GIN AND TACOS

A while back I owned a sports car. A legitimate two-seater with room for perhaps a moderately sized flat box (the Dunkin Donuts party pack type) in the back atop the engine and, in the frunk (front trunk) a compartment sized to hold precisely one carry-on sized suitcase. It was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the least practical car on the planet not named the Lotus Elise (which is like that, but doesn't even have soundproofing).

Occasionally people would point out to me – as though it had not occurred to me independently – that it was not a very practical vehicle. "You can't fit anything in that!" they said, as if my decision to purchase and drive it was driven by cargo capacity. It would be every bit as stupid for me to remind a Honda Odyssey minivan owner that his vehicle couldn't beat anyone in a drag race. One could safely assume that this was not a relevant concern to the Odyssey buyer, nor is it fair to criticize a vehicle designed to carry many passengers safely for being kinda slow.

As you've probably figured out, this post is about Nancy Pelosi.

Wait. What?

It struck me recently that there is one important aspect in which nearly all criticism of Pelosi recently has been unfair, and it's not the simple "Well she's a woman" point that has been made a great many times. It is unfair in a sense to criticize Pelosi on the grounds of not being enough of a fire-and-brimstone leader when in ordinary political time there would be zero expectation that a House minority leader or Speaker would fit that mold.

That simply isn't what they're for. Criticizing Pelosi for not leading the charge into the front lines of the GOP with her sword out and her hair on fire is technically accurate – she's not – but misses the point of whether anyone should consider that a realistic thing the House Minority Leader might do. It isn't.

Think of how incredibly, almost painfully, dull most of the people who have occupied House leadership positions for either party have been throughout history. There is a reason Speaker, Majority / Minority Leader, etc are not springboards to higher political office or places to groom future presidential candidates.

Bob Michel? Tip O'Neill? Paul Ryan? Sam Rayburn? Dick Gephardt? All people who had some good qualities and filled their House roles well, but my god can you imagine a more boring dinner party to be at? House leaders are technicians and parliamentarians.
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There's a good reason they make terrible presidential candidates when they try.

So the question is, why does it make sense to hold Pelosi's blandness and rather tepid approach against her?

It doesn't. The problem is that there is a leadership (not formally, but Big Picture) void in the Democratic Party. Obama and Hillary Clinton were the two most obvious figureheads and now both are Private Citizens; you can't be the party's focal point when you're on the outside. Sanders is too polarizing and also too old. The Democratic Senate leadership is a joke (and also ancient). The only Democrats generating excitement outside of their own constituencies are people like Beto O'Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, it bears noting, haven't won anything yet (Beto has held some lower offices, but the Senate race is anything but a sure thing).

People gravitate toward the names they know, and for better or worse Nancy Pelosi is just about the only recognizable name in a leadership position in the Democratic Party at the national level. With Trump turning the GOP into a cult of personality, it is natural to look for a Democratic counterpart. There isn't one; whether there should be is a separate question. It certainly isn't going to be a congressional lifer, if such a person exists.

In short, expecting Nancy Pelosi or any House leader to be inspiring is a bit like expecting your accountant to be inspiring. It's not only terribly unlikely but also very much beside the point.

Yes, I believe all of the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate need to find successors under the age of 70 and start fading away. No organization, political or not, should feel comfortable with such an old group of leaders. Imagine any big corporation having nobody under 70 on the Board or in a management role. But in the immortal words of Dennis Green, Nancy Pelosi is what Nancy Pelosi is, and that's OK. It is not reasonable to expect her to fill a void that someone like the House Minority Leader would not, in any remotely reasonable set of expectations, be called upon to fill.

What went through Omarosa's or Michael Cohen's minds when they started secretly recording conversations at work? I can't tell you that. But I can tell you what was going through mine.

To nip any untoward rumors in the bud, the following predates my academic career by years. So no need to cast about looking for a culprit among the many wonderful academics at any institution I've ever been associated with. Or, let me spell it out: This is not about anyone in higher education, period.

