The Road Goes Ever On

I was one of those kids who took a deep dive into Middle Earth at an impressionable age and never quite resurfaced.

My introduction to that world came in early 1980 when some network decided to air the Rankin Bass version of The Lord of the Rings. I remember watching it and thinking that this was a great story but there had to be a better version of it out there than this.

Turns out there was, and I spent a good chunk of the next month reading the book, which the library was happy to lend me, and then much of the summer working as an assistant to my mother in the Montgomery County Courthouse fetching real estate records. She paid me $1/hour out of her own pocket and when I’d amassed enough funds I rode my bike up to the little bookstore in Suburban Square in Ardmore, just outside of Philadelphia, and bought the red-boxed single-volume edition and rode home with it bouncing around in the front basket. I read that annually for more than a decade after that. I can still write your name in Elvish script, which is not the most useful skill in the world but it’s mine and I enjoy it.

From there I read The Hobbit – the prequal to the main story, though Tolkien had to retcon the story to make it fit into the larger universe so there are a lot of differences between the first edition and the one that’s available now. Not all of the gaps got filled by the revisions, though, and one of my favorite facts about that process is that the canonical explanation for this is that Bilbo Baggins was just an unreliable narrator.

I also read The Silmarillion and enjoyed that immensely – it’s much more dense, but if you’re looking for the backstory of it all you will not be disappointed. There’s a reason I became a historian, after all.

I have reached the point in my life now where I am starting to deaccession things. I like stuff as much as the next person – ascetic I am not – but having been part of the process of clearing out my parents’ house I’m seeing the virtue of not leaving that task to my children whenever they need to think about such things.

One of the nicer consequences of this is that more and more of the gifts I receive for birthday or Christmas presents come in the form of experiences, of time spent with family, and that’s a lovely development.

For Christmas last year Lauren said she would get tickets for us to see a play up in Madison, and we went on Friday. I drove up after work and we made a grocery run (because as a parent that is one of the things I enjoy doing for my children) and had a lovely dinner together at a Thai place, and then we headed off to the theater.

The Hobbit: A Musical.

It has to be said that the musical part was pretty limited – most of it was a stage show, though there were some songs interspersed throughout. It was a fairly small but very talented ensemble cast who did a nice job of switching in and out of various roles, highlighted by some really clever costume changes. And they covered pretty much all of the main events of the book in a way that was fun for those of us who know the story and also worked pretty well for people new to it.

Honestly they did a better job with the story than Peter Jackson did.

We didn’t realize until a week or two before the show that it was a production aimed at children – the actors were adults, but a good chunk of the audience was too young to drive. They were captivated. And so were we.

Lauren and I had a lovely evening together.

Merry Christmas to me.

Staring Evil in the Face

We need to talk about the Epstein files.

Because holy fucking shit these things are grotesque.

One of the more interesting articles I read about them was written by a cop, someone who spent a good chunk of his career investigating the sexual abuse of children, and the whole point of this article was that we aren’t ready for these documents. He wasn’t trying to be condescending. His point was that the level of moral depravity and horror that is in these documents is deeply harmful to anyone who isn’t specifically trained to deal with it, and frankly it’s harmful to those people too. He wrote as a man who has stared true evil in the face and survived, barely, haunted and damaged but still mostly whole. For the rest of us, he had only warnings.

And the more that leaks out about the content of these files, the worse it gets.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of what I’ve read – I’ve only seen the public versions of things, and they’re horrifying even in their redacted and censored state. All I will say is that everyone mentioned in these files needs to be put in holding cells and thoroughly investigated and if they have actually committed the crimes against children that they are accused of committing then we as a nation need to think long and hard about whether the Eighth Amendment should be repealed because there needs to be some deeply cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on those fuckers.

All of them. No matter what their current job title may be.

I want every goddamned one of them dangled in a harness from a lamppost and then executed with a cheese grater, starting with their left big toe. I want those fuckers to suffer, immensely and without relief, for what they did to those children. I want a lot of things I won't get, but that doesn't stop me from wanting them.

We are not normalizing this shit. No way in hell. Not on my watch. Not in my country.

And here’s the kicker, folks.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration was required by federal law to release ALL of those files back in December. By most accounts they haven’t released half. I’ve seen some estimates that take into account new analyses indicating that they’ve barely released 4%. If this is the stuff they thought they could get away with releasing, what the actual fuck is in the rest?

