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.

NA Social's about to be dead, so "Long Live NA Social."

Surely my favorite of all Vaclav Havel quotes is this one.

“You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”

Closer to home than Czechoslovakia, there's this.

"This is the end of New Albany Social as Beth and Kelly."

Well, damn. Several friends have asked me to explain why NA Social is winding down its operations, if "operations" is an appropriate way to describe a couple of local women on a fun and instructive "journey discovering all the awesomeness there is in downtown NA."

I've directed them to Kelly's post (below), and since my opinion doesn't matter, I'll offer it anyway.

There comes a time when you realize the fix is in, that others have more power than you, and no matter how you play your hand it's doubtful you can win. At this juncture it seems pointless. It's not exactly like resigning from a chess match, although "resignation" is one aspect of the way it feels.

Never mind that NA Social did it better than that other organization, because the latter had the official stamp from approval from the "cool kids," and NA Social didn't.

By extension, an under-appreciated fact of life in New Albany after eight years of a civic governing clique is that gradually, almost imperceptibly, downtown's previous spirit of improvisational cooperation and egalitarianism has been supplanted by a nervous calculation: whose "side" do I need to be seen supporting?

That's a calculation unlikely to be friendly to NA Social or any other genuinely independent organization similar to it, and it's yet another sad testament to the current money/power/control imperative pursued on a daily basis by City Hall.

Regular readers know that as time passes, it's becoming increasingly harder to do what I'm doing here. That's why I'm an unrepentant fan of what Kelly, Beth and their socialites have been trying to do at NA Social, because swimming against the tide is damn tough.

That's my two cents, offered as a dissident who struggles with Havel's personal sense of responsibility on a daily basis. NA Social's about to be dead -- Long Live NA Social.

SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2019

Although we’ve come, to the end of the road...

Prepare yourself folks, there’s going to be a lot of cheesy quotes, quote memes, maybe some curse words, maybe even some politics. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. This is raw. This is real. This is me.

Deep breath.

If you have followed the page for a while, we have said it before, but this time we mean it. This is the end of New Albany Social as Beth and Kelly.

Last week was rough for me (Kelly). And it was the last straw for me. Last week a very rude lady said my daughter was dressed as a prostitute.

Beth and I get nothing out of this page. We only get the enjoyment of seeing our socialites out there trying new places. That really brings us so much joy. But when it starts affecting me and more importantly my children, that’s when I have to step back.

The same day that the woman insulted my daughter, a local business owner posted a gif on his personal page taking a stab at me. Calling me the most dramatic, hypocritical, victim playing individual he knows. This was after I posted my blog about the taco walk.

SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2018

What’s today?

Today is a difficult day for me. I still carry around a lot of hurt feelings from what happened to me last August. But I also carry around a lot of gratitude from what happened last August. I have debated on writing this because I preach almost daily about how my page is a positive page, but I have also been completely open and honest with everyone. So here we are...

(snip)

So, enough of the negativity

I have gained so much from this page. I’ve met people that I have impacted my life. I’ve eaten foods that have rocked my world. I have grown. I have gained.

There are so many amazing women in this community. So many strong women.

Beth and I talked about this one day after I came up with #wwyd (What would Ysha do) Ysha is one of the most level headed, loving, kindest people I have met. Whenever I get angry I say to myself, #wwyd. But then I usually do it anyway lol.

So mottos to live by:

Be kind like Ysha (owner of MESA)
Be fierce like Stephanie (owner of Salon b)
Be pure like Kim (owner of Sukhino)
Be supportive as Susan (Countryside Insurance)
Be as fun as Mara (gm at The Earl)
Be as sexy as Scott (chef at MESA) sorry, I had to add that 😂

I could go on and on.

Speaking of Beth. She came into this knowing she would be spending her own money. Spending her own time. She has been my rock. I get crazy y’all. And she has had to listen to it all. So can we give her a huge pat on the back?

So I’m closing, thank you socialites. Our socialites are a force to be reckon with. I don’t think people get how strong our army of over 6k on Facebook and almost 3k on Instagram is. #socialitesforever (not even two years!!)

We are going until the end of the month, so let’s finish strong! We are going to really focus on those who have lifted us up. Forget the haters!

Help us go out with a party! Buy tickets to our MESA event! And maybe we will go to The Earl afterwards ...

Three reminders of rock music's role in defeating the Communist bogey man.

I intend to watch this soon.

