ON THE AVENUES: A week that was wooden like Pinocchio and dry as an unused water park or an unfilled glass.

This is what happens when you realize (a) the draft of your weekly column isn't writing itself, and (b) the Green Mouse already has 900 words for the weekly Nawbany news wrap.

Besides, I've mostly stuck to my pledge to refrain from telling the truth about local affairs, a task made easier by the pandemic-borne restrictions and the general weirdness following in their wake. It's time to loosen up a little, a la Holcomb.

Consequently, this week ON THE AVENUES and GREEN MOUSE presents NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW have merged.

And what a wild damn week this proved to be.

Friday afternoon Governor Eric Holcomb chose the international May Day celebration to announce a five-stage plan to reopen Indiana almost entirely by July 4 -- probably a coincidence, that national holiday of a date. There are so many moving parts to it that the Green Mouse prefers to return at a later date and explain ... once the drugs have worn off.

---

On Thursday, as ever wishing to appear like he's socking it to those nasty Republicans, Mayor Jeff Gahan released one of his patented, socially distant videos -- because when you're agoraphobic, your whole life has been about keeping others as far away as possible.

Except that in this video, Gahan failed utterly to find his footing.

The upbeat ebullience and jingoism no longer comes naturally. He can still come out with the same words, but he can no longer even bring himself to believe them. For the first time in his life, there are signs of self-doubt. When he looks in the mirror, he now sees his reflection beginning to fragment. His persona that has been carefully constructed over 55 years to protect himself from the pain of being himself is falling apart. Yet still he can’t quite access the humility that might go some way to healing himself.

Okay, so the preceding passage was lifted word for word from The Guardian, speaking not of Gahan, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson. However, the parallels are both instructive and striking.

With nothing whatever to do for six weeks since pandemic curve-flattening measures were imposed -- just about all of the responses have come from GOP-controlled county, state and federal governments -- the congenitally bunker-bound mayor seemed wooden, listless and uninspiring.

The font on his cheat sheet may have been too small. He also seemed distracted and sad, as if in mourning.

What about the odd ball cap -- can you make it out?

Yep, it's a municipal parks and recreation logo, right there on Gahan's pate covering, but why this of all things?

In the current time, shouldn't it be an ambulance driver's emblem, or a first responder's or hospital nurse's?

Ever since 9-11, when every politician started popping up dressed like firemen and cops, symbolism like this is carefully scripted -- and we already know that Gahan can't so much as take out the trash without post-it notes.

The answer, of course, is that the mayor surely is mourning. 

At a time when numerous townspeople are suffering, jobs have been lost, social inequalities exposed and the groundwork laid for pervasive revolution, the primary reason for Gahan's video Thursday was to inform his adoring public (cue the somber violins) that there cannot possibly be a season this summer for the River Run Family Water Park, our glorious aquatic center.

Fabric is torn and teeth ground together. The coronavirus dunnit, ya know.

Goat herders in Kosovo understand that the parks and recreation department is Gahan's baby, with a budget that went in a very few years from zero to somewhere around $3 million. Right now, with these park units mostly closed and the majority of functions suspended by the pandemic, the mayor's baby is under siege.

Not a word in six weeks about the homeless, the hungry or the vulnerable. But there's a video lamenting the enforced absence of a three-month water sports calendar at a catastrophically expensive facility built to cater to the better-off among us.

Bizarrely, seeing as River Run has hemorrhaged tax dollars since inception, even in the best of climate-altered Ohio Valley heat waves, keeping it closed and eliminating operating expenses might actually save the city money in 2020, even if we continue making the bond payments (assuming the city has the spare change lying around to do so).

We shouldn't assume that. At last Gahan faces a crisis, and if he somehow bluffs his way through the pandemic, there's the Sherman Minton idiocy coming next year.

---

I thought occurrred to me, and I did a Google search: When was the last news item in which "HWC Engineering" and "New Albany Indiana" both appeared?

You'll really love this: it was in the Seymour Tribune in December, 2019.

After 12 years as mayor of Seymour, Craig Luedeman will embark on a new career in 2020.

Luedeman, 43, has been hired by HWC Engineering in Indianapolis. He will serve as a community business development manager for the firm beginning Jan. 6.

HWC is a full-service planning and infrastructure design firm with offices in Terre Haute, New Albany, Lafayette and Muncie. Although he will be based out of the Indianapolis office, he’ll be working remotely from his home, too, and will have to travel a lot, he said.

“Basically, I’ll be going to cities and counties and communities and trying to help them with getting grants and any kind of business development HWC does as far as transportation, bridges, wastewater, stormwater, all those areas and design services,” he said.

He will meet with mayors and other leaders across the state to discuss projects they may have and how HWC can assist with getting those projects accomplished.

Wondering what Slick Jeffie would be doing now if David White or Mark Seabrook had beaten him in 2019? Look homeward, Seymour, and remember this graphic from last year's mayoral campaign.

So, are Gahan's well-heeled revolving corporate donors (including but not limited to HWC) now lining up to contribute to local relief efforts in a time of 20% unemployment?

Is Mayor Gahan reminding them about the optics?

You know, "hey, um, guys -- well, thinking back to all that pay-to-play money you gave me, then I gave tons more of it back to you, um, uh, couldn't you maybe, like, send a little of it this way, you know, to taxpayers in their time of need?"

A city shakes with laughter. The mere thought prompts hilarity. Which comes first, being unable to imagine Gahan ever once thinking to ask them, or those well-dressed campaign donors conveniently failing to conceive of the idea on their own?

---

But wait -- there's much more.

For instance, it appears that Extol Magazine now owns a stake in the New Albany Housing Authority. Hard to miss a privatization of such size; has Ben Carson already cashed the check?

I blame it all on COVID.

It's the NAHA monthly newsletter at the Joomag website, boasting a new cult of overpaid administrative personality in the offing, and I'm sure the official explanation will include trite Business First-speak about strategic partnerships in communications, synergy, and charitable backpack blessings.

Still, this would constitute a relationship, and ever since January 1, lifelong Republican Jason Applegate is destined to find these LinkedIn affairs troublesome owing to a nagging topic called "ethics."

Presumably he still owns Extol, and may or may not continue to serve as the magazine's chief ad sales person during the first year of his term as Democratic councilman-at-large.

As such, any connection whatever between the business affairs of a public agency like NAHA, with its yahoo poobah and sycophantic board both appointed by the mayor, and an outside entity owned by an elected official like Applegate is deserving of scrutiny.

Donald Trump may be president, and Gahan persist as mayor-for-life, but conflicts of interest have not magically disappeared from the planet. The newspaper in its pathetic death throes won't help us, pandemic or otherwise. Rather, ordinary citizens must keep their eyes fixed on the clique's gyrations, and demand answers to their pertinent questions.

