"Conservatives should be wary of Big Business," notes a conservative, correctly.

Meet the multinational corporation.

According to the article, John A. Burtka IV is executive director of the American Conservative magazine. As for his topic, but of course they should.

In recent years, as politics become increasingly and stupidly polarized, I've tried to look past the obvious points of disagreement with my friends on the right, and focus instead on what we have in common.

Arguably, it's easier when they're indie business owners -- then we're speaking a universal language about somewhat "free" markets from the perspective of the trenches.

Conservatives should be wary of Big Business, by John A. Burtka IV (Washington Post)

Among conservatives, the erosion of civil society is most often attributed to the heavy hand of the administrative state. While the welfare system, especially at the federal level, certainly deserves its fair share of the blame, a growing number of conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, Patrick Deneen, Rusty Reno, Michael Brendan Dougherty and Rod Dreher, have also expressed concern about the side effects of economic globalization and the elite culture that shapes many corporations. In short, conservatives are coming to see that Big Business can also threaten our liberties and the flourishing of civil society.

I am not insinuating that capitalism is bad or that the free markets haven’t dramatically reduced poverty and raised living standards. What I am saying is we should not underestimate the importance of our immediate commercial environment to the forging of a sense of community, and that the shift from locally owned businesses to multinational corporations comes at a cost ...

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: In Havel, I trust.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: In Havel, I trust.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I'm not ill, but I need a personal day. Two Food & Dining column deadlines are approaching, and 1,001 minor tasks keep nipping at my writing time, so it's rerun week at OTA. 

This column originally was published on May 7, 2015. It came to mind recently when I watched a video about the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland. 

In the video, a recent interview with Lech Wałęsa (he's now 74) was juxtaposed with archival footage and views of the Lenin Shipyard today. The latter are sad, given that the once sprawling birthplace of Solidarity has been reduced to almost nothing -- Jeff Boat puns are not intended -- and Poland itself currently is gripped by a reactionary sociopolitical phase. 

Looking back, the devoutly Roman Catholic ex-president Wałęsa is convinced that God placed him on earth for one purpose, and one alone: to topple the Communist regime in Poland. He is proud to have accomplished this mission, and as for what came afterward (read: an unsuccessful political career), well, it can be discussed some other time. 

My first reaction was to compare these thoughts with the career of Ulysses S. Grant, a man who possessed the ideal qualities to win the Civil War, but not to navigate the political realities of the Oval Office. 

Then the post-Communist experiences of Havel seemed a better analogy. Coming from very different backgrounds (Wałęsa was an electrician and Havel an intellectual), they shared an ability to resist authoritarianism, though not to be effective national leaders amid the scrum of new beginnings. 

As a polemicist, I may resemble that remark. It might even be a tad too close for comfort. Then again, the ruling clique has yet to be overthrown. Shall we check back in November of 2019?

---

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
-- Vaclav Havel

Considering that the late Vaclav Havel is a longtime personal hero, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for you to learn I have been profoundly moved in the aftermath of reading Havel: A Life, a biography of the Czech playwright, dissident and president, written by Michael Zantovsky.

Zantovsky was a personal friend and sometimes confidant of Havel, but the book cannot be classified as hagiography. It’s a “warts and all” sketch of a man’s exceedingly complicated inner world and public persona. More than half of Havel’s life was lived during his country’s Communist period – and much of that time he was a marked man and presumed “enemy” of the state. Then, in a supreme irony, he served multiple terms as president.

This largely symbolic post seems to have strained Havel’s abilities as much or more than surviving outlaw status in a dictatorship.

Born during the interwar period when Czechoslovakia seemed to be emerging as a model for capitalist democracy, Havel was a child of privilege, and as such, his economic class rendered him a societal pariah when the workers’ paradise was forcibly installed after 1948. He was made to feel that he didn’t “fit,” and while capable of addressing the dichotomy intellectually, there were lifelong feelings of guilt.

Still, Havel assuaged them in various ways, and managed to find a foothold. Excluded from university owing to his origins, he served a hitch in the military and then became a stagehand, ushering him into Prague’s theatrical milieu precisely at a point where the usual governmental restrictions on free expression were softened just enough for him to begin writing slyly subversive and anarchic plays (the “theater of the absurd”), and making a name for himself – not just inside Czechoslovakia, but in Western Europe, which became of inestimable importance later, when he most needed the money and contacts.

