Indy, Meet Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Meet Indy

With all eyes on the 317 area code this weekend, I thought I would take an opportunity to introduce the citizens of Marion County to the shiny newborn city of Indy located in the middle of the county. Its a small city, and it not only gets all of the tax revenue generated countywide, but even rakes in millions from the region and rest of the state as well. About the size of the Vatican, Indy is roughly bounded by I 65/I 70 on the north, east and south sides of downtown and White River on the west.

Its a very beautiful city built special for the Super Bowl to make the folks from out of town believe “there’s more than corn in Indiana” which is the important targeted message they have settled upon to sell folks on Indy. But Indy is a different place than Indianapolis, the real city surrounding Indy. This is a tale of two cities that live on top of each other.

In Indy, beautiful buildings, shiny new amenities, clean streets and absolutely NO homeless seen anywhere near Super Bowl Village is what you will see while here for Super Bowl 46. If you take a cab out to Indianapolis though, you’ll find a much different scene. Payday loan centers, pawn shops, liquor stores and fast food shops galore are the usual scene where I live. Streets are filthy and riddled with holes, and your brother, his wife and their baby are sleeping in your living room since their foreclosure so you personally are acquainted with homelessness.

In Indy you can wander the streets with an open container of beer in your hand, drink it in front of cops and no one says a word. In Indianapolis you get arrested for public intoxication and end up paying steep fines for doing the same thing in your own home’s driveway. If you have a joint in your cigarette pack and the cops find it, you can do a year in jail and pay up to $5000 in fines. In Indy, folks feel free enough to walk around smoking a joint in front of cops.

In Indy thousands show up for free concerts by corporate logo draped musicians selling products from the stage for their corporate masters. In Indianapolis, local musicians who write far superior music with emotion and feeling play to rooms with their girlfriends and family members mixed with drunks from the neighborhood.

In Indy, if you lose your child or developmentally disabled adult the cops will help locate them for you and reunite you with your loved ones. In Indianapolis, the cops will show up with Child Protective Services because your 11 year old daughter called 911 to say “Mommy was being mean and won’t feed me” because you wouldn’t let her watch raunchy music videos on YouTube.

So visitors, keep in mind you are seeing our best foot forward when you visit Indy, but if you want to see a real picture of this city, come and visit Indianapolis sometime.

He’s Baaaaack!

<Dusting off cobwebs and settled dust off easy chair>

AHEM!

Well now, this place is a little bit in disrepair after being unused for 4 years, but the interwebtubes have a habit of holding onto things FOREVER so I decided maybe its time to scratch the old writer’s itch and reactivate this blog. The world has flipped upside down since I last wrote a Monticello blog post. We as a nation have lost our collective minds and are being abused by the 1% who control everything and the 30% who want to be 1% who manage all the businesses for them. Politics has exposed nasty fault lines in our society and with the economy flushed down the toilet and heading toward every bad conspiracy movie’s inevitable dark ending, I felt like a Jeffersonian voice should at least provide play by play for the destruction of our nation.

So kick back, relax and enjoy the new Monticello. I plan to cover local and national politics, the marijuana reform movement, Occupy America and more. Feel free to read the archives below, theyre ancient and dusty but might be fun reading for newer friends who never saw this blog before. If something catches your eye tell me about it in an email to johpadgett@gmail.com.

“Yeah, But it’s a Nice Place to Raise a Family”

I hear this phrase a lot around here from all different kinds of folks. I hear this from musicians, bartenders, doctors, attorneys, cooks, secretaries and all kinds of other folks from all walks of life. It’s one of several versions of what I like to call “automatic responses” to certain keywords that when a person hears the keyword or phrase being spoken by another, it will automatically spit out this answer.

In the case of “Yeah, But it’s a Nice Place to Raise a Family” I believe this is code for “this place really sucks and I feel I am drowning.” It is the response usually programmed for any sort of complaints about the social conservative culture that permeates life in Indianapolis. If you say “There’s no nightlife or good live music in Indiana” someone will say “Yeah, but it’s a nice place to raise a family.” If you say “I wish there were a decent theater or poetry reading scene in Indy” your best friend from work will say “Yeah, but its a nice place to raise a family.”

