Windy City Blues

Amercan What?

2010-09-27T20:53:00.003-05:00

I woke up to NPR this morning talking about how one sign the Democrats are in a big hole going into the fall elections is that polling shows that a record number of Americans don't believe in the American Dream, especially the non-professional working women who have been the backbone of the party's support the past decade or so. To me, this just shows how out of touch NPR is. The American Dream? Really? When was the last time you heard anybody talking about the American Dream? Do you even remember? I do:

Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission,
Ignorace, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
All of which are American Dreams
All of which are American Dreams
All of which are American Dreams
All of which are American Dreams

Rage against the Machine! That was, what, nineteen years ago. It was still a culturally relevant concept back then. People longed for it or mocked it, but there it was. But now? What does it even mean, a house with a white picket fence in the suburbs? Like I could ever dream about owning a single family home anywhere that I'd actually want to live. The fact is, the precious housing bubble that left all these speculators "underwater" upon its partial collapse put owning a decent home beyond the reach of most of the younger generation by pushing up prices at a pace far faster than the paltry to nonexistant rise in wages we've seen the past decade. And the government wants to re-inflate it! If prices don't fall, eventually there would be no one able to buy any of these properties, since baby boomers can't keep selling them to each other forever. Eventually, they will want to downsize and sell their homes to . . . somebody. Not me, because I can't pay those prices, and we have a six figure household income, so if we can't afford them, who exactly can?

Or by the American Dream are they talking about getting ahead through an honest day's pay for an honest day's work? How are we going to do that? Real wages are stagnant or worse for the majority, while the top 2% just get richer and richer. But Republicans are arguing that the way to get people back to work at miserable low paying jobs is to give these 2% another big tax cut.

Let me take a stab at what has replaced the American Dream: taking a gamble and winning a big payout at longshot odds. Either literally, through winning the state sponsored lottery, or figuratively, through winning on Reality Television or getting a fat contract with a giant entertainment corporation to churn out insipid pop or hip hop albums. Working hard and playing by the rules gets you nowhere in the new scheme of things, you have to get lucky and if a fortune falls in your lap, be prepared to take advantage of it:

I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad
Buy all of the things I never had
Uh, I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine
Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen

But that wasn't what the American Dream was all about, it was about a broad swath of society, not rich but not poor, that everybody who did their homework, got a decent job and worked hard at it could join. I don't want to make it sound to idyllic. A big part of it was about moving out into dreary fake plastic suburbs and leaving the old neighborhood a blighted segregated prison for the non-white underclass, who were never really invited to participate in the American Dream. But for the majorit, it was an attainable goal that you could get to by working hard. Or that's the way I remember it. Like I said, I haven't heard anybody talking about it lately.

Personally I'm pretty well traveled and after making a few trips across the pond I must say I think this vision doesn't stack up very well with what I'd call the European Dream - that is, well tended cities with cohesive communities in an enviromnment with higher taxes and unemployment, but in which no one is permitted to fall below a certain floor in terms of access to social goods (food, medical care, education). This kind of arrangement removes some of the fear of failure that I believes clings to and twists around so many things in American life. In Maslovian terms, being unable to permanently resolve the survival needs at the base of the pyramid of needs means that many of us are stunted by fear and don't really get a chance to work on higher order needs and development (creativity, moral imagination, self actualization etc). The right may feel that fear is motiviational for little people, but it isn't healthy.

This European Dream too is exclusionary, based on ethinic solidarity and leading to a hostility to immigration. I suspect that's why a similar vision is not more popular here - indeed, I have heard Tea Baggers complaining that Obama wants to turn America into Europe. That's a problem for some people in our country precisely because Americans don't share an ethnic solidarity - and if extending a safety net for the poor means redistributing money from "us" to "them" the many whites are dead set against it. Hence the dream based on individual effor rather than national solidarity. But since that isn't working too well, at this point we can either decide to be a "we" after all, or all get left further and further behind in our separate little individualistic shacks, waiting for the big windfall to fall in our laps.

I am not optimistic about the American people wising up over the next few weeks, but I am reminded of one of the first things I ever learned about statistics: "The Lottery is a special tax on people who are bad at math."

Wendesday.

2010-06-23T22:15:00.004-05:00

Wednesday again already?

If I were the sort of person who blogged regularly instead of the sort who works all the time like a dog, I would have gotten online last week and blogged about last Wednesday. I would have written about how I had an unpaid day off thanks to the city budget crisis, and how I kept my 3 year old son out of day care for the day.

I would have told you how we rode downtown on Mommy's train, and stayed on the train for a couple stops after she got off to go to work, and how we got off the train at Roosevelt Road. I would have written about carrying my son on my shoulders through to Grant Park, and setting him down to run free by the headless statues once we got to the grass. I would have told you about carrying him over the bridge over the Metra Electric tracks, about how I told him the trains were powered by electricity and he was able to explain that back to me later. About how he told me the shiny silver and orange train was coming FROM Indiana, not going TO Indiana, and he was right. I would have told you about visiting the robot dinosaurs at the Field Museum, about how he was fascinated for a magical 20 minutes by the triceratops hatchlings, about running around the nature walk telling me the flamingos weren't flamingos with a grin on his face. I would write about how we got a banana muffin and a mango frozen lemonade and how he said "we call it lemonade but actually it's mostly called ice." About watching the people with the bright orange signs that said CAROL on one side and TURN AROUND on the other, about how they held them up as Carol's boyfriend crept up behind her by Sue the Tyrannasaurus skeleton to propose to her, about how we saw the geeky happy couple later by the other dinosaur bones. I would write about how my son pushed the button again and again to hear the funny voice say "triceratops horridus." I would tell you about the guy in the Tyrannasaur costume, my son called him "the roaring guy" and wouldn't go up to touch the rubber skin. "He'll eat me" he said.

I would tell you about getting hot dogs from a hot dog stand (his plain, mine a Polish with everything), and about the kids with the identical red t shirts milling around, and about rolling down the hill. I would talk about walking back across the bridge and seeing the yellow train car with the crane on top that my son christened Harvey.

I would definitely tell you about how he brought the yellow duckie watering can along the whole trip and carried it like a work bag, and how on the way up Michigan Avenue he set the duckie on the seat next to him and sat there seriously, leaving me to stand next to him in the aisle. I would tell you about visiting my wife's office, about my son telling everyone "I saw baby triceratops. I saw some that haven't hatched yet" to everyone's amazement.

I would tell you about getting our feet wet in the fountain with the spitting faces, and about my son doing a belly flop in the half inch deep water and soaking his clothes. I would write about the mean guard on the sculpture garden roof of the Art Institute's Modern Wing and how he wouldn't allow me to carry my son on my shoulders or stand him on the ledge buy the windows, forcing us to leave or allow him to run around and touch the art made out of jet engines. I would discuss how it was silly art but they were cool engines.

And I would write about how we took the Brown Line to the Red Line home, and how my train-crazy son later told me his favorite part of the day was getting to change trains.

But I'm not the type of person who blogs regularly anymore, because I am too much of a perfectionist and I have too little time. So this is what you get. The sky was brilliant blue, and the trains were running on time, and a little boy saw baby dinosaurs, some of which hadn't hatched yet.

Amnesty

2010-04-21T22:40:00.003-05:00

For once I'm not even going to try to be clever and I'm just gonna come out and say something. Of all the vile political trends that have come around in my lifetime, the anti-immigrant hysteria is my least favorite. I like it even less than the warmongering neocon thing. While I agree that for security reasons we should control our borders and be aware of who comes in and out, that's not at all the same thing as saying we should try to reduce immigration. The reason there is so much illegal immigration to this country is that legal immigration is restricted by an anachronistic quota system that basically does not give most people who want to immigrate a legal way to do so. The solution to illegal immigration is not to reduce the number of immigrants, but to increase the number of visas to meet demand for them. Just about everybody here is descended from immigrants of one kind or another, and the day we cut off the flow is the day we cut off the nation's lifeblood and it shrivels and dies.

But to even propose limited reforms to make the system slightly less bad, it's necessary to propose draconian police state measures. Otherwise the nativists will go off the deep end fearing that somebody, somewhere has gotten a job that was rightfully theirs. I find this ironic, because really it's restrictions on immigration that interfere with the smooth operation of the labor market, making the entire country poorer. But for some people that's fine, as long as it also keeps the country more white.

Of course, saying that in a public forum is asking for trouble in a day and age where accusing someone of racism is seen as a greater evil somehow than racism itself. But it's increasingly obvious that the right wing "tea party" opposition is motivated primarily by race and identity politics, and I call 'em like I see 'em.

"We work for Fox"

2010-03-23T22:07:00.002-05:00

No Kidding, Dave?

You know these media guys do better when their audience is pissed off, right? So what do they care if you "win?"

In my opinion, the President erred on the side of trying to make a deal. Why the Republicans repeatedly slapped his hand away is beyond me. They could have negotiated something they could take credit for. Now they're stuck with what they got.

Poetry

2010-03-09T22:17:00.002-06:00

Can there be an urban poetry? In Chicago? I wonder. The naked fact is that Chicago has little aesthetically to inspire poetry. It is ugly. Most of its buildings are facades like a movies set, with plainspoken bare brick behind, crumbling. These sides were not meant to be seen but often stand, exposed by the death of a neighbor. New structures are smaller, meaner, with less time for beauty and artifice. With these, all sides are bare and plain. Weeds poke up through the melting gray snow, and trash. On the streets, cars stand in lines by the bare tree stem medians while drivers howl. Monoxide swirls lazily making everyone a little stupider. The neighborhood has always been ugly, with tall preposterous victorian flats rising next to white wooden shacks. Tall next to short, and varying distances from the street, the houses are like the teeth of an unsuccessful boxer or longtime minor league hockey goalie. Everywhere parking, cars, exhaust, cement. It's not grey here it's babyshit brown, polluted, dying. A woman with a broken nose? Chicago is like loving a leper.

V for Vacuous

2009-12-01T18:43:00.002-06:00

Having come back home to my Tivo at last, I have been able to catch up on the new "V." Obviously I record everything because I have a two year old who believes TV sets are for watching videos and who doesn't realize anything is broadcast live except for baseball games. So prime time at my house starts at about 10 pm if it starts at all. So I finally watched the end of ABC's boring-assed remake, and when it was done I switched to 1984's "V: The Final Battle" which I have out from Netflix at the moment.

And I have to say, the '80s version was better, and that says something good about the world for a change. I mean, in the 80s, America becomes an alien-occupied fascist state like Vichy France, while our new alien overlords steal all of our water resources and shrink-wrap non-cooperative humans as a food source. They also engage in some truly scary mind control "conversions" where they perform a procedure on anti-alien humans which brainwashes them and turns them into collaborators. This reflected the world of the 1980s where we all felt threatened by immanent nuclear annhilation and totalitarianism. When I was a kid, I seriously doubted that I would ever grow up, believing the Cold War would turn hot and destroy the world at any moment.

By contrast, today's "V" features sleepers cells of aliens disguised as humans who may engage in terrorist acts or distribute some poisoned flu shots. Aliens come with a fleet of high tech spaceships floating over our major cities, and that's all they've got? Big deal. The problem here is that we live in much less scary times. Sure, 9/11 was frightening and tragic, but it certainly wasn't the end of civilization as we know it. If that's all the terrorsts have, then they are no the existential threat they have been made out to be in some quarters. It's terrible when terrorists blow stuff up and kill a tiny fraction of a percent of the population, but it's not really a menace to your way of life. Spain, Israel, Turkey etc. have all dealt with stuff being blown up by terrorists without being destroyed by it, and there's no reason the US couldn't do the same. All this is just to say that the military threats posed by todays world are simply not as great, and as a result, a TV show updated to be "relevant" today's world is simply not as scary as one influenced by the Cold War and World War II before it.

Thinking about this, it really struck me that all this talk about "unprecedented threats" and color coded terrorist alerts are just completely overblown. If there is an existential threat to our way of life, it comes from climate change and our dependance on world-destroying fossil fuels, not from terror cells with silly facial hair. All Al Queda can do is murder a few thousand people. Sad, but you'd take it over nuclear annhilation or fascism any day of the week. They're certainly not a threat of a magnitude that should provoke us to restricting civil liberties, spying on our own citizens, or resorting to torture or imprisonment without trial. If those extreme steps were not necessary when faced with the Soviet Union, why on earth does anyone theink they are necessary now?

Apparently they're giving them out like Halloween candy now

2009-10-09T22:10:00.003-05:00

You could call it a WTF moment. I mean, I like Barack Obama and all, really I do. But a Nobel Peace Prize? For what? He hasn't done anything yet. His goals are right on, and if he managed a peaceful resolution to the Iran nuclear confrontation, finds a way to get out of Afghanistan without it collapsing back into full scale civil war, negotiates an arms reduction treaty with Russia, passes climate change legislation and negotiates a global climate treaty, and facilitates a lasting peace agreement in the Middle East creating a Palestinian state, then yeah, sure I suppose he'd deserve to be a Nobel laureate. But he hasn't done any of that stuff yet, and do you really believe all of those things will actually get done? Because I didn't think the prize was just for good intentions.

Hell, in some ways Bush had fairly good intentions too, his means were just awful and anti-human. The President of the United States has a lot of power to make things better, so a lot should be expected before you give one a Nobel. I mean, aren't we still at war? Aren't we still holding a bunch of "detainees" we basically kidnapped and now have no idea what to do with, at Guantanamo and CIA facilites around the planet? Or did that change in the past week while I've been too preoccupied with the baseball playoffs and my own health issues and vacation plans to pay any attention to the news?

The President himself, from my inbox:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.

That is why I've said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.

I'm glad he realizes he doesn't deserve it, but I wish he had declined it, saying, "I am puzzled by this decision" or something like that. It's not that I don't like Obama or support most of his goals, I just think giving the award out like this devalues the award more than honors the recipient.

I understand that you have to give out the Oscar every year even when there were no good movies, and maybe nobody has done that much for peace in the last year. It's certainly possible, you certainly hear a lot more about people blowing stuff up than working for peace. But obviously, if stuff is on fire, the media will be there. But I don't think that changes my point, if you give the award out without it being earned, then you end up devaluing the award.

It's Official. We Suck.

2009-10-02T21:47:00.005-05:00

Where's Mine?

Wow, wasn't expecting that. After all that buildup and the Olympics issue dominating local political discussion for months, we don't even make the final round. Not even sure what to say about this as I started the day really expecting to win. I'm not sure why, a week ago I would have told you, "it's Rio, silly," but this week I've been feeling certain it was going to happen.

Sorta like this time last year when I thought the Cubs were going to take the pennant for sure.

Here in Chicago, there will be ramifications, a loss of confidence in the city's future, and questions about whether our Mayor for Life will actually run again in 2011 (I'm guessing yes, after a period of introspection). And that was a lot of money that won't get spent here, I was hopeful that an Olympics would lead to increased federal spending on infrastructure here. Probably that was a pipe dream anyway.

On the national stage, however, this is probably a good thing for the Obama administration, since the Chicago 2016 was basically a committee of Obama's friends and political backers. Any scandal or inefficiency or delay or nepotism would have been dragged around by the Right and the Press in an attempt to sully the President's reputation with it. Too much cronyism could have been turned into Obama's Whitewater scandal. Now Chicago 2016 as a story will die out in a few weeks. Not that I think the bid was more corrupt than any other - Madrid's bid was headed by former IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch Torelló, Marquess of Samaranch, a former Franco crony who's no stranger to scandal (remember how Salt Lake City bought the games in 2002?). The reason Madrid lasted so long was basically that Samaranch has more clout with the IOC than just about any other figure, and his personal appeal carried more weight than Obama and Lula da Silva put together. So why did Madrid fail to win if they were so connected? Probably their bid was not good enough on the merits.

And the same was true of our bid. Honestly, it lacked vision. Daniel Burnham, the author of the 1909 Plan of Chicago who is regarded as a founding father hereabouts, is famous for saying "make no little plans" (among other things). But this plan, it was little. Since Burnham's day, Chicago has been home to Big Architecture, and its build environment is marked (some might say blighted) by all of the architectural ideas that have come and gone since - Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Stanley Tigerman, Rem Koolhaas, and all of their pallid imitators. Beijing was almost a dare, with its Water Cube and Bird's Nest. But the Chicago 2016 bid, as it was, lacked vision, and lacked the memorable design that would impress our image on the world. Instead, we got a low budget bid with a disposable stadium and largely existing facilities and infrastructure. We weren't even proposing much in the way of enhancements to public transit. And I'm telling your, our transportation infrastructure can't even handle a Cubs game and a drizzle at the same time. The Olympics? Fageddaboudit.

So, it's probalby sour grapes, but I'm feeling like maybe it's better not to win rather than to be unfavorably compared to Beijing.

Today's earworm: Chicago by the Tossers has been stuck in my head all day. For a song I have only heard once, live, it sure is sticky.

Well that didn't work

2009-09-22T23:30:00.002-05:00

Apparently today was world car free day. In practice, traffic was awful, the worst it's been since the traffic jams returned after Labor Day. So bad I abandoned my first route to work in favor of a second route that ended up being worse and resulted in my being late to work on a day I was sure I'd be early. The bitch of it is, Chicago's transportation infrastructure really is more or less adequate for the core task of getting people to work in the morning and home in the evening. That's why traffic really isn't that bad over the summer, when most rush hour drivers are actually on their way to work, and a large share of workbound commuters are using public transportation (my office, unfortunately for me, is not located in the central business district, but in another neighborhood, much like the one where I live except less affordable - and being neither downtown nor suburban, it features neither easy transit access from home nor parking). But every year once Labor Day weekend is over, the horrible traffic meltdown returns. The reason? Public school is back in session.

I haven't heard this discussed enough when people talk about planning, or at all really. But the largest cause of Chicago's horrible traffic jams is people driving their kids to school, not people driving to work. For one thing, if you work in the central business district you can probably find another way to work other than driving yourself alone in your personal automobile. The infrastructure, as I said above, is designed to help you achieve this. But faced with abysmal test scores and the resulting environment of selective enrollment and charter schools, few middle class parents are actually allowing their kids to be (mis)educated at their local public school, which is typically right down the street from their houses. Instead, they have picked the public or private school they feel best fits their children's needs and yet will allow them to attend, regardless of where it's located, and then resigned themselves to driving them to school every day and then driving to work. Part of the reason is the relative rarity of yellow school buses in Chicago - but then, how do you design a bus route that transports kids from neigborhoods all over the city to your school? And the existing public transit system, while adequate for transporting workers from many neighborhoods to work, do not allow for crosstown transportation of school children in less than two hours if neither the child's home nor school are centrally located. Such a route would typically involve several bus transfers as well, potentially leaving school age children standing by a busy street in a crime ridden neighorhood for up to 20 minutes several times a day - not an ideal situation.

So our substandard education system is directly negatively impacting the environment and our quality of life in a way most of us don't seem to recognize or understand. There's probably some deeper insightful point to make here about modern society or something, but I'm tired and I just don't have it in me.

Sprain - Part 2

2009-09-10T21:32:00.002-05:00

Right on cue, the big evil corporation that "provides" me with health insurance has decided to screw me over. It's as if someone out there (probably an evil web-based insurance company AI) heard me typing

And anyway, while it will be great to have a public insurance option to cover the uninsured, I have no intention of ever using it for myself while I can get employer-subsidized private health care.

and thought to themselves, "hey, it sounds like we're not doing enough to make this guy suffer." So within 24 hours I get a call from the physical therapist's office.

Tuesday morning I had my initial PT session with a friendly therapist named Jamie. Basically, she repeated the stress tests the Sports Medicine Genie performed last week (Does this hurt? How about this? Okay, how about this?), then attempted to yank my arm all the way out of its socket. Oddly enough, that part felt pretty good once I got used to it, since it apparently took the pressure off my bursitis for a moment. Seriously, as in "my bursitis is acting up." When did i get so old?Afterwards, she gave me some odd activities to do at home, including dangling a can of soup from my limp arm and making circles in the air with it, and pulling on a giant rubber band, and scheduled me for several more weeks worth of appointments.

Today they called and said my insurance company had told them that I didn't have a primary care physician on file, and that therefore my referral from my primary care physician was not on file. Since this made no damn sense at all, I called my insurance company. After spending ten minutes or so in voice mail hell, I reached a fairly rude woman in Plano, Texas who told me that my primary care physician was in their other HMO network, but not in my HMO network. I asked why they were mentioning this now, since I've been on this plan for nearly two years and have gone to the doctor several times within that span. She said - seriously - that they have a computer program which randomly selects claims for . . . I wasn't taking notes, but I think the term she used was adjudication. She said that most claims were paid automatically, but a certain number were randomly selected to be scrutinized and my number came up. Now that they've actually looked at the file, they have noticed for the first time that my primary care physician is not someone in their network, and now I have to pick a new one. Since my doctor is not my doctor according to the insurance company, her referral to the physical therapist is not valid. In fact, she said none of the claims should have been paid in the past, but we would just "start over going forward."

This is, on top of everything else, clearly a lie. I mean, they way my doctor got to be assigned as my primary physician was, I picked this plan out of three offered by my employer, I looked up my doctor on the insurance company's Web site, then called the insurance company's registration number and dialed in the ID number I found next to my doctor's name on the insurance company's Web site. So clearly, at one point my doctor was part of my network and subsequently she has been dropped. But according to Texas lady we have always been at war with Eastasia. . .

What I suspect happened is that the insurance company was happy to ignore me as long as my premiums kept getting paid and I didn't need any particularly expensive care. Once I was injured, they went through my records looking for a reason to delay or deny care, hoping if they caused me enough trouble I would go away.

So Annoying Texas Woman told me to get a new doctor and ask them to give me a new referral to the physical therapist. This, of course, is never going to happen. None of the doctors offices I spoke to today refer to the clinic I went to on Tuesday, they all refer only to specialist within their own hospital networks. Evidently some kind of elaborate kickback scheme is in place where by specialists bribe medical practices to refer to them, possibly the doctors are part owners of the firms etc. Anyway I will have to go to an appointment with a new primary physician next week, who will probably refer me to a new Sports Medicine specialist within his own network, who will then repeat the same examination again (Does this hurt? How about this? Okay, how about this?), and then, a couple weeks later I will start physical therapy again at a new, less conveniently located clinic. So several people will get paid unnecessarily, and the insurance company won't end up saving any money by harassing me.

Of course, my shoulder will continue to hurt like a bitch in the meantime, but nobody in the medical industrial complex seems too concerned about that. Some "centrist" politicians have raised concerns that if health care reform passes with a public insurance plan attached, this will be "unfair" competition that may drive private health insurers out of business. To me, that seems like a feature, not a bug. I mean, do people seriously think adding Annoying Texas Woman to the unemployment rolls is a reason not to do reform? Again I will direct your attention to this:

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an
appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic
clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching
shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same
afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an
operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and
said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

America has "the best health care system in the world?" Whoever told you that is your enemy.

Hope?

2009-09-09T23:15:00.003-05:00

So I hear the President made a speech tonight.

Full disclosure - 0ne thing I regret about taking a couple years off from blogging is that I didn't really write down anything about the whole campaign thing. It's sort of a damn shame because I started this blog to write about the election we lost and everything it dredged up about America, culture, values, religion etc. Then obviously I kinda got sidetracked. But I think the 2008 election cycle, while it certainly dredged up a lot of garbage as these things do, also revealed a lot of promising things. For my part a knocked on a lot of doors - Iowa, this time, Dubuque and Waterloo, places I discovered I really like. I wish I had pictures to post. The energy and tone of the campaign, as well as the stated political goals, were a profound mix of inspiration and practicality, the right message and messengers at the right time. I say this to let you know that I'm a sort of a diehard supporter, to give you context for what may well be a solid week of critical posts.

Because right now I'm frustrated with the guy. Not really with the policies - outside of the refusal to investigate torture, which I do believe is wrong and sets a dangerous precedent. But honestly I haven't given much thought to foreign policy and security issues in the last few months. On domestic policy, I'm actually lined up pretty closely with the Administration. For example, unlike lots of vocal lefties, I'm glad the Administration is not pushing for "single payer" health insurance. I don't want "single payer." The country I'm vaguely familiar with using this approach is Canada. And while Canada's health care system is probably better that the US, that's only because our health care system is really lame. Canada has the second most expensive system per capita to the United States, and in other ways seems like it's better that the US but worse than every other industrialized democracy that is not the US. And in this country, if there's only one insurance provider in the country, you just know they're not going to pay for abortion services or indeed much reproductive health care at all. It's just too politically explosive here for a plan to ever pass which actually paid for that stuff. And that won't be the only health issue that gets to be used as a political football. Remember Terry Schiavo? And anyway, while it will be great to have a public insurance option to cover the uninsured, I have no intention of ever using it for myself while I can get employer-subsidized private health care. I hate the bureaucracy (yes, Virginia, there would be less bureaucracy with a government plan, look in your heart you know it's true if you've ever tangled with an HMO or PPO over what they will deign to pay for) but like having choices.

No, what actually is pissing me off about the Administation is how incompetent these people appear to be. Which is frustrating because while I had tons of policy differences with them as well, the rank incompetence was really what drove me batty about the Bush Administration as well. I'll be bitching a bit about implementation tomorrow if I get the chance, but today what sticks in my craw has been the shocking political incompetence, a complete misreading of the political currents in which policy proposals need to swim, and from a team that really seemed to understand these things just a short year ago.

