ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

(On the Avenues has moved back to Thursdays)

If not for Ollie North’s illegally financed Nicaraguan "contra" rebels, U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky” would not have been written, though there'd have been so many other chances during the decades to come. 

From 2009 through early 2011, I wrote weekly columns for the pre-merger New Albany Tribune. This one was published in the newspaper on October 28, 2010, and for the first time at the blog on February 18, 2016. A few topical modifications have been made.

---

On Election Day in 1984, I was unexpectedly late for work. To this very day, I blame it on the zeitgeist.

It was Tuesday, November 6, 1984. The anti-climactic culmination of a profoundly unbalanced presidential campaign wasn't so much the re-election of the former actor Ronald Reagan. It was a re-enthronement.

Indeed, in my contrarian, left-leaning lifetime, conservatives never have seemed as smugly insufferable, or liberals more depressingly disenfranchised, than at that precise juncture.

Granted, living on the border between Indiana (former governor Mike Pence) and Kentucky (current governor Matt Bevin) in the year 2019 can make life feel like déjà vu all over again, although now we have the inner satisfaction of knowing that demographics are at long last on our side.

In 1984, doomed Democratic challenger Walter Mondale had a few bright moments early in the campaign, much like when the Hazard County Dulcimer Institute sinks a basket or two after the opening tip before succumbing 130-25 to the University of Kentucky in a preseason roundball tune-up.

Alas, although “where’s the beef” was an entertaining sound bite, and despite signs of Reagan’s unfortunate descent into dementia occurring at regular intervals on the coronation trail, Mondale was no Chaminade waiting in ambush.

When the singer Stephen Stills performed during a Mondale appearance on the steps of Louisville’s City Hall just prior to Election Day, he strummed a medley of 1960’s protest songs and spoke of a “surprise” in the offing. The “surprise” turned out to be how very close Mondale actually came to losing his own home state of Minnesota, along with the other 49.

It was one of those years – strike that; it was one of those decades.

Whenever I was in my cups, that comfortably numb region conducive for enduring brain-dead patriotic platitudes and acute disgust with condescending Falwellian theocrats, and while toiling multiple jobs to accumulate enough money to travel somewhere in the world more civilized, I’d grimace, stare balefully at the date, and rationalize: Just four more years.

I’d be only 28 when Raygun performed his long overdue curtain call, except there was the perpetual fear that he would decide to install a chest-thumping, flag-waving, trickle-down dictatorship. In such a case, known heretics like me might have to consider more hospitable climes.

Until then, there’d be hash marks on the wall, calendar sheets torn and wadded, and oceans of alcohol for solace.

---

Not coincidentally, alcohol was the reason why I turned up late to work on November 6. My gang’s preordained eulogies for the electoral right-wing landslide started at least three days earlier, over beer and brats; honestly, the re-elective problem drinking may have commenced as early as the New Hampshire primary.

Accordingly, on the evening of Monday, November 5, I attended a party in New Albany, where the guest of honor was a Missouri-born friend of a friend -- I’ll call her Lorna, not because I care to protect her identity, but because I can’t remember her real name.

She was an attractive, smart and formidable woman who fancied herself the second coming of Margaret Thatcher, and her periodic visits to town inevitably prompted vigorous ideological tussles so agitated that they verged on the erotic … not to posit opportunity, or anything as Hollywood-like.

Lorna was so far to the right that I habitually referred to her as the “St. Louis fascist,” and this verbal shorthand inaugurated a habit that has remained firmly embedded in my derisory repertoire to the present day, hence NABC’s “These Machines Kill Fascists” t-shirts, and occasional rhetorical embellishments like the substitution of “Peronists” and “Falangists,” better to send the Fascists scurrying to their dictionaries for edification.

From late afternoon beers, we quickly progressed to Bloody Marys, and as the evening wore on, the political discussion predictably escalated. Somewhere between the explication of a Marxist dialectic and my standard anti-Apartheid spiel, Lorna appointed herself bartender.

By the time I was advocating a war crimes trial for Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Lorna was mixing triples – just for me, not anyone else. This development was confided to me much later, but just then, all I felt was advancing intoxication, with a concurrent neglect of the clock ticking on the wall, for it was getting late … and 6:30 a.m. would come very early.

Drinkers accept that the fog of war is not restricted to the battlefield, and mercifully, I was driven home by a friend. Once there, the alarm may or may not have been set, although it is irrelevant, because I did not awaken until well past ten.

Charitably speaking, you could say I was suffering from a hangover. Uncharitably, you’d be giving me a breathalyzer to see if Lorna’s straight vodkas had yet been metabolized. Either way, one point was clear amid the painful haze: I was quite late.

---

At this juncture, I must confide to you the nature of my daytime job.

I was a substitute teacher.

