New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Showing posts with label progressives who aren't. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progressives who aren't. Show all posts
I might be able to get drunk enough to vote for Biden, but caution is merited, because if I begin drinking too soon, it won't be easy staying drunk enough to vote for Biden.
Pundits are panicking about whether the Left will help Joe Biden defeat Trump. The former vice president probably doesn't want it, but here's some advice for him from the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
For at least the last two years, the Left has been imploring the Democratic Party and its loyal voters not to choose Joe Biden as their nominee. I even wrote an entire book about it. The argument against Biden is well known and easy to find, and I’m not going to bother repeating it here.
Unfortunately, Biden is now indisputably the Democratic nominee, and will be facing Donald Trump in the general election. As inadequate as Biden and the conservatives who are propping him up are to handle this moment in history, no one reading this wants to see a second Trump term. But despite what polling currently shows, it is far from assured Biden will deliver even that result, and he is entering the race in a weaker position than Clinton this time in 2016, after she had already weathered months of criticism and press scrutiny — the kind to which Biden has so far not been treated.
Already, some members of the liberal pundit-sphere are calling for a moratorium on criticism of Biden. Besides being a repugnant idea for any journalist, this is not sustainable: though liberal news outlets might view their top priority for the next seven months as getting Biden into the White House at all costs, there’s no guarantee mainstream news outlets will see their jobs this way, and they will almost certainly start applying serious scrutiny to Biden again now that Bernie Sanders is out of the race.
So as someone who literally wrote the book on why Biden would not be a great nominee or president, let me give the Democratic Party and Biden’s campaign some free advice ...
New Albany’s municipal election took place more than a month ago, and you’ve no doubt noticed that I’ve had very little to say about it.
On some fronts this reticence will be viewed through a lens of chortled gloating with a Bud Light Lime chaser, while others might simply be puzzled.
It isn’t nuclear physics. From the standpoint of newsworthiness, exactly what is there to say?
Jeff Gahan, the incumbent mayoral candidate with the biggest stack of cash and the widest network of political patronage, correctly deployed the famous dictum of noted military strategist Nathan Bedford Forrest: "Git thar fustest with the most mostest" (money … and yes, I know it’s a misquote). Gahan kept his fix rammed firmly inside the city’s body politic, good and hard, and so the junta abides even if the Astroglide remains optional.
If it’s an Oriental despot you want, the governing shtick and jive is all yours. Until New Albany is gifted with its own John Galt, someone capable of stopping cold these wheels of greaseball Gahanesque commerce, here we are.
Of course the city’s dissidents, of whom I remain one, understand the necessity of the longer game. There’ll be a period of reformatting, followed by numerous opportunities to make tactical sorties against Chief Duncecap and his Merry Band of Looters.
Nothing much will change except the snowballing size of the city’s debt, and yet voters resoundingly chose to ignore this reality for fear of looking in the mirror and examining their own rampant mythologies.
So it goes; and so be it, but as the forgotten band Moving Pictures once asked so presciently, what about me?
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On Election Day my Twitter parodist Rogar -- Susie, her daughters and their bootlicking Fairmontian accomplices are endlessly creative -- had this to say about the election results.
"Looking back on my life no one will remember my work in craft beer or local business advocacy, my entire legacy will be "the guy who hated the guy who was mayor of New Albany for a few years" and I feel great about this"
It isn’t surprising that Team Anonymous Troll is mistaken.
I have absolutely no regrets, and although there generally isn’t time to waste contemplating legacies, I know mine is secure. Granted, no one’s going to be inducting me into the cool kids’ hall of fame any time soon; frankly that’s a relief rather than a disappointment, as well as a persuasive reaffirmation that knowing one tried to tell the truth is the best way to “look back” on life.
And, as we used to say in high school, fuck the Gahanites if they can’t take a joke -- or the truth.
For me the four years elapsing since 2015, when I cashed out my farthings and stepped away from NABC, have been tantamount to a pants-down, post-graduate university degree. It hasn’t always been easy, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
Next year I’ll turn 60 years of age, once a daunting number, now a hopeful platform for navigating the next two decades. I’m fortunate to be working with beer and words, and while neither job pays a lot, it hasn’t ever been my habit to chase riches. The Baylor family is doing fine, thank you, and I’m feeling quite good.
My own personal reformatting proceeds apace, and when I scan the local horizon, I see others who are capable of mounting an alternative to the numbing corrosiveness of orthodox Gahanism.
Either this next generation steps forward to lead, or they don’t, but either way I’m taking a break from charging machine gun nests across no man’s land all by myself. I pledge my assistance to the next wave of resistors, whenever practicable. Overall, I’ll be spending my time differently.
