Fútbol, You Bet

It’s been pretty much all soccer all the time around here of late.

For one thing, Kim, I met Lauren in Madison to see our local professional team play Wednesday night. We’d gone a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, so we figured it would be a lovely evening and indeed it was, storms notwithstanding.

It’s been a stormy year here in Baja Canada, it has to be said. Apparently as of today Wisconsin has had over 280 severe thunderstorm or tornado warnings – warnings mean you’ve got one, while watches mean you could get one – and that’s more in the last four months than all of the previous fourteen years combined. So, yeah, we got that going for us.

Fortunately the severe thunderstorm and tornado passed just a bit south of us and cleared off before game time. We decided to have dinner at a nearby Tibetan restaurant before the game rather than get food at the stadium, though, since the restaurant had a roof and it was in fact raining at that point. It was really, really good food, so if you’re in Madison and looking for tasty Asian food I have a place to recommend. The owners are actually Nepalese, and we had a lovely conversation with them about the various cuisines of the region.

From there it was about a four-minute walk over to Breese Stevens Field where FC Madison plays, and with the earlier rain slowing down all the pre-game activities we even managed to get there before kickoff. The opponents were Fort Wayne, the referee was an idiot who lost control of the game early (which is why the Madison coach got red-carded in the 17th minute – there are certain words that are automatic cards in soccer, no matter how justified one is in using them, and if you use them twice in succession that’s two cards all at once), and in the end it was a hard-fought and entertaining 1-1 draw.

It was also Free Hat Night.

Of course, all of this comes as the 2026 World Cup gets up and running. This year it’s being hosted by all of the North American countries – Canada, Mexico, and the US – which means that it has made a bigger impression on Americans than usual. Most times you’d be hard pressed to find a dozen Americans in any given census tract who even knew what the World Cup was, let alone that it was happening, but since this time it’s spread out across the entire US and our neighbors it seems to have penetrated the zeitgeist a bit more than usual.

And that’s all to the good, I say. Yes, I understand that FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, on a scale that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s kleptocratic tyranny, but it’s the most popular sport on the planet, these are the best male players in the world (the women get to do this next year), and you might as well enjoy the spectacle in this fallen world.

We’ve been watching some of the games as best we can, given the fact that both Kim and I are still gainfully employed – not always guaranteed in the higher education world – and they’ve been fun. We don’t get any of the English-language broadcasts, but fortunately Peacock – to which we already subscribe in order to watch Premier League games (and let us pause briefly for a moment of silence for my poor, extremely relegated Wolves) – carries the Spanish-language broadcasts and let me tell you those are a lot more fun even if, and perhaps especially if, you don’t actually speak the language.

Those guys get excited by the game.

I know only a very small amount of Spanish which is often enough for me to fight my way through something written or spoken slowly but there is no way I can keep up with a conversation at speed, let alone soccer commentary at a much higher speed. All of the words blend together and while I can pick out some words here and there (“pelota!”) and once in a while they throw in some strangely American-accented English (“English Premier League”) I mostly go by tone. When the words speed up more than usual and the tone starts to rise that means something exciting is happening. Or might happen. Or just happened. Or possibly that it’s Tuesday. Whatever. It keeps me on my toes.

I have to admit I was more than a little hesitant about the fact that the World Cup is being staged in the US under our current regime. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have never once missed an opportunity to be petty, cruel, vindictive, immoral, or violently authoritarian, and their reaction to the World Cup has been of a piece with that.

They banned a Somali referee from coming to the US despite him being fully vetted as Not A Terrorist. Apparently the idea of Somalis in America was just too much for these Nativist clowns. They made it almost impossible for the Iranian team to compete, forcing them to stay in Mexico unless they are actually playing a game in the US and then leave US territory within minutes of the game ending. Don’t even get me started on the shabby treatment of Iranian fans or the fans of several other brown-skinned nations. They yanked the Uruguayan team off their bus and sicced sniffer dogs on them because somewhere one of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s minions read (probably in a comic book) that a lot of cocaine comes from one of those countries in South America and it might have been that one and they might be using their World Cup soccer team to smuggle it into the US because that’s obviously how that sort of thing works. It took formal protests to stop their plan to seed the World Cup stadiums with ICE thugs, and even now I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it anyway – those jackbooted Fascists seem to regard themselves as untouchable, much as the SS did until suddenly they weren’t.

So yeah, I had my fears.

And yet not only has it not worked out that way, at least so far, but also it has been an astonishingly restorative experience overall to watch the visiting fans discover so many of the things about the US that we ourselves have forgotten in the avalanche of deliberately cruel and divisive cultural politics over the last decade or so. It’s been a long few years recently – and a very long two years in particular – and to see these visitors experience what the US can actually be and should actually be has been astonishingly lovely.

