Yanis told you so: "How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history."

As we've observed here in New Albany at a grassroots level, breaking free from the tentacles of business as usual is a daunting task. As an example, there are too many beak-wetting imperatives to justify local government perpetually spending money on shoddy annual repaving projects rather than examining the realities of car-centrism and alternatives to it -- and if you believe against all prevailing evidence that "leaders" like Bob Caesar have any interest in learning new tricks, think again. They're too busy nuzzling the effete pants legs of oligarchy-drunk entities like One Southern Indiana, hoping they might be tossed a tattered bone.

Where was I?

Oh yes, Greece.

In an essay at New Statesman, Yanis Varoufakis explains the invariable result when the Left, forever unwilling to stand by the veracity of its own political principles, caves to the Right -- itself forever willing to seize opportunity when the vacuum presents it.

How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history

The left-wing party’s embrace of austerity created the conditions for a parasitic and cruel oligarchy to return.

 ... What the people of Greece had said to us, their government, in that 2015 referendum, made perfect sense: “We don’t want to leave the euro or to clash with the European Union. But, if the European Union is demanding of you, of our government, the intensification of the austerity-insolvency doom loop that forces our youngsters to emigrate and the expropriation of what is left of our public assets, don’t you dare surrender — even if Grexit is the price we must pay.”

That night, while our people were out on the streets celebrating their remarkable victory, the political representatives of Greece’s oligarchy were in tatters. The leader of New Democracy resigned, the party’s cadres wallowed in deep despair, the oligarchy they represented was in a state of panic. Alas, they worried unnecessarily. For at the same time, a coup against the people was being hatched in the office of my colleague, the prime minister.

Russell Brand's podcast Under the Skin with guest Yanis Varoufakis: "How To Construct A Global Revolution."

I highly recommend taking 80 minutes out of your day and listening to this podcast.

Russell Brand is intelligent, entertaining and a solid interviewer.

Yanis Varoufakis makes as much sense as anyone currently commenting on the world situation.

To repeat: Highly recommended.

Under the Skin with Russell Brand

My new podcast 'Under The Skin' asks: what's beneath the surface - of people we admire, of the ideas that define our time, of the history we are told. Speaking with guests from the world of academia, popular culture and the arts, they'll help us to see the ulterior truth behind our constructed reality. And have a laugh.

You can also listen to it here:

#015 Yanis Varoufakis - How To Construct A Global Revolution

In a fascinating interview I discuss with Yanis what happens when you take on the political, financial and media elite, and how radical reform can occur. Through accounts of his confrontations with the IMF, European institutions and the German government we examine where true power lies and how it is wielded.

Grexit to Brexit, "Yanis Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time."

Our plans to seek exile in Cornwall have been muddied by Brexit, and Yanis Varoufakis is keeping me informed about it.

The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May

Two years ago Yanis Varoufakis led Greece’s failed attempt to negotiate with the EU. He explains how the Brussels establishment will do everything to frustrate and outmanoeuvre the British prime minister, using tactics ranging from truth reversal to ‘the Penelope ruse’

On the same topic, a reminder:

Superlative current events panel discussion: "Brexit: An unorthodox view," with Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat and Elif Shafak.

I consider this absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in learning numerous themes (generally) specific to the UK and the EU, but at the same time applicable to current events in America. Yes, it's 90 minutes. I'd say it's worth an hour and a half for context alone, and recommend especially to local Democrats.

This brings us to Varoufakis's new book.

Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis review – one of the greatest political memoirs ever? by Paul Mason (The Guardian)

The leftwing Greek economist and former minister of finance tells a startling story about his encounter with Europe’s ‘deep establishment’

Yanis Varoufakis once bought me a gin and tonic. His wife once gave me a cup of tea. While dodging my questions, as finance ministers are obliged to, he never once told me an outright lie. And I’ve hosted him at two all-ticketed events. I list these transactions because of what I am about to say: that Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time. It stands alongside Alan Clark’s for frankness, Denis Healey’s for attacks on former allies, and – as a manual for exploring the perils of statecraft – will probably gain the same stature as Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson.

Yet Varoufakis’s account of the crisis that has scarred Greece between 2010 and today also stands in a category of its own: it is the inside story of high politics told by an outsider. Varoufakis began on the outside – both of elite politics and the Greek far left – swerved to the inside, and then abruptly abandoned it, after he was sacked by his former ally, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, in July 2015. He dramatises his intent throughout the crisis with a telling anecdote. He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice.

In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis ...

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Prior to reading the book, my friend Brandon warned me that it wouldn't improve my mood.