My specific assignment that Election Day was to cover senior civics classes at Floyd Central. Luckily, first period was open, and so my own absence only truly began with second period, extending into third, with my panting, belated arrival coming just at the beginning of fourth.

Expecting to be caught dead to rights, I weaved directly to the classroom. To my jaw-dropping amazement, it transpired that not a soul had noticed me missing. My name was there on the morning attendance sheet, standing in for the regular faculty member ... alongside a hundred or more seniors officially excused for the day to “work” the polls, in a now passé custom that truly saved my bacon on November 6, 1984.

The handful of otherwise unexcused students straggling apathetically to civics class during second and third periods merely shrugged, took their proscribed turns with the hall pass, and behaved impeccably.

I was in the clear.

Reagan was duly re-elected, and the drinking continued. Somehow, we survived, and probably will next time, too, whether it's The Donald or one of several hundred Democrats seeing the job. Is it too late to be an expatriate?

---

Recent columns:

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: "Pints&union, where the classic beer hits keep right on pouring."

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Where do we go from here?

"Reaganomics killed America's middle class," and "the old deal that held US society together started to unwind."

Photo credit.

Following are two topics raised during the Tuesday "Chew On This" discussion about what divides Americans.

Tuesday night, we chewed on THAT.

Starting the conversation here.

A return to Piketty: "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class ...

... Capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Continuing it here.

Decline and fall: how American society unravelled, by George Packer (The Guardian)

Thirty Forty years ago, the old deal that held US society together started to unwind, with social cohesion sacrificed to greed. Was it an inevitable process – or was it engineered by self-interested elites?

 ... The large currents of the past generation – deindustrialisation, the flattening of average wages, the financialisation of the economy, income inequality, the growth of information technology, the flood of money into Washington, the rise of the political right – all had their origins in the late 70s. The US became more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, more individualistic and less communitarian, more free and less equal, more tolerant and less fair. Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline. It as a period that I call the Unwinding.

In one view, the Unwinding is just a return to the normal state of American life. By this deterministic analysis, the US has always been a wide-open, free-wheeling country, with a high tolerance for big winners and big losers as the price of equal opportunity in a dynamic society. If the US brand of capitalism has rougher edges than that of other democracies, it is worth the trade-off for growth and mobility. There is nothing unusual about the six surviving heirs to the Walmart fortune possessing between them the same wealth as the bottom 42% of Americans – that's the country's default setting. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are the reincarnation of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, Steven Cohen is another JP Morgan, Jay-Z is Jay Gatsby.

The rules and regulations of the Roosevelt Republic were aberrations brought on by accidents of history – depression, world war, the cold war – that induced Americans to surrender a degree of freedom in exchange for security. There would have been no Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial from investment banking, without the bank failures of 1933; no great middle-class boom if the US economy had not been the only one left standing after the second world war; no bargain between business, labour and government without a shared sense of national interest in the face of foreign enemies; no social solidarity without the door to immigrants remaining closed through the middle of the century.

Once American pre-eminence was challenged by international competitors, and the economy hit rough seas in the 70s, and the sense of existential threat from abroad subsided, the deal was off. Globalisation, technology and immigration hurried the Unwinding along, as inexorable as winds and tides. It is sentimental at best, if not ahistorical, to imagine that the social contract could ever have survived – like wanting to hang on to a world of nuclear families and manual typewriters ...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the chimp Ray-Gun left behind.

For anyone in a huff about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's collegiate dancing, allow me to introduce you to this bountiful genre called Movies Ronald Reagan Made.

Ready to change the subject now? I thought so.

A return to Piketty: "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Seven days in April ...

7 Days of Piketty: Thursday, or "Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a Piketty Tax."

7 Days of Piketty: Wednesday, or "Piketty's Three Big Mistakes."

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

7 Days of Piketty: Sunday, or "Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic."

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

7 Days of Piketty: Friday, or "Capital in the Twenty-first Century' explained."

 ... but I forgot this one, from way back in 2014.

Reaganomics killed America’s middle class, by Thom Hartmann (Alternet via Slate)

This country's fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980

There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, “middle” class of professionals and mercantilists – doctor, lawyers, shop-owners – who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people – typically over 90 percent of the population – who make up the working poor. They have no wealth – in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives – and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today’s dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical “raw capitalism,” what we call “Reaganomics,” or “supply side economics,” our nation’s largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed – this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class “middle class” can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval – a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century – or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...

He's absolutely right. It should be named the Eliza Harris Bridge.

In the overall scheme of things, we live in a region that values dull uniformity, and isn't afraid to wield it like a deadly weapon. We're positively evangelical about rote mediocrity.