For one thing, my fellow Americans have generally responded to these visitors with warmth and hospitality. The entire city of Lawrence, Kansas turned out to welcome the Algerian national team. New Jersey fans partied with Moroccan fans. There’s a marvelous video of a cop hyping up the Egypt fans while everyone was waiting for something or other. And lest you think this is limited to here, the love fest going on in Mexico with the Korean fans and team has been amazing. I’ve trained my various social media algorithms to show me all of these things, and if you haven’t you should. One of my favorites was a reel where someone interviewed three or four big, burly American men dressed entirely in flag outfits, all of whom were asked what they would say to the Iranian fans. “You are welcome here,” they said. “This event is meant to celebrate the world despite our government’s actions.” “The everyday American wants you to feel welcome.” “The World Cup is not about shutting people out.” This is what it should be, not the ginned-up hatred spouted by the current American regime, and to see it coming from these guys in particular was cheering.

One English visitor filmed his friend at a Mississippi BBQ place as they ordered ribs. When the ribs came one of them – in a proper English move, it has to be said – pulled out a knife and fork and the restaurant owner just said, “No” and taught him how to eat ribs properly. The stunned look of joy as the guy took his first bite was worth the entire video. BBQ has been a theme among the visitors, actually – there’s a lot of reels focusing on it. It’s something the US does very, very well and Americans have been happy to share it.

Visitors have posted videos of themselves walking into firehouses and getting tours of the stations, of walking around neighborhoods, of dancing in streets. It’s amazing.

As an American it has been lovely to see them enjoying so many of the things that we just take for granted.

The stores that we go to – Buc-cee’s, Target, 7/11, Walmart, Costco, Bass Pro Shops – that have had them marveling. The yellow school buses that many of them were convinced existed only in movies. Steam vents on city sidewalks. Wild squirrels. It’s all new to them and their reactions make me want to experience these things through their eyes.

The national parks and the open spaces.

The stadiums and all the excess that Americans devote to them – the bald eagle flight before the game, the warplane flyover, the admittedly odd tradition of everyone singing Sweet Caroline somewhere about three-quarters of the way through any game. Watching the future king of England singing along was an experience.

And the food. My god, do they love the food here. As someone who has traveled abroad and marveled at the food there, it is both amusing and deeply heartwarming to see people doing the same in this direction.

The Italian visitor frankly amazed at the idea of free refills on sodas (“I can refill this a thousand times?”). The corn bread. The boiled peanuts. The barbecue, all the time the barbecue. The machines that some fast-food places have that allow you to combine hundreds of kinds of soda and flavors (which admittedly took me a bit to get used to as well).

Ranch dressing. Do they not have this anywhere else in the world? Apparently not. I live in the midwest where people put ranch on everything including pizza so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and that, really is the point. All of this knocks the jaded right out of us and we see through their eyes and it is new and amazing like it was the first time we tried it.

I lost track of all the people flocking to their nearest Waffle House – admittedly an icon of American eating, an experience not to be missed, and a cultural keystone of regret, spectacle, and grease that defines so much of the American experience. You have to love Waffle House.

Texas Roadhouse also seems to be a favorite among the visitors – I’ve seen videos from Africans (who rarely specify their home country for some reason), Australians, French people, and British people talking about it. “I don’t know why Americans are so angry all the time,” said one. “You have Texas Roadhouse. If we had that back home we’d be walking around hugging people all day.”

As one American said, of course our food tastes good. We’re not here getting chronic diseases for nothing.

One of my personal favorites was a Japanese visitor who went to a Mexican restaurant in the US and found himself presented with chips and salsa, and I can’t even explain it in a way that does it justice so here it is in the original:

Some of the best things I’ve seen are just clips of the visitors enjoying themselves here.

The Dutch fans dancing their sideways dance.

Norwegians doing that rowing motion that they do, in the streets and up escalators.

Japanese fans meeting cowboys.

The Ecuadorians, who took over Philadelphia, sang in the El, and partied on the Art Museum steps though nobody told them about the Rocky Curse – no visiting team who puts their jersey on the statue of Rocky at the Art Museum wins their game, and they duly lost to Cote d’Ivoire. The Brazilians are there now, partying just as hard if not harder, but they’ve posted guards at the statue.

And, of course, the Tartan Army. “No Scotland, no party!” as the song goes. They sang with the Iraqi fans in the streets of Boston. They took over Fenway Park during a Red Sox game. They paraded through the streets – pipes and drums calling – thousands strong to get to Fenway. They literally drank Boston out of beer – one bar noted that they did three times the business they usually do on St. Patrick’s Day, and at a nearby liquor store when someone came in to buy a case of water they booed.

They also cleaned the park after they left, much as the Japanese fans did at the stadium where they played. That’s a class act. They even donated thousands to local charities in Boston and Providence where they were staying.

My favorite bit from the Tartan Army is that they have brought the Glasgow tradition of putting traffic cones on statues to America. It started with the statue of the Duke of York in Glasgow in the 1980s, and eventually the city stopped fighting it.

