It’s great to be sitting in a quiet room, away from the bedlam of the past two days. I’ll begin the Sunday morning Tribune wrap with the newspaper’s letters to the editor.
LETTERS: March 1, 2009
— Reader thanks city council for proposed adult ordinance
— Reader has something to say to landlords
The first reader is Vince Garmon, a member of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK), who thanks the New Albany City Council for being so very diligent in tackling the grievous threat to our community posed by adult entertainment, even as the same council congenitally refrains from tackling any of the other dozen (two dozen?) threats that don’t conveniently fall beneath the hot-button umbrella of evangelical preoccupation with sex to the exclusion of interest in all those “other” mundane threats, which after all, don’t really affect life in the non-blighted exurb where the real church-goers live — right, Gary?
Coincidentally, today’s front page headline informs us: Adult ordinance faces changes with New Albany City Council.
The minute adjustments include extending the hours of operation and changing the no-contact distance between customers and dancers.
Sorry, but it’s venting time for the Publican.
Perhaps well intentioned councilman Bob Caesar, who is quoted in the article, would do well to consider Terry Stalwar’s recent column about unintended consequences.
Bob, you’re permitting the Christian Right to frame the rules of the game, and you do so at the peril of us all. You are risking a slippery slope that will be greased when these (currently) one trick ponies declare victory over the current imaginary peril and change focus to another just as ephemeral, but as “defined” by a specifically religious outlook that jibes not one solitary jot with the secular legal tradition that we ostensibly observe in this country.
Their object is a theocracy, Bob.
Also, recall that every word currently devoted to depicting the damage inflicted by adult entertainment was once deployed to explain the need for the enforced sobriety of Prohibition. It’s bad enough that so few of the newly elected council persons ever bothered to study the body and function of that which they wanted to become a member. It’s even more depressing to conclude that none of them have read history, either.
The second letter comes from our own Highwayman:
However, don’t walk in the door with fairytales about how being a landlord is not being a business person.
Lloyd is referring to the latest instance of landlord gibberish, as reported by the Tribune last week:
“It’s just another tax. You cannot convince me that it’s anything other than that,” (Haeseley) said. “My biggest concern is that they’ve already established that we’re a business, and I disagree with that.”
He buys it and he resells it for a profit, making use of all available legal quantifications while doing so, and yet in the past, Brian Haeseley has referred to his rental properties as “products,” and echoed the current propaganda that he so freely rehashes that his chosen vocation should not be described as a business.
What is it, Brian? A xylophone? Girl Scout cookie? Cumulo-nimbus cloud?
That rumbling sound you hear is George Orwell doing somersaults six feet under, but perhaps Goebbels was right: The bigger the lie, the more likely that a benumbed public will swallow it.
Stray note to Pat Harrison: The preceding is an historically accurate reference to history in the context of the Gestapo.
Finally, something encouraging to balance the idiocy: New Albany on the Levee?, in which it is suggested that the experience of Newport, Kentucky, might have relevance to our own.
A jolt, to be sure. Believe it or not, there are people living in the city of New Albany who are capable of gazing upon a similar-sized river city less than two hours away and learning something.
I know, I know … learning probably is illegal, and if so, it’d be the only ordinance we ever bother to enforce, but the point is that these people want to bring someone to New Albany for all of us to learn something.
That’s positively subversive for the Open Air Museum.
Freedom to Screech almost certainly is against it, and the concerned troglodytes are preparing to self-immolate on the courthouse steps in protest of the government taking a penny more of their Wal-Mart shopping money — you know, the cash that keeps Chinese sweat shops ticking.
I’d like to finish this essay, but there’s a semi-trailer caught in a pothole outside my door. Gotta go hitch up the team of Dalmatians and go pull him out. Wish me luck. And if anyone finds one of the those anonymous letters circulating to the effect that I lack sufficient moral character to be permitted to do business here (alas, B, that’s what I persist in calling it), please forward it to me.
Now more than ever, I could use a good laugh.