I’ve heard defenders of the indefensible claim that if we prosecuted everyone in the Epstein files the whole system would collapse, and you know? If the system depends on protecting child rapists, then the system should burn and take every one of those vermin with it.

It’s going to be a long few months, folks. This isn’t going away, and the reckless actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are going to take to distract from this will get ever more desperate, ever more violent, ever more authoritarian, and ever more criminal.

Watch your back.

Sportsball

We had a sport-filled weekend, and I have to confess it was good to take a bit of a break from the madness of the world.

The joy of sports is that they are utterly meaningless. It’s a game, and you can get caught up in what’s going on and cheer for one side or another – especially if it’s Your Team, or just a team you happen to like for whatever inscrutable reason one decides to like a team – and the action goes this way and that until the game is over and then you just move on with your life. Nothing of any significance has changed. The sun rises the next morning, the state of the republic remains whatever it was prior to the final score, and all that happened is that you got a couple of hours of entertainment out of it.

More things should be like that.

It’s still early in the semester and this spring I only have one class going (versus the five that I had last semester), so there’s not much grading to do. I got Monday’s class prepped first thing Saturday morning – none of the various Sportsball events I wanted to see had started when I came downstairs, so why not – and the weekend was mine.

First up: Premier League soccer.

I watched the Premier League for over a decade before deciding to settle on a team to cheer for, mostly because I like the logo and their coach at the time reminded me of Ser Davos from Game of Thrones. The Onion Knight is still coaching in the Premier League, though on his third or fourth team since leaving, but I still support Wolves whenever I get a chance to watch.

On the plus side, I have discovered that this gives me a surprising amount of credibility among soccer fans here. The conversation is always the same. We get to talking. We discover that we share a fondness for watching Premier League soccer (while I have no particular issue calling it football, I’m American enough to default to soccer). They ask me what team I support, fully expecting me to say one of the Big Names (Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, or Tottenham) and when I come back with Wolves there is a little pause as they decide that maybe I’m not just some bandwagon casual. Not many Wolves fans here in the US, I suppose.

On the down side, Wolves have pretty much already been relegated this year – they have a grand total of one win since the season started in August – and it will be a lot harder to watch them next year. So I try to catch them when I can.

Yeah, they lost. But they played hard and that has to count for something. As a Philadelphia sports fan, that’s all I ask.

Next up: the Olympics.

I generally prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer version. Yes, I enjoy watching the track and field events and the soccer games and some of the random Weird Sports that they insist on adding every four years, but there’s nothing to compete with a Sportsball Festival that includes hockey, luge, and curling. I’ll watch the figure skating because it’s fun to see what people can do and even the skiing is entertaining for a while, but give me the sliding sports, the hockey games, and the sheer absurdity of curling any day.

C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.

I saw a couple of the women’s hockey games – both Canada and the US beat a determined and hard-working Swiss team that held them pretty close for most of the two games – and I’m looking forward to more of that. The mixed doubles curling event has been fun to watch and since Oliver and Lauren were curlers for several years back in the day and I went to my share of bonspiels, I actually know what’s going on when I watch. And I saw some of the luge runs, because that’s just astonishing that people are allowed to do that unmedicated. Skeleton coming up!

Kim and I did watch large chunks of the figure skating, and it’s really amazing how much better the skaters are than they used to be.

And finally, here in the US it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after the Fourth of July and the only day of the year where Americans are legally obligated to have junk food for dinner.

On the one hand, most of the usual parts of this were kind of meh. My team was eliminated early in the playoffs so there wasn’t the Home Town Interest to keep me focused on the game, and to be honest I can’t remember a Super Bowl where the game was so much of an afterthought. There was almost no hype for it leading up to the game that I noticed, and there were times last week when it was actually hard to remember who was going to play. And then they got to the actual game and, yeah, suddenly that made sense. If I had just woken up from a coma and you told me this was a week three preseason game I would have believed you.

Both of those teams played like they knew the winner was going to have to go to the White House afterward.

Even the commercials were uninteresting this year. There was only one that I thought was even remotely funny, in a gross sort of way, and even the good people who make Doritos clearly thought there wasn’t any point in spending their money this year so that was disappointing. From what I could gather from the ads, the American economy is being held together by cryptocurrency, AI, and prescription drugs right now and this does not give me much hope for the future.