And now it’s here.

The thing is, all of this has been a balm to the American soul. We’ve had a long, hard decade of division, tyranny, and anger. We needed to see joy for a change. We needed to be reminded of who we can be when there is nobody actively working to rob us of that. To see and participate in community. Kindness. Service. Diversity. Welcome. Healing. We’ve been starved of that in the public sphere for so very long, and it took all of these outsiders, all of these visitors, to make us see what we’ve lost so we could find it again.

“The World Cup didn’t need us,” said one American on social media. “We needed the World Cup.”

I watched a video today where a guy from Boston talked about how his city had a whole different vibe now, joyous and oddly unified. It has been wonderful, he said, to see how great it could be if we had things like the World Cup more often to bring people together and bring them into the city to celebrate with each other, and it will be hard when it’s over because we’ve been reminded of how things can be better. “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days when you’re in them,” he said. “This feels like one of those times.”

We still have problems in the US. They haven’t and won’t magically go away because of the World Cup. We’re still ruled by a senile, corrupt pedophile and his cult of slaves. We just lost an illegal war of aggression that he started for no coherent reason. We still have a frightening degree of economic inequality, there are Fascist thugs wearing federal badges hauling the innocent away without due process, we have a racism problem that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, and so on. None of these things have disappeared.

But it has been good to be reminded of who we can be, of who we are. That we can come together with kindness and community, that we can welcome the visitors and bring them into our lives in joyous celebration, and if we can do that here, if we can look into the mirror that is being held up to us by our World Cup visitors, we can do it elsewhere and we can do it when they’re gone.

We can be better than the last decade. We are better than the last decade. Sometimes you need people from outside to help you see that.

To all our visitors, thank you. Welcome to the United States. We will try to be good and kind hosts, to show you the best of our country and people, and send you home with cherished memories. We will try to carry that over into the rest of our lives and into our broader society. It may take some time. We will not completely succeed. But we will try.

A Trip Up North

The odometer on the minivan reached 200,000 miles this weekend, a milestone that we missed completely because we were actively driving at the time. I remember looking down and thinking, “Only a dozen miles to go!” and then a couple minutes went by and I looked down and thought, “Huh, now we’re six miles over,” and that was that. But now all of our vehicles have passed that milestone. We are the Car Whisperers. Or, more accurately, the guys over at the auto mechanic place are. But we’ll take it.

We hit this Big Round Number on the way home from spending the weekend in northern Wisconsin, up by Kim’s old stomping grounds. It’s pretty country if you enjoy rural areas, small towns, and wide-open spaces, though more often than not we’re heading up that way for somebody’s memorial service which does put a damper on things. But you go, because you pay your respects. And it’s good to go back to one’s roots.

There were actually two memorials, it turns out – one for Veronica and one for Lena, who died about four months apart. It was a rough year up there.

We drove up on Friday and found the little rental apartment with no problems. It was the right-hand side of a small house owned by an older Mennonite couple who were quite lovely to talk with. Despite being fairly new construction the place was clearly designed with 1986 in mind. The “late-Reagan floral with patterned couches” style – complete with an actual oak-stained computer desk with a hutch overhead and a pull-out keyboard holder underneath – is instantly recognizable to those of us who lived through it. But it was a great place to spend a night, clean and comfortable and very quiet, out there on the farm. We watched a storm roll in that night across the fields. We’d stay there again.

Kim’s parents and her brother Randall drove up for the memorial as well and we met them at the diner in Ladysmith before heading to the lobby of their hotel for further hanging out. It’s good to spend time with good people. Afterward Kim and I walked around the public park in the middle of Ladysmith, a place full of memories for her. You get to know people a bit if you spend time in their places.

The next day we headed over to Jump River for the memorial.

Jump River is an unincorporated town with two bars, a church, a store, and a dozen or so houses strung along the highway. At one point before everything got started Kim and I walked around the entire town, which took about fifteen minutes even if you include the random dog that tried to bite me (three cheers for sturdy pants, I say). Kim spent a good portion of her younger days in Jump River Rose’s bar, in fact, because in northern Wisconsin bars function as community centers as well as saloons and it had live music and dancing every weekend. Jump River Rose herself was a fixture when Kim was growing up and was apparently quite a character, as fixtures in small towns should be. According to reminiscences of some of the people at the memorial as well as several newspaper stories I just looked up, she could hold a 16lb maul at arm’s length for five minutes straight, smoked cigars as big as she was, swore like a stevedore and once threw a drunk through the front door. (“Sometimes you ain’t got time to open them,” she said.) She’s long gone now but the bar is still there. Every town needs its landmarks.

