Author: Stagger Lee

That’s the recurring theme of our politics, it seems like.  Florida starts purging the voter rolls until told to stop by the DOJ – will everyone be legit in time for the Florida primary?  Who knows?  Fox makes its own campaign ad to slam the President and runs it twice on Fox and Friends, then says they will deal with the producer privately.  It’s the same problem as when the papers blast something in the headlines and then run the corrections buried on A14 somewhere.  And today, this very day, a “reporter” for Tucker Carlson’s “newspaper” – which, inexplicably, has press pool access – actually has the gall to interrupt the President of the United States – twice – and then walk out of the presser, live on cable news.  Which, of course, he knew would be carrying the whole thing.  I expect some sort of pro forma statement of regret from the Daily Caller in a couple of days, by which point its reporter will be the toast of the conservative world as a bold unafraid truth-telling hero instead of the asshole douche he is.

I know exactly how this works.  Of course I do, hell, I had a little brother growing up. I have almost half a dozen nephews now.  I have plenty friends with kids.  And everyone’s seen it at some point – the age-old move where the kid takes a swing at somebody or shoves his sister or grabs the toy out of somebody’s hand and immediately reflexively blurts “SORRY” at the first sign of adult notice.  (Makes me wonder how I didn’t beat the hell out of my brother more than the one time I did, when he wrenched my knee and inadvertently caused me to have surgery 21 years later, but I digress…)

This is of a piece with my theory of modern electoral politics: the GOP has become the Bully Party.  You see it in the opposition to anti-bullying laws, you see it in the likes of SB1070 in Arizona or HB56 in Alabama, you see it in the shenanigans of the Foster Frieses of the world. The ethos is simple: be the bully or be the bullied.  And that’s why it’s so critical they win – because they assume the whole world shares this outlook, and if we don’t bully the Middle East and Russia and China and the homos and the wetbacks and the hairy-leg feminists, they’re going to bully us, in fact we’re already being bullied because we have to pay for birth control and it’s a crime to beat up gay kids now and why is everything different from how it was in 1954* WAAAAAAAAH!?!?

And it’s only getting worse.  Multiple states down South are losing their shit over the library possibly stocking “50 Shades of Gray” (how the worse load of shit fanfic imaginable becomes a bestseller itself says a lot about American intelligence in the 21st century), while the board of Alabama Public Television is firing executives who resisted running Christian Dominionist propaganda on taxpayer-funded channels (god, remember when APT was the first public television statewide network in the country? Too long ago). Now comes word that the same casino magnate who essentially bankrolled the Newt Gingrich campaign zeppelin is now prepared to kick in literally tens of millions of dollars to the primary Romney SuperPAC.  Now the rich kids can just beat you to death with a wallet.

But there’s a larger problem, one I’ve mentioned elsewhere: the power of gall.  Of blatantly lying – worse yet, lying in a way that everyone KNOWS you’re lying – and defying anyone to call you on it.  This isn’t just a GOP political thing – you see it from everybody from Oakland cops to the RIAA to Hollywood studios.  You’re entitled to your own opinion, but when you decide you’re entitled to your own facts and insist on them – then what?  As I may have blogged before, it’s the problem of the asshole who stands on the train platform under the NO SMOKING sign puffing away on a whole bloody pack of Marlboro Reds – breaking the rules, annoying everyone else, but as soon as you call him on it, you’re the asshole for getting in his business.  And then, invariably, people who weren’t really paying attention or are late to the party, who might otherwise decry the smoker, will wash their hands of it by deciding that you’re both assholes, and just walk away from the whole thing.  And now you know why the GOP is running and ruining politics.  Now you know why there was a Romney campaign bus driving around the site of today’s Obama speech honking the horn.  Politics of the douchebag, for the douchebag, and by the douchebag.

So yeah, it’s going to keep coming.  It’s going to lie and dare you to say something, it’s going to be “do you know how much money I have”, it’s going to be punch first and then maybe say sorry once you’re knocked down – especially since this is real life and there’s no Daddy to grab them by the arm and stand their ass in the corner until they learn to behave.  The problem is that between an indifferent public and an incompetent press, America has a deadbeat dad.