This said, before year’s end I’ll return to this space to explain why there is cause for optimism in the makeup of the reshuffled city council.
This dynamic might be enough to periodically fill gasbag Gahan’s gas tank with sugar, toss the random spanner into the rigged works, shine light into the down-low bunker, and compel Greg Phipps to wish he’d stuck with the relative anonymity of sociology.
Perhaps the usual brown-nosed sycophantic suspects will pant and gasp after finally being made to actually work hard greasing the wheels of Tricky Jeffie’s legion of pay-to-play campaign donors.
I certainly hope so.
Anyone that clueless with so much money should be opposed on general principle alone, and to repeat, I’ve no regrets at having written the alternative history and formulated the case against Gahan from precepts ranging far beyond simple contrarianism, even if I inherited my father’s stubbornness. Posterity will be kind to me, indeed, and all I need do is live long enough to see it happen.
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Meanwhile, I’ve learned a crucial lesson these past six years: There are very few “progressives” in New Albany, probably one of every twenty who describe themselves this way.
Most of you who continue to claim you’re “progressive” are lying to yourselves, straight up.
You’re fine with abstractions, talking points and sanctimonious Facebook proclamations, but you possess no intent whatever to apply these rumored-only principles to your favored local Democratic Party’s purported “leadership,” which is as bereft of ethical moorings as the Trumpians you love to hate.
Gahan’s given you, the pretend-progressives, a teeny-tiny slice of power, and you’ve grabbed this illusion like a little kid pursues the forbidden cookie jar; unfortunately, as with those comfy sweets, it’s all empty calories, and as the crumbs fly, your ability to think critically has been lost.
To be brutally honest, if we’re to base these judgments on real-world performance -- as opposed to self-delusion -- supposed Democratic politicians like Gahan, Phipps, Pat McLaughlin, Bob Caesar and Jason Applegate are conservatives who could just as easily be Republicans. At times they’re more Republican than the GOP, and yet the bait ‘n’ switch of bright, shiny objects charged to the TIF One Card keeps so-called progressives chasing glitz on a string.
Eventually they’ll choke on it. This saddens me, so I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and taking a break from commenting on the localized idiocy.
Professionally, I’ll be programming beer at Pints&union, writing for Food & Dining Magazine, and looking for other ways to make a buck here and there.
Personally, beyond the prime imperative of spending quality time with my beloved, there’ll be cats, reading, walking, a new bicycle, traveling and lots of learning.
I’ll also keep one eye on the pendulum. It will swing back, and when it does, then there may be new opportunities.
In closing, the late Vaclav Havel ofers sound advice for the coda.
“The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.”
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
British politician Winston Churchill and economist John Maynard Keynes both have been credited with this phrase or variants of it, although their attribution does not survive scrutiny. Probably it dates to a 1970 interview with an economist named Paul Samuelson, who may or may not have thought he was quoting Keynes:
Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?
Rest easy, dear reader. I’m not about to endorse Slick Jeffie for a third term. Actually the phrase came to mind this morning when I caught myself saying, “Well, I used to think that … “
There’s no need to complete the sentence because I say it at least once daily, as pertaining to a wide range of topics. It fits nicely with “there was a time when” and “I was absolutely clueless back then,” emphasizing a never-ending learning curve as a planetary inhabitant.
I suspect the vast majority of human beings are readily capable of acknowledging the need to adjust their thinking to changing circumstances, so long as doing so constitutes perceived material benefit. If not, millions of smart phones would be packed away in Asian warehouses, untouched. Doctors would be treating broken legs with leeches, and instant Ramen noodles might never have been invented.
However far fewer are willing to hold the same yardstick to what they’d undoubtedly refer to as their core “beliefs.” This word alone should tell us something.
Tangible, tactile reality is infinitely swappable, whether mutating from horse-drawn carts to automobiles or insipid Lite beer to an inspired Bavarian Kellerbier. Those only vaguely verifiable (if at all) “beliefs” are tantamount to the enduring human stain, as writer Philip Roth tagged it. Religion, race relations, the role of the sexes; occasionally we’ll permit experiential evidence to erode our pre-conceived notions, but far less often than we “upgrade” our redundant devices for communicating – ironically, a task that renders us increasingly isolated from human all direct contact.
Rock music radio commentator Eddie Trunk was talking about this a few days ago in response to a question about the future of rock as we know it. Trunk offered pros and cons in response, and in my view he correctly identified the digitalization of music in the internet era as a double-edged sword.
It makes all music available at any time, thus theoretically broadening exposure to different types of music and educating listeners about it. Maybe they’ll stop listening to hip hop after hearing Ten Years After or Ratt – or so this notion goes.