I grew up far away from Jump River, out on the east coast, and by “east coast” I do not mean Sheboygan the way people in Wisconsin do when they say “east coast.” Memorials were rather more formal where I grew up then they are in Wisconsin, and I was duly warned about this, perhaps to prevent me from defaulting to some combination of three-piece suit and cape, neither of which I own but wouldn’t it be something if I did? So I was expecting something more low-key than I had experienced in the memorial services of my youth though it did take me a second to adjust to the picnic format.  It has to be said that it was a very good time, though, all things considered. There were a lot of people to whom I was introduced as “And this is Kim’s husband, Dave,” and there were some lovely stories told about Veronica (whom I’d met once or twice) and Lena (whom I don’t think I’d ever met at all), and there was quite a tasty lunch afterward – the “funeral lunch” in Wisconsin being one of the nicer traditions I’ve run into since moving here.

We said our goodbyes and headed off to visit our friends Joe and Lisa, who had just moved into a new house where the backyard is full of deer and golfers. They’re both recovering from surgeries on top of trying to move, which is how I ended up spending a chunk of that evening putting together an entertainment center with an Allen wrench, because this entertainment center was made of depleted uranium and grief and there was no way two people recovering from various surgeries were going to moose that thing into existence. It looks nice and I am hopeful that my construction skills do not lead to it suddenly implode at a random time to be named later.

All four of us are fairly low-stress people and we had a relaxing time of it, Allen wrenches notwithstanding. There was much hanging out. We watched the Phillies beat the Brewers in a game where the final score looked like they were playing football. There were Aperol spritzes and at least one Dairy Queen run, which you can do in town. We had a good time.

It was an uneventful drive back down to Our Little Town Sunday afternoon, and we arrived to one very grateful cat, one deeply annoyed rabbit, and our own bed.

News and Updates

1. So apparently we’ve hit the point in the year where these quick hit posts are the best I can manage, or perhaps we’ve hit that point again. They do tend to crop up more and more, I find. The odd thing is that I’m not objectively all that busy – the semester is over, I’m not teaching any summer classes, my Perpetual Online Class got handed off to some other sucker instructor back in December, and I’m only getting paid to be an advisor two days per week. And yet here we are.

2. It’s not like we don’t have other things to do, though. Friday Kim and I went to a Social Gathering of friends, which was enjoyable. We are all people who enjoy the idea of drinking alcohol more than the actual practice of drinking alcohol so it does tend to build up in our homes and every so often we have a Cocktail Lab Party where the main goal is to get rid of some of the back stock, except (vide supra, re: idea vs practice) it tends not to work very well as far as the main goal is concerned, though we have an enjoyable time anyway.

3. And last night we were at a retirement party for one of our colleagues down at Home Campus, which was both a lot of fun, since there were many good people to talk with, and a bit sad at the same time, since this colleague will be sorely missed. But that is the nature of jobs, and so we enjoy having people around while we can.

4. This lesson got reinforced today when we went to a memorial service for a former colleague from Home Campus, one who had retired back in 1999. It was a long service but it went well and there were a number of old colleagues I hadn’t seen in a while. I genuinely do not like going to these sorts of things, but I’m always glad I went. You pay your respects.

5. I’m slowly making headway on designing my new class for next spring. I taught a version of it a decade ago for a different university and I’m trying to incorporate parts of that, and it will also overlap with the last third or so of my Western Civ II class, so I’m trying to incorporate parts of that as well, and the goal is to do this without it coming out as a Frankenstein’s Monster of mismatched bits and bobs. We’ll get there.

6. Yes, I’ve been paying attention to the news. Let me see if I’ve got some of the recent low points: We’re merging our military with the IDF and likely turning over control of it to the Israeli government, because that’s a surefire long-term winner of a strategy. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump got called out over his election lies by a reporter (a woman, which he can’t handle in the best of times), got pissy with her, and then lurched off camera in a toddler-level snit which he has tried to sell as strength but which anyone with more than six working brain cells knows is just what happens when a weak and cowardly bullshit artist gets cornered by something he can’t handwave away. California is taking its time counting all the ballots in its recent primaries by hand to avoid having the results tampered with by Elon Musk and the American right is melting down over the entire idea of having a free and fair election that they might not win – keep this in mind for November, by the way. Two economists published a thoroughly researched paper that predicts AI will – not might, will – destroy the global economy unless strong countermeasures are taken immediately. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s henchmen recently began removing scientific apparatus from the Atlantic Ocean because it measures how badly the AMOC is deteriorating, which directly contradicts their hallucinatory fantasies about there not being any climate crisis – this despite Congress twice prohibiting any such removals. The DOJ argued in court that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump could have the Statue of Liberty bulldozed tomorrow and there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about it, because this is somehow different from an unrestricted dictatorship. The World Cup is collapsing in real time due to the vicious and nonsensical Nativist restrictions on players, fans, and officials entering the US. There was a fourth presidential assassination attempt (so-called) that already nobody remembers or cares about. The CEO of Exxon is predicting that US oil stockpiles will fall below viability in July, causing fuel and food prices to skyrocket. Couple this with the approaching Super El Niño and we could see mass hunger and social disruption around the world, since the last time we got one of those back in the late 1800s millions of people starved to death. That’s just what I can remember off the top of my head without bothering to look anything up. Are we great yet?

