Are my eyes really blue?

Third time was the charm for Spider-Man: once to break the seal, once as an obvious cash grab for the rights holders, and finally into the MCU proper. As with Spidey, so with the Fantastic Four: a flagship property for Marvel, literally their First Family, and in desperate need of some way to get it right. And like Spidey, they figured it out by going back to the comics as they were in the beginning.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is the MCU’s first love letter to Jack Kirby, and long overdue, and perfectly executed. The whole New Frontier retro future, set in 1964 to match. A Ben Grimm that you can absolutely see growing up on Yancy Street and who never lost touch with his roots. The sci-fi conceit of “we can do anything and we will.” And all leveraged into modernity with a Reed Richards who is clearly on the spectrum, a Sue Storm with tremendous emotional intelligence, and a Johnny Storm who is young and goofy and loves the ladies without coming across as a skeeze.

In a way, it’s of a piece with James Gunn’s new Superman, which also eschewed retelling an oft-told origin story in favor of straight Silver Age madness – and also reminded us that it’s possible to have heroes who are unambiguous, no shades of gray, just good people trying to do good in the world as best they can, in the face of pure evil and implacable forces alike. Lex Luthor and Galactus are very different threats, but the approach is the same: square up, stick together, we rise and fall as a team. As a family. As all of us.

It’s a bit on the nose, given our present circumstances, but it’s true: we get nowhere by giving up. Which is a hard lesson to learn and live with, but sometimes there’s no alternative.

Honestly, it ended in 2000, when the Supreme Court chose the President along partisan lines and handed victory to the candidate with fewer votes – and we did nothing. That’s when the Electoral College should have been burned to the ground.

Or it ended in 2009-2014, when the Democrats didn’t burn the filibuster to the ground to make the American Health Care Act pass in something other than the ratchet half-assed form that already had passed in the Senate. Or in 2016, when the Senate held a Supreme Court seat open for a year to prevent the President from filling it.

Or in 2021, when an attempt to overthrow the results of an election with actual violence wasn’t met with a sea of human gazpacho on the Capitol steps, and another “lost with the most votes” incident in 2017 was met with a shrug instead of doing away with the Electoral College as should have been done twenty years earlier. And in typical form, the American press, weak and feckless, acted as if losing office was sufficient punishment for all sins and regarded consequences of crime as somehow “partisan”. And since it would be “political” to prosecute a criminal running for office, he completely got away with it.

And now matters are worse.

I don’t know how to fix this, but it doesn’t get any easier from here.

It’s interesting to look at the media we have between Episodes III and IV and see what the Rebellion was up to. For a long time, it seemed to be about hiding and protecting what Jedi still lived after the Order 66 purge. Then you had the various stories of pushback by the likes of the Specter cell or Saw Gerrera’s partisans. And clearly, Luther Rael and Kleya Marki’s organization – aka Axis – was working to build the framework for something larger to fight back against the Empire.

The question was…what was the endgame? How did they think they were going to vanquish the Empire even before the ability to destroy a planet appeared? For all the drilling in the jungles of Yavin, boots on the ground were never going to be enough to hold off the Empire. And it was going to be very difficult to outgun the Imperial Fleet at any point. It forces the question: was the Death Star the Empire’s biggest mistake? Without that – with all those resources turned toward more Star Destroyers, more TIE fighters, more stormtroopers – would it not have become nearly impossible for the Rebellion to ever have enough resources to carve out even a piece of the Outer Rim outside Imperial influence?

Most of the activity in Rebels is about either rallying what Jedi exist, building the Rebel fleet, or sabotaging the Empire at a high level. All of which is viable and good work, but by comparison to, say, the IRA in Northern Ireland – the idea that you can make it so untenable that the Empire will withdraw and give up becomes problematic when you have a single authoritarian Emperor and the resources of a galaxy backing him. So at some level, it feels in retrospect as if the Rebellion’s ultimate goal was just to prevent the Empire’s grip getting any tighter while waiting for some sort of opportunity to come along.

And it’s clear the leadership of the Rebellion was divided on where and how to fight. It certainly felt as if some elements were willing to keep their powder dry in perpetuity, which makes me wonder whether there would have ever been a counterattack in the absence of the Death Star. What’s evident from all of this is that the Emperor himself was the author of his own destruction, both by betting the house on the Death Star (twice) and betting that he could lure the Rebels into one place to be wiped out.

