Birmingham-born Californian, age fifty-two, cannot return to his native state…there are 651,972 reasons why
A TWELVE-part series on Chandra Levy?
Ladies and gentlemen, an official announcement: the Washington Post is no longer involved in any form of journalism. Refunds of subscription will be posted presently.
Jimminy Christmas, where the hell can I go in this country to get news that adheres to higher standards of newsworthiness than The View?
Guinness + black cherry cider = the Black and Red, a.k.a. the Diamondback.
God I’m money!!!
| Man tells why he’s first in line for iPhone |
…the last big cross-country drive. This would be the last voyage of Danny – Arlington to Alabama to Silicon Valley. Well over 3000 miles to drive in the heat of July, from my old life to my new.
In retrospect, after all the stress and strain of the final months in DC, it was ideal. I had about a dozen cigars – lovely parting gifts from the crew at my old shop – and there were 12-packs of soda in cans for $2 each in the grocery store in my hometown, so I loaded up – and my little cooler could be filled with ice every morning. So there I was, all day every day, flying down the interstate keeping pace with the wife’s car in front of me. (Usually. We have a mildly differing philosophy on convoy tactics.) Cigar smoldering in one hand, ice-cold Buffalo Rock ginger ale between the seats, new XM radio playing everything from Outkast to Jefferson Starship to the Pixies to the Doors to “A Secretary Is Not A Toy” to BBC World Service for 4 hours at a stretch. Sunlight gleaming off the blue lenses of the wireframe shades, arm slowly baking to well-done on the windowsill, the wind whipping right through me.
(And a good thing too – turns out the thermostat was broken and the fan assembly wasn’t kicking in, so all I had to keep the engine from boiling over was a steady stream of fresh air on the intake. Which was problematic, say, stuck in rush-hour traffic in Denver where they barely have air to begin with. Taking a car with 190,000 miles on a cross-country joyride may not have been the smartest thing I ever did.)
We got to drive what will someday be I-22 across Mississippi, and I hope they have the sense to keep the billboards off it, because it is gorgeous. We stayed in the Peabody in Memphis, we saw the ducks, we ate in B.B. King’s club, and we rolled out of town on the 50th anniversary of the day Elvis Presley recorded “That’s All Right Mama.” We stood on the banks of the Big Muddy at New Madrid and read about what a real earthquake can do to you (and everyone else in a 500-mile radius). We stayed in the Bob Dole-Arlen Specter Suite at the AmericInn Suites in Russell, Kansas, with real live tornadoes visible out the drivers-side window in the worst thunderstorm I’ve seen in a decade. We stopped at every Dairy Queen between Hannibal, MO and Wamsutter, WY. We saw friends and relatives and took great advantage of the opportunity to couch-surf, and a good thing too – I had no idea when I would find a job. (As it turns out, it only took about three weeks before I started one, for which I was profoundly grateful.)
Well, I wanted a new beginning and a fresh start. Interesting to see how things have progressed.
BTW, secret code message to the Rifles of the EUS: after a week of Special Forces, I am now getting ready to go floor by floor and obtain Reports from the Underground. The rest of the administrators are trying to figure out how I covered twice the systems in half the time, and they don’t seem to be satisfied with the explanation that I “went all Mowbray on that ass.”
Alan Moore is a genius. Either Watchmen or V for Vendetta would have been enough to cement his legacy as the most innovative comic book writer of the 1980s. That he did both, and completely changed the game, puts him right up there with Schuster and Siegel or Lee and Kirby.
I say that because if you’ve read Watchmen (and if you haven’t I will explain now), you notice the ads for “Nostalgia” perfume, and how the Veidt corporation appeals to that sort of imagery for maximum profit in times of distress. This is either well-researched, or tremendously intuitive. Most people under 40 probably won’t recall this very well – I certainly wasn’t cognizant of it until well after the fact – but the 1970s in American were a time of massively huge nostalgia, to the point where Time ran an entire issue about it.
Think about it. There’s the obvious stuff – Happy Days and Grease spring to mind. There was a movie version of Doc Savage, which just hit at the wrong time to become a massive movie franchise, there was American Graffiti, and off its profits there was Star Wars which was nothing if not a return to 30s movie serials. (Lucas actually wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie but couldn’t get the rights, but both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers would see theaterical release before 1980 was out). Beyond that, the hula hoop came back in, there were attempts to bring back the exact sort of variety show that had just been killed off with the cancellation of Ed Sullivan – does anybody remember that NBC had to call their show “NBC’s Saturday Night” because ABC already had “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell”? Just think, they thought the Bay City Rollers were going to be the new Beatles….
