Are my eyes really blue?

There’s a lot of postmortem going around this week about the twentieth anniversary of the second invasion of Iraq, which by any definition was absolutely catastrophic. It crippled American power in ways both real and perceived. It squandered the moral high ground of September 11 and shredded the international support for attempting to thwart Al=Qaeda and its affiliates. It marked the final collapse of mainstream American media into a fetal position begging not to be called liberal or unpatriotic (never forget, Maddow fans: MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for being insufficiently enthusiastic about war in Iraq). And it marked the ascent of bullshit worship to the highest ranks of the GOP. From that moment on, if asked who they were going to believe, the Republican Party pledged to choose its leader over its own lying eyes.

Bullshit worship really began a decade earlier, though, when any and all manner of conspiracy and calumny against the Clintons was uncritically accepted as true, or at least as worthy of chin-stroking mournful-sounding “just asking questions.” Members of Congress shooting watermelons in their yard to disprove Vince Foster’s suicide should have been a sign that we were off the rails, and anyone with a lick of sense could have said “wait, this is getting crazy,” but between Rush Limbaugh (nay he writhe in Hell) and Roger Ailes (dittos!), a media ecosystem had emerged into which bullshit could thrive and flourish and eventually drown out rational thought and the evidence of one’s own eyes.

Thing is, if you can say whatever you want, believe whatever you want, and no one can force you to acknowledge anything you don’t want to be true, what you end up with is the cult of the Asshole. The Asshole is the embodiment of self-regard, of “I got mine fuck you”, of being able to shit on anyone else you like. That’s why there is a fundamental underlying substrate that connects Wall Street, the VCs of Silly Con Valley and the cult of the Founder, the Neo-Confederates in search of their next untermensch, and the army of car dealers and realtors and small business owners with a seventy-year inferiority complex that fueled the rise of the pre-Goldwater conservatism in the first place.

But what we have gotten in the last 20 years is a full subculture, an ersatz ethnic group of Whiteness that steers hard into green-beer Irishness and performative redneckery and loudly trumpeted how oppressed it is – because for the first time, it’s a genuine minority. You only have to look at California to see how powerless it is when the rules aren’t rigged in its favor with an Electoral College or a filibuster-armed Senate or complete gerrymandering – or when the identity of Whiteness is the basis of politics the way it is in the South.

And thus we come to a discomforting truth being borne out across the pond at the same time. The DUP has declared that it will not support the Windsor Agreement – thus opening the door to sandbag the Stormont assembly, in which they would presently be obligated to share power with Sinn Fein, who got more votes. Just as in America, it is an effort to throw on the brakes and halt a process that they could not stop at the ballot box. The DUP never supported the Good Friday Agreement, and is now holding it hostage in the name of hardening a Brexit that Northern Ireland did not vote for.

It is very hard not to feel like my people – the Scotch-Irish – are in fact history’s useful idiots, the ones who the wealthy of England or Wall Street or Fox News can always rely on to hate whoever The Man tells them to. The people whose lives were wrecked by corporate globalization, pointless endless wars and runaway for-profit health companies have turned their fiery wrath on…transgender people. Gay people were plentiful and affluent enough to push back, their precious self-starter small businesses depended too much on undocumented labor, their daughters were women, but by damn, they could sure go after that 0.3% of the population without fear of pushback!

My people aren’t inherently scared of anything different. But they don’t flinch from being taught to fear what is different, Never have. The best you can hope for is for them to learn it imperfectly in the first place, the easier to pull them away from it once they’re exposed to the wider world. But if we want the same kind of broadly centrist world of the 1950s that everyone seems fixated on, it’s going to require two things: 1) the acceptance that everyone is free and equal before the law and entitled to mind their business and live their life, and 2) the containment of boomers and bullshit-worshippers and a refusal to let them influence the political process any longer.

That’s it, ultimately. When you’ve spent twenty years fucking up, you don’t get to play any more, and you need to go stand in the corner and sit with the consequences of your wrongness while others clean it up. And that is what the GOP needs: the same kind of forty-years-in-the-wilderness exclusion that lasted from LBJ to Clinton. Every Republican needs to be made to disavow Trump, to disavow Bush, to regret the Iraq war and protest that they don’t just do whatever Fox tells them.

