Intellectual history: A Twitter passage by George Monbiot, two good books by Tony Judt, and you can hear a pin drop in New Gahania.

George Monbiot "is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism."

The following thoughts by Monbiot as expressed at Twitter this week seem almost certain to fall on deaf ears in New Albany.

"We are born in total ignorance of everything, and we die in total ignorance of almost everything. Acquiring useful knowledge requires determined study. Yet we no longer have a culture of public learning. This makes us vulnerable to every charlatan who stands for election.

"The charlatans seek to keep us in ignorance. When they deride "elites", they don't mean people like themselves - the rich and powerful. They mean teachers and intellectuals. They are creating an anti-intellectual culture, to make people easier to manipulate.

"Bring back the workers' education movements. Bring back a rich public culture of learning and intellectual self-improvement, open to everyone. Knowledge is the most powerful tool in politics."

Earlier tonight at Pints&union a few of us were talking about European post-war history. I recommended the late historian Tony Judt's masterful Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, but not to neglect Judt and co-writer Timothy Snyder's 2012 book, Thinking the Twentieth Century.

Here's the closing passage from my column of October 30, 2014.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Does New Albany even have an intellectual history?

Judt’s and Snyder’s book takes the form of several loosely themed conversations, as transcribed by Snyder. At the time of the book’s preparation, Judt was immobilized by ALS, the disease that subsequently killed him. As with Stephen Hawking, Judt’s mind was mightily sharp, and the two historians tackle topics beneath an umbrella term many New Albanians might find frightening, pretentious or both: The “intellectual history” of the past century.

In short, how did ideas and systems of thought play a role in European society, art, politics and history during this era? I’ve already mentioned some ‘isms,” as in capitalism, communism and fascism. What about socialism? How is it that I persist in identifying my core political persuasion as resembling European-style Social Democracy rather than conforming to an American version of Democrat or Republican?

There are numerous other examples, as in the case of Zionism. What is the pathway of a Jewish separatist movement rooted in fin de siècle Vienna, as it leads toward a post-Holocaust consolidation of the modern Israeli state? How did rural and urban Jewish societies in Europe differ in the first place? And so on.

Reading and thinking about this wonderful overview of intellectual history have been tremendously exciting for me. I needed a stimulating “break” after so many months of concentration on specific matters of local, personal and business interest – from lane widths to commercial kitchens, from the death of a house cat to Silvercrest, and from 800-lb gorillas to shrubbery.

Judt and Snyder’s engaging scholarship has helped bring me back, full circle, to the time when I was advised to register for an Introduction to Philosophy class only because (a) it’s easy, and (b) I’d need humanities credits, anyway. But I was abruptly awakened by a vibrant world of thoughts and ideas, which high school simply didn’t prepare me to fathom or discover. The book reminds me of what changed my life so very long ago ... and continues to do so today.

Yes, I persist in a belief that certain of these ideas and doctrines, some more so than others, still preface daily living in a place like New Albany. Ideas and words matter, as in a comment recently passed along to me:

"Before we talk about transportation we have to ask what city we want and how we want to live."

I want to live thinking.

Without it, my quality of life suffers.

The beatings will continue until morale improves: Happy 15th birthday to NA Confidential ... the only New Albany blog that matters.

Tuesday, October 22 will be the 15th anniversary of the NA Confidential blog.

There have been just over 14,353 posts, 4,670,829 page views (including a handful recently from Singapore), 409 posts tagged "street grid," and flaccid spitballs too numerous to count lobbed back at us, often anonymously, from folks who -- in the parlance of our contemporary era -- are "butt hurt."

We've outlasted all the Trog Blogs of old. Naturally the main reason for their demise is the ready accessibility of social media; with reduced attention spans there is an accompanying reluctance to read and write. For a contrarian who revels in both, it's the perfect time to double down on longer-form expressions.

The vast majority of posts at NA Confidential have dealt with the eternally confounding life and times of Nawbany, a confounding little river town with an inferiority complex. The blog's founding premise in 2004 was, and remains, that local issues deserve more attention and discussion than national affairs, primarily because proximity at the grassroots brings possibilities to be involved and effect changes.

