES: My 2015 in books and reading.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.
-- Vaclav Havel

As it pertains to my year of reading for pleasure, this pig admittedly will countenance no lipstick. In terms of books, 2015 was absolutely miserable for me, primarily because local politics remains the single best way known to man to disfigure the life of the mind.

John Gonder just might agree with me.

As such, having declared my candidacy in February as an independent candidate for mayor, it quickly became obvious that I needed to “bone up” on the classic texts of municipal governance, embracing such masterworks as the “Unexpurgated and Periodically Referenced New Albany Storm Water Master Plan,” and volumes 1 through 160 of “Collected Non-Enforced New Albanian Ordinances.”

The latter isn’t so much a “whodunit” of epic dimension, as a “willtheyeverdoit,” as experienced while standing in an alcohol-free queue which has existed since the city’s founding ... in 1817.

Happily, there was time in 2015 for one good book bearing relevance to the trials and tribulations of our emerging one-party New Gahania, which I undertook to read precisely because so few members of the ruling nomenklatura (Shane thrashes in mute nostril agony) are capable of grasping it.

I’m reading Michael Shuman’s “The Local Economy Solution,” primarily because David Duggins isn’t.

The first thing to understand, Shuman says, is that the traditional “economic development” model of chasing after large companies with huge taxpayer subsidy deals is absolutely the wrong way to revitalize a crippled or stagnant local economy. Indeed, he says, “economic development today is creating almost no new jobs whatsoever." In support of that conclusion he methodically dissects and refutes the “eight myths of [conventional] economic development.”

So long as “The Erotic Adventures of Mama TIF” remains on Duggins’ night stand, Shuman is destined to be ignored hereabouts.

But: I have no complaints.

My absorption of non-fiction essays and articles reached a new peak in 2015, and one of my objectives in contesting the election was to provide myself with a better understanding of a broad range of issues, which in turn informs an ongoing advocacy of policy, and better enables me to write about these topics for casual readers.

Now, in 2016, I’m hoping there’ll be a chance to adjust the balance and return to recreational reading.

---

It won’t take long to describe the books I read in 2015, seeing as there were so few.

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, by David Gilmour

This book has been in my possession for years, but it was moved to the top of the stack only after I struck up a Facebook friendship with Fabio, owner of a good beer bar in Arezzo. To summarize: From afar, we look at Italy as a place uniting Italians, but even today, 140 years after modern Italy was created, it isn’t nearly as simple as that.

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume I, by Fernand Braudel

If you’re not a history buff, stay away. It’s a mid-20th century text of epochal dimensions, in which Braudel rejects the usual narrative of great men and their events, and instead pioneers the examination of systems, both natural and man-made, from a grassroots perspective. No detail is too small. The book is excruciating, exhausting and highly informative – and someday down the road, there’s always Volume II.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger

A quick re-reading following the election, as intended to bring me back to earth in a far-off age before canine aquatic parks.

The authors take something called the Julius Work Calendar, a medieval reminder of work and faith with wonderful illustrations at the bottom of each month's page reproduced at the beginning of each chapter of the book and explained in the following text, to illustrate life in Anglo-Saxon England.

Enough of the appetizers; now for the main courses.

---

Two books, a novel and a biography, defined my year of reading.

Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky

A column was devoted to this one.

ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

 ... Havel the star playwright now became Havel, the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He was harassed and frequently imprisoned, and yet managed to formulate a doctrine of principled dissent, focusing on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level.

Václav Havel was a complex figure, both personally and historically. Zantovsky’s biography whets my appetite for a return to the source material: Havel’s plays, essays and letters.

2666, by Roberto Bolano

As for Bolano’s fictional tour de force, author Stephen King has this to say.

This surreal novel can't be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory. Suffice it to say it concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juarez, Mexico. Given this as a backdrop, the late Bolaño paints a mural of a poverty-stricken society that appears to be eating itself alive. And who cares? Nobody, it seems.

While I’m eternally delighted to report that I care not one solitary jot about Star Wars, there remains a measure of personal sensitivity to the plight of those prone to the decidedly First World Problem of becoming enraged by the “spoiling” of plot twists. Consequently, I’ll stick to the barest of bones in describing the broad outline of 2666.

Four European academics, whose university sinecures depend on perpetuating the weird cult following accorded a reclusive and mysterious European novelist, track him to a troubled city in Mexico, where they briefly encounter an aging university professor relocated from Spain, who is losing track of his own mind's narrative.

The professor’s daughter may or may not be consorting with the wrong crowd, and what’s more, numerous women in their city are being murdered in a serial crime spree that has completely overwhelmed the capabilities of local police.

