Author: Stagger Lee

The South tried to break away twice. Once was in 1861, once was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In both cases, they were thwarted in large measure by the willingness of the Federal government to use force to stand up for the principle that where a conflict arises, the national government supersedes the state government. Since then, the South – mostly in the form of the Republican Party, which by 1994 was a party under the direction of the South if not wholly of the South – has attempted to win back the power to do what it pleases. Now we are seeing the fruits of two decades of strategy – a strategy which began with massive resistance to the legitimate election of Barack Obama and came to a conclusion in 2021, and one which betrays the utter cynicism of a party bent on one ideal and one only: that no one but them should ever wield power.

The plan was twofold. The first part entailed stuffing the judiciary full of political hacks who would in all things defer to their ideology, with no regard for precedent or law, and to get as many seated as possible without regard for two hundred years of prior practice. They stymied so many lower court nominations that the then-Senate majority leader carved out a clumsy exemption to the filibuster (rather than killing it outright as he should have done), which was then used for the trumpet call that the rules were being bent by Democrats and therefore any amount of rule-breaking was not only moral but necessary. Culminating, of course, in a logic that said that Antonin Scalia’s seat must be held open for a year to get a Republican President [sic] to fill it, yet Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s must be fulled in a month lest a Democrat be allowed to fill it. With the result that we have had thirty years of a conservative-majority court. Never mind Ford or Nixon: three Reagan appointees, four Bush appointees between the two of therm, and three more Trump appointees, as against four total for Democrats since 1976 – despite 20 years of Democratic Presidency and 24 years of Republican, they have almost triple the seats. The Court is broken, possibly beyond repair.

But that’s only half the plan. The other half is simply to have no policy whatsoever at the federal level, other than to thwart Democrats. In four years under Donald Trump, the GOP’s great policy initiative was to confirm judges and throw out Obamacare – the latter of which they couldn’t even find fifty of their own votes in the Senate for – and nothing else, to the point that they literally had no platform for the 2020 Presidential election. Democrats can do nothing at the federal level, the Republicans will do nothing, and the courts will defend the Republican point of view.

And so we reach the soft secession we have now. Rather than break away from the United States, the South and its fellow travelers will merely make one outrageous decision after another at the state level, confident that the machinery of the Federal judiciary will not touch them as it did sixty years ago – and confident that it can stop any federal agency from intervening, either through the judicial shield during a Democratic administration or their own indifference during a Republican one. Florida can throw out public health altogether, Tennessee can tiptoe up to the line of burning books, Texas can create a vigilante mechanism for attacking women seeking abortion care, and the federal government is stymied in any attempt to intervene, while the Neo-Confederates waltz away with their “low-regulation low-tax” paradise paid for with federal money leeched from California and New York.

Set against this, why even bother to secede by force of arms? Just brazenly ignore any number of norms and unwritten rules, get your tame Federalist Society judges to rip up any judicial precedent with language that would get a 1L laughed out of the classroom, and do whatever you want without let or hinderance – or consequences, to this point.

The only thing that is going to throttle this is an aggressive and comprehensive attack on Trumpism by everyone else, including Republicans who have supposedly disavowed Trump yet still want to reap the benefits of his ill-gotten power. Not allowed. Either you are on his side or you will do everything to remove them from political life, and if it means your Reaganite dreams are deferred for a generation, that’s the price of your folly. And there may come a day when the economic engines of America have to start giving serious thought to how their wealth can be diverted away from underwriting the very people who want to transform America into a new Confederacy.

Whatever it takes.

I lost a cousin this week. He was 57, the youngest of four sons of my mother’s late older brother. He was the typical late-boomer East Tennessee rowdy boy of the 70s, of the sort I knew well knocking about town growing up in the exurban South. He also didn’t have a particularly easy run of things – the usual constellation of drinking, arrests, car crashes, divorces, gambling, kid or two out of wedlock. My mother mentioned more than once how he’d had a tough life, and how she was trying to help where she could, but sadly, her various reclamation efforts have not exactly borne fruit over the years.

Which seems harsh. Probably is, really. But maybe I finally understand how some of my “I can fix this” DNA comes from that side too. Then again, it’s also easy to pull on the JD Vance school of victim-blaming pathology and say “buy the ticket, take the ride” – which is a family motto, if not that part of the family. But that doesn’t satisfy things either. Because there are plenty of people who are only as successful as their options everywhere from East Tennessee to the California coast and everywhere in between. 

