Farewell, 2024

Normally I put together a little year-end poem for my final out-of-office message at work. This year all I could muster up for 2024 was a haiku:

Twenty Twenty-Four,
A kidneystone of a year.
Farewell. Good riddance.

That seems a bit depressing, so we'll see if I come up with something else before 5 pm. What I'd like to remember of 2024 is that we welcomed Benny Beagle into our home, we saw a cool solar eclipse and several amazing nights of aurora, we built a new porch and deck, and that Monique and I have made it to the wrapup of this year a little the worse for wear, but still here and still in love with each other.

I live a blessed life and I'm keenly aware of it -- even in the midst of a day-by-day disaster like 2024.

I'm also a usually a pretty optimistic fellow, but it seems likely to me that we're all headed into rough waters in 2025. I'm going to give some more thought over the next couple of weeks to just what I want to do in 2025. I haven't felt very effective in recent years. I've mostly felt exhausted. But perhaps I can find a useful place to put my shoulder to the wheel and find an effective way make things a little better at some level in the world. 

For now I'm trying to combat it all with pretty pictures. Here, have one of my favorites from 2024!

That might not seem very effective, but in an online world filled with possibly even more horror and anger than we see in the real world, some beauty to balance the scales can't hurt. 

I've thought about dipping my toe back into politics. I've been pretty good at fixing things and building things in politics, but it seems to me that the next four years may call for constant full-volume screaming into the void. I could do that, but I'm not sure it would change anything and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like who I'd become by the end of four years of that.

I might try going back to some writing in 2025. Time flies and it's been quite a while since I've written any fiction. The last sustained push was a couple of decades ago when I wrote a few short stories set in a near-future dystopia. I set it aside for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was that it was a fairly depressing world to live in. Now that I find myself actually living in a near-future dystopia, maybe it's time to revisit it. (I wasn't entirely prescient. I thought it would take at least fifty more years to get to where we are now.) I'm not sure another run at science-fiction is in my future. But I might like to tackle something. We shall see. I fear it might devolve into what I mentioned above about politics: four years of shouting loudly into the void to no effect.

Hmmn ... time for another pretty picture:

Or I might try something else altogether. Whatever it is, I think my way of dealing with 2025 and beyond is going to be building something for the future, whatever it may be. For a long time now it has felt as if life has me on the run, ground down and trying to hold on to what I've got. That hasn't felt all that good lately. It's time to try something new.

Whatever you might be thinking of doing with your 2025, I wish you all the best with it!

Here, have another pretty picture: 

Mood Melancholy - November 2024

 It's been a rough 12 months for me and Monique, full of disease and death and setbacks and sorrow. We are ground down. Tuesday's election results were a perfect capper.

Early on in the Biden Administration -- henceforth known as the Second Weimar Republic -- I remember saying a couple of things. The first was that it drove me crazy that he was having these remarkable policy and legislative achievements, but was utterly unable to communicate those successes to the American people. The second came as they repeatedly failed to deal swiftly and harshly with an armed insurrection and Trump's attempt to overthrow the American government:

"Feckless Democrats and fascist Republicans will be the ruination of us all," I said, donning the mantle of the Cassandra of the early 2020s.

The feckless Democrats have done their part. Now the fascist Republicans have center stage to themselves.

This was the first time I wasn't directly involved in a campaign since the 2000 election shortly after I moved to Michigan. The reasons were mostly entirely unrelated to the election itself, but I hesitate to offer up a post-mortem for Tuesday's Democratic disaster because I hate to be the guy sitting out on the side pointing out what the players did wrong. However, a fair number of people have asked me for my two cents, so here it is:

Several big lies repeated loudly again and again over four years beat out a thousand small truths mumbled incoherently over the same period.

It would be easy to blame Kamala Harris for that, since it was her name on the ballot. But it feels to me as if these results were baked in before she ever took the lead on the ticket. Had she not run a very strong campaign for her hundred days as candidate this could've been an even bigger disaster for the Democrats. Thanks, Kamala. I appreciate the effort.

Joe Biden was a great Senator and a master of the inside game in Washington. But for all that I admire Biden's accomplishments in his first two years, he also failed to communicate those accomplishments effectively. And it constantly felt as if he failed to understand the moment. He kept trying to negotiate with the GOP of forty years ago but never understood that he was getting clobbered in a back alley of the Age of Misinformation.

