ON THE AVENUES: Another year older and deeper in debt, so let's doo-doo it all over again.

ON THE AVENUES: Another year older and deeper in debt, so let's doo-doo it all over again.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
-- Ulysses S. Grant

End-of-year compendiums taunt as much as they tempt. While at times an adequate teaching tool, the glibness of 20/20 hindsight usually gets in the way of instruction.

Apart from the planetary scourge known as Homo sapiens, there are no neatly printed numerical calendars, just natural cycles of life and death, recurrence and the dialectic. Nothing ever really ends on December 31, or begins the following day. All of it is a continuum, until the final pervasive darkness overtakes us all. After that, calendar pages no longer turn.

Encouraged yet?

Awesome, so let’s begin the year’s end housekeeping with thoughts pertaining to the life of ON THE AVENUES itself. In short, there’ll need to be a slight adjustment.

That’s because speaking personally, the single biggest story of 2018 was the official debut of Pints&union on August 1, which put an end to three and a half years of my semi-retired underemployment. As the pub's advent followed the long delayed final settlement of my NABC buyout, it became a judiciously considered exclamation mark affixed to what I view as a personal rebirth.

During my hiatus there were ups and downs, births and deaths, frustrations and exhilaration, but in the main it was a gratifyingly productive period. I’ll look back on those years as a cherished time to learn and grow. It was like earning a second undergraduate degree, or perhaps finishing a master’s program in creative synthesis.

Just as in an overall daily sense I’ve no idea where I’d be without my wife Diana, in professional terms this accolade now fully extends to my friend and employer Joe Phillips, to whom I’m grateful for the opportunity to reinvent a career in beer. We’ve had six-months to build a foundation, and in 2019, the beer program’s going to fly high.

It’s about time – and it’s all about time.

My work routine became established fairly quickly, but it has taken me a few months to sort through the scheduling implications for my sidelines of writing and blogging. Since the advent of ON THE AVENUES in 2011 it has been my weekly goal to publish the column on Thursday. However, my work week at Pints&union is front-loaded, falling largely at the beginning of the week (from Monday through Wednesday, and into Thursday).

Perhaps a better course in 2019 would be to publish ON THE AVENUES on Tuesday, giving myself the weekend to prepare -- and what better day to begin than Tuesday, January 1, New Year’s Day?

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Bernie Sanders tweeted on Friday.

The American people are tired of a president who is a liar, a fraud, a narcissist and a bully. They want leadership which unites us, not divides us. They want policies which work for all, not just the wealthy few.

I hastened to comment on this.

Welcome back to Nawbany, Bernie. We have one of those charlatans, too.

Because New Albany is similarly afflicted, it was another long, strange civic journey in 2018, and it’s going to be twice as annoying in 2019.

Fortunately, unlike the chaotic situation three decades ago in the People’s Republic if Romania, my fellow New Albanians will have the lawful opportunity next year to exercise their power of the ballot and remove our own under-educated, egotistical, image-replicating, cash-in-the-service-of-special-interests, bullying and personality cult curating Nicolae Ceausescu wannabe, along with the bootlicking clique of vapid lackeys drooling in his general vicinity.

We can get to Trump later. He’s minor league by comparison. First, it’s time to pluck the Genius of the Flood Plain from the comfy projected office chair in his palatial Reisz Mahal, and put him back into peddling veneer.

Wait …

Veneer: A thin decorative covering of fine wood applied to a coarser wood or other material.

That’s it: Potemkin veneer. Come to think of it, the ideal epitaph for eight long years of toxic Gahanism.

Bring out your brooms, citizens. Behind the bright shiny Disney images, this place is a mess. Granted, it won’t be easy beating a campaign-finance-engorged narcissist of the 19th-century Tammany Hall model who genuinely believes his face must adorn Kroger shopping carts right next to where consumers toss their Metamucil, condoms and Rice Krispies Treats, but working together, we can do it.

---

Brevity may be the soul of wit, although it isn’t typically my specialty. Today I’ll play against type and keep it relatively short.

Returning to those pesky compendiums, a summary: It’s been a year, and next week there’ll be another one. Throughout the past year, I’ve struggled first to discover, and then maintain a balance between the varying public roles I’ve written for myself. Privately, I’ve confided in some of you why this has been the case.

Paranoia may be the big destroyer, but when you’ve no doubt the threat is real, there’s an obligation to calculate risks. That’s because bullies are cowards, and cowards often are disinclined to target the source of their rancor. Rather, they nibble maliciously at the periphery – family, friends, employers – rather than come straight to the source.

