Are my eyes really blue?

Well, back to ecto – now that I know what’s happening, it’s a lot easier to manage. For whatever reason, new posts show up in MT4 as “scheduled” but never actually post. But that’s an easy fix from the browser, so I’m better off with the WYSIWYG approach. MarsEdit means riding bareback on HTML, with tags and everything, and that’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

So anyway, I’ve been looking through my ridiculous collection of outerwear, and I have the oddest urge to fit something with some patches. Not like my patch jacket of yore, with everything from shuttle mission patches to a UPS logo – this would just be something simple, almost military-ish, something that would work out for cyberpunk dress at Maker Faire or some such. Blame William Gibson and Cayce Pollard, but I keep being drawn to the MA-1 nylon flight jacket despite the fact that it’s far too warm for most winter days (and too short to be an effective raincoat).

Actually, I should be working harder on a steampunk getup (despite my misgivings about how warm it’ll probably be) and some sort of attire plan for the Europe trip in June (cool to warm, rain likely). Most of all, I kind of need to go through my dresser and plow through whatever I can get rid of – there’s a lot of old sox and drawz that need to go away and make space for the new stuff…

Sad to see AJ leave Vandy – I doubt he’ll even be a first-round pick – but I almost wonder if we’re better off with the three-headed monster in the lane plus the new recruits (Kyle Fuller and Rod Odom are both top-100 prospects nationally) and just turning into a run-and-gun team. We’ll still have plenty of beef down low – I daresay that more slightly smaller guys who can get up for offensive boards would help things a LOT.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got at this point…no politics, precious little tech talk, ain’t that something?

It’s quite a gadget. It certainly seems to obviate the need for a dedicated e-book reader. It’s incredibly easy to pull out and use in a way you’d never use a notebook, just because of the whole folding action and the space it takes up. (I really wish I’d had this trick on the trip to DC.) And by using a phone OS, it’s incredibly fast to get going – button, swipe, 4 digits, Safari, and boom goes the dynamite. As opposed to: open, wait for login box, log in, wait for desktop, double-click icon, wait for app to load…it’s like an iPhone, just pull it out and go, except that the processor is so much faster and the screen so much bigger that you actually get to work and see things sooner and easier. The 4-way screen rotation is great – work from whatever angle you pulled the thing out.

It does seem excessive for things like Foursquare or Twitter, but those are so location-specific that they really do belong on the phone, not the iPad. You could take the iPad most anywhere, but you definitely will take an iPhone everywhere, so – horses for courses.

If I hadn’t bought the netbook, I would be sorely tempted. As it is, I find that I tend only to use Mail, Safari, Notepad, and the e-book readers. Other things are nice, but I don’t get the mileage out of them on a routine basis.

Long story short – does this sound familiar? Steve Jobs delivers new product. Not a completely original concept, but the first real consumer-friendly approach, easy to use and sexy as all hell. Looks like a premium product, and priced like one; right off the bat it’s too much money for not as much functionality as you might like, but from day one it becomes the new standard that everyone else is chasing.

iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Lather, rinse, repeat.

* It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design.

* If it’s a big iPod Touch, the key word is definitely BIG. Having 1024×768 scale changes everything, making for a better UI experience and a lot easier time with things like mail or reading complex websites (you don’t need a Facebook app for the iPad, you just go to Facebook).

* The killer app, for me, is the battery life. This is the thing Apple has done: they have used a phone OS to get light and lean, while still including a first-rate browser – the net result blows away any netbook you like for speed while offering ridiculous battery performance (after almost 7 hours of off-and-on browsing and mail and even some video, I’ve still only blown off 1/3 of the charge). Better than my MacBook Pro, better than my Dell Mini 1012 (in Ubuntu OR WinXP), better than my iPhone – hell, I could use all three of those one after the other until the batteries all died, and I think an iPad would outlast them all. Now in fairness I’ve been using it on a college campus with pervasive Wi-Fi, not taxing it with the need to hold a 3G signal, but even so – this is something you can take around for email and web surfing all day and not have to worry about when you’re going to plug it in. For that reason alone, I think it has a lot of potential not just as a netbook killer, but as a MacBook Air killer.