Because in any other era, Neil Munro’s “journalism” career would be done.  Instead…just wait. 

 

* Again, nobody ever seems to remember that the workforce was one-third unionized or that the top marginal tax rate was 91% in the 1950s. When you see nostalgia for the old days, it’s for WASP social hegemony, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Jack Gilbert ran the writer development workshop at Warner Brothers for a decade.  He taught screenwriting at Azusa Pacific and elsewhere.  He has kids writing on or running at least a hundred shows (hell, probably more like two hundred) since 1994.  Every night, you can turn on your television and watch something that one of Jack’s acolytes had a hand in.

He was there in the early days of our misbegotten mailing list, always around the edges, definitely two decades older than anyone else in the bunch but never coming across as old. We found out years later than his license plate was YODA1 – which made perfect sense.  He was quietly funny, understated yet evocative, and on the occasions when he said something, you paid attention because you knew it would be something worth listening to.

We had birthdays only a few days apart (well, and a couple decades) and a favorite movie in common, but I first came to his attention when there was some silly dispute on the mailing list that led to some misunderstanding and hurt feelings.  Jack took it upon himself to make nice on behalf of the list, and as I was in the same town as one of the aggrieved parties, he tapped me to act as his agent in the matter.  Which is how I found out that Emma’s Florist and Gifts was the go-to for Warner Music when congratulating new artists.  Later, he would come to DC every year to visit friends – and he was always good for a lunch full of catching up and an insider’s eye on the new television season.  Everyone in the DC crew made sure to post for that lunch whenever they were in town.

He died too young. 62, pneumonia that he waited on too long before going to the hospital.  His memorial service packed a church on Mulholland Drive, because even though I don’t know that I ever heard anything explicitly religious from him beyond the “God bless us every one” closing of his Christmas letter, he was a more effective advertisement for Christianity than any sermon or tract or lecture I ever saw in my life. And I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can say with some confidence that Jack Gilbert is what I want to be if I grow up.

It’s sexy, make no mistake.  A 2880×1800 display on a 15″ laptop is earth-shattering, especially at that price point.  It might be too big for my bag, though, and the step up from 3 to 4.5 pounds might make a difference with my shoulder issues, so we’ll have to see what’s doing.  I’m not ordering anything for a couple of days, I promise you that.

The Mountain Lion and iOS 6 stuff is of a piece – basically different interfaces to an iCloud-connected world.  The Maps changes were inevitable (cue Steve Jobs-Scarlett O’Hara clip) – sucks not to have transit directions anymore, but they weren’t that helpful and I was always using the Caltrain and VTA and BayTripper apps anyway.  The Passbook app seems to be a better solution than Google Wallet for now – different, but not requiring NFC technology; if you can scan a barcode you can make use of Passbook.  Moving to a Retina Display in iPhone 4 made that feasible.  Siri improvements are necessary and predictable, esp. since it was a beta before – basically this is all about getting the original Siri features into the iOS built-in version.

A little disappointed but not surprised that iOS 6 isn’t coming to the original iPad, but that sort of drives home that 512 MB of RAM is the price to play on iOS 6.  They say it’ll be on the 3GS, but I doubt the full feature set is there – and the A5 seems to be mandatory for Siri support, which is also not surprising.  If the viable lifespan of an iPad is two years, though, it doesn’t speak volumes for its viability as a laptop replacement.

The most telling stat for me was that 80% of iOS devices are running iOS 5.  Ice Cream Sandwich, which dropped one week later, is on less than 10% of Android devices.  That one stat drives home why merely pointing at units shipped doesn’t persuade me that Android has in any way surpassed iOS, not when the bulk of those devices are running an 18-month-old base OS release.  Hell, we’re coming up on a year since a point release.  The number one disincentive for Ed Earl Brown to buy an Android phone is that he has no idea when – or even if – he’ll be able to update it.  Whereas any iPhone you buy on a contract has always has updates to the OS, free, for the life of said contract.  Not a stat that shows up on paste-eaters’ feature-comparison charts, but one that cannot be ignored.

So far, it looks like Apple will survive without Himself.  Check back in a couple of years, though.

