Are my eyes really blue?

…about the ten most influential books of your life. So I’m going to give it a shot. In no particular order except roughly chronological…

1) Our Universe, by the National Geographic Society. An illustrated atlas of the solar system and beyond, unbelievable in its artistry and comprehensive in its information. It even came with a floppy vinyl record that demonstrated the doppler effect. For a kid who was a space freak (and had plenty of classmates willing to inform him of same), it was THE book.

2) Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. An anthology of vignettes of turn-of-the-century life in a fictional Ohio town, this was an assignment for summer reading when I donked off English 11 in the summer of 1988 so I could fit AP English in later. While the books in general were pretty good – Gatsby just missed this list – Winesburg is the one that first made me think, “I wish I could write that.” Still does, over twenty years on.

3) The Moon Goddess and the Son, by Donald Kingsbury. A recommendation in the summer of 1989 from my long-distance nigh-imaginary dream girl at the time, this one had everything: non-linear plotting, near-future setting, and a concept of simulation-based historical and political analysis that did as much as anything to start making a political science major of me.

4) The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore H. White. I read this in its entirety while waiting for a scholarship interview my senior year. A landmark view of a style of politics in transition, before primaries and television made party conventions irrelevant. Subsequent installments were also interesting, but this is the one that made White as a political commentator – and conclusively bent the curve from pre-law to political science.

5) V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The greatest graphic novel of all time, Watchmen be hanged, this is the book that opened my eyes to what anarchy really means…and to what terrorism can really accomplish. Also features the most compelling anti-hero of British fiction until the coming of DCI Gene Hunt. If all you’ve seen is the movie, you really don’t know the story.

6) Griffin and Sabine (and its sequels), Nick Bantock. An obvious hook for any English minor pining after somebody far away, the combination of “epistolary novel” and artwork that you actually had to open up and touch was unlike anything before or since. I think this got turned into an interactive CD-ROM at one point, and it’s the sort of experience that would be downright transformative rendered on an iPad. The quintessential grown-up pop-up book, and one that made me realize that a bad girlfriend in the deep South was no way to go through life.

7) The Macintosh Bible, 4th ed., by Art Naiman et al. I got my first Mac in the summer of 1994 before going to grad school. This is the book that made it possible for me to use it, and thus to wind up with the life and career I currently enjoy.

8) The Nudist on the Late Shift, by Po Bronson. Ultimately, this is the reason I am in Silicon Valley. Written at the height of the dot-com boom, the stories within – new arrivals trying to make it big, sales people trying to spike the hockey stick on the last day, or a young CEO trying to take the company public – made me wonder if I could do that, and if I could do it in Northern California at ground zero of the future. As it turns out, I can. Which is kind of a relief.

9) To Say Nothing Of The Dog, by Connie Willis. The most accessible of her Oxford time-travel books, this is just begging to be made into the first truly great sci-fi-rom-com. I keep going back to it (and forcing it on the wife) just because you can hear those characters in your head, pitch-perfect. (And if you don’t think I’m desperate to make sure I live until All Clear is published…)

10) Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. The Bigend trilogy shows Gibson working in an entirely new world, full of idiosyncratic characters, too-real-to-be-real plot twists, and chockablock with brand names – in other words, ours. James Bond reimagined for the 21st century, with secret agents replaced by nondescript young women and gadgets you could probably pick up on eBay if you searched long enough. Cayce Pollard probably informs my wardrobe over the last 3 years more than any other influence – lots of plain solid separates that could pass muster anytime since the end of the war…

The backlash against Apple is reaching gale force. Wags from LA to New York to London are convinced that the iPhone 4 is somehow the Edsel of mobile phones, and the elite of the paste-eaters are insistent that Android is just the thing to bring down dictatorial empire of Jobs. Which begs the question: uh, LOLWUT?

