Strong Towns: Redlining in Kansas City: What local reparations might look like.

The actual title of the article is "The Local Case for Reparations," which Lauren Fisher explains. It's about reparations for redlining, in case you're wondering.

 

On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Previously:

On understanding reparations.

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The Strong Towns no-gimmicks approach truly is a "third way" for the city of New Albany because it crosses political boundaries.

Balder and Dash, or H.L. Mencken describes Warren Harding's command of written English.

In Ohio, James Blaesing, the grandson of long-forgotten U.S. President Warren G. Harding (Blaesing's mother was presumed as the "love child" of Harding and his mistress), has gone to court to exhume Harding's body so all of this can be proven scientifically through DNA testing. 

Officially, Harding and his wife had no children, and oddly, a surviving branch of the family does not contest Blaesing's assertion. Rather, it is surmised that the grandson is angling for enhanced recognition of his mother at a museum in the president's home (an historic site) as well as his presidential center, neither of which can be imagined as prime tourist destinations even before the pandemic.

However, perhaps some day we can include Harding on a road trip itinerary. After all, I've been to my hero H.L. Mencken's house in Baltimore, and Mencken detested Harding. This sounds like a circle in need of closing. Following is a brief excerpt from the Sage of Baltimore. The whole work is here.

    

Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

But I grow lyrical. More scientifically, what is the matter with it? Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? If you had first read the inaugural address and then heard it intoned, as I did (at least in part), then you will perhaps arrive at an answer. That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.

I Know I'm Not Wrong.

Aaron "Urbanophile" Renn moved back to Indiana (Indianapolis) from New York City earlier this year. This column was published a few months ago and is worth a read even if it is directed primarily as larger cities.

STORIED CITIES, by Aaron Renn (Comment)

The lost link between a city's forgotten history and its cultural potential.

It’s been widely observed that there’s an increasing sameness to cities today, a sort of neoliberal urban monoculture that’s swept the globe. Visit any city in the world and see the same boutique hotels, swank restaurants, outposts of global luxury brands, and so on.

Sameness ... even in smaller cities like ours.

It's what happens, utterly predictably, when the same old engineering and design firms with no connections to the cities, and no knowledge of their history and uniqueness, are hired to deploy their same old suburban template of design elements, generally a ludicrous collection of shopping mall motifs that somehow dazzle the barely-educated dullards who adfarm-near-me/">minister local political patronage programs.

For those cities who don’t understand their identity or have failed to believe in its value, it’s probably not too late. In some cases industrial knowledge may have been lost. But the local culture is surely still there in some form, even if it may need to be updated for today’s realities. Today’s younger urban dwellers, who see these cities in a very different light than their parents and grandparents did, are ideally suited to this task. They missed the collapse of the urban-crisis era. In many cases their cities are now showing nascent signs of rebirth, setting the stage for the rediscovery of these places as cities on a potentially upward trajectory again. The generation who left Egypt was unable to enter the promised land. Sometimes it takes a new generation to look anew and see the possibilities of a place. They perhaps will be the ones to rediscover the identity of a place, to look again at its history, culture, its traditions and rituals, to embrace the uniqueness of their city as their own.

Texas Rangers? "The team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen."

Something else I've learned today. The argument is convincing. Just call the team the Texas Horny Toads from now on, and be done with it.

The Texas Rangers’ team name must go, by Karen Attiah (The Washington Post)

As the Washington football team finally gives up its racist slur of a name, there is one major sports team that has avoided the spotlight and resisted meaningful engagement with the violent and racist implications of its name. To know the full history of the Texas Rangers is to understand that the team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.

I grew up in Dallas, raised on myths about Texas Rangers as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier, helping protect innocent settlers from violent Indians. At church, boys could sign up to be Royal Rangers, the Christian equivalent of the Boy Scouts. I still remember the excitement when Chuck Norris himself, star of the television show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” came to visit my elementary school class.

My dad sometimes took my younger siblings and me to Arlington Stadium to watch the Rangers play. No state mythologizes itself quite like Texas, so of course, it made sense to have a team name that embodied that gauzy, self-regarding history. At the same time, being from a Ghanaian immigrant family, we weren’t that invested in baseball, or the team name. I just liked going because my dad would sometimes let me take sips of his Coca-Cola mixed with beer.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Rangers were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory. The first job of the Rangers, formed in 1835 after Texas declared independence from Mexico, was to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.

That was just the start. The Rangers oppressed black people, helping capture runaway slaves trying to escape to Mexico; in the aftermath of the Civil War, they killed free blacks with impunity. “The negroes here need killing,” a Ranger wrote in a local newspaper in 1877, after Rangers fired on a party of black former Buffalo soldiers, killing four of them and a 4-year old girl. A jury would later find that the black soldiers “came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty,” an unsettling echo of the justification for modern-day police killings ...

ON THE AVENUES: Anything except common, that Kentucky Common.

I'm cross-posting this weekend. The article offered here about Kentucky Common beer is something I'd planned on sharpening for use in my print-edition Food & Dining Magazine beer column (and still might), but I'd reserved a keg of Falls City Kentucky Common, received it, and need to make a tout.

Pints&union is open Friday and Saturday for now, probably until the second week of July, when hours will expand as we "reopen." Those details can wait. Until then, and I'll be candid, those of our adherents who'd like to further the cause -- and help us survive a bit longer -- should allocate a bit of their discretionary income to buy a meal and a growler.

Here's some more honesty: While others in town pretend neither the pandemic nor a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement ever happened, Joe Phillips has run toward every damn fire he's seen the past three months. While so many others in the local restaurant business were whining about science ("but I don't WANT to believe it") and doubling down on their distaste for essential social justice, Joe was feeding people, helping people and getting involved with people to further their causes.

If you don't approve of reality in this sense, then maybe you weren't a customer in the first place. If you do, and you were -- and are, and wish to be still -- then please think about coming down and spending a few bucks.

Thank you. And now, Kentucky Common.

Anything except common, that Kentucky Common.

