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BAYLOR: Someone’s in the kitchen with Chloe
A common house fly of the species Musca domestica wearily hugged the wall by the cracked window next to Councilman Cappuccino’s cluttered kitchen sink. Winter was coming, and the fly was feeling profoundly sluggish. Casting his 8,000 eyes downward, he slowly scanned the chipped Formica countertop in the hope of scoring a last tidbit of delectable barbecued bologna before oblivion arrived.
Instead, with rapidly escalating horror, the fly saw a ventriloquist’s dummy seated cross-legged with his back to Cappuccino’s elderly Mr. Coffee — and there was something ominous in his wooden hand.
Was it a flyswatter?
Alarmed, yet too fatigued to move, the fly examined the mosaic. Suddenly he grasped the cosmic inevitability of what was about to happen. It was worse than a flyswatter.
It was a ukulele.
TWANGJINGALING
“Hello, Chloe, waddayouknowy,
I just got back from a vaudeville showy”
Seated at the table, fresh from another raggedly rag picker’s auction, Councilman Cappuccino busily sifted through the contents of a weathered Bud Light case. Much to Li’l Stevie’s chagrin, ice-cold cans of flavorless, low-calorie swill did not appear to be among the lucre.
TWANGJINGALING
“Chloe, Chloe — Someone’s calling ... “
•••
Cappuccino’s rotary-dial cell phone squawked. He jabbed a stubby into the coin slot and answered:
“Hello ... You don’t say? You don’t say? You don’t say?”
“Who was it, CC?”
“He didn’t say.”
Tossing the phone aside like the mayor’s most recent budgetary request, Cappuccino continued affixing strange parts from the beer crate onto a large metallic cylinder. Before long, the machine had been completely reassembled. Cappuccino stood and beamed.
TWAN ... . gggggwhump
Lil Stevie dropped his ukulele into the wayward remnants of a jelly doughnut.
“We can’t afford a sausage grinder, boss. Don’t you know it’s a depression now, and meat’s awful expensive, and we’re all hurtin’ ... when it comes to granmaw’s ol’ cookie jar, well, nickels and dimes add up to more video poker machines down at the post - Nazis! - and rates and fees ... “Cappuccino glared.
“I’ll have you know that this is gonna save us plenty of nickels and dimes, Stevie. It’s the answer to all of our problems with getting the right information.”
Li’l Stevie scratched his head. “But CC, I thought we just ignored all the information, at least the part we didn’t want to hear. Why do we need a meat grinder to help us do what we already don’t do?
Cappuccino asked, “Haven’t you ever heard of IT?”
“Eye teeth?
“No, IT — information technullogy!”
“Beats me, CC, sounds like those big words the progressives always use, like Certificate of Appropriateness. Heck, I know what’s appropriate for my rental properties, but I’d rather just pick and grin.”
TWANGJINGALING
“Thunder or lightning, shower or snow
when I get a call, I’ve gotta go ... “
Cappuccino’s phone sounded again.
“Hello ... You don’t say? You don’t say?”
“Who was it, CC?”
“Same guy!”
•••
“Stevie, this is a machine built especially for the little people of New Albany. I call it an RIP - a Right Information Processor.”
“How’s it work, CC?”
“I’ll show you.”
Cappuccino reached for a dusty, mangled manila envelope marked MASTER PLAN. He turned it upside down, and a thick stack of drawings and explanations cascaded onto the tabletop.
“Hey, look — that’s the MP, CC! I thought we didn’t have that information at all.”
“We had it, all right, replied Cappuccino. “I borrowed it from one of the commissions that I appointed myself to serve on. But see, the only way this information is useful to us is if we make it the right information. We have to use the RIP to process the MP so it doesn’t lead to a new PG downtown.”
Li’l Stevie’s eyes narrowed. “What’s a PG?”
“A parking garage.”
“Aiyyee! I hate cars! They bring all that traffic, and all them people, and more cash than I get when I rent out the couch, and then those people we don’t like spend money at those places we don’t like ... but CC, how does the RIP help us stop the PG?”
“Just watch.”
Steadily turning the handle on the RIP, Cappuccino fed one sheet at a time into the hopper on top. Soon the casing at the bottom began to fill with confetti, and when it bulged out at full length, Cappuccino expertly tied and snipped. It plopped down and rolled over, revealing a single word in block letters: “NO.”
“That’s how we stop it,” remarked Cappuccino.
“Wow,” exclaimed Li’l Stevie. “Finally, some big, fat, right information. I bet we could use this here RIP for citations from the ordinance enforcement officer. Hey — do you have any mustard to go with that?”
•••
The NO casings were piling up in front of Councilman Cappuccino, and somewhere behind the wall of empty Bud Light cans, Li’l Stevie strummed. The fly on the wall began contemplating suicide.
TWANGJINGALING
“Most any afternoon at five
We’ll be so glad we’re both alive
Then maybe fortune will complete her plan
That all began with cocktails for two (hic) two (hic) two-we-ooh (hic)” Cappuccino’s phone erupted.