You’re not a Trumpist? Prove it. Beyond a shadow of doubt. And this had better be amazing. And until you do, your fitness for political and moral life is less than zero. And that has to stand up until they’re all gone. It’s the only way to get to something approximating normal.

And it’s never going to happen.

So thanks to a certain individual whose actions were either incredibly selfish or incredibly clueless (¿por que no los dos?), we returned from Disneyland to have my wife sick on Saturday and test positive for Covid on Sunday for the first time in the three years of t he pandemic. At that point, it was more or less inevitable that I would test positive as well, which I did on Tuesday…four hours after our house lost power due to wind. That’s right, high winds under a clear and sunny sky knocked our neighborhood completely off the grid along with 275,000 of our closest friends up and down the Peninsula.

We were down for a little over 48 hours, which frankly would have been a doddle if it hadn’t been for Covid. Alternately, a C19 positive test would be okay if you could just collapse on the couch and watch BritBox for a couple of days while ordering DoorDash. Instead, we were faced with the conundrum of “you have no electricity and you can’t be around people.” Which made things exceptionally tricky, as within a few hours, the cellular coverage at the house ceased to function altogether, only coming back sporadically in the middle of the night.

So in the grand scheme of things, this was a very good test of our 72 Hours readiness, and in the wake of having mucked out the fridge and plugged everything back in, these are my preliminary conclusions:

* We had gas and water uninterrupted throughout. If we had not had gas, we would have been cooking on the side burner of the new Weber grill – but at any given time we have four propane tanks in various states of readiness, so that probably could have held for a day or three.

* Water…well, we need to have more in stock than we have. It was nice to be able to shower, but that could be foregone in a pinch. As for the bathroom…well, that’s why they call it pea gravel, isn’t it? We probably could stand to have an Apocalypse Bucket in case of trafficking with Duce Staley. Speaking of which:

* The next town over was mostly OK, and we were able to drive over there to get cell signal and certain extra provisions. I would not count on that when the Big One comes. The flip side is that after The Big One we probably will not be obligated to report straight to work for a few days. The absence of internet access is going to be tougher to work around, because unless one has a Starlink system or similar, it’s a big ask to find a connection.

* As for things that take power, we have enough flashlights and cellphone battery packs to easily get through three days even before recharging things in one of the cars. It would be even nicer to have two-way charging in the ID.4, but that was a model year too late for us. As it is, we had the loan of a Jackery battery pack with a couple of solar panels, and that might provide enough power for rudimentary use of my wife’s CPAP and maybe to charge a laptop in a pinch as long as you have all day to move the solar panels for recharging. We’ll look into that. Without an actual generator, the refrigerator is probably toast anyway – but the freezer compartment of the kitchen fridge and the chest freezer in the garage both came through with flying colors. The rickety old beer fridge, less so – but we probably shouldn’t have had that much in its freezer as it is. (The beer is fine, as far as I can tell.)

* While power is back up, the AT&T internet access is not, nor is there a timetable for its return. We can tether off our phones for now, but that’s not a long term solution especially given the limits of our cell coverage, and while we could always drive to Starbucks, that is no more an option in an actual Big One than going into Starbucks with Covid and just camping out for two hours.

* In the finest traditions of the University of California Marching Band, I dare say we managed to adapt and perform.

In The Imagineering Story, a six part documentary on Disney+, someone says that Disneyland makes you feel young, because it’s like you remember, but it makes you feel better about getting older, because it’s gotten better with age. It’s got new attractions, new features, new cool stuff. And that dichotomy is in the service of making you feel like it’s going to be all right, that this is a step out of the real world and into the best world.

I suppose it’s no wonder that I thought of Disney parks as I was in London at this time last year. That was also a trip into a different reality, complete with rides and attractions and posh themed sleeping arrangements. And this year, a quick park jaunt took care of multiple things: birthday celebration, family obligation, flex of my own independence, the beginning of a badly needed month off. After having hit the park four times since the Covid restrictions were lifted, I have thoughts.

