David Brooks says we're having a moral convulsion.

As usually seems to be the case with David Brooks, there are enough germs of truth and even inspiration here to make you think that maybe this time, he'll make a strong case and reach a forceful conclusion. 

Then you reach the end, and you're still hungry. 

There'll be those on the right who insist the mistrust of which Brooks writes stems from matters like not enough prayer in schools, and of course abortion rights. Conversely, the left will point to racism and the patriarchy preferred by the right. 

And yet, while the first great "shock" may have been Watergate, how can we rationally discuss any of this without taking into the deep dive into capitalism's late-stage cancerous mutations? Brooks tap dances around it, but he doesn't get near this third rail. 

He should. We all should, in fact. 

This said, it's a piece worth your time to read. My advice is to keep expectations low, and sniff out those few nuggets of worth.

America Is Having a Moral Convulsion, by David Brooks (The Atlantic)

Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late? 

The events of 2020—the coronavirus pandemic; the killing of George Floyd; militias, social-media mobs, and urban unrest—were like hurricanes that hit in the middle of that earthquake. They did not cause the moral convulsion, but they accelerated every trend. They flooded the ravines that had opened up in American society and exposed every flaw. 

Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens toward its climax. Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation. Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated. 

This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this fateful moment ...

Pope Francis is correct about the failures of market capitalism. But there's a small problem ...

The current Pope's economic critiques make a great deal of sense. So much so that even as an atheist, it means I'm tempted to make common cause with the Church. The problem is the Pope's theological obligations, which tend to take away what the Holy Father's economic platform giveth. We pagans tend to be burned first. 

But I'll give Francis major props for daring to tackle the prevailing neoliberal dogma, even while being sure I'll hear about it, probably from the economists first.

Pope Francis Laments Failures Of Market Capitalism In Blueprint For Post-COVID World, by Sylvia Poggioli (NPR)

Pope Francis has presented his blueprint for a post-COVID-19 world, covering a vast number of issues from fraternity and income inequality to immigration and social injustice.

The document, released Sunday, is his third encyclical — the most authoritative form of papal teaching.

Its title is Fratelli Tutti, and it is a scathing description of laissez faire capitalism and a meditation on the coronavirus pandemic that has swept across the globe.

BEER MONEY: New Albany Is A State of Mind (2009).

As noted in today's previous post, my two-years-and-five-month run as a guest columnist at the pre-merger New Albany Tribune began in 2009. This was the very first column, which ran on January 10. The photo was my official newspaper photo, as attached here to a 2010 column about something I'm no longer allowed to address openly, hence the "redacted" discretion. 

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New Albany Is A State of Mind

You might recall that roughly 2,500 years ago, there lived the Greek philosopher called Socrates, a man whose dogged pursuit of knowledge endeared him to succeeding generations of admirers, although not to his fellow Athenians. In fact, most of his neighbors considered him not only an annoyance, but a heretic, too, and if there’s anything to be gleaned from reading history, it’s that there’s always time enough for a priest to throw another heretic on the fire.

So goes the eternal tyranny of the majority, and yet thanks to Plato’s writings, we now recognize Socrates as a peerless moral and social critic. Appropriately, he has been honored by the tag of gadfly, a term for describing “people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or just being an irritant.”

That’s my kind of guy, although naturally gadflies are detested by small, non-expandable minds of the sort that are the norm in human societies the world over, and who assign themselves the task of protecting the status quo whether or not it is sensible.

Accordingly, you can picture the scene in the agora, with Socrates and his small band of youthful followers avidly questioning accepted beliefs, while the “little people” of Athens hover nearby, muttering, and eavesdropping on the dialogues.

These many centuries later, I can almost hear the anonymous bellow from behind the adjacent stone wall, followed by the pitter-patter of fleeing sandals:

“Hey, Socrates, if you aren’t happy here, then why don’t you get the hell out and leave us alone?”

Socrates stayed, of course, and was made to pay dearly for it. During a period of political upheaval, he was put on trial and convicted of corrupting the morals of Athenian youth. Offered the opportunity to devise his own punishment, the philosopher wryly suggested that his “sentence” include a regular monetary stipend and free meals for life.

Instead, the humorless judges gave Socrates the choice of exile or death, and he opted for the latter, drinking the hemlock, cementing his martyrdom, and proving that in ancient Greece as in modern-day America, folks don’t take kindly to having their premises examined, not to mention taxed … but let’s leave Their Man Mitch’s properties and proprieties out of it, shall we?

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And so there I was, cradling a craft-brewed pint of beer within the cozy confines of Connor’s Place and reflecting on the dubious merits of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” when suddenly that nagging, familiar existential question reared up and bit me … again.

“New Albany is a state of mind … but whose?

Numerous other pressing questions have come and gone since I was a youngster growing up in Georgetown, experiencing the sort of small town ambience remembered with warm fuzziness primarily by those who never actually lived through the crushing boredom of it all, queries like, “Where can we get served?” and “Is it really cheating if the teacher doesn’t catch you?”

But nowadays the tough questions keep getting harder to answer, like this one:

Have you ever been standing in the supermarket, trying to fathom the industrial process bakeries use to remove the flavor and texture from white bread in order to make it marketable to the terminally fearful among us, when suddenly a remarkably obese woman down the aisle starts screaming obscenities at her own helpless children, and you realize that all this prattle about free people making informed choices to suit their individual needs must be coming from those who’ve never driven an automobile through New Albany’s decaying streets, artfully dodging listless vagrants, texting drivers and the occasional neglected, doomed dog or cat?

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In 2008, Barack Obama enunciated “change” and “hope” as electoral mantras, and predictably, local voters went big for Obama’s befuddled Republican opponent. Therein lies a glimpse of New Albany’s personalized 800-lb gorilla, and the civic psychosis that so degrades our future prospects as a city. It is our persistent failure to muster any degree of comprehension as to what is occurring in the larger world outside the municipal devil we know, and to imagine another way of life.

As an example, consider the simple notion of riding a bicycle in an urban setting. Doing so in New Albany can be profoundly dangerous, in part because of the gaping potholes, and more importantly, as previously observed, because local drivers are notoriously unskilled and inattentive. However, the problem goes beyond an absence of empathy.

Numerous New Albanian drivers actually can’t imagine riding a bicycle, and moreover, they can’t imagine life outside the confines of an automobile – and if they can’t imagine something, how on earth could anyone else?

To them, anyone who is able to imagine biking and also to achieve it must be mistaken or defective, and poses a vague threat. Any person riding a bicycle surely must be too poor to afford a car, or is restricted to biking owing to mental illness, a DUI conviction, bad personal credit or contrarian tendencies.

In other words, a heretic. Do I hear the sound of flicking Bics?

In this and related matters, the New Albany Syndrome is a very real and self-defeating malady, and one of my goals in life is to somehow locate the source of the dysfunction and drive a stake composed of equal parts modernity and rationality straight through its heart so that future generations just might enjoy a better place to live and work.

Socrates had it right: The unexamined life is not worth living … and the examination begins now.

In My Room.

According to the death cult curated by the Right, these people who insist on staying home are behaving unpatriotically.

They should have all gone to Sturgis to experience the world's toughest guys drinking the lightest beer available.

But maybe, just maybe, tending to one's health when he's skint, anyway, is another variation on the pursuit of happiness.