I don’t know the details of how he died. One of his brothers hanged himself eleven years ago. 57 is an age that could be most anything, but things being how they are in 2022, my first thought is obviously this damned ongoing pandemic. The easy assumption is that things being how they are, he was almost certainly not vaccinated, and Omicron did what it does. Or it could have been a car crash, or a heart attack, or whatever. There are a lot of ways to die in America in the 21st century. And that sort of strikes at the point of my thinking. We have not, by and large, done very much to reduce the number of ways to die – nor the odds.

The problem is, so many of the things that would reduce the likelihood of premature dying don’t exist in America in the 21st century. We could have lowered the number of firearm deaths – suicides, mass shootings, accidents – if we took mental health seriously and made firearms harder to get than real Sudafed. We could have prevented literally hundreds of thousands of deaths by taking public health measures seriously and uniformly embracing masks and distancing nationwide for six lousy weeks in March 2020. We could have a measure of universal healthcare, or some level of basic income, or underwrite college to the point that six figures of debt are not an entry level requirement for the job market, all of which would lead to an improvement in stress reduction and life expectancy. There are a lot of things that could have made life easier for a working class man in Anderson County in the last forty years.

But at some level, there is an ideology that has slowly permeated most of our American society in those forty years, and it boils down to one very simple idea: the notion that you don’t have to know or care that there are other people. Some people dress it up as “libertarian” and call it the triumph of rugged individualism. Others wrap it in language of self-fulfillment and self-actualization. A handful of people disappear up their own ass into Ayn Rand and proclaim that selfishness is the highest moral virtue. But at the end of the day, it boils down to the simple proposition that what we owe to one another is absolutely nothing. And once we don’t have to consider anyone else, then we can have all the assault rifles and 20-round pistol clips we want and who cares how they’re stored, because freedom. We don’t have to care when nine cops team up to shoot one man on a freeway, because who cares if the cops killed someone else? We can make up whatever we want and broadcast it over cable as news, no matter how logically inconsistent or factually disprovable, and live by it as literal gospel even when it conflicts with the actual Gospel.

And it’s turned into a whole ideology with tentacles in every aspect of world and life. It’s the common thread underlying the financial fraud of crypto and NFTs, the manosphere and its whole ecosystem of podcasts and chat boards, the rejection of the international order by China and Russia and the Trumpian United States, the doctrine that the same sort of injection that was a rite of passage for polio and an annual afterthought with flu is now some sort of unspeakable imposition – and best of all, the notion that the way to deal with a global pandemic is to ignore it, and doing anything to prevent spreading or perpetuating it is an act of submission and fecklessness. Because you should be able to do whatever you want, all the time, with no regard for the consequences, because consequences are for other people.

The problem with this worldview is that it has been leveraged against most of the people who have adopted it. It’s a great ideology for those that have got, but for those who ain’t, it offers you equal freedom to starve under the bridge to the financial benefit of them that’s got. You can’t afford to look at the bad knee that could really stand to be scoped, or go to rehab for the oxy you were overprescribed for bad cramps, or send your kid to the good school they got into. But you can engage in all the performative defiance you like. Performative defiance is free, and easy, and you can sing its praises to the masses who refuse Moderna and Pfizer while you require it for your employees, and if they die of performative defiance, well, you just told them to march on the Capitol and take their country back, you didn’t make them do it.

In 1995, I had the privilege of sitting in a lecture hall at Vanderbilt and listening to Benjamin Barber elucidate the principles behind what would become Jihad vs McWorld, where he pointed out that neither retreat into nationalism and/or religious zealotry nor the deracinated sterility of neoliberal late capitalism lend themselves to a healthy viable democratic society. The solution, as he sees it, involves civic engagement – which is the exact diametrical opposite of the ideology of the 21st century. I thought at the time that the solution would be broadly communitarian, with the Internet as the connective tissue for people forming common bonds. More fool me. I expected that the USENET ethos against spam and misuse would serve as an underpinning value system for a modern social contract. More fool me. I thought having embedded newsgroups as part of the newspaper would be as essential as live coverage on the spot. (This whole “more fool me” thing is making me question how bright I really was in the 1990s.) But it turns out that free trade plus low taxes plus small government sends the money in one direction, to the cost of most. And rather than unwind that process, those who it cost the most would rather find someone to loathe that makes them feel superior, or defy reason and logic for the sake of no man living telling them what to do.

