Are my eyes really blue?

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.

Gov. Rick Perry, R-TX, today:

Austin — Gov. Rick Perry today in a precautionary measure requested the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide 37,430 courses of antiviral medications from the Strategic National Stockpile to Texas to prevent the spread of swine flu. Currently, three cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Texas.

Gov. Rick Perry, R-TX, two weeks ago:

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Partial text of HCR-50:

RESOLVED, That the 81st Legislature of the State of Texas

hereby claim sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the

Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise

enumerated and granted to the federal government by the

Constitution of the United States; and, be it further

RESOLVED, That this serve as notice and demand to the federal

government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective

immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these

constitutionally delegated powers;

I don’t see anything about the Centers for Disease Control in the Constitution; therefore, I believe the federal government is officially within its obligations and duties to tell Rick Perry to shit in his ten-gallon hat and screw it on tight.

I’m entirely serious. There are a bunch of people out running their mouths about crap like “socialism” and “fascism” and “USSA” and “losing the republic” and yes, secession. At some point, if we don’t make Bubba* eat his words, he’s going to think he can make another go of it just like ’61. Hopefully, this President will be less like Eisenhower and Kennedy and more like Lincoln…and show some sack. Besides, as I never tire of pointing out, this time the Feds have got the hydrogen bomb.

* “Bubba” hereafter to be used as the equivalent of “Fritz” in WWII or “Charlie” in Vietnam. If we’re going to have a second Civil War, it’s not too early to be working on slang.

While I work up another post, consider this nugget: South Africa is wrapping up a general election. No results yet, because they are meticulous to the point of fastidiousness about keeping it clean, and they do a good job with it, but in the meantime, consider this:
There are kids who voted in that election who were not born when Mandela walked free from prison.
Tempus Fugit.* It’s a different world out there, folks.
*But The Special AKA still kick ass, don’t think they don’t.

When I lived in DC, especially in the second half of my career there, my surrogate big sister memorably described my wardrobe as “black shirt, black shirt, Hawai’ian shirt, black shirt, black Hawai’ian shirt.” And with the exception of the black shirt, the black shirt, and the mambo shirt, that was pretty much accurate. A proflieration of aloha-wear was good for many things: covering the emerging gut, resisting the heat of a Washington summer, looking snappy at the cigar shop.

Once I moved west, though, those shirts largely went in the closet and stayed there. Part of it was because they weren’t really practical for warehouse work, but I think at some level I was trying to make myself over a little and leave behind some of the more unpleasant aspects of my personality developed in the latter two years with the old firm. That may be why I also ordered myself a pair of No Sweats the day we pulled into Silly Con Valley to stay. Now, these shoes are your classic NorCal: a Converse Chuck Taylor lookalike, in black, made by sweatshop-free union labor in some less-benighted Third World hellhole. For whatever reason they don’t make them anymore, but back then, it felt like a nice change from years of Doc Martens. Ironically, within six months I was wearing steel-toed Docs, which I actually needed for my job, and the NS went in the closet.

If you need proof the 80s are back, just stroll around any shopping area populated by young people – I saw kids in Union Square up in the city on Saturday who could have dropped into my junior-high era without drawing so much as a blink. The Chucks are everywhere (as are drainpipe jeans and garish neon, but that’s a problem for another day) – much like the M1911 is for firearms manufacturers, every shoe company on Earth has made a Chuck clone at some point. And for similar reasons of timelessness and demonstrable utility.

I haven’t owned actual Chucks since a pair of maroon hightops for PE in 9th grade. I bought a pair of black hightops at some point in college and returned them within a half hour, and I had a pair of the big leather basketball shoes that Converse styled to look like Chucks during my new-kicks-every-month phase in college and grad school. In fact, since arriving in Washington all those years ago, I hadn’t bought a single pair of athletic shoes in at least…well, ever.

But there is something about the simple black Cons, with the white rubber toe and the stripe around the sole, that suggests – I don’t know what. All I know is that I put them on today, with the black Hawai’ian shirt, and felt like I probably looked five years younger. Which, as things go, well, you could do worse.

(There will be more weird flashback nostalgia later, including cigars.)

If you recall, the great antiwar protests of 2003 really didn’t accomplish that much. Part of it was because they didn’t get a lot of media coverage – MSNBC fired the host of their highest-rated evening show because Phil Donahue was just too liberal for the zeitgeist, for crying out loud – but largely because those protests were, to put it bluntly, the hottest of hot messes. For every concerned middle-American who was uneasy about so quickly launching a second military front in the War on Terror, there were a dozen assorted goofs – International ANSWER types, Palestinian liberationists, moronic Ralph Nader dead-enders, anarchists with paper-mache puppets, Free Mumia douchetards, a smattering of dirty hippies with signs about how George Washington grew hemp, greying 60s hairballs on a nostalgia trip – in short, enough incoherence and mixed messages that what came across was a muddled collection of hard-left cliches sure to weaken the resolve of any plain ol’ voter who just wanted to register that this was the wrong war at the wrong time.

Looking at today’s “teabag” protests (brought to you through the courtesy of Fox News Channel), it’s tough to say that the right doesn’t have the same problem. You have the whole 2009 right-wing grab bag of Birthers, who still think Obama’s not actually an American citizen, the “secret Muslim” crowd (which apparently represents roughly 10% of the population, which is why we have words like ‘decimation’), the black-helicopter militia types who just got done re-applying the “I Love My Country But I Fear My Government” bumper stickers they scraped off eight years ago, a bunch of free-range secessionists (this is a particular problem in Texas, apparently, but then Texas is a particular problem anyway), gold-standard buffoons, flat-tax enthusiasts, and not a small number of outright racists. And all of that obscures the message of…

…um…

…what exactly? Taxes are bad? (Look, I don’t like taxes either, but it’s not like I could buy a nuke with my own money – it’s the sort of thing you have to go in on, like a keg.) Raising the top marginal rate 3.5% two years from now – as will be done by statute law that was passed eight years ago – is beyond the pale? Some as-yet-undetermined tax increase in the future is untenable? Cutting payroll taxes is wrong? Socking it to rich assholes who spent bailout money on their own bonuses is a bad thing? (Cause there sure were a hell of a lot of votes for it four weeks ago.)

Actually, that’s unfair. There is a unified and coherent message to today’s protests, and it is this: “We’re still mad that we got the beatdown last November, and if we just whine loud enough and whine long enough, we can magically turn back time.” It’s just another variation of the Great Southern Sickness: the belief that somehow, some way, you can make things be back the way they were. And as somebody who’s not only a victim but a carrier for GSS, I damn well know it when I see it.

The Boston Tea Party was about taxation without representation. Everybody out there today has their representation, and had it in November, and they got clowned. Last check, they still had tons of Congressmen and over forty Senators, so excuse me if I can’t get too worked up. If I want to deal with that kind of crying, I’ll babysit.