But you have to wonder what the original victory conditions were, and if they acknowledged just how hard it was going to be to return to how things were – or build something new.

One sympathizes.

One of the things that has come out of the Disney+ explosion of Star Wars content has been a new layer of nuance in the good guys. It’s pretty obvious that after the fall of the Empire, the New Republic was fairly feckless – both in terms of hunting down and finishing off the Imperial Remnant and in countering the rise of the First Order. But what we’re seeing in a lot of ways, thanks mainly to Andor but also elsewhere, is that prior to the Clone Wars, the Republic was not exactly in good health – and neither was the Jedi Order.

In fact, the takeaway from The Acolyte is that 100 years prior to the Clone Wars, the Jedi were high on their own supply and convinced of their own right and righteousness, and in the ensuing century the Republic and the Senate were corrupt and strangled by their own bureaucracy. It all suggests that the Old Republic was closer to the Articles of Confederation than anything else, and the Senate much closer to the General Assembly of the UN (or worse, the League of Nations) than an actual galactic government. It’s not hard to see how the Separatists rose up and formed a united faction, because the Republic was ill-equipped to stop them with anything other than a handful of Jedi supporting individual worlds.

But even more than that – in the Mandalorian, Kuil says he was enslaved by the Empire for 300 years. Clem and Marva Andor were looting a Republic vessel on a planet devastated by extractive mining. It really seems as if the Empire just did in public what the Republic was allowing to happen unnoticed. And it makes it a lot easier to understand how people were willing to shrug off the coming of the Empire if it just made the shooting stop. Life in the galaxy can’t get any better anyway, so what does it matter what the powers that be call themselves? And then the Empire era was just a 20-year slow boil, to the point that I suspect the majority of the galaxy didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until Alderaan was vaporized.

And then the Emperor was gone, problem solved, why you bringing up old shit. Little bit on the nose, no?

It’s become apparent that in terms of their acquired intellectual properties, Disney had decided that Star Wars goes in Disneyland and Marvel goes in Disney California Adventure. And now that both have their own “land” it’s possible to compare and contrast now that we’ve had a couple of years for things to settle in.

It’s pretty clear that one of the real stars of Star Wars is the aesthetic. If you never had a single character walking around, if you didn’t ride the two rides, the Aurebesh signs and the X-Wing and A-Wing parked in the woods and the architecture and the ambient music would be an attraction all by itself. There are things to buy: blue milk, lightsabers, robes, droids. It’s an immersive space.

Avengers Campus has to some extent been ill-served both by the Covid delays and by the strike-induced lag in the MCU. But Marvel’s world is sprawling and diverse. There’s not an obvious thing like a lightsaber or an X-wing — Thor has a hammer, Cap has a shield (and wings sometimes), there’s a quinjet on top of a building, but there’s so many different things across thirty movies that it’s impossible to have a unified look or a common point of reference.

And that’s why despite only one ride, Avengers Campus has (and needs) characters. Lots of them. I have a pic of me and the wife with the Wasp holding the shrunken version of A Bug’s Land. I have a pic with America Chavez from a gray morning where no one seemed to recognize that she was an actual superhero and not just a kid at the park (the problem of not having a flashy costume). At different points on Monday I saw Spider-Man, T’Challa, Steve Rogers, Loki and Red Guardian just hanging around.

Star Wars is about creating a world. There are characters that fill that world, some amazingly compelling (Andor might well be the defining piece of Star Wars media at this point). But Marvel’s world is all about the characters, because it’s too big and sprawling for anything else. They still need a proper E-ticket ride at the park, and the real problem is the same as Rise of the Resistance: how do you commit to a single moment and put a billion dollars on it? Especially when Star Tours has a ridiculous number of possible combinations and even Smuggler’s Run is ticketed for new mission types in 2026?

And that’s another thing: Galaxy’s Edge, to me, is proof that Disney always planned for the story of the Resistance and the First Order to go past episode 9. The only way you allow Rian Johnson to deconstruct everything is if you know you’re going to carry on from that point, not immediately go to a finale that undoes half of what you did. Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewie were meant to fight the First Order for a whole new trilogy of their own once the Han/Luke/Leia triumvirate had their sendoff, but that’s not how it went down in the end. No one planned for Carrie to die, or for the Mouse to quail in the face of basement chuds reacting poorly to challenging storytelling.