Here are some facts that everyone who pays attention to politics should be aware of:

Ever since Clinton the American right has thrived by using cultural identity politics to convince a solid majority of white people that liberals are dangerous "other," alien, subversive, "anti-American," possible traitorous. The Bush "Administration" used this as a key element of its governing strategy. There was no reason to believe Republicans would stop this behavior in the minority. It's all they've got right now, frankly.
Decent health care reform that gave everyone guaranteed coverage and ensured that no one would go bankrupt because of illness, lose their coverage because they lost their jobs, or be denied coverage because of an existing health condition would be extremely popular. It would change the nature of the relationship that Americans would have with their government in ways that would not benefit Republicans or the Conservative Movement. They know this, people. To answer the perennial political question, they are evil, not stupid. Had the Obama Administration been able to pass comprehensive health care reform quickly during the "honeymoon" period Democrats would have stood to pick up even larger majorities around the country in 2010, and go into post-census legislative redistricting from a position of great strength. In other words, they'd be in political power for a generation. No sane Republican politician would allow this to happen if they had anything to say about it.
Following on from the point above, a bipartisan health care bill is impossible. Hell, the GOP wasn't even willing to go along with a bipartisan economic stimulus package. It had to be substantially weakened and made much less effective (by reducing the amount of aid to states, thus forcing pro-cyclical cuts to state budgets to offset new Federal spending) to get the tiny sliver of Republican support it needed to escape the Senate - and one of the Republicans who voted for it had to switch parties afterwards to avoid losing his primary. It's just not in the self interest of any Republican politician to support a Democratic health care reform bill.
Republicans are therefore going to try to kill any proposal, attack it as Socialistic or Death Care or whatever. This is what they do. Making concessions to make the bill more palatable is just not going to work, they are going to make the same attacks whether they are true or not. Whatever it is, they are going to call it evil, immoral and Communist. Center-left Third Way proposals are going to be attacked with the same vitriol as more robustly liberal proposals. It's not about the policy, it's about holding together and expanding their coalition based on cultural identity politics.
The right lost the last election and lost pretty badly. So while there are not many possible legislative parters on the right, the right is somewhat marginalized in Congress, with both houses dominated by a Democratic coalition of the center and the left. The only compromises that need to be made are among Democrats. Attempts by the Administration and even more so by Senate "moderates" to build a coalition including some Republicans have been foolish, not only because the GOP has not incentive to play along, but because these attempts have alienated many Democrats, angry about being cut out of some theoretical center-right legislative alliance. The real goal of Senate "bipartisanship" has been to falsely cast the position of these "moderates" as the conciliatory center of the debate, when in fact they represent its right flank. The real compromise needs to be worked out between Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh on the right and Bernie Sanders and the Progressive Caucus on the left. The President's original blueprint for health reform occupied such a spot in the center, not the center of the national "debate" but the center of the Democratic party. Attempts to "compromise" with the GOP are really attempts by the most conservative Democrats to bring the plan closer to their own position. And the Administration got played by these guys and lost control of the agenda.

So I hope the President gave a good speech tonight. I don't know, because I forgot about the time zone thing and tuned in at 8 pm, right as he was finishing. But whether or not he did, he needs to figure out, and quickly, that it's the Democrats' right flank he needs to be putting pressure on to make concessions, not the left flank. And if they won't get 0n board, then screw 'em. Who cares if we lose those seats. If they won't vote for the President's agenda, then "we" don't have those seats anyway. And we don't need them. Bush's Medicare expansion passed the Senate with something like 54 votes. It's not true that 60 votes are needed. And in a year nobody will care how a bill was passed, only if it's a good bill that helps Americans get their health care needs filled. Because it's not how popular a law is on the day it passes that matters, it's how popular the law is on election day. And on core practical issues like the economy and health insurance, the public knows more about what's working than the isolated media elite do. To win on this turf, you need effective policies. Winning the news cycle on a Thursday fourteen months before the next national election isn't actually worth very much. But policies that work matter. And if my side is incapable of delivering policies that work, then they will deserve to lose.

Get Off My Lawn!

2009-09-08T08:54:00.002-05:00

Drove this morning through all the back to school traffic. This system of roads is such a socialist crock. I mean why do we need the government building all these roads? They're obviously not building them in the right places, am I right or am I right? Or what's all this traffic about? Look, individual citizens are perfectly capable of paving their own driveways, and maintaining the sidewalks on their stretch of street, right? I mean except for that guy who lives at the corner of North Shore and Bosworth . . . So there's no reason to think they can't build their own damn expressways if they like them so much.

So that's my plan - Just let people build their own damn roads. With the government involved, because you want to go visit your grandma in Cleveland, I have to pay part of the bill! And that's socialism! Socialism is bad, people! Socialism kills! If you want to drive to Cleveland, build your own damn road! I don't want to pay for it anymore! I'm never going to drive to Cleveland! I don't like Cleveland! It's too damn cold.

/sarcasm - I think.

Sprain

2009-09-01T22:47:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I went to the doctor to have my shoulder looked at. This is very unusual behavior for me. Normally I avoid doctors the way a pickpocket avoids the police. I don't think they're going to do anything really bad do me, but there's no reason to go looking for trouble. So evidently (and I'm really not "in touch with" my body, so I don't have much more to go on then you do) I was in a great deal of pain on Thursday when I actually called the doctor and asked for an appointment. My regular physician directed me to call a sports medicine guy directly and make an appointment, and foolishly I believed this meant I should call the sports medicine guy directly and make an appointment. So I did.

ntense nausea inducing pain aside, there was no way they could see me before Monday, so Monday it was. By Monday the pain had subsided quite a bit, but I'd already asked for part of the day off and couldn't bear the thought of actually working instead (it's been an intense month at the office) so I went anyway. At first i did a double take when I was given the address, since it was the street address of my son's pediatrician and I had never seen any trace of a sports medicine specialist loitering around the waiting room amongst the snot-nosed toddlers and desperate looking couples huddled with their tiny baby-in-Graco-pods. But I went there somewhat secure in the belief that my doctor would not send me on a complete wild goose chase.

Sure enough, when I walked through the front door, I noticed that the small "airlock" anteroom between the automated glass doors to the outside and the automated glass doors to the waiting room, there was an elevator door. This struck me as odd, because before yesterday I would have sworn up and down that the doctor's office was in an ugly modern one story brick medical building. But I pressed "up" which was my only choice, and rode the old creaky elevator up to another floor. It deposited me in a hallway with no markings. I walked down to the end of the hall and found a medical practice, but not the one I was looking for. Walking back to the elevator, I noticed a black sign with tiny white writing on it next to the elevator door. My sports medicine guy's name was one of those listed, and the number 202. I looked back down the hallway, the place I'd found was marked 210. About a third of the way down the hall was the only other door, which was so nondescript I'd assumed it was a supply closet. But when I peered in, I saw a small waiting room with a receptionist sitting behind a glass window. On the window was a small sign that read simply "202." Next to the window was a door that led to another hallway and more offices and examining rooms than could possibly fit in a supply closet on the roof of of the pediatrician's office. This had to be the place.

I thought I was doing well, arriving ten minutes early and having already downloaded the requisite paperwork from the Web and filled it out in advance. But I was greeted by an attractive and exceptionally tall woman of indeterminate Central Asian ancestry who informed me that while I had been referred here by my doctor, she hadn't given me a referral, which meant that I was missing a specific piece of paper in my file. She told me if I didn't have that specific piece of paper in my file before the doctor saw me then my insurance company would refuse to pay the bill. Since out here in the real world the only reason I came to the magic sports medicine closet was because I'd been told to by my doctor, I had to assume that the only purpose for this specific piece of paper to exist was to create a frivolous pretext for the insurance company to deny a certain number of claims. I ended up sitting in the waiting room for about an hour while the two doctors' offices called back and forth and debated exactly which piece of paper would convince the insurance company to reluctantly pay its bills.

Before I found out about the paper scam, I had believed that the mysterious elevator and magic sports medicine supply closet were only visible to patients with a referral due to a spell cast by demonic insurance company lawyers. But that was clearly delusional thinking on my part. I mean, seriously, why would the insurance company do that? It would go against their entire business model. They want you to see the guy without a referral, precisely so they can deny your claim! No, it's clear to me now that the Sports Medicine Genie has cast a spell on his own magic supply closet to conceal himself from potential patients whose insurance companies won't pay him. An elaborate scheme to be sure, but easier that trying to collect on medical bills from public employees whose insurance plans have denied their claims.

Speaking of the Sports Medicine Genie, he was a shorter, friendly, shaven headed man also of indeterminate origin, but probably not the same indeterminate origin as his lovely assistant, who interviewed me first. After I told her the story of my injury (which amounts to "my shoulder hurts, I have no idea why or for how long"), she left for a whild and then brough in the Genie and repeated my story to him, verbatim, as if I were not there. After which he poked and prodded me for a while and made me perform what amounted to Stupid Human Tricks for a few minutes, some of which I'm convinced he was just doing to make me look ridiculous so the two of them could have a laugh at my expense after work when the walked down the street to have a beer at the Old Town Ale House. In the end, he told me I have a rotator cuff sprain, an injury I associate with pitchers who have just been signed to multi-year deals with no-trade clauses, not with thirtysomething men who pull their flailing two year olds out of the carseat the wrong way. I need physical therapy to make the ball of my shoulder joint stay in the socket the right way, or so I'm told. That sounds painful, but if it makes my shoulder thing go away I suppose i'll do it.

He wrote a prescription that's only good at one particular clinic, at which his assistant is also employed. Now tell me how that works - doesn't it sound to you like he's referring to a business he also has a stake in? I'm not saying he's not right about my particular case, or that he personally is doing anything corrupt. I would never imply such a thing about a powerful genie who has an office in a magic supply closet. Who knows what other supernatural deeds he's capable of if aroused? But this kind of situation seems rife with potential conflict of interest, and incentives that perversely reward prescribing unnecessary treatment. No wonder the insurance gnomes are reluctant to pay. . .

I told you that story to tell you this one, as Bill Cosby used to say. (Still does, for all I know.)

Today I was reading blogs online (apparently I felt my blood pressure was getting too low) and I came across an excellent piece on health care in the Washington Post. And it ain't often you come across an excellent piece in the WaPo these days, not since they fired most of their reporters and replaced them with Random Non-Sequiter Conservative Opinion Piece Generator Software (sometimes referred to as "George Will") designed by the American Enterprise Institute. The piece is called 5 Myths About Health Care Around the World and you should read it, because there's a lot of babble and blather floating around the mediaverse about health insurance and health care reform, and you probably don't actually know as much about different systems of health care provision as you think you do. I didn't.

At the beginning of Page 2 I came across this gem:

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an
appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic
clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching
shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same
afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an
operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and
said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

What huh? I try to imagine any American health insurance company allowing that. The mind boggles. And yet:

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to
use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to
any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits
such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You
pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Yet this system is cheaper than what we have in the United States, and results in a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality. Like just about every developed country. But isn't the Japanese system, you know, all Socialist and un-American? Actually,

many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and
Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private
hospitals and private insurance plans.

Bet you didn't know that either. I happen to favor a "public option" as part of a health care reform bill, primarily because I think it will achieve the same result as subsidizing private insurance coverage, only cheaper. After all, insurance companies are going to find a way to turn some share of a public subsidy into pure profit by raising prices to match the subsidies, which will make publicly funded private insurance more expensive than it needs to be. But a fancy new plan with a fancy new name like AmeriCare isn't the point of health reform. It's just a means. The goals are:

Guaranteed Issue: this means insurance plans would have to let you buy in, and would have to cover "pre-existing conditions," which is a good thing gramatically as well as health policy wise. I mean, what purpose is that "pre-" actually serving there? Why not just call them "existing" conditions? And that's just one example of the kind of waste that's built into our current system that could easily be eliminated.
Community Rating: that means that plans would not only have to give you insurance even though you're sick, they wouldn't be able to charge you rates much higher than everyone else. But wouldn't they lose money on you if they had to do that? you ask. It's called risk pooling, people. Another word sometimes used for this concept is insurance.
National Minimum Benefits: Right now there is a patchwork of state regulations governing what kind of minimum benefits have to be included in basic plans. This results in a near monopoly in some states, but if you allowed for insurance plans to compete nationally without minimum standards on the national level, all the plans would just move to the states with the wimpiest regulations, like the credit card companies do. This would prevent situations like the one we had after my son was born, where we had a health care plan which had an annual budget for well baby care which was so small it was used up by the first round of immunizations. (We were able to delay the third round until after the new year when we could switch to a new plan. But I'm still pissed we had a year where we paid for a health care plan that refused to pay for any actual health care. I'm looking at you, Blue Cross PPO.)

These are the actual issues that the media should be talking about. Instead, they continue with horse race coverage like they did during the election. Who's up? Who's down? Who's cheating on his wife this week? Is it bias? Or is it just the result of cost cutting moves in which media outlets fired all their investigative reporters and replaced them with cheaper, easier to maintain evil robots. Or with bloviating center-right talking heads. So hard to tell the difference these days.

Make it a Bud Light!

2009-08-05T21:38:00.002-05:00

Oh, c'mon now. Is the American public so stupid as to fall for this crap? Don't answer that, I'm trying to hang on to my last shred of patriotism here. But please, aren't we over that "I'm defined by my consumer choices" garbage? Do some of us really still think membership in the "elite" is defined by eating arugula (in which case the elite is heavily concentrated in Midwestern farm states . . . ) rather than, I don't know, the posession of unfair, unearned power and privilege to manipulate outcomes to one's own advantage at the expense of the non-elite?

Okay, now that I've made my obligatory disclaimer, I'm goint to dive into this morass myself, since like our national media I am cursed with an attention span too short to actually learn anything about a substansive issue. I am talking, of course, about the faux brouhaha about the President's choice of beer, and the respective beer choices of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department the other day at the "beer summit" to discuss race relations. Gates and Crowley, you might remember, had the misfortune of getting into a heated argument that resulted in Gates' being arrested at an opportune moment to be used by those forces opposed to national health care reform to change the subject. I won't comment on the arrest itself because I really don't give a shit. I am neither dumb enough to yell at a cop, nor naive enough to believe that a white suburban cop is going to treat a black guy the same as a white guy. I suspect that both men would annoy me immensely if I ever had a beer with them, actually.

No, what's interesting here is the beer. Not the fact that Crowley had a Blue Moon (American-Canadian, but Belgian Style), Gates changed his choice from Jamaican brewed Red Stripe to Sam Adams, and the President had a Bud Light. No, the interesting thing is that someone is taking this seriously enough that Steve Dahl is blogging - er, writing - about it in a prominant location in today's Tribune. First of all, there's the fact that the Trib has Dahl writing about what passes for "serious news" at all. I mean, you have to give Dahl props for Disco Demolition. That was awesome. But causing a really hilarious riot one time does not make one a real journalist. Beyond that, though, there's the content. The assumption that the choice of one's beer is meant to make a statement about oneself. That may be true, but what difference does it make where the beer was made? It seems obvious that there are three classes of beer, mass market domestic, import, and microbrew. They mark one, respectively, as working class or faux working class "regular guy," worldly/striving middle class, and beer snob/wanker. I count myself firmly in the latter category, most of my favorite beers are from microbreweries in Michigan. If I were invited to a National Beer Summit, I think I'd bring Bell's Lager of the Lakes. Sort of a classy, understated, self assured beer. Although I'd never turn up my nose at a Guiness. Mmm, Guiness. But I digress.

The important thing here isn't that Blue Moon is a Coors product half owned by a Canadian firm, it's that it's a Belgian-style microbrew and Crowley is trying to show he's a sophisticated guy from Cambridge and not a dumb thug (the two things are obviously not mutually exclusive in the real world, but bear with me, we're talking about the Mediaverse here, AKA the Dumbosphere). I'm pretty sure this is the case, because Blue Moon does not actually taste good. It's way too fizzy and sharply bitter, the kind of thing you don't really like but all the cool kids are drinking it and you drink it to be cool, not realizing that all the cool kids are doing the same thing.

The Red Stripe is from the Caribbean, symbolizing black power or someing I guess, although I've always associated it with punk rock shows, which is where I am when I drink the stuff. Or drank, I guess, since I never get out to punk rock shows anymore. For some reason. My toddler would probably love them, and even though he doesn't have hearing loss now, he pretends to whenever I say something he doesn't want to hear, like "Bath Time!" So the only reason not to take him to see the Bad Brains or whoever's uncool and antisocial these days is that it would be past his bed time. . . Red Stripe, in my opinion, tasted better than Bud Light but not enough better to justify the price difference. Sam Adams is ordinary but pretty good beer, the brand credited with starting the whole movement towards brewing beer that actually tastes good, right here in America! I'm not sure what Gates is saying here, it's either "I'm really a sophisticated Boston college professor, not a Black Power radical at all, just another case of mistaken identity!" or maybe it's "I would like a beer that actually tastes good." Nah.

As for the Bud Light, I am reminded of those happy superficial times a decade ago when people were saying they wanted to vote for the candidate for President they'd most like to have a beer with (never mind that by all acounts night that started by having a beer with George W Bush, back before he quit drinking, might well end with him punching you in the face). While that was an inane moment in our history, I remember it fondly if only because i did have a beer one time with Barack Obama, back when he was neither President nor US Senator, but a state senator representing my old district who had one foot in the upcoming Senate primary. He came to one of the great parties my wife's nonprofit organization used to throw before the economy got so depressing. He was funny and engaging, and didn't seem like a normal Bidenesque windbag politician at all. In fact, I changed my prospective vote from Chico, whom I didn't really like that much anyway but I knew someone on his campaign, to Obama as a result of having met him. Actually I told the cab driver on the way home I had just met the first Black President and then threw up on my beautiful handknit scarf, but that's another story. The point of this story, to the extent that there is still a point here somewhere, is that the guy was drinking Bud Light. Back then, trust me on this, the media was not covering what beer the state senator from Hyde Park was drinking. So my own suspicion is that he really likes the stuff, for some reason. The Bud Light motto could be "beer that doesn't let taste get in the way of getting your buzz on." Bland, bland, bland, bland, blah.

Unrepresented in the whole National Beer Debate kerfluffle is the fourth estate of beer, which we generally refer to as "the cheap stuff" or perhaps "piss." Milwaukee's Beast is perhaps the best known brand of the cheap stuff - Icehouse comes to mind as well. But the best loved brand of the cheapstuff here on the North Side is Old Style. Hell, the neighborhood dive bars don't even publicly display their names half the time, they just hang out a white sign with the Old Style logo on it, and "cerveza fría" or a bunch of consonants that allegedly say the same thing in Polish. (Sorry buddy, that doesn't translate as "free beer." Better luck next week). It's the perfect drink for a North Sider because a) it's not really from here, it's from Wisconsin, b) it has sort of a foul taste but we're proud of it anyway, and c) it can often be found sloshing around the bleachers at Wrigley field. So it's sort of like that clueless but friendly guy who lives in your condo building and engages you in bizarre conversation while you're trying to take out the trash. But Obama would never be seen drinking the stuff. It's one thing to be faced with the dilemma of looking like either an effete snob or a poseur wannabe regular guy. But a Cubs fan? Never.

Why Not Al

2009-06-30T21:50:00.002-05:00

Well, Why not?

In a further sign that our society is blurring the line between the media and reality, Al Franken has been declared the winner of last year's Minnesota Senate campaign by the Minnesota Supreme Court and will be sworn in soon as the 100th Senator. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy about this. I mean, Norm Coleman always struck me as a serious wanker, and worse, he's a Republican. But a couple things bother me about this. Not least the fact that from my perusal of Blogistan, it seems to me that all Republicans and conservatives were quite convinced that Coleman's arguments were valid without really knowing what they were, and and all Democrats and progressives seemed to accept that Franken's arguments were true, without really knowing what they were. This constant wrangling and litigating over elections without giving much thought to who actually got the most votes and whether that should matter makes me worry that in the future the United States might end up dysfunctioning a lot like places like Honduras, in which all parties decide politics is a zero sum struggle for power, the rule of law be damned.

But in addition, there's the strange case of "Why Not Me?" the 2000 masterpiece of political parody documenting Franken's fictional rise as a candidate, election, and subsequent fall from grace in a storm of meth addiction and mental illness. It's a good indication of why I'm not a real blogger that I searched the condo this evening and was incapable of locating this book and finding a suitable excerpt. At this point I've given up. But one piece I remember was his sort of prescient bit about winning the fundraising battle by operating a 900 number that combined campaign information and phone sex. Now that's what I call social networking. Needless to say upon reading the book, which I highly recommend because it's laugh out loud funny, I said to myself, "well this guarantees that Al Franken will never run for political office."

Bearing in mind that this is the same state that once elected a professional wrestler as Governor, this is still prettyfar out there. But about that whole Jesse Ventura thing: I once asked my uncle, a longtime Minnesotan, about how Ventura managed to get elected, and he admitted that he'd voted for the wrestler himself. I asked him what the hell he was thinking. We were on the deck of a cruse ship in the Carribean, believe it or not, during what members of my family have since come to refer to as "the Titanic Incident." He balanced his Cuban cigar on the railing and took a sip of his Manhattan. Finally he said, "you don't understand who else was running."

In this case I think the same logic applies. Welcome Senator Franken. Why not?

Naked Hiking Day

2009-06-24T21:59:00.003-05:00

Not quite sure what to think about this. The governor of South Carolina disappeared for several days. His wife indicated that the family didn't know where he was, and reports were that nobody in state government did either, yet he had not taken steps to have the Lt. Gov or somebody step in and assume executive powers.

So obviously I figured he must be in rehab for his crack addiction or something, and people were covering for him. He does seem a bit . . . addled, so I figured a little rehab might be in order.

But then, we heard that he'd gone for the weekend to hike the Appalachian Trail. Now that made sense, too. I mean, I see why he'd be lying about hiking this weekend, seeing as how Sunday was Naked Hiking Day. If Gov. Sanford had really been hiking the Trail this weekend in secret, it seemed likely that he'd been doing so in the buff. Oddly, this made me like the guy a little more, although it also made me grateful I wasn't hiking anywhere near him, since he comes off as kinda creepy, you know?

Then, of course, he throws a press conference (that he was 45 minutes late for) in which he claims he was in Argentina having an affair with a "dear, dear friend" he met on the Internet. With whom he apparently spent "hours" driving along the shore in Buenos Aires, even though there are barely 2 miles of waterfront highway in the city. How slow was he driving? Or perhaps we should be asking, is "driving along the shore" some kind of conservative politico slang for getting a blow job in a parked car?

What I do know is this is two scandals in two weeks involing hypocritical conservative politicians who claim that letting gay people marry each other would undermine the institution of marriage. Ensign and Sanford belong in the same club as Newt Gingrich, who famously left his wife while she was recovering from cancer to marry his mistress, whom he later also divorced for a younger woman with whom he was having an affair, and then converted to Catholicism and claimed that the drive for same sex marriage was undermining the institution. I've got news for you guys - something is, in fact, undermining the institution of marriage, and it's - you guys!

But don't be sad, conservatives. Here's a fine, reasonable response from our good buddy Grover Norquist to give you some perspective:

“I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican
Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford, he joked, “I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.”

You see? Everything's cool. Because the sexual exploits of middle aged white guys are not morally offensive, the way, say, a happily married gay couple would be. It's just guys out having fun. No harm, no foul. Because personal "morality" is a construct designed to keep low status, unimportant people under control to keep the social order intact in order to preserve the power and privileges of the elite. There's no reason to keep the elite under control, for heaven's sake. They can do whatever they want to whomever they want to. That's the whole point. The only thing offensive here is the unfairness of the Liberal Media in being mean to these guys. Leave poor Mark Sanford alone!

More health care bitching

2009-06-23T22:53:00.002-05:00

You'd think that a policy which has the support of more than 70% of the public, that the President ran on as a candidate and won, would have a decent chance of becoming law. Unfortunatelu, several "Democratic" Senators seem to suffer from a compulsion to split the difference between what the public wants and the maximalist demands of big corporate donors. As a result, it's likely that health care reform will either not pass, or be so watered down that it will leave millions uninsured while failing to reduce costs. "But it will drive insurance companies out of business to offer an affordable, quality alternative" is actually taken as a legitimate argument by some of these clowns. This is bizarre - if firms can't compete because they are more bureaucratic and topheavy than the public sector, than, um, they suck. So why should I care if they get outcompted?

America Ain't Ready for Reform

2009-06-19T22:02:00.003-05:00

At heart, I think people - or at least sane people - all want the same things. Among these are absulute power over everything, and to live forever and never die. Also love, sex, tasty food, and victory for your local sports team etc. but I really feel that much of human motivation is a semi-conscious groping for immortality and absolute power.

Now absolute power, as far as it goes, the problem is as the movie says - "there can be only one." Since the odds are slim that it would be you, most of us in the modern world have decided that it's better nobody than somebody else with the absolute power, and have arrived at some form of democracy as the second best answer.

But as for immortality, that's a different story. Back in Buddha's day the only choice was to achieve a state of mind where you could forget that old age, sickness and death existed, but in the modern world we are coming intriguingly close to finding a cure for these things.

Which brings us to health care reform. I just don't think we are defining this problem the right way. The way I usually hear it talked about is, "health care is too expensive," meaning too large a fraction of our economy is the health care system. I'm not sure what this means, and I don't think I agree. You don't hear too many people complain that too much of the economy is the automobile industry. You don't hear too many people complain that too much of the economy is the software industry. In fact, when these industries grow, it's "good news," and when they shrink and lay people off, it's "bad news." You don't even hear people complaining that too much of the economy is the adult entertainment industry. But health care? Too big. I don't get it.

