Fondly Remembering the Solidarity Books Collective

 

They were known fondly, but also, sadly, hostilely, as “The Kids.”  They, the Solidarity Books Collective, were comprised, when they formed in 2001, as a group of feisty young anarchists ranging in age from 17 to 25.  Some were Indianapolis homegrown, some had come from out-of-state to take jobs here.  Their great ambition was to form a nonsectarian left bookstore in Indianapolis, which they did—Solidarity Books, on Indy’s South Side.  And from the beginning, they were regarded hostilely by the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” who comprised what passed for a left here in the justly named IndiaNOPLACE.  As I was alienated from these “churchgoing progressives” already, I was naturally drawn to the Collective by the very hostility it generated.  My first exposure to the Collective came when I overheard Harry Van Der Linden, a pacifist philosophy professor at Indianapolis’s Butler University and then President of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, the political home of the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” indignantly complaining to the two leading “churchgoing progressives,” Ron and Jane Haldeman, how the Solidarity Books Collective had the temerity to ask Van Der Linden’s son, a teenager same as others in the Collective, to give $70 toward making the bookstore a reality.  A whole $70!  (But that’s typical of cheapskate Indianapolis—I had encountered it many a time as a writer here, people telling me, “I love what you’re doing!  Where’s my free copy?” with the emphasis on “free,” as though everything just grew on trees!)  Right then and there, I just knew I had to check out the Solidarity Books Collective.  I wasn’t in the least disappointed when I did, met them, and from the beginning regarded them as a fine bunch of young radicals of whom more were needed in IndiaNOPLACE.

 

They formed their bookstore, Solidarity Books, and kept it alive even after having to relocate it, then having to relocate it again, changing the store’s name to Paper Matches, and worked long and hard to keep it alive, despite its being deliberately boycotted by the “respectable progressives” due to the young Collective’s open espousal of anarchism, and its frequent non-pacifist rhetoric, even though the Collective’s members themselves were all de facto nonviolent and highly democratic, welcoming, and inclusive.  Certainly at first.   Further, they took Solidarity Books’ non-sectarianism seriously by stocking its shelves with a wide range of offerings for sale.  (Later, frustrated and beleaguered by the “respectables’” slighting of its efforts, the Collective became more specifically, more hegemonically, anarchist, and stocked the bookstore’s new titles exclusively with offerings from anarchist AK Press.)  Frustration, and with it, sectarianism, had set in, as the Collective grew beleaguered and chagrined by the deliberate sabotage of what they were trying to do by the “respectables,” and by 2005 they’d all left, in anger, frustration, bitterness and resentment.  Meanwhile, what remained of the left in Indianapolis only grew older and more hidebound, and lost all attraction it had once had among Indianapolis’s young.  Yes, a fatality engineered by the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” who just couldn’t stomach anyone not calling himself (or herself) a Christian, a “spiritual person,” or religious.  (The members of the Solidarity Books Collective, same as I, were overwhelmingly atheists.)  Or possessing boldness, which the Solidarity Books Collective had.  But they were gone by 2005, killed off by “churchgoing respectability,” a “left” form of it that differed only from the right-wing version of it by whom they considered “fellow respectables.”  Their “respectables” were Democrats, as opposed to the others’ Republicans.  But that was the only major difference.  Rather than embrace the Quaker principle of “Speaking truth to power,” I’d suggested to the Solidarity Books Collective, which heartily agreed with me, the “respectables’” approach was, instead, “Begging ‘Pretty please’ from power,” which, I really believe, sums up the whole of the “political approach” of Indianapolis’s “respectable churchgoing progressives”—a group not nearly so much pacifist with a “c” as they were passive-ists with an “i-v-e,” when they weren’t being outwardly passive-aggressive!

 

Needless to say, Indianapolis, one of the Top Ten cities in the U.S. by population size, thus lost its chance to have what nearly every large city has, a prominent left bookstore.  Now it has no independent bookstores, only national chains, and the chief source of left books in Indianapolis is ordering them online.  All because Indianapolis, through its “respectable churchgoing progressive” denizens, insisted on being moored down by “respectability” first and foremost, thus ensuring that Indianapolis would resemble, and remain resembling, despite its growth and gentrification, a city more out of a Sinclair Lewis novel than anything else.

 

Which is a prime reason why Indianapolis has not, nor ever has really had, any kind of serious left movement, let alone any left movement of any notable size.  But it’s always had “respectability” of a shabby middle-class sort.  A “respectability” borne of—not being anything of consequence!    

George Floyd Protests in Indianapolis

I haven’t been much able to participate in protests over the police killing of George Floyd because of my second shift job, and also, because of the curfew imposed by the City of Indianapolis.  But I was finally able to participate in one on Sunday, June 7, a nonviolent symbolic action at the City-County Building at noon, where we 25-30 participants, all observing social distancing, knelt for nine minutes of silence, the amount of time George Floyd’s neck was held under the knee of the Minneapolis cop, causing him to asphyxiate and die.  My friend and fellow trade unionist John Jett (he of IATSE, the stagehands’ union; I’m in the UFCW) invited me, and I was glad to join.  And, of course, glad I did.  The organizer of the event, a black man, spoke briefly afterwards, and pointedly noted that Floyd’s killing wasn’t just a racial thing, it was a class thing, because being mistreated by the police happened also to poor whites considered criminals.  (I've since found out he's Chris Shelton of the Indiana AFL-CIO, and now a Facebook Friend of mine.)  When he finished, I spoke to this point briefly, “Being treated professionally and respectfully by the police is not a ‘privilege,’ it’s a right!” and received applause for it from the multiracial crowd.   

As I had walked along Delaware St. to the City-County Building from my car and back, I noticed the boarded-up windows that had been shattered by earlier protests, and felt the poetic justice involved in just whom got trashed.  For one, the windows and doors of the bail bond parasites had been trashed, as had been the front of the Wheeler “Rescue” Mission, where homeless, desperate men could “get” a cheap meal and a bed for one night only, after standing in line for hours, by being “offered salvation” through mandatory attendance at a fundamentalist Protestant fire-and-brimstone religious service and sermon.  Two most deserving targets, in my opinion!

