Month: January 2025

I don’t know why, but…no let me explain. Last night, I went to Trials, where I’ve been seeking solace for a third of my life, only to find the cask ale was empty and the big leather chairs have been removed. But instead of sinking into misery, I rallied and decamped to Dr Funk’s, a tiki establishment where I enjoyed several drinks without ruining myself – and along the way, Vandy beat Tennessee in men’s basketball and Washington upset Detroit for a berth in the NFC title game for the first time since I was touring Central Europe.

And then, after a lovely foggy day, I walked all the way into town for dinner with church folks, floating on the high of Vandy repeating the Tennessee win with the women’s team. And under a socked-in 6 PM sky, waiting out in the cold, I listened to Enya sing the old hymn “How Can I Keep From Singing.” And I felt myself filled with…hope? Determination? The Holy Spirit? I don’t know what it is, but I’m more optimistic right now than I have been since the weekend before Election Day. And I have no reason to. It’s grim. It’s going to be bad. It’s gonna be worse before it gets better and a lot of people are going to suffer and there’s so little we can actually do about it right now.

But even so…

As long as we hope, as long as we are not afraid, as long as we believe, we have a chance. They want us to give up, to surrender, to submit. And as long as we don’t, we’re still in it.

At a minimum, it’s gonna take 1,461 days of endurance to get through this. Maybe more. And who knows how much it will cost, or whether we can get away with this one. But giving in and giving up are not options.

Do you reject Satan and all his works and all his pomps and all his empty promises? With God’s help, I will.

I don’t think I believe in America any more.

Everything I learned, everything I was told growing up. The Great American Melting Pot. The land of opportunity. I’m Just A Bill. Democracy. Individual responsibility and the equal chance to make it. Like God, the vision which I was sold all my life was a lie, one honed and polished by those who benefited most from it. And I don’t – can’t – believe in that any more, for the same reason: the people pushing that vision know it’s bullshit, and act in ways they would never consider if they actually thought it was true.

So now what happens?

It took the better part of a decade to come to a way of seeing God that made sense, and finding a tradition and a community that were on board with that way of seeing. I suppose in ten years or so, it might be possible to see my way clear to an idea of America I could believe in, but it would take a lot. It would take a massive mid-term rejection in 2026, followed by a re-aligning election in 2028, affirmed in 2030 and 2032, and resulting in an extinction-level event for the Republican Party as it exists today. Then, by 2035, I’d feel like I could exhale, and maybe – maybe – still be able to retire and have ten good years.

It’s not lost on me that retirement is not on the cards before then. It’s not lost on me that retirement might not be on the cards at all, depending. I need an employer for health care, I need income to feed the retirement account to the point we can still afford the house, I need the economy not to collapse and I need those accounts to grow somehow. And I need it all to happen in a world where a 50 year old in this Valley is un-hireable.

We didn’t care enough about America to defend it. We let things fall apart in the twenty years between “9/11” and “January 6” and by then it was too late. The unwritten rules were shredded by one side and the other thought if they just kept playing by them, everything would work out eventually. Turns out when you lose with class, that just means the other side wins.

In a perfect world, this wouldn’t have happened. In a better world, I’d have the resources and means to decamp to an actual democracy and retire there and see out my days in a village near Galway (or maybe on the Oregon coast of an independent Pacific Empire, who knows). But we only get the one world, and we have to make our own best way in it. I and my loved ones are positioned about as well as we can be, under the circumstances, so now we just have to protect each other and help fuel the fight, and learn to love the struggle.

What had happened was, in typical fashion, the end of the Y2K project meant laying off everyone they could. And one of our techs was a Kildare man, and said he’d gone to this Irish bar in DC called Ireland’s Four Provinces where there were live musicians, and they’d asked where he was from and played a Kildare song, and that it had the finest pint of Guinness he’d had outside of Ireland. And we agreed, and so all went up there Friday after work at 6.

We left at 2 AM, having drunk ourselves senseless and bought all the tapes from the selfsame musicians as our man had seen previously (and they played his song again). And the next night, Saturday, we were back again at 6 PM and stayed until closing time again – and in between, I drove through the residual snows to Tyson’s Corner and bought my first pair of Dr Martens 1460 boots, in brown leather, while the McTeggarts’ version of “Whiskey In The Jar” played through the speakers of my old Saturn. To this day, there is one chord in that song that puts me right back in the humidor of Georgetown Tobacco, looking at Domain Avo or Padron 3000 cigars and new Zippo lighters.

It became a regular stop. The 4P’s was where it seems everything in my life happened from January 2000 until June 2004. Everything was celebrated there, mourned there, it’s where we brought friends, and in my mind, if I do as I should in life, Valhalla will be the front table at the P’s at 11 PM with the third set of five just striking up as more friends come through the door and a fresh round of pints are sat down and “On The One Road” begins…forever.