---

There's yet another news item: our new three-story tall anchor symbol on the south side of the parking garage. It's horrendous, but there is consolation in the absence of Dear Leader's gleaming mug.

Oft times in the past I've joked about the way Team Gahan's fondness for anchors has resulted in ubiquitous imagery alarmingly similar to the vainglorious shambles of Mussolini's Italy, spreading like a virus throughout the city.

For those just tuning in, all these anchors weren't ever submitted for approval to the city council -- and we already have had a city symbol on the books. But David "Bag Man" Duggins, previously referenced above as the newly buttoned-down overlord of NAHA, thought anchors looked cute.

Hamster wheels spun, a "marketing device" was born, and now we're drowning in the inanity of its ceaseless citywide repetition. The governing clique routinely scoffs at me for mentioning Mussolini's name, and yet the plain fact that few of them have bothered reading books implies an unfamiliarity with the way totalitarian systems use symbols. It's precisely the same, as with Gahan's parks department cap.

However, at this late date it has become evident that I may have been wrong slightly mistaken all along. It was pointed out to me recently that anchors can symbolize conditions quite apart from being deployed at water's bottom to prevent forward progress.

Life, stability, a connection: over time, it was only natural that the anchor became a symbol of love. This object is often depicted as a symbol of fidelity: the anchor gets firmly planted into the bottom of the ocean floor and provides the ship with the stability it needs. This is the same stability that two people who are in love with each other rediscover day after day.

Many couples get matching anchor tattoos to symbolise their eternal love. Or they wear jewelry embellished with this meaningful nautical symbol.

Turns out that Duggins is a devotee of the Hallmark Channel.

Anchor soft as an easy chair
Anchor fresh as the morning air
One anchor that is shared by two
I have found with you

Who'd have guessed?

---

Recent columns:

April 23: ON THE AVENUES: Hemingway in a time of mercifully silent thunder.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Bunker mentalities, bunker abnormalities; bunker dreams, bunker screams.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

It's godawful and tacky BUT let's look at the bright side, because it might be FAR worse.

I knew it was too good to be true.

Say what? Look, it's a pandemic parking garage painting innovation.

How many of these "branding" mechanisms do we need before the whole world understands New Albany is "anchored" to the floodplain?

Then again, it could be much worse, and Gahan might have emulated Il Duce -- again.

yes yes yes

NO NO NO

GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Tuesday) In 2015 roughly 14% of New Albany's eligible voters opted for the Anchor Deity, and they’re getting exactly what they deserve – good and hard.

Last week was so much fun, let's do it again. As a run-up to Decision 2019, I'm headed back into the ON THE AVENUES archive for five straight days of devastatingly persuasive arguments against four more years of the anchor-imbedded Gahan Family Values™ Personality Cult.

I've already made the case for Mark Seabrook as mayor. Now let's return to the voluminous case against Gahanism in five informative and entertaining installments -- at least until next week, when I may decide to do it all again. Heaven knows we have enough raw material. Following are last week's hammer blows.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Monday) The Reisz Mahal luxury city hall, perhaps the signature Gahan boondoggle.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Tuesday) Gahan the faux historic preservationist demolishes the historic structure -- with abundant malice.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Wednesday) The shopping cart mayor's cartoonish veneer of a personality cult. Where do we tithe, Leader Dearest?

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Thursday) That Jeff Gahan has elevated people like David Duggins to positions of authority is reason enough to vote against the Genius of the Floodplain.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Friday) Slick Jeffie's hoarding of power and money is a very real threat to New Albany's future.

And this week's pink slip chronicles:

GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Monday) No more fear, Jeff. This isn't East Germany, and you're not the Stasi.

GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Tuesday) In 2015 roughly 14% of New Albany's eligible voters opted for the Anchor Deity, and they’re getting exactly what they deserve – good and hard.

Today's column is so good that I keep using it.

---

May 5, 2019

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader soon will be going away, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

---

I. May, 2019: the column introduction 

The following column was written in 2017 and repeated in 2018, and our city's anchor-laden civic idiocy has continued to proliferate.

We've witnessed the final Reisz Mahal luxury city hall fix, the death of a skateboarder on uncalmed city streets, a planned sixty-mile recreational trail to nowhere, David Duggins' piece-by-piece dismantlement of Riverview Tower, the Colonial Manor public relations catastrophe and Jeff Gahan on the verge of $600,000 in career earnings from pay-to-play political patronage.

NA Confidential has documented Gahan's bullying of a street department worker and a career policeman, and we've watched with dismay as the News and Tribune continues to duck, cover and abdicate its responsibility to cover news in New Albany.

There have been Kool-Aid blackouts and loaded Rice Krispies Treats freakouts, and all the while the insider Democrats keep doubling down on Dear Leader -- and why not? They're at the apex of a cliquish and privileged pyramid looking down at the people they're supposed to be serving, but have been too busy implementing Gahan's luxury enhancement program to give a damn.

Now they're nervous, aren't they?

---

II. April, 2018: the column introduction 

Early this morning I began writing the weekly column over kippers and coffee, and after 300 words, a pervasive feeling of déjà vu began furrowing my brow. Sure enough, upon comparative examination, I'd been there before -- 13 months ago, to be exact.

In which case, why not just repeat the original?

I tend to refrain from reruns of such recent vintage, but as Year Zero approaches, there has been a noticeable resurgence of sheer, unmitigated hubris on the part of Team Gahan's increasingly vacuous functionaries, including (though not limited to) Pat McLaughlin's malicious Knable censure resolution, the shameless and bullying pilferage of intellectual property rights on the part of Develop New Albany's tittering second-raters, a rumored million-dollar cost overrun on the mayor's luxury city hall reclamation, and politically motivated harassment and intimidation of city employees.

There's a great deal of talking down, and too little talking to or with. The stench emits from the top, from Jeff Gahan himself and the Floyd County Democratic Party.

Local Democrats are feeling cornered, and like animals, their fangs are being bared. Decades of ward-heeling patronage and forever merrily wetting beaks is at last threatened by a gradual rising tide in the form of the municipal wing of the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, ranking local Democrats remain enamored of center-right pandering spiced with occasional whiffs of gesture-laden identity coding to entice the two-person-strong East Spring Street Neighborhood Association -- and they're as terrified by the likes of Dan Canon in 2018 as they were by Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Straight up: Gahan's all the Democrats have; this is an apocalyptic Alamo in the making, and doubling down is their only real choice. The re-election tactics already are nasty, and they're going to get worse, because the institution is incapable of reform as constituted, on the fly, but the problem goes far deeper, because in addition to the usual petty graft and high school city council chicanery, the power elite -- Gahan, Dickey, Gibson and Duggins, among others -- truly believe they're infallible.

They aren't. Furthermore, neither am I.