The daughter then meets an American magazine writer assigned to cover a prize fight being held in the city, and ultimately he takes her with him to America, though not before becoming personally interested in the serial killings, which subsequently are recounted in painstaking detail. The murders don’t end, even after the police finally arrest a suspect.

We learn the identity and back story of the reclusive novelist, and the novel concludes. As with Eleanor Rigby, no one was saved, and Stephen King is absolutely right: 2666 is surreal, and it must be experienced, but possible side effects include cynicism and jaundice.

That’s because the notion of a society “eating itself alive” is never quite as relevant as during the months preceding a presidential election year. In this context, a New Year’s resolution to visit the gym strikes me as far less important than the imperative to spend more time in the library -- but this is America, and it isn't necessary for me to "spoil" the probable outcome for you to know which of these two choices is the likeliest.

---

Recent columns:

December 24: ON THE AVENUES: Fairytale of New Albania (2015 mashup).

December 17: ON THE AVENUES: Gin and tacos, and a maybe a doughnut, but only where feasible.

December 10: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2015).

December 3: ON THE AVENUES: Who (or what) is New Albany's "Person of the Year" for 2015?

November 26: ON THE AVENUES: Faux thanks and reveries (The 2015 Remix).

November 19: ON THE AVENUES: Beer, farthings and that little-known third category.

ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
-- Vaclav Havel

Considering that the late Vaclav Havel is a longtime personal hero, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for you to learn I have been profoundly moved in the aftermath of reading Havel: A Life, a biography of the Czech playwright, dissident and president, written by Michael Zantovsky.

Zantovsky was a personal friend and sometimes confidant of Havel, but the book cannot be classified as hagiography. It’s a “warts and all” sketching of a man’s exceedingly complicated inner world and public persona. More than half of Havel’s life was lived during his country’s Communist period – and much of that time he was a marked man and presumed “enemy” of the state. Then, in a supreme irony, he served multiple terms as president.

This largely symbolic post seems to have strained Havel’s abilities as much or more than surviving outlaw status in a dictatorship.

Born during the interwar period when Czechoslovakia seemed to be emerging as a model for capitalist democracy, Havel was a child of privilege, and as such, his economic class rendered him a societal pariah when the workers’ paradise was forcibly installed after 1948. He was made to feel that he didn’t “fit,” and while capable of addressing the dichotomy intellectually, there were lifelong feelings of guilt.

Still, Havel assuaged them in various ways, and managed to find a foothold. Excluded from university owing to his origins, he served a hitch in the military and then became a stagehand, ushering him into Prague’s theatrical milieu precisely at a point where the usual governmental restrictions on free expression were softened just enough for him to begin writing slyly subversive and anarchic plays (the “theater of the absurd”), and making a name for himself – not just inside Czechoslovakia, but in Western Europe, which became of inestimable importance later, when he most needed the money and contacts.

All the while, Havel cultivated a wide range of friendships in the intelligentsia, including rebels, misfits, scholars and even the stray apparatchik. In 1968 came the Prague Spring, a thawing which held hope that there might be “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia. Leonid Brezhnev thought otherwise, and for the next two decades, the country became mired in a debilitating process derisively known as normalization.

Consumer production was increased even as the fundamental deficiencies of a primitively industrialized economy, one chained to the Soviet Union, went unaddressed. Free thought was suppressed. The inevitable result was stagnation and despair, addressed through sausages, beer and maybe a yearly holiday on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. One could live, albeit without thinking.

Havel the star playwright now became Havel, the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He was harassed and frequently imprisoned, and yet managed to formulate a doctrine of principled dissent, focusing on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level.

Examining society’s daily psychological assumptions, Havel theorized that Communism was a trauma primarily at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, despoiling the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers.

Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality, as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda, subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.

---

Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: “Civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up. It was a gently scolding and passive resistance, carefully calculated to avoid open conflict, and subsequently it was assisted immeasurably by one of those historical quirks that seem irrelevant at the time, in 1975, as buried within a non-binding international conference called the Helsinki Accords.

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "Leonid Brezhnev had looked forward, Anatoly Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."

To summarize, the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, desperately desired the recognition of borders reshaped by World War II, and a seemingly insignificant appendage to the Helsinki Accords pertaining to human rights and freedoms was tolerated as a mere talking point for Western campaigners.

In fact, in a strange and perhaps legalistic way, the Czechoslovak government (and other Warsaw Pact nations) provided moral legitimacy to internal opposition by signing the Helsinki Accords. Granted, it did not mean opponents would avoid persecution, but in 1977, Havel and a small band of courageous dissidents wrote a document known as Charter 77, and then undertook the informal organization of a civic initiative known by the same name.

