Scrubs is Back! For Season 2 of the Reboot! Joy! They Still Can't Do It All On Their Own – And It's Still So Much Fun

 

For much of the last decade I just didn't get so much of the appeal of the reboot. Not the 'remake' such as the way NBC tried to reinvent Quantum Leap or ABC's version of The Wonder Years both shows whose cancellations I still mourn. No bringing back the casts of a 1990s or 2000s show, usually a comedy, twenty or thirty years later.

I didn't understand either the reason to bring back Roseanne, Murphy Brown or Will & Grace and I never understood the idea behind …And Just Like That. The fourth and fifth seasons of Arrested Development left me could and Live Another Day of 24 was false advertising. (There were only 12 episodes, for crying out loud!) I understand theoretically why these shows were brought back – Hollywood will always do safe properties when asked – but not the motivation.

Then Scrubs came back last February. And now I can't throw stones anymore.

I will say there's an argument behind the revival of Scrubs that really isn't there for so many of the other series I've mention in the second paragraph. Unlike all of them Scrubs was ahead of its time in the 2000s, being far closer to the dramedy model that has increasingly become popular on cable and streaming alike. There's no denying, unlike with shows like Orange is the New Black, Shameless and The Bear, what genre Scrubs has always belonged it. I've rarely laughed longer or harder at any comedy series then watching the antics that went on at Sacred Heart during the 2000s. But it was always closer to shows like MASH or Cheers then Seinfeld or Frasier; Bill Lawrence never let us forget for a moment that this was a hospital and I think they average a death per episode over the entire run.

So Scrubs came back to ABC just when we all needed. And it was hysterical to see that JD, Eliot and Turk are all twenty-five years older then when we first met them and yet somehow they still haven't grown up. JD and Turk are still absolutely in love. (Asked by their HR recruiter in the premiere of Season 2 if they're a secret couple JD is indignant. "You can't put a name on what we have!") JD is still talking to himself and unable to stop talking altogether. Turk is still as cocky as all get out. Eliot is still a hot mess, emphasis on mess (and hot, let's be honest.)

It's the smaller details that are different. JD and Eliot's marriage ended in divorce which honestly wasn't a shock if you saw how it played out during much of the original series. And even though they now run the hospital they're still dealing with all their insecurities. JD is now Chief of Medicine and is trying to deal with how the hospital works and how a new generation of residents is far more of a sticklers for rules and frequently less fun. Eliot is trying to find a way to be a mentor to Tosh (Ava Bunn is currently the first of the residents promoted to series regular) who is very much the same kind of mess she is both professionally and personally but wants her own independence. Turk is dealing with the fact that while he may still be the best surgeon in the hospital not even he can stop the sands of time.

And they're all reminded with the guest stars of the other changes. Carla (Judy Reyes) is still trying to dealing with being the Mama Bear as well as the fact she's also getting older. Perry Cox (please try to give us as much John C. McGinley as possible!) is dealing with the fact that he's now a patient and no longer in control of his destiny the way he was when he was in charge. And as joyful as it is to see the bosses wife (Christa Miller) still being capable of rage, we get to see her reluctant humanity so much. "I'll deny this if Perry says so but I love him very much," she tells Eliot in a moment of openness.

The nostalgia vibe is as strong as ever with Scrubs and hits the highpoints every time. We still have JD needed to tell Turk the moment he gets laid and how many times and overcorrected when it comes to romantic gestures and of course he still has rowdy. Turk is still very clear of just how handsome he is and how proud he is about who he is. "My keister failed sixth grade science because it doesn't know what gravity is!" he tells JD. And Eliot still gets terrified by so many small things like when she wanders into the pediatric ward and runs right into so many creepy children. It's wonderful to know that all of these masters – Zach Braff, Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke – have lost none of their power to drive me into hysterics in twenty years' time and of course every time McGinley goes full Perry he still has the ability to cause me to double over in laughter.

And every time JD goes into his head we are reminded that Scrubs basically invented meta. When it's time for a full medical team he flashes back to his crew as the Power Rangers. Given the ability to imagine there are four of them, the first thing they do is narrate the Law and Order voice over and do the theme song. And when JD imagines Father Time, of course its Flavor Flav and of course Turk immediately calls him on it. Even when he's given a chance to find a mentee he walks right past a guy doing a voiceover monologue in his head – and pushes him aside rudely.

And it's not like some of the new cast members haven't added a lot to the show. The new African-American nurses, both female and gay, are hysterical every time they do the work they need to and pushes back. When Eliot says how much she loves fall one says: "We get a month. You get a season."  Vanessa Bayer is hysterical as the head of HR in every single scene she's in where she's trying to get consent forms sign and time after time misreads every situation she's in.  And I love how Todd is still exactly the same twenty years later, and only slightly less randy and with his own mentee.

At this point many of the residents we met back in the first season of the reboot are beginning to become individual characters in their own right, though Tosh and Charlie are still the only ones who've basically formed a lot as having full arcs. Much of their reason to exist is still to bounce off the older staff, not that there's anything wrong with that. Hopefully as the show keeps going they'll continue to grow in their own rights.

And I still love how Scrubs is leaning on its history but not that hard. It's great to see Neil Flynn back having moved on as a Janitor but his own son working for them and I can't wait until Scott Foley makes his long awaited return later this season. (He really hasn't aged in twenty years either; does everyone on Scrubs spent more time in the cosmetic surgery ward at Sacred Heart?) And if anything the issues involve medical care that Scrubs has to deal with have actually helped the show improve with age.  Everything involving health care is worse than it was in the 2000s and everyone on staff has learned to roll with it, if not live with it.

All of this and so much more has made Scrubs just as sublime as it was when I was first watching in 25 years. And I get why so many people have felt the need for shows like Fuller House or That 90s Show. I don't want it with every TV show I watched growing up in the 1990s or 2000s but in small doses and done well, its absolutely everything I need. Hell when Season 2 of Dexter: Resurrection debuts in November I'm not going to bother stalling watching it like I did last time; I'm going to watch from the season premiere. Hey Michael C. Hall looks good too and he's just as good with a needle and a knife as the staff at Sacred Heart.

My Score: 5 STARS.

As Doc Heads Into Season 3 Memories Linger On For Everybody

 

 

I put Fox's Doc on my Top 10 list of 2025 and while it moved into frequently soapy directions going through its second season it maintained a level of dramatic steadiness when it managed to be primarily about the medicine rather than the increasingly protracted love triangle that was at the center of the show. There were actually signs of that the writers may be moving forward with this in the rough Season 2 finale in which Amy Larsen after being pulled between her ex-husband and her boyfriend throughout the last season has temporarily chosen neither, pushing both away in the aftermath of last year's contagion that left so many dead.

As Season 3 begins we're still dealing with the wreckage both personally and professionally. Joan (Felicity Huffman) essentially sacrificed her life to save Amy at the end of the season. Richard (Scott Wolf), who turned up like a bad penny during the second half of the season,  is also gone having survived the fever and realized that the best thing both for him and the hospital was to move on. Amy and Sonya (Anya Banerjee) are taking on their roles as co-chief resident. Michael (Omar Metwally) has left the board to take on the role of Chief of Internal Medicine and is now Amy's direct boss rather than an ally on the board. And Richard (John Michael Elker) has transferred to cardio to soothe his broken heart and is now seemingly reconciled with his ex-wife Rachel with whom he reconnected after she developed breast cancer last year.

