Waste Not ... uh ... something something

 So we had a "bonus week" available, a not-quite-free stay in a condo provided by the company that we book through sometimes for our annual Condo Week trips. There are some restrictions, mainly that we can only book a month and a half in advance. We've had this bonus week for almost 2 years, and have sat on it thinking that, eventually, we'd want to use it. Then Coronavirus showed up, and suddenly it's not something my wife is interested in.

We were going to let it go by the way -- it expires near the end of this month. Were we going to the Lake this October, like we usually do around the time of the Huntsman Games? Would I get to make another trip in the Sacramento Jag? Did I even want to? What about the dog? Things seemed to conspire against it, so we reconciled ourselves to the thought that it would go unused. The Huntsman Games were cancelled; Nancy, who usually meets us out at the Lake, had her schedule all disarranged by the virus; I injured my foot in Jackson this summer and my mobility is limited. All kinds of things were keeping the planning in flux, so finally I just decided: I was going to see what was available, and just go somewhere. 

Park City, Utah, is the choice I made. I contacted my old friend Curtis, who lives in Las Vegas; he and I have gone hiking every October for a few years, in conjunction with the Huntsman Games. I could collect him, we could go up to Park City, and spend a week in a condo doing whatever it is people do around Park City in October. I could be back in time for the rescheduled trip to the Lake in the second half of the month. I would get to take the convertible, I would get to visit the two remaining counties in Utah, I would get to go to the two car museums I wanted to see in remote parts of western Colorado, and we could have our traditional hike-and-kvetch trip. Hiking would be limited this year, because of my injury, but kvetching is undiminished by the pandemic. It'd be great.

Well, so far, it's only good. The drive out, on the freeway, was of course as boring as three days on the freeway can be (athough it was better on the third day, after I collected Curtis, who can make conversation). I spent the first night, Wednesday, in a dreary little mom-and-pop motel in Lordsburg, New Mexico. It seemed okay until I decided to take a shower, and found that there was no cold water available. And the hot water was really, really hot. Thursday night I was at the Strat, in Las Vegas. This is the hotel with the 1200' tower with an amusement park on the top. The room was reasonably priced, even with the "resort" fee, and I had a nice view toward the east from 20-something floors up.

sunrise from the hotel

I didn't see the amusement park, but I did go up to the bar for a look around. Vegas is a sleazy-looking place in the daytime, but at night it looks as exciting as everybody seems to think it is. Vibrant, colourful, flashy, as long as you don't look too close. Downstairs in the hotel there's the usual over-the-top casino, designed to disorient. I walked through it a few times on one quest or another, and managed to get lost almost every time.

In the morning, I loaded up the car in the parking garage (one of the reasons I picked this hotel is that they offer free parking in their garage) and headed out to get Curtis. When I got to his place and got out, I found two slashes, about 5 inches long, in my convertible top. I'm just guessing the work of the passenger in the white Toyota that parked next to me in the garage. So that free parking will turn out to be the most expensive parking I've ever had. 

The drive from Curtis's house to Park City is, according to Google Maps. a little less than six and a half hours. We managed to do it in about ten. I mention this because I don't know where all that extra time came from. I mean, I always manage to exceed Google Maps' estimates, because I don't quite go the speed limit usually, and I make a lot of stops along the way. But three and a half extra hours ... well, that may be some kind of record. 

I was really only concerned about it because I knew we'd have to check into the condo. But around 4:30 that afternoon, the condo office called my landline to give instructions on how to check in. Ain't it lucky, there was someone to hear the message. (Actually, there is a sign on the office window with a phone number to call for late check-in.) 

It being late and already dark, all we did Friday night was walk up the road to "downtown", about 8 blocks away. Lots of cars but not many people out; but all the restaurants were full and each had a few groups waiting for seating. We first located a place that would be showing the Aston Villa:Liverpool match on Sunday -- first things first -- and then turned our attention to somewhere for dinner. 

In the relentlessly trendy heart of Park City, we were unable to find any truly satisfyingly ordinary place to grab a light supper. We ended up at some overblown fusion place that may actually have a name, but the only thing that attracted us was the fact that there was nobody ahead of us in line for a table. The restaurant's virus protections were over the top (a good thing): the server who took our order was not allowed to touch anything on the table; they had designated employees going around collecting menus. When it was time to pay, they gave us a sanitizing towel for the credit card. Impressive. The food was good, and only moderately overpriced. The ambience was nice -- we sat outside, with a propane heater nearby to keep the slight chill at bay. 

