BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Better to support Tailspin Ale Fest, your LOCAL beer festival, than fluff those carpetbaggers from afar.

Okay, listen up. Personal point of view, and nothing to do with the people who pay me.

The last time I wrote anything in this space about Tailspin Ale Fest was in 2017.

THE BEER BEAT: Tailspin Ale Fest returns to Bowman Field on Saturday, February 18.

In my view, Tailspin Ale Fest has become Louisville's premier beer festival, and it's the brainchild of New Albany's own Tisha Gainey.

There are two primary reasons for this period of evident neglect. First, in complete candor, I'm not such a beer festival goer these days. Moreover, Tailspin has been a spectacular success, and who needs to hear me tout it, anyway? After all, it's been a while since I had a Top 10 beer hit.

Tisha assures me that ticket sales for 2020 are on track, and the reason I know this is because I messaged her to ask -- and the reason for that was the advent of something called Louisville Beerfest this weekend. It's a festival presented by out-of-towners, and it's taking place on what seems to me the weekend previously used by Tailspin.

I wrote them to ask about it.

What I haven’t seen addressed in recent media accounts about your new beer festival is the timing for early February, a time slot most of us from Louisville have come to associate with the Tailspin festival, which is run by a woman who has lived and worked in Louisville for a long time. I notice that Tailspin attributes its new March slot as resulting from the scheduling conflict with your festival.

Was all this the result of cooperation between the two entities? That’s not the way it sounds, but I’m hesitant to make assumptions without asking. I’d like to think it was discussed up front.

This was two weeks ago. The schmucks haven't answered. The company behind this venture seems to have been dumping tickets, and while it's just my opinion and mine alone, the whole thing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

You know, the way drinking Coors Light does. 

Here's the latest notice from Tailspin. Lots of events act as lead-ins for this local festival, and this Against the Grain/Tailspin Tapping at Crescent Hill Craft House is one of them.

Saturday, February 15 from 6 - 8 p.m. at Crescent Hill Craft House

Enjoy a tapping of Against the Grain Beers at Crescent Hill Craft House and a chance to WIN tickets to Tailspin Ale Fest. No purchase necessary to win, but gain extra entries by enjoying Citra Ass Down IPA, A Beer or Pile of Face. Ticket drawing will be at 8:00 p.m.

MORE INFO HERE.

BUY TAILSPIN ALE FEST TICKETS

Tailspin Ale Fest
March 7, 2020
Louisville Executive Aviation Center

If you're going to attend a beer fest in Louisville this year (Keg Liquors Fest of Ale is in SoIn, natch), isn't Tailspin the one you should be selecting? Tisha and here team always have great beers. It's not 95 degrees outside. And, the part of importance to me whether or not I show up, it's a local show.

Consider it, and have fun.

Hollingsworth? Nah. Local Democrats may be useless, but calling them out doesn't mean I'm a Republican.

Home sweet home.

With Tennessee Trey in town earlier today to raise funds (could he even find his way?) what can I add except this: let's always remember the famous Scottsburg town meeting, and the congressman's links to the Koch Brothers, and his desire to build walls ... but of course he's rich, and in our advancing oligarchy, the money's all that matters.

Hope you enjoyed the first Gilded Age.

Where is Trey Hollingsworth? Carpetbagging Congressman cancels first-ever town hall, angering constituents and emboldening opponents, by Christopher Rex (Medium)

They descended on Scottsburg under the cover of early-morning darkness, from all over Indiana’s Ninth Congressional District. They came from places like Mitchell and Bedford, Bloomington, Memphis, Floyds Knobbs, and more. They were teachers and construction workers, mental health counselors and high school students; retired postal workers and stay-at-home moms. One was a bundled-up third grader in a pink Colts stocking cap. They were there to speak face-to-face, finally, with their elusive representative, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth.

It was a small group, not more than 25 in number, and they were carrying signs with slogans like Protect Working Families; Stop Re-Writing the Tax Code in SECRET; and, most simply, #SHOWINGUP. They were exceedingly polite and civil in their actions, huddled together along South Lake Road North, trying desperately to keep warm as cars and trucks whizzed past in the dark, but they were angry, too, oh yes, and they had some questions they wanted the man representing them in Congress to answer.