So let’s see: a depressed claustrophobe, going for an MRI to determine what’s wrong with his spine, worried that it might be similar to what afflicted his dead father, and having the MRI on the weekend of the anniversary of his father’s death? You’re goddamn right I ditched work for the whole day. And that means only one thing: an afternoon movie, in this case my third viewing of The Avengers.

Some thoughts after three tries, not all of which were revealed on the third try but all of which are clear after my third go-round:

1) Tony Stark arrived in Stuttgart by overriding the PA system and playing AC/DC’s “Shoot To Thrill” at top volume – the same song that heralded his arrival at Stark Expo. Tony Stark has theme music. That fact alone tells you tons about the kind of guy he is.

2) Similarly, Captain America’s throwaway line is significant: “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.” In one stroke, we learn that Cap has the religious beliefs and values of his era, and that he is the kind of person who still feels compelled to address one of the world’s most dangerous assassins and spies as “ma’am.” A Boy Scout to the last, our Cap. That’s why his line to Agent Coulson asking of the starts and stripes on the costume weren’t “a bit old-fashioned” seemed out of place. I’d buy that coming from Stark, but I don’t think it would ever occur to Steve Rogers that the Stars and Stripes would go out of style.

3) Again, one of the best lines isn’t a line at all, but a callback to Steve saying “I don’t think anything could surprise me” and Nick Fury saying “Ten bucks says you’re wrong.” And then the SHIELD Heli-carrier rises up from the water, ascends to the sky, and cloaks itself to disappear…and without a word, Steve reaches into his pocket, pulls out his roll of bills, peels off a tenner, and passes it to Nick Fury without a word. Just perfect.

4) Tony Stark’s deepest moment is when he’s talking to Bruce Banner, the only person who can keep pace with him in the brains department. He points out how the arc reactor is part of him now, and how it saved and changed his life, and says, “It’s…a terrible privilege.” And if that line doesn’t hit you where you live, well, you probably didn’t grow up gifted in the deep South in the 70s and 80s. I strongly suspect that at some point in his life, Tony Stark has said “I AM THE GOD OF HELL FIRE!! I am, right?”

5) It needs to be said again: how many All-Star games are just complete clusterfucks? How often do you get to bring together a whole bunch of leading players and cram them together as a team and it works out? Joss Wheedon took full responsibility – story, screenplay-director – for delivering the payoff of five movies since 2008, and he delivered completely. People I know who have seen this movie without any of its predecessors loved it. That tells you what kind of movie it is – that it can pay off the buildup while still remaining accessible to those just showing up.

Actually when was the last time I saw a movie three times in the theater? Hell, I’m considering going again Tuesday night…

I can’t control it.

The year after it happened, when the anniversary came round, I planned on taking the day off work.  I ended up going in for just a couple of minutes to help get a writer set up for Eastern Europe, making sure the laptop had dialup numbers in Budapest and could use the right voltage.  A couple of minutes turned into nine hours, and in a way, I was oddly comforted, because I’d put in a good day’s work and done the best I could and not been a horse’s ass, and that was all the old man would have wanted as a memorial.

The next few years were turbulence incarnate. There was enough free-floating ambient rage that any other emotions around that date kind of got swept up and burned in the same fire that was propelling me forward.  The first seven or eight years were surpassing chaotic – hell, the eighth year after is more memorable now for being the day I sat on my bachelor party glasses in the course of moving my surrogate big sister in with us.

By the next year the darkness had started.  I don’t know if it was a byproduct of the year-or-so spent under the black cloud, or the assorted health nightmares of that summer, or just an increasing awareness of my own age, but it seems like every passing June is worse than the last.  It took a couple of days to catch me in 2008, but it got there.  In 2009, it salted an open wound of work issues and knee troubles.  In 2010, I was actually in Germany, with my mother and her new husband (about whom I have ranted elsewhere) and the days were fraught with enough peril that any angst about the date was tough to separate out.  And last year, I thought I was fine, right until the mere act of biting into a strawberry caused me to have a complete breakdown right in the middle of the farmer’s market.  And where did I go to be alone and clear my head? Oh, how about a movie theater showing Thor, because a film about family issues and lost fathers is exactly what I needed that day. Fucking brilliant.  A lot of people say I’m smart, but I say the evidence is suspect.