* I mean, seriously, think about it. What do you do on a netbook? What CAN you do on a netbook? The physical keyboard may give it a slight edge on the text-entry front, in theory, but (in horizontal mode at least) the iPad’s virtual keyboard is every bit as viable as my netbook’s physical one in practice. I can check my mail, I can surf the web – well, the iPad does those things as well if not better (I’m generally stuck on webmail with the netbook, because using Thunderbird or Evolution is painful on that screen and with that processing power.) I could input with Google Docs or Evernote if I wanted text, I’ve got the WordPress app right there for blogging things – hell, right now the only thing I absolutely need the netbook for over the iPad would be video chat. And that’s not exactly a huge part of my life.

* If you’re doing all this stuff in the cloud anyway, you can get by fine with 16 GB of storage. Hell, get all your movies from Netflix and you don’t need to use your local space. I guarantee you that the notional Google Chrome OS devices aren’t going to have 16 GB of local storage. All the “cloud” really consists of is a move back to the old client-server days, and the iPad is the thinnest of thin clients.

* Yes, you can RDP back to your Windows machine – just not very well. Similarly, I expect VNC would be kind of a show. I don’t think you’re going to get Apple Remote Desktop for iPad for some time, unfortunately.

* The iPad, at its root, is a consumption device. You read mail, read books, surf the web, watch video, listen to audio. It’s necessarily compromised for things like churning out flashing newsletters or hammering out the Great American Novel or administering a rack of servers. I certainly wouldn’t undertake NaNoWriMo on one. But the people breathlessly intoning “this is your new TV” – I think they’re onto something. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, this is going to be a big part of how you see your shows. (The notional Hulu app will go a long way there.)

* I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android.

* All of this said, I’m probably going to pass it along to the next tech by the end of the week if not sooner. When you have a laptop and an iPhone, it’s definitely a device too far. It’s not a substitute for a laptop for people who legitimately have to work remotely or on-the-go (by contrast, it’s the IDEAL device to give your CxO so he can look slick in the first class lounge). And for my purposes, it’s neat…but it’s not really suitable for Twitter, or text messaging, or walking around with the headphones in on a constant stream of the Junks. I downloaded a ton of the free iPad apps, but most of them are things I don’t use or aren’t practical – Pandora, ABC Player, Y! Entertainment, two or three news apps, stuff like that. Until portable devices become the prime way of consuming media, the iPhone is still the best horse for the course for me.

This post is coming to you from an iPad. I have the Apple folio thingy, it is sitting on top of my net book on the coffee table, and I’m already seeing some of the compromises on the keyboard. It does a good job with some of the autocorrection, but also makes two words of netbook and doesn’t give me an apostrophe without using the shift. It also makes ozone curious decisions on what not to correct. That should be “some”, not “ozone”. You see the problem.
in the grand scheme of things, though, it isn’t bad. I daresay it’s as least as typable as the much maligned keyboard on the Dell Mini 9. Obviously I’m in landscape mode and counting on the spell check, but even so – it’s miles beyond trying to do the same on an iPhone. I wouldn’t dare try to write anything this long on there.
(An aside: Duke got freerolled into the Sweet Sixteen with a one seed they didn’t deserve, then managed to be two points better than a five seed in a game where the refs basically let them play Red Rover under the baskets. Least impressive champion of the modern era. And I’m all the more bitter that Vandy got skunked in the first round, because that Duke team is one we could easily have beaten. Douchebags.)
I’m not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It’s not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can’t stop thinking over and over is “it’s the Dynabook”. Alan Kay’s landmark vision of a super-thin 9×12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them. One device the size of a magazine, pound and a half – and it’s all your textbooks, all your notebooks, your mail, your TV, your damn near everything. If I were starting college this year, I would move heaven and earth to have one before I headed out the door.
Well, now to see if it can replace the DVR for strategic “V” purposes…

* Look, “can tell time” was not part of the job description when I applied for it. At least I’m going to my review meeting 2 hours early instead of posting for the interview 45 minutes late…

* It’s odd – I didn’t go through Arlington at all on this trip. That makes it a full three years since last I saw that part of the old country other than on Google Earth. I remember the last day, turning in the key in July 2004 and then walking back to where I was parked – it was like all the years rolled back at once and I was standing in 1997 seeing the apartments for the first time.