I get that the fact that many people can't afford coverage.

I get that the US has crappier outcomes than other developed contries in terms of infant mortality, cancer survival, diabetes, etc. These things are legitimately problems.

If you re-state the problem as we're not getting our money's worth then I'll agree with you. But just saying "we're spending too much on health care," I don't get it. What are we supposed to be spending money on instead? Big screen TVs? Bigger houses? New cars? WHY?

The answer you usually get is that spending on these things is economic growth and creates jobs. But isn't the same true of health care? I mean, doctors and nurses and phlobotomists have jobs, don't they? Isn't that economic growth?

So here's my health care plan/economic recovery plan/stimulus package. We convert all of the slack resources of the economy into health care, and launch a Manhattan Project/Moonshot type program to eliminate old age, sickness and death. We could stop building homes and TVs and cars for a whild and just do medical research all the time, and treat all the sick and disabled people in the world with really top flight medical care.

You think I'm being facetious, but let me ask you this - do you think it's reasonable, or even sane, for Senators to be backing away from universal, quality health care because it's too expensive? The problem here is that the country has been infected by the conservative trope that people know how to spend their money better than the government does. I call bullshit. You don't see the government spending all its money on malt liquor and Swank magazine and conducting the people's business in a trailer, or an abandoned apartment building on West 69th, do you? The economy is in crisis because people did completely stupid shit with their money. Do you seriously think that individuals spending their money on Hummers and flat screen TVs, and then borrowing someone else's money to buy a mini mansion they know they'll never be able to make payments on, is a better use of their money than high quality health care for everyone? Would you rather add 30 productive years to your life, or be able to buy new games for your Play Station Portable? If you really think consumer spening is a better use of our resources than medicine, you are probably an idiot. Or a "libertarian."

How many libertarians does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. If they can't manufacture a light bulb themselves in their very own bomb shelter, they'll just live in the dark and be "free."

But I digress. The point is, health care uber alles. If you don't have your health, you don't have anything. Once Congress sees the light and enacts my health plan, I will release my plan for achieving absolute power. Keep watching this space for more details.

Loss

2009-06-17T22:56:00.003-05:00

My Great Aunt died on Friday. I don't have anything witty or clever to say about that. She lived in the same house in Brooklyn since the early 1960s. It was a refuge to me as a young child living not so far away in New Jersey. I felt at home there, safe and accepted for who I was in a way I never really felt back home in the burbs. She was my grandmother's sister, I guess you could say she was a surrogate grandmother at the time since my real grandparents were all back here in Illinois. She encouraged me to read and write and explore music. When I was very small, we had a book and an accompanying 45 record she made of children's songs - she had been an elementary school teacher before leaving the field to pursue acting. You may have seen her on TV - she did some recurring guest spots on several soaps, did a recurring sketch portraying the mother of a late night talk show host, and once did a commercial with Sean "P. Whatever" Combs. There were supposed to be more spots, but after the first one she heard some of his music and did not approve.

Back in the day, my aunt worked to integrate New York - she and a white friend would go to a restaurant and make reservations, then a black couple would show up later to claim their seats. You don't think of New York as a place that had restaurants that refused to serve black people, but that's because you don't really understand how much times have changed. Nobody young really does, I guess.

Although a young radical, in her old age she was the first person I ever heard describe herself as a "neocon" which she defined as "a liberal who's been mugged." While I don't agree with everything she ended up buying into, I completely understand her support for Giuliani. A longtime New Yorker who depended on the subway to get around, she felt intimidated by the lawlessness of the late 80s and early 90s and felt it limited her mobility and thus her ability to accept roles in the theater that kept her out late at night. Whatever you want to say about some of the methods used, by the late 90s everybody felt safe taking the subway home again. My values of tolerance and diversity do not extend to armed thugs and gangbangers either.

Even when we disagreed about stuff she was always interested to find out where I was coming from. If it weren't for her I wouldn't value my own mind enough to write about stuff. I wish I'd spent more time with her as an adult. I'm glad I got to see her several times the past decade since my brother's been in New York too.

Anyway, she was a big influence on me and now she's gone. The circumstances were awful and the way our society treats old people is often a disgrace, but honestly it wouldn't make much difference to me if she'd died under the "best" circumstances. Death sucks. I hear that healthy people are able to integrate death into their understanding of life, accept it and move on. I want no part of it. The human condition is a tragedy. The only way to understand it is through art, the thing itself is an incomprehensible mess.

She was strong. She was funny. She is gone, and the world is poorer for it.

Deep Thoughts on Iran

2009-06-17T06:56:00.001-05:00

Go Reds! Beat State!

Driving with Bonzo

2009-06-16T20:57:00.002-05:00

On our way home today, driving north past Wilson we passed the Buddhist temple in the building that used to house the Paul Revere Chapter of the American Legion. Every year they put up a giant lotus behind a statue of the Buddha to celebrate the Buddha's birthday. This was only a couple months ago, so Bonzo remembers. "Happy Birthday, Buddha!" he says as we drive by. Then he starts to sing the song we made up back when the birthday display was up:

Happy Birthday, Buddha.
Happy Birthday, Buddha.
Happy Birthday, Bald Fat Guy,
Happy Birthday, Buddha.

Hey, it's a long trip home some days. Anyway, at the end of the sound, Bonzo starts to blow, like he was blowing out candles. I tell him if you blow out candles for the Buddha, you have to ask, "Where does the flame go when I blow it out?"

"Where did it go?" he asks. "Where did it go? I don't know!"

Then: "There it is! It's right there! It's right there! I found it! I found the Buddha, it's RIGHT THERE!"

Many years from now, perhaps I will be enlightened.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZz

2009-05-17T22:20:00.002-05:00

That obnoxious noise is actually the sound of a website under construction. Soon there will be something here. Slowly the beast awakens. Slowly the dark ones return to their old citadels along the fringes of the World Wide Web. That which was dead shall rise again.

We have been busy. We have created life. Life! We made it from string cheese and carrots and pie and love. We have been busy nurturing it, raising it up, preparing it.

Now it wants things. "Daddy, we need a robot," says the creature, after watching the first third of WALL-E. So much he has yet to learn. I would tell him that robots look all shiny cool, but eventually they always rise up to destroy their creators, but he's to little to understand.

For now.

Election Day

2007-02-28T23:43:00.000-06:00

Wow, that was more interesting than I thought it would be.

Daley was re-elected with 71% of the vote. Scandals did hurt him – he won with 83% four years ago. He had no real opposition, Dorothy Brown (current Clerk of Courts) was a token opposition stand-in, and “Doc” Walls, former aide to Mayor Harold Washington, is extremely far Left, only gets 9% even here. Hell, even I couldn’t vote for him, if he had his way with affordable housing policy the condo I am buying would be illegal. He wants to ban the conversion of apartment buildings and require the construction of two affordable units for every market rate unit, or something like that. It wouldn’t create more housing, it would make sure that nothing got built at all, ever. The building where we're looking at buying, with smaller units going down into the $160s or so, provides a gateway to homeownership for all kinds of working/lower middle class people who would be priced out of the market otherwise. The solution is more housing, not less. If we want more affordable housing (and we do), the city should subsidize construction of more affordable units.

But downticket, big things were afoot. Here in the 32nd we forced our banally evil alderman into a runoff, anyway, holding him to 47%. Natarus, the downtown alderman since 1971, was defeated by an Irish kid named Brendan O’Reilly or something. Downtown’s population has swelled by about 100,000 people allegedly. Since there are supposed to be 60,000 to a ward, this will now be a huge, bizarre ward until it can be broken up after the next census. So the 42nd (Loop, Near North etc) probably has 90,000 residents or so right now. But only about 12,500 people voted there.

Hell, Daley won with 317,000 in a city of 3 million – so, probably 20% of eligible voters. Chicago, thy name is Apathy. Still, most wards look like they had 9,000-10,000 votes cast, lending support to my theory that too many people live in the 42nd.

2nd ward (South Loop, Near South) also has a heck of a lot of voters, and the incumbent, Haithcock, trails challenger Fioretti 28%-20%. If Fioretti wins the runoff, it will mean that the oldest Black ward in the city has gone yuppie – inevitable, maybe, but still a surprise. This reduces the Black Caucus to 20 or 19, I’m not sure which. After census 2010, which will result in a shift of ward boundaries toward the denser, highrise areas downtown, they may drop to around 18 out of 50 depending on the gerrymandering. Big, big demographic changes are taking place here.

3 aldermen were defeated outright, including obviously the woman caught taking bribes a few weeks back and saying “most politicians are hos” on tape. Sort of wish I'd been blogging at the time - she was just priceless. The incident apparently did not sit well with 68% of her constituents, who voted for other candidates, including the former cop who won the majority. 11 or 12 other aldercreatures will probably face a runoff. Runoffs do not favor incumbents here. Haters will be pumped and show up in droves. Supporters are discouraged this morning, key players like developers will hedge their bets now. Most runoff races had 3 or more candidates on the ballot, now it will be an up or down referendum on the incumbent. Look for 8 of the 12 incumbents to lose, resulting in a turnover of 11 (as opposed to 3 four years ago). Not sure which way I lean in many of the disputed races, but my suspicion here is that generally change is good.

Daley’s budgets will still pass 50-0 or 49-Preckwinkle. But development patterns will be impacted a lot. Look for fewer teardowns and constructions in Bucktown (32nd) while the South Loop etc (2nd) will explode over the next three years, slowly transforming into the Upper East Side, only with crime. It is Chicago, still. Due to the odd timing of Chicago elections, the census data will not be ready for Feb. 2011 and changes won’t take place until 2015 when they are already outdated. But the 42nd and 2nd will probably be broken up into 3-5 wards for that election, when we choose Daley’s successor and a wealthy, dense city core will be assuming a much larger role in city politics.

Parking Circle of Hell

2007-02-21T19:04:00.000-06:00

There's nowhere to park legally by the city tow yard on a Tuesday night. Seriously, you just beach your ride somewhere in the general vacinity of the traffic circle and get out saying, "well, at least they won't tow it very far . . . "

The tow yard is like stepping out of the city and into backwoods Arkansas or somewhere like that, only cold. Backwoods Siberia?. It's quiet at night. The lot itself is a fenced off, secure yard with automated gates. In order to get access, you need to go up the rickety wooden stairs to a building that looks like a collection of aluminum trailers welded haphazardly together. It's one of these "temporary" facilities thrown together 50 years ago and then never replaced, or maintainede, or noticed unless your car gets towed. Or stolen and lit on fire, which was the case with Trope's old Civic.

The crowd was interesting. Mostly Latin, including three or four sullen men who looked like they were usually asleep at this hour ahead of early morning shifts at horrible mind destroying jobs, and a gaggle of giggling girls with brightly colored cell phones. Also ahead of us were two young, angry Eastern European cab drivers, an enormous, heavy lidded black man, a couple Pakistanis and a lost, yuppie looking white couple. The line was held up for a while as the cabbies argued with a bored looking Puerto Rican woman barely out of high school about various reasons why he should be allowed to pick up his car without paying for his parking tickets. Eventually they stormed out, stormed back in again, and finally were issued a yellow card to get on the lot.

When it was finally our turn, about 45 minutes on, we told the uninterested young woman why we were there: the Arson Unit had called us to let us know that what was left of our stolen car had been located at the scene of a fire on the West Side, about a week after it vanished from the street in front of our house, and that it was towed here. Trope showed the woman her title and she signed and stamped some papers disinterestedly. Then she told us we couldn't see the car.

Apparently, she said, they didn't really know it was ours because the VIN number on the dash board was no longer readable due to fire. They wouldn't let us near the car until a police officer had been out to read the VIN off the engine block. I didn't understand the issue.

"They know it's our car. They called us," I said. She said no, the car had just been identified by our plates. Apparently there was the possibility that it was someone else's car, with our plates on it. Until they were sure, they couldn't hand the car over to the insurance company so we could get paid.

"Well let us look at it, and we'll tell you if it's our car." But if it wasn't ours, it wouldn't be appropriate for us to be poking around the remains. The only way to tell was to wait for the police to find the VIN.

"But why the hell would somebody put our plates on an identical car and light it on fire?" [Antisocial personality disorder?] Another rhetorical question I would never have imagined I'd have cause to ask for real. Ah, the stimulation of city life.

Goodbye, Rummy

2006-11-10T13:51:00.000-06:00

Tempering (slightly) my joy at this week's political events is the realization that the Chicago area's influence on the national stage has dimmed a bit. The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and the end of Dennis Hastert's reign as Speaker of the House has removed two big local players from the national stage. Rumsfeld used to hold the House seat now occupied by Democrat Melissa Bean, back before the Earth cooled. And Hastert represents an exurban district out on the fringes of "Chicagoland." Both brought to the national scene some of the hallmarks of Old Chicago politics - the refusal to give a straight answer to a simple question, opting instead to speak in elliptical koans ("there are known knowns...known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.") For comparison see any speech Richie Daley has ever made. Also, their use of corruption and cronyism to reward friends and punish enemies is pure Chicago politics-as-blood-sport.

He may have been a mover and shaker in the Conservative Movement, but Speaker Hastert's big contribution to Illinois has been to brink home tons and tons of "earmarked" cash to the state, including federal funding for CTA improvements and other regional transportation issues. In fact, his greatest contribution to himself was probably buying up a bunch of land in the exurbs, securing funding for a new highway through the area, and then selling the land at a $2 million profit. So don't cry for Denny in his retirement.

The new crop of Chicago influence includes new subcommittee chairs Luis Gutierrez and Jesse Jackson Jr, who, tasting the new power they will wield in Washington, will now decline to run for mayor, ensuring another term for Daley, who's been Boss since 1989. He stands to eclipse his fater as Chicago's longest-serving chief executive. And Illinois Senator Dick Durbin will probably end up as #2 guy in the Senate, which gives him a lot of clout, but it's no Speakership and he's from downstate anyway. He may be helpful in advancing an urban agenda. But I doubt he will do much to reverse the net outflow of tax money from the City, which persists in spite of the widespread suburbanite faith that the cash flows the other way.

But our biggest splash on the national scene is likely to be Democratic Congressional Campaign Comittee chair Rahm Emanuel. Already he's claiming credit for the Democrats' new electoral clout and jockeying fo ra leadership position. The "Netroots," ar already criticising him as a cronyist, insider power player who doesn't listen to grassroots activists and prefers to run handpicked machine-style centrists to real reformers. I'm not sure that's completely fair, but he did get his start with Daley's machine. What can I say? Anybody from here who makes a splash on the national scene is bound to do so as a villain. Chicago's fresh out of heroes.

Guy Fawkes Day

2006-11-05T23:24:00.000-06:00

So I went out to the suburbs today to volunteer with the GOTV operation for Tammy Duckworth, a candidate for the House in Illinois' 6th Congressional district. The 6th is mostly mile after mile of suburban sprawl, strip mall after strip mall along 6 lane "arteries" surrounded by characterlesws subdivisions. It's the part of America I like the least. So why the hell was I out there, butting my head into an election way the hell out in Republicanland?

First of all, there are only three, or possibly four, competitive House districts in Illinois. When it was redistricted in 2002, there were nine safe Democratic seats, and ten somewhat less safe Republican seats. Since then, longtime GOP incumbant Phil Crane was ousted from what had once been a suburban stronghold (before Crane, the seat was held by Donald Rumsfeld). The seat has become the key "swing" seat, but honestly the Democrat, software millionaire Melissa Bean, is a little too conservative for me to actively support.

My own district is represented by Luis Gutierrez, and is not contested. In terms of state and local politics, my choices are abysmal. For Governor, our incumbant Democrat, Rod Blagojevich ("G Rod" to almost everyone), will almost certainly be indicted soon on various hiring fraud and corruption charges. His Republican opponent, Treasurer Judy Barr Topinka, was a close associate and ally of previous governor George Ryan, who is already in jail. The other hotly contested local race is for County Board President. Longtime President John Stroger won the primary over reformer Forrest Claypool, in spite of the fact that President Stroger had just had a stroke and was in a coma. Since Stroger couldn't stand for office, the party leadership conducted an intense search for a new candidate, and came up with . . . Stroger's son, Chicago Alderman Todd "Toddler" Stroger. While Toddler does have some experience in government, as a state Representative and later an Alderman (appointed to a vacancy by Mayor Daley), his big qualification for office is being able to hold together his father's coalition of political forces, a remnant of what used to be called the Chicago "machine." I'm not really a big fan of those people, but his Republican opponant is anti-gay, anti-abortion zealot Tony Pereica, whom I probably wouldn't vote for if his opponent were Saddam Hussein.

So if I wanted to do something this election cycle, it would have to be far afield.

The other reason I was out in the 6th district is that I'll always feel connected to this particular area even though I'd never really want to live there: I was born there, and lived in the town of Wheaton until I was four. Our town wasn't that sprawling, we had sidewalks and were a few minutes walk from a train station and a commercial street with storefronts right on the sidewalk, just like you find in the city and in traditional small towns.

The neighborhood I walked today had sidewalks, but no shops or restaurants were within reasonable walking distance. There was a park that backed up on a gulf course, a sprawling one story elementary school, and a nice looking new Public Library. For some reason, the tiny square of suburbia that we worked was back on the city grid, with street names taken from my own neighborhood, perhaps a dozen miles due east - Fullerton, Montana, Altgeld, Nevada, Schubert, Wrightwood, etc. These houses were not so far apart as in newer sprawl, and many of them were looking sort of run down. And in a race featuring so much demagoguing on immigration, I found a surprising number of Latino, Vietnamese and Indian names on my roster.

I don't know if we did much good - the people seemed sick of all the attention, since at this stage in the campaign we were only contacting previously identified supporters to encourage them to vote on Tuesday, give them directions to their polling place, and ask if they needed a ride (ridiculous in this case, since the polling place was less than half a mile away for most of the houses we visited). And we were asked to stop knocking once the Bears game started and just leave campaign literature and directions. Considering how badly the Bears got their asses handed to them by the previously hapless Dolphins, my guess is that was a real good call. The last thing the Duckworth campaign needs to be associated with is a historic, ignominous defeat.

Other than Iraq, I mean. The reason the Democrats think they can pick up a seat that's been represented since my toddlerhood by Henry Hyde is that their candidate, Tammy Duckworth, is an Iraq war veteran who lost both her legs while serving as a helicopter pilot in the National Guard. She's studied international relations and worked with Rotary to wipe out disease in the developing world, campaigned against indoor air pollution, etc etc whatever, but everyone knows she's running because of the war, and because Party people believe enough Republicans might be sick enough of the war to switch sides or stay home on election day. My unscientifically small sample size (I still have family out there) suggests they just might have a point.

But even if we gained the seat, could we keep it? It seems to me that long term, we're going to gain much of DuPage County. Not only is the population changing and growing less overwhelmingly white, but the older parts seem to be experiencing a bit of decline, and if I've learned one thing from knockng on doors, it's that the shabbier looking houses are more likely to have Democrats living in them. Underneath all the bullshit talking points, the class struggle persists.

When I got home (and woke up from a long nap) Trope pointed out that it was November 5, and wanted to watch V for Vendetta. The film is based on a graphic novel, based on the story of Guy Fawkes, "the only man who ever went to Parlaiment with honest intentions," as the British say. Actually he was trying to blow it up. Fortunately democracy offers us the opportunity to accomplish the same goal nonviolently every couple years. I hope we take advantage of it Tuesday.

people in glass houses always have to wear pants

2006-11-03T23:05:00.000-06:00

I think I understand something. For the past few years I've wondered what the hell these Christian Right people are talking about when they claim that allowing same sex marriage would undermine or threaten traditional marriage. I mean, I'm in a traditional heterosexual marriage, and I don't see how two gay men getting married would threaten my marriage, or really affect me at all, unless it's somebody I know and I have to buy another damn gift.

But then the other day the next big sex scandal broke, involving the leading evangelical pastor who I'm always going to remember as "Big Gay Ted." All the while he's been preaching against the evils of abortion, drugs, homosexuality and the secular world (not to mention doing battle to rid Colorado Springs of the conspiracy of witches and evil spirits he calls "Control" - you couldn't make this shit up) he was meeting with a gay prostitute in Denver to have sex and score crystal meth.

This is so typical it's become a cliche. But why? Here was my first clue:

No Christian should be surprised that Haggard may have given in to his perverted thoughts and turned them into perverted actions. It’s a temptation we all face. - LaShawn Barber, Christo-fascist blogger

Huh? And then I relized, gay marriage doesn't threaten me because I'm not a closeted homosexual. But for somebody like Big Gay Ted, it seems like a terrible threat. Here he is, pretending to have a "normal" family life like he's always been told he should, with a wife and kids and a big house in sprawlville. He's had to make sacrifices to maintain the illusion, and it's been hard for him but he's done it. And now some secular humanist like myself wants to come along and say, "it's okay to be gay?" If society normalized other kinds of relationships besides the kind he's faking, how's he going to keep his sham of a pretend life together? If everyone else in his situation doesn't struggle like he does to be "normal," it makes it that much harder for him to do it. Instead of admiring him for trying to do the right thing, people like me are just going to mock him for being a hypocrite.

And mock, we will. From the great Harper's piece I linked to above:

Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil's plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church [I'll bet he did!]; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.

And check out the decor at his megachurch:

Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress. My favorite is The Vessel, by Thomas Blackshear, a major figure in the evangelical-art world.[2] Here in the World Prayer Center is a print of The Vessel, a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels team-pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel can't handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and spills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear's work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

Hee. It's like I always say when I'm walking through the neighborhood critiquing the horrible Modernist condos: "People in glass houses always have to wear pants."

So my point, if I still have one at all, is that I suspect there is a lot of repressed sexuality going on among the "God Hates Fags" crowd. It's like, they can't handle who they really are, so they have to inflict it on the rest of us by disguising their psychosexual garbage as religion and dragging it out into the public sphere. Wouldn't it just be easier on everybody if they would just admit who they are and be themselves?

This means you, Fred Phelps. Go for it girl, release your inner drag queen and let that bitch dance!

Until then, nothing like a sex scandal to cheer you up on a cold November afternoon.

politics and pickup trucks

2006-11-02T22:52:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I took an online poll by Polling Point. They asked me what I thought about the candidates for Governor (ugh) and Congress. They also asked questions about what I thought about my Senators, which is weird since neither of those guys is up for re-election next week. They asked how much money we make, whether we are married, whether we attend religious services regularly, and whether we have family in the military. All fairly interesting demographic questions, I suppose, although our answers make us look quite a bit more conservative than we actually are. But so far, so good, as far as survey design. They asked if I keep a handgun in the house or garage, which is politically interesting, but since that would be illegal in my city, I wouldn't have admitted to it even if it were true (I don't, because I don't believe in arming yourself for self defense - that's what we pay cops, judges, and jailers for. Under normal conditions, the state has an absolute monopoly on the legitimate use of force).

Then they asked if I own a pickup truck. Odd, I think. The gun question is not just cultural, but political. There is, after all, a sizeable movement in this country to ban or restrict ownership of guns. But as far as I know, there is no movement afoot to ban pickup trucks. So why ask something like that? What does it mean?

I guess they have identified pickup truck drivers as a certain demographic and want to determine how that demographic is politically different from the population as a whole. If so, I'm thinking somebody thinks strange things are going on with this demographic, considering the new tactics being used to try to sell pickup trucks in recent weeks.

Specifically Chevy pickups. There was a TV ad that ran during the baseball playoffs featuring John Mellancamp singing "this is our country" and a backdrop of footage from recent American history. The moon landing, Iwo Jima and Martin Luther King, and also 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, both the flooded city and Habitat-type people people rebuilding houses.

Several people I know, including Trope, find this ad exceptionally offensive, since it uses footage of catastrophes in which people died to sell trucks. While I can see this point, I don't really feel it; when I saw the ad the first time, I actually laughed at the non-sequiter of it all. Call me Irony Boy.

But thinking about it now, it's just another attempt to use patriotism to sell consumer crap, a tradition in this country going back at least a century. What's interesting is the form patriotism seems to be taking in the ad: identification of victimhood, suffering, hard times, a struggling once-proud auto industry, and American patriotism. In other words, the image is of a proud nation kicked around and suffering, a nation of losers clinging to memories of better days and hope for the future. A nation of Cubs fans. And this identity is supposed to resonate with the alleged pickup truck demographic. Apparently the song is a hit - Mellancamp played it live before Game 2 of the World Series in Detroit.

This seems radically different from the vision of American power that was used to convince so many people to run out and buy Hummers a few years back. Has their been such a big change in our national self-conception over such a short period?

Either the ad is grossly mis-targeted and won't sell any trucks, or this is going to be a pretty good election year for the Democrats. Identification with the downtrodden is the essence of liberalism. Identification with power is the essence of the Right.

Happy Spam

2006-11-01T22:43:00.000-06:00

Alas, spam has started to slip through the filter of my Yahoo account. Last week I opened what turned out to be a piece of spam pushing some stock deal. But after the obnoxious, colorful message was this poetic gem:

The answer was obvious. Hit the jump for pictures and a video of the entire process. Hit the jump for more photos of the carnage. Wow, they make some money over there. People think I'm a manwhore already. Was my Mac playing podcasts all by itself now? Since he moved the poor guy's been using a tin can attached string that he jammed into the miniplug.