And now.

I’m going in for an MRI tomorrow, to see what’s going on with my neck.  Two years ago, there was a pinched nerve and a bulging disc, and there was a brief discussion of surgery, and then some painkillers and some prednisone (and isn’t THAT drug emotionally triggering for me), and eventually it more or less went away, right up until the day last month when I lost my shit at work – and it’s been bad ever since.  Post hoc ergo proper hoc, although who knows which one caused the other or contributed to it.

The cloud is always there this time of year. I never seem to think about why I feel like this in June until I’m already under its spell – which doesn’t make any kind of sense, but these things never do.  It doesn’t take much to start pushing the buttons, as the last couple of posts probably make clear (although being the son of two public employees will probably contribute to the snapping).  That’s the insidious thing about this…condition. It doesn’t adhere to any rules that make sense, it doesn’t respond to things that would make a person of ordinary circumstance feel better, and you can never tell if the drugs actually work – you can only tell when they’re not working.  And it’s hell on your loved ones, who can do literally nothing to help, so you end up spreading the badness around without actually ameliorating the symptoms in any way, and maybe get a nice soupçon of self-inflicted guilt to go on top of everything else.

So in the end, ride it out. Seek out some distraction. Try not to drink, or at least not too much. Try not to watch or read or think or dream anything that’ll set you off.  Just tell yourself that it’s only for now, that this too shall pass.

Then, for fun, try to believe it.

Miss you, pops.  You sure left us in a hell of a fix.

It’s been obvious for a while that when the GOP pines for the good old days of the 1950s, they’re thinking about minorities and women.  Segregation, the coloreds in their place, the fruits in the closet, the little woman at home with dinner and a pitcher of martinis for her man when he gets home, the works.  It’s nothing to do with things financial, because in the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was 91%.  And more important, one in three American workers belonged to a union.

The union was the safety net, in a way.  It was the lookout.  It made sure that businesses didn’t balance the budget on the backs of the workers, that you couldn’t be pink-slipped just for the sake of making the stock bounce next quarter, that your working-class job would pay enough that you could put food on the table and a car in the driveway and send the kids to college.  And unions took the same thrashing as every other institution took in the 1970s, what with the mob ties to the Teamsters and the Nixonland encouragement of the politics of resentment.

But most of all, the nature of work changed.  Work moved into offices, to desks, in front of computers, and the people in those jobs forgot they were workers.  You’re indoors at a desk, you’re not blue-collar, you job doesn’t need organizing, unions aren’t for fine upstanding middle-class folk like yourself.

Horseshit.

This idea that the working world is somehow full of white-collar professionals is absurd.  Doctors?  Lawyers? Engineers? Probably.  But look at the tech sector, for instance.  My first boss had a marketing degree.  My tag-team partner had a doctorate (!) in psychology.  My wife’s degree is in environmental science, and famously, I have two degrees in political science that only get used in the service of blogging and trivia night.  We took jobs in the tech sector based on what we were mostly self-taught, and worked our way up through the ranks and learned as we went. And unless we were in management, many if not most of us were filling out an hourly timesheet.  The senior contractor at my first job, who was essentially the top non-com and the senior enlisted man, was typically sardonic: We’re bit-janitors, he proclaimed, we’re on the same level as general services and security and the maintenance guys.  They don’t put our names on our shirts, is all. 

He was right.  We had college layered over top of high school, but it was for show – when it came time to get a job, we went out and got a job, resemblance to our degree field not required, and played out our careers just the same as if we’d been down at the plant like our grandfathers.

Problem is, people don’t want to think they need a union.  They do if they work for the likes of Wal-Mart, but they don’t get it, not anymore.  You can be a warehouse picker and basically get wrecked, or do manual labor and have the threat of a truckload of illegals who’ll work for half held over you, or you can take an office job with two weeks’ vacation and sick leave combined and a big chunk out of your paycheck for your HMO coverage, which will get changed next year to whatever’s cheapest for the company, and you’ll get told that there’s 8% unemployment, you’re lucky to have a job, so shut up and get back to work.