Since 2004 the municipality of New Albany has changed far less than misleading (and expensive) appearances might indicate, but it has proven to be far more entertaining than I'd ever have imagined.

It's a tad ironic that a blog so few will admit to reading is regularly "answered" in other media and out on the hustings, and I wish I had a beer for every time someone snarled, "If you don't like it here, leave!"

But you see, I've not been doing this for 15 years because I want to leave.

I've done it because I want to stay.

Why should I always have to be the one to change?

Neanderthals, puritans, sloths and teetotallers -- inhabitants of the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness -- step right up and take your turn. Maybe the time has come for YOU to go back to wherever.

Fifteen (15) years is an eternity, so on the occasion of this column, profuse thanks to Jeff Gillenwater, Randy Smith and the late Lloyd Wimp for their credited contributions over the past nine years, to Mark Cassidy for his support and willingness to cross-examine, and to all the green mice, guest columnists, moles, agitators and malcontents who help these ideas to gestate. Thanks to my wife for tolerating my writing and cage-rattling compulsions, and to Joe, my current employer, for his unparalleled patience.

Thanks especially to you, the reader.

Special thanks to the late, great Howard Zinn for demonstrating the fundamental veracity of a people's history, and the critical need for it, because while this blog is as imperfect as its originator, the intent all along has been to provide New Albany's “other” side.

Doing so has required a learning curve, but I'm damned proud of the results, and I think we've helped provide a body of work and an alternative record, while offering more ideas per square pixel than New Albany’s local political power structures and non-local media combined.

Disney does fantasy just fine. I prefer the real world.

Has any of it really mattered? It's a question others must answer. I'm too close to the beating heart to tell. Personally, I think NAC is ridiculously underrated, particularly by local "media" outlets, but of course this doesn't matter all that much. It's their loss, and that's life, because somewhere it's beer-thirty.

Through it all one question still remains:

New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? We continue to observe the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town, because if it's true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?

The beatings will continue until morale improves -- or, happy 14th birthday to NA Confidential.

2006. Sold out!

This essay has been substantially revised since its original publication on the occasion of the blog's 10th birthday in 2014. Much has happened during the intervening 48 months, both publicly and privately, but through it all one question still remains: New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? We continue to observe the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town, because if it's true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?

---

This coming Monday (October 22) marks the 14th anniversary of NA Confidential.

As usual, I've pondered the possibility of a party in celebration of making it another year without my imposing physique being institutionalized, but there’s no pressing reason for a gathering.

We need only gather at the pub of our choice for commemorative elixirs (on Tuesday, seeing as Pints&union is closed on Monday) and call it good.

Fourteen years is an eternity, and I've long since conceded to fudging when making the claim that the blog's conception was a direct result of massive personal despair in the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election; obviously, the actual NAC birth date in October preceded Election Day in 2004.

However, in retrospect it is perfectly accurate to suggest that the grim promise of four more wasted White House years merely exacerbated the development of an epiphany already budding. It's hard to tell whether matters have gotten better or worse. In 2016, in a cataclysm at once bizarrely inconceivable and entirely understandable, election day gave us Donald Trump in the presidency.

In New Albany, we already possessed ample reason to resist -- and once we're done with Gahan, it'll be on to Trump. More than a blog will be needed to cope with the necessary cleanup, and so I've started drinking bourbon, too.

However, the blog's opening phases remain somewhat intact in the historical record.

During the years 2003 and 2004, several previously disparate threads gradually came together in my life. The most significant factor was personal renewal. My first marriage was finished, and a wonderful new relationship under way.

We felt sure enough about our combined future prospects to begin shopping for a house, and in 2003 came the purchase of a home located on Spring Street, in what these days occasionally is referenced as Midtown. Halloween of 2018 will make 15 years of living there.

Verily: Trick or treat? If we’d only grasped these nuances of civic foreshadowing.

Circa 2007: The stuff of 1,001 captions.

