🍻 🥯

More on that Politico profile of the NH voter: A retired Lt. Colonel living in house worth well north of a half million.
And then...because of course:
“You do your own reading and your own research, and you’re like, ‘What the hell’s happened to this country?’” he told me.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 23, 2024

I was in graduate school in Austin in the late ‘70’s, working for Schlotzky’s (which was then just an Austin institution). I worked in the bakery. We baked the buns for all the sandwiches for the…six?… locations. Anyway, on this occasion I was having beers with my boss.

And we both had enough beers to get noisy and excitable and loud. The topic, as I recall now 45+ years later, was “survivalism.” We forget now, but there was a thriving cottage industry that eventually got so big (and lasted so long) you could buy “prepper” food (basically MRE’s) at Costco. (Costco was decades in the future at this point.)  Our loud and half-drunk discussion was about the necessity of such preparation.

You may recall Ruby Ridge, which was a few years in the future from this discussion. Those people were “preppers” as well as criminals. They were convinced society was about to decay into complete anarchy, and they weren’t going down with it. Race war, class war, economic collapse (inflation was much worse than anything we’ve seen since Covid, and had been since Nixon. Paul Volcker wouldn’t tame that until the mid-‘80’s, with double digit interest rates): pick your reasons, but the end was near. Decades later, again, when there were Silicon Valley billionaires, some of them were reportedly making billionaire-level preparations for the coming collapse.

And we’ve vanished all of this down the memory hole.

The Lt. Col. in that Politico article sounds like a man who just stepped out of a time capsule. Not a fallout shelter from the ‘60’s, but a man frozen in the ‘80’s. It wasn’t all “Morning In America” back then. There was a conviction it was all going to hell in hand basket, and that it needed to happen sooner rather than later.

Trump didn’t invent that; he just gave it an excuse to take center stage. The idea never really left; it just now needs to work its way all the way out, in order to return to the fringes once more.

Which is where it was when my boss and I argued loudly and drunkenly. He was the manager of about six people who worked six hour days cranking out enough bread for about six stores. I say six hours, but I think that was my day, because after making the buns from scratch with the other workers, I loaded the van and delivered the goods, which gave me longest working day in the bakery. Not, in other words, a major operation.

Nichols makes much of the value of this Lt. Col.'s house; geez Tom, have you priced houses lately? The fact is, there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. Not even the impotent wish to make your life more significant than it is.  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau, before the Civil War.

The more things change, and all.