In sharp contrast to many other cities and states, the Indianapolis police, the Indianapolis Democratic Mayor Joe Hogsett’s office, and the office of Indiana Republican Governor Eric Holcomb have been quite cool toward the unfolding protests.  While I hadn’t been able to attend other protests, I did receive information on them from friends and media.  At one such, when the police asked the crowd to disperse because of curfew, and the crowd protested it wanted to march on the Governor’s mansion, a Deputy Mayor addressed the crowd, and the demonstrators and police hugged afterward and marched off to the Governor’s house.  Only one ugly police incident here on the part of the police has been documented:  A May 31, 2020 incident in downtown Indianapolis where two women were hit on the legs by police batons, evidently for walking while curfew was called.  This was reported by the Washington Post, the incident filmed by a cameraman with local WISH TV, and can be seen here: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/05/indianapolis-police-arrest/)  The officers involved were removed from beat duty, and both Mayor Hogsett and the Chief of Police said the matter would be investigated.  Donald Trump has decidedly not attacked Indianapolis or Indiana for being allegedly “soft of protestors,” so we’ve been spared that; nor have the police here responded badly, aside from the above incident, as far as I can tell.  (I've since learned that lazy members of the Indianapolis police dispersed protestors at curfew time by unnecessarily tear-gassing them, which is now, thankfully, the cause of a lawsuit filed by the Indiana ACLU and others.)  Perhaps it’s because Indiana is a small state, with only about half the population of neighboring Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, and perhaps it’s also because Indianapolis is not considered a “major city” on par with Minneapolis, Seattle, and elsewhere that have drawn Trump’s wrath, but it is indeed a blessing when such does occur.  So, kudos to the police and the pols for having uncommon good sense in this time of travail, concern and fear.  And let us all remember our Constitutionally guaranteed right to “peaceably assemble,” which can be taken from us only if we don’t use it.

Police Killing of Unarmed Black Man Finally Wakes Up Sleepy Naptown

On June 29, 2017, Indianapolis police approached the car driven by African American city resident Aaron Bailey, who sped away.  The two officers in the car then shot at Bailey’s car multiple times, causing it to crash into a tree.  Bailey was pronounced dead at the scene, had no warrants out for his arrest, and was unarmed.

While police killings have happened several times before in Indianapolis, they are usually greeted by an apathetic “Ho hum” by the city’s residents, black, white and Latino, and the officers are almost always automatically acquitted of any charges by the city’s toothless police review board.  This time, however, was different.  The two police officers have been placed on administrative leave, the FBI is investigating for possible civil rights violations against Bailey by the officers, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett stated publicly that unspecified changes would be made in the way the police handled shootings, and the prosecutor’s office is even supposedly looking into criminal charges against the officers. 

Also, an angry rally against the killing of Bailey occurred July 15 on the grounds of the Indiana State House, a traditional free speech gathering place.  It drew about 200 people of all races, with many participants, speakers, and rally organizers wearing “Wake Up!” and “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts.  Relatives of Aaron Bailey tearfully addressed the gathered crowd, and one local speaker from Black Lives Matter gave an impassioned, militant speech calling not only for justice for Bailey but also demanding justice for Indianapolis’s black community, indictment of the officers, and substantive changes, not just cosmetic ones, in the way the Indianapolis Police Department relates to the black community.  In this writer’s 38 years living in Indianapolis, he’d never before seen such a response to a police shooting.  But then again, even in sleepy Naptown, Trump’s election has brought about a new sense of urgency and activism among blacks and Latinos, and the politically liberal and left, not previously experienced.  And it has sustained itself.  And is not fizzling out, as the Occupy demonstration and takeover of the State House lawn did in early 2012, leaving almost nothing behind except wistful nostalgia

Indianapolis.  Naptown (the city that always sleeps).  Indianoplace.  Frustrating city for progressives to live in; the largest city in equally frustrating Indiana, yet one would not sense it.  The standard norm here is apathy and complacency, with glitzy shopping areas and upscale restaurants that mock its 22% poverty rate and the lack of good jobs.  In many ways, Indianapolis is a throwback to an earlier time, a place straight out of a Sinclair Lewis novel. An atavism, a throwback to the mores of 19^th Century Mississippi, only with high tech.  Indianapolis’s most notable contemporary citizen, the late leftist writer Kurt Vonnegut, scathingly satirized it (although as a thinly-veiled fictional surrogate) in his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, calling it, through one of the book’s characters, “the asshole of the universe.”  Vonnegut also said of Indianapolis, his boyhood and adolescent home, “Indianapolis watches the 500 one day, and sleeps 364;” and as well, “There’s the 500, then 364 days of miniature golf, then the 500 again.”  Another noted contemporary writer who grew up here, Dan Wakefield, was equally harsh in his satirizing of Indianapolis in his 1970 novel Going All the Way, which, while set there in detailed accuracy in the year 1953, still eerily resembles the Indianapolis of 2017.

But perhaps now, all that is changing?  This writer hopes so.  But he’s also seen a lot of hopes raised in the past, only to be dashed.  But there is real possibility that this time now is different, markedly so, and the old ways of justly-named Naptown and Indianoplace will not recur again.  Al least on the overwhelming, stultifying scale they did before, and so heartbreakingly often.  Hell, even Indianapolis’s overarching problem of massive sewer overflow whenever it rained that spewed fecal matter and raw sewage waste into the streets has finally been addressed, and is being fixed!  Granted, fixing it will take till 2025.  But that’s much better than the frustration of before, when nothing was done.  As Bob Dylan sang, “the times, they are a-changin’.”  Even in Indianapolis, even in Indiana.       .

"When we fight, we win!"

