To the Year Ahead and Year Behind

The time between Christmas and New Year’s is precious and underappreciated. There’s time to visit with family. The businesses and activities that remain open feel like they’re set to glide mode. All the homies that teach are on break and can meet up–it’s a good time to champagne & campaign.

On the other hand, as someone who consumes a lot of podcasts and blogs, this week is also kinda meh. Year in review episodes, best ofs, reruns, etc. are hit or miss. An exception to this rule is the Stadios, the end of the year award show on the Stadio soccer podcast. It rules, if you like soccer you should go listen to it right now. On my own show, after the trash-fire of 2020, I swore off year-in-reviews. 

So instead of recounting 2022, here are some things I’m looking forward to in 2023.

Football in February - In May, Hope and I flew home to visit family during Eid Al Fitr, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan in Islamic culture. Coincidentally (I swear), the Seattle Sounders were playing that week in the CONCACAF Champions League Final at Lumen Field. It was possibly the greatest live sporting experience of my life. Seattle won the continental title for North America and qualified for the Club World Cup, which will be played in February in Morocco. At one point, the tournament was rumored to be hosted in Abu Dhabi but alas it wasn't meant to be. In the tournament, Seattle will be competing against the best teams from each continent, including Real Madrid and  Brazil's CR Flamengo. 

Travel in February - In the fall, we  visited Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia for the first time. We enjoyed our time and I fell in love with the region. The Caucuses remind me of Central America and Southeast Asia–criminally under-traveled places that are accessible and deeply affordable. During the trip, we made plans to revisit the region—this time we’re headed to Baku, Azerbaijan. Unlike Georgia, which is majority Orthodox, Azeris are majority Muslim and their state feels a bit more off the beaten path. Dumplings and wine aplenty await.

Reading in June - One of my greatest discoveries of 2022 was the author S.A. Cosby (no relation). He writes Southern noir novels. They’re engrossing crime and heist tales, as if Elmore Leonard could write credible Black characters (yes, that’s shade). I devoured his prior books Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland last year. Someone who recommended Razorblade Tears compared it to Lethal Weapon or 48 Hours but following the story of the crooks. He writes deep, complex characters and amazing tension filled narratives. His next book comes out in June, All the Sinners Bleed. Here’s the slug: 

“After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county.

Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies.”

Football in July - The Women’s World Cup will be in Australia and New Zealand this year. This will be our third WWC. We will be attending the tournament’s opening match, NZ versus Norway, and all the US’ matches in the group stage. All the US matches will be played in New Zealand, so we’ll also make some time for some Lord of the Rings related sight-seeing.

Justice in September - the Tacoma police officers that killed Manuel Ellis are scheduled to go to trial. The case, a shameful travesty of justice, has been repeatedly delayed due to law enforcement obstruction, false statements by police spokespeople, and complicit cowardice by local elected officials. 

Dune in November - I recently wrote about my admiration for the book Dune and excitement about the upcoming movie sequel. Shooting wrapped in Abu Dhabi over the break. Part 1 ended right at the point the book gets very, very weird. I’m excited to see how Villeneuve navigates the tail end of the book, the uprising on Arrakis, and the all-knowing-talking-babies.

Recommendations for this Week 2022: After talking smack about year end lists, it’s silly to turn around a do end of year recommendations, but I’m a silly person so here goes:

• Best TV show of 2022 - The Bear, FX

• Best movie of 2022 - Athena, Netflix

• Best podcast I discovered in 2022 - If Books Could Kill

• Best thing I ate in 2020 - Khinkali, Georgian dumplings

• Best book, fiction - Razorblade Tears

• Best book, non-fiction - The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less

See you next week!

Back in Tacoma for the Holidays

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch

You really are a heel,

You're as cuddly as a cactus, you're as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch.

In my pre-teaching life, I spent six years working at UPS. The holidays were my most chaotic and least restful time of year. It shaped how I view the season today. Combined with my general anti-consumerist bent* (and putting my faith to the side), I'm pretty meh on the festive season. But we live at the mercy of those we love. After what my family has been through the last two years, coming home and celebrating with family was a must. So after fourteen hours sitting in a right-triangle of crying babies, Hope and I touched back down in Cascadia on Monday.

The fifty-five degree temperature change tested the limits of my layering. I departed our apartment in Abu Dhabi in a t-shirt, adding a hoodie at DXB. I donned another layer upon landing, and added a fourth as I exited Sea-Tac into the blowing snow. It’s currently Timberland boots and goose down cold here. But we made it.

Each time we return to Tacoma feels a bit odd. This is now our fourth year overseas and we've signed contracts for year five. So, the earliest we would return, barring an unforeseen emergency, would be summer of 2024. But even that seemingly distant date is unlikely. The trends in public education that caused us to decide to pursue work abroad have accelerated, not abated.  I struggle to picture myself sliding back into my old role. I know there's a future for us in Tacoma but that time isn't now, not yet. 

