Alt-Hist

I picked up Chuck Klosterman's Rock* at the library the other day.  Chuck's work isn't always great and sometimes I wonder if he finished thinking through his idea before starting to write, but I love the strangeness of where he often goes and I'd heard about this novel on a podcast.  The premise is that it's 1967, and instead of Sgt Pepper taking them to a new level, it bombs and the Beatles (along with the Rolling Stones and the Who) become irrelevant.  In their place, The Velvet Underground & Nico becomes the biggest album of the year.  With this in mind, how does the next 30 years of music change?  

I'm only a few pages in, and it's interesting and as I read I'm going back and looking online at various bands (like VU) that I am not that familiar with but are referred to as being influential during that period of time.  But even beyond increasing my knowledge, I like this idea of "instead of _____, ______ other thing became important'.  And while the various superhero and sci-fi franchises have jumped on this idea of there being an infinite number of universes in which an infinite number of things could have happened, I actually like thinking about the reality of what certain things in human history have made a big difference.  And not just the tired 'what if the south had won the Civil War?' or 'What if Hitler got the a-bomb first?'  

So as I mowed the yard on this cool November day today, here's five fun (or not fun) questions I was thinking about:

-What if Alexander the Great had not died in his early 30s?  And his empire had not been divided up between four of his generals?  

-What if Nelson Mandella had died in prison?  Would peaceful change have come to South Africa?

-What if more than a handful of Republicans had stood up to Trump following January 6th?  Actually impeached him and shamed him and even sent him to prison as he deserved? 

-What if George Washington had had kids?  Would he have had the time to fight the Revolutionary War and then build America?  And if he had, would one of his kids become the second president/emperor of North America? 

-What if the black plague of the mid 14th century had not happened?  Would the Renaissance and Reformation have been possible?  

Maybe this will become a new feature on this blog, histories that take place in alternative universes.  Who knows, but these five are good starting points.  

Still in shock, two days later

I guess we aren't gonna get those $5000 checks.

The question going into Tuesday night was continually, how much can we trust the polls?  The polling showed that the Democrats were almost certainly going to win the House of Representatives, and there was a slightly better than positive chance they could win the Senate.  To do so they needed to win some races that six months ago seemed impossible, including one here in Kansas, where a megachurch pastor was running as a Democrat (!) and going up against an incumbent Republican.  While Kansas is actually more moderate than most people believe, and we have had Democrats or moderate Republicans as governor most of the time I've lived here as an indication that we aren't as deeply red as, say, Alabama, it had been since 1932 since we last had a Democrat elected from Kansas in the Senate.  My long-deceased grandparents were teenagers in 1932.  

The Democrat won in the Senate by five points, over 55,000 votes.  And to my surprise, it seems that Cindy Holscher, the Democrat, is going to beat a not-that-offensive Republican candidate for governor, though the race hasn't yet been called even as she is up by about 7000 votes.  And to my delighted shock, it seems that Kris Kobach, our hardline Trump-worshipping attorney general, is going to lose by about 13,000 votes.  Even the state house of representatives, which has had a GOP supermajority for quite some time, is now swinging back to be balanced, as somewhere around 15 state Republican representatives have been defeated, not to mention many others who chose not to run again.  

(Someday I will look back on this post and wonder why I chose to write this.  I'm not really trying to make some clever point.  It's just that two days later, I'm still in shock.  My home state of Kansas, finally starting to act like the sensible people I know we are.  At least most of us.  I just wanted to get this down for the  historical record, in case the AI monster eats us alive in the next five years.  Perhaps some space people will come along in a billion years and this blog will remain the only output of humanity that they can find.  If so, hi there...sorry I didn't get to meet you.  But dang, the GOP got their asses handed to them in 2026, didn't they?  Just wanted this to be on the record.)

There's been a lot of glee from the late night comedians and news guardians over the past few days.  It's been almost unseemly, but I get it.  We've been wallowing in despair ever since around 2017 when we realized that yeah, Trump is going to be as bad as we thought he would be, not to mention the abject terror in 2025 when he returned and many of have genuinely thought that this is the end of our country.  

But I'm not quite so giddy.  In the days running up to the election, there's a part of me that almost was hoping that the Senate might end up being split 50/50.  Let the House put the brakes on Trump, but when the economy inevitably collapses sometime in the next two years (e.g. $40 trillion in federal debt, household debt through the roof, AI bubble popping, gas prices and cost of living not coming down), the Senate still being Trump's wouldn't give the next wave of the GOP ammunition to say, as they inevitably would, that the economy's problem is all the Democrats' fault.  Now, however, with the Democrats probably moving into 260 House seats territory (over 40 seats gained!) and ending up with 54-56 Senate seats (a 7-9 seat gain!), the Democrats have a stake in what happens the next two years...and having a stake means that they will absorb some of the inevitable blame.  

