Shit Towne.

The thoughts expressed here are generalized. They're not about any one person, trend or object. 

You can convince yourself to live with ignorance, because ignorance is merely an absence of knowledge, and there's always a possibility that with hard work and education, there might yet be a measure of enlightenment.

But mean-spirited envy, casual pettiness and sheer malice -- well, those are always harder to cope with. They come from places where the light seldom reaches.

Out-foxed by the fix; dip-shit-shot by the townie dimwits; thirty years, toxic dirty river city ... and has anything really changed here for all this effort?

Honestly, not really.

It's where you want to be -- providing you're dysfunctional at best, and a sociopath at worst. It's not where I particularly care to be, any longer. What this means isn't clear, at least yet.

H.L. Mencken understood, and explained on the eve of the Scopes trial in 1925.

"Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized - though I should not like to be put to giving names - but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

"Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer - that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

"On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands."

"The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Not only is car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely free from social stigma.

"The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives."

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media. We demand to be in control, and we insist the rest of you get the hell out of our way.

The headline is to be taken as sarcasm, by the way.

THE FUTURE IS FOUR WHEELS, CYCLISTS BE DAMNED, by Jacob Bacharach (The Outline)

Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.

 ... Nationally, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have spiked since 2009. The ubiquity of cell phones and the growing preponderance of integrated screens in vehicles is a major contributing factor, as is the American preference for trucks and SUVs, with which their taller front profile makes them far more deadly in collisions than the lower, slanting hoods of normal cars.

There is also the unrelenting, often murderous hostility of drivers toward pedestrians and people on bikes. No cyclist I know has not been menaced by an enraged driver — brushed past within inches, bumped at an intersection, run off the road — and most of us have been menaced more than once. No pedestrian who has to cross at a mid-block crosswalk is unfamiliar with the experience of a driver actually speeding up when they see you; no one who has crossed at a regular intersection is unfamiliar with a turning driver laying on the horn and waiting until the last second to jam on the breaks as you scurry out of the way.

The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control. A car is a missile and a castle, a self-propelled, multi-ton fortress, hermetically sealed against the intrusions of weather, environment, and, of course, other people. Drivers view the world through the lenses of speed and convenience — most of the anger at cyclists, in my experience, is at having to drive at something resembling a normal urban speed limit because there’s a bike in front of them — but also through the lens of ownership. Streets belong to cars. The rest of us are interlopers, invaders, invasive species.

In fact, most Americans, and certainly most of our political leaders, seem to view our car-based infrastructure as essentially organic and inevitable, and anything that impedes, slows, reduces, or provides an alternative to the circulation and storage of internal combustion vehicles is an engineered scheme to alter an essentially natural order. Newspapers relentlessly editorialize about massive road and highway projects as absolute fundamentals of economic wellbeing and development, whereas rail and bike lanes and other multi-modal transit options are generally treated as luxe amenities at best, or public menaces at worst.

(snip)

But cars are not creatures and have not evolved to fit their environment; we have designed our environment around cars ...

 ... And here, curiously, we find a great undiagnosed cause at the root of our supposed cultural malaise. (Also, incidentally, a great undiagnosed source of national violence: cars kill as many people in America — around 40,000 a year — as guns.) These, too, are persistent bugaboos of op-ed writers and pundits: fragmentation and atomization; loneliness and disconnection; declines in communal values and an absence of interpersonal interaction.

Well, easy enough to blame it on the internet, but for a century now we have been putting things farther and farther apart and, more and more, traveling to and from everyplace in single occupancy vehicles, grimly zooming from garage to garage, interacting with no other humans along the way except for that fucking cyclist taking up the whole goddamn road! The interactions that presumably create the sorts of communities that conservatives and columnists so frequently lament losing require more than a front porch on which to sit; they require some strolling passersby as well.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Agoraphobia with a peniaphobic chaser, or the drunkenness of a sociopath's power.

