Author: Stagger Lee

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

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 Thanks to the fact that Senate rules are about seventy years out of date for modern political norms, a vote of 59-41 means that the 41 carries the day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Dec. 26, 2005

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

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

-Dec. 27, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons learned? There were a few:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This makes me think about the draft.

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

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

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

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

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

WHY I AM A POLITICAL NIHILIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

That glass ain’t so scratch resistant. I am bitter, especially since I never actually dropped the damn thing.

4 hrs 19 min use, including over an hour of audio playback, some phone calls, and more or less constant web surfing and social media check-ins, and 50% battery left. and that’s with push turned on for MobileMe and Exchange, and wifi active, and 3G in San Francisco. This massive improvement in battery life and speed, simultaneously, is worth the whole price of the phone. especially considering that it’s pushing a bigger screen.

The bumper case isn’t too big – largely because the phone itself is Keira Knightly thin – but it’s rubberized edges make it difficult to easily pull out of a pants pocket. Not having had the “death grip” experience, I can’t see much difference with/without the case. Looking forward to a screen protector and seeing whether the scratch is concealed by it – which happened successfully with my first iPhone.

I have the distinct sense a lot of people have been rooting for Apple to shit the bed, and now that they sense blood in the water, they are pouncing hard. I don’t really get why people picked now to go the full Silky Johnson, but the lads on 1 Infinite Loop are doing a pretty poor job pushing back – and may be making matters worse. I don’t think they’ve grasped the malleability of reality in 2010, especially in dealing with a media for whom the plural of anecdote is “ultimate truth”.

I’m too old to try to sleep on a futon.

I took four years of German in high school and two more semesters in college. Less than a year after I stopped, I took a trip through central Europe – Hungary, Poland, the former East Germany and the erstwhile Czechoslovakia. I was able to get along reasonably well with a pastiche of German and English, weighted a bit differently for each country, and I survived. And that was it for my German-speaking…until June 2010 arrived.

A series of trains took us to Salzburg – overnight sleeper through Munich, then a regular inter-city train on to Austria. We were two nights in Salzburg, spending a lot of time walking around the old town and one afternoon off on a cruise around a lake in the Salzkammergut. There was a much more medieval feel there – all the old signs hanging out into narrow streets, churches with rudimentary onion domes signifying that we were on the old border between East and West. It was in Salzburg that Ma and Cousin Pa finally broke down and went to McDonalds for dinner. (In fairness, I went by there myself, but mainly to steal their free Wi-Fi for the price of one coffee – and later one Sprite, and later still 50 Euro cents for the pay toilet; what can I say, there was a lot of email to catch up on).

After that, there was Munich, and Neuschwanstein, and bits of Bavaria generally before heading to the train to Switzerland. Munich we didn’t see that much of – by then, we had established the pattern: city bus tour, country bus tour, and get pictures by the big landmark(s). It would have been interesting to see a little more of the town, but I think by then we were seriously hitting the wall, and Switzerland was perfectly timed: three days in the Berner Oberland during the low season, with crowds down to a minimum and very little to do other than sit, relax, enjoy the view and the cool temperatures.

After Switzerland, we stayed with friends outside Frankfurt for the final long weekend. And saw a couple of World Cup matches, including the surprising US draw and the not-at-all surprising shelling of Australia by our hosts. A good time was had by all, far as I can tell.

Lessons learned? That’s for another post…

In about an hour and a half, 2010 is half over on the west coast.

I guess I can’t complain. There are things in my life that are reminiscent of less good times, but even then, they were things that led me to better places. At least this time I think I’m positioned to make better choices this time – maybe I’ll figure out a way to win through without giving in to the dark side.

I’ve burned through all my leave, unfortunately, so there’s going to be a long slog through to the holidays. Once more minibreak for the 20th reunion – which should be intriguing – but then it should be routine for a while. As much as it ever is.

John Gaventa ’71, in his study of Appalachian poverty, hit it out of the park with his discussions of the three dimensions of power. He took the premise of Schattschneider (in The Semisovereign People) and followed it to its natural conclusion. In the Gaventa/Schattschneider model, political and social power exists at three levels:

1) The decision of what is to be done about select issues. This is what most people think of as the political realm.

2) The decision of what issues are to be considered in the first place. Schattschneider considered this to be the actual point of decision-making, as political institutions chose to promote certain issues over others.

3) The decision of what issues are allowed to exist. Gaventa’s case study was of coal mining communities in the Appalachians, where company towns were run by the all-pervasive hand of the mining company. Workplace safety, unionization, health care and related topics were simply quashed out of existence in the political realm, and any political figure who brought them up was assured of a short career.

I’m almost tempted to attribute 3) to something in the cultural background of Appalachia, because God knows I go through this with my mother all the time: the complete unwillingness to acknowledge something as a topic of debate, never mind the point of view or prospective resolution. But to some extent, this is American politics in the 21st century, writ large: each side talks past the other, unwilling to even acknowledge that something is a legitimate field for debate.

In a way, this becomes a vicious cycle: the politicians talk past each other, the media reports everything verbatim without challenge or analysis, the public tunes it out, the media glosses past it to get back to American Idol, and the politicians focus themselves on the ever-shrinking (and ever-radicalizing) audience that DOES hear them and care, leading to further polarization and even greater odds that they will talk past each other…

There’s not really a way to get past this. The media itself will not be an active part of the solution; stockholders tend to make companies risk-averse and as long as there’s more money in Brad and Angelina than in heavy political reporting…well, you can guess who will win. And the vast middle is uninterested and, almost by definition, uninformed – so the only way to get their attention is to do something huge. And even then, it won’t last. You can attack the United States mainland for the first time in almost two centuries, and within six months we’ll be back to arguing about Britney Spears. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody gives a shit, does it matter?