Greetings and all that. Welcome to Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. Somewhere out there, a neighbor is about to be neighborly whether you asked for it or not.
My calendar says it's Drink Beer Day, Family Day, Good Neighbor Day, Strawberry Cream Pie Day, and World Rabies Day. Sit down to dinner with the family, wave at the guy next door, pour yourself a cold one after work, and finish with strawberry cream pie, but skip the rabies celebration entirely and just keep your dog's shots current.
Today in History:
1066: William, Duke of Normandy, lands at Pevensey Bay in southeastern England, beginning the Norman Conquest.
1542: Explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo lands near present-day San Diego, becoming the first European to reach what will become California.
1781: Revolutionary War forces, backed by a French fleet, begin the siege of Yorktown, Virginia.
1787: Congress votes to send the just-completed Constitution to the state legislatures for ratification.
1850: Congress abolishes flogging as a punishment in the Navy.
1912: W.C. Handy's "The Memphis Blues" goes on sale in Memphis, and the first 1,000 copies sell out in three days.
1924: Two Army planes, Chicago and New Orleans, land in Seattle, completing the first round-the-world flight after 175 days.
1928: Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin, the first antibiotic.
1939: Germany and the Soviet Union agree on a plan to partition Poland.
1958: French voters approve a new constitution, establishing the Fifth Republic.
1980: PBS premieres Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by astronomer Carl Sagan.
1994: The ferry Estonia sinks in the Baltic Sea, killing 852 people.
2015: NASA announces evidence of liquid water flowing on Mars.
Birthdays Today include: Brigitte Bardot, the late actress from And God Created Woman; Janeane Garofalo, comedian and actress from Reality Bites; Mira Sorvino, Academy Award-winning actress from Mighty Aphrodite; Naomi Watts, actress from Mulholland Drive and The Ring; and Hilary Duff, actress and singer from Lizzie McGuire — if today's your birthday too, happy birthday.
* * *
Huh.
Megan McArdle.
Now, there’s a name I’ve not heard for a long time. At times, I brushed up against her name frequently when writing items for BitsBlog. She ended up at The Atlantic, which I seldom read, so I kinda lost track of her. I figured she’d get polluted by the prevailing leftism that publication has long embraced. But I see little evidence of this in her Washington Post piece of yesterday morning about what she (very carefully, I think) suggests is the end of “Cancel Culture” or, more correctly, the end of "Woke 1.0". She may be correct.
For those who missed the news, Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue recently announced that one night a week, it would relax its policy requiring customers to wear KN95 masks. You might think that’s reasonable, given that it is hard to eat or drink with a mask on and dubiously effective to keep pulling one up and down.
A passionate faction in the Last Ditch community didn’t think it was at all reasonable. Those patrons thought it was a “pander” to “capitalism and white supremacy.” You can guess what followed: social media pile-ons and a heated community meeting.
Yeah, I’ve actually been waiting for that situation to settle out a little so I could write a column on it. As I’ve watched the story develop, there’s one thing that’s been missing from the discussion: The science of the matter. While it’s true that COVID-19 is still a concern for the immunocompromised, it’s not nearly the concern for the general public that it once was. For this conversation, I will leave aside the Chicken Little scenarios that were attached to it in the past. I will also mention that it’s the one place in America I’m aware of with such a restriction. And finally, the town this bar is in hasn’t recorded any instance of COVID-19 in months.
I guess we should back up and explain things to those who aren’t aware of the story. Last Ditch is an LGBTQ bar, arts venue, and “community space” at 10 Fiske Ave. in downtown Greenfield, Mass., in the basement of a building that formerly housed another bar called 10 Forward. (Oh, cute reference to Trekkies).
Anyway, It opened in 2025, founded by three housemates who wanted to create a LGBTQ gathering place after other such bars in the area had closed. (Spoiler alert: That's a clue.)
The physical space is essentially a DIY basement club, with a dance floor, bar, stage, eclectic furnishings, and artwork. It has a very deliberately countercultural atmosphere. Two of the originators have left, leaving just the one who has been struggling to keep the place viable.
The thing is that while Last Ditch was created to provide an unusually “safe and inclusive environment for a particular community,” its strict rules helped define what made it distinctive — but those same rules apparently contributed to limiting its customer base and financial viability. When the remaining owner (Jackie Matellian) tried to loosen one of those rules to increase attendance, the people most invested in preserving the original mission objected strongly enough to threaten the very enterprise they wanted preserved.
That's why the story has escaped the confines of Greenfield. It's not really about a bar anymore. It's a rather fascinating case study in the collision between leftist ideological purity, economics, and the practical requirements of keeping a small business open. In other words, Woke vs. Reality.
In short, the place is failing financially, or was as of last week. What’s happening now with everyone talking about the place is unclear to me. Matellian says the bar isn’t profitable and has been subsidized by her working two jobs and living in her truck. The alteration in the masking policy was intended to bring in paying customers.
Related: Mutiny at the #ZeroCOVID Lesbian Dive Bar!
Look, I have stout disagreements with the whole concept of that bar, but honestly, you have to admire the pluck involved with her dedication and indeed the dedication of ANY entrepreneur, trying to make a small business place work.
McArdle, for her part, suggests that this story signals the end of Woke V1.0. She may have a point. I’ve long predicted that the “woke” would be feasting on its own flesh sooner or later. The problem, of course, is that financial realities keep rearing their heads and spoiling the fantasies. Or, as McArdle puts it,
...for about a decade, social media dynamics gave larger firms the misimpression that woke was a mass movement rather than a fringe phenomenon. It wasn’t. Moreover, that fringe — the customer base Last Ditch was built for — contains too many people who hate the very idea of running things like a business. They will demand policies that are incompatible with making a profit or running a functional organization, and if you capitulate, they will wreck you.
So essentially, the cancel culture will take out a place that was designed to cater to it. That part of the story is still being played out. According to a few unofficial reports I’ve seen, the first mask-optional Saturday nearly collapsed: staff turned away a crowd at the door, held a last-minute emergency meeting, and eventually declared the "goth night" a private event over unspecified "safety breaches," with nearly 100 people stuck outside. The landlord, meanwhile, is reportedly demanding $3,900 in back rent.
At the moment, the joint is still open, so far as I can tell, and the relaxed N95 rules are still in place. Including, I note, the relaxed rules on Saturday. But the friction here isn’t going to allow that condition to continue for long, I think. As one comment to McArdle’s piece puts it, the Woke Crowd has devolved into a caricature of itself, with the bitter-enders canceling one another.
It appears that in the end, "Woke" cannot support itself, and as a result, Last Ditch will lose to the ideological fanaticism that gave it life.
Thought for the Day: On Good Neighbor Day, remember that history's most famous neighborly handshake was Germany and the Soviet Union carving up Poland, proof that "neighbor" has never guaranteed "good."
VIP members: It's your turn to shine. Your voice matters, so make it count. Hit the comment section.
Take care, Gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.