REWIND: Good points aplenty ... "The big urban mistake: Building for tourism vs. livability."

Social media at Strong Towns reposted this link today. It appeared previously in this space in May 26, 2017. It has long been my viewpoint that grassroots "economic development" officials (municipal officials, non-profit organizations, business owners and other stakeholders) should use points like these as the basis for their discussions. Do they? Beats me, but I think we can all see how much Greg Fischer's "Bourbonism" has been worth in the year 2020. 

THE BIG URBAN MISTAKE: BUILDING FOR TOURISM VS. LIVABILITY, by Arian Horbovetz (The Urban Phoenix)

... I’m painting with a bit of a broad brush, but essentially what so many cities are currently experiencing is the dilemma of whether to invest in large urban draws that will bring outside money in, or invest in a growing and changing downtown residential population that yearns for investments in keeping them there. To put it simply, do cities invest in big projects that create an entertaining space that grows tourism, or do they invest in the people that have already taken a risk by moving back into their long-dormant downtowns?

LEAP

City leaders, this one’s for you. You can either cater to your new residents by going into the downtown apartment buildings and listening to real people, or you can hop on the big ticket project train en route to a revolving door downtown. You can either build for livability or build for fleeting, often overrated promises of tourism revenue. You can facilitate local small business and community development, or you can create a short-lived wow-factor by opening the floodgates to developers and business interests who take money out of our communities. You can empower and invest in your new downtown residents and let THEM be the ambassadors for our growing urban paradises, or you can ignore them and build casinos and other flashy complexes that cater to the outsider and likely line the pockets of someone beyond the boundaries of the community.

The choice, as always, is yours to make. Choose to invest in your residents and local business owners… the people that invested first… tourism, development and financial success will likely follow. Empower your people, honor the risk they took by taking one yourself, and like happy employees of a strong company, they will take care of everything else.

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.

New Albany too? How will #MeToo play out here at the grassroots?

“Sexual assault is the most under-reported crime in the United States. It’s a crime that people usually tell nobody about.”

Just the other day I was at the downtown Coffee Crossing reading my book and making work notes. At an adjoining table, a man and woman I didn't know were talking about the #MeToo movement.

It wasn't my choice to eavesdrop, but it's hard not to hear people when they're speaking in normal conversational tones.

Their chat centered on Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, although they also were referencing a sexual harassment scandal involving Baptists in Texas, with which I'm completely unfamiliar.

This started me thinking. How has the #MeToo movement played out here in New Albany? We might extend this to the entire Southern Indiana sector of metro Louisville. There have been few high profile #MeToo stories in the city of Louisville, including the LMPD rape case in 2018 and a handful of others in the food, drink and hospitality business, although the latter seem not to have been manifested in formal legal proceedings as with Weinstein.

We've been here before, blogwise.

We're not exempt, so NAC's New Albany "Person of the Year" for 2017 is #MeToo -- the NA silence breakers.

There'll be some who will question this decision, given the absence of an attention-grabbing headline in New Albany thus far. Maybe so, but we all know it's here, too -- don't we? In a place like this, we tend to be a bit behind all conceivable curves, and so even if our civic discussion about sexual harassment and assault is belated, it's still the right one to have.

Yep.

Given that New Albany fully corresponds with the old saw about this being the best place to be when the world ends because it takes a decade for anything important to reach us, well ... what about us?

Surely we're not immune.

I used the enduringly flimsy search engine at the News & Tribune to see what sort of information on the topic the purported newspaper of local record has published, and there have been a couple dozen articles going back to 2017, all of them involving #MeToo nationally, not locally.

The following story is from Kalamazoo, Michigan (population around 75,000 -- roughly double New Albany's), dating from November, 2018. One thing that jumped out at me was the Victim Advocates Unit in Kalamazoo; a quick search reveals that yes, we have something similar: Victim & Witness Services at the Office of the Floyd County Prosecutor.

Readers, your thoughts are appreciated. I'm sure there is lots I've missed pertaining to this topic, so educate me, please.

Does #MeToo take on a different dimension in a smaller town where so may people know each other? Think of the differences in local opinion prompted by the judicial melee in the White Castle parking lot in Indianapolis.

Would big fish in small ponds have even more self-interest in covering up such shenanigans were when they to occur here?

Is #MeToo on local law enforcement's radar?

Here's the link to Kalamazoo.

#MeToo: How a movement changed a community, by Franque Thompson (WWMT 3)

The Me Too movement continues to spark change addressing sexual assault worldwide. The campaign exploded on social media and television, as victims stood up to their abusers. The movement ist still making waves in west Michigan and across the state.

Launched in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke, the Me Too campaign was designed to empower girls and young women of color who experienced sexual abuse, particularly in underprivileged communities. A year later, in 2017, the idea ignited an international movement for survivors of sexual assault, shared across social media with the hashtag #metoo.

According to the latest Michigan Incident Crime Report, reports of sexual assault increased 4.6 percent in 2017, the year Me Too gained global attention. The crime report also states that girls ages 18 and 19 have the highest numbers of cases reported.

Sherry Brockway, the director of emergency response services at YWCA Kalamazoo, said almost 80 percent of victims know the person who assaulted them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote them to ask about it.

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

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

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

You know, the way drinking Coors Light does. 

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

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

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

MORE INFO HERE.

BUY TAILSPIN ALE FEST TICKETS

Tailspin Ale Fest
March 7, 2020
Louisville Executive Aviation Center

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

Consider it, and have fun.

Canon on independent local voting: "You vote not for the party but for the candidate you know; your friend, your neighbor, your friend’s neighbor, someone you went to elementary school with."

Some fine points by Dan Canon, who lives among us right here in Nawbany.

National Politics Taint Local Races And Lay Waste To Societal Norms, by Dan Canon (LEO Weekly)

... In years past, there was not a lot of daylight between Republican and Democratic candidates at the state and municipal levels in Indiana and Kentucky; you often still can’t distinguish one from the other if they don’t tell you. It is not uncommon for a local politician to switch parties depending on who is likely to get more votes at the top of the ticket. So, to a degree, national-level politics have long influenced what goes on in small towns.

The degree has gradually increased over the last few decades, as federal wedge issues have been made the focal point of every political contest in America, from the Clarksville dogcatcher to the Rabbit Hash dogmayor. This shift has not happened by accident; the GOP was shrewd enough to localize national issues in order to dominate state legislatures and redraw the federal map, a strategy that has proved stunningly successful ...

Allow me to skip to the conclusion.

... The real question is: Given that these are the devils we know, what does a (Matt) Bevin victory or a (Bob) Hall victory say about the degree to which people have adopted the national lens as the one through which all politics should be viewed? Dissembling, insulting teachers, bulldozing family homes or outright insane behavior — do these still matter to heartland voters on Election Day? Or, has our collective attention span been whittled away to the nubs of abortion and immigration, with no room for anything else?