​FREE TO ROCK is a documentary film directed by 4-time Emmy winning filmmaker Jim Brown and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. Rock & Roll spread like an uncontrollable virus across Eastern Europe despite Communist attempts to outlaw it. Thousands of underground bands and millions of young fans who yearned for Western freedoms and embraced this music as the Sound of Freedom, helped fuel the nonviolent implosion of the Soviet regime. Free to Rock features Presidents, diplomats, spies and rock stars from the West and the Soviet Union who reveal how Rock & Roll music was a contributing factor in ending the Cold War.

I intend to read this soon.

BURNING DOWN THE HAUS: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Tim Mohr (Kirkus)

How a forbidden punk-rock underground fomented rebellion against totalitarian East Germany.

A translator and former Playboy staff editor and club DJ in Berlin, Mohr carefully documents a rousing, little-known Cold War story, showing how alternative culture developed in the Eastern Bloc in a similarly grass-roots fashion as elsewhere but for greater stakes. “The ethos of East Berlin punk,” he writes, “infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence.” But during the 1980s, homegrown punks were seen as both a nuisance and threat, worthy of repression. Based in part on interviews with survivors, Mohr ably documents how regional small-scale punk scenes grew and connected nonetheless. From the start, he notes, “groups of punks started to attract attention from security forces everywhere they went.” East Germany provides a vivid backdrop to the narrative. Conformity to state-supervised existence was enforced by surveillance and informants, so punks’ embrace of abrasive music and fashion was inherently political ...

And, I haven't forgotten the Plastic People.

How a Revolutionary Czech Rock Band Inspired Vaclav Havel, by James Sullivan (Rolling Stone)

Havel met the Plastic People of the Universe in 1976

It took a Czechoslovakian rock band that worshipped Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground to make Vaclav Havel realize the true power of rebellion. Havel, the Czech playwright, humanitarian and political revolutionary who died yesterday, put his movement on the line with the manifesto known as Charter 77, which was directly inspired by an underground rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe.

Named after a Zappa song, the Plastic People formed in 1968, shortly after the suppression of the uprising known as the Prague Spring. They played a psychedelic brand of garage rock like their American heroes, including the Velvets, Captain Beefheart and the Fugs, says Paul Wilson, a Canadian who was teaching in Prague at the time. Wilson joined the band in 1970 at the request of their manager, Ivan Jirous, a culture critic who acted as a kind of art director for the group, much as Andy Warhol did for the Velvet Underground ...

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.)

The Baylor for Mayor meme, October 25: Truth and circumstances.

From October 12, 2015:

Commentary worth repeating: Gahan's "balanced budget" claims are bogus.

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?

---

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.

---

Recent columns:

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

April 27: ON THE AVENUES MONDAY SPECIAL: Et tu, Greg Phipps? Or: Anger and the electoral variability of transparency.

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.

---

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.)

Václav Havel, civil society and the New Albany Syndrome.

It wasn’t until I began planning European travel extravaganzas during the Ronald Reagan era that the name Václav Havel meant very much to me. Once it did, the contrasts in chosen theatricalities between the privileged, incumbent Hollywood actor and the imprisoned, dissident Czech playwright seemed to handily encapsulate the decade. They still do.

For more than a year prior to my spending five weeks in Czechoslovakia in 1989, I had a job writing abstracts of articles in periodicals, and enjoyed the good fortune of being deemed my department’s unofficial “expert” in deciphering foreign publications written in English. There was much to read in British magazines about Eastern Europe in general, and Czechoslovakia in particular. Among other topics, I learned much about Havel’s role in Charter 77. Overall, I was far better informed while visiting in ’89 than I’d been in ’87, which made quiet, substantive conversation such a joy.

In the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, there was enough time to read Havel’s plays, essays and letters. For obvious reasons, my personal favorite piece of Havel’s work always will be the two-person play called “Audience.” It’s about an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state (in essence, the author himself, based on his real-life experience) abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands for a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares, sinking into comic inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

I’ve seen frequent parallels between the “battered city” syndrome (GC's apt usage) in New Albany, which we’ve also referred to quite often as the New Albany Syndrome, and Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society. It reminds me of the post-communist adage that goes something like this: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.” I wrote about it in a newspaper column in 2009.

---

Pogo and the New Albany Syndrome

“We have met the enemy … and he is us.”

According to Pogo’s Axiom, most societal ills are firmly, fatefully localized, as in New Albany’s enduring disregard for shared purpose and social cohesion.