With all that swirling in my head, on Thursday night I got up in front of an audience of civics nerds and  hosted Adult Civics Happy Hour at the Press Room. ACHH is a series of live events that I began hosting in various forums in Tacoma five years ago. It’s a live community dialogue featuring policymakers, journalists and activists. Thursday's program, the first since the start of the pando, included two panels: one on the local sheriff and one on the upcoming legislative session.

The legislative panel, L to R: yer boi, Rep Bateman, Sen Trudeau, Rep-elect Mena

The situation with the sheriff is telling for where things are right now. The window for meaningful police accountability laws that opened with the mass protests of 2020 has largely closed, with little gained to show for it. Pierce County is a microcosm of the country. Tacoma has four murdering police on a multi-year administrative vacation for a killing they committed in March 2020.  The county has a sheriff that is drunk on power (among other things); he was recently acquitted in a trial where he was charged with making false reports. During the trial multiple witnesses, including fellow officers, indicated he had lied, repeatedly. But he was acquitted by a jury (If you’re not local and want to learn more about this case, I have covered it on my podcast here, here, and here.)

In the second panel, three state legislators talked about the upcoming legislative session. We talked about their policy priorities, what was likely to pass and I asked about my priority issues  as well. The audio from both panels will be on future episodes of Nerd Farmer. 

I acknowledge that it is odd (but also very me) to fly 7,500 miles across the globe to visit family and also toss in hosting a sold out political forum. But we did it—we packed out the venue on a brick cold night. It felt good, like putting on that old comfortable sweater you haven’t worn in ages. 

It Was Capitalism All Along

One of my favorite discoveries of the pandemic was the podcast You’re Wrong About. I describe it as MythBusters for the major media stories, scandals, and moral panics of the 1980s to 2010s. On one episode co-host, Sarah Marshall, uttered an exasperated throw-away line that has stuck with me for nearly two years. After a long retelling of a sensationalist moment of media coverage by her co-host, Sarah retorted, “come to find out, it was capitalism all along.” She nailed it, perfectly. 

So much of what we argue about in the US: the culture wars, climate inaction, housing policy, health care access, school privatization, policing, etc. are just capitalism doing its exploitive thing. The dominant class and their interests drive policymaking. When we take our eyes off that, we can end up in all sorts of weird places and tirades. I have fallen for this at times and this week I want to offer a bit of a mea culpa.

I wrote a piece in 2017 that got a fairly large online response. It  was a critique of Boomer politics but on revisiting it, it misses the mark. The culprit is neoliberalism and imperialism, not just the Boomers. Yes, the last forty plus years of US politics are basically inter-generational theft via tax cuts. Yeah, Reagan ushered in an era of disinvestment in infrastructure and the commons that leaves our roads jammed and bridges crumbling. Sure, we spent 8 trillion dollars (8,000,000,000,000 USD) on Forever Wars that could have gone to education, transit, climate mitigation, or countless other things. That’s a pretty damning list and what really irks me is that collectively we haven’t learned much of anything from any of it. 

On the other end of the generational hot-take spectrum from my piece, are people who should know better writing “what’s the matter with kids these days?” articles in US media. A generation of journalists that carried around Tamagotchis in the 90s and spent countless hours in AOL & ICQ chats unironically bemoan Gen Z’s embrace of TikTok. Listen, there’s  nothing wrong with “the kids” except what is being perpetrated on them by the exploitative practices of late-stage market capitalism.

For example, I offer you the triannual national panic over PISA scores. Each time the numbers are released the usual suspects, who want to dismantle or as they put it “reform” schooling in America, try to collectively rub the noses of the teaching profession in the wet spot of criterion-referenced test scores. These scores aren’t rocket science—they are more a manifestation of what’s happening in society than they are of what’s happening in classrooms:

Fifty-nine percent of kids from low-income families said they’d gone to school hungry, and 46% of those kids said that hunger had hurt their performance in school. Hunger impacts learning and academic performance throughout the year, not just on a specific date. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about hunger on any date—high stress, low stress, test day, normal class day. We have the tools and the resources to ensure every child in this country gets the nutrition they need to learn and grow…

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed millions of families into unemployment, food insecurity, and hardship, exacerbating already unacceptable levels of hunger and poverty. As a result, 1 in 4 kids could face hunger this year. - National Honor Society

I have seen this particular PISA scores panic cycle at least five times in my career. It’s the same routine every time: scores come out, the media runs headlines decrying American ruin, corporate reformers blame unions (even for scores in non-union states), and months of headlines and whitepapers fly to and fro. Can you tell that I am tired of it yet? 

It’s a tired merry-go-round and I want off.

As the new year approaches, I’m making some resolutions and I am going to ask you to join me (if you want):

• Let’s retire generational hot-takes. Yes, there is very likely mass lead-poisoning among Boomers but even that was due to capitalism. 

• Let’s also stop blaming individuals for systemic problems. I think I will write more on this next week.

• Lastly, I was really bothered by some of the Islamophobia and racism that I saw from self-professed progressives during the Qatar World Cup. Let’s stop holding individuals responsible for the actions of the regimes they live under. No, it wasn’t my fault that George Bush (both of them) invaded Iraq. Why should a random Qatari or Russian, for that matter, catch hell for the actions of their states?