Chuck Sebastian, a local barber, wanted to know who Hollingsworth was really working for, the people of the Ninth District, or the large donors that the tax bill would benefit the most; Barbara Burton, a cancer survivor, wondered if Hollingsworth and the GOP would be coming for her Medicare next; High school senior Dylan Baker had the $1.5 trillion deficit in mind when he asked why he and his generation were being asked to pay, tomorrow, for rich people’s tax cuts today; Roger Pedigo, a construction worker, wanted to know why we weren’t investing in infrastructure — the roads and bridges he helps build — while his wife, Jennifer, wondered how her two daughters were expected to thrive, financially, with crippling student loan debt.

There was one singular question, however, that they all demanded an answer to:

Where was Trey Hollingsworth?

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: America's everlasting Reconstruction: Carpetbaggers, scalawags, canards and a biography of U.S. Grant.

The book is Ron Chernow's Grant, a biography of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). When the Civil War began, Grant was a former military officer languishing in obscurity in Galena, Illinois. The war changed everything, because Grant's fundamental skill was grasping the logistics of warfare, and it served him well, indeed.

Grant coordinated the strategy that won the war for the Union, became Commanding General of the Army, and then was elected to two terms as the 18th President of the United States.

The war itself was finite. What came afterward continues to vex us.

Chernow is clearly out to find undiscovered nobility in his story, and he succeeds; he also finds uncannily prescient tragedy. There are ways in which Grant’s times eerily resemble our own.

It’s jolting to read about how the Union’s Civil War victory proved to be a beginning, not an ending; how it led to a spike in white supremacist groups and their efforts to keep newly enfranchised black men from voting; how the president who succeeded Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, seemed determined to undo the Union’s success; how the voting rights for freed male slaves guaranteed by the 15th Amendment were allowed to erode; how the once squeaky-clean Grant began surrounding himself with rich friends and became embroiled in financial scandal once he attained the power of the presidency.

The first half of the biography documents Grant's life and career up to the conclusion of the Civil War, with the remainder devoted to his presidency and later life.

As a Civil War buff since childhood, Grant's war record is very familiar to me. However, I've never properly studied his post-war career in politics, which is synonymous with the period of the Reconstruction -- and like most Americans, I know far too little about this period of the nation's history.

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, two more years of war, service by African American troops, and the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population. The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for readmitting them into the Union, and defining the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a non-slave society. The South, however, saw Reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition and did not welcome it.

Whatever else might be written about Reconstruction, it spawned the imperfectly understood term "carpetbagger."

Five Myths About Reconstruction, by James W. Loewen (Zinn Education Project)

3. Northerners used Reconstruction to take advantage of the South and get rich.

Many Americans still learn this canard, epitomized by the term “carpetbaggers.”

The story—as exemplified in the 2011 edition of the textbook The American Journey — is that fortune-hunters from the North “arrived with all their belongings in cheap suitcases made of carpet fabric.” Penniless, they would then make it rich off the prostrate South. John F. Kennedy said in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage, “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi.”

The first clue that this view might be far-fetched comes from the fact that the economies of most Southern states were in ruins. Fortune-seekers will go where the money is, and it was not in the postwar South. Instead, immigrants from the North were mostly of four types: missionaries bringing Christianity (and often literacy) to newly freed people; teachers eager to help Black children and adults learn to read, write, and cipher; Union soldiers and seamen who were stationed in Mississippi and liked the place or fell in love; and would-be political leaders, Black and white, determined to make interracial government work.

A "canard" is a noun about a duck, implying buffalo chips.

Before 1850, from French canard "a hoax," literally "a duck" (from Old French quanart, probably echoic of a duck's quack); said by Littré to be from the phrase vendre un canard à moitié "to half-sell a duck," thus, from some long-forgotten joke, "to cheat."

It's an interesting question of perception.

We've long since accepted "carpetbagger" in the sense of an opportunistic political candidate, and I've been among those who've used the term to describe Trey Hollingworth, who came to Indiana from Tennessee with a cash-stuffed banjo on his knee and bought a seat in the House of Representatives.