If the former, then I think there’s real hope for our fragile republic and for the Midwest in particular. Nearly a hundred years ago, an editor of the Terre Haute Tribune said of iconic socialist Eugene Debs: “Ninety-five percent of the people [in Terre Haute] don’t like his ideas, but they worship the man.” For now, it is still acceptable — even desirable — to cast yourself as an independent voter in small-town Indiana. You vote not for the party but for the candidate you know; your friend, your neighbor, your friend’s neighbor, someone you went to elementary school with. You couldn’t imagine them doing anything too nefarious. As long as this is still true, there is a chance, however slim, that progressives who’ve laid roots in their communities can win municipal offices and state legislatures. In red states, the image of left-wing populists has needed rehabilitation at least since the McCarthy era, and mainstays of small towns are just the people to do it. Alas, it seems this cycle will be more about expelling the worst devils we know and meeting some new ones. Let’s hope we can at least do that.

Of course, it depends on what is meant by "progressive," given that the differences between Bob Hall and Jeff Gahan are paper-thin at best, but I'll refrain from quibbling with a thought-provoking essay.

As LEO reminds us: Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and law professor. “Midwesticism”is his short-documentary series about Midwesterners who are making the world a better place. Watch it at: patreon.com/dancanon.

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

The notion to repeat these thoughts from the Pre-Trump Pleistocene (okay, 2016) came when yet another News and Tribune staffer recently departed for greener fields at Louisville Business First, the latter having become an admitted source of information for me during the course of writing web site posts for Food & Dining Magazine. 

Let's turn back the clock.

---

June 23, 2016: ON THE AVENUES: There's no business like no business, and it's none of your business.

“I used to say I practiced clinical medicine, now I say I practice political medicine, because it’s the mother of all illnesses. And we have to fix this one if we’re going to fix the things that are literally killing us.”
-- Dr. Jill Stein

I’ll return to politics in a moment, because naturally business must come first. Note that my contempt for the breathless contents of business-oriented publications is boundless. It is eternal. It is the stuff of inebriated, chortling legend.

Talk numbers to me, baby.

Um, no. Rather not.

Business porn is where good writing goes to die, condemned to sadistic asphyxiation in the service of coded buzz-speak and greasy greenback envy of the sort that only a One Southern Indiana oligarchy fetishist truly can appreciate when curled up in pajamas by the stock market ticker app, with an ice-cold Bud Light Lime and a box of handy tissues – doused in aloe, of course.

However, every now and then a stray provocation slips through my cordon sanitaire, as here:

How to survive political hostility when trying to run a business, by Terry Brock, Contributing Writer, Louisville Business First

Whoa! Have you sensed the level of political rivalry in this year’s election?

This seems to be much more intense this year. Notice the attacks on Trump supporters and the attacks by Trump supporters on opposition attendees at Trump rallies.

Yes, the American political scene has been known to be particularly venomous throughout history ...

… Yet, this election seems even more vicious, at least by 20th and 21st century standards. I’m wondering how it affects relationship marketing for small businesses and entrepreneurs like you and me.

Here are some ideas …

Venomous and vicious – which is to say, potentially important. This election may influence everyday business reality for generations to come. It may engender revolution, ignite reaction, or reinforce an uneasy status quo.

In short, the 2016 election truly matters for small business persons and entrepreneurs, and consequently, the consultant Brock’s bullet points counsel complete and utter detachment from the election (for their maddening details, kindly fluff Louisville Business First by visiting its web site).

• Political sharing idea #1 — Politics shouldn’t mix with business
• Political sharing idea #2 — You’ve got more important things to do — like focus on business!
• Political sharing idea #3 — If you must share politics, do it in the right place
• Political sharing idea #4 — You can lose customers
• Political sharing idea #5 — Avoid politics in public

And who’s this guy again?

Terry Brock gives real-world, practical tips on how to generate revenue and increase productivity.

Not that 1Si's self-interested cadres care one jot, but my practical advice differs markedly. I generally advise small business persons and entrepreneurs to make an earnest effort to understand politics and elections, particularly at the local level, where it impacts them the most, and to actively participate in these exercises.

Concurrently, is there any valid excuse for squandering potentially productive work time by reading business-oriented publications?

Business writing should not ever be mixed with actual business. Don’t these business people have more important things to do than read -- you know, like focusing on their businesses?

---

In mid-rant, I was reminded of a passage in Dylon Jones’ remarkable profile of “The Independent” (that’s me) in the June, 2016 edition of Louisville Magazine.

The profile  -- as of 2019 it isn't accessible on-line, but Dylon told me he'll fix that -- is required reading for the likes of Terry Brock, Wendy Dant Chesser and Adam Dickey – but I digress all too readily.

Jones writes:

I have a conversation with someone at the (Bank Street Brewhouse) who threatens to hunt me down if I identify them. I could, but won’t. I don’t believe in “off the record,” especially not retroactively. But I do believe in letting certain wounds – whatever they may be – heal beyond public gaze.

“Did you get the part about how Roger destroyed his business?” they said. “No one from city hall comes here.”

Then: “Don’t quote me.”

“Well, who could I talk to about that?” I asked.

“Anyone on the street,” they said.

As Elton John once observed, it’s a sad, sad situation – and it’s getting more and more absurd. After all, if it’s true that "city hall" stopped coming to Bank Street Brewhouse, then I managed to achieve a cherished goal of Americans from coast to coast, for it means I personally saw to it that GOVERNMENT GOT OUT OF OUR LIVES.

You’d think I’d be paid handsomely for this, not basely insulted. If only I could bottle this government-free formula, and hastily sell it to AB-InBev; that’d get my face on the cover of a business publication, for sure.

---

It’s an unspeakably dreary landscape. There’s the professional business consulting class, recommending that entrepreneurs accustomed to taking fabulous risks – who’d never have gone into small business in the first place without standing tall for something – adopt generic, beige Pablum as a staple of their professional diets.

Then there’s the shrill claim that political extremism destroyed my own business, and that’s odd, because when I behaved exactly the same way for more than 15 years while standing atop a soap box situated behind the bar at Rich O’s, my behavior was edifying, entertaining and educational; probably an alcoholic Commie, though few seemed to mind.

Brock would be so proud of me: I helped generate revenue and increased productivity. We have medals for that, right?

And plaques?

However, there is a difference in scope between eras, and it is genuinely instructive. During the period of my nightly barside preaching at the Public House, subject matter typically pertained to national and international affairs.

There were opinions aplenty, but they were safe, in the sense that it’s a breeze to pontificate when lubricated, and there is no way to directly influence the outcome.