You see, there is a Brain Drain in Indiana that gets much discussion in this state, but that is all. The primary reason for the drain is that when our college graduates are faced with the choice of taking a job here or taking one elsewhere, especially if they have any sort of creativity involved in their work or social life, they usually opt for the far away out of state job over the local Hoosier job.

Creativity is valued immensely in economic development circles because where there are creative communities that are thriving, there are more college graduates there to enjoy the cultural amenities that a city has to offer. Educated populations enjoy art, music, theater and other creative pursuits more than lesser educated populations. A few years ago I knew a young attorney graduating from IU School of Law – Indianapolis that I met because he was also a fantastic guitarist in a local band I worked with. He actually took a much lower paying job in Austin, TX over a firm here in town just so he could go be a part of the Austin music scene.

Take a look around you if you live here in Indianapolis. Of all the people you know, of the ones who do have college degrees, ask yourself a couple of questions. 1) Are they originally from here or married to someone from here, and 2) are they raising a family and is their primary motivation for living here the cost of living and school choices for their children? I bet your entire list of college degreed friends answer yes to both of these questions.

Indy is not a city you move to by choice. It’s a second or third choice city. It’s a place you move to because you have to for work reasons or family reasons or both. Every dissatisfied resident of this city I meet moved here for a job and found a cultural wasteland that bores people to tears. Our sports heroes publicly lament this all the time. The reason Jermaine O’Neal opened the Seven nightclub in Broad Ripple was so he could bring a real NYC/LA/London style nightclub for him and his friends on the Pacers to hang out in during the offseason.

So when idiots like Senator Brandt Hershman give the Hoosier Brain Drain a boost by sicing the fundies on the gay people and trying to ban same sex marriage and even benefits for unmarried heterosexuals via the Indiana Constitution, you have to wonder why the Mayor and Governor continue to blather on about Indy being a World Class city.

It’s real simple folks, you run off the gays, you run off their creative collaborators who are straight, this runs off the college educated fans of their works and your economy starts to stumble badly. This is why we are becoming a state full of married redneck truck drivers and their wives because we have had to resort to the “logistics industry” for economic development.

If you want scientists to work in a biotech economy here you’re gonna need to have some good local bands to divert their attention in the off hours. There’s a wicked guitar player at Purdue who is a biotech major who is shopping his resume in California and Texas right now. You want to lose him? Too late, he and his domestic partner are probably moving to San Jose or Houston next June.

Indiana Brain Drain Gets a Boost

In an effort to run off the entire creative population of Indiana, state Senator Brandt Hershman (R-Evil Bastards) has recently reintroduced legislation, Senate Joint Resolution 7, in the Indiana General Assembly that would create a Indiana Constitutional Amendment to add some key paragraphs which are as follows:

Marriage in Indiana consists only of the union of one man and one woman.

This Constitution or any other Indiana law may not be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

These two paragraphs would not only ban same sex marriage, but would also tangle up a whole host of laws which have nothing to do with marriage but that extend legal rights and considerations to unmarried couples of all persuasions. This amendment would basically assign married couples to a class of citizen above all else, granting them exclusive rights. You know, quality folks like this:

Gary Welsh at Advance Indiana has been blogging about this issue the last couple of weeks and has been keeping his eye on the situation closely. Gary is a moderate to progressive Republican which is a rare combo in these parts but he can be counted on to be principled and advocate on the logical view of any issue. As an openly gay attorney here in Indianapolis, Gary is a lone voice in his party against this amendment and so he has his work cut out for him.

Today he put a post up on Advance Indiana that caught my eye and brought me into the battle with him. It seems our friend Senator Hershman, who has a colorful past of his own (more on that below), has brought in the notorious Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association to help advocate on behalf of the amendment. This has kicked this debate up to the next level so I’d like to reach out to friends in the progressive and liberal blogosphere to help out in combating this atrocious legislation.