All the while, Havel cultivated a wide range of friendships in the intelligentsia, including rebels, misfits, scholars and even the stray apparatchik. In 1968 came the Prague Spring, a thawing which held hope that there might be “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia. Leonid Brezhnev thought otherwise, and for the next two decades, the country became mired in a debilitating process derisively known as normalization.

Consumer production was increased even as the fundamental deficiencies of a primitively industrialized economy, one chained to the Soviet Union, went unaddressed. Free thought was suppressed. The inevitable result was stagnation and despair, addressed through sausages, beer and maybe a yearly holiday on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. One could live, albeit without thinking.

Havel the star playwright now became Havel, the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He was harassed and frequently imprisoned, and yet managed to formulate a doctrine of principled dissent, focusing on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level.

Examining society’s daily psychological assumptions, Havel theorized that Communism was a trauma primarily virulent at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, despoiling the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers.

Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality, as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda, subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.

---

Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: “Civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up. It was a gently scolding and passive resistance, carefully calculated to avoid open conflict, and subsequently it was assisted immeasurably by one of those historical quirks that seem irrelevant at the time, in 1975, as buried within a non-binding international conference called the Helsinki Accords.

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "Leonid Brezhnev had looked forward, Anatoly Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."

To summarize, the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, desperately desired the recognition of borders reshaped by World War II, and a seemingly insignificant appendage to the Helsinki Accords pertaining to human rights and freedoms was tolerated as a mere talking point for Western campaigners.

In fact, in a strange and perhaps legalistic way, the Czechoslovak government (and other Warsaw Pact nations) provided moral legitimacy to internal opposition by signing the Helsinki Accords. Granted, it did not mean opponents would avoid persecution, but in 1977, Havel and a small band of courageous dissidents wrote a document known as Charter 77, and then undertook the informal organization of a civic initiative known by the same name.

Charter 77 was hounded mercilessly by the Communist regime. Still, the very fact that Czechoslovakia had accepted human rights responsibilities intensified human rights scrutiny outside the Soviet zone, and ensured continued publicity for the opposition, which could be weakened, although not squelched entirely.

During the 1980s, as Communism’s intrinsic structural flaws began afflicting the entire Bloc, Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the USSR would have to divest itself of economically draining responsibilities to Eastern Europe to survive (of course even then, it didn’t). Without the formerly perpetual Soviet guarantee of support, Czechoslovaka’s regime lapsed into a state of terminal illness.

In 1989, when push came to largely peaceful shove, the government collapsed in what is now known as the Velvet Revolution. Just eight months following his final incarceration, Havel became president of the country, embarking on a period of recovery still ongoing, more than three years following Havel’s death – or as the post-Communist adage puts it: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.”

New Albany resembles that remark, doesn’t it?

---

Whenver I think about New Albany’s “battered city” syndrome, as our friend Gina always referred to it, Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society come to mind.

Admittedly, 25 years later, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland, except that sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and he excelled at that.

In good times or bad, New Albany’s Battered City Syndrome is still on display, as manifested by secrecy, mistrust, inertia and contempt, especially on the part of those who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness, which provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.

From the subsequent vacuum oozes the lowest-common-denominator politics of fear-mongering. Once not so long ago, during a heated council debate, the spluttering 1st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s most detested target: “Them people.” In reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people do, but this alone doesn’t scratch the ward-heeler’s itch. A truly civilized, functional city has no need for Dan Coffey, and he knows it.

Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and vituperation, and get on with the process of building a civil society – a civil city – with a sustainable, inter-related foundation that prefaces future progress.

Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Let’s talk.

Meanwhile, I heartily recommend Zantovsky’s biography. Ultimately, much went wrong for Havel following the Velvet Revolution, although the author notes that Havel remained invariably courteous and polite, even when dealing with his oppressors, whether Communist or parliamentarian.

I’ll have to work on this.

---

Recent columns:

April 5: ON THE AVENUES: New Albany's downtown food and dining scene is solid ... for now.

