Author: Stagger Lee

“There is another point when things slipped in a starker way: November 8, 2016, when everyone in America realized they were living in the South. The perversity of realizing that the worst parts of where you’re from — the racism, the galling inequality, the fictionalized victimhood, an illusion of power, the reliance on a bankrupt concept of loyalty disguised as faith, the disgust for learning and fatal aversion to uncomfortable truths, the willingness to protect a deranged sense of identity at the cost of what might literally be the entire world — were all there, everywhere, all along.“

-Spencer Hall, 1 Sept 2017

 

We lost, 57-43. We had the 57, and we lost. Because the Enemy – that amorphous blob of racism and Objectivism and silver-drinking conspiracy thinking that wandered from the Democrats to the Republicans throughout the 50s and 60s and then metastasized to take over the party for the last 25 years – the Enemy has figured out how to win without the most votes. Whether it’s employing the arcane system of the Electoral College or optimizing itself to prevail with acreage rather than voters in the Senate or taking advantage of a media in thrall to the idea that there are two equal sides of identical veracity, volume and significance for every issue – the country is now rigged for a sane and sensible majority to always be at the mercy of lunatics.

Not even winning the White House and control of the Congress is enough to overcome it. All we have now is containment and hoping it might turn on itself and burn out. But make no mistake: this is what the Republican Party is now. This is the Trump QOP. If you stay, you are complicit. There’s no going back from this. To remain now is to say that all of this – the insanity, the denial of majority rule, the use of violence to derail the electoral process – all of this is all right.

It isn’t. And we have to devote every day to making those who believe it pay for the error of their ways.

At long last, it’s the one device. I don’t use the laptop for anything personal but blogging. I don’t use the desktop for anything but Zoom and YouTube. This is my preferred device for anything personal, to the point that it is the exclusive home of social media and RSS; personal content doesn’t happen on the work laptop at all any more.

Next step is for my personal line with USMobile to be convertible to an eSIM. Once that happens, this phone can literally go anywhere I go with service. No more buying random SIMs or negotiating APN settings or anything like that. I have a one-handed device with a 5-inch display that can do my music, my podcasts, my streaming, my reading, phone calls, the works. The only reason I don’t call on it for video chat is because usually there are two of us in the frame and it’s hard to lean back on a phone screen.

Which brings up the question: what would I need a personal laptop or iPad for at all at this point? Now that work requires a privileged access device, a personal iPad Air isn’t going to get me anywhere. As long as the old iMac is my permanent telepresence solution, and the AppleTV works (and doesn’t have a higher-res TV to drive), this phone can do everything I need a personal computer for. (And may have to for years, given the rumors. If there’s no new iPhone mini coming, or it goes completely portless, I will ride this little blue thing until it drops out of OS support. New battery in two years and another one in four if that’s what it takes. AppleCare until they stop allowing it. You name it.)

It’s a marker of hope, in a way. Hope for a life where an iPhone 12 mini can be taken around the world as all the computer-camera-soundtrack-wallet you need. Hope that by this time next year, the soles of my Rancourts will be thumping on London cobbles or at least the alleys of Black Spire Outpost. Hope that maybe the world will get a little better somehow. It’s an artifact of the life I wish I could live – the sort of thing that goes with my brown M-65, my flannel and Rancourts, my wool caps and short 10 oz Yeti tumbler as the pieces of my attempt to cosplay as my best self.

“What I want; what’s most important to me is that Reuben gets his share of the hotel restored. Now I’m here to give you that chance.”

“Oh, you’re gonna give me a chance? OK. Let me guess. It’s a Billy Martin? I pass.”

Joe Biden stood on the West Front of the Capitol today and offered 74 million Americans a Billy Martin…with a catch. Yes, unity. Yes, coming together. Yes, negotiation and reason. But you’re coming back to us. You’re going back to how things used to be. You have to partake in the rejection of Donald Trump, and all his works and pomps. You have to abjure the Republican mode and manner of the last quarter century. You can be Republican, you can be conservative, but you have to agree not to be dragged around by the dick by Fox News and AM radio and conspiracy theorists.

