Accidental Historian

I'm Back, Baby!

Well, after a fashion, that is.  I've decided to decamp and head over to Wordpress because, well, reasons, mostly.  So from here on out you can find me right here:

http://accidentalhistorian.wordpress.com/

Stop on over.  Set a spell.

Selah

This week, man.  This fucking week.

A couple asshole cowards bravely stood up to the people of Boston by leaving bombs in public and then running off.

A few dozen asshole cowards bravely stood up to the people of America by keeping us from even allowing a weak-tea plan to move the gun conversation in America.

That's what they all are.  Assholes and cowards.  Mitch McConnell and Heidi Heitkamp are going to have the blood of the next eight year old that gets shot by a madman on their hands just as surely as the asshole cowards who planted a bomb in Boston have the blood of Martin Richard on their hands.

It's a different type of cowardice.  It's a different type of assholeishness.  But it's cowardly and it's assholery all the same.

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In news that didn't get much traction because it was overshadowed: America unequivocally engaged in torture.  There are those of us who knew it.  There are those who did their best to deny it.  But it's out there, now.  America gave up what little moral superiority it had.

And in exchange for our souls we didn't even get actionable information.  Of course, those of us who don't get our information about torture from 24 saw that coming.

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Texas, meanwhile, blew up.

Chicago drowned.

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All I can do is offer the words of Charlie Pierce.  How he managed to get through this week with such grace and poignancy I'll never know.

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And if not that, perhaps this will help.



May next week be better.

We're Screwed

This would be hilarious if it weren't a combination of sad and horrifying.  Basically, it's delicious bacon in the middle of a sandwich made of moldy bread and shit:

The film is the work of Joel Gilbert, whose previous claims include having tracked down Elvis Presley in the witness protection program and discovering that Paul McCartney is in fact dead.

If you can't trust the guy who found out that Elvis is alive and Paul McCartney isn't, who can you trust?

You're Not Helping!

I actually feel the need to strongly disagree with Charlie Pierce on something.  Everybody write that down.

Apparently he's on the ground in Chicago, talkin' 'bout the strike.  He's also registered his bias in favor of organized labor overall and the CTU in specific.  It is here that I have a problem.  Well, specifically, it's in this piece, wherein he makes a gigantic strawman argument and also does a fine job of poisoning the well when discussing taxpayer reaction to the strike.

As an iconic collective political entity, they fall over and over again for privatization scams and then howl when the streetlights go out or the garbage gets picked up, or some executive in a for-profit prison winds up bribing a judge to send him more inmates. Or, conversely, they want high-quality public education that doesn't cost what they perceive to be too much,  as well as the right to vilify the people who provide it, whatever their salaries may be. This is the collective statement of the principle expressed often by people stopped for DUI who lecture the cop on "who it is that pays your salary." It is that attitude writ large.

That may be true, but it's really not a good idea when discussing labor strikes to confuse the average Chicago taxpayer with Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Ultimately, the teachers' salaries will come out of the taxpayers' pockets.  It will come in the form of raised property taxes, raised rents, and, potentially, lowered property values if enough people decide that they don't want to live in the city limits.

For some people that means less food on the table.  It's an obvious, objective measure.

And this isn't some abstraction, either.  The city of Chicago selling its parking meters to a private firm was supposed to be a cost-saving and income-growing method that -- as of the last time I looked -- failed on both counts.  That's the sort of case where the city and/or its taxpayers might have been snookered or fallen flat-assed on the ground.  Here it's a pretty straightforward case of highly paid public workers wanting more money and more concessions.  What they want might be objectively valid.  But what they want will also be objectively expensive.

This is where the dichotomy of the story of labor in America gets in the way.  Pro-labor folks want to talk about unions as if they're still fighting for the 40 hour work week in Packingtown.  Anti-labor folks want to talk about Jimmy Hoffa and corruption and entitled asshole workers.

There is a middle ground in all that, though, and to ignore it is to create convenient narratives that solve nothing.  The union is, after all, neither wholly good nor wholly corrupt.  It can be one or the other, but it's usually some combination of the two, in the manner of all things human.

The biggest problem with the union as an object, however, is that it eventually hits a point where its initial purpose isn't needed any longer.  Conditions improve, salaries go up, the plant owner is no longer allowed to wear his workers as shoes and walk around proclaiming he's the king of all the multiverse.  At that point the union purpose becomes self-perpetuation.  It is in this step where a union potentially becomes a villain, because it creates work rules designed to keep everyone employed and make sure they get paid well and promoted.

