How about election night cocktail suggestions? I'm thinking one blue, one red, and one purple, to be deployed as key races one might be watching are called (or not, hence purple).
I've worked out the red: 1.5 oz T. J. 's cranberry, 1.5 oz Grey Goose, 0.5 oz lime, 3 oz ginger beer.
Also. Boodles? Nope. Creme de violette? Nope. Carpano Antica vermouth? Hahaha, no. The Pennsylvania liquor control board is the reason why I can't have nice things.
There’s something quietly devastating about those lines, and it has nothing to do with which lever people pull or which slogan wins the night. It’s the recognition that the machinery keeps humming while the human face underneath keeps cracking. Bars closed, rituals suspended, everyone suddenly pretending this moment is sacred—when most of the year, the same institutions treat ordinary people as afterthoughts.
That’s where this song has always lived for me. Not as protest in the modern sense, and not as populism with a program, but as a lament for a republic that keeps asking for faith while steadily draining trust. The quarter matters because it’s small, tangible, personal—unlike the abstractions we’re told to worship. The tears fall not because of who’s in charge, but because fewer and fewer people feel in charge of their own lives.
I’ve never expected salvation from presidents, parties, or movements. Power centralizes; it always does. What erodes is the space between people—the voluntary, local, human arrangements that once absorbed disappointment without turning it into despair. When those thin out, every election starts to feel existential, and that’s a dangerous place for a free society to live.
Exene’s right. Those lyrics age well because they’re not about a cycle or a candidate—they’re about the permanent tension between authority and dignity. John Doe may play it with hope, or muscle memory, or affection for the craft. Exene writes it like someone who understands entropy: that systems persist, but meaning has to be renewed, again and again, by people who don’t confuse power with legitimacy.
So yes—happy Election Day, I suppose. Shine if you must, perishing Republic. Some of us will still be here, counting quarters, choosing our associations carefully, and trying to live free in the cracks where the big stories never quite reach.
How about election night cocktail suggestions? I'm thinking one blue, one red, and one purple, to be deployed as key races one might be watching are called (or not, hence purple).
I've worked out the red: 1.5 oz T. J. 's cranberry, 1.5 oz Grey Goose, 0.5 oz lime, 3 oz ginger beer.
Also. Boodles? Nope. Creme de violette? Nope. Carpano Antica vermouth? Hahaha, no. The Pennsylvania liquor control board is the reason why I can't have nice things.
Rye whiskey. Ice.
There’s something quietly devastating about those lines, and it has nothing to do with which lever people pull or which slogan wins the night. It’s the recognition that the machinery keeps humming while the human face underneath keeps cracking. Bars closed, rituals suspended, everyone suddenly pretending this moment is sacred—when most of the year, the same institutions treat ordinary people as afterthoughts.
That’s where this song has always lived for me. Not as protest in the modern sense, and not as populism with a program, but as a lament for a republic that keeps asking for faith while steadily draining trust. The quarter matters because it’s small, tangible, personal—unlike the abstractions we’re told to worship. The tears fall not because of who’s in charge, but because fewer and fewer people feel in charge of their own lives.
I’ve never expected salvation from presidents, parties, or movements. Power centralizes; it always does. What erodes is the space between people—the voluntary, local, human arrangements that once absorbed disappointment without turning it into despair. When those thin out, every election starts to feel existential, and that’s a dangerous place for a free society to live.
Exene’s right. Those lyrics age well because they’re not about a cycle or a candidate—they’re about the permanent tension between authority and dignity. John Doe may play it with hope, or muscle memory, or affection for the craft. Exene writes it like someone who understands entropy: that systems persist, but meaning has to be renewed, again and again, by people who don’t confuse power with legitimacy.
So yes—happy Election Day, I suppose. Shine if you must, perishing Republic. Some of us will still be here, counting quarters, choosing our associations carefully, and trying to live free in the cracks where the big stories never quite reach.
call me weird but I loved that krazy band.