I don’t know what killed Matthew. But at the bottom of the pile, I guarantee you I know what fed it and enabled it to kill him. It didn’t have to be like that. It doesn’t have to be like that. But it starts with asking what are you prepared to do, and what you are prepared to do for others, and accepting that there is in fact something we owe to one another, whatever framework you may couch it in.

Of, as I say, which.

In mid-2020, we blithely put in a reservation for an electric vehicle, thinking it would mainly be a goof – we had no room in our garage for it, we didn’t actually need more than one car, and we were in the midst of a global pandemic and were working from home anyway. And then we ended up moving, and to a place without transit, and there’s going to be a time when we need two reliable cars again. And so, last Wednesday, we scrambled to do a deal and take possession of the new ride. And thus was my wife’s 22 year old Jetta replaced with a brand new ID.4 AWD Pro S.

The dynamic of an electric car is very different. Set aside the mechanics of an electric motor – you make a normal start off the line from a stop sign and one second later you’re doing 40 in a 25 and still accelerating, and you have to get used to that – the dynamics of how the car functions will blow your mind. There’s no ignition, just an on-off switch, and even that is superfluous. The car unlocks when you walk up to it and starts itself when you sit in the drivers’ seat and put your foot on the brake – walk up, get in, go. There is no gear shift where I’ve rested my hand since 1993; a knob above where your right hand holds the wheel will switch you from neutral to drive to reverse, and instead of shifting into park, you stop and press a button which puts it in park and sets the parking brake all at once. The display shows your speed, your remaining charge, your nav directions if set, and your road surroundings – what’s the speed limit, what sides can you pass on, how close are you following. No odometer. No trip odometer. No tachometer. No oil pressure or engine temperature. Basically, what you are driving is a well-appointed electric golf cart that was 295 brake horsepower, which is within a rounding error of my late father’s 1969 Corvette Stingray.

There’s a lot to relearn in the dark when you leave the dealership in a car like this. Not just where the turn signals or the windshield wipers are, but what the haptic-touch buttons on the wheel do and where the controls are buried in the 12-inch touchscreen UI on the dashboard. The mechanical controls are the pedals, the wheel, the turn signal, the wipers, two buttons for four power windows and the seat controls. Everything else is either a haptic button or a touchscreen control. Muscle memory avails you nothing here; you’re meant to tell the car what to do with “Hello ID” and it can’t necessarily do it all. (The lack of tangible controls for climate control will be a pain in the ass sooner than later, especially when all you want is the fan blowing and not “get me to this set temperature on this side of the car”.) On the other hand, it does mean fewer mechanical switches to wear out and break. On the third hand, Volkswagen is not exactly famous for its robust and reliable electrical systems. On the fourth hand…it’s an electric car. Either they haven’t figured out the electronics and it’ll be towed back to the dealer in 500 miles or it’s going to be all right soon as you learn it.

There are nifty touches. All the modern bells and whistles, like a fairly aggressive lane assist that will make sure you don’t drift on curves (and will supposedly slow you gradually to a stop if it thinks you fell asleep or had a heart attack) or wireless phone charging and wireless CarPlay (which, combined with the interior club lighting and the fact that CarPlay continues until you climb out and thereby power the car off, increases the odds that you’ll inadvertently park with the Village People blasting and look like you’re stepping out of Heaven on the Charing Cross Road rather than a compact SUV). The glass roof doesn’t retract, but the shade does with a finger swipe and it’s a panoramic view the length of the whole vehicle. The bottom is almost completely flat, with no transmission or emissions elements to catch anything, and coupled with six and a half inches of ground clearance gives the real and imagined advantages of some height (not inconsiderable in a world where the luxury-station-wagon-with-a-lift-kit has become the default vehicle of Silly Con Valley, whether it’s a Tesla Y or a Mercedes G-class). 