Two big grievances keep coming up from the union side that just make me laugh: teacher evaluations and administrator control of which laid-off teachers get to move to other schools if a school closes.  The big complaints are that teachers might lose their jobs, to which I say, "Yeah, so?"  They argue that it's impossible to quantify what value a teacher adds, but their solution to that seems to be to argue that teachers shouldn't have accountability whatsoever.  They also seem to think that they should have more say over what teachers work in a school than the principal.  I don't actually know this for a fact, but I'd be willing to bet that teacher rehires will be on something closer to the UAW's last in, first out policy than anything that's actually merit-based.

Unions, ultimately, are just a big bureaucracy.  The people in charge can decide they have their own agenda and I have little doubt that CTU President Karen Lewis has her own goals in mind.  She's up against Rahm Emanuel, who I have never said anything nice about.  So, basically, as I said yesterday, there are a lot of villains.  Since the city (which is in a massive budget hole and has already taxed the shit out of its residents, may I remind you) had already made some pretty hefty concessions before the whole thing started it also looks like a basically unnecessary strike that will ultimately do a bit more harm to the image of public-sector unions in the United States.

To imagine that the taxpayers are potentially a whiny bunch of entitled brats who just want their cake and to eat it too is foolhardy.  Not everyone complaining about the cost is a grandstanding pol or a greedy worker who might have to give up one latte a month to make up the difference.  Some of them are the baristas making those lattes or the guy in the hotdog suit handing out coupons on the corner.  For them an increase in taxes only makes life that much harder.  And Chicago has already increased taxes quite a bit.

Thoughts

So, I got distracted on Wednesday by a strange need to free up hard drive space on my laptop and watch the Palehose in their life and death struggle with the Orange Stripey Kittehs.  Still, I have some things on my mind.  So, in no particular order:

1.  Smash Mouth released a new album last week.  Seriously, you guys, Smash Mouth.

2.  Matchbox 20 also released a new album last week.  I actually own that, because it pretty much sounds like every other Matchbox 20 album.  Now that I think about it, that’s not really an advertisement.  Whatever.  Rob Thomas needs to feed his family or something, dammit.

3.  True story: the first concert I ever went to that I will proudly admit was Matchbox 20 at the Aragon Ballroom.  The last time I was at the Aragon Ballroom was to see Flogging Molly.  Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears opened.

4.  You might have heard that there’s a teachers’ strike in Chicago.  You might be thinking that I have something to say on the subject.  You’re probably wrong.  This is one of those stories where there basically aren’t any actual good guys and everyone is a villain on some level.  Rahm Emanuel is a dick.  The head of the CTU seems to be grandstanding in an attempt to score points off of Rahm Emanuel, who is a dick.  The teachers have some legitimate grievances about the quality of the CPS buildings and the classroom sizes, but they’re also pretty much the highest paid teachers in the country and they have the shortest school day in the country.  There’s a lot of whining about teacher evaluations that might lead to teachers getting fired because the teacher evaluations are arbitrary and pointless.  To that I say, “Ha!”  Again, “Ha!”

Seriously, every time my company starts talking about year-end goals and evaluations I go into a mental loop where I just think, “Is my resume up to date?”  It’s not that I’m worried about getting fired or anything.  I am, in fact, already in position to meet or exceed all my 2012 goals.  It’s just that the whole thing is a giant load of flaming bullshit.

Oh, and the city of Chicago is kinda-sorta broke and they have offered some pretty big monetary concessions, including a 16% raise spread across four years.  So, really, where is all the money for the raises and extra teachers and building upgrades supposed to come from?  I suppose they could raise taxes, but Chicago also has the highest taxes in the country at the moment.  This is not a good way to create fuzzy goodwill in the community.

Basically, the whole thing is making me happy I didn’t buy in the city.

5.  Speaking of, I’ve been keeping an informal survey of yard signs.  There are a grand total of 7 houses with Romney signs and 4 houses with Obama signs in the Wheaton city limits that I’ve seen.  Considering that this is Wheaton, I take that as a sign that there’s little enthusiasm for Mittens.  Also, I’ve seen three houses with yard signs for Peter Roskam, the Republican who’s pretty much guaranteed to win the House seat for Illinois District 6 (seriously, up until about five minutes ago I thought the Dems weren’t even putting anyone up against him.  Turns out I was wrong.  But the district primarily covers Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Barrington, Downers Grove, Hoffman Estates…and, fuck it, it’s been represented by a Republican since 1973.  True, that Republican was mostly Henry Hyde, but…well, my point stands).  The houses that have Roskam signs don’t seem to have Romney signs.  Also, Obama won the district by a pretty hefty margin in 2008.  Like, a double digit margin.