Returning to March of 2017 and rereading what I wrote last year, it occurs to me that the odds of regime change have improved. The more we point at the deficiencies of Gahan's megalomania, and to the absurdity of a veneer peddler's innate perfection, the more numerous are those heads nodding in agreement.

They may or may not vote, but there'll be two chances to topple the statue and begin papering over those anchors.

---

III. March, the 2017 original column

Țuică is plum brandy, and sweeping generalizations tend to be insupportable. Seeing as I’m in no mood to be dainty, let's have a drink of the firewater and stumble into the breach.

As human beings go, the late Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-1989) was a regrettable and unfortunate piece of work.

Yes, Ceaușescu was canny and possessing the survivor’s keen animal instincts, but offered few redeeming qualities otherwise. He was brutal, long-winded and poorly educated, though slightly brainier than his wife, Elena, a semi-literate bumpkin who built her own cult of personality around pretending to be a superstar scientist.

To read about the despot Ceaușescu nowadays is to constantly find yourself asking, “How could this nondescript dullard of a rural functionary be called the Genius of the Carpathians?”

Even apart from Ceaușescu being an installed and pliant cog in a closed international geopolitical system, itself constructed to institutionalize precisely such non-ironic chicanery, the very thought is breathtaking – and almost surely he believed every word of it.

While shaving each morning, the Conducător (leader) gazed into the mirror not unlike Wile E. Coyote, and paused to admire the length and breadth of his genius.

And why not? A quasi-feudal collection of stooges, sycophants and “yes men” surrounded Ceaușescu, assuring him constantly that he was every bit the ranking luminary ever to have emerged from the dark, forested Transylvanian mountains, overshadowing even the legendary Vlad Tepes – historical basis for the character of Dracula.

In turn, these assurances became the substance of propaganda, including press clippings about himself that Ceaușescu read eagerly over his daily breakfast of luxury foods generally unavailable to his subjects, as well as ubiquitously placed visual reminders of his presence.

Propaganda was the source for parroted and fluttering expressions of fealty on the part of those Romanian citizens who grasped the obvious, and cheerily rebroadcast the boilerplate from a desire to stay out of prison – and of course some of them ended up there, anyway.

What a vicious and dreary fraud, that Ceaușescu.

For 25 years, he was a veritable anchor of vapid tastelessness, mired in the mud flats of the Danube River delta, surrounded by clueless henchmen and corrupt vandals who enriched themselves at the expense of the common man.

Hmm. I’m not sure what made me think of all this, but did I tell you there was a ceremony at the amphitheater on Tuesday morning?

---

As we enter Year VI in the Chronicles of New Gahania, the only major surprise is that Mayor Jeff Gahan hasn’t yet designed a logoed scepter.

On Tuesday morning, Gahan – our Genius of the Floodplain – bounded to a podium hastily erected at the underused amphitheater, chosen for this occasion because the river looks so “cool” behind it, though it remains unfit for the dashing Team Gahan otherwise.

Giggling and gesticulating in a paroxysm of agoraphobic ecstasy, Gahan thanked the Horseshoe Foundation board members who he’d either had appointed or strong-armed, or both, and accepted a check for $5 million from the only Floyd County politician whose compliance really mattered, his neighbor and arch-rival Mark Seabrook, who from this moment forward will be utterly forgotten as Gahan claims full credit for the foundation’s largess.

Gahan proceeded to run down the list of previous multi-million dollar quality-of-life luxury improvements, praising the investments while never revealing their true cost in terms of municipal subsidies and post-ribbon-cutting maintenance.

Verily, Gahan’s done it all; laid the bricks, moved the dirt, smoothed the asphalt, sold hot dogs and swept the floor. It was repulsive and sickening, and within a few seconds it became evident to me as never before that short of getting caught in bed with a known book reader, Gahan has emerged as the odds-on favorite to serve indefinitely as New Albany’s de facto mayor-for-life.

The list of baubles, glitz and glitter – of bright, shiny objects that function as Potemkin facades, suggesting municipal progress while obscuring the ongoing rot proceeding apace underneath – has become as lengthy as Shane Gibson’s arm.

Concurrently, Gahan’s increasingly pedestrian press releases clearly indicate that he’s efficiently cured our city of the social ills that plague the remainder of the planet, apart from a handful of Scandinavian towns and the acreage of various Disney properties.

We have no crime, drug abuse, homelessness, poverty or red lights being run by speeding vehicles. Litter? It isn’t really there, you know. Perhaps you imagined it.

It is left to vicious scandal-mongering dissidents like Jeff Gillenwater to challenge the status quo.

With what's potentially the most significant political upheaval in several decades currently taking place, New Albanians can take solace in the fact that both city and school corporation leaders have ensured an equally significant lack of flexibility going forward with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt payments coming due over the next two or three decades. If you're planning on having any good civic ideas in 2027, tough cookies.

The problem for Bluegill, and for me, and for anyone else who pays close attention, is that in the main, New Albanians seem perfectly content with the Ceaușescu-like tendencies of King Gahan.

After all, in 2015, roughly 14% of the city’s eligible voters opted for the anchor, and as with Donald Trump nationally, they’re getting exactly what they deserve – good and hard.

It’s increasingly difficult to imagine a scenario in which Gahan loses a third term in 2019. Try as he might, Seabrook won’t ever be able to shake the ignominy of smiling weakly while handing Gahan what amounts to five million free clams to campaign for re-election.

At the same time, the current crop of potential Republican challengers has largely chosen to play along with Gahan’s beautification-over-substance shell game.

Granted, the rules of this game have been written to exclude elected officials and empower political appointees, and there isn’t much the minority party can do, but when push comes to gag, the nominal opposition will be depicted as having been complicit.

Just remember: The Bicentennial Boondoggle was very bipartisan.

---

Consider one of Gahan’s chief acolytes, self-important councilman Bob Caesar, who formerly served as nominal Ceaușescu of the Bicentennial Commission.

Most readers are aware of my two-year-long struggle to wrest public Bicentennial Commission financial records, first from Caesar and then the city itself, only to be dismissed with supreme condescension by both.

To repeat: The celebration of New Albany’s two-hundred-year birthday cost several hundred thousand dollars, and was funded in part with taxpayer funds. I’m a citizen of New Albany. Caesar refused to show me the records, and the city attorney Gibson said the city doesn’t have the records to show.

In short: Go peddle your papers, insufferable peasant.

This is amazing, and it should be unacceptable; absolute power corrupts absolutely, and any mayor who takes seriously his obligation to enforce the law shouldn’t allow it.

However, I’m happy to announce that the Green Mouse has obtained these Bicentennial records. Fascinating revelations lie within, and copies currently are in my possession, illustrating plainly that while Caesar and Gibson may not have lied outright, they certainly have acquiesced in a cover-up, and are guilty of consciously subverting the intent of state laws governing freedom of information and public access to records.