Even before the ink was dry on our bouncing baby debt, I'd taken dozens of walks and bicycle rides through the deserted wastes of a criminally neglected downtown, with a huge question eventually looming over all of it: Why was New Albany’s devastated former business district downtown different from those vibrant quarters I’d visited in other states and nations?

Was the decay avoidable? Could it be these people in other places knew something we didn’t? If so, why weren’t we emulating it? Was it money, politics, culture … or something in the water?

The questions mounted, and easy answers seemed frustratingly elusive. I didn't fully understand at the time the extent to which my ground was shifting. Thoughts previously devoted to escapist obsessions (generally, variants of beer and travel) began turning elsewhere, toward a vague context of rootedness.

Surely, something could be done, right there in the city's core.

NABC already was brewing on the north side, but it was only a small facet of the “good beer bar” business model. It began to occur to me that the answers to these questions of everyday life in one’s place of residence impacted this model. As a brewery, perhaps NABC was transitioning toward a fuller embrace of local existence. Might brewing make sense as the ultimate, local, creative act – in fact, what we should have been aspiring to achieve from the start?

This emerging epiphany was about place, and one’s place in it. As the presidential election year of 2004 advanced toward the pathetic re-enthronement of the second-worst American chief executive ever, an absurdity began gnawing at me.

Most of us spend vast chunks of our lives living in a specific place, but spend much of our time debating issues far beyond it. Granted, being aware of the world outside remained absolutely vital, and I wasn’t about to renounce my planetary citizenship, but when it came to action, as opposed to verbiage, what chance did I have of influencing the tragedy of a second Bush administration?

(Or Trump's first.)

To devote precious psychic energy debating these faraway issues left none to apply to matters nearest me, when these were precisely the sort of local conditions best addressed through direct participation. How to make things better right here, outside the doors of my home and business?

The comparative odds were 1 in 300 million, or 1 in 37,000. Which would you choose?

At this juncture, a deeply personal proclivity came into play, because what I decided to do first was write about it. After all, everyone is entitled to my opinion, although some might say that writing and action aren’t the same things at all.

I disagree. Ideas, words and how we use them do matter.

Quite early in my life, it was obvious that being able to arrange words on a page was essential to my being. I don't know why. It just is. Through most of my adult life, I have awakened to a jumble of thoughts centering on topics for the day, along with thoughts on how this jumble might be untangled and organized. They must be written, as soon as possible, in order to expel the current crop of thoughts and make room for others.

I suppose it’s a compulsion of sorts. Music always plays in my head, alongside sentences forming there. I'm convinced that when these idiosyncratic synapses cease to occur – or when math and numbers finally start to make sense to me – death will be imminent.

Concurrently, what better way to facilitate these needs in 2004 than electronic media? It required no start-up funds. I could write locally, and disseminate globally. And so it has gone, from then until now. It builds character, and makes me a better gadfly.

On the occasion of this column, NAC's 13,228th post, thanks to Jeff Gillenwater, Randy Smith and the late Lloyd Wimp for their credited contributions over the past nine years, and to all the green mice, guest columnists, moles, agitators and malcontents who help our ideas to gestate.

Thanks to my wife for tolerating my writing and cage-rattling compulsions, and to Joe, my current employer, for his patience.

Thanks especially to you, the reader.

Lloyd at the Bistro New Albany, circa 2006.

Special thanks to the late, great Howard Zinn for demonstrating the fundamental veracity of a people's history, and the critical need for it, because while this blog is as imperfect as its originator, the intent all along has been to provide New Albany's “other” side.

Doing so has required a learning curve, but I'm damned proud of the results, and I think we've helped provide a body of work and an alternative record, while offering more ideas per square pixel than New Albany’s local political power structures and non-local media combined.

Disney does fantasy just fine. I prefer the real world.

Has any of it really mattered? It's a question others must answer. I'm too close to the beating heart to tell. Personally, I think NAC is ridiculously underrated, particularly by local "media" outlets, but of course this doesn't matter all that much. It's their loss, and that's life.

Because: Somewhere, it's beer-thirty.

2012.

The beatings will continue until morale improves: A week late, but happy birthday to NA Confidential.