Apple’s explosion into mobile telephony has been a circus hitched to a tornado and no mistake. Over the last three years, Apple has made more profit off the iPhone than every other mobile phone maker has made on their entire product line. That’s an innovation right there, to bring Silicon Valley margin to a segment that was previously fixated on providing the phone free to the user in hopes that they’d make it up on minutes. More impressive, though, is the projection that Apple’s profit on the iPhone in 2010 will be double all other US phone sale profit combined – on 3% market share. Clearly, they’re making crazy paper, and people are willing to pay for their goods.

So why the nerd backlash? I suspect it’s got a lot to do with the fact that the iPhone *is* popular and is the face of the smartphone revolution, while simultaneously being a relatively tight ecosystem. It’s not “open,” it’s not “free,” it’s not got root access and the ability to load your own operating system ROM and and and and… well, you’ve still got to “jailbreak” many if not most Android phones, and in the case of the Droid X circumvent hardware protection. Let’s also remember that somebody did remotely delete applications off their phones, and it wasn’t Apple. And the platform itself is fragmenting in all directions, with multiple versions of Android in the wild and different UI layers over the top – and that with the end of the Nexus One, you can no longer go out and buy a phone running the latest version of the Android OS on the retail market. If Apple were killing off phone models after seven months, revving the OS every three and obsoleting hardware barely halfway through its contract, the Slashdot gladiators and Gizmorons would be losing their shit.

The problem for the paste-eaters is that the iPhone’s not meant for them, and it’s successful. Most people don’t care about being able to install this widget they wrote themselves. Most people couldn’t give a shit about having “root access” to the phone. And I guarantee you that most people haven’t even considered the developer model behind their phone. All they know or care about is that they like it and it works.

And this is why Apple has succeeded so far, and why the iPhone 4 issues are the biggest problem yet: Apple has blown off the usual laundry list of specs and features in favor of one criterion – user experience. The reason why the original iPhone didn’t have 3G was because the coverage was so bad and the power demand so high, there was no way to make it work without sucking. The reason why the first two iPhones didn’t do video capture is because cellphone video at the time was, at best, 320×240 and maybe 15 frames per second, and that sucks. Full-motion VGA in the 3GS, 640×480 at 30fps, didn’t suck, and that’s why you didn’t get it until then. Video calling has been around for years, and it sucked, and that’s why Apple didn’t offer it until they had an implementation that was easy to explain and simple to use – and didn’t suck.

UE.

Thus the issues with the iPhone 4, and the consternation at Apple. Reading the papers, you’d think the iPhone 4 couldn’t get a signal anywhere, and any attempt to pick it up causes it to implode. Patently not the case – I was in an elevator yesterday, bridging the antenna gap with a damp finger on both sides, and I still had 2 bars of 3G and the call sounded unimpaired. But if people think the phone is terrible, that’s all it takes – which is why Himself was so crabby at that presser. He knew what had to be done, and he did it, but he didn’t like having to answer for a problem that was nowhere near what it was being made out to be. But ultimately, I think he’ll be fine, because there’s still a waiting list for new iPhones (at least as of yesterday at the Apple Store in Palo Alto) – and people don’t line up to buy something they think sucks.

And so we fall back on the oldest of nerd tropes: that the people buying Apple are sheep, are morons, are fanboys who will eat whatever shit is shoveled out of Cupertino, that only an idiot would pay for an iPhone when you can get this amazing thing with an 8 MP camera and a 4-inch screen and 4G and a kickstand and it’s got video calling too and it’s open and you can root it and and and and…

Message to my fellow geeks: there are a lot of regular donks out there. They do not have the same priorities. They want something else, and Apple is apparently willing to give it to them. Ever since 1997, one thing has been true at Apple: the nerd market is not, cannot be, and will not be the focus of their attentions, because that’s not where the money is.

Well, that didn’t take long – after less than seven months, the Nexus One has been discontinued. The first – and to date, only – mobile phone that came close to wooing me from the iPhone is no more. Was that fast? I thought that was fast.

The charitable explanation is that the Nexus One was never meant to be a large-scale consumer product: it was designed as a proof of concept, to show what Android could do with the right hardware platform, and meant to spur other manufacturers on to better products. As an aside, being an unlocked phone, it made a great developer tool or just geek toy.