The only place that still has unionized labor in any quantity is in government, the last employer that has to play by the rules and observe the letter of the law.  It’s not that union labor in government has special privileges, it’s that they’re the last ones to have to give up what everybody used to have.  And for the longest time, that was part of the deal if you worked for the city, or the state, or Uncle Sam – you’ll never get rich, but you have the benefits and security of the union to protect you.

And now, that’s going.  You can expect Wisconsin to open the floodgates for GOP-controlled legislatures and statehouses around the country: time to break the public-employee unions.  Partly because it’ll save money if you can slash salary and benefits without consequence, partly because it’ll hurt traditionally-Democratic organizations, partly because they’re government workers so they’re not REAL Americans, and partly it’s just the dog scratching its nuts.

The greatest trick the Republicans ever pulled off was convincing American workers that somehow they weren’t actually working class, and that they should take the side of the bosses.  Social issues may have prized them off, but now it’s just loyalty to the tribe – vote for the Big Mules if you want to be on the side of the Real True Job Creator Americans.  And it worked, because there’s an amazing number of Americans who are happy to live on a slab of cardboard under a leaky bridge cooking a dead crow on a car antenna over a fire, just so long as the wetback/homo/feminazi/spade next door doesn’t even have the car antenna.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America.  But I pretty much fucking hate Americans.

 

…the theological deconstruction of the legend of Stagger Lee brings a smile to my face.

I have an appointment to look at my retirement money setup next week.  Prompted by my ongoing problems with my neck and shoulder and the realization that I really don’t want to do this job for another twenty years, and made worse by the realization that my rollover IRA from my last two jobs is basically making no money at all.  I mean, theoretically I have control over it and could have put it all on AAPL and rolled the dice, but that’s not supposed to be my job.

I mean, look what happened: they blew up conventional pension plans (I actually have one from my first job vested on seven years’ employment – not much but maybe it’ll pay for a monthly Coke in the retirement home) and replaced it all with 401K plans.  Hey look, you save your OWN money and we’ll match it, and you can invest it however you like! You have the power! You have the control!

Unfortunately, it’s the same power and control a 15-year-old boy has the first time you give him a set of car keys.

I forget whether it was Amarillo Slim, or Doyle Brunson, or maybe just Matt Damon in Rounders, but the nugget of poker wisdom is true: if you’ve been at the table for thirty minutes and haven’t spotted the sucker yet, the sucker is you. The whole 401K stock-based retirement system works on two levels: either you’re the sucker and have to figure out how to make money playing the market against people who do it for a living, or you can trust your nut to one of those people and hope they work in your best interest.

And you can’t even count on that.  401Ks are basically a license for the financial system to go to Vegas with our bankroll.  They’re going to get paid on the transaction fees and the percentage off the top no matter how the trades go, so there’s very little incentive for them to play smart or fair.  Exhibit A: the London Whale, who managed to lose literally billions of dollars for JP Morgan while trading as part of their safe investments group.  This is the safe money, the widows-and-orphans money, the reliable sound been-here-for-a-hundred-years stuff, and the biggest bank on Wall Street is putting it all on red and letting it ride.

But hey, they’re sick of playing it safe!  How can you be a big swinging dick if all your money’s in government bonds and index funds?  The biggest scam of the last quarter century was Wall Street swindling America into letting them play No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em with our old-age security.  And just think, seven years ago, George W. Bush thought it was the best idea ever to 401K-ize Social Security.  Wonder how that would have worked out three years later?

They skated. They wrecked the world economy, got bailed out, and promptly poured all their time and energy into fighting hard against the people who saved their asses. And it’s increasingly starting to look like their kept man might just wind up in the White House – and even if he doesn’t, Big Money’s kept catamites in Congress will continue to ensure the Whiffle Life continues for the chosen ones.

Or, to quote Charles P. Pierce over at Esquire:

“The nation is in crisis now, and The Deficit is not it. The nation is in crisis now because an irresponsible and unaccountable money power ruined the economy, and the political system was unwilling or incapable of either fully repairing the damage, or fully holding to account the people who caused it. Half-measures were the order of the day, and too many of them were based on the mostly unreasonable assumption that American corporations are in any way patriotic, and on the entirely unreasonable assumption that the American government today responds to all of its citizens, and not just to the ones who write the checks. We are, most of us, just one bad turn away from being part of the long-term unemployed. We are suckers, we are. We’re playing in a rigged game.”

