Are my eyes really blue?

I went down to the local at 2:30 this afternoon, just in time for happy hour. A pint of robust porter for $7, cheesy bread, and a pleasant hour and a half of just sitting around in the neighborhood bar and grill. Assorted folk on the rail, a couple of tennis moms at a bar table, a gang of high school bros congregating around fries in a booth. It felt like the neighborhood spot, the place where folks come for everything. It doesn’t hurt that it shares a parking lot with a Starbucks and a grocery store, all within walking distance.

And then, two miles away and easily bikeable, is the actual downtown. Alternately in another direction two miles away is the actual downtown of the next town over. There is a cozy village here, as materially accessible as Shepherd Market is from the Park Lane. And if I’m willing to hop a Lyft, there’s the Duke. Or Trials. Or O’Flaherty’s and Dr Funk, the latter of which is the closest thing to Mr Fogg’s without going up to the city.

Walkable is a big part of it. I need to be walking more. I need to be going to the gym again, doing something to get the kind of exercise I did on this trip. But I also need to embrace the cheeky pint. Yes, bird never flew on one wing, but instead of depending on an afternoon or evening, I need to be willing to pop out for an hour for just the one, the way I would (and did) in London or Amsterdam or elsewhere. And if I’m going to do that, then I need to be downtown more, availing myself of the no less than four perfectly good options for “just the one.”

I have my stuff. I have all the stuff I could need. I have books, podcasts, fresh earbuds at last. I even have some stuff I didn’t have after the 2022 trip, like an indoor pub night space at home and a local church community to connect with other people. The lesson from this trip is that until they run a light rail down Foothill Expressway or install a canal next to the back patio at Fibbar Magee’s, I have all the pieces I need to live locally the way I want to in Europe. The trick is just to do it. If a few bucks is the price of perfecting the illusion, find someplace else to skimp and spend that few bucks.

Break out the lightweight blazers, the cotton caps, and put the socks back in a drawer until November. Spring has sprung.

Dublin and Amsterdam had more in common than you think. Both acutely aware of their history, both served by trams down the middle of main thoroughfares, both dominated by an iconic beer brand in their taverns and restaurants, both places where you could get by entirely in English without a bit of bother, and – on this trip at least – both gray and rainy almost the entire time bar one morning and early afternoon of pleasant sun without being too hot.

But Amsterdam, for all the novelty of the canals and the road system they create where pedestrians, bicycles and tiny speck city cars can occupy the same space, felt to me like English-speaking Paris. It came off as a bit smug, a bit spiky, a bit “oh it’s you,” and this was not helped by the preposterous light rail system where you are obliged to tag on AND off while also entering and exiting the car through different doors. More than once the doors were slammed on us before we could get out of the train and in one case they actually pulled out while we were still trying to disembark, and we had to make our way back on foot.

And the other thing that was hard to square was that you got that “oh…Americans” that almost everyone gives you in Europe (there’s a reason I always identify myself as Californian), but Amsterdam – for all the pot and prostitution – is the country that gave us colonial capitalism, chattel slavery, the Orange Order in Ulster and Boers in South Africa. It was tough not to have a snarl of “we learned it from you.”

Ireland…well, I’ve mentioned before Pete Brown’s like about how most countries have a motto like “God and my right” or “Get off my land” while Ireland’s is “a hundred thousand welcomes” and it certainly felt that way. The person behind the counter will give you what you need, whether it’s a pharmacist sizing you up for decongestant and cough suppressant or a barman offering you a cup of coffee to space out those pints. Every time I’m in Ireland, all I can think is how human the scale of life is – I know my cousin and I joke about the Irish retirement plan, but whether it’s Dublin (larger than San Jose) or Galway (the size of Mountain View) or Ballyferriter (the size of a peanut butter sandwich), every Irish place feels like somewhere I could be comfortable and not feel like the world around me is going to Hell. Which is probably why I need to spend two and a half weeks living in Dublin so I can see the downsides and have some perspective, or at least find some more political podcasts to see what’s wrong there.

