Aspen’s own Jack Nicholson had it right: you can’t handle the truth.

You means you—and you know who you are. You are the citizenry of Aspen, self-annointed, and it is up to you to give a flying whatever about what happens to your town. Some of you even think that you know what’s going down. Some of you even care or at least say you do.Even so, the collective consciousness of the local body politic has no more feeling about what is actually transpiring than a thumb gone numb.

As you might guess, there’s an unfortunate series of events that leads me to this conclusion: the story begins and ends with what has to be the most expensive lumber yard this side of the rain forest: the BMC lumber yard that cost the City of Aspen $18 million as a future home for affordable housing. An appraiser hired by the City—and sent back to the drawing board more than once, by the way—decided the land was actually worth $16 million at the time of purchase, very nearly the sum the City actually paid at the top of the market for the land.

Remember well that the City forked up $35 million in all for land purchases for affordable housing, thereby depleting all available funds and even borrowing money from the Wheeler Opera House to pay the bill. Remember also that this binge left absolutely no money to building any affordable housing whatsoever without going to voters to approve hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds. After the Burlingame disaster, the political climate meant bonds were not going to be on the May 2009 ballot.

So consider this: even if the City paid a fair price for the BMC lumber yard, they still grossly overpaid for everything else, buying at the absolute worst time to make everything even worse. If they sold the BMC lumber yard today, according to a broker close to the situation, they would be lucky to get $9 million, less than half what they paid.

Can you handle the truth? The City overpaid for every parcel and has no money to build affordable housing without going into debt. No appraisal or spin is every going to change those facts.

Do people care? The reaction to John McBride’s letter has been a collective yawn by those grown accustomed to collectivism. The housing director says there is no crisis in affordable housing to begin with, which renders the question “why build” anything but moot.

I’m come to the conclusion that Aspen always gets what it deserves. In the end, like it or not, you get what you overpay for.