While most mad scientists prefer harsh materials like steel and electrophoresed kitten blood, you can be original by making novel use of more classic materials like felt and string. While most mad scientists prefer harsh materials like steel and electrophoresed kitten blood, you can be original by making novel use of more classic materials like felt and string. To their chemically-induced point of view, the controllers have plenty of room for vibration in the handles.

Meh, maybe I'd skip the meal. We buy a lot of crap.

We are actually a little disappointed at the news and would much prefer a smaller version of the notebook.So why does my alarm need a date at all? We guess it could be a nice Skype introduction for the parents who just got used to their cell phone layout, but we will probably buy it out of pity for the Apple wannabe.

Sure, it can be produced as a Macbook Pro. Hit the jump for pictures and a video of the entire process. You can't possibly dial this phone without looking.

Just check out those hollow caverns of wasteful nothingness.

The answer was obvious. Could it possibly be worth that kind of money? To their chemically-induced point of view, the controllers have plenty of room for vibration in the handles. And editor who also skims.

Seriously, we would like to see the technology in athletic apparel, so people can kick your ass while running at night, too.

You might want to check out the Sketch Furniture Project by FRONT.

For its own peace of mind?

be it a little slower and less fierce than we are eventually hoping for. Snark aside, we were a little one sided in covering his coverage. What do all you readers think? Doesn't seem worth it. We are actually a little disappointed at the news and would much prefer a smaller version of the notebook.

Rock on. Did someone sit down and write this? Was it randomly generated by some kind of spambot?

After months of cocooning in crusty sullen silence, this is the kind of thing that makes me want to write again.

If fafblog's back then I guess I can post too

2006-06-07T23:14:00.001-05:00

I hate blogger. I mean I really, really hate it. I just wrote a pretty good post and it got eaten because blogger thinks they're too cool to have cut and paste and select work with the same commands that work in every other program. So I erased it and can't undo. Thanks for ruining my night with your stupid interface guys! I hope you all get painful boils on your asses.

But it's free, so I'll probably keep using it for the time being.

I wrote about what I've been pissed about, why I haven't been blogging, and what's made me feel a little better about things. But I'm not seriously going to sit here and waste an hour typing the stuff I already typed once, so the rest of y'all are shit out of luck.

The important stuff: We walked down to Glade Memorial Hall to see the Vaudeville Underground show this evening. This edition is really cool, with jugglers, modern dance, performance art, and a band. There's one show left, tomorrow night at 7:30, which you should go see. I mean, if you don't take advantage of this stuff while it's here, you might as well live in Naperville.

Also, and I'm not sure I'm supposed to say anything yet so they will remain nameless here, but a little bird told me some friends of ours got hitched yesterday, on 6/6/6. That's just awesome guys, congratulations. And what an anniversary! I'd love to have a ring with that engraving, just wicked cool . . .

typically I mow the grass myself

2006-05-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

May Day. Such a great opportunity! Abundant choices as to what I could blog about this evening.

May 1st is celebrated around the world as International Labor Day in honor of a Chicago demonstration and general strike in favor of an eight hour work day that went disastrously wrong on May 1, 1886.

This is the three year anniversary of President Bush's aircraft carrier stunt, with the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Both of those topics would have been interesting, but my plans for today were blown away by the 400,000 people who marched downtown in support of an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

What did they want? (when did they want it?) I have to confess I'm not sure, since I had to work today and couldn't attend. I've heard a lot lately about "fair and reasonable immigration reform" but I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. But I do know that the march has inspired newpaper message board posters to a lot of RANDOM CAPITALIZATION and creative spellig! Seriously the march has inspired a lot of emotional talk, mostly on the part of people who want to put a stop to illegal immigration, but some who support the marchers as well. The comments on both sides made me realize that most people are even less informed about these issues than I am, so I thought I'd respond to some of the ideas being bounced around, just for fun. I'm going to paraphrase rather than quote or link, because I'm lazy and also because most of these people can't write worth a damn. So in no particular order:

It's appalling that people who have broken the law are demanding "rights." They're criminals and should have no rights.
Actually criminals do have rights. And if you've seriously never, ever broken the law, never broken the speed limit, never smoked a joint, never illegally downloaded music or TV shows, never had a beer when you were underage, never stole a condom from a conveniencce store while you were on a high school church trip, or whatever, then you're a seriously boring person and there must be something wrong with you. Funny how they shouldn't do that because it's against the law suddenly becomes irrelevant when it's you that thinks the law is stupid, rather than somebody else.

Anyway, we should be more specific about what we mean when we talk "illegal immigrants." At least a quater of "illegals" are people who entered the country legally but overstayed their visas. Since the reason these people stayed is they found better jobs here, or spouses, or both, I think we can mostly agree that this group, anyway should be granted amnesty, even if we profoundly disagree about people who snuck across the border. Overstaying your visa as a felony? Hell, the tags on my car are expired right now! Should I be locked up? Don't answer that.

These people mow your lawn, cook your food, care for your children, etc.
Now who exactly are these comments addressed to? Typically I mow the grass myself, right after surgery my wife did it. As for the long running and stupid debate about hiring housekeepers and nannies, I will never be able to afford such services and neither will 90% of Americans. This isn't a convincing line of argument for most people. In fact, if all that's at stake is rich people's ability to get a good deal on servants, it's not clear why most of us should care. What this is, is a weird debate about what rich people should be doing with their money. Is it liberal to have a nanny? Is it feminist? I'll tell you what you should be doing with your money in order to feel good about yourself. You should be giving it to me. Seriously, e-mail me and I'll write you back with the drop location. A briefcase filled with non-sequential 20s would be best, for tax (evasion) purposes. Think about it. Now won't it feel good to be freed from all that ethical conflict and doubt? I'll send you a postcard from Paris.

Today's immigrants are not like my noble ancestors who only wanted to lose their culture and gain 80 pounds eating McDonalds all the time and getting teary eyed about our troops on the Fourth of July. These guys won't learn English and keep to their own communities and cultures, threatening our way of life with strange words and customs, and, um, we heard that Mexican sausage contains donkey meat!
In 1920, Chicago had newspapers in 20 languages. The truth is, it's hard for adults to learn a new language. We're just not smart enough anymore. The best time to learn a new language is as a 2 to 5 year old, sadly an age when mostly we aren't teaching kids much that's more complicated than "stop hitting Jimmy" and "don't drink the bleach" and "don't stick the fork in the electric socket" and "stay away from mommy's vodka tonic, honey, you're too young." So typically, immigrants live here, the children learn both languages, and the grandchildren are totally assimilated and become monolingual, lazy, ignorant couch potatoes who can't even find their ancestral homeland on a map. That's how it worked with Eastern European Jews in their Yiddish speaking enclaves, and famously for Italians who hop back and forth between their new and old countries, keeping family contacts alive on both sides of the Atlantic. Assimilation takes generations, not months. And personally, I find it sad that so many of us have lost our traditions, and that ethnic enclaves have vanished into the post-cultural fog of bland, pasty-white undifferentiated suburban sprawl.

But I'm taking this line of argument seriously. If it's really a cover for "I'm not comfortable hearing other languages spoken and seeing people dress, and eat, and worship differently and I wish I didn't have to look at that," then you are a bigot, and go jump off a bridge.

A country should be able to control its borders.
Well, duh. But how? There is a lot of economic and demographic pressure driving people to move to the developed world, mostly because said countries are hogging capital by forcing down the prices on commodities, third world labor, anything we buy from them. It's a global economy in which the developed exploit the underdeveloped, so why wouldn't the exploited want to switch sides? People are going to move no matter what. The easiest way to "get control of the borders" is to raise immigration quotas to reflect the actual number of people driven to move here. Then, we will know who's here and be able to screen for terrorists, etc.

Before 1920 we had virtually no controls on immigration, and the result was, yes, cultural change and population growth, but also the transformation of a backwoods rural country into a superpower. Renewed immigration has clearly reinvigorated this country, at least where I live. 400,000 people is about 13% of the population of Chicago proper. True, some marchers came from the burbs or out of town, but still, that kind of turnout is huge. Represented were not just Mexicans, but Polish, Koreans, Chinese, and South Asians. The whole rainbow of our city neighborhoods. If these people didn't move here, who would buy the houses as white people flee south and west? It's a multicultural society now, get used to it. If you don't like it, you can go back to Europe. If EU immigration restrictions will even let you in.

Cubs' lost weekend

2006-04-30T23:56:00.000-05:00

Nosebleed seats with a great skyline view?
check.
Sausage?
check.
Grilled onions?
check.
Old Style?
check.
Rain Slicker?
check.
Souvenir with corporate logo attached?
check. (pink Cubs hats for the ladies).
Loud, happy crowd undimmed by the raid delay?
check.
Underperfoming starting pitcher?
check.
Humiliating loss to a subpar opponent?
check.

It must be Wrigley Field. The 9-0 loss makes the boys 25-2 over 2 days! Vs the Brewers!

But did I mention the cool pink hats? Trope should be able to pick off the MasterCard logo in a couple of days.

Jane Jacobs 1916-2006

2006-04-25T23:16:00.000-05:00

I hate to see a name I recognized accompanied by dates for the first time, the closed parentheses of a life. It means somebody important is gone, and if you wanted to ask them something, it's too late now. Jane Jacobs has been a huge, if indirect, influence on my life for several years. While I'll come right out and confess that I've never read "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," her articulation of what went wrong with urban America at midcentury and how to fix it has trickled down to influence where and how I live, what I do with my life, and what kind of country I want to live in, and it's sad to hear she's gone. Ironically, I heard about her death, and heard an interview with her discussing a successful attempt to organize her Toronto neighborhood to stop the demolition of historic housing, as I was taking a spin throught the neighorhood trying to capture yet another demolition on film:

Jacobs is dear to my heart not so much because she wrote about cities, but because she was so often successful in opposing misguided "urban renewal" and preserving what is essential about neighborhood life. Once she even stopped Robert Moses from building an expressway through lower Manhattan! Imagine if that monster had been built, it would have destroyed Downtown more thoroughly than Osama could ever dream of.

Jacobs wrote a lot of stuff you should read, but I'll sum up:

* Density is good, it leads to diverse, interesting places to live.
* A crowded street is safer than an empty one.
* Small businesses give life and charater to a neighborhood
* The car is not necessarily an improvement over walking and public transportation.

Basic stuff, but it certainly was news to the modernist misplanners of midcentury.

I miss her already.

Skyway

2006-04-25T07:49:00.000-05:00

So I make one stupid Barbie joke and look what happens. They're selling naming rights to the Skyway! Since all the employers down that way have pretty much disappeared, I wonder who's left to sponsor an elevated expressway and exactly what they'd hope to gain from putting their name on a place where people sit trapped and frustrated in traffic for hours each week. Apple? I can see the iPod Skyway working out I guesss. A cell phone company? Been there, done that with US Cellular Field. Maybe the Dan Ryan, which goes right by the ballpark, but not the Skyway. Plus, using a cell phone while driving is illegal in Chicago. Unless you have a headset! That's it, the Bluetooth Skyway!

Alas, it will probably just be Hummer.

Stop Breaking Down

2006-04-22T18:44:00.000-05:00

So I'm driving in Chicago's Wild West Side, Hank williams on the radio hits me like morphine but without the horrible buzzing head rush. Ahead an 18 story crane tears at concrete, I watch the projects coming down. Hank's so lonesome he could cry. You think he's out of place? You don't think this is the desert? This is the Pueblo ruins, crumbling husks of buildings and the footprints of buildings, where you can retrace the steps of vanished people on the ghosts of streets. The lines and borderes once reinforced by social convention fall back into the natural world, just shapes now, not borders at all. You can walk any which way, stand in the street, jump the curb, meander among the rubble in the blinding sun. I drie maybe half a mile along Adams before I realize it's supposed to be one way - the other way.

There is nobody else driving here.

I do find a little knot of trucks sitting haphazardly in the middle of the road. A van. A red pickup with guys sitting in the back drinking beer. They are watching the monolith fall. A crane and a little work crew are battering the half-demolished concrete mountain again and again. They were here yesterday too - the crews and the crowd both. They don't seem to be making much progress.

You'd never know you were in America's third largest city. This is a wasteland - a ruin. People are surprised to learn that the population density of Chicago is actually less than that of Los Angeles - LA is more suburban-looking, but doesn't contain the vast stretches of postindustrial emptiness and ruin. The first time, they tore this neighborhood down to build the monoliths, to cantain the black population and prevent its westward spread. It didn't work. The white population fled beyond the city to points west - and middle class blacks followed. After the riots of 1968, the population plummeted as everyone who could leave trickled out. House after house was demolished, whole blocks gone or with a few buildings left, standing irregularly, little clumps huddling against the cold and emptiness, separated by stretches of weeds and crumbling asphalt. Trees have grown up where homes once stood.

Beyond the crumbling projects, I can see new luxury condos going up. It seems pretty naive - the condos are buing build at city density, but ther eare so few of them, new clumps on the new prarie. If they put housing up on all these abandoned blocks, who will live there? The Census Bureau believes the city population is falling again. There are no grocery stores here, no bars, nothing but churches, liquor stores, beauty salons. The locationis great, we're right on the highway, close to the Loop, close to the Green Line. But nobody wants these neighbors.

Part of me thinks nothing could bring middle class whites to the West Side in large numbers (short of full scale ethnic cleansing). The reality is, they flee further and further from anyone unlike themselves. The reality is, the city has lost a quarter of its population since 1950. At this point, the entire Chicago region is losing population to outmigration.

What was once the nation's liveliest metropolis has been slowly transforming itslef to one type of wasteland or another. Postindustrial sludge. Sprawling subdivided suburbia. Ghost town neighborhoods of the South and West sides. The rubble where the projects once stood.

Somewhere in Tim Samuelson and Camilo Jose Vergara's Unexpected Chicagoland is the line:

It's the breakdown of social relationships, not of bricks and mortar, that turns neighborhoods into ruins.

I reread the bulk of it and can't find it, but I know it's in there somewhere. And I know it's true. Hate is killing Chicago. Hate and fear. It ain't murder, it's a slow suicide attempt.

True, she's coming back. She's out of the ICU and eating solid food. But half of Chicago is still Detroit. In fact most of our major cities are dying slowly, neglected - New Orleans was being destroyed day be day long before the hurricane hit . . .

Anyway, I took pictures.

He's Guilty

2006-04-17T23:34:00.000-05:00

Of course George Ryan is guilty. The question is, does it make any difference? Ryan joins former governors Joseph Duncan, Joel Aldrich Matteson, Lennington Small, William Stratton, Otto Kerner, and Dan Walker in his legal troubles - the others didn't get caught. Clearly Ryan broke the law, but when he says he was just playing the game the way it's always been played in Illinois, he's just speaking the plain truth. Republicans, Democrats, or Whigs, rewarding political favors with jobs, contracts, or public largesse has been the way of things in this state for its entire history.

And Ryan was as good as you're going to get from a Republican Governor. His Illinois First infrastructure project replaced hundreds of miles of crumbling roads and bridges and vastly improved public tranportation in Chicago. And his courageous change of heart over the death penalty was an important example for the country and probably spared innocent men from execution. But most of the crimes he was convicted of were committed back when he was Secretary of State, before he ever became Governor. Did knowledge of his guilt haunt his days in power like some depressing, heavy-handed Greek tragedy? Or was he too self-deluded to admit to himself he'd done wrong, or as they say in these parts, "gone too far?"

Who knows? But what I do know is, this is hardly the last act of the play. We have another election coming up this fall, and considering the candidates are Governor Rod Blagojevich and Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, both of whom are haunted by similar ghosts, I'm guessing the culture of you know what will go on for at least four more years.

considering lillies for a change

2006-04-16T22:19:00.000-05:00

Last year I had a lot to say about Easter and this year I really don't. It was a peaceful day. I slept in, and both the Sox and Cubs won (the Sox game got called on account of rain at a lucky moment). We made Easter Eggs, and went out to see family. It wasn't an Easter event at all - my cousin is blessedly, miraculously?, home from Iraq for good, and all in one peace and still alive and laughing and looking forward to being posted in San Diego for a while, where he's thinking about taking up surfing. My other cousin's child is two and a half and talking and curious. A third had a girl visiting from Germany and took her to see RENT on Wednesday and told me the production was terrible. The girl rolled her eyes at this but I think he was trying to make me feel better - I had tickets but missed the show because I was just out of the hospital and hardly able to walk. The flowers are opening up in front of the house and are a gleaming white. The rhubarb is back and so is my hydrangea. We stopped off at Mr. Thai for a late dinner on our way home and the curry is still exquisite. The cat hasn't broken anything for hours. I'm so glad I'm still alive.

Intelligent Design, My Ass

2006-04-13T10:57:00.000-05:00

"I don't even remember what the hell an appendix is," I said to my wife.

It felt like the wee hours of the morning, but more likely it was the wee hours of Tuesday afternoon - the eternal twilight of the emergency room. Northwestern Memorial, just off Chicago's Magnificent Mile is the real world setting for the TV show "ER," but the staff we met there were much more "Gray's Anatomy." That's right, my "surgical team" consisted of a rouguishly attractive thirtysomething male doctor accompanied by a gaggle of bleary-eyed hot chicks, including the obligatory token Asian.

I hate hospitals, because of the whole sickness and death thing. And every time I've NMH, I've always been too preoccupied by something or other (I think it's called abject terror) to notice, but afterwards I think about it and realize it must be an interesting place to work. It obviously runs on chaos, adrenaline, hormones and caffeine - and the people who work there, their sleep deprived weariness clashing with their perfect hair and breezy, casual attitudes, seem genuinely more interesting than what little I've seen of their TV counterparts. For one thing, doctors are just more interesting people than actors - if you want people to love you, saving their lives seems a much more compelling approach than trying to be beautiful and fabulous. For another thing, the gallows humor and coping mechanisms that characterize any kind of crisis-oriented workplace just don't make for family-friendly entertainment.

But as cool as the place might be to work - it just sucks to visit. It was loud and overcrowded. The place was slammed with crazy people, a bleeding cop being rushed by on a stretcher, armed officers accompanying a wounded criminal, a frightened woman in need of a Chinese translator. They ran out of emergency cubicles and had me stashed on a wheeled bed in a hallway for hours, surrounded by noisy, swarming anarchy, a migraine steadily growing to epic proportions and eventually surpassing the piercing pain in my gut that had brought me to the hospital in the first place.

When a slightly less rouguish but still handsome thirtysomething doctor finally tracked me down in the hallway just as the latest round of narcotics were wearing off, I wasn't really up for rakish banter. "Do you have a surgeon?" he asked. Yeah, I keep one on retainer, my witty TV counterpart replied. "Huh?" I said. "You're going to need one," said Dr. Chipper. "Shit" was all I could come up with without professional writing team.

So, the appendix. Fortunately, my wife knew what one was even if I, in my drug and migraine addled state, did not. "It's a little sac attached to your colon, which doesn't really do much until a little piece of food gets stuck in there. Then it gets infected, swells up and explodes and kills you." How much do I love this woman?

Intelligent Design, according to Wikipedia, is is the concept that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."[1]

Proponents of intelligent design look for evidence of what they term "signs of intelligence" — physical properties of an object that they assert necessitate design. The most commonly cited signs include irreducible complexity, information mechanisms, and specified complexity. Design proponents argue that living systems show one or more of these, from which they infer that some aspects of life have been designed. This stands in opposition to mainstream biological science, which relies on experiment and collection of uncontested data to explain the natural world exclusively through observed impersonal physical processes such as mutations and natural selection. Intelligent design proponents say that while evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent cause or agent" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected. Dembski, in Signs of Intelligence, states: "Proponents of intelligent design regard it as a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes. Note that intelligent design studies the effects of intelligent causes and not intelligent causes per se." In his view, one cannot test for the identity of influences exterior to a closed system from within, so questions concerning the identity of a designer fall outside the realm of the concept.

In my experience, the way the human digestive system works does not count as a "sign of intelligence," nor do birth defects, miscarriages, Hodgkin's disease, or that weird thing where cats can't taste sugar because their genes were transposed wrong at one point (thanks to Creek Running North for the link). Creationists (whatever they're calling themselves) always come back to the same basic argument - the world is too intricately, perfectly put together to have happened "by accident." But that's not true at all. Life is extremely complicated, I'll grant you that. But "perfect?" There are just too many flaws in everything. Life doesn't maximize its potential, it "satisfices" - it's just good enough to solve its immediate problems, but no better. Old age, sickness and death might be deep and meaningful to many of you out there, but to me they are mistakes, poor design or more accurately, lack of design.

Speaking of transposition, there's another definition for appendix: A collection of supplementary material, usually at the end of a book. . . generally when I've seen them they are tables, references, or anecdotes that couldn't be fit smoothly into the body of the text. So if mine's been removed I guess I've finally been edited, which some picky and grammar obsessed readers could've told you was something I desperately needed anyway.

Ladies and Gentlemen Your Sox

2006-04-05T23:03:00.000-05:00

Saw my first game of the year! It didn't go so well for the Sox, alas. But the crowd, still slap happy over the world series title, didn't seem to mind one bit. After Contreras walked a guy, the drunken ass the next section over did scream "he sucks! Trade him!" . . . but then he laughed. What a difference a year and a championship makes! Sox fans who can laugh at themselves. Also, Sox fans who show up at games - the place was packed! In April!

But some things never change. The good? The bratwurst still rules on the South Side. The bad? The stupid "fan rivalry" expressed as homophobia, or sexism, or sexual harassment, or some bizarre, repressed combination of the above, as in [to a guy in a Mark Prior Cubs jersey]: "Hey Prior, I got your Wood right here!" Also an impossibly vulgar exchange in the men's room between several pissing white men and a large black man waiting in the urinal line (wearing a Wood jersey, natch) which ended with the the big guy, on his way out, saying "hey, I thought this was the ladies room." You're just going to have to conjure that one up yourself.

I can't wait to get back up to Wrigley Field where yuppie scum like me can run free and feel safe, and in love, and get plastered in peace, and where ignorant and offensive insults are kept where they belong (screamed at people from St. Louis and Houston, mostly).

Opening Day!

2006-04-03T22:04:00.000-05:00

Like I said a year ago, hope springs eternal. In a flashback to last year's Opening Day, Carlos Zambrano couldn't complete the fifth inning, but the Cubs scored 16 runs against the hapless Cincinnati Reds and took the first game 16-7. Of course, not everything was the same. In fact, there aren't too many familiar faces in the starting line-up: this is the youngest opening line-up the Cubs have fielded since 1977. So far, led by Matt Murton and a resurgent Todd Walker, they look like pros.

94 more games like that one and we're in business!

Sympathy for the Governor

2006-04-02T17:32:00.000-05:00

I've been by G Rod's house twice in the last two weeks, as we've been spending our Sundays going to open houses in Albany Park. (Yes, that's right - when I said I was thinking about leaving Bucktown while some of it was still standing, I wasn't entirely kidding.) I have to admit I was a little surprised by what I found. Unfortunately, the presence of cops in unmarked cars sitting on the block sort of discouraged me from taking pictures of G Rod's digs, so you'll have to take my word for it the Blagojevich place on the corner of Richmond and Sunnyside is not a mansion. I mean it's a nice place and all - sizeable for a city home, probably four bedrooms, a little bigger than its bungalow neighbors - but it's eighty years old and looking like it needs a little work. I'm quite certain the Governor's Mansion in springfield is a much more lavish affair.

I bring this up because this governor has taken a lot of flack for a lot of things - and he's earned most of it. But one of the oddest things he's taken fire for is living at home. Many downstaters - who were key to his election in 2002 - have taken affront that his family prefers to stay at their own digs in Chicago rather than move into the Governor's mansion.

When Jerry Brown was elected governor of California, but decided not to move into the Governor's Mansion, he was hailed as a hero and an antidote to some of the waste and bloat of the Reagan years. But G Rod, instead of turning his fairly modest middle class home into a PR coup, has flubbed the whole thing and gotten burned.

So here's what's cool about the Governor's crib. It's in a funky, mixed income, ethnically diverse neighborhood where single family homes, two flats and apartment buildings sit side by side on the same block. It's the kind of place where you can walk a few blocks to the EL stop, the pizza place, the grocery store or a Korean or Lebanese restaurant, and hear several languages spoken on your way there. On the Northwest Side of the city, it also sits about dead center, population wise, of the metropolitan area. And like it or not, Downstaters, metro Chicago is eight million of twelve and a half million Illinoisians, and most of the Democrats.

So the Governor is living right in the middle of his voters, on a public street with a tiny little lawn and a house that's no larger or better appointed than most of the suburbanites and Downstaters who curse his name. In short, he lives like a regular guy.

The fact that this is regarded as a curse instead of a blessing goes to show what a crappy, untalented politician the man has turned out to be. But it also goes to show just how much the people in Red-tinted counties hate and envy us city folk. Living in a diverse, interesting neighborhood has somehow joined literacy, the arts, and knowledge of other cultures as a sign of "elitism." Admit it guys, you'd rather live in Albany Park than Springfield. So would I. The difference is, I just might do it.

Goodbye, Dodger

2006-04-01T18:12:00.000-06:00

No, that picture's not one of mine. I did stop by and photograph the old girl before the execution began, back when there was a drive to save her and over 3000 neighbors signed a petition to save the building. A preservationist architect even offered over 1.3 million for the building so he could save it and move his offices there! Alas, there's more money to be made, somehow, by building a single-family mansion on the two lots, so asshole developer Wally Kos elected to reject the offer and demolish one of Bucktown's landmarks.