The other thing that sticks out to me from this trip is the specialization. There were drugstores, but they weren’t all purpose like a CVS or Walgreens, they were strictly selling medical stuff. There weren’t any big box stores, just clothing stores or electronics stores or grocery stores. It felt like a throwback to the main-street pharmacy of my small town childhood, which coupled with everyone’s personable nature…well, it’s hard to explain, but it feels like what Alabama could have been like if the state had made better choices for the last hundred years or so.

So that’s pretty much the story. The obvious question now: lessons learned? Things to bring back? Of which.

The last time I saw Prague was in January 1992, only a little over 2 years past the Velvet Revolution. I was 19 years old, able to get by with barely-passable German far more easily than English, and in my memory the 700 year old beer hall was serving a giant liter mug of midnight-black beer with a head you could set a quarter on and too strong to contemplate.

When the lady behind the counter at the hotel asked us if we’d visited Prague before and I said “32 years ago,” she got a look I couldn’t place and then said “well…welcome to the new Prague.” Which, I get it – today Prague is the Nashville of Central Europe, the home of wild drunken stag nights, a place where the car service from the airport includes “lap dancers” on a list of offered amenities, a reasonably-priced party town for the young and wild-spirited, very much in the spirit of its Belle Epoque past as the spiritual capital of Bohemia.

Prague feels European. By which I mean to say, you know you are not in an English-speaking or American-influenced country. The fact that they don’t use the Euro adds to this; converting koruna to dollars and back took me most of the week to figure out (although I’m not going to lie, beers for $4 or less is magical). Forty-some years of Communism didn’t bother taking down the art nouveau architecture, with the result that it feels like a less expensive and more accessible Paris. After a couple of days in the nice hotel, which I ruined with the worst bout of food poisoning in my life (never eat “shrimp quesadilla” in a landlocked country), we wound up in the Flora neighborhood, and thus began one of the stranger weeks of my life.

It’s a weird dynamic to wake up, eat breakfast (something I only seem to do on vacation), kiss my wife goodbye as she heads for the office, and then be left to my own devices to kill time from around 9 to around 4. I was working remotely, on the sly, and 4 to midnight approximated 7 to 3 in California, which was enough to fake out the company and play it off as though i were still in the front room of my own house. So I had six or seven hours to kill with random perambulations, after which I had to come back to the room and go to work – after which I had to lie down and try to fall asleep, which proved impossible. I don’t think I fell asleep before 2 AM any day i was working, because you really do need time to let your mind wind down.

The other quirky thing is that when you wake up on Central European time, you have a bunch of stuff to get through on your phone from the day before – and then you basically have five or six hours of radio silence before the East Coast wakes up. For someone who refreshes his phone more or less constantly all day, this was unsettling. Everyone I knew was asleep or at work themselves and I was left to my own devices – a sense that hit me in Budapest in 1992 when I woke up at 2 AM all alone in the Hotel Ifjusag. But three decades on, I had resources I didn’t have back then – an iPhone, Internet access, and a much better sense of urban exploration.

So I set off, on foot, secure in the knowledge that Apple Maps could get me back where I needed to go and my transit pass on the phone could be my magic carpet for trams and buses and metro alike. I sought out that 700 year old beer hall, which turned out to be a little over 500 years old, and the giant intimidating pitch black beer turned out to be a half liter of brown lager with a typically Czech head and only 4.7% ABV, and it was delicious. I drank Pilsner at the first bar that ever served it, and while I will never be a Pilsner drinker, I get how it managed to conquer the world. I took a tram up past Prague Castle and found myself in the tiny neighborhood of Novy Svet, with its winding medieval cobbled streets and a coffee shop a step down into a centuries-old building. And I walked through Flora, a pleasantly quiet mostly residential stretch that nonetheless had bars and trams and plaques commemorating resistance fighters in 1945.

It was quiet. It was pleasant. It was far from the worst place to be an expat working remotely for a company back in the US. And in a lot of ways, it felt more normal – the Atrium Flora mall across from the hotel was like a mall from days gone by, with a cleaners and a McDonalds and clothing stores and a newsstand and a tobacconist and a toy shop. Not like the “everything is geared toward the Chinese luxury tourist” malls in the Bay. It felt like a place I could spend a lot of time and be all right, language barrier notwithstanding.