Because denouncing the Iranians from a barstool is easy. Repeating these words on a downtown Tehran street corner to their faces – well, that’s hard. Distance and liquidity enhance vehemence and courage.

And yet, if my university political science professor was right, and politics is all about the allocation of power … and if Tip O’Neill was right, and all politics is local … then for a local business, the allocation of local power is a critically important local variable, isn’t it?

Local political power structures play a huge role in determining business conditions and influencing business decisions, every day, throughout the year – don’t they?

And these local political power brokers live right here among us, right?

Theoretically, their proximity is as sweaty and direct as democracy gets. The grassroots can be no closer to you than the councilman residing two doors down. If a two-way street would lift your business, and yet it still runs in only one direction, then political power is being arrayed against you.

How does one hope to rectify the imbalance and fix the street without becoming part of the solution?

But no one from city hall comes here …

Perhaps their absence is a reflection on the prejudices of city hall, not the business or the proprietor, and their negligence is an abuse of political power, not its proper exercise.

Perhaps my political involvement has been grassroots-up, in reply to their top-down, because contrary to American default assumptions, self-defense still can exist apart from firearms.

Perhaps we can cure the mother of all illnesses right here at home, where it’s as close as it will ever be, but administering the needed medicine requires involvement and engagement, not cowering from a distance, head stuck in a business publication, pants around ankles.

1Si espouses unity on behalf of The Man, but I prefer unity in defiance of the Man. As citizen Franklin said, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

He was a good businessman, that Benny.

---

The preceding prompted a follow-up the very next day.

---

June 24, 2016: Business publications, and why I should know better than to tangle with an Over 50 Marketing Thought Leader. 

Yesterday my weekly column made reference to an Insider Louisville piece by Terry Brock, hastily assuming he was a local writer, but this is mistaken. He actually lives in Florida, and appears to be quite renowned.

I appreciate that Brock took the time to post a comment about my column, and of course I'd love to have a beer with him if he comes through town while on tour.

Terry Brock has left a new comment on your post:

ON THE AVENUES: There's no business like no business, and it's none of your business.

Brilliant piece, Roger! I love every word of it. Yes, I believe we need a separation of business and politics and businesses should focus on their business.

You raise some excellent points about local issues. That is important. For many of us, "local" is Planet Earth. We focus on issues that affect many and are tied together based more on values and aspirations than a defined piece of dirt where we happen to live currently.

Hey, I would *LOVE* to talk with you more about this. Sounds like these types of discussions would be best over some of that good craft beer you have up there in New Albany! For doing such an outstanding job on this piece, I owe you a nice beer, or other beverage of your choice!

Thanx for writing this. Simply brilliant, Roger! Keep up the good work!

Terry Brock - TerryBrock.com

Here's my most renowned contribution to business marketing. It's rather politicized, though only because I fully intended it to be that way.

---

Terry Brock and I never got together, unfortunately. My former business finally disgorged me in February of 2018, and City Hall currently is engaged in a great struggle to renew its pay and privileges for another four years. When Dylon posts the profile text, I'll link readers to it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have several "business publications" to ignore ... and adult beverages to consume.

---

Recent columns:

September 5: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to traditional Danish lunch in Copenhagen, September 1989.

August 29: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to "Pagan Life," a weekly column devoted to heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

August 22: ON THE AVENUES: The 32 most influential books in my life.

August 15: ON THE AVENUES: Breakfast is better with those gorgeous little herrings.

Paging Bill Hanson: It's called Report for America ... in part, addressing that pesky bit about holding elected officials accountable.

Not trying to bug you or anything, Bill. Maybe you can leave the cheerleaders be, check out Report for America and imagine the possibilities?

The crisis in journalism has become a crisis for our democracy.

Our mission: To strengthen our communities and our democracy through local journalism that is truthful, fearless, fair and smart.

Local coverage has been decimated. Residents no longer get the information they need to understand the critical issues facing their community, to make good decisions for their family, and hold elected officials accountable.

We need a new model — one that calls an emerging generation of journalists to service, reporting in under-covered corners of America.

Think City Year, Teach for America or Code for America for journalists — a public service program we call Report for America. The initiative deploys outstanding emerging journalists into newsrooms around the country to report on under-covered topics and communities. The model draws on successes of national and community service movements, as well as recent innovations in local news. An initiative of the nonprofit media organization, The GroundTruth Project, it is structured to harness the skill and idealism of an emerging group of journalists plus the creative spirit of local news organizations. RFA is NOT government funded. Rather, its unique structure and funding formula will dramatically expand the base of donors supporting local journalism.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones (2018).

Originally published on May 17, 2018. What's the turnout going to be for Tuesday's primary election? I've already made my choice: David White.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

"Might the accused gentlemen be prepared to admit their mistakes and publicly drag themselves and their politics through the mud, while at the same time admitting the strength of the Soviet state and the correctness of our collectivization strategy? That would be nice."
 -- Stalin, note to Molotov (1930)

It is my theory, one subjected to earnest consideration and reconsideration about as often as spike-helmeted insomniac Helmuth von Moltke habitually polished and revised the Schlieffen Plan – only for the meticulous German general to be foiled by mathematical equations pertaining to amassed railway logistics – that insofar as ordinary humans ever think much at all outside the limitations of their own corporeal and localized skins, they prefer fixing their gaze on faraway topics rather than the street where they live.

Except for potholes.

Everyone bitches about potholes.

Stated another way, apart from the minimum daily requirements of family, work and the perpetually horrible service at McDonald’s – and as God is my witness, I’ve never going to eat there, ever again – we’re at our most passionate and insistent when ranting and raving about matters over which we have little input, and most of the time absolutely no control whatever.

Let’s face it. There’ll be zero opportunity for most of us to quiz Kanye about his tweets, or personally threaten manufacturers of firearms. We have nothing to do with the outcome of basketball games unless we’re participating in them, and the royal couple of the moment isn’t aware of our existence.

On and on it goes, and we remain ordinary Joes, just plain schmucks, the 98% of us, and yet we’ll prattle forever about occurrences a million miles away from the front door, even as only 17% of registered voters in Floyd County bother offering their insight into purely local issues by voting in a primary election.

Now, I’m not here to argue with the unmistakable verdict of so many non-voters, who instinctively grasp that with 35 variations of Ranch dressing on Kroger’s shelves and only two hardwired political parties, there’s no sense in voting given the absence of any semblance of genuine choice.

What’s more, it’s all about the money, isn’t it?

Yes, it is about the money, which flows from our salad dressing selections, soft drink addictions and McDonald’s melancholy meals straight into the mouths of the engorged corporate wealth mongers hovering above us – but let’s not complicate the argument with pitchforks.