Hereabouts, there’s always something or someone else to blame, from immigrants and property taxes to the outside world and insider corruption, and mirrors are perpetually short of supply.

Consequently, if you’re looking for absolution, you’ve come to the wrong column. We’ve all acquiesced in perpetuating the New Albany Syndrome, permitting the city to devolve and deteriorate, and the best hope of reversing this accumulated weight of bad habits and poor decision-making is unity via a grand coalition that concedes the task’s immensity, suspends partisan wrangling, formulates clear strategies, and gets down to work.

Moreover, we need to find a kennel for Pavlov’s dog, which is keeping us all awake at night. Maybe we can ship the mutt off to Central Europe.

----

Communism in Czechoslovakia began with a questionable election in 1948, and ended in 1989 with “Velvet Revolution.” Shortly thereafter, the dissident writer and playwright Vaclav Havel was chosen president.

It was a stunning development. Less than a year before the unraveling, Havel had been imprisoned by the seemingly impregnable regime. A humanist and intellectual, he had been denied the opportunity to work in his field, theater arts, and during the 1970’s was subjected to internal exile by being sent into the countryside to work in a brewery.

The inexperienced government faced a hitherto unprecedented task. The process of socializing a country was well documented, but what about the job of reconverting it? How do you set about reversing four decades of stagnation brought about by an outgunned, undercapitalized and outmoded state-owned economy?

The intrinsic absurdities of the Soviet-style system were evident to all, and yet ordinary people were accustomed to them. True, the system had to change quickly lest Czechoslovakia fall even further behind, but how to manage change without exacerbating human misery and risking societal chaos?

President Havel actually offered few concrete ideas as to how the country’s economy might be reinvented. However, others did, and a program of privatization was designed to quantify the value of Czechoslovakia’s state-held assets through vouchers (shares) that could be bought, sold and swapped by citizens.

The jury remains out. Posterity likely will judge the reform effort as middling in the overall context of the Warsaw Pact, and what’s more, Havel’s country split into two entities in 1993. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia both belong to the European Union, and the ex-president is long since retired.

So, why focus on Vaclav Havel’s role in Czechoslovakia’s post-communist history when he played only a minor part in the country’s economic restructuring?

Because this isn’t about the economy, comrade.

Throughout his unforeseen political career, Havel focused his interpretive powers on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level. He persistently reminded his countrymen that any reform program would have little chance of succeeding without an examination of the society’s daily psychological assumptions.

Havel theorized that the chief legacy of Communism was a trauma at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, something that had despoiled the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers. Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare had 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: Before post-communist revitalization could have a chance of success, a “civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up, and without exclusive recourse to the unfettered mercantile self-interest preferred by capitalism’s victorious adherents.

Admittedly, two decades further along, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland. His position was largely ceremonial, and he had neither substantive political power nor accumulated wealth to back up his words.

But, 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 to me, an imbibing humanist, habitual contrarian and profoundly spiritual (albeit displaced) European, Havel’s analysis applies foursquare to New Albany in the year 2009.

----

Truly, it isn’t about the money.

In good times or bad, the New Albany Syndrome is displayed in mistrust, inertia, secrecy and contempt on the part of those who fear the unknown future more than the dilapidated past, and who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness that somehow provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.

From the subsequent vacuum oozes the politics of fear-mongering. Once during a heated debate, 1^st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s target, spluttering at “them people,” although in reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people.

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 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?

R.I.P. Václav Havel.

Thought ... what a concept.

First Hitchens, and now Havel; the grim reaper is having a pre-Christmas harvest spree, taking men of letters as oblivious shoppers revel in the ephemeral.

Appropriately, the Guardian's obituary is not a casual or fast read, but rather seeks to convey the nuances and ambiguities surrounding Havel's own life and the experience of the Czech lands during the course of a tumultuous century.

Václav Havel obituary: Czech playwright and former dissident who led his nation after the collapse of communism, by WL Webb (Guardian)

... After the Soviet invasion that turned the Prague spring of 1968 to long winter, he became a leading dissident, a founder of Charter 77 and Vons (the Czech acronym of Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted), and spent much of his 40s in and out of prison. Finally, he emerged as the effective voice of the crowds that, after 20 years of sullen resentment, at last exploded in Wenceslas Square in the winter of 1989 and, having postered all of freezing Prague with the slogan Havel na Hrad! (Havel to the Castle!), did indeed send him across the river and up the hill to the castle as president of the reborn republic.