7. We fired up the pizza oven last night and had our first homemade pizzas of the season, because life is short and there are enough people out there trying to make everything worse so you might as well try to enjoy things while you can. It was good pizza.

8. We’re heading into our first heat wave of the season, and this is why I don’t like summer. People think summers are good but that’s only because they remember the break between school years when they had months of unstructured time and no real responsibilities. Summer itself is hot, sticky, uncomfortable, and overlong. It’s June 8 – only five more months until civilized weather!

9. Today also marks eight years since Anthony Bourdain died. I never met the man but even so I miss him. He was an interested and interesting person who understood that people are people and the best way to get to know them was through food. The world is a poorer place with him gone.

10. We are finally making progress on replacing the Door To Nowhere, which sits at the end of the upstairs hallway and provides instant access to the driveway though the first step is a long one. The wooden storm door is hanging on through sheer inertia and the interior door is mostly single-pane unsealed glass. We’ve been threatening to replace these doors since before the pandemic. Last fall our friend Adam – an actual carpenter – came by and measured everything that needed to be measured. And this weekend I went over to the Mega Hardware Store and told the door guy what Adam told me. And then the door guy asked me about a hundred questions, none of which I knew the answer to, so it took a couple of hours to get everything straightened out (who knew doors had so many options?) and then I sent everything to Adam and he said, “Yep, that’s the right size.” So sometime in July we will have doors, and then sometime after that we will get them installed. Honestly, if we get this resolved before the snow flies I’ll be good.

The Bicensesquiwhat?

Did you know that the United States is celebrating its 250th year of independence this year?

Admittedly this idea has a number of qualifiers attached to it.

It depends on how you define “250th,” for one thing. Americans have always backdated the end of British colonial rule here to July 4, 1776, which is the date that Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress then meeting in Philadelphia, with some editorial changes that Jefferson wasn’t happy about. As the junior member of the Virginia delegation there wasn’t much he could do about it, though. John Adams thought the date we would celebrate would be July 2, which is when the Continental Congress voted to approve the resolution declaring independence in the first place, but so it goes. Both of those dates rest on the idea that the colonies suddenly became independent simply by declaring themselves to be so – something that the veterans of the Revolutionary War might have had some opinions to the contrary about. It took six years of hard fighting (starting more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was approved) and then another two years of negotiations to produce the formal treaty granting the colonies independence from Britain, but nobody really worries about 1783. We count our independence from July 4, 1776, and that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

It also depends on how you define “independence,” which seems to be an issue these days as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump takes his marching orders from a parade of failed human beings across the globe, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu but also including Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. Hard to pretend you’re independent under those circumstances.

And it depends on how you define “celebrating.”

I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, back in 1976. No, we didn’t wait until 1983 to celebrate 200 years of American independence. This was the 1970s, a decade that included a deeply corrupt president neck deep in criminal activities and illegal conspiracies to hold onto power, a wildly unpopular war that the US lost, an oil crisis, and a stagnating economy, so it was very different from today. Sort of different. Vaguely different? Yeah, kind of the same, actually. Sorry. Anyway, we needed something to take our mind off all that and the Bicentennial was it.

If you weren’t there, you can’t even begin to imagine how hyped the Bicentennial was.

Every product on the market came in Bicentennial packaging, for example. Beer. Paper towels. Toys. Phones. Lawn décor. Plates. Clothing. Hats. Pencils. Food of all kinds – I have distinct memories of buying Spanish olives that had a Revolutionary War scene printed right on the jar. On and on. Packaging companies ran out of red, white, and blue ink. It was hard to tell brands apart because for nearly two years they all had interchangeable Bicentennial labels. I’m sure in the confusion a lot of money was spent on things people didn’t actually intend to buy, but at least we got to try new stuff that way.

Speaking of money, they even changed the coins for the Bicentennial. We got new quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins, and if nobody ever used the last two that was just how it went. I still find Bicentennial quarters in change even now. They made billions of them. They’re worth exactly twenty-five cents these days, but they’re kind of cool. Also, our local chamber of commerce minted giant aluminum coins that you could buy for 76 cents and then participating merchants would redeem them for a dollar. They called them Continentals, which was kind of ironic if you know the history of Continental currency, but it was a good deal and we appreciated it. I still have a couple of them.

The railroad underpass near my house got an entire Bicentennial mural painted on it and my brother and I would beg to go that way to get to my grandparents’ house – all of three miles away – but it wasn’t on our usual route there so that didn’t happen very often. It was exciting when it did. They finally painted it over sometime in the 80s after most of it had mildewed off the walls.