The problem was multifold:

1) The phone was only available online, and for the most part unsubsidized. Which means $530 up front for a phone you could only physically gauge by putting your hand up to a Flash app on the site. No typical consumer who doesn’t suffer form brain damage is going to go that route when every other phone on the market can be physically held and toyed around with at a cell store, or Apple store, or Best Buy, or Radio Shack, or…

2) The phone wasn’t carrier-subsidized. The upper limit on a smartphone seems to be $299 for all the bells and whistles, $199 for the mainstream variety. Asking almost double that is the height of foolishness, especially when…

3) Frequency lock-in means that you could only use the phone on T-Mobile. Oh, you could put it on AT&T, but you’d have no 3G coverage, since AT&T doesn’t operate in 1700 Mhz. And since T-Mobile’s 3G only works in that band, you could buy the AT&T version but be stuck there unless you were willing to go EDGE-only on T-Mobile. And AT&T’s rates per month are the same whether you bring your own phone or not – hell, even when you’re out of contract. Verizon and Sprint are right out – good luck going to them with a phone you don’t buy from them.

4) They barely advertised the damn thing. I saw ads on websites, but that’s about it. And really, Google doesn’t care about selling the Nexus One any more than Cisco cares about selling the Flip camera – it’s a sideline to help spur people to consume the company’s REAL offering – advertising in Google’s case, bandwidth in Cisco’s. Compare to Apple, whose main line of interest is in making you buy the device itself; things like the iTunes Music Store or App Store are nice, but those are to help facilitate and encourage the purchase of iTems, first and foremost.

Well, that’s made one bit of my life easier. If there’s not going to be an unlocked Nexus One, there’s precious little to be gained for me by switching my entire underlying infrastructure. As with so many things in my life, I ended up making the right decision through no fault of my own.

(An aside, leading up to the next post: how loud would the outrage had been if Apple had cancelled its flagship phone model after only seven months?)

Another day, another colossal fuck-up. The details of how Shirley Sherrod’s speech about her own racial-awareness come-to-Jesus incident got spun into some sort of black-supremacist plot and cost her a government post are all over the place right now, so I won’t waste time going into it. However, a few things should be obvious at this point:

* Every word that Andrew Beitbart says, writes, or publishes is a lie, including “a”, “an” and “the”, and the only time he should be getting public attention is if he is being mauled by a live panther at halftime of the Super Bowl.

* Every word that Fox News broadcasts is a lie, including “and”, “but” and “or”, and anyone who attempts to assert that Fox is anything other than a propaganda arm for the worst sort of hack Confederate propaganda should have his testicles crushed by a lead-filled 3-liter Coke bottle. The only reason Glenn Beck folded on this one is because a) he thought he could make the White House look bad by doing so, and b) to continue to support a known fabulist might cut into his televangelism racket.

* This President, this White House and this Administration are running scared of a bunch of toothless hicks and their amen corner in the right-wing media echo chamber. It is past time for people who are sick of this shit to lean on the White House to sack up – and to browbeat every media outlet they can find into spending more than ten seconds fact-checking video clips from an organization with a proven track record of doctoring their content to support their avalanche of lies.

* Oh yes – it might be nice to give this lady her job back, since the pretenses under which she was pushed out of it are demonstrably and patently false.

If we’re going to decide that opinion isn’t enough, and everyone is entitled to their own goddamn facts, well, fuck it. I give up. We had a good ride there for a few decades. Maybe our new Chinese masters will make the cellular network run on time.

Yet another right-wing shooter went berserk over the weekend, this one in California. His mother – who sounds like a real piece of work herself, given that the shooter took most of his guns from her supply – says her sprog was angry about “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”

It flabbergasts me that we have a Congress that has more Democrats in its majority than the Republicans ever had from 1995-2007, that we have a President who was elected by a much greater margin than George W. Bush ever managed, and yet somehow, anything they attempt to pass is some sort of affront to what “the America people” actually want. When, that is, they can pass anything – because in classic Texas fashion, you no longer win by having the most votes. Thanks to the fact that Senate rules are about seventy years out of date for modern political norms, a vote of 59-41 means that the 41 carries the day.