So how are they going to handle success?  The Democratic party I have known for most of my life has been a party of incompetence and naive dreams.  I fully understand why there is a large segment of the population who says, yeah I know the Republicans are bad, but the Dumbocrats are worse.  But this newfound confidence of the Democrats?  Maybe it's a sign that they too will be changing.  This might be the peak of Adam Hamilton, pastor/senator.  But Jon Ossoff?  James Talarico?  Rob Sand?  Keisha Bottoms?  A bunch of names that maybe we'll never heard about again but are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame?  Maybe some of these new Democrats will turn out to be the new wave of post-Obama paragons of hope.  I hope so.  

And maybe, just maybe, some of the Republicans will finally wake up and repent of the shitshow they have been raining down on this country.  Maybe we'll finally see the last days of Trump as well as the people who wanna be Trump: Ken Paxton, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and a cast of hundreds.  A good portion of people are finally seeing what they are, and maybe the Adam Kinzingers of the world will be able to bring back a moderately conservative sense of sanity and make it a Grand New party.  We can only hope.  

But today, I'm still shocked, and will be for sometime. 

The Circus Comes To Town

We are two weeks away from our midterm elections, and here in Kansas for the first time in anyone's living memory a Democrat has a chance to win an election for Senate.  He's a popular megachurch pastor from the suburbs of Kansas City, a former Republican (aren't we all) who is charismatic and seems to be saying all the right things.  His opponent, a doctor who has made a name for extorting and suing (and jailing, it seems) his former patients because of unpaid medical bills, is riding the coattails of a deeply unpopular president.  

So we were all excited to hear last week that the president was coming to town for the first time in 10 years.  Yep, spending somewhere under six hours in an American state once every decade shows how much he cares about Kansas.  He came here to ostensibly campaign for the embattled Republican senator and the other GOP candidates who wish to cozy up to him; of course, flying all over the country these past few weeks he's gotten to hear cheers from the 32% that continue to support him.  Likely the affirmation and worship is what he really wants.  

It's interesting, though, that as he came to Sedgwick County he chose for the arena not Koch Arena on the campus of WSU (named after the Koch family, who is as conservative as they come), nor Intrust Bank arena in downtown Wichita, which is the standard all-purpose modern arena for big events in Kansas.  Instead, he decided to go to a small arena on the northern end of the county.  I've been there once or twice over the years...it's basically a barn with a bunch of seating around a bowl.  Maybe he couldn't get the first two due to other scheduling conflicts...but it strikes me as hilarious that here in Deep Red Kansas, a place where many people continue to revere him, they were worried enough about the crowd size that they chose a smaller venue for his standup act.  

I had no desire to go, either as somebody who would have to endure hours of warmup acts (included: washed up rocker Ted Nugent!) before he showed up an hour late for the lovefest, or as a protestor who would likely get beaten by his thuggish worshippers.  Instead I made a nice lasagna soup that my wife had been asking for, and enjoyed an evening home watching some TV and talking to my son on the phone.  I never did see Air Force One, though I drive my bus near the airbase in which he landed; I stayed out of the city and the traffic jam that his motorcade would have caused; I refused to watch any of the local coverage in the moment.  Not for me, thanks.  

The only surprising thing that might have happened (beyond the moron in the town one over from us who posted on multiple social media sites that he was gonna cap the president; yeah, he's going to jail) was that Trump announced $8 billion dollars for a 'Harvest Fuel Relief Program', something dreamed up in part by our desperate senator.  So let me get this straight...we engage in a pointless war of choice that has spiked fuel prices, we watch farmers (many supporters of the president) go belly up because they can't afford to run their equipment, and then we cheer on a plan that is essentially a bribe to keep the farmers on his side?  The same people who scream about how the left is racing into socialism races to bail out with massive spending the farmers who are suffering because of Trump's own policies?  Surely people are not so stupid as to fall for this again?   I mean, all those DOGE checks, tariff checks, 'vote Republican and get $5000' checks, and now farmaid checks?  None of these things actually exist, of course...but how many people teetering on the fence in the Senate election are going to now vote for our Florida-based incumbent who has enabled all these problems?  

Maybe it's a pipe dream to think that we can ever get rid of these morons.  But the fact that they are spending tens of millions on ads (many going straight from my mailbox to the recycling bin) here rather than elsewhere shows what kind of mess these people have created for themselves.  It should be an interesting next two weeks.

Thinning the Herd

My last Sunday to preach is December 27th.  Maybe not the LAST last, as I believe that I will always be called to serve God's people, and after at least a six months sabbatical ("no preaching, no teaching, no leadership, but yes I'll do a funeral") someday I'll get back up on that horse.  But my time as the preaching minister for our church is coming to an end, and the church is already making plans to move on without me.  