Part of me wants to get out of this dying place so I can remember it in a nice way. But I feel oddly compelled to stand witness and document the destruction so everyone can share my pain. So here you go:

As you can see, the details on the old pub are not only cool in their own right, the whole thing was tied together in a very beautiful and expressive package. The Dodger in better days:

Also lost in the last couple weeks was this simple old church on Augusta Boulevard in the Ukranian Village:

I mention this not because it's anywhere near as beautiful as the Dodger was (it wasn't), but because the demolition punctures a nearly uninterrupted wall of historic building along Augusta. This is important and scary, because while the tree-lined residential streets going back into the neighborhood have actually been landmarked and protected, Augusta itself, the central avenue that gathers the Village together into a cohesive whole, has not. Preservationists are working on this now, but it may already be too late.

The Pink Line?

2006-03-31T12:00:00.000-06:00

So today the Chicago Transit Authority in its infinite wisdom announced it has come up with a new name for the southern (Douglas) branch of the Blue Line, which will start running as a separate line on xxxdatexxx: the Pink Line! This new "Fluffy Bunny" line will start from 54th Avenue and Cermak Road in Cicero, Illinois, run through the tough Latino neighborhoods of Little Village and Pilsen, head north along Paulina Avenue, join the Green Line tracks at Ashland and circle the Loop.

The announcement has caused a little bit of consternation, as you saw if you were a good little reader and followed the link to the Tribune article.

While the board chose pink over silver and gold, it wasn't necessarily the favorite of people who ride the line.

"I don't think so," said Joseph Santoyo, 18, as he stood at the entrance of the Cermak branch's California stop on the border of Little Village and Lawndale. "Let's take the Pink Line? No."

"They shouyld rename it somewhere else," he added, sayhing the neighborhood is too tough to have a Pink Line running through it. "I don't think the neighborhood will like it."

But, noted one 8th grader who nominated pink, the color isn't just for girls any more. "Pink is a really pretty bright color and when people hear the color pink they probably think it is a girly color," wrote Jeaninie Zarate, a student at Graham Elementary School in Chicago. "Today, a lot of people including boys like pink."

Several other pink supporters said the color could help raise awareness of breasst cancer, which has long been symbolized by pink.

The fundamental divide boils down to a left on left pile-up between culturally sensitive defenders of Latino machismo, who feel that the Pink Line might in some way be belittling or mocking their neighborhoods, and liberals and feminists who decry the stigmatization of the color pink - note the impassioned debate over the pink-painted visitors locker room at the University of Iowa:

Critics say the use of pink demeans women, perpetuates offensive stereotypes about women and homosexuality, and puts the university in the uncomfortable position of tacitly supporting those messages.

Relativists might suggest a simple name swap: West Side Hispanics could take pride in their very own Brown Line, while North Side PC white liberals could take the Pink Line to the Loop if they're gonna be so amped about it.

But in the end, these debates don't matter, because if the CTA wouldn't listen to Demon Dogs, the Bottom Lounge, or DePaul University, what makes you think they'd listen to mere riders? Anyone out there who thinks the CTA cares about you clearly hasn't tried to catch a bus at two in the morning. [Note to East Coast readers: in New York, trasit customers have their own colloquial nickname: straphangers. the name doesn't apply in Chicago, because there are no straps: apparently the CTA finds it amusing that people fall on their asses when the train stops suddenly for no apparent reason; in fact, that's what the cameras are for.]

So we might as well get used to it people! The CTA wants the new line, because it uses the expensively rehabbed "Paulina Connector" track between the 18th Street and Ashland stops. The Connector was rehabbed in order to be put back in service as part of the mythical Circle Line that will form an "Outer Loop" for "Greater Downtown" as soon as the Feds come up with the cash. Since the new line would cost roughly the same amount as the Iraq War, I'm not holding my breath. So their gonna damn well use it, even if no one wants it, and the re-route needlessly cuts off West Side students from access to the UIC campus.

Anyway, there's definitely an upside to this. And I'm not talking about breast cancer awareness, because those people are not going to pony up the cash for a sponsorship. As I've mentioned before, the CTA is desperate for advertising cash. So I figure, if Sox Park could get a sponsor, why not the Pink Line?

Anything to save us from another rate hike.

Nullification?

2006-03-30T19:03:00.000-06:00

These are strange days indeed. Chicago City Council is claiming the right not to enforce Federal laws, and I find myself hoping they can get away with it.

For most of the Twentieth Century, right wingers and racists trotted out old arguments about "states rights" and "nullification" that most people thought had been defeated, militarily, in the Civil War. Unable to control national centers of power, racists claimed that states had the power to disregard Federal laws in order to continue Jim Crow policies of segregation and discrimination at the state and local level. So throughout that time, enhanced Federal power was looked at as the liberal principle while state and local independence was considered to be a conservative principle.

Such "principles" of course being generally camoflage for self interest, it's interesting to see how quickly they seem to have flipped now that conservatives are firmly in control of Washington.

The House has passed, and the Senate is considering, severe legislation which would "turn illegal immigrants into felons and compel private individuals and employers to report them." In response, City Council has passed a law forbidding city employess, including police, to inquire about anyone's immigration status under most circumstances. This policy, sort of a "don't ask, don't tell" for illegal immigrants, has been in place via executive order since shortly after Mayor Daley took office in 1989, but by formally passing it as law City Council is throwing up a challenge in the face of the Feds.

Daley's executive order states, "No agent or agency shall request information about or otherwise investigate or assist in the investigation of citizenship or residency status of any person unless such an inquiry or investigation is required by statute, ordinance, federal regulation or court decision."
. . .
It further orders that city services, benefits and opportunities should not be "conditioned" on "matters related to citizenship or residency status" unless otherwise required by law.

In other words, the city plans on continuing to provide services to illegal aliens as much as it can, Federal policy be damned.

Basically, Federal demagoguery on the issue of immigration has run smack into economic reality on the ground. Ironically, many people in states without substantial immigrant populations are apparently quite terrified about waves of Latinos changing the face of the country and threatening their jobs. By contrast, cities like Chicago, struggling to maintain the momentum from the economic growth of the late 1990s, depend on immigrants to survive. Latinos were responsible for all of the population rebound the city saw in the 90s, and illegal immigrants from Mexico, Poland and elsewhere are essential to the health of industries such as food service and construction.

If we were to enforce immigration laws and expel residents who here illegally, the city would see a substantial population drop, widespread business closures, and something resembling a regional recession would occur. It appears to me that foreign workers are going to get a lot of jobs in a number of industries, and the real question is whether they will be working here, or in their home contries. I vote here, because we still get to tax the businesses that way.

[A friend who knows more about this than I do once told me that a real global economy would require free movement of capital, goods, and labor, and that a big problem with the system in practice is that capital and goods can move freely but labor is restricted. I'm not really sold on the free market neoliberal world, but his description of what's going on does seem to track with the news.]

The result of all this is that, as with environmental policy and gay and lesbian civil rights, liberals are using terms such as states' rights and home rule to justify breaking with federal policy on immigration.

It's not the first time. Before the Civil War, progressives could be found making these same arguments. In fact, in 1850, Chicago City Council and Mayor James Curtis took similar action, ordering Chicago Police not to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. scary to think how far the wheel has come around.

Deborah

2006-03-26T19:37:00.000-06:00

I don't want to rant on about this, because I've been doing it all day, but I wanted to put something up because this was such a big deal . . . and fun! I love a good (polite) debate.

Today at Third Unitarian we had a guest speaker, The Reverend Myriam Renaud, who preached on the figure of Deborah in the Book of Judges, and the implications of holding her up as a role model for feminists.

First of all it was rather strange to hear someone reading the Bible from the Thomas Paine Memorial Pulpit - I don't think that's happened before in the two years I've been attending, and it certainly came as a surprise to many of the old leftist humanists in the pews. [I believe she used the Judaica Press Translation, which was possibly to soften the blow.--Trope.] More on that in a minute.

Rev. Renaud started by saying that the victors generally write history, which is why we don't learn enough about women in history - there have not been enough women victors. Then she used Deborah as an example of a "victor-woman," and explored what that was like.

Deborah was one of these prophet figures who led the Israelites to a military victory in which they slaughered their enemies to the last man. This is one of the reasons I stopped believing in the Bible all those years ago - I read it. In the book, these Israelites commit massacre after genocide after ethnic cleansing, all with the blessing of their God. It's horrible, self-justifying bullshit to my ears, and I don't admire these people or take much spiritual guidance from their travails. That may have been what the world was like then, but it's not much of an example for progressives.

[Renaud's argument was based on the idea that women are underrepresented in authority, and that because women tend to be self-effacing, meek, or more likely to share credit, this will continue. I would argue that there are currently several examples of strong female leaders worldwide, and that the way to get us into power is not to teach women to overcome their conditioning for collaboration and cooperation, but to call men on the fallacy that everything in this world can be accomplished with a big ego and a big sword. Women in power who act like men are not, of themselves, any different or better than men in power. It's not the women per se who are being devalued, it's the traits often thought of as "feminine": negotiation, compromise, power-sharing. Not every woman is good at that, and many women are shocked when a woman in power doesn't espouse those values. --Trope.]

Rev. Renaud's argument was that women should stand up for themselves, not be ashamed of success, and seek power unapologetically much like men do. [Though she suggested we display these tangible measures of our success in the living room of our homes, presumably to be admired by our husbands' friends. I think next time she should suggest writing letters to the editor, or possibly renting a billboard. --Trope.] She pointed out that even progressives tend to hold archaic ideas about gender roles, seeing women as the gentler, more peaceful, more conciliatory sex. [Yep. We bring the flowers. Y'all run the board.] Women shouldn't be expected to behave according to these roles, especially women in positions of power - a point that I agree with. She pointed out the silliness of the oft-repeated statement that "if women ran the world there wouldn't be wars," which I agree is ridiculous. Worldwide, we've had plenty of women as heads of state, who have been no less violent or authoritarian than an equal-sized sample of male leaders would be.

But she went on, and held up Margaret Thatcher as an example of a woman defying these expectations by going to war over the Falkland Islands. Then she said if Hillary Clinton became President and decided to go to war, she hoped we'd all support her - this to a room full of peace activists!

So after the service we had an interesting conversation. I said that when we say history is written by the victors, it's not a compliment. We're calling them liars and implying that the losers had a story that deserved to be told as well. She pointed out that the people Deborah killed were "oppressors" and I said that of course the victors, who wrote history, would say that, but I wasn't going to take their word for it.

Basically, I don't care much whether more of the "victors" who dominate and control the rest of us are women and minorities. This is the worst kind of tokenism. I feel that most of the people who exercise power do so illegitimately, that they haven't earned and don't deserve their power over others. Rev. Renaud told me she disagrees, that she feels that people in power more or less come by it legitimately. [Again: I don't think that being male or female lends any more or less legitimacy to an authority figure, or the wars they start. I'd love to see a woman President, but I would move to Canada before I voted for Condi. --Trope.] I guess this is the wrong period of history to appeal to my faith in authority figures!

At this point, what I want most from the next President is a weaker Presidency. Having one person making so many decisions in our name without hardly consulting us is just unacceptable. I would hope President Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama or whoever would leave the business of declaring war to Congress, like the Constitution says. [For the business of avoiding war, I might be tempted to vote for a male candidate over a female one. Ask me why sometime.--T] And I don't much care about the gender or skin color of the people who are dominating and coercing others to conform to their beliefs or ideologies. I just want it to stop, and to the greatest extent practicable, to return power and control to the people themselves. [This is a goal that most folks at TUC can get on board with. It was a great sermon, and a great debate following. More Sunday feminism!--Trope.]

Brett

2006-03-25T18:11:00.000-06:00

This afternoon I found the blog of a friend from my college and Columbus days. (Actually he tried to tell me about it months ago but I didn't see it due to my ongoing email nighmare.) Brett is of the better writers I've known, so I added him to my Links section. The blog does what I'd like to do with this space - record and communicate the vicissitudes of life in a specific geographic, social, political and cultural context.

Brett's context is obviously quite a bit different from mine, perhaps that's why I find this post so unexpectedly moving. Don't get me wrong, I love being a city boy - I'm just an urban person, most at home watching millions of stories play out at one in one creative, interwoven mess. But I haven't heard silence, or seen the stars, in a long, long time, and sometimes I miss those things a great deal.

On Monsters

2006-03-19T09:48:00.000-06:00

There's a great article in this month's Atlantic magazine about the frightening lengths British intelligence went to infiltrate and destroy the IRA. Their agents participated in shootings and bombings and killed other spies in the process of gathering the intelligence the British needed to break the back of the organization. Agents participated in activities including bombing attacks and the murder of police officers. Many reasonable people would agree that these efforts went too far in pursuit of a goal which may (or may not) be worthy. I am tempted to call the people who ended up doing such things somewhat monstrous.

At what point does order or peace or justice justify immoral or evil behavior? When do the ends justify the means? I confess up front that I really don't know, but that won't stop me from taking a stab at it.

In popular culture, this has become sort of a meme, because art is where we work out the issues that we're ordinarily too polite to talk about as a society. I've noticed three prominent fictional examples of individuals who become monsters in the service of some higher goal. Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Operative in Serenity, Hugo Weaving as the terrorist V in V for Vendetta, and Mary McDonnell's President Roslin in Battlestar Galactica. The Operative is presented as villain, V is presented as (anti-) hero, and as for Roslin, as well as for everyone else in the gloriously ambiguous space opera, the jury remains out. But all three of them do evil in the name of good, to create a better world they won't live to see, so in some ways they're all archetype, looked at from three different perspectives. They claim to know better than the foolish masses, so they use undemocratic, coercive and violent means to enforce their vision on the world. In their own eyes they are making a sacrifice for the greater good by engaging in evil. Jack Bauer on 24 would probably be another great example of this archetype, but since I don't know how his story ends I really can't draw any conclusions about him.

The Operative does monstrous things, including slaughtering an entire town, including children, on the off chance that our heroes may seek refuge there. He does these things in the name of preserving order, stability, and social peace. He thinks the triumph of his side will bring about a better world ("all of them, better worlds"). He has no proof of this, but he believes. He believes (incorrectly) that even though he murders people, the maintenance of order means fewer lives will be lost overall. He recognizes that he's a monster, and says of the coming utopia "I'm not going to live there." There will be no place for men such as himself in a perfected society.

Often in fiction we see such people used to cover up the corruption and cynicism of political leaders, but here it's not so simple. What he's covering up is a holocaust, albeit an accidental one - a drug that was supposed to calm and pacify the public actually killed 30 million people. The Operative does not know this because he never asks what it is he's fighting for.

Verdict: This one's obvious. That the Operative is wrong is the whole point of the movie. TWOPper Jacob wrote in his recap:

I think I just became a fucking Libertarian. And possibly a Christian.

Which sums up the moral universe of the movie pretty well. The Operative's sin is that he thinks he has the right to make decisions for everyone else, and enforce those decisions with violence, because the decisions are "right." But who decides what is right? Politicians? Scientists? Moralists? The Operative doesn't deserve the moral standing he gives himself. In the end, he rejects his old life and appears to be on the way to redemption. The other characters don't seem to care very much, and they have a point - he's a monster.

Laura Roslin is the formerly liberal Secretary of Education who is thrust into the role of President after the 42 people ahead of her in the line of succession are killed in a nuclear attack which decimates civilization. As President she embraces religious prophecy in order to consolidate her political base, and bans abortion when her fundie supporters demand it. Roslin almost routinely orders the execution of prisoners and does not consider the enemy to be persons with any rights or moral value. In the season finale, she tries to steal a democratic election, relenting only when she is caught by her chief military leader.

Many fans would justify her actions based on how her enemies behave - the wholesale murder of civilians, suicide attacks, sleeper agents etc. Except we see unapologetic terrorist Samuel Anders employing similar tactics to blow up a civilian cafe in order to drive out the occupying forces - holy HAMAS, Batman! We think that's okay, because he's on our side, right? Except that the specific Cylons he's targeting include the even sympathetic Boomer, programmed to think she's human, as well as Six - who played a key role in destroying the world and thus has it coming - except she feels really bad about it and is trying to find some way to end the war, which makes her what? Hero? Villain? Another monster? But this is not the issue. I'm not asking if Roslin's behavior is emotionally satisfying, I'm asking whether it's justified.

Verdict: Laura is meant to be controversial and difficult to pin down. Her backing down and conceding the election is supposed to mean that she stands at the precipice but is not a monster (yet). I disagree. Her horrible treatment of POW Sharon (who wanted to defect, for chrissakes), her execution of other unarmed prisoners including peace emissaries, her general moral obtuseness about the dignity and rights of her enemies, her embracing of fandementalism for political gain - all of these things place her beyond the pale in my eyes. True, she pursues power because she wants "what's best for her people." But who the hell is she to decide that? The show is more sympathetic to her than I am, and conspires to make her right more often than wrong. Settling on the new planet - which she opposed in the election campaign - does lead to disaster and occupation. But she couldn't have known that in advance, and didn't have the right to make everyone's decisions for them, or to decide who is worthy of life and who should die. I say she's a monster. A sympathetic, compelling monster perhaps, but a monster.

Which is not to say I don't like the character. Mary McDonnell deserves an Emmy. In fact the wonderful juxtoposition of the soulful, repentent killing machine Six with the bloody-minded, unapologetically murderous and deceitful human President was one of the high points of my entertainment year, making the episode "Downloaded" (TV guide subscribers can get it for free from iTunes, by the way) probably the best hour of TV I have ever seen.

V is the most obviously "monstrous" of the lot. Clearly a vengeance-obsessed madman, V blows up London landmarks as a call to revolution, and assassinates political, religious and media figures associated with the government. It's a clearly opressive government, however, which has banned both homosexuality and the Koran, as well as most foreigners apparently, and "disappears," tortures, and executes dissidents, as well as using them for medical experiments. Yet V himself is a terrorist, not above kidnapping, torturing and executing people, so where does he get off?

Verdict: He doesn't get off. Like the other two, he won't live to see the world he wants to create. But, crucially, he isn't trying to force his beliefs and views on people or make decisions for them. Quite the opposite - he wants people to be able to make choices for themselves, rather than have decisions made for them by the Government or Party. He may be a monster, but he's our monster.

So what do we conclude from these monsters? For me, the defining issue remains for what do they fight. In cases where the monster's goal is to make other people's choices for them, because they think they know better, becoming a monster is monstrous. There's only one cause worth giving up your soul for. It's not survival, not justice, not God, not patriotism, certainly not "security."

The only reason someone would be justified in monstrous deeds is the preservation and advancement of human freedom. In other words, what's wrong on behalf of the "saints" can be justified on the behalf of sinners. Using violence to exercise power over someone else in the name of one's beliefs or ideology or values, trying to make the world over in one's own image, is monstrous. But fighting in the name of human freedom and self determination is basically just self defense writ large - you can't grow and function normally as a human being without freedom, any more than you can do it without enough food or oxygen.

Live free or die - it's not just a license plate anymore.

whose machine is this anyway?

2006-03-18T17:52:00.000-06:00

So far this year I'm down to about two posts a month! I'm disappointed, even if nobody else out there cares very much one way or the other. My problem is not that nothing interesting is happening, it's that a lot of interesting things are happening, but it's work stuff, and I can't really blog about it. In fact, I don't really feel comfortable doing this at all during work hours. It's not so much that there's more pressure to use time at work productively (there's really not), it's politics. The nature of my employment looks like it's likely to change soon, and if it does I will offically be a public employee.

Which is great for me, but as you might have heard, there's been a lot of scandal surrounding political activity and public employment in Chicago and Cook County lately. So if I were to be working on something even vaguely political on time which is being compensated by the taxpayers would not be just shiftlessness, but illegal and in violation of the city's consent decree as well.

This is why I use a pseudonym and never discuss the department or field in which I work, which has become annoying recently because there's so much to say about it. But even so, I just don't think I can spend any of my convenient office computer time on the Web anymore, which has put a damper on my blogging.

This being Saturday, however, and me feeling sickly and having decided not to attend today's historic Michigan Avenue peace demonstration largely because it's cold and I'm being a wuss about it, I suppose I can spare some time to talk a little politics. Usually I'm fairly partisan, and not only do I know who I'm going to vote for in any given election far in advance, but I'm often actively campaigning for somebody. But this time around I'm stumped.

Tuesday morning is the Illinois Democratic primary, and the big race here is for President of the Cook County board (Board President sounds like a small time job not worthy of much thought until you realize that Cook County contains five and a half million people, roughly 42% of the state population, billions of dollars of tax revenue, and an army of patronage workers as large as any in North America). The Republican doesn't have a prayer, so whoever wins the primary wins the seat - or that's what I would have told you last week, anyway. But events have conspired to make things a bit more interesting.

The race pits longtime encumbent board president John Stroger against up and coming political operative Forrest Claypool. Stroger is one of the most powerful men in the state, and although the political hiring scandals that are spreading like wildfire across the prarie state have so far not reached his doorstep, all these guys who are getting indicted basically work for him, as he's on of the leaders of what they used to call the Machine - the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization. So reformers and Goo-Goos ("good government" advocates) are basically after his hide. In addition to my suspicion that machine politics leads to a bit of waste and inefficiency (although perhaps not as much as you'd assume) I have a bit of a personal grudge against Stroger - his determination to tear down the old Cook County Hospital building, mostly to improve the view of its replacement, which Stroger built and named Stroger Hospital. Since the old building is a classic which developers would like to turn into really nice condos, and the new one looks like a toddler built it out of glass blocks and random pieces of metal junk, I oppose this plan. Fortunately, most of the rest of the board agrees with me and the demolition is on hold while they examine offers to buy the building.

On the other hand. things have gotten quite a bit better in Chicago and Cook County while Stroger's been in charge. Crime and poverty are down, and at least some schools have improved a little. This weeks Economist magazine contains a special section touting Chicago as a success story and a possible model for reversing urban decline in the Rust Belt. So if taking out the trash is the standard by which officeholders are measured, Stroger's had a pretty good tenure.

Claypool, on the other hand, is running as a reformer, and has said everything the Goo-Goos want to hear. Transparency, accountability, etc. In theory I am in favor of these things. On the other hand, Claypool was Mayor Richard Daley's chief of staff at one point, so how independent and reformist can he really be? In addition, while he's widely respected for fixing things at the Park District when he was in charge, I've heard people complain that he was virulently anti-union in that position, and basically balanced the budget on the backs of longtime employees. And I also have a personal grudge against Claypool - he's backing the plan for a third airport at Peotone (along with Rep. Jesse Jackson Junior) over an expansion of O'Hare. The problem with this plan is that Peotone isn't even in Cook County! Basically, he wants to export yet more jobs that could become available for city residents to a distant exurb, just to mollify a few suburbanite mayors who are angry that an O'Hare expansion would demolish some of their oppressively tacky tract homes.

So where does that leave me? Two candidates I could never love, and I vote I have to base on guesswork - which will do less harm to Chicago's future over the next few years?

And then it got complicated. On Tuesday, John Stroger, who is 76 years old and fairly obese, suffered a serious stroke and had to be hospitalized. He's been in the ICU ever since and may or may not recover enough to return to work. So Chicago is faced with its own Ariel Sharon moment. What happens if Stroger wins but is unable to govern, which looks like the likeliest outcome as of this writing? The 80 Democratic committeemen - 50 representing Chicago's 50 wards and 30 from the burbs - will decide among themselves who the next candidate will be. I have no clue who this might be, and whether the official Machine candidate would be better or worse than Claypool. Do I trust those guys to pick a leader, or vote for Claypool, whom I don't like, but could probably live with?

My hunch is that the Board President job will be used as a political tool by the Machine. A longhot idea - perhaps the job will be offered to Jesse Jr. as a payoff to get him to not run for Mayor against Daley. More likely, it will go to some insider or loyalist - like Dan Hynes, the insider who had the oganizational support but failed to gain traction against Barak Obama in the '04 Senate primary. So any way the primary goes, we're in for some upheaval at the top. It's exciting stuff, but it leaves me playing an unfamiliar role - as an undecided voter.

your philosophical primer for the day

2006-03-09T20:43:00.000-06:00

People are evil. Not in the sense of "there are evil people out htere," but in the sense of "all of us are and do evil." We've all done things we regret, or should regret. We hurt or abuse or exploit others in our pursuit of self interest. We put our own convenience over the common good. This is just a part of human nature.

Liberals used to be the guys who said people were basically good and you should cut them some slack. Brian Covell has remaked that part of the decline of the American Liberal worldview had to do with our understanding of hte Holocaust as proof that human beings are fallen and sinful. The good pastor finds this somewhat lamentable, but after the events of the 20th Century, I would look upon with alarm any movement that claimed humand beings were perfect or perfectable.

Due to our sometimes miserable nature, life for much of human history was "nasty, brutish, and short." To deal with our insistant squabbling and murder of each other, the modern state evolved. Rules were developed for people to follow in order to bring relative peace to human relations. This was a vast improvement over the "warring tribes" system, which is what it replaced. In easter Europe, Somalia and Iraq we have witnessed what happens when the State collapses and we return to this brutish existance.

However, hte State has problems of its own. Basic human nature has not changed, so the people who run the government are also evil. They tend to use the power they have been granted to enrich themselves by exploiting everyone else, and work mostly to expand their own power.

