TL;DR

WHAT: Pub Crawl
WHEN: Sunday 1/18/26, Beginning 1pm
WHERE: Williamsburg
CHAT: Here

Map

Schedule

Sunday Sunday Sunday at 1pm

(high round draft pick aging out of rookie deal now stepping up after old MVP team lead retired) Banter Bar
(cherished locker room presence) Lucky Dog
(all-star role player looking for more minutes) Horses and Divorces
(chasing sixth ring) Skinny Dennis
(hall of fame) Radegast Hall
(beloved glue guy) The Charleston
(promising sophomore) George & Jack’s Tap Room
(hall of very good) Turkey Nest

Overview

Picture with me if you will the year 1991 – our parents in the full flush of youth, birthing us and our siblings in leafy suburbia as prosperity roared through America, the nation now unopposed in its global dominance after the depredations of Gorbachev and Yeltsin across the fallen Iron Curtain. Reagan gave way to Pappy Bush – no problem, for the juggernaut that was the Republican Party swatted away Gov. Dukakis’ challenge to their divine right to the presidency like a quickly darting gnat. When Bush the Elder in his pursuit of a New World Order decided to flex his unipolar muscles in the face of the menacing Saddam Hussein, the resulting Gulf War was a nothingburger.

Gulf War Map

Boutros Boutros-Ghali got the United Nations to acclaim Bush the right to expel Iraq from Kuwait, like the Senate voting Caesar a triumphal crown. Mrs. Thatcher and Mitterrand sent cadres of beaming European pilots to join the force of 2,780 fixed wing aircraft which would over the course of 5 weeks fly 100,000 sorties to drop 88,000 tons of munitions on the Iraqi landscape. HR McMaster won the last and improbably greatest tank battle of the 20th century at 73 Easting, destroying 28 Iraqi tanks with his troop of 8 M3 Bradleys in the time it would take to watch an episode of “Arrested Development”. Fewer soldiers died while deployed in the Gulf than would have died had they stayed home due to accidents and natural causes. The aerial bombing campaign which gives us the name Operation Desert Storm began on 17 January. Before February was over, Pappy Bush put a peacetime smile on his face as Kuwait was liberated and Saddam, Uday and Qusay sent back to the palace in Babylon.

Desert Storm Tanks

Or did it? By the start of March 1991, a poststructuralist fop teaching at the Université de Paris, Jean Baudrillard, kicked off a veritable revolution in semiotics with the publication of “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”.

Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what an ultra-modern process of electrocution is like. a process of paralysis or lobotomy of an experimental enemy away from the field of battle with no possibility of reaction. But this is not a war, any more than 10.000 tonnes of bombs per day is sufficient to make it a war. Any more than the direct transmission by CNN of real time information is sufficient to authenticate a war.

By 1991, Baudrillard had become famous for his book “Simulacra and Simulation,” which presented the contemporary world as a place where the line between reality and simulation had blurred sufficiently as to make them indistinct: mass entertainment, fiat currency, globalized capitalism, urbanization, English as the global lingua franca. For Baudrillard, the drama of the war, the months of buildup and UN votes and coalition building and sabrerattling on the part of HW Bush and the concomitant defiance and threats from Saddam, the promises to castigate the civilian population and deploy his dread shock troops in the form of the Republican Guard – all of which made for excellent TV fodder in an age where Ted Turner became legend for birthing CNN – was the event. That Coalition aircraft were reported to have chased the massed Iraqi army back from Kuwait is not sufficient to evince a war. Saddam endured, chastened but, in Baudrillard’s view, played perfectly to role as a foil for the all-knowing all-conquering all-staging American presidency.

Time Magazine Covers the Gulf War

Like the Gulf War, the 2025 edition of the Ryan Anderson Williamsburg MLK Pub Crawl Extravaganza did not take place. There was no Skinny Dennis swingtime, nor any soggy traipses through the flurries on the way to McCarren Park. A drinking holiday in Williamsburg remained at least for your author a comfortable image with which to distract himself while the important business of life took precedence, but it did not self-realize. To reverse our forebears, we can scry the sacrificial bones for causes, to understand what went wrong – a simple answer is that a good 75% of the regulars at this event got married last year – and yet no answer will ever be complete. The map and the territory, for 7 years established in at least a stable relationship, diverged catastrophically.

Will the 2026 RAWMLKPCE take place? The answer lies in your heart, reader. Take the red pill.

Here’s a groupme link if you want lmao: https://groupme.com/join_group/84245095/Qn6mhbRi

Unsolicited Guidance for the Day

Advisory guidance is max 2 beers per bar unless it’s really fun! Especially early on. Not only is this day not a sprint, it’s no mere marathon – this is the Pheidippides running to announce the victory at Marathon of beer drinking events.

Merson's Pheidippides Giving Word of Victory After the Battle of Marathon, 1869