In this specific instance that source is me, and so kindly allow me to close the year by encouraging all those having something to say to me to cut out the middle man and come directly to … that’s right, me.

Mano a mano is the one thing they seem utterly terrified to try, preferring instead various chicaneries from afar to silence dissent rather than engage it through direct dialogue.

Yes, I can be a handful.

Yes: I say what I think, believe in what I say, and fight for what I believe. I care deeply about justice, fairness and equality of opportunity for all, not only those playing their big fish/little pond games. It’s not a switch or spigot capable of being turned on and off, although I’ve tried mightily to do so.

But you see, facts are the end game for me. My "side" has legions of them, and in the coming year, the facts will continue to be enabled to speak for themselves – with the necessary polemical assistance from the likes of me.

After all, that’s why I'm here.

Readers, thanks for another fine trip around the sun.

---

Recent columns:

December 20: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2018 Remix).

December 14: A joyful noise? The six most-read ON THE AVENUES columns of 2018.

December 6: ON THE AVENUES: Straight tickets, unsociable media and whether Democrats should rally around Gahan's gallows pole.

November 29: ON THE AVENUES: "That's why I voted no," explains Scott Stewart, pausing to duck rocks feebly lobbed by Team Gahan's propaganda pygmies.

ON THE AVENUES: Clamming up is hard to do, but I'm trying my best.

ON THE AVENUES: Clamming up is hard to do, but I'm trying my best.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.



Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
-- Michael Corleone

I can’t remember being born, though surely it was a traumatic experience. Being reborn is proving to be just as disruptive. I’m trying my best, but habits of long standing die hard.

In a previous column, I wrote a few words about trying to wean myself from an axiom attributed to television journalist David Brinkley, one that has served as motivation for my entire career as a noxious scribe and chronic pain in the butt: “You’re entitled to MY opinion.”

So far, results are mixed.

It may seem to readers as if nothing’s changed at all. I’m prepared to argue that apart from yet another recent outbreak of callous indifference on the part of city officials, this time as their everlasting cowardice pertains to the street grid-abetted death of a bicyclist, you’d have experienced a noticeable softening.

Yes, I responded to THAT outrage, full-throated and unapologetic. As long as the self-inflated denizens of the mayor’s ruling monetization camp remain breathtakingly boneheaded about life, death and human safety in Speed Thru City, I’ll call out their miserable hunks of vapid wasted brain matter ... every single time.

Otherwise, I’m taking my abstinence pledge very seriously.

Having never smoked, groped with a Diet Coke problem or consumed beverage alcohol to excess, perhaps there’s no basis for comparison for the sensation of withdrawal when seeking to moderate my addiction to the gentle art of the polemic -- as well as rhetoric, invective, disputation and a handful of other ten-dollar terms combining to suggest a very strong personal point of view about a topic, and the willingness to pursue it by whatever means are necessary to get my case across and win the damn argument.

In other words, I’m just as “passionate” about the expository art of acidic commentary as the esteemed councilman David Barksdale when it comes to his fondness for using someone else’s money to dress up old buildings, all the while enabling money to continue flowing into a campaign account of a mayor from the opposite political party.

Oops -- I did it again.

Just a momentary lapse of reason, and now I’m back up there, high on that wagon.

---

Joking aside, there’s something suitably deep and serious about all of this. The past month has been a challenging one, and there’s a colossal inner struggle raging. There’s been something existential in my noggin demanding a resolution.

When does a hardened dissenter choose to “give in” to the system -- to the bastards, the powerful, the tyrannical and the despotic -- and conversely, when does he or she say no, the fight must continue, come what may?

When does a person assess the playing field and conclude that while the fight must go on, it cannot continue in its current form, and somehow must be reformatted – to the down low, or via the underground?

Hence the inner struggle. I already know the rational answer, because the tipping point arrives when one’s own actions begin to invite retaliation from the vandals against others. That’s when it gets serious.

The Czechoslovak ruling apparatus during Communist times was appropriately Kafkaesque in this manner. Dissidents might be subjected to direct, physical punishment, but they also were deprived socially and economically by being denied employment in their fields of expertise and training. Doctors became window washers and engineers worked as garbage collectors.

What’s more, their families often were made to endure the same indignities. Literal black marks were affixed to sons and daughters, who continued to pay for the “crimes” of their mothers and fathers. It didn’t end until the whole rotten edifice caved in on itself.

The American way may be slightly different, and dissidents here still retain a few protections even if the architects of excessive capital accumulation andtheir drooling lackeys connive diligently to strip them away, sliver by sliver.

But chicanery remains rampant, and the smaller the pond, the greater the peril. As one coping mechanism, I've been thinking a lot about my upbringing, particularly my father's worldview.

