The cool kids can go fu ... well, you know what I mean.

The pirate looks at sixty, and the evidence is incontrovertible. Each time in my life, when for some arcane reason it seemed a good idea to try becoming a cool kid -- part of the "in" crowd, belonging to a certain trendy group, inhabiting a clique, seeking to enlist in the power elite or aspiring to a socially ascendant organization -- it always has turned out badly.

Always; without exception.

It's better to remain contrarian, an iconoclast, infidel and outsider, because staying true to yourself at least allows your dignity to remain intact. Independence is neither cool nor uncool. It is merely principled. It just is.

Not only that, but you can't become a cool kid by your own rule book, anyway. The beautiful people, those fashionable arbiters of style, have rules of their own, and if you have to ask what these are, you'll never know.

Furthermore, I'm allergic to arrogance, and the thought of abiding the inevitable group-think is enough to avoid these entangling alliances.

The so-called cool kids generally select a leader; there's a head cheese or a big dog at the apex of their pyramid, and this grand poobah usually turns out to be my intellectual inferior; often, he or she quite simply is a dreadful dullard and the ensuing idolatry makes no sense.

Accordingly the exalted boss's followers acquiesce at being sheeple, no less arrogant or exuding their in-crowd privileges, but otherwise devoid of understanding and unaware of any meaningful narrative apart from yearning to belong to something irrespective of the cost to their identities.

You can count me out.

Again and again, perhaps twice on Sunday, remorseless experience has taught me that the "cool kids" aren't cool at all. They'll always make you drink the Kool-Aid first, before there's any chance of acceptance, and then stripped of autonomy, you become one of the braying jackals.

Don't misunderstand, because remaining independent does not imply aloofness. Cooperation still serves the common good, so long as the conditions are clear. I stand ready to be of assistance -- just don't expect me to sell out.

Because you can't afford me, dipshits.

Gahan commits violence against our most vulnerable because our most beautiful can't get enough of "sanitary conditions."

It was another morning among many, walking back home from work, entertaining myself by watching as drivers of automobiles routinely violated the traffic rules, all the while ready to turn into road-raging beasts if a solitary bicyclist were to do the same by rolling through a stop sign, when from the shadows emerged a gargantuan 300-pound male pedaling frantically atop a terribly creaky ten-year-old’s bike.

This is the sort of contemporary phenomenon that eludes comprehension, these full-grown adults on kiddie bikes, and yes, I’ve certainly heard the litany of their vagrancy, drug abuse and petty thievery. Some of it may even be true, and deprivation in one of its numerous sanctioned forms surely plays a part, although I insist on thinking it goes deeper.

I believe they're the dispossessed protesting against the current reign of the fashionistas, or as I've termed them previously, the "beautiful" people.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Is there a -cracy word for government by the beautiful people?

... To me the term "beautiful people" is decidedly pejorative.

It's inevitably the people who fancy themselves as beautiful, not necessarily in some accepted sense of outwardly physical beauty, but those possessing the right ideas, the right look, the right connections and the right way of viewing their privileged place in the world.

Obviously I reserve the right to heatedly differ with "right" in these contexts, extolling a alternative definition in the process.

As an awkward and ungainly ugly duckling of a book reader, I've learned the hard way that trying to fit in with the beautiful people is a fool's errand. Whenever I've tried it, the story has ended badly.

I'm not sure whether these experiences made me into a defiant jaded contrarian or the other way around, but there we are. I've become fairly contemptuous of the self-centered milieu of the beautiful people, who know far less about the world than they profess, and who tend to dismiss the "little people" -- and this may be one reason why Donald Trump is president, among other things.

There are beautiful people and homeless people, and almost axiomatically, never the twain shall meet. In fact the beautiful people tend to view the homeless people as blotches to be removed, lest property values plunge and visitors come to believe we weren't taught about deodorant.

To close this post, give it up for this blog's co-editor, who has a knack for finding the center of the target.

---

We were out of town when Mayor Gahan lied to and then destroyed a community of homeless people here in New Albany. His personal actions and the usual lack of substantive response from other Democratic officials are deplorable but not at all surprising given their consistent track records of subsidizing the wealthy while seeking to limit or penalize nearly everyone else. 

What’s mostly gone unremarked, though, owing to them being wholly unremarkable in this country, are the other lessons again made clear: 

1. It’s not just possible but highly probable for working people to be unable to afford a decent place to live. 

2. Medical situations to which we are all susceptible make and help keep people homeless every day.

I’m sure, via occasional donations, thoughts and prayers, etc., some of you think you’re offering support for the homeless. The fact is, though, there isn’t a single good and justifiable reason why the factors above need to be true. When we continue to respect and re-elect a leadership class that doesn’t support a living wage and universal health care, we are choosing to make people’s lives look and function like the photos and videos we’ve all seen too much of lately. We are choosing, in the wealthiest empire to ever exist, to set the humanitarian baseline so low that “unsafe, unsanitary” housing camps are accepted as a “natural” consequence of our systemic beliefs and actions. 

