Month: September 2018

When I was a kid, Alabama football was a national power. Bear Bryant, in his lion-in-winter phase, won back to back national championships in 1978 and 1979 (and should arguably have had another in 1977). Bama meant success. Crimson Tide football was the air I breathed and the ground I walked on until Bear Bryant came on TV at the end of the 1982 season and said that it was time for him to hang it up. A month later, he was dead.

Nick Saban arrived at Alabama in the spring of 2007 on an absurd-for-the-time contract, something like 8 years at $4 million per, and the absolute confidence of the Tide faithful that THIS was their guaranteed ticket back to the big time. Which…well, I don’t think even the most irrational Finebaum caller would have predicted how things would end. Five national championships. Two Heisman trophy winners after over a century with none at all. The Bear’s teams were a national power; Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide is THE national power. Clemson and Ohio State and others get their licks in, for sure, but right now, Alabama is the Death Star of college football. They are the rake, they are the dealer, they are the moral equivalent of rooting for the house.

In between was a long strange quarter-century that accounted for the majority of my life and the vast majority of my Alabama fandom. That was the Alabama I grew to adulthood on – a team that could go 5-6 in 1984 but somehow it was okay because they upset Auburn. A team whose coach could win 10 games and then decide to decamp to the University of Kentucky. A team that won the same number of national titles between 1982 and 2007 as BYU, as Georgia Tech, as Washington or Colorado or Tennessee. Basically, a long stretch in which Alabama football had the memory of great past success and tradition to buoy what was, at root, a generally mediocre bog-standard state university football program. Usually won enough games for a bowl, occasionally won double-digits and got a conference title or otherwise fell into a January bowl named after a commodity rather than a sponsor. Occasionally slipped and fell hard. Made some dubious decisions on coaching, many of them of a piece – hiring Mike Dubose because Gene Stallings wanted to choose his successor, then hiring Franchione when Dubose’s position became untenable, then hiring Mike Price when Franchione sold out in a hurry, then desperately grabbing Mike Shula when Price became morally untenable, then finally shooting a gigantic money cannon at Nick Saban.

I was a pretty damn devout Alabama fan (even if I didn’t much understand football) from the time I can remember football up until I got to Vanderbilt. At which point I had a football team of my own to be mildly interested in, and Vanderbilt had rattled off three 5 win seasons out of four and was primed for the come-up…until LSU hired the coach away and Vandy hired the offensive coordinator of my beloved Redskins and ruined both squads in the process. And then I was living in DC, and the NFL took most of my interest for pigskin, and while I was still aware of Alabama football (and blissfully unaware of Vanderbilt), it just wasn’t a big deal unless it was Tennessee or Auburn week. And I wasn’t in the South any longer. And then, I met a girl with her own Cal season tickets, and they were on the way up, and pretty soon that was the dominant football interest for a long time. And when Cal ran on the rocks, Vanderbilt suddenly became pretty damn good – incredibly good, by its standards – and that absorbed me completely.

And then it ended, and the wheel stopped spinning, and Vanderbilt and Cal were a mess and the NFL was reprehensible and Alabama…well, Alabama had changed, hadn’t it? It was as if you rubbed the lamp and the genie gave you everything you could have wanted. The first victory over Texas, in the Rose Bowl stadium, to cap a 14-0 season with the Tide’s first Heisman trophy winner? It was like something out of a dream. Nobody had any notion there would be four more national titles in the next eight seasons, a pace not even the Bear ever managed. And somewhere in there, Alabama football had become joyless. Maybe it was the distance, maybe it was the time, but the kinds of fans we quietly derided behind their backs as lunatics had become the archetypal Tide fan. Sports talk radio and social media had made the hype all-consuming. Obsession was the default mode. And for all that, actually watching the team was joyless. If you won a national championship, it was what was expected. If you lost unexpectedly to Ole Miss or something, it was the end of the world. Meanwhile, Vanderbilt rent its garments and went insane with rage because a coach left after averaging a record of 8-5 over three years – numbers that would almost certainly show Nick Saban the door.

The question for me becomes – did Alabama football really change, or did I just become more aware of it? Were things this nuts in Bear’s era, with no ESPN or Twitter or recruiting rankings or sports radio, or is it just easier to see now? And to come back to Alabama now feels like being one of those new soccer fans who runs right out and signs up to support a Manchester team, or like the legion of bandwagon Golden State Warriors fans. Maybe you don’t feel the connection any more when there’s no connection there. I don’t know that I could be an Alabama football fan now even if I’d actually gone to Alabama…which was a lot closer to happening than some people may remember or realize.

Of which.

