Author: Stagger Lee

(gasp)

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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My God, for me this is like “what if Tennessee hired Ty Willingham, Matt Millen, Mike Shula and Tom Holmoe all on the very same historic day.” I can’t imagine what it must be like to know that your party is being run by the stupidest fucking people alive.

Actually, I’m starting to think that the Larisons and Posners and etc. of the world are sitting it out on purpose and waiting for the dog’s breakfast of holy rollers, neo-Confederates, and just plain old assholes that make up the modern Republican party to flame out, so they can start fresh with some new conservative party grounded in, you know, conservatism, rather than trying to turn a handful of zingers into a political philosophy.

I don’t know that anyone else has ever been sworn to protect the Constitution of the United States on an iPhone. But my left hand had to go somewhere, and it was in my pocket…and there you have it. By the power vested in me by Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and Scott Forrestal…

So the wife and I were sworn in as disaster service workers tonight. I’m not sure why this requires a loyalty oath – I suspect some mid-50s law that never got rescinded – but there it was, right on the page, “that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California.” Which is a pretty tall order, if you’ve ever see the Constitution of the State of California – a document second only to the Constitution of the State of Alabama in making you hang your head and mutter “you sorry son of a bitch…”

I’m sure that in 1911, when the railroads had the California Legislature in a professional threat sandwich, the idea of proposition/initiative direct democracy seemed like a good idea. And hell, it probably was. For a while. However, as was memorably said years ago in another life, “California officially failed in 1978 when people realized they could vote themselves free shit.” That was the year of Prop 13…and that was the year when “citizens” were replaced by “taxpayers.”

The problem with cutting taxes is that while it will free up money, some of which may even go into investment and creative efforts that eventually produce more jobs and economic growth, it also deprives the state of money. Which probably sounds like an unalloyed good to a lot of people, until you consider that the state also has the responsibility for things like schools. And jails. And police. And disaster management. The sorts of things that you probably could privatize, as long as you’re willing to farm out your kid’s eduction or your neighborhood’s safety to the lowest bidder. Sure enough, California’s public services went to hell, went directly to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 because by God, that’s your money. There were efforts, of course – keep the legislature from spending or taxing any more (2/3 vote required, ably deadlocking government), there were added fixes (couple dozen propositions per year, EVERY year, writing this or that trendy preference into black-letter Constitutional law), there were attempts to take it out on the foreigners (Prop 187) or the coloreds (prop 209) or the homos (Prop 8). And the state is still just as bad off as ever, and teetering over the precipice, for one reason that is an indisputable fact:

Democracy doesn’t scale.

I could be wrong, except I’m not. The reason why we can enshrine the likes of the Greek polis or the New England town meeting in our collective mythology is because those were small, localized undertakings, consisting of considerably less than every living adult, where everybody knew everybody else’s business and were responsible before each other for the daily consequences of their decision-making. And at some small-town level, I’m sure things still work like this, where the mayor and the city council and the local crank and the harpy vice-president of the PTA and Otis the village drunk all have to face each other tomorrow at church, or Piggly Wiggly, or the football game.

California is the 8th largest economy in the world. California has 36 million people. The notion that anything at all in California can be handled by direct democracy is…what’s the word?…insane. Most people have no idea what’s on the ballot every year, even if they think they know because they saw the same commercial every morning for six months. The average voter gives ten times more thought to who they want for American Idol than they do for Proposition n+1. In fact, the most common coping mechanism is a blanket no on everything, which would make perfect sense, staff it back out to the elected officials – but the elected officials are hamstrung by constitutional rules that were voted upon them…wait for it…by a proposition.

If you think that the working equivalent of a G20 country (think Italy or so) can run itself by direct referendum at the ballot box…well, you’re entitled to your opinion, but you would be factually incorrect.

And this 18-wheeled shitshow is what I am pledged to support and defend. I guess it’s a good thing I was being sworn in as a disaster service worker.

to be continued…

So I went through and totalled up everything in Stuff White People Like. I took a point for anything that I could not honestly say I was wholly indifferent toward, then knocked off a point for everything I revile on the list (Not Having A TV, I should get TWO points off for) and divided it all up and got 0.352 as my SWPL Index. I figure as long as I keep it below 50%, I’m doing OK in staving off the inevitable onslaught of middle-aged yuppie douche-dom.