March 29: ON THE AVENUES: Al Knable doesn’t lie, but the local Democratic Party is a flood-plain Pinocchio. Let’s censure it at the ballot box.

March 22: ON THE AVENUES: Remembering Max Allen, bartender extraordinaire.

March 15: ON THE AVENUES: The books I've been reading during the winter months.

ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
-- Vaclav Havel

Considering that the late Vaclav Havel is a longtime personal hero, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for you to learn I have been profoundly moved in the aftermath of reading Havel: A Life, a biography of the Czech playwright, dissident and president, written by Michael Zantovsky.

Zantovsky was a personal friend and sometimes confidant of Havel, but the book cannot be classified as hagiography. It’s a “warts and all” sketching of a man’s exceedingly complicated inner world and public persona. More than half of Havel’s life was lived during his country’s Communist period – and much of that time he was a marked man and presumed “enemy” of the state. Then, in a supreme irony, he served multiple terms as president.

This largely symbolic post seems to have strained Havel’s abilities as much or more than surviving outlaw status in a dictatorship.

Born during the interwar period when Czechoslovakia seemed to be emerging as a model for capitalist democracy, Havel was a child of privilege, and as such, his economic class rendered him a societal pariah when the workers’ paradise was forcibly installed after 1948. He was made to feel that he didn’t “fit,” and while capable of addressing the dichotomy intellectually, there were lifelong feelings of guilt.

Still, Havel assuaged them in various ways, and managed to find a foothold. Excluded from university owing to his origins, he served a hitch in the military and then became a stagehand, ushering him into Prague’s theatrical milieu precisely at a point where the usual governmental restrictions on free expression were softened just enough for him to begin writing slyly subversive and anarchic plays (the “theater of the absurd”), and making a name for himself – not just inside Czechoslovakia, but in Western Europe, which became of inestimable importance later, when he most needed the money and contacts.

All the while, Havel cultivated a wide range of friendships in the intelligentsia, including rebels, misfits, scholars and even the stray apparatchik. In 1968 came the Prague Spring, a thawing which held hope that there might be “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia. Leonid Brezhnev thought otherwise, and for the next two decades, the country became mired in a debilitating process derisively known as normalization.

Consumer production was increased even as the fundamental deficiencies of a primitively industrialized economy, one chained to the Soviet Union, went unaddressed. Free thought was suppressed. The inevitable result was stagnation and despair, addressed through sausages, beer and maybe a yearly holiday on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. One could live, albeit without thinking.

Havel the star playwright now became Havel, the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He was harassed and frequently imprisoned, and yet managed to formulate a doctrine of principled dissent, focusing on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level.

Examining society’s daily psychological assumptions, Havel theorized that Communism was a trauma primarily at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, despoiling the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers.

Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality, as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda, subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.

---

Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: “Civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up. It was a gently scolding and passive resistance, carefully calculated to avoid open conflict, and subsequently it was assisted immeasurably by one of those historical quirks that seem irrelevant at the time, in 1975, as buried within a non-binding international conference called the Helsinki Accords.

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "Leonid Brezhnev had looked forward, Anatoly Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."

To summarize, the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, desperately desired the recognition of borders reshaped by World War II, and a seemingly insignificant appendage to the Helsinki Accords pertaining to human rights and freedoms was tolerated as a mere talking point for Western campaigners.

In fact, in a strange and perhaps legalistic way, the Czechoslovak government (and other Warsaw Pact nations) provided moral legitimacy to internal opposition by signing the Helsinki Accords. Granted, it did not mean opponents would avoid persecution, but in 1977, Havel and a small band of courageous dissidents wrote a document known as Charter 77, and then undertook the informal organization of a civic initiative known by the same name.

Charter 77 was hounded mercilessly by the Communist regime. Still, the very fact that Czechoslovakia had accepted human rights responsibilities intensified human rights scrutiny outside the Soviet zone, and ensured continued publicity for the opposition, which could be weakened, not squelched entirely.

During the 1980s, as Communism’s intrinsic structural flaws began afflicting the entire Bloc, Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the USSR would have to divest itself of economically draining responsibilities to Eastern Europe to survive (of course even then, it didn’t). Without the formerly perpetual Soviet guarantee of support, Czechoslovaka’s regime lapsed into a state of terminal illness.