And this is crucial: I wore a BSC hat out in public, willingly, for the first time in at least 18 years. Because I was closing the loop. I was there for the kid who didn’t know that in three decades, his biweekly take-home would be more than what it cost to send him on that trip back then. For the kid who didn’t know anyone, who felt as completely lost in Birmingham as in Bratislava, who was too callow and too Baptist and too scared to know his way around a cheeky half. I always reply to anyone who says “it gets better” with “when and how”, but if it actually does, sometimes you have to take a moment and acknowledge it.

Of which.

It was in a random neighborhood in Denver last October where the thought first occurred to me: brick is what I key on. There’s precious little brick left in the Bay Area, thanks to 1906 and 1989 and the unsuitability of unreinforced masonry as building material in earthquake country. But the neighborhood of early-20th century low brick buildings of two or three stories reminded me of Asheville, or of the bits of the Southside of Birmingham that first tipped my notice back in 1985. And then a walk through the France section of EPCOT in November confirmed it.

The neighborhood as urban village: that’s the thing I always seem to imagine. The confluence of old brick buildings, some centuries old, the presence of canals from an era before rail, the presence of streetcars or trams for anything that’s too far to do on foot.

The apotheosis of this, of course, is Shepherd Market. A tiny square with a couple of side streets in and out and a couple more pedestrian passageways. Inside: restaurants, barber shops, a couple of corner shops with soda and magazines and knockoff phone chargers, no fewer than four pubs, a tobacconist, a pharmacy, a hardware store. Apartments over almost all of them, many associated with centuries of practitioners of the oldest profession until only a couple of decades ago.

We’ve stayed at the Park Lane four times now – five if you count the one-night stopover at the end of the trip – but I only realized Shepherd Market was there at the end of a previous trip. These last two times, it has been where I get my haircut and straight razor shave, where I grab my first pint of the trip at Ye Grapes, where I can be assured of grabbing a couple bottles of Coke Zero to take back to a hotel that seems to have a deal with Pepsi in every country. It is a place of imagination: that perfect other realm where there is no job, no American politics, nothing to think about other than where shall we go today and what do we feel like doing.

In William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard thinks of London as “mirror world” – different plugs for different electricity, different light switches, different weight to the coins and different denominations. I feel that, big-time. A world where a pint of beer is a hefty and generous measure, but where as likely as not it’s barely 4% alcohol by volume. A place where fountain soda is basically unobtainable other than at American fast food chains, and God help you if you want a portion larger than a half liter even there. A place where coffee means espresso and is served in a thimble, a place where ice in a beverage is one piece at best the size of a Monopoly die. A place where I eat more vegetarian food in a week than I do the rest of the year in America, because it’s plentiful and better. A place where the wheat doesn’t put my wife’s immune system on monkey tilt. A place where instead of dealing with rideshare apps and their casual exploitation of distributed servantry, you put your hand up to hail the best cabs in the world – or climb to the top of a double-decker bus and enjoy the view from the front.

And yet, even as London is our own personal Disneyland, our friends there are contemplating getting out. Because just as Austin and Nashville and Birmingham can’t escape Texas or Tennessee or Alabama, London is trapped in England, in Brexitland, in a tabloid press culture and a non-urban population incapable of relinquishing imperial pretensions, A city that was the financial capital of the planet and the greatest cultural melting pot of our time until voters outside the M25 decided that they could vote themselves a British moon on a British stick. I know about all of this, thanks to BBC Sounds and Londonist and the sardonic remarks on BritBox panel shows, but when I’m in London it feels like something that never touches me, like what it must be like for people who don’t know or care or think about politics. I can just be. (Especially since for all its own bigotries, English conservatism doesn’t seem particularly hell-bent on ending abortion access or burning books. Their attitudes toward trans people are desperate, but that’s another post.)