It didn't, and reading the book evidently did nothing for Yanis Varoufakis' mood, either. Varoufakis gives a leftist economist's reply to Piketty here. Just know that the fundamental point is the difference between wealth and capital, and the truths flowing from this difference. Pour a stiff drink first. It took me a while to get through it.

I'm still interested in pitchfork acquisition.

Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Yanis Varoufakis (Paecon)

The commercial and discursive triumph of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century symbolises this turning point in the public’s mood both in the United States and in Europe. Capitalism is, suddenly, portrayed as the purveyor of intolerable inequality which destabilises liberal democracy and, in the limit, begets chaos. Dissident economists, who spent long years arguing in isolation against the trickle-down fantasy, are naturally tempted to welcome Professor Piketty’s publishing phenomenon.

The sudden resurgence of the fundamental truth that the best predictor of socio-economic success is the success of one’s parents, in contrast to the inanities of human capital models, is undoubtedly uplifting. Similarly with the air of disillusionment with mainstream economics’ toleration of increasing inequality evident throughout Professor Piketty’s book. And yet, despite the soothing effect of Professor Piketty’s anti-inequality narrative, this paper will be arguing that Capital in the 21st Century constitutes a disservice to the cause of pragmatic egalitarianism ...

Superlative current events panel discussion: "Brexit: An unorthodox view," with Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat and Elif Shafak.

I consider this absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in learning numerous themes (generally) specific to the UK and the EU, but at the same time applicable to current events in America.

Yes, it's 90 minutes. I'd say it's worth an hour and a half for context alone, and recommend especially to local Democrats.

Brexit: An unorthodox view, Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat & Elif Shafak (full)

Published on Feb 14, 2017

Srećko Horvat, a Croat philosopher, Elif Shafak, renowned Turkish novelist, and Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, bring to this conversation an intriguing perspective. As intellectuals who know Britain well, they understand first hand the perils of nationalism, disintegration, isolationism and marginalisation. They place post-Brexit Britain in a context informed by a view of Europe and Britain from the continent’s opposite ‘corner’, sharing insights from Greece’s tensions with Brussels and Berlin, Yugoslavia’s disintegration, and Turkey’s fraught relationship with a Europe that both courts and marginalises it.

More here

Pan-European Progressive Movement: "An alternative to prevailing authoritarianism and austerity."

Dear Mr. Varoufakis,

When you're finished reforming Europe, could you drop by New Albany?

You need to meet our "democratic" mayor, Jeff Gahan. He alone embodies enough source material for a Pulitzer.

Thanks

R

Greece's Varoufakis to Launch Pan-European Progressive Movement, by Lauren McCauley (Common Dreams)

Hoping to show Europeans they have an alternative to the prevailing system of "authoritarianism" and austerity, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced a new cross-continent movement with a "simple, common agenda:" To democratize Europe.

The movement, known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM 25), will be launched on February 9 at Berlin's Volksbühne theater.

Varoufakis, who first revealed the plan late last month in an interview with L'Espresso, said that he is hopeful this "activist movement" will connect progressives across the continent and enable them to take back power from the ruling elite and what he described as the "shadowy world of bureaucrats, bankers, and unelected officialdom."

Greece: The bailout (this is a coup) and Varoufakis's refusal to play by the rules.

Yeah, I'm up early today. This one just came over the wire.

Greece bailout agreement: the key points (The Guardian)

However, it has been pleasing to note the widespread recognition that these past few weeks have been not unlike a war between international bankers and Greek politicians, with the "collateral" damage being suffered by ordinary Greeks with no dog in the fight.

#ThisIsACoup: Germany faces backlash over tough Greece bailout demands (The Guardian)

The draconian list of demands eurozone leaders handed to the Greek government in return for a European bailout has inspired a social media backlash against Germany and its hawkish finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.

ž#ThisIsACoup was the second top trending hashtag on Twitter worldwide – and top in Germany and Greece – as eurozone leaders argued through the night to convince the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to take the deal or face bankruptcy and his country’s expulsion from the euro.

The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis departed the scene following last weekend's referendum, but to me, the following points remain significant, especially this one:

"Thinking of himself as a representative of the Greek people, he made his wishes public."

Transparency. Imagine that.

The Man Who Refused to Play by the Rules: the Real Sins of Varoufakis, by Chris Bickerton (Counterpunch)

... The negotiations didn’t break down because of an unbridgeable gap between the North and South; creditors and debtors; the German ‘Ordoliberalism’ of Schäuble and Djisselbloem and Greek-style Marxism of Varoufakis and Tsipras. This gap has never existed. They broke down because Varoufakis repeatedly breached the Eurogroup’s etiquette. In doing so, he challenged the very foundations of the eurozone’s mode of governance ...