INDIANAPOLIS.  What was going to be a civil disobedience confrontation between SEIU Local 1 and Mission Peak, the building management company that just hired a new anti-union janitorial service at two adjacent buildings in downtown Indianapolis, turned into a victory celebration instead.  The day before the scheduled civil disobedience action, Thursday, July 13, Mission Peak informed SEIU Local 1 by letter that it was not hiring as its janitorial contractor Bulldog, the contractor Local 1 vehemently opposed as unfair to its workers.   (Local 1 held a union contract with the previous contractor, which was now nullified under Bulldog.)  Mission Peak, as stated in its letter, would instead open bidding for a “responsible employer,” one that the union could work with.  So, at 10 AM, the approximately 75 people gathered at Indianapolis downtown’s City Market to move over to the nearby Gold Building for civil disobedience, remained gathered for a victory celebration instead.  In telling the supporters of the good news, Paul Nappier, SEIU Local 1’s 31-year-old sole paid staff organizer in Indianapolis, shouted out the lesson from this:  “When we fight, we win!”

Represented among the supporters of Local 1, which has waged a multi-year campaign to organize the janitors in Indianapolis downtown janitorial services, were of course, activist janitors of Local 1 themselves, but also security guards supporting Local 1, which is another organizing task in Indianapolis the SEIU local is undertaking.  Also among the activists were members of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), United Steelworkers (USW), AFSCME, and community activist and political groups Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); Labor for Our Revolution, offshoot of the Bernie Sanders campaign; Jobs with Justice (JwJ); and activists from the campaign for justice for Aaron Bailey, an unarmed black man who had recently been shot dead in his car by an Indianapolis police officer.  This writer attended as an activist and as a member of the union he belongs to, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). 

The short but spirited rally featured four Latina activist janitors who had worked at the Mission Peak-managed Gold Building and the adjacent 262 E. Ohio building, and had been dismissed.  They now had their jobs back, and each one addressed the crowd in Spanish through an interpreter thanking everyone for their support.  Of the 75 or so in attendance, a good ⅔ had been willing to perform civil disobedience and be arrested.  The rally ended by everyone joining together in singing all five verses plus the repeated chorus of “Solidarity Forever” to sax and French horn accompaniment, and multiple photo-taking of the participants.

While Indiana’s overall poverty rate is 14% (however, that’s according to federal poverty guidelines, which considerably understate the threshold for actual poverty), in Indianapolis it’s 21% overall, with the poverty rate for African Americans at 22%, and the poverty rate a whopping 28% for Latinos in the city, while the Indianapolis poverty rate for whites overall is 14%.  Also, janitors at the cleaning services often only work 4-6 hours a night, and pay, even under the union contact, is only around $9 an hour; however, with a contact there are benefits, and workers represented by the union do much better than the minimum wage or a little above, with no benefits, that non-union janitors make.  Plus, they have job security.  While SEIU’s demands for a “responsible employer” and “fair wages” with decent working conditions may seem “reformist” or just apolitical pure-and-simple trade unionism to many on the left, these demands are very important to the workers involved themselves, who are enthusiastic supporters of SEIU Local 1, and are heavily black and Latino.

So, Paul Nappier, SEIU Local 1’s young activist organizer, definitely has a point.  “When we fight, we win!”—and sometimes with surprising victories.  And every victory for labor in these hard times is, of course, incredibly sweet.  

Sabbatical closed—leaving behind fond memories, emptiness and loss

Sabbatical, the Indianapolis bar/restaurant in Broad Ripple, on the Strip at 921 Broad Ripple Avenue, closed its doors for good on July 12, 2015, victim of struggling business fortunes and an only-three-year lease set to expire.  But it leaves behind many fond memories for being an arts-and-original-music venue that was especially attractive both to aficionados and to inveterate square-pegs-in-round-holes such as myself.  And it went out in a splash, with four days of partying and special music events that featured some of Indianapolis’s most talented “other alternative” musicians, plugged-in acoustic folksingers and folk-rock bands, and ended its final night with the regular Sunday-evening show sponsored by Rocketship Comedy.  All in all, it gave us a good run for the money in its three-year tenure, a mightily unorthodox business finally felled by the humdrum  of “business as usual” in a burg never friendly to alternative voices that weren’t safely tamed by conventionality.

So the building that housed independent Sabbatical now stands empty in Broad Ripple, Indianapolis’s supposedly “hip” business venue-neighborhood that, despite the patina of picturesque pseudo-vintage storefronts, is dominated by conventionally-upscale chain boutiques and bars catering to frat rats and suburban shoppers who prefer a “hipster” ersatz to any really bohemian, creative, or unorthodox substance.  Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s  We’re Only in It for the Money LP delineated with eerie prescience just what Broad Ripple has become:  “Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet.”  Indianapolis itself—its smug complacency exposed in novels by its two most-talented Native Son contemporary authors, Dan Wakefield’s Going All the Way and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—killed Sabbatical, though the apparent cause was a limited lease that was only the tail end of the lease held by a previously-failed Mexican restaurant.  Yes, Indianapolis itself, characterized in the Vonnegut novel above as “the asshole of the universe,” really killed Sabbatical.  That and, of course, commercial greed; but a commercial greed above all seeking to maximize profit by kowtowing to the lowest-common-denominator conventionality and generic standard.  This is simply standard operating procedure in Indianapolis, also known as IndiaNOPLACE:  a big city bereft of any kind of truly urban ambience outside of staid business districts and a plethora of shopping malls where everything looks essentially the same because everything is essentially the same.  Because, at bottom, Indianapolis is a burg straight out of those angry novels by Sinclair Lewis, cities that are really only overgrown small, insular towns which Lewis immortalized in his telling phrase, “dullness made god.”