But it wasn’t just limited to that bar and that time. I found myself supporting Celtic FC for the better part of a decade. I got up at stupid o’clock in the morning to go to Bethesda to watch the 2001 All-Ireland Final in football. Five years later, I did it again, three hours earlier, in Millbrae California for the same thing. When I moved to California, I immediately found an Irish place down the street from that first apartment, and then spent years trying to find any place that would have the music (the closest I came was the trad sessions at O’Flaherty’s in San Jose, and when I sang along with the Fields one night, Mr. Ray O’Flaherty of blessed memory pressed a complimentary pint into my hand and asked where in the Holy Land was I from myself). And I never really found it despite my best efforts.

But then my cousin began to date a gal who was living in Galway. And they picked the lock for me to finally spend two weeks in Ireland. And what I found was a country that operated at a human scale, felt warm and welcoming, was conscious of the price of sectarianism and warfare and acutely aware of the demands of modernity and moving beyond the old ways. It felt like what might have been in Alabama had Folsom been re-elected in 1958 and the Birmingham Community Chest’s racial efforts actually borne fruit and Reagan never happened. It felt like home.

And I delved into the history books, watched my fill of Cheap Irish Homes and Derry Girls and London Irish, listened to podcasts from RTE and Virgin Media, learned to appreciate the Irish spots in the Bay Area that were just as authentically Irish even if they weren’t wall to wall trad and rebel songs like I thought. And when I was there last April, Dublin felt like the most obvious and natural place in the world to be. And I felt like I could see myself easily spending the rest of my days there.

It won’t happen, of course. Unlikely in any event. Maybe if a giant bag of money hit us on the head, we could afford the requirements to retire there and split time. But the slogan painted over the stage at the 4Ps has stood up in my mind for 25 years now, and I’ve never had reason to question it, because I have always felt a hundred thousand welcomes.

The kings are the VC billionaire set, convinced of their divine right to rule and their mastery of all the world. The things they know are the only things worth knowing, and their primacy is the deserved, natural and inevitable result of a well-ordered world, and in no way connected to luck, inheritance, regulatory arbitrage or financial manipulation.

The barons are the “founder” class, who get their money from the VC kings and thus give a share of ownership in their lands. In return, they get the resources to pursue their own goals, with the tacit promise that they too will become as kings if they succeed…assuming they aren’t just bought out or plagiarized out of existence.

Below them are their vassals – the full stack developers, 10x engineers and the “thought leaders” who drive the serfs to produce the value that can go back up the line. They’re kept going with the belief that somehow they can become founders and ascend to the ranks of the most high…eventually.

And at the bottom are the serfs – not only the coders and the infrastructure of sysadmins, operators and back office staff that support them, but the actual drivers, delivery runners, TaskRabbits, content screeners and Mechanical Turks who actually do the last mile interface that makes the thing go – just. Thanks to regulatory arbitrage and loopholes, they’re not employees, they have no stake, they get none of the protections labor fought for a century to obtain. Because that would be expensive, and insufficiently agile and future-facing, and also woke, so hustle harder!

Which is kind of the point – this is the natural end stage of “bigotry protecting wealth.” It’s not democracy, or even much of a republic, it’s the Morlocks stuck in place and distracted by the Eloi telling them who to blame (not the Eloi, that’s for sure). It’s the constant drumbeat that the poor person across the border might undercut your job if you don’t take a 5% pay cut, and that’s why you’re bad off – not because 50% of the national wealth is held by eight people, or because health care costs double what it does anywhere else, or because you have to play against the pros to have retirement money (or else cut them in for a percentage and hope they’re actually good with it and honest to you).

And they will keep getting away with it as long as Ed Earl Brown hates colored people more than he hates billionaires, even as the billionaires wring him dry day by day. I don’t have an answer, because there isn’t one. We just have to protect our loved ones and hope that maybe bird flu will wipe out enough of the other side’s voters to give us a chance someday.

Much like the first Civil War, the Confederates won the Civil Cold War today. The people who invaded Congress to stop the democratic process were handed the reins of power through that democratic process. It brings to mind Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men: “if the rule you followed brought you to this point, of what use was the rule?”

We’re in for a long dark stretch. Maybe people will react. Maybe not. There is clearly a majority in this country that is all right with every bit of this, or we wouldn’t be in this spot. Business is complicit, the press is absolutely complicit, the Republican Party is what it has been for years: the Confederacy writ large. Now we find out who is OK with it when the reality starts to hit.

If there is one rule for Democrats here, it must be: No. Always No. Scorched earth. Do not save the Republicans from themselves. If it means a government shutdown, so be it. If it means a national default, so be it. The Republican Party has been spared any consequences for its actions other than to lose power long enough for someone else to clean up the mess. Being the bigger person has failed. Hoping for a return to sanity has failed. Appealing to “norms” has failed. Focus on protecting people locally, but don’t think you can “moderate” or “work with” or “find common ground.” Because you can’t split the difference. You can’t throw trans kids or DACA kids under the bus and say “that should be enough for them.”

There is no going back. This is the world we live in now. Stop appealing to what was and fight against what is, and maybe in a generation or so we’ll be able to think about what can be.