6.  So, there’s something that’s been wandering about through my mind off and on for the last couple years and I figure I might as well solicit some advice:

I’m 31 and single, last I checked.  One of the interesting things about being 31 and single is that there’s a not insignificant chunk of single women of roughly my age who are single mothers.  In the past that’s pretty much been an automatic deal breaker.

I don’t have anyone in particular in mind, so this is a purely academic inquiry, but should I be re-evaluating my stance?  On a functional level, I am fully capable of holding down a career, I’m a homeowner, and my dog has managed to not starve to death on my watch, so I know I’ve got most of the earmarks of maturity necessary to handle the situation.

Also, I’m basically surrounded by children these days.  It’s weird.  That’s basically why I’m trying to decide if I need to re-evaluate things.

7.  This is awesome.  In a sort of “I just threw up in my mouth” sort of way.

8.  This is not so awesome, mostly because it didn’t really have to happen.

Seriously, the whole Libya thing over the last 24 hours or so has been awful.  Specifically, though, the way it’s been hijacked into a conversation about Mitt Romney and Israel has been beyond terrible.  Romney or his handlers apparently decided that this was a chance to win a news cycle and came out with some of the dumbest, most tin-eared possible talking points.  So rather than talking about the fact that terrible things happened we got to talk about how Romney did a terrible job of responding.

Then a bunch of theories cropped up amongst the commentariat of the places I frequent on the internet that this whole thing was just ginned up by Romney and Bibi Netanyahu to try to discredit Obama in a false flag operation or something.  I lack the words to describe how indefensibly stupid I find those theories to be.  But this is one of those things where it pretty much illustrates that both the left and the right are fully capable of creating the dumbest possible conspiracy theories out of thin air and being annoying as fuck about it.

9.  Also, too, right now the Orange Stripey Kittehs are up 7-1 in the eighth.  I’m not happy.

Look At Me, I'm Captain Suburbia!

I’m mechanically inclined
I’m blissfully insane
I’m rescuing the sacred
From the jaws of the mundane
-- Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, “Captain Suburbia”

In case anyone’s wondering, I’m very much not dead.  I’ve just been…busy.  Really busy.

So, to recap, I bought a house on April 20th.  I finally moved in to said house about two and a half weeks ago.  It’s been kinda weird, too, since I now live in Wheaton, Illinois, known to most at the place where Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center are.  To me, it’s my hometown.  Which, if I’m honest, is kinda weird, too.  I never intended to move back here.  Hell, on a fundamental level I never wanted to move back here.  Yet, here I am.

I’m still trying to adjust to the notion.  I’m also still trying to get a sense of how my schedule is going to work.  I’ve got some ideas kicking around in the back of my head about what to do with the blog and my writing and any number of other things.

For the moment, though – and especially for the last two weeks or so – it’s just nice to be able to sit on my couch in my house and, y’know, just sit.

But, in case you want to see a few things, here are some pictures.

There’s my car, parked in my garage (this is kind of a big deal to me):




There’s the TV in my office, which may or may not be attached to a NES, a SNES, and a N64.  Are you jealous?  You should be jealous:




And here’s Daisy, trying to eat her way through a chain link fence:


There was a softball game on the other side of that fence.  She really, really wanted to play softball.

Thank You, John Roberts

I do believe that the news coming from SCOTUSblog is what I think of as "good."  I, as we all know, am not a lawyer, but as an educated layperson I'm fully willing to say we can all breathe a sigh of relief because the decision is correct.  The sad thing is that we've had to hold our breaths at all, due to the fact that SCOTUS has been increasingly politicized of late.

Personally, I think that the Affordable Care Act is a terrible piece of legislation.  It consists of several good and important ideas slapped together into an extremely inefficient system.  But it's better than what it is replacing.

For right now we can't have nice things.  With today's decision, however, we're moving incrementally towards them.

In other words, we're bouncing into Graceland.

Every Day I'm Rising Up

I turned 31 on Monday.  I know, right?  I'm sure some of you are all, "Wow, that's fucking old."  Others are like, "Pffffft, young'in, come back and talk to me when you can grow hair on your nuts."

As such, I think 31 is a pretty damn good age.  And it was definitely time for a party.  Three years ago on my birthday I saw Local H at the Double Door in Chicago.  Two years ago I saw the Lost Immigrants at the Doublewide in Dallas (and met James Dunning, who turned out to be a cool dude).  Last year I got my offer letter to come back to Chicago from Dallas.  This year, well, this year I had a party game:



Yup.  Nothin' like taking the day off to sand down your stairs.  Anyway, it was a good birthday, all things considered, especially since I got an email from Barnes & Noble at 11:30 on Monday night that Blackout, the third Newsflesh book, was ready to be downloaded.  I hadn't been expecting to get it until June.