Gonna be tough, though, because I picked up another pair of New Balance yesterday. Didn’t intend to – at most, I was looking for insoles – but these are apparently the new hotness and are additionally tricked out with aftermarket insoles with VERY rigid heel coverage. And believe it or not, coupled with socks of appropriate thickness, they are as stable and comfortable a pair of walking/running shoes as I have ever had. Given the weight (very low), the evaporation factor (very high), and the prospects for keeping me from rolling my knee any worse (pretty good, and anything is an improvement, my damned knee hurts worse than it has since before my surgery), I may find myself leaning harder on these than I’d expected as spring wears into summer.

All I can say is thank God that coffee and Apple products only count as one point apiece…

In case you didn’t know, San Francisco hosts two Fleet Weeks a year. One for the United States Navy, complete with the Blue Angels and such, and one for the Imperial Navy…

I pay good money to avoid this kind of temperature. You know it’s hot because the direct sunlight is searing, but there’s fog over the western mountains (clearly visible from in front of the hospital today). Unfortunately the cloud cover and occasional rain means it is also abnormally muggy for this place and time of year, and I got enough of that in the old country.

Speaking of the old country, on top of the trip this weekend, one of my best friends ever is on Pastebook now, where apparently a good chunk of my high school has reunited. Jury’s still out on this. Coming all slam-bang at once, it makes for quite the temporal fugue, aggravated by the fact that it’s twenty years since the Big Spring – let’s see, by this time 20 years ago, I think we were through most of the big travel and I had the fourth ace in my hat (district, county, regional, and finally state championship) but prom had not yet happened, which meant that things were still more or less normal between me and my common-law girlfriend. (Long story.) Trying real hard not to think about how most of the kids I see on campus were not born yet by then.

It’s a weird thing for me because I didn’t exactly part on the best of terms with my high school. Most of my friends – certainly my two best ones – were a year ahead of me, and I didn’t quite get on with my fellow seniors (to the point where six weeks into my senior year, I was dating a pageant girl from a much more rural high school). In fact, I was kind of a headcase – I wasn’t the Terrell Owens of Scholar’s Bowl, but you wouldn’t want to live on the difference. At least I wasn’t a cancer on the team. Much. (My insistence on keeping score in practice as me vs. everyone else might have been a detriment to team unity.) And of course, everyone went to college, and most folks at least got out of town – I ended up closer to my house in college than I was in high school. I think the souring experience of undergrad more or less permanently put me off the old home patch, which meant that I never really got into the alumni circles after my closest fellows left town for good themselves.

And yet…all in all, it was a good time. I had a much more collegiate experience from high school than I ever got from undergrad – hell, I was wearing my high school ring on the day I was married and I will claim RLC ’til the day I die in the same way that I won’t even acknowledge where my BA came from. I lived hell and gone from everyone, and my social circles might not have been as broad or numerous as others, and a lot of it had to be done over the phone, but fuck it – I was a starter on the closest thing we had to a flagship varsity team, I took at least half a dozen out of town trips competing in one thing or another, we had Led Zep and the Who and damn near a secret handshake in “Magic Bus”, and I drank Dr Pepper a 3-liter at a time and stuck cards in my hat like a fighter pilot’s kills and opened class with TWO verses of “Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog” daily and bribed the German teacher with lunch if he’d let us skive off class to go to the Bangkok House for curry and covered lockers in Post-It notes, and it may not have been perfect, but I can look back at high school and say in confidence that I was cheated out of nothing. There’s a black-hole void in my life, sure, but it’s nothing to do with the mustard-ugly blockhouse on the back side of Red Mountain.

So I was in the old country over the long weekend (well, long for me, and it sure as hell felt long after my flight – but that’s another story). I was walking around what, at the time, was the mall of malls, the Death Star of competitive commerce, the Riverchase Galleria. In 1989, it was the undisputed champion: every major regional department store, plus Macy’s (Macy’s! In Alabama!) and all sorts of intriguing stores for a high-school kid to lose himself in. In a world with no pubs, no clubs, no apartments and no girlfriend, this is where the action was.