Because, as the philosopher reminds us, pleasure is the absence of pain.

Americans Stayed Inside Even as Cities and States Reopened, by Alexandre Tanzi and Olivia Rockeman (Bloomberg)

Well after U.S. economies began reopening this year, Americans continued to stay home.

By the latter half of August, 130 million Americans said they avoided eating at restaurants, a new U.S. Census Bureau survey analyzed by Bloomberg News shows. Only about 21 million of the nearly 250 million people had resumed dining out, according to the data gathered in collaboration with multiple federal agencies.

Asked if they were still making fewer trips to stores in late August than before the pandemic, 70% said “yes.” Even among the youngest adults aged 18 to 24, 68% said they were shopping less.

In some cases, the ability to stay home was tied to income. More than 70% of households earning more than $100,000 said they were able to substitute telecommuting for some in-person work. By comparison, only 27% of households with annual incomes under $75,000 said someone in their home was able to telecommute ...

A Night in Tunisia.

A Facebook conversation about Black Lives Matters and the "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure." If you haven't already done so, accept my encouragement to visit the Black Lives Matters website, and instead of hearing from a friend who heard it from a friend about what BLM is saying, go straight to the source and think for yourself ... for a nice change.

JM: So you totally missed the BLM part where they want to tear down the nuclear family?

Roger A. Baylor: Hmm, "tear down" -- well, I couldn't find that specific wording anywhere. I imagine you are referring to this passage:

"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."

I'll readily concede to not knowing exactly where BLM is coming from here, but it's evident that (a) the system of American slavery and botched "reconstruction" did a fine job of disrupting Black "nuclear" families; (b) late period capitalism has pitched in to further disrupt "nuclear" families beyond strictly Black ones; and (c) I'm extremely suspicious about what is being implied by the "nuclear" family in the first place, as it strikes me as code for what always was more cliche than reality. What I glean from the BLM passage is that there are numerous sorts of families, too many to be confined by "Leave It to Beaver." If anyone out there can assist with my education on this matter, I'd appreciate it. In the interim, I don't see the threat in any of this.

Jeff Gillenwater: It’s always amusing when people object to BLM via racist interpretations.

JS: No you're correct. It's of the "It Takes a Village" variety. Not meant to supplant the "nuclear family" but to expand it, like much of the world. Parents look out for each others' kids, especially important when parent(s) work. Elderly are part of the community and not shuffled off to homes to rot away, etc.

JG: More communal, matriarchal community structures are historically prevalent in Africa, hence the notion of Western prescription. It’s been genuinely inspiring to see that in contemporary action via BLM. The level of organization and leadership is impressive. Those who think the movement is limited to protest don’t know or understand much as their ignorant and often hatefully aimed comments tend to make clear ... Black women leading is plenty enough reason for some people to be obviously hyper critical and find something wrong with every (often manufactured) aspect of the movement without ever actually mentioning Black women. They think no one notices their racism/sexism that way. It’s sort of pathetically funny to watch them act as if they’re taking some great stand for justice when they so clearly lack the awareness and courage to even face themselves.

The remainder is here.

Social, political, and environmental phenomena drive the emergence of infectious disease, but we talk about magic bullets.

An ounce of prevention? Maybe next time. America is far too dipshittian for this, at least at the present time.

It’s Time to Tell a New Story About Coronavirus — Our Lives Depend on It, by Sonia Shah (The Nation)

The way we talk about contagion matters. It shapes how societies respond—and whether many of us will survive ...

 ... It’s time for a new story, one that more accurately captures the reality of how contagions unfold and why. In this story, pandemics would be cast as both a biological reality and a social phenomenon shaped by human agency. And the coronavirus, if cast as any kind of monster at all, would be a Frankenstein’s monster: a creature of our own making. We, after all, created the world in which SARS-Cov-2 evolved, one in which our industry has swallowed up so much of the planet that microbes from wild animals easily slip into livestock and humans. We created the society of overcrowded prisons and nursing homes staffed by underpaid employees who must work in multiple facilities to make ends meet; in which employers force their workers to labor on meatpacking lines even if they’re sick; in which asylum seekers are crammed into detention centers; and in which people living in hard-hit cities like Detroit lack access to clean water with which to wash their hands.

A narrative that elevates these realities would compel us to consider a much wider range of policy responses to counter the threat of pandemics. Instead of blaming outsiders and waiting for magic bullet cures, we could work to enhance our resilience and reduce the probability of pathogens reaching us in the first place. Instead of reflexively demanding that killing chemicals be slathered across the landscape to destroy mosquitoes infected by the West Nile virus and ticks infected with Lyme disease bacteria, we could restore the lost biodiversity that once prevented their spread. We could protect the forests where bats roost, so that Ebola, SARS, and other viruses stay in them and don’t find their way into human populations.

A new story would allow us to see contagion as more than a purely biomedical phenomenon to be managed by biomedical experts and, instead, as the dynamic social phenomena they are. It would necessitate new alliances among public health advocates and environmentalists, between doctors, epidemiologists, wildlife biologists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, and veterinarians. It would shift the meaning of human health itself. Instead of thinking of good health as the absence of pathogenic contamination, we would understand it as a complex latticework linking the health of our livestock, wildlife, and ecosystems to the health of our communities.

When pathogens emerge, we could scrutinize our social and economic relations to find ways to reduce transmission opportunities as attentively as we screen pharmaceutical compounds to create new pills and potions. When we encounter respiratory pathogens that spread silently in crowded places, we could empower our workers with hazard pay, sick leave, and fair wages. When faced with viruses ferried around by mosquitoes, we could work to improve drainage and housing so that people aren’t regularly exposed to their bloodthirsty bites. Rather than prop up a drug industry that profits from our sickness, we could work to prevent the conditions that lead to contagions.

Progress toward this new paradigm has already begun, thanks to a new approach called One Health, which considers human health in the context of the health of wildlife, livestock, and ecosystems. As a theoretical approach, One Health has been endorsed by the WHO along with a wide range of high-level agencies in public health and veterinary medicine. It’s been operationalized, on a more limited basis, as well. After a 2005 outbreak of avian influenza, USAID used it to launch the Predict program, which sought to identify viruses that could slip from animals into humans. The New York City–based EcoHealth Alliance used a One Health approach to discover a reservoir of SARS virus in bats, opening up new ways to understand the coronaviruses that afflict humans. And in the Netherlands, it’s been used to tackle the spread of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in people, by addressing the use of antibiotics in livestock.

These still-nascent efforts could go much further to address the social, political, and environmental phenomena that drive the emergence of infectious disease, but they are already under attack ...

Black Lives Matter? Here PAVING is what matters -- and NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW, presented by the GREEN MOUSE.

That's right. Corbin, Kentucky.

Good job, Corbin, Kentucky. By the way, do any of the pretend-progressives in Nawbany have a pulse?

Why The Small Protests In Small Towns Across America Matter, by Anne Helen Petersen (Buzz Feed)

People who’ve watched and participated in the Black Lives Matter movement say that this time feels different. And the prevalence of these small protests is one of many reasons why.