This should disturb all of us, and both should be cashiered. If they’ll resort to evasions and subterfuge to obscure Caesar’s handling of relatively paltry Bicentennial funds, just think what they’ll do to obscure the leakage from the many yearly millions going toward feel-good, beautification projects.

And yet … you’re bothered, but only a bit, and not enough to rock the boat, right?

The newspaper doesn’t ask these questions, does it?

In more candid moments, it may seem like smoke and mirrors, but just enough of that magic pixie dust is being spread around to encourage acceptance.

Isn’t it?

And you’re fine with it, aren’t you?

The fact is, if I were to spend 40 more hours of my own time, gratis, to sifting through the records the Politburo has denied exist, in order to show that lots of Bicentennial bucks were hemorrhaged this way and that, often straight to community pillars and/or political party stalwarts who nuzzled up to wet their beaks – as I'm completely confident I could – nothing at all would happen, would it?

They wouldn’t concede error or apologize, would they?

You wouldn’t expect it, would you?

And this is a slight problem, isn’t it?

I’m not ruling anything out, or in. I might take the time to sort through those records, or maybe use those precious hours to drink beer and watch documentaries about tin horn dictatorships the world has known.

But there isn’t much one person alone can do to prevent Jeff Gahan from redesigning New Albany in his own beige image, and as the sainted Bob Knight once implied, if tacky Disney totalitarianism is inevitable, then we might as well escalate plans for a new barroom in order to have somewhere to seek refuge from the sheer indignity of it.

That's exactly what I'm working to achieve, and when it finally comes to pass, I promise to place portraits of Ceaușescu and Gahan right where they belong, at the entrance to the toilets.

Or better yet, inside them.

To park or not to park? Conflicting signage is the question.

A regular reader sent a note to the Green Mouse.

Just noticed this yesterday on Vincennes, just before DePauw. Nice parking spots complete with a no parking sign. All that’s missing is a no-progress anchor.

Our crack graphics team can fix that.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader soon will be going away, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

Header corrected from the original.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader is here to stay soon will be going away, so let', so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

---

I. May, 2019 Preface to Rewind

Perhaps as many as two-thirds of our 2019 primary election votes will be cast on Tuesday. Regular readers already know my choice.

ON THE AVENUES: It's time for a change, and David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing.

The following column was written in 2017 and repeated in 2018. In the year since then, the anchor-laden civic idiocy has continued to proliferate.

We've witnessed the final Reisz Mahal luxury city hall fix, the death of a skateboarder on uncalmed city streets, a planned sixty-mile recreational trail to nowhere, David Duggins' piece-by-piece dismantlement of Riverview Tower, the Colonial Manor public relations catastrophe and Jeff Gahan on the verge of $500,000 in career earnings from pay-to-play political patronage.

NA Confidential has documented Gahan's bullying of a street department worker and a policeman, and we've watched with dismay as the News and Tribune continues to duck, cover and abdicate its responsibility to cover news in New Albany.

There've been Kool-Aid blackouts and loaded Rice Krispies Treats freakouts, and all the while the insider Democrats keep doubling down on Dear Leader -- and why not? They're at the apex of a cliquish and privileged pyramid looking down at the people they're supposed to be serving, but have been too busy implementing Gahan's luxury enhancement program to give a damn.

Now they're nervous, aren't they?

II. April, 2018 Preface to Rewind

Early this morning I began writing the weekly column over kippers and coffee, and after 300 words, a pervasive feeling of déjà vu began furrowing my brow. Sure enough, upon comparative examination, I'd been there before -- 13 months ago, to be exact.

In which case, why not just repeat the original?

I tend to refrain from reruns of such recent vintage, but as Year Zero approaches, there has been a noticeable resurgence of sheer, unmitigated hubris on the part of Team Gahan's increasingly vacuous functionaries, including (though not limited to) Pat McLaughlin's malicious Knable censure resolution, the shameless and bullying pilferage of intellectual property rights on the part of Develop New Albany's tittering second-raters, a rumored million-dollar cost overrun on the mayor's luxury city hall reclamation, and politically motivated harassment and intimidation of city employees.

There's a great deal of talking down, and too little talking to or with. The stench emits from the top, from Jeff Gahan himself and the Floyd County Democratic Party.

Local Democrats are feeling cornered, and like animals, their fangs are being bared. Decades of ward-heeling patronage and forever merrily wetting beaks is at last threatened by a gradual rising tide in the form of the municipal wing of the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, ranking local Democrats remain enamored of center-right pandering spaced with occasional whiffs of gesture-laden identity coding to entice the two-person-strong East Spring Street Neighborhood Association -- and they're as terrified by the likes of Dan Canon in 2018 as they were by Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Straight up: Gahan's all the Democrats have; this is an apocalyptic Alamo in the making, and doubling down is their only real choice. The re-election tactics already are nasty, and they're going to get worse, because the institution is incapable of reform as constituted, on the fly, but the problem goes far deeper, because in addition to the usual petty graft and high school city council chicanery, the power elite -- Gahan, Dickey, Gibson and Duggins, among others -- truly believe they're infallible.

They aren't. Furthermore, neither am I. Returning to March of 2017 and rereading what I wrote last year, it occurs to me that the odds of regime change have improved. The more we point at the deficiencies of Gahan's megalomania, and to the absurdity of a veneer peddler's innate perfection, the more numerous are those heads nodding in agreement.

They may or may not vote, but there'll be two chances to topple the statue and begin papering over those anchors.

III. March, 2017 Original Column

Țuică is plum brandy, and sweeping generalizations tend to be insupportable. Seeing as I’m in no mood to be dainty, let's have a drink of the firewater and stumble into the breach.

As human beings go, the late Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-1989) was a regrettable and unfortunate piece of work.

Yes, Ceaușescu was canny and possessing the survivor’s keen animal instincts, but offered few redeeming qualities otherwise. He was brutal, long-winded and poorly educated, though slightly brainier than his wife, Elena, a semi-literate bumpkin who built her own cult of personality around pretending to be a superstar scientist.

To read about the despot Ceaușescu nowadays is to constantly find yourself asking, “How could this nondescript dullard of a rural functionary be called the Genius of the Carpathians?”

Even apart from Ceaușescu being an installed and pliant cog in a closed international geopolitical system, itself constructed to institutionalize precisely such non-ironic chicanery, the very thought is breathtaking – and almost surely he believed every word of it.

While shaving each morning, the Conducător (leader) gazed into the mirror not unlike Wile E. Coyote, and paused to admire the length and breadth of his genius.

And why not? A quasi-feudal collection of stooges, sycophants and “yes men” surrounded Ceaușescu, assuring him constantly that he was every bit the ranking luminary ever to have emerged from the dark, forested Transylvanian mountains, overshadowing even the legendary Vlad Tepes – historical basis for the character of Dracula.