This explains why certain of our legislators have again chosen to walk the rutted path of deadening predictability and advocate naming the new east end bridge for Lewis and Clark. The state recently electing Matt Bevin as governor chose Abraham Lincoln as the name for the downtown bridge, pointing to another facet of life hereabouts, namely an immunity to irony.

But it gets even worse. With living white males having narrowed the naming competition to dead white males, Indiana's fascist governor is said to prefer Ronald Reagan. I'd rather cut out the middle (dead white) man and cast Steve Stemler and Ron Grooms in a remake of Bedtime for Bonzo, to be filmed at One Southern Indiana.

Keep a pail nearby as you read the recurring, sad litany.

Lewis and Clark bridge naming resolution dies in Senate committee, by Elizabeth Beilman (Clark County Jail TV Guide)

Public safety concern hold-up in naming process

INDIANAPOLIS — The official name of the east-end bridge is still uncertain, since a resolution to name it after explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark died in Senate committee.

My friend LP has sensibly suggested an alternative. He proposes we name the east end bridge the Eliza Harris Bridge, so as to "celebrate the literal freedom crossing that the Kentucky/Indiana border and Ohio River represents."

Eliza Harris: Famous Escaped Slave

Eliza Harris was the name informally given to a slave sheltered by Levi Coffin after a precarious escape on treacherous ice floes with her baby. The event was retold to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was inspired by the brave slave and based her character, Eliza Harris, upon the slave in her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Levi Coffin and his wife thereafter referred to the unknown slave as Eliza Harris.

Or, LP adds, perhaps the Harris-Coffin Bridge; after all, while white and male, the abolitionist Coffin afforded shelter to the escaped slave. It's real history that genuinely matters, and Eliza Harris has the tremendous advantage of NOT being yet another dead white male.

I replied to LP that given the limitations of our creativity-challenged area "leadership" cadre, it's almost impossible to even imagine pitching this idea to Grooms or Stemler. Just try. LP did, and produced this imagined dialogue about the Harris-Coffin Bridge.

Grooms: Coffin was an abortionist? Why would we celebrate that?!?
LP: No, an ABOLITIONIST.
Stemler: Oh, yeah. A tree doctor.

[I leave room]

For once ... just for once ... could we think outside the claustrophobic confines of our cultural box?

ON THE AVENUES: Mourning in America, circa 1984.

ON THE AVENUES: Mourning in America, circa 1984.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

If not for Ollie North’s illegally financed Nicaraguan "contra" rebels, U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky” would not have been written, though there'd have been so many other chances during the decades to come. 

From 2009 through early 2011, I wrote weekly columns for the pre-merger New Albany Tribune. This one was published on October 28, 2010, and has not appeared previously at NA Confidential. A few topical modifications have been made.

---

On Election Day in 1984, I was unexpectedly late for work. To this very day, I blame it on the zeitgeist.

It was Tuesday, November 6, 1984. The anti-climactic culmination of a profoundly unbalanced presidential campaign wasn't so much the re-election of the former actor Ronald Reagan. It was a re-enthronement.

Indeed, in my contrarian, left-leaning lifetime, conservatives never have seemed as smugly insufferable, or liberals more depressingly disenfranchised, than at that precise juncture.

Granted, living on the border between Indiana (Mike Pence) and Kentucky (Matt Bevin) in the year 2016 can make life feel like déjà vu all over again, although now we have the inner satisfaction of knowing that demographics are at long last on our side.

In 1984, doomed Democratic challenger Walter Mondale had a few bright moments early in the campaign, much like when the Hazard County Dulcimer Institute sinks a basket or two after the opening tip before succumbing 130-25 to the University of Kentucky in a preseason roundball tune-up.

Alas, although “where’s the beef” was an entertaining sound bite, and despite signs of Reagan’s unfortunate descent into dementia occurring at regular intervals on the coronation trail, Mondale was no Chaminade waiting in ambush.

When the singer Stephen Stills performed during a Mondale appearance on the steps of Louisville’s City Hall just prior to Election Day, he strummed a medley of 1960’s protest songs and spoke of a “surprise” in the offing. The “surprise” turned out to be how very close Mondale actually came to losing his own home state of Minnesota, along with the other 49.

It was one of those years – strike that; it was one of those decades.

Whenever I was in my cups, that comfortably numb region conducive for enduring brain-dead patriotic platitudes and acute disgust with condescending Falwellian theocrats, and while toiling multiple jobs to accumulate enough money to travel somewhere in the world more civilized, I’d grimace, stare balefully at the date, and rationalize: Just four more years.

I’d be only 28 when Raygun performed his long overdue curtain call, except there was the perpetual fear that he would decide to install a chest-thumping, flag-waving, trickle-down dictatorship. In such a case, known heretics like me might have to consider more hospitable climes.