Non-voters merely reinforce the participatory conundrum, wherein anyone can walk outside at any time they like, risk arrest (or internet video notoriety) by filling potholes with arsenic-laced oatmeal, or better still, by painting phallic symbols around them, but almost no one does, and yet these same folks are quite positive they understand the inner workings of Donald Trump’s brain, having never once met the man.

Consequently, my latest variation on a theme: We’ll get involved locally only for so long as we’re spared responsibility for our opinions. In fact, the less we can do about anything, the better.

At the end of the day, perhaps it isn’t a bit counter-intuitive that so many people refrain from involvement in local political decision-making, because politics is about the distribution of power, and as such, there’ll be winners and losers.

When there are winners and losers, there’ll be arrogant triumphant pricks and downcast sad faces, sometimes accompanied by rancor, and these hard feelings can run deep – then without notice, the fellow who absolutely hates your guts turns the corner at neighborhood stop ‘n’ rob and comes face to face with you, right there by the rotisserie hot dogs.

And then what?

I’ll tell you what.

You remain true to your principles.

You indulge in meaningless pleasantries, smile and grin.

Then you return to the business at hand of calling out the villainous petty bastard, because even Trump himself once inhabited a venue smaller than the vast United States, and the grassroots remain the most relevant of laboratories.

The self-appointed community pillars detest you, eh?

Cool.

It’s how you know you’re on the right track.

---

As a non-swimmer who dove into the deep end just shy of 14 years ago and did my share of thrashing, at least until I learned to tread water by gathering a few stylistic chords into a floatation device and patrolling a corner of the pool, I’ve learned about the vacuous viciousness of big fish in small ponds.

Many, especially the ones gathered together into a governing clique of circled wagons fed by dependable rivulets of pay-to-play patronage for sustained beak wetting, don’t much like being questioned, challenged, or exposed to the cleansing properties of transparency.

That’s why they should be, and relentlessly.

They’re actually capable of incredible feats of creativity, although not unless the task at hand is evading questions, dismissing challenges, keeping the room dark, and exhibiting symptoms of junior high school snobbery – making a show of looking the other way on those rare occasions when they walk past you on the street (because their gas-guzzling, tinted-window sofas on wheels are so pricey and comfy, and besides, don't you have a car?), removing your address from an e-mail list or slapping your back a little too forcefully when exaggeratedly feigning a display of good-old-boyness that might easily be mistaken for deep-seated anger issues.

That’s why you keep at it.

It’s why you don’t quit.

Their greed and clannish bad behavior is predicated on power, entirely insignificant on a global scale, but all the more annoying here on the flood plain owing to the sad absence of both humility and gravitas.

We just keep digging.

Our motivation is based on principles like fair play, justice and equality of opportunity. We can’t wait for these to trickle down from above, but must do what we can to expand them, right here … right now.

Allow me to state this clearly and with the utmost force, because in the city of New Albany, the major obstacles to progress are DemoDisneyDixiecrats in the lamentable habit of viewing their multi-salaried chief campaign finance accumulator, Mayor Jeff Gahan, as the most glorious of all Great White Hopes.

It’s absurd, and it's a viewpoint of jaundiced self-delusion, one that this blog will continue to contest, disprove and oppose. Perhaps there’ll come a time when the administration’s abundantly burgeoning bad karma coagulates into a massive sewer fatberg and explodes into the faces of the poseurs.

That would be nice.

So-called Democrats, if you’re tolerating in New Albany what you’re decrying elsewhere, then the looting clique isn’t to blame. Rather, you’re the hypocrite, and it’s YOUR problem to resolve – and honesty’s always a good place to begin if you’re serious about supporting a civil society.

---

Old dogs can learn new tricks, but zebras assuredly cannot erase their stripes. I’m entering a phase of my life where there’ll be less time to devote to the blog, even if my dander remains at highest-alert dudgeon.

I’m not going away, and neither is this soap box. The more they ignore us, the closer we get – and stealth is a many and varied treasure, capable of being molded into numerous tools.

"After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it."-- Ernest Hemingway, from "Death in the Afternoon"

However, I could use some help, so consider this another in a series of requests to become a part of the written, expository resistance effort.

Please consider submissions to NA Confidential. You needn’t be a polished professional writer to be eligible for inclusion, because I’m certainly not. I can help you state your case, acting as an editor and advisor.

In terms of editorial thrust, longtime readers know I’m a contrarian progressive socialist, a misplaced European who values books, a disgruntled former everything and a hopeful future something. If you’ve read this far today, you know exactly where I stand going into the 2019 municipal election cycle.

However, opposing points of view are welcome. I’ve always read them myself, and still do.

What I will not do apart from rare occasions of Facebook-impelled intellectual rabies – and conceding this blog’s identity policy (anonymity only under strictly defined circumstance – is to block, ignore, silence and disenfranchise you from expressing your point of view.

It’s what some of Team Gahan’s and the Democratic Party’s bootlicking functionaries have done and continue to do to us, so to hell with all that.

Let’s see if we can level this playing field a tad. Take away their money, and what have they got?

Nothing, that’s what.

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Recent columns:

May 5: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader soon will be going away, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

May 3: horse-race-rehash-sadly.html">ON THE AVENUES HORSE RACE REHASH: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

April 30: ON THE AVENUES: Greg Pennell tells his story.

April 23: ON THE AVENUES: Gehenna, Franklin Graham, Jean-Paul Sartre and Fred Astaire lead us straight to Hell.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Amid Deaf Gahan's "victory" over grassroots activists at Colonial Manor, the toxic paranoia is no less rancid.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: It's time for a change, and David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Donnie Blevins tells his story.

These seven important things about the government shutdown -- and look, not one of them has to do with Covington Catholic High School.

The federal government shutdown has brought the dysfunction of American civilization right to our doorsteps, and yet we've spent the past few days screaming at one another about Catholic school students in DC.

Maybe our Pavlovian reactions to social media prompts are the problem, not the solution. Localism is my mantra, and while defining it hasn't always been easy, to me it comes down to paying attention locally.

How does our local habitat work, and can it work in a more human way?

What's happening outside our front doors and in our own communities?

What can we do at the grassroots level to make life here fairer, better and more equitable?

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse as it pertains to localism. The medium is capable of ready use in reaching numerous households with matters of local importance, but just as often serves as an impediment by monopolizing attention spans over a plethora of national and international issues both fake and real, none of which tend to be capable of addressing by direct grassroots action.

In the sense of ancient Rome, bread and circuses: "A diet of entertainment or political policies on which the masses are fed to keep them happy and docile."

Or in our times, increasingly unhappy, angry and feeling pinned down.

I haven't watched any of the videos documenting the MAGA/Native American molehill. I've read none of the commentaries, screechings and tub-thumpings. Rather, I've been viewing the local scene these past few weeks, and noticing the shutdown becoming increasingly divisive -- and why wouldn't it be?