In turn, these assurances became the substance of propaganda, including press clippings about himself that Ceaușescu read eagerly over his daily breakfast of luxury foods generally unavailable to his subjects, as well as ubiquitously placed visual reminders of his presence.

Propaganda was the source for parroted and fluttering expressions of fealty on the part of those Romanian citizens who grasped the obvious, and cheerily rebroadcast the boilerplate from a desire to stay out of prison – and of course some of them ended up there, anyway.

What a vicious and dreary fraud, that Ceaușescu.

For 25 years, he was a veritable anchor of vapid tastelessness, mired in the mud flats of the Danube River delta, surrounded by clueless henchmen and corrupt vandals who enriched themselves at the expense of the common man.

Hmm. I’m not sure what made me think of all this, but did I tell you there was a ceremony at the amphitheater on Tuesday morning?

---

As we enter Year VI in the Chronicles of New Gahania, the only major surprise is that Mayor Jeff Gahan hasn’t yet designed a logoed scepter.

On Tuesday morning, Gahan – our Genius of the Floodplain – bounded to a podium hastily erected at the underused amphitheater, chosen for this occasion because the river looks so “cool” behind it, though it remains unfit for the dashing Team Gahan otherwise.

Giggling and gesticulating in a paroxysm of agoraphobic ecstasy, Gahan thanked the Horseshoe Foundation board members who he’d either had appointed or strong-armed, or both, and accepted a check for $5 million from the only Floyd County politician whose compliance really mattered, his neighbor and arch-rival Mark Seabrook, who from this moment forward will be utterly forgotten as Gahan claims full credit for the foundation’s largess.

Gahan proceeded to run down the list of previous multi-million dollar quality-of-life luxury improvements, praising the investments while never revealing their true cost in terms of municipal subsidies and post-ribbon-cutting maintenance.

Verily, Gahan’s done it all; laid the bricks, moved the dirt, smoothed the asphalt, sold hot dogs and swept the floor. It was repulsive and sickening, and within a few seconds it became evident to me as never before that short of getting caught in bed with a known book reader, Gahan has emerged as the odds-on favorite to serve indefinitely as New Albany’s de facto mayor-for-life.

The list of baubles, glitz and glitter – of bright, shiny objects that function as Potemkin facades, suggesting municipal progress while obscuring the ongoing rot proceeding apace underneath – has become as lengthy as Shane Gibson’s arm.

Concurrently, Gahan’s increasingly pedestrian press releases clearly indicate that he’s efficiently cured our city of the social ills that plague the remainder of the planet, apart from a handful of Scandinavian towns and the acreage of various Disney properties.

We have no crime, drug abuse, homelessness, poverty or red lights being run by speeding vehicles. Litter? It isn’t really there, you know. Perhaps you imagined it.

It is left to vicious scandal-mongering dissidents like Jeff Gillenwater to challenge the status quo.

With what's potentially the most significant political upheaval in several decades currently taking place, New Albanians can take solace in the fact that both city and school corporation leaders have ensured an equally significant lack of flexibility going forward with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt payments coming due over the next two or three decades. If you're planning on having any good civic ideas in 2027, tough cookies.

The problem for Bluegill, and for me, and for anyone else who pays close attention, is that in the main, New Albanians seem perfectly content with the Ceaușescu-like tendencies of King Gahan.

After all, in 2015, roughly 14% of the city’s eligible voters opted for the anchor, and as with Donald Trump nationally, they’re getting exactly what they deserve – good and hard.

It’s increasingly difficult to imagine a scenario in which Gahan loses a third term in 2019. Try as he might, Seabrook won’t ever be able to shake the ignominy of smiling weakly while handing Gahan what amounts to five million free clams to campaign for re-election.

At the same time, the current crop of potential Republican challengers has largely chosen to play along with Gahan’s beautification-over-substance shell game.

Granted, the rules of this game have been written to exclude elected officials and empower political appointees, and there isn’t much the minority party can do, but when push comes to gag, the nominal opposition will be depicted as having been complicit.

Just remember: The Bicentennial Boondoggle was very bipartisan.

---

Consider one of Gahan’s chief acolytes, self-important councilman Bob Caesar, who formerly served as nominal Ceaușescu of the Bicentennial Commission.

Most readers are aware of my two-year-long struggle to wrest public Bicentennial Commission financial records, first from Caesar and then the city itself, only to be dismissed with supreme condescension by both.

To repeat: The celebration of New Albany’s two-hundred-year birthday cost several hundred thousand dollars, and was funded in part with taxpayer funds. I’m a citizen of New Albany. Caesar refused to show me the records, and the city attorney Gibson said the city doesn’t have the records to show.

In short: Go peddle your papers, insufferable peasant.

This is amazing, and it should be unacceptable; absolute power corrupts absolutely, and any mayor who takes seriously his obligation to enforce the law shouldn’t allow it.

However, I’m happy to announce that the Green Mouse has obtained these Bicentennial records. Fascinating revelations lie within, and copies currently are in my possession, illustrating plainly that while Caesar and Gibson may not have lied outright, they certainly have acquiesced in a cover-up, and are guilty of consciously subverting the intent of state laws governing freedom of information and public access to records.

This should disturb all of us, and both should be cashiered. If they’ll resort to evasions and subterfuge to obscure Caesar’s handling of relatively paltry Bicentennial funds, just think what they’ll do to obscure the leakage from the many yearly millions going toward feel-good, beautification projects.

And yet … you’re bothered, but only a bit, and not enough to rock the boat, right?

The newspaper doesn’t ask these questions, does it?

In more candid moments, it may seem like smoke and mirrors, but just enough of that magic pixie dust is being spread around to encourage acceptance.

Isn’t it?

And you’re fine with it, aren’t you?

The fact is, if I were to spend 40 more hours of my own time, gratis, to sifting through the records the Politburo has denied exist, in order to show that lots of Bicentennial bucks were hemorrhaged this way and that, often straight to community pillars and/or political party stalwarts who nuzzled up to wet their beaks – as I'm completely confident I could – nothing at all would happen, would it?

They wouldn’t concede error or apologize, would they?

You wouldn’t expect it, would you?

And this is a slight problem, isn’t it?

I’m not ruling anything out, or in. I might take the time to sort through those records, or maybe use those precious hours to drink beer and watch documentaries about tin horn dictatorships the world has known.

But there isn’t much one person alone can do to prevent Jeff Gahan from redesigning New Albany in his own beige image, and as the sainted Bob Knight once implied, if tacky Disney totalitarianism is inevitable, then we might as well escalate plans for a new barroom in order to have somewhere to seek refuge from the sheer indignity of it.

That's exactly what I'm working to achieve, and when it finally comes to pass, I promise to place portraits of Ceaușescu and Gahan right where they belong, at the entrance to the toilets.

Or better yet, inside them.

---

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April 9: ON THE AVENUES: It's time for a change, and David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing.

