Are my eyes really blue?

Some people in this life need an elephant to take a shit on their head before they will acknowledge the possibility the circus might be in town. So now Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham and a bunch of other South Carolina Republicans, finding themselves backed into a corner by the Internet and the media and the blood of nine dead citizens, are saying the Confederate battle flag needs to come down from the South Carolina statehouse grounds. Yay and hooray.

Here’s the thing: those battle flags went up across the South – and onto state flags that had not heretofore incorporated them – not in the aftermath of the War of the Rebellion, not in the heady days after the Redeemers brought an end to the Federal occupation, but in the 1950s as a deliberate response to the emerging civil rights movement.  It was “Forget, hell!” writ large.  It was pledging the full faith and credit of Southern states to the cause of massive resistance to the notion that all men were created equal.  It had nothing to do with history, or heritage, or anything of the like; it was a deliberate gesture on behalf of white supremacy, and any argument to the contrary is facially invalid.

Yes, symbols matter. But this isn’t some kind of triumph. This isn’t even a win. This is table stakes, the barest small-blind ante necessary to participate in the 21st century. The idea that Nikki Haley deserves some kind of credit for “coming around” less than a year after saying it wasn’t important because she’d been elected and she hadn’t heard from any CEO about it is risible.  She’s not doing it because it’s the right thing to do, she’s doing it because the whole world is finally watching. You get zero credit for decisions you made because CNN had your nuts in a professional threat sandwich.

Start with this. Read it. The whole thing. Don’t skip bits. This might be the most important thing written about the topic of race in the United States in the last forty years.

I know you didn’t read it.  Go back. I’m deadly serious about this.

Okay. Now. 

Here is the thing: this country has never come to a reckoning with how we got to this point. We kind of sort of tried with the war, but there were slave states in the Union too, and their slaves were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation (slavery in places like Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri only came to an end with the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of 1865). And Reconstruction – spun by the Confederates into a horror of foreign occupation and oppression rather than any kind of effort to maybe do right by freed slaves – lasted maybe a decade, until it was possible to throw it over the side for the sake of political advantage (and the election of Rutherford Hayes as President). The Civil Rights movement lasted long enough to get a Voting Rights Act that has since been disemboweled, and efforts to extend its reach beyond the South, or Jim Crow, or the ballot box, went by the boards as soon as one party decided to take advantage of the backlash for political purposes.  We as a nation are overly fond of making a grand gesture and then forgetting about it as soon as we can get something by forgetting it.

Reparations for black America aren’t about cutting everyone a check.  You can’t dump a sack of money in everyone’s yard and call it square, because it’s not just about poverty, it’s not just about water fountains or bus seats.  Hell, the effort to try to get black elected officials got utilized to gerrymander white supremacy into Southern Congressional delegations for the last twenty years. Affirmative action – that much-derided phrase – isn’t about diversity or a quota or ticking a box, it’s about exactly what it means. Affirmative action. Recognizing that people have been wronged and making a willful, deliberate, conscious effort to undo the effects of that wrong.

It also means something else.

It means not giving in to despair.  It means not deciding that the task is too enormous, too overwhelming, too difficult to explain. It means not choosing to punt because the last slaves died decades ago and nobody alive today ever owned one.  It means grappling with how to make our society and our country worthy of what we say about ourselves.  It means taking seriously things like “justice for all” and “all men are created equal” and “a more perfect Union.”

And for the first time in twenty years, it means struggling with whether that means not throwing your hands in the air and running away and hoping that death and demographics will bend the curve for you without having to put your own shoulder to the wheel and do your part to atone for the shortcomings of your forebears.  It means turning that question in upon myself.

It means I have to ask, in all seriousness and full well aware of what the answer may require, what am I prepared to do?

This post, gentle reader, is brought to you by Android 5.1 on a 2013 Moto X. Three months after the update and a year after the Lollipop launch, and two months after the Japan excursion on which I planned to use it. But hey, let’s overlook how long it took to show up and celebrate that we got an update at all. This phone shipped with Jellybean and now has Lollipop, and you don’t get two full updates for a non-Nexus phone very often.