Which leads to this: there’s a certain appeal to pushing what Volkswagen is sotto voce promoting as “the people’s EV.” Not the people’s car; you can’t be the people’s car at $40K even after federal tax breaks. But this is about the cheapest way into a compact electric crossover – I don’t know if the Bolt EUV is out (and if it is, whoever is in charge of promotions should be sacked forthwith), but even as loaded an ID.4 as this is will still save you $10K over an equivalent Tesla Y, with the added satisfaction of promoting electric driving without being a Muskmelon.

There’s one other issue: charging. There are plenty of places to charge in Silly Con Valley, some of them even gratis depending on day and time, but so far, level 2 charging is not as easy as “roll up, plug in, fill ‘er up” – instead, you have to specify how much charge you want and in what amount of time, and the app will balk and tell you that it takes longer, and you’ll have to keep tweaking back and forth until you can get what you want, and then you have to start all over again because it’s estimating a cost greater than what you have in the app wallet, and then once you have the money in the app wallet it quotes you a different rate than you thought, and and and. Plus you have to use the VW’s own app to release the charge cord when you’re ready to call it quits. It’s going to take some getting used to; the car, like the phone, is going to be something you charge overnight when it’s down to 25% rather than something you’re likely to top up at every stop. (I did use the Level 1 portable charger that came with the car to try topping up overnight and got it from 70% to 85%, which suggests that I could charge it from 20% to 95% in about five days. Mixed bag. Maybe if we drive to Tahoe and leave it plugged in outside the cabin the whole time, who knows?)

But here’s the thing: this feels like the car of the future. I got my Monte Carlo with its mechanical radio dial just as digital tuning became a thing and the world started moving to fuel injection. I got my Saturn with its cassette deck as CDs and sunroofs became cheaper. I got the VW Rabbit with its quirky I-5 engine just as navigation screens and hybrid drive trains began to proliferate. The Malibu was the first car of my life that didn’t feel like it was obsolete six months after it rolled off the lot. But this…this is a Great Leap Forward. With the soft teal glow inside (adjustable across the spectrum depending on mood!) and the automatic wireless pickup of BBC Sounds or Apple Music or SomaFM (we’re going to try this one without paying for a second satellite radio) and the destination outlined on Apple Maps on a dashboard display the size of an iPad and the full moon through the glass roof and the eerie electronic whine that’s legally required under 20mph to warn others of a vehicle, it feels for all the world like the dream of a 1979 My Weekly Reader come to life. Unlike the last time I moved into this address, this time I got a new VW within four months. 

Now we see what life in the future is like.

“you get your dog back, your truck back, your wife back, you get out of jail…”

The big open-ended things are beginning to fall. The new vehicle is here at last (of which), the house and mortgage are finally sorted (for better or worse), I have an interview for another job, and even if I don’t get it, the labor I have done to facilitate it is paying out in a work project. And the back-end server support I’ve been waiting on for six to eight weeks has finally been sorted out to the point I can start trying to do my actual job.

It’s not bad, really. The problem of bashing your head against the wall is it feels so good when you stop. My sister pointed out that you can endure almost anything as long as it comes with an end date, and the things that tend to torture you are the open problems that lack a date certain for ending. It doesn’t do much good to say “it gets better” if you can’t say how or when.

There are still big things ahead that are not my call. Some state power could put paid to our plans to go to London. No other employer has to offer me a job. The current one could easily resume ignoring me, or worse. There’s always the risk of something unexpected stepping backward out of the fourth dimension to slit your throat when you weren’t looking. And while worrying means you suffer twice, it’s good to be prepared for – or at least cognizant of – the risk posed by known unknowns. And realistic about it.

For now, it’s tempting to believe that after a turbulent year, things are finally settling into the new normal. Not back to the way they were, which is never possible; the bell doesn’t un-ring. But if we reach a stable state we can live with rather than an unceasing river of anomaly…that would almost be enough, wouldn’t it?

“But if there’s a new iPad mini coming in 2021…maybe? At this point I think it’s turned into a gadget that I aspire to because I want it as an accessory for the kind of life I want to live, one where video chat with friends is a regular feature rather than a momentary pandemic novelty. One where I need the big display to dash off a little bit of remote work from the Adirondack on the porch overlooking the fog in Galway or Pescadero or the Smokies. It’s my age old story of wanting to need the things I want…and wanting to live in a world where the need for the things I want is both possible and realistic.”