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Branding Gahan's "sweet spot," part two: He's selling a whole city in his own image, but personality cults aren't pretty pictures.

Part one here.

There can be no doubt. Jeff Gahan's "sweetest spot" is himself.

In his What is character and why it really does matter, Thomas A. Wright states, "The cult of personality phenomenon refers to the idealized, even god-like, public image of an individual consciously shaped and molded through constant propaganda and media exposure. As a result, one is able to manipulate others based entirely on the influence of public personality...the cult of personality perspective focuses on the often shallow, external images that many public figures cultivate to create an idealized and heroic image."

A few recent examples follow. Cautionary note: these images are not for the faint of heart.

The conclusion is as obvious as it is absurd.

Jeff Gahan has been branding the city in his own image, and using our money to do it, but we need collective thinking, not the shoddy veneer of a personality cult.

Here's one definition of branding.

The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers' mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

Below is an article by the estimable Aaron Renn, in which the author discusses branding, or in this case the marketing efforts undertaken by cities.

You can’t help but notice how few unique things about these cities manage to come through.

What about branding our town? For the past eight years here in New Albany, what passes for a "brain trust" at City Hall (try not to cringe in disgust) surely has undertaken a branding campaign. It may or may not have been explicitly organized as a branding campaign, but the effect has been the same.

In essence, New Albany very much has been branded as New Gahania, which is to say that in terms of promotions, every aspect of the city has been tied to the mayor's cult of personality: New Albany is Jeff Gahan, and vice versa.

Students of history will recognize this device from numerous authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, but let's focus on just one: Italy under Benito Mussolini during the 1920s and 1930s.

Mussolini's Italian "fascism" came along first, and was in many ways a precursor of Adolf Hitler's organizational model for Nazi Germany. In fact, Mussolini's chosen symbol became the word to describe his movement.

Fasces ... a bound bundle of wooden rods, sometimes including an axe with its blade emerging. The fasces had its origin in the Etruscan civilization and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolized a magistrate's power and jurisdiction.

A fasces looks like this.

Gahan's chosen symbol emerged from the back rooms where appointed committees meet, utterly without the input or votes of any elected official, and as selected by then-redevelopment honcho and noted artistic design expert David Duggins because it looked "cute."

Now it has become the anchor that adorns every city-owned object.

In Duggins' own words, the anchor was chosen to be a "branding device" for the city. This points to the importance of knowing the meaning of words, for an anchor is something heavy that is used to keep a boat fixed in place, not moving.

Consequently New Albany's second-most-important act of branding during the past eight years has been to slap the anchor logo on everything, which has the effect of announcing that we'll be moving forward while remaining anchored right where we were.

It may not be the best branding for the world outside, but it actually jibes with Gahan's self-aggrandizing governing philosophy, as when he claimed to radically change the street grid while doing almost nothing to ... radically change the street grid.

But far more so than anchors, our foremost branding effort has been devoted to slapping Gahan's cherubic chihuahua image on every last advertisement purchased with taxpayer dollars. An anchor keeps the boat from moving. Gahan keeps the city from moving, while grandly lubricating his own pockets with pay-to-play dollars from special interests.

Of course, Benito Mussolini already had been there and done that.

Allow me to direct this comment to those merchants and independent business owners who tend to accept what they're told at gatherings without examining any of it too closely: if we work together as a collective bearing the weight of our combined investments, the city's marketing and branding would reflect us.

As it stands, the city has indeed been branding -- as New Gahania, not New Albany. This does much for the incumbent, and almost nothing for the rest of us. Worse still, he's been using our money to pay for his own glorification.

Cities: Don’t Fall in the Branding Trap, by Aaron Renn (CityLab)

From Instagram stunts to Edison bulbs, why do so many cities’ marketing plans try to convince people that they’re exactly like somewhere else?

It’s curious that while every company tries its hardest to convince you of how much different and better it is than every other company in its industry, every city tries its hardest to convince you it’s exactly the same as every other city that’s conventionally considered cool.

Look at any piece of city marketing material, from promo videos to airline magazine ad inserts. It’s amazing how so many of them rely on the same basic ingredients: hipster coffee shops, microbreweries, bike lanes, creative-class members, startups, intimations of a fashion scene, farm-to-table restaurants, new downtown streetcars, etc.

These are all good things, mind you: things cities should be happy to have. Some of them may even be modern necessities. But you can’t help but notice how few unique things about these cities manage to come through ...

Four more years of this?

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

Yes, the "Tsar of the Shopping Cart" has been branding the city in his own image and using our money to do it.

However, we need collective grassroots thinking, not the shoddy veneer of a personality cult, even if the absurd personality cult veneer is what we keep getting, again and again. Here's a sampling.

December 16, 2018: Cult of personality: Jeff Gahan's face appears on doggie calendars and in newspaper inserts. It's blatant electioneering at the taxpayer's expense.

August 13, 2018: Earache My Eye: Check out Deaf Gahan's full page Anchor Marriage ad in Extol's wedding issue.

August 10, 2018: Shameless self-aggrandizement as Gahan invites 1Si to provide career counseling to local students.

June 13, 2018: Jeff "Look at Me" Gahan's aquatic cult of personality: He brings us health, all by himself.

February 3, 2018: Inflatable Date Night is ultimate proof that Deaf Gahan seeks to emulate Rev. Moon with a hip new campaign finance baby boom.

January 18, 2018: ON THE AVENUES: During our State of the Gahanaissance Address for 2018, feel free to resort to hard liquor. I did, and will.

September 10, 2017: Adam polishes Jeffrey's personality cult, and yet Dickey's Floyd County Democratic Party still hasn't embraced Gahan's public housing putsch.

June 11, 2017: CARTOON: Gahan Mach III ... or, daddy needs a brand new logo.

June 4, 2017: Scraping rock bottom: Jeff Gahan brings his cult of personality to Kroger shopping carts. But who paid for these political ads?

June 4, 2017: Shopping cart blurbs, magazine ads, billboards ... and now the NTSPY Awards. How much of your money is Jeff Gahan spending on all this?

There's a way out of this deaf, dumb and blind alley: #FireGahan2019

---

I'm voting for David White.

Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

Jeff Gahan has been branding the city in his own image, and using our money to do it, but we need collective thinking, not the shoddy veneer of a personality cult.

Here's one definition of branding.

The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers' mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

Below is an article by the estimable Aaron Renn, in which the author discusses branding, or in this case the marketing efforts undertaken by cities.

You can’t help but notice how few unique things about these cities manage to come through.

What about branding our town?

For the past eight years here in New Albany, what passes for a "brain trust" at City Hall (try not to cringe in disgust) surely has undertaken a branding campaign. It may or may not have been explicitly organized as a branding campaign, but the effect has been the same.

In essence, New Albany very much has been branded as New Gahania, which is to say that in terms of promotions, every aspect of the city has been tied to the mayor's cult of personality: New Albany is Jeff Gahan, and vice versa.