Until then, there’d be hash marks on the wall, calendar sheets torn and wadded, and oceans of alcohol for solace.

---

Not coincidentally, alcohol was the reason why I turned up late to work on November 6. My gang’s preordained eulogies for the electoral right-wing landslide started at least three days earlier, over beer and brats; honestly, the re-elective problem drinking may have commenced as early as the New Hampshire primary.

Accordingly, on the evening of Monday, November 5, I attended a party in New Albany, where the guest of honor was a Missouri-born friend of a friend -- I’ll call her Lorna, not because I care to protect her identity, but because I can’t remember her real name.

She was an attractive, smart and formidable woman who fancied herself the second coming of Margaret Thatcher, and her periodic visits to town inevitably prompted vigorous ideological tussles so agitated that they verged on the erotic … not to posit opportunity, or anything as Hollywood-like.

Lorna was so far to the right that I habitually referred to her as the “St. Louis fascist,” and this verbal shorthand inaugurated a habit that has remained firmly embedded in my derisory repertoire to the present day, hence NABC’s “These Machines Kill Fascists” t-shirts, and occasional rhetorical embellishments like the substitution of “Peronists” and “Falangists,” better to send the Fascists scurrying to their dictionaries for edification.

From late afternoon beers, we quickly progressed to Bloody Marys, and as the evening wore on, the political discussion predictably escalated. Somewhere between the explication of a Marxist dialectic and my standard anti-Apartheid spiel, Lorna appointed herself bartender.

By the time I was advocating a war crimes trial for Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Lorna was mixing triples – just for me, not anyone else. This development was confided to me much later, but just then, all I felt was advancing intoxication, with a concurrent neglect of the clock ticking on the wall, for it was getting late … and 6:30 a.m. would come very early.

Drinkers accept that the fog of war is not restricted to the battlefield, and mercifully, I was driven home by a friend. Once there, the alarm may or may not have been set, although it is irrelevant, because I did not awaken until well past ten.

Charitably speaking, you could say I was suffering from a hangover. Uncharitably, you’d be giving me a breathalyzer to see if Lorna’s straight vodkas had yet been metabolized. Either way, one point was clear amid the painful haze: I was quite late.

---

At this juncture, I must confide to you the nature of my daytime job.

I was a substitute teacher.

My specific assignment that Election Day was to cover senior civics classes at Floyd Central. Luckily, first period was open, and so my own absence only truly began with second period, extending into third, with my panting, belated arrival coming just at the beginning of fourth.

Expecting to be caught dead to rights, I weaved directly to the classroom. To my jaw-dropping amazement, it transpired that not a soul had noticed me missing. My name was there on the morning attendance sheet, standing in for the regular faculty member ... alongside a hundred or more seniors officially excused for the day to “work” the polls, in a now passé custom that truly saved my bacon on November 6, 1984.

The handful of otherwise unexcused students straggling apathetically to civics class during second and third periods merely shrugged, took their proscribed turns with the hall pass, and behaved impeccably.

I was in the clear.

Reagan was duly re-elected, and the drinking continued. Somehow, we survived, and probably will this time, too, whether The Donald or Hillary.

---

February 11: ON THE AVENUES: James Fallows, New Albany, and the primacy of bricks over string music.

February 8: ON THE AVENUES EXTRA: "No, John Rosenbarger, congestion is our friend. Help us achieve it, or get out of the way."

February 4: ON THE AVENUES: Hello, I must be going.

January 28: ON THE AVENUES: They're surely not ROLL models.

"Alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s."

Those of us who were not among the Gipper's ideological brethren have found it all too easy to blithely shrug and say we knew it all along. Of course, it's far deeper than that, and Donne's "no man is an island" hits closest to home.

As one enamored of words and writing, HL Mencken always has served as a sad and cautionary tale. The Sage of Baltimore suffered a stroke in 1948, leaving him (eventually) able to speak and communicate, but unable to write. A man who wrote millions of words lived eight years this way, often referring to himself in the past tense as dead already.

Pick a terror -- any terror: Mine is Mencken's fate, or Ronald Reagan's. Alzheimer's is nasty business indeed, and the thought that alterations in speaking patterns might serve as early warning is fascinating.

Parsing Ronald Reagan’s Words for Early Signs of Alzheimer’s, by Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. (New York Times)

... Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.

The findings, published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office.

But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.

Video: "Bill Maher Contrasts 'Sex Machine' John F. Kennedy with 'Amiable Square' Ronald Reagan."

Best video of the 80's, best Ronald Reagan video ever.

In honor of Phil Collins' retirement from the music business, it's the Genesis video that always pops into my mind when a 25-year-old begins blathering about the greatness of Ronnie Raygun ... but of all the Cold War era figures pictured therein, circa 1987, who other than Muammar al-Gaddafi remains a factor today?