This is a bet. Joe Biden is wagering that there are enough Republicans willing to deny Trump three times to let him push forward with the appearance of bipartisanship and push the QAnons and the OANNists and the Proud Boys into a corner – and let the resulting civil war rip the Republicans apart from the inside. The bet is that ultimately, enough of the 74 million people who were willing to re-elect Trump will be shorn off to prevent Trumpism from getting the critical mass to regain power.

We’re back to containment. This is the last chance for the GOP to climb off the train before becoming the QOP. It may yet be necessary to blow up the filibuster and resort to adding states and going full scorched earth to prevent the scum who tried to overrun the capital taking a place in American politics. But for the moment, the “not all Republicans” are being offered one chance at a Billy Martin.

The recent discovery of “Nemo’s Dreamscapes” on YouTube has been a boon for multiple reasons, not least because it provides an alternative to the same old rain machine for evening wind-down and slumber.  But the scratchy 30s music is evocative on multiple levels. One is 1991, that autumn when I discovered the past – not just as history, but as old yearbooks and student handbooks, as football teams from 1940 and recordings of Glenn Miller. The other is 1995 – when my imagination became an anachronistic mashup of wax-cylinder recordings in Bristol and flying car terminals in Nashville.

I was on the Internet in my apartment and listening to scratchy AM radio driving around, clear channel stations from Cleveland or St Louis or Chicago, hearing traffic conditions on the Dan Ryan or Blues hockey or just the outrage of Browns fans seeing their team shipping off to Baltimore. A history professor asserted that with modern technology and media culture in the 1920s, Elvis Presley would have passed his days as a third-rate Jimmie Rodgers impersonator. And on those rare occasions when I was back in Birmingham and not in the dorms, I was occasionally found in a basement coffeehouse called Celestial Realm, where the music was almost invariably some scratchy gramophone-type big band recording of just the sort that has surfaced 25 years later with rain and fireplace sounds superimposed on it.

It’s a reminder that I was sort of there in the beginning. When 105.9 “The Bear” was attempting to bring modern music to a stagnant radio scene. When a coffeehouse, not a Starbucks, was a thing, and in the last days before Lion & Unicorn went all in on sports cards and collectibles instead of comics and rare Dr Who toys. During the era when Birmingham seemed on the verge of becoming a soccer town, and longneck Red Mountain Red Ale at the Garages after Bulls games was the height of my social aspirations.

Had I stayed in Birmingham, unburdened by the worst relationships of my life, it’s entirely possible I could have stayed and built, and felt like I was part of what I see down there now and honor in the breach with Legion t-shirts and Barons hats and the like. But my Birmingham was circumscribed by the limits imposed on me from the Hilltop, and to get out, I had to leave the whole thing behind. I don’t regret it. I had to escape what I had, because it took more off the table than it ever put on it. But it did rip out some roots that I probably could have used at diverse times in the last decade.

Instead, I’ll settle for falling asleep with vaguely pleasant memories of lemon poppyseed muffins, black bean soup in a bread bowl, raspberry Italian soda and very black coffee.

It didn’t have to be like this. 300,000 dead and climbing every day. An economy brought to a slow bleed and an uncertain future. Vaccines that will sit in warehouses for want of a distribution structure. Make no mistake: if Pittsburgh had been wiped off the map by a terrorist attack or stray North Korean missile, we would be on a wartime footing that would make September 11 look like a garden party. Instead, we’ve lost the same number of people to a virus, and half the country is still shrugging and saying “it’s just like the flu” and wailing about their freedom.

I don’t make the September 11 comparison idly. I’ve said it before, but had the shoe been on the other foot, I don’t trust that the GOP would have rallied behind Al Gore. I know for a fact that they wouldn’t have rallied behind Barack Obama, and I expect scorched earth from January 3 onward. The plague that’s killing Americans isn’t coronavirus – we had a coronavirus pandemic threat in 2009 and it was controlled; MERS and SARS and other animal-originating respiratory ailments never struck the United States like this, and we didn’t have vaccines for them. The plague that’s killing Americans in 2020 is stupid-worship. Fox News, the Southen Baptist Convention, Facebook, AM talk radio, the Wall Street Journal – a decade of validating the worship of stupidity as the only truly American viewpoint has made it impossible to have cohesive government action.