... All over the country, people are showing up — often for the first time in their lives — to protest police brutality and injustice. In tiny ag towns like Havre (Montana) and Hermiston, Oregon, but also in midsize cities Topeka, Kansas, and Waco, Texas; on island hamlets (Friday Harbor, San Juan Island; Nantucket, Massachusetts; Bar Harbor, Maine); and in well-to-do suburbs (Lake Forest Park, Washington; Darien, Connecticut; Chagrin Falls, Ohio). They are showing up at the courthouse. They are kneeling and observing eight minutes of silence — a reference to how long Floyd was pinned to the ground in a knee chokehold by the Minneapolis police officer who was later charged with his murder. They are marching down interstates and waving signs on street corners. Sometimes, like in the town of Alton, New Hampshire (population 5,335), where one woman organized a protest just two months after being hospitalized with COVID-19, only seven people come. Sometimes, like in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, there are thousands ...

... There have been protests in Belfast, Maine. In Farmington, New Mexico. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In Bentonville, Arkansas. In Lubbock, Texas. In Idaho Falls, Idaho. The biggest anyone can remember in Paducah, Kentucky, in Bozeman, Montana, in Pendleton, Oregon, in Frisco, Texas, and in Ogden, Utah. In Tacoma, Washington, pastors knelt in the rain, pleading with God. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, three rolling days of protests. In Owatonna, Minnesota, a student-led protest lasted for 10 hours. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, thousands gathered on the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. In Myers Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Charlotte, North Carolina, where black people were prohibited from owning property for decades. And in Petal, Mississippi, where protesters have spent days calling for the resignation of Mayor Hal Marx, who tweeted last week that “If you can talk, you can breathe” ...

Here in the campaign finance paradise of New Gahania, we don't care shit for no damn revolution, because it's street sweeping season!

To which I answer:

Street “sweeping” should not be expanded. It should be ended. The physical process of “sweeping” is largely futile, and there is no United Nations storm water “law” stipulating dust cloud creation as a workable corrective to anything. Genuine drainage impediments like leaves and garbage barely are addressed by “sweeping.”

Until you've seen the townies on their front porches chasing Hostess doughnuts with iced tea and waving at the street sweeper drivers, you've no idea why people like Bob Caesar are elected to office.

Read more here:

ASK THE BORED (IN EXILE): It appears that street sweeping is suspended through April 7, although it should be eliminated altogether.

But there's more: The 4th of July on the 3rd of July is postponed!

New Albany postpones July 3 event following extension of public health emergency (at Hanson's Folly)

Well, at least there's still Harvest Homecoming ... what's that?

Nope. There'll be no waves of orange coursing through the streets this October, because New Albany's civic celebration also has fallen victim to pandemic public health logic. A very tough call for the committee, but absolutely the correct one.

Organizers cancel 2020 Harvest Homecoming Festival amid coronavirus pandemic (at WDRB)

And, there was a primary election and less than 25% of us bothered. This being a presidential year, the voter turnout percentage will increase tremendously in November, and Donald Trump probably will win Floyd County again.

In the interim, the big news out of the primary was the NA-FC school corporation's safety referendum defeat, by a margin of around 5%. Consequently, let's get something straight: Black Lives DO Matter, the COVID pandemic is absolutely real, street sweeping is a horrendous boondoggle, and Van Hagar was better than Van Halen.

Taking all this into consideration, do you really believe the Green Mouse has anything to say at all in the nature of a post-mortem about the referendum?

That'd be plain dangerous. Following are a few headlines.

What budgetary crisis? Nawbany nickel-and-dimes 50K for the homeless, then awards $2.2 million in tax abatements for Sazarac NOD.

LIVE TO EAT: Those new clothes you're wearing, well, they're a tad threadbare. That's regrettable.

Councilman Phipps' future council meeting emergency reduction resolution is another Team Gahan mess. Can it be tossed out with the rubbish?

Floyd County DemoDisneyDixiecrats issue courageously mundane statement about racism, then return to fundraising.

Count me in, emphatically: "Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning."

I endorse the following remarks.

Covid-19 has changed everything. Now we need a revolution for a born-again world, by Simon Tisdall (The Guardian)

As global demands for justice and equality gather force, only a truly radical agenda can make it happen

... Many countries have seen small-scale Covid-related protests. Yet by and large, insurrection has not gone viral – yet.

That’s despite a consensus among business leaders, scientists and pundits that the world will never be the same again. A watershed has been reached, they say. Mostly older people are suffering now, but millions among the younger generations may have their lives forcibly upended for years to come. Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning.

So the real question is not whether but what manner of revolution is coming ...

LIVE TO EAT: 50% of Indiana goes first. Getting your queue on, or keeping to the curbside?

Habana Blues.

These past few days I've been reminded of forgotten topics in history, as in the late 1980s, when those in the profession of analyzing Eastern Europe commonly debated what would happen if communism ever fell.

Essentially: We already know how to transform a capitalist economy into a communist one. But we don't know how it's done the other way around. 

Similarly, today is RO Day, the grand reopening for Indiana's restaurateurs. If food service operators so desire, they may place 50% of your ass in a seat and begin the process of implementing a new normality, subject to a great many mandates and restrictions, few of which will be clear to anyone -- operator or customer -- until doors actually are unlocked.

ON THE AVENUES: COVID tolls for thee -- whatever, so hurry up and get your ass back into this seat.

It is my personal belief that this reopening process is coming too soon in terms of public health, and inescapably, there'll be a social/political/cultural aspect to it which stands to be divisive -- although it might be plausibly argued that American society already is divided and wasn't about to come any closer together, pandemic or not, in an election year.

I continue to marvel at the results of The Fat Lamb's informal polling over the weekend at Facebook, in which the Louisville eatery asked its customers how they felt about a possible return to on-premise dining, as opposed to the curbside carryout regimen that has evolved over the past two months.

The result was not unexpected, but the veritable landslide came as a great surprise, even to me; the last time I looked, the score was approximately 145 in favor of continued curbside (with little or no likelihood of coming inside), and four, maybe five preferring to be seated again at a table. But even they expressed a cheerful willingness to continue take-aways if so ordained.

Treading lightly, I can imagine the results at a typical sports bar -- say, Hoopsters in Jeffersonville -- being slightly different, perhaps even 145 - 5 in favor of re-entry.

Not being critical, mind you; the choice to reopen or not is theirs, although you have to wonder what's going to be showing on the televisions at area sports bars.

Tiddliwinks?

I put together a pants-down survey at Food & Dining Magazine, listing restaurants intending to reopen this week, and some that aren't. Clearly, there is a division of opinion among owners and operators. It's to be expected. They're all different people, with different stories and personalities.

The food and drink industry plainly is divided, though not yet acrimoniously so. No one knows exactly how this reopening will play out, and beginning today, an experiment will begin yielding demonstrable results, which will inform further measures.

Individual conscience plays a role in all our lives, decisions and actions. We've arrived at one of those points in history, hopefully not to be forgotten, where individual conscience is of paramount importance, even more so than usual.

Here's the article. You'll have to click through to see the names of the restaurants.

Now or later? Reopening Southern Indiana restaurants — or not yet

Today is Monday, May 11. Indiana restaurants may reopen at 50% capacity, and the Indiana Restaurant and Lodging Association has released these guidelines for them, as outlined in the organization’s “Hoosier Hospitality Promise” and published at the Indianapolis Star.