-27 May 2020

This post is coming from the back yard, tapped out as is tradition on the device itself. iPad mini, sixth generation, purple with a purple cover (in tribute to my mother in law), and featuring the Apple Pencil. The post has been saved for a while, because I was told on Christmas morning that it was coming, and I figured I should have it prepped.

My last iPad was the second generation mini, acquired exactly eight years earlier, which has not seen an OS update in three years apart from emergency point patches. It wasn’t really a concern, either; by that point my work-provided iPhone X was a one-oversized-fits-all option. The 7.9-inch screen of the mini made sense when I had a 4 inch phone screen, less so with 5.8. Well, now I famously have a 5.4″ phone…which is great for phone stuff but not so great for, you know, reading. Or video chat with multiple people. Or battery life if you’re going to lean back and cast it to the TV.

But there’s also work to consider. It’s become readily apparent that I need to get my personal life off my work computer. This splits the difference nicely and would be less than a pound in my laptop bag. And then, there’s pub night at home on Sundays. It’s hard not to be tempted by things on the phone, so why not do away with the legal pad, the Kindle and the iPhone altogether and just take the iPad out by the firepit to help with physically detaching from the weekly grind?

I am going to have to relearn my two finger glass typing techniques, though. I haven’t figured out the on screen keyboard with its vital differences from a laptop or phone. And writing directly on screen is an art that may take me a while to master. Simple deletes and returns are a challenge, because my reflexes for such things were honed in the dot com era on the Graffiti system adopted by Palm, and they are still buried deep in my operating system to be unlearned before the Apple Pencil can be more than a fine-point finger.

This is an aspirational device. This is a take-abroad-to-spare-the-phone device, a do-some-work-in-a-pinch device, a pop-it-up-on-the-coffee-table-to-Zoom-with-friends device. A force multiplier for iOS. A way to ensure that the phone lasts all day when I’m not at my desk with a charge cable all the time. The tweener for IMDb use watching Disney+. Something that doesn’t have Twitter on it, or at most the tightly constrained friends-only variety.

Hopefully it will be my personal computer for the world to come. Of which.

“I get why people want this to be over. I want it to be over. But it’s not over, and until people are willing to do what is necessary, it won’t be over. And that’s what America feels like in 2021: a huge group project where only a handful of people are actually doing their part of the assignment.”

-27 Feb 2021

 

800,000 dead and counting. We got the vaccines we needed, and tried to get them into as many arms as possible, but because the Stupid-Worship party immediately made vaccine-refusal its latest shibboleth of fealty, we didn’t get enough shots in arms quick enough, and we got caught by Delta. And even then, it wasn’t enough to change people’s minds, and we got Omicron. And predictably, the same people who have taken a giant shit on science for thirty years are painting viral evolution as a socialist hoax while red-state cities and towns report positivity rates over 25% in daily testing.

We’ve lost half a million people, easily, to the doctrine of “choose your own reality.” If we had responded to this in the way we claim we responded to September 11 – hell, if we had responded to this in the way we did for the first couple of weeks, only for a couple of months instead – we might have avoided this and gotten out with deaths comparable to a very bad flu year. Instead, we have basically the equivalent of metropolitan Nashville wiped out, and the response from actual Nashville is to open everything up and throw off the masks and chant anti-Biden slogans at Kid Rock’s Great Big STD Palace or wherever. For whatever reason, we have evolved a minority population in this country that worships its own obstinance and is willing to die or kill just so that they never have to abide by what someone else said. WJ Cash’s Southern disease has metastasized outside Dixie, and the necks are everywhere now, and there are enough of them to make it worse on everybody – especially if a good chunk of everybody else is willing to indulge them for their own benefit.

I was right to predict scorched earth. I wasn’t expecting actual insurrection, more fool me, but I wasn’t surprised by it, and I’m absolutely not surprised by the ongoing complicity of the GOP. What is shocking, under the circumstances, is that you can’t get the marginal Democrat to go along with his party. Time was, having Robert Byrd in charge of the Senate meant that West Virginians were wiping with federal money. Joe Manchin has the Biden administration by the nuts and could probably get the streets and I-79 paved with actual literal gold for his vote, and instead he wants…nothing. Stasis. Status quo. Never mind that West Virginians seem to want the Build Back Better package, or would at least benefit from it; he’s not even out there angling to get other things in exchange for his vote. It’s just one long “NOOOOO” which is why I am assured, much as the Pope is assured of the existence of the Blessed Mother, that Joe Manchin will change parties the day after the 2022 midterms once the GOP takes control of the Senate. Unless it can be prevented.

