Solitaire Book Club: How to Hide an Empire

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. At its peak, the British Empire controlled 24% of the land mass of the globe. The U.S.does not hold nearly that much, but it does have over 800 overseas military bases (more than 30 times the rest of the nations in the world combined) and several overseas possessions and territories which might be of the U.S. but which are in important ways not in the U.S. In this scholarly but accessible tome, Immerwahr shows how the U.S. developed a "pointillist empire" not by seizing land but by using economic power, industrial strength,and technological advances to secure its interests. The confluence of circumstances that resulted in the U.S. coming to into its prime after the second world war allowed it to eschew the traditional colonialism with which it had experimented early in the 20th century and create the hegemony it enjoys today. An important read, especially for anyone who doesn't know that the U.S. held The Philippines as a colony for over the 30 years and that Guamanians are American citizens but cannot vote in federal elections.

Solitaire Book Club: Myth America

Myth America edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. In this hefty tome, 21 respected historians provide heavily-researched, evidence-based, fully-cited chapters debunking commonly-held misconceptions about the United States: that American Exceptionalism means anything; that the New Deal and the Great Society were failures; that change could be made if only we had "good protests"; that confederate monuments celebrate history, not racism; that "America First" is not fascist; that the Republican Party did not deliberately court southern racists for political power. The content is not exactly news to anyone who has really been paying attention, but seeing it laid out clearly and precisely is an education, with some astonishing moments highlighted that are often overlooked.

But of course, one must wonder how much it matters. The people who need to read this book will not read it, since it reeks of the "wokeness" they despise, and even if it were read to them they would ignore the facts and the historical record and the documentary evidence and choose to believe the narrative that makes them feel both comforted and victimized and which justifies their continual rancor. So it goes in America today.

Sprung forward

So, there were bold plans for this morning - a 7am walk on the Bay trail with a pal. But when the kitty-gets-his-pills 6am alarm went off at what was still 5am in my head and body and I realized that it would actually be a pre-dawn walk with the time change, we canceled. I thought about sleeping in, but the kitty shortly thereafter decided it was time to get up anyway, so here we are.

Since the PST/PDT is a marker of change, I thought I would check in to this venue about the Bug Change that is coming up: at the end of the month, the Bellingham condo will go on the market and we will begin our transition to Tacoma.

There's lots of moving parts involved in this transition: selling this place, with a rent-back; finding a new place 120 miles away - just far enough away to be really annoying; closing both of those; moving; Coco's finishing her thesis and graduating; Coco's finding or starting a practice in Tacoma; and my figuring out what I'm going to do next. And we have to do all that while caring for our superannuated cat, dealing with the "end" of the pandemic, and trying to make sure we keep connected to the people we care about up here. It's gonna be a busy 90 days or so.

And yet, it feels right. As much as we both love Bellingham and will miss our walks on the bay, it is time for a change. We're getting a better sense of what this next chapter is going to look like,and starting it in a new place seems fitting.

For a little while, book reviews and ruminative essays might be a little thin on the ground, but only because I will be otherwise occupied.

Oh, and by the way:

That was then...

 

So, I was looking for something else in some dusty computer files but ran across one of my old, ubiquitous spreadsheets (see unreadable facsimile above). It is a record of the social activities (both dates and group events) that Coco and I initiated in Fall/Winter of 2005.

Over the course of a little over four months, we had some sort of activity about every eight days with an average participation of 8 individuals (ranging from just the two of us to twenty people on New Year's Eve). A total of 31 friends and acquaintances are represented in these activities, most attending between one and three events and six people attending five or more.

I look at this from 17 years ago and compare it to my experiences even in the last decade or so and I can feel the drastic difference. A number of factors have contributed to that, of course; a minor diaspora of the old Seattle gang, mostly in response to housing pressures; our own move to Bellingham seven years ago; the general effects of aging and changing job circumstances on social activities; and, of course, for the past three years or so the disruption caused by the pandemic (which I believe is leading to continued patterns of behavior, but that's another essay). In any event, outside of work, I am not sure I have socialized with 30 different individuals in the past five years...

I don't have a spreadsheet with the stats (shocking) but I am sure the same decline is true in my tabletop RPG experience. I can remember playing every week in the campaign John was DMing, DMing my own campaign, and participating in a campaign at the game store on Cap Hill, all at the same time. Now I have one Zoom/Roll 20 game that I can attend three times a month.

So it goes.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. When I shared with Coco the details of the spreadsheet, she said "No wonder I was a wreck and you were so happy!" It is true that the pandemic slowdown -- less socializing, working from home, etc. -- has actually played to some preferences of introverts like her, but I wonder if it it isn't time to swing the pendulum back a little bit, maybe not all the way to our "posse days" but somewhere closer to the middle.