REWIND: It shan’t happen here (2009).

New Albany's civic inferiority complex is the subject of this, another of my Tribune columns. It was originally published on March 12, 2009.

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BEER MONEY: It shan’t happen here.

By ROGER BAYLOR Local Columnist

To live in New Albany is to be compelled forever and always to look at positive developments with a shrug, knowing that local Limbaughs are praying for failure, and to listen to their self-flagellating admonitions of futility, powerlessness and begrudgery:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even try.

Which ideas and activities do the naysayers advise us to shun? Virtually all of them, especially any that suggest a departure from established thought and practice, even if it can be demonstrated that the “way we’ve always done it” never worked.

You name it, and it has been rejected as impossible in New Albany. From electrification and internal combustion engines in days past, to ordinance enforcement and restoring two-way streets in the present age, reality-based forward thinking always has been derided as completely unattainable.

Usually the excuse for inaction is the city’s lack of cash, but the malaise extends far deeper into the tortured psyche of the citizenry. Ours is an inferiority complex of epic dimensions, and outlanders discern it immediately upon entering the city limits, yet because these widespread feelings of inadequacy constitute a known devil, ruinous conservatism compels people to hug the ground and wait for impending change to cease before rising to scurry to previous dysfunctional patterns.

But the world continues to rotate and calendar pages inexorably turn, with or without New Albany’s assent, leaving the city’s enlightened elements to struggle against the dreary shackles of habitual humbuggery as they seek freedom from the fear-crazed nooses of the little people, whose contradictions are legion.

Is it rational to insist that we are citizens of the greatest country on the face of the earth, purportedly a place where opportunity is unlimited, but at the very same time, to assert entirely different rules for New Albany, thus dooming us to suffer through ignorance, squalor and underachievement as though we’re being gleefully punished by one of those celestial deities that folks hereabouts so eagerly accept?

I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

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Given my outspokenness on this topic, dissent is inevitable, and I’ve heard the vague rumblings. These might be enough to induce paranoia into the bloodstream of this opinionated barfly, but since the market on New Albanian paranoia is fully sated in the 1st council district alone, I shall continue to walk through the valley of the shadow of the alley between my Bank Street Brewhouse and Connor’s Place without fearing evil – or anonymous e-mails, or even spilled, bitter Coffey.

Ten weeks into this experiment in constructive agitation, the objections can be distilled to this essence:

“Roger, why do you hate New Albany so much?”

Let me try to count the ways that this accusation makes even less sense than the usual opinions seeking to pass muster as facts in a place that seldom values the distinctions between the two.

I hate New Albany so much that it has been my conscious choice to live here since descending the Knobs in 1994, later moving into a century-old house downtown with my wife in 2003, and all along resisting the common local impulse to transform the house into a quadplex rental unit while disingenuously denying that rental property is a business activity.

I hate New Albany so much that I’ve been working here in one or another capacity since 1983, becoming a business owner myself, and spending the past four years studying urban revitalization, networking with the like minded, and devising a business plan for an expansion of our brewing business into downtown – even though there were opportunities as good elsewhere.

I hate New Albany so much that I remain sanguine about the prospects of forging pacts of unity with fellow progressives, and doing my little bit to transform this city into a viable, marketable, modern component of the Louisville metro area.

Sorry to dash those preconceived notions, but I don’t hate New Albany.

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However, with our longstanding civic inferiority complex looming over us like an 800-pound pigeon perched on the Elsby Building, New Albany’s populace certainly seems to hate itself. Why does it conduct itself in such a self-loathing way?

Perhaps because so many of the ward heelers we elect to local office provide living, daily proof of the old axiom, “Insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Too many New Albanian politicians persist in greeting the wide world around them with fear and incomprehension, trumpeting their confusion as bequeathed to them by birthright, citing their own shortcomings as proof that the world cannot be changed or even modified, and spending their political careers excusing futility and failure.

Not to single out my 3rd district councilman, but where else do you hear campaign slogans like this:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even trying.

And yet the citizens of New Albany vote for those proud of being incapable. The same people vote for the similarly incapable further up the Indiana governmental food chain, those who insist that local government must do more with less than ever before?

I won’t point a finger at government, because we get exactly the quality of government we deserve. If we hate ourselves and vote for others who do, too, then there’s only one place to look for the real answer: Pogo, who knew the truth.

The enemy (still) is us.

Yet another new blog, this one sensible: Impeach Coffey.

As though in response to The Coffey Corner, there's now ...

Impeach Coffey

"New Albany has had about enough of Dan Coffey. Under the guise of serving the citizens of New Albany, he has single handedly set our once great city back decades."

Can we really impeach him, or merely recall him? Is Skittles the Cat coffeyplating another run? Will the huddled, long-repressed Westendians rise up and free themselves from their doltish shackles?

Sometimes the Open Air Museum is the most entertaining place on earth.

America’s Most Wanted – with a slice o' Coffey Cake on the side.

Do we deserve any of this?

You know, as punishment for some variety of karma wastage?