I absolutely agree about the aging. The two foundational experiences of Disney for me were 1989 and 2011. The first time, I was with friends, on property at the Contemporary, no grown-ups, in a world of endless possibility. And in 2011, I was doing the same thing, with different friends, in an all new hotel and park at California Adventure, and reliving an experience I didn’t think I could have again. And there’s a little of that in every visit – most notably in 2019, the opening week of Galaxy’s Edge, staying at the Disneyland Hotel for the first time and experiencing Black Spire Outpost for the first time, but there’s always that frisson of “I have escaped.”

If I’m the head of Disney Parks, the thing that keeps me up at night is that six of my twelve parks are now in places where I’m in partnership with an unreliable and totalitarian government, and China or Florida could screw me at any moment. Japan and Paris seem to be mostly all right, I guess, and then there’s Anaheim. Where the problem is…there’s nowhere left to go. You’re out of space, and they aren’t making any more Orange County. Which to me brings up the biggest question of them all…what are we gonna do about Tomorrowland?

See, in Florida, you at least have space to add a TRON Lightcycles. In Anaheim, your only hope is to retheme something, to change Tower of Terror to a Marvel ride or shrink Bugs Land down for Avengers Campus or turn Splash Mountain into Princess and the Frog and never mind where the mountain fits in a Louisiana swamp. And Tomorrowland is a giant field of two-cycle lawnmower engines surrounding huge blocks of asbestos. Look, I know it’s an original attraction, but Autopia has to go, because the juice ain’t worth the squeeze any more. And then there’s the existing show boxes, which have been turned into…what? Astro Blasters, which is better as Midway Mania across the plaza? An exhibition hall? What the Hell is in Captain EO’s old space now?

If I’m head of Imagineering, my entire legacy right now rests on finding some way to gracefully wind up an area that’s as dated and out of touch with reality as Frontierland and come up with a way of fitting something that matches the original aspiration into the available space without causing a billion dollars of environmental remediation. It is honestly an impossible challenge, but that’s what you go into Imagineering for, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, the number one attraction for me won’t open for another ten years at least. But California High Speed Rail, and a cheaper alternative to flying down and faster alternative to driving or Amtrak, would mean that it would be easier to get the Magic Key and then spend the morning at the park, the afternoon working from the hotel and the evening soaking up the vibes. Because I’ve reached a point where the park itself is the immersive attraction. Just being there is the sort of thing that we’ve had our fill of by day three, and yet after being home four days, we’re thinking about the next visit.

There’s something there. I just need to figure out how much of it I can replicate here.

It sounds like Rishi Sunak has somehow managed to mostly un-fuck the Northern Ireland Protocol which was dumped on him by…his predecessor but one, who in turn bluffed out his “oven ready Brexit” as a response to the unexpected secession from the EU…which he campaigned for in a referendum called by…his own party leader one preceding. And now the Windsor Agreement, so-called, is being questions and sandbagged by the very same bad-faith DUP who walked out of the NI Assembly to bring this deal about, and who provided the balance of majority for…the same party that called the referendum, signed the NI Protocol, and then spent three years wailing about the horrible burden of…the deal they negotiated.

Honestly, at this point, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking that the problem behind all of this is simply the fact that the Tories are in charge, and have been for almost thirteen years, and that they took over a country with a comparatively strong European economy and now want credit for partly re-attaching the leg they blew off with a shotgun themselves. One could also boggle at the fact that in that thirteen year period, the Tories have put up five different individuals as Prime Minister, four since the Brexit vote and three in the last twelve months. It rather begs the question of why there hasn’t been an election at this point.

And that goes back to 2010, when the Tories made a deal with the LibDems to get into government and then quickly passed a law that would guarantee them a full five years, rather than facing a vote of no confidence. Thanks largely to that, the Tories have been able to avoid accountability – gladly undoing their own rules to get rid of Theresa May or Boris Johnson without facing the voters. For all the turnover, they’ve only faced two general elections since Brexit – one which was won by Boris Johnson on the basis of outright misinformation and misrepresentation, and one very nearly lost by Theresa May and saved by selling out to the DUP.