Here’s what you can expect:

• All staff, including in the kitchen, will wear masks.
• All staff will pass a health check or complete a health survey prior to each shift.
• Hand sanitation stations will be available upon entry and exit from restaurants.
• All tables, chairs and common areas will be cleaned regularly.
• Menus and condiments will be single-use. Utensils will either be single-use or cleaned after every use.
• Each restaurant will have a designated employee to oversee safety and sanitation measures.
• Bar seating will be closed, with no live entertainment.
• Tables will be limited to 10 or fewer guests.
• Physical barriers will be used to separate tables, booths and bar stools.
• Communal serving areas such as buffets will be closed.

If patrons have been exposed to COVID-19 or have symptoms, they are asked to not dine in restaurants and order takeout instead. Restaurants will be limited to 50% capacity until June 14, at which time they will increase to 75% capacity. According Indiana’s plan, restaurants will be able to operate at full patron capacity beginning July 4. Bars will be closed until June 14 and will be able to operate at full capacity on July 4, pending continued positive trends.

Following in no particular order is a non-comprehensive seat-of-the-pants survey of independently owned establishments in Southern Indiana that have commented publicly about their reopening plans in the run-up to May 11.

I exchanged messages with a few of the owners, and otherwise gleaned information from their social media posts and local news reports. Even if not explicitly stated, it is reasonable to assume that all these restaurants will continue their curbside carryout and delivery programs during the coming weeks, but of course there is no substitute for contacting them directly to be sure.

Finally, to repeat, this is a survey; if your business has been omitted from either list, just e-mail me and I’ll update: foodanddiningmagazine@gmail.com

COVID-19 has no idea who is running for president.

I went out yesterday to pick up Chinese food at Green Tea, which worked out wonderfully. There were 12 - 13 persons waiting to approach the ad hoc window for payment or gathering their orders. Interestingly, the folks waiting were aware of distance, and spacing. I told my social worker wife about this.

She said it's an example of peer pressure, indicating there was a cultural expectation of which these persons were aware, thus their obvious conscious effort to comply. I thought about this and replied, but then isn't the problem that we actually have two major cultures?

Isn't it inescapable after two months of COVID that reactions toward an apolitical virus as yet are predicated on previous political/cultural identities? I've resisted mightily conceding this point, but the evidence seems clear to me. Same crap, different pretext.

Peer pressure is working within these distinct sociopolitical cultures, not crossing them -- or isn't it, if polls consistently show a clear majority in favor of caution in opening the economy, as opposed to haste?

I worry about these things in the context of the food and drink industry. It's been bad enough for us, and now the industry itself could be split between the camps of rev-it-up-now and let's-wait-for-safety's-sake.

Mind you, this division always existed. Like so many other areas, COVID has acted as a diviner of innermost convictions. What you were before, you remain -- only amplified, and in many ways rendered into parody, as with the white guys with guns "protesting" science-based public health.

I don't have an answer. But personally, I believe the economic reopening is happening too soon. Personally, I lament the probable consequences. At the same time, COVID has been conducive. Now I can see who and what you really are, and I'll base our future relations accordingly.

H.L. Mencken wrote, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." This is overly simplistic. In the decision to reopen the economy too soon, the so-called common people are getting what they neither want nor deserve. They'll be used as always by the architects of capital accumulation, and ground underfoot.

These next two or three weeks likely will be more divisive than before. Both arms of our "us versus them" culture will be responsible; we're all self-centered narcissists, just facing different altars.

The coronavirus is laughing at us, and your choice of presidential candidates means absolutely nothing.

Ghost juleps on non-race day: "Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch."

This one's from May 3, 2019, but it goes back considerably further. For those just beaming to Earth from the Starship Whatever, the pandemic has pushed Kentucky Derby 146 to Labor Day weekend in September. This hasn't prevented phantom celebrations of the race that isn't, at least just yet. All of it is suitably surreal, but as Hunter S. Thompson observed a half-century ago, the Kentucky Derby hasn't ever been exactly as it appears -- even when it disappears.

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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.

Everybody's working for the weekend.
-- Loverboy

(Ralph) Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”
-- Hunter S. Thompson

It’s getting better all the time, except when it isn’t. That’s why the Great Pumpkin invented gin.

The insipid cacophony of Blunder Over Louisville has receded from view, and the most recent iteration of Kentucky Derby Festival hyperbole approaches its yearly sell-by date.

Soon our peculiar institution, otherwise known as the Run for the Roses -- or, the greatest two-minute anticlimax in all of sports -- mercifully concludes, freeing the dazed masses to return to exurban multiplexes for repeat viewings of whatever comic-book-derived motion picture drivel currently diverts their attention from facing up to the daily challenges of this decidedly uncivil society.

By then the two-week expanse of festive revelry will have rendered half a month null and void as they pertain to any semblance of useful activity.

Insightfully, though not judgmentally, visitors entering the gates of European cities in medieval times wrote of rampant public drunkenness, especially during celebrations, with people sprawled insensate in the streets amid mounds of garbage and excrement.

Mud, blood and beer; all merely natural states of urban occupancy. Consequently 700 years later, on Sunday, numerous residents of Louisville metro likewise will find themselves lying prone on the toasty tarmac; chewed up, spat out, and duly prepped to begin queueing at local rehab clinics. Let’s hope they bathe first, but maybe cynics like me will get lucky and it will rain all day Saturday.

Meanwhile the world’s foremost horse pimps, with their entourages of low-paid attendants and exploitative regalia, already will have traveled to fresh drugging grounds elsewhere in pursuit of the Triple Crown, which now trails full-contact tiddlywinks in the spectrum of TV sports ratings, but almost made sense back when previous masters like Heywood Hale “Woody” Broun appeared on black and white television doing commentary at Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park.

If you’re getting an impression of personal distaste about the Kentucky Derby, that’s only because it’s entirely true. 

As I’ve often observed, ruinous mint juleps and atrociously unflattering hats don’t function as aphrodisiacs in my rarefied world, and yet someone always asks if I’m excited by this most over-rated time of year in Louisville metro.

Nah, but hey -- I’ve mellowed and shit.

It’s fine by me if the Kentucky Derby is your kind of gig, so please go forth and have right at it. Just count me out, and kindly refrain from stepping on my lawn this Saturday unless you’re bringing delicious bottles of Schlenkerla Rauchbier to accompany our projected roast beast.

Then everyone can be happy, as opposed to the flag-waving idiocy of Blunder, when the noise is impossible to muffle no matter how much I drink.

And I drink a lot whenever warplanes strafe my house.

---

For some, especially non-gamblers, the Kentucky Derby is a time to admire the innate beauty of horses. Indeed, they’re splendid animals, albeit regrettably subjected to criminal interference by humans when it comes to thoroughbreds being genetically engineered for the sole purpose of maintaining the custom of wagering and the devastating addiction it often spawns.

Kentucky Derby fest season also is a time for lowlifes like me to straighten up, fly right, and obey the one-percent’s finger-wagging instructions by displaying a proper veneration for upstart new money, inbred old money, ephemeral showbiz glamor, ostentatious (read: tacky) parties, and conspicuous consumption by our presumed “betters” of such a vapid intensity that by all rights the spectacle should impel us to commence the instantaneous honing of curative pitchforks.