If everyone had been made to shelter in place for six weeks in March, with masks sent to every household and $5000 in stimulus money for every taxpayer who made less than $100K last year, this could have been mostly behind us by May. But it was always somebody else’s problem right up until it wasn’t, and a cohort of Americans conditioned for years – for decades, really – that they don’t have to care about other people promptly did what they wanted. Which is asinine. It’s like a zombie apocalypse – you can’t reason with the virus, you can’t negotiate with it, you can’t own it online and chortle at those stupid libs. It. Does. Not. Care. It will keep coming until you or it are dead. And useful idiots from Washington DC to Sturgis, SD to Orlando, FL colluded unwittingly to give it what it wanted. And now here we are.

The lesson of the plague year is that you can’t wait for your problems to go away. If you want a better life, if you want a future, you have to take action. And keep taking action. It wasn’t enough to elect Joe Biden, you have to do it in such a way as to frustrate the aims of the ratfuckers who will try to overturn it. And then you have to turn out the vote in Georgia in hopes of preventing the Senate becoming the graveyard. And then, and then, and then. One foot in front of the other, forever, accepting that there will never be a day when the lion lies down with the lamb and we ain’t gonna study war no more. Not in this life.

And that’s the other bit, the hard bit. You have to protect yourself from the virus by creating conditions where it can’t get to you. Masking, hand washing, constant vigilance. So too with that other virus. You have to put the stupid-worship where it can’t get at the vulnerable, where it can’t infect and spread. Until we have a vaccine for it, it must be contained – actively, transitively, and relentlessly, until we have a cure or it dies out for want of hosts. Call it what it is and fight it. Heal it where you can, quarantine it where you can’t, but you can’t give up and you can’t give in.

Because we’re all going to die if we do.

The grievance of grievances for the last five years chose today to really rear its head for good, spewing pardons around like STDs at a Panama City spring break bar. I don’t know what’s worse: the utter contempt for the rule of law or the complete Republican acquiescence. Or the fact that they will simultaneously court the fanatics forever while demanding that we quit bringing up old stuff.

I don’t understand how we’re meant to get along with this, how we’re supposed to find common ground with people who reject the very notion of commonality. We’ve been in a cold civil war for 50 years that went brushfire-hot in the last 10, and at this point, quite frankly, the democrats – deliberate lower case – have given all the ground they need to give. Otherwise we’re looking at a very real threat of permanent minority rule, with old rural whites maintaining control of government despite the constant failure to collect the most votes.

When the structure of the system gives one side a permanent advantage over the side with more votes, it’s broken. The system is broken. How we survive as a country will depend on whether we can make the needed changes – and overcome those who will fight like Hell to keep their unearned privilege.

What had happened was, I had a piece of mail from a friend of mine during my first couple months at undergrad, and he had graffiti’d the outside with all kind of random nonsense. “WARNING: TOPOGRAPHICALLY UNSTABLE CONTENTS”, “OPEN IMMEDIATELY unless HAVING SEX”, that kind of stuff. And in that spirit, I did something similar with a piece of correspondence to a former high school classmate at Randolph-Macon Women’s College. And what I got back was not from her, but from a couple of upperclass women who had been amused by it and posted me back a note to tell me so, scribbled on a piece of cardboard from some free publication distribution rack.

I have no idea what I replied with. That’s the downside of the five years before my first email account: I have no record of my sent correspondence. As embarrassing as it might be to read from 2020, I think it might be illuminating to see the thought processes of my brain thirty years ago, if only to marvel at how much has (and has not) changed. Be that as it may, I sent off a reply to them, expecting nothing to come of it.

What I got back was a homemade scrapbook of sorts. One populated with magazine cutouts, biographic details and the like. Babe, so-called, was from St Louis (and somehow an Auburn fan), and Bimbo from the greater NYC area and of Italian extraction. They detailed what they liked and didn’t like (it being 1990, Kevin Costner figured highly in the “like” range), and more to the point, actually invited me to an event at RMWC. Along with the note “We know your real name…and we still wrote to you,” along with an addendum to the party invite “THIS IS NOT A JOKE. Contact your friend for details.”