Charter 77 was hounded mercilessly by the Communist regime. Still, the very fact that Czechoslovakia had accepted human rights responsibilities intensified human rights scrutiny outside the Soviet zone, and ensured continued publicity for the opposition, which could be weakened, not squelched entirely.

During the 1980s, as Communism’s intrinsic structural flaws began afflicting the entire Bloc, Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the USSR would have to divest itself of economically draining responsibilities to Eastern Europe to survive (of course even then, it didn’t). Without the formerly perpetual Soviet guarantee of support, Czechoslovaka’s regime lapsed into a state of terminal illness.

In 1989, when push came to largely peaceful shove, the government collapsed in what is now known as the Velvet Revolution. Just eight months following his final incarceration, Havel became president of the country, embarking on a period of recovery still ongoing, more than three years following Havel’s death – or as the post-Communist adage puts it: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.”

New Albany resembles that remark, doesn’t it?

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Whenver I think about New Albany’s “battered city” syndrome, as our friend Gina always referred to it, Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society come to mind.

Admittedly, 25 years later, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland, except that sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and he excelled at that.

In good times or bad, New Albany’s Battered City Syndrome is still on display, as manifested by secrecy, mistrust, inertia and contempt, especially on the part of those who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness, which provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.

From the subsequent vacuum oozes the lowest-common-denominator politics of fear-mongering. Once not so long ago, during a heated council debate, the spluttering 1st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s most detested target: “Them people.” In reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people do, but this alone doesn’t scratch the ward-heeler’s itch. A truly civilized, functional city has no need for Dan Coffey, and he knows it.

Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and vituperation, and get on with the process of building a civil society – a civil city – with a sustainable, inter-related foundation that prefaces future progress.

Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Let’s talk.

Meanwhile, I heartily recommend Zantovsky’s biography. Ultimately, much went wrong for Havel following the Velvet Revolution, although the author notes that Havel remained invariably courteous and polite, even when dealing with his oppressors, whether Communist or parliamentarian.

I’ll have to work on it.

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April 30: ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

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April 23: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Say a prayer for NA Confidentialas it conducts this exclusive interview with Councilman Cappuccino.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Complexities and simplicities in Boomtown.

Flashback: "Suit yourself. Plaid?"

It's 2015, and I'm reading a biography of Václav Havel: Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky.

The secret police also came for the philosopher Jan Patocka, Havel’s fellow Charter 77 spokesman. Patocka did not survive interrogation, and Havel dedicated what became his most famous text to his older friend’s memory. “The Power of the Powerless” tells the story of a greengrocer who every morning obligingly puts the sign “Workers of the World Unite” in his shop window. Of course neither the greengrocer nor the passers-by believe the sign. Even the Communist regime no longer believes the sign. Yet everyone goes on pretending. Pretending is in the greengrocer’s interest, for it allows him to live in peace. If one day he were to take down the sign, he would be harassed, perhaps arrested. And yet, Havel points out, if one day all the greengrocers were to refuse to hang their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution. Therefore the powerless greengrocer is not so powerless; on the contrary, he is responsible and therefore guilty: By failing to “live in truth,” he makes it possible for the system to continue.

Rather like New Albany persisting in pretending that its Democrats really are, although we're not entirely powerless. They can be voted out.

In 2011, during my unsuccessful city council campaign, I offered this opinion of suits -- the clothing. Looking at the photos in Zantovsky's fine book, Havel always seems more natural when dressed as an artist, playwright and dissident. In point of fact, I do own a suit. Since losing weight, it's too large, and so a trip to Sew Fitting is in order -- which is not to say I cherish the thought of wearing it.

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A Candidate’s Progress (11): Suit yourself. Plaid? 

(April 19, 2011)

The Woodstock festival took place in 1969, when I was only nine years old -- too young to completely understand what was occurring in America amid the generational upheavals depicted nightly on the tube, and yet capable of registering their impact in my evolving consciousness.

Something was happening, and not unlike Bob Dylan’s musical Mr. Jones, I didn’t know what it was. But it was exciting, if for no other reason than an older generation’s (read: those of my parents’ age) often expressed annoyance and exasperation with it.

One of the mantras of a turbulent period devoted to letting it all hang out struck me at the time as enduringly valid advice: “Never trust anyone wearing a suit.”

Obviously, the powers that be – the wielders of capital, the exploiters of the proletariat – all wore suits, and insofar as the middle and lower classes inevitably imitated the mores of their wealthier “betters,” it was a form of unwitting obeisance better avoided than indulged.

Bizarrely, here was a topic on which both the Baby Boom hippies and my Great Depression father should have been able to agree, had it not been for his inability to move past the length of their hair and listen to what they actually were saying.