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The two of us couldn't be any more different overall, but nowadays it seems that I managed to learn at least three important lessons from him.

For one, an affinity for the underdog, which points directly to the second: utter and everlasting contempt for those who amass power in whatever form and infer their own privileges accordingly, and concluding with the final point, which is a solemn obligation to seek whatever way possible to make it a fair fight.

Consequently, I detest the arrogant, self-serving cliques that form around power structures, and I find them just as objectionable whether large in scale or small. For this reason, my daily commentary toward local exemplars of this odiousness can be barbed, acidic, and occasionally downright nasty.

Verily, someone has to do it.

The chain newspaper refuses, so someone has to challenge the orthodoxy and offer the alternatives. If the rhetoric gets salty and steamed, then it’s just part of the game.

I detest unchecked authority, back-room plotting, fixes laid in, cash-stuffed envelopes, threats against people who haven’t the means to fight back, and the hypocrisy of the elites when it comes to excusing their own bad behavior as necessary under the circumstances.

Tellingly, these things I loathe usually emanate from groveling and unintelligent buffoons, and this offends me aesthetically on top of the other reasons to strike back.

Accordingly, I could not care less that any of this offends the people with whom I'm disagreeing in the first place.

The polemic is intended to be a war of words, and I'm personally well equipped to hold my own in such a struggle. Most of the small-timers who feel the sting of this blog’s lash also whine about my vocabulary, and this expression of inadequacy, while amusing, implies no responsibility on my part to be their tutor.

However, lately I've been trying to temper the excesses. 

As noted, it’s a big challenge. At least I'm trying. The reason I'm trying is the local election cycle quickly approaching in 2019. Should the political conflict between increasingly desperate Gahanism and the coalescing Resistance escalate, I've no way of containing the collateral damage and restricting it to me and my person, alone.

For this reason, a degree of circumspection is necessary, and I'm doing my best to accommodate the real world, as it exists right here and now, which is to say at the present time, I’m outgunned by the unscrupulous.

You'll no doubt have observed throughout human history that power of any sort, once amassed, is seldom if ever relinquished without the process turning ugly. I accept this as an ironclad fact, albeit quite sad, and speaking only for myself, I welcome their hatred (thanks, FDR).

Alone, I can cope just fine, and they can’t do much to hurt me. However, I cannot expect others near me to shoulder the same burden. 

I'll continue to explore ways to adapt, modulate and moderate -- to temper the satire, restrain my barbed tongue and keep the debate as factual as possible.

Just know that complete 100% silence isn't an achievable option, precisely because of the way my father raised me. He didn’t take kindly to shysters, mobsters and charlatans -- and neither do I.

Wish me luck -- or tell me to go to Hell. I'll get by, either way, because laughter never goes out of fashion.

---

Recent columns:

September 30: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL EDITION: As David White's mayoral campaign begins, let's briefly survey the electoral landscape.

September 28: ON THE AVENUES: If this is adulting, I’d rather be leaving on a jet plane.

September 20: ON THE AVENUES: Fighting the power with ballots, not bullets.

September 11: ON THE AVENUES: After 49 years, two more reasons to be an Oakland A's fan.

More bullies and bullying from the Sunday summit of the bully pulpit.

What's a bully, anyway?

bully

[boo l-ee]

noun, plural bullies

1. a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.
2. Archaic. a man hired to do violence.
3. Obsolete. a pimp; procurer.
4. Obsolete. good friend; good fellow.
5. Obsolete. sweetheart; darling.

In fact, definitions vary. Teddy Roosevelt used the word one way (below) and my anonymous correspondent (above) another.

The applicability of these many definitions to examples in real-life also is variable. H.L. Mencken spent decades (a) eloquently writing truth to power, or (b) spewing intemperate vitriol at respectable pillars of society.

Was Mencken a buffoon or a bully? A man in love with his vocabulary or a muckraking ray of sunshine? Would he be accused of "cyber-bullying" today, if his columns appeared on-line and not on newsprint?

We all cross the lines on occasion, and I have done so, too. At the same time, this notion of my writing as bullying is strange to me, and perhaps it reveals a different issue, in that some folks probably don't know what to make of me. I don't fit into a convenient box, and I like it that way, but defying categorization bothers some of them.

If they can't tell exactly what my "job" is, they can't typecast me -- and they can't tell me how to go about doing "my job," whatever it might or might not be. Furthermore, in the absence of any willingness on their part to interact, the usual policing levers aren't effective.

What am I? Blogger? Politician? Business owner? Drunkard? Vocabulary deviate? Polemicist?