"We're the American people," he liked to say after some outbreak of general crappiness. "We're better than that."

"No, Joe," I would think wearily. "I've studied a lot of American history and on average we are not better than that. Not unless we are exceptionally well led."

So what next? I don't know. Our best hope for the next few months is the sheer demonstrated incompetence of Trump and his hangers-on and yes-men. But too many of the worst people have been planning the worst things to give me much hope that we'll be as lucky as we were the first time around. 

I doubt I'm entirely done with campaigning, but I'm not sure if I'll be ready to come back off the sidelines in 2026 or not. As with 2024, it would mostly be for reasons not related to the election itself.

If I was in charge of Democratic Party messaging for the next four years -- and nobody is knocking down my door asking me to take the gig -- I'd pick two or three brutal truths and shout them again and again and again. And again and again and again. And again and again and again. 

Sadly, I belong to a political party that failed to have the stones to deal effectively with the aftermath of an armed insurrection. I doubt genuine messaging discipline will suddenly appear in our bag of skills.

If anybody cares enough to buy me lunch, I'll tell you my nominees for the brutal truths we should be telling again and again and again. But there'll be no lack of terrible things that the Republican Party will do in the next few years. The problem will be picking just two or three. But the real problem is that the Democratic Party never found a truth it couldn't bury under a nuanced 23-point policy statement.

In the meantime there will be plenty of calls to storm the ramparts in protest of whatever's happening. I'll be more inclined to heed them if the elected Democrats still in office look as if they are finally battling on our behalf. For the last four years it has felt as if they were more interested in fundraising off the rising tide of fascism than in actually defeating it. I'm going to need to see something effective out of some of them before they see another dime out of me.

The institutionalists and technocrats have failed us. It's time for a wartime consigliari to take charge.

All in all, not a very cheerful blog post. But it's not a cheerful time. The grey November rains outside  my window match my mood melancholy.

Winter is often a time for rest and recovery. Our new year starts around the winter solstice for good reason. I'm planning some rest and recovery for myself this winter. I wish you all the same.

The Revised Patioboater Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

Up is down! Down is up! Higgledy Piggledy all around!

Like a lot of folks, I'm relieved that Biden decided to step down after all. I suspect his Presidency is going to age well. He accomplished a ton of things in a short period. 

Since nobody reads this blog anymore this is mostly for myself, but I'd like to go on this bloggy record as predicting a narrow Harris win in November, followed by two months of dirty tricks and lies. I haven't really looked at the Congressional races, but I'd like to think there might be enough momentum to push both houses back to the Dems. We shall see.

I also predict a very bumpy ride for these final six weeks. 

Maybe, just maybe if Harris and the Dems win the GOP will take a look at itself and what is has become and step back from the abyss. I doubt it though. The alternative right-win information environment that a majority of Republicans live in these days is just too toxic. A crushing defeat at the polls might lead the toxicity merchants to step back a bit. But a narrow defeat is likely to just encourage them to double down on toxicity and disinformation. Woe betide us all in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

In any event, good luck Kamala! I'm afraid you're going to need it. 

The Patioboater Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

Honestly, do any of you need or want any guidance for the 2024 election? Anybody? 

These two guys have been around on the public scene for a long time, so I can't imagine there's anybody left undecided, unless they've been in a coma for the last 20 years.

Okay, here's the quick guide: on the one hand, we have a failed president who led the worst Covid response of any industrialized country, then attempted to overthrow the government when people voted overwhelmingly against him. On the other hand we have a decent guy who has led the best economic recovery from the pandemic among industrialized nations, and who passed a series of very effective economic and environmental bills through a narrowly divided Congress.

Choose wisely.

But for those who sat down with a cup of coffee for this read, here's my longer take on the election...

It has probably not gone unnoticed by many of you that my Facebook page has been a quiet place in recent years, mostly filled with photos of sunsets, dogs, and old British cars. This was a conscious decision to focus my space and time back to its original intent, which was to get nice little glimpses into the lives of my family members and friends. I recommend it for peace of mind. I also made myself a rule that I'm not going onto other people's timelines to rebut whatever crapola they post. Again, I recommend it for peace of mind. I have yet to see anybody win a Facebook argument on that basis.