Although in doing so, we're accepting the Southern definition of the term as one of opprobrium, and ignoring the fact that it was used to denigrate well-intentioned people who'd now fancy themselves as left-leaners voting against the likes of Hollingsworth.

We probably should be referring to Hollingsworth as a canard, not a carpetbagger. 

Perhaps I'm too European, but a duck quacks, a quack is a meteorologist physician politician, and the notion of a politician quacking like a duck reminds me of certain opportunistic city council members embracing urban designs redolent of suburban outlet malls.

As Groucho Marx might have asked, viaduct?

By the way ...

What’s the difference between a carpetbagger and a scalawag? by Elizabeth Mix (History)

White Southerners who supported Reconstruction-era Republicans were called scalawags by their political enemies, who considered them traitors to the South and just as bad, if not worse, than carpetbaggers. Scalawags included non-slaveholding, small-time farmers; middle-class professionals and others who had stayed loyal to the Union during the war. Although the exact origins of scalawag are unknown, it was in use in the United States before the Civil War as a term for both a farm animal of little value and a ne’er-do-well individual.

What are YOU reading?

REWIND: Drochubh, drochéan ... and the Kentuckiana Celtic Foundation.

My letter appeared  in the July 5 edition of the News and Tribune.

Understandably, some will find my position to be too aggressive, so just let me say this: I'll give my city a very hard time when merited, but I'll also defend New Albany against those who screw us unjustifiably ... and this is one of those times. Good riddance to the bums.

Next stop, Shoals?

---

An old Irish-language proverb goes Níl aon suáilce gan a duáilce féin, translated as, “There are no unmixed blessings in life.”

In January, we learned that the 2012 Celts on the River concert would not take place at New Albany’s Riverfront Amphitheater, as it had for the past three years, but on the waterfront in Jeffersonville.

The Kentuckiana Celtic Foundation (KCF) apparently saw no compelling ethical reason to inform New Albany officials that a bidding war for the concert had started, because doing so might have allowed for a matching counter-offer.

I don’t contest Jeffersonville’s favorable offer to the committee, only that the committee is guilty of considerable tackiness and slap-in-the-face ingratitude by its failure to give our city a chance to reply, whatever the response might have been.

It must be remembered that three years ago, the KCF came to New Albany as a fledgling splinter group with neither marketable experience nor organizational credibility. The England administration graciously gave the KCF metaphorical refuge, a physical riverfront home, and extensive logistical assistance in nurturing both the KCF and its concert concept.

But worry not; New Albany's loss probably will be Jeffersonville's, too, once the Kentuckiana Celtic Carpetbaggers flee next to Otisco, New Amsterdam or Birdseye, given there seems to be no sentiment for them to be hosted anywhere in Louisville, which surely speaks volumes in itself.

I’ll close with another Irish proverb: Drochubh, drochéan, meaning “A bad egg, a bad bird.”

Drochubh, drochéan ... and the Kentuckiana Celtic Foundation.

My letter appears in today's on-line edition of the News and Tribune.

Understandably, some will find my position here to be too aggressive, so just let me say this: I'll give my city a very hard time when merited, but I'll also defend New Albany against those who screw us unjustifiably ... and this is one of those times. Good riddance to the bums.

Next stop, Shoals?

---

An old Irish-language proverb goes Níl aon suáilce gan a duáilce féin, translated as, “There are no unmixed blessings in life.”

In January, we learned that the 2012 Celts on the River concert would not take place at New Albany’s Riverfront Amphitheater, as it had for the past three years, but on the waterfront in Jeffersonville.

The Kentuckiana Celtic Foundation (KCF) apparently saw no compelling ethical reason to inform New Albany officials that a bidding war for the concert had started, because doing so might have allowed for a matching counter-offer.

I don’t contest Jeffersonville’s favorable offer to the committee, only that the committee is guilty of considerable tackiness and slap-in-the-face ingratitude by its failure to give our city a chance to reply, whatever the response might have been.