Year after year, a bulk of the American voting public, regardless of party and desperately clung-to delusional self-images, actively chooses and reinforces numerous forms of poverty and violence. It’s what we electorally say we want and it’s precisely what we get.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Is there a -cracy word for government by the beautiful people?

There's a song by Marilyn Manson called "The Beautiful People," but my first recollection of the phrase is from The Beatles.

[Verse 1]
How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?
Now that you know who you are
What do you want to be?
And have you traveled very far?
Far as the eye can see

[Verse 2]
How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?
How often have you been there?
Often enough to know
What did you see when you were there?
Nothing that doesn't show

[Chorus]
Baby, you're a rich man
Baby, you're a rich man
Baby, you're a rich man, too
You keep all your money in a big brown bag inside a zoo
What a thing to do
Baby, you're a rich man
Baby, you're a rich man
Baby, you're a rich man, too

The song combined snippets from John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

This song grew from a verse of John’s (“one of the beautiful people”) and a chorus of Paul’s (“baby, you’re a rich man”). The song deals with the celebrity, wealth and fame the Beatles were experiencing at the time, and is sung to their manager Brian Epstein, as they ask him how it feels to be thrust into the limelight as “one of the beautiful people.”

I was a little kid during the "Summer of Love," but evidently the briefly ascendant hippies were referring to themselves as "beautiful people."

Musicologist Walter Everett writes that the song "asks an unnamed Brian Epstein what it's like to be one of the 'beautiful people'"; Everett adds: "This appellation was used of both communal hippies and those who mingle with the most celebrated entertainers." Another interpretation is that the "Beautiful People" verses were meant as a "tip of the hat" to Epstein for finally taking the psychedelic drug LSD. Lennon claimed, however, that the meaning of the song was that everybody is a rich man, saying, "The point was stop moaning. You're a rich man and we're all rich men ..."George Harrison said that the message of the song was that all individuals are wealthy within themselves, regardless of material concerns.

"Those who mingle with the most celebrated entertainers" strikes closer to the heart of the matter, because to me the term "beautiful people" is decidedly pejorative.

It's inevitably the people who fancy themselves as beautiful, not necessarily in some accepted sense of outwardly physical beauty, but those possessing the right ideas, the right look, the right connections and the right way of viewing their privileged place in the world.

Obviously I reserve the right to heatedly differ with "right" in these contexts, extolling a alternative definition in the process.

As an awkward and ungainly ugly duckling of a book reader, I've learned the hard way that trying to fit in with the beautiful people is a fool's errand. Whenever I've tried it, the story has ended badly.

I'm not sure whether these experiences made me into a defiant jaded contrarian or the other way around, but there we are. I've become fairly contemptuous of the self-centered milieu of the beautiful people, who know far less about the world than they profess, and who tend to dismiss the "little people" -- and this may be one reason why Donald Trump is president, among other things.

Rant over, although a clarification is necessary.

The "usual suspects" aren't always synonymous with the "beautiful people." The latter need to be out in front to be seen; selfies were made for them. Conversely, the usual suspects can include those who are in the game for power and money alone. They're the cynics who see the value of leveraging the vanity of others, and are content to remain in the background whenever expedient.

I'm venting owing to an omission. We often use the word "democracy," noting the meaning of the suffix -cracy (government by the people).

60 words ending in -cracy

When you’re tracing the etymology of a word, you’ll find that many roads lead to Greek. A large amount of English word do have their origins in the Hellenic language, although they might’ve entered the English via other routes.

We have already looked at words ending with Greek –phobia, so this time we turn our attention to another word of Greek origin that has produced many words used in English. The combining form –cracy denotes a particular form of government, rule, or influence, and originates in the Greek –kratia, meaning ‘power, rule’. The suffix – cracy did not, however, find its way into English directly via Greek, but has rather been borrowed from French –cratie.

While browsing the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), we found a large number of words using –cracy. Some of them, like democracy, are in frequent use, and will doubtlessly be well-known to you. Others, like logocracy, may be more obscure – or they might’ve even entered the language as nonce words. But read through the list below to see whether you’ll find some new terms to add to your vocabulary.

My question today: What is the word for "government by the beautiful people"?

Is it omorphiocracy?

Omorphia is one of several Greek words for beauty. If any readers have a source for the proper term, please let me know -- and I'll keep it ready to use as an antidote to pomposity.

Centenary adaptive reuse: "What about a homeless shelter?"

A regular reader offered this insightful comment about the impending sale of Centenary United Methodist Church.

Centenary United Methodist Church, downtown -- it's half a city block, now up for sale.