Tourism flourished to the point where the mayor of Philadelphia – the same deep thinker who once said that the streets of Philadelphia were safe, it was only the people who made them unsafe – openly talked about calling out the National Guard for crowd control, which drastically lowered the number of people who wanted to come to Philadelphia and thus, in a roundabout sort of way, solved the problem.

There were Bicentennial movies, Bicentennial television shows, Bicentennial games, Bicentennial advertisements, Bicentennial sporting events, and Bicentennial cultural events – my personal favorite as a 10-year-old boy being the parade of tall ships that they sailed up the Delaware River that summer. There were Bicentennial parades, picnics, and celebrations. I remember going with my family over to my grandparents’ house on the actual day and hanging out with them and their neighbors who had set up a ping pong table in their driveway. We spent a glorious afternoon whacking a ping pong ball over the roof of the garage and into their back yard and felt suitably patriotic while doing so. It’s what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.

It’s hard, in other words to overstate just how saturated the United States was with Bicentennial everything, and for how long. It started small, sometime in 1974 or so, a cheerful distraction from the sleaze of the Watergate Scandal, gathered steam through 1975, and then was full-blown Everywhere All The Time for most of 1976 until it faded away by the fall in time for the elections. You couldn’t escape it if you tried.

For all the problems facing the US at the time – and there were so, so many – Americans still felt that the republic was worth celebrating. That there was something there underneath all of the grime and if we dug in and tried we could find it and get back on track. We disagreed vehemently what “on track” might look like, but even in the middle of all the crises of the 1970s there was broad agreement that there was still something worth celebrating, whatever it was.

I’m not getting that vibe here in 2026. Really, I’m not.

For one thing, there is almost no hype. I’ve seen some product packaging but only the barest percentage of what I saw in the mid-1970s – a few soda cans, a hat or two, and some paper plates with the “America 250” logo on them surrounded by a flag design that was, objectively, upside down. This might have been an accident or it might have been some clever messaging because an upside-down flag signals distress and that’s where we are right now. In theory we have some new coins to mark the occasion just like we did in 1976, but since nobody uses cash anymore they’re actually kind of hard to find and almost nobody I ask about them – including my bank – knows they exist.

And for another thing, there is very little celebration and even less reason for people to want to change that. We have a blisteringly incompetent, openly kleptocratic government run by a staggeringly corrupt senile convicted felon who has been credibly accused of raping children and is turning the entire federal government into a cover-up machine to protect him from punishment for that crime, among others. He is surrounded by neo-Nazi ghouls working to ethnically cleanse a nation of immigrants while systematically reducing the republic to dictatorship and destroying a century of progress made by better Americans. He’s led us into the worst military defeat in this nation’s history, one whose repercussions haven’t even begun to sink in yet. His minions executed American citizens in the streets for daring to object to his kidnapping and trafficking children to foreign countries, and none of those minions have been punished. He’s gutted American science and research. And if you think the midterm elections will be allowed to happen freely and fairly you’re not paying attention.

Nobody wants to celebrate this, not even the people responsible for this degradation. The only official events that I’ve seen planned are a homoerotic wrestling match to be held on the White House lawn – ironic, given this administration’s outright and perhaps just a little too stridently bellowed opposition to anything that isn’t performatively heterosexual, though apparently large groups of gay men are planning to buy tickets and show up for the event shirtless and fully glittered out just to make the point – and a concert that has now completely fallen apart because county-fair-level has-beens like Milli Vanilli declared it was beneath their dignity to participate. Not that they are wrong about that.

As one internet comment I read so eloquently put it, celebrating the American republic right now feels kind of like attending an Irish wake – nice party and all, but the guest of honor is dead.

I don’t know when things will change or whether I will still be around to see it – several people have recently told me I need to watch what I say here or even delete my internet presence entirely, given my loudly expressed contempt for the current regime and its lickspittle toadies. But it’s my country and they can’t have it, and there will come a time when everyone will have always been against all of this.

And when that time comes, perhaps then we’ll celebrate.

News and Updates

1. I spent most of this week not doing much of anything, which was a really nice break after running flat out for most of the last year or so. My main accomplishment during the workweek was to go grocery shopping. I think there should be more weeks like this in people’s lives.

2. Of course the continued destruction of the American republic by its corrupt, neo-Nazi regime and its bootlicking toadies continued apace the entire time, so there was a certain amount of stress intruding into this idyll even so. I keep thinking I should get back to some political posting and at some point I will, but that point will have to come when I am able to write about it without descending into a wholly appropriate level of obscenity. I am very much looking forward to the prosecution and imprisonment of every single one of those utter wastes of oxygen.

3. After nearly being washed away in April we really haven’t had any significant rain here in Our Little Town since then. On the one hand, this means I haven’t had to mow the lawn and that is an unmitigated win in my book. On the other hand, the farm fields outside of town are starting to look a little worrisome.