The swipe function of the keyboard is pretty good given that the keys are just letters on a gray field, and the word correction looks to be pretty good. This is the speech recognition at work, and it seems to be pretty decent. Naturally there is a party piece with this version and it is Project Volta. Just as Jellybean was about getting smooth and responsive UI, and KitKat was about reducing the footprint of the OS, Lollipop is about battery life that doesn’t make you want to give your phone the Rhett Wiseman treatment with an aluminum bat. It won’t be easy to tell for a couple of days because of the way you can’t stop piddling around with a new phone, but my hope is to finally fulfill the Moto X’s original promise of a 24 hour phone that goes 24 real hours.

So off we go. More to follow.

Fifty-two years ago, white supremacists used dynamite to bomb the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four little girls.

Last night, a white supremacist walked into Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine people dead.

Set aside the mass-shooting aspect of it, because we’ve proven time again again that we as a nation don’t care. Aurora, Sandy Hook, the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona – somebody said that this was the fourteenth time Barack Obama has had to address a mass-shooting incident in his presidency. Mass shootings are merely the regular dues we pay to appease the people who want to need the guns, and we as a nation have decided we’re cool with that, apparently, or too chickenshit to change it.  So set that aside.

This was a 21-year-old white male (born 1994), wearing the flags of Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe in 1980) and apartheid South Africa (which released Nelson Mandela and started dismantling legal apartheid in 1990).  This little bastard has never known a world with minority-white governance in African countries. He’s never lived in a world with de jure segregation, no separate water fountains or back of the bus. Nothing about the Civil Rights Movement or Jim Crow is remotely living memory for him.

What is living memory for him is a world in which every Democratic President has been presented as the illegitimate head of a tyrannical power out to take the guns and empower The Other at white expense.  Where all criminals are actually super-powered sub-humans only kept in check by allowing unlimited power to local police – unlimited power of the same type which they accuse the Feds of mounting against them. A world with a steady drumbeat from cable news and talk radio and the Internet, pounding the same message over and over and over: they’re coming to get you, white man, live in fear. Be afraid. Be always afraid.

And, of course, he has parents. Maybe they grew up in living memory of these things. Maybe not. They could easily be my age, born a scant few years after blood on the streets in Kelly Ingram Park and the Montgomery bus terminal and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Maybe it’s only living memory for their parents. I had parents too. One was bombed out of her high school by segregationists in 1958. The other was able to watch from a Birmingham office window as fire hoses rolled black children down the street. I’m under no illusion about the kind of people my parents might have grown up as, what they believed, what they might still believe.  But I do know this: at a very young age, maybe four or five or six years old, they went out of their way to make sure I knew that those old ways and those old beliefs were wrong.

I don’t know if anyone ever did that for the mop-haired white-trash punk-ass thug that was taken into custody this morning. In a state where the battle flag of the Confederacy still flies over the state capital in 2015, I sincerely doubt it. Someone taught him, though. Maybe not his parents, whose piss-poor parenting job sullies the good name of piss, but someone told him that “the blacks” were taking over and coming to get him and raping their women and basically imparting to him four hundred years of racist fear and hatred. And he went into a church – and not just any church, but a black church, founded by an ex-slave who led a rebellion for his people, and don’t think that church was picked by accident – and in this church, at Wednesday night Bible study, he took nine lives.  Nine people dead because of an evil doctrine. Nine people dead because of the wickedness that comes from deciding that one human being can buy and sell the life of another. Nine souls lost to us because of a lie.

And now we have to consider the possibility that it may not be enough to contain and wait.  It may not be enough to ride out the dying of the Old Ones and let demographics and generational change do the job. It’s not going to be enough to let the hateful fire burn itself out as long as there’s someone willing to feed it fuel.  And it’s not going to be enough to let the government do it, not when we’ve sat idly by and let a black President be painted as an evil socialist Muslim dictator and the federal government of “we the people” be tarred as an occupying army of tyranny.

We did this, white people.  We built this inferno. We shook hands with the devil and decided we could compromise with sin, and we let the fundamental law of our country reduce a black man to three-fifths of a person. We let rebel slaveholding states rewrite history to glorify themselves and whitewash their crimes. And every time we grappled with the Confederate enemy, we hastened to let them off the hook. And we stopped applying the medicine before the infection was burned out.  It’s on us. We let this happen. Our mistake. Our fuck-up. Our problem to solve.

What are we prepared to do?

