Everyone has a favorite H.L. Mencken quip, and here's mine: If he hated his surroundings and the people within it so much, why, he was asked, did he hang around? “I don't know,” Mencken replied. “Why do people go to the zoo?”

It didn't seem to matter where in this town I bartended - uptown, downtown, way downtown - there was always some pretender Mencken (all bile, no wit) drinking three stools from the door for far too long in the middle of the day whose pet obsession was the forlorn state of Fort Wayne. What the guy ended up conveying, of course, was his own forlorn state: pathological know-it-all-ism combined with a raging inferiority complex. And he was usually a meanie.

I thought I'd left that guy behind when I left the bar business. But what's become glaringly apparent in recent years is that this man and his condition have grown and dispersed throughout the community. His pathology has metastasized. The city itself has turned into one large, stale tavern chock full of petty accusers and not a few grand contrivers. To do business here, to so much as get along at the water cooler, is to some extent to conform to the dysfunction. Fort Wayne has become a singularly nasty place to work in, to shop at, to pray for, to raise its future within. Its culture is now in full decay and its leaders are doing something far worse than acting in bad faith. They are embracing something that there's not even a word for but should be: They are lit from within by whatever it is that is the opposite of grace. It's sadder and more profound than mere disgrace. A metaphysician would call it negative transcendence. A bartender, watching it walk through his door, would just call the cops.

None of this, of course, is verifiable. A culture in crisis is an impossible thing to prove. But I defy anyone of any degree of refinement to tell me that his stomach didn't drop a little a few years ago when Men's Health Magazine called Fort Wayne “The Stupidest City in America” or that the following thought didn't occur to him: “This is, possibly, quite true.”

I'm not sure the town has ever recovered from the Harvester pullout nearly 25 years ago. While its economic recovery is debatable, it certainly hasn't recovered its civic or its moral nerve. That vacuum was neatly filled in the '80s by a band of wily entrepreneurs, who, consulting nothing more than a $5 Rand McNally road atlas, noticed that Fort Wayne was equidistant from some half-dozen major metropolitan centers and thus the perfect export center for cocaine. Morally, culturally, Fort Wayne turned into Little Detroit. Fort Wayne's response to this crisis set up a reaction-formation that it has been practicing ever since and has lent me my own working definition of cynicism. Cynicism, Fort Wayne has taught me, can be defined as malicious apathy.

Any college student who's taken Civilization 101 knows how to build a viable culture. You begin with rule of law and industry, clarifying the first and expanding the second until it generates a tax base that is able to support your hobbies. Fort Wayne has this absolutely backward, and it turned it backward at a breakneck pace. Never mind that its leaders want to build its second playpen version of the Roman Colosseum before they can support it. They want to start throwing the impious to the lions before they build the Colosseum.

I mean precisely Matt Kelty and the multiple indictments he faces. Kelty is thoroughly immersed in the history and culture of Fort Wayne, and the artifacts attesting to that aren't up on the walls of his campaign office; they are on the walls of his architectural firm. The 19th-century map of the city in its lobby attests to its early industry, not its political ambitions or its vanity.

And the Troy Laundry Building sketches? “Built in 1919 in 90 days for $30,000,” Kelty will tell you before the question is out of your mouth. He carries more information within him about city pioneers John Henry Bass, Oscar and Helene Foellinger, Sylvanus F. Bowser and Samuel M. Foster than anyone outside local academia. He was immersed in Fort Wayne's history and was adding to its culture long before he announced for office. He is absolutely and, civically speaking, profoundly grounded.

The indictments against Kelty are the latest manifestations of this town's collectively immature psychology, its sense of adolescent resentment and pernicious masochism. If all that sounds too psychological, it is. But this newspaper would refuse to print words that would more accurately describe what is going on; and psychology is the language that modern society has chosen to describe our most disgusting behaviors. I welcome any language that would more accurately describe why a culture would choose to destroy its best and brightest and why it would exhibit such glee in the process. Unlike Mencken or the omnipresent guy in my bar, they don't even have the excuse of drink to fall back on. The mainstream media have done nothing but amplify this town's worst self-destructive tendencies.

The Kelty indictments are nothing more than an indictment of the psychological condition of the leaders of this community - an inkblot that its leaders are holding up to themselves. Their psychological and moral future has been tied now to Kelty's character. Kelty's character is what it has been from the beginning: mature, tough, independent and conscientious.

It's the cultural health of the city that's at the crossroads.