4. We had a lovely lunch with Lauren, Aly, and (in a roundabout sort of way) Alexia yesterday, which means that I managed to share meals with both of my children in the space of a single week – not a bad achievement as they scatter off into the world. The conversation was lively, the food was good, and there were things to celebrate even beyond the simple fact of the company, and I’m going to ride that high for as long as I can.

5. Kim and I also stopped off at the nearby Costco because we are addicts and because Kim’s glasses had finally come in. We decided against getting a cart on the way in because we were only there for her glasses and one other item, but that’s a rookie mistake at Costco and in the end we staggered up to the register laden with things. I suppose if you’re going to get some retail therapy to deal with the world Costco is as good a place as any to get it. Plus I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since we were in a play together in 2015 and it was nice to see her.

6. I now have new Kirkland pants, and if you’ve ever heard Sheng Wang’s routine about that you’ll understand.

7. Also, we saw this on the way in. Rarely have I seen such a complete match between vehicle and license plate. Not sure how they got it past the DMV, but there you go.

8. The other productive thing I did last week was get started with developing a new class that I’ll be teaching in the spring. The state legislature in its infinite wisdom decided last year that we needed to revamp our entire curriculum in seven weeks and then the Mother Ship Campus decided to implement that shift in the most obtuse and retrograde way possible by adding a pile of classes to our workload that neither count toward any major nor transfer as anything other than random credits, which all sums up to mean that Home Campus – a very small institution run on baling wire, the willingness of its staff to work above requirements, and a certain buccaneering spirit – will no longer be able to offer some courses because we just don’t have the staff to do both. I’ll miss my Western Civ II class, but we’ll see how the new one goes. The Mother Ship will figure out that this was a mistake in about 3 or 4 years but by then I will likely be retired so this is the task in front of me now. It will be an adventure.

9. Last night Kim and I watched Stanley Tucci’s new series about eating his way across Italy – as opposed to his previous two series about eating his way across Italy – while we shared our first Aperol spritzes of the season, and it is well and truly summer now. Stanley Tucci is basically what happens when you take Anthony Bourdain and file off all of the rough edges and sharp observational skills but he’s still fun to watch, especially with an Aperol spritz or a glass of red wine in your hand.

10. Sometimes I will sit out on the back porch with a book and just watch the neighborhood cats wander up my driveway, cast baleful looks in my direction, and wander off. I’m blocking their access to the catnip patch that we have in our back yard like some cop hanging out at the corner donut stand while the hardworking drug dealers of the world wait for him to leave so they can get back to conducting business. It is a strange position to be in.

A Quick Visit

Sometimes you throw a bag or two in the minivan and head out of town for no reason other than you have time to do that and you have someone to see on the other end.

It’s been a long semester but that finally came to an end last week, as did the giant conference that all of the graduate students in Oliver’s program were conscripted into running. Our summer activities haven’t quite had time to get rolling. We had no particular plans for Memorial Day – a holiday that has been bleached of all meaning anyway. And we hadn’t seen Oliver in person since January. So Kim found us a nice little suite on the second floor of an old house not all that far away from his apartment and we left on Saturday.

It’s a pretty straightforward journey if you don’t mind the fact that you’re driving around Chicago, and we got into town right around check-in time, though we stopped in to see Oliver first so we could deliver a few things that he’d asked for from home – notably a normal window air conditioner to replace the portable floor unit that we’d brought last summer, since this would a) free up a couple square feet of floor space (always a concern in a small apartment) and b) probably use less power (also a concern in a vintage space like that).

In the process we sort of vaguely met Oliver’s new cat, a rescue kitty that he has named Georgia and who is ever-so-slowly getting comfortable enough to let people pet her while she remains deep in her cat cave. Progress!

From there we drove over to our spot to drop off our stuff and plan the rest of the evening, which took some doing, because the roads in that town were laid out by spiders. Nothing goes in a straight line, nothing intersects at right angles, and most of the roads are one-way with no discernable system to them. Also, a good chunk of that town is on a thirty-degree incline. Oliver says this is fun in the winter.

That said it is a nice town, with a pile of good restaurants, some pretty parks, and the air of a place that is working to rebuild from harder times, and you have to appreciate that spirit. I’ve enjoyed visiting whenever I’ve been there.

Every time we’re there we end up at the ramen place downtown, so we decided to check that box early because it is really a great little place and there is no reason to delay good food. Along the way we ran into the Prom.

There is a park right in the downtown, about one city block in size, which you have to pass through if you’re going to do pretty much anything downtown. There is always something going on in this park, and on this night that something involved hordes of Sharply Dressed Teenagers milling about the place getting their pictures taken and hanging out with friends and family. Seriously – kids today have so much more fashion sense than when I was in high school, even after you adjust for the fact that I didn’t have any then and still don’t now. It was fun to walk through the park and just take it all in.