In my early post-college life I worked directly for a ownership-level person at a company and that person was engaged in illegal activities that require, and will receive, no additional detail here because the specifics are not relevant. What is relevant is as follows:

1. I was being asked to do things that were either not legal or were highly suspect
2. I was about 22 and in a position with no power, dependent on the whims of one or two people for continued employment
3. I needed the job, as it paid above-average and I had recently graduated from college with not-insubstantial credit card debt. Basically whatever part of my college tuition and living expenses for three-plus years I couldn't borrow or pay for with earnings during summers and part-time during the school year, I charged. I did what I could under the circumstances in which I found myself.

So the first obvious question is, why not just quit? "Why didn't you quit" is a question often asked rhetorically that gives away a great deal about the privileges of the questioner.

I didn't quit because like the vast majority of Americans I lived essentially paycheck to paycheck and didn't have another job offer handy. If there are people out there in the early 20s who can afford to quit a job and support themselves without one for an indeterminate time, I was not one of them.

Given this, I felt strongly that:

1. Someone might end up being arrested or going to jail, and it was NOT going to be me.

2. I was in a weak position in which I could, I imagined, be blamed for something I did not do and was not my fault
3. I needed to protect myself somehow and make it clear that I said no when asked to do certain things, and I needed something more than my word against a wealthy white guy's word to prove it.

This was pre-smartphone, but owning to some writing I did for a now-defunct sports website, I owned a small digital recorder. And on a couple of occasions – maybe three total – I used it to record conversations wherein I was extremely uncomfortable with some of the things being discussed and in which I was being involved against my will.

I didn't ask to be there, in other words, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it. But short of quitting and walking out the door, I didn't see how to avoid it.

Nothing that involved me ended up coming of this, at least as far as I was affected. I left the job as soon as I could, and what legal consequences followed had nothing to do with me. I was relieved, obviously, and had not enjoyed what happened one bit. At the same time, however, I believed I had done the right thing to protect my own interests.

Obviously there is an angle with White House employees that wasn't a factor for me – the potential to sell-tell, or financially profit from taking recorded conversations to a tabloid or writing a book. Simply put, nobody cared about me or the job and nobody would have any interest in hearing the conversations.

In short, there are a small number of reasons someone might record a conversation:

1. Profit
2. Blackmail
3. Ass Covering in an environment where illegal things are happening

Apparently everybody is secretly recording everybody else in the circle of people around Trump, which is probably the least surprising thing we could learn. From the outside we can't assign one of these motives. All I can tell you is that from my perspective, profit or "blackmail" never even entered the picture. The dominant, and in fact only, consideration was that I recognized an illegal activity when I saw it and resolved that 1) I was not going to participate in any way and 2) I was not going to be the one punished for it, if it came to that.

My guess – and it is solely a guess, of course – is that the covering of one's own ass preoccupies the thoughts of everyone near or inside this White House. The president is a con man and a grifter, and no doubt he attracts some fellow grifters whose interests in recording conversations or collecting "evidence" may be to profit from it later. But I think a very basic human tendency in a workplace where employment is at-will and one is at the mercy of more powerful people is to recognize when something fishy is going on and ensure that if someone ends up going to jail or being called to account in the future that person is someone else.

I need to preface this, as I have developed the power to foresee comments, by emphasizing that I have enjoyed every single minute of this long vacation I have been fortunate enough in circumstances to take. Would do again in a heartbeat and would not trade it for anything. Also, this is not a post about beverage ice, which no longer requires discussion because I am so unbelievably correct on that point.

It's hot here, guys. Balls hot.

Every day of this trip I've sweat through all of my clothes and peeled them off at the end of the day wondering if I jumped in a lake and just don't remember doing so. Here I was expecting that famous Adriatic / Mediterranean climate, and instead it's eerily similar to "pit stains by noon" season in Chicago. So I am not surprised to see a headline like "Europe’s summer was so hot that tropical flamingos laid eggs for the first time in 15 years." There have been record highs everywhere. It was 95 in Prague. 97 in Vienna. And reader, I shit you not, my car thermometer (for what that's worth) registered 37 Celsius in Slovenia of all places, which is over 100 F. That isn't "hot for Europe;" that's just hot.

The highs matter here because this part of the world is, very reasonably and logically, not equipped to handle "Balls Hot." It's never this hot here, so why should they bother air conditioning everything or organize any of their routine around it being literally too hot to move for part of the day. It would be like building a home with a double-thick door up on stilts on the off-chance that it is ever -50 F in Chicago. It just wouldn't make sense.

