Author: Stagger Lee

I don’t know quite how to reckon with the extent to which we are traumatized and exasperated through being terrorized by the stupidest shit on Earth, flung by the stupidest people on Earth. You think about how dull-witted the average American is these days, and then think half of them are as bad or worse, and it all starts to make sense.

My lovely bride is fond of saying “the question isn’t how smart are you, it’s how are you smart,” and I find no fault with that. I’ve known people who would struggle to read this post but know how to manufacture a semi-automatic firearm from bare metal, who would struggle to balance a checkbook but can instinctively do the calculus required to drain ten 3-pointers in a row, who can single-handedly take down an entire pub on trivia night but cannot make it past day two of any in-person programming course ever. I absolutely endorse her position. However, it comes with a contrapositive, which is “how are you stupid,” and we are afflicted with multiple overlapping stupids. Always have been, honestly, but it goes a long way toward explaining how we got here.

There’s the “I don’t know anything about politics/I don’t care anything about politics” form, which is absurd when you consider how many of those people have opinions on how the BCS should have worked or how the College Football Playoff should be constituted. There’s the people who treat politics as spectator sport, assuming it will never have a material effect on them. There’s the generation of boys with failed parenting who think entirely in Call of Duty, Joe Rogan and racist Twitter accounts with Roman statue avatars. And there’s the Democratic consultant class permanently trapped in amber in 1995, convinced that the mythical white working class male vote is the only thing worth winning and trying to run back the business-conciliatory New South Governor as the sole hope of the Democrats.

But there’s one particular brand of stupid that is driving me out of my mind, and it’s the stupid of Republicans who think they can keep shaking hands with the devil without consequence, that this will all go by the boards when Trump is gone, that normal service will return and there will be no consequences or any repercussions for what they have done. It’s just business. All in the game, yo. It would be unproductive and unseemly to hold anyone to account. The American people want us to move forward.

Horseshit.

The reason we are in this position now is because we never move forward. We never completed Reconstruction, in the 1870s or the 1970s alike. We never held anyone to account for the Iraq war and the credit crisis of 2008. We never held anyone to account for January 6 and the malfeasance that followed. We never held the media to account for harassing Joe Biden off the ticket because of age and incipient senescence, only to pretend nothing was wrong with a transparently worse case. We never held Big Tech to account for the things they enable.

We never paid the price, never asked anyone to, and as a result the bill has grown astronomical. And it might well cost us a nation. We cannot flinch from making this right if we ever get the opportunity. We can’t shrug off a mob of paramilitary killers sent to wreak havoc on an American city. We can’t wave away the kidnap and deportation of American citizens. We absolutely must not allow “mistakes were made” to be the extent of the repentance. No forgiveness without contrition and reparation. Red America, in its lands and homes and minds and television networks and blogospheres, must be occupied and de-MAGA-fied or else we’ll be right back here and worse in another decade. Just long enough for the Democrats to struggle to pull together a fix and then lose.

Because that’s the stupidest stupid of all: the memory of a goldfish that says why should we worry about measles, or polio, or Y2K, or anything else that we once fixed and hasn’t been a problem for so long that people assume it’s the natural condition and doesn’t require constant vigilance.

You know, like democracy.

How many more citizens will have to be publicly murdered by government thugs before the “pro life” and “Second Amendment” and “government tyranny” and “All Lives Matter” people admit it was never about any of those things and always about white supremacy?

Every Democrat in Congress needs to shut down regular business until something happens to stop the American Stormtrooper Squad. Not one penny for ICE. Not one penny for DHS. Not one penny for the functions of the American government as long as this is what it does.

We cannot stop this with a flip of a switch. That’s what elections make possible. But we cannot stop throwing things into its path. If they want our blood, we have to make those bastards work for it.

We have friends everywhere.