This was kind of earth-shaking. It was interest. Not even in a sexual or romantic context — just the fact that two women were curious about me was a mind-blowing development in a time and place that had made it abundantly clear I was no one of interest. The vast majority of my undergraduate institution closed the doors as soon as I flunked out of fraternity rush, and I was left on the stoop, all alone save for the girlfriend I had desperately made a play for the moment she evinced an interest herself.

And here we ran into the problem of the bird in the hand. I had absolutely no way to get to Lynchburg, Virginia, to the best of my knowledge. I had never driven anywhere further from Birmingham than…Gadsden? Maybe? This was an eight or nine hour drive. I had ridden to Knoxville countless times, so that would be familiar, but the back half of the route…I might as well be driving to Mars. My car was a seven year old Monte Carlo with 150,000 miles on it already. I had functionally no money, no prospect for lodging, and certainly no way of explaining to my girlfriend, the one person at this school who would speak to me, that I needed to drive 500 miles to meet two women I’d never met and only knew through two pieces of mail.

Call it fear, call it anxiety, call it a catastrophic attraction to the devil you know, but I chickened right out. I must have counter-offered them the spring band festival at my own school, and mentioned my girlfriend, because in December came a care package: liquor filled chocolates, a can of Coors Light, a can coozie,  a candle (“for when you want a romantic interlude with {$NAME}”), a pink disposable razor (purpose unknown?) and some other things, all detailed in a blue book along with grips about Auburn losing to Alabama and their rider requirements for attending Southern Comfort that spring.

And I don’t know what happened after that. I assume nothing. I probably never had the nerve to reply. Four years later, with a reliable Saturn and practice wheeling everywhere from Nashville to Chattanooga to New Orleans to Pensacola, with the added utility of email…maybe? I certainly could have done it by 1997, because I did, but in 1990, the pieces weren’t in place yet to make it feasible even if I’d had the nerve to go for it.

But I think something important was lost when I didn’t have the chutzpah to try it anyway.

The Apple Watch series 6 and the iPhone 12 mini are both at the leading edge of current Apple hardware. Unfortunately, getting them to work together was trying. It ended up taking two resets of the watch for Apple Pay to actually start working properly, and there is still some question of whether notifications are all ironed out.

But after a couple of tests, the original case is still on it. As evinced by its spiritual ancestor the Moto X, so much of a phone’s feel is the thickness of the edges – and putting an iPhone 4-style bumper case on a phone of this side effectively inverts the process, making the sides thicker and the middle comparatively thinner. This case will also take the MagSafe charger puck, which might be important, because on three separate occasions now the phone has failed to charge overnight on the Anker wireless charging stand – I think this phone is too short for the charging coil to line up. I either have to place it on the stand higher up and slide it down once it’s charging, or else put something on the bottom shelf to stand it up higher. A sufficient annoyance that if I ever go back into the office, I will almost certainly invest in a MagSafe puck.

The camera, though, is sterling. The screen is amazing. The battery life is no worse than the SE and largely fit for purpose. FaceID is instantaneous when not wearing a mask. I find myself gravitating to this phone for every non-work task other than blogging or video watching. Much like the M-65 feels like the jacket that’s been missing from my back, the iPhone 12 mini feels like the phone that’s been missing from its pocket.

Meanwhile, the watch is getting one particular job done. I have close all three rings every day but one for over a month, and I frequently find myself either walking out at 9 PM to close all three or walking out for coffee in the morning to ensure I don’t have to walk out at night. With the Fitbit and its step count, I had long since given up on hitting even the 8000 step mark. But the watch is forcing me to clock 25 exercise minutes, 500 calories of movement and 12 hours standing every day, and I’m hitting those numbers even when it forces me out on a fifteen minute walk to settle accounts. And then I plug it up to charge. While I haven’t missed a day yet, there are times when I look at my arm at 10 PM and think “shit, I haven’t charged it” but I can get it from 30% to 75% quick enough to go to bed and pick back up in the morning.