London is what I think of when I think of getting away now. The Palm Court of the Park Lane, indie-chill music overhead and a glass of Auchentoshen on one big rock to hand, memories of our honeymoon or the time we just decided to live in London for three weeks and pretend we were wealthy and retired. Winding cobbled streets, a cheeky half of cask ale literally around almost every corner, the entire Mr Fogg’s chain of delightfully immersive cocktail parlors. A mirror world. Work doesn’t matter, politics doesn’t matter, we have no obligation but to enjoy ourselves and take lots of pictures. Sit in the club room with a fizzy clear lemonade (and maybe just the least splash of cognac on top) and use a big piece of hotel stationery and my favorite blue-black pen to write out what we want to see tomorrow.

But there was more to this trip than London. Of which.

Birmingham-Southern College is shutting down.

I don’t know how to feel about this.

I stand by my previous remarks: BSC was the biggest mistake of my life. Fortunately, years of drugs and therapy have helped me understand how I made that mistake, and how much of it was not of my doing, and how much harm I did myself from years of trying to go back and keep fixing that mistake and the others that spiraled out from it. And I suppose thirty years after graduation, it’s far enough in the past that I’ve learned to walk around the broken step that leads to the black hole.

It’s hard not to feel weird about seeing a big chunk of your past detach itself, like a calving glacier, and disappear beneath the waves. The only people I can really talk about this with are one or two folks on Bluesky, people whose government names I don’t even know. When I left BSC, it was with essentially no friends but my psychotic girlfriend, and when she finally cost me my Vanderbilt career – or caused me to cost myself said career – I was left with a void that I spent literal decades trying to either fill with meaning or retcon into something else. At some level, I think I hoped that somehow BSC would do what Birmingham accomplished, and evolve into a place I would again be happy to claim and be associated with. I think they could have, and they were on the right track, but they had too far to come and started far too late to make it.

After hearing the news, I found myself out in the shed digging for some stuff I’d boxed up. A sweatshirt. A pennant. The ubiquitous opaque container. A few caps. The pewter engraved flask I bought myself because I didn’t have anyone else to buy it for me. The football jersey I had made for myself at a point when transitioning straight to Division III with football would have been a fun and interesting swerve and not a blindsiding comedown based on a fraudulent vision. And the class ring – not the bespoke design that was yet another dose of Vanderbilt envy, but the stadium-top 90s style with its degree that I never used adorning one shank. Except I suppose I did use it to get into Vanderbilt, do the resume laundering and collect an MA that would give me a leg up at NGS and Apple.

I mean, the things I was taught at BSC pale next to what I learned, and how I fell into a life lived on defense rather than offense, and how that manifested itself for a quarter century. And when I disavowed it in 2006, I felt none the worse for disclaiming it. And at some primal Celtic level, I am grimly satisfied that bad conduct has had consequences, even thought a lot of people are going to suffer as a result. I hope Miles can move in, or UAB can take the opportunity to establish a presence and a residential college, or something at least happens to preserve Yeilding Chapel and the planetarium.

The fight song didn’t have words, the alma mater was a direct word for word lift of Vanderbilt’s, and the only campuswide traditions were getting thrown in the fountain by your friends and having smoke blown up your ass by everyone in authority, but it was a thing that happened to me for four years and now it’s not there anymore, and will not have an opportunity for redemption.

So it goes.

If there were any doubt that Merrick Garland is a mediocre hack with banana pudding between his ears, I don’t know why, given the desultory reluctance to do anything about the events of the January 6 attack on Congress. But the announcement of an antitrust suit against Apple yesterday should have dispelled any questions.

There are plainly things that Apple could be dinged for. Mostly because they already have, by an EU determined to take a chunk out of the hide of American tech companies. And the things they have been dinged for are illuminating, as are the things they haven’t. The EU didn’t view Messages as an issue, because unlike the US with its fixation on “green bubbles”, literally everyone in Europe is on WhatsApp – which is in the App Store. They said nothing about “super apps”, because WhatsApp is a product of China’s authoritarian marketplace and nothing anyone in Europe uses any more than they do in the United States. They did say a lot about the App Store – and Apple is already deploying the framework for additional App Store options to be run by third parties. Whether that works has yet to be seen, but it’s in progress.