In a narrow sense, bourbon is distilled beer. It’s a fermented mash of grain with no hops or spices added, destined for a very different outcome.

But this very analogy confuses the specific with the general. By definition, bourbon is a particular type of whiskey native to Kentucky, while Louisville’s craft breweries produce many varied types (or styles) of beer, ranging from India Pale Ale (ale) to Bohemian Pilsner (lager), encompassing numerous (limitless?) flavor profiles.

What most beer drinkers in metropolitan Louisville probably don’t know is that one style of beer is indigenous to the state of Kentucky. It’s as specific to the wider world of beer as bourbon is to whiskey, and it likely was the single biggest-selling type of beer in the city of Louisville 125 years ago.

It is known as Kentucky Common, and ironically -- perhaps even obtusely -- it’s a style not often brewed these days by breweries located in city or state.

Therein lies a story.

First, allow me to begin with the conclusion: Starting on Friday, June 19 at Pints&union, we’ll have a keg of Falls City’s Kentucky Common for $12 growler fills, curbside. Call (812) 913-4647 or visit the order portal after 4:00 p.m. on June 19th and 20th, and also on coming weekends until we reopen in July, date TBA.

Note also that Falls City Bock, a superlative dark lager and one of the finest American-style Bocks to hit my lips in a good while, still is available in growlers at the same price. Don’t force me to drain this keg all by myself, people.

Now I’ll explain to you why the commonality of history matters, and why I personally enjoy Falls City Kentucky Common so much.

---

Prior to the contemporary craft beer era, most North American beers were brewed according to the broad parameters of styles that originated in Europe and were brought here by immigrants. Almost all of these styles came from the British Isles (in colonial times) or Germany and Central Europe (from the 1840s, on). Recall that “microbrewing” began only in the 1970s, and didn’t reach any semblance of critical mass until the late 1990s.

While brewers from Europe may have come to the United States with traditional recipes in mind, they often found that it was necessary to adapt to New World realities. Perhaps the most noted example of this shift came with lager beers in general, and Pilsners in particular.

Transplanted German brewers were compelled to adjust their thinking to suit climactic conditions and the raw materials at hand, particularly six-row barley as the malt backbone of their beers. Now, 150 years later, we can see that German and Bohemian Pilsners and their American cousins, pre-Prohibition “adjunct” Pilsners, are two separate branches of the same tree.

In like fashion, what we now refer to as “California Common” (or Steam, which is a term copyrighted by Anchor Brewing) reflects a hybrid brewing approach dating to Gold Rush times. Another uniquely American style is “Cream Ale,” which most of us of a certain age always will associate with Little Kings from Cincinnati. Cream Ales came about because 19th-century breweries specializing in top-fermented ale styles (the British tradition) sought a counterweight to increasingly popular German-sourced golden Pilsners.

Kentucky Common fits this paradigm. Here’s a bit of history of which you might be unaware, courtesy of the Beer Judge Certification Program.

A true American original style, Kentucky Common was almost exclusively produced and sold around the Louisville Kentucky metropolitan area from some time after the Civil War up to Prohibition. Its hallmark was that it was inexpensive and quickly produced, typically 6 to 8 days from mash to delivery. The beer was racked into barrels while actively fermenting (1.020 – 1.022) and tightly bunged to allow carbonation in the saloon cellar. There is some speculation that it was a variant of the lighter common or cream ale produced throughout much of the East prior to the Civil War and that the darker grains were added by the mostly Germanic brewers to help acidify the typical carbonate water of the Louisville area. Up until the late 19th century, Kentucky Common was not brewed in the summer months unless cellars, usually used for malting, were used for fermentation. With the advent of ice machines, the larger breweries were able to brew year round. In the period from 1900 to prohibition, about 75% of the beer sold in the Louisville area was Kentucky Common.

In its heyday, Kentucky Common would have been a localized example of “present use” beer, brewed in 6 – 8 days, low in alcohol content, delivered to taverns while still young and intended to be finishing its fermentation in the wooden barrel when first tapped. Kentucky Common was consumed quickly at a low price point.

This is why accounts of the period refer to Kentucky Common as being the working man’s choice. Rushing the growler in Louisville in the year 1900 meant sending one of your kids to fetch a (literal) bucket of beer from the neighborhood watering hole for pennies – and the liquid in the pail probably was Kentucky Common.

---

The typical grist for a Kentucky Common might have been 65% six-row barley, 30% corn, and 5% dark malt enough to resolve the brewer’s chemistry issues and give the finished product an amber to light brown appearance (Falls City uses rye).

Hopping was minimal, with American hop varieties used for bittering and just a pinch of aromatic (and more expensive) imported German hops at the end of the boil. Brewers likely used an aggressive house ale yeast to jump start the fermentation. Ingredients and techniques for making Pilsner were reserved for Pilsner, often the higher-priced “special occasion” beer.

There’d have been as many different interpretations of Kentucky (and Southern Indiana) Common, riffing off this basic model, as there were brewers-- several dozen in the metro at local brewing’s acme in the 1890s.

Today, the modern version brewed at Falls City might be the city’s most unique beer simply because no one else in town regularly brews an “Amber Cream Ale.” Exceptions include Apocalypse (brewer Leah Dienes helped write the official style definition), Old Louisville and Against the Grain, but availability isn’t year-round at those establishments. Seldom can we find a beer for direct comparison in terms of flavor profile.

Falls City Kentucky Common has an amber hue and looks a bit like a Dos Equis, but the resemblance ends there. It’s malty, not hoppy, with a bready flavor touched by caramel. The rye peeks through, adding complexity. The body is light, and there is hint of fruitiness. You’ll notice an element of sweetness derived from the use of corn as an adjunct; it’s something most mass market Louisville beer drinkers wouldn’t notice because it’s generally present in Miller and Coors products (less so AB-InBev).

I like Falls City Kentucky Common for what it is: a solid summertime quencher with enough beeriness to maintain interest, and to pair with assertive food.