2006. Sold out!

This essay is revised substantially from its original publication on the occasion of the blog's 10th birthday in 2014. Much has happened since then, both publicly and privately, but through it all one question still remains: New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? We continue to observe the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town, because if it's true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?

---

Last Sunday (October 22) marked the 13th anniversary of NA Confidential.

As usual, I pondered the possibility of a party in celebration of making it another year without my being institutionalized, but there’s no pressing reason for a gathering. We need only gather at the pub of our choice for commemorative elixirs (Progressive Pints remain my drink of record, though fewer than before) and call it good.

Thirteen years is a long time. Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of fudging when making the claim that the blog's conception was a direct result of massive personal despair in the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election; obviously, the actual NAC birth date in October preceded Election Day in 2004.

However, in retrospect it is perfectly accurate to suggest that the grim promise of four more wasted White House years merely exacerbated the development of an epiphany already budding.

Since then, it's hard to tell whether matters have gotten better or worse. In 2016, in a cataclysm at once bizarrely inconceivable and entirely understandable, election day gave us Donald Trump in the presidency.

In New Albany, we already possessed ample reason to resist -- and once we're done with Gahan, it'll be on to Trump. More than a blog will be needed to cope, and so I've started drinking bourbon.

However, the blog's opening phases remain somewhat intact in the historical record.

During the years 2003 and 2004, several previously disparate threads gradually were coming together in my life. The most significant factor was my own renewal. My first marriage was over, and a wonderful new relationship under way.

We felt sure enough about our combined future prospects to begin shopping for a house, and in 2003 came the purchase of a home located on Spring Street, in what is now occasionally referenced as Midtown. Halloween of 2017 will make 14 years of living there.

Verily: Trick or treat? If we’d only grasped these nuances of civic foreshadowing.

2007: For heaven's sake, give 'em
some candy ... and maybe they'll leave us alone.

Even before the ink was dry on our bouncing baby debt, I'd experienced dozens of walks and bicycle rides through the deserted wastes of a criminally neglected downtown, with a huge question eventually looming over all of it: Why was New Albany’s devastated former business district downtown different from those vibrant quarters I’d visited in other states and nations?

Was the decay avoidable? Could it be these people in other places knew something we didn’t? If so, why weren’t we emulating it? Was it money, politics, culture … or something in the water?

The questions mounted, and easy answers seemed frustratingly elusive. I didn't fully understand at the time the extent to which my ground was shifting. Thoughts previously devoted to escapist obsessions (generally, variants of beer and travel) began turning elsewhere, toward a vague context of rootedness.

Surely, something could be done, right there in the city's core.

NABC already was brewing on the north side, but it was only a small facet of the “good beer bar” business model. It began to occur to me that the answers to these questions of everyday life in one’s place of residence impacted this model. As a brewery, perhaps NABC was transitioning toward a fuller embrace of local existence. Might brewing make sense as the ultimate, local, creative act – in fact, what we should have been aspiring to achieve from the start?

This emerging epiphany was about place, and one’s place in it. As the presidential election year of 2004 advanced toward the pathetic re-enthronement of the second-worst American chief executive ever, an absurdity began gnawing at me.

Most of us spend vast chunks of our lives living in a specific place, but spend much of our time debating issues far beyond it. Granted, being aware of the world outside remained absolutely vital, and I wasn’t about to renounce my planetary citizenship, but when it came to action, as opposed to verbiage, what chance did I have of influencing the tragedy of a second Bush administration?

(Or Trump's first.)

To devote precious psychic energy debating these faraway issues left none to apply to matters nearest me, when these were precisely the sort of local conditions best addressed through direct participation. How to make things better right here, outside the doors of my home and business?

The comparative odds were 1 in 300 million, or 1 in 37,000. Which would you choose?

At this juncture, a deeply personal proclivity came into play, because what I decided to do first was write about it. After all, everyone is entitled to my opinion, although some might say that writing and action aren’t the same things at all. I disagree. Ideas, words and how we use them do matter.

Lately I'm phrasing it a bit differently: You're entitled to my opinion, and as time has passed, I've come to see that facts are crucial -- but they should never stand in the way of a proper polemic.