* There are so many things that are so many years ago now. California is six years this July. Next January, I’m ten years together with my girlfriend-turned-wife. This summer is my twentieth high school reunion. I don’t know why all of this amazes me so much. I probably said this already elsewhere, but 1997 is the midway point; on one side is everything from junior high to leaving grad school and on the other side is everything SINCE grad school. It doesn’t feel like a quarter-century since I was an impressionable young seventh-grader, consumed with comic books and RPGs and vaguely aware of things with two X chromosomes. There’s a big post about the non-linearity of time in there somewhere.

* Speaking of Google, above, DoubleTwist (an open-source iTunes workalike to let you use your music library with other phones) now has an interface to the Android Marketplace. It even has a web version – which means that for the first time, you can practically explore the world of Android apps without an Android device. And based on this, I was able to look and see that there are Android versions of probably 90% of my commonly used iPhone apps – there’s not a Twitter client as polished as Tweetie 2, I don’t think there’s a Tumblr app let alone one as good as the iPhone version, and I’d have to learn to live with the Texts From Last Night website – but almost everything else is there. Facebook, Foursquare, Amazon, DirecTV, MLB At Bat, Absolute Radio, Paypal, Open Table, Urbanspoon, the FCC broadband checker, WordPress, IMDB, Evernote, Midomi Soundhound – all official versions. There are also workalikes for things like Wikipedia readers, wi-fi scanners, movie ticketers, Caltrain and VTA schedulers, RSS readers, even a sleep cycle alarm clock and a lightsaber. The practical upshot is this: there is very little to keep me from replicating the functional equivalent of my iPhone environment on a Nexus One or similar Android device, especially if it includes a mechanism for direct download and playback of podcasts.

* The catch is, though, almost every single one of those apps I mentioned (except for Soundhound, the alarm clock and the lightsaber) is something that under normal circumstances can be used through a web browser, plain and simple. So why all the apps? Convenience? An attempt to refine the interface for a mobile device? (Probably.) And yet as I look through the apps, I notice a lot of apps for multiple services. Foursquare, Gowalla and Whrrl…Yelp, Urbanspoon, Opentable, Geodelic and AroundMe…and obviously Facebook and Twitter. And that’s where the thought clicked:

WE ARE BACK TO 1992. Instead of being segregated into AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, GEnie, and the like – not to mention a crap-ton of BBS outlets – we now have to have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, etc etc. These are not open systems, and are not generally fungible (except insomuch as Facebook has connectivity to them through RSS or whatever). Basically, we’ve come full circle and in the case of Facebook and Twitter are back to having a single entity providing us with a closed communication service. Or put it another way: if your email provider goes down, the rest of the world carries on using email. If Twitter goes down, that pretty much does for everybody. If Facebook goes down – well, not nice to think about, especially since the privacy model changes repeatedly and occasionally they publish everyone’s email without thinking about it. Social networking has created a situation where we are back to largely non-interoperable services and dependence on single providers, only this time there’s even more potential for mischief. Especially in light of the explosive growth of Foursquare and its competitors, who have somehow managed to wheedle us into reporting the details of our life in a manner that I can only assume they will attempt to monetize eventually…

* Actually, that’s the uneasy-making part. Social networking compels us to disclose all manner of things, because we’re only telling our friends. Well, that’s what we’re meant to think. But anything we tell our friends, we’re also telling Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Google, and at some point the VCs and angel investors will demand some sort of return on their capital – at which point these entities will find it necessary to use your personal information to make money. Yes, I do continue to use these things – but when I only have maybe half a dozen friends on Foursquare, Buzz, Whrrl, and Gowalla combined, what’s the ratio of communicating with friends vs. preparing a detailed demographic survey to be sold for big bucks in a couple of years?

The problem with these services is that they promote lock-in. Everyone’s on Facebook, because everybody is on Facebook. It’s Metcalfe’s Law run riot – as long as these systems are closed, there can be only one – the more there are, the less likely you are to use them all. Friendster begat MySpace begat Facebook, with each one being effectively killed by its successor – because who wants to update three different social network sites? If there were some sort of interoperability system for social networking, you’d at least have the security that comes with distribution – imagine if email were simply one great big bulletin board with a few rudimentary privacy filters. As it is, I’m getting more and more uneasy every time I check in.