Welcome to another installment of SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

In April of 2016, we offered the word "agoraphobia" for Shane's consideration. Today's reprise (below) is occasioned by two occurrences.

First, I yet again caught myself mispronouncing "agoraphobia."

It's ag-uh-ruh-FOE-be-uh, and if I owned a blackboard, I'd be standing there like Bart Simpson writing the pronunciation 100 times in the hope of getting it right in the future.

Second, someone asked me this seemingly unrelated question: Does Mayor Jeff Gahan possess a phobia about poor people?

You'll be delighted (or saddened) to know that yes, there's a word for this.

Peniaphobia

Etymology
From the Greek πενία poverty and φόβος panic, fear
Related to Latin penuria (“poverty”)

Noun
peniaphobia ... The fear of poverty and/or poor people.

Assuming a fear of poverty, one needn't be a credentialed professional to surmise that for one to fear the condition of poverty might well presuppose a fear of those who are impoverished -- or more likely, a sense of loathing toward them.

Especially if the poor can't be relied upon to vote, and/or when the ground beneath their feet is deemed more valuable than the dignity of their existence, or somehow more cost effective than pursuing measures to help lift them from it.

11 Signs Your Mayor May Be A Sociopath, at Huffington Post.

This brings us back to agoraphobia, because throughout 2017, as Gahan has staged his hostile takeover (putsch) of public housing for the purpose of eliminating as much of it as he can, you'll notice that he has refrained from speaking to residents of public housing, or those who'll be impacted the most by his peniaphobia.

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April 27, 2016

Today's word is occasioned by an inquiry from a regular reader: "It seems that Mayor Gahan tries to avoid being in a position of spontaneity in a crowd. What do you think causes that?"

One possible explanation is online.com/index.php?term=agoraphobia">agoraphobia.

agoraphobia

noun

"Fear of open spaces," 1873, from German Agorophobie, coined 1871 by Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal (1833-1890) from Greek agora "open space" (see agora) + -phobia "fear." Related: Agoraphobe; agoraphobic.

In ancient Greece, the agora was an open space in the city, used for assemblies, meetings and markets. The term agoraphobia doesn't so much imply a fear of the open space itself, but fear of public spaces and crowds occupying them, because these cannot be controlled. If there is no control, panic ensues.

Note the pronunciation. It's not a-GOR-a-foe-be-uh, and as such, is an example of a word I've often mispronounced.

Definition of Agoraphobia By Mayo Clinic Staff

Agoraphobia (ag-uh-ruh-FOE-be-uh) is a type of anxiety disorder in which you fear and often avoid places or situations that might cause you to panic and make you feel trapped, helpless or embarrassed.

With agoraphobia, you fear an actual or anticipated situation, such as using public transportation, being in open or enclosed spaces, standing in line or being in a crowd. The anxiety is caused by fear that there's no easy way to escape or seek help if intense anxiety develops. Most people who have agoraphobia develop it after having one or more panic attacks, causing them to fear another attack and avoid the place where it occurred.

People with agoraphobia often have a hard time feeling safe in any public place, especially where crowds gather. You may feel that you need a companion, such as a relative or friend, to go with you to public places. The fears can be so overwhelming that you may feel unable to leave your home.

Agoraphobia treatment can be challenging because it usually means confronting your fears. But with talk therapy (psychotherapy) and medications, you can escape the trap of agoraphobia and live a more enjoyable life.

The Mayo Clinic definition contains several examples of the agoraphobia used in a sentence, but here's another one:

I believe agoraphobia explains Mayor Jeff Gahan's reluctance to attend city council meetings, as well as his tendency to avoid unscripted appearances.

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And, for October 2017:

When it comes to Mayor Jeff Gahan's complete absence of empathy for those who might lose their homes owing to his hostile takeover of public housing, agoraphobia and peniaphobia taken together comprise a toxic cocktail of the sort only Adam Dickey would willingly chug.