Amy is no longer suffering from the trauma of so many memory flashes over the past year that caused her to suffer seizures during that period. She appears to have recovered from much of the TBI that has been at the center of the first two seasons. And she clearly just wants to move on to be of service, as she put it, using the last words of Joan before she lapsed into her final illness. But the repercussions of her past are still everywhere, both in obvious ways and subtle ones.

The subtle ones are being shown in how both she and Sonya are taking their roles as chief resident. When she was a resident herself Sonya frequently clashed with Amy about her harsh and brutal teaching style that had led her to file a workplace harassment complaint the day before the accident that changed everything. Now in one of those deep ironies that it's not clear Sonya herself can see, she's taking very much the same brutal teaching style that Amy did with her on a new generation of residents who are reacting very much the same way Sonya did. Amy herself is aware of it and has pointed it out but two episodes into Season 3, its unclear if Sonya is aware of what she's doing or if she decided that in fact Amy was right about the best way to instruct. Because the flashes and memories are always from the perspective of Amy we can never tell if those around her process the behavior as part of how they work professionally. (The personal aspects are always crystal clear.)

Amy herself has been trying to fit into her new role and in one of those approaches of symmetry she's trying to do the carrot more than the stick this time around. The question that Doc is asking is whether it's too little, too late. Everyone already knows the reputation of Amy Larsen prior to her accident and the possibility that she may not be able to rebuild it with this new crop is unclear. Much of the second episode, when she brings in a resident and is both harsh and comforting in the same day, gives evidence to both sides of the equation. The clearer message comes when she goes out of her way to apologize to him at the end of the episode. The viewer knows that's not something the Amy prior to the accident would have done.

The more prominent reminder of Amy's past is Dr. Ben Grant, played by Blair Underwood as the new regular for Season 3. We met Ben in the lockdown of Season 2 when he was there to visit his sister who was suffering from poor health. He spent time in the hospital in the OR and has joined the staff as the new Chief of Surgery.

The show goes out of its way to show that Ben is very much the type A that Joan was last year but in a different way. He's determined to make surgery more important at the hospital and he's more brazen at pushing an older doctor out of the job because he's too conservative. The board, which is now absent Michael's presence (and its clear in many ways that seem glad he's gone) are more than willing to back him for whatever he wants. When Ben first meets Michael, however, he makes it very clear that his approach ruffled a lot of feathers with rank and file and that he has to have a good working relationship between the departments.

Naturally Ben had a relationship with Amy in the past and as we got by the last moment of Season 2 it was romantic as well as professional. During the second episode we saw how they first met at a medical conference four years ago and they bonded over their failed marriages. The two of them hooked up (naturally Amy was the aggressor) but Amy hasn't remembered. Ben made it clear to Amy that it was something of a situationship for about a year but based on the message he's got saved on his voicemail for three years it's pretty clear Ben is lying about it. The bigger problem is that the two of them worked together in a clinical trial together and there are hints in the flashes it ended badly for Ben and probably the relationship.

It seems unfair that, like with Rob Lowe and Scott Wolf, Blair Underwood looks just as handsome as he did when we first met him in L.A. nearly forty years ago. In the 21^st century he's become an increasingly fascinating actor as those who remember his arc as a fighter pilot in the first season of In Treatment or for viewers like me who remember him as the husband in an open marriage in 2024's Three Women. As is the case with every major character on Doc the writers resist the usual hero/villain archetype: Yes Ben is an aggressive surgeon who seems to be something of a cowboy but he's also a good mentor to people like TJ and we know that he's a good brother. The possibility for romantic sparks between him and Amy is intriguing particularly for those of us who were getting frustrated with the love triangle much of last winter.

At the center of the show is Molly Parker, who continues to demonstrate why she is one of the great actresses in TV. I mentioned in my review of the show last year that Parker was part of a new generation of brilliant female led dramas, with such standouts as High Potential and Kathy Bates as Matlock. (Elsbeth is officially a comedy according to the Emmy but Carrie Preston fits the general dynamic I spoke of.) As we reach the second half of the 2020s, it's fascinating how so many of the best shows on television, regardless whether they are network, cable or streaming, have centered fundamentally decent female characters trying to do their best in a complicated world. Doc is very much in this tradition not just due to Parker but also Banerjee and Amirah Vann as Gina, still the beating heart of the show. Doc will deal with social issues in its cases but rarely tries to bond its various characters under the bonds of sisterhood or race.  Sonya has made it clear multiple time that Amy is as bad a boss as any man could be and the few times she's defended her its basically because of her own reasons.

And the show rarely points out some of the racial issues even within in the cases themselves. In the second episode a family is part of a medical crisis when they're in a car collision with a deer. The family is all African-American. At the start of the episode the teenager says he waved down a few people but no one stopped. It's never mentioned again. When Grant and TJ, who are both African-American mention this, it's there for five seconds and then they get back to the process of trying to save their patients life. No one, not even the teenager, ever mentions race as part of the case again: all they care about is saving the family and when they do it’s a good day.

It's not like the show doesn't deal with politics but its always done with nuance. In the season 3 premiere a case of hysteria among teenagers in high school occurs because of a viral video about an active shooter drill. Obviously they talk about it but again its only in a medical basis: no one is making a point about school shootings or gun violence. The most that is said is "this happened because of the stress of being a teenager' which really shouldn't be a political thing to say but I have no doubt will be interpreted that way for those who want to.

Doc remains one of my favorite series on TV, even if it's not always consistently at the high quality of such clear network masterpieces as Will Trent or Elsbeth. It demonstrates how the medical drama is clearly moving away from the model that Grey's Anatomy set (seriously will someone at ABC sign a DNR for that one?). I'm not deny the soapy elements are still there but it's great to watch a medical drama where the drama is basically still about the medicine and less about hooking up in supply closets.

My score: 4.5 stars.

Yankees Vs. Red Sox Greatest Rivalry in Sports…Now, Part 1: Can We Just Concede the 20th Century Doesn't Count?

 

 

When I was growing up I think I first learned about the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1995 when I read a book on the subject. My guess is Ed Linn wrote it, but I can't look it up as Casey would say.

To be clear I read the lore of both franchises, the sagas between them, the legends associated with both teams. And I think it's now safe to say that calling the Red Sox and the Yankees in the 20^th century a rivalry is really being generous. To be fair by the 2000s even the most devoted Red Sox fans acknowledge it never really was one in same way that the Celtics and the Lakers once were or the Dodgers and Giants basically always were starting back when both teams were in New York and essentially continued when the moved to California.

Because for a rivalry to be a thing one of the teams has to win occasionally. And as has now become entrenched in lore starting after Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees that never happened for the rest of the 20^th century.  The total after 1918 to 2000 was Yankees 26, Red Sox zero. There've been football games between the Giants and the Patriots that have been closer – and honestly the Patriots had a better track record during the second half of the 20^th century then the Red Sox ever did.