But Star Wars still provides a fully immersive world, especially now that we’ve demonstrated how much more storytelling is possible there once you pry yourself away from Skywalkers. And it’s made it possible and necessary to reevaluate what we thought we know. Of which more later, certainly. But all I know is that owing to a quirk of hardware breakdown, I was able to walk the length of Black Spire Outpost on a cool gray morning with absolutely no one in sight and only the ambient sounds around, and it was worth the entire price of admission just for those few moments.

(Hella spoilers for Thunderbolts* below)

So now, in roughly 2027, weeks finally have someone trading under the name of the Avengers, presumably with a modicum of government endorsement (although”Selina Meyer, Director of SHIELD” doesn’t seem to be working out that well). And presumably Sam Wilson, aka Captain America, is not on board with this and is putting together his own team. But…who? If you go with strict definition – aka people who were involved in the Time Heist and are still alive and not retired on Earth – you’ve got…Rhodes (who is definitely getting too old for this shit, having already been War Machine for 16 years in this timeline), Ant-Man (and thus Wasp) and *maybe* the Hulk, who could just as easily be off-world along with Carol Danvers, Thor, Nebula, Rocket…

Okay, old Avengers are thin on the ground. So who does that leave on Earth who is active and known to the Avengers in an official capacity? Well, you have the Wakandans (including Shuri, the Dora Milaje, and possibly Riri Williams) but are they more likely to side with the White Wolf or with Official Captain America? Or either? Then you have the Magicians – Doctor Strange, Wong, America Chavez and company – maybe? There are SHIELD/SWORD/SABER operatives and allies past and present – the Pyms? Monica Rambeau? Kamala Khan? What the Hell ever happened with the Super-Skrull anyway? Shang-Chi is still out there somewhere and known to Wong, Carol and Bruce, who seem to be the closest thing to an Avengers leadership at the moment. And then there’s She-Hulk, who probably needs work. (This doesn’t even include people they have no reason to know about like Moon Knight or Silver Scarab or Echo, and you have to think Daredevil and his sort aren’t really on their radar). And of course, the whole world has forgotten Spider-Man.

So in terms of who is around to be an official team of Captain America’s Avengers, the practical lineup is Sam, Scott and Hope, Rhodey, maybe Monica, maybe Bruce, and if things were really bad maybe you get help from Wakanda or Kamar-Taj, with the likes of Kamala and Kate Bishop and Cassie Lang as the junior varsity AA team. You need the maybes just to fill out a roster of six.

The biggest takeaway from this Keltner List is that Phased 4 and 5 of the MCU, now technically complete, have shotgunned a lot out there without ever really building a through-line. We know there is a multiverse, but it’s been kind of orthogonal to the plot, and we don’t really have the kind of obvious destination as Infinity War was – in part because Jonathan Majors is a dick and screwed up the Kang angle, but to a large part because we have completely reset who’s in the MCU with a minimum of exposure. No one has gotten multiple movies, there’s been precious little team-building, so we’re in for a lot of hotshot work in Phase Six starting in July, for better or worse.

The challenge of the Infinity Saga was “can they stick the landing in a satisfying fashion” and they nailed the assignment. At this point, the challenge of the Multiverse Saga is “can they make anyone care.”

It was 2012, I think, the first time I saw a self-driving Lexus in Mountain View. It said “Google self-driving car” and my reaction was “I beg your pardon?” And then, as the years went by, you couldn’t move in Mountain View without seeing one of the little two-seater self-driving pod cars. Then they rebranded the self-driving business as Waymo, moved to Chrysler Pacifica vans, then to Jaguars, and then last year, finally launched service in San Francisco.

Thirteen years on, I have finally ridden in one. In three or four, actually, having gone to the city for the express purpose of taking Waymo to bars I wouldn’t be able to get to on the MUNI Metro. The goal is to speed the day when I get access to the service area closer to home, because honestly, I am a lot more comfortable with the idea of self-driving cars on suburban back roads limited to 25 miles an hour or so.

The thing is…it was effortless. It was simple. The car rolled up, I got in, buckled my seatbelt and tapped the “Start Ride” on screen, And then the car drove itself a couple of miles, wheel turning as if a sullen ghost were at the helm, ambient chill music automatically playing (which seems like the most appropriate music for a self-driving EV). And then I got out and walked into Ireland’s 32, easy peasy.