So I've started looking around my office to figure out what to take.  21 years of books, sermons, memories, plus whatever I brought here from the 10 years before that.  Since I'm not moving to another office somewhere, most anything I take will probably have to fit in the basement or maybe one of the kids' rooms.  Having had a few months to think about it, though, I think most of it's not going to the house.  I've already taken three boxes of books to our local library for their booksale (mostly books about sports, humor, and history); probably 90% of the rest of a lifetime's library will stay here.  I need to call some preacher friends to come and have a look through, because what preacher can keep from getting more books?  I know that for most of my career I couldn't.  Whatever doesn't get taken will stay on the shelves for whoever ends up replacing me.  

On this rainy morning I spent some time going through some boxes that have sat mostly untouched.  In them were my old class notes from two stints in grad school, plus some journals that were part of my postgraduate academic phase when I thought it necessary to try and keep reading what was new and trendy in ministry or Biblical studies.  The journals ended up being taken upstairs into our church library where they will likely sit for another 25 years, but I agonized a little bit more about my old classroom notes.  Surely I could use these again?  Or some wide-eyed student preacher might appreciate my insights and term papers from John Mark Hicks' class on hermeneutics?  In the end, I was ruthless, and took two big boxes out to the dumpster.  

I've still got a long ways to go.  Pictures of the wife and kids, a Ron Swanson bobblehead still in its packaging, a cricket ball from my trip to Sydney before I was married...those will all go home to the Me Museum.  But much of the rest of this?  Soon to be gone or abandoned.  

It's always easy at this point to hear again the words of our Lord from the Sermon on the Mount: 'Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal...'  Yet I wonder, if Jesus had come in our day and age, would he have had a library?  Pictures and cartoons on his wall?  A first draft of the SOTM laying on the corner of his desk?  And before he was crucified, would he have brought the Twelve into his office and start giving stuff away?  

Perhaps all this kind of stuff is what makes us so stagnant as we get older.  When we're young, we can toss everything into the back seat of a car and just go.  But decades later, we struggle to let go to anything. Maybe cutting ties with so much stuff will be a blessing for me, and get me back to remembering what's important again.  

In the meantime, anybody want some books???

Can't Unsee That

Walking into my local Casey's that is now advertising fuel for $4.19/gallon (Thanks Mr President!), I was planning to get a fountain drink on this very hot day.  As I was walking in, a lady pulled up in her gigantic pickup; I could see that there were a few kids with her.  She jumped out and I noticed she was wearing a football T-shirt from a nearby town; likely she and the kids were in our town for a youth football game.  As I opened the door for her I looked down and noticed on her legs there were two tattoos.  On her right leg was the word F*CK (not asterisked out); on the other leg was the word BIDEN.  Well then.  Classy comes to our little c-store; glad she will pay be paying taxes here on her beer and vapes rather than elsewhere.  

I'm always fascinated by the people who thought that "Let's Go Brandon" was clever.  I say this fully understanding why some people didn't care much for his presidency; he was, after all, painfully mediocre.  While future historians will probably rate him higher than he is now because of the way he kept us from collapsing (for awhile) after Trump 45, there wasn't much more to look at and get excited at.  He was a solid C-.  

Yet my guess is that for this classy lady it wasn't so much that she hated Biden, but that she couldn't stand that her lord and savior was deprived of the presidency for four years.  Not that DJT lost it...that was unthinkable!  Rather, that his rightful place was STOLEN from him.  And Joe Biden, who so unfairly took his place, became the criminal whom she couldn't mention without throwing a vulgar word in front of his name.  

As this woman and her kids continue this ongoing parent-child relationship over the next few years, I wonder how that's gonna go.  Sometimes I have seen a child nuzzle up to a parent and trace the outline of a tattoo with their hand; did this woman's elementary school child learn the word F*CK (again, not asterisked out!) through the tattoo on mommy's leg?  When she goes to her school for a teacher conference, and she's sitting across from her child's teacher who may or may not be some kind of raging liberal, does she feel proud that this teacher will know how much hatred is in her heart?  When she is sitting in church as she does on Easter morning, will she feel a need to modestly cover her legs not to distract men (not that any but the most desperate of men would be attracted to her IMO), but to keep God from striking her down for her vulgarity?  And when she gets old and increasingly infirm, what's going to happen when this woman has a home health aide from a foreign country taking care her of her most personal needs and seeing those words every single day? 

But hey, our classy lady has this tattoo to scream at the world for the next half-century.  I'm guessing that someday another Democrat will join Mediocre Joe on her left leg.  We should all be so proud.