As part of that shift, I've been posting a lot less about politics myself. It isn't that I suddenly don't have opinions, thoughts, or insights. But I also grew tired of the inevitable wave of right-wing misinformation and lies that piled up on those posts, which required me to then spend my time moderating and deleting crapola from the worshipers of the Cheeto God. I could spend a long, long blog post opining about the Age of Misinformation. This isn't that post, but it's important to acknowledge the context for this election.

Since there are very few truly undecided voters to be found, this presidential election is going to end up being a turnout election. The convicted felon is going to spew his Big Lie about the 2020 election to get his base fired up. They will be fired up and they will vote, presumably having also been told that the fix is in so they will have to vote in overwhelming numbers. At the same time, he and his allies and a bunch of Russian 'bots will be spewing a firehose of negative disinformation about Biden, mostly by way of getting people to bring it into the open so that dimwitted pundits will opine about it as if it's not utter made up crapola. ("Meanwhile, is President Biden planning to ___[Crapola]___? Some people say yes. Stay tuned after the break and we'll explain...."

The convicted felon also needs to convince people who would sigh and dutifully vote for Biden that it's not worth it and they should either throw away their vote on a 3rd-party candidate or stay home altogether.

On the flip side, Biden has a different problem that also is based in turnout. He wasn't particularly anybody's #1 choice going into 2020, so there's not really a passionate base supporting him personally. Heck, he wasn't my top choice, either. But he's done a much, much better job with a difficult situation than I expected. Not flawless by any means. But if you sit down and evaluate the job he's done fairly, he's done extremely well.

But the polls sure as heck don't show that. There are some genuine reasons, but a lot of it is also the public reaction to the unrelenting drum of negativity that buzzes of our televisions 24/7 nowadays and seeps into the rest of the news sphere. In any case, he needs to convince people who would be inclined to vote for him to actually show up and vote for him. 

He also needs to convince Republicans who won't vote for him but can't stomach another four years of Trump to at least not do the thing that Republicans do in overwhelming numbers: vote for the R on the ballot, regardless of who it is.

So that's what we're going to see in this election: from the GOP and the Russian bots an unrelenting torrent of crapola about how the country is somehow now a hellscape compared to 2020, despite a lot of facts like economic and crime statistics that compare favorably to 2019 before Covid hit, much less 2020. (Does anybody actually remember 2020? Anybody? Because that was *not* a good year!) And from Biden we're going to see some general feel-good marketing reminding people to take a look around because 2024 is mostly pretty good. Plus, there's going to be a lot of targeted campaigning to people who might show up because they support a specific issue or set of issues -- hello, women. And there'll be a fair amount of targeted campaigning to whatever's left of the non-MAGA Republicans asking them to take a very close look at their guy before pulling that lever.

It's going to be a bumpy four-and-a-half months.

If you're looking for something you can do in the midst of all of that to help keep a failed President and convicted felon from somehow getting back into the Oval Office for a revenge tour, here are my suggestions.

1. Vote for Joe Biden.
2. I mean it. Vote for Joe Biden. I don't care what your specific beef with him or the two-party system is. If you care about the future of this country, vote for Joe Biden. You can bring your beefs to me on Wednesday, November 6, and I'll hear you out.
3. Make sure your friends and family members also vote for Joe Biden. No sitting this one out just because we're all tired.
4. If you're looking for more to do, find a local candidate that you like and help with their campaign. In some elections the top of the ticket has coattails that carry the candidates lower on the ballot. My guess is that in this one the top of the Democratic ticket is most likely to benefit from good campaigning and get-out-the-vote campaigns from the rest of the ticket.
5. If you have a few extra bucks to put into this, donate to Joe Biden's campaign. You will probably feel that the money gets spent asking you for more money, but that's okay. Marketing campaigns are expensive, especially when they have to counter a firehose of crapola.
6. If you have a few extra bucks to put into this, donate to other good candidates. They will make a difference in who shows up to vote.

And that's about it. I'd advise steering clear of the 24/7 television news industry for the next few months. It's going to be ugly and uninformative. If you need a peaceful place, stop by the ol' Facebook page. I can't promise I won't ever post on politics between now and Tuesday, November 5. But if I do I can promise I'll be using the ol' delete function energetically in the comments. In truth it'll mostly be sunsets, Benny Beagle, and old British cars.

Here. Have a pretty sunset photo. If you read to the bottom you've earned it.