And so but anyway, now that I'm officially ensconced in my fourth decade on this planet, I feel it's time to pretend like I've developed some wisdom about life.  So here are my three big lessons on life:

1.  Every few years I realize how dumb I was a few years ago.  I fear the moment when that stops being true, because it means I've stopped growing and learning.

2.  I always have to be willing to get hurt and be disappointed.  I've spent the last few years focused solely on expectation management, i.e. if you don't expect too much you won't be let down when the roof inevitably falls in on you.  I've finally figured out that the only thing you get from that is misery compounding misery, because if you don't dedicate yourself to something and try you'll just end up wondering why you can't have nice things.

3.  If I'm waiting for someone or something to come along and complete me, I'll never be whole.  No one else can tell me who or what to be.  It doesn't matter if I'm looking for god or a significant other or that job that I think will be the best thing ever.  If I don't know who I am and can't give myself meaning, then I'll just be defining yourself by some external thing.

So, yeah.  It's pretty trite and obvious, I suppose.  But it took me thirty years to learn, so maybe it's not.  Life is really good right now and I've got some developing developments of a developmental nature that I think will probably actually cause my head to explode if they go the way I hope they do.  But even if they don't, well, I've learned enough to say that it won't be the end of the world and there's always something new and exciting around that next corner.

Anyway, here's some happy-making music:



And here's some Florence + the Machine, because, holy shit, Florence + the Machine:

Chicago Bear Patrol

I'm currently 30 miles outside Chicago.  That saddens me, since I'd rather be in Chicago right now so I could walk around the Loop and take pictures of the streets that I'm told are surprisingly empty for a gorgeous Friday in late May.

So, basically, after three solid weeks of ratcheting panic and, "STAY AWAY WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE," Chicago is enjoying what might be the most peaceful day it's ever enjoyed.  At the very least it's a close second to the city-wide day of mourning declared when it was announced that Chicago Code had not been renewed by FOX.

It'll be nice, though, to hear all of the talking heads and pundits and everyone else stand up and say, "You know what? Maybe we panicked over nothing and we need to seriously re-consider our response to things like this.  Perhaps it's time to have a little faith in humanity again."

Oh, wait, I'm sorry.  That's how things work in my alternate universe where people are intelligent and decent and capable of being reasonable.  In that universe I'm also married to Kristen Bell and Mary Elizabeth Winstead at the same time.  Also, I have a pony.

So, since we don't live in that world, I'll bet I can tell you exactly how this went.  The whole thing ended up being peaceful and no one got hurt because of all the great prep work done by the City of Chicago and the various other entities who spent the last month working all the office workers up into a nice frothing panic at the thought they might have to possible be in the same street at the same time as an unwashed freak.  Also, too, there might even be MORE unwashed freaks than usual, so said office workers wouldn't have the luxury of ganging up on that person and yelling, "Get a job!"

Because, y'know, that's the real problem.  They're all too goddamn lazy to work and they want to take all of the hard working office peoples' stuff away.

Again, welcome to America in 2012.  Treasure it, people.

The Calm Before the Summit

They're giving the city of Chicago over to the mob on Friday in preparation for giving it over to the landed gentry of the largely superfluous Cold Warmongering body known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the weekend.  It's been strange to be in Chicago for these last few weeks.

Way back on May 2nd we got our first warning about what to expect when the rabid hordes of Occupy protesters descend on the city like so many patchouli-scented locusts.  At the time I made jokes about the importance of holding hourly panic drills.  I also planned on taking my lunch hours on May 18th and May 21st to (gasp) head out into the streets of Chicago with a camera and take pictures of the doin's-a-transpiring.

In the last two weeks I've witnessed the panic slowly getting ratcheted up from "pointless and laughable" to "extreme and genuinely worrisome."  Last weekend I found out that Metra (the collective train lines that connect the suburbs beyond the reach of the L to the city) is putting in regulations for Saturday to Monday that skip merrily past "draconian" right into "completely batshit absurd."  Then yesterday my company declared an all-company work from home day and said that the doors to the office will be locked and don't bother even trying to come in because OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

Well, that last part was more subtext...

Anyway, I hope to have an opportunity to write more about this later.  But I've drawn one conclusion.  In America we now have two sides: the fascists who want to take away your freedom and the wild, unreasonable animals who want to burn everything to the ground.  Because, y'know, that's way easier to believe than any sissified moderate option that actually requires listening to your opponent.

There's really no sense in wondering why we're so fucked up.  This is America in 2012.  Treasure every minute of it, people.