Are my eyes really blue?

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?

Well, here goes nothing. I have pirated a Bluetooth keyboard and paired it with the iPhone, so now we see once and for all what it’s going to be like to actually blog from this thing.

Looks like I may miss having a mouse to help with corrections and edits but for sheer speed of input, this can’t be beat. Ironically, this experiment comes on a day that Cisco, of all people, launches what may be the best challenge yet to the iPad: a 7″ tablet with the infelicitous name “Cius” (apparently pronounced ‘see-us’) which runs on Android and supports, among other things, Cisco Telepresence. Which is more or less the gold standard in you-are-there video communication, to the point where it was practically a character in 24 and gets commercials with Ellen Page during the World Cup.

It’s true: the PC is going away. More and more people are putting the lie to the idea that the iPad is only for consumption with assorted feats of media creation (and hell, if I can blog like this on the phone, how much easier with the bigger screen?) while the Cius expressly supports thin-client login so you can use your work machine from afar. And let me emphasize: I am writing this on a razor-thin Bluetooth keyboard and the most compact smartphone out there. The combined pair takes up less room in my bag than a trade paperback thickness or a magazine area footprint. If I could just find one of those old collapsable Palm keyboards from years ago, like the one a former contract “boss” had and threw on the scrap pile for lack of utility…

well hell, I guess that’s that question answered. It can be done. Add the keyboard to the mix, and everything I would have done on the laptop, I can do on the iPhone…except for ripping DVDs. And Netflix and Hulu seem determined to make that unnecessary as soon as possible. Hell, I can get VGA video out on the iPhone, what’s to prevent me connecting it to a projector and watching movies on the wall? (Except for the fact that it would almost certainly destroy the battery life.)

We live in the future, boys and girls. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.

Robert Byrd had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. That’s all you need to know to realize just how long he was in the Senate – he was first elected at a time when such a revelation was the farthest thing from electoral poison.

Byrd was also the institutional memory of the Senate, the man who knew everything there was to know about how the upper chamber worked. There was a story in DC, probably apocryphal, that Newt Gingrich had a dry run for pushing the Contract With America through the Senate, and had a whole team of researchers to play the part of Robert Byrd – and was dismayed at how simple it would be for one man to tie the chamber in knots.

With the passing of Byrd, the Senate takes one step farther away from the “Folkways of the US Senate” days and one step closer to being the House of Representatives – only with longer tenure and a worse grip on math.

“This may just be once-every-four-years ignorance here, but is it asking too much to have more than one official on the field? Every time I start watching international soccer, I am amazed by just how consistently inconsistent the officiating is. Would it utterly kill the sport to have three guys out there instead of one lone nut? I did love Eric Wynalda’s line, though: “There are only two kinds of referees: bad ones and worse ones.”

This was written after Jorge Larrionda gave the US two red-cards in 4 minutes in a 1-1 draw with Italy in the 2006 World Cup.

Larrionda was assigned to the England-Germany match today, where he missed an England goal where the ball hit the crossbar and landed three feet deep in the goal.

FIFA never learns.