I’ve probably said it before but it’s amazing how the single universal thread in everything I hate right now is the Choose Your Own Reality crowd pissing around after a childhood (and much of a life, really) where Imagination was a dirty word. The same people who frowned at comic books or called Dungeons & Dragons the stuff of devil worship have spent the last ten years on another planet where email forwards and talk radio nutters are all the proof you need of a world of secret Muslims and Martian pedophile rings and crisis actors and false flags. At least I had the decency to know my imagination wasn’t real, which is more than you can say for the yokels I left behind.

My whole life, I am sensitive to the world. I take in everything, process everything, try to solve everything. I’ve always had to face the possibility of being overwhelmed by the inputs, made worse by those problems I couldn’t solve but wasn’t allowed to acknowledge I couldn’t figure out. Social life, from second grade to grad school. My relationships in college. The handful of enemy users at NGS. Anything that I couldn’t deduce my way out of just became a burden I wasn’t allowed to refuse to carry. 

I can’t turn it off, and my whole life, the only alternative has been to diminish the inputs by hiding, shutting out the world, getting rid of anything I have to solve or deal with. I can aid this chemically, a little, but it’s not sufficient; neither five Guinness nor six months of Wellbutrin helps. Maybe a little bit of antidepressant, or one pint, might be enough to derail the train momentarily – but I have to be free from any other inputs. And then I need safe input – the right books, the right music, the right conversation, the right people. And if I played my cards right, that’s enough to muffle the noise. Making the best use of the downtime, that’s something else again. Refusing to answer the trick questions – and letting go of them – is the thing I have only recently begun to learn and still struggle with, and the old impulse to just hide is still dominant. Especially if I can find some way of distracting myself while hidden – at which point I’m safe, until I have to come out of the hole again.

So that’s why I have to uncouple from the emotionally damaging things. Politics. Relatives. Sports that carry emotional involvement. I need the worst sort of easy listening music, Muzak or yacht rock or whatever. Or maybe even Gaelic-language radio that I can’t even understand, just as background noise. I need the gentle low-stakes television of Escape to the Country or a hundred sixty-two games of baseball or video from the cab of a train going from Carlisle to Newcastle. I need one imperial pint of a mild 4.0% ABV nitro summer porter that I can take an hour and a half to slowly sip my way through. I need a long bus ride in the morning under a leaden overcast sky, or hours on end on a train bound for – if not nowhere, then nowhere stressful, with a Kindle in one hand and a head on my shoulder. I need to open my eyes in the morning and have nothing that compels me to get out of a warm and cozy bed, least of all sunlight pounding through the windowpanes.

What I want, as it turns out, is a dull moment. And another one. And another one, in a string as far as the eye can see.

This is the thirteenth year of the blog. In that time, I’ve had four primary cell phone numbers, six different Twitter handles, been all over the place with other social media services from Path to Mastodon to Peach to Tumblr, and had three different work email addresses. All piped through ten different smartphones and who knows how many computers.

It irritates my wife and friends to no end that my number has changed as frequently as it has. But in a way, it’s almost for the best, as is my erratic Twitter presence. It’s made it difficult to have a consistent online history, especially as I’ve spent years staying away from Google and Facebook services (yes, I have Instagram and WhatsApp, but neither ever connected to the other and neither ever connected to Facebook proper). On my personal iPhone SE, with its US Mobile SIM on prepaid, there is not one byte of Google code and no Facebook app other than Insta. And it runs through a VPN at all times which makes it appear I’m online from somewhere in London.

The Internet changed the rules about what is possible. As a result, a digital world has different imperatives and different issues around everything from copyright to speech to harassment to advertising to what is reasonable to expect from asynchronous communication. And because we live in a world where norms and unwritten rules mean nothing, we haven’t established any around this new world. In the past, if you ordered something from a catalog, you’d get their catalog every month from now on. Now you get email from them every day. No one in the old days would have dreamed of requiring you to conduct business on your home phone; now it’s nothing for a company to say they don’t have phones and expect you to use your own mobile phone for work. And there’s no planet on which South Central Bell could have said “we want to monitor your conversation so we can advertise to you” but now that’s more or less exactly what Verizon and Comcast and AT&T are arguing that they should be able to do “just like Google” without seeming to grasp that they’re the phone line, not the correspondent on the other end.

Add this to the long list of things that need repairing…someday. Assuming the world is still here and generational inertia hasn’t set in with everyone under 30 who has no idea or expectation of online privacy. Meanwhile I’ll be over here plotting to get a 669 area code for the personal line somehow.

It’s hard to think about given how 2016 and 2017 went, but for me, personally, it all sort of went to hell for good in 2014. The slide started almost immediately, with the first of ultimately seven ER visits for my in-laws that year as soon as I got back from Birmingham. That was when their health took a turn for the worst once and for all. Lost in the aftermath was how Vanderbilt’s most successful coach in the last century chose to go help Penn State get right, functionally taking a huge shit on everything he’d said for three years about “build don’t rent” – and sacrificing our best success in football history so that the Nittanys could speed their recovery from having harbored a child molester for years. That’ll sour your outlook.