Saturday, having verified on line that the car museum in Rangely, Colorado, was open from 10AM to 6PM, we went for breakfast in Heber City and then drove east. It's about three hours, each way, and included passing through one of the two counties I had yet to visit in Utah. The sky was clear, though oddly hazy at the edges when we left Park City. The route took us through national forest lands, with trees and rivers and reservoirs in the first half of the trip, and high desert after that. There is, I am always reminded, a stark beauty to desert landscape, and this trip was no exception. It was almost as colourful as the Painted Desert: greys and reds overtopping each other, browns dark and light, mountains in the distance ... except that there didn't seem to be any distance. In fact, throughout the day, the visible horizons got closer and closer, and the scent of wood smoke got stronger and stronger until the sun turned red at four in the afternoon. Ah! Fires out west! That explains it.

smoke from forest fires

So after our three-hour drive to Colorado, we pulled up in front of the Rangely Auto Museum. Which was closed.

feet on the ground: Kennedy Station

We had lunch in a little Italian place in town, then headed back through the smoke. I took a detour through the little community of Bonanza, Utah, just for the variety, and along the way we found a historical marker for Kennedy Station, a stage stop on the route between Vernal and the Dragon Mine.

 

 

sheep parade

 We also got stopped by a flock of sheep running across the road in single file on their way to a watering hole. After watching them for a few minutes I decided just to plow my way through, as there appeared to be about twenty minutes' worth of sheep yet to cross. They were still crossing when they went out of sight in my rearview mirror.

So now it's Sunday. Breakfast this morning was in a grill a few miles up the road. There aren't a lot of choices in this town. This place wasn't bad, but the service was ... uneven. Hint to waiters: when someone orders coffee, that should include cream, sugar, sweeteners, and a spoon. And when you refill the cup, it's best to stop pouring before pulling away. And even in a fancy-schmancy resort town like this, two dollars for a single slice of toast is too steep.

Well. So. Sunday noon and we head down to Main Street, where we earlier identified a bar that would have the Aston Villa:Liverpool match showing. That match proved to be a metaphor for this entire trip so far: exciting, engaging, intensely disappointing. Villa beat the Reds, 7:2. Sadness overwhelms.

But not for long. After the crushing defeat, we walk farther up Main Street to the top of the town, thinking of making a small hike to the Ontario Tunnel, which turns out to be a drainage culvert. Somehow that lacked appeal, so we went back down the hill a ways and found a shaded bench where we planned to do a little people-watching. That turned into hours and hours of people-watching, and so far that has been the best part of this trip.

On Trump

I watched about three minutes of Monday night's "debate" between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, then flipped away confident that I'd gotten the gist of the performances; news from every source Tuesday morning confirmed the accuracy of my conclusion. But thinking about it on the long drive across country on the Interstate got me to wondering, not for the first time, about Trump's supporters. They make up about a third of the electorate; they are all adult enough to vote, and drive, and have at least an average education, and presumably they are largely able to function to some degree in the real world. I know a couple of these people pretty well myself, and I know that they, at least, tick all those boxes. How, then, can anyone still support this man, after three and a half years of lies and failure? (I even read an entire book, Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild, hoping for some insight on the question.)

I've had conversations, in person with one and by email with another, and both of the Trumpistas that I know stick resolutely to their support for him. They have no articulable basis for it, beyond "I like what he's done" -- though they can't really say what that is. When I look at Trump's accomplishments, other than the lies and the cover-up of those lies and the denial of reality and the readiness to brand any uncomfortable fact "fake news", I see next to nothing. 

I see a very, very bad tax law change, which redounds to the disadvantage of most people, including both my Trumper friends. I see the missile attack on a Syrian air base in response to that nation's use of chemical weapons (at least Trump did something, even if halfheartedly; Obama, despite his "red line" warning, did nothing). I see the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court (Gorsuch is a knowledgeable and, I think, reasonably mainstream judicial thinker, with respect for principles and traditions, though I wouldn't say I necessarily agree with his outlook). I see the Kavanaugh appointment; however questionable the man's behaviour may have been when he was in college and drunk, I think, after a certain amount of time, it's just too late to hold that against him. (Plus, I think there's a certain amount of unfairness in using the mores of the 2010s to judge the behaviour of a 20-year-old living with the mores of the 1980s; it's kind of like condemning the founding fathers, now, because things they did that were commonplace in the 1780s are considered reprehensible in the 21st Century.) It's too early to form an opinion of Kavanaugh's respect for the rule of law and the traditions of American jurisprudence, and to be honest I'm not all that optimistic about him as a justice; but I'm prepared to be persuaded one way or the other. So let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say that the Kavanaugh appointment can be chalked up on the Accomplishment side of the ledger.