To address this problem, Enlightenment thinkers such as the Founders of this nation developed a system under which the leaders of the government would be chosen by and held accountable to the people. Furthermore, they divided up the essential powers of the government among the 3 separate branches of government. They figured that the leaders of each branch woudl work hard to enhance thier own power. This would lead to conflict among the branches, often leaving them at loggerheads. While inefficient, this system would ensure that no one in government would be able to assert complete authority and misuse their offices too badly. The other branches would always be there to hold them accountable.

For example, the executive branch has the power to investigate criminal activity - this is an essential function of the state. Under the "warring tribes" system, when people wronged us, we would take our revenge upon them. In civilized society, we have given up our right of revenge to the State in exchange for its promise to protect us. So the State has a legal monopoly on the use of violence. They can grab people off the street, lock them up, and sometimes kill them. You, however, are not even allowed to throw a punch. "Assault," as it's now called, is a crime.

But what's to stop the leaders of the executive branch from using their monopoly on force to intimidate, threaten, blackmail and silence people in their own self interest? The answer lies in the separation of powers between the branches of government. The laws to be enforced are written by the legislative branch (Congress). Determining whether or not a law has been broken or properly carried out is the job of the courts. The executive just carries out and enforces the will of the other branches, it cannot make the law.

In order to protect people from tyranny, the system is set up to ensure that the government does not normally intrude on the privacy of ordinary citizens. Sometimes it must, but only to protect the public and enforce the law. But in order to do so, the executive must have permission from the other branches of government - they must present evidence to a judge that individual X has broken or is conspiring to break on of Congress' laws. This is part of the system by which each branch is supposed to be restrained by the other two.

So there's you philosophical primer for today. The real world relevance, of course, is that the Bush Administration now claims it has the right to invade peoples' privacy without presenting any evidence to the courts.

This amounts to saying "trust us. We're not going to use these powers against innocent people for our own gain becasue we're good people." But there arent' any good guys in real life, onlu uss self-interested pricks. It is necessary fro the government to investigate and detain people to protect the rest of us from the world of evil pricks outside the governmetn. But who protects us from the evil pricks inside the government? It's supposed to be the other branches of government. Public accountability through separation of powers and the rule of law. But by instituting large scale surveillance in secret, without informing Congress or the courts, the executive branch has proclaimed itself to be above the law.

"Trust us" they say. But trusting the people at the top to be nice is not a good plan for maintaining our liberty and ensuring that Americans will not be persicuted and jailed for political reasons. A much better plan is to keep the separation of powers and the rule of law in place.

We have maintained and expanded our freedom for over 200 years by not trusting anyone. We shouldn't let our fear of evil people out there make us forget that peopel are just as bad on this side of the border.

The Upside of Anger

2006-03-03T16:39:00.000-06:00

Okay, what the hell. Another contest! Just to see if anybody's still checking this page. This one is inspired by our media overlords at Fox News, and I'm sending it out to all you sarcastic cynics out there, especially my snarky blood relatives. Look at the zany topic of discussion they had the other day on Fox! Those crazy kids! ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ: COULD IT BE A GOOD THING? You bet it could! Let us count the ways! Post your reasons why genocidal sectarian civil war is good for humanity as comments to this web page. The person with the best reason, as judged by me, gets the greatest prize in the whole world (a case of beer, natch).

Bob, I'm working on it

2006-02-28T20:33:00.000-06:00

Yeah, so I haven't written hardly at all this winter. There's a couple reasons for that. A lot of the interesting stuff that's been going on in my life has to do with my job, and I'm just not going to blog about that. We've had visitors coming out like every other week for the last two months. Also, I'm really lazy, as a rule.

But the big thing is, I've been a little burned out. The things I've been talking about - the disappearing neighborhood, the Bush administration, the downward spiral that is American culture - it's just all been so depressing to me of late. I'd just rather not think about it all the time. I mean, I'm waiting for the moment to arrive when we can stand up and do something, but it just doesn't seem to be in the cards. The destruction of Pilgrim Baptist Church (pictures will follow soon) and the possible impending doom of the Artful Dodger building have me this close to giving up on preservation in Chicago. And the weakness and ineffectuality of the Democratic Party in the face of an obviously impeachable President just makes me want to puke - like the guys in the "Too Much Light" skit where they sit down to read the paper and start spewing fake vomit everywhere(sorry Trope I had to).

So I've been taking a break, thinking about less depressing things - if reading about Vietnam and watching humanity dwindle towards extinction on Battlestar Galactica count as less depressing. (There will be a BSG post in my future, probably once the current season wraps on March 10. The recent run has been a mixed bag, but the last couple have returned the show to its rightful place as the best show on television.)

I am also working on a real answer to Bob's question about the wiretapping issue. I was surprised today to look at my blog for the first time in weeks and see that there are six new comments on this issue since the last time I was here. I didn't mean to ignore you guys it's just, like I said before, I've been a bit burned out on the real world.

The short version is that I am not opposed to using wiretaps to spy on possible terrorists. I think it's a good idea, and it might help stop people from flying airplanes into buildings. What I'm adamantly opposed to is first of all doing so without a warrant, secondly the government blatantly lying and saying they cannot obtain warrants because they have to act quickly (warrants can be obtained retroactively up to 72 hours, so that's a non-issue), and most of all by the government's assertion that it's above the law and isn't constrained by Congress, the Courts, or the Constitution - in the words of Dick Nixon, "If the President does it then it isn't illegal."

This country was founded on the principle of "the rule of laws, and not of men." I thought this concept was a bedrock of our civilization, something that didn't need to be defended or even mentioned because it was a value everyone shared - standing somewhere between "slavery is bad" and "we would all prefer not to be nuked this afternoon." But if we all shared this principle this government would not be making the arguments it is making, so apparently the rule of law does need defending after all. I'm not really prepared to make the case today, but I'll dig out my copy of the Federalist Papers and start working on it. Right after Battlestar Galactica.

intensive diplomacy

2006-02-08T20:33:00.000-06:00

The other day on the way to the gym we were listening to public radio go back and forth about the Iran situation. The announcer said the Administration had no plans to attack yet, and instead was beginning a process of "aggressive diplomacy." It sort of sounded like an oxymoron to me, and made me laugh. Then I wondered if there might actually be hope that Bush could achieve some kind of deal with his even more dumber counterpart in Iran, if only they would put their rock-like heads together somehow.

Here is an outline of such a deal:

* Amedinajad agrees not to nuke anybody.

* Bush agrees to stop calling them "Moo-Lahs"

* Shrub admits that the reason Iran has not been a democracy for the past 50 years is that back when it was a democracy, the CIA overthrew it and installed a repressive monarchy.

* "Crazy A" admits that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a hoax, and the Holocaust is not.

* "Shrub" apologizes for backing Saddam when he used poison gas against Iranians

* "Crazy A" apologizes for taking the staff of the US Embassy hostage for a year and half back in 1979-81.

* "Shrub" agrees to publicly announce that his foreign policy will not be guided by prophesies of the End Times.

* "Crazy A" agrees to publicly announce that his foreign policy will not be guided by prophesies of the return of the hidden 12th Imam.

* "Shrub agrees to reduce funding to Israel every time the IDF carries out a military operation that kills innocent civilians.

"Crazy A" agrees to reduce funding to Hamas and Islamic Jihad every time they carry out a militant operation that kills innocent civilians.

* Both guys publicly admit that they are on the same side in Iraq and Afghanistan, and have all the same friends in the region, so they're just going to have to get along in public for the sake of the children - er, the Iraqis.

* Both guys privately admit that they're not smart or sane enough to be President, but pledge to do their best not to get anybody else killed for the rest of their terms.

Sounds simple, right? But people assure me it's not - I guess that's why I gave up my dream of working for the State Department so many years ago. Answers are easy - it's the people who are so fucking hard.

war pigs

2006-01-28T08:16:00.000-06:00

I’ve never spent much time around livestock, but I’m told that hogs in a pen become vicious animals. Wound one, in fact, and the others will smell its blood and weakness and devour it. Or so I’m told. When I lived in Ohio, I worked for a while with a woman whose grandparents had been bootleggers. I learned a lot from her, among other things how to make fried green tomatoes. I had some fantastic co-workers in those days... Anyway her grandparents raised hogs in addition to their extra-legal whisky business, and on at least one occasion a government “revenuer” ended up getting fed to the foul creatures, erasing the evidence of whatever it was that had led to the sudden death of a Federal agent on private property. I have no idea whether the story was true, but she sure liked to tell it.

Such folk legends of resistance against government authority are a part of people’s identity in many parts of the country – antisocial, yes, but quintessentially American. I used to look on these loony libertarians with a certain amount of skepticism and despair, but recent events have me coming around. What with the government claiming the right to spy on Americans, detain them without evidence, torture them, and hold them incommunicado for the rest of their lives, these folks are starting to make a lot more sense to me.

Common sense arguments seem to fall on deaf ears. Torture doesn’t work as an intelligence gathering tool. It produces compliance, not information. Spying on everybody just wastes scarce resources like agents’ time and leads mostly to dead ends and useless information. The good stuff the NSA can get the old fashioned way, with warrants, the way the FBI does when it’s surveilling the same people.

These arguments don’t convince anyone because the White House is bent on expanding power for its own sake, not because they want to defend the country. They think the American people are so dumb stupid that they can justify anything just by shouting terrorism! 9/11! Look, bin Laden! So if the whole point of this exercise was to push some old school liberals like me into the arms of the Libertarians in wanting to restrict the scope and power of the Federal Government, then congratulations. You win.

It makes me so mad, these people should by happy there’s not enough room in my postage stamp back yard to raise hogs.

Sometime soon I'm gonna edit this guy and put the links back in, but I just can't be bothered this morning.

a saur taste

2005-12-30T08:20:00.000-06:00

It was my grandfather's favorite restaurant. Whenever he was in town for Steelworker stuff he would make sure to stop in for some good old German food like his momma used to cook on the farm. My father would eat lunch there when he worked in the Loop in the '70s. And my wife chose to eat there for her birthday last summer. And now, it seems, the Berghoff - proud owner of Illinois Liquor License Number 1 - will close at the end of February. It appears that the business has actually been doing quite well, but that the third-generation owners of the bar and restaurant, established in 1898 as a way to promote Herman Joseph Berghoff's locally brewed beer, are retiring. And their daughter, Carlyn Berghoff, doesn't want to run the restaurant, preferring instead to focus on her catering business and open some sort of trendy bar in the space.

Yuck. I wish they could have been persuaded to sell the business, a Chicago institution, to someone who would keep it open. It's hard to explain the value of the restaurant to out of towners - the building is one of the last post-fire commercial structures and a neighborhood dominatied by Modernist skyscrapers interspersed with a few remaining Guilded Age masterpieces. It's one of the first things that comes to mind when someone mentions the Loop, and has been for about five generations now. They still make their own German style lagers, as well as a damn fine homemade bourbon - what's going to happen to the bourbon? Even the cheap stuff takes ten years to make, imagine all that whisky, sitting in the basement for four, eight, ten years - what will happen to it now? The horror.

Anyway, the family is saying they plan to use the dining room as a banquet hall for private functions, along with the trendy bar. They can afford this because they own the building outright - but certainly the plot of land in the heart of downtown is worth a pretty penny in this market. I'm sure it will come down within the decade. The irony is, the Loop is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, as old-school office buildings are converted to condominiums, and new condo towers go up. What used to be the region's depopulated business core is once again becoming a densely populated neighborhood. People have been flocking to be downtown so they can be steps away from institutions like Marshall Field's and the Berghoff - instititions that will have disappeared in the time between the new residents dropping their down payments and their move-in dates. I, for one, would feel ripped off.

save us

2005-12-29T19:32:00.000-06:00

I've been wondering about Iran and this Mahdi character for about a week now. What sort of messiah wants you to build him his own special railroad? I ask around.

Krishna doesn't know. He's out in the fields, trying to pick up a couple of cowgirls again. He's not interested in trains, he doesn't want to miss the countryside on his journeys.. "Country girls are the best," he adds. I ask him if he's been to Carol's Pub the country bar in Uptown. He has. He said he's dipped in that well a few times already. "It's rough going if you're always running into exes," he says. I mention the band on Friday is known for its Elvis covers, though, so he says he might come along.

Buddha doesn't know. "I think I'm just gonna stay here, so I don't need a train," he says, reclining at the base of a Bodhi tree. "Need is an illusion anyway." Buddha's never had to fight traffic. If he did, he might have a little more appreciation for public transit. "I don't commute," he says. "It's the same there as it is here."

Jesus is bringing flowers to his mother, who is still hanging out with the bums under the overpass. "A train to Tehran?" Jesus is skeptical. "I thought he was going to use taht money to help the poor." I explain about the ripple effects of big infrastructure projects, but he seems unconvinced. He's not really sold on the bar, either, but tells me to page him if Krisha comes along.

Since I don't have any connections with the Mahdi himself, I go to the closest thing I have to a source. Since he named his private army after the guy, I figure he must know something. I find Moqtada al Sadr in a cinderblock house near Kut, in southern Iraq. Few people know this about him, but he's a big Nirvana fan. When I find him he's listening to "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle" while reassembling an AK-47. I notice that while it's a plain and sparsely furnished little hut, he hase one of those cool Bose speakers hooked up to his iPod.

"Oh great, another American," he says by way of greeting. "You'd best get up off my land, boy," he adds. I explain my question about the Mahdi. "Fuck you," he replies conversationally. I ask him whether the Mahdi would want a rail line constructed to ferry him to Tehran from the holy well place. He adjusts something on the gun with a screwdriver. "That whole well story is just a folk tale," he says, finally. "Why would he come to Iran, anyway? He would come here, where his people are." I point out that there are far more Shi'ites in Iran than in Iraq. Moqtada puts his cheek to the gun and stares down the barrel for a moment. He frowns and shakes his head. "Mohammad was an Arab, like me," he says. "He was my ancestor," he adds. The Mahdi is also a descendent of Mohammad. He will come here." He starts to adjust the sights again, then lays the gun down. "Fuck Iran," he adds, judiciously. So he feels closer to Sunni Baathists like Saddam, because they are Arab, than to Persian Shi'ites? "Fuck Saddam." Of course.

"The Mahdi will come to Iraq," he repeats. "We are his people. That's why fucking Saddam always feared us." I look back over my notes. "Fuck America. Fuck Iran. Fuck Saddam," I read back to him. "I notice a pattern developing." Finally he looks up at me. "Yeah. What part of 'Get the hell up off my land' do you not understand? Do you know what the problem with Iraq is?" I am tempted to show him a mirror, but prudence takes the better part of valor. "Foreigners," he says, finally.

He goes back to adjusting the gun sights. The next song starts up. It's "All Apologies." After a minute, he looks down the barrel again, and looks satisfied. He opens a drawer, pulls out a clip, and rams it home. Then he looks up at me again.

"Why are you still here?" he asks.

I have no earthly idea.

ear bugs

2005-12-28T21:23:00.000-06:00

For Christmas this year, Trope dragged me into the digital age by giving me a tiny little Samsung digital audio player, the kind that clips to your belt and people think it's a cell phone. Up until now, I didn't understand what the big deal was with these things - "BFD, I had a Walkman in the 80s, too," I said. Well, part of the deal is being able to carry around enough hours of music to blot out the chattering of your co-workers and the cacauphony of the gym without being forced to listen to the same tape over and over. But an added gift of music portability is bringing the music front and center again - this is the first time I've actually listened to these recordings rather than had them blaring in the background while I did other things around the house.

The principal thing I've discovered is that some of these songs have lyrics. Take the Soviettes, my favorite Minneapolis punk band. Who knew the they had redeeming social value to go with the aggression and the tatoos?

Check it out:

There's a Banana in My Ear

He said "they hate us for our freedom."
He said "there'll soon be less to hate."
You said "keep your voices low."
You said "always trust the state.
Keep your money in the market,
Educate the nation's youth.
The papers wouldn't print what isn't true."

And so filters become layered
And so nothing can get through
And so all you hear are whispers
'Bout the bullshit that we pull.
No one will name those to blame for 100 red hot years,
Since no one can listen no one hears.

Guess that's why the college kids
Would rather tune out than sit in.
Guess so, whatever, I don't know,
It's easier to join than win.

How can it fucking matter, when no one knows what's true?
No one can be blamed for what no one never knew.
Cover up your tracks,
Wash your hands free from their blood,
No one knows they hate us for what we've done.

I guess they really are leftists. That's so hot.

You can download a couple tunes from their new album, which I don't have for some reason, here. And put them right on your little music thingy, and take them with you on the subway. Maybe progress isn't so bad after all.

never grow old

2005-12-27T23:13:00.000-06:00

In the late 80's my grandmother took me with her to see her mother in a nursing home in small town Western Illinois. This was around the time of my big high school relationship (all of 9 months) and my experiment with born again Christianity - I'm guessing it was roughly 1987. The place was bleak, institutional painted cinderblock. I remember my great grandmother slumped over the table in a common room, crying, and my grandmother, not really the nurturing type, not knowing what to do with her. Grandma Eva never did learn my name - she referred to me as "D," after my father, and when I corrected her she'd wave me off and say, "I know where you come from, anyway" - but on that day she didn't know me from Adam. She'd always been the life of the party - she was running around with a boyfriend and a sporty red car well into her 80s, and was a fixture at family events like weddings and funerals, fortified by a couple Rob Roys (if you're local, the place to get this drink in Chicago is definitely the Green Mill - up, with a twist). She started offering me beer at the ripe old age of ten - probably confusing me with my father already. Buy by 1987 she divided her time between staring off into space, and crying, near as I could tell.

After the awkward visit, my grandmother turned to me on the way out and made me promise: "If I ever get like that, just shoot me." A steelworker's wife who made a name for herself in local Republican politics and had counted Don Rumsfeld as a friend back when he was a lowly Congressman, she was known to joke about firearms in much the way I am, but this was no deadpan - what she'd seen scared her more than death and Big Government put together.

Christmas eve, I went with my father to visit her at the nursing facility where he moved her six weeks or so ago. The walls were not painted cinderblock, in fact they were decorated with a tasteful border. Pictures of her loved ones, were arranged around the room, including my wedding pictures and some endearingly goofy shots of my late grandfather. At least these places look nicer these days; I'm sure the saunas and the juice bar will be installed by the time the Baby Boomers start checking in. But the low moan of chaos was still there in the background, and the incessent beeping of the patient alarms added a new level of hell for those of us without hearing aids to turn down.

Mostly my father talked and she nodded compliantly, asking a few confused questions here and there. Her hard edges are mostly worn smooth by now, except for occasional glaring moments of clarity.

"Elwood's just in town for the day, but he wanted to make sure he got to see you," my father exaggerated.

"Well, what do you think?" she asked, in one of those lucid moments when her personality still comes through the dementia. "Do you like what you see?" My father kept right on talking. The worst part is, he's starting to get like everyone else and talk about her as if she's not there. On this day he started to talk about people coming in to monitor her bowel movements, with her sitting right there - to some extend I think he find's the situation darkly funny, but she seemed mortified and I cringed on her behalf.

I hope she doesn't remember. She's forgotten a lot, and I hope one of the things she's forgotten is my promise. I don't even own a gun, and wouldn't have the balls to shoot her anyway. But the weight of all she's lost weighs me down in that place. And the worst part of it is the way people talk about you like you weren't there, they way we talk about our cats. My grandmother held on to her dignity and pride when her father walked out during the Depression and she was left raising her younger siblings at the age of twelve, and I don't think she wants to live without them now.

It's not getting old itself that scares me, it's the thought of being treated like I'm not a person anymore.

guess he always did look more like captain caveman anyway

2005-12-24T00:30:00.000-06:00

An Agnostic Looks at Christmas

2005-12-23T23:54:00.000-06:00

Elwood Grobnik: There was a Chrismas sing a long deal at work last week. Not that anyone sang along. But the choir from Roberto Clemente High sang, they were pretty good. This guy Ray played guitar and sang a piece he wrote about Mary and her baby . . .
Harvey: Sounds like bullshit to me.
EG: Now, it was good. He sounds like Eddie Vedder when he gets going.
Inner Queen: Yay?
EG: So parts of it were cool. That was one. But then this . . . person . . . goes up and reads this poem. It was called "the night before Jesus came" and was all about how Jesus comes back and the narrator hadn't been "saved" and doesn't get to go with him.
IQ: Presumably to the tune of "Twas the Night Before Christmas."
HR: Dude, 1-800-ACLU-SUE!
EG: I was offended, man, but I gotta eat too.
HR: Sure, but there's a wrongness there. I know there's another Unitarian in that office, and at least one Muslim - the "Jesus or die" poem, that's not what you'd call inclusive. And isn't that a government office?
EG: I suppose. But I don't want to get into it. They're already screaming about the War on Christmas. And that's not even what I'm talking about. Ray was singing about the glory of God, and I have no problem with that. It's the proselytizing I have a problem with.
IQ: Anyway it's just sad all these people clinging to their delusions for safety, hinking somebody's going to save them in the end.
VOICE: You Don't Know He's Not Coming
IQ: And you don't know he is coming, so we're even.
HR: I know the book is bullshit. I know people wrote it, and made it up, and there's no such thing as prophecy.
EG: But you don't know
HR: He's not . . .
VOICE: Something's Coming.
EG: Something's always coming.
HR: Well, sure. You always expect tomorrow to be the same as today, but it never is.
Buddha Nature: really? i hadn't noticed
Dog: Arf!
EG: That's not quite what I mean!
HR: Isn't it?
Voice: You Don't Know He's Not Coming.
HR: Who's not coming? What's coming? The books are all bullshit.
EG: Granted. Nobody knows. But something's coming. The situation is untenable.
Buddha Nature: the situation is transient
EG: It demands change!
Giblets: Giblets demands change! cough it up! Give him your money NOOOW!
HR: It is changing. You just don't like how.
Buddha Nature: really, i hadn't noticed
Voice: Something's Coming
HR: You don't know that!
EG: I say we wait.
HR: But you don't know anyone's coming!
EG: What's the alternative?

Johnny .316 and other passages

2005-12-22T10:26:00.000-06:00

I hate this week. The darkest day of the year yesterday, the always stressful Christmas season, and did I mention Johnny Damon is a Yankee now? Now that's a dark day. WWJDD? Play for the Romans for 54 million pieces of silver, apparently.

Jesus Shaves

I have very little intellingent to say about the world right now, mostly because I've slept all of 12 hours since Sunday, spent a day and a half being violently ill, haven't worked out all week, and I'm still not done with Christmas crap yet. Bah fucking humbug! I'd put the rest of my gifts in brown paper bags and staple them shut, if I had any brown paper bags.

From what little I've picked up from the outside world:

* They're not going to rebuild New Orleans. Not for the people who used to live there, anyway. I hear they are talking about resettling neighborhoods one by one, starting with the high and dry districts by the river. There is concern that if they rebuilt the housing all at once, there would be "blight" because not everyone will come back and some buildings will stand empty. In other words, they don't want too much available housing because it will drive down property values to where poor people might afford them. So "gentrification" becomes a prerequisite for rebuilding. In addition, federal loans for rebuilding are being handled through the Small Business Administration and only handed out to people who meet stringent creditworthiness requirements. As a result, nearly all loans are going to well to do districts. Again, the poor and working class need not apply.

* President Bush ordered the NSA to spy on people in the United States without a warrant starting in 2002. Apparently they started with a relatively small list of people associated with suspected terrorists and then went out to 12 degrees of separation, which would be, what, a third of the country? [Hi, NSA guys, how ya doin' out there? You must be busy, faced with the thankless task of defending us all from our liberty! You must feel you don't get much credit for all the work you do. You know why that is? Because you suck! Now back off and mind your own business.] This practice is clearly in violation of Federal law. It is also unconstitutional:

' Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. '

I believe this is an impeachable offense.

* The senate had an emergency spine transplant and refused to renew the Patriot Act without adding significant oversight, partly as a response to the President's illegal spying program. Bush caved in and allowed the act to be extendeded for just a month while new safeguards are considered.

* Our unesteemed chief executive also gave in and agreed to sign a ban on torture. The guy is becoming downright progressive in his old age, isn't he?

* Oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve was again defeated at the last minute.

And now for the bad news. They had an election in Iraq. I know what you're going to say, "wait, isn't that good news?" No, it isn't. Because the parties in power have used the last year to get their militia people in to all the key jobs - literal "political footsoldiers," sort of like Chicago-style ward organizations with AK-47s. They have been able to produce an electoral victory for themselves even though many people are quite disenchanted with them. Not only that, but their opponents are already crying foul and accusing them of cheating.

This would be bad under any circumstances. But the parties in power in this case are fundamentalist religious Shiites allied with Iran. And Iran recently had elections of its own, which were enough to give pause to even the most ardent supporters of democracy. There were actually a couple candidates for which a sane person might vote: reformer Mustapha Moin, for one, or former President Akbar Rafsanjani, an old revolutionary who nevertheless would like improved relations with the West. But no, the rabble chose to elect the profoundly ignorant former mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a lay fundie who is slowly rolling back the hard won social freedoms of the last decade. He's a go it alone hardliner internationally and a social rightie at home. Sound familiar? Actually he makes Bush look like a brain trust. He believes the world is going to end in the next couple years and wants to build a special railroad line to carry the Messiah to Tehran from the site of the well out of which he will appear. Apparently this Messiah will need nuclear weapons for some reason. And, oh yeah, we're spending our soldiers' lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to put his buddies in power next door in Iraq, where they're running secret prisons and torturing people and forming death squads and assassinating journalists who criticize them. Hoo-Rah.