So today, the California Labor Commission has decided that an Uber driver was, in fact, an Uber employee. This is one of those things that doesn’t past the “are you dumb as a box of hammered snot” test: are you provided equipment by the company? Does the company set the rates for your service (and prohibit your receiving tips)? Does it rate your performance and disallow your working if you drop below a certain threshold?  Congrats! You are an employer.

I’ve been chirping for years that this sort of thing was inevitable – that given the opportunity, companies would eventually outsource anything below a director level and collect individual contributors and their leads/managers in a way that would make them completely disposable – the only thing is, I assumed it would be through the sort of staffing agencies that provided us with contractors during the boom of the late 90s in DC.  Instead, we have “the 1099 economy,” which is the middle-class-white-people-smartphone-enabled version of day labor. Minimum viable product? The modern way of life in Silly Con Valley appears to be “least possible amount of work you can do and still be a company.” That’s the trick Uber is trying to pull off: being a taxi company that outsources the business of owning cars or hiring drivers and just collects the vig for matching people up. What they argue is that they’re not Yellow Cab, they’re Tinder.

But it’s everywhere.  I get the same thing at work when the telecoms people won’t troubleshoot a phone issue – the VoIP phone is plugged into a local network jack, so go look at that and confirm it works before you call us, and oh by the way we don’t support the headsets we gave out with the phones because they’re peripherals, and if you can’t fix them you should call the company we hired to go hand out the phones and headsets in the first place, but not us.  That’s the miracle of technology combined with outsourcing: you can run a business and collect money while simultaneously chanting “NOT IT” the minute someone has a problem.

Good gig, if you can get it. But a future where you can either be the big entity cashing the checks or the 1099’er stringing together gigs to build an income sounds more like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia than a future vision of the good life.  I used to say that Silicon Valley is where the future comes from – and if that’s still true, you might not be glad that it does.

I’m having the strangest feelings lately.  Put it down to reading The Bitter Southerner on a regular basis, put it down to O Brother Where Art Thou running in heavy rotation on HBO, just put it down to aging and timing and the fact it was hot as hell all week. But when you find yourself blowing up Google Street Maps to full-screen on a 30-inch display and looking at the downtown streets of your former rural-exurban haunts, it’s a sure sign something weird is going on in your brain.

Moving from Nashville to the DMV to Silicon Valley has been a process of going further and further away from the home patch. With each move, the phrase “in it but not of it” comes ever more strongly to mind. College football was replaced by the NFL was replaced by baseball as the defining local sports fixation.  The local business went from country music to government to high tech.  And I myself became an ever greater anomaly, to the point where I am now as exotic and curious an attraction as you can find around these parts.

Part of that is a lack of local ties. I lived in DC for seven years and have been in Silly Con Valley almost eleven, but I didn’t go to school here – no Dematha or Roosevelt or St Francis or Gunn or Cal or Santa Clara for me – and I don’t remember things like Mayfield Mall or People’s Drug Store or the drought and fires of ’91 or the blizzard of ’96. Every place I’ve lived since leaving the old country is someplace where other people aspire to get to, and where true locals are frequently as not thin on the ground. Every place I go, I find myself in it but not of it. Including back to the old country.

Here’s the thing: I was born in the wrong place. I never fit in there. To borrow a line from the famous British traitor Kim Philby, “To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged.” And in the early 90s, that was as true as could be.  But now…you look at the food scene in Birmingham, you look at Railroad Park and the new Barons stadium, you look at the forthcoming electric bike share program, and you consider how much less expensive it would be to buy a spot in the Southside…

Could I do it?  Could I go back to the 205?  Beer at J. Clydes, whiskey at Dram, meats and brews at Bottle and Bone, season tickets for the Barons and completely punch out of college football other than maybe UAB? A place where Uber is actually a necessity in the absence of decent transit options, where you never have to wonder if a place will have air conditioning or not during a hot spell, where you still have internet access and Amazon Prime to cover your retail needs…

Four years ago I went south with only the family I chose myself for company, barring a quick stopover in Birmingham.  But for the most part, it was just me, the wife and the cousins, and I got to see the old country through completely different eyes. Sliding around the backroads in a big black rented Dodge Charger, honeysuckle aroma strong in the humid night, that sparse style of building in dying rural exurban communities, a world away from Silicon Valley and the things about it that drive me crazy…