Quite early in my life, it was obvious that being able to arrange words on a page was essential to my being. I don't know why. It just is. Through most of my adult life, I have awakened to a jumble of thoughts centering on topics for the day, along with thoughts on how this jumble might be untangled and organized. They must be written, as soon as possible, in order to expel the current crop of thoughts and make room for others.

I suppose it’s a compulsion of sorts. Music always plays in my head, alongside sentences forming there. I'm convinced that when these idiosyncratic synapses cease to occur – or when math and numbers finally start to make sense to me – death will be imminent.

Concurrently, what better way to facilitate these needs in 2004 than electronic media? It required no start-up money. I could write locally, and disseminate globally. And so it has gone, from then until now. It builds character, and makes me a better gadfly.

On the occasion of this column, NAC's 12,108th post, thanks to Jeff Gillenwater, Randy Smith and the late Lloyd Wimp for their credited contributions over the past nine years, and to all the green mice, guest columnists, moles, agitators and malcontents who help our ideas to gestate. Thanks to my wife for tolerating my writing and cage-rattling compulsions. Thanks especially to you, the reader.

Lloyd at the Bistro New Albany, circa 2006.

Special thanks to the late, great Howard Zinn for demonstrating the fundamental veracity of a people's history, and the critical need for it, because while this blog is as imperfect as its originator, the intent all along has been to provide New Albany's “other” side.

Doing so has required a learning curve, but I'm damned proud of the results, and I think we've helped provide a body of work and an alternative record, while offering more ideas per square pixel than New Albany’s local political power structures and non-local media combined. Disney does fantasy just fine. I prefer the real world.

Has any of it really mattered? It's a question others must answer. I'm too close to the beating heart to tell. Personally, I think NAC is ridiculously underrated, particularly by local "media" outlets, but of course this doesn't matter all that much. It's their loss, and that's life.

Because: Somewhere, it's beer-thirty.

2012.

Mencken meets Manics: "A farrago of nonsense" ... because "the penalty of intelligence is (everlasting) oblivion."

I awoke to the word "farrago" as it fought for release from my tortured conscience, no doubt an inevitable side effect of watching Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening.

Another hour of my life, wasted without strong drink.

Flashing like motel neon just adjacent to "farrago" was the name "Mencken." It's tempting to take the easy way out and extract all of Shane's excellent future words from Mencken's writings. Typically I must consult the dictionary several times per Mencken essay, as with "sempiternal" (eternal and unchanging; everlasting).

Of course, the word "everlasting" takes me directly to the Manic Street Preachers.

But I digress.

Mencken's famous observation that the Book of Genesis is a "farrago of nonsense" is included herein, in an essay embracing a general theme that will be painfully familiar to New Albanians who've watched the unfolding Chronicles of New Gahania.

"The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear."

---

Forgotten Men, by H. L. Mencken (American Mercury, March, 1928, pp. 280-282)

Happy nations, said Cesare Bonesano Beccaria, have no history. Nor, it appears, have intelligent men; at all events, they are seldom remembered generally, and almost never with respect. All the great heroes of the human race have preached things palpably not true, and practised things palpably full of folly. Their imbecilities, surviving, constitute the massed wisdom of Homo sapiens, lord of the lion and the whale, the elephant and the wolf, though not, as yet, of the gnat and the fly, the cockroach and the rat. So surviving, these august imbecilities conceal the high probability that, when they were new, they must have been challenged sharply by doubting and dare-devil men—that sober reason must have revolted against them contemporaneously, as it does today. But of that revolt, in most cases, nothing is known. The penalty of intelligence is oblivion.

Consider, for example, the case of those ancient Jews whose banal speculations about the origin of things still afflict the whole of Christendom, to say nothing of Islam. Is it possible to believe that, in the glorious Eighth and Ninth Centuries B.C., all Jews swallowed that preposterous rubbish — that the race was completely devoid of intelligent men, and new nothing of an enlightened public opinion? I find it hard to go so far. The Jews, at that time, had already proved that they were the best of the desert tribes, and by long odds, and they were fast moving to the front as city folks, i.e., as civilized men. Yet the only Jewish document that comes down to us from that great day is part of the Book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it. The kind of mind it reveals is the kind one encounters today among New York wash-room attendants, Mississippi newspaper editors, and Tennessee judges. It is barely above the level of observation and ratiocination of a bright young jackass.