We’ve given politics over to the worst crop of ignorant rednecks imaginable, and I don’t know what’s worse: that they’re allowed to be part of the process, or that there are non-redneck Republicans who will go along with them in November just because that’s notionally their team. For whatever reason, nobody ever has to apologize for the crackers. Nobody has to answer for those who question whether the President is a citizen. Nobody ever has to REPUDIATE endless ever-so-veiled remarks about “Second Amendment solutions.” And yes, the word is “repudiate” – there is no such word as “refudiate,” you stupid, stupid (INSERT PREFERRED HURTFUL EPITHET HERE).

So yes – when this country goes down the shitter, just so you know, it happened because we allowed our political elites to declare that the goal, ideal, and apotheosis of American political life was the cast of Hee Haw.

As reunions go, you could do a helluva lot worse. I recognized most everyone; the women are definitely better-preserved than the men – some of them looked like they’d aged, oh, two or three years tops, but everyone has held up very nicely – and people’s reaction to me generally broke down to some admixture of “OHMIGOD” and “HOLY SHIT!” Which, you know, I wouldn’t have had it any other way, then or now.

It was amazing. It really and truly felt as if I was the same person, just twenty years older. Maybe that ol’ boy grew up better than I gave him credit for, I don’t know, but it was truly fantastic to be back among the tribe. I was incredibly nervous heading in, and that disappeared within about three minutes, and after that it was off to the races. Just a blast all around. (And a surprisingly reasonable bar tab. When you can drink your way out of your reunion for under $50, you done good.)

Just once, I’d like to go back to the ancestral lands on the down-low, not let on to any of my local trying relations that I was there, maybe have Team Black Swan East come up and join us, and have our fellow Trees show us what’s good in the 205. I mean, there’s stuff there I would never have though to even look for. Soho Square? I didn’t even know that existed until drinks at the Aloft last Christmas. Bottletree? What’s a bottle tree? There may actually be cool stuff there, and it would be a blast to actually get to check it out. Put that on the “maybe” list once of these days – if we can ever circumvent the flight issue…

I have spent the better part of the last five hours digging through a footlocker stuffed full of my old paperwork, from junior-high to the middle of Vanderbilt – in short, everything between “hey, girls are interesting” and “subscribe FRIENDSZ”. I generated two huge trash bags and most of a good-sized box, parsing into “keep this” and “trash that,” although half of the stuff to keep should probably actually be trashed. If any of you are Doctor Who fans, I think I may have just finished regenerating.

It’s a very surreal experience, knowing that all this stuff is at least ten years old and probably more like fifteen, but what’s more surreal is the way that I had that big needle-scratch in my mind when the wife came into the room and I realized that it wasn’t actually 1988, or 1993, or…

In high school, you always think you’re all alone, that you’re special and misunderstood and whatever. The really disappointing thing is realizing that you were just exactly like everybody else….

-Dec. 26, 2005

It’s probably for the best. The process of weeding out the cruft of half a life ago (literally, this coming spring, half a life ago) has done some really weird things to my psyche. All I can say is that I am clearly not the man I was, and not just the way that Christopher Eccleston is not Jon Pertwee. If you track back to 1988-90, I have gotten almost everything I ever wanted – granted, it took a hell of a long time, and a lot of what I got was not what I expected, and I have since lost some of what I got, and a couple of the things I just grew out of needing. But for better or worse, here I am. I don’t even have anything I wanted for Christmas and didn’t get.

God willing, maybe this means that some of my thought-processes and reflexes and instincts that were wet-wired back in the dark days of adolescence will go away now, or at least grow up. I’m not counting on it, though…

-Dec. 27, 2005

Two decades in the making, and it starts in less than 8 hours. Tonight, I’ll be seeing the stand-up comedy stylings of one of my fellow alums, and the next day, I’ll be on a plane for Saturday’s 20-year high school reunion dinner.

