12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 8): The Kingdom of the Zlatorog.

This digression is launched by memories of a beer from Slovenia called Laško Zlatorog

I remember the beer from my visit to Yugoslavia in 1987, and it might once have been available in America on a sporadic basis, maybe even now. The bottles I remember were the old chunky half-liters with brown glass, not this sleek modern version.

However it never occurred to me to learn what "zlatorog" means, so in order to explain, observe that Bled in Slovenia, where we're spent the weekend, lies just a few miles from Triglav National Park which Lonely Planet describes:

Triglav National Park (Triglavski Narodni Park; commonly abbreviated as TNP), with an area of 840 sq km (over 4% of Slovenian territory), is one of the largest national reserves in Europe. It is a pristine, visually spectacular world of rocky mountains – the centrepiece of which is Mt Triglav (2864m), the country's highest peak – as well as river gorges, ravines, lakes, canyons, caves, rivers, waterfalls, forests and Alpine meadows.

Hence, the Zlatorog, or Golden Horn.

Enter the Kingdom of the Zlatorog

One of Slovenia’s best-known legends tells of a golden-horned chamois who reigned over the Julian Alps. Enter his kingdom and search for his greatest treasures, which lie hidden in Triglav National Park and its surroundings.

Wikipedia summarizes the story of the Zlatorog, as recorded in 1868 by the writer Karl Deschmann.

Goldhorn's golden horns were the key to a treasure hidden in the mountains around Triglav. A young and brave hunter from the Trenta Valley fell in love with a beautiful girl and managed to win her heart by bringing her beautiful flowers. However, one day, a rich merchant from Venice came by and tried to gain her attention by giving her golden jewelery and dancing with her. As the hunter approached the girl, she mocked him. The hunter was desperate and left. Persuaded by another hunter, called the green hunter, who was said to have brought about the fate of several honest boys, he decided to go that very night to find Goldhorn and claim his treasure. In the morning, they found the animal, shot it, and pursued it. The dying animal dragged itself onto a narrow, rocky ledge. Suddenly the boy saw on a dangerous trail the most beautiful and healing flowers. The green hunter forced him on to catch the Goldhorn before it ate the magic Triglav flowers that grew from its blood, but it was too late. The Goldhorn had already eaten one and the flower gave it tremendous life power. It ran towards the hunter, who being blinded by the bliss of its golden horns, lost balance and fell from the mountain. The river Soča brought his corpse to the vale.

I'll let you know if we found one -- the mythological white chamois buck, not the beer; I'm fairly confident of the ubiquity of the latter.

COMMENTARY: Deaf Gahan mentioned "opioid crisis" in a press release, but this probably doesn't mean what you think it does, so let's clear it up.

It seemed like big news earlier this week, but with a wee bit of scrutiny, the spiel is exposed as more of the same New Gahanian institutional flatulence.

Three years after Southern Indiana's opioid crisis exploded into widespread consciousness, both here and throughout the nation ...

(Austin, Indiana) is a tiny place, covering just two and a half square miles of the sliver of land that comprises Scott County. An incredible proportion of its 4,100 population — up to an estimated 500 people — are shooting up. It was here, starting in December 2014, that the single largest HIV outbreak in US history took place. Austin went from having no more than three cases per year to 180 in 2015, a prevalence rate close to that seen in sub-Saharan Africa.*

 ... Jeff Gahan finally referenced the issue publicly, for attribution. Upon closer examination, however, it appears that Gahan said nothing at all of substance.

Gahan piggybacked the opioid topic only after Mike Moore broached it at the press conference announcing a lawsuit against distributors, one clearly impelled and initiated by Jeffersonville, not New Albany.

He hitched his "unwoke" consciousness to the usual preferred study grants, After all, how else to properly monetize opioid addiction to serve the cause of campaign finance?

And, he showed no signs that he believes addiction is a problem right here in New Albany.

Note the Jeffersonville- and Moore-centric tone of local chain newspaper coverage. In fact, the reporter Beilman's initial "breaking news" tweets didn't mention New Albany's participation in the lawsuit. This news came later.

Jeffersonville, New Albany to sue opioid distributors over 'broken homes, families torn apart', by Elizabeth Beilman (Chain Newspaper)

Three multi-billion distributors targeted in federal suit

The cities of Jeffersonville and New Albany are taking on multi-billion dollar wholesale pharmaceutical distributors that officials claim are responsible for proliferating the opioid addiction crisis in their communities.

Jeffersonville Mayor Mike Moore announced at a Wednesday morning news conference that the city is filing a lawsuit against AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson Corp.

Impressive. Jeffersonville's mayor actually spoke publicly in a room with people present. Perhaps Moore doesn't suffer from a personality disorder.

