Life’s a Beach
The Supreme Court has been very busy as it comes to the end of its term. Most of today’s attention has gone to the decisions regarding the obstruction of justice ruling regarding the January 6 insurrection, and about the overturn of the Chevron case which effectively guts the ability of agencies to operate in the manner in which they have in the past. But there’s always a silver lining and today’s silver lining from SCOTUS is their decision to not grant Steve Bannon a reprieve from starting his prison sentence of four months on Monday. There is something very satisfying in knowing that a man of Steve Bannon‘s very low character is being forced to serve jail time, even though he already once received a pardon from his conviction for defrauding erstwhile donors who gave him money to help build the wall that he never built. Steve Bannon has always seemed to me to be the worst distillation of all of the ugliness that we see from the Republican party and even from Donald Trump. In many ways, where Donald Trump always complained that he didn’t have his Roy Cohn, instead he had his Steve Bannon, who spends his time bringing out the worst of Donald Trump and telling him that he could do even more to be yet worse again. I usually don’t wish harm on people, but I must admit I am glad to see Steve Bannon, getting a bit of his comeuppance on Monday. Life’s a bitch.
I’ve promised myself that I will not keep writing incessantly about politics, but I just couldn’t help myself when it came to Bannon. But now I’d like to move on. I have, inadvertently, met several Virginians who are vacationing here on Virginia Beach. The first was a guy minding his own business at the Pocahontas Pancake House yesterday morning. By the time I had walked the 6/10 of a mile to the breakfast spot, my gang was standing outside waiting for our table of ten. My poor aching back was not prepared to do that, so I just went into the crowded breakfast diner and found a table with one lone guy sitting there and asked if I could join him while sitting down and declaring my back done in. Initially the guy, with his mouthful of pancakes, was surprised and slightly put off, but I overwhelmed him with pleasant banter and drew him in. Who wouldn’t prefer a pleasant breakfast conversation than a quiet, lonely breakfast alone. I would give that about a 90% odds on the former and this time it worked. We actually had a very nice conversation and shared a slice of each other’s life. He as a guy of about 60 or so who works or worked at the Department of Defense and lives in Fairfax. In other words, he was a member of what Trump would call the Deep State. He explained that he came down to Virginia Beach whenever he had free time in the summer and just hung out on the beach and ran/walked the boardwalk. I sensed that he was either a divorced or widowed man with two grown kids who shared his beach house with him at times, but mostly he was alone. To him, what made life worth trudging through was his work as a DoD analyst and being at the beach. Our table freed up and I grabbed his check (it was $8) and told him that his breakfast was on me for his being so kind as to let me sit with him. I jumped up before he could protest too much and disappeared like the Old Lone Ranger that I like to think I am. I gave him a fun story to tell or a fond memory to recall as he went to sun himself on the beach. Life is a beach and we all have and obligation to engage with others whenever we can.
After breakfast, we walked another four blocks to the Neptune Statue on the boardwalk. It is actually a very impressive thirty foot high mixture of stone and metal and stands out as a great reminder of the importance of the sea to a town like Virginia Beach. It highlights that the entire 3 mile long boardwalk is the heart of this town and gives rise to all the condos and hotels along it. The beach is the biggest part of Virginia Beach, as you can imagine. As the gang went off to do a walking art tour of street art, followed by a round of miniature golf, I chose to walk the mile back to the hotel, ever so slowly with plenty of bench-sitting breaks for my back. It gave me a chance to see the life of this beach town all out on a sunny late-June morning. Nearby Norfolk is a huge military town with Norfolk being the east coast center for the United States Navy. Every once in awhile you can hear a naval aviator taking his or her jet aircraft out for a spin. The beach is wide and very well manicured, presumably by a town service department tasked to keep this place a desirable vacation spot by making the beach look pristine every morning. There was the usual array of old and young people walking or running or riding bikes on the boardwalk. You could also see just about every socioeconomic class in evidence at every teak bench resting area. Life is a beach and we all have an obligation to accept and embrace the broadest spectrum of Americans, be they wealthy or not, healthy or not, compos mentis or not.
When I got back to the hotel, I did not want to go up to the room (that seems such weak sauce in the middle of a sunny day), so I went to find a spot of repose by the beach/pool until my gang found their way back to the hotel. It was VERY sunny and many of the seating areas were flooded with the bright warm sunshine on a high-80’s day. I finally found a soft sitting area that had some shade and as I was sitting down at one end of it, a youngish couple did the same at the opposite end (the other shaded spot nearby). They and I simultaneously did the “After you ,Alfonse” routine and we just laughed and all sat down. It gave me the opening to engage them in conversation since they looked like a couple just killing time. In fact, they were just wrapping up their stay until lunch time before they left to return to their home in Northern Virginia. They were a 40-something couple with several teenage kids in camp down here in Virginia Beach. They had driven down to deliver them and were heading back home to do what they do. They had both come from California (Merced and Fresno) and had gone to school at BYU in Provo. That meant they were Mormons, which, from my experience, explained the pleasantness. Every Mormon I have ever met is a very nice person so long as you don’t get onto a topic of religion. He was a JD/MBA who builds high-end luxury homes in the suburbs of D.C. Apparently, business is booming in the 8,000 sf housing market according to him. What became clear to me in a few moments was that these people were more closely aligned to my liberal politics than to the redness that permeates much of Utah politics. But they were what I will call Mitt Romney Republicans and absolutely not MAGA. We had a polite and light conversation about the debate, which they had not seen and yet were curious to hear about. All in all, this interaction reminded me that many of us who feel differently about many social and economic issues are, indeed, more alike than different as Americans. Life is a Beach and we all need to compromise and accept one another.
We ended our day with a walk through an arcade and ride complex. While waiting to buy tickets for the kids, I saw a mixed-race family staring at the prices and then getting out of line for what I suspected was the sticker shock of their inability to afford it. I bought a double load of tickets and tapped the guy on the shoulder so he would tun towards me and away from his kids. I handed him the tickets, patted him on the shoulder and said, “Us Dads gotta stick together.” I just walked back to our gang and gave them our tickets. Life is both a bitch and a beach and we each choose to call it and make it as we see it.