It must be remembered that three years ago, the KCF came to New Albany as a fledgling splinter group with neither marketable experience nor organizational credibility. The England administration graciously gave the KCF metaphorical refuge, a physical riverfront home, and extensive logistical assistance in nurturing both the KCF and its concert concept.

But worry not; New Albany's loss probably will be Jeffersonville's, too, once the Kentuckiana Celtic Carpetbaggers flee next to Otisco, New Amsterdam or Birdseye, given there seems to be no sentiment for them to be hosted anywhere in Louisville, which surely speaks volumes in itself.

I’ll close with another Irish proverb: Drochubh, drochéan, meaning “A bad egg, a bad bird.”

"There will be live entertainment at the New Albany Riverfront Amphitheater as well as downtown this year."

This is good news from City Hall.

Other than Billy's fave (Confederate Railroad), among the acts not set to return to the amphitheater this summer is the Celts on the River concert, which was poached by Jeffersonville after the Celts committee organizer did not provide the city of New Albany with notice that a bidding war was underway. But New Albany's loss will be Jeffersonville's, too, once the carpetbaggers flee to Otisco or New Amsterdam at some point in the future, given that there seems to be no sentiment for them in Louisville.

There'll be much, much more to say about Celts, so for now, a few positives.

New Albany ‘in the process of deciding’ riverfront schedule, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)

NEW ALBANY — A schedule of events has not been confirmed, but Mayor Jeff Gahan vowed there will be live entertainment at the New Albany Riverfront Amphitheater as well as downtown this year.

“We’re in the process of deciding what the schedule is going to look like this year, how it’s going to be managed and who’s going to be involved,” Gahan said.

Former Mayor Doug England’s wife, Shelle England, managed the riverfront plan last year and led the fundraising charge. Gahan said she informed him recently that she had decided to step down from the post ...

... Gahan said he hopes to include more entities, organizations and people in the process this year, as he added there likely won’t be a two or three member committee overseeing riverfront entertainment.

Several parties have expressed interest in helping with planning events and Gahan said “I want to encourage” an inclusive group to manage the program. He added his administration wants to press for more shows at the downtown farmers’ market stage off Market Street as well.

Anger management? No, thanks. I’ve had all the placid acceptance I can stomach.

I’ll begin this essay with a promise. This is my final posting on the topic.

And, an observation.

Thanks to New Albany’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08, I know conclusively that in spite of numerous personal differences, which I’m only now, this year, in the process of resolving, I am in fact my father’s son.

It may not seem like the sort of revelation designed to hang one’s rhetorical hat, but considering the year I‘ve had, it’s huge.

And if it means parting ways with my progressive brethren by sneering at orthodoxy, so be it. It’s healthier to sneer at orthodoxy than it is to dip snuff or smoke cigars, wouldn’t you think?

---

Several hundred people visit NAC on a daily basis. Among regular readers of this blog, there is a smaller, select group composed of true friends. Among this group, there are fewer still with whom I’m very close, and they know what a challenging year it’s been in my world. I’ll leave it at that, as background information.

Looking at it objectively, during the past month I’ve expended a disproportionate amount of time and energy in vigorously and vociferously contesting the city council’s smoking ban decision, and yes, that fact may seem counterintuitive to casual acquaintances, given that I’ve never smoked cigarettes, am not enamored of the odor they generate, and have little desire to be a pariah on my own side of the fence.

It’s just that the effete stench in this case isn’t emanating from an ashtray.

Furthermore, it certainly isn’t that I have ample time to devote to this particular struggle. Like many other people, I’m working two jobs: I’m helping my partners run our existing business, and I’m trying to start a second business. I’m serving on two volunteer boards. I’m married, and we own a home, and there are four cats and a 25-year-old truck in need of an oil change. The list goes on. Quite a few people out there have it far worse than me, and because I know that’s true, I’m not going to make it into a federal case, but if you haven’t owned a small business, you have no idea how difficult time management can be.

Or how much it pisses you off to be told that you obviously don’t know how to manage your own affairs.

---

Recently, the Bookseller asked me about my frequent disparaging of “out-of-towners” during this discussion. His unspoken question has been, “Why are you taking all this so personally?”