But the three owners of Sabbatical tried—Dave Queisser, his wife Jeannie, and their associate, Kevin Phillips.  Queisser, an experienced bar owner, had previously owned the Hideaway and Locals Only, places where those who were unconventional and loved original art and music always felt at home.  To Dave, hanging original artwork on the walls by local artists and having bands play music of all genres that was different from one which one heard on the radio, and was more often than not originally composed, was just part and parcel of the way he did business.  Certainly he wanted to make a living at what he did; but that was not his sole raison d’etre.  Creating a quality ambience was.  Creating spaces where artists, musicians, and the unconventional and unorthodox could feel comfortable and belonging was as integral to his business models as was having a bottom line that didn’t end in red ink (which, unfortunately, Sabbatical did).  Call him a businessman with a vision; and yes, a vision that in the end, both for Locals Only and for Sabbatical, was undermined by landlords focused on high-profit “economic development” of their properties.

From its beginning in late summer 2012, Sabbatical tried to be a bar/restaurant that was different.  But its very location in Broad Ripple was antithetical for that—because over-commercialized Broad Ripple already had too many bars, far more conventional bars that catered to a far more conventional clientele than the type that would find Sabbatical congenial.  And there were space limitations in the building that housed Sabbatical that interfered with making Sabbatical the kind of place that the owners had really wanted it to be.  It was much smaller than Locals Only had been, and lacked the stage that Locals Only had for the musicians and bands.  That meant that the musicians had to make do in a corner on the floor of the second room, walled off from the bar area, which was in another room; thus, a built-in physical setup that separated the patrons of one room from those in the other—an obvious hindrance for musicians and audiences alike.  Further, Broad Ripple is plagued by lack of parking space, and the space that is available is either almost always metered or, if on private lots, expensive.  Though Sabbatical did have a small parking lot in the back, space was readily taken up—often by people who weren’t customers of Sabbatical; but it was just too expensive and bothersome to regularly patrol for miscreants and tow them away.  Moreover, the exotic, rather gourmet, menu Sabbatical tried when it first opened did not suit well the burgers-and-fries tastes of the regular Broad Ripple denizens, and had to be regularly downsized and conventionalized lest food rot away unsold.  So even the large crowds eating and drinking on the front patio the first two years of Sabbatical did not translate into profitability—and because of the thick stucco walls that trapped heat and humidity Sabbatical’s inside was never much of a draw, and was usually only sparsely occupied. 

Last, the square-pegs-in-round-holes ambience of Sabbatical itself simply did not attract because it was far too unconventional for the conventionality that is at the heart of Broad Ripple’s present-day bar and partying-hangout appeal—as a place where white fraternity types and business majors can rub shoulders with the white upscale suburbanite young and not be disturbed by those who are brazenly different, who lack mainstream aesthetics and values, and who, moreover, are decidedly of a darker skin color and cultural sense.  It is telling that the two bars in Broad Ripple most noted for their overflow patronage, Kilroy’s and Brothers, are both chain establishments with studiously antiseptic décor, bar versions, essentially, of a Steak ‘n Shake!

Now Sabbatical’s building is empty—but it’s not the only emptiness Sabbatical left behind.  I felt this keenly on the Tuesday and Wednesday after closing, when I became distraught that there was now no longer a Sabbatical to go to for a friendly brew and banter with Gina, the regular bartender those two days.  And that I deeply missed both that and her.  Along with TJ, Jeff, Krista, Damon, John, Chris, Steve, Jeannie, Kevin, and the other good friends I felt I had there, some of whom I may never see again.  And how I will miss the friendly-mocking banter of Dave Queisser, his genial insults that paradoxically made me feel appreciated, his chuckling “dismissal” of me as one utterly lacking in social skills, but nonetheless intelligent, accomplished, and a valued customer all the way back to Hideaway days.  Now I had lost another ambience where square-pegs-in-round-holes were welcome, because in Indianapolis few places welcome square-pegs-in-round-holes.  They even try to get rid of them despite their being paying customers, as was true with the Sinking Ship, transmogrified by the greed of the owners from a hipster bar to yet another frat-rat sports bar. Here I had been deliberately insulted and told never to return by the manager sitting five seats down, despite being a paying customer, because  I was no longer the kind of ultra-conventional customer the owners wanted!   There just aren’t many places in this justly-named IndiaNOPLACE that want offbeat poets and writers coming in.  Now I am left with only the Melody Inn, primarily a late-night music venue that is accepting of both me and my writing, and where I am greeted and made to feel welcome by the socially-liberal-yet-fiscally-conservative libertarian owners—when the place is open.  Yet that is but all there is now, unless I settle for a generic bar just for a brew absent any sense of belonging, of feeling truly welcome; but if it’s only brew I wish, better to just stay at home and drink by myself!  Another emptiness that has enveloped me now that Sabbatical’s gone.

And there is a bigger loss also: the art and music that Sabbatical had, something carried on by Dave from the Hideaway and Locals Only that made them places that both the customers and the musicians enjoyed.  That certainly was something that was felt those four days of Sabbatical’s final partying; and was felt by me personally when local musician Jethro Easyfields invited me to the mic to do some Lenny Bruce/George Carlin-inspired stand-up comedy.  Because only at Sabbatical would I have been so invited, and only at Sabbatical would I have been appreciated for that.  Alas, now it’s gone.  The crowds just aren’t there for those who publicly perform the offbeat.  Only poets come to poetry readings, effectively making them read only for themselves and a small coterie of others, never for broader audiences; and the same for comedy also.  We who do original spoken-word art aren’t welcome by the general crowd, who only want to hear karaoke and DJs.  Even live music, especially if it’s original and not just copies of what’s heard on the radio, isn’t much wanted anymore here in IndiaNOPLACE, to the chagrin—and unemployment—of my many musician friends.  Ah, sad but true—only the staid, the familiar, the derivative, and the conventional has market appeal anymore.