Providentially, Pints&union is working with Freedom Run Farms via the LEE Initiative’s Restaurant Reboot Relief Program and we’ll be featuring lamb dishes, and my guess is the Kentucky Common will go nicely with these.

---

Recent columns:

June 11: ON THE AVENUES: Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger.

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: There, there. People are dying, so you may have to wait until 2021 for your pork chop sandwich.

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The late, great Lee Kelly -- by Matt Nash.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: Godlessness in defense of heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

A wee rant: Why must we have statues of "famous" people? Can't we just have art instead?

Rather than argue about which statues to remove and which to keep, I'd rather have a discussion about why humans deploy statuary as propaganda markers to begin with, a habit that strikes me as similar to dogs marking territory with urine.

Face it, there's a considerable difference between art for the sake of art and statuary for the sake of establishing what is "true." Michelangelo's David is an idealized male form. It celebrates itself. Southern cities dropping statues of Civil War "heroes" during the 1960s? That's so-called art for the sake of societal control.

Why do we do this? The planet is filled with statuary capable of being defined or redefined into repugnance, because after all, doesn't each triumphant victory arch ever erected have the side purpose of provoking the defeated?

Ordinary working men and women have created the planet's wealth -- and the rich folks (generally men) who exploited them get the statues. The same goes for street names; the best are simplest: Main, Market, Oak, Riverside and the like. Naming them for actual people is fraught with peril if objectivity is the aim, because those chosen are flawed by nature.

As I've pointed out many times, a person born in Berlin during World War I, and residing in the same building until his or her death in the mid-1990s, might have enjoyed as many as five different street addresses based on which ideology ruled at the time.

One of these days, our munificent municipal mediocrity will generously allow his fans and campaign donors to erect a statue in his honor.

And I will figure out a way to topple it.

The Calumet Club celebrates a century, so hats off to the Bliss family for their stewardship of an institution.

Under renovation, 2006.

We begin with the newspaper's account on Friday (June 12), then turn to our legal bagel Shane for a new/old word, before concluding with three vital links.

Calumet Club celebrates 100th anniversary as family continues legacy, by Daniel Suddeath (Hanson's Dotty Folly)

NEW ALBANY — It helped launch the career of a Major League Baseball Hall of Fame player, provided a gymnasium for local basketball teams at a time when such space was scarce, and served as the base for a group of men who valued community spirit.

A century ago today, the Calumet Club moved into its new headquarters at 1614 E. Spring St. Considered a prestigious organization that reached a membership of about 800 at its peak, men paid about $1.50 a month to be part of the social and athletic club.

The continued use of the building and the living history behind its century of existence are testaments to a family's vision.

Richard Bliss died in 2012, but he got to fulfill his dream of owning the Calumet Club and restoring it into a charming centerpiece of the East Spring Street and Vincennes Street corridor.

“The main reason was to save a beautiful building because of its history and to give back to the community,” Mark Bliss said of his parents’ intentions for buying and restoring the Calumet Club.

---

Back in 2016, the Calumet Club prompted a question of our resident municipal bond fetishist wordsmith.

Welcome to another installment of SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

 ... Many readers already know about the Calumet Club in New Albany. There are also Calumet rivers, regions and towns. But what is a calumet when used as a noun?

It's a Native American pipe.

Tobacco, indigenous to North America, followed Indian trade routes throughout the continent long before Columbus arrived, and pipe smoking took on a ritual and religious importance in many tribes. Naturally, the crafting of pipes became equally important.

The most famous Native American pipes are the long calumets or "peace pipes" of the Sioux and other Plains Indian tribes, which were made by attaching a wooden stem to a bowl carved from catlinite or "pipestone." (Pipestone is native to Minnesota, but due to intertribal trade was available throughout Native North America.) Other native pipe-making traditions included the smaller one-piece stone and ceramic pipes of the Iroquois and Cherokee tribes, wood and antler pipes of the Southwest Indians, and the post-Columbian tomahawk pipes with a metal pipe bowl and hatchet on opposite ends of the stem.

Calumet Club Dates in History, courtesy of the Calumet Club, illustrate that it was a thriving social institution on post-WWI New Albany. Finally, from the library's Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room comes this memento of times long gone.

As the singer pithily observed, we have all been here before.

November 25, 2004:

NA Confidential goes troubleshooting, enjoys dessert, and visits the Calumet Club

December 16, 2006:

A peek inside the Calumet Club's third-floor future ballroom.

November 24, 2009

The Calumet Club adds an elevator ... so when's the beer festival upstairs?

Memorial Day 2020 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

There are long, long trails a-winding ...

... through places like France.

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery

With headstones lying in a sweeping curve, the 42.5-acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, sits at the foot of Belleau Wood. The cemetery contains the graves of 2,289 war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918. The memorial chapel sits on a hillside, decorated with sculptured and stained-glass details of wartime personnel, equipment and insignia. Inscribed on its interior wall are 1,060 names of the missing. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. During World War II the chapel was damaged slightly by an enemy shell.

Belleau Wood adjoins the cemetery and contains many vestiges of World War I. A monument at the flagpole commemorates the valor of the U.S. Marines who captured much of this ground in 1918.

Respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task perhaps best undertaken with respect for history.

Speaking only for myself, I take it very seriously. It's a habit of thought almost certainly springing from my father's fascination with far-off events that conspired to transport a hick from bucolic Georgetown, Indiana to the Pacific Theater of Operations -- and in his case, back home again.

Others weren't as lucky, and every year on Memorial Day, I pause to reflect on the serendipity of it all.

As a prelude to Memorial Day, there tend to be scolding social media reminders to the effect that Americans fixated on holiday feasting, partying and recreation somehow dishonor the nation's military heritage. To be sure, I contribute my fair share of rants about the general populace and its chronic ignorance of history.

However, I don't think honor and bacchanalia are mutually exclusive concepts. After all, the venerable institution of the wake combines them very effectively, and what's more, the human condition is incapable of sustaining a permanent state of mourning. Life does go on.