And so now it’s just another layer of daily fight. I was hoping that the new normal would be less obtrusive by now than it was after September 11 – sure, you have to put your shoes on the conveyer belt and you get robbed for $50 to check your bags or change your seat, but at least you can still fly. Going up to the city and having the vaccine card scanned to get into the bar was not too much to ask, but no place else seems to be doing it. Boosters are out there free for the taking, but that small yet telling minority of rednecks won’t get them. And so we limp along with the same voluntary half-measures we’ve been stuck with for months and months, and nothing ever gets any better, and it’s as unsafe as it ever was just to pop down to the pub for a nice leisurely pint. 

And this has all been the backdrop for a highly liminal year. I had no idea twelve months ago that we would bury my remaining parent-in-law, or try to move into their house and sell our own, or that the financing would jerk us around for literal months, or that I would spend six months at war with my employer over whether they or I knew more about my area of expertise after 25 years, or that I would spend the last third of the year flinging around resumes like Elizabeth Taylor did wedding invitations and still come up empty-handed. And every time it feels like we might have a handle on the pandemic and a view of a finish line, here comes yet another variant to knock it all off course. We managed as far as Disneyland and Seattle this year, but until there’s a vaccine mandate for air travel I don’t know how I’m going to handle a notional 10 hours to London.

2020 was, for the most part, the longed-for dull moment – a stressful one, fraught with peril, but at least carrying the sense that if you could just endure to the end there would be a path back to the light. 2021 proved the light was an oncoming train. I don’t know what to expect for 2022, but “better days coming” is a prayer, not a realistic appraisal.

Pretty easy to talk this one out after the year we’ve had. The problem now is not what it looks like. It’s not the ravenous anti-vaxxers or the Confederate assholes who stormed the Capitol or the “patriots” rushing Cheesecake Factory to breathe unmasked. These people are all scum and deserve whatever they get – mostly from omicron – but they are not the ones I have the beef with this year.

No. The people who have disappointed me are the press, and not even the gutter press like Fox and its imitators. The press that can only see two equal and opposite sides to everything, deserving of equal consideration. The ones who report on resistance to vaccine mandates without also acknowledging that it’s not 50% of employees refusing a mandated vaccine, it’s not 25%, it’s closer to 1%. The ones who can only see horse race approval ratings because they’re too stupid to address issues and see nuance. The ones who refuse to acknowledge that the 60-vote Senate threshold is an artificial creation from the filibuster and a 21st century anomaly and is fundamentally undemocratic. 

It is not asking too much for every reporter in this country to have a firm grasp on 12th-grade civics and 6th grade math. It should be possible to say that these bullshit opinions only represent about a quarter of the population, and then call out the additional quarter that hems and haws about agreeing with them but is happy to trade on their paranoia and delusion for their own political gain. Every single Republican in public life should have long since been forced to answer two questions: “do you believe Joe Biden was rightfully elected President” and “do you believe the Capitol incursion on January 6 was wrong.” These are not complicated questions, and a “no” on either one should be followed up with a constant and relentless “why not” and their logic and reasoning should be debunked at every turn.

But that would require a smart press.

It is rapidly becoming apparent that most people don’t understand dealing with a pandemic, or the transition from pandemic to endemic illness. The odds of crushing this out the way that SARS or MERS were dealt with in the past are nonexistent now – C19 is with us to stay. The flip side is that with the omicron variant, we are seeing a less deadly form, which is what evolution would predict – after all, an organism that kills its host hasn’t got long to live itself. C19 was not “just like the flu” in its original forms, but it is becoming more like the flu – which is to say, we have a vaccine against it, and we have treatments for it if you catch it, and it is still deadly to those with underlying health issues or compromised immune systems, but it should not be lethal for the majority of the population if properly dealt with.

At least, that’s what could be the case. We would still need the Pfizer treatment to be as cheap and effective as, say, tamiflu. And we would need the vaccines to remain efficacious or quickly updatable, with the expectation that you’ll get the shot every year, same as a flu shot. And some people will get it, but it will be treatable with bed rest and hot liquids and the tamiflu equivalent, and it will not tax the health care system for them to recover at home.