* I may or may not be using a company iPad this time next week. Hmmmmm…

But if you drink nine pints of stout, you won’t really notice.

We closed the 4P’s last night (it’s always and forever the 4Ps, no matter what the sign out front says) – half of a dozen of us, in the old style, knocking down pint after pint and fortifying ourselves on THE GREATEST POTATO SOUP ANYWHERE and roaring along in actually pretty good harmony. We sang the old rebel songs with our own modifications, and when the band didn’t play them, we put them on the jukebox and belted them out. I may or may not have stood on the table for “Sweet Home Alabama” despite the fact that it’s not particularly MY sweet home…all we lacked was the Chernobyl cloud of pipe smoke overhead, which you don’t get in any bar in DC anymore.

I haven’t been back to Arlington, and I may not get there, and that would be fine – so many times, trips like this take on the feel of visiting the place where they shot a movie you saw long ago. Even now, everything feels slightly unreal – even the old route home down Rock Creek Parkway and onto 66 felt familiar, but it’s not like I was never gone. Tyson’s Corner was almost unrecognizable, even inside the mall once I oriented myself. Names, places, things that I remember on the periphery of my consciousness – stuff that I’m sure was critical once, problem users and implacable foes and girls who walked out of the cafeteria line like it was a runway show – so much of it barely rings a bell anymore.

We’re old. We’re none of us getting younger, and the other five guys around the table last night represented twelve kids back home (ten of them girls – you don’t think God has a wicked sense of humor, think again). For many of them, it was the first trip to the 4Ps since the old days – or at least since we were last in town in 2007. We couldn’t do this on the regular anymore even if we wanted to – it’s damn near impossible to synchronize babysitting and then throw down the cash (and the bill last night wasn’t a patch on the old days, when we routinely pushed the upper edge of three figures because there were so many of us staying so late.) Even if I’d stayed around, this kind of thing wouldn’t have continued steadily on – maybe my birthday every year, with a little luck, but making it once a month? Not a chance. One person can’t make it, then another, then maybe you feel like you’re in a rut anyway. One guy moves, another gets married, there are kids now, you get out of the habit, and before you know it, it’s been years and years. In fact, when I first walked in and sat down, and looked around at the changes in the menu, and the decor, and the staff, and the jukebox, I had a creeping sense of dread and sadness – that it wouldn’t be the same, that it couldn’t be the same, and that it would only be depressing in the end.

But it wasn’t. It was glorious. It was enough to be able to reach back and touch that part of who I was again – and a great comfort and relief to know it’s still there. Here we go again, we’re on the road again, we’re on the road again, we’re on our way to paradise…

“Well, I didn’t come three thousand miles not to get crabs.”
-to the waitress at Dog Fish Head Shoulder Knees and Toes Knees and Toes Ale House, who had the crabcake special available at market price ($23 for 2, as it turns out)
If there’s one thing I’m learning in a hurry, it’s that managing a Flip camera, an iPhone, and a regular still camera makes for a difficult juggling act. I’m counting on the next phone taking VGA-quality full-motion video AND snapshots that are at least good enough not to look utterly noisy – maybe that way I’ll get the pictures AND the video when the toddler decides that her new friend the stuffed turtle needs to go through the bedtime routine.
(Honestly, the Google Voice integration and noise cancellation are pushing the Nexus One hard…Cupertino’s got about 3 months to get their thing together before I get into renewal territory…)

So my second-cousin-in-law (to whom I am related in the exact same fashion as I am related to a prominent Senator in the health care reform shenanigans) sent a link to a book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and Why It Will Rise Again)”. Setting aside the standard comical use of “Politically Incorrect” to somehow imply ‘truth-telling and edgy’ when in fact it generally means ‘rude and hackneyed’, I think the author misses the point just by the title. The South has in fact already risen again, and now sits on the precipice of another fall.