Like the vast majority of topics pertaining to human beings, the notion of dying for one's country is inordinately complex. John Gonder once touched on it during a conversation, when he mentioned the notorious escape clause during the American Civil War, where men drafted into the Union Army could buy their way out of service by paying $300 or providing a substitute to serve (and sometimes die) in their place.

During the Vietnam War, songwriter John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival noticed it, too: Exactly how is it determined who risks dying for his or her country, and who subsequently profits from their deaths?

Dick Cheney might know the answer.

Preferably, respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task best undertaken with a respect for history on the part of those still living, along with sadness and regret that human civilization seems not to have evolved to a point of no longer requiring violence to settle issues. War is a ridiculous concept, although humans seem enamored of it.

It's also a holiday weekend, and I suspect you are enjoying it.

Carry on, then.

Memorial Day (Snopes)

Claim: Former slaves reburied dead Union prisoners of war in May 1865, thus creating the modern observance of Memorial Day.

MIXTURE:

TRUE: In May 1865, free blacks in Charleston reburied dead Union prisoners of war and held a cemetery dedication ceremony.

UNDETERMINED: The event referenced above is the origin of the modern Memorial Day observance.

Wikipedia's article goes into greater detail.

Memorial Day 2020 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

Memorial Day 2020 (2 of 4): Charles Ives, from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2020 (3 of 4): "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Memorial Day 2020 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

Old-school economic development: "At the height of alum production at this factory, human urine was a valued commodity."

The jokes write themselves. Wonder if this one might make the NAHA newsletter? After all, $137,918.02 buys a piss-load of Miller Lite.

Peak Alum Works -- Ravenscar, England (Atlas Obscura)

At the height of alum production at this factory, human urine was a valued commodity.

SINCE THE DAYS OF THE Roman empire, alum was used as a mordant or fixative that allowed textiles to be colored using vegetable dyes. The manufacturing of alum was largely controlled by a Papal monopoly, and after the Reformation in England, the supply was interrupted. This forced the process of dying textiles to be outsourced.

Alum was made, in part, from extracting shale, then burning mounds of it for up to nine months. During the 16th century, Thomas Challone found that fossils in shale along the Yorkshire coast were the same as those found in alum producing areas of Italy. An alum producing industry was thus established in the region.

The process of creating alum involved mixing leachate with aged human urine to provide ammonium, and roasted kelp for potassium. Massive amounts of urine were required, and public urinals were specifically established in Hull for alum production.

It was said that barrels of urine also came from as far away as Newcastle by boat and were hauled up the cliff by a tramway. It’s estimated that some 200 tons of urine was used per year at the height of the alum industry ...

Follow the Auschwitz Memorial page at Twitter and root yourself in reality.

A disturbing number of my fellow Amerikaners have decided the Holocaust didn't occur. Stupidity or ignorance? Either way, dipshittedness of this magnitude is just about as unimaginable as the fact of the atrocity itself.

A few weeks back I saw that the Auschwitz Memorial page at Twitter is seeking to add followers in the run-up to the 75th anniversary of the death camp's liberation in January.

The material posted by Auschwitz Memorial on a daily basis at Twitter isn't easy or pleasant reading. It's just essential to being a responsible and responsive human being.

If you are of the tweeting persuasion, go there and give them a follow. There is a Facebook page as well. The web site is here.

Should you be one of the deniers, you're advised to examine your own life with care and precision; if we happen to be acquainted, then get the hell out of my life until yours is placed in the context of reality.

Thank you.

Today was Rudolf Maister Day in Slovenia, because he was a Slavic Badass.

Another historical footnote of which I was unaware. It's only 119 miles (as the crow flies) from Vienna to Maribor, which lies in Slovenia's wine region.

23 November, Rudolf Maister Day: Remembering the Man Who Secured Slovenia’s Northern Border (Total Slovenia News)

Slovenia observes Rudolf Maister Day on Saturday, remembering the general who established the first Slovenian army in modern history and secured what later became Slovenia's northern border. The holiday commemorates the day in 1918 when Maister (1874-1934) took control of Maribor.

Several events commemorating Maister were held this week. The main ceremony, on the eve of the holiday in Murska Sobota, was addressed by parliamentary Speaker Dejan Židan.

Židan praised Maister's courage, patriotism and determination also in his address to MPs yesterday. He said that Rudolf Maister Day was a great opportunity "for us to ask ourselves how do we contribute to a better society on a daily basis and whether we are worthy of the great deeds of our ancestors".

He added that Maister and his fighters could serve as an inspiration particularly to "us, current decision-makers" to be "bold enough to join forces in our efforts for a better future".

Interior Minister Boštjan Poklukar noted in his message marking the holiday that Maister had not hesitated for a minute before taking his army into battle for "our northern border".

After laying a wreath at the monument to Maister in front of the Defence Ministry building on Friday, Defence Minister Karl Erjavec said Maister, a superb army commander, had felt at the end of the First World War that a historic moment is coming.

"It was a time, when we were able to take advantage of the first opportunity to get to independent Slovenia. It was a dream of many generations, many have given their lives for this goal. This is why is consider General Maister's actions as the first step towards our country," he stressed.

Today, President Borut Pahor will welcome visitors at the Presidential Palace, and the honorary guard of the Slovenian Armed Forces will be lined up in front of the building.

In Maribor and Kamnik, where Maister was born, memorial plaques will be unveiled, honouring the ardent Slovenian patriot.

Following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Major Maister prevented Maribor and the Podravje area from being made part of German Austria, the country created after WWI comprising areas of the former empire with a predominantly German-speaking population.

On 30 October 1918, the German city council declared Maribor and its surroundings part of German Austria, which Maister found unacceptable.

He set up a Slovenian army of 4,000 soldiers, disarmed the German Schutzwehr security service, and disbanded the militia of the German city council.

The general then occupied Slovenian ethnic territory, establishing the northern border between Austria and Yugoslavia that was later ratified by the Saint Germain Peace Treaty. The same border still runs between Slovenia and Austria today.