At the same time, according to Trunk, the digital revolution has deprived listeners of the joy of waiting anxiously for new music to be released, then rushing to the mall (his reference) to be the first in line for an album or CD, before hurrying back home with friends to crack the cellophane and listen while enjoying a microwaved pizza roll.
Trunk previously has lamented the evolution of outdoor music fests, observing that young attendees seldom are riveted to the music; instead, they’re wandering the grounds consuming gourmet food, craft cocktails and multimedia experiences – if not spending every moment documenting the scene for “live” transmission.
Why don’t they care about the music? I’d say they do, albeit in a different way than during my own youth. The problem is that no one these days wants to pay for it (see journalism, death of), including me, even though I know better.
It occurs to me that while Trunk’s perspective is as dated as my own (he’s in his early 50s), he’s also missing the central element that ties together his case: the communal joy of pre-digital listening.
For better or worse, rock and roll -- the post-WWII cultural phenomenon that morphed into the voice of the Vietnam and Cold War generations worldwide --- became the musical equivalent of a mass political rally, perhaps reaching its apogee in 1985 with the global transmission of Live Aid by means of just then emerging satellite technology.
It is said Freddie Mercury was reluctant for Queen to appear until Bob Geldof reminded the singer that the gig was what he’d always sought: the whole world as attentive audience.
So it was, and one’s like or dislike of Queen aside, Live Aid made possible the band’s subsequent career, before and after Mercury’s untimely death in 1991. By then the baby boomers were well along their way toward rejecting the political and economic lessons of the 1960s, maintaining cultural bona fides with an attachment to increasingly corporate rock while otherwise subscribing to fascism, or Live Aid with swastikas.
But I digress.
All of Trunk’s lamentations point to the same phenomenon, beginning in the 1990s with the availability of home computers and expanding exponentially in the 2000s with smart phones and the like: Progress is isolating us from the communal, shrinking our sense of the collective, and diminishing human contact.
It’s an isolation born of the digital revolution, but it is sadly abetted each time an angry white male (and yes, that’s what they tend to be) sprays a crowd with gunfire. Of course your fear of shooters, Muslims, diseases, dark people and gays cannot be completely dispelled in the comfort and safety of your home, where statistically most accidents continue to happen, with or without purposefully discharged weapons.
Rather, we seek to be reinforced by those of like mind, which in turn means cocooning with Netflix and the Imbecile Supremacy Channel of the moment, handily closing ourselves off from facts capable of changing our minds.
As for me, well, when the facts change, I change my mind.
What do you do?
---
It shocked me at first that Donald Trump had been elected president, although in time the accumulated evidence convinced me to change my mind because Trumpism is not shocking at all. It isn’t an exception, a mutation or an aberration.
Trump as a poster child for capital accumulation, and consequently as the best available conduit for every evasive maneuver in history deployed by the oligarchy to maintain its pre-eminence, is in fact the fruition of American history to the present age, a sum total of founding hypocrisies about race, money and power, as supported full-throat by the GOP, the political party singularly better suited to elites, and only nominally “opposed” by the second of two monopolist political parties, which suckles the very same teats but has grown damningly adept at pretending it doesn’t.
It sucks, and loudly, yet it’s exactly who and what we are.
This brings me to the notion of “resistance,” a word I’ve heard less often as Trumpism has become normalized – and don’t kid yourselves; it has.
To repeat, Trumpism is a natural consequence of our survival-of-the-fittest variant of capitalism. You see, one needn’t have studied botany to know that tomato seeds seldom produce asparagus. Systemic conditions presupposing the manifestations to which one objects cannot logically be altered by any single presidential election cycle.
Most of us, myself ruefully included, have spent the past few decades accepting a default way of living which supports the superstructure of oppression with virtually every transaction. How exactly does one resist a system while continuing to live according to the system’s dictates – with which we otherwise remain in full cooperation?
If you’re in full cooperation with the purely intentional exploitation engendered by robber baron capitalism in its current form, exactly how can you resist it?
You’re accepting and opposing at the same time, but your compromises invariably result in acceptance, not resistance. So, while you’re prattling about your rights, perhaps it might be time to pause and consider whether Americans possess an inalienable right to be entertained around the clock to the exclusion of consciousness about the real nature of things outside, beyond reach of your streaming device?
“Trumps sucks! Oh, by the way, I’ll be holed up for the next 18 hours gaming, screwing and binge-watching pure fiction, and I simply can’t make time to toss a Molotov cocktail at yonder one-percenter.”
Please.