The DUP has been a bad-faith player from the beginning, going back to their opposition to the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998. They lent their supply and confidence to the Tories in 2017 in exchange for being allowed to work their will in the North with the tacit protection of the Tories. As a result, when the DUP found themselves behind Sinn Fein and Alliance, they were able to fall back on “cross-community” and tank the NI Assembly rather than go into a position where they would enjoy only mildly reduced puissance. And now, despite the fact that a solid majority of the people of NI support this agreement, they will have the power to thwart it if they don’t get special feelings in their chicken parts about it.

This is of a piece with so many things. You could point to the Super League, and flailing powers in Spain and France (and England, if we’re keeping it a quid) trying to keep by rule what they cannot earn on the field or at the turnstiles. You could point to the Republican Party in the United States, clinging to national power through gerrymandering and the Electoral College and rigging the judiciary to their advantage. Right now, we are watching an old and fading generation trying to rewrite the rules of the game to keep their power and wealth at the expense of everyone who comes after.

Everything dies, as Bruce told us, that’s a fact. Nothing lasts forever. Those who rage against the dying of the light have a choice: accept the inevitability of life and death and do the best you can for those around you and those who will follow you, and thereby attempt to make yourself a glide path to the end of the line – or pretend it’s not going to happen, change the rules to say it can’t happen, and then die ugly when it comes for you all the same. The people whose future is being choked to death will not be content to shrug and say “well the rules clearly state that the Boomers can choke us to death, and the rules clearly state that we only get 3/5 of a vote” – and the people who have rigged the game may not like what happens when the players who are always made to lose decided to play a very different game.

Which is the problem with being just this age. I never could get my head around being in one’s 50s – it felt like a weird sort of no-man’s land where you were too old to even pretend to be young, but not old enough to retire, and an age where it was too late to start from scratch. So the idea that I’m pig-committed to a career path and a retirement savings solution that depend on other people’s greed and bad decisions…well, suffice to say, I’m looking forward to being under 55 and having my Social Security savings handed over to Goldman Sachs or some such shit while the generation that won’t let go continues to get its tax free Social Security benefits, and then in twenty years or so watching as retirement income gets taxed to the gills to stick it to boomers who are mostly dead by the people who got shafted for their first twenty years in the workforce.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way in my first year with a 5 on the front of it, it’s that nothing lasts forever and anything can be taken away from you at any time. All you can do is hold onto what you have, hope you don’t lose it, and learn to live with the loss when it comes. And it’s hard not to hear Robert Palmer’s most anomalous song echoing in the distance.

Johnny’s always running around trying to find certainty

he needs all the world to confirm that he ain’t lonely…

AUBURN 65

VANDERBILT 67

FINAL

WHAT IS HAPPENING???

(6) PENITENTIARY OF TENNESEE VILES 65

VANDERBILT 66

FINAL

NEVER BELIEVE IT’S NOT SOOOOOOOO

I find it interesting that we’re staring to see Trump pitching slurs against DeSantis. It’s pretty clear that the whole USP for DeSantis is “Trumpism without Trump”, and the only way for Trump himself to strike back against that is to say that the governor of Florida is not a real true believer. It’s pitched at the level of a third grade schoolyard spat – but then, that’s the intellectual level of Republican politics for the last quarter-century or more.

The standout feature of this kind of politics is how much it relies on not only stupidity, but weakness. Donald Trump prevailed over a field of fifteen other candidates simply because none of them could get traction in that huge a swamp, and therefore all of them were waiting for someone else to fail. And they all thought ”well Trump will lose eventually, and I can pick up his supporters and vault to the top of the pack.” And that is the weakness. Everyone is afraid to stand up to Trump, to stand up to those who support him. Had just one candidate confronted him and said “you’re wrong and you’re going to lose it all for us, and I’m not having it”, and had the Never Trump people all rallied behind this single candidate, and had the press not been high on the daily fart of another Trump appearance, he never could have won the nomination.