The problem with the DOJ suit is that it seems to have been whipped up three years ago by someone without any experience of tech, and not touched since. “Green bubbles,” about which some people are entirely too much in their feelings, are a product of carriers sticking with SMS and MMS to the point Apple felt the need to build their own superior solution (as did Facebook, twice, and as did Google, more times than anyone can remember, and as did Signal, which is the one you should be using). Things like the Amazon Fire Phone failed not because of anything Apple did, but because it was shit on toast.

In the macOS settings, you have three options for apps: install from the App Store only, install only from the App Store or from verified developers, or install anything from anyone. Option one is what the iPhone has now, option two is what Apple is moving to for iOS in Europe, and option three – which is not the default in Android at all, for what it’s worth – is asking for Ed Earl Brown to fling down his phone with the same disgust as his virus-riddled HP Pavilion running WinXP. I suspect that implementation of something similar in iOS – choose from these three levels of security and buy the ticket, take the ride – is probably inevitable and will disembowel a huge chunk of this case, as will the RCS implementation in iOS 18.

It seems like most of the DOJ’s case is based on vibes, like suing Apple because they should have built Messages for Android or because super apps should be a thing or because CarPlay shouldn’t be superior to the typical car infotainment system. It’s a piss poor case, honestly, but that means nothing with the right forum-shopping and a good jury draw. But the real dagger is that this case seems to revolve far more around the harm to Spotify or to Epic than any harm to the end-user, and the fact that this is rhetorical flagship case – rather than going after Google or Facebook – uncomfortably suggests that Puddin’head Garland is far more worried about the well being of companies than people. Which makes it just as well he didn’t wind up on the Supreme Court, really. Shame Doug Jones couldn’t also have wound up at the DOJ instead.

I skipped the State of the Union for what feels like the 26th consecutive year, and am no worse off for having done so. To all accounts, though, Uncle Joe delivered the goods in a setting where everyone was primed to expect Weekend At Biden’s. Followed by a former Machine SGA president from the University of Alabama delivering the breathy baby voice horror stories of any Sunday night Baptist service. Between the two, we have begun the 2024 campaign in earnest: the first collision between reality and Cable News Make Believe, with democracy itself at stake.

Because there’s no hiding it anymore. No pretending there’s some kind of miracle get out of rematch free card, no matter how much CNN and the New York Times want to wish it into existence. Donald Trump will be representing the GOP for the third straight election in a world where his record of venality and incompetence has been festooned with multiple criminal charges in three separate jurisdictions, half a billion dollars in civil liability, and four more years of delusion and conspiracy theory that looks far more like dementia and decompensation than anything Biden has ever exhibited. And in most polls, he’s running neck and neck with the President.

And to make matters worse, the rigged judiciary is breaking things his way – the case that should be the end of him is in limbo with a judge he himself appointed, somehow, and he is being transparently protected, and the system shrugs. But then, when it took Merrick Garland two years for his pudding brain to cough up “maybe we should be investigating a a coup attempt,” it’s hardly surprising.

For some reason, we decided that investigating and prosecuting someone who was running for office was inherently a political act, without considering that in doing so, we basically grant criminal immunity to anyone running for office. And the instant someone worries about the implications for potential political violence, the terrorists have won. The most successful practitioners of terrorism in America have always, always been the racist right, from the Klan to the Birmingham bombers to Tim McVeigh to the January 6 insurrectionists. Yet we cannot devote one percent of the energy of post-September 11 to pushing back against a coup attempt by an anti-democratic mob.

I don’t know. Every Democratic win seems to just make the Enemy more intractable and the political press more supine. Things that would have been career-ending twenty years ago are blithely ignored now. Consequences are for people who aren’t rich or white enough. And even if Biden clocked 40 states and 370 electoral votes and 55% of the popular vote, does anyone think for a second that Republicans would shake their heads and say “well we got beat” rather than start back in on denying reality and threatening lives if they don’t get what they want?

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, age 81…you have less than eight months to save the world. And even then, it still won’t be saved for good.

I know how Wile E. Coyote felt.