Why not just plain citizen, exercising that elusive concept of citizenship?

Is this really so hard to grasp? I have demonstrable principles. I'm able to state them cogently. I take part in the process even when it's futile. As a citizen, I'm just trying to do my small part in making this city a better place -- and all these hidebound, antebellum fogies stand in the way of progress.

It's enough to make a man curmudgeonly. Of course humans are fallible. We can't be perfect. Were always learning. I just try to tell the truth as often and consistently as possible, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may. I hope you like it, and I'm not sorry at all if it bothers you. It's my art. You may cease reading at any time.

After all, I'm not at the homeless shelter commanding the occupants to get better. I'm at city meetings demanding openness, transparency and accountability of elected officials, and chiding the supposed journalists when they're to busy promoting cooking school to bother.

I'm not cruel to kids or dogs. Rather, I'm delighted to offer an alternative viewpoint as it pertains to self-assigned community "leaders" with more money and power than brains, and who really did learn everything they need to know way back in kindergarten.

The kids and dogs make better company, anyway -- and have you ever noticed that when a dog offers his territorial pissing, he confines it to a sustainable zone?

If you think Jeff Gahan knows more about a city's street grid than Jeff Speck, I'm not going to miss your comments about the theory and practice of my art as a polemicist. However, I'll remind you that your belief is foolish, and falls into the category of palpable absurdity.

In reverse chronological order, here are a few blog references to Bully Baylor over the past three years. Surely these began prior to 2013, and if you have examples, add them to the comments or at Fb.

August 6, 2015:

ON THE AVENUES: Money is the ultimate bully.

 ... Even this heretic knows that Goliath was the big bad bully, and not the dude with the spot-on slingshot, and accordingly, I’ll continue to speak and write openly about the way things are in New Albany, because when it comes to underdogs, sleepers, dark horses and the man in Tiananmen Square blocking a column of tanks with his briefcase, you won’t find any of them in the $100,000 mayoral suite overlooking one-way Spring Street.

September 27, 2014:

Bully for you, bully for me. Let's have a bully pulpit in every foyer.

 ... Like Harding’s “normalcy” and Kennedy’s “vigor," the phrase with which Roosevelt begins this letter, “Bully for you” will forever be emblematic of his presidency.

April 24, 2014:

RUMOR MILL..... (at Freedom to Screech)

... Our final thoughts: A message to Mr. "Bully" Baylor. Hell would freeze over before Freedom of Speech would EVER Support or Endorse you. Sorry Rog the only thing your good at "is kissing ass or bullying people...

August 24, 2013:

My second favorite News and Tribune reader comment yet.

... Without question, Roger Baylor's a bully. Like the previous post says, he would post something like what the Health Dept posted on him and laugh his head off and get his gang of bullies to laugh with him. This person is a menace of the worst sort. He incites anger and hatred. Nothing more.

August 19, 2013:

My favorite News and Tribune reader comment yet.

 ... No question Baylor is a bully. He would, without so much as a wink, put together some sort of picture just like the one on the Health Dept. site and feature this on his blog. He would do this while sneering and jeering, and he would spout venomous comments with his loyal followers who would gush all over the remarks with similar refrains of their own. Then, he would promote such a picture/blog entry on every website he frequents, Twitter, Facebook, other blogs. And he would guffaw and drink while adding one lie on top of the next in his self-righteous screed.

All together now ...

Quite possibly the only reference to Florida Georgia Line you'll ever see in this space.

I'm a lifelong fan of creatively rendered written bile, and so this album review is immensely pleasing to me. Granted, I'm not a "country" music listener (we must always be wary of broad categories), though contrary to my reputation, I can find much to enjoy in it, especially when the music's traditional roots and folk veins are on display.

I wouldn't have imagined Florida Georgia Line to be something I'd appreciate. In this hilarious dissection, I've learned why. Or, as my pal Paul wrote: "These guys REEK of Bud Light, Roger."

The source blog comes with a thought-provoking mission statement: "When a culture's music is lifeless, that culture is bound for more trouble than just having nothing decent to listen to."

Yes, indeed.

Florida Georgia Line’s “Anything Goes” is the Worst Album Ever (Saving Country Music)

... And talk about going to the cliché well too many times, there’s a song on this album called “Angel” that I kid you not is built around the often sarcastically-used pick up line “Did it hurt when you fell from the sky?” Any woman who hears this line coming from any man has my personal blessing to immediately spray them in the face with mace and knee them in the nuts. The idea that these knuckleheads think that this line is “sweet” just speaks to the depravity of self-awareness they suffer from in an irrevocable degree.