If you know me, you’ve heard the story a million times – how I was closer to the class the year before me, how I had the blockbuster spring semester my junior year followed by an even more eventful summer, and how my senior year was a letdown because of the distance between me and the rest of my class – but I didn’t care, because college was going to be IT and I didn’t need to worry about high school anymore. And you probably have some idea how that worked out.

I’d like to think that my best days are still ahead of me. Certain persons (Whom I’ll Figure Eventually ;] ) like to occasionally tease me about being one of those guys still coasting off that time his football team in high school won the big game and milking it for the next sixty years. To which I can only plead nolo contendre – I’m not admitting it, but I’m not denying it either. =)

Because college didn’t really work out. Neither did grad school, which basically served as a degree-laundering program while giving me some hands-on experience to let me try to luck my way into my first job in a totally unrelated field. Throughout college and grad school, for the most part, the friends I had were the same guys from that great run in 1987-89, and by the time I’d left grad school, they’d all split town ahead of me.

My life history, when you get right down to it, has been one of leaping from one rock to the next while the ground crumbles behind me shortly after. I left a gaping black hole where higher education used to be. I left Washington, and my old group at work was scattered within a year (with an additional admixture of spouses, offspring, and housing changes to enhance the effect and drive home the point that it would have happened even if I’d stayed). My two previous jobs in California left me with, at best, 4 or 5 combined people with whom I’m only in sporadic touch. One step ahead of the void, always.

And then last year, the previous class had their 20th high school reunion. And although I didn’t even know about it until it happened, the ripples in Facebook caught me – and all of a sudden I started to see names I hadn’t heard in years, think about things that hadn’t occurred to me since that night I dumped all the papers over four and a half years ago now. And that artificial blue stone on that 10-karat white gold ring began to wink at me… I’ve got three class rings. One I never wear, because I’ve disavowed that institution. One I routinely wear, as the world’s most expensive bottle-opener and part of my degree-laundering so I can feel better about myself in a world almost wholly defined by Berkeley on one side and Stanford on the other, and one because I graduated from there and I claim it and it has been with me every day since.

A couple months ago, in a preview of things to come, we had dinner with one of the guys who was part of my crew back in the day. He looked– well, he looked about 2 years older, and dressed like a tech-sector VP on a Silicon Valley fact-finding mission. (Conveniently, it turns out that’s exactly what he was.) And he couldn’t get over how different I looked. Maybe how different I seemed. And I can see how that would happen. The white T-shirts have been replaced with black polo shirts. The Reeboks gave way to black Docs. The (shudder) stonewash has been displaced by plain old standard blue 501s. There’s a goatee now, largely to compensate for the Folliclypse on my actual dome. The gray fedora and the Members Only jackets are long gone. And if I’m honest, I’m a good sixty pounds away from where I was all those years ago. I also have thirteen years in the world of IT on top of two degrees in political science and a world of life experiences on two continents.

But the kid underneath all that? The kid from twenty years ago? The one who urgently needed his four or five guys that had his back 24/7? The one who desperately craved constant validation, everywhere, everything, all the time? The one who’d rather face a firing squad than have to walk up to a crowd of strangers and assert himself? The one who had to be on guard every second of every hour of every day just to ward off the black cloud that would come eat his soul given half a chance? The one who needed to belong worse than he needed air?

Yeah. He never went anywhere. I just pay his taxes.

Lessons learned? There were a few:

* I really do like London. The last time we were there, I said we either needed to skip it next time out or just move there. Now I’m leaning toward just moving there.

* Being in Mürren for three days was amazingly relaxing – the town was very quiet, mostly closed down, but it was cool and peaceful and I was able to relax. Either I need to do this more often, or maybe I really could survive in a very small town where I could keep to myself and go to the one bar.