Culturally, it didn’t take long at all. Sixteen years after the Birmingham police were hosing marchers and setting the dogs on them, CBS was running a Friday night back-to-back of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Dallas.” (I once took a graduate seminar on Southern studies with another Alabamian and sixteen non-Southerners, all of whom – to a man – said their image of the South originated with “The Dukes Of Hazzard”.) ‘Southern rock’ was a dominant form (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty, 38 Special, you name it). Movies like “Urban Cowboy” were grossing tens of millions of dollars (not to mention Grammy and Golden Globe nominations and a multi-platinum soundtrack), artists from Johnny Cash to Glen Campbell and Barbara Mandrell had their own variety shows, and CBS showed the Daytona 500 wire-to-wire for the first time. For their trouble, they got a fistfight in the infield between the Allison brothers and Cale Yarborough while Richard Petty got the checkered flag – and blockbuster ratings. Time Magazine was running special cover stories on “The New South” when they weren’t putting Bear Bryant on the cover – and the Alabama Crimson Tide was quickly displacing Notre Dame at the apex of college football awareness (though not enough for the 1977 poll voters, who jumped the Irish from fifth to first for the title despite a higher-ranked Alabama beating an even higher-ranked Ohio State. I’m not mad).

Politically, the old crop of Southern senior senators went nowhere fast. Names like Howell Heflin, Sam Nunn and Jesse Helms came in to replace the old Sparkmans and Eastlands and Russells, while Strom Thurmond plowed right along. Jimmy Carter won election in 1976. More importantly, consider this: from 1976 to 2004, each election had at least one Southerner on one Presidential ticket every year. In fact, both tickets had a Southerner every year from 1980 to 2004, barring 1984 (Mondale-Ferarro for the Dems) and 1996 (Dole-Kemp for the Repubs). Texas and Florida each became as pivotal an electoral prize as California or New York – after all, the 2000 election hinged on Florida.

To see the real political rise, though, look at the 1990s. The Democrats won two Presidential elections behind an all-Southern ticket of Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee). The Republicans countered behind Newt Gingrich (Georgia), who took over the House of Representatives in January 1995 alongside such pivotal committee leaders as Bob Livingston (Louisiana), Dick Armey (Texas), and Tom DeLay (Texas). When Bob Dole left a year later to run for President, the Senate went to Trent Lott (Mississippi), who was succeeded in the 2000s first by Bill Frist (Tennessee) and then Mitch McConnell (Kentucky). Meanwhile, Denny Hastert – who replaced Gingrich and displaced Livingston after both had adultery scares – was effectively a figurehead while Tom DeLay (aka “The Hammer”) ran the Republican affairs in the House. The Clinton/Gore team was succeeded by George W. Bush (Texas) and Dick Cheney (born in Texas but elected out of Wyoming). And the entire Republican succession rested on the final realignment of – the South, where retiring veteran Democrats were almost uniformly replaced with Republicans, especially as VRA created “majority-minority” districts of African-American voters and left behind lily-white Republican safe seats (the transformation of AL-6 and AL-7 is instructive here).

In every way that mattered, the governance of the United States from 1995 to 2007 was effectively Southern, in politics and practice. The style of Southern politics (see previous posts) became nationalized, and cultural populism masked a rush to “business-friendly” policy (most prominently and painfully the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which allowed commercial and investment banking to merge and ultimately gave us the 2008 meltdown).

Meanwhile, the culture of the South continued to metastasize. Atlanta – Atlanta! – hosted the Olympics. The self-proclaimed title of “America’s Team” was shared between the Atlanta Braves in baseball and the Dallas Cowboys in football. NASCAR grew to become the only sport other than the NFL with free broadcast coverage on multiple national over-the-air networks. Country music went wholly mainstream behind everyone from Garth Brooks to Shania Twain to Toby Keith to Taylor Swift. Monday Night Football continues to be opened by Hank Williams Jr, a Detroit rock-rapper cloaked his entire career in Southern imagery (right down to his pilgrimage to Nashville where Kid Rock received the ‘blessing’ of George Jones himself), Jeff Foxworthy got an entire TV career out of “You Might Be A Redneck” jokes, and – astoundingly – a book by a former weathergirl from Birmingham became both a print touchstone of the lesbian experience AND a wildly successful feature film with two Oscar nominations, while another Candide-esque tale of a marginally-bright Alabama boy racked up SIX Oscars and made a blockbuster A-lister of Tom Hanks. (Also launched a chain of the worst tourist-trap seafood joints on Earth.) And most of all, from stem to stern, the national press – just as they had in the 1970s – began to gravitate to the South as the repository of old-time value and virtue in times of crisis, and gladly bought into the notion that the folks with Confederate flags on their trucks (as Howard Dean put it) were, in fact, the quintessence of “real Americans.”