And honestly, it’s a bit of a dream. Living in a place with no transit to speak of, the idea that you could set a dozen of these down feels transformative. I never felt unsafe, I never saw the car do anything untoward, and you can see on the monitor what the sensors see – in some cases, which blinker is flashing on the car three ahead and which way the pedestrian with his arm up is facing. I wouldn’t take it on a freeway, for sure, but at low speeds in an urban or suburban environment, it’s just about perfect for what I need to get home from the pub.

And then comes the obvious question: what does this mean for Uber, for Lyft, for everyone for whom gig driving has become a necessary side hustle or an actual lifeline?

I don’t really have a good answer for this. Well, I do, but it’s never going to happen in my lifetime in America – and that is “this is exactly what we were promised sixty years ago, so we should have the other things that were supposed to come with it – leisure time, short to nonexistent work weeks, and a way to make a living that doesn’t involve being a cheap replacement for a machine.” Confiscatory taxation of billionaires coupled with universal basic income would torpedo the human-pack-mule business. We were made to do the things machines can’t, and we should pay accordingly. Every dollar of productivity improvement for decades has been siphoned up by the 1% at the expense of people who actually do the work, and it’s past time for some of that cash to flow the other way.

Because this is a way to get something approximating transit into places that are never going to have trains, never going to run bus routes, never going to be walkable. This would work just fine in my home town in Alabama, something that could have taken my grandfather from his rural house to Jack’s and back. It’s the sort of thing that could have let me get home from the other side of Nashville during grad school without having to stop drinking three hours earlier. It’s the replacement for the interurban that was thoughtlessly yanked out of what is now Foothill Expressway decades ago. It is an ever so thin but nevertheless satisfying slice of the world we were promised, the world we were supposed to have.

And I want to enjoy it for however little time we have. Of which.

Back from a brief sojourn in the Big Smoke for the third time in four years. It’s not even a joke when I say this has become our Disneyland – it is a place we get away to, in order to ride the rides (underground, black cabs, double-decker bus, premium air travel), visit the attractions (Dishoom, Fortnum & Mason, pubs, Mr Fogg’s cocktail bars, the British Boot Company, SkyGarden, Pret), meet the characters (our friends, any cabdriver at all), and bring back the branded merch (shortbread, “spicy Advil”, occasional jelly babies, new bovver boots). It’s a refuge from the real world, from the miasma that is America 2025, from work (or the lack thereof), from everything. It is, in short, the long-desired escape. Except that you have to come back from it.

It was in the breakfast room at the St Pancras hotel in 2022 that I realized how much it felt like something Disney would spend tens of millions of dollars to capture the feel of. And I took note of this as we visited Disneyland, and Disney World, and other places in Europe, and other places in America. And I came to the realization that I can get a high percentage of what I wanted from London without having to get on a plane. It comes down to: gray skies, cool temperatures, brick buildings of roughly three stories, and the ability to have a cold pint of local ale at 10 AM in a cozy setting. And after a fashion, I have been able to piece this together a bit at a time everywhere from San Francisco to Cupertino to Seattle to Santa Cruz to Denver to Nashville.

The missus and I have long said “there’s no point in going back to London unless we are moving there” but then gone back again over and over anyway. But this was the first time she said about London what she says about New York: “I want to be there, but I think I want to be there and 30 years old.” And I absolutely get that. I mean, I could be in London at 55 a lot easier than NYC or even SF at 55, but I’m also thinking that I’d rather be someplace at a more human scale. Like Sacramento. Or Portland. I want a new city that has new things, big enough to have health care but small enough to be comprehensible, big enough for transit but small enough for minor league sports, big enough to be safely blue but small enough to be affordable.

But at some level, the urge is just to be somewhere else, to have a couple days off from reality, to have a brief respite from the bleak mundane. To retire and have enough in the bank to stay retired somewhere (or at least working something more enjoyable). And if the same caliber of retreat can be obtained closer than GMT, then it’s past time to explore it at every opportunity.

Well, he only went and did exactly what he said he would, and the results were exactly as was expected, and now everyone’s lost a chunk off their retirement with no prospect of getting it back, and the damage is done. Things don’t just magically go back to the way they were, and the rest of the world is going to spend the rest of the 21st century interpreting America as damage and routing around it. We are officially a pariah state on a par with Russia or Israel or North Korea. And now I don’t know when or whether I’m going to be able to retire, let alone where.