I’ve spent a year going into the office to sit at a desk, stare into the middle distance, and then do exactly what I would have done from the front room, or the sofa, or the bed, or the shed, or Gulf Shores, or Nashville, or Prague – because I did. And nothing ever slipped, nothing ever failed for lack of my physical presence. In fact, since returning to the office? Half the support staff has been laid off and incompetent three-ring-binder phone jockeys have been given the keys to the kingdom. I’m still waiting for a review, still waiting for anything but the same across the board raise as everyone else, waiting for promotion, waiting for acknowledgement that we do a good job, waiting for acknowledgement that we even do a job, waiting for the axe to finally come for the oldest system administrator because why do we need an administrator for someone else’s system.

I just about survived the first year of Trump 1 because that was all I had to deal with. There was no work misery as such, or at least no more than the traditional frustrations. Nothing like the second-class citizenship that came from being outsourced. I could just about handle that. And then when we were outsourced, we got a break from a worldwide pandemic and then a ghost of hope that the world would stop getting actively worse, so work was the only real issue. But then the seesaw broke. Now look, both sides are on the bottom.

The attempts to punch out and get some separation from reality aren’t going too well, if the stress dreams are anything to go by. When you dream that the most incompetent part of your org has set fire to your Corvette because they were proactively trying to fix something they imagined necessary, it’s to a point you can’t even rely on going to bed as refuge.

If 2026 is anything like 2025, bugger all, I might take the whole Christmas fortnight off and see if we can decamp to Santa Cruz or something. This is unsustainable.

And that is my Grievance, Aired. Now give me a ball bat for these Feats of Strength.

Anyone who’s seen a loved one deal with stroke can see what’s happening here. The current occupant of the Oval Office is almost certainly taking blood thinners to prevent – or remediate – a TIA, or worse. He can barely hold his head up, his public utterances are the stuff that gets Papaw’s car keys taken away, and the press continues to act as if nothing is wrong at all by comparison to how Joe Biden was branded a senile half-corpse a year and a half ago. The question of whether any one person can take charge of the MAGAtsis going to be a serious concern sooner than later, and it’s the same problem that’s existed for a decade: the Republicans don’t have one person who can take the torch from Trump but at least half a dozen who believe they can.

This is an old old story – half a century, at this point. These things happen when the GOP and the mainstream press can’t accept that they were wrong – about Vietnam, about Clinton, about Iraq, about Trump. So the people who were *right* have to be discredited – because otherwise the press would have to acknowledge their wrongness. And right now, with three-fifths of the country out of patience with the bullshit, the white house press corpse [sic] is as hapless and helpless as ever.It’s going to take so much. The power of billionaires has to be broken, ruthlessly and without ambiguity. A billion dollars has to be treated like a rogue nuke, and as equally unsafe in private hands. the Supreme Court has to be expanded and packed with people who respect the rule of law and reject a blank check for one party. There are entire layers that have to be peeled back to remediate what’s happening here. And it will take the rest of our lives. And it won’t work until enough people are fed up – you need 2/3 of the country to be mad enough to back a change. And while the numbers may be there, or close, the numbers of people willing to take action to turn things over aren’t where they need to be. You need enough people to elect 250 in the House, 54 or 55 in the Senate, a President who can hold their feet to the fire and make it plain they need to vote right, and a public mad enough to let them do what has to be done to clean up the rules and the process.

And we’re going to have to tear down the ballroom, rip down the tacky gold shit, make an affirmative rejection. It happened, and nothing can undo that, but we also need to make it clear that it has been rejected. The bullshit they build in an attempt to gain the continuity with some imagined great past – like all fascists do – has to be hosed down and washed away, and those who made it happen tarred for life. That’s the biggest piece of all: we are going to have to bring back shame, properly targeted and mercilessly pressed, and the kind of people who advocated for revoking women’s suffrage and repealing birthright citizenship need to be more radioactive than David Duke in 1991. “Republican” needs to be synonymous with “pedophile” for the rest of our days. The last decade – hell, the last three decades – need to be looked on like the Gilded Age or the Know-Nothing era, an age of kakistocracy and corruption without parallel.