I get the reason for Boston wanted the rivalry to exist. It's not like they weren't dominant in basically every other sport over the 20^th century. The Celtics are very much the definition of a dynasty during the 1950s and '60s and they've always been formidable ever since. The Patriots, well, everyone in New York hates them with a passion and we really loved it when the Giants broke the undefeated season in 2007. Bruins, formidable hockey team, definitely have a better track record then the Rangers or the Islanders during that period.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I live in New York but I only sporadically root for the Yankees. I'll get to why in the next article.)

But during the 20^th century baseball was the National Pastime and it must have galled Boston not just that the Yankees won but that they did so with the Babe. Though it wasn't only the Babe.

Henry Frazee was selling Red Sox to the Yankees years before he started on the Babe. He sold them half of the 1918 pitching staff, including Ernie Shore, Dutch Leonard and famously Carl Mays halfway through the 1919 season. And after the Babe, he kept right on doing it to the point that the 1923 Yankees had eleven former Red Sox on the team. The Red Sox went from winning four world series in the 1910s to last place practically overnight and it kept happening right up until the end of the decade when they sold Red Ruffing to the Yankees.

Ruth was bad enough, but Frazee essentially sold three future Hall of Famers and over 900 wins to the Yankees just on the pitching staff alone. The Yankees dynasty of the 1920s was built on the backs of former Red Sox. But by the 1930s they had grown their own farm system and were standing on their own two feet. That didn't change when Tom Yawkey bought the Red Sox.

Bostonians don't hate me for this, but Tom Yawkey has no business being in Cooperstown. For one thing during his forty years as an owner the Red Sox won just three American League Pennants and no World Championships. For another he famously chose to install cronies who gave him bad advice and caused him to trade away capable players  in his farm system such as Pee Wee Reese. And worst of all, because of his bigotry the Red Sox were the last team in major league baseball to integrate. The Yankees and Red Sox were rivals during the 1950s but not in a good way as they seemed to be openly dawdling to integrate their teams while the National League raced ahead of them.

Both the Yankees and the Red Sox passed on the chance to sign Willie Mays and the Red Sox actually had a chance to sign Ernie Banks but they passed on that too. The Yankees were able to dominate the 1950s because they had a good farm system but the Red Sox never did.

There's also the fact that because the Red Sox were a terrible team that they constantly were at the bottom of attendance. In fact they were drawing so badly in the 1960s that many thought the Red Sox might have to leave Boston much like the Braves had relocated to Milwaukee in 1952. At the time the Red Sox were a contending team led by Ted Williams and had won the AL Pennant in 1946 and come within one game of doing so in 1948 and 1949.

Boston fans must have been cursing into their clam chowder for the next decade as the Braves became one of the biggest draws in baseball as well as a perennial contender, winning the World Series in 1957, the pennant in 1958 and finishing in a  tie for it 1959. During the 1950s the only draw the Red Sox was Ted Williams while the Braves had Eddie Matthews, Warren Spahn and Hank Aaron. During that era Boston baseball fans must have felt cursed from both sides.

When the Yankees dynasty came to a catastrophic end in 1965 the Red Sox's miracle 1967 AL Pennant revitalized the team in Boston. But the Yankees collapse didn't lead to Red Sox triumphs. Indeed while the rivalry between Boston and the Yankees may have been at its strongest during the 1970s, the franchise that owned the American League was Earl Weaver's Orioles which had the best win-loss record of the entire decade, won five AL East titles, three American Leagues and the World Series in 1970. Indeed it was Baltimore who became the dominant force in the American League east and the Yankees and Red Sox basically were fighting to beat them every year.

To be sure the stigma of bad luck became prominent for the Red Sox during the 1970s – losing the AL East by half a game to Detroit in 1972 because the first MLB strike wiped out six games for the Tigers and seven for the Yankees; the Red Sox shooting out to an eight and a half game lead over the AL East in August and losing 30 of their last 40 games in 1974, just missing out on the AL East in 1977 and of course Bucky F---ing Dent. But the Orioles were always more of a problem. Their collapse in hitting in 1972 gave the Red Sox and Yankees an opening that neither could get through and in 1974 they put on a 28-6 drive at the end of the season to defeat the Yankees by a game and a half at the end of the season. In 1975 the Red Sox ended up having to fight off Baltimore to win the AL Pennant. In 1977 the Orioles were tied with the Red Sox for second place, two and a half games out behind the Yankees. And even though the Orioles finished in fourth in 1978 they did go 90-71 which is not exactly small potatoes.

The Orioles were the real winners of that decade but because of the true brutality of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, led by Billy Martin as manager of The Bronx Zoo, it got all the publicity. And by the time the Yankees collapsed during the 1980s under Steinbrenner's horrible ownership style during that decade there were no real dynasties to speak of anymore in either league. The Red Sox actually did much better in that period before the Wild Card: they won the American League Pennant in 1986 and the AL East in 1988 and 1990 (they lost both times to the Oakland A's) but somehow being able to beat a team that had Stump Merrill as the manager didn't have the punch it once did.

During the 1980s the Red Sox definitely had better players – Jim Rice was on the team, Wade Boggs was the best hitter in baseball and Roger Clemens had the best fastball in the majors. But during the late 1980s and early 1990s the best team in all of baseball was the Blue Jays. After winning their first AL East title in 1985 they ended up winning four AL East titles between 1989 and 1993 and of course back to back World Series in 1992 and 1993.  Which is around the time I started to seriously love the sports.

So if you had told me the Yankees and Red Sox were the greatest rivalry in sports I'd have said, well they both suck now. And that would have been a perfectly rational response for a fifteen year old boy to have.

To be clear I would have had a far deeper and richer understanding of the game that the average teenager: I would have known all of the names In Yankee lore and the names in Red Sox lore. I would have known of all the plaques the Yankees had on their wall and their retired numbers.  And I could have made convincing arguments, even then, for many members of both teams during the 1970s to be in the Hall of Fame.  And just to be clear I'm still annoyed that two of the greatest players of that era: Luis Tiant and Graig Nettles still aren't in Cooperstown because they should have been in decades ago.

But that didn't change the simple fact that even in 1995: the ledger was clear. Since 1918 the Yankees had won 22 championships and the Red Sox: zero. I thought that the more accurate description was that the Red Sox were the Yankees punching bag and the 'rivalry' had been coined in during the DiMaggio-Williams era and no one had bothered to fact check since. (That would have actually been forgivable up until 1995 because the internet really didn't exist back then.)

And as I was about to start watching baseball more seriously I was about to see that, for the Red Sox, it was going to get so much worse.

 

To Be Continued…

The Only Three Senators The Left Has Respected in the Last 50 Years. You Won't Be Stunned By What They Have In Common

 

 

After Richard Nixon's 49 state landslide in 1972 both political parties went to the right and both parties enjoyed electoral success by doing so. For the Republicans it would be part of 5 out of 6 presidential elections between 1968 and 1992, gaining control of both houses of Congress in 1994 and maintaining a lock on the House for 18 years in the 21^st century so far and the Senate 14 of so far this century. The Democrats by contrast would manage to win the White House in the rest of the  twentieth century when they elected centrist Southern governors (Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992) and control of the White House with Obama in 2008.

The left has essentially been on the outside looking in with only a few exceptions during the next half a century and have never regained the influence they had during the forty years of mostly Democratic control of both Congress and the White House between FDR's first term and the end of LBJ's presidency. They know the reasons why this happened but they basically refuse to accept reality, instead yearning for a simpler time when Democrats had all the power and Republicans were perfectly docile and happy being the minority party and having no real power to change policy. The fact that many of these years many of those who were Democrats were more conservative than some Republicans at the time is a fact they've chosen to erase from their collective unconscious.