But everyone was too weak to stand up to him until it was too late. And now, here you have DeSantis. DeSantis, who won Florida by twenty points in the middle of the biggest Republican national El Foldo in a midterms in decades. DeSantis, who the New York Times is dying to anoint as Not Trump (speaking of stupid and weak, but we’ll get to that). DeSantis, who has made no secret of wanting to be the nominee in 2024 and whose entire policy program revolves around giving Fox News viewers special feelings in their chicken parts. And he will not denounce Trump. He will not tell off Trump. He is standing on the bridge of the ship while Trump teeters on the plank and he doesn’t have the balls to push him, because he is terrified that personal attachment to a whining Yankee who is electoral poison is somehow a greater draw in the South than open racism and hippie-punching.

Stupid and weak.

And that’s the other thing we come back to. The GOP has won any national success in the last twenty-five years on gerrymandering, technicalities and war panic. Trump is not that popular. His policies are not that popular. And yet, for fear of his supporters, the mainstream press insists on telling us how much we all hate Joe Biden, how much we all hate Hillary Clinton, how bad the economy is and how out of control inflation is – when individual commodity prices can be easily shown to be a product of supply chain breakdown, or avian flu (for eggs), or OPEC manipulation (for gas), and when corporations are laying off employees by the thousands at a time when profits are through the roof. Yet after fifty years of being mau-mau’d by the right, the stalwarts of the mainstream media are in thrall to providing they’re not liberal and as a result bend over backwards to tongue-bathe the most easily disproven liars among us.

Stupid and weak.

And it’s no wonder that Trump’s strongest state is Alabama. The state of the big mules, the state of company coal towns and sharecropper scamming, the state where the poor have to be kept down below the salt in the pickle barrel so that Alabama Power and TCI and Blue Cross and Georgia Pacific can have their way with a nice healthy bidness environment. A state where the great and the good have fallen about themselves for decades to keep people weak and stupid and offer them nothing in return but Baptist-fried racism and the promise that you’re better off than the darkies and your reward is coming in the next world. It is a mentality that the GOP has taken national with Trump as its flag-bearer: you just believe whatever we say and we will give you someone to shit on.

Stupid and weak.

Because what’s the platform at this point? What are the issues? What are the things that are the highest priority? Trans people are gross and icky? The cops should be allowed to do murder without explanation or consequence? White people should never be limited in how much firepower they can accumulate? Children must never find out that someone might be different from them – or worse, that they might be different from someone else?

Stupid. And. Weak.

I don’t want to live in a country where stupid and weak is aspirational.

Sometimes, in idle moments, I think about what it would be like if I were actually able to retire someday. A small walkable village somewhere in the west of Ireland, or even on the coast somewhere between Pacifica and Aptos, maybe. And I think that I would need the AppleTV for things like BritBox and PBS and Disney+, and my Kindle for reading, and maybe a HomePod that i could ask for music from Apple Music or SomaFM or maybe even RTE, depending…

And then I start to think about what I would need from the phone in that situation. Music? Well, a good bit of the local stuff I rely on could be on an SD card converted to MP3, and Twitter is dead and half my friends are barely on social media in any way that can’t be managed by group chat, and…could I get by with a modern Nokia flip phone? And my hand strays toward the order button until I realize I don’t have a personal SIM to put in it any more, let alone an excuse for it when the iPhone is work phone, personal phone and shutdown night phone all in one. And then it occurs to me to think about how many phones I went through in that span between late 2000 and mid-2007, and how many more I wanted and never got hold of, and how stale the world of phones is, and…

Did the iPhone actually ruin everything?

I’ve made much of the fact that the phone crossed the finish line ten years ago. Yes, nicer screens, yes better camera and faster networks, but what new features have descended on phones since NFC payment and different biometric unlock? (This is a good spot to point out that the Moto X not only supported swipe or PIN login, but NFC-based login where you could tag a sticker on your desk or a little clip on your pocket to unlock the device, something I haven’t seen anyone else ever adopt…and lest we forget it took 7 years for Apple to mostly approximate the feature set of that original Moto X.) The iPhone 13 mini which I intend to ride to its death does everything a little better than the original iPhone SE that it eventually replaced as my personal phone, but what does it do that the SE couldn’t (albeit slower or fuzzier, I grant you)? And what did the SE do that the iPhone 4S couldn’t? That 4S, free as a warranty fix in the spring of 2012, had Siri and shot HD video and had GPS and was one-handable.