Maister is buried at Maribor's Pobrežje Cemetery, where he has a modest grave.

23 November has been observed as a public holiday since 2005, although not as a bank holiday.

Under threat: "Why Venice Is Disappearing."

Ten million tree trunks, or in short, what's underneath most of the buildings in the city of Venice.

First a short and very informative documentary from Deutsche Welle.

Under threat: Venice's need to rescue its future

Built on small islands and mud banks, Venice is slowly sinking. More than ever before, the pearl of the Adriatic is under threat. Having recently been hit by its most severe floods and with a state of emergency declared, what is being done to combat this?

Well over a thousand years ago the first wooden huts were built out on the middle of a lagoon off the coast of northern Italy. The archives tell us these were the homes of people fleeing barbarian invasions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Later, with land in short supply, man-made areas were developed. But construction was far from easy; the bed of the lagoon consisted of sediment and mud, forming a foundation that was constantly moving. Yet Venetian architects managed to build the city’s palaces, towers, and cathedrals. Venice stands on a forest of wooden piles which anchor the buildings to the lagoon’s muddy bed. The buildings themselves are constructed in such a way that they can compensate for movement, even earth tremors, without suffering noticeable damage.

But the water the Venetians built their city on is becoming more and more of a threat. Industrialization has played its part in disturbing the natural balance of the lagoon: The sea bed has subsided and the effect of the tides has changed, resulting in a water level in the city’s canals that is 24 centimeters higher than when they were first built.

Added to that is the controversial presence in the lagoon of giant cruise ships: A source of income for the city, but also one that contributes to atmospheric pollution, as well as causing wake damage.

Also an article that amplifies a few of the video's points.

Why Venice Is Disappearing, by Jeff Goodell (Rolling Stone)

Flooding in the historic city is about more than climate change — bad engineering and corruption are also to blame

On Tuesday night, as epic floodwaters were rising in Venice, Italy, members of the Veneto regional council gathered in their chambers on Venice’s Grand Canal and, incredibly enough, voted to reject measures to battle climate change. Within two minutes, according to council member Andrea Zanoni, water started pouring in, flooding the chambers with several feet of murky lagoon water.

Coincidence? Maybe. But it almost makes you believe there is a god, and she is laughing hysterically at how foolish humans can be in the face of the climate crisis.

What’s happened in Venice this week, however, is no joke. High winds in the Adriatic Sea drove six feet of water into the city, causing the worst flooding the city has seen in more than 50 years. Tourists took selfies in San Mark’s Basilica in waist-deep water (one man swam across St. Mark’s Square – likely the first, but surely not the last, person ever to do that). Eighty-five percent of the city flooded; at least two deaths were reported. The floodwaters did incalculable damage to the foundations and structural integrity of the 1,000-year-old city’s most iconic buildings, including St. Mark’s Basilica. “These are the effects of climate change,” Venice mayor Luigi Burganaro said as he waded through the flooded city.

But the tragedy of Venice is about more than climate change and the power of rising seas. It’s about how bad engineering, combined with greed and incompetence, can make the climate crisis we are facing so much worse ...

ON THE AVENUES: Pay attention, students, because voter turnout went UP in New Albany.

This time out, the weekly column is to be kept (relatively) short and sweet. I’ve no grand pronouncements to make, and quite a lot of catching up to do. After all, the art of the polemic is hard enough when you win.

---

Has anyone in Southern Indiana who purports to be “exercising” the practice of journalism (right) ever once considered the notion of institutional memory – or, conversely, the usefulness of a scant ten minutes of basic research?

Take it away, Susan Duncan; for the uninitiated, she’s the editor of the local chain newspaper.

Yet another exercise in flexing our Democracy muscles is in the books. Here are some post-2019 election musings from the editor’s office …

The majority of voters aren’t into exercise. Only about a third of the electorate in Clark and Floyd counties bothered to vote. That’s disappointing. Even the convenience of vote centers — something I favor for all counties — didn’t seem to make much of a difference in Floyd County. We have to start thinking outside the box when it comes to attracting voters. Maybe door prizes.

“Democracy muscles”?

Actually here at the vicious tabloid blog no one reads, door prizes are being saved for those rare and elusive occasions when the local chain newspaper's editor departs from daily news suppression and displays a modicum of comprehension, and this isn’t one of those cases.

That's because voter turnout on Tuesday in New Albany went up, and in truth, it went up somewhat dramatically given our recent history.

(That’s right: history. It’s all right there in the newspaper’s morgue, but as with so many of life’s challenges, one has to care enough to look past the knee-jerk and gaze upon facts.)

Alas, Duncan’s not the only one ignoring history. I'm having trouble understanding the many lamentations I've heard from members of both parties about "low" voter turnout on Tuesday.

Yes, it's all relative, and from an overall perspective 30% is puny, yet almost 1,800 more votes were cast in the mayor's race (8,447) than in 2015 (6,684). In fact, that’s the most votes in a mayor's race since 2003.

Isn’t THIS the takeaway, the headline, the banner?

If I'm bright enough to cut and paste numbers from the newspaper's own stories, you'd think the editor would be, too.

Obviously it wasn't the election result I personally was seeking, but both parties brought out voters who haven't been participating during recent election cycles, and for Jeff Gahan to pull in an extra 1,000 votes over his total in 2015 cannot be overlooked even if I'd like to. Seems his cash was well spent.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, it remains that those 4,631 Gahan supporters knew exactly what they wanted, and now they'll be getting it good and hard, but this doesn't make the mayor's ability to increase his support via 1,000 more votes any less newsworthy.

Of course, Duncan missed this, and a better indicator of her newspaper’s steady decline is hard to imagine.

---

You won’t be surprised to learn that I’m a bit discouraged, but life goes on.

What I'll never forget about the 2019 election campaign in New Albany is the way the incumbent's ludicrously massive pot of special interest money successfully deflected substantive discussion about so many important topics that his own political party supposedly cares about, as well as the accompanying way so many of the community's self-encrusted pillars let him get away with it, because in the end tribal spasms count for more than anything else to them.