Two decades later, the Macy’s is completely empty. Another store has become Macy’s through buyout – in fact, buyouts mean that there are three anchors stores worth of Belk’s while names like Rich’s, Pizits/McRaes, Yielding’s, Parisian – PARISIAN, for Godsakes, the place where a cute salesgirl first demonstrated that even the surliest of nerds can be conned into splashing out on fashion-forward apparel with enough eyelash flutters – are all long gone. There are a ridiculous number of empty storefronts, and almost as many filled by some local hole-in-the-wall store or fly-by-night modeling agency rather than a national retail chain. No record stores. No bookstores – well, no general-interest bookstores, and only one or two of the religious variety. No candy store, no toy store, and even the food court has empty berths where the Taco Bell used to be.

Part of it is because of the Summit, certainly. Up I-459 at the US 280 intersection lies an outdoor shopping center that has all the most yuppie-tastic stuff, the place where I would probably be doing my shopping had I remained in the old country. Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Cheesecake Factory, Saks, an Apple Store – everything you need for the frustrated mid-level HR drone with his ex-sorority wife living out his days in quiet desperation and wishing like hell he’d taken a chance on a life outside the South when it was offered. Now, why in the hell you would set up an outdoor shopping mecca in a place with 100-degree heat, 90% humidity, air quality in the unhealthy range all summer, regular afternoon thunderstorms from May to September, and REGULAR TORNADO SIGHTINGS? I’m sure that some donk looked at the Grove, or Santana Row, and said “we can do that!” without thinking about the difference between California and Alabama.

But a sagging economy is not going to be good to a mall on the downside. Nordstrom has cancelled their Alabama expansion, which would have put a store in the Galleria in 2012 and given them a huge boost. Century Plaza, on the east side of town, is circling the drain. Eastwood Mall, one of the first enclosed malls in the country, is bulldozed to make way for – of course – a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Only the tiny Brookwood Village, now Colonial Brookwood Village, hangs on – and it’s been completely remodeled to take on some “lifestyle center” aspects and has the fortune to sit next to the most affluent zip code in the state.

Recessions hit Alabama earlier, harder, and for longer than most places. And their main effect is to weed out the middle. The “beautiful ones” hang on just fine, drive their Lexus SUVs with Birmingham-Southern College stickers to Whole Foods, and everyone else shuffles down to Wal-Mart. Meantime, the place where everyone used to go sits there on the slippery slope, because there’s not that much in the middle anymore.

However, it is oddly comforting to know that Bama Fever is still selling a crimson silk robe with houndstooth lining and a big script A on the front. Horrifying, but comforting.

The scary thing is that the latest polling shows Republican self-identification at 20-21%. Don’t forget, that jug-eared Texas lunatic – no, not that one, Ross Perot – pulled 19%. Michael Steele’s doing for the GOP what Ty Willingham did for Notre Dame.

Meanwhile, I’m headed here…check ‘scalawag’ at Tumblr for ongoing coverage of the latest covert incursion.