(the non-democratic Europgroup "rules" are recapped)

... The hostility towards Varoufakis stems from his breaking of all of these rules. He refused to play the Eurogroup game. It’s not really about riding a motorbike, wearing combat trousers and being a celebrity academic-blogger — though his charisma and popularity probably created jealousies amongst the other (colourless and tie-wearing) politicians.

At the heart of the matter is how Varoufakis presented his demands. Thinking of himself as a representative of the Greek people, he made his wishes public, and when in the Eurogroup, he maintained the same stance — changes in views could not be informally agreed around a table but had to be taken back to Athens and argued for, in cabinet and with the Syriza party.

Paying attention to what's happening in Greece.

Why is it that amid the discussion of bailouts and debt and money, no one seems willing or able to explain why several million Greeks should be made to pay a price in impoverishment for the misbehavior of international bankers and wretched politicians?

Greek villagers' secret weapon: Grow your own food, by Gregory Katz (AP - The Big Story)

KARITAINA, Greece (AP) — Ilias Mathes has protection against bank closures, capital controls and the slashing of his pension: 10 goats, some hens and a vegetable patch.

If Greece's financial crisis deepens, as many believe it must, he can feed his children and grandchildren with the bounty of the land in this proud village high in the mountains of the Arcadia Peloponnese.

Happily, Bernie Sanders has had something coherent to say about Greece. Our Republicans presumably are busy searching for Bible passages.

“I applaud the people of Greece for saying ‘no’ to more austerity for the poor, the children, the sick and the elderly ... in a world of massive wealth and income inequality Europe must support Greece's efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.”

Sanders spots the element that's usually missing as the bankers do their numbers fetish -- you know, the piece about dignity.

Greek Voters to Eurozone: We Can’t and Won’t Do This Anymore, by Maria Margaronis (The Nation)

... “We won’t be saved by Yes or No,” said a gentleman in his 80s. “It’ll be bad either way. But one thing will change: They’ll know they don’t have our agreement for what they’re doing to us. The government may have made mistakes, but the position of the Europeans has been cruel, oppressive, humiliating, shockingly inhuman. They’ll get their money. But they have to realize we need time to recover first.”

I'm looking for lessons wherever I can find them.

Greek referendum: smart response from Tsipras, but triumph may be brief, by Larry Elliott (The Guardian)

... David Marsh, of the thinktank OMFIF, said: “The failure of the creditor countries, led by Germany and the Netherlands, to recognise a central maxim of guerrilla fighting – the enemy will always surprise – provides a key reason for the Oxi win. If you’re outnumbered, practise the unorthodox. Tearing up the rules of Brussels conduct, Tspiras and Varoufakis, his finance minister-cum-field marshal, have outmanoeuvred and divided the surplus states by constantly re-engaging, over five months, from unexpected, demanding and outrageous battle positions.”

Yanis Varoufakis blogged his resignation with these important words.

I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride. We of the Left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office.

Prior to his resignation, an excerpt from Varoufakis's book provided closing context: Greece this time. Who's next?

Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push?, by Yanis Varoufakis (The Guardian)

Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American “invention”. The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone. Imagine their chagrin if the citizens of hard-hit states (eg Nevada or Ohio) had to worry about a death embrace between the debt of their state and the losses of the banks who happened to operate within the state.

Additionally, Americans were spared the need to contend with a central bank utterly shackled by inner divisions and the German central bank’s penchant for treating the worst-hit parts of the union (the eurozone, that is) as alien lands that had to be fiscally waterboarded until they ceased to obey the laws of macroeconomics.

"The vultures are circling, but Tsipras and Varoufakis tweet on."

This might be my favorite story of the week.

How Tsipras and Varoufakis turned Greek tragedy into Twitter triumph, by Hannah Jane Parkinson (The Guardian)

Politicians aren’t particularly renowned for a strong game on social media. Whether it’s falling for parody accounts, tweeting their own names, or, er, offering free owls for all, it’s not often they get it right.

Enter the Greeks. Never before has a government embroiled in one of the biggest global economic crises been so good at tweeting. We hear President Coolidge, for instance, was always screwing up his mentions.

Not so with Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Varoufakis on Greece: “We’ve lost everything, so we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do."

Sovereignty?

Greece will say it as it is: five years on, the medicine prescribed by Germany, Europe’s paymaster, to mend the ills of run-away profligacy hasn’t worked. Instead, the nation has become an echo of its former self; its economy slashed by almost a third, one in four out of work, one in three facing the prospect of living in abject poverty.