And that's about it. One of my Trumper friends said he liked Trump's stand on immigration. (That was the only particular he could articulate.) I have no opinion about it, one way or the other: I don't consider immigration a big deal, though I understand why people in the formerly lily-white midwest, and in the historically black-and-white south might be frightened out of their minds (as they seem to be, from here) by all the taquerías suddenly sprouting up in their quaint little farming communities. It can be scary to be suddenly confronted with a noticeable number of people who talk with a different accent and eat strange foods, I suppose, if all you've ever known for generations is steak and corn and coleslaw at the church social. 

But one of my Trumper friends lives in San Antonio, a city that has had a very, very large population of people whose roots are in Mexico and Central America. (At one time, I calculated that my wife and I were the only "anglos" on our street, but I think now that I had forgotten about the elderly couple who lived across the street and a couple of doors down. One of them, at least was anglo -- a term that, around here, just means "not hispanic".) Most of them are from families that were long-settled here when Travis drew a line in the sand. Some of the more recent arrivals speak with that accent that we call "Mexican" because Mexicans are by far the largest part of the group; or speak only Spanish. Either way, they get by; their children -- whether "dreamers" or native-born citizens -- are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. They are as American as my friend or me, and here in South Texas, they are no kind of "threat" to our way of life. Hell, they have influenced and defined our way of life, mostly for the better, as much as any ethnic group. (The other large ethnic groups here are German and Polish, who are distinguishable only by their family names; a fair number of Blacks, whether descended from slaves or more recent arrivals, who seem to me to be about as integrated into the fabric of the city as everyone else, unless they hold themselves apart (as some people are wont to do); growing populations of East- and South-Asian people, groups just now getting large enough to start moving out from the concentrated enclaves that immigrant groups seem always to start with;  and smaller numbers of Arabic and Caribbean people, who are mainly recent-enough arrivals to still stand out for their accents and their overly-polite uncertainty about How We Do Things Here. They'll get over that, presumably, and their kids will be mostly indistinguishable when their time comes.) My friend has no cause to be so agitated about immigration here: all these people, where ever they came from way back when or last year, they're here now, and they're part of us. (The other friend lives in South Louisiana, where there are blacks and whites, and the whites are either Cajun or otherwise. I can see where he might have a knee-jerk reaction to novel ethnic changes.)

So I can see how people in places where large-ish new concentrations of immigrants from non-European places can be disconcerting; but I see it as a temporary issue, one of perception and unfamiliarity rather than any kind of real undermining of American values. I can respect my friends' discomfort with immigration without agreeing with it. What I can't respect is Trump's shameless playing up to that prejudice, and his unconstitutional diversion of funds appropriated for other purposes to his boondoggle border fence. (I know, he likes to call it a wall, but it's not a wall, it's a fence, and not a very effective one at that.) And let's not even talk about the cost of this project.

And then there's Trump's "muslim ban," the exclusion of immigrants from a bunch of what he considers "shithole countries". This policy amounts to nothing more than a tawdry bit of window dressing on our side of the question, much like the old exclusions of East Asians that provoked our first immigration policies many decades ago. Those policies at least had the questionable virtue of being in line with general attitudes, back when the American melting pot was as ethnically homogenous as fondue (except for the black folk, but they didn't count back then, did they?).

So I would say that Trump's actions on immigration are a failure; though I will give partial credit for the ending of "temporary protected status" for some groups. The formalist in me thinks that, if we're going to allow people to come to the US on a temporary basis because of humanitarian concerns, that protection shouldn't last a lifetime. If those people who came here 30 years ago want to stay on, let them apply for green cards or citizenship, or go back home. (I admit to not knowing what's involved in applying for either green cards or citizenship, but when you get right down to it, it doesn't matter. They were allowed in temporarily, and then they should leave just like a guest who comes for a visit.)

His trade policies are a failure, too. His trade war with China has produced nothing but bills for American taxpayers. His modifications to NAFTA have produced nothing but hot air and semantics. 

