Diary: Endeavour Morse, Joseph Brodsky and coping with the darkness of the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness

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Diary: Endeavour Morse, Joseph Brodsky and coping with the darkness of the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness

Back on October 27, 2019 at NA Confidential, I undertook to explain a reference I’d previously made to New Albany as the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness. The British television series Endeavour factored into this little bit of pedantry. Now it’s 2023, and the final series of Endeavour is airing on public television. It began in 2012, when I still was a co-owner at NABC, and our Bank Street Brewhouse expansion was ongoing. In the years to come, I left the company and BSB perished. Now Endeavour is gone, too. But make no mistake: New Albany is as much an Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness as it always was, even if our collective powers of denial have grown infinitely stronger. 

It took a few days for me to see it, but last night’s council meeting provided the necessary epiphany.

Why have I reacted so strongly against the scrubbed and polished fantasy land depicted in New Albany’s new Comprehensive Plan?

Because it’s delusional lipstick on an unreconstructed pig. We’re still the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness.

As last night’s meeting amply attested, the same perennial prejudices, assumptions, idiocies and clannishness held by the same perennial ruling caste haven’t gone anywhere at all in spite of the ballyhooed makeovers. Dan Coffey mouthed the mantra of the New Albanian dark ages, and a room filled with people who earnestly believe they’re more intelligent than Coffey said and did nothing. From somewhere deep within his bunker, Jeff Gahan beamed proudly.

DC Endeavour Morse: How do you do it? Leave it at the front door?

DI Fred Thursday: ‘Cause I have to. Case like this will tear a heart right out of a man. Find something worth defending.

DC Endeavour Morse: I thought I had! Found something.

DI Fred Thursday: Music? I suppose music is as good as anything. Go home. Put your best record on. Loud as it’ll play. And with every note, you remember: That’s something the darkness couldn’t take from you.

[Thursday walks away, Morse emotionally looks at the view of Oxford and then leaves the rooftop]

The poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is a far cry from a defeated Scott Wood’s imaginary magnum opus or the Inspector Morse prequel, but the unifying theme is darkness — and dissent.

From Brodsky’s obituary in the New York Times.

However, he was something of...Read more