As long as you keep running and don’t look down, you won’t fall. As soon as you consider your circumstances, you’re cooked. On a day when the Supreme Court aided and abetted the Trump scheme to kick the can past Election Day at the same time New York refused to indulge his “appeal bond on layaway” scheme, it’s difficult not to consider that we are hanging by a thread in so many ways. If you state it factually, “a bad president who lost fair and square and attempted to use violence and fraud to remain in power is attempting to get re-elected to avoid the consequences of his actions, and could win” is facially insane. And yet.

In a year where I reluctantly acknowledged the God-shaped hole in my being and began working on filling it, it’s perhaps obvious to say that I’m taking a lot on faith – faith that the system can take the strain again, faith that enough people will pull the lever for the cause of democracy and consequences, faith that I won’t have to make hard choices about how to live in a world where America would willingly put that melting garbage turd back in the Oval Office. Faith that somehow things will work out. Faith without works is dead, so I will have to figure what I can do to help do the work of making sure it doesn’t happen. But that work is hard for me to engage with and not cripple myself with anxiety and fear along the way.

Meanwhile, we can stay in the house for the foreseeable future…but who knows how long we can afford the property tax in retirement. We dodged a bullet on needing legal assistance for the last 12 months…but who knows when someone will appear out of nowhere to make trouble. I’m still working 100% remote…with no agreement, no policy, and nothing to say they couldn’t shitcan me at any time for not having come into the office for months. Nothing is promised to you in this life, but it’s difficult to think about how much that actually means. For someone who’s always running around trying to find certainly, it is an exceptionally challenging way to live.

And I haven’t had much to say on here for a while. Baseball might get me back into sports, but aside from being dragged along into the Super Bowl, I haven’t kept up with Vandy basketball or even watched that much Saturday morning Premier League lately. I’ve been skipping podcast episodes rather than contemplate American politics. I feel decent, mood-wise, as long as I don’t think too much, but I also take longer getting out of bed in the morning or bringing the laundry in to fold or remembering to shower and shave. Missing a trip to the pub is a shrug rather than a “when am I going to make this up.”

I’d like to want to do stuff again. I have assembled all the pieces to do stuff, just not the motivation and desire. But a good chunk of that could be the cocoon, the effort to preserve my sanity by not allowing myself to be too much in this world again. I’d like to believe we could reach a point where better things are possible. I’d like to believe the best days are still to come.

For now, I’ll take as consolation that I still want to believe.

More fool me, I gave up on Alabama football when Mike Shula limped out of town and the Tide went through the foolishness of dancing around RichRod for a month before wildly overpaying for a floundering NFL coach who’d won a title at LSU a few years earlier. And I thought that even if he did have a ring, hell, I’m not sure Bear Bryant was worth $4 million a year.

Well don’t I feel like a jackass.

Six national championships, the same as the Bear, and in fewer seasons. Four Heisman trophy winners, where previously there were none. At all. The first 14-win season, the first 15-win season, and most importantly, success in an era unlike anything the Bear ever had to deal with: 24/7 sports talk radio, social media, a conference title game and then a four-team playoff (fully half the Bear’s championships were awarded before the bowl game!), and recruiting 365 days a year with the kind of scholarship limitations and NCAA scrutiny that simply didn’t exist before the 1980s.

Saban did it with recruiting, obviously: schematic advantage is nice but if you can put 20 new five-star players on the roster every year, talent will eat schematic advantage alive. Not that they couldn’t scheme; Alabama started off with the man-ball Neanderthal smashmouth game and when the spread-hurry came in he asked “is this what we want football to be?” and tacitly answers “aight, bet” before turning Alabama into a lightning offensive powerhouse. Much like the Bear – and in a decade less time – he pivoted his entire philosophy and won just as much with the new one as the old.

And to be honest, that’s probably a big part of why he’s getting out now. Starting next year, it’s going to be a longer road yet to a title – a 12 team playoff, meaning possibly 16 games to a finish, which puts you where the NFL was for years. And speaking of the NFL, the players get paid now, but there are no multi-year contracts, no salary cap, no cost containment or long-term certainty, and now you have to re-recruit your entire roster every year and hope that you can poach more from everyone else than they’re poaching from you. And while Bama spent wildly on the things you could legally spend on – assistant coaches, facilities, equipment, stadium improvements – now there’s an entire new level of spending required, which means more fundraising and glad-handing boosters and activity that takes away from the recruiting and game day prep and actual coaching to win those now-16 games.