I’d like to see things on the way back up before I die. It’s not much to ask.

There really aren’t words.

Vanderbilt won 10 games for the first time in the 135-year history of the program. They hung the most points on Tennessee since 1923. They only lost two games, both on the road to ranked opponents, and went undefeated at home. They beat four teams that were ranked when we played them. They are currently the #14 team in the country.

Diego Pavia may be going to NYC for the Heisman ceremony. I have no expectation of him winning it, but he should absolutely be there. And he deserves a statue on campus, because he believed in Vanderbilt football more than we believed in ourselves. He sued the NCAA to keep playing football for Vanderbilt. Read that sentence again.

We are playing with house money. Even if we lose whatever bowl we go to, we won 10. No real difference between 10-2 and 10-3, and 11-2 would be incredible. Owing to the bullshit farm that is the College Football Playoff, the games where a similarly-ranked SEC team might normally expect to play are now off limits (the Cotton, the Peach) or are not on the board because of the overexpansion of the SEC (the Citrus, possibly even the Outback or Gator Bowls). It’s entirely possible we could wind up in the same bowl we got with eight wins. Or six. It will suck, but only a fool expects the SEC to do right by Vandy in any instance.

But it happened. We all saw it. They went out there, fought Tennessee to a draw for a half in Neyland Stadium, and then ran them out of their own house in the second half. It would have been ashes in the mouth to tie our record for all-time wins and then lose to the Vols when history was in the balance, but it didn’t happen.

And now, Jared Curtis – by some measures, the #1 prep prospect in the country and certainly in the top five of five-star recruits – flipped at the 11th hour to Vandy. The kind of player we would never have gotten, the kind of player I said we should just cheat and open the checkbook for, a player who opens at least the tantalizing possibility that this is not a fluke, not a flash in the pan, not entirely down to Pavia, but a real change in Vanderbilt football and a new floor of seven wins and a competitive future…

This could be the beginning of the age of gold. Right now, Vandy men’s and women’s basketball are both ranked and both undefeated – but not ranked as high or with as many wins as Vandy football. If there was any doubt whether Candice Story Lee had made her bones, she is now the Goldmother and no disputing it, and well earned.

But the bigger thing for me is that I got pulled back in, in a way I never expected to. I was done. I had accepted that our future consisted of being a feeder team for bigger programs to fleece. I never expected that they’d find the money to make payroll against the rest of the SEC, let alone find guys willing to stay a couple years and close the deal. It’s hard to be invested in something when you can’t tell if the people in charge care about it or not, and that was an open question for decades at Vanderbilt. But for better or worse, you’ve got to make uncapped salary and unlimited free agency work for you…and we did.

I bought a #2 jersey. First current Vanderbilt jersey I’ve purchased in twenty-plus years. But I will treasure it because one undersized spitfire from New Mexico believed in Vandy enough for all of us until we came around to his way of thinking.

Diego Pavia, the greatest football Commodore of all time. Well done young man.

Assume the best. Assume that at the first time of asking, in 2029, we will swear in a Congress with 220 loyal Democrats in the House and 50 loyal Democrats in the Senate, accompanied by a Democratic President and Vice President. What needs to pass on day one, before the balls and the parties, what needs to be ready for the new President’s signature at 12:01 PM before he walks off the stage?

Pace Josh Marshall, I was there already:

1) End the filibuster for good in the Senate and establish rules that except as specified in the Constitution, no vote in Congress shall require a supermajority.

2) Expand the Supreme Court. Minimum of 19, but maybe as much as 27 – a chief justice and two for each circuit. Then randomize the selection of jurisdictions, outlaw venue shopping, do whatever can be done to limit the ability to leverage the courts for partisan advantage.