In 1989, when push came to largely peaceful shove, the government collapsed in what is now known as the Velvet Revolution. Just eight months following his final incarceration, Havel became president of the country, embarking on a period of recovery still ongoing, more than three years following Havel’s death – or as the post-Communist adage puts it: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.”

New Albany resembles that remark, doesn’t it?

---

Whenver I think about New Albany’s “battered city” syndrome, as our friend Gina always referred to it, Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society come to mind.

Admittedly, 25 years later, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland, except that sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and he excelled at that.

In good times or bad, New Albany’s Battered City Syndrome is still on display, as manifested by secrecy, mistrust, inertia and contempt, especially on the part of those who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness, which provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.

From the subsequent vacuum oozes the lowest-common-denominator politics of fear-mongering. Once not so long ago, during a heated council debate, the spluttering 1st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s most detested target: “Them people.” In reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people do, but this alone doesn’t scratch the ward-heeler’s itch. A truly civilized, functional city has no need for Dan Coffey, and he knows it.

Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and vituperation, and get on with the process of building a civil society – a civil city – with a sustainable, inter-related foundation that prefaces future progress.

Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Let’s talk.

Meanwhile, I heartily recommend Zantovsky’s biography. Ultimately, much went wrong for Havel following the Velvet Revolution, although the author notes that Havel remained invariably courteous and polite, even when dealing with his oppressors, whether Communist or parliamentarian.

I’ll have to work on it.

---

Recent columns:

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

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

April 23: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Say a prayer for NA Confidentialas it conducts this exclusive interview with Councilman Cappuccino.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Complexities and simplicities in Boomtown.

Václav Havel, civil society and the New Albany Syndrome.

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

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

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

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

---

Pogo and the New Albany Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because this isn’t about the economy, comrade.

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

Havel theorized that the chief legacy of Communism was a trauma at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, something that had despoiled the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers. Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare had turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.

Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: Before post-communist revitalization could have a chance of success, a “civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up, and without exclusive recourse to the unfettered mercantile self-interest preferred by capitalism’s victorious adherents.

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

But, sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and to me, an imbibing humanist, habitual contrarian and profoundly spiritual (albeit displaced) European, Havel’s analysis applies foursquare to New Albany in the year 2009.

----

Truly, it isn’t about the money.

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

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

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

Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Thoughts for the weekend.

From New Trends in Cultural Policy for the Twenty-First Century, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Social Text, No. 59 (Summer, 1999) pp. 5-15.

In truth, the assault on public support of the arts, draped as it was in the cloak of moral piety and family values, was part of a larger, unrelenting movement away from government support of a public sphere. The assault on the arts is part of what many have identified as privatization. For the purpose of this essay, I am defining privatization as the abandonment of public responsibility, an abandonment of the idea that there are places in society where, as the late Christopher Lasch notes, we all meet as equals, where excellence is available to the general population, where merit rather than money or primogeniture gains access. In the arts, privatization has meant being cautious about the new, the risky, the experimental, since they tend not to do well in the marketplace. Privatization assumes that the creative process as opposed to the cultural product can thrive in the marketplace without any special support. As such, privatization sharply deviates from some fundamental national ideals.

In defining an ideal sense of public good, Horace Mann, in his advocacy for mandatory universal public school education, wrote the following in 1846: "all have derived benefits from their ancestors." And, "all are bound, as by an oath, to transmit those benefits, even in an improved condition, to posterity."

REWIND: Bile, loathing and a civil society.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there anybody in there?

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

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

You know the rest of Pogo's Axiom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Did I just hear another pin drop?

On property taxes and a civil society.

It has become glaringly apparent that my reckoning of the components necessary for a civil society differ somewhat from the local norm.

Accordingly, I’ve been asked on numerous occasions why I haven’t ventured an opinion on the “property tax crisis” in Indiana. The reason is quite simple.

I’ll join the discussion when there is as much emphasis on responsibilities as citizens as there is on rights as taxpayers.

Let me know when this happens, will you? Until it does, there just isn't much to say.

REWIND: Bile, loathing and a civil society.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there anybody in there?

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

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

You know the rest of Pogo's Axiom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

Did I just hear another pin drop?