Two bubbles and a list of side effects do not a prosperous era make.

I have to admit that I enjoyed the halftime show. I wanted to see an accomplished American with strong artistic skills and a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation, so naturally I watched the Bad Bunny show.

No, I wasn’t going to spend my time watching the Right Wing Safe Space Consolation Halftime Show featuring a has-been lip-synching about having sex with children, which is apparently what conservatives consider a comforting these days. It seemed a bit too much on the nose here in the Age of Epstein if you ask me.

So Bad Bunny it was.

As JJ Watt said later, “Did I understand a word of it? No I did not. Was it a vibe? Yes it was.”

The songs were interesting. The staging was phenomenal. The message was inspirational. The impotent rage it inspired in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves was deeply satisfying. Pedro Pascal was there in the background, which is always a good thing. And apparently Mr. Bunny ran more yards while carrying a football during that halftime show than the New England Patriots did during the actual game. Win all around, I say.

I also loved the fact that the plants were played by actual people in costumes. For everyone who played Tree #3 in their elementary school musical, this one’s for you.

And then we went back to the Olympics. 

A Wedding in February

One of the better things I’ve done in my life was to get ordained online because under the laws of the State of Wisconsin this means I’m legally allowed to officiate weddings.

A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.

I got to officiate a wedding today.

I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.

There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.

Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.

News and Updates

1. I forget – was the release of the three million or so pages of the Epstein files (still only part of the whole and thus still not compliance with federal law) that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is a pedophile who would likely not last three hours in prison before the other inmates fed pieces of him into a shower drain supposed to distract us from the continuing Fascist occupation of Minneapolis by poorly trained jackbooted ICE thugs who have kidnapped and trafficked citizens and immigrants alike, tried to arrest cops for being Brown In Public, actually did arrest multiple journalists because apparently the First Amendment only counts if you’re supporting the government, and publicly executed two American citizens in the streets while being filmed and then tried to lie about it both times or was that the other way around? Are both of these things supposed to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump still talks about invading a NATO ally even though he “negotiated” a deal to get us exactly what we already had in Greenland before he decided to do Putin’s dirty work? Is all of that meant to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are openly calling for the federalization (read: “partisan control”) of American elections in direct violation of the US Constitution? It’s hard to keep track. Are we great yet?

2. The madness of these times is exhausting, but we press forward because there is no other option. Fuck those clowns. It’s my country. They can’t have it.

3. So … yes, but aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

4. One of the strangest disconnects in my life right now is the simple fact that we are all living in the Worst Timeline Ever while at the same time my personal world is actually going along pretty well. Yes, this creates an obligation to use that privilege in the service of creating a better timeline in general and I do my best to fulfill that. But on a day-in, day-out basis, things are going well in my little corner of the world.

5. The semester is going along pretty well so far, a week and a half into it. My Zoom class is asking questions and seems engaged with the material so far – they’ve already asked me a couple of questions that I couldn’t answer, which I regard as the hallmark of a good class. Most of my advisees are enrolled though there are a few stragglers who apparently enjoy filling out forms to try to do that sort of thing after the deadlines have passed. And I seem to have found myself on a hiring committee where the candidates are all pretty good so I think we’ll be okay there. So far, so good.

6. I’m still not managing to read much, even though the book I’m currently working through is really good. I get to it when I can focus.

7. In these parlous times you just have to do things that make you happy no matter how ridiculous they are, and that is why there is a 5lb block of Cooper Sharp cheese in the fridge in the basement now, waiting for me to take it to one of the local supermarkets to be sliced. I am a happy Philadelphian.

8. I am currently avoiding the OS updates that Apple is pushing out to both my phone and my computer because from what I can tell both of them are poorly designed interfaces full of useless AI and I’m waiting until a) they figure out how to make updating at least not a step backward and/or b) I have no choice because they break the older OS that I’m using enough that I can’t do anything anymore. I have already noticed that the login shortcuts for both devices only work sporadically these days. We’ll see how it goes.

9. It’s getting back to more normal winter temperatures here – yesterday we nearly hit the freezing point, and it’s nice to have temperatures with real square roots – which means that the snow and ice melts a bit during the sunshine and that’s lovely but it also means that the salt on the roads gets picked up by the now-liquid water and splashed about by every car on the road and now both of our cars are white. I’m trying to think of it as camouflage.