I guess MagSafe? Maybe? MagSafe isn’t bad, especially for a battery booster, but then, I used to carry a SonyEricsson Z520 that went four days between charges. I also used to carry an iPod alongside it, but now, in a world where I don’t get out much and don’t work remotely…would it be enough to say “hey Siri, play the St Patrick’s Day Essentials playlist on Apple Music” and let the fabric thing on the desk do the job? If I lived in a place where the pubs all had their own trad – or the carefully-curated Pandora stream at Trials – maybe?

In the end, the biggest thing that made the old tools viable is that they only had to be a phone, or a Kindle, or an audio player. The new phone has to be everything, but it also has to be a lifeline in a world where all of the Castro Street Dining Consortium have moved away, and Vox is a news site instead of an LiveJournal successor, and the only way to digest news is second hand through foreign podcasts. Technological solutions to social problems don’t exist, more’s the pity.

It would feel nice to think you could still get by with a flip phone, though.

There’s a lot going on. Very little of it actually good. A lot of holding breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This kind of anxiety is like asthma – you have medication, inhalers, you know what to do if you’re going to Tahoe or going on a plane or what have you; soon as the hills are all on fire and the air quality is 300, though, your regular coping mechanisms are not going to be sufficient and you can either shelter in place or go outside and get hit hard.

The flames aren’t all around us, but there are a lot of flammable goods between us and the fire, and there’s a lot of crossing fingers and hoping the winds don’t shift before we can get some hoses or dig some trenches or what have you. it’s both micro and macro, made worse by the kind of people who always told you “well that could never happen” and then, years after it did, have the gall to say “well that could never happen again.”

One place that apparently didn’t learn those lessons is a little conservative-arts school on the west side of Birmingham. Comes today the news that BSC has to come up with $200 million over the next three years in order to survive, of which they have only raised about $46 million – and want another $37 in state, federal and local money ASAP or they might go under next academic year. There is a very real chance they will commemorate my 30th anniversary by ceasing to exist.

This is hardly surprising. The fool who succeeded Neal Berte as President went frog-sticking without a light, demolishing the athletics program because it was too expensive but adding football and an on-campus stadium, while simultaneously kicking off a wave of building and eating the seed corn to do it – and then came the 2008 financial crisis, and then the revelation of accounting irregularities and the financial hit from that, and then a decade later, C-19. And now all of a sudden the bills have come due and the money isn’t there any longer.

Which is not surprising. In my day, BSC was mostly for people whose daddy owned half of some Lower Alabama county, so they could sit on the front porch of the frat house for four years before going back to take over the business. Most of those people just go to Bama now, I suspect. The balance of the student body was filled out with people who had one thing in common: a rejection letter from Vanderbilt. (Come on – black and gold colors, basketball first, stole the alma mater word for word, lots of red brick – you tell me.) The problem is, BSC was always only suitable for fitting you out for a life in Alabama, and ideally in Birmingham. And if you wanted to be a politician, you were at Bama anyway. If you wanted to be an engineer, you were at Auburn or UAB. If you wanted to be a doctor, you were at UAB or maybe South Alabama. If you were gonna make a preacher, you’d go to Samford. If you were a person of color, you were anywhere else at all. Even within the state, Montevallo (the hated rival) and Spring Hill College were on the come-up, and there wasn’t a huge delta with any number of other private schools that they would play in football – Millsaps, Rhodes, even Sewanee was a decided step up.

Ultimately, it begged the question: what is Birmingham-Southern College for? I don’t think there’s really an answer for that any more, or at least, not one that would compel people to throw cash in quantity. Might be better off as an adjunct of UAB, the way Peabody became for Vanderbilt or Oxford College is for Emory. Or maybe the plans from the mid-70s will finally come to fruition, and Miles College will finally get its new campus after all. That honestly might be the best solution: a new combined institution, more HBCU than not, fit for a modern 21st century Birmingham.

Something like that might actually get me to claim them again.

#15 Arkansas 84

Vanderbilt 97

FINAL

“Never believe it’s not sooooooo…”