Since time began, the powerful seek to maintain their privilege by dividing the populace; we're already losing our grip on reality, so why not a few more coffin nails? The article below adroitly surveys the situation, most aspects of which are being ignored as we prepare for the arduous demands of the 10-year challenge on Facebook, or the next student field trip outrage.

As for the government workers being held hostage by the two-party system, it's a siege. If you're feeling bad because you've played no role and done nothing to help them, here's an idea: Do something to help them.

Occam's razor and all; the simplest explanation usually is the best.

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Time for the U.S. Yellow Vests, by Paul Street (CounterPunch)

Here are seven things you won’t hear much if anything about in the reigning corporate media regarding the ongoing record-setting partial shutdown of the United States federal government:

1: The Longstanding Neoliberal War on “Big Government”: a proper understanding of the shutdown in relation to the longstanding capitalist project of what the leading corporate-neoliberal champion Grover Norquist called “starving the beast,” with “beast” taken to mean “big government.” Norquist wanted, he said, “to cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Now might be a good time to recall how Trump’s former top political adviser the faux-populist Steve Bannon (with whom Trump certainly still regularly speaks) described his main policy goal when speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February of 2017: “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Bannon once proudly told an academic: “I am a Leninist.” Bannon said that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too.”

Is the current shut-down not an exercise in “administrate state deconstruction” – something right out of the faux-libertarian (more on why I use that term in my next comment) fever dreams of a Norquist, a Bannon, a Charles Koch, a James McGill Buchanan, a Milton Friedman and others of their right wing and so-called free-market ilk? The orange monstrosity says the shut-down could “go on for years.” You can be sure that capitalist politico and ideologues in the Norquist and Bannon mode are hoping the shut-down can last as long as possible with no clear reported disasters resulting. This will help them advance their “drowning” project. “See?” they can proclaim, as former federal employees work for reduced wages at grocery stores and shopping malls, “we don’t really need this big monstrous and totalitarian government after all. All hail the free market!”

2: On the “Left Hand of the State,” That is: any serious discussion of which parts of government are really targeted by right-wing neoliberal “Leninists” like Norquist and Bannon. Beneath their anti-statist discourse about the great conflict between “government bureaucracy” (bad) and the “free market” (good), they wish to aggressively wield state policy of a specifically regressive, plutocratic, and authoritarian — state capitalist — sort. They don’t really want to destroy the state. They want to de-fund and de-legitimize what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state”— the programs and services won by past popular struggles and social movements for social justice, equality, environmental protection, and the common good. They do not wish to axe the “right hand of the state” – the parts that provide service and welfare to concentrated wealth and dole out punishment (including rampant mass incarceration and felony-marking) for the poor (and right-handed social-control functions tend to rise when left-handed ones fall). They do not go after America’s Pentagon system, a great cost-plus subsidy for high-tech corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing.

It’s not about whether the state should work or exist. It’s about who government should work for: the public and the working-class majority or leading centers of concentrated wealth and power.

3: The Bipartisan Terror of Neoliberalism: how richly complicit the contemporary Democratic Party is in the ugly and regressive neoliberal project. The 2018-19 lockout may be primarily owned by Trump and the Republicans (as MSNBC will tell you again and again) but (as “MSDNC” will not report) the Democrats have participated in the assault on positive government functions across the whole long neoliberal era.

The deregulation of corporations rose dramatically under the Jimmy Carter presidency. It was the arch-neoliberal president Bill Clinton who proudly proclaimed that “the era of big government is over” and then signed off on ending poor families’ entitlement to federal cash assistance while advancing racist mass-incarceration (a government program) with his “three strikes” bill. Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a new continental bill of regulation-free rights for global investment capital. He also worked on to work with Republicans to de-regulate derivatives and the financial sector more broadly. Giant Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets – a massive taxpayer windful for corporate war masters – remained the rule under Clinton despite the collapse of the only other planetary “super power” (the Soviet Union) right before the beginning of Clinton’s presidency.

Bill Clinton was a masterful, silver-tongued fake-progressive champion of the U.S. bourgeois state’s movement from left- to right-handed state power when it comes to enforcing social control on the victims of the nation’s intertwined regimes of class rule and racial oppression. So, of course, was Obama, whose richly right-handed neoliberal and imperial policy record I have detailed on numerous prior occasions here and in other venues.

4: Wall Street Dems for the Wall: how key Democrats like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senator Minority Leader Charles Schumer have in the past supported border fencing. All three voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, and all three supported the 2013 Senate immigration overhaul that passed the Senate, which called for tougher border security including additional physical barrier construction. As Oliver Ortega noted on Counterpunch two years ago, the border wall was a bipartisan project before it became a partisan football under Trump:

“When President Trump signed an executive order last week to complete a wall along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, he was building on decades of bipartisan consensus among lawmakers…In fact, Congress had already approved a border wall not too long ago. In 2006, legislators—including many Democrats—passed the Secure Fence Act, which called for 700 miles of double-fence construction along certain stretches of the border. Trump cited the Bush-era law in the first paragraph of the executive order he signed Wednesday as rationale for his executive authority to order a wall be built.

“Many of the same Democratic leaders now bemoaning Trump’s wall voted for one at the time— Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein….Then-Senator Barack Obama, who as President would later deport a record-high 3 million people during his two terms, lauded the bill on the Senate floor, saying it would ‘help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.’”

And let’s not forget Bill Clinton’s critical wall-building activities in anticipation of heightened Mexican in-migration expected to result from NAFTA’s decimation of Mexican farmers. As Ortega noted:

“The most pivotal moments in the militarization of the border arguably took place during the time of Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. ‘Operation Gatekeeper,’ passed in 1994, poured billions of dollars into border security. High-intensity stadium lights, motion detectors, and remote video surveillance were installed along key points of the U.S-Mexico divide, and the amount of border patrol agents was increased by roughly a third. With resources deployed to patrol densely populated sectors, undocumented immigrants were often forced to trek barren desert and mountains. Thousands died in their quest for a better life. ‘We will not surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,’ President Clinton said at the time.”

“It’s no coincidence that Operation Gatekeeper followed another landmark in US-Mexico relations that same year: the North American Free Trade Agreement. Under NAFTA, Big Ag flooded the Mexican market with heavily-subsidized corn and other staples, displacing small farmers in Mexico in one of the greatest neoliberal coups in history. The result was a flood of immigrants heading northbound in search of opportunities, accelerating one of the largest mass movements of people in history.”

“In short, the U.S. government, acting in the service of corporate profits, caused the very mass migration it has spent the last 25 years trying to keep out and criminalize.”