* There were a slew of German flags everywhere, tons of red and black and gold in time for the World Cup. It was apparently the biggest show of patriotic spirit anyone could remember, especially since decades of Germans don’t even know the words to the national anthem. For lack of a less blunt/crude analogy, the Allies did to Germany what you do when the dog shits the rug: pick him up, rub his nose in it, and scream “NO!” For over six decades, the drumbeat has been steady for Germany, from Germany: we did a bad, bad thing and we must take responsibility for it – and for making sure it never happens again.

* The fact that I was there with Cousin Pa, and thinking about how the man had a Rebel flag on a pole out front of his house three years ago, made me think: the South was let right up off the mat. There was no punishment, there were precious few consequences – a few National Guard troops were stood around, the Justice Department did a couple of prosecutions, and five years after standing in the schoolhouse door George Wallace drew 13% of the vote in a national Presidential election. Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, Dallas and The Dukes Of Hazzard opened the 1980s as the top shows on TV – the latter featuring a car called the General Lee, with a rebel flag on the roof. It all got swept under the rug, quickly, and within a couple of decades the very people who had been at the edge of rebellion were being held up as “real” Americans. Even by – especially by – people who should have known better.

* I’ve come back into the United States seven times since 1988, and this was the first time the person swiping my passport and checking my status smiled at me on the way back in. The last couple of times, I was treated like I had oily smoke pouring out of my carry-on. I don’t know who said something, but it needed saying: no matter how uptight you are about security, you can at least make an effort to be civil to your own passport-holders.

* “Spezi” is the German word for a blend of cola and orange soda – although it may carry the Fanta label, it’s closer to Orangina than the radioactive antibacterial-orange stuff by that name here – and the Coca-Cola corporation actually bottles something called “Mezzo Mix” that is pre-mixed Coke and orange. It’s surprisingly good. And yes, they already have Mezzo Mix Zero. It’s apparently only bottled in German-speaking countries, more’s the pity.

* I would love to be able to do without a car. I loved inter-city trains. I even enjoyed the overnight sleeper car. I loved being able to walk out to the high street and browse up and down the shops in the evening.

* I didn’t really have much in the way of souvenirs I was looking for – I made a little noise about footwear and Swiss Army knives and watches, just for form’s sake, but nothing really jumped out at me the whole trip. Inasmuch as I had a souvenir, it was the iPhone 4 that I watched being launched from a lobby PC in Munich and picked up in person a couple weeks after – because I would love to have been carrying an HD video camera and 5 MP camera all bound up with my music player and email checker.

* I’m happy that I got to see the World Cup kick off in a place that was insane about it. I’m equally happy that I got to see the World Cup carry on in a place that became insane about it.

I’ve mentioned before what a problem I have with being “the guru” or “the wizard” or whatever else the end-users want to call me. Because what I do isn’t magic. It’s not incomprehensible – and the belief that it is makes a convenient excuse not to try to comprehend it. (Example: if I am trying to rip out and reinstall the printing infrastructure on your laptop, you should not try reading your email and ordering a new phone online while I am doing so. You wouldn’t take your car to get an oil change and say “While you do that I’m going to drive down to KFC for a Double Down” would you? Actually, too many people might. Never mind.)

This separation manifests itself in other ways. Google seems to be the biggest offender these days, although Facebook is a close second – in both cases, features were launched and changed in ways that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but made little to no sense when placed in contact with the real world. These usually revolve around privacy issues, but the current big-name Google phone, the HTC Evo 4G on Sprint, shows some of the same things. It supports 4G, despite the fact that only the top thirty or so metro areas even have 4G coverage – and despite the fact that it’s in the 2.5 Ghz band, so building and barrier penetration is minimal. It has an eight megapixel camera with HD video capture – that stutters and artifacts to the point of unwatchability. It has a 4.3″ display – which combined with the 4G gives its battery the lifespan of a mayfly. It has a front-facing camera for video calling – but requires you to find an app to use it, and may or may not require you to hold down a talk key like a CD radio. Most of all, it has Android 2.1 with the Sense custom interface – which makes it anyone’s guess how soon it will be able to run Android 2.2, and whether that update will be at the mercy of Google, HTC, Sprint, or all three. In short, it represents a laundry list of features and specs thrown together with very little consideration of how effective the total package will be when it hits the real world.