The disconnect between wants and needs is particularly vivid.

From the listing:

"A fantastic opportunity in Downtown New Albany. Maybe you're not looking for a church home, but what about living space? Something cool, hip and funky with a millennial vibe. We also need more senior housing with some independent living. You could mix it up with co-existence of space that caters to all walks of life. This property offers lots of creative uses. What about a boutique hotel?"

What about a homeless shelter? From the story:

Centenary does its share to feed those in need by opening its food pantry from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. every Tuesday. Free meals are also served at the church twice a week — at 6 p.m. Thursday and 4:30 p.m. Sunday.

Centenary serves 18 percent of Floyd County residents through its food pantry where those in need are allowed to take items once a month. Akins-Banman also said more families are coming to the weekly free meals.

"Yesterday [Tuesday] we had so many veterans come in who needed food," Akins-Banman said. "There is so much need."

Hopefully one of the other churches or organizations downtown pick up those Thursday and Sunday free meal times, because that's going to be a huge loss for the community.

Good point, Jim. Very good point.

But we must remember that City Hall as presently occupied will not publicly acknowledge the existence of unsightliness, whether homelessness, hunger or opioid addiction. The mayor believe irrefutable truth reflects badly on his hermetic "special interests first" kingdom, and so he stares resolutely in the opposite direction. Take the proposition to the city's top leaders, and boutique hotel wins in a landslide.

It's sad. Very sad.

Heard it through the grapevine: This year's Extrapolative New Albany.

I swear that if the idea had occurred to me in time, I'd have hired Steve Price to perform karaoke for our June 20 yard party. Never was Lynyrd Skynyrd so solely missed as last Thursday evening.

We established a joyful dissident's perimeter in Sandra's yard. How fortunate for us that her house adjoined the location of this year's Exclusively New Albany.

The view was peachy. We likened it to perching on a rooftop opposite Wrigley Field and peeking in on a baseball game while drinking one's own, far superior beer.

Everything about the bicentennial edition of Exclusionary New Albany purportedly was "local," save for the multinational beers and wines being vended from the bar. It's too bad such a beautiful setting as Larry Ricke's home was victim to such conceptual futility as Bud Light and Beringer, but it's what always happens when small cabals (England kniggets?) exercise control, and others, who are perfectly well-meaning, permit them to do so.

Come to think of it, "cabal" could be referring to the Floyd County Health Department, which visited last Thursday's DNA party. Shoes do fit, after all.

On October 4, business formal wear and 200 smackers will render you Crutchfelt.

Civic embarrassment: Bicentennial Commission goes mercenary, disses localism. (December 27, 2011)

 ... If the “official” bicentennial celebration is going to be the same old white-bread-and-Budweiser karaoke show, it’s time for the creative class to get to work on the underground version.

What we need: The New Albany Bicentennial Writers' Project.

Books don’t seem to matter as much as they used to, and so it was instructive to witness a generally annoyed reaction to the Bicentennial commission’s non-transparent decision (itself so indicative of the city’s generational tendencies) to ingloriously import a freelancer from Tennessee to “write the book” on New Albany.

Both here, at the newspaper and on Facebook, savvy readers immediately grasped the obvious: It makes no sense to employ a freelancer from afar when the writers we already have can do the job.

New Albany’s history reads like any other city’s record, in the sense that it boasts the sublime and the ridiculous in roughly equal measure. The commission’s aim in producing a coffee table book for fund-raising purposes undoubtedly is to render the standard, glowing and heroic account of numerous bearded white folks defying the odds to raise a city from the flood plain – when, of course, it would have been far more sensible of them to leave the bottomland be and place it on the non-tubercular hillside.

Respectable history is one thing, and daily life something else entirely. To me, the ideal Bicentennial book would be a written snapshot of New Albany at 200, looking back and ahead, inclusive of a number of perspectives, and unafraid both to celebrate the victories and to dissect the warts. 

What is needed is a New Albany Bicentennial Writers' Project (BWP), with a goal of producing “The People’s History of New Albany”, nodding toward historians like the late Howard Zinn, and his life’s work of balancing the talking points of officialdom. New Albany is a place filled with numerous instructive and entertaining stories, most of which would have no place in the Babbitt History of New Albany (thank you, Sinclair Lewis). That’s all the more reason to pursue them.

Know from the very start that this is going to be hard, hard work. First, what are the major themes in the New Albany historical narrative worthy of examination? Who’ll be doing the writing, and when is the work due? How do we pay for it, with local government already stating its inexplicable preference for the “infallible fatherland version” of the past? 

Well, I’m willing to put in the time, and as for the money ... we'll figure it out.

Let them have their “official” volume. Conversely, let’s aim to create a thought-provoking counterweight. Who knows? It might turn into a permanent feature of the New Albanian landscape.