I’m sure I’ll come to my senses quick enough, but for the first time – well, maybe ever – the old country is something other than a thing to be avoided at all costs. There are bits and pieces that resonate, that feel important to me, that deserve to be preserved and cherished. Creeping into an empty Rickwood Field to eat a couple of special dogs in the stands with a big bottle of Grapico, riding down barely-paved country backroads to nowhere in particular with a sack of Milo’s for lunch, hanging out behind the home bullpen with friends watching local girls try to holler at Barons relievers…there are things there worth cherishing and enjoying, and it’s past time I found a way to avail myself of the good without letting it be overwhelmed by the bad.

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/201506/silicon-valley-is-a-lie

Sam Biddle, the bloke who revived Valleywag in 2006, nails it. Go read it. What are you wanting for? GO.

Three quarters of my life. 33 years. A world without David Letterman seems almost inconceivable. I mean, I was imitating Paul Shaffer in a Letterman skit in high school in 1988. It’s every bit the same as when Johnny Carson retired – a legend, the sort of late night host that you’re never going to see again. Because let’s be honest, none of the guys out there now, not the Jimmies ( how the hell did we get three guys named Jimmy or James hosting late night shows on three different networks in the same time slot?), not Stephen Colbert, not Conan O’Brien – none of those guys would be there without Letterman. and none of them can remotely do what he did.

It really does seem like now everything is geared toward the YouTube clip, waiting for things to go viral the next morning. Nobody sits down and interviews, everything is geared towards what’s going to look splashing and funny, and it’s not the sort of setting for you to get the Indy 500 winner or the heavyweight boxing champion or hell, even some kid who won a 4-H ribbon at the Indiana State Fair. It’s basically celebrity goof off night, well God knows he did all the goofing off in the world, Letterman was real. He had that look that said ” look, you know and I know that this is bullshit” for all the celebrities and Hollywood riff raff. And then, when he would introduce his heart surgeons, or give that amazing monologue in the first show back after the September 11th attacks, it felt like something only he could do. Jay Leno couldn’t give that speech. Jimmy Fallon couldn’t give that speech. I can’t think of a single currently employed talk show host on late night who could.

It’s another memento mori – enjoy the things you enjoy it while you have them, because tomorrow is not promised to you and neither are they. It was a great ride, Dave. Hope you never have to see the Merritt Parkway again.

UK elections are always fun to watch for a number of reasons.  For one, you don’t have the holy rollers mucking everything up. For another, it’s a short sprint of a campaign with strict limits on campaign broadcasting so you don’t get hammered with the samn damned ads every commercial break. And really, it’s a different and interesting form of governance that I can watch without that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, because it’s somebody else’s problem.

And right now, that problem is David Cameron’s. He’s gaining ground. The threat of UKIP appears to have been somewhat overstated, and Labour is crashing hard and fast, and the LibDems are paying the price for having allied with him – but the Scottish National Party, if the polls are to be believed, is about to take every single seat in Scotland bar maybe one. Which means Cameron may yet get to go down in history as the Prime Minister who presided over the dissolution of the United Kingdom.

It’s bad for everyone, really.  Labour relied so heavily on Scotland for support in recent years that the fallout from its Unionist stand during the referendum has really and truly poisoned the well.  The LibDems enabled a Tory government without getting anything its own way and have been well and soundly thrashed by what should have been their base, and may be on the verge of electoral annihilation. UKIP’s share of the vote is spiking without giving them any actual extra seats. And for all that, the Conservatives may yet fail to book a majority in their own right.

Long story short: this election was a powder keg under the UK political system, and the British people grabbed the plunger and slammed it down with both hands. Now things get interesting.

So this review of the Apple Watch ends with the reviewer saying that it’s useful for him “to track my fitness and check the time and important notifications from the apps I care about most.” Turns out that’s the exact use case for me and the Pebble. I check the time on it. I have step counting and sleep tracking via Misfit – they don’t really integrate well with Apple Health but I don’t actually use Apple Health, and the Misfit watch app works much better than Morpheuz as a standalone tracker. Notifications to the arm without pulling out the phone are also handy, to the point where I’m actively considering changing my two-factor authentication at work to SMS rather than Duo Mobile because then I’d have two-factor authentication ON MY ARM.