In fact I suspect many are openly hostile that during Republican administrations, that Democrats chose to work with Republican Presidents. Much as they hold men like Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich with his visceral hatred I suspect that they wish Tip O'Neill or Nancy Pelosi had openly refused to work with Reagan or W. or that Tom Daschle had used the filibuster with the same reckless abandon to stall Republicans.  Like so many other things the left thinks bipartisanship should only apply to Republicans reaching across the aisle to Democrats when they have power and never the other way around.

I suspect the left has much of the last twenty years angry at how so many Congressional Republicans have thwarted the agendas of first and Obama as much out of envy as frustration. "Why didn't our guys think of that when W. was in charge?" must have gone through every left-wing thinker during that period. Furthermore their outrage over a permanently stagnant Congress that accomplishing nothing only bothers them as far as it allows them to play into their own outrage. To them Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court only get in the way of the true left-wing agenda which everyone wants. That they've never bothered to define what it is, only what it isn't, is just a minor detail.

In the left's mind the American dream died when Democrats decided to abandon the liberal dream for the trivial reason that they'd been told in no uncertain terms in 1972 that the voters didn't want it. Watergate officially erased every single flaw in George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972 and indeed every single flaw that had made so many in the Democratic establishment think – rightfully, I should add – that the voters would send them to electoral disaster that year. The fact was that in the Congressional election in state after state that Nixon won Democrats were able to either run ahead of Republicans.

If you win a landslide as sweeping as Nixon you should have huge coattails. And yet despite that four Republicans who'd been in the Senate for two terms years lost their elections. Margaret Chase Smith got 47 percent of the vote in Maine as Nixon got 61 percent of it for President and lost. Gordon Allott who'd been in the Senate in Colorado since 1954 narrowly lost by one percent to Democrat Floyd Haskell even as Nixon carried the state by 22 points. Jack Miller lost Iowa by ten points as Nixon carried by 38 points.

And here's the biggest sign of McGovern's weakness. In his home state of South Dakota McGovern lost with 46 percent of the vote. Yet Democrat James Abourezk won election over his Republican opponent with 57 percent of the vote. In South Dakota George McGovern was less popular then a freshman Democrat.

And just to drive the point home when McGovern managed to win reelection two years later he only beat his Republican opponent by 6 points. McGovern's very left-wing positions might have been popular with a certain group of Americans but they were out of touch with the rest of the Democratic Party and his own state. When he ended up losing as part of the Reagan landslide it was by 19 points to James Abdnor. McGovern actually outspent Abdnor by nearly 2 to 1 but Abdnor made it very clear that McGovern's liberal voting record was out of context with the involvement of the people of South Dakota. And just to make that point clear McGovern, who was pro-choice, actually faced a primary from an anti-abortion Democrat that year. He beat it back, to be sure, but it demonstrated the validity of Abdnor's point: even South Dakota Democrats thought McGovern was too far to the left.

As I've said before the 1980 Senate election sent a message just how much liberalism in its current form was dead as some of the most famously liberal senators such as Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Warren Magnuson and Gaylord Nelson lost their seats. The Democrats would eventually take the Senate back by a big margin by gaining eight seats, including Tom Daschle defeating Abnor. Many of the Democrats who gained office would be forces in the Senate for years to come such as Barbara Mikulski and Harry Reid. But given how narrowly many of them managed to win election as well as how difficult it was for some incumbents, the Democratic Party had received the message: liberalism as they knew it was no longer a winning sales pitch.

This was true even when Bill Clinton won election in 1992. The Democrats managed to lose 9 seats in the House and made no gains in the Senate. Clinton was a minority President having gotten barely 43 percent of the vote and was no doubt helped by victory by Independent Ross Perot's historic third party run. The key to Clinton's success had been by his arguing liberalism was dead and that his approach was 'a Third Way'.

But a freshman senator from Wisconsin didn't get the message. That year Russ Feingold had run as a progressive who had made it very clear that his way was the only way. During the campaign he unveiled an 82 point plan to eliminate the deficit by the end of his first term. The plan called for a raise in taxes and cuts in the defense budget. He was viewed as an extremist by Republicans and two liberal by Democratic opponents.

When Feingold won election he quickly became a bigger pain in the ass to the Clinton administration then the Republicans were. He frequently broke with his own party to the detriment of the President. He opposed NAFTA and other Free Trade, actually was the only Democrat Senator to vote against a motion to dismiss Congress's impeachment charges (he would vote against conviction, he thought Clinton's approach to health care wasn't progressive enough and voted against the Defense of Marriage Act

Say what you will about Feingold he was an equal opportunity pain in the ass to Democrat or Republican. He was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act, voted against Timothy Geithner being confirmed as Treasury Secretary and was the only Democratic Senator to vote against Dodd-Frank both times it came before the Senate. He moved to amend an appropriations bill that would have given emergency relief to Katrina to require troops withdraw from Iraq. He voted to censure W in 2006 and most Democratic Senators wouldn't give him the time of day. He led a filibuster against extending the Patriot Act in February of 2006. In one of the biggest examples of bipartisanship in the 21^st century, the Senate voted 96-3 to break it up.

I won't deny that Feingold was behind many major important Congressional acts included McCain-Feingold and co-sponsored the Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency act. But Feingold's position basically put him at odds with his own party most of the time. And there's a clear difference between both he and John McCain being considered 'political mavericks'.  When McCain did it, he went across party lines to help the opposition. When Feingold did it, he was hurting his own party to make a point.

And I think one of the reasons for Feingold's popularity came in December of 2004 when he went on a golfing trip to Greenville Alabama. Afterwards he'd wrote about it for the left-wing publication Salon.  After noting how nice the people were and that Wisconsin had similar places he expressed sorrow that 'such a poverty-stricken area was the reddest spot on the map because of policies that Feingold considered destructive to the poor and middle class." He talked about the trailer parks, check cashing stores and a rundown used car lot.

The Republican mayor of the city and the Republican governor of Alabama were perturbed by his description and invited him to make a tour of the city to make amends. I suspect that the readers of Salon were upset that he apologized. If he had doubled down on his remarks as I suspect they wanted, he might very quickly have become the frontrunner among left-leaning Democrats for 2008 as he was considering running at the time. In fact there was a Draft Feingold campaign starting in 2005. But after the midterms of 2006 he announced he would not seek the nomination in 2008. Having done so he told his supporters not endorse anyone for the Presidency who voted for the Iraq War. Considering that only 23 Senators had voted against going to war and he had accused his fellow Democrats of being timid this was as close as he came to calling members of his party sellouts.

I suspect his support of Obama in 2008 was because he was the only candidate who met that criterion and as I listed when Obama became President he was no more of an ally to him on his agenda unless it suited his own purposes. When he lost reelection in 2010 to Ron Johnson there's a part of me that wonders how many Senate Democrats who basically said: "Good riddance'.