5: The Authoritarian Idiocy of Our Holy Constitution, crafted to prevent popular sovereignty in the time of the French Bourbon monarchy: how the manifestly un- and even anti-democratic U.S. Constitution empowers the right-wing-led assault on positive federal government functions by absurdly over-representing the nation’s disproportionately white rural “red” (Republican) states in the presidential selection process and in the composition of the U.S.Senate. We hear nothing about how the Constitution helps feed the partisan polarization that lay behind the current government shutdown by enabling states to create House of Representatives districts so badly gerrymandered on partisan lines that right-wing extremists in Republican districts can exercise political influence far beyond their numbers. And we hear little if anything about how the Constitutional system of “checks and balances” is prone to crippling gridlock when its separate components are controlled by different and conflicting, mutually hostile parties (the Constitution’s framers thought they had avoided this flaw because they foolishly believed or claimed to believe that they had created a scheme that would prevent the emergence of political parties).

6: The Need for a Popular Intervention Beneath and Beyond the Masters’ Election Cycle. The Gilets Jaunes (“yellow vests”) in France have given us a taste of what’s required. Among their list of demands is a real and functioning democracy—popular self-rule. Further to that, they have called for a referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French Parliament to debate and vote on a given law within one year. Evoking the French Revolution of 1789, there have even been calls for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution meant to create a new French government—a Sixth Republic based on popular sovereignty and majority rule rather than the demands of a de facto corporate-financial dictatorship. Imagine!

The yellow vests have no illusions that their nation’s reigning elite-controlled political parties and time-staggered election cycle offer anything remotely like substantive popular and democratic input on the making of policy. They have already forced the repeal of a regressive fuel tax and are fighting effectively every day and in the streets for things supported by the majority of the French populace.

We, like the French, get to vote every few years? So what? Mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, as the latest and best political science definitely shows, “government policy…reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office” The notion that “we the people” are supposed to sit around with glazed eyes captivated by the endless RussiaGate drama and the already-underway two-year build-up to the next quadrennial electoral extravaganza (U.S. cable news is already obsessing over the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate field when it isn’t panting over crumb of Mueller-Trump-Russia news) while hundreds of thousands of “our” government’s workers go unpaid and key positive government functions are disabled in the present is preposterous from any kind of remotely democratic perspective.

7: The Potency of Direct Action. As the venerable left writer Barbara Ehrenreich recently Tweeted: “The shutdown would come to a sudden end if airport workers stop working and shut down air travel. Business, aka capitalism, cannot function if its minions are all floating in the stratosphere or fattening themselves at Cinnabon. The whole thing should take no more than 3 hours.”

That’s a bit too simple, perhaps. TSA workers lack the legal right to strike and are likely afraid of losing their jobs and the back pay that is due them if they walk off their jobs. Still, the basic direct-action point is sound. Hiring replacement airport screeners for no pay would be no small problem for the federal government. The TSA workers would get strong public support for refusing to work without pay – support that might be modeled on the remarkable airport mobilizations that protested Trump’s Muslim travel ban in early 2017. And what if the airline pilots walked off their jobs, reasonably refusing to fly planes under the unsafe conditions created by the non-payment of air-traffic controllers?

It’s not for nothing that the remarkable Gilet Jaunes struggle and story has been essentially blacked out in U.S. corporate media.

The time has come for direct worker and citizen action against the insane federal shut-down. Since I’m referencing Twitter, let me give the last word to an excellent and dead-on Tweet from the left economist Richard Wolff: “Where are the US ‘yellow vests’ to protest gov’t shutdown and the wall? Millions would sympathize, mobilize. The movement could grow, win demands, and expand just as in France.”

"Death to Chain Restaurants!!" -- in which Lew Bryson's pioneering essay is joyfully reprised.

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.
--Arnold Toynbee, historian (1889-1975)

There was a time when I'd always point to Lew Bryson's pioneering essay as my inspiration for the "Death to Chains" mantra.  It's been more than a decade since Lew wrote this stirring call to arms, and at some point I stopped giving him a bow, but let's give credit where credit's due.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lew Bryson breaks it down: Follow. The. Money. -- and reject monoculture.

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Death to Chain Restaurants!!

Applebee's: A sign that the End Times are near.

I used to grab a burger lunch at McDonald's frequently, two or three times a week. That's frequently for me; I like to cook and I'm too cheap to go out much. I'd take the family to Chi Chi's and Red Lobster and Pizza Hut and never think twice about it.

Then I interviewed Don Feinberg, half of the brains behind Brewery Ommegang and beer importers Vanberg & De Wulf. Don walked me all over Ommegang's territory by the Susquehanna River in upstate New York, took me on a wild brewery tour, and fed me local apples and cheese sliced with a pocketknife while we sampled his delicious beers outside in a beautiful summer's day. Then he gave me a ride into Cooperstown and started talking about monoculture.

Monoculture

"The real problem," he said, "and this is politics, not just beer, it’s monoculture versus diversity. That's what we are fighting the fight for, for good beer and for better food against McDonald’s and Monsanto.

"Look, monoculture actually means two things," he said, waving one arm wildly as he navigated the small road. "It means a lack of diversity. We’re only here for 60, 70, 80 years, I’d like to try as many things as I can, with as many peoples’ input, creativity, and fulfillment expressed as possible. The other thing: 99 times out of 100, you’re not giving me one choice because it’s better for me. It’s because it’s better for you.

"Having said that," he said, calming a bit, "the reason monoculture is so successful in the world is because it’s predictable, and predictability leads to efficiency, and efficiency leads to profitability, and that leads people to get involved in it.

The Seductive Key: It's Easier

"Why did everyone in America in the 1950s want to have a franchise for McDonald’s?" He posed the question, and here was the nut that would knock my noggin and make me realize exactly why chain restaurants are a blight upon our land.

"Because the chances of you coming up with an idea for a restaurant that would be that successful… there aren’t that many creative people. It was easier for you to take this person’s formula and make money off of it, and most of us have to pay the rent and put the kids through college. So it’s easier to adapt things, especially if what you’re adapting has proven to be successful.

"Monoculture is very powerful," he said in conclusion. "But powerful and better are not always the same thing."

No Chains On Me

I stepped out of that car a changed man. Today I shun McDonald's and chain restaurants -- not entirely, because sometimes it's all you got -- and go out of my way to try new local places, wherever I am. It's one of the reasons I love upstate PA and NY; lots of local eateries and stores left up there, and out on Long Island, too.

I get questions about that, and I've got some answers.

Do all chains suck?
No! John Harvard's Brew House doesn't suck, Rock Bottom (despite what beer snobs say) emphatically doesn't suck. Regional chains like Quaker Steak & Lube don't suck. Why? Because they all allow their local operations a lot of flexibility. They don't always impose a menu, a beer list, or (most importantly) suppliers. Besides, when does an expansion become a chain? When the second place opens? The fourth? The tenth? It's like pornography: I know it when I see it.