Seemingly as an afterthought following Moore's explanation, Gahan's thoughts are recorded, via the same old ritualistic bunker news release quote.

New Albany announced later in the day that it is joining a lawsuit against these same distributors.

New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan attended the Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Symposium in Indianapolis this week, participating in workshops and hearing from speakers from a variety of professions.

"The opioid crisis is spreading to communities across the nation, and we all need to be more active in learning about what we can do to prevent opioid addiction," Gahan stated in a news release.

New Albany has applied for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor's Challenge grant, which focuses on early education and what communities can do to fight the opioid crisis.

As Beilman attributes, New Albany's copycat case is lifted directly from Gahan's agoraphobic propaganda generator, deployed in the absence of a living human being willing to tackle a genuinely vital issue.

Perhaps mayoral stand-in Mike Hall was ill, or at lunch.

Mayor Gahan Joins Lawsuit Against Wholesale Opioid Distributors

Mayor Gahan joins others in a lawsuit against wholesale opioid distributors, which have helped spread the opioid addiction crisis.

“The opioid crisis is spreading to communities across the nation, and we all need to be more active in learning about what we can do to prevent opioid addiction,” stated Mayor Gahan.

Earlier this week, Mayor Gahan attended the 8th Annual Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Symposium in Indianapolis ...

Profiles in courage, eh?

In essence, other people have an opioid problem -- we'll study it a bit longer, and let someone else pay the lawyers. But I suspect Gahan is harboring deeper conniving on this matter, as tutored by Breitbart and Bob Norwood.

Let's say you're a 50-something white male C-student New Albany High School graduate steeped in the mythology of (a) a local Democratic Party structure in perpetual thrall to the legacy of Strom Thurmond, and (b) your upbringing in a decaying river town, where you always close your eyes when you sneeze and the presence of vulnerable people in public housing prevents honest and upright folks from making a living selling veneer.

Furthermore, thanks to the Peter Principle, you've somehow emerged as mayor -- the biggest fish in a tiny pond.

Privately, you've already resolved to solve the public housing "problem" by annexation, sycophant-seeding and demolition. Comes the opioid epidemic, and your first inclination is to hunker down and deny such things even exist in your idyllic city. 

Hence one of Shane's excellent new words: syndemics.

The term syndemics was coined by Merrill Singer, a medical anthropologist at the University of Connecticut. Singer was working with injecting drug users in Hartford in the 1990s in an effort to find a public health model for preventing HIV among these individuals. As he chronicled the presence of not only HIV but also tuberculosis and hepatitis C among the hundreds of drug users he interviewed, Singer began wondering how those diseases interacted to the detriment of the person. He called this clustering of conditions a "syndemic," a word intended to encapsulate the synergistic intertwining of certain problems. Describing HIV and hepatitis C as concurrent implies they are separable and independent. But Singer’s work with the Hartford drug users suggested that such separation was impossible. The diseases couldn’t be properly understood in isolation. They were not individual problems, but connected.

The wheels can be imagined squeakily turning in the mayor's noggin.

Singer quickly realized that syndemics was not just about the clustering of physical illnesses; it also encompassed nonbiological conditions like poverty, drug abuse, and other social, economic and political factors known to accompany poor health. “Syndemics is embedded in a larger understanding about what’s going on in societies,” he said when I spoke to him. Singer dubbed the syndemic he’d observed in Hartford "SAVA," short for substance abuse, violence and HIV/AIDS. In the past ten years, several medical anthropologists have pursued syndemics theory in other contexts. Emily Mendenhall, who studies global health at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, has described a syndemic of type 2 diabetes and depression among first- and second-generation Mexican immigrant women in Chicago. She named that syndemic "VIDDA," short for violence, immigration, depression, diabetes and abuse, the constellation of epidemics the women were experiencing. “The people who get affected by any given disease, it’s not random,” said Bobby Milstein, a public health scientist, today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who founded the now-defunct Syndemics Prevention Network at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It happens systematically with certain people who are placed in conditions of vulnerability that are not entirely under their own control.”

He reaches for a Bud Light Lime bar napkin and begins drawing circles.

All of what has happened since the late 1980s is potentially part of Austin’s syndemic: the sudden unemployment, the desertion of the young, the fall in rent prices, the rise of the itinerant population, the decline of infrastructure, the overprescription of pain pills, the lack of assistance. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, it seems, the town itself had become sick, the result of various forms of ‘structural violence’ — a term introduced by Harvard physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer to describe harmful social frameworks — along with historical, behavioral and political risk factors.