Happily, the Kentucky Derby is a time for filling the Crescent Hill Reservoir to the rim with bourbon, and here, at last, we find a genuinely positive attribute of the season, so please do me a favor and save that detestable mint for chewing gum or some of the wonderful chilled yogurt soup the Greeks do so well in summer.

As a lifelong contrarian, I’ll take my bourbon ration served neat, then immediately trade it for requisitely peaty drams of Scotch. On the big day, I plan on stocking plenty of hooch and keeping the doors to the 1117 East Spring Neighborhood Association firmly bolted, because in addition to the horse races, May 4 in the year of 2019 doubles as the last Saturday of invasive voter canvassing prior to the Indiana primary election on the 7th.

I just might be compelled to booby trap my porch with tarantulas and other deadly cargo.

But recall that the calendar was even less favorable to civilized existence in 2018, when Derby Day coincided with Cinco de Mayo, which is fast approaching St. Patrick’s Day as an expression of sheer amateurism among my fellow Caucasians. This year Cinco de Mayo arrives on our post-Derby Sunday, encouraging the oblivious party to keep right on going, and lending a whole new meaning to Day of the Dead.

---

Last year at Insider Louisville, Susan Reigler -- musician, educator, former local restaurant critic and bourbon expert -- sat down with Sara “Bar Belle” Havens for a few questions.

(Reigler’s) affinity — or awareness, we should say — for bourbon came much earlier in her life, when she would spend Saturdays at Churchill Downs with her family.

“The track in those days always smelled of old wood, cigars, popcorn and bourbon — quite a special combination,” says Reigler.

In spite of all my cranky bluster, I can relate to these sentiments. There’s a part of me that genuinely appreciates the old-school, tactile joys of the pre-intravenous ponies, the shabby and dung-laden track, and the laid-back Southern culture that used to characterize this scene.

The native Louisvillian writer Thompson grasped it better than most, and his 1970 account remains essential reading precisely because it deconstructed the mythology and described what the Kentucky Derby symbolized -- what it "was" -- with what it very shortly would become:

(The Texan) had, after all, come here once again to make a 19th century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition."

Around the same time, I can remember Broun doing his televised racing commentaries -- and the man could write, too.

To be great, a horse must have metaphorical wings. In mythology we punished wax-winged Icarus for flying too close to the sun, but in recognition of the nobility of their singlemindedness, mythology has let the chariot horses of Apollo traverse the sky. Race horses do not chaffer over money, get into bar fights or endorse horse blankets and aluminum shoes. They combine strength, grace, beauty and speed as perhaps no other link in the Darwinian chain can manage (cheetahs have funny-looking shoulders).

There was a certain poetic flair, albeit oblivious, to the way the Courier-Journal of old used to cover the varied expressions of Churchill Downs pageantry, a quality of an indefinable “something” both venerable and genteel involving rites of spring, colorful flowers, exclusive balls and parties, and as a last resort, the horses themselves. Customs were handed down from one generation to the next, and honored.

Compared to what the Downs and the Derby have become in this time of celebrity-besotted, Disney-cum-Vegas plasticized swipe-card, UPC-tattooed entertainment experiences, 1970 might as well have been 1905.

Listen, I’m not delusional. Breeding horses for racing, wagering on them, smoking, drinking, eating and all the social constructs draped around the experience always had to do with shaking down suckers, first and foremost.

That's understood, although I submit that during the course of my own life -- perhaps as a result of globalization, or Reagan’s trickle-down, or the entire business of America’s business becoming a 24-hour-per-day psychological waterboarding designed to sell, sell, sell -- most of the tradition and authenticity have been drained away, or perhaps stripped and flipped like the Yankee Stadium demolition and rebuild, yielding an improved model in which every last corpuscle of sculpted cement, fake wood and pastel color is calculated for one reason and one reason alone -- to ensure that fools and their cash are expeditiously parted now, as a racetrack, and then even more so later, somewhere down the way, as a casino.

---

But enough of the Kentucky Derby’s deleterious implications for human civilization.

Let’s talk about beer.

From 2012 through 2017 the “official” beer of the signature institution known as Churchill Downs was Stella Artois, chosen import of AB-InBev’s payola empire. In 2018 the title passed to Corona, perhaps the most vile mainstream corn-choked Mexican lager atrocity known to man.

In 2019, pay-to-place reaches glorious new heights of Goebbelsian categorization, although I'm crushed to learn that there isn't (yet) an Official Hard Seltzer Water of the Kentucky Derby.

• Corona – Official Import Beer of the Kentucky Derby
• Budweiser – Official Domestic Beer of the Kentucky Derby
• Blue Moon – Official Craft Beer of Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Oaks and the Kentucky Derby

The Brewers Association reminds us that Blue Moon cannot be "craft," but no matter. While the Kentucky Derby has spawned or embraced many intrinsic traditions since its inaugural run in 1875, locally brewed beer hasn’t ever been prominent among these predispositions.

After all, bourbon gets you there way faster.

Still, we can surmise that in the oldest of far-off times there’d have been plenty of local beer to celebrate the annual race, at least prior to the idiotic onset of Prohibition, which rendered the United States a planetary laughingstock.

After restorative Repeal, local beer returned, but when the original Falls City swapped its fermenters for a fleet of semi-trailers in 1979, there was nary a single drop of hometown beer left to drown a wretched punter’s sorrows until 1993, when Sea Hero’s triumph may have been marked by a few hardy and pioneering microbrew fans drinking David Piece's Silo Red Rock Ale from a growler on their porch with a radio nearby, because then, as now, the very last situation you'd expect to experience in this life is local beer at Churchill Downs -- where first Stella, then Corona and now Blue Moon is the this-that-or-another "official" mass-market creation of choice, and there’s barely any incongruity worth noting because the multinational track itself has little to do with the schizophrenic city and increasingly impoverished state in which it resides.

Here, there and everywhere: when the real money is at stake, you can be sure that soulless neoliberal capitalism will be oozing through the keyhole, breathlessly drooling in anticipation of sponsorship opportunities, with conceptual coherence always taking a back seat to the sheer weight of numerically amassed ending zeroes.

Maybe next time it will be Michelob Ultra. Anyway, there’s plenty of time for an experiment, so go out and assemble a committee of horse pimps. We’ll see if any of them can spot the difference between the watery, beer-scented banality of Corona and those equally reeking buckets of equine drug-testing residue over there where the inspectors are being paid off.

It’s not a trick question, you know.

My homes away from home are gone, so the SOCIALIST is having BEERS WITH himself.

And with his wife, of course. Let's take a look at the calendar.

Oktoberfest? Nope.

The Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona? Canceled.

Poperinge Hop Fest? No word yet, but "no go" would seem to be a foregone conclusion.

I'll concede to no longer being the type who enjoys large gatherings like Octoberfest and San Fermin. Poperinge's triennial paean to the magic cone is vastly smaller and better suited to my preferences. It's clear that all such gatherings will succumb to the coronavirus in 2020.

That's part of the reason why as years go, 2020 already has ceased to exist. For all intents and purposes, we're playing for New Year's Day, 2021.