Say what you will about Feingold, he was even more of unhelpful to Democrats out of the Senate then in it. He formed a PAC called Progressives United to raise money for 50 Progressive candidates which for its label supported as many non-progressives as progressives – it gave money to help reelect Jon Tester as it did to elect Elizabeth Warren. It didn't help four progressives running in Wisconsin. And he saw no problem breaking his pledge about campaign finance reform the moment Citizens United decision becoming just as willing to spend as much money as the conservative PACS did – though to less success.

Nor did he agree to run in the recall election of Scott Walker after it happened which might very well have helped the Democrats take the seat back after the recall took place. And as a result Walker became the first governor to survive a recall and the people of Wisconsin suffered under him. In fact he won by  a bigger margin then when he was elected the first time.

Scott Walker was as much a boogeyman to all progressives during the first half of the 2010s as Russ Feingold had been their hero during the 1990s and 2000s. But during the decade Feingold lost reelection to Ron Johnson in 2010 and again in 2016 while Scott Walker won three elections. Which would seem to argue that the state of Wisconsin had a clearer idea of what they wanted from elected officials then the left wanted from theirs. Of course by that point the left had long forgotten Feingold and moved on to their most recent standard bearer who wasn't even a Democrat but was more than willing to play one on college campuses.

Bernie Sanders' first four years in the Senate overlapped with Feingold's final term and by the time Feingold had lost Sanders' had taken the torch from him and run even further to the left as the biggest problem the Democrats. Unlike Feingold Sanders has spent 20 years in the Senate and has been a bigger failure by any metric you want to use.

He has not passed any major legislation during that period. Both his runs for the Presidency in 2016 and 2020 ended in him losing the nomination to more centrist candidates. The various movements inspired by his candidacy, the Justice Democrats and his own Progressive Democratic PAC have pretty much failed to create a significant bloc of progressive elected officials outside of a few Representatives in deep blue districts. During the peak of his influence between 2016 and 2024 the Democrats have controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress just once in Biden's first two years in office and many left-wing candidates and his own followers were more upset that he chose to work with the administration.

And just as with McGovern and Feingold Sanders has frequently had little influence even within his own state. In 2018 Christine Halquist was the Justice Democrat candidate for Governor in Vermont. She was running in one of eight states that Hilary Clinton had won in 2016 that had a Republican governor. And yet in the midst of the national blue wave Halquist got just 40.3 percent of the vote, the worst performance for a Democratic Party candidate in Vermont since 2008. Sanders received 67 percent of the vote running for reelection which means that 27 percent of Sanders voters chose Republican Phil Scott for Governor.

To drive the point home in 2024 Scott won his fourth term getting 73 percent of the vote. Esther Charlestin, his opponent had the endorsement of both the Democratic and Progressive Party in Vermont and only received 21 percent of the vote. By contrast Bernie got 63 percent of the vote winning reelection which was still over 37,000 fewer votes than Scott got for governor. The good people of Vermont think Bernie's too far to the left for their liking.

The reason for Sanders' continued influence in the Democratic Party for the last decade is mainly due to the Democratic Party's determination to crack the reason for why Sanders's is so popular with young people. And that reason is the same one that McGovern did so well with college people in his 1972 primary campaign.

It's never been that complicated. Young, college educated, white voters are more left-leaning then the average American and will always vote for the most progressive candidate running in a primary. That's the real link as to why this cycle Democratic primary voters chose Abdul El-Sayid in Michigan, Angie Nixon in Florida and Ed Markey in Massachusetts to be the party's nominees for Senate. Race, gender and age aside they were by far the most left leaning candidates running for their office and that is why they won the nomination.

But as been the case with McGovern, Feingold and Sanders, what is popular with these kinds of progressive voters in primaries has never really carried over with the electorate at large in the last half-century. It may make these candidates popular nationally among certain circles because of the stands they take but as I've illustrated the electorate at large and in every case the voters of their  states have a different opinion of it of what they want from their elected officials.

For the last half century left-leaning scholars and ideologues have increasingly devoted themselves to a way of life that not only perished before many were even born but was in fact the same kind of nostalgic view of the past that is far more common among their equivalents on the right. They've spent far more time and energy arguing why the progressive dream was destroyed by the conservatives then they have finding a way to reverse engineer a similar takeover of the Democratic Party. That the voters, even a decade after Trump's arrival, by and large still have no desire for these ideas, may be part of the reason; that they can't define what it is, only what it isn't, may be a bigger one.

For that reason George McGovern, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders have been among the very few elected officials they respect, not because they succeeded in established a left-wing agenda for the nation but because they met the metric of what the left really wants from its elected officials: to not give into the establishment doctrine. That this doctrine was rejected by the electorate, either nationally or by their own states, is actually part of the reason for their being lionized. The left has never really escaped the activist model for how it wants to get things done and these Senators were far closer to being activists then they were being effective senators. And while they make you heroes to some it just pisses off the people you need to work with if you want to get things done.

As we enter the midterms it's important not to let extremists on either side of the aisle continue to define what government and representatives should be rather than what they want them to be. A Senator is theoretically supposed to serve the voters of their state, their party and their country. The leftist believes an elected officials is only supposed to support the progressive agenda, even if that is in direct opposition to what all three of these masters tell them to do and even if it means the voters reject them at the polls. They've always been indifferent to the idea of any form of public service in the first place, so it's never as important to them if these officials lose and therefore can no longer do good for anybody.

Republicans, for all their flaws, do understand something of party unity and often have a better reading of what the voters of their states want then the left does. (I'm not having the debate the left wants to have about why that is here.) To a left that considers the Democrats and the Republicans two sides of the same bad coin, they don't care if a centrist Democrat loses to a Republican. To people like Hakeen Jeffries and Chuck Schumer it's something they take very seriously because it's their job too. And for half a century these kinds of Senators have made it so much tougher for Democratic Presidents to get anything done. That hasn't exactly helped the brand of a party that's considered ineffective and disorganized even by its members.

I refuse to indulge the progressive dream any longer, certainly not when so many years of losing having proven the reality to be otherwise. The left is going to bitch that nobody is doing what they believe is right no matter who wins so its time to stop indulging them. They want to vote for left wing candidates who speak their language – and no one else's – well, that's what they've always done. The voters have told a different story and I think it's time we started listening to where they actually are rather than where the McGovern's and Feingold's and Sanders's say they should be. If that means betraying 'the cause', well, it hasn't worked out for those guys so why I should I trust that they know what they're talking about anymore?

Coalition for the Sane:Two Times Op-Eds Last Week Illustrated For Me Why The Left Keeps Losing the Battle For Hearts and Minds

 

What's the line between academic theory and conspiracy theory?

Before every intellectual starts yelling at me about how their study involves research and deep study and not to put them in with the Alex Jones and Joe Rogans of America I need to be very clear that I've read my share of right wing and left wing academic works over the years and I can tell you with the certainty of a child of an academic both sides can use research to fit their political ends. I've lost count of how many right-wing studies I've seen arguing that FDR had links to Communism that explain why the New Deal was created and why it never worked, why the Great Society was just a smokescreen for LBJ to get blacks to always vote Democrat without thinking and that the real reason Nixon was impeached had to do with his plan to expand the government in his second term and Watergate had nothing to do with it. These are just as nuts as any theory I've read from Oliver Stone from the last thirty years in which he believes the deep state had Kennedy killed to benefit the military-industrial complex.