Are we to assume that this appalling mind was the best Jewish mind of the time—that Genesis represents the finest flowering of the Jewish national genius? To ask the question is to answer it. The Jews, you may rest assured, were not unanimously of such low mental visibility. There were enlightened men among them as well as sorcerers and theologians. They had shrewd and sophisticated fellows who were to Moses and the other patriarchs as Thomas Henry Huxley was to Gladstone. They had lost and happy souls who laughed at Genesis quite as loudly the day it was released as it is laughed at today by the current damned. But of these illuminati not a word survives in the records of the Jews. Of their animadversions upon Moses’s highfalutin tosh—and no doubt those animadversions were searching and devastating—we lack even so much as the report of a report. Thus all we know today of the probably brilliant and enterprising intellectual life of the ante-Exile Jews is contained in a compilation of balderdash by certain of their politicians and ecclesiastics. It is as if their descendants of our own time were to be measured by the sonorous rumble-bumble of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Otto H. Kahn. It is as if the American civilization we sweat and prosper under were to go down into history in terms of Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford and Arthur Brisbane.

Well, why not? Those, perhaps, are the precise terms in which it is to go down. On second thought, I change perhaps into no doubt. What has happened invariably in the past will keep on happening to the end of the chapter. Certainly we can’t expect to escape the fate of Greece and Rome—and both Greece and Rome are chiefly remembered today (and venerated by the learned and unintelligent) by the records of their second- and third-rate men. Is it seriously argued that Plato was the most enlightened Greek of his age? Then it may be argued with equal plausibility that Upton Sinclair has been the most enlightened American of this one. Item by item the two match: as political scientists, as professors of esthetics, as experts on the natural processes. In some ways, true enough, Plato was clearly superior to Sinclair: for one thing, he was better versed in the jargon of metaphysics, heavenly maid—which is to say, in the jargon of organized nonsense. But I think that no one will undertake to deny that Sinclair beats him on the pharmacology of alcohol, on the evils of voluptuousness, and on the electronic vibrations of the late Dr. Albert Abrams.

Plato survives today as one of the major glories of Greece. Put upon oath in a court of law, more specialists in dead ideas would probably rate him as the greatest Greek of them all. But you may be sure that there were Athenians in his own day who, dropping in to hear his Message, carried away a different notion. Some of them were very bright fellows, and privy to the philosophical arcana. They had heard all the champions, and had their private views. I suggest somewhat diffidently that there were ideas in the Republic and the Laws that made them retire to the nearby wine-shops to snigger. But no one remembers those immune Athenians today, nor the hard-boiled fellows who guffawed at the court of Philip of Macedon. The world recalls only Plato.

Here, I sincerely hope, I shall not be mistaken for one who seeks to cry that great man down. On the contrary, I venerate him. There is implicit in his writings, though not often explicit, the operation of an intellect of a superior order. Whatever may be said against him, he at least refrained from ratifying the political, theological and epistemelogical notions that were current in his time. He was no Athenian Rotarian, but his very intelligence made him remember, when he got up before his customers, that it was necessary to adapt his speculations to their capacities and prejudices. Like Woodrow Wilson in a later age, he had a weakness for oratory, and got himself enmeshed in its snares. Some of his principal works are no more than reports of his harangues, and the heat in them singes the sense. He suffered, as all reflective men must suffer, from the fact that what is put into words for the general ear can never come within even the remotest reach of what is pondered in the privacy of the study or praying-room.