My reaction to the global pandemic response recalls the words in 1914 of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who remarked to a friend as the United Kingdom's prepared to enter the First World War, "The lamps are going out all over Europe, (and) we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

The lamps were lighted again, though it took a while. 106 years is one thing, 75 another (since the end of WWII), so nine years is sufficient for the rehash of an essay, given my inability at this late date to even remember the rationale for the original column.

First published in October of 2011, this essay was an attempt to explain the central place that pubs, libations, travel and their wonderful third spaces have occupied in my life.

However first a few words about the current fate of these third spaces.

During the pandemic an atheistic Dionysian public imbiber like me finds himself just as deprived of religious worship as any conventional believer. Without exaggeration, all the things I've truly cherished outside the boundaries of my own home are gone, with their return utterly uncertain, or whether they’re to come back in any recognizable form at all.

Depressing isn’t the word. It’s worse than that, of course in a metaphysical sense and not to be confused with a clinical diagnosis.

Seldom do I reference motion pictures to make a point, but I’m reminded of the Star Trek reboot a few years back wherein Spock watches as the planet Vulcan disintegrates before his eyes.

That’s the last six weeks for me, and for so many of us in the food and drink industry. 40 years and an entire working career, suspended in a flash. Forgive me if I’m unwilling to contemplate life without boisterous pubs with pints in Dublin, or relaxing beer gardens in Bavaria with 2,000 of your best friends. Being unable to go to places and experience them? Might as well amputate a limb or two.

Right now, I can’t fathom it. For me, here in America, pub culture always was the one sure antidote to our failed political experiment. Now the coronavirus has exposed the latter beyond any shadow of doubt, while also depriving us of the means to cope with (cov)idiocracy.

Hemingway’s empty bottle as a means of sovereign action serves no purpose if it cannot be thrown at the oppressor -- and if your oppressor is with you sheltering at home, your problems are far larger than a garden-variety hangover.

I’m not tremendously well. I’ll get better. Revolution works for me; it always has.

As Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

Here’s the 2011 rumination, touched up just a bit to fit my circumstances a decade later.

---

Homes Away from Home (2011 - 2020)

We went for a stroll one Sunday a few years ago and passed a fly-by-night evangelistic church occupying an old shotgun house that had witnessed better days.

A graying middle-aged man I’d never seen before was standing out front, and he waved animatedly as we passed. I stopped and looked at him with as dull an expression as I could muster, but he was undeterred.

“Some Sunday, why don’t you come to church with us?”

I stopped and thought about it.

“Sure, as long as you’ll come to my church with me.”

Now he was the one pausing to think.

“Where’s your church?”

Got him.

“Any pub will do.”

We kept walking. I never saw him again.

---

Often in this space I write about otherwise forgettable days both near and far, and the fact of these days being forever marked in my memory by the presence of beer.

Well, isn’t beer always involved?

Whether opening a growler of lager on my own porch with a cigar nearby, or schlepping bottles filled with ale via bicycle panniers through the Belgian countryside, times are better with beer.

Human life spans are long and short all at once, and most of our days and nights are passed and beyond recall, and yet I’ll never forget that one time in Bohemia, walking to the neighborhood rail station pub tap for pitchers of draft beer, and then spending the afternoon drinking with good, kind, giving people, even though communication was a challenge owing to our linguistic divergences.

On that occasion, we brought the beer back with us, but during the course of my decades as a professional drinker, I’ve preferred my consumption to be on premise, out in the open, and part of the public record. It’s a tightrope I enjoy walking, even if such openness sometimes has resulted in less than flattering recollections, both on my part and in the minds of those forced to witness my drunken antics.

Most of the time it doesn’t come to that, and there is a fundamentally positive dynamic at play. The reason why bars, pubs and other watering holes are the only places I’ve ever truly felt comfortable – my natural habitat, as it were – is in part a statement about my innate proclivities, and also owing to the historical function of those places as third spaces.

Nowadays most of us in America have living rooms of our own, but a social instinct still impels us to find another milieu to spend time apart from home and work, another comfortable spot – perhaps a gym, coffee shop, park bench … or even a church, in a pinch derived from sheer desperation.

Well, churches can be interesting to look at, preferably while drinking at a sidewalk café across the square.

These are functional examples, but all of them a bit dry for my taste. I prefer my third spaces to offer the possibility of consuming beverage alcohol, most often beer. When I’m surrounded by people who feel the same, anything is possible. This is especially true when you’re a wandering stranger, and find yourself welcomed, albeit temporarily, into the public living room of the locals.

It never gets any better than that.

An inviting barroom shifts the perspective of the traveler from the expansive outside looking in, to the inside looking back out ... at times, tightly. From five thousand miles away, you enter a cozy room and ask for a tankard of whatever is made right there, whether in the building, the town or the region.

Granted, one might have a lovely experience in Munich at a mock Pampas restaurant specializing in the beef and wines of southernmost South America, but really, shouldn’t you be going somewhere else for those?

---

The late Bostonian ward-heeling politician Tip O’Neill rather famously commented that all politics is local, and in like fashion, my pathway is leading me inexorably to this conclusion: All beer drinking culture is local.

Although I’m no longer a craft brewery owner, and allow myself a broad range of geographical libational constructs, there remains an essence and primacy to what is being brewed at or near the place one drinks beer.

Truthfully the homebrewer’s self-made bounty is the purest possible example, followed by local commercial brewers and their products. If the beer comes from elsewhere, whether down the road or around the globe, there remains a commensurate importance in choosing genuinely local ownership of the establishments serving it.

I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive all the way to Chico, California, and drink Sierra Nevada at the “neighborhood” chain restaurant, Applebee’s. They may serve it, but chains don’t deserve my patronage.

Returning full circle to the man’s invitation those many years ago to come to church, it may sound as if I’m formulating commandments and theological doctrine. You bet it does. What do you think this philosophy major has been pondering all these years while balanced, at times precariously, atop those thousands of bar stools?

Beer drinking is my sacrament, and pubs are my sanctuaries. When the collection tray was passed, I put all of my money into beer. I got the true religion for sure, but it came from drinking the beer … not the Kool-Aid.

ON THE AVENUES: Bunker mentalities, bunker abnormalities; bunker dreams, bunker screams.

Ian Anderson wasn’t waiting for Altamont to bring the 1960s flower-power era of peace and love to a close. His band Jethro Tull’s single “Living in the Past” was released in May of 1969, while the disastrous Rolling Stones show in California didn’t occur until December.

Lyrically it was a bit of a rejection of the swinging fashion of that post-Beatles, slightly hippy idealistic period," Anderson told Mojo. "There were a lot of people talking pompously about love and peace and revolution and, you know, people then as now were quick to jump up and scream and shout, but they're not actually really quite sure what they're stamping their feet about."

Happy and I'm smiling
Walk a mile to drink your water
You know I'd love to love you
And above you there's no other

We'll go walking out
While others shout of war's disaster
Oh, we won't give in
Let's go living in the past

Once I used to join in
Every boy and girl was my friend
Now there's revolution, but they don't know
What they're fighting

Let us close our eyes
Outside their lives go on much faster
Oh, we won't give in
We'll keep living in the past

Oh, we won't give in
Let's go living in the past

Oh no, no we won't give in
Let's go living in the past

To be truthful, “Living in the Past” isn’t a favorite song of mine, although it’s hard not to at least appreciate the wit behind a pop ditty with a 5/4 time signature.