If my dad owned a suit, it was reserved for weddings and funerals, and worn grudgingly even then. He was a working man’s populist to the very core, and usually as suspicious of moneyed elites and polite society as any bandana-wearing revolutionary. In a different country than the United States, one with more than two political parties to channel belief, his course in life might have been profoundly altered.

However, like so many others, in striving arduously for his sought after place in a middle class perhaps already doomed, even in the late 1960’s, he was inexorably steered by those very same besuited powerbrokers into emulating them by craving a modicum of their material trappings.

In fairness, a vast majority of the rebelling hippies at Woodstock eventually discarded their own youthful principles, taking the same materialistic path, but diverging from my father’s way in one very important sense: The Baby Boomers aged and became steadily more selfish, to the point that they’re now refusing to pay taxes.

Meanwhile, to the end, my father retained his agrarian communal instincts. Somewhere else, he might have been one hell of a socialist. We’ll never know, and that’s a shame.

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Resolved: Never trust anyone wearing a suit?

Never?

Ever?

No, not really. It is not a matter of trust, and I trust plenty of people who wear suits. Conversely, I seldom ever wear one, because I don’t have to. Comfort, personal preference and an active desire to enjoy what I do and not feel constrained by unnecessary adornments have conspired to result in an absence of suits in my closet. You’re free to dress as you please – or as you must. Just leave me out of it, please.

While it is true that for a brief period during Junior High School, I took an active interest in dressing according to society’s restrictive expectations, a candid assessment of acne-laden adolescent gawkiness led me to realize that a life of high fashion was not my likely destiny.

So be it. Know thyself; when you dispense with redundant fantasies of a GQ modeling gig, you’re free to use your entire brain, unbound by convention, custom and prejudice. It’s almost as liberating as Woodstock, and there are times when it still infuriates the unreconstructed Nixon generation.

That makes me very, very happy.

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There are many reasons why the craft beer milieu “suits” me as a job and avocation, and one of them is the casual nature of its dress code, which “suitably” contrasts with assumptions about the genre’s dynamic, expansive business success.

Huh? Say what? Growth nationwide … during a recession … and seemingly none of you wear appropriate business attire so as to buff and fluff the share holders? How on earth is that possible?

It’s because it matters far less what we look like than how we conjure our performance in the marketplace, and besides, if we had conformed to the expectations of what fuddy-duddies believe beer should be, there’d be no craft beer business at all.

Craft beer creates interest where there was none. It adaptively reuses, and leaps ahead of habit. It is vibrant, evolutionary and exciting. How many rock stars wear suits on a regular basis? Aside from Bryan Ferry and perhaps David Bowie ...

I dress casually for the requirements of my job, just the same as those bankers and lawyers with whom I transact company affairs, and who, at their first opportunity, gleefully change into shorts and a t-shirt to come drink some of the craft beer that’s brewed thanks to all of our labors, suited or otherwise. The wonderful part of my career is that I can dress the same way working, drinking, or all of the above. It simply does not matter what I wear, nor should it.

A college professor friend, himself a veteran of the Age of Aquarius (and who may be reading this essay), used to greet unsuspecting new sociology students in the guise of a custodian. With the class still awaiting the arrival of the instructor, he’d enter the room clad in work overalls, lope around, dust a shelf and empty the trash can -- and then begin talking about sociology.

You can imagine the students’ collective reaction, gleaned entirely from conditioned responses to mere appearance, as opposed to content: Who does that lowly janitor think he is talking to us about sociology? What could he possibly know? As it always turned out, he knew quite a lot – if the listener chose to look past the hair, beard and coveralls.

Given that I entered the race for at-large city council as an outspoken contrarian already thoroughly loathed by those discredited Dixiecrats pretending to be Democrats, it is perhaps inevitable that the oldest of these perpetually irrelevant fogies will criticize me for not looking the part of a politician, whatever that means, even while they excuse the typically slovenly appearance of their antebellum, regressive darling, Steve Price.

It is hypocrisy, but I do not begrudge it. They wouldn’t vote for me under any conceivable circumstance, whether I’m clothed in an Armani suit, Newt Gingrich’s loincloth, a hoop skirt or medieval armament, so why does it matter, apart from another opportunity to remind myself that while I might age, I won’t let my attitudes grow old and stodgy like them?

For the rest of you, those capable of discerning thoughts and ideas, we’ve been having a marvelous discussion for quite a few years, and we’ll continue to do so – win, lose or draw.

If you’ll kindly excuse me, I have a load of “These Machines Kill Fascists” t-shirts to wash. One of them needs to be clean and tidy for my next public appearance, at IUS on Friday evening. Hope to see you there.

(Note: A few minor corrections have been made. Your words never seem to read quite the same when time has elapsed.)