So many educated people – most of them left-wing – have a spent a lot of time bemoaning how so much of America has fallen sway to the conspiracy theories of the right. And I could take them more seriously had I not spent much of Biden's administration reading Daily Kos, a progressive site that spent so many of its articles coming up with its own conspiracy theories as to why so many Americans had become stupid enough to believe the gospel of Fox News and Republicans rather than the warm embrace of collectivism preached by Bernie and AOC which was the correct theory of government that was of course being suppressed by the rich and the special interests. You know, rational stuff.

As always progressives never ask the right question which is why do the masses embrace the conservative conspiracy theory of government, which are complete BS, instead of the socialist conspiracy theory of government, which are correct. (Yes I left the Democratic Party out of the equation. I'm getting to that.) The short answer is simple: right wing  theories have always been able to help political parties in America then left wing ones. That has been true for 200 years and its still true today. And a large part of it is that right-wing theories are easier to match with the extreme views of people then left-wing ones.

Let's say, for example, it's 2012 and Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity is talking about how if Obama is reelected it will bring about the destruction of America because he is a Kenyan communist. If he were to bring, say, George Will or Bret Stephens (back then full-throated members of conservative think tanks) they would be able to describe how Obama's first term is all about creeping socialism, that he is bringing around Sharia Law, and all the worst things the right already thinks. Because this audience is inclined to vote Republican, it can be used to attack Democrats and help Republicans.

But if Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews wants to defend Obama's first term, she couldn't bring in someone like Noam Chomsky or Nikole Hannah-Jones to do that because their writings argue that there's no real difference between the two political parties. They will cheerfully attack Republicans if they're paid to do so but not long after they'll write articles arguing that Obama is just the latest example of neoliberalism engaged in protecting Wall Street and expanding American Empire. (Oliver Stone in fact used the final episode of 'Untold History of the United States which aired during Obama's administration essentially making that argument in the final episode.) Many of them no doubt at the time would have attacked Bernie Sanders because he caucused with the Democrats as having 'sold out'.

So at the most cynical level the reason left-wing theories are not popular with the masses is because of marketing. The right-wing academic can easily frame its theories to sell to the people and his elected officials who'll buy into it because it offers a solution. The left-wing academic is essentially still selling their product to a far more intellectual group of academics which is by definition smaller and less political.

I was reminded of this by two articles I read in the New York Times within 24 hours last week. Both were written by two prominent left-wing academics: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Roxanne Gay. Both are African-American female academics who even by the standards of left-wing academia are incredibly left-wing and therefore very successful. In other words they have become rich and successful in America by pointing out in great detail why America is a failure and how everybody is failing America. )Apparently irony is not something they study.) And like almost every other African-American academic who has become successful they take a certain pleasure in writing about how American has always failed minorities and women can never do anything to make things better for them, and have sold many, many books arguing that point.

In 24 hours I read how Hannah-Jones and Gay looked at two major problems – systemic racism and the crisis in Gaza – and how they thought each could be solved. Naturally because Western Civilization is racist, favoring the patriarchy and white supremacy neither mentioned even the idea that institutions such as democracy or diplomacy could resolve these deep problems. And of course as with all these kinds of works it is implied that these problems are solvable but that 'they' – whoever 'they' you  want to use – lack the will to do so. That these problems may not in truth be solvable is not considered by an academics who work only in the classroom and have little to know involvement with putting their theories into practice. And such things as economic or political process can't solve them.

No what both Hannah-Jones and Gay chose to argue is that old hoary chestnut: raising awareness. Like the overwhelming majority of left-wing thinkers they truly believe the problems today are not solved because the masses are unaware of it. That their writing by definition is meant for a niche audience as well as the fact that much of their writing argues the masses are sheep anyway is a contradiction they ignore. The fact that the masses might care about things that they don't care about – like say, paying their rent and their bills – is not something they are able to comprehend despite all of their talk about wealth inequality but that's a subject for a different essay.

Those of you who read my article know all too well what Hannah-Jones wrote about. In her article: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? Hannah-Jones explained in great detail how her decision to put her daughter Najya in an integrated public school rather then a segregated private school ended up doing nothing to help the problem within that school and that her own child's education suffered as a result. I considering that article self-aggrandizing and self-promoting as Hannah-Jones seemed to have exploited her daughter a decade ago for her own cache among her colleagues and was doing the exact same thing today, with no apparent growth or self-awareness on her part. She openly compared herself to the parents of Ruby Bridges and her classmates, even though she fully acknowledged that she came from a far wealthier history and had benefited from their sacrifices. She was unapologetic about how she had used her five year old daughter – who was in no position to consent – and how when it came to choosing between her daughter and her values, she spent six years choosing her values.

Since the article came out on Sunday Hannah-Jones has become the target of the right-wing media which I really do think was part of the point of Hannah-Jones publishing this article. When Fox News and the New York Post choose to call out a prominent left-wing scholar or Democratic politician it has the magical effect among liberal and Democrats of erasing the message because of the messenger. This is a method that has worked for Hannah-Jones in the past with the Times before. Prior to the publication of The 1619 Project multiple historians had argued against it because of the cherry picking and the twisted versions of leftist academia and presentist thinking. For whatever reason the Times chose to publish and when Trump and the right wing attacked it Hannah-Jones was essentially insulated because of who she was being attacked by. Magically all the very real criticisms could be put under the label of racism and conservatism and she ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize and multiple awards. All of the criticisms of her work, which have not ended, have become background noise.

Najya Hannah-Jones will soon be going to college and I suspect will have many things to say when asked about her experience. She may even write them herself.  So I suspect her mother published last week's essay as a kind of damage control and preemptive strike. That article was not about her daughter's struggles and how she contributed to them; it was about her using her arguments to get ahead of this. And it worked. This is no longer about what her daughter went through because of Nikole Hannah-Jones parenting; it's about systemic racism and whether you want to be on the right side of history or Fox News.

And it masks the arrogance of a woman who truly believed that she could almost single-handedly improve a public school where decades of liberal government had failed. It was clear as early as first grade to the rest of the parents who'd come with her that it was a fait accompli and it was also clear to Hannah-Jones how badly the system was failing. But Hannah-Jones makes it clear that when it came to the problems of this particular school, she alone could fix it. Like any extremist conservative confronted with failure Hannah-Jones chose to double down and only backed away when her daughter confronted her on it. Her article, while better punctuated and more literate then the average Truth Social Tweet, is just as defiant about her position: she didn't fail her daughter, the system did. Perhaps Najya should use this article for the therapy she's definitely going to be spending years as an adult paying for.

Not 24 hours after this I read Roxanne Gay's piece about Ed Sheeran and the controversy surrounding his latest tour. I'm not going to recount it here because  by this point everybody and their Irish uncle has heard about it and Gay really didn't have anything original to say about it. And while I read Hannah-Jones article with a gathering sage of rage, I read Gay's with the constant belief "Am I reading the Times or The Onion?"

Because right in the center of it Gay actually wrote: "With the exception of a relative few such as Mark Ruffalo, most celebrities don't use their platforms to raise sufficient awareness." And I could only think: "Girl, if this is them not being sufficient, I'd hate to see them in they met your standards."

