"We have arrived at that point of time in which we are forced to see our own humiliation, as a nation, and that a progression in this line cannot be a productive of happiness, private or public."
An appropriately lugubrious morning out there, rainy and cold on the bay.
Peg's on the couch swearing at her phone, trying to turn off a Blink subscription we've let drain our bank account with no utility for the last couple years. I'm not even sure where we stashed those cameras, purchased so we could spy on the work crews here at the condo during the reconstruction after Michael.
I'd thought I would write today about the news of the loss of two old mentors of mine, Richard Gershon and Harry Barr. Richard was the dean at Charleston who hired me in 2008 and helped me learn how to survive and sort of thrive in academia. He was droll, brilliantly smart, and never took himself very seriously. Secure in his own skin. His wife Donna was one of the founding publishers of Garden and Gun. I last saw him in Oxford when I traveled there to officiate a wedding last May. It was a chance meeting there on the sidewalk down the street from the Graduate Hotel. He looked like hell, but was cheerful as always. Now I'll never see him again.
Harry was a grizzled old lawyer, about the same age as I am now, when I met him early in my career. He was best known for his larger than life presence on the Board of Bar Examiners before I joined, where he authored what we all called the "Harry Barr Rule". The HBR was invoked every time we encountered a similar candidate for admission to the Florida Bar: a young man usually in his late 20s, with a pattern in his youth of mayhem and substance abuse that abruptly ended a couple years before, leaving us with a polite, well-spoken gentleman who couldn't possibly have engaged in the conduct described in those police reports. What changed? He'd met a young lady who pushed and pulled him into a life of responsibility.
Hence, the Harry Barr Rule: there is no young man whose life is so dissolute that he cannot be rescued through the intervention of a good woman.
No truer words, those.
But I'm distracted from those losses by what's happening around me, around us. The coup continues. Musk's digging into our IRS records, and there's plausible surmise that the goal is to feed all the government data he's looting into his AI product so he can crush his competitors and rule the world. We've sold out the heroic Ukrainians. We've sold out Europe. There are videos on X of innocuous looking brown people being led onto airplanes in leg irons and manacles, like slaves, to be flown back to the places they escaped as too dangerous. Dear Leader has sued the Brazilian courts to help his buddy Bolsonaro, who we learned this morning had plotted his own January 6th that included killing his opponent. But in Brazil one gets indicted for such things; here we reelect the bastard.
Brazil as a beacon for the rule of law, the U.S. a banana republic. What's become of the world I was born into?
What to do? My neighbors are apparently okay with all this, which is simply repellant. I'd thought about socializing this evening somewhere in town, but I can't stomach swilling cocktails in the midst of treason.
Dying would solve the problem, but we seem way too well for that. We could scoop up what's left of our savings and leave the country, as so many others are doing, but we'd have to figure out a way to offshore our money so it doesn't get confiscated by the DOGE goons.
Right now Wales seems like a good answer. Think Ireland, but cheaper because you don't get the benefit of living in the EU. Peg's ancestors came from there, and I can look across the Irish Sea to where my people embarked on an adventure nearly180 years ago that seems to be coming to an end now for our tribe.
Time to get ready for a big hearing after lunch, then some bloodwork, then I think I'll clear our calendar and drive back to Wyldswood to ponder all this with our cats.
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