And the ramen place was top notch, as always.

Later we ended up hanging out back at the house where we were staying, talking about whatever came to mind, and if there is a better way to spend time together I don’t know what it is.

Kim and I had Sunday morning pretty much to ourselves, since Oliver’s summer class has already started and like most summer classes it is a “drink from the firehose” experience when it comes to material and he needed to do homework. We found a bakery downtown that sold fresh-baked pastries, hot tea, and coffee, and that’s a marvelous way to start the day. They also make bread of several varieties and we stopped this morning on the way out to get some for home. It’s really good bread, as you would imagine.

The rest of our Sunday was divided into four pieces:

First, we found lunch at an “Eccentric Pub” downtown, and it was very good. We are food-motivated people, what can I say?

Second, there was a Costco run because (see point one, above) one of the privileges of being a parent is stocking your child up with food, plus we really just enjoy Costco runs.

Third, after dropping off the spoils of the Costco run and getting the cold stuff put away we went over to the local art museum, which has a surprisingly nice collection. They had an exhibit dedicated to the history of footwear (mostly sneakers), which largely escaped me since my interest in shoes starts and stops with “comfortable,” but Kim and Oliver had a good time.

The museum also has a wide assortment of paintings and sculptures, my favorite being this one. Not sure why.

Fourth, after an abortive attempt at a campus visit, was dinner was at a pizza place called Bilbo’s, which really commits to the whole Tolkien bit in ways that are a bit strange but surprisingly entertaining.

We didn’t do much Monday morning – mostly slept in while Oliver worked on his homework and fed his friend’s cat while she was away – but eventually we picked him up, found a tasty lunch at a taco place, and then spent most of the afternoon reading our various books at a park just outside of town while a boisterous crowd kicked balls around and splashed about in the lake. It was a nice day to do that. Afterward Oliver showed us around campus a bit, giving us a tour of the various buildings that he as a graduate student calls home. Sometimes low-key is all you need.

We went back to his apartment and, after a fair amount of fiddling with the ratchet strap, managed to get the portable floor air conditioner down the stairs and into the minivan without damaging any component of this escapade.

We let this morning and now we are back home, one visit richer. It was a good way to spend a holiday weekend.

Reading the Names

Another year has come to an end.

When you’re an academic the year starts in August or September and ends in May or June, depending on local conditions. There’s a strange, oddly hot interlude between those points that doesn’t properly belong to any particular year which is why people leave town if they can. They come back in the fall with all sorts of new and exciting diseases to share and that’s why the first month of the school year is always such a festival.

The students show up and go through the year, taking classes and figuring out how this whole University Student gig actually works. Most of them will grow along the way. The ones who don’t tend to drift off into other pursuits. And around this time of year a good chunk of them will complete their time with us and move on to new challenges. From our campus that usually means further education on another campus, but it can also mean a job or something else entirely. It’s up to them.

Last night was our graduation ceremony, an event that I look forward to each year.

We do graduation right, I think. We host it in the gym, because we can fit more people in there than in the theater and we want as many friends and family to attend as we can get. This is a milestone for these students, and they should be able to share that with their people. There are no tickets to buy – as long as people show up on time they can just walk in. We don’t even charge for parking. Welcome! That’s our motto. We also keep things moving right along. Nobody wants or needs an all-night spectacle. They want to come and See The People Do The Thing and then go somewhere else to celebrate on their own, and last night we were done in 71 minutes including all of the speeches and every single graduate in attendance walking across the stage individually.

Since I am the Emergency Back-Up Historian On Call, I get to sit up on the stage with the faculty, all of us in our billowing black robes and oddly-shaped hats happily looking out into the audience where the graduates are. For the last three years my job at the ceremony has been to read the names of the graduates as they walk across the stage. They fill out a little card beforehand, listing their name and how to pronounce it, where they’re heading next, and any shout-outs they want to make, and they hand this to me as they go by the podium at stage right. I usually spend the hour before the ceremony walking up to them randomly and asking “How do you pronounce your name?” because it’s easier to get it right from hearing it than it is from reading it, but the cards help immensely too. I like to think I get things right more often than not.

They walk over to the Dean to shake her hand and get their diploma case (the actual diplomas will be mailed, since grades aren’t even posted until the next day), then to the Chancellor to shake his hand, all while I read out what they wanted me to say. They’ve worked hard for this. Many of them never thought they’d get to college at all, let alone finish a degree, and they should have their names read. There are always cheers from the audience, as is proper.

As an advisor I get to know many of the students pretty well, which means that sometimes I make it into some of the shout-outs. That’s always a good feeling, that they would want to do that on this night. I will admit it is a bit odd to go all Third Person in front of a large audience, but so it goes.

This is why we do this, for events like this when we can recognize and celebrate the achievements of our students.

Congratulations to this year’s class. May the world treat you kindly, and may your future bring you good things.