Travelogue 2010, part 4

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.

Gaps

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.

Blast from the past: October 31, 2006

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.

third impressions

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.