Their "team" won, and now they can return to their sustaining daily delusions, warm and safe on the fantasy side of those Potemkin facades.

Probably none of it will impact me, but lots of less fortunate folks are going to suffer the next four years because Jeff Gahan remains mayor, and the cool kids who'll be so quick to criticize me for saying this aloud will be the same ones resolutely looking the other way when the whip comes down.

As usual, my main muse (his name is Jeff Gillenwater) has bored directly into the central points emerging from Tuesday’s balloting.

"We have to change the local culture, not just the people in office. That means holding those self-encrusted pillars and cool kids every bit as accountable as the politicians themselves. There are plenty of “educated professionals” - not to mention professional educators - around here who ought to be ashamed to walk down the street today. But they’re not. Because they “won”. 

"I’ll say again: Do not trust those people in politics or daily life. They lie. They cheat. They suck.

"Personally, I’m just glad we won’t be here in five, 10, 15 years as all the bright, shiny, unbid, and absurdly misdirected objects start to crumble and need substantial but wholly unfunded maintenance, not to mention an even more substantial change of overall direction toward the sustainable and/or regenerative well before current patronage projects are even paid off. 

"Whoever gets stuck in office trying to deal with that is going to be wildly unpopular, likely owing to the crime of trying to be honest and realistic. New Albany votes not just like it’s the 1950s but as if the 50s are an infinite possibility. It would be wonderful if people had the forethought to choose better, to think even 10 or 20 years ahead. As is, they’ll be forced in future as usual without ever tracing their pending lack of choice back to choices they’re making now."

Jeff also states the case in personal terms, and my household concurs.

"We both have long family histories here and in moving back thought we were going to be a part of genuine, cooperative community development. The insular power trip folks here, though, don’t want that at all. We both have a long collection of ugly stories and memories. A few along the way have sold out completely. Most have just left. Lots of talent rejected and wasted here in the name of “winning”.

"We’ve been here for 15 years or so, which is too long. During that time, though, everyone I’ve ever met here (except those getting a paycheck from a politician) who has legitimately studied urban planning or community and cultural development ends up disgusted and happy to leave."

I'm grateful to Jeff for expressing my feelings. At first it seemed I might be angry after the beat-down. However, in terms of civic dysfunction, the results were entirely in keeping with the very nature of New Albany. I'm sad and a tad puzzled. That's just about it.

One doesn't stop caring, agitating or fighting after losing a single battle or one ballgame. However, multiple setbacks suggest reformatted thinking and different tactics. We'll see how this goes. In the meantime, there'll be some literal and figurative housecleaning in my universe, and a period of desperately needed cerebral battery recharging in Europe later this month.

Political asylum in Trieste? Now that's a pleasing thought.

---

Recent columns:

October 31: ON THE AVENUES: In which Team Gahan's looming appointment with unemployment is examined.

October 3: ON THE AVENUES: The cold hard truth, or just plain Slick Jeffie-inflicted consequences.

September 26: ON THE AVENUES: Socialists for Seabrook, because we desperately need a new beginning in New Albany.

September 12: ON THE AVENUES: There's no business like no business, and it's none of your business (2016).

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

Last week was Harvest Homecoming, and my city's favorite amok time kept me pinned to the tarmac, but now we're back to what passes for normal here in New Gahania, where "We're All Here Because We're Not All THERE."

This week 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 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.

It is likely that posterity will view May, 2017 as the period when Jeff Gahan's ludicrous cult of personality spectacularly jumped the shark.

Gahan had only recently seized the New Albany Housing Authority with a publicly stated vow to bulldoze half the units, and now he was encouraging us to shop at just one bloated supermarket chain to the exclusion of others -- unless the city eventually might choose to pay for his re-election ad placements at Aldi and Wally World, too.

What's next, Big Lots?

Maybe the ads were free, intended as barter for the perfectly functional fire station the city razed (at a loss to taxpayers) so as to facilitate Kroger's ginormous enlargement.

Two years later, some of the Kroger shopping carts still bear the mark of the Anchor King.

Shopping cart worship portals weren't the first manifestation of Jeff Gahan's "inspired by Pyongyang" personality cult. In the grand tradition of failed watercolor artists, seminary students and cobblers, this middling veneer salesman concluded early in the game that destiny was clearing a path for his brilliance -- and we've been reminded of it on a daily basis ever since. 

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?

---

May 14, 2015

ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

Human psychology is a nuanced and often bewildering topic, but it’s probably safe to assert that to some vague extent with respect to interpersonal relationships, most of us want to be liked, and prefer being liked to being feared.

(Note that in this digression, I have no intention of trying to fathom what it means to be “liked” on Facebook)

Meanwhile, as always in the real world, the devil resides fully within the details.

Getting along with people and being liked are two very different issues. To get along with someone requires that you figure out how to balance meeting your needs with that of another person until the two of you arrive at a resolution. Your best chances of being liked occur when you go along with the desires of other even if it means sacrificing your personal goals. To be liked means that other people have positive associations to you so that when they see or think about you, it's with a mental smile.

What about if you don't particularly care about being liked? You have a job to do, for example, that involves your making tough decisions that possibly cause other people to resent your or, at best, prefer to stay out of your way. When they think of you, it's with an active sense that being with you will cause them more pain than pleasure.

If human psychology is a tangled wilderness of conditioned responses and primal screams, consider the genre of politics.

Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, definition "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (a usually hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities.

In the context of politics, which pertain to invasive concepts like power, control and authority, what does it mean to be liked?

Are our likes and dislikes personal, or professional?

Can politicians be inspiring, totemic figures, or do we merely tolerate them as a regrettable but necessary evil?

---

Longtime readers already know about my youthful travel experiences in Europe, and how these wanderings dovetailed with previous university studies in history, geography and philosophy, producing the opportunity to witness, albeit it briefly, the phenomenon of 20th-century communism in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.