It’s all falling apart now, though. 2008 featured no Southerners on the Presidential ballot. 2009 featured a Republican party in disarray, shedding its non-Southern elements once by one. And 2010 has seen the most talked-about movement in politics revealed as the same sort of irate redneck that scowled through Birmingham fifty years earlier – only instead of bombs on black homes, it’s bricks through Congressional office windows and cut gas lines on a home mistakenly identified as a Congressman’s. And the reason it’s come to that is because, once again, the South’s moment has passed, and those who cling to its values are raging against the dying of the light.

So why is it falling again? Simply put, the South is utterly dependent on a devil. Whether in politics, in religion, in football – there has to be a bad guy, and his defeat is at least as important as one’s own victory. The highest happiness for a Crimson Tide fan is not to see Alabama on top, but to see Auburn on bottom. And as NASCAR goes more and more corporate, as country music becomes less and less Nashville, as American Idol stops being regularly won by folks from the 205 and Southern comics drop by the wayside and the White House goes to a biracial Yankee and the Congress into the hands of a sharp-tongued woman from San Francisco – as the devils win, the South feels itself losing.

Until Southern pride shifts to being “We’re great!” rather than “Y’all suck!”, expect the backlash to continue. If there were an easy fix, it would have been tried in the last century and a half.

Maybe I haven’t explained why the Southernization of politics is a bad thing. I’ll thumbnail it real quick just in case somebody hasn’t read the whole damn blog.

In 1877, the Democrats – who had won the popular vote in the 1876 Presidential election, but saw the electoral vote split between contested states in the South – made a deal where they would concede the election to Rutherford B. Hayes and the Republicans in exchange for the end of Federal occupation of the postwar South. Aided by paramilitary violence by assorted Redeemer groups (look it up), the result was the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow laws – not to mention the whitewashing of the voter rolls. By the mid-1880s, the old Confederacy was essentially a one-party zone; the Democrats owned the whole thing. (For an interesting comparison, match the electoral map of the 1896 election to that of 2004.) They would continue to own the whole thing until the 1960s, when the national Democratic embrace of the civil rights movement paved the way for George Wallace and ultimately a switch to Republican voting for President, which trickled down to the Congress by the mid-1990s.

But for that period of almost eighty years, the Democratic primary was, for all intents and purposes, the general election. Republicans were negligible – if not outright nonexistent. One-party rule meant that except for the occasional populist appeal to rise up against the big mules of industry or finance, campaigns were fought between candidates whose actual policy differences could be patched over with a postage stamp.

So what happens if candidates all believe the same things and pursue the same policy?

What you get is the Southern style of politics. Elections that are fought on the basis of personality, hyperbole, and the constant appeal to vigilance against the great Other over the hill – whether that be the Negro menace or the Yankee menace or the Red Agitator menace. Candidates competed to be the most outspoken defender of Southern womanhood, to pay the greatest tribute to the gallant fallen of the Lost Cause, to whip crowds of working-class white men into a mad frenzy that would drive them to go out and elect the kind of people who would then continue to leach money out of the South while keeping its poorest “below the salt in the pickle barrel,” in Wayne Flynt’s immortal phrase.

Southern-style politics doesn’t care about policy differences. Hell, it doesn’t care about policy at all. The Southern style of politics gets you the “Suppose a state trooper pulls your wife over one night. He turns out to be black. Think about it. Elect George Wallace” radio spots of 1970, or the “white hands” ad for Jesse Helms in 1990. That constant threat that the boogeyman is coming to get you, and only (INSERT WHITE CANDIDATE HERE) can stand firm against the assault of the forces of evil. Southern politics is about scaring the shit out of you until you pull that lever.

You know…Teabaggers. The hysterical cries of socialism, the dark warnings about the President’s real origins and nationality, the impending doom of a radical Muslim takeover or a radical feminist takeover or a Godless homosexual takeover – the “Tea Party” movement and its amen corner in the national broadcast media are the inevitable final product of the cult of Southern conservative populism that had its origins in the Redeemers and its apotheosis in George Wallace.