There it is in a public policy nutshell: 

If the city is honest and pristine, but is being held back by public housing, then public housing must be like an Austin infiltrating the perimeter; that's where all the drugs, fornicators and layabouts are. Obviously, uproot public housing like a stray LEGO block and toss it over to Louisville or Greenville or Birdseye -- somewhere, anywhere except here in Come To City -- then magically, we'll have rid ourselves of the preconditions of opioid addiction. What's more, there'll no longer be poverty amid Luxury Lebensraum ... and there'll be lap dances aplenty for the Interim Executive Director.

Look, I didn't say it made sense, only that it's highly likely. Money first; logic a distant second.

Of course, Dan "Copperhead" Coffey arrives at precisely the same conclusion without aspiring to justify all those C-minuses: They're not citizens, so tear down their buildings and they'll go away. Fuck 'em; they don't vote.

In short, the systemics of syndemics apply to New Albany outside the boundaries of public housing, but scapegoats always play better amid the dynamics of denial.

There really ought to be a vaccine for this level of stupid.

---

* How Did A Small Midwest Town End Up With America's Worst HIV Problem?, by Jessica Wapner (Digg)

Statue removal? Yes, the Civil War was about slavery -- and I'm just fine with tracing it all the way back to the Founders. Now, let's all go read a book.

But what of Thrasher's fork?

Our lead photo is from The Baffler's elegant summary: Weekly Bafflements: What a dogshit week.

Man, what a terrible week. Just an unrelenting deluge of morally bankrupt people parroting stupid opinions. Usually we round up a few good and funny things we read this week but honestly, everything is so fucking bad right now. So, here are some statues that are better than Confederate monuments.

The statue controversy? We visited this territory just this past May.

From Berlin to Budapest to New Orleans: "Historically, Confederate symbols have appeared at times of racial discord."

 ... Symbolism matters, but at the same time, if we're determined not to learn lessons from 152 years ago, symbolism just might be the least of our concerns.

Did these lessons somehow begin with the shelling of Fort Sumter? Of course not. As NAC's junior editor Jeff Gilenwater observed last week on social media:

I've seen several mentions now saying that comparing Confederate leadership to patently racist, pro-slavery, slave owning, slave raping, slave and any "other" murdering founding father types is a false equivalency. It's not. It's the latter who brought white supremacy to these shores in the first place and used it not just as justification for their own violent, self-serving actions but as the foundation upon which this country was built. If you're still clinging to some alternative mythology, perhaps you're not ready yet for the truths we have to accept. It's somewhat understandable given several hundred years of Eurocentric storytelling, but get ready anyway.

Mythology.

Hold on to that word; I'll get there in a moment. First, I point you to Daniel Suddeath's stand-alone commentary in the Glasgow Daily Times ("You can love the South without loving its biggest mistake.")

If anyone has to explain to you why supporting a group that believed it was OK to torture and murder people for personal gain isn't a good thing to do, you have bigger problems than worrying about the future of a statue. And that goes for supporters of the Confederacy and Nazis.

At Insider Louisville, Joe Dunman addresses the Castleman equestrian statue in the Highlands, beginning in Berlin.

Commentary: The Castleman statue has stood long enough

... Missing from our tour, and from Berlin in general, are any memorials to Hitler or any of his subordinates in the Nazi regime. No dignified bronze casts of Herman Goering or Josef Goebbels, no marble statues of Heinrich Himmler or Wilhelm Keitel on horseback. No murals of brave Wehrmacht soldiers marching off to invade France or Russia.

And yet, without any of these relics, the history of the Third Reich is alive and well in Berlin and across the rest of Germany. The country has not forgotten its past. In fact, it still works daily to reconcile with it. To atone. To make sure that through a very clear memory of what happened in the past, it will never make the same horrible mistakes again.

Don't worry -- I'm working my way around to the mythology. In the following video (circa 2009), historian James M. McPherson refutes the "states' rights" Confederate apologetic.

That's right, kids -- it really was slavery that ignited the American Civil War. Sorry about that faux "Lost Cause" verbiage. It's merely barroom banter after the fact.

In 2001, McPherson's argument in the lengthy book review linked below is a detailed, fact-based, well-nigh irrefutable case for slavery as first cause of the war. It's a long read, but it effectively rests the debate, and I've highlighted the "mythology" explanation.

Southern Comfort, by James M. McPherson (The New York Review of Books)

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, at the end of four years of civil war, few people in either the North or the South would have dissented from his statement that slavery “was, somehow, the cause of the war.” At the war’s outset in 1861 Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had justified secession as an act of self-defense against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose policy of excluding slavery from the territories would make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless,…thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.”