3) Lift the debt ceiling and establish automatic current-baseline budgeting so that government shutdowns are no longer possible.

4) Expand the House, ideally by around an order of magnitude, ensuring that no member has more than 100,000 constituents. This also diminishes the power of any one individual member, brings them closer to the voters, and makes it more difficult for lobbyists who now have ten times as many people to snow. It incidentally puts a boot in the ass of the Electoral College, effectively reducing the Senate advantage to .2 EV per state – if you really want to solve things, mandate independently-drawn districts for any and all state elections to federal office.

5) Term-limit committee chairs, to disincentivize clinging to office endlessly.

Not one of these proposals of these require a Constitutional amendment. None of them requires a 2/3 majority, and none of them are subject to Supreme Court review as they are all based around internal organization of Congress or matters that are decided by Congress. If they had all been implemented in 2010, as they should have been, we would probably have been spared the last decade of nightmares and gotten a real public-option health care solution.

The only issue going forward is the agenda above: to restore separation of powers, abolish the unitary executive and defang a Supreme Court that provides air cover to a lawless dictator. Nothing else – not the rights of our trans siblings, not saving the planet from the ravages of humankind, not breaking the billionaire oligarchy – not one a damn thing is possible until points one, two and three are accomplished. It has to be done if we are going to continue to have democratic government in this country.

And there is a thirst for it. The Democratic Party ran the table in every race of interest a week ago. All the way down, Republican offices for decades were turned over to Democrats by an electorate that had simply had enough. And not in Democratic strongholds, either – after all, there would be no Republican to upset if these were permanently safe seats. The fact that the Senate leadership was unwilling and unable to follow the election returns does not obviate the fact that if Democrats were to win every state in 2028 where Trump’s approval rating is a net negative-6 or worse, they would walk away with over 450 electoral votes and the kind of decisive victory that is required to break the back of MAGAism.

That is the big issue. That is the only issue. Everything that is going wrong – the economy battered with tariffs, our international standing in tatters everywhere but in public in Saudi Arabia (they’re laughing up their burnooses in private, bet), uniformed and unmarked thugs alike snatching citizens off the street for their skin color – every bit of it is happening because Republicans are in charge, and none of it would be happening with Democrats in charge. Because it didn’t. The only issue remaining in American politics is whether you want the dictatorship of the stupid, the senile, the racist and the rich, or whether you want to repair American democracy.

And the campaign has already begun.

I know that house rules dictate everyone gets safe passage across the Styx before the guns come out, but I just can’t. Dick Cheney’s legacy is on exhibit right now at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: a Republican Party divorced from reality and in thrall to a unitary executive who commands lockstep obedience.

In every way that matters, George W Bush was just Donald Trump with a salad and a treadmill. Same fact-light grip on the world. Same loyal coterie of aides ready to wipe their asses with the Constitution. Same party willing to look aside because any notional Democrat would be “worse.” How exactly is left as an exercise for the reader, but in the Republican mind, imagination always trumps [sic] reality.

The truly ironic thing is that after spending a decade tarring Barack Obama as a Muslim socialist, Cheney’s death will almost certainly coincide with the election of an actual factual Muslim socialist as mayor of New York City. And when it happens, it will be because people who have been told for a decade that anything to the left of Ludwig Von Mises is socialism think “well if it means I can pay the rent and afford child care, then bring on socialism.”

Let us redouble our efforts this Election Day as we look to the next one, and the one after that, and remember that nothing will get better until we create a world with consequences for all.

I am distracting myself from the shit state of the world, in macro and micro, by thinking about stuff. Physical goods, of the sort of which I have accumulated too many, in the eternal quest to have Just The Right Thing – which usually results in having four or five things which are each a slightly different Eighty Percent Of The Right Thing.