10. The other day Kim and I were driving through Our Little Town when we noticed that there was a turkey sitting on the streetlight. This seemed odd. We took photos. And then we noticed the second turkey on top of the building behind the streetlight. As Les Nessman once noted, “It’s almost as if the turkeys were … organized.”

A Selection of Memes on the Current Crisis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Dissent

Back in October, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, an executive order that basically overturned the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

Anyone who criticizes fascism suddenly became a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes the policies of the federal government in any way was likewise declared a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes “capitalism” – a term which I sincerely doubt Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump can actually define – was also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes Christianity as defined not by churches or clergy or even individual believers but by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, is also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who isn’t a bootlicking toady for the current administration is now labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

This is an attempt to criminalize dissent.

The Founding Fathers understood that this was tyranny. They understood, as George Washington said, that “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”

Yeah, no.

I am a goddamned American patriot. I have devoted my life to the study of this country’s history and I literally have a PhD in the Founding Fathers to go with that. My family has been here for two hundred years. I have at least three ancestors who fought on the correct side of the Civil War, for the republic created by the Founding Fathers and against the treason of the slaveholding South. During World War II the United States of America gave medals to my ancestors for shooting Fascists and we called them The Greatest Generation. I will be damned if I will disgrace their memory by kowtowing to these fucking losers now. 

This country was built on dissent. This country was built by people who looked at the shit being thrown their way and told the people throwing it that they could go to hell. It’s an ongoing process and we have a long way to go before we reach our aspirations, but there is only one way to get there.

I dissent.

To Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slave, I dissent.

From your cruel and inhumane war on American cities, your rogue personal army, your executions in the street, your kidnapping and trafficking small children, and your tyranny, I dissent.

From your promotion and defense of bloodshed as long as the people you hate are the ones dying, I dissent.

From your equally cruel and inhumane war on the immigrants who are here making lives and communities, following the processes and still being kidnapped and trafficked to foreign countries for pretend offenses in direct violation of legally binding court orders, from your campaign of ethnic cleansing in a nation of immigrants, I dissent.

From your Fascist “show me your papers” policies, from your use of a small child as bait, from your lack of ethics, morality, humanity, and decency, from your violent authoritarianism and small-minded bigotry, I dissent.

From your reckless assaults on education, your totalitarian attempts to rewrite history to suit your ideological demands, your refusal to accept the absolute fact that this country has always been a multi-cultural, multi-lingual nation with great virtues and great flaws standing side by side, I dissent.

From your obvious white supremacy and white nationalism, your soul-destroying racism, your brutal ignorance of actual Americans and the people living here, I dissent.

From your assaults on democracy, from your overt attempts to rig elections, suppress votes, and overturn results that don’t support you, from your weaponizing voter rolls as a tool of authoritarian control, I dissent.

From your eviscerating the US Constitution and its system of checks and balances, its limits on executive authority, and its safeguards against tyranny, I dissent.

From your destruction of American standing in the world, your attacks on allies, your coddling dictators, your clear subservience to a foreign power, your destructive trade wars, your catastrophic abandonment of everything that has made the United States a reliable ally, your refusal to recognize the contributions of American allies and your callous and ignorant dismissal of their losses, I dissent.

From your cruelty to the poor, the outcast, and the powerless, I dissent.

From your blasphemous twisted version of Christianity, I dissent.

From your eagerness to see hungry people starve, sick people die, and poor people suffer, I dissent.

From your overt war on women, on women’s health care, on women’s political and economic rights, on everything that the majority of the population might do that marks them as separate from breeding stock, I dissent.

From your desperate protection of pedophiles, all the way up to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump himself, from your willingness to start wars and invade American cities to distract from the fact that you are now over a month late in releasing the Epstein files as required by federal law, from your lawless immorality, rampant perversion, and twisted sickness, I dissent.

From all of this and more, from the mere fact that you have installed yourselves into positions of power and are systematically destroying everything that better men and women than you have built over generations of sweat, blood, and effort, from everything that you are and everything that you represent, I dissent.

I am not alone.

We outnumber you.

We will not be intimidated.

We will be here when you are just a negative example in a textbook.

I dissent.