So yeah. To borrow a line from another Protestant supporter of Celtic, “you glorify the past when your future dries up.” Oil soaring, gas through the roof, unpopular war, ridiculous interest rates, incumbent President about as popular as herpes, people buying ridiculous little cars to replace their massive American gunboats…anybody else got the deja vu?
Put it down to the outsized influence of The Catcher in the Rye, I suppose. (God knows every 10th grader who reads it thinks he’s experiencing the sort of life-changing epiphany that nobody else has ever had, exactly like every other 10th grader who reads it.) The effect is far greater for a kid at a gifted magnet school who is convinced that he can somehow figure out how to crack the code of adolescent sociology and bring down the entire colossal social structure of the high school world. (I had never seen nor heard of either of them, but if there was a Venn diagram showing the overlap between V for Vendetta and Square Pegs, I was right in the middle of it. Go ahead, laugh it out, I’ll wait here.)
Ready? Right, carry on:
Independence of Thought Day, Dennis Dale writing for The American Conservative magazine.
Take-home nugget: “I prefer the nation that accepts the uncertainty of the question to that which preens as the answer. I prefer the bravery of the free to the arrogance of the powerful.”
See, this is why I’m not ready to renounce conservatism. Just neo-Confederacy.
This is not directed at anyone y’all know, but recent events (some personal, some not) have led me to conclude that I need to remind certain persons who shall remain nameless that today we celebrate the creation of the United States of America. That’s USA with a U, not a C. I would further like to remind said persons that the last time around, they got pwned, and that since then the Yankees have got the Hydrogen Bomb, so I would think long and hard about whether you want some more.
Stars and Stripes Forever, father-muckers, and don’t you forget it.
…that we’re now down to 3 tree-sitters. Even the euphoniously-named Dumpster Muffin has deserted her post.
Three means you could clean house with a pump shotgun without having to reload. I’m just sayin’.
Let’s be honest: this is going to end badly at some point, and the University of California will come in for an assload of wrangling and histrionics and crocodile tears for their horrible, horrible conduct. And yet, there are a few simple things to bear in mind:
1) There is a fundamental disconnect between the University of California (it’s in Berkeley) and the city of Berkeley, California. The University is an odd hybrid of 1925 and 2015, while the city is an odd hybrid of 1970 and 1981, neither in a good way.
2) Everything at dispute here is within the University grounds and pretty much out of the jurisdiction of the city.
3) Aside from some documentation issues which the court would like to clear up, the judge pretty much found for the university every step of the way, so why those bong-watered granola-shavers were celebrating last week is quite frankly beyond me.
4) (BIG IMPORTANT POINT) This is how civil disobedience does not work: you break the law and then say that the law is unjust and therefore you should face no consequences for it. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, fucking wrong, Peach Seed. The way civil disobedience works is that you break the law, knowing full well what the consequences are, and accept those consequences fully, trusting in the civil conscience to be forced into questioning itself. That’s how Gandhi did it, that’s how Dr. King did it, that’s how Fred Shuttlesworth did it*, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.** Basically, it boils down to a motto which I wish I knew how to render into Latin (three dozen Catholics in my life and nobody speaks Latin? Nobody? WTF?): buy the ticket, take the ride. The reason people feared for the life of Martin Luther King, Jr, when he came into Birmingham, was because there was a very real possibility that the consequences of breaking the law would be extra-judicial murder.
In short, all civil disobedience ultimately comes down to one question: are you prepared to die in the service of your cause? If the cause is the freedom of a subcontinent, or the end of racial tyranny, then maybe you can say yes, if you have a lot more character than a wuss like myself. SO what Potstem and Crotchrot and the rest of the Symbionese Junior Liberation Front need to ask themselves is “Am I willing to give my life to prevent these particular trees from being replaced by triple the number of generally similar trees in a different location?”
At that point, we can accurately judge the wisdom and sanity of the protest. I hate to annoy the time-warps on Telegraph***, but I have to say that I’m not betting heavily on a “yes” response.
* Look it up. Seriously, I mean it. Go look up Fred Shuttlesworth. What MLK dealt with for a matter of months in Birmingham, Rev. Shuttlesworth faced down for the better part of a decade, and now the one-time “Wild Man of Birmingham” is about to see the city airport renamed for him in the twilight of his life, which I am sure was completely unfathomable fifty years ago. I mean it. Go go go. Wiki wiki.
** Stark Industries gets a nickel.
*** A great whopping stinking lie of the first order. Come on, I have two degrees in political science, I took entire course groups in forswearing and deception, you should expect this of me by now. At least I have the decency to tell you when I’m lying my ass off.
The problem here, obviously, is that they let him up. Seriously, who the hell’s checking green cards around here?