As it pertains to the general sentiment of living in the past, there are at least two ways of looking at it. Living in the past might imply harmful obliviousness to the present, in the pejorative sense of one who cannot function owing to obsessive veneration of what’s dead and gone.

Conversely, the condition of living in the past might be more benign, perhaps even constructive; the sort of optional reverie with an on-off switch that allows a guy to take a trip down memory lane without waking to find the rose-colored glasses welded permanently to his head.

Such is my state of mind lately.

I forever strive to avoid being the sort of old white male who regards high school or college as the acme of his life. At the same time, there is a strong urge in my cosmos to relive youthful travels, and to contemplate how they played out -- or, with the luxury of a few hours to waste, what might have been. For instance, I wish I'd been into bicycling in the 1980s.

The COVID-19 kinda-sorta quarantine has produced plenty of hours appropriate for principled time-wasting of this magnitude, and I’ve been happy to use them to continue my ongoing project of digitizing long-ago travel slides. With the viewing of these images, most of them unseen for decades, living briefly in the past almost is inevitable, and I’ve given in to the urge.

It transpired five years ago during my period of post-NABC redundancy that I finally completed a fairly detailed written narrative of the 1985 trip, my first overseas journey. This was published over a period of months at the since-mothballed Potable Curmudgeon blog, and it also came about prior to the digitalization era.

This means I probably missed a few things. Consequently, now that all the 1985 photos are at my disposal, I’ll be revising and reposting this narrative, with visuals, here at NA Confidential. I've not decided exactly which day(s) of the week will be devoted to the series, so stay tuned.

While the 1985 remix project unspools, I’ll be diving into the banker’s boxes filled with detritus from the 1991-92 stay in Slovakia (I taught English at the university hospital there), and composing a narrative about those months abroad -- with photos, which I’m scanning right now.

In short, an hour or two a day of living in the past, then returning reluctantly to the present mass breakdown of human reason, otherwise known as the pandemic: covidiot, covidiocracy, covidiocy … covoodoo, covid-cuckoo?

---

Those Louisville-area restaurateurs and bar owners who believe they’ll be back i the thick of it in a few weeks -- of course not even the Shadow knows how long it really might be -- have started dipping tentative toes into the murky, swirling waters and asking their customers via social media what the future looks like.

How can bricks ‘n’ mortar restaurants and bars help make diners and drinkers feel safe while dining and drinking on-premise, as opposed to cruising a drive-through window or utilizing curbside carry-out?

The answers have been instructive.

A good number of respondents want limited seating, perhaps by reservation only, and lots of spacing between tables.

Masks, gloves and PPE for staff would be great, and maybe a designated person to run food orders who isn’t the same server touching pens, body parts and credit cards.

And isn’t it time you paid these people a living wage? After all, they’ll be unionizing, anyway, unless Trump unleashes the peaceful militias on them.

From an owner’s perspective, these visions combine to suggest half the customers, twice the employees, a larger payroll, higher post-pandemic food costs reflecting new regulations all the way up the food chain, and renewed criticism by rigged bots on detested Yelp if the cost of any single menu item is raised a buck.

To be fair, many other diners and drinkers have been supportive without reservation or any conditions whatever, repeating a variation of this: “Just unlock the doors, and we’ll be back as before.”

It’s a very good idea for restaurateurs and business owners to be canvassing folks this way. There's going to be a lot to learn, and two-way communications are a must.

As a long-term employee of the food and drink sector, a chronic worrier and a semi-professional cynic, it seems unlikely to me the hoped-for-return to normality will be normal at all. Adaptation is being thrust upon us, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Here are three (of many) obvious challenges:

1. Consumer expectations and the cost of implementing them, and not merely as these costs pertain to money. There’ll be psychological ramifications. For all of us in the hospitality industry, Yogi Berra’s perverse maxim always has been our business model’s objective (paraphrasing): That joint is so crowded that no one goes there any longer.

How will Yogi's observation fare in the post-COVID world? 

2. The time frame for the re-instituting of temporarily suspended regulatory regimes, especially as they pertain to carryout alcoholic beverages, but also in matters like parking (for curbside) and other “wartime” statutory relaxations. More to the point, if things worked fine while these were relaxed, is there even a valid case to be made for tightening them yet again, or might this be the long-awaited opportunity to purge the book of useless rules?

I know the correct answer, and am utterly pessimistic it will be implemented.

3. For those operators in New Albany, retail as well as food service, struggling for the remainder of 2020 to cope with all the other obstacles to rebuilding, trying their best to get their groove back, surprise! The 800lb Sherman Minton construction disruptions are waiting to crush them for the second time … in less than a year.

If COVID-19 doesn’t disable enough independent local businesses, INDOT is standing by, eager for someone to hold its beer.

---

A parting thought.

Maybe it’s the relative silence, but just the same it’s been a while since I've heard so many engines revving, gears shifting and tires screeching. As other cities close their streets to automobiles to facilitate outdoor social distancing during the pandemic, it comes as no surprise that New Albany’s streets are reverting to their previous wilderness state of high-speed, pass-through, dangerous raceways.

What I’ve noticed about life in this time of pandemic is that for the majority, stress and uncertainty don’t guide us to cool, analytical thinking about revolution, reinvention or reexamination.

Rather, they merely enhance the defaults already wired into 350 million noggins. If in January you regarded 40 mph as a proper speed for Spring Street, you’re now traveling closer to 50. If you waited for the light by blocking the crosswalk, you’re now halfway into the intersection. If you used your turn signal once in a blue moon -- well, you catch my drift.

The coronavirus continues to act as an amazing societal truth serum, extracting stupidity, weakness, cupidity and avarice with a degree of precision seldom seen in our lifetimes.

Understandably, living in the past becomes a steadily more appealing option when the present is frustrating and the future unclear, but I know there’s no choice in the matter, and one simply mustn’t remain in the Great Before.

I’ll be back in Deaf Gahan's Na Na Land as soon as the 1991 scanning’s finished … can you keep a light on for me?

---

Recent columns:

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: If it's a war, then the food service biz needs to be issued a few weapons. We need improvisation and flexibility to survive the shutdown.

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.

Learning from Megxit: Our device-driven "bread and circuses (while we remain) supine in the face of the social and democratic collapses."

Amid this analysis of the British royal family's latest effort to confirm its own senselessness, there's a very valuable point that I wish I'd found the words to describe.

First, the pitch.

The Real Megxit Deal, by John Davis (CounterPunch)

In a move that reflects the time-worn pathologies of powerful aristocratic families, the House of Windsor has agreed to allow the Queen’s grandson, Harry, currently sixth in line to the throne, and his California-born wife, Meghan, to leave the family business (The Firm) and attempt to establish independent lives in Canada, a former colony which remains a member of the British Commonwealth. This represents their exile from the territorial, ceremonial, financial, and emotional heart of the royal family.

The gimcrack contrivance of the constitutionally constrained modern royal family was immediately apparent upon its founding in the late seventeenth century.

Now, the section with universality quite apart from the United Kingdom.

Enthralled by freshets of free entertainment enabled by personal electronic devices, and the increasing availability of cheap consumer goods brought directly to one’s attention by those self-same devices, we exist in a perfect storm of twenty-first century bread and circuses – supine in the face of the social and democratic collapses that fester under such conditions of popular disinterest, inattention and apathy.