Because all along, that has been the principal limiting factor: does the health care system have the capacity to absorb C19 patients? It has the capacity to absorb flu patients, and if C19 becomes the flu, that capacity is still there. If hospital ICUs and ERs are still filling with patients who require intubation and monoclonal antibodies and extreme care, then it is not the flu yet and we still have a problem that requires extreme measures. At this point, it’s not about wiping out C19, it’s about eliminating the need for these extreme measures.

And right now that is not a difficult proposition. Wash your hands, wear a mask, ESPECIALLY wear a mask if you think you might be coming down with something – which people in Asia and Asian people in the Bay Area have done for decades, seeing people in face masks at the farmer’s market in winter was a totally unremarkable event before 2020 – and either create social distancing indoors or require a mask in environments that are crowded and conducive to spreading colds, like aircraft for instance. I can’t remember a flight I took between 2005 and 2016 that didn’t have a sinus infection concerned in it somewhere after. 

It’s not about making C19 go away, that ship has sailed. Now it’s about lowering the impact on public health, such that fewer people get it badly enough to require hospitalization and that the people with other things – stroke, heart attack, broken leg, transplant, cancer – aren’t driven out of the hospital by the volume of C19 patients. We should probably stop using percentage positive as the metric for remediate measures and start using “percentage of area excess hospital capacity available”. If all the hospitals within 100 miles of you are full up, it’s mandatory masks everywhere and we’re gonna play games in empty arenas until it throttles back down. 

And above all, it’s time to make the vaccine pass a thing. If you have three shots, you can pretty much go anywhere. If you don’t, you’re going to have to take extra measures and there may be limits on where you can sit and what you can do. Probably not forever, possibly not even for very long, but the evidence has proven so far that when you force people to get vaccinated or lose their job, 99% of people will (and let’s face it, there’s no org that’s not better off losing the most recalcitrant 1% of their staff). In a world where you need a measles shot to start college and you need a license and insurance to drive your car and you have to have a blood test to get married, mandating a C19 vaccination for the duration of the pandemic is not outrageous or unreasonable.

Because the objection to the vaccine is in bad faith all the way around. A few years ago, when antivax was mostly the province of Marin hippie parents , conservatives fell about themselves to trumpet the value of the measles shot and demand that students not be able to come to school sick, because it was something to bash their enemies with. Now it’s become a shibboleth of fidelity to stupid-worship, which is all that being a Republican means any more: the worship of stupidity over everything and anything else. It’s long past time for private business to do what governments can’t or won’t: proof of vaccination or you aren’t riding Space Mountain. Proof of vaccination or you can watch the Cowboys and the Bucs on TV. Proof of vaccination or your kids will make you FaceTime instead of bouncing the grandchild on your knee. 

The fundamental flaw of the 21st century is that we gave up on any idea that living in a society requires responsibility and that you can’t do whatever you want, whenever you want. If people wouldn’t sacrifice in the face of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, they certainly won’t give way for a virus when all the cable news assholes encourage them to believe the Facebook bullshit. And the conservative governments  in the UK and elsewhere aren’t calling it fake and throwing open the doors. This is American exceptionalism at its worst, and it’s making me really wish I could get that Irish passport somehow.  

The updates are not as frequent these days. That is for multiple reasons. One is that for years now, my chosen instrument for blogging has been Red Sweater Software’s MarsEdit, which has been reliable and easy to use for more than a decade – but which is not installed on any of the work computers. Part of the price of moving houses was giving up the office, which means that for the moment I don’t have a desktop computer. The old iMac is the family computer and in a not-very-convenient place for me. Which is fine! It’s for family use, not for me to noodle around on watching YouTube videos of walking through London all day. But it has made blogging a lot less spontaneous.

I thought that might be fixed with an iPad, but the more I think about it, the more I think that I really do need to be waiting for the forthcoming new MacBook, if only because a fixed keyboard and an upright display is better for blogging, video conferencing, and all the things I think I need something bigger than a phone to work with – plus equivalent battery life thanks to Apple Silicon. Then again again, with a possible trip abroad on the cards for spring, I may not want to wait. I don’t know. I’m in that age-old position of knowing the money is about to be tight and wanting to spend like mad on everything and anything, which is how we’ve wound up with a 4K OLED television and hopefully an electric crossover on the way.