This makes me think about the draft.

From World War II until Vietnam, if you were a guy and you were out of high school, you were going to be doing some time in the Army. Or Navy, or what have you. You might get out on a medical exemption or something religious or whatnot, but odds are that no matter who you were, you were going to do your service. Look at something like Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers – college boys, cab drivers, school teachers, business heirs, all thrown together and re-sorted by military rank, rather than income or upbringing or geography.

That all ended in the wake of Vietnam, with the shift to the all-volunteer force. That happened in 1973. So we have reached a point where literally everyone in the service has come up through the age of the all-volunteer army, which means everyone was self-selected. What happens when a population self-selects for thirty-seven years? More to the point, what happens to the remaining population?

From Eisenhower to Bush I, we lived in an age where it could be safely assumed that every President – in fact, every major political figure – had served in the military at some point. PT boat captain, pilot, even public affairs officer – whatever. Now, it’s safe to assume they haven’t. Basically, anyone in high politics aged 55 and under can safely be assumed not to have been in the service. And this is a perilous disconnect.

Civilians defer to the military – it enjoys levels of respect that most other institutions in public life would kill for. In fact, the Constitution says that the President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but to listen to the press, you’d think the President was commander-in-chief of everyone in America but the military. And as we saw with the McChrystal meltdown, it’s becoming evident that a large chunk of the military – including a disturbing amount of the top brass – rejects the notion of civilian authority, or at least any sense that military authority should defer to it. Each side has become progressively more alienated from the other, made worse by the decision of civilian authorities to deploy the military over and over.

The disturbing thing isn’t the idea that the military might decide they should quit taking orders from a bunch of idle loudmouth civilians. The disturbing thing is the number of civilians who would endorse it.

WHY I AM A POLITICAL NIHILIST

My background: raised in Alabama in the post-CR era, two degrees in political science, specializing in 20th century institutions and political culture as they apply to the politics of the American South.

Democracy is a pretty blunt instrument in the American context. Most of the time, you’re basically voting thumbs up or down on the incumbent; when there’s an open seat, you might have more of a choice, but almost every time you vote for Congress, it’s either throw the bum out or keep him. You can vote for a third-party candidate, if you feel like wasting your vote (and it’s even more stupid in a Presidential race) – no effective third-party candidate has ever emerged in the last hundred years except as a split from one of the major parties (TR) or as the result of hardcore regional support (Wallace). And all they succeeded in doing was throwing the election to the opponent of the group they split from before eventually joining the winner’s party.

I threw the major parties under the bus after 1988, and again after 2002. In both cases it was for the same reasons: the GOP was running as the party of the Deep South, both in policy and in style, and the Democrats were unwilling and/or unable to formulate or articulate a response. The only thing more disgusting than a party who paints a triple-amputee veteran as weak on defense is a party unable to effectively punch back against such a cartoonish argument.

Really, when I step into the booth, who else is there? A plurality of the country won’t even show up. Of those who do, half of them have paid far more attention to Dancing With The Stars than actual events. The other half are basically zombies, who will do whatever the New Media tells them to do, because the blogs and talk shows and cable tell them exactly what they want to hear, how bright and smart and patriotic they are and how much better they are than those wrong, evil, horrible things on the other side of the debate.

There’s no fix, either. You’d need a more informative class of media, interested in more than just entertaining and dodging accusations of bias. You’d need political parties capable of making their case and acknowledging that they might not be in their current position forever. And to be honest, you’d need voters smart enough to count past ten without undressing. Any of these is unlikely. To get all of them is impossible.

So I show up and do my part, but I know it doesn’t mean anything. In the end, the American public gets precisely the government it deserves…and I’m just stuck with it.