Royalty, heads of state, captains of industry, sports and entertainment stars offer up their lives in service to the insatiable maw of those who trade information for the privilege of exposing consumers to targeted advertising. They are but the tip of the pyramid, the base of which consists of all those who contribute cat videos, personal vignettes and the like to social media. Goods routed to consumers, along global supply routes and hub and spoke distribution networks, do so only upon the initial capture of their consumers’ attention on, most often, the tiny screens of their devices. (The actual production of those goods remains largely hidden from their consumers eyes, spread across the planet, most often in areas of poverty-wages, pollution and environmental vulnerability).

Eric Hoffer, the Longshoreman Philosopher.

Eric Hoffer (1898-1983) was an "American writer on social and political philosophy," dubbed the Longshoreman Philosopher. In fact, even after his writings were published, Hoffer continued to work and retired as a longshoreman at the age of 65.

Hoffer was an interesting person and an independent thinker; even if I'm not in agreement with everything he wrote, his thoughts inspire discussion.

Hoffer always reminded me of a working man's H. L. Mencken, or Mencken if Mencken were a longshoreman and not a newspaperman: "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."

This article explores Hoffer's enigmatic nature. Where did he really come from?

Eric Hoffer, Genius—And Enigma, by Tom Bethell (Hoover Institution)

... Hoffer’s place in American politics and intellectual thought is an enigmatic one. Much of his writing was in the form of aphorisms: short, pithy remarks that touched on eternal truths. But he was also capable of the sustained thought and expression that went into The True Believer and some of his other books and newspaper columns. Hoffer was interested in probing the depths of human behavior and discovering the motivations behind the twentieth century’s wars and revolutions. Wary of public praise, he resembled the prophets of the Old Testament, free to make people of high and low estate uncomfortable with his insights.

LIVE TO EAT AND DRINK: "It’s unsurprising that the two crucial figures in Tiki’s history were notorious liars."

Photo credit.

“It’s hard to appropriate a culture that was made up in the first place.”

“A nostalgia that is nostalgic for nostalgia itself.”

"When 21st century Tiki fails to be authentic, it settles for being authentically inauthentic."

Tiki bars aren't my sort of pleasure, but to each his or her own. This duly noted, here's an absolutely riveting overview of how Tiki ever came to exist in America, why it went away, and speculation about the reasons for the genre's comeback.

This is an uncommonly excellent essay.

The Tiki Bar Resurgence of the Trump Era, by Jackson Arn (The Nation)

It’s tacky and willfully inauthentic. Of course it’s popular again.

“It’s gotten too tacky.”
-- Donald Trump, when asked why he was closing Trader Vic’s at The Plaza, 1989

Ignore, if you can, the fact that the man who spoke these words is famous for gold buildings, gold seat belt buckles, and gold hair, and then ask yourself, “Did he have a point?”

By 1988, the year Trump bought the Plaza Hotel, the Trader Vic’s in the basement—probably the most famous branch of the most famous Tiki bar chain in the world—had become that dullest of things, a New York Institution. Three decades’ worth of prep school kids, ad men, and movie stars had been fattened on its spareribs, Samoan Fog Cutters, kava bowls, curry puffs, and pu-pu platters, and when Trump told the Times about his plans for The Plaza, it was predictably outraged. Even Richard Nixon weighed in: “It was always our daughter’s favorite restaurant,” he said, “and it quickly became mine, too.”

Then and now, Tiki provokes these kinds of strong reactions—either it’s insufferable or it’s the best. It’s my friends’ favorite genre of bar, or it’s the worst thing they’ve ever heard of. With their plastic grass, pink paper umbrellas, and yellowing ceramic skull mugs, Tiki bars have been on the cutting edge of tackiness for the better part of their 80-year history. And yet it is the humble Tiki bar, increasingly, where young urban epicures go in search of fresh-squeezed mixers, painstakingly aged liqueurs, wild-fermented imported liquors—in short, “authenticity.” A slew of high-profile new Tiki spots have opened in the last few years—Manhattan’s Mother of Pearl, San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove, Chicago’s Three Dots and a Dash—stocked with world-class ingredients and manned by top-tier bartenders. For Americans who were of drinking age in the middle of the last century, this turn of events must seem especially bizarre—since when were Tiki bars authentic or world-class in any way?

You can’t tell the story of Tiki without bringing up vast ingenuity and equally vast bigotry, heroic soldiers and charming hucksters, avant-garde and kitsch. It’s a cultural phenomenon as crude as the society that birthed it, but in a flailing, babyish way that provokes an amused headshake instead of a gasp. It is also, by its very nature, so overdetermined that it forces people to judge it, second- and third-guessing its excesses. It makes a mockery of indifference. No wonder it’s gotten popular again.

Martin Scorsese is absolutely right. Down with "market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified" life.

Photo credit: the article.

Let's begin with a vital disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a movie "buff." This said, as a reasonably well-educated human being, I'm by no means blind to the artistic merits of cinema. It's just that film entertainment is seldom entertaining to me, and as it pertains to the famous query -- well, 99 times out of 100, I'd just as soon read the book.

Unless it's sci-fi, fantasy or a comic book. Hard passes, those.

It remains that nothing cultural exists in a vacuum, even those aspects I disdain, and so I'm alert to the times when items of little interest to me as yet retain their ability to teach.

This essay by John Semley at The Baffler is one such occasion. It's about Martin Scorsese's much-discussed "The Irishman," for which I've read pans as well as praise. Semley goes deeper.

Those film franchises?

Fuck 'em.

The ad hoc, often brutally violent manner in which the Teamsters, the mafia, etc., assert their authority seems, by today’s standards, almost quaint. Old fashioned racketeering is downright homey compared to corporatized forms of exploitation practiced by the modern capitalist-as-gangster. Think of scene in The Sopranos when Patsy Parisi attempts to shake down a chain coffee franchise, only to be spurned by a manager who explains that the diffuse corporate structure makes extortion essentially impossible. “It’s over for the little guy,” Patsy moans. It’s played as a joke. But is he wrong?

Granted, the rush towards an increasingly corporatized, homogenized experience of American life may well negatively impact entrepreneurial mafiosi attempting to secure protections rackets. But it also affects the whole culture. In a world where everything is Starbucks and Walmart and Disney movies and generic Howard Johnson’s hotels, where the experience of life is determined in board rooms by parties purely interested in bolstering their bottom line, where pretty much every aspect of existence increasing feels, in Martin Scorsese’s terms, “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified,” the individual feels superfluous, a Frank Sheeran-styled leftover. The same is true of popular filmmakers attempting to ply their trade in a climate that, more and more, seems not only inhospitable to anything like art, but contemptuous of it. Even more than his searing Times op-ed, The Irishman, warts and all, mounts a persuasive case for the preservation and cultivation of such individual artists.

As to the specious claim that Martin Scorsese—with his uncredited voice-overs and sly cameos, his recurring cast of confederates, and his re-articulations of themes of faith under duress—constitutes his own “franchise,” well: that certain viewers fail to comprehend the difference between the expression of personal peccadilloes and the mandates of a mega-corporation, between art and commerce, speaks to the very breadth of the abyss Martin Scorsese stands against, onscreen and off.