“We’ve lost everything,” he says. “So we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do.”

Damned book readers.

I wonder if he knows Papa John personally?

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis: ‘If I weren’t scared, I’d be awfully dangerous’, by Helena Smith (Guardian)

... At 53, Varoufakis is still clear that he “understands the world better” as a result of having read Marx. But he no longer considers himself a diehard leftie, whatever others may think. Rather, he says, he is a libertarian or erratic Marxist, who can marvel at the wondrousness of capitalism but is also painfully aware of its inherent contradictions, just as he is “the awful legacy” of the left. “It is a system that produces massive wealth and massive poverty,” proclaims the economist who taught at the universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Glasgow and Sydney after gaining his doctoral degree at the University of Essex. “I don’t think you can understand capitalism until and unless you understand those contradictions and ask yourself if capitalism is the natural state. I don’t think it is. That’s why I am a leftwinger.”

More than that, Varoufakis is an iconoclast, a self-styled “contrarian” who is also an idealist, “because if you are not an idealist, you are a cynic”. And he has, he laments, lost a lot of friends on the left who believe that Grexit, Greece’s exit from the currency bloc, would be the country’s best course.

Je suis Greece.

I may be a Europhile, but underdogs come first.

Those who would say that it's just another instance of a slacker country looking to evade its debts are missing the metaphor. In a world dedicated to income equality and the preservation of the 1%, most of us are Greece, already.

Greece's leaders stun Europe with escalating defiance, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (The Telegraph)

"The euro is like a house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” says Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister

Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has spelled out the negotiating strategy of the Syriza government with crystal clarity.

“Exit from the euro does not even enter into our plans, quite simply because the euro is fragile. It is like a house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” he said.

“Do we really want Europe to break apart? Anybody who is tempted to think it possible to amputate Greece strategically from Europe should be careful. It is very dangerous. Who would be hit after us? Portugal? What would happen to Italy when it discovers that it is impossible to stay within the austerity straight-jacket?”

Yanis Varoufakis, business cults, and why I refuse to wear a suit.

Photo credit: Guardian

Note that Wetherspoon's is a casual pub chain in the UK, and give ample props to Yanis Varoufakis for his New Age-style, "Castro-in-fatigues-at-the-UN" moment. Then I'll explain why suits don't suit me.

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis goes casual at number 10, by Imogen Fox (Guardian)

... It was apparent from the photocall on Downing Street that we were witnessing a bit of a fashion moment. There was Osborne, himself riding high on his rebooted fashion skills with his Julius-Caesar haircut and properly fitting suit, shaking hands with a man wearing a Wetherspoon’s-appropriate bright-blue shirt and an early-1990s madchester drug dealer’s coat. The shaved head, the feet apart hands-in-pockets bouncer’s stance and the easy grin serving to underline the look.

I resemble these remarks.

At present, I own one suit, and since I lost weight, it's now much too roomy. It hasn't yet occurred to me if there'll be implications in my mayoral campaign, apart from observing that just because one isn't wearing a suit/uniform, it doesn't mean he cannot dress appropriately.

Can a person dress like a normal human being and be mayor? It sounds like an experiment worth performing. The following has been written and revised several times, most recently in March of 2014 as a Potable Curmudgeon column at LouisvilleBeer.com.

---

The PC: It doesn’t suit me.

I pay fairly close attention to civic affairs in New Albany, and perhaps this owes to broad personal interests and a degree of community-mindedness, although as in most communities, a taste for low comedy doesn’t hurt.

Among the political tugs-of-wars witnessed on a daily basis throughout the year, those various mechanisms by which municipal governments of all ideological identities – both country and western – pretend to develop their economies have come to be especially entertaining to me.

Whether it’s my town or yours, they tend to work the same. A business purporting to be the second coming of Henry Ford, Ben & Jerry and Versace, all rolled into one unstoppable juggernaut, argues that it is poised to bring great joy to the inhabitants, not to mention a job or three, if only (ahem) the business climate might be adjusted just a tad. Consequently, it is gifted with a heady cocktail of incentives, including tax abatements, loans, grants, discount sewer coupons, lottery tickets and oral sex on demand.

It’s a little known fact that these businesses actually must make some semblance of a theoretical case to merit their share of governmental largesse, as in a certain number of positions to be created, machines purchased, and dual-purpose flanges shipped. And so they do — theoretically. City councils salivate with Pavlovian aplomb, stenographers (still quaintly referred to in some quarters as “journalists”) cut and paste from breathless press releases, mayors pad their resumes, and the incentive pies are duly sliced.

