Looking back, Fully Flared seems to me to have a legacy not unlike the Obama administration. After the hard fought battles of the 2000s sk8 culture wars ? between Black-hair-dyed girl-pants-wearing Jamie Thomas-produced rail chompers and Chris Cole and Corey Duffel-be'ers, and the dignified tasteful-tech 90s-venerators (once the unquestioned Slap contingent consensus) ? Fully Flared came along as the dominant skate document of the era, generating a sense that the good guys had won, that lines had beaten out hammer-clip parts, that ledges and manuals had toppled El Toro. A year later, the darkness of the Iraq-invading Bush years received a similar repudiation in the 2008 election, and everything, for a short moment, looked to be so bright. But then we had to grapple with the loosed beasts of combo-tricks and drone bombings and Ty Evans emboldenment and congressional gridlock and a mediocre Mariano. We learned then, that nothing is very good.