No, things are set up quite logically for an area where summer means "it might hit the low 80s, but don't worry because if it does we can just sit in the shade until it passes." I can promise you that the sipping a barely-cold beverage in the shade when it's 95 is, well, it's still pretty fucking hot. That's the difference between peaking at 85 and peaking nearer to 100.

And it raises the troubling question of what precisely the effects will be if 95 degree summers become the new normal in places that have not previously experienced it. It's not automatic that it will become normal, of course. This year could be anomalous, and it's not unprecedented (note the "in 15 years" in the WaPo headline). But what happens when a region prepared to handle Hot is suddenly upgraded to Hot-Hot?

The thing is, this kind of heat kills people. Talk about the Mediterranean breeze all you want, but elderly people in un-air conditioned apartments are not all gonna make it if they had to experience 2-3 months of the mid-90s. I have lived in one place where summer means that it's 98 every single day from Memorial Day to late September (Athens, GA) and dealing with it requires building a lifestyle around it.
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Everything is air conditioned to "Ice Station Zebra" levels because you couldn't get anything done while the sun is up otherwise.
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And of course it helps a ton that Americans do most of their place-to-place travel in an air conditioned car. So although it is definitely a hot, sweaty experience, it's survivable.
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People in Texas and Arizona are getting used to 110 being a long-term normal high and they survive the same way.

If Europe's continental climate turns into the American Midwest – the brutal extremes of summer heat and winter cold – patterns of energy consumption are likely to change in ways that will require beefing up infrastructure.
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Many homes and apartments here are far too old for structural changes to deal with hotter weather – I get the sense that a place like Budapest or Prague has the buildings it has, and isn't about to tear them down and build new ones.

But nothing changing isn't going to be an option. Believe me, the fat, pampered American and German tourists were not the only ones reeling from the heat. The locals looked equally stunned, and neither group seemed to find "Sit for a second and have a warm Coke" satisfactory as a solution. America has exported a lot of things to Europe, and a lot of it has been questionably useful (Burger King, Lil' Pump, etc). I hope we don't add our sometimes insane climate to the list.

As a Chicago resident I largely ignore the salacious crime reporting about the city, which routinely and blatantly ignores 1) that crime is actually down by nearly any measure and 2) that other American cities far outpace it in crime rates and focusing on Chicago is part of a political agenda.

That said, I'm not blind to the fact that the city obviously has problems. Those problems start with the CPD, which has so completely lost the trust of most residents who aren't white and 65 that cooperation between victims, neighbors, and police is nonexistent. Successive mayors' offices have been an even more significant problem, redlining areas of the city that are declared not worth saving and pouring resources into "good" areas.

My Avondale neighborhood is *not* some ultra-gentrified island of privilege.
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There are no Fancy Restaurants and we just got our first Hip Person Bar a couple months ago. I pay less than $1000 / month for a 2-br apartment, compared to the $1500-2000 that would cost in Wicker Park, Logan, or Lakeview. I am one of maybe five non-immigrants on my block, the vast majority being Polish or Mexican families who park their work trucks out front at night.

The neighborhood has not had a murder in four years. In a city of millions with something of a crime problem, that's amazing. It's not because I rub shoulders with real estate titans, Bears players, John Cusack, and Chance the Rapper. It's because the neighborhood is part of the city map that has not been written off by the city and county governments.
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The schools are open. The street lights work. The streets get plowed in the winter. Public Transit service is ample and works. OK, the streets themselves still look like they were recently bombed by the luftwaffe but you get the point.

Compare that to Garfield Park or West Lawn and it's not real hard to see the difference.

This weekend, a staggering 66 people were shot in 48 hours, including one three-hour span with 30 shootings. That is an average of one every five minutes. Meanwhile, when I'm home I and my neighbors walk the streets at all hours.

People in the city understand that "the person who pulls the trigger" is ultimately to blame. But they also understand that the root cause of the chain of events leading to that is the underlying economics of race and class in the city. Close the schools, abandon the neighborhoods, refuse to hire "those people," and then act real surprised when gang activity becomes the primary form of entrepreneurship in blighted areas. Maybe don't resign yourself to two large swaths of the city being "blighted areas" and you might see less appalling crime statistics. Just a thought.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I'm on vacation in the former Austro-Hungarian empire and I'm quite busy trying to enjoy it.