We cleaned out the garage this weekend, as you tend to do on Memorial Day – at least, I assume that is what people tend to do judging from the line at the Goodwill truck on Sunday afternoon. Lot of stuff went away, including a television and a sit-up-in-bed pillow, both of which are significant in their way.

See, I bought the pillow the summer before going off to grad school – I had envied them in college but never gotten it together to find one myself, especially since they always seemed to be offered in some sort of nasty corduroy. Then I decided one day to just get in my Saturn and drive up to the big-ass 24 hour Wal-Mart up US 78, because I could, and because I’d take any excuse to go for a spin in my little aquamarine compact. It was simple green fabric, and I snapped it up and immediately began using it to sit back against the chest of drawers as I fooled around with my new Power Macintosh 6100. And it stuck around, in varying degrees of cleanliness, for the next eighteen years.

Meanwhile, the television that I’d used throughout grad school suddenly and inexplicably bit the dust a month after moving to Arlington. It died without warning or explanation on the very weekend of the Alabama-Tennessee game, when my folks were up to visit me. Since they refused to sleep on the floor, they bought a bed; since they refused to sit on the floor, they bought a futon, and since they refused to miss the game, they bought a simple 19″ RCA television.

That was my TV for the next six years. When the wife-to-be moved in with me, she brought her larger television, and the RCA was relegated to the role of bedroom television, where it served more or less uninterrupted for the next eight years (barring our one year in a California apartment where it was stashed in the office rather than the bedroom, for want of appropriate furniture or a cable drop). And for seven years after moving into our house, the pronounced tick followed by the sound coming on was the regular alarm in the morning from which it was impossible to fall back asleep.

Then the cousins moved in with us, bringing their bigger HDTV, and our flat-panel 37″ became the bedroom television, and the RCA went into the garage and sat for a year.

Now it’s going to go find a new home with somebody who will actually make use of it, and I wish them luck with it. Some of the channels still have the manual labeling when you tune to them, from the days when it was a cable-ready set on Cable TV Arlington in the late 1990s. And being the pack rat I am, I thought I’d be sorrier to see it go – after all, it’s fifteen years old and a tangible reminder of those strange impossible days at the end of 1997 while the world was still set on “Flash Blend”.

But it’s kind of a preposterous keepsake when you can get a 46″ 1080p120 LCD for $700 at Costco. Nevertheless, I do wonder sometimes if there’s a single electronic device in the house now that will ever reach the 10-year mark without breaking or becoming unusably obsolete.

The last good summer before coming to California was 1990. I was out of high school, the whole promise of college lay before me, I had no girlfriend or trauma to deal with, the future was perfect. And then summer became an endless sea of heat and humidity and no escape for my life (and made doubly worse after 1998)…until 2002, the first California summer.

I’ve written about it endlessly, but 2002’s vacation week in California – cool, green, not humid, days spent among Apple stores and GSM cellphones and free pervasive Wi-Fi – was what really started the clock on “yes, I need to be here.” And summers here have been better ever since. There was 2004, where I arrived halfway through and had all the fun/terror of exploring my new home. There was 2006, also known as the dull moment, which in fact turned out to be a pretty damn good year top to bottom. The summer was spent in my office, out of the sun, doing a desk job with no manual labor required and banging my work out on a fast new black 13″ MacBook, when I wasn’t watching the World Cup or the Premiership. Lot of pub searching, lot of finally using the light rail, lot of enjoying my excellent new house. There was 2009, where the cousins came out to start the process that ended in summer 2011 with them becoming our new housemates. In between, there was 2010, loaded up with a 20th high school reunion and two weeks in Europe.

This year feels like it’s going to be a good summer. There’s European Cup soccer at one end and the Olympics at the other. There’s fog over the hills and it’s pleasant all day (for the moment). The job is manageable, Vandy baseball is in the postseason again, we have friends here and more moving in, and if I could just sort out my damned shoulder everything would be actually pretty cool.

Still, with the breeze from the open patio and live Irish music strumming away as I type this on an iPad with a pint to hand, it’s hard not to think that this is, in fact, the life.