We are mostly settled into the new house. The back yard has been very useful just the way I hoped it would: on a foggy morning, I can walk out with my coffee, light the fire pit, and sit in an Adirondack chair warming my toes under foggy 49-degree skies while on the morning Zoom call. It’s also served as the Sunday night pub space – either that or under the overhang of the porch in a zero-G chair watching and listening to the rain, lost in Irish and British podcasts or perhaps reruns of the Eddie Stubbs show. For whatever reason, the actual RTE in Irish has sort of gone by the boards in recent months, possibly because I’m not actually reading as much as I need to on pub night.

Now there’s the matter of whether I want to make an effort to get out there and find a viable space. The new downtown is void of just about anything that would meet my needs; there’s barely any place open past 8 on a Sunday night at all let alone one that approximates a pub. But the bars of my occasional frequency that were one stop away on the light rail are now only a couple miles away by Lyft or cab or Wife, including the one that acted as our spirit grocery at the beginning of the pandemic and which was my first pub pint of the After. I should probably give it a try, although for some reason, I have a mental block about crossing the city line for it now in a way I didn’t have a problem going to the next town the other way before (possibly because there were at least two and sometimes as many as five viable drinking establishments on the one block).

The thing I’m going to struggle with more than anything in this place is that for the last twenty-eight years of my life, some sort of walkability or transit has been the defining characteristic of where I live. Whether the Overcup or Hillsboro Village or the various offerings on 21st at Vanderbilt, or the various things along the Orange Line in Arlington, or on foot or light rail to Castro Street in Mountain View, it’s always been at least broadly feasible to walk out for a meal or a pint or the like – even during the pandemic, I could hit 7-Eleven or the taqueria or the deli or the coffee shop or the liquor store or a haircut without any significant effort. Now, matters are more constrained, and I need to alter my perspective and be willing to explore by riding around, either in a car or on a bike, in a way that I’ve let go by the boards in the last decade.

Which brings us to the other new thing I need that is not on offer: I’ve applied for five different jobs since Labor Day and been rejected or ghosted by all of them. I have two or three more applications in flight at the moment, depending on how you look at it – prompted by the wise words of a Spelman grad that sometimes you have to apply for the same job more than once – but the prospects of relief from my present employment and one more fresh start elsewhere are kind of grim at the moment. I thought I’d be coming into 50 as the proven veteran, the voice of wisdom mentoring the next generation of greater talent, and instead I’m faced with a) the prospect of twelve years of institutional memory and site-specific knowledge going completely to waste because it is not valued where I am, and b) having to hire on and make a fresh start at an age that Silly Con Valley generally thinks is only suitable for venture capital or the compost bin. 

So either I need a new job, or I need to find meaning in a way that is not compromised by the insecurity of not knowing whether I will still have a job this time next month, or year, or week. Which – after two years in which I’ve been laid off, furloughed, ignored and run roughshod over, in ways that only acting a complete and utter ass has successfully pushed back against – is not a consideration I can dismiss out of hand. 

It feels like I’m waiting for the curtain to go up on the next stage of my life. I just don’t know when, or how.

Roe is going away. That was crystal clear from the nature of the reporting today. The fact that the court makeup has changed is a green light to bring cases that can be used to wipe their ass with stare decisis and precedent is officially meaningless.

That’s the problem. The structural obstacles are to action. One side believes in action, and the other side believes only in thwarting whatever the first side wants. Health care for all, or at least for more? A hundred bills to repeal it. Fair elections? Gerrymandering and foreign interference and actual physical insurrection to derail them. Public health, or at least not to have hundreds of thousands of people die from a virus? There will be war. On vaccines, on masking, on anything that might save people – even if it means disproportionate sickness and death among their own numbers.

Normal service is gone. People who worried about preserving the existing norms and rules miss the point: there is no going backward. You can’t un-ring the bell, you can’t un-break the branch. Damage can be repaired, but not undone.

It’s a lesson I’m struggling to learn myself, as one thing after another gets whittled away. You have to repair or replace, and it’s not always easy, and it absolutely will not go back to the way it was, and it’s possible that the future is just learning to live with ever less and trying to build a cocoon capable of actually keeping the world out.

But the world keeps coming for you. And at some point, you have to accept that your best case scenario is to ameliorate as much of the harm as you can.