Well, I got new for Rapture-seekers here, there and everywhere to brighten up the holiday season:

He ain't comin'. Time to make other plans.

The world's going to keep spinning for a while yet, whether you're on board or not. The Middle East is not going to suddenly transform into a land of peace and democracy just because a bunch of Marines charge in there and start waving the flag around. Homosexuality and abortion are not going to go away just because you ban them - we don't care that you think they're icky, we didn't ask, because we don't respect your opinion. Oil prices are going to keep going up no matter who you invade, because there's just not that much oil left. And the Messiah? He got a better offer from the Yankees.

a theory of actual reality part 2

2005-12-12T14:30:00.000-06:00

As I've said before, it is becoming apparent that the muddle-headed postmodernism that afflicts our public intellectuals has crippled their ability to resist the full scale onslaught against reason and the Enlightenment being carried out by boneheaded mouth-breathers and the corporate elite that exploits them. What is needed instead is some kind of worldview grounded in a respect for the central importance of Actual Reality.

For the latest round in this intellectual boxing match, we are proud to bring you Harold Pintner vs. Harold Pintner. From his recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

I wholeheartedly endorse his newfound appreciation for the value of the truth, and his concerns about what he calls "the tapestry of lies" that surrounds us. But even Pintner admits he hasn't always been it's biggest champion. He starts his speech with these words:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

So he has come to the conclusion that in order to make a convincing political case, he needs to abandon the reality-defying principles of his art. A political program, like a house, needs to be built on a concrete foundation. I hold out hope that this may turn out to be a watershed moment in a larger movement in which people come to realize that the tools of literary criticism are not, in fact, the most appropriate tools for analyzing culture, society, and life in general, a movement that leads the practitioners of that esoteric art to retreat to their Ivory Tower, where they will never be heard from by people with jobs again.

Unfortunately, Pintner then procedes to play a little fast and loose with the facts himself. He claims that "At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began," for example. The truth is bad enough without resorting to eggageration to make your political point. If we are going to be the "reality-based community," we need to stick to facts we know are true, rather than grasping at any statement that appears to support us and harm our enemies. Sadly, sloppy argument and faulty reasoning are just as common as egaggerated numbers. If we can't make a case agains Bush with the plain truth, there's gotta be something wrong with us.

The Empty Bottle Test

2005-12-08T15:45:00.000-06:00

"Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women. They'll drive you crazy. They'll drive you insane" - 50th Ward Alderman Bernie Stone

I guess they've had their last meeting in those legendary "smoke-filled back rooms." Yesterday, accompanied by a public display of laughter and bawdy song, Chicago City Council finally passed a ban on smoking in most public places. While many of us have waited a long, long time for such an ordinance, we're going to have to wait longer still for it to take effect.

Disappointingly, the legislation as passed does not pass the "Empty Bottle" test, embodied in the statement:

"If the city passed a smoking ban, I'd be able to hop down to the Empty Bottle and watch a jazz, alternative, or punk band without my eyes turning read and my jacket smelling so bad I can't wear it again for a week." In spite of the fact that the bar is scarcely a mile from our house and features some of the best music in the city, we rarely go there, because of air quality issues. It just frankly stinks in there, and my wife won't go unless, of course, her friend's band is playing (like they will be this Saturday night, the 10th). So I don't want to hear about smokers' rights, or how a ban will drive people away from local businesses. It didn't hurt business in New York. In fact, it's probably helped, because it's such a pleasant and non-foul-smelling experience to go to a bar there. Every time I visit I'm amazed by how far you can see in those places, how clean everything is, and how it almost completely fails to stink.

Alas, Chicago's "ban" as passed allows smoking in bars and restaruants with bars in them until July 1, 2008, at which time Chicago, rather than being one of the first cities to have such a law, will almost certainly be one of the last. Furthermore, individual bars will be exempt from the restriction if they can devise "air filtration or purification devices" that "render the exposure to secondhand smoke" in the bar or tavern "equivalent to exposure to secondhand smoke in the ambient outdoor air surrounding the establishment." Of course, no such technology exists at this point, but it does leave open the possibility that the city will eventually come up with some bogus air quality standards that undermine the law altogether. And that, my friends, will stink.

Demolition of the Week: El Rincon Community Clinic

2005-12-01T21:43:00.000-06:00

I haven't been keeping up with the demolition watch, obviously. This feature, and to some extent this blog, started with a conversation in a neighbor's apartment over a game of Go. The idea was that someone should keep a record of all the architecturally good but everyday neighborhood buildings that are being destroyed on a weekly basis in the city of Chicago. While cities like New York value their architectural heritage and painstakingly preserve it, to the extent of painstakingly preserving the facades of old buildings when new ones are built behind them. In Chicago such a thing would only be attempted after a protracted fight with preservationists - early morning demolitions without even a permit are the norm, and go on all the time, unquestioned.

Everyone at the gathering lamented this state of affairs, and an architect who was present suggested the old neighborhood buildings should be documented somewhere. Someone else (not me) suggested a newsletter with a "Demolition of the Week" feature. This was perhaps 10 days before the 2004 election, and I was already planning to start this blog, so I just incorporated the feature.

But in recent months, the destruction has been so widespread that I've basically given up. By the time I notice a new demolition, there's nothing left to photograph but a big hole in the ground. This happens so often that the actual population of the neighborhood has probably declined significantly, as house after house has become a construction site in an orgy of speculative development. Developers have no consideration for the neighorhood that was here before, instead they are explointing every loophole they can find to allow demolition of the existing working class housing in order to build half million dollar condos for the wealthy. For those of you who are out of town and haven't been here to see the hood, I'm sorry you missed it. It had character. My only consolation is that the real estate market is bound to crash soon, as there are clearly not enough buyers for all of these astronomically priced homes. People here just don't make that kind of cash - the median income in Illinois is actually falling these days.

The building I've picked out for this week must seem an odd choice. The commercial building at 1874 N Milwaukee is not exactly an architectural gem. In fact, it's sort or ugly and the building that used to flank it have already been destroyed. other than the charming little detail (above) over the door, it doesn't have that much to recommend it.

Actually, I won't miss the building at all. But I think it's representative of the changes taking place throughout the Near West Side. The building coming down currently houses the El Rincon Community Clinic, a methadone clinic serving the Latino population. This explains the poor quality of my photograph here - it's fairly awkward trying to snap pictures of a methadone clinic on a Thursday afternoon in late autumn. You have to be careful not to get any clients in the picture, and even so, everyone glares at you for invading their privacy. Sort of a creepy corner right now, which is kind of a shame because it's right across the street from the best little Costa Rican restaurant ever.

The new building goin up on the property and the surrounding vacant land won't be so sketchy. In fact, it's supposed to the new wave of environmentally friendly architecture. In addition to insulation and advanced water recycling including one gallon toilets filled with used shower water, the building's appliances will be powered by photovoltaic cells, meaning no gas and electric bills. In fact, CK Developers claims it may be possible for the building to sell electricity to Com Ed. The price for these low-impact living quarters? A bit less than half a million each.

Artist's Rendering of the proposed green condos.

Developing this kind of technology sounds like it's all to the good, in fact it's a greenie's wet dream. But who's going to move into these units? Certainly not the colorful, artistic and pansexual crew who made up the old Wicker Park/Bucktown area and earned it the nickname of "Chicago's Greenwich Village." Not aspiring actors, not painters, not photographers, not Puerto Rican laborers, not octogenarian Polish grandmothers, and certainly not the patrons of the methadone clinic. Which might be great from a developer or investor perspective; "Woo hoo! Rising property values!" But where are people of the non-rising income values supposed to live?

a theory of actual reality part 1

2005-11-28T14:26:00.000-06:00

Talk about coming late to the party. Over the weekend, I saw the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Rent, a phenomenon which I managed to completely miss when it came out back in 1996. Not only did I not catch the musical, I'd never even heard the soundtrack until after I'd seen the first time (for the rest of you who were as out of the loop as I was - it's really good. Go see the movie).

It's really not surprising that I've never seen the stage production, since at the time it came out, I was living in a co-op in Columbus, OH, 22 of us camped out in a crumbling, glorious ruin of a mansion just east of Ohio State University. The mix of perennial grad students, wannabe writers, artists, and musicians, and party people with fluid sexualities would be familiar to the characters from "Rent." But we didn't go to see Broadway shows that much (I got the impression neither would the "Rent" crew. What else was out then, anyway? Cats?)

Seeing the musical at such a remove from that time and place raises a lot of questions for me. Was I a "bohemian?" What am I now? Have I betrayed my ideals? Did I have any ideals worth clinging to? And so on.

Before we go there, some more obvious observations:

The AIDS epidemic probably hurt New York a lot more than 9/11 did. It killed more people, and in the process gutted the creative community that had been the energetic beating heart of Downtown communities like the East VIllage and Alphabet City. Also, while 9/11 caused the country to (briefly) rally behind New York (remember "it's your patriotic duty to go to a Broadway show?"), the AIDS epidemic caused Middle America (and there was such a beast back then) to recoil.

A lot of reviewers have complained that Rent is now a "period piece" - the community depicted no longer exists in the same way. It seems a strange criticism. Did critics feel that was a negative thing in the case of "Chicago," or "Capote," or "Dances With Wolves," to name a few movies set in times that are not now? Every Western ever made, for example? The truth is, "Rent" was already a period piece when it premiered on stage - the Alphabet City bohemia depicted was already vanishing, for the very reasons discussed in the play - AIDS for one, as well as rising rents in the neighborhood (hence the name).

In fact, pronouncements that "those days are gone" are a bit premature. It's true that the East Village is now filled with multimillion dollar condos (one of which is owned by Rent star Anthony Rapp!), but Bohemia has simply left Manhattan for grimier pastures in Dumbo, Williamsburg, and other points east. But if Brooklyn doesn't exist to these people, there's just no point in bringing up Yellow Springs, Ohio, is there?

"Relevance" isn't exactly the point, anyway. "Bohemians" (so named after the centuries-old hipster scene in Prague, still going strong last I heard) are out of the mainstream by definition. Most critics of the movie (and Broadway show) quickly devolve into personal attacks on the relevance and worth of the type of people depicted in the show.

The best review so far:

"Get a job for God's sake, people, and bring back some better songs while you're out."
-- Jeffrey Bruner, DES MOINES REGISTER

This one goes into more detail:

I’m shocked that a musical about AIDS, heroin, and squatters could become the eighth longest running musical in Broadway history with over 4,000 performances. It has grossed more than $210 million in New York alone. After seeing the movie, I’m glad I didn’t go to the Las Vegas performances of this acknowledged worldwide phenomenon.

I understand that the musical has a huge following, but the movie RENT will not. Why hail the lives of a group of people who do nothing, engage in sexually risky behavior, get terminally ill, and refuse to pay their rent? Because they feel that it is only important to love and let someone else pay the Con Ed bill? To find this “truth,” these misfits have traversed a lifestyle of anonymous, multiple sex partners and needle drugs. Larson ignores what made this group of sweet kids damaged souls of hopelessness.

Who are these boring, uncreative friends? Roger (Adam Pascal) is a songwriter who hasn’t written a song in a year. He just kicked heroin. His tenement roommate is Mark (Anthony Rapp), an out-of-work filmmaker who keeps filming his friends sitting around. Surprisingly, since Mark appears gay, he was unceremoniously dumped by sultry performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel), who is now in love with a successful lawyer, jealous Joanne (Tracie Thoms). Downstairs lives Mimi (Rosario Dawson), a fully-dressed exotic dancer who does not make enough money to pay her rent either. She is a heroin addict. She likes sullen Roger. It is so sweet when they admit to each other they are both taking AZT and are HIV-positive!

WEST SIDE STORY’S Maria and Tony look like whining babies now!

Roger and Mark’s buddy Tom (Jesse L. Martin) turns up. He is homeless, jobless, and has just been mugged. But he has a really good attitude! He meets the Soul of RENT, precious Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a drag queen. They are HIV-positive. That makes four sick people in one movie. They go to AIDS meetings. Everyone gets up and sings a We Shall Overcome song.

Trying to promote reality into these happy-go-lucky freeloaders is Benjamin Coffin III (Taye Diggs). He married their tenement owner's daughter and, even though he long ago promised his friends their valuable loft rent-free, he now needs the space for a business enterprise. What an ***! Where is the love in New York City real estate?
. . .
I didn’t like the music. I know it is sacrilegious to write anything negative about RENT (as the show-stopping song goes, “but I am who I am”). And, like the SERENITY and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA fans, I am sure I will hear from everyone who ever brought a ticket to RENT and cried. After all, it is a musical about HIV-positive young people who haven’t a care in the world. The creator died at 36 years old of an aortic aneurysm before enjoying the perks of creating the first Gay AIDS musical.
-Victoria Alexander, FilmsInReview.com

Feel the love, people.

And then there's this gem:

His songs, with their somber despair and contrasting seize-the-day attitudes, slice to the heart of a disillusionment that has been forgotten since Sept. 11, 2001, even though the problems of AIDS, drugs, urban isolation and self-serving relationships still infect a generation.
- Mark Collette Tyler Morning Telegraph

Huh? There are people out there who are less disillusioned after 9/11? Apparently there are, in Texas.

For me, dropping out of mainstream society was a rejection of the hypocrisy and greed I saw in mainstream, materialistic society. I wanted an entirely different kind of existence, rooted in creativity and spirituality, in community, relationships and people. Which is sort of funny, because I'm bad at relationships, irreligious, and lack the follow-through to really write the Great American Novel. But I never said I was the model for a new society, I just said I wanted one.

Which brings us to the philosophical underpinning for the whole project, Tom Collins' intriguingly hinted-at "Theory of Actual Reality" that got him kicked out of trendier institutions like MIT (He reprogrammed a virtual reality demonstration to say Actual Reality! ACT UP! Fight AIDS!).

What would such a theory be like? I can see it's something I'm going to be chewing on for the next few weeks. But here's an outline: wherever humanism and postmodernism are incompatible, postmodernism should be dumped like a high school girlfriend. This approach will allow us to excape from the solipsistic trap that has pretty much short circuited critical though in this country for the past couple decades.

AIDS is a great place to start. It isn't socially constructed, it's real. It's a retrovirus, a renegade strand of RNA that will kill you regardless of what social meaning you ascribe to it or how you attempt to integrate it into your understanding of reality. Or another example. People often say that race relations are "so much better than they used to be." Again, you may feel that way, but there are actual facts, and the facts say different. Segregation is worse than ever - the average white person and average black person live further apart than ever before, and are less likely to have a member of a different race living within a mile of them. African American infant mortality rates are worse than some Third World nations (Cuba's is much lower, for example).

In postmodernia, we are expected to give equal weight to all "perspectives." Hence the news media, intent on showcasing both "sides" of an issue even when one side is lying. But nobody calls it a "lie," now it's called a "conservative perspective." How many times have I heard a talking head or some guy on NPR say that same sex marriages will "undermine marriage" or "threaten American families." Why? How would that work? What does that even mean? If these questions can't be answered, then this "perspective" doesn't belong on the air. Perspecives with evidence to back their claims should be - what's the word - privileged over other perspectives. Yes, I'm saying that some people's views are more important and better because they are well informed, while other people's views deserve to be devalued and ignored because they are ignorant. Obviously people have different values and opinions about a great many subjects, and that's all to the good. But we don't need to show good natured tolerance and respect for self-serving blather based on assumptions that can be proved false with a few minutes of effort.

Look at these so-called critics. "Get a job?" Do you know how hard it is to make a movie or write a novel while working a full time job? If people don't drop out of the mainstream work force to create art, where is it supposed to come from? Or are people actually satisfied with the empty-headed "cultural products" peddled by Disney and Viacom? Even if they are, they should realize that most of those guys also started out in an unheated loft somewhere. And if neighborhood after neighborhood is converted into housing for the wealthy, where the hell are the other 90% of people supposed to live?

These are not rhetorical questions, I actually want answers. That's another thing that separates Actual Reality from the Blatherverse. The irony here, of course, is that right now it's me who's just ranting. But I plan to return. Soon! With Actual Examples! And then maybe I'll Make Sense!

Till then, just go see the movie.

in the mean time . . .

2005-11-22T22:05:00.000-06:00

sorry it's taking so long for me to get the latest update out. In the meantime, I have a post up here, about some depressing stuff which nevertheless is probably the most important thing going on in this country. Be a good citizen and check out some of the articles I linked to, I'll see you back here tomorrow.

Wish I'd Said That . . .

2005-11-14T18:07:00.000-06:00

Facemonkey forwarded this gem to me:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears.

Thanks, man. That brightened my day.

Ranting into the Void

2005-11-14T17:20:00.000-06:00

There's been a lot of talk about blogs being the subversive new media, with a new breed of citizen-journalist daring to tell the truth in the face of the corporate media juggernaut. This kind of talk strikes me as mostly bullshit. If you should take anything you read in the paper with a grain of salt, you should take anything you read on the internet with a whole cube, followed by two tylenol and good night's sleep to mull it over. For one thing, people like me don't have time to do much research, we have actual jobs to do. So what you get is mostly uninformed, unreflective ranting, not to say gibberish.

You can't just read this blog, for example, and think you have some idea what's going on in Chicago. In this space I have been recording, intermittantly, the destruction of neighborhood buildings which I felt were beatiful and good and contributed to the city's unique character and personality, to be replaced by a blank, featureless autoscape somewhat resembling a huge suburban apartment complex but louder, and with more traffic. The other week, however, when I was late for an appointment on the South Side and took what I remembered as a short cut, I discovered that I have missed what should have been the story of the last year.

Downtown Englewood is gone.

The area around 63rd and Halsted was once the downtown of one of the first suburbs of Chicago, a working class immigrant community south of the Union Stockyards, where many of its residents worked. By the end of the 19th century Englewood had been annexed to the city proper, and in the first half of the 20th Century its old downtown served as an important commercial strip for the central South Side, which at the time was pretty much the residential and industrial heart of the city. In addition to shopping, the area was home to several theaters where locals could catch both live jazz and "talkies."

After World War II, as discrimitory "housing compacts" were held to be illegal, Chicago's growing African American population began moving west across Cottage Grove and towards Englewood. The idea of racial integration was not viewed in a positive light by the local white community, and in the early 50s a riot famously broke out in the area after the rumor spread that a local man planned to sell his house to a black family (actually, a nosy neighbor had merely observed a black man attending a labor meeting at the house. Rioters burned the house down anyway, or maybe they didn't - we bloggers are not so big on fact checking, remember).

Long story short - as African Americans began to move into the area, virtually every white resident left the community in the course of perhaps years, pretty much one block at a time moving east to west. At first there were enough new residents from the crowded Bronzeville area to buy or rent whatever space opened up, but soon there were more sellers than buyers, property values tanked, and new residents became poorer and poorer (during the period of urban "white flight" the first black families to move into a neighborhood generally had higher incomes than the previous white residents - they could afford to escape the ghetto, but their choices were limited by rampant discrimination by lenders as well as sellers). Soon, the original middle class black settlers, realizing they had been joined in Englewood by the very same ex-neighbors they themselves had been trying to get away from, moved again, this time to the south, leaving Englewood as a segregated community with increasing poverty and a rapidly declining population. Today the neighborhood has less than half the population it did in 1960.

Soon all the businesses around 63rd and Halsted were closed and boarded up with the exception of a liquor store and a drug store, if I remember right. By the time I arrived here a few years ago the abandoned downtown was an honest to God ghost town, with boarded up 19th Century wooden and brick storefronts lining an eerily quiet street, with an impressive and abandoned old bank building and a few other gems. Ironically, the city had hastened the commercial strip's demise by demolishing part of the area to put in parking and routing traffic through a detour to create a "pedestrian mall" - those things almost never work. For years the boarded up district was flanked by taunting signs with arrowd for "Through Traffic" and "Shopping" - hence my old short cut through the ghost town. I used to find reasons to take out of town visitors through the area, just so they could see firsthand exactly what's happening to America's cities. As Juan Cole recently noted in a blog post about the riots in the French banlieu:

(Americans who code themselves as "white" are often surprised to discover that "white people" created the inner cities here by zoning them for settlement by racial "minorities," excluding the minorities from the nicer parts of the cities and from suburbs. As late as the 1960s, many European-Americans were willing to sign a "covenant" not to sell their houses to an African-American, Chinese-American or a Jewish American. In fact, in the US, the suburbs were built, most often with de facto government subsidies in the form of highways and other perquisites, as an explicit means of racial segregation. Spatial segregation protected "white" businesses from competition from minority entrepreneurs, who couldn't open shops outside their ghettos. In France, government inputs were used to create "outer cities," but many of the same forces were at work.)

Couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't try. Anyway, apart from the bank building and a few neighboring structures, the entire 19th Century downtown has been demolished. It's one big, flat construction site today.

Urban historian Max Grinnell tells me the corner of 63rd and Halsted is going to be the location for the new campus of Kennedy-King College. Which brings us to one of the things you haven't heard much about if you're getting your news about what's been called "gentrification" just from bloggers and alterna-rags (you haven't heard me use the dreaded G-word, but people read it into my posts anyway): some neighorhood changes are good, and even necessary. While it pains me that unimaginitive bureaucrats could not find a way to preserve and re-use more of the charming old facades that lined the street, it's hard to argue with the kind of development that will bring students and their spending money, as well as a libraty, bookstore, and swimming pool all open to the public, to a neighborhood that had none of these things. If it's done right, it should create an actual functioning commercial district in an area where for the past 25 years a ghost town has stood.

It's true, based on the execrable design of the other City Colleges I'm scared of what monstrosity may rise there - another cold, uninviting bunker separated from the street by fences, hedges, and expensive, useless little patches of grass will certainly not enourage anyone to stay around and have lunch. But the bones of the old neighborhood - Englewood is very nicely laid out, with above average access to parks and civilized, tree-lined streets, and would be walkable if there were any businesses left to walk to, plus it has it's own El stop, unlike most of the transit-deprived South Side - make me hopeful that the area will recover.

Apartheid was bad for South Africa and it's bad for America today. A little "gentrification" in Englewood would be a very, very good thing.

Last Thoughts on 35th Street

2005-10-27T20:53:00.000-05:00

. . . at least until spring training and the whole cycle of joy and sorrow starts over again.

Winning the World Series is not my dream. It is my goal.
- Ozzie Guillen, a few long, impossible weeks ago.

The White Sox won the World Series. Strange to think about. The Red Sox and their legions of long-suffering fans made sense somehow, and made the world seem right, and good, and orderly. The Cubs? Someday. But the White Sox? This was the team that hadn't won since the 1919 squad threw the series to collect the gambling payoff. In spite of the name, their team color is black. Once they had to forfeit the second game of a double header when fans wouldn't leave the field following a publicity stunt which involved blowing up disco records. For years they've been playing to a half-empty house in a forlorn, cement monolith of a ballpark stuck between the railroad track, the Dan Ryan Expressway, and the Stateway Gardens, Wentworth Gardens, and Robert Taylor housing projects. Suspecting this was the source of their long-standing attendance problems, owner Jerry Reinsdorf tried to move the team to the suburbs in 1988. But after he bought up the land, the suburb of Addison wouldn't take them - residents voted down the stadium proposal, fearing that it would result in drunk people pissing on their well-manicured lawns. (Why is it so boring out there? They like it that way.)

But it wasn't just fear of the neighborhood that kept the crowds away. An Opening Day Ipsos Poll revealed that the cross-town Cubs have approximately five times as many fans as the Pale Hose. In fact, a good number of people at the Cell on any given game day, myself included, are Cubs fans who want to see a game and can't get tickets to perennially sold out Wrigley Field. A World Series title may shift those numbers a bit, but the Sox are still mightily unloved. A loser among losers. The geek the other geeks make fun of. In short, the ultimate underdog. So it does make the heart feel glad, and the burden of life a little easier, to see them win something.

And who did they beat? The Houston Astros. George Bush Sr.'s team. The whitest team in the league: did you know the Astros were the first team to play in the World Series without a single African American player since the 1953 Yankees? (The league was integrated when the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jackie Robinson in 1947, but the Evil Empire didn't integrate until 1955).

This isn't really the team's fault, it's a symptom of the broad decline of African American ball players over the past 20 years. Inner city kids of they kind who used to dream of playing professional baseball now prefer football and basketball. Brian, the pastor at our Unitarian Church and a diehard Red Sox fan, tells me that part of the problem is the expense of assembling all the equipment for a game of baseball - all you need for a game of football or basketball in the park is a ball. Whatever the reason, his attempts to lure neighborhood kids into forming a team have so far been unsuccessful.

A few generations ago baseball was huge in black communities. A middle aged black professional I work closely with was reminiscing last week about White Sox past. "I remember when they went to the Series in '59, I was in 5th grade. Of course, I was a Dodgers fan. We were all Dodgers fans then, because of Jackie Robinson."

Even before the Dodgers integrated, African American professional baseball was widely followed. Although the numerous attempts to form stable professional leagues were mostly financial failures, a number of teams persisted through the early decades of the 20th Century and managed to play some great baseball. In fact, the White Sox, during the 1950s, shared old Comisky Park with the Chicago American Giants, another great South Side team that was built on speed, pitching and defense. Before that the American Giants played at Shorling Park, which had been home of the White Sox from the 1880s until Comisky was built.