“Hello ... you don’t say? Just write this down: Gallon of milk, Fig Newtons, taco seasoning, sardines, and a loaf of Bunny Bread. Got it?”
“Same guy again, CC?”
“No, it was Councilman McWafflin. I sure hope someone else doesn’t call him before he gets to the checkout line.”
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BAYLOR: Dear Pat
“I can’t help but wonder if we’ve made a mistake in settling down in New Albany. This place is nuts.”
The words quoted above are real. I didn’t make them up. They were spoken to me by a friend who wasn’t raised here, like you and I were, you in the city, and me in the county.
Perhaps neither of us is able to see the counter-productive political dysfunction holding sway hereabouts quite as clearly as someone who views our home turf with clear, unprejudiced eyes — the type of person far too many natives persist in dismissing and deriding as an “outsider.”
Pat, we don’t know each other that well, and during the time since you were elected to represent the 4th council district, we’ve had a few heated debates over politics, policy and public affairs. Let’s forget those. The reason why I’m writing you today is because of my friend, who came here from somewhere else because he and his wife believe in our city’s largely untapped potential. In spite of our differences, Pat, it’s always been my view that at some level, you genuinely “get it.”
As such, what are we to tell my friend — tell him, and her, and “them people,” as your caterwauling council colleague Dan Coffey has oft times referred to anyone who is educated, artistic, productive and capable? Are we to follow Coffey’s lead and turn away the new blood — the sort of people that any community needs to build, grow and prosper — or shall we harness, integrate and welcome them to a city that values their presence and benefits from their labors?
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, Pat. It isn’t about newcomers alone. It’s about those who already live here — most importantly, about their children. It’s a cliché, but children are the city’s hope and its future. In the past, our best and brightest tended to leave town, because we couldn’t offer the sort of economic, cultural and lifestyle opportunities they regarded as necessary to stay. This needs to change, and in some respects, it has.
Surely we can agree: When it comes to education and educational opportunities, that selfishness, resentment and spite have no conceivable place in the discussion.
And yet, Pat, since you’ve served on the city council, can unbiased, neutral observers reach any other conclusion than this one:
New Albany’s city council, as permitted by its members to be dominated by a regressive, anti-intellectual faction led by Dan Coffey and abetted by Steve Price, has consistently stood against education, and educational attainment, and sustainable economic development flowing as a natural consequence of education?
I’m trying earnestly not to exaggerate the Coffey-led council’s anti-educational bias, which in practice might better be referred to as an aversion to human progress in virtually any quantifiable form, except you and I both know the malignancy is there, and profoundly damaging.
My question to you, Pat: If you know better, and I think you do, then why, at this late juncture, is your name so closely linked politically with theirs?
Consider last week’s tragicomic school closings. If ever there were a time for this pointlessly fractured, hopelessly divided council (and that’s just the eight strong Democratic contingent) to come together, call a special town hall meeting, posture, grandstand, point fingers and squawk, this was it: Neighborhood schools being closed in three downtown council districts, hampering if not outright crippling revitalization prospects and economic development for decades to come.
Predictably, none of it occurred. As a body, the council was silent, and the only way to explain its timidity is outright malice on the part of its movers and shakers. City Hall came out forcefully against the school closings, and almost certainly, that’s why the Coffey-Price “let’s pretend to be Democrats and hope that we all fail” faction refrained from comment.
That they fail as individuals to see any value in progress merely seals the deal on their crass political absenteeism. Either way, it’s another black eye for a city already ill disposed toward insight.
Understood: Times are hard. The business climate is tough, and yet quite a few people, many of them from elsewhere, have invested in downtown New Albany. To cite one example, the new State Street branch of Wick’s Pizza has been its best performing store in metro Louisville. Wick’s is situated in Coffey’s council district, and yet he hasn’t missed an opportunity to speak and act against such development, to bad-mouth entrepreneurs, and to urge future investors to stay away from New Albany.
Pat, is this really leadership?
(No, Roger, it isn’t.)
I know you believe that. I know you’re better than that. I know you have what it takes to lead. But Pat, here’s what bothers me.
Why do you tolerate it, and why do you persist in voting with Coffey and Price?
Sorry, no; you can’t explain it by saying that the issues upon which you’ve been marching lockstep with the council’s ward heeling looters — sewer rate votes, audit envy, public safety and dollar-and-cents issues —are somehow different in nature from the spiteful, repugnant, self-debilitating attitude toward the city’s future displayed by these same congenital “no” voters. The non-governing principles prefacing book burning and tea parties are exactly the same.
Pat, it’s eloquently simple even though it’s excruciatingly hard.
When the time finally comes for last call — not a quick pint before the trip home from the warm pub on a cold, desperate and anonymous night just like all the rest, but the punching of the big ticket and the cosmic bow prior to that most irrevocable of all curtains falling, how will posterity judge your political legacy?
Was it progressive or regressive?
Was it Dan Coffey’s legacy … or yours? -
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