It wasn’t always that way, but is now, and what was once a vibrant scene in Broad Ripple precisely for what Sabbatical offered has now been absent for a couple of decades.  Back in the 1980s Broad Ripple had a vibrant live music scene, where punk and alternative predominated, throngs of the young walked the streets, the Patio nightclub drew enthusiastic crowds for unconventional music and ambience, the telephone poles and city light posts were pasted over solidly with colorful fliers advertising alternative cultural events.  But all that was too much for the conventional merchants, who wanted to clear the place of the “clutter” of improvised fliers and skateboarding youth who weren’t twenty-one and big spenders in the bars and boutiques, and  didn’t patronize the strictly commercial ersatz the merchants offered.  So the youth on the streets were chased off, new venues opened that served alcohol and thus forbade youth to enter, posting on telephone poles and city light posts was punishable, and black youth in this predominantly white part of town seen as potential “criminals”  The police “helped out” by aggressively prowling for those suspected of partying too much, and ever-so-“helpfully” arrested them for drunk driving or public intoxication—putting yet another chill on the street scene, and thus ensuring “respectability” for the merchants, who weren’t selling anything original, but were only franchising national and regional chains.  Loss of innocence to commercial “reality”—the vibrancy of youth and experimentation giving way to “proper” old-age stodginess and devoted dullness in the name of profit.  In such an environment a Sabbatical could not last, and didn’t; but, needless to say, it will be sorely missed—and the good times, as well as the loss and emptiness left behind, well remembered

Indianapolis: Super Bowl city not so super

Not so super Indianapolis, Indiana's State Capital and largest city, as it was when it hosted Super Bowl XLVI, an event which, ironically, followed one of the absolutely worst seasons ever for the Indianapolis Colts.  Originally posted on Examiner.com--GF

 

By all standard measures, Indianapolis’ first hosting of a Super Bowl, Super Bowl XLVI on February 5, 2012, was a resounding success.  Certainly that’s shown by glowing press coverage.  The Associated Press’ Tom Coyne penned a February 5 story, “No more Naptown: Super Bowl boosts Indy’s image,” that was long, detailed, extensive and fulsome in praise of Indianapolis in snagging Super Bowl XLVI.    “Scoring High Marks,” a February 7 story by Robert King in the Indianapolis Star, the city’s daily newspaper, specifically noted the very favorable impression as Super Bowl host Indianapolis had garnered among the professional sports news broadcasters and networks.  By all press reports (of which those above are only two), Indianapolis had successfully carried off one helluva splashy party that Super Bowl week.

 

But for us who live in Indianapolis, one successful special-event weeklong party doesn’t a successful city make.  For its residents, as opposed to those who came into town from outside specifically for the Super Bowl activities, Indianapolis is still beset by many, many problems and drawbacks.

 

For one thing, participating in Super Bowl week events, not to mention attending the big game itself, was prohibitively expensive for many residents.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Indianapolis-Carmel metropolitan area (Carmel being a suburban town just north of Indianapolis) still had an 8.6% seasonally-unadjusted unemployment rate in January 2012, which meant 76,500 living here were out of work, while many others had only part-time jobs when they wanted full-time, or had dropped out of the labor force altogether.  (Including these, by BLS methodology, nearly doubles the “official” unemployment rate, which measures only those without jobs who are actively seeking work.)

 

Further, parking one’s car in downtown Indianapolis, where the activities that week were, cost $20 per day; and although downtown was served by IndyGo, the city’s public bus system, many parts of Indianapolis aren’t served by public transportation at all, nor are any of the outlying suburban communities.  Just one of the reasons IndyGo is dubbed IndyDon’tGo or IndyWon’tGo by many Circle City residents.  (The moniker comes from Indianapolis having at the heart of downtown Monument Circle, a circular roadway enclosing the War Memorial, the city’s central landmark.)  Nor is public transportation all that convenient even for those areas that are served:  there are long waits between scheduled buses, and because of this, spending six hours’ time at Super Bowl activities could often cost bus riders eight-ten hours’ time when considering the wait for buses.

 

Downtown Indianapolis also presents a sharp contrast between the very rich and the very poor—intermixed with all the high-class hotels and upscale shops, restaurants and bars is a large population of homeless, many of whom are highly-visible street beggars.  Downtown is also home for the city’s missions that provide beds and meals for some of the homeless, though with harsh restrictions.  But they don’t even come close to serving all the homeless.

 

Back in fall 2011 Republican Mayor Greg Ballard succeeded with his plan to privatize the city’s parking meters, resulting not only in a considerable rise in parking rates, from 75¢ an hour to $1.00 an hour an even $1.50 an hour, but also extended the time parking fees had to be paid from 6 PM to 9 PM and eliminated Saturday free parking.  Ballard touted the “convenience” of the new meters which had to be installed, because they now made it possible to feed the meters by credit or debit card—but of course, only if the credit or debit card isn’t maxed out, which isn’t the case for many, including myself at the time (as I was unemployed during Super bowl week, and subsisting on only $150 per week unemployment compensation).

 

 Then there’s Indianapolis’ famous sewer overflow, a perennial problem and health hazard every time there’s a major rainfall or snow melt (neither of which occurred Super Bowl week, so the tourists didn’t have to notice—unlike year-round residents).  This problem stems from a sewer system that was put into place in the 19^th Century and not expanded essentially since then, despite considerable population growth.  The result is sewer water flooding the streets and overrunning river banks during heavy rainfall and snow melt, and it’s a problem that has plagued Indianapolis now literally for generations.  When I moved to Indianapolis in December 1979 residents were then grousing about the sewers, and had been for many years prior; and although everyone acknowledges the problem, political bickering on how it is to be financed, and who is to pay for it, has stymied action.  Due to the conservative nature of Indiana politics generally, which carries over into Indianapolis, the financing plans proposed so far have been regressive, substantially exempting rich property owners while disproportionately soaking the middle-class and poor instead.  The result has been gridlock over the truly-needed extensive overhaul and expansion of the Circle City’s sewer system.