In many places and at various times in history, those undertaking to resist, dissent or rebel have gone into the fight with a clear understanding of the sacrifice involved – often although not always the “supreme” sacrifice, but at the very least grasping the potential price of non-conformity. They’d be giving up comfort, security and much else in order to bring about necessary change and secure a future for their kids.
Returning to social media to make yet another slam-dunk of a riposte visible only to the denizens of our hand-elected silo didn’t free the slaves or bring down the Berlin Wall, yet for today’s “resistance” it’s the risk-free strategy for … what?
You can color me skeptical.
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Here in New Albany our self-styled local “progressives” surrendered any notion of “resistance” to The Donald when they refused to acknowledge that one of their own is just as capable of being foul as one of “theirs.”
Local “progressives” surrendered the moral high ground as fast as their minivans would carry them by refusing to get involved in Jeff Gahan’s public housing takeover … and David Duggins giggling about TASER jokes … and more recently, the demolition of the homeless camp by Silver Creek as ephemeral beautification projects everywhere are endowed with fat cat funding … and yet again by looking the other way at Gahan’s cash-stuffed political patronage machine … and seriously, the list of Dear Leader’s undemocratic transgressions stretches from Rustic Frog to the loading docks at Mejier’s, and while just about every component of Gahan’s reign has included set pieces borrowed from right-wingers, these so-called “progressive” Democrats can’t move themselves an inch to see how ridiculously little their snarling darling has done when it comes to supposedly core Democratic platform values like seeing to the betterment of the community’s most vulnerable citizens.
Of course, these purportedly “Democratic” platform planks guaranteeing the right to luxury are tethered just as tightly to moneyed elites as the GOP’s. At the end of the day I suppose the cognitive dissonance is just too much for otherwise well-meaning folks who have no intention of negotiating their privileges, irrespective of imagined party affiliation, because after all, the two aisles share common roots by regarding as inevitability of the well-off confiscating value from the underprivileged (capitalism) rather than the other way around (socialism).
As a wee lad, I bought into the bilge. I’ve been changing my mind ever since, not because the facts have changed all that much, but because eyes wide open are capable of seeing far more than when they're glued shut.
Consequently, when it comes to the approaching round of municipal elections, I'll be voting for ... nah, let's wait another week or two for that.
I'll give a respectful nod to Pete Buttigieg for being that rarest of breeds, a Maltese-American. The Knights Templar aside, I'm not very impressed with Mayor Pete's positions so far.
This article interests me for two reasons. Secondly, it briefly surveys Buttigieg's policies to date, and these come up lacking. But before doing so, the author contrasts the political identifiers known as liberal and progressive.
There are an increasing number of Democrats locally referring to themselves as progressive. I've even done it at times, so no stones are being cast by me. I'm not sure being a progressive interests me much any longer, probably because so many local progressives are liberals -- and the governing elite is neither.
Anyway, I consider myself less of a "progressive" and more a Social Democrat of the mixed-economy, European model; since there's no place for such a beast in L'America, I scrape by as a pants-down independent.
And while independence may never be enough to win an election, it's an honest designation and describes me pretty well. I'm comfortable with that. Groucho Marx was supposed to have said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
Yeah, that's me.
Here's the link, with the opening passage about the difference between liberals and progressives. Broadly speaking, I agree with the author's assessment.
The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo.
This is important because whether or not it gets covered, the dramatic ideological split on the left will have a massive impact on the 2020 election. In 2016, 43% of the Democratic Party did not vote for the party’s hand-picked nominee. Progressives are not some small faction of the party, and in fact, given that millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, you could define our generation—the largest in human history—as largely “progressive.”
I bring this up because Pete Buttigieg is having a moment in the early 2020 Democratic Primary, and the former McKinsey consultant has (falsely) branded himself as a progressive ...
I'll keep posting about speed because speed kills. If you wish to ignore all available evidence and retain a sense of automotive entitlement, which allows you to drive 40 mph on city streets that pass through neighborhoods, then I'd submit that your entitlement is anti-social -- and whatever the neighborhood must do to restore safety is justified.
If you can't understand any of what I'm writing here, that's not a deal-killer. But thinking of yourself as a "progressive"? That is.
... Nationally, speed was recorded as a factor in 27% of fatal crashes resulting in 10,111 crash deaths in 2016, according to the study. Research has shown that the likelihood of pedestrians or bicyclists surviving impact with a vehicle increases significantly with each 5 mph decrease in the speed limit. Further highlighting the importance of lower travel speeds, researcher Eric Dumbaugh notes in a recent Vision Zero Network webinar on Safe Systems that 18mph is the human tolerance of crash impacts.
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