The case of Abraham Lincoln immediately recalls itself. He was, I believe, one of the most intelligent men ever heard of in his realm—but he was also a politican, and, in his last years, President of the Federal Union. The fact worked an immemorial cruelty upon him when he visited the battlefield of Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863. One may easily imagine the reflections that the scene and the occasion must have inspired in so sagacious and unconventional a man—at all events, one may imagine the more obvious of them. They were, it is highly probable, of an extremely acrid and unpleasant nature. Before him stretched row upon row of new-made graves; around him ranged the gaunt cinders of a witless and abominable war. The thought must have occurred to him at once that --

But before him there also stretched an acre or two of faces—the faces of dull Pennsylvania peasants from the adjacent farms, with here and there the jowls of a Philadelphia politician gleaming in the pale Winter sunlight. It was too cold that day to his badly-cushioned bones for a long speech, and the audience would have been mortally offended by a good one. So old Abe put away his reflections, and launched into the tried and sure-fire stuff. Once started, the furor loquendi dragged him on. Abandoning the simple and crystal-clear English of his considered utterance, he stood a sentence on its head, and made a pretty parlor ornament of it. Proceeding, he described the causes and nature of war in terms of the current army press bureau. Finally, he launched a sonorous, meaningless epigram, and sat down. There was immense applause. The Pennsylvania oafs were delighted. And the speech remains in all the shool-books to this day.

Lincoln had too much humor in him to leave a diary, and so we do not know what he thought of it the day following, or a month later, or a year. But it is safe to assume, I believe, that he vacillated often between laughing at it sourly and hanging himself. For he was far too intelligent to believe in any such Kiwanian bombast. He could no more have taken it seriously than he took the strutting of Mr. Secretary Seward seriously, or the cerebral steam-pressure of General Grant. He knew it, you may be sure, for what it was. He was simply doomed, like many another good man before and after him, to keep his soundest and loftiest thoughts to himself. Just as Plato had to adapt his most penetrating and revolutionary thoughts to the tastes and comprehension of the sophomores assembled to hear him, so Lincoln had to content himself, on a great occasion, with ideas comprehensible to Pennsylvania Dunkards, which is to say, to persons to whom genuine ideas were not comprehensible at all. Knowing their theological principles, he knew that, in the political field, they grazed only on pansies.

Nor is this all. The highest flights of human intellect are not only inordinately offensive to the overwhelming majority of men; they are also, at least in large part, incapable of reduction to words. Thus the best thought of the human race does not appear in its written records. What is set down in orderly and seemly sentences, even today, always has some flavor in it of the stilted rubbish that the Sumerian kings used to engrave upon their tombs. The current cliches get into it inevitably; it is never quite honest. Complete honesty, intellectually, seldom expresses itself in formal words: its agents of notification are rather winks and sniggers, hip flasks and dead cats. The language was not made for it. Reading Shakespeare, a man of penetrating intelligence, one frequently observes him trying to put a really novel and apposite thought into words—and falling helplessly into mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. The groundlings pulled him and the deficiencies of human speech pushed him. The result is many a magnificent salvo of nonsense, vastly esteemed by the persons who esteem that sort of thing.

I propose no remedy. In fact, I am convinced that no remedy is possible, or even imaginable. The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear. Sound ideas, when by chance they become articulate, annoy it and terrify it; it prefers the sempiternal slobber.

ON THE AVENUES: Does New Albany even have an intellectual history?

ON THE AVENUES: Does New Albany even have an intellectual history?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The last time I can recall dressing up for Halloween was in 1986.

It was the year after my first trip to the Soviet Union, where I’d bought a top quality ushanka (a furry cap with ear flaps) for $25 at a hard currency shop in Leningrad.

As a regular customer of the old Sam’s Tavern, as opposed to the newer generation “Food & Spirits” moniker, my curiosity was piqued by a Halloween costume contest at the bar, but why waste precious drinking time on creative wardrobe when a pair of work boots and the ushanka perched atop my head announced my participation as a Bolshevik?

Shrug. It was good for second place.

After all, on yet another pagan-sourced holiday excuse to flaunt base capitalist greed and excess, one ostensibly devoted to ghosts and ghouls, my posing as a communist bogeyman seemed perfectly fitting. Joe Stalin was a failed seminary student, and his paranoiac, murderous police state has come to exemplify fear, loathing and the “reality” of Marxism as quasi-religious doctrine.