Trump's murky dealings with Russia have produced nothing for the US as a nation, though it sure seems to be doing something for Trump, personally. Who knows what. 

Trump's threats to abandon NATO have caused unrest among our best friends in the world, and have produced only a grudging increase in defense spending by some of those friends, and a whole lot of ill will. I won't deny the propriety of his insistence that they live up to their commitment to spend two per cent of their GDP on defense, but I sure think that result could easily have been accomplished without all the fuss and bother that his hack-handed methods produced. Partial credit, then.

He gets no credit for his handling of the ongoing morass in Afghanistan. I know my own views on how to handle that situation; he has, apparently, none of his own. Another failure.

He promised to "drain the swamp," an idea he got from Mussolini. (Trump probably doesn't know who Mussolini was, but somebody he talked to during the campaign must have once read about Mussolini's promises to drain actual swamps.) Look at the people he's brought into government -- the "best people, the very best", according to him. They are quacks and dilletantes, self-serving hacks and antisocial zealots. The decent ones, though few in number, were mainly in and out in a few months, hired and fired more or less on a whim. Many of them were outright criminals. Trump's vaunted judgment of people -- vaunted, that is, by him -- gets a failing grade from me. I believe he could have picked better people at random from a list provided by the DMV of any state.

Somebody (Steve Bannon, I bet) convinced Trump early on that Iran was getting away with something because of the 6-nation agreement they entered into. So Trump pulled the US out. Okay, he's in charge, he gets to make that decision, even though everyone else involved thought there was no problem with it. But then he tries to use the agreement's enforcement mechanism to re-impose sanctions against Iran. Hey, fool: you aren't a party to the agreement anyore, you can't invoke its remedies any more than, say, Cambodia or Bhutan can. Amateurish move. 

North Korea makes wild threats against the US and its ally, Japan. Trump conducts his personal diplomacy, promising either a non-nuclear Korea or war. Which do we have now? Kim ran circles around our dealmaker-in-chief.

The economy was doing alright until the pandemic hit. He gets a little credit for letting Obama's methods of promoting recovery from Bush's recession play out. But take back some of that credit because of Trump's self-serving lies about what he's done. He campaigned on the promise of 3% growth; he's failed to attain that, and in fact the economic recovery, the long, slow economic recovery from Bush's recession a decade ago is less impressive under Trump's aegis than what Obama accomplished in the latter part of his administration. 

And then there's the handling of the pandemic. Trump didn't create the virus, of course, but he saw it coming and did nothing to prevent disaster. It was a conscious choice, to eschew national health-protection policies in favour of a "states' rights" checkerboard of more or less effective responses.  It was a conscious choice to not stockpile the equipment that would be needed -- a choice determined by Scrooge-like attention to cost and not much else. When he flipped on that decision, it was a conscious (and un-American) choice to prefer giving aid to "red" states over "blue" states. It was a conscious choice to disparage the opinions of those people who should -- and do -- know best how to prevent the wide spread of disease. It was a conscious choice to press for relaxation of protective measures despite the advice of people who understand disease. It was a conscious choice to muddle the population's understanding with talk of medicine-show cures, to politicize basic protective measures like masking-up; to question with no factual basis the epidemiology; to broadcast claims, based on ignorance and hopeful assumptions, that kids don't get sick, that warm weather will solve the problem, that it's safe to go back to school and back to work and back to normal. And it was a conscious choice to do all of this just in the hope that miracles would occur and he would look good when the election came around. Trump's handling of the pandemic is a total and most abject failure, epitomising the most repulsive consequences of his unfortunate personality: arrogance, self-importance, lack of empathy, ignorance, willful stupidity, incompetence, laziness and poor judgment.

When you add up Trump's accomplishments and failures, they don't add up to much. When you then take into account his sleaziness, his inability to focus, his loucheness, his incompetence at administration, his frauds, his lies, his nepotism, his disrespect for -- well, everyone, his inappropriate and autocratic insistence on loyalty to himself instead of to the Constitution .... I mean, the man even cheats at golf.

Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it; his supporters wouldn't care.  Based on the unwavering support of that third of the population who seem to think the man walks on water, despite everything he is and everything he's done or not done, I'd go even further. If Donald Trump hosted snuff porn films on television, his supporters would first call it fake news, then they would blame the victims' parents for not having raised them better, and then they would say, Hey, Trump's just trying to make a buck; What's wrong with that?