 

While Indianapolis has 43% of Indiana’s college graduates according to the BLS, as

noted in an October 19, 2008 Indianapolis Star story, “Indy area is flourishing while rest of state falters,” it doesn’t mean that having a college degree in Indianapolis automatically translates into a high-paying, high-skill job for many of these graduates.  This results in many college degree-holders being rejected by many employers in low-education, low-skill Indiana as “overqualified,” and thus stuck in low-skill service jobs or only temporary employment.  (After all, 48.6% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state upon graduation, precisely because of the lack of degree-level jobs.)  I can attest to this firsthand myself, as one who scored the standardized state system standardized tests in a local temp job that requires a college degree and temporarily but regularly employs nearly 1,000 college graduates during the yearly-recurring test-scoring season, but which provides employment only four-six months a year.  Since then, I’ve “moved on” to a permanent, full-time blue-collar warehouse job, grateful that my economics degree from Indiana University was simply ignored, not used against me!  And that was the only permanent full-time job offer I’d even received in the previous ten-and-a-half years.  My personal observations, plus anecdotal evidence, tells me that many of Indianapolis’ college graduates are insecurely employed, working strictly temp jobs when work is available, or if among the better-paid, are working as servers, bartenders, or other tipped employees in Indianapolis’ upscale restaurants, bars and hotels where no college degree is required.

 

Tom Coyne’s story cited above credits long-serving (1976-1991) Republican Mayor Bill Hudnut with making Indianapolis an eventual Super Bowl city.  Hudnut’s goal was to capture an NFL team for Indy, capitalizing on Indiana’s sports mania.  As Coyne put it:

 

In the 1970s, then-Mayor Bill Hudnut decided that sports was the ticket to revitalizing the city and putting it on the national map.

It seemed to be a good fit. Indianapolis was the capital of a sports-crazed state that had Notre Dame winning national football championships in the north, Indiana University winning national basketball championships in the south, the Indianapolis 500 in the middle and a high school basketball tournament that created Hoosier Hysteria.

 

Although Indianapolis already berthed the NBA Indiana Pacers, the team’s uneven playing record, propensity for brawling, and lack of fan support did not make basketball a big-ticket item.  To Hudnut and others, that required snagging an NFL team, which Indianapolis did in 1984, when the then-Baltimore Colts sneaked out of Maryland in the wee hours of the morning, under cover of darkness, and arrived in Indianapolis at dawn.

 

But even that didn’t do it all by itself.  The real ticket to NFL success in Indianapolis all came down to one man:  Peyton Manning, Indianapolis Colts’ quarterback from 1991 until released by Colts owner Jim Irsay on March 9, 2012.  It was Manning’s stellar playing for the Colts that made the team a top-rated NFL contender that went on to play in two Super Bowls and win one of them.  His reputation was key not only in getting Indianapolis to be the site of Super Bowl XLVI, but earlier, in persuading Indianapolis and the State of Indiana to specifically build for the Colts the brand-new Lucas Oil Stadium and tear down the still-serviceable, not-yet-paid-for Hoosier Dome the Colts now found inadequate, threatening to leave Indianapolis if a new stadium were not built. 

 

But as CNN reported, before Peyton Manning the Colts were a “laughingstock.”  They may become so again—during the 2011 NFL season, with Manning out the whole time because of recovery from neck surgery, the Colts were 2-14 for the football year in which Indianapolis hosted the Super Bowl!  The only honor the Colts snagged that season was the dubious one of having first choice in the upcoming NFL draft because of its bottom-of-the-barrel last-place finish.

 

Indianapolis’ turn-around from Naptown (where everyone napped) and IndiaNOPLACE has been based on an economic development strategy that could be called Third World:  using not just big-name sports, but conventioneering, upscale shopping and tourism as well, to attract big spenders from out-of-state and the affluent suburbs surrounding Indy to make the city flush with money.  But that success has come at the price of long neglect of those who actually live in Indianapolis—for the Circle City, along with Indiana as a whole, continues hemorrhaging well-paying manufacturing jobs and replacing them with low-paying service jobs, while, as mentioned above, nearly half the college-educated continue to leave the state.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2009 Indiana ranked below both the national and the Midwest averages for educational achievement among those 25 and older, and each year from 2006-2011 had a drop in per capita income, according to the Department of Commerce.  In just the last year, two major manufacturing plants in Indianapolis, the General Motors foundry and auto parts manufacturer Navistar, permanently closed their doors, further devastating an already-devastated East Side, once home to 100,000 manufacturing jobs.

 

So yes, while in certain ways Indianapolis has turned around, in other, also-crucial, ways it hasn’t at all.  Indianapolis still resembles all too much the final line in that venerable jazz standard, “You Came A Long Way From St. Louis”:  “You came a long way from Missouri/But baby, you still got a long way to go.”              

 

 

 

             

             

           

  

          

 

 

 

 

             

             

           

A bad forum advocating a really horrible idea

This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com.  While I stand behind what I wrote below, and believe that what I wrote is essentially accurate, I may have overstated the anti-college opposition of the KI EcoCenter participants; but that was because the presentation was so incoherent, so definitely below the usual high standards of KI forums, that I may have given more coherence to what was actually said than it deserved.  I may have read coherence into what was just confusion, and thus the participants' stated objection to me, that they "didn't completely say that," may be somewhat true due to this incoherence and confusion--GF

 

Last Tuesday, October 28,2014, a group that I’ve usually admired, the KI EcoCenter (KI) of Indianapolis, Indiana, http://www.kiecocenter.org, held a public forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” in which the various panelists advocated directly for—let’s face it—ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and giving money to black people as “reparations” for slavery instead of intellectual improvement of the black communities of Indianapolis and the U.S., by coming out squarely against college education.  But that’s putting it generously, as my thumbnail description of the forum gives the “discussion” that ensued by the panelists and the approving audience participants a far greater coherence and understanding of the issues than actually ensued.  In reality, what transpired was incoherence, intellectual confusion of the worst sort, constant comparing of the proverbial apples to oranges, massive tendentious omissions, lack of a truly serious approach, and significant omission of data and evidence.  Instead what was proffered—in all seriousness!—was a pseudo-populist “left black nationalist”  exercise in derision and self-abnegation, a rather hypocritical posturing by black college graduates themselves on how they were supposedly duped by becoming college-educated; a masochistic display of anti-intellectualism by the panelists made all the more pathetic by the basic fact that, without their supposedly worthless college educations, they would’ve lacked even the basic erudition and coherency to present their own presentations against college!