A few people, all older men, have asked me as we've talked casually about where I'm traveling if there is any resentment of Americans in the short experience I've had. The easy answer is No, nobody seems to care. To the extent that there is any resentment to be felt I think it's directed at the Germans for being obviously so much wealthier than Czechs, Croatians, etc.

The more interesting answer is, it says a ton about the generation gap that anyone from the Cold War era still thinks Europeans are envious of or aspire to be Americans. Yeah, they like our shit music and movies. The dominant sense, though, is that they just feel sorry for us at this point. Nobody's crawling under barbed wire to escape East Germany now, and certainly not to get to a country with zero paid vacation days mandated by law and in which people can work full time and have no ability to see a doctor when they're sick. I feel – and maybe I'm projecting – that people in Southeast Europe have lived through a collapsing, failed regime and they know one when they see one. And they feel sorry for Americans today the same way Americans used to feel sorry for Eastern Europeans under communism. Just replace "God, they don't even have toilet paper! They have to wait in line for bread!" with "God, they're all one paycheck from being homeless, and they can't even go to the hospital!"

America's immigration policy where white Europeans are concerned is an open door now. Nobody resents us – they see others (Japanese, German, etc) who are as wealthy as American tourists, and they see the benefits they enjoy for being EU citizens and consciously choose not to trade it for what they could get in the US, which boils down to lower taxes and not much else. They'll continue to buy our Lil' Pump tracks and our Dwayne Johnson movies, but do they want to be us?
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No. They think we're nuts. Right now we're the Crazy Friend who you like but want to keep at arms length.

We're on our way to being the Train Wreck Friend who you actively ignore when the number comes up on the phone.
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One deal I have with myself as a traveler is that I will partake of every opportunity to see something that advertises itself as a museum (I could stop the sentence there and it would be mostly true) of the cold war period. This has led me into some truly awful, abysmal, corn-ball shit (the "Spy Museum" in DC is among the funniest things I've seen that was not intended to be funny) and a few interesting places as well.

This will sound bad, but I don't go into such places to learn anything. I don't mean that I already know it all; it's more that I could get all the information I could ever want from any number of books, online sources, documentaries, and so on. So, and I suspect this is a big reason behind the Disneyfication of museums everywhere, they have to find an interesting way to tell the story.

Finding out that Prague has a "Museum of Communism" was a no-hesitation moment for me. Finding out once we arrived that it is located in a tourist-heavy area and thus would likely cater to American tastes was icing on the cake. This would be BAD.

On one count the place was legitimately good – everything was presented from a Czech perspective. That was refreshing. I feel like younger people (those who don't remember pre-1989) could learn a lot there.

Points of reference as specific as addresses, small towns, and stories from normal people were used widely for context. I mean, I know that's not exactly rare in the museum world now but as shit as I was expecting the place to be, it was welcome.

The editorial perspective, though, was weird.

It's always weird on this topic. It's clearly the "See? Communism failed! You are so lucky not to have to live in this failed system!" perspective, as every take on the Soviet bloc written after 1989 has used. Hooray! Capitalism won! Here's an enormous list of flaws with centrally planned government.

The genius of that framing is that it's impossible to refute in a vacuum. Clearly nobody really misses a system in which toilet paper was a rare commodity. It's indisputable that if you judge systems by their ability to churn out consumer products, there's no comparison. If you give people a choice between two systems that don't really work and one has ample, cheap Ass Paper, they're going to pick that one every time.

The irony, though, is that focusing attention exclusively on the failings of "Communism" is a great way to allow people of a certain mindset to walk out thinking, "See? Communism sucked!" without prompting any kind of reflection about the system we live in now. Because aside from the obvious gap in ability to make cheap shit to fill store shelves, every criticism in the entire museum was as applicable to modern capitalism as to Soviet-style communism.