At my point of debut in the mid-1980s, this political system didn’t have very long to survive, but of course this couldn’t be known at the time. During the post-war period in these places I visited, the theory and practice of communism actually was subject to change, though most often for reasons of ideology (and international power politics) rather than any natural evolutionary process.

I’ve told the story of Ladislav, with whom I became acquainted in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was 65 years old, and had observed his country’s period of hopeful interwar democracy, then a devastating conflict, to be followed by the imposition of communism by the occupying Soviets and a subsequent four decades of historical entrapment.

Ladislav would have been just shy of 30 years of age when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, a termination which led to a brief period of communist reform and softening under Khrushchev.

Czechoslovakia’s own indigenous version of Stalin, a nonentity named Klement Gottwald, died of his excesses shortly after Stalin’s funeral and was replaced by Antonín Zápotocký, who gifted Prague with a huge statue of Stalin on a hillside overlooking the Vltava River.

Interestingly, the sculptor was so filled with remorse that he committed suicide prior to the unveiling, and the statue was dynamited in 1962 after one shifting of socio-political breezes, and just prior to the next.

It would be very hard to maintain the illusion than any of the men mentioned here were “liked” in ways we might fathom -- not even by their wives and children, although perhaps by their dogs. And yet, they were obeyed, venerated and even worshipped in a political-cum-religious sense, surely out of fear, but also because they had erected and encouraged personality cults to reinforce their positions.

Khrushchev the successor pilloried Stalin for his cult of personality. Ironically, the philosophical father of them both, Karl Marx, disdained the notion.

Cult of personality is a pejorative term implying the concentration of all power in a single charismatic leader within a totalitarian state and the near deification of that leader in state propaganda. Totalitarian regimes use the state-controlled mass media to cultivate a larger-than-life public image of the leader through unquestioning flattery and praise. Leaders are lauded for their extraordinary courage, knowledge, wisdom, or any other superhuman quality necessary for legitimating the totalitarian regime. The cult of personality serves to sustain such a regime in power, discourage open criticism, and justify whatever political twists and turns it may decide to take.

Many Americans will scoff, dismissing these examples as unique, arising from diseased ideals amid peculiar historical imperatives, and taking place in the lives of other people, elsewhere.

Unfortunately, cults of personality are American, too, and can exist in a democracy just as easily as in a totalitarian system of government. George Washington was resistant, and Huey Long obliging. No matter the locale, certain themes in a cult of personality are constant.

The political platform has no independent existence apart from the leader, and the political process is utterly dependent on the leader for guidance.

Manifestations of activity on the part of government also are promoted as inseparable from the leader’s benevolence, and while the leader may have utilized resources theoretically shared equally by his or her subjects, the results must always be portrayed as stemming from the wisdom of the leader.

Mistakes never occur, and when they do, they’re never, ever acknowledged even as minions pay the price.

The leader’s pre-eminence is reinforced by the constant repetition of mass marketing, including the leader’s name and image as attached to almost anything lacking the good sense to move out of the way.

Contemporary electronic media surely assists the cause of building a leader’s cult of personality, but it must be remembered that the Roman Catholic Church was adept at pursuing the same strategy for its papacy long before electricity and the outsourcing of Twitter feeds.

---

Often during the course of my own beer business, there have existed the temptation to indulge in precisely this sort of self-deification. I wouldn’t have been the first, and regrettably, I wasn’t immune to periods of relaxed vigilance, which are characterized by reading one’s press clippings (especially his own) and believing what they say.

What kept me grounded most of the time was the simple realization that I was part of a team, and the daily efforts of the team resulted in satisfied customers, who returned and made possible the survival of the business. I played one role, and it was just that: One part among many, inter-related, and meaningless when separated from the whole.

Perhaps politics works somewhat like this, and perhaps it doesn’t, but either way, the very notion of a personality cult is deeply offensive to me. What’s more, the greater our proximity to it, the more indefensible a cult of personality becomes.

If functioning as an elected official means a stock photograph behind everyone’s desk, daily laudatory references, names on plaques and a ceaseless perpetuation of peerless wisdom, then the wheels have jumped the track.

Those of Ladislav’s generation in Eastern Europe and the USSR had no say in the personality cults inflicted upon them. Those of my generation in America have a ballot box. It’s an interesting tool, and when used properly, acts as kryptonite to the cult.

Just remember that, because very soon, you’ll have a chance to act accordingly.

Posterity will affirm it: "Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?"

“When it came my turn to present, the solution I proposed for trips of less than a mile -- and more than half of urban trips are this short -- was shoes, available since 1600 BC.”
-- Samuel I. Schwartz

I've heard it said that drugs rewire the brain. This may or may not be true, but to me, driving definitely does. We become something different when we're behind the wheel, and for the most part the difference is unpleasant.

Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake? by Nathan Heller (The New Yorker)

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past few years. The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.

Every technology has costs, but lately we’ve had reason to question even cars’ putative benefits. Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?

And this.

It is odd, then, that we still look to the mid-century for evidence that cars proved their necessity and worth. Tell someone that you cannot drive, and they respond as if you had confessed an intimate eccentricity, like needing to be walked on with high heels before bed. “Re-e-eally! ” the reply goes. “How do you . . . ?”

The answer is planes, trains, buses, ferries, cabs, bikes, feet, and the occasional shared ride: almost anywhere in the world can be reached this way for less than the amortized cost of a car and its expenses.

And this.

The original sin of cars, the problem from which other problems emerged, was commercial pressure for private ownership—for the car to be a personal vehicle in your garage rather than a shared technology woven into the transportation network, as early electric cars would have been. The costs of this decision can be seen on every curb: the typical American vehicle spends ninety-five per cent of its life parked.

It appears this 95% of a car's time parked is spent by its owners bitching and moaning about the period of 5% movement.

Memorial Day 2019 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

There are long, long trails a-winding ...

... through places like France.