 

Yes, their very articulateness (such as it was—really not at all at the high level KI panel participants have presented in the past) in arguing against college, and thus de facto for ignorance, would not have been possible even at this disappointing level had it not been for the panelists’ own college educations!  Their position, as presented by these three college-educated African Americans, became simply a whining complaint of “Don’t go to college! We’ve been there, it’s not worth it.  Savor your mere high school-educated ignorance instead, despite our token lip-service to the general notion of education.  Do as we say, not what we ourselves did!”    

 

This display of articulate self-abnegation by the three black panelists was of course echoed by the one token white panelist (himself hand-picked by KI and given a voice, I take it, in name of “diversity”), who himself was also another self-abnegating college graduate.  This panelist offered to entertain us by deliberately tearing up his college diploma that evening; but that was a “promise” left unfulfilled (undoubtedly for the better).

 

These four panelists—the three African Americans Paulette, Imhotep (usually referred to simply as M.) and Khalil, along with the token white panelist, John—are all people I’m acquainted with as an active supporter of KI in the past, and it is no pleasure for me to trash them.  But I feel obligated simply because I am a lower-rungs-of-the-socio-economic-ladder college graduate myself, a working-class white man who worked hard to achieve my degree; a college degree and educational immersion I myself find invaluable in enabling me to do my avocation of writing prose and poetry for publication, something that would not have been possible without it.  And so, while my degree has not paid off for me economically in terms of a good job, it has contributed immensely in granting me a sense of self-worth, in giving me a fulfilling life, and making me a positive contributor in the cause of social and economic justice for all, African American, Hispanic, other ethnicities, as well as my own white working class—all those excluded from the American Dream by the 1%, whose domination of our lives the Occupy movement made us so rightfully aware of.  Getting that degree (Bachelor’s in economics from Indiana University, supplemented by later paralegal training) gave me an education in the broadest and most proper sense, it opened for me the vast realm of knowledge, enabled me to commune with the greatest minds of humanity past and present—something that would not have come about had I remained a mere high school graduate, or even as someone with only some college.

 

This, and more, I tried to articulate in the technically open and extensive, but actually perfunctory and limited, audience discussion of the panelists’ remarks.  Needless to say, my remarks in favor of education were completely ignored by the panelists themselves, who were too absorbed in promoting their own anti-intellectual shtick to “bother” with me.  But I was “answered” with vociferous objection by audience members who had only high school educations themselves, or who were disgruntled college dropouts, themselves inadvertent advocates of the value of higher education through their own angry denunciations of that which they didn’t have themselves, but which they disdained because they lacked it. Confirmation of a positive good by denunciation of it as worthless by those who had never possessed it in the first place!  Or else, trashing at the hands of those who failed to realize the value of what they themselves did possess, resentful discarders of the gold at their feet in favor of the tawdry glittering tinsel of ignorance their pseudo-populism inclined them to embrace in its stead.

 

As I stated above, I’ve long been a supporter and enthusiast of the KI EcoCEnter, which I first encountered at a community jobs forum it held in October 2012, and on which I published a very extensive-praising post in my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blog, http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=7. But lately, KI has allowed its ideology of “black cultural nationalism” as articulated by Maulana Karenga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maulana_Karenga), to weaken the quality and multiracial appeal of its earlier work and public forums; most recently it has focused less on its organizational philosophy of “social entrepeneurship” and “bootstrapping” as positive aids to the empowerment of the primarily working-class African American residents of Indianapolis’ Near North Side neighborhood where it exists, and more on being an angry, and at times highly incoherent, megaphone of black grievances against what it claims is an all-encompassing structure of “white privilege;” something this decidedly unprivileged member or the white working class finds very much at variance with actual reality, and who objects strongly to Paulette’s and M.’s insistence that I, struggling just to get by, also partake of.  This vague, generalized, all-encompassing “white privilege” so “politically correct” to assert, but which is so factually compromised, truncated and rebutted by so much of white working-class reality.  This “privilege” I allegedly have despite only my receiving Social Security standing between me and homelessness—something I’d hardly call a “privilege”! 

 

Sadly, I find KI moving from being “pro-black,” which it should be, to being more openly “anti-white,” except toward those whites who uncritically subordinate themselves to KI’s “cultural nationalism.”  To me this is a disservice to what was so positive in KI’s earlier activity, and which garnered my strongly admiring allegiance and support in the first place.  I feel uncomfortably on the receiving end of “reverse racism.”  Not that whites, and especially my own white working class, haven’t done a lot to harm African Americans; they certainly have.  But they themselves are also Bob Dylan’s “pawns in their game” who ride only “the caboose of the train;” they themselves are also the inarticulate and dispossessed victims of whole hierarchies of economic, social and institutional power held by the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) white ruling 1%, which oppresses and subordinates both white and non-white in very similar ways, and increasingly, to very similar, if not exactly identical, degrees.  While white people can be said to have a relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases vis-à-vis African Americans, this is far from an absolute “privilege” that ensures whites always come out on top, are always psychologically satisfied, materially sated, and economically secure, no matter what their socio-economic status.

 

And yes, while whites too often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from being a “benefit” to them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only receive but profit from; rather it is a liability, a delusional sense of superiority, a pernicious illusion that blinds them not only to the commonalities of oppression they share with their brethren of color, but makes them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really 0.01%).  The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who comprise those corporate and financial elites and their satraps who manipulate far too many ordinary white people as puppets, who set them against people of color as (often eager) attack dogs,  but who are still tightly leashed by the 1%.  “White privilege” is thus an often-unacknowledged liability that undermines the white working class every bit as much as it oppresses African Americans.