However, as the late historian Tony Judt and his co-writer Timothy Snyder point out in their 2012 book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, at least Marxism-cum-communism remains an actual doctrine, or system of thought and ideas. It’s more than can be said about fascism during its 20th century heyday, because there were no intellectual underpinnings of fascism, which in essence was (and remains) a cult of pure, unadulterated power.

Power. Not unlike a Mitch McConnell television ad, as financed by far-off political money aggregators. Our contemporary capitalist American era, a time dominated by the likes of fracking, the Koch brothers and Wal-Mart, bears a good deal more similarity to fascism than communism, the imagined excesses of managed health care and locale of Barack Obama’s birth certificate notwithstanding.

It’s why my brewing machines are calibrated to “kill” fascists, not communists. I’m for capitalism with a human face, although I’m afraid it may be too late for that.

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There’ll be an election next week.

Why do ordinary Americans insist on vote against their own best interests by casting their ballots for Republicans? Why do they support the crippled and unresponsive “two party system” by voting at all? As the 1% garners an ever higher share of the wealth, what keeps 99% of Americans off the streets, demanding change?

Inelegantly paraphrased, Judt offers a theory from self-delusion to explain this phenomenon.

Democracy depends on an informed and responsive citizenry, but generations of consumer-oriented, materialistic capitalism have resulted in large numbers of humans existing in a state of non-responsiveness, unable to act in their own best interests, primarily because they remain besotted, dazzled and duped by the convenient myth of America as a place of opportunity, where any lowly schmuck can get rich by working hard.

In much the same way as science contradicts religious superstition, incontrovertible economic statistics plainly disprove the notion that most of us have any chance whatever of becoming a card-carrying member of the 1%. We’ll be lucky if we die out of debt.

But superstition perseveres, and according to Judt, Americans insist on voting to maintain the conditions of their own impoverishment precisely because they retain the childlike faith that some sweet day, when they’re finally as rich as Mitt Romney, they’ll receive the rewards for voting like Mitt Romney, even when they were poor.

And then there is white male anger, which is a topic for another day.

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Judt’s and Snyder’s book takes the form of several loosely themed conversations, as transcribed by Snyder. At the time of the book’s preparation, Judt was immobilized by ALS, the disease that subsequently killed him. As with Stephen Hawking, Judt’s mind was mightily sharp, and the two historians tackle topics beneath an umbrella term many New Albanians might find frightening, pretentious or both: The “intellectual history” of the past century.

In short, how did ideas and systems of thought play a role in European society, art, politics and history during this era? I’ve already mentioned some ‘isms,” as in capitalism, communism and fascism. What about socialism? How is it that I persist in identifying my core political persuasion as resembling European-style Social Democracy rather than conforming to an American version of Democrat or Republican?

There are numerous other examples, as in the case of Zionism. What is the pathway of a Jewish separatist movement rooted in fin de siècle Vienna, as it leads toward a post-Holocaust consolidation of the modern Israeli state? How did rural and urban Jewish societies in Europe differ in the first place? And so on.

Reading and thinking about this wonderful overview of intellectual history have been tremendously exciting for me. I needed a stimulating “break” after so many months of concentration on specific matters of local, personal and business interest – from lane widths to commercial kitchens, from the death of a housecat to Silvercrest, and from 800-lb gorillas to shrubbery.

Judt and Snyder’s engaging scholarship has helped bring me back, full circle, to the time when I was advised to register for an Introduction to Philosophy class only because (a) it’s easy, and (b) I’d need humanities credits, anyway. But I was abruptly awakened by a vibrant world of thoughts and ideas, which high school simply didn’t prepare me to fathom or discover. The book reminds me of what changed my life so very long ago ... and continues to do so today.

Yes, I persist in a belief that certain of these ideas and doctrines, some more so than others, still preface daily living in a place like New Albany. Ideas and words matter, as in a comment recently passed along to me:

"Before we talk about transportation we have to ask what city we want and how we want to live."

I want to live thinking.

Without it, my quality of life suffers.