Like the Yeti. These days, it’s mostly down to two: one stackable 20 oz which goes back and forth to work and one stackable 16 oz which is for home use. There are way too many more to speak of, but these are the anchors, and for good reason: the 20 is the right size for a full pint of beer, or a grande Starbucks drink in bring-your-own-cup mode, or enough ice for a can of soda or more. It’s a perfect all-purpose size. By contrast, the 16 is a little smaller – fine for filling from a can, but closer to 15 oz with the lid on which screws up other things. But if you’re refilling regularly out of a pitcher or a growler or whatever, it’s a much cozier size to have to hand. It’s the bedside cup, and the Moon Dust textured purple serves as a tactile reminder that I’m at home, not out in the world. Which is nothing to sneeze at.

It’s also finally dipped cool enough to get out the gray chore coat from American Giant which was a gift last year – it is the perfect “light layer” weight and pairs nicely with the Solovair Chelsea boots I picked up a couple of weeks ago and have mostly broken in. There is something about the jacket-and-boots combination that just feels right. I don’t know if that’s a callback to Star Wars, or to life in DC, or just the ongoing desire to spend my whole life in that four month window without daylight saving time, but at a moment when I need something to shift, being able to dress the part helps.

The wider world is bad right now. There is immense comfort in being at home in the back yard, with a nice marine layer keeping the glare off, either flipping burgers on the grill or relaxing in the Adirondack chair or (especially) reclined in the shed with the candle for aroma and the battery-powered string lights and faux-neon giving that purple glow while reading myself into another reality. Even just the feeling of walking out the front door to bring in the trash cans, or down to the school to plug in the car – there is a cozy little world here that I can almost reach out and touch, just beneath the surface of the real world, and any chance to immerse myself in it is a gift.

I guess I finally learned to live in the moment and appreciate it. If you poke your head over the parapet even a little, you realize it’s a long stretch into the darkness ahead with no telling how bad it could get or for how long. So the goal is to remain ever focused on here and now and find the joy – or at least the contentment – in whatever can be carved out of the present.

October always beings memories of 2004, or 2016 – when it felt like a bad time might be pushed back, only to fail. I suspect last year will be added to that cavalcade of misery, although it honestly didn’t feel that bad until November 1 when it couldn’t be kicked any further down the road. But October also feels like 2019, with Asheville and Ken Burns’ Country Music and the desire to stretch out and cuddle up and just watch hours and hours of informative history.

But I don’t know how long this will be enough.

He was GamerGate made flesh.

Anyone who graduated from high school and went straight into right-wing politics in 2012 is a pure product of the Obama/Call of Duty/4chan era of shouted slurs, Nazi trolling and nihilism for the lulz. That was his world and that’s exactly what he wanted for ours. There’s a reason all the effusive tributes from the worst people in America don’t actually include clips or quotes.

He was definitely useful, inasmuch as he was a divining rod for people who think debate is an objective rather than a tool. Some things are not up for debate, like the humanity of trans folk or the intellectual capability of women of color. The Republican Party which ran like Hell from David Duke in 1991 is washing the balls of his dead heir in 2025, and that’s pretty much all you need to know about the trajectory of this country in the 21st century.

Bad things happen to bad people and it doesn’t make them good people. Nobody deserves to be shot at a distance, nobody deserves to be orphaned before you’re too young for school, nobody deserves to die for their political opinions. But to act like this is somehow a loss for American political culture, for “free speech”, for anyone but his loved ones is not only risible in the extreme, but an insult to all those who gave their lives pushing back against his kind for decades in my native territory.

It’s one more lump of shit to throw onto the bonfire of America, as three-fifths of the country shrugs off the things that outraged them four or five years ago when they falsely claimed to see them coming from the other side. It wouldn’t do a lick of good if we reversed the outcome of the 2024 election tomorrow – there are too many people who are just fine with all this for me to have any hope of seeing it repaired before I die.

Because it’s gonna take a lot longer than 34 years to get back to when Republicans ran and hid from associating with Klansmen instead of worshipping them.