In the 1999 film Three Kings, Major Archie Gates (as played by George Clooney) asks what is the most important thing in the world. He dismisses his fellows as they respond “respect,” “love,” and “the will of God,” before answering “Necessity.”
Necessity is a good word to remember when thinking about Arlen Specter, senior senator from Pennsylvania, who as of today is apparently a Democrat. Some will argue that he was a Democrat in all but name, but he will certainly be a Democrat in the mold of Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman – the sort of conservative outlier who is a perpetual thorn in the side of the party and is regularly feted by the Sabbath Gasbags as a grand statesman.
This is merely the latest instance in the great shakeout. From 1994-96, conservative Democrats either retired or defected in relatively extraordinary numbers, which gave the Republicans a stronger grip on the Senate than they should have normally had – but made the extent of Southern conservatism clearer and more consistent. The Democratic majority in the Senate now is as high as it’s been in 40 years, but this time, it’s not padded out with the likes of Richard Russell or James Eastland or John Stennis; there are no Senators with a (D) by their names who could legitimately be described as “conservative.” Centrist, hawkish, just plain ornery perhaps, but no conservatives – especially not by the modern definition.
Arlen Specter hasn’t moved that much. He was an unremarkable sort of Republican in the age of Lugar and Kassenbaum and Heinz and Dole. In the post-Gingrich Congressional GOP, though, he was a poor fit, as evidenced by the repeated primary challenge from Pat Toomey. As the GOP shrinks and becomes more conservative (two polls this week suggest that only one in five voters nationally self-identifies as a Republican), the odds that Specter could survive a primary against a hardcore GOP challenger are…well, they’re non-zero, but you wouldn’t want to bet your lunch money. And even if Specter could see off the challenge, doing so would entail running so far to starboard of his usual positions that he would make himself even more vulnerable in the general election for a state that hasn’t gone red in Presidential elections since 1988. Add in the likely nomination of Ed Rendell on the D’s side, and the cause becomes perfectly hopeless.
So there you have it. Necessity. If he wanted his Senate career to continue past next November, Arlen Specter had one option open to him, and he took it.
Now things get REALLY interesting. The GOP now has every incentive to fight like hell to keep Al Franken from being seated, as he would make Big Sixty – thus very nearly taking the filibuster off the table. If he does get seated, the GOP has no incentive at all to cooperate with anything, because none of their votes are needed for literally anything at all; any negotiations over legislation will be purely internal to the Democratic party-in-Congress. Which means that maximum heft will go to those last four or five votes needed to make 60…one of whom is Specter.
Bear in mind that New England went for the Democrats in a big way in 2008 – not only did Obama win every state of Red Sox Nation, but none of those states elected a single Republican to the House of Representatives. The other Specter-ish New England Republicans in the Senate might well be tempted to make the jump now – the choice seems to be either a shot at being key players among Senate Democrats, or a stint as a helpless Republican in a party intent on sliding out from under them to the right.
Ultimately I don’t think it will come to that – more likely there will be a precarious balance for a couple of years as people jockey for position ahead of the 2010 elections. But with the GOP defending a number of open seats, the odds of getting serious pushback against the Dem majority are not great, and much depends on whether more veteran GOP Senators decide to pack it in and retire (or run for governor, in the case of Kay Bailey-Hutchison). The prospect of another Great Reshuffle, scarcely 15 years after the last one – well, that’s the sort of thing you get into political science for in the first place.

So last week during the April heat wave – which doesn’t leave me sanguine about summer – I walked by the Old Knickerbocker Tobacco Company in Menlo Park, close to the train station and in back of the British Bankers Club. It was about 95 degrees outside, and as soon as I walked in, it was 70 degrees and the air was thick with the scent of stacked cured tobacco…and if I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine I was back in the old shop in DC where I spent so many hours getting educated in finance and politics and army pranks. And smoking, of course.

Obviously, living in California, I barely smoke anymore – there’s nowhere TO smoke except in your own house (fat chance of the wife signing off on that) or out in a field somewhere (good luck finding THAT) or in your car (not since Danny went to his reward after 200K+ faithful miles). But in retrospect, one of the biggest benefits of not smoking the pipe on a routine basis has been that I don’t have to carry around all the S that goes with smoking a pipe. You have to have a pipe (duh), some tobacco (duh), a source of flame (ideally a Zippo), some sort of tool to knock out the dottle and ideally at least one or two pipe cleaners. Not a small amount of accoutrement.

To make matters worse, back in the old days, not only did I carry all that but I also packed a cell phone, a pager, an iPod, a Leatherman or Swiss Army Cybertool, and occasionally even a PDA of some sort. Adds up to quite the heavy load, especially if you don’t have the Dockers with the concealed extra pockets. For me, that was the pull of the smartphone – and now, people as far-flung as DJs in London acknowledge that if you didn’t have an iPhone, you’d need to go everywhere carrying a phone, an iPod, a camera, a laptop, a beeper and a pint of beer.*

All this leads me back to the notion of cloud computing, which is damn near a necessity if you’re really going to live the digital nomad lifestyle. There’s nowhere to keep all your stuff on most netbooks – certainly not on your smartphone – so some sort of secure online storage with browser-based editing tools becomes essential if you really want to live light and go anywhere. Given that I’m about to go over to a new work laptop full-time, but don’t want to have my personal stuff stored on there (or taking up space in my work backup), having things safely cloud-based has become more important. Of course, when your iTunes folder is 104 GB, online storage suddenly becomes a hell of a lot less practical…

* You know damn well you downloaded the iPint app, don’t front.