Students of history will recognize this device from numerous totalitarian regimes, but let's focus on just one: Italy under Benito Mussolini during the 1920s and 1930s.

Mussolini's Italian "fascism" came along first, and was in many ways a precursor of Adolf Hitler's organizational model for Nazi Germany. In fact, Mussolini's chosen symbol became the word to describe his movement.

Fasces ... a bound bundle of wooden rods, sometimes including an axe with its blade emerging. The fasces had its origin in the Etruscan civilization and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolized a magistrate's power and jurisdiction.

A fasces looks like this.

Gahan's chosen symbol emerged from the back rooms where appointed committees meet, utterly without the input or votes of any elected official, and as selected by then-redevelopment honcho and noted artistic design expert David Duggins because it looked "cute."

Now it has become the anchor that adorns every city-owned object.

In Duggins' own words, the anchor was chosen to be a "branding device" for the city. This points to the importance of knowing the meaning of words, for an anchor is something heavy that is used to keep a boat fixed in place, not moving.

Consequently New Albany's second-most-important act of branding during the past eight years has been to slap the anchor logo on everything, which has the effect of announcing that we'll be moving forward while remaining anchored right where we were.

It may not be the best branding for the world outside, but it actually jibes with Gahan's self-aggrandizing governing philosophy, as when he claimed to radically change the street grid while doing almost nothing to ... radically change the street grid.

But far more so than anchors, our foremost branding effort has been devoted to slapping Gahan's cherubic chihuahua image on every last advertisement purchased with taxpayer dollars. An anchor keeps the boat from moving. Gahan keeps the city from moving, while grandly lubricating his own pockets with pay-to-play dollars from special interests.

Of course, Benito Mussolini already had been there and done that.

Allow me to direct this comment to those merchants and independent business owners who tend to accept what they're told at gatherings without examining any of it too closely: if we work together as a collective bearing the weight of our combined investments, the city's marketing and branding would reflect us.

As it stands, the city has indeed been branding -- as New Gahania, not New Albany. This does much for the incumbent, and almost nothing for the rest of us. Worse still, he's been using our money to pay for his own glorification.

One way to repair this profound malfunction is #FireGahan2019, and start the process of taking back our civic identity from the charlatan in chief.

Cities: Don’t Fall in the Branding Trap, by Aaron Renn (CityLab)

From Instagram stunts to Edison bulbs, why do so many cities’ marketing plans try to convince people that they’re exactly like somewhere else?

It’s curious that while every company tries its hardest to convince you of how much different and better it is than every other company in its industry, every city tries its hardest to convince you it’s exactly the same as every other city that’s conventionally considered cool.

Look at any piece of city marketing material, from promo videos to airline magazine ad inserts. It’s amazing how so many of them rely on the same basic ingredients: hipster coffee shops, microbreweries, bike lanes, creative-class members, startups, intimations of a fashion scene, farm-to-table restaurants, new downtown streetcars, etc.

These are all good things, mind you: things cities should be happy to have. Some of them may even be modern necessities. But you can’t help but notice how few unique things about these cities manage to come through ...

These stickers have been placed throughout downtown New Albany.

Don't worry. I fixed them.

Link to an actual story having nothing to do with anchors.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader is here to stay, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader is here to stay, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Early this morning I began writing the weekly column over kippers and coffee, and after 300 words, a pervasive feeling of déjà vu began furrowing my brow. Sure enough, upon comparative examination, I'd been there before -- 13 months ago, to be exact.

In which case, why not just repeat the original?

I tend to refrain from reruns of such recent vintage, but as Year Zero approaches, there has been a noticeable resurgence of sheer, unmitigated hubris on the part of Team Gahan's increasingly vacuous functionaries, including (though not limited to) Pat McLaughlin's malicious Knable censure resolution, the shameless and bullying pilferage of intellectual property rights on the part of Develop New Albany's tittering second-raters, a rumored million-dollar cost overrun on the mayor's luxury city hall reclamation, and politically motivated harassment and intimidation of city employees.

There's a great deal of talking down, and too little talking to or with. The stench emits from the top, from Jeff Gahan himself and the Floyd County Democratic Party.

Local Democrats are feeling cornered, and like animals, their fangs are being bared. Decades of ward-heeling patronage and forever merrily wetting beaks is at last threatened by a gradual rising tide in the form of the municipal wing of the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, ranking local Democrats remain enamored of center-right pandering spaced with occasional whiffs of gesture-laden identity coding to entice the two-person-strong East Spring Street Neighborhood Association -- and they're as terrified by the likes of Dan Canon in 2018 as they were by Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Straight up: Gahan's all the Democrats have; this is an apocalyptic Alamo in the making, and doubling down is their only real choice. The re-election tactics already are nasty, and they're going to get worse, because the institution is incapable of reform as constituted, on the fly, but the problem goes far deeper, because in addition to the usual petty graft and high school city council chicanery, the power elite -- Gahan, Dickey, Gibson and Duggins, among others -- truly believe they're infallible.

They aren't. Furthermore, neither am I. Returning to March of 2017 and rereading what I wrote last year, it occurs to me that the odds of regime change have improved. The more we point at the deficiencies of Gahan's megalomania, and to the absurdity of a veneer peddler's innate perfection, the more numerous are those heads nodding in agreement.

They may or may not vote, but there'll be two chances to topple the statue and begin papering over those anchors.

---

Țuică is plum brandy, and sweeping generalizations tend to be insupportable. Seeing as I’m in no mood to be dainty, let's have a drink of the firewater and stumble into the breach.

As human beings go, the late Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-1989) was a regrettable and unfortunate piece of work.

Yes, Ceaușescu was canny and possessing the survivor’s keen animal instincts, but offered few redeeming qualities otherwise. He was brutal, long-winded and poorly educated, though slightly brainier than his wife, Elena, a semi-literate bumpkin who built her own cult of personality around pretending to be a superstar scientist.

To read about the despot Ceaușescu nowadays is to constantly find yourself asking, “How could this nondescript dullard of a rural functionary be called the Genius of the Carpathians?”

Even apart from Ceaușescu being an installed and pliant cog in a closed international geopolitical system, itself constructed to institutionalize precisely such non-ironic chicanery, the very thought is breathtaking – and almost surely he believed every word of it.

While shaving each morning, the Conducător (leader) gazed into the mirror not unlike Wile E. Coyote, and paused to admire the length and breadth of his genius.

And why not? A quasi-feudal collection of stooges, sycophants and “yes men” surrounded Ceaușescu, assuring him constantly that he was every bit the ranking luminary ever to have emerged from the dark, forested Transylvanian mountains, overshadowing even the legendary Vlad Tepes – historical basis for the character of Dracula.