Oh, under communism lots of people were imprisoned? People didn't feel free? Government was corrupt and unresponsive? Wow interesting tell me more. Through that lens even the line of argument that capitalism is awesome for consumption looks a little wobbly; "Most people couldn't get the things they wanted or needed" sounds an awful lot like "Most people can't afford the things they want or need" and the difference is semantic.
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I guess if the reason people end up under-provided for is the most important thing to you, that argument is worth having. In practice it isn't.

I liked all the photos and video of Wenceslas Square during the events of 1989. In that era it looked gray, dull, and absent any obvious symbols of affluence. Today it's crammed with equally sad, but in the sense that every available inch of space has been crammed full of foreign chain stores. The Jan Palach memorial is about 25 feet from a McDonald's. Across the square from that is a casino. It's gaudy and shitty and sad in a very affluent First World way that you can experience in just about any city on Earth.

It's not that the argument about a "failed system" is flawed. That doesn't bother me. What does bother me is the absence of recognition that it has been replaced with an equally flawed system. There was and is no "winner." People with power and money simply decided one set of flaws was more to their liking than another.

Pissing on the West Wing might seem like picking low-hanging fruit in 2018, now that political reality is an even more stark contrast to its Disney version of the Beltway than before. But I recently re-read this Luke Savage piece from last summer detailing the popularity of the show as a product of an era (the late 1990s and pre-9/11 00s) in which the politics of ideologically neutral centrism finally seemed within reach to the many people who are into this sort of thing.

Look, it's a TV show. I've grown out of trying to talk people out of liking TV shows. If you like it, you like it. In the Trump era, though, I'm starting to feel like some of the people still obsessed with the show – given when it aired, mostly the 50-and-over crowd right now – might be falling into a trap that conservatives have wallowed in for years now.

You know how the entirety of white conservatism is based on the shared idea of a "good old days," back before the fall? Of course the idealized America they're thinking of never really existed.
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It's a fantasy. It's fair to say that in the 1950s and 1960s ordinary working people were financially better off (thanks Unions!) but the monoculture, the institutionalized racism and sexism, the social stratification, it was all there. Nothing was perfect and wonderful, except for a select portion of white people.

I think some liberals, and a lot of people in the center, are starting to adopt a similar fantasy about the politics of the West Wing. If only we could rid ourselves of the slimy corruption of Trumpism and get back to a politics of integrity, honesty, and mutual respect! When there were Good Republicans, and Democrats were Pragmatic, and all policy discussions (and of course that was the majority of what governing was) ended with handshakes and some good, common sense status quo reinforcing centrism.

Look. I see the appeal of that. But that was a TV show; politics was never like that. The zeitgeist of the West Wing was the early Clinton years, but look at what happened during the actual Clinton years: a billion dollar campaign of lies to undermine universal health care, Democrats signing on to Reagan's agenda wholesale (welfare reform, sentencing reform, NAFTA, etc.), and Republicans spending six years trying to rip them to shreds anyway.

To the extent that consensus and Both Sides handshake politics ever existed it was on issues where a brutal elite consense pervaded (segregation, for example) and so no debate was necessary. It's like the old joke about how you can get a Catholic and a Protestant to stop bickering if you bring up Jews, because they can both agree on that point.

You see some ribbon threads of this today – Democrats and Republicans "coming together" to roll back Dodd-Frank and appease the financial industry. That's a terrible outcome. Just terrible. "Bipartisan" or "consensus" are not synonyms for "good" when it comes to public policy.
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It simply means that everyone agrees on an outcome (inevitably the status quo) and says nothing about the outcome itself. The Iraq War resolution was bipartisan. Agreeing to let Wall Street off the hook in the early Obama years was a bipartisan consensus. Spending a trillion dollars a year on the military is a bipartisan consensus. These are all idiotic and destructive ideas. If you applaud any of them simply on the basis of how good it makes you feel that no one really argued about anything and everyone shook hands and smiled and agreed, then I think you might not fully understand what politics is. This week, Congress passed a 7 Billion Pentagon spending bill without one word of debate.
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Everyone in Congress was no doubt very Civil about it, because they all want to roll around in the trough of money they just created. I would rather they caned each other over the head on the House floor and spent half as much on the military.

There's a reason the West Wing had to create a fictional world in which politics is good and wholesome and full of people of integrity. If you could follow actual politics and get any of that, there would have been no need to write the show.