REWIND: Bile, loathing and a civil society.

The following, the first of two going out to our community's "small government" adherents, was originally published in April, 2006 under the title: Goodbye, Main Street Grind ... maybe in another 12 years, your view might have improved. Or not. It has been reprinted on several occasions since, because the topic a "civil society" remains of enduring significance for New Albany. I've omitted the photos that originally were attached, and apologize for those parts that seem dated. I'd prefer preserving the integrity of the original rather than edit.

See also: REWIND ... From Norquist to Torquemada to Brambleberry: Pathologies of tax "reform."

---

I learned over the weekend that New Albany’s Main Street Grind coffee shop plans to wind down operations at the beginning of April after 12 years in business.

That’s quite a run, and it’s a shame for it to end. The way you feel when you read an obituary -- that's the way a small business owner reacts to word that a fellow operator is folding up his tent. I look into the mirror, and say to myself: I'm still standing – at least for now ... but tomorrow may be very different.

Although we have mutual friends, I’m not well acquainted with the owners, who’ve always been hospitable and friendly during my infrequent visits.

Especially since moving into downtown in 2003, D and I have eagerly sought a “third place” to pass time near our home, but since our working hours are during the day and Main Street Grind’s hours were geared to lunchtime, it wasn’t possible to go as often as we’d have liked.

Yesterday I was corresponding with a friend and discussing the impending departure of the Main Street Grind, and she wrote:

I've been going to the Grind for 12 long years, and I've watched those buildings across the street from it decay for 12 long years and then some.

I've watched other businesses open in other parts of town, struggle and finally close because of the lack of leadership, vision and management in this city. It's sad, it's disgusting and who the hell do you blame when there are so many people responsible for the mess? City planners? Mayors? Develop New Albany? Building Commissioners?

Is there anybody in there?

Lamentable, but very true, although she omitted a key player: We the people – the residents of New Albany. "We" have just the sort of town "we" want, because if we didn't, would it be like this?

The inescapable conclusion is that "we've met the enemy ... "

You know the rest of Pogo's Axiom.

In the end, leadership is meaningless unless one consents to being led, and vision optional in the absence of a desire to clearly see.

Management? That’s merely an impediment to the profits to be accrued in the preferred vacuum of non-enforcement and apathy.

At the conclusion of the Communist era in Czechoslovakia, the dissident writer and playwright Vaclav Havel was elected president of the country that less than a year before had imprisoned him. Havel's government faced an exceedingly difficult necessity of finding ways to reverse four decades of economic stagnation brought about by the outmoded, state-owned economy, and doing so without societal chaos.

After all that time, the intrinsic absurdities of the command economy were evident, but people were accustomed to them. Suddenly, things had to change.

President Havel offered few concrete ideas as to how the government might retool his country’s uncompetitive economy. Instead, and significantly, he focused on what he perceived was necessary at a more fundamental and human level, something without which the economic reform program would have little chance of succeeding.

Havel theorized that the chief legacy of Communism was a degradation of the core of Czechoslovak society itself, and consequently, before economic rationalization could succeed, a “civil society” would have to be defined and rebuilt from the ground up.

----

As events of the past week have amply illustrated, Havel’s analysis applies foursquare to New Albany, and this is why events like the forthcoming neighborhoods forum are so important. Without a firm perimeter established in the places where we live, it is unlikely that citywide redemption can succeed.

Currently there are pockets of worthwhile activism scattered throughout the city, but owing to longstanding patterns of mistrust and a general lack of communication, there is no cooperation between them.

Unfortunately, there is an attitude of persecution and secrecy on the part of many who fear that communication and cooperation might somehow provide succor to the political enemy of this moment or the next – and this is profoundly shortsighted, although understandable in the present context of bile and loathing.

To be truthful, the beneficiaries of non-cooperation aren’t so much political in nature as they are social. Non-cooperation nurtures the same deleterious conditions of incivility and inertia within the same vacuum of unaccountability that we all claim to abhor and seek to terminate.

As my friend noted above, whom do you blame when there are so many to blame?

Vaclav Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and get on with the process of building a civil society with a firm foundation that prefaces future progress.

New Albany is profoundly dysfunctional. We’ve all acquiesced in various and sundry ways in permitting the city to become dysfunctional. The only hope of reversing this dysfunction is to join together in a workable coalition that suspends partisan wrangling, concedes the immensity of the task, formulates sustainable strategies, and gets to work.