But once you get away from the more purely personal, you see the real shit emerge. Ferguson, when some white people finally began to catch on that a huge swath of law enforcement is fundamentally lawless. GamerGate, where it became apparent that social media is a fundamentally negative force and that its operators are utterly unwilling to control or contain when bad people weaponize it.The GOP leveraged six years of blind obstruction to capture the Senate and elevate that obstruction to genuinely unprecedented levels. And the rest of the world finally began to catch on to how Silly Con Valley is sexist, ageist, kind of racist and the functional equivalent of Wall Street in the 1980s, and how its regular business was submerged under the get-rich-quick chicanery of companies whose business model was built on the tripod of “forgiveness not permission,” “do this for me like Mom used to” and “send nudes.”

We more or less live in the world that 2014 made. Just as Waterloo set the tone for the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I did for the 20th, 2014 showed us the shape of things to come. Retrograde populism, harnessed in the service of destabilizing any threat to unbridled wealth. And here in Silly Con Valley, we have a better view of it than most, because this is where your future comes from. So…wanna know what’s coming?

Consider the primacy of technology in the American marketplace. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, to a lesser extent Microsoft – the big dream of wealth now runs through high-tech, more so than the Alex P. Keaton stockbroker fantasy ever did in the 1980s, because tech convinced people that it was all about “making the world a better place.” The cliche got to be a cliche because tech believed it was inherently virtuous. With that fallacy plainly dismissed, we can look a little closer and see that in a LOT of ways, it’s about reordering society to ensure continued privilege for the tech elite. Things like “everyone should learn to code” aren’t about trying to lift all boats, they’re about wrenching away the oars for themselves. Beware the man (reliably a man) who thinks the one thing he knows is the only thing that’s important to know.

People are starting to figure it out. That’s why we resemble Wall Street 1986 so much; the same dickbags are in search of the next pinnacle of power and this is it – with the added bonus that heretofore at least, tech CEOs have gotten the uncritical praise not afforded to finance in the post-crash era. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Zuckerberg and Kalanick and Y Combinator are this era’s Boesky and Milken and KKR. And the insidious thing is that they’re facilitating a slide toward an economy where the ultimate luxury good is financial stability. Think about it: a rental model is the key to the 21st Century indenture. Don’t own music, pay every month for Spotify. Don’t own movies, pay every month for Netflix or HBO. Don’t own a car, pay for Uber or Lyft or Limebike. Don’t own a home, pay…well, pay whatever the market will bear, in Silly Con Valley anyway, where starter homes cost easily $1.5 million.

And you can’t afford to accumulate the wealth needed to make bigger purchases, because on top of the rent you have to pay the college loans…and by making a college degree the gatekeeper credential, they’ve ensured that you start in enough debt to be stuck on the wheel. After which – well, odds are you’ll probably never get rich, but it takes on the psychology of the lottery. You can’t win if you don’t play, and if you don’t play, you save a pittance while ensuring the winner is Not You. You can ensure that you’ll be driving Uber and running TaskRabbit on top of your hourly day job forever, or you can indenture yourself to Sallie Mae for twenty years…and drive Uber and run TaskRabbit on top of your hourly day job. Meanwhile, the wacky loan packages that used to make home ownership at least broadly feasible in a distorted market are gone, and now you’re going to need at least 15% or 20% down – which, as mentioned above, now means that you have to cough up something in the six figures all at once, and around here do it in the face of people sailing in with cash offers so they can buy investment properties. Which leads to the quasi-feudal practice of writing your begging letter to the seller in hopes of convincing them to take your deal. Downton Abbey by the Bay. Which actually dovetails quite nicely with the distributed servantry of the gig economy. No wonder everyone’s into British period drama. It’s our own Back to the Future.

And the thing about it is, when all this wealth only flows to the top, you would think the obvious solution is “soak the rich.” But the mythical white working class has gone right along with the course of things, perfectly happy to be living on a slab of cardboard underneath an overpass, cooking a dead crow on a wire coat hanger over a fire in a tin can, so long as the brown people on the next slab over don’t even have a dead crow. It’s the same trick played on white people in Alabama for a century, and it worked a treat there. It just so happens that the cracks in the system made it possible to take it national. And now, because of that 2014 Senate campaign, the Supreme Court goes from possibly having six Democratic appointees for the first time in decades to having the most stalwart conservative tilt in a century. Which means the refs are permanently biased for the foreseeable future, and misconduct like gerrymandering or voter suppression will be even harder to get over on, and changing course will be ever more difficult. When the GOP hasn’t elected a new President with the most votes since 1988, but controls all three branches of the federal government, something has broken. Possibly beyond repair.

Heads Greenock, tails Galway.