The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, had said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution” of Southern independence. The United States, said Stephens, had been founded in 1776 on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, by contrast,

is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Unlike Lincoln, Davis and Stephens survived the war to write their memoirs. By then, slavery was gone with the wind. To salvage as much honor and respectability as they could from their lost cause, they set to work to purge it of any association with the now dead and discredited institution of human bondage. In their postwar views, both Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states had seceded not to protect slavery, but to vindicate state sovereignty. This theme became the virgin birth theory of secession: the Confederacy was conceived not by any worldly cause, but by divine principle.

The South, Davis insisted, fought solely for “the inalienable right of a people to change their government…to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered.” The “existence of African servitude,” he maintained, “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Stephens likewise declared in his convoluted style that “the War had its origin in opposing principles” not concerning slavery but rather concerning “the organic Structure of the Government…. It was a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other…. Slavery, so called, was but the question on which these antagonistic principles…were finally brought into…collision with each other on the field of battle.”

Davis and Stephens set the tone for the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War during the next century and more: slavery was merely an incident; the real origin of the war that killed more than 620,000 people was a difference of opinion about the Constitution. Thus the Civil War was not a war to preserve the nation and, ultimately, to abolish slavery, but instead a war of Northern aggression against Southern constitutional rights. The superb anthology of essays, The Myth of the Lost Cause, edited by Gary Gallagher and Alan Nolan, explores all aspects of this myth. The editors intend the word “myth” to be understood not as “falsehood” but in its anthropological meaning: the collective memory of a people about their past, which sustains a belief system shaping their view of the world in which they live ...

Finally, what to do with all those empty plinths? Public art, dad.

What To Do With Baltimore's Empty Confederate Statue Plinths? by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

Put them to work, Trafalgar Square style.

Baltimore suddenly has a surfeit of empty sculptural plinths. Overnight, Mayor Catherine Pugh and a fleet of trucks removed four Confederate monuments with a quickness not seen since the Colts skipped town. While other cities fret over what to do with Lost Cause memorials that are increasingly targets of ire and vandalism, Baltimore appears to have put the issue to rest.

With the statues gone, only opportunity remains. What can the city do with those empty (and now graffiti-covered) pedestal plinths? Baltimore could do worse than to take a page from London’s Trafalgar Square.

The last word goes not to me, but to Jamil Smith.

Happy demolition, sports fans.

More American wet dreams.

Maybe if we had the right religion, the right immigrants and the right firearms, this wouldn't seem so obvious.

The American dream has become a burden for most; As wages stagnate and costs rise, US workers recognise the guiding ideal of this nation for the delusional myth it is, by Gary Younge (The Guardian)

 ... For underpinning that faith in a better tomorrow was an understanding that inequality in wealth would be tolerated so long as it was coupled with a guarantee of equality of opportunity. In recent years they have seen both heading in the wrong direction – the gap between rich and poor has grown even as possibilities for economic and social advancement have stalled.

The next video should be instructional.

A video feed of the second rental registration and code enforcement meeting will be posted as soon as I can get it done. The process takes hours and, seeing as how I'm trying to do the traditional media's job with a 12-year-old video camera I bought off eBay nine years ago, patience is appreciated. I think I'll leave the rig at home next time and just smoke a cigarette in the meeting room. Then you can watch it on the 11:00 news.

One needn't view the video in it's entirety, however, to grasp the essence of the situation. Amidst the embroidery of humorously bad arguments, irrelevant anecdotes, and sanitation fantasies, at least one thing is plain:

No one knows the law.

Over and over again, the questions arose: What legal obligation does the city have to notify property owners of code violations and what can legally be done if they don't respond? For that matter, what enforcement and collection options, according to the state, does the city have if they do respond? Every time, the answer was "I don't know".

Given the number of times the building commissioner has expressed exasperation with those unknowns, you'd think finding them out would be the crux of his efforts. If thinking was the hallmark of New Albany's past couple of decades, though, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

As much credit as I give John Gonder for displaying the fortitude so lacking in previous councils, there's not much sense in continuing the foray into chaos until those legal questions are answered. Otherwise, we'll be seeking to build an enforcement mechanism based on faulty remembrances rather than contemporary understanding.

And with all the superfluous talk throughout this conversation of how great things used to be, another myth is the last thing we need.

Liquid stocking stuffers, anyone?

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
A new one just begun

Contrary to popular opinion, the senior editor does celebrate the holiday after a fashion. Christmas Eve is the occasion for the annual "shopping" expedition of Roger and the lads. We'll make appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company (Shelbyville Road) circa 12:00 noon, followed a bit later by a visit to Cumberland Brews, with a stop at Ear-x-tasy falling conveniently in between.

If you're out and about today, look us up. And don't forget that NABC is closed until Wednesday.

Happy holidaze, folks.