If you have any friends, relatives, former co workers or any other personal ties to Indiana through which you could ask them to contact their state Senators to oppose this craptastic fiasco-in-waiting of an amendment please direct them to this website where they can locate their senator and send him email. It’s a simple web form using their ZIP code to find their Senator and Representative.

For a little background on Senator Hershman to give you an idea of what kind of guy we are dealing with, a story that first appeared in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune on November 7, 2000 told the story of Senator Hershman’s first wife, Tracy Johnson Hershman, who the good family values senator forced to get an abortion against her will upon finding out about an unplanned pregnancy in 1997.

Ever the gentleman, a week later this advocate of pro-life policy for thee not me then upheld his own family values by filing for a divorce from his wife. The hypocrisy of this man knows no bounds! You can read more about this story at Advance Indiana and also at Bilerico, another Indiana blogger riled up by the Hershman/Wildmon Bunch.

That Bilerico link is a hoot, you all should check it out. He wants folks to tip him to good gossip like the Hershman story about some of the other sponsors and supporters of the amendment. Cast ye not the first stone kind of stuff if you ask me, whats good for the goose…you get it.

Republican Induced Schizophrenia and Treatment Options

I have an online friend in the financial world named Ari who is a currency trader that sent me an article I’d like to share with people because it refers to one of the symptoms of a mental illness Ari and I refer to as Republican Induced Schizophrenia. In an article written by Robert Kiyosaki for Yahoo Finance, the Last Days of the Dollar is the subject of probably the best explanation for how our currency trading system operates as I have ever seen written.

Local Race Shocker – Dickerson Leads Carson in WTHR Poll

The Indianapolis Star and its news gathering partner WTHR TV Channel 13 in Indianapolis last night reported the results of a new poll conducted for WTHR that shows maverick Republican candidate and former local auto dealer Eric Dickerson leading the incumbent Democrat and local power broker Rep. Julia Carson for the 7th District seat. Dickerson ran an insurgent campaign to win the GOP primary back in May against the party endorsed candidate and has ran a rather austere and quixotic to some campaign from the grassroots underneath everyone’s radar.

Several dynamics at play here I believe, Carson has built a patronage machine locally that has in recent years embarassed her, including a scandal involving a bar being located in a government building where she has an office and the building is named after her. Several of her local supporters are behind the bar project and managed to muscle through the liquor permit for the bar and touched a nerve in the community in the process.

Secondly, and no local pundits have picked up on this yet, support for Mayor Bart Peterson, who has closely allied himself with the Carson machine, is much softer than he realizes. The Mayor has been making controversial decisions that have made enemies of former friends, has set priorities that many citizens feel are lower down the list of concerns to worry about in lieu of working on other issues and is in general showing signs of weakness. Coupled with weak support for the Carson machine and insurgent Republican efforts within the local GOP and you have the makings of an interesting race no one was paying attention to.

Afternoon News Roundup

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly brings up an issue that has not been discussed much by pointing to a WaPo article today on the issue of what to do with the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Everybody wants us to close Gitmo (I’m in favor of this too) but there seems to be an issue with Europeans like the British and Germans being reluctant to take back their own citizens who have been detained there upon their release. It turns out our allies are reluctant to take them back because we are requiring them to keep the detainees on 24 hour surveillance as a condition for their release.

Morning News Roundup

Over on CorrenteWire Chicago Dyke has a great post up about how “His Majesty Wipes His Ass with the Constitution” about the signing ceremony held yesterday at the White House in which (Vice) President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This odious legislation will be remembered as the moment when our nation lost its way.

The destruction of habeus corpus contained within this law reverses hundreds of years of English Common Law upon which our democracy was built and allows the Cheney Administration a free hand to round up anybody it decides on a whim is acting against the interests of the US Government, which if you listen to their rhetoric in recent months includes reporters, Democrats, antiwar activists and other well known terrorists and sympathizers RIGHT HERE AT HOME! (Gasp! Scream! Passes out)