Ostensibly, that’s where the public/private partnership begins, but in the real world of attention spans the length of a fruit fly’s adolescence, it’s where the relationship usually ends. The barn door has been left ajar. Calendar pages turn, concrete is poured, accountants diligently wield their fiduciary looms … and then, every once in a while, something exceedingly strange happens to shatter the monotony.

At a meeting, a timid hand will be raised, and an inconvenient question proffered:

"Excuse me, resident economic development tsar, but all these claims of jobs and sales and market dominance justifying the incentive package you awarded this company … well, did they actually create those jobs? Did they really ship that many flanges, or was it only a projection? Was anything they were saying actually true?"

Crickets chirp, and pins are heard dropping. The patriotism of the questioner is ridiculed.

Somewhere, a stenographer dozes.

—

Thinking back to the time when I was asked to explain how I’d managed to survive in business for more than two decades with a lowly Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and history, rather than appropriately seductive parchments in business, I recall spitting, harrumphing loudly, and barking back at my interlocutor: Because serendipity rules our planet, and thinking outside boxes trumps rote recitation … and I doubt any of it is taught amid the quasi-theological curriculum at “business” schools.

I went into business because I love beer, and an opportunity was presented for me to love beer (for inconsequential and symbolic pay) while sharing my love of beer with others. It was nothing more at the time, it is nothing less now, and it remains absolutely nothing to build a business school curriculum around.

I’m very, very proud of that fact.

An autobiography is still possible; if so, it will be entitled “Beer, Bile & Bolsheviks: A Fermentable Life,” although if the tome ever comes to fruition, there’ll be precious little inside it about spreadsheets. Numbers are what you hire other people to understand, while carefully applying the greasepaint, rehearsing the shuck and jive, and performing “My Way” for the 3,657th time.

America’s weird indigenous cult of business achievement titillation repels me. My personal heroes have always been artists, baristas, musicians, chefs, writers, actors, dancers, sportsmen, brewers and other practitioners moving within the less easily quantifiable realm of creativity.

How and why they’re paid is far less interesting to me than how they create, and what they produce in an aesthetic sense. How do their physical skills capture the output of their brains?

If the business of America truly is business, then it causes me to openly shudder, and if so, my personal “business” encompasses looking elsewhere – anywhere will do – for a higher order of inspiration, as opposed to worshipping techniques to amass and maintain wealth. While it’s true that Bruce Springsteen is handsomely rewarded for creating music, give me the Boss over Donald Trump, any day. I can whistle along with music, but only wince at avarice.

As a matter of convenience, I accept the term “businessman,” but prefer to think of myself as a beertrepreneur.

The very root word “entrepreneur” is suitably French. There’s an element of daring and risk contained within it, contrasting with “businessman”, which sounds far too numerically vocational and conservative for my blood. Entrepreneurs sweat to create, and can relate to Lear’s raging. Businessmen wear dull threads and merely manage the inspiration of others.

The prime reason for this violent, lifelong allergic reaction to the trappings of chambers of commerce and like-minded business idolatry societies is their vacuously obnoxious glorification of business for the sake of business, in the form of endless rounds of symbolic pom-pom waving, mysterious networking rites, totemic seminars and expense account driven re-education junkets, the sum total of which is the perpetuation of eager, grasping and typically greedy cadres of business “elites”, each dressed exactly alike, refusing to travel in steerage, wholly ignorant of the universe beyond their sales strategies, but perfectly capable of exchanging indecipherable business lingo and colloquialisms that surely would have inspired Sinclair Lewis to update the saga of “Babbitt” for an even more annoying age.

—

That’s why I generally refuse to wear a suit. I waited a long time to find a line of honest work that would permit me to dress like a normal human being. My uniform is different from yours, just as a football player’s is different from mine. Having found such a pursuit, permitted to be both comfortable and unhesitant to dribble hot wing sauce down my chin, I’m hesitant to surrender the autonomy.

I’m a craft beer kind of guy, and there’s a saying in the craft beer business: We brew beer, we drink beer, and we sell what’s left. At the end of the day, if there still are a few farthings lying around, then we made a profit, and while I readily acknowledge the imperative of making a few bucks, it’s worth repeating that love of beer is what drew me to my business.

History, geography, lore and storytelling about beer are my interests. Being truthful in relaying them is my goal. Anything less is Wal-Mart … or AB InBev.

It was inevitable that craft beer would grow up, but if growing up means embracing the tactical fictions and emulating the attitudes of our mass-market brethren, you can count me out. I’d rather raise that timid hand, rouse the steno from the clutches of the sandman — and repair to the nearest bar.