So now we have the watch, the compact phone, and the AirPods Pro. The personal Apple environment is complete. Now to see how we live in it.

He lost.

He lost fair and square, and by the time you get around to mathing it up, he lost in particularly impressive fashion. The binary nature of American politics thankfully broke through to the kind of people who will waste their votes on Greens or Libertarians or other feats of electoral masturbation, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris brought home a solid win for the idea that the four-year anomaly should not be allowed to continue.

Not that it will help. Anyone surprised at the reluctance of the Republicans to accept defeat hasn’t been paying attention for thirty years. Clinton did not break 50%, so he wasn’t really President. Obama was a secret Muslim born in Kenya so he wasn’t really President. Now, the thrust will be that Joe Biden was the beneficiary of a stolen election by some strange cabal of Democrats, Venezuelans, hackers, and [FILE_NOT_FOUND] and therefore is not really President. It is foundational to the Republican mind that no Democrat can ever legitimately hold power, and thus any cooperation or compromise or normal order of business is unthinkable and to be denied at every turn.

And this is a problem, because the Republicans have an unnatural advantage: they remain viable as a party purely thanks to structural flaws. They have lost every popular vote for President but one in the last three decades, seven of the last eight, but have put two in the Oval Office with fewer votes than their opponents. The last new GOP winner who had the most votes was in 1988. It’s past time for the Electoral College to go, because it has made it possible for a minority of thinly-populated rural states to prop up a party that can’t get more votes than its opponent. And spare me the concern for the intent of the Founders, which was already cast out with the 12th Amendment and further refined with the 14th, 15th, 19th, 20th, 23rd, 24th and 26th Amendments. It’s time to stop pretending that the Electoral College is fit for purpose in the 21st Century.

Another thing we have to get our heads around is Congress. If you want to stop things, a President is sufficient. If you actually want to accomplish something, you have to have Congress. At this point, it looks like Joe will take office without control of both houses of Congress – which was bad enough when a minority GOP was dedicated to scorched Earth opposition to Clinton, or to Obama. Only an actual Democratic majority in the Senate will make legislation possible, and only by doing away with the filibuster – and right now, the ongoing orgy of recrimination about how Biden stole the election is there mainly to whip up the GOP and try to ensure they can remain in control by winning both Georgia runoffs. And if they do, prepare for the same problem as ever: the Republicans will sabotage everything the Democrats do to try to bring pandemic and economic relief, then blame them for the failure and win big at the midterms thanks to a dullard populace and a compliant and supine media. (If there’s one lesson from the last four years, it is that the New York Times is only fit to train a puppy on and no longer deserves to be regarded as a valid source of news, let alone any kind of “paper of record.)

And frankly, it’s time for wartime leadership from a new generation. I have nothing against Nancy Pelosi, who has regained control of the chamber twice and made Obamacare happen. She has been a stalwart and deserves to go down in history alongside Rayburn and O’Neill. But she’s 80 years old. The Democrats need leadership that doesn’t remember life before color television. The generational shift is long overdue. No more Boomers. No more Clinton-era loyalists. Skate to where the puck is going, not where it was during Vietnam or Lewinsky. That goes for Congress, it goes for the administration, and quite frankly, it goes for the DNC at this point. And it’s more important than ever, because while this was an existential crisis for America, it may not be the last one. Because the Republican Party is beyond help. They’re in the krokodil stage of their opioid addiction. The much-vaunted “Never Trump” rump faction is so small and ineffective as to be negligible, and the endless furrowed brows of Murkowski and Collins and Romney are no longer pertinent because there are no votes behind them. The Democrats need to act decisively and without appeasement, and only consider the opinion of a Never Trumper who is willing to act on it. Sorrow and concern aren’t worth a fifth of a damn if you follow the party every time anyway.

The Republican Party has become Trump, and Trump has become the Republican Party, and the GOP that built itself on Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan has been reduced to a postmodern religious cult of hate, fraud and make-believe. Only an idiot seeks to meet bullshit halfway, and there is nothing to gain by trying to split the difference with Crazy World. Call it out, cut it off, and shun everyone and anyone who won’t, including the catamites of the Washington press corps. “Come let us reason together” only works with people capable of reason, and the burden of proof is all on the other side now. Start by making the most simple litmus test of all: if you can’t say who won, you don’t get to play. The end.