New Albany councilwoman says ‘I’m innocent’; Diane McCartin-Benedetti arrested for DUI, by Matt Thacker (News and Tribune).

New Albany City Councilwoman Diane McCartin-Benedetti didn’t have much to say Monday following her weekend arrest for operating while intoxicated by refusal. However, she said her story will be told at a later date.

“I’m innocent and the facts will be forthcoming,” McCartin-Benedetti told The Tribune.

Score at least one point for the council woman. Lest we've forgotten, Americans are presumed innocent until proven guilty, or at least that's the assumption. She’s not a black male, and that bodes well for her in purely statistical terms (kindly note that I abhor profiling in any form).

Not unexpectedly, the main local news sources are choosing to entertain us even further by enlisting Dan Coffey in the cause of subjective analysis, enabling him to fulfill the only political mandate that he really knows: Interjecting his own agenda into places where it seldom belongs.

So it is that the same etiquette-challenged council president who earlier this year mistook Studio’s for a costume party and impersonated a copperhead snake, later threatening bodily harm to an educated citizen, now helpfully notes that there is a reason why his fellow council time servers didn’t admonish him at the time.

… Coffey said he does not condone McCartin-Benedetti’s action, but he does not expect the council will take any action against her because it has no policing authority.

Indeed it doesn’t, although ethical authority might be a different and reachable goal, but as with his own transgression and the manner by which it was swept under a rug of indifference, Coffey sees to it that there’ll be no concepts like that on his watch.

Remarkably, it gets even worse. Apparently it’s Halloween every day on West 7th, as Coffey makes the reporter wait on the porch while he ducks into a nearby water closet, dons the plush vestments, approaches the stand with a plastic cup of Welch’s and a plate of stale Ritz crackers, and straddles a standard of piety that congenitally escapes his own political realm.

“I hate to see anybody in a difficult situation, but the bottom line is we all make mistakes,” Coffey said. “Sometimes it actually ends up making us a better person.”

Verily, that’s a straight line for the ages. Where’s Milton Berle when you need him most? However, there’s even more mirth to come:

Coffey said McCartin-Benedetti’s arrest underscores a growing problem in New Albany.

“If you look at all the development downtown, it’s all been alcohol establishments,” Coffey said. “Downtown is just saturated with them.”

That’s one breathtaking grandstand.

We know from the start that Coffey's as perpetual a political non-entity as we’re likely to witness in our lifetimes, but just for the fun of it, we'll take him at his caterwauling word and concede that yes, it’s true: There are a few places downtown that sell alcoholic beverages.

Of course, this plain fact has nothing whatsoever to do with Benedetti’s consumption (if any) and arrest. There are places to drink in the suburbs, too, and also package stores. One might run a basement distilling operation and pour the yield into a flask.

Then again, we already knew that rarely does a nonsensical Coffey utterance correspond with reality outside of his pre-determined spin-cycle needs, and in his present zeal to co-opt Benedetti’s misfortune for his own personal and political self-aggrandizement, Coffey is able to play a double game, holding out an olive branch of sorts to lure the council woman into his obstructionist hovel, and blaming downtown revitalization (“them people”) for the first of what we can expect will become a long list of evils and travails.

Amid the exaggerated nothingness of Coffey’s stunted game playing, it’s worth recalling that the downtown food and beverage establishments slated for ritualistic attack by the Coffey cabal were made possible by the state's special riverfront development area rules for three-way licenses, and in turn, these rules could not be implemented without an affirmative vote by the city council.

That's right: New Albany’s city council duly approved the riverfront development area and the regulatory regime leading to the “saturation” against which Coffey froths – not yesterday, but in 2006 – and by a unanimous vote. Even Steve Price was for it, at least after being assured that the video poker machines at the VFW remained safe and sound.

Yes, and this means that three years ago, Coffey voted in favor of what he now finds expedient to decry, surely dismissing the inherent hypocrisy as a standard that doesn’t apply to him. Exactly how does Coffey explain his previous vote?

We’re left to guess that as is customary with him, he didn't have the right information at the time – and has been busy fabricating freshly spurious “facts” ever since by means of the sausage grinder he keeps for just such cases.

As always, it’s a purely depressing spectacle.

Has Skittles the Cat registered for a primary run against the Wizard next time?

Open thread: How do our ward heelers win elections?

Theresa Timberlake was at the meet 'n' greet on Tuesday evening. She has filed (as a Democrat) to run for the 1st district council seat currently occupied by Dan "Wizard of Westside" Coffey, who has yet to file, and was once overheard to remark that he would not run again as a Democrat. Presumably, and if true, this leaves open the intriguing possibility of Coffey joining silver tongued Dick Stewart as insurgent standard bearers of the Unreconstructed Minstrelsy Party (UMP), and campaign in ... yeah, you guessed it.

But I digress. Again.

The question arose: Exactly how is it that a bad actor like Dan Coffey wins elections?

Please contribute your thoughts. Keep it clean, okay?

Thanks again to all attending on Tuesday.