It shouldn’t have been like this. The Jetsons promised us robots doing the work and a twenty hour week tops. We have become more productive, it takes less effort to accomplish more work, people live longer – but the result is that we have to work to sixty-seven now and we’re stuck in offices forty-five hours a week ever since lunch became an unpaid addendum to eight hours work. We don’t need as many people working – which means that a job becomes a privilege and lack of one means you don’t have health care. And instead of cutting down to four days a week or thirty hours a week or otherwise reducing the burden as we did all through the 20th century, now we employ fewer people and use that to suppress wages, because if you need to have a job and there aren’t enough to go round, you’ll take less to ensure you have something.

We need confiscatory taxation of wealth. We need to separate health care from employment. We need to establish universal basic income. And if we do that, we don’t need any of the existing unemployment insurance or welfare assistance, employers don’t have to provide insurance or severance, and instead of billionaires with “send pop stars to space” money to waste on subverting our democracy, we can take jobs that do good without worrying about our cost of living, we can strike out and be entrepreneurial without risking our families’ health, we can live closer to that mythical 1950s of plenty that only became an issue for conservatives once it was extended beyond white people.

They say you’re supposed to grow more conservative as you get older, but that only worked when each generation did better than the next and had something to lose. Generation X, with its pensions turned into stock roulette and its kids paying confiscatory tuition for what was once free in-state public college and the prospect of returning to lifetime benefit caps and pre-existing exclusions, is at the vanguard of the Great Screwing. And if the billionaire and boomer classes are going to continue to bleed us dry, then we have to protect ourselves. Somehow.

It’s known that there was a moment on move-in weekend in August 1994 when I turned from 21st Avenue onto Wedgewood Avenue in Hillsboro Village, and before turning onto 18th to my new apartment, looked past Belmont Mansion and suddenly had the premonition “I’m never going to know what’s on the other side of that hill.” And sure enough, when I left for the last time, it was under a cloud and with the Oxford-style consolation MA instead of the PhD I’d been accepted to earn. My career as I had known it was over. There was no idea what might be coming next.

But the thing I also remember is the end of that first year, May 1995. I remember hearing the Cranberries singing on Lightning 100 on my way down Blakemore. “Ode To My Family” was a different song before I was Irish, when my parents were both alive and I hadn’t been alienated from my relatives, before the blindside letter that summer that would be the warning shot for the future. It sounded like the end of the movie. Like I’d battled through and finally had that fifth year of college in a super-senior setting where I finally had what I’d dreamed of: friends, football, walkable campus with stuff to do, Internet access, a new city with new radio stations and new TV channels and new places to learn. In retrospect, it was the end of one movie, I just didn’t realize it.

And last weekend, for the first time since before I was in high school, I went to Nashville and didn’t set foot on campus once.

I was busy. I was spending time with the last blood family I have before they make the escape I wish I could. We went out to dinner like in days of yore: four adults in a cool place enjoying the comfort of company that knows its history together. We saw friends we rarely get to see. And I saw a city that is a funhouse mirror of what it was thirty years ago, one that steered hard into becoming Baptist Vegas and remade itself into the cultural capital of White America. Nashville was always a blue dot sort of town, but when your business is hospitality for the kind of people who think having to see brown people is woke, it’s hard to see it working out as a retirement option.

I never wanted to need a blue dot. I just wanted to be. There is another edit where I stay in Nashville, or Birmingham, or find myself in New Orleans or something, and have the crew of people around me that makes it possible to survive or even thrive. But everyone in high school moved away, and there was no one there in college or by the time I crashed out of Vandy, and as I’ve said so often of Birmingham, I didn’t have twenty years to wait.

I don’t know what happens next. The world is in far worse shape than it was in 1995, or 1997, or any of the other times in my life where I didn’t know what happens next. It’s impossible to think about a future further away than June right now, and retirement feels like it’s off the cards without moving somewhere else. And then where do you move where you don’t need a dot, or can find the people who can make you one at age 60 or worse?

The dream is being pared down to what is really important. We’re inching our way down Maslow’s pyramid. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but that’s the course we were put on 25 years ago by people who assumed things would just work out and the floor couldn’t collapse. Now when people say it’s going to be okay, I have two questions:

when? And how?