This isn't the first time I've read such an article: over the last year I've read in some reviews of the Emmys and the Oscars for being 'insufficiently political' as if that were a condemnation rather then something to be celebrated. By this point you'd think Gay would know that celebrity awareness does nothing to solve problems. Remember last February when everyone at the Grammys was telling ICE to go F--- itself because of what was happening in Minneapolis? And every left wing thinker cheered Billie Eilish for saying "No one's illegal on stolen land."

The Times published an article this past week arguing that during the summer ICE deportations are just as high with numbers greater then in 2025. So it doesn't seem like all the awareness raised at the Grammys did a single thing to stop it. But it's not like celebrities have been paying as much attention to it this summer anyway because the administration has been less showy and more organized then it was during 2025. Either way, the awareness of it has done zip to change policy.

Nor did Gay mention the organization Artists4Ceasefire which was founded two weeks after October 7^th 2023 and has a fairly sizable membership bigger than Mark Ruffalo. And while this article was published before Netanyahu's appearance at the UN last week where Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon were arrested protesting his appearance (though its not like they need an excuse to protest period) at this point in time it's harder for me to find a celebrity that hasn't taken the gospel position that Gay has on Gaza.

Like Hannah-Jones' Gay's article is based on a false construct even more flawed than hers. The problems that are happening in the Middle East have not been solved because singers like Ed Sheeran have spent too much time singing and recording albums and not raising awareness about Gaza. Even writing that sentence down makes you wonder about the sanity of Gay if she thinks that this is how the world works, but having spent enough time among the left on this site and others that's how they see the world on everything.

Both Hannah-Jones and Gay are essentially arguing that the problems with America and the world are too important that they can be left in the hands of the people who are qualified to deal with them. Their version of the world is one where all decision operate on a simple and binary moral calculus which everyone but them has failed. And obviously we can't trust the proletariat to solve the problems of today because they're dumb and racist and have been brainwashed by the wrong sort of elitists. To them democracy is too important to be left in the hand of the voters and foreign policy to important to be left in the hands of the diplomats.

No the only people who can solve it are left-wing millionaires, educated people in Hannah-Jones reading, celebrities in  Gay's. And even if they are unable to solve these systemic problems because they are unqualified at every level, it is far more dangerous if they don't make even token efforts to please left-wing thinkers like the author's of these columns. Gay, I should mention, thinks Sheeran is a lousy singer anyway and probably hates Macklemore's music with a passion but I assume she likes him more because of his politics.

I can't help but wonder how much of this is based on the level of education and race more than anything else. These same people, had they watched any number of Fox News speakers rant 'Obama's not a real American', they'd have dismissed him outright. But if those same speakers had said: "Obama's not a real liberal" would they have changed the channel so fast?

I'd say that Hannah-Jones and Gay have lost the plot when it comes to how to fix problems of America were it not for the very fact their wealth and success come by writing how they are unfixable. Hannah-Jones is not humbled by her experience and Gay seems as unaware as anyone in a right-wing media thread how little connection she has to even the world of the left-wing. And because both are African-American women, criticisms of their writings no matter how legitimate can be labeled as ''racist' and 'sexist', almost all of that defense no doubt coming from educated white people first and foremost.

Their writings will be read by the highbrow readers of The New York Times and criticized and torn apart by those on Fox News and other media. Hannah-Jones and Gay will receive accolades from one group and abuse from the other, leading to them getting more rich and famous. The problems they raised will remain unsolved despite their efforts to raise awareness. And the average American will continue to ignore all of it focused on such minor details as getting through the day and paying their bills.

And next month, despite the efforts of Hannah-Jones and Gay to raise awareness, the overwhelming majority of Americans will cast their votes based not on Gaza nor systemic racism but the real issue of this election: affordability an issue that stopped being important to either of these scholars years ago and that they can only comprehend in the same abstractions that make up the lion's share of their writing. Perhaps they'll vote, perhaps they won't. Regardless they'll complain within days or weeks of the election how America has failed yet again depending on what current trivia or reality touches their fancies. And the endless theorizing about how America needs to do something will continue from this, free from the possibility of ever conceivably being put into practice.

See capitalism does work. Where else could you get rich saying your country has failed you? As another famous African-American said: "Only in America."

 

Stephen King Writing As Richard Bachman, Part 4: Roadwork (1981)

 

In 'Why I Was Bachman' Stephen King acknowledges that Roadwork was his first real attempt to do 'a straight novel'. It was written in the period between Salem's Lot and The Shining when Kings makes it clear "I was young enough in those days to worry about that casual cocktail-party question: 'Yes but when are you going to do something serious?" He also admits it was in part to make sense of his mother's death by cancer the previous year that he says: "I was left grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all."

For that reason he thinks Roadwork is the worst of the lot because it's trying too hard and to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain. (King had no idea in 1985 just how much film and TV would end up dealing with this subject in the 21^st century or for that matter how much he would end up dealing with in a more genre type vein in his own novels in the decades to come.)

You can debate whether King ever tried to right a 'straight novel' after Roadwork. There's certainly some work of his in the early 1990s such as Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne that basically that basically have no real supernatural elements to them and certainly most of his best novellas in Different Seasons and later on would have no real supernatural elements to them. What I do know is that Roadwork is a better book that King thinks it is and that's almost certainly due to setting as much as anything else.

Roadwork is the only Bachman novel that has something resembling a timestamp. Every chapter is a date from November 20, 1973 to January 20, 1974. The book has the subtitle 'A Novel of the First Energy Crisis' and takes place at the center of the oil embargo that was part of Nixon's policy towards the Middle East. It takes place just as the unparalleled economic growth that's existed since the New Deal has come to an end and the record inflation that would become the feature of the seventies isn't even close to becoming as bad as it will become. The Vietnam War is nearing its end as is Nixon's Presidency. All of this is essentially background noise to its main character/

In August of 1972 a young reporter is covering the mayor and governor in a groundbreaking ceremony. He interviews a man in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves who makes it clear the groundbreaking of a highway is a piece of shit. That's cut from the story automatically

That man is  Bart Dawes who lives in an unnamed city and state (it's possible it's Wisconsin but King never gives it away) At the start of the book Bart is dealing with the fact that he has to move out of his house which is right in the line of where the title roadwork is going to take place. His neighborhood has agreed to take the buyouts and has relocated to other towns where their business take them. He and his wife Mary are the last family still there. His wife has accepted this reality. He hasn't.

Bart is the manager of the Blue Ribbon Laundromat which is being taken over by a corporation and has to relocate. The store has an option to buy a Thom McCan in Waterford on November 26^th when the book begins but Bart has been unwilling to pull the trigger even while the 784 extension is being built. Bart's one of the few people who's still part of the old ownership under the Tarkington family who put him through college. Bart Dawes is very much the model of the kind of guy whose lost in the past both in terms of work and family. When he tries to explain what is so good about his old bosses to an underling even he admits he's lost the thread by the end of it. There is a logical reason for it – the new site is going to require at least a quarter of a million in renovations before it even turns out a clean sheet – but all of that is very much based on Bart's own word and his contempt for boss. Bart seems so bent on self-destruction he doesn't seem to realize he's going to destroy the entire company he spent his life working for.