College football shifted hard and broke something in the BCS-CFP era. The game in 1991 was very different from where we got to by 2014, never mind now, and at some point, when you have your own Crimson Infinity Gauntlet, what more do you possibly have to prove at age 72? It’s time to call it a day. Bear was three years dead by your age.

Have a Coke and a Little Debbie and hit some unsuspecting kid at the Publix with a Deez Nuts joke, Coach. You’ve earned it.

The last time the Republicans took a loss with anything approximating grace was 1976, two years after Watergate with a candidate who had never won anything bigger than his Congressional district in Michigan, and with the party in turmoil over which was was up. Since then, they have dismissed Bill Clinton as illegitimate because he didn’t win 50% (despite having the most votes), Barack Obama for being a secret Muslim and not a citizen (despite being Congregationalist and born to a US citizen in a Honolulu hospital), and Joe Biden for having the temerity to get more votes than Dear Leader Trump after four years of incompetence harnessed to Russian cuckoldry.

We are where we are because a plurality of Republicans would rather embrace Nazis than have to take the L.

The conservative takeover that took off like a rocket in 1980 was in many ways the product of the end of the postwar boom in the 1970s. Time was, everyone was swimming in money, and a top marginal tax rate of 70% was not so much of a big deal – especially if it means guns and butter and free in-state tuition and that one high school graduate could support a family and home ownership and even a pool all the way to his [sic] pension-fueled retirement. Then the economy turned south, other countries caught up to us, and we embarked on our long fifty-year experiment in using bigotry to protect wealth. And with every reversal in fortune, the wealthy and bigoted doubled down.

Because this really is an existential crisis for them. If you can’t accumulate all the money you want without having to do your bit for society, if you can’t shit on everyone who isn’t just like you, then what is the point of living? It was a lot more quiet in years gone by, but then, once forced to admit people of color were human, gay people were human, trans folk are human – well, the reason the arguments sound the same every time out are because they all boil down to “I shouldn’t have to acknowledge that there are other people if they aren’t just like me.”

There’s no easy way out. There are obvious moves that could be taken if there were enough votes for it – the Wyoming Rule to expand the House (and thus the Electoral College, and thus cripple the rural chokehold on politics), the expansion of a rigged Supreme Court to 13 (one Justice per circuit, as was the original aim), the admission of new states – we are currently in the longest stretch of our national history with no new Representatives, Supreme Court seats or states. But for this to work, something like two-thirds or more of the country would have to agree that no matter what, shoring up democracy and breaking the impact of an authoritarian minority is the most critical issue in American politics and everything else – nationalized health care, lower taxes, foreign policy, whatever – has to be subordinated to making sure that the person who the most people voted for is the one who wins. No more gerrymandering your way to control of state courts, no more electing the person with millions fewer votes because they had a football stadium lead in three specific states.

Because if it happens again – if more people vote for a Democrat but a Republican wins anyway, and is allowed to start doing what these current Republicans do – you have to consider what happens when the levee breaks. A system that doesn’t work any more is not worth saving, but you may not like what comes after – or survive it. And yet, no matter how ugly the prospect is of starting over, sometimes you don’t have a choice.

The reason why every election is the most important election of our lives is because all the Democrats can be right now is a finger in the dike. They need 218 in the House, a reliable 51 in the Senate (with votes to remove the filibuster), and a majority on the Supreme Court, or all the President can be is the last line of defense. People ask “well why come the Republicans can do things?” Because they don’t actually want to do anything. They want to leave the states alone to be as backward and bigoted as they please, they want to go on Fox News and own the libs, they want to raise infinite money and they want to appoint judges, but actual policy work of the sort that has to get through Congress? Nothing. They couldn’t even overturn Obamacare with no filibuster possible and a majority in both houses. Making something, fixing, something, requires more work than breaking it.

But we have to do the work. Not just in 2024, but beyond. The work will always be with us, and what is at stake this year is determining what that work will consist of.