OLED display, 2200 Mac battery, voice control, one-handable, five color options – it took seven years, but Apple finally made a phone that competes in the same cruiserweight class as the 2013 Moto X, the last American-assembled phone and the only Android phone that ever actually coaxed money out of my pocket. So what does seven years and well over double the starting price get you?

For starters, there seems to be an ongoing issue with buying a case that’s on the market before the phone. It burned me on the iPhone 6, and on the iPhone X, and now it’s happened again: poorly-placed charger cutout and too much on the edges. Probably safer, to be honest, but I’m going to have to splash out for something more streamlined, and it’ll probably end up being Apple’s own leather case again. But the bulk in hand from the case took away from the initial impressions of slimness I was hoping for, even knowing intellectually that it wasn’t going to be as big a step down as the original SE was from its successor.

Even without the case, holding it side-by-side with that Moto X just shows how Google is doomed. Because they had this phone that Apple has only just caught, seven years ago, and it still feels more comfortable in hand than the 12 mini – because they sacrificed a flat back and put in a stepped battery with a curved backplate that fit the hand perfectly and gave the impression of great thinness around the edges. All these years later, it is still the most ergonomically satisfying phone ever made, and Google couldn’t sell it – which means there’s no phone they can sell. (And the Pixel 5 seems to bear this out.)

FaceID is still a problem in mask-world, but to be honest, the number one thing I do with a mask on that requires FaceID is Apple Pay, which can be handled through the watch – mostly. Maybe a straight migration would have been better than a restore from backup, but the latter is the only way of preserving the Duo two-factor auth settings without having to set them all up from scratch, and that alone is worthwhile. I would definitely like to be on faster wifi next time I’m setting up a phone, though. Speaking of, my work SIM does not appear to support 5G. Which is not a problem given that 5G is the biggest non-political fraud perpetrated on the public in the 21st century. No faster than LTE unless you have millimeter-wave, and the coverage area of a mmW station is comparable to wifi and only available on Verizon – and when your super duper network depends on which end of the stadium you’re sitting in, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Two days in, the battery life hasn’t yet been a concern. It also hasn’t been easy to judge. Getting the phone on Friday afternoon, going through all the migration, and then an all-day drive on Sunday meant there hasn’t really been time to experiment with the battery usage in normal service. Early returns are that it’s not as good as the 12, definitely not as good as the 11, but better than the X or SE it replaces for me. And that’s a fair comparison. You know you’re giving away battery when you go to a one-handed phone, and with 20W fast charging (and 12W wireless charging with Apple’s MagSafe), it stands to reason you should be able to top up with a quickness.

The back is glossy and fingerprint-strewn (this is where the matte finish of the Pro line definitely feels premium) but the aluminum frame is a rich dark blue with the ceramic screen uncurled and almost completely flush. It’s gorgeous, a worthy successor to the Dieter Rams elegance of the 4 series. Coupled with the true blacks of OLED on the most pixel-dense display in Apple history (476 ppi!) and the edge-to-edge picture, it looks more like a slice of the future than any iPhone in years, a piece of concept art come to life.

And the camera is as advertised. Clips works fine with the front camera (although I wish they still had the Star Wars backdrops available) and Night Mode is truly remarkable – at first glance I would have sworn there were floodlights on the house I took a picture of, but there weren’t, it’s just that effective. And just in time for the holidays. Which is fitting, because I had reconciled myself to not buying the phone and sticking with the SE until I was gifted it as an early Christmas present by my lovely wife. So the SE was passed forward and gifted to a very worthy recipient, with 18 months of AppleCare still on it, and I am back down to one phone and one number again.

It feels like the last piece of the puzzle. My Apple needs are complete. No new laptop, no new iPad, everything can wait. I have the AirPods Pro and the Watch as wearables and this driving it all, and I am complete. The most personal computing is set for a minimum of the next three years, hopefully more. All I need now is to get back into the world – a world which finally has a sliver of hope that it might be possible to get back into.