I don't know if the term 'midlife crisis' existed when King wrote Roadwork but you could make an argument Bart is just having a very bad one. He even has a good reason. Three and a half years ago his son Charlie was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor:

Somewhere…deep in Charlie's brain was a collection of bad cells roughly the size of a walnut. If you had that collection of bad cells in front of you on the table, you could squash them with one hard hit. But they weren't on the table. They were deep in the meat of Charlie's mind, still smugly growing…

Within months Charlie is dead. Bart admits he never cried, while his wife cried immensely. It has essentially left their marriage a shell of itself and turned her into someone who drinks, though not as much as Bart and it takes away a lot of who she is. But eventually she is the one who heals, albeit within what a 1970s woman who has not embraced feminism is allowed to do. He has been robbed of all the things father's do with their sons and he can't get over it:

And if a collection of bad cells no bigger than a walnut could destroy all these things…what did that leave? How could you ever trust life again? How could you see it as anything more meaningful then a Saturday night demolition derby?

All of it was inside him, but he had been honestly unaware that his thoughts were changing him so deeply, so irretrievably…and if the world was only a demo derby, wouldn't one ne justified in stepping out of his car? But what after that? Life seemed only a preparation for hell."

Bart does have outlets; indeed his wife suggests multiple times he see a therapist. And its certainly clear even to Bart that he has lost his reason even when the novel begins in earnest:

He kept doing things without letting himself think about them. Safer that way. It was like having a circuit breaker in his head, and it thumped into place every time part of him tried to ask But why are you doing this? Part of his mind would go dark.

He does this when he walks to a gun store and just decides to buy two rifles with his credit card and lie about it. He does it when he lies to his wife over and over about going to see a new house. He lies about it to his bosses and to his employees. And at the start of the novel all of those lies catch up with him when he loses first his job, and then his marriage on the same day. His wife takes it the hardest, thinking she's blaming him for everything. Even then he doesn't have an explanation and he doesn't think he owes anyone.

Much of Bart's rebellion is pathetic. He drives on the freeway, frequently drunk and keeps the thermostat high in violation of the energy crisis. Eventually it becomes more dangerous with him deciding to blow up a highway installation with gasoline cans on Christmas Eve and seeing a gangster named Sal Magliore who wants to buy explosives. It's telling that the mobster's first reaction is that he thinks Dawes is a fruitcake. "This is a game to you. Crazy but still a game." And Magliore is correct Dawes increasingly seems to enjoy being against 'the man' even though his rebellion is far more pathetic then those who chose to march on Washington and burn their draft cards."

That's clear with Olivia, a hitchhiker he meets in her early 20s and tries to explain himself to in what he refers to as 'The Trained Dog Ethic:

…explains such mysteries as the monetary crisis, inflation, the Vietnam War and the current energy crisis. Let us take the energy crisis as an example. The American people are trained dogs, trained in this case to love oil guzzling toys…In the years 1973 to 1980 we will be trained to hate energy toys. The American people love to be trained. Training makes them wag their tails…I don't object to saving energy. I object to training.

Like Pavlov's dogs…we've been trained to salivate when somebody shows us as a bombardier skidoo with overdrive or a Zenith Color TV with a motorized antenna…It isn't the Trained Dog Ethic I object to anyway. It's the fact that the masters are mental, moral and spiritual idiots."

Olivia, who is very much the model of the college protestor, has to have heard this before and her reaction is "You're just trying to soothe your conscience with a lot of rhetoric." When he shows her the highway that has wrecked his life her reaction is to shrug: "It's roadwork, so what?"

Still she does have some perspective and can put it better than Bart does:

I started to think of the last 15 years or so as some kind of grotesque Monopoly game. Francis Gary Powers gets shot down in his U-2. Lost one turn. N----ers dispersed by fire hoses in Selma. Freedom riders shot gunned in Mississippi, marches rallies, Kennedy getting blown up in Dallas, Vietnam, more marches, Kent State, student strikes, women's liberation, and all for what? So a bunch of heads can sit around stoned in a crummy apartment watching Bob Hope?

Olivia has looked at America and has decided that the best thing she can do is try to get her life together. She's decided to get a job and try to move forward. Bart decides to keep paying her money, first from his life insurance and then for his sale of the house. But as with Magliore she has a clear idea that he's a fruitcake himself and his interest is all about himself.

Roadwork does make it clear that Bart is dealing with forces that don't have his best interests: late in the novel it's clear that the city has been tapping his phones, may be engaging in surveillance and that in fact there is a darker reason behind why the city is building (though in keeping with Bachman's work in general Dawes has no idea of it at the time.) And it makes clear that everything Dawes ends up doing is meaningless in the grand scheme of things; even when the truth comes out it doesn't nothing to stop the moves of progress.

However Bachman/King is very clear that none of this excuses any of Bart's actions and not even he can accept it. At the climax of the novel there's a period called 'stop time which is basically a Joycean type sentence which is coherent. It reveals that not even Bart realized how far this would go that demonstrates the duality of his mind as well as how crazy he's actually gone.

When he talks with the press even the reporter who will end up becoming a Pulitzer winner because of it makes it very clear how lost he is: "I'll see your side gets told."

Bart just says: "I have no side. That's why I am doing this."

Late in the novel Bart seems to have realized that remind us very much of the journeys we'll see characters like Walter White and Jimmy McGill take in this century

He had done things he had never done before…Deep emotions had been excavated from his dry, middle echelon executive's soul like the effect of a dark religion on an archeological dig. He knew what it is what like to be ALIVE.

Then after recounting his sins:

But even those things, as bad as they had been, had been new and exciting, like the thought that he might be insane or going insane. The tracks through the interior landscape he had been strolling (or crawling?) through these last two months were the only tracks. He had explored himself and if what he had been finding was often banal, it was also sometimes dreadful and beautiful.

It's at that point he briefly thinks of getting out, finally going somewhere else, maybe with Olivia, maybe on his own. He admits he can't remember Charlie's face anymore, denying what even he believes his stand has been about. At one point Mary actually tells him: "What good are you doing yourself thinking about Charlie all the time? It's eating you up. You're his prisoner."

At that point Bart says his last words to his wife. "You knew it was time to leave him and so you did. I wish I could be that instinctive."

It's clear throughout the novel that Bart is trying to find a way to kill himself rather than fix himself and face his fears. He knows this is a mortal sin and is told so twice late in the novel, one by an expected source, one by an unexpected one. In a very real sense he spends the entire novel destroying everything he has ever held dear and what happens at the end of the book is just the biggest way to do so.

All of the novels in The Bachman Books end with the lead character either killing himself or going insane and considering that Bart Dawes is pretty much crazy at the start of Roadwork the ending is inevitable. One might want to read into Dawes the pattern of so many assassins and American born terrorists we've had in the over forty years since Roadwork came out but Bachman bears no more responsibility for that then for any school shootings that came in the aftermath of Rage.  One of Bart's last thoughts is that there is no good place to make your stand in this world and he might hate that he becomes a symbol of sorts after it.  Bart Dawes isn't a rebel without a cause, not just because he doesn't have a cause but he's not really a rebel. He's just a guy for whom tragedy led to the worst kind of midlife crisis and rather than try to find a way through he decided to make sure 'midlife' was all the life he got.

 What a sad, lonely man. If he'd just lived a little longer he'd have seen Nixon resign. If that wasn't something to live for, I don't know what was.