Money would help, too, but unity is far more important.

So, 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?

Did I just hear another pin drop?

REWIND: Bile, loathing and a civil society.

The following, the first of two going out to Daniel in the "small government" exurb, was originally published in April, 2006 under the title: Goodbye, Main Street Grind ... maybe in another 12 years, your view might have improved. Or not. The part of current interest to me is the mention of a "civil society." I've omitted the photos that originally were attached.

See also: REWIND ... From Norquist to Torquemada to Brambleberry: Pathologies of tax "reform."

---

I learned over the weekend that New Albany’s Main Street Grind coffee shop plans to wind down operations at the beginning of April after 12 years in business.

That’s quite a run, and it’s a shame for it to end. The way you feel when you read an obituary -- that's the way a small business owner reacts to word that a fellow operator is folding up his tent. I look into the mirror, and say to myself: I'm still standing – at least for now ... but tomorrow may be very different.

Although we have mutual friends, I’m not well acquainted with the owners, who’ve always been hospitable and friendly during my infrequent visits.

Especially since moving into downtown in 2003, D and I have eagerly sought a “third place” to pass time near our home, but since our working hours are during the day and Main Street Grind’s hours were geared to lunchtime, it wasn’t possible to go as often as we’d have liked.

Yesterday I was corresponding with a friend and discussing the impending departure of the Main Street Grind, and she wrote:

I've been going to the Grind for 12 long years, and I've watched those buildings across the street from it decay for 12 long years and then some.

I've watched other businesses open in other parts of town, struggle and finally close because of the lack of leadership, vision and management in this city. It's sad, it's disgusting and who the hell do you blame when there are so many people responsible for the mess? City planners? Mayors? Develop New Albany? Building Commissioners?

Is there anybody in there?

Lamentable, but very true, although she omitted a key player: We the people – the residents of New Albany. "We" have just the sort of town "we" want, because if we didn't, would it be like this?

The inescapable conclusion is that "we've met the enemy ... "

You know the rest of Pogo's Axiom.

In the end, leadership is meaningless unless one consents to being led, and vision optional in the absence of a desire to clearly see.

Management? That’s merely an impediment to the profits to be accrued in the preferred vacuum of non-enforcement and apathy.

At the conclusion of the Communist era in Czechoslovakia, the dissident writer and playwright Vaclav Havel was elected president of the country that less than a year before had imprisoned him. Havel's government faced an exceedingly difficult necessity of finding ways to reverse four decades of economic stagnation brought about by the outmoded, state-owned economy, and doing so without societal chaos.

After all that time, the intrinsic absurdities of the command economy were evident, but people were accustomed to them. Suddenly, things had to change.

President Havel offered few concrete ideas as to how the government might retool his country’s uncompetitive economy. Instead, and significantly, he focused on what he perceived was necessary at a more fundamental and human level, something without which the economic reform program would have little chance of succeeding.

Havel theorized that the chief legacy of Communism was a degradation of the core of Czechoslovak society itself, and consequently, before economic rationalization could succeed, a “civil society” would have to be defined and rebuilt from the ground up.

----

As events of the past week have amply illustrated, Havel’s analysis applies foursquare to New Albany, and this is why events like the forthcoming neighborhoods forum are so important. Without a firm perimeter established in the places where we live, it is unlikely that citywide redemption can succeed.

Currently there are pockets of worthwhile activism scattered throughout the city, but owing to longstanding patterns of mistrust and a general lack of communication, there is no cooperation between them.

Unfortunately, there is an attitude of persecution and secrecy on the part of many who fear that communication and cooperation might somehow provide succor to the political enemy of this moment or the next – and this is profoundly shortsighted, although understandable in the present context of bile and loathing.

To be truthful, the beneficiaries of non-cooperation aren’t so much political in nature as they are social. Non-cooperation nurtures the same deleterious conditions of incivility and inertia within the same vacuum of unaccountability that we all claim to abhor and seek to terminate.

As my friend noted above, whom do you blame when there are so many to blame?

Vaclav Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and get on with the process of building a civil society with a firm foundation that prefaces future progress.

New Albany is profoundly dysfunctional. We’ve all acquiesced in various and sundry ways in permitting the city to become dysfunctional. The only hope of reversing this dysfunction is to join together in a workable coalition that suspends partisan wrangling, concedes the immensity of the task, formulates sustainable strategies, and gets to work.

Money would help, too, but unity is far more important.

So, 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?

Did I just hear another pin drop?