In turn, these assurances became the substance of propaganda, including press clippings about himself that Ceaușescu read eagerly over his daily breakfast of luxury foods generally unavailable to his subjects, as well as ubiquitously placed visual reminders of his presence.

Propaganda was the source for parroted and fluttering expressions of fealty on the part of those Romanian citizens who grasped the obvious, and cheerily rebroadcast the boilerplate from a desire to stay out of prison – and of course some of them ended up there, anyway.

What a vicious and dreary fraud, that Ceaușescu.

For 25 years, he was a veritable anchor of vapid tastelessness, mired in the mud flats of the Danube River delta, surrounded by clueless henchmen and corrupt vandals who enriched themselves at the expense of the common man.

Hmm. I’m not sure what made me think of all this, but did I tell you there was a ceremony at the amphitheater on Tuesday morning?

---

As we enter Year VI in the Chronicles of New Gahania, the only major surprise is that Mayor Jeff Gahan hasn’t yet designed a logoed scepter.

On Tuesday morning, Gahan – our Genius of the Floodplain – bounded to a podium hastily erected at the underused amphitheater, chosen for this occasion because the river looks so “cool” behind it, though it remains unfit for the dashing Team Gahan otherwise.

Giggling and gesticulating in a paroxysm of agoraphobic ecstasy, Gahan thanked the Horseshoe Foundation board members who he’d either had appointed or strong-armed, or both, and accepted a check for $5 million from the only Floyd County politician whose compliance really mattered, his neighbor and arch-rival Mark Seabrook, who from this moment forward will be utterly forgotten as Gahan claims full credit for the foundation’s largess.

Gahan proceeded to run down the list of previous multi-million dollar quality-of-life luxury improvements, praising the investments while never revealing their true cost in terms of municipal subsidies and post-ribbon-cutting maintenance.

Verily, Gahan’s done it all; laid the bricks, moved the dirt, smoothed the asphalt, sold hot dogs and swept the floor. It was repulsive and sickening, and within a few seconds it became evident to me as never before that short of getting caught in bed with a known book reader, Gahan has emerged as the odds-on favorite to serve indefinitely as New Albany’s de facto mayor-for-life.

The list of baubles, glitz and glitter – of bright, shiny objects that function as Potemkin facades, suggesting municipal progress while obscuring the ongoing rot proceeding apace underneath – has become as lengthy as Shane Gibson’s arm.

Concurrently, Gahan’s increasingly pedestrian press releases clearly indicate that he’s efficiently cured our city of the social ills that plague the remainder of the planet, apart from a handful of Scandinavian towns and the acreage of various Disney properties.

We have no crime, drug abuse, homelessness, poverty or red lights being run by speeding vehicles. Litter? It isn’t really there, you know. Perhaps you imagined it.

It is left to vicious scandal-mongering dissidents like Jeff Gillenwater to challenge the status quo.

With what's potentially the most significant political upheaval in several decades currently taking place, New Albanians can take solace in the fact that both city and school corporation leaders have ensured an equally significant lack of flexibility going forward with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt payments coming due over the next two or three decades. If you're planning on having any good civic ideas in 2027, tough cookies.

The problem for Bluegill, and for me, and for anyone else who pays close attention, is that in the main, New Albanians seem perfectly content with the Ceaușescuist tendencies of King Gahan.

After all, in 2015, roughly 14% of the city’s eligible voters opted for the anchor, and as with Donald Trump nationally, they’re getting exactly what they deserve – good and hard.

It’s increasingly difficult to imagine a scenario in which Gahan loses a third term in 2019. Try as he might, Seabrook won’t ever be able to shake the ignominy of smiling weakly while handing Gahan what amounts to five million free clams to campaign for re-election.

At the same time, the current crop of potential Republican challengers has largely chosen to play along with Gahan’s beautification-over-substance shell game.

Granted, the rules of this game have been written to exclude elected officials and empower political appointees, and there isn’t much the minority party can do, but when push comes to gag, the nominal opposition will be depicted as having been complicit.

Just remember: The Bicentennial Boondoggle was very bipartisan.

---

Consider one of Gahan’s chief acolytes, self-important councilman Bob Caesar, who formerly served as nominal Ceaușescu of the Bicentennial Commission.

Most readers are aware of my two-year-long struggle to wrest public Bicentennial Commission financial records, first from Caesar and then the city itself, only to be dismissed with supreme condescension by both.

To repeat: The celebration of New Albany’s two-hundred-year birthday cost several hundred thousand dollars, and was funded in part with taxpayer funds. I’m a citizen of New Albany. Caesar refused to show me the records, and the city attorney Gibson said the city doesn’t have the records to show.

In short: Go peddle your papers, insufferable peasant.

This is amazing, and it should be unacceptable; absolute power corrupts absolutely, and any mayor who takes seriously his obligation to enforce the law shouldn’t allow it.

However, I’m happy to announce that the Green Mouse has obtained these Bicentennial records. Fascinating revelations lie within, and copies currently are in my possession, illustrating plainly that while Caesar and Gibson may not have lied outright, they certainly have acquiesced in a cover-up, and are guilty of consciously subverting the intent of state laws governing freedom of information and public access to records.

This should disturb all of us, and both should be cashiered. If they’ll resort to evasions and subterfuge to obscure Caesar’s handling of relatively paltry Bicentennial funds, just think what they’ll do to obscure the leakage from the many yearly millions going toward feel-good, beautification projects.

And yet … you’re bothered, but only a bit, and not enough to rock the boat, right?

The newspaper doesn’t ask these questions, does it?

In more candid moments, it may seem like smoke and mirrors, but just enough of that magic pixie dust is being spread around to encourage acceptance.

Isn’t it?

And you’re fine with it, aren’t you?

The fact is, if I were to spend 40 more hours of my own time, gratis, to sifting through the records the Politburo has denied exist, in order to show that lots of Bicentennial bucks were hemorrhaged this way and that, often straight to community pillars and/or political party stalwarts who nuzzled up to wet their beaks – as I'm completely confident I could – nothing at all would happen, would it?

They wouldn’t concede error or apologize, would they?

You wouldn’t expect it, would you?

And this is a slight problem, isn’t it?

I’m not ruling anything out, or in. I might take the time to sort through those records, or maybe use those precious hours to drink beer and watch documentaries about tin horn dictatorships the world has known.

But there isn’t much one person alone can do to prevent Jeff Gahan from redesigning New Albany in his own beige image, and as the sainted Bob Knight once implied, if tacky Disney totalitarianism is inevitable, then we might as well escalate plans for a new barroom in order to have somewhere to seek refuge from the sheer indignity of it.

That's exactly what I'm working to achieve, and when it finally comes to pass, I promise to place portraits of Ceaușescu and Gahan right where they belong, at the entrance to the toilets.

Or better yet, inside them.

---

Recent columns:

April 12: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: In Havel, I trust.

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.