If local people own a franchise restaurant, isn't that a local business?
Yeah, like a Toyota made in Indiana is an American car. Follow the money. Money's leaving the area, and what comes in? Orders, ideas, and supplies. Headquarters doesn't care about supporting local suppliers, or serving local beers, or making allowances for regional tastes.

Why is a successful chain restaurant bad for my town?
Because it sucks up loan money that local, unique businesses could be using. A banker will always loan money to a guy with a chain restaurant franchise over a guy with a new idea: the chain idea is safe, proven, and bankable. It's also boring, leveling, and is never going to make your town a destination. Sure, it's convenient, it's popular, it's reliable. But what kind of great new food is going to come from a place that gets its potatoes pre-peeled and pre-sliced in 100 lb. plastic bags from a depot 500 miles away? Will people from far away come to your town, shop in the other stores in your town, and tell other people where they live to go to your town...because of your local Ruby Tuesday's? No, but I've done all of that for the Miss Albany Diner in Albany, NY, and it's worth the trip.

Eat Local

So the next time you're away from home, don't do that stupid, cow-consistent thing and go to Applebee's, Shoney's, Denny's, or Wendy's! Take just a little more time and ask around till you find a place, a local place, a one of a kind place. Chances are good that you'll get lucky and find a place like the Academy Dinor in Erie, and you won't find bumbleberry pie at Applebee's!

Needless to say, this goes for beer, too. Chains hardly ever carry any decent beer, and when they do, they don't know a damned thing about it. Local chains are often exceptions, of course, like The Winking Lizard's outstanding beer program in Cleveland. I'd still stack Augusta's Winking Judge in Hamilton, ON up against the Winking Lizard, though! (And you can find some outstandingly fantastic local foods at the Hamilton Farmer's Market.)

It never ends, the quest for the rare, the local, the different, the best. "Powerful and better are not always the same thing." Reject the chains, and make your life more exciting at every turn.

ON THE AVENUES: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones.

ON THE AVENUES: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

"Might the accused gentlemen be prepared to admit their mistakes and publicly drag themselves and their politics through the mud, while at the same time admitting the strength of the Soviet state and the correctness of our collectivization strategy? That would be nice."
 -- Stalin, note to Molotov (1930)

It is my theory, one subjected to earnest consideration and reconsideration about as often as spike-helmeted insomniac Helmuth von Moltke habitually polished and revised the Schlieffen Plan – only for the meticulous German general to be foiled by mathematical equations pertaining to amassed railway logistics – that insofar as ordinary humans ever think much at all outside the limitations of their own corporeal and localized skins, they prefer fixing their gaze on faraway topics rather than the street where they live.

Except for potholes.

Everyone bitches about potholes.

Stated another way, apart from the minimum daily requirements of family, work and the perpetually horrible service at McDonald’s – and as God is my witness, I’ve never going to eat there, ever again – we’re at our most passionate and insistent when ranting and raving about matters over which we have little input, and most of the time absolutely no control whatever.

Let’s face it. There’ll be zero opportunity for most of us to quiz Kanye about his tweets, or personally threaten manufacturers of firearms. We have nothing to do with the outcome of basketball games unless we’re participating in them, and the royal couple of the moment isn’t aware of our existence.

On and on it goes, and we remain ordinary Joes, just plain schmucks, the 98% of us, and yet we’ll prattle forever about occurrences a million miles away from the front door, even as only 17% of registered voters in Floyd County bother offering their insight into purely local issues by voting in a primary election.

Now, I’m not here to argue with the unmistakable verdict of so many non-voters, who instinctively grasp that with 35 variations of Ranch dressing on Kroger’s shelves and only two hardwired political parties, there’s no sense in voting given the absence of any semblance of genuine choice.

What’s more, it’s all about the money, isn’t it?

Yes, it is about the money, which flows from our salad dressing selections, soft drink addictions and McDonald’s melancholy meals straight into the mouths of the engorged corporate wealth mongers hovering above us – but let’s not complicate the argument with pitchforks.

Non-voters merely reinforce the participatory conundrum, wherein anyone can walk outside at any time they like, risk arrest (or internet video notoriety) by filling potholes with arsenic-laced oatmeal, or better still, by painting phallic symbols around them, but almost no one does, and yet these same folks are quite positive they understand the inner workings of Donald Trump’s brain, having never once met the man.

Consequently, my latest variation on a theme: We’ll get involved locally only for so long as we’re spared responsibility for our opinions. In fact, the less we can do about anything, the better.

At the end of the day, perhaps it isn’t a bit counter-intuitive that so many people refrain from involvement in local political decision-making, because politics is about the distribution of power, and as such, there’ll be winners and losers.

When there are winners and losers, there’ll be arrogant triumphant pricks and downcast sad faces, sometimes accompanied by rancor, and these hard feelings can run deep – then without notice, the fellow who absolutely hates your guts turns the corner at neighborhood stop ‘n’ rob and comes face to face with you, right there by the rotisserie hot dogs.

And then what?

I’ll tell you what.

You remain true to your principles.

You indulge in meaningless pleasantries, smile and grin.

Then you return to the business at hand of calling out the villainous petty bastard, because even Trump himself once inhabited a venue smaller than the vast United States, and the grassroots remain the most relevant of laboratories.

The self-appointed community pillars detest you, eh?

Cool.

It’s how you know you’re on the right track.

---

As a non-swimmer who dove into the deep end just shy of 14 years ago and did my share of thrashing, at least until I learned to tread water by gathering a few stylistic chords into a floatation device and patrolling a corner of the pool, I’ve learned about the vacuous viciousness of big fish in small ponds.

Many, especially the ones gathered together into a governing clique of circled wagons fed by dependable rivulets of pay-to-play for sustained beak wetting, don’t much like being questioned, challenged, or exposed to the cleansing properties of transparency.

That’s why they should be, and relentlessly.

They’re actually capable of incredible feats of creativity, although not unless the task at hand is evading questions, dismissing challenges, keeping the room dark, and exhibiting symptoms of junior high school snobbery – making a show of looking the other way on those rare occasions when they walk past you on the street (because their gas-guzzling, tinted-window sofas on wheels are so pricey and comfy, and besides, don't you have a car?), removing your address from an e-mail list or slapping your back a little too forcefully when exaggeratedly feigning a display of good-old-boyness that might easily be mistaken for deep-seated anger issues.

That’s why you keep at it.

It’s why you don’t quit.

Their greed and clannish bad behavior is predicated on power, entirely insignificant on a global scale, but all the more annoying here on the flood plain owing to the sad absence of both humility and gravitas.