Fair enough, and I’ll try to explain why the professional cessation lobbyist’s comments during the last city council meeting grated on my nerves so thoroughly with each passing moment (lest we forget, many moments past the previously mandated “one”) that I felt compelled to speak aloud from my front row seat with reference to the unfolding travesty, and to remind the pusillanimous council president to follow his own stated “rule” … and to be ejected as a result of my insolence … and, just for the hell of it, what all this has to do with my father’s life.

At its most basic, I reacted the way I did out of pure instinct, because just like my father before me, I simply can’t resist throwing in my lot with the underdog, and as the smoking spectacle has stupidly proceeded, it’s become increasingly obvious that the truest underdog is the dude sitting on a barstool smoking a cigarette I’d never smoke, and drinking a beer I’d never drink, and probably watching a NASCAR race that I’d never watch.

Why do I so resent the presence of the paid professional anti-smoking lobbyists, the carpetbaggers from afar, and the associated health fascists who’ve descended on the city, then decamped just as quickly for further adventures in expense account living in other unfortunate burgs down the lonely Interstate from here?

It’s because they don’t have to do more than one thing at a time, while I don’t have the time to do anything, and what they’re being paid to do is intolerable from a standpoint of basic human fairness.

To me, they’re the health fascist obermenschen, these nannying, passionless people who are paid to perform one task and one task only sans the endless multitasking that fills my days, and that task is to demonize cigarette smokers, to the exclusion of anything and anyone else, and it infuriates me, because my fellow bar owners, who by the admirably frank admission of prime anti-smoking campaigner John Gonder must now cope with ground unexpectedly “shifting” beneath their feet, don’t have the luxury of spending 40-hour weeks defending their interests from predatory attack.

They’re peasants armed with mere sticks, squinting through the clouds at bombers cruising 20,000 feet or above … and the cluster bombs are hurtling through the air.

These bar and restaurant owners have next to no time to take away from their labor-intensive business creations, and no kneejerk lobby to level a playing field tilted against them from the start. They must scramble during rare off-hours to protect conditions that they genuinely perceive as important to their livelihoods, to rally their workers and customers (who’ve no time, either) to fight against something that was sprung on them without substantive warning, with not a solitary soul on a suddenly non-reactive council preparing them for the unexpected.

Just deft politics?

Pfui.

The speed of the council’s smoking represents cowardice by any reasonable definition.

Frozen in the headlights, with indignity piling atop indignity, and in the almost complete absence of clear public communication from the pro-ban bloc (how long will Jeff Gahan use his president’s chair as a shield from scrutiny?), these hard working business owners attended as many of the incredibly scant public hearings as possible, and were compelled to limit their comments to one minute, graciously complied in the main, and then were forced to listen with mounting frustration as they were lectured like dawdling kindergartners by Tim Filler, the carpetbagging cessation lobbyist from another city, who of course couldn’t possibly have any clear notion of how to run the businesses these people have operated on a daily basis, in some cases, for decades.

Want to respond? Sorry, suckers – you already had your minute … and by the way, Mr. Filler, just keep talking. Keep demeaning. Keep insulting. To hell with science. Just make these redneck bar owners look bad.

Mr. Filler, you can have as many minutes as you like to call honest people liars, to dispute their professional acumen, and to denigrate their comprehension of their own business, of their own interests, of their own customers – including that non-confrontational fellow on the barstool who wants above all else to have a few minutes away from it all, and can’t understand why we’re yelling about smoking when the street outside remains unpaved.

Detecting a wee bit of anger?

I won’t deny it.

---

It should make you angry, too, to have two sets of rules, and to have someone you’re never met speak with a theatrically straight face about your own inadequacies as an operator. Gee, how did I ever keep a business open for 16 years knowing as little as I do?

Anyone possessing a shard of empathy and a trace of solidarity with people engaged in the same pursuit as yours would feel the same way as I do, but this is different. This is the smoking “debate,” which manages to muddy the scrum comprehensively without my tossing buckets of water on the pitch.

So tell me, fellow fair-minded progressives, what part of any of this is fair to these extremely hard working people?

I may be a progressive, but what part of importing a for-hire suit to tell people they don’t know how to run their own businesses makes sense to you?