Ultimately, this is where smartwatches will become a thing: you just have to get them into enough people’s hands to figure out what the use case is. Apple threw a bunch of stuff at the wall – things like sending your heartbeat or tiny sketches smacks of Samsung’s feature-itis for its own sake – but their user base is big enough that enough people will roll the dice, and they can iterate from there for the second generation.  As for me, I do have one customization that I wouldn’t have had on an Apple Watch: my primary watch face during the day tells time with Swatch Beats, which is a nice throwback to 1999 and a memento mori of booms past.

$80 to inoculate against a $400 purchase turns out to have been money well spent, even if I do wish I could have copped the gray one instead. But this one also works just as well with the Moto X, which is handy (in fact it works slightly better, as I can pick and choose apps to notify me and reply with emoji to certain forms of messaging…not completely useless, which sounds like damning with faint praise but isn’t).  And in the end…it’s a watch. You don’t stare at a watch for hours on end, you look at it for a specific piece of information (like day or date, for instance). Viewed in that light, the Pebble is about dead solid perfect for what I need, and kind of an inspiring notion: a small company that had an idea and brought it to market without just selling out to Apple or Google or Microsoft, and with crowdfunding no less.  Well done. Would that more of this industry was like that.

They call it the A-Bomb Dome.  It’s what’s left of the former Industrial Hall, the building closest to the hypocenter of the detonation. It looks pretty much like any other bombed-and-burned building, just brick and steel, scorched and twisted and slightly melted in spots.  The thing is, all around it you have the river and the assorted monuments and memorials and the museum, and beyond that is the rebuilt city.  So when you go into the museum and look at the black-and-white pictures of a giant burnt plain with a few stubs of trees or buildings standing like random scarecrows in winter, it doesn’t seem real.

The aftermath is worse, of course.  The lucky ones got blown to pieces right away; the rest were left with burns and fallout and throwing up internal organs and microcephalic offspring.  All in all, pretty horrifying stuff, especially when you think about how we really didn’t know just how the thing would work out.  After all, there had been exactly one detonation of a test device, and the production design was the Mark 1 that was dropped from the Enola Gay.  They weren’t even sure if the thing would detonate, let alone what would happen.

Was it the right thing to do? We did it again three days later to Nagasaki – and even then, as the emperor was preparing to broadcast his rescript of unconditional surrender, there were officers plotting a palace coup to prevent it so that the army could fight on.  And the US had enough fissionable material for one, maybe two more bombs at most – so what then? Tokyo? Kyushu, to try to pave the way for the invasion forces? Hold it in reserve just in case things really turned ugly?

And then there’s that invasion itself.  Scheduled for November 1, 1945, less than six months after V-E day, the first landing to establish a base for the eventual assault on the Kanto Plain outside Tokyo four months later.  The biggest invasion force in human history, one projected to lead to a million Japanese casualties and more American deaths than the rest of the war put together.  And I think about the fact that today, in 2015, there are American officers in Afghanistan and Iraq with Purple Hearts in their kit bags, ready to award on the spot, because in seventy years we still haven’t awarded all the Purple Heart medals that were manufactured in anticipation of that invasion.

War is hell. We firebombed the very shit out of Dresden and Tokyo. We caused more casualties in Tokyo than in Hiroshima, simply because the city was mostly built out of wood and paper and went up like a torch when General Curtis LeMay switched to incendiary bombing. If everything in Osaka and Yokohama and Tokyo looks like it went up around 1960, well, I have a stunning coincidence to report.  About the only thing we didn’t pound into rubble was Kyoto, simply because some of the higher powers in the US command were unwilling to destroy the historic capital and cultural center of Japan; otherwise it probably would have taken the A-bomb instead of Hiroshima.

In the end, it was probably necessary.  It probably saved close to a million Japanese lives that would have almost certainly been lost in a protracted invasion, especially when middle-schoolers were being handed sharpened screwdrivers and told to aim for an American soldier’s abdomen.  The Marines who’d fought their way through the islands for over three years were counting on another three; the sullen motto was “Golden Gate by ’48.”

But if there’s a lesson here, this is it: you can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. And if you decide to do it, you’d better be prepared to accept and live with the consequences.