But back to the “College Isn’t the Answer” forum.  The forum based its anti-college position on two very bad articles which appeared in the Washington Post (a dead giveaway in itself of how the anti-intellectual initiators of the forum themselves profited from their own college degrees—knowing about these articles, knowing about the Washington Post as a primarily college graduate-appealing elite source of information and opinion in the first place):  “sociologist and writer” (nothing more)  Tressie McMillan Cottom’s  “No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/?mc_cid=a19a9ef833&mc_eid=[UNIQID]&mc_cid=9f4ac1282f&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) and Valerie Strauss’s blog, “No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-algebra-isnt-necessary--and-yes-stem-is-overrated/2012/08/26/edc47552-ed2d-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_blog.html) which reprints a New York Times Op-ed by one Roger C. Schank, described as “a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and education reformer.”  These two articles are at best but half-truths zealously overstated. 

 

Cottom tries to make a case that only reparations are the solution to the problem of glaring economic inequality (as though it were only a problem for the black community, which is blatantly false), and counterpoises reparations for the past enslavement of African Americans to African Americans today getting a college education, which she sees as just another way of perpetuating black inequality through substantial black college-graduate unemployment. Which is an undoubted fact of our economy still not overcoming the Recession of 2008 (Cottom is correct here), but which has also meant high rates of unemployment and underemployment for college graduates as a whole, not just for African Americans (and which is really a problem that goes back to the 1970s and has continued since, only exacerbated, but not created, by the ongoing recession). 

 

Schank states baldly, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics or trigonometry…,”  and that our supposed societal obsession with math and STEM all goes back to a claim made in 1892 by the president of Harvard University of what should be taught in high school.  As with Cottom, Shank is half-right (but remember, half-right is also half-wrong!).  Yes, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” but that’s really a problem more than a superfluity, a problem well-articulated by 1920s iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The same with “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics[.]”  All we have to do is look at the level of public political discourse and electoral appeals in this 2014 election to give the lie to the beneficence of these statements of fact.   The simple fact of the low level of political discourse, open demagoguery, and statement both of half-truths and outright lies in the 2014 electoral appeals, plus the facile (but fallacious) appeal of free market-fundamentalist economics making supposed experts out of people such as Paul Ryan and even Ayn Rand, shockingly exposes how We, the People are directly harmed by voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics.”  Voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics” frequently determine through their ignorance just who our political leaders are—and through them, what social and economic policies are put into practice!  Proof positive that ignorance is far from bliss, though ignorance may be popular, deliberately promulgated and disseminated, and even celebrated (the Tea Party being a stellar example of the last).

 

As one who studied mathematics extensively, I myself can attest that its value lies not so much in the mathematical formulas taught but in its overwhelming value as a heuristic, i.e., as a means to understand and practice the daily art and science of problem-solving, something that confronts each of us every day.  Through mastery of math we come to mastery of logic, of logical inference and deduction, how to employ reason correctly, and what is valid and invalid, relevant and irrelevant, evidence on which to base our solutions, our daily decisions.  That is math’s overwhelming strength in “practical” affairs, and is precisely why algebra, plane geometry and trigonometry are taught in our high schools, or should be; and why, given our reliance on statistical information today, statistics and probability should also be.  If that’s “elitist” or not narrowly “practical,” so be it!  As a person of the left who considers the Jeffersonian ideal of “An aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity” to be one of the hallmarks of a good, just and equitable society, I say the teaching of “abstract reasoning,” math, and yes, even “macroeconomics,” is necessary to move us forward in the “democracy of opportunity,” made more of a reality by the Civil Rights and labor struggles of ordinary people than it was before, to become more of what we need to be—a society where those in charge truly represent an “aristocracy of talent” as opposed to the “oligarchy of mediocrity” our political and societal leaders represent today.

 

And as a college graduate who found specific value in that college education, I openly state that all that comes about easier when the masses of ordinary people have access to broad means of education, both formal education and self-education as a lifetime project, through greatly improved primary, secondary, and yes, higher education.  Yes, there are many things wrong with higher education as it exists today—its frequent detached elitism, its cost, its increasingly strictly vocational orientation, its often chilling effect on imagination, creativity and independent scholarship which it should foster instead—but the correction of these major faults depends on deepening the educational experience, not simply throwing it out as an unneeded irrelevancy the way the panelists did at the KI forum.  Because, for all the faults of higher education today, it certainly beats ignorance!  Which is precisely where the panelists of “College Isn’t the Answer” would lead us—inadvertently to be sure, but also inexorably.

 

Furthermore, if we wish to see an example of a society where college is disdained, and where ignorance is enshrined, we need only look at our own Indiana, which ranks 42^nd in the nation in the percentage of its people with at least a Bachelor’s degree, and which ranks last in the Midwest as such.  The Hoosier State is a bastion today of poor job opportunities, abysmal social services, and extreme right-wing politics, and these are all interconnected with our fellow Hoosiers’ lack of education; our notorious Brain Drain, where college graduates leave the state in droves because of lack of suitable jobs for them; and our poor primary and secondary schools, which directly impact on employment opportunities, the lack of which, along with the state’s hemorrhaging of previously unskilled but high-pay manufacturing jobs, has consistently caused Indiana’s per capita income to drop.  Drop so significantly that, today, Indiana ranks 39th in the nation in per capita income when in the 1950s it ranked in the 20s.  As Philip Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington told the Indianapolis Star as far back as 2009 and which has remained unchanged since, “We’re stuck. We’re stuck because we don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force. A lot of that is because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”

 

(For documentation of the above, see George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039, and the accompanying “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf; Though some of the statistics cited there are old, sadly, the trends referenced by them are not.  For the overweening right-wing character of Indiana politics, see, Bryan K. Bullock, Truth-out, June 27, 2014, “The Ultra-Right-Wing State Nobody Mentions,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24552-the-ultra-right-wing-state-nobody-mentions.)

 

Sadly, the KI EcoCenter’s forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” represents just a “left-wing” pseudo-populist variant of that virulent anti-intellectualism so continually prevalent in U.S. society that’s so eloquently scored by noted science popularizer and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (himself a Ph.D. in biochemistry): “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”  It is unfortunate that an organization, KI, which I have thought of so highly, decided to perpetuate that.