Why must smokers and operators be demonized in such a manner?

Wasn’t it supposed to have been about workplace safety?

Why did Jeff Gahan permit the “debate” to devolve into anarchy?

Why is John Gonder the only council pro-ban advocate to have basic human respect for the other side, while the other four remain as ziplocked as the barbecued bologna sandwich in Dan Coffey’s Bazooka Joe lunch box?

Take your time before you answer – but no more than a minute, because another important point that we’ve been taught by the smoking ban debate is that when it comes to social engineering campaigns undertaken by ward heelers, debate really isn’t necessary at all. Lip service to disposable principle is it, and nothing more.

Perhaps this oppressive absence of meaningful discourse will go down in history as the King Gahan Doctrine, and maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and the council will retain some semblance of a “progressive” bloc to enforce limited debate on slumlord abatement to the barest minimum necessary to appear civilized, but somehow I doubt it. Coffey will scurry when the time is right ... and then what?

---

Why did it come down this way?

You see, neither that quiet guy on the barstool, nor the bar owner serving him, have anywhere near the lobbying clout that rental property owners have, and in the end, that’s why the pro-ban council bloc decided to schedule them first for the ritualistic ostracizing. It’s because sitting there, minding their own business, they couldn’t see it coming.

They were easy marks, and at a low, low price.

It’s because the out-of-towners would do the heavy lifting, the council members voting in favor would have three and half years for people to forget about it, and the socially unacceptable smokers with no organized resistance would be chased into the street to pitch their filthy nicotine-stained pup tents in the unrepaired pot holes that this council hasn’t had the guts to address, primarily because there’s no money, just like there’s no money (and likely, no will) to enforce the non-smoking mandate.

Y’all feel better about yourselves now that you've solved a purely cosmetic problem by disenfranchising people who did nothing to provoke it?

Not so fast, Jeff, John, Pat, Dan and Bob.

That question is aimed at my fellow progressives, not the council.

----

And what of my dad?

My father spent his life chasing populist windmills, and most of the time he got burned, but his instincts were noble. He looked at any problem from the perspective of the guys like him, and guys like him were the underdogs, and yeah, while it’s true that I’ve spent most of my adult life distancing myself from getting hurt by believing in something so much that losing it would matter to me, sometimes I guess blood is thicker than water.

I asked the council why this, and why now? Gonder tried, and I appreciate it, but in truth, there has been no answer. Yet.

The Bookseller asked, why this issue and not another?

It’s because there’s something so repugnant about this, and that cuts at such a deep level, that I’m forced to do something I seldom sanction, and that’s douse the lights and start swinging. Sorry if it offends you. Like my dad before me, I'll get over it ... but not before I'm finished having my say.

We didn’t always get along, but my dad taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right. In my view, a smoking ordinance that purports to protect defenseless workers has achieved its aim only by targeting and vilifying business people and their customers, because in the end, at closing time, no one really wants to talk about science at all.

Science simply can’t be trusted to assuage individual prejudices, to scratch irrational itches, and to make us fear dying any less. At the same time, substituting one prejudice for another strikes me as hypocrisy of a very high order. The hypocrisy is what I'll remember when I'm standing outside the building I own, smoking my cigar, and wondering if Sam will run again for the sixth in 2011 ... and whether redistricting will have been achieved by then for the first time since 1992.

This hasn’t been a fair fight, and my dad taught me that fights should be fair, even if the outcome is preordained.

And that’s why I’m angry about it.

Thanks for asking.

Yes, I’m being feisty, prickly, disputative and contrarian about something that the majority of my own friends and acquaintances would prefer me to let lie and peacefully move on to other issues, but damn it, the more you see rigid orthodoxy enveloping you, the more someone – anyone -- has to try to state an opposing viewpoint.

That is what I’ve tried to do. At least I’m open and fully transparent about it. Jeff Gahan and the council pro-ban bloc has chosen opaqueness and subterfuge. Let history be the judge of which has shown more integrity in the process … and I accept the verdict.

Just don't limit me to a minute. That's just plain insulting to an intelligence seldom valued in this town.