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery

With headstones lying in a sweeping curve, the 42.5-acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, sits at the foot of Belleau Wood. The cemetery contains the graves of 2,289 war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918. The memorial chapel sits on a hillside, decorated with sculptured and stained-glass details of wartime personnel, equipment and insignia. Inscribed on its interior wall are 1,060 names of the missing. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. During World War II the chapel was damaged slightly by an enemy shell.

Belleau Wood adjoins the cemetery and contains many vestiges of World War I. A monument at the flagpole commemorates the valor of the U.S. Marines who captured much of this ground in 1918.

Respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task perhaps best undertaken with respect for history.

Speaking only for myself, I take it very seriously. It's a habit of thought almost certainly springing from my father's fascination with far-off events that conspired to transport a hick from bucolic Georgetown, Indiana to the Pacific Theater of Operations -- and in his case, back home again.

Others weren't as lucky, and every year on Memorial Day, I pause to reflect on the serendipity of it all.

As a prelude to Memorial Day, there tend to be scolding social media reminders to the effect that Americans fixated on holiday feasting, partying and recreation somehow dishonor the nation's military heritage. To be sure, I contribute my fair share of rants about the general populace and its chronic ignorance of history.

However, I don't think honor and bacchanalia are mutually exclusive concepts. After all, the venerable institution of the wake combines them very effectively, and what's more, the human condition is incapable of sustaining a permanent state of mourning. Life does go on.

Like the vast majority of topics pertaining to human beings, the notion of dying for one's country is inordinately complex. John Gonder once touched on it during a conversation, when he mentioned the notorious escape clause during the American Civil War, where men drafted into the Union Army could buy their way out of service by paying $300 or providing a substitute to serve (and sometimes die) in their place.

During the Vietnam War, songwriter John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival noticed it, too: Exactly how is it determined who risks dying for his or her country, and who subsequently profits from their deaths?

Dick Cheney might know the answer.

Preferably, respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task best undertaken with a respect for history on the part of those still living, along with sadness and regret that human civilization seems not to have evolved to a point of no longer requiring violence to settle issues. War is a ridiculous concept, although humans seem enamored of it.

It's also a holiday weekend, and I suspect you are enjoying it.

Carry on, then.

Memorial Day (Snopes)

Claim: Former slaves reburied dead Union prisoners of war in May 1865, thus creating the modern observance of Memorial Day.

MIXTURE:

TRUE: In May 1865, free blacks in Charleston reburied dead Union prisoners of war and held a cemetery dedication ceremony.

UNDETERMINED: The event referenced above is the origin of the modern Memorial Day observance.

Wikipedia's article goes into greater detail.

Memorial Day 2019 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

Memorial Day 2019 (2 of 4): Charles Ives, from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2019 (3 of 4): "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Memorial Day 2019 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

Ten years ago, Bank Street Brewhouse's brewing equipment arrived at the former "day-old bread store."

Ten years ago (May 11, 2009) I was so excited that a rare exclamation mark was merited: "NABC's brewery arrives on site!"

Imagine the number of exclamations required had the forever fevered DNA been telling the story.

We opened the front of the house in March with draft beer from NABC's original brewery, as well as guests taps. The DME system took a while to install, which David Pierce managed with his characteristic aplomb, and brewing began circa July.

Now that Bank Street Brewhouse is closing (the last day is Saturday, May 25), a big piece of the "what's to come" equation is exactly how much this brewery is worth after a ten-year run. Of course the best answer is "it's worth what the market will bear." I've no idea what my former business partners are asking, and I've been away from brewing a bit too long to hazard a guesstimate about used equipment pricing.

I'll have to wait and see just like you. In the meantime, as a reminder, it actually wasn't my idea to adorn the BSB brewing system with faces of famous Commies. It was a surprise gift, and I was very surprised -- as well as appreciative.

"Reaganomics killed America's middle class," and "the old deal that held US society together started to unwind."

Photo credit.

Following are two topics raised during the Tuesday "Chew On This" discussion about what divides Americans.

Tuesday night, we chewed on THAT.

Starting the conversation here.

A return to Piketty: "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class ...

... Capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Continuing it here.

Decline and fall: how American society unravelled, by George Packer (The Guardian)

Thirty Forty years ago, the old deal that held US society together started to unwind, with social cohesion sacrificed to greed. Was it an inevitable process – or was it engineered by self-interested elites?

 ... The large currents of the past generation – deindustrialisation, the flattening of average wages, the financialisation of the economy, income inequality, the growth of information technology, the flood of money into Washington, the rise of the political right – all had their origins in the late 70s. The US became more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, more individualistic and less communitarian, more free and less equal, more tolerant and less fair. Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline. It as a period that I call the Unwinding.

In one view, the Unwinding is just a return to the normal state of American life. By this deterministic analysis, the US has always been a wide-open, free-wheeling country, with a high tolerance for big winners and big losers as the price of equal opportunity in a dynamic society. If the US brand of capitalism has rougher edges than that of other democracies, it is worth the trade-off for growth and mobility. There is nothing unusual about the six surviving heirs to the Walmart fortune possessing between them the same wealth as the bottom 42% of Americans – that's the country's default setting. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are the reincarnation of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, Steven Cohen is another JP Morgan, Jay-Z is Jay Gatsby.

The rules and regulations of the Roosevelt Republic were aberrations brought on by accidents of history – depression, world war, the cold war – that induced Americans to surrender a degree of freedom in exchange for security. There would have been no Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial from investment banking, without the bank failures of 1933; no great middle-class boom if the US economy had not been the only one left standing after the second world war; no bargain between business, labour and government without a shared sense of national interest in the face of foreign enemies; no social solidarity without the door to immigrants remaining closed through the middle of the century.

Once American pre-eminence was challenged by international competitors, and the economy hit rough seas in the 70s, and the sense of existential threat from abroad subsided, the deal was off. Globalisation, technology and immigration hurried the Unwinding along, as inexorable as winds and tides. It is sentimental at best, if not ahistorical, to imagine that the social contract could ever have survived – like wanting to hang on to a world of nuclear families and manual typewriters ...