For almost eighty years, these forces were allied with the Democrats, at a time when both parties had their liberal and conservative wings. Then, for almost forty years, they were allied nationally with Republicans, until the South was as monolithically Republican in federal government as it had been Democratic thirty years prior. Since 1994, they have held the reins of power in the Republican party – Gingrich, DeLay, Lott, McConnell, and of course Bush; John Boehner of Ohio is the first non-Southerner to occupy a non-figurehead leadership position among national Republican officeholders since Bob Dole left to run for President in 1996. And in the past twenty years, the effective result has been to make the GOP the party of the South. California – a state that went GOP in six straight elections from 1968 to 1988 – is generally regarded as unobtainable for Republicans in a national election. New England – the traditional heartland of the Republican party for generations, the home base of Dewey and Rockefeller and Lodge, of rock-ribbed New Hampshire conservatism – has not a single Republican in the House of Representatives. Look again at that 1896 map, and then at 2004 and 2008 – the South is still solid; it’s just switched sides.

The polling numbers tell the tale. Presidential support, belief that the President is in fact an American citizen by birth, pretty much all aspects of approval of Obama in particular and the Democrats in general – the numbers are fairly consistent from the East to the Midwest to the Pacific, but skew wildly in the South. It’s not a coincidence. The South, after a couple of ascendant decades, is losing the Civil War again. That’s why you see the hysteria. When Medicare Part D passed in 2003, it was a half-trillion dollars worth of unfunded entitlement giveaway, which passed literally in the dead of night when the Speaker held a fifteen minute vote open for three hours (with the cameras turned off) until they could threaten, browbeat, and twist enough arms to get over 218. And nary a peep from the very people who have now decided that implementing a Nixon plan from 1974 amounts to the breaking of the seventh seal and the unleashing of the Antichrist.

That’s the politics of the South. And it will be the end of us all – if we let it.

I don’t know why I have a catastrophic irrational attraction to the lobby of a posh hotel. I think maybe a bit flipped in my brain back in 1983, when the family stayed at the Contemporary Resort Hotel during a Walt Disney World visit in the early days of EPCOT, and I was mesmerized by the monorail sliding silently through the Grand Canyon Concourse. (This may also be where I get my catastrophic irrational attraction to commuter rail transit, whether it be the Metro or the VTA light rail or Caltrain or the Underground or…but I digress.)

As it turns out, assorted lobbies of assorted Disney resorts became the scenes of a number of moments throughout my life, from 1989 to 2003. But somewhere along the way, I stumbled into others. Two stays at the Mayflower in Washington DC, right across the road from my future employer. A spring break spent in the Kansas City Riot Regency during the NAIA tournament – there wasn’t a Vitale-esque All-Lobby team, but if there had been, I would have been first team. More than one drive to Nashville to spend hours hanging out in the Opryland Hotel, with its outrageous jungle of greenery and fountains that to this day strikes me as the world’s greatest Quake map. And all that just gets you up to the end of the undergrad years.

I think the appeal lies in the fact that a very nice hotel means you’re away from home. You’re in rarified air, and normal activity is on hold in favor of something unique – dare I say, adventurous. Plus people are probably treating you very well (e.g. Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay) and have no objection if you want to swan across the lobby bearing a tumbler of $28 Scotch (e.g. Ahwahnee in Yosemite Valley). Something as simple as hanging out after a movie becomes an event if you’re doing it at Fahrenheit in the Ritz in Georgetown. And let’s face it: getting a spontaneous round of applause as we sailed through the St Francis, still in the tuxedo and wedding gown, is probably as close as we’ll ever get to feeling like we just won the Sugar Bowl. (For the record: she was wearing the gown.)

If I’d had a lick of sense, I’d’ve skipped out on buying tickets for the NCAAs and just spent my money drinking at the Doubletree in San Jose with the Vanderbilt entourage. At least it would have been over quickly and for less money. Assuming I’d had the sense to read the bar menu first…

NB: Yes, I did have the “El Capitini” this weekend at the Ahwahnee. However, it was their hotel bar’s signature cocktail, created to commemorate the ascent of El Capitan in 1958. Vodka, champagne, Cointreau, and (I think) just a dash of something pomegranate, served in a moderate-sized birdbath with a carabiner clipped to the stem. What the hell – you only go around once, so you may as well go around waving something with a sugared rim.