We just keep digging. Our motivation is based on principles like fair play, justice and equality of opportunity. We can’t wait for these to trickle down from above, but must do what we can to expand them, right here … right now.

Allow me to state this clearly and with the utmost force, because in the city of New Albany, the major obstacles to progress are DemoDisneyDixiecrats in the lamentable habit of viewing their multi-salaried chief campaign finance accumulator, Mayor Jeff Gahan, as the most glorious of all Great White Hopes.

It’s absurd, and it's a viewpoint of jaundiced self-delusion, one that this blog will continue to contest, disprove and oppose. Perhaps there’ll come a time when the administration’s abundantly burgeoning bad karma coagulates into a massive sewer fatberg and explodes into the faces of the poseurs.

That would be nice.

So-called Democrats, if you’re tolerating in New Albany what you’re decrying elsewhere, then the looting clique isn’t to blame. Rather, you’re the hypocrite, and it’s YOUR problem to resolve – and honesty’s always a good place to begin if you’re serious about supporting a civil society.

---

Old dogs can learn new tricks, but zebras assuredly cannot erase their stripes. I’m entering a phase of my life where there’ll be less time to devote to the blog, even if my dander remains at highest-alert dudgeon.

I’m not going away, and neither is this soap box. The more they ignore us, the closer we get – and stealth is a many and varied treasure, capable of being molded into numerous tools.

"After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it."-- Ernest Hemingway, from "Death in the Afternoon"

However, I could use some help, so consider this another in a series of requests to become a part of the written, expository resistance effort.

Please consider submissions to NA Confidential. You needn’t be a polished professional writer to be eligible for inclusion, because I’m certainly not. I can help you state your case, acting as an editor and advisor.

In terms of editorial thrust, longtime readers know I’m a contrarian progressive socialist, a misplaced European who values books, a disgruntled former everything and a hopeful future something. If you’ve read this far today, you know exactly where I stand going into the 2019 municipal election cycle.

However, opposing points of view are welcome. I’ve always read them myself, and still do.

What I will not do apart from rare occasions of Facebook-impelled intellectual rabies – and conceding this blog’s identity policy (anonymity only under strictly defined circumstance – is to block, ignore, silence and disenfranchise you from expressing your point of view.

It’s what some of Team Gahan’s and the Democratic Party’s bootlicking functionaries have done and continue to do to us, so to hell with all that.

Let’s see if we can level this playing field a tad. Take away their money, and what have they got?

Nothing, that’s what.

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Recent columns:

May 10: ON THE AVENUES: Seeing is believing.

May 3: ON THE AVENUES: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

April 26: ON THE AVENUES: The wonder years.

April 19: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader is here to stay, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

"I know a place where your voice really matters and where your opinions and actions can make a definite impact: your own neighborhood."

It was a bizarre dream.

I was having breakfast at Daisy's with 15 Republicans, a lone European-style Social Democrat (read: independent) amid the Floyd County GOP.

They were talking about local issues, only briefly touching on wider Indiana state matters and with not mention of national or international affairs.

In this dream, I was aware of a certain uneasy caution, because in all likelihood their political ideologies and chosen candidates for state and national office were sure to differ radically from my own.

What struck me was the knowledge that for so long as the discussion remained centered on local problems and solutions, differences seemed less pronounced than similarities.

When I awoke, my first task was to find a toothpick, as there seemed to be a shard of bacon lodged in my teeth.

I'm neither stupid nor naive, but rather increasingly determined to remain non-aligned, capable of speaking with whomever I please for so long as the conversation makes sense to me.

Keeping it local tends to aid and abet this objective, and since so many local Democrats are unwilling or unable to converse with me about local topics, I've no compunction about having intelligent chats with those non-Democrats who will. It is of little concern to me who they are or which clique they belong to.

Rachel Quednau wrote these words months before the current tax "reform" measures -- which I oppose, for what's it's worth. I feel the way I always have: peel back the layers, strip away the dross. Life's all about the haves versus the have nots.

There's probably a Bible verse to this effect, though as you know, I'm an atheist.

I know full well that a spruced up public space in my neighborhood isn’t going to solve America’s immigration problems or infrastructure crisis. It’s not even going to solve the problems of poverty and crime in my city. But it's not worthless. And it's activism on a scale that everyone is capable of and equipped with the tools to do.

We ought not to let the immenseness of the problems facing our nation paralyze us into inaction. Yes, there is work we can do to change national politics, but there is also so much work to be done close to home, and we have a much better chance at getting it right. Whether that's work on immigration issues that impact your community or on a small public space that might make your neighborhood a more pleasant place, keep your eyes open for what needs to be done and don't wait for someone else to do it for you.

There you have it.

I'll do what I can, as I can, when I can. I possess my own indie social democratic principles, and I'll apply them to the local realm, because in spite of everything, my immediate vicinity remains the place where my efforts will be devoted. I'll push for little pockets of sanity, and hope they grow. Trump won't ever hear my voice; Gahan has already.

If a Republican can be of assistance, great. If it's a Democrat, fine. Beyond this, it's impossible to predict the future. I don't know why I feel compelled to share these thoughts. Perhaps it's necessary to re-declare independence from time to time.

Now, back to pub planning.

FRUSTRATED BY NATIONAL POLITICS? IT'S TIME TO THINK LOCAL, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

 ... I know a place where your voice really matters and where your opinions and actions can make a definite impact: your own neighborhood.

At the beginning of 2017, I wrote about how renters can be neighborhood advocates, in spite of some of the unique challenges that come with trying to have a voice in your community when you’re not a homeowner. I offered some advice and shared some from friend and member of Strong Towns, Michael McGinn. I’ve been doing my best to live by that advice for the past few months.

This Tuesday, for example, I went to a community forum discussing local businesses, public safety and public space. It was incredibly refreshing to sit in a room full of people who care after a day spent glancing at social media posts from people who feel the need to shout loudly that they care, and spend far less time actually showing their care. At this meeting, we listened to a representative from our neighborhood association talk about business closures and openings (four long-standing businesses sadly departed from our commercial street this year, but two new ones have already filled their spaces!). We heard a brief report from our alderman about traffic safety at problematic intersections and streets, and thanked him for taking our questions. I even got the chance to check up on the status of a traffic study about the one-way streets that I’d like to see turned to two-ways and saw a majority of the people in the room express their agreement about the necessity of this change.

We concluded the meeting with an extended discussion about a small strip of green space next to sixty odd yards of bike/walk path that connects two streets in our neighborhood, led by an architect who’s been working to redesign the space to be more inviting. I couldn’t help but mentally step back and reflect on the fact that, here was a group of 25 or 35 people listening attentively and seriously discussing a 50’ x 200’ strip of land for the better part of thirty minutes. Maybe that sounds like a waste of time to you. But it doesn’t to me ...