I suppose I had a point when I started writing this post. I can't for the life of me remember what it is now. My mind's getting bleary from daydreams, and lack of sleep, and the several drinks I had with dinner down at the bar. But what I've arrived at is this. Fifty years ago, even with Jim Crow and all the problems this country was facing, African Americans had their own leagues - they owned the teams, played the games, and packed the seats. Today, in many communities the cost of bats, gloves, face masks and helmets is considered prohibitive. Often we tell ourselves that things have been getting better in this country, but that all depends on where you stand.

When I think about Ozzie's statement about winning I think about the state of America, her cities, her progressives. I tried to say this yesterday, but looking back I didn't do such a good job so at the risk of being repetitive:

We do too much dreaming, as well as too much intellectualizing and perfectionist nitpicking. It's time we stopped dreaming, and set some goals, and worked together to achieve them. I hear that sometimes that's all it takes for a bunch of losers and misfits to win it all.

a year of living dangerously

2005-10-26T17:06:00.000-05:00

WE WON'T THROW THIS ONE
- sign on the marquee of the Shamrock Express, at 110th and Western

It's come to my attention that this blog is just about a year old. It was born a day or so after the 2004 elections, partly in an attempt to explain or at least explore the much discussed Red/Blue cultural divide. My sense was that the essential conflict was not so much between states or classes as between types of communities - dense, diverse places like Chicago in which the attempt to build and sustain community is paramount vs. low-density sprawl and rural areas in which the cult of the radical individual is more important.

I still hold fairly strongly to those ideas, but my thinking has become a lot less simplistic over the past year. So I want to take a look at some exceptions. Do they prove the rule? Who knows.

The other weekend we were on a subway train on our way to 125th Street in Manhattan (yes, music lovers, the A Train to Harlem)when it was boarded by a large group of creepy African American churchgoers, who commenced to start singing hymns. Some of the passengers knew the songs and started to sing along, the others looked uncomfortable. Trope gave me one of her ear bugs and we sat there listening to Ditty Bops MP3s trying to ignore all the Jesus. Then they stopped singing and a preacher lady started talking about how God had destroyed New Orleans because of all the voodoo and homosexuality and it was time to repent.

"Hell no," I failed to say. "Get your ass off this train and go spew your hate in the sewer where it belongs, you nasty old cow," I failed to add. I sat there, heart beating in my ears, blood pressure about to make my eyeballs explode out of my face, paralyzed. I wouldn't (and couldn't) have actually pushed her in front of a train, but if someone else had done so I might just have cheered. The only thing hate begets, evidently, is hate.

If there's a core "problem" with American culture it's our tendency to kick down the ladder. If we need someone to blame, it's far easier for us to blame someone beneath us on the food chain, rather than someone "successful," or god forbid, ourselves. Blame the poor for drowning in a flood, or blame gay people - apparently everything is their fault today. First it was divorce and sex abuse scandals, now even the weather can be blamed on gay people!

Take my favorite bete noir of recent weeks, White Sox fans. While it's true to some extend their bitterness towards North Siders is class based, and thus "progressive," it's expression is usually "cultural" rather than economic. Even within Blue America territory, they vent about "yuppies" and especially about how there is a large gay community surrounding Wrigley Field (overheard at a game: "This one's a Cubs fan and the other one's a Red Sox fan. I should have just dropped them both off at the Man Hole.") What's up with that, anyway? Homosexuals are just one of a crowd of scapegoats I keep hearing about. Working class Americans, rather than uniting against the depredations of Corporate America, tend to blame: welfare moms. Affirmative action giving "their" jobs to minorities. Foreigners: as welcome as Americans' righteous indignation about the Katrina disaster was, you didn't have to listen to people talk about it for long before someone said: "We should stop all foreign aid until we rebuild the Gulf Coast." Because people who drown in Bangladesh are so much less important than we are, right?

We're all like this to some extent. Blue people too. Our country wasn't taken over by a coup or a conspiracy, people chose this. Until we can come to grips with that truth, we'll never change it. And I'm not just talking about voting. We chose this by our lives, by our consumption, by the way we participate in keeping other people down and then justify to ourselves how they brought it on themselves. They didn't finish school, couldn't keep their pants on, did the wrong kind of drugs, whatever. It couldn't be our fault.

Game 3 of the World Series - wow. After 14 innings, the White Sox finally get a couple runs in to win as reliever Ezequiel Astacio collaped. After the game, Astros manager Garner vents to the press about how "pissed off" he is that his team played terrible and wasn't hitting. But none of it was his fault, for not pulling the pitcher, for not calling for a bunt with a guy on third, in short for not doing his job. It was all the people under him, who work for him, what a bunch of losers.

Often I see progressive America behaving exactly like Garner. It ain't us, it must be the refs. The media. Voting machines. The Democratic Party leadership jockeying for the next election. It couldn't be us. We can't even imagine a world in which people might see us as hypocrites.

It's so easy for corporate elites to roll over us time and again in their single-minded pursuit of profits because the rest of the country is a bickering, squabbling mess. Religion, race, and "culture" divide us and keep us down. Some people want to build a progressive movement that's a mirror image of the Right - well-funded, ideological, bent on manipulating the public's understanding of reality rather than understanding it. None of that for me - I'd prefer a team that looked like the White Sox.

As I've noted, it's hard for me to root for them, since their fans express such contempt for my sushi-eating yuppie ass. And it's especially hard when they're playing in Houston and the camera pans across the crowd, zooming in on the disappointed faces of little kids in Astros gear as their team gets beat down, again. But that's not the team's fault, that's just life. And the team is interesting. A minority-led coalition not based in religion or language, but unified by a goal. They let each other off the hook when they make mistakes and present a common public face. They laugh, and do belly flops on the tarp when it rains. They like themselves, but take responsibility when their screw-ups cost the group. They bring crippled old Frank Thomas along for the ride even though he can't play anymore.

What's with all the sports metaphors? It's all about achieving a goal. In baseball, the goal is totally inconsequential and arbitrary - nobody really cares what happens to the little white ball, so the whole thing can be about process.

American Progressives don't have a goal these days. Everybody knows what the Right wants - a dog eat dog libertarian world with a veneer of religious and cultural bullshit to explain to the little dogs why they deserve to get eaten. But what's our goal? What does our America look like? We need to stop complaining about how bad things are and start talking about how great they can be if we pull together and try to accomplish something.

Demolition of the Week: Chez Roberta

2005-10-18T17:46:00.000-05:00

Roberta's house on Webster, last December

Well, our house has been more or less patched together, but the rest of the neighborhood continues to disappear one building at a time.

The most recent loss was, in my opinion, a real classic. The house at the northwest corner of Webster and Hoyne appears to have been built as an apartment building, but it has spent the past few decades as a single family home. Roberta, a friend from Tai Chi who lived there until a year or so ago, grew up there with her parents and 12 brothers and sisters. The family bought the house back in the 1950s when they moved to Chicago from South Dakota - recently her parents retired for good and decided to go back to their hometown in the Badlands.

The developers simply offered them too much money to turn down, and never hid the fact that they planned to demolish the property as soon as they sweet-talked the alderman into changing the zoning. Because the house had a small "yard," a small empty corner lot next door, they knew they'd have room to build something a millionaire could love.

The house was a great example of how attention to decorative detail in a structure can contribute to the neighborhood.

I really liked this one. It was part of a group of buildings that complemented each other and helped establish the neighborhood's character right away as you entered it, walking or driving west on Webster. The whole northeast frontier of Bucktown has been gradually disappearing, being replaced by a generic hodge podge that nobody will really care about, not even the people who live there.

When you add in the fact that a bunch of guys from the gas company just ripped up my impatiens with a back hoe, the neighborhood just doesn't have the charm it did even a week ago.

The Joys and Sorrows of a 115 Year Old House

2005-10-13T23:33:00.000-05:00

So we got back from Ohio on monday and smelled gas as soon as we walked in the door. Trope summoned a guy from the gas company, a nice enough guy, sort of a young black Santa Claus. Santa told us that the line carrying gas in from the street was leaking, and he'd have to shut off the gas to the house until our landlord got it fixed. Also, there was no shutoff valve in the house, so some guys would have to come out, right away, and tear up the front yard to disconnect the gas by, like, smashing the pipe with a backhoe. You couldn't make this stuff up. Using a little clicking device that reminded me of the jury-rigged motion detectors from "Alien," Santa determined that the line in question runs right through the bedroom, and our closets, to the meter at the back of the house. The leak is somewhere south of the stairwell, meaning that a sizeable chunk of wall or ceiling will have to be removed to get at the pipe in question in order to repair it.

So the landlord dispatches a guy he knows who can allegedly fix the pipes. Call him Manny Ramirez. Manny's plan is to remove the gas meter and attach a tank of pressurized CO2 to the gas line, repressurizing it and inspecting it to find the leak. Only it won't repressurize, because the end that's outside isn't really shut off, it's just been smashed by a backhoe. Manny takes off to Home Depot to buy something to plug the hole with, and never comes back.

The next morning Manny's back a little after eight. He borrows my shovel and starts digging around in the big muddy pit the gas company dug for us. Did I mention that they covered it with wooden skids they stole from a nearby construction site? No? Now how could that have slipped my mind?

Anyway, Manny can't fix the pipe because the whole thing is crumbling to the touch now. He says it's original to the house, which is a little scary because the house is a little worker's cottage built in 1890. Apparently in all that time nobody's tried to shut the gas off before and realized that it couldn't be done. In any case, it now looks like the gas company needs to tear up the street, and we need to tear out our ceilings etc. if we ever want to spoil ourselves with hot water again.

I've never been so glad for our gym membership - at least I have somewhere to take a hot shower every morning. But I'm going to start getting testy if I can't cook something soon. And Trope has this thing where she believes that disease is caused by fanciful, invisibly small creatures called "germs" rather than enemy witch doctors, and she tends to like things to get washed in painfully hot water, which is supposed to melt these germs like the witch in "Wizard of Oz." But of course we don't have any of that here.

So we're going to do what any sensible person would do - flee to New York for a few days, and hope we have gas service by the time we get back. If not, we can always break out our terrorist incident emergency stash of MREs. Nutrition: A Force Multiplier!

See ya next week.

Johnny Saves

2005-10-06T23:23:00.000-05:00

I can’t do it.

I can’t root for the White Sox. Not yet, anyway.

I know the arguments on the other side: they’re the best hope for a title-starved town, while Boston has already won their Series at last. And the White Sox are probably the better all-around team, so in some sense they “deserve” to win.

But I just don’t care. And I think a lot of people around town are having the same experience. If you have been watching the media recently, you’d thing Chicago has been swept with a wave of Sox fever, but it’s just not true. Most Chicagoans regard the success or failure of their redheaded stepchild baseball team as irrelevant to their own happiness and well-being. And why should they?

For that matter, why should they care about any sports team? I grew up with baseball, more or less. As we bounced from city to city in my youth, we never really stayed faithful to a baseball team, although my father continued, mostly fruitlessly, to root for the Chicago Bears, which taught me something about humility and identification with the underdog. But when we moved to the Cincinnati area when I was, my father embraced the community wholeheartedly for some reason, and soon we were all pulling for the Bengals and the Reds, two teams that were much better back then than they have been recently.

Summer vacation in those days was embodied by the Reds game on the radio, my father grilling spareribs on the back porch. And, of course, the inevitable end-of-season letdown. I didn’t care that much about the team either way, but trips to Riverfront Coliseum were a treat, what with the junk food, the crowds, and the cool skybridge connecting my father’s office building with the ballpark. That ugly, ugly ballpark has since been replaced by a newer, more intimate field, but I can still see the raw concrete and smell the crowd. In 1990, the Reds led the division from wire to wire and rolled on to the Series. I was too busy starting college, falling in love and getting political to pay too much attention to late season baseball, but I did catch most of the Reds’ four game sweep in the basement of a frat house that was trying to recruit me by plying me with free beer.

A few years later came the strike – the World Series cancelled over a labor dispute? Players and owners both became warring tribes of annoying rich people who cared more about getting richer than they did about the game or the fans. Why did we care about those people anyway? In and of itself baseball is a sublime and beautiful thing, but I’d always been suspicious of fan identification – if you’re not on the team yourself, why does it matter to you which team wins? Most fans are just “rooting for laundry” anyway – backing whoever wears the uniform, not because of who they are, but because of the name of the city scrawled on their jersey (and teams should play for cities, dammit, not states. None of this “Utah,” “Texas,” “Florida” or “Arizona” crap. Not to mention “New England.”) The strike brought this suspicion home to roost. These people didn’t care about us. What fools we were to care about them. I don’t think I watched a single game for the next five years. I ignored the dominance of the evil corporate Yankees in the post-strike era, only paying attention for the Indians’ brief, futile title run, and then only because my ex-girlfriend’s family were such big fans, I sort of hoped on their behalf that the would win. But the Indians, another of the great, hexed teams, ended up losing (Besides the Curse of the Bambino, there is of course Sam Sianis’ goat keeping the Cubs down, the Indians were cursed by the members of the American Indian Movement over their offensive mascot, Chief Wahoo, and of course the White Sox haven’t won since the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which the team threw the Series after being paid off by gamblers.)

Then came the post-9/11 era, and the Idiot Mob’s determination to circle their wagons as a response to the attacks. Not only did they decide to rally around the flag and “God Bless America,” (Irving Berlin! So much catchier than the official anthem), they rallied around their loathsome President, and more shocking still, around the New York Yankees. Now I love New York as much as anybody and more than most, and I was deeply affected and horrified by what had happened. But I’m not going to root for the Evil Empire. The Fightin’ Plutocrats are a travesty, an offense against fair play and competition. A $200 million dollar stacked deck. The attempt of a billionaire madman’s ego to buy the championship year after year after year. They were going for their 27th title in 97 tries, and almost the whole country was rallying behind them.

Not me, baby. George Steinbrenner does not need my support. I ended up getting behind a team I had never heard of, a team I swear hadn’t heard of the last time I paid any attention, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Did I mention how annoying I find it when they name teams after states or regions rather than towns? Still, the Diamondbacks were the last thing standing between the Evil Empire and world domination – and all they had were two pitchers named Kurt Schilling and Randy Johnson. I was hooked. They held on through a full seven games, and in the end they beat back the forces of darkness.

Since then, I care about baseball, especially our lovable losers of Lakeview, the Chicago Cubs. They may not always play well, but they play for us. The “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, Sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show” we call Chicago. I think I never understood why people identify with a team before because I’ve never identified with a community. Now that I have a home, I care about it a great deal, and identify with it.

Which is why I can’t get excited about the White Sox. It’s nothing against the team, who are great at what they do. And Ozzie Guillen is always amusing when he tries to talk to the media. But the fans, well, they ain’t us. In fact, the White Sox fans seem to define themselves as “not Cubs fans.” Even now, in the postseason when the team has other teams to worry about, the fans are focused on the Cubs. On my trips to the Cell the past couple days I’ve seen T Shirts and chants of “Cubs suck.” Jokes about dropping friends who are Cubs and Red Sox fans off at the Man Hole, a bar in the predominantly gay neighborhood surrounding Wrigley field. They call us “wine drinkers,” even though wine is for sale at the Cell, while Wrigley sells only beer as far as I know. There’s a cultural fault line here, one that should be familiar to anyone who has read “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” But why should such a rift occur in sky-Blue Chicago, Illinois?

A glance around the Cell on game day reveals a very white crowd, my hulking but friendly tattooed Mexican neighbors for Game 1 aside. This light complexion is striking because the South Side of Chicago is 77% minority, a patchwork of African American and Latino neighborhoods interspersed with a shrinking number of white enclaves on the far Southeast and Southwest sides – and, of course, Chinatown. The Sox themselves are a mix of black and Latin players with a couple of Polish guys and some newcomers from Asia, not so different form the neighborhoods surrounding the ballpark. But the fans? In the stands, anyway, many of them seemed to be descended from the old Irish South Side, today living mostly in the south suburbs since their families abandoned the city in droves in the 70s and 80s rather than live next door to black people. There were a lot of handmade shamrock-adorned “Southside” posters in evidence, at any rate. “Southside” is a state of mind, I guess, a mythical place encompassing the lives and beliefs of neighborhoods throughout the South Side and south suburbs, an attitude more than a real place, a strange amalgam of what was and what might have been. From what I can tell from having lived and worked on the South Side, the actual population there is divided evenly between indifference, Sox fans and Cubs fans. But the real South Side is not the point. Bitterness towards the perceived elite is the point. It seems that regret and shame over what has happened to their communities and envy towards our more engaging lives can both but sublimated into anger and contempt directed at people like me. So we can’t get on a “Sox bandwagon” because we’re not invited. Anyway, as an ESPN radio announcer explained the other day, “there is no Sox bandwagon. That’s the whole point of the White Sox.” If y’all actually enjoy playing the role of ostracized, victimized loser, then more power to you.

This is exactly the kind of ‘false consciousness” that people use to keep themselves down. Compare this false populism of White Sox fans with the broad, community-based authentic populism of Red Sox fans. In the Red Sox cult, everyone from Maine farmers to Boston city slickers to blue collar guys from Lowell are bonded together in the shared experience of human suffering and loss. While the generations-long talk of a “curse” was pretty bogus, the game does teach something about suffering and struggle, inevitability and chance. While you can defy the odds for one day, or one play, in the end the game is about averages – winning percentages, batting averages, earned run averages – and a manager’s job is to line up the numbers just right. So year after year, fans hoped for a miracle, but year after year the numbers didn’t lie. Physics guides the ball, probability guides player performance, reaction inevitably follows action, and the Red Sox lost. Last year, when the finally deviated from the mean enough to win, they gave me something I didn’t know I could still feel – hope. Wonder, awe, and hope.

It’s kind of like my relationship to life, death, and faith. I know what goes up must come down. I know we are all born to die. I know that, over the long term, we are all doomed to war, disease, death. But part of me continues to hold out hope that maybe, somehow, there could be something else. If not immortality, then meaning. Participation in eternity. Hope.

So I can’t root for the White Sox. Not yet. I know they have the better team, the better pitching rotation, and are almost certain to get the one win out of three chances they need to advance to the ALCS. The numbers don’t lie, match the pitchers’ past performance against the hitters and you get a high probability of a Southside sweep. But I’m still hoping for a miracle.

Of course, if they do advance, I’ll be pulling for them against the Yankees next week. Because beating Team Evil is what baseball is all about.

Us and Them

2005-10-04T00:17:00.000-05:00

A strange column appeared in the Trib last week: folksy observer Charles Madigan discussed the nation’s discovery that there are many poor people in this country. He describes “fixing the poor” as a “Federal fantasy.”

One of the mistakes we make, left, right and center, is to think that the symptom is the actual cause of social illness we decide to attack.

Housing is the solution to the homeless problem in this formula, except it's not. A job, any job, is the solution to joblessness. "Just say `no'" will get you off drugs or alcohol.

Go find someone who is homeless and talk and listen. I have. Right away, I realized, "Having a home is not the big problem here."

It might be substance abuse, a persistent mental health problem, a very bad attitude, whatever. Homelessness is a symptom, not a cause. Any house you put that person in would be a house full of trouble because you have not addressed the cause, just shifted it indoors.

Shelter is good, shelter and professional help are better. But don't be misled. Building lives is harder than building houses.

Poverty, too, is a symptom.

If it were the cause, we could just give money to people to solve it. We tried that a lot of different ways. It didn't work.

I think the solution is a hard one. We have to look at people as individuals, not as members of a race, a class, a displaced slab of society.

If you want a model, go back to the early days of Hurricane Katrina. Helicopter pilots and rescue experts saved one person at a time.

It was difficult and risky.

I believe we can do that, save one person, build one life, at a time.

But we have to be as brave as those rescue workers. We have to look beyond race and class, into the eyes of individuals who need help.

One person at a time? That is a complete fantasy. In fact, it’s a big cop out. Yes, the problems individual people face can make sure that they are the ones who end up poor. But how many people are poor is largely a function of the overall economy, so until we’re willing to address problems on that level, we’re just playing a game of musical chairs with poverty. The way the system’s set up, somebody’s going to get screwed.

Or look at it from another angle. In the same day’s Tribune, from the Tempo section:

Fashion’s polarizing economics
By Guy Trebay
New York Times News Service

NEW YORK – There are probably more scientific ways to measure the bulge at the upper end of the economy, but the season’s hot Prada coat is one way to tell how much disposable income is floating around. The coat is black wool and has jet beading at the lapel and collar. It is fitted, severe, and as chic as widow’s weeds. The person who puts one on immediately assumes the sleek and impertinent air of an urban crow. That the price of the coat is around $5,500 has apparently done little to deter sales. Since the first fall shipments, even the Prada stores have had trouble keeping the coats in stock.

Price resistance is not typically the first thing on people’s minds during Fashion Week, which ended Friday. But even industry die-hards have been forced into a new, and slightly uneasy, relationship with what people outside the business might think of as reality. “I’m a real person and I’m, like, totally sticker-shocked.” Said Lauren Ezersky, the Style channel commentator, befor the Duckie Brown menswear show. An inveterate clotheshorse, she has recently had to cut back on her wardrobe outlay.

“Prices have gotten insane,” Ezersky said, the reasons having to do partly with the continued weakness of the dollar against the euro and partly, one assumes, with the proliferation of an expanded cast of what marketers term the superaffluent. “You used to be able to buy a pear of Manolos for $500, and now every pair of shoes is 800 bucks,” she said indignantly.

For most Americans, the idea of buying a $500 pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes is so far outside the realm of the possible that it is not so much an aspiration as a delusion.
. . .
So when Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, said last week that business was surprisingly strong, it was with the caveat, “I’m shocked that there’s no price resistance anymore.” For this season’s must-have jacket from Marc Jacobs, Doonan said, Barneys shoppers will blithely pay $4,000.
. . .
“I’m personally in a little bit of a strange economic bracket, so I don’t really look at price tags,” the lingerie entrepreneur Sarah Siegel-Magness said at the Esteban Cortazar show on Friday afternoon, as her 6-year-old daughter, Camryn, dressed in a Burberry sundress, squirmed in her lap.

Siegel-Magness is the daughter of Mo Siegel, the former Colorado hippie who made his fortune on Celestial Seasonings herbal teas. And she is married to Gary Magness, the son of the late cable television magnate Bob Magness, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $875 million in 2004.

“My friends look at the prices of my clothes and my bags, and they’re like, you’ve got to be kidding.” Said Siegel-Magness, who flies in from Boulder, Colo., to attend the twice-yearly New York collections for the fun of it and because, as she said, “If I only lived in my world, I would be out of touch.”

Quote

Uh huh. Don’t see the connection? Apparently some sectors of the economy (herbal tea?) are doing very well while other sectors, such as, ironically, the people who actually make clothing, or used to before their jobs were moved to Asia, are enduring a prolonged and stifling economic stagnation.

Let’s look at another fun area, Manhattan real estate:

Data from Miller Samuel shows the median price per square foot for all Manhattan apartments reached a high point in 1987, at $305 a square foot for co-ops and $413 a square foot for condos. What that means is that the median price for a 1,000-square-foot co-op was $305,000 - half the co-ops sold in Manhattan cost more than that and half cost less.

Prices bottomed out by the mid-1990's, losing about 44 percent of their value in real terms, and then they started to rise again. By 2002, prices had passed their 1987 levels, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars and by the first six months of 2005, the median co-op price was up 37 percent from 1987, while the condo price was 35 percent greater. Averaged across the entire period, the cost of a Manhattan apartment has risen at a rate of about 2 percent a year above inflation.

So what happened to the median income in Manhattan during the same period?
Census data reveals that median household income growth in Manhattan was strong from 1979 to 1989, increasing 35.8 percent above inflation. But in the 1990's, median income - the point at which half the households earned more and half earned less - barely rose, going up just 8.5 percent in real terms from 1989 to 1999, or 0.85 percent a year. Since then, a similar rate of growth has been documented by the Census Bureau in its annual American Community Survey, which shows a 4.1 percent inflation-adjusted increase in the median income for Manhattan from 2000 through 2004, or 0.82 percent a year. The median household income last year in Manhattan was $50,731, according to the Census Bureau.

In other words, since the last peak in the real estate market, Manhattan apartment prices have grown about one and a half times faster than median household income.
Manhattan has the greatest income disparity of any county in the country, and the census data shows that while the household income for the bottom 20 percent rose just 7.9 percent from 1989 to 1999, in real terms, the income of the top 20 percent went up 61.5 percent.

Reasoning that it is mainly earners at the top end who can afford to buy an apartment in Manhattan, a group of economists argues that, despite the galloping price increases of recent years, real estate on the island has actually become more affordable.

The group, Business360, an economic consulting firm, compared the increase in apartment prices per square foot with increases in personal income for Manhattan. While real estate prices rose and fell and rose again, average personal income in Manhattan, reported by the federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis, rose at a fairly steady pace, increasing 87 percent in real terms since 1981. The figure is very different from the median because it is an average of all earners, and with Manhattan's great income disparity, it is heavily skewed toward the top.

Average income has grown faster than average prices, which since 1981 are up 50 percent for co-ops and 37 percent for condos. Because of that, the study concludes, housing is more affordable for the average Manhattanite than it was in the early 1980's or at the peak of the last real estate boom.

To show the relationship between rising incomes and prices and falling interest rates, Business360 calculated the number of days it would take for the average household to earn enough money to pay a year's mortgage payments for a 1,000-square-foot condo, at the average mortgage rate and square foot price for each year of the study. In 1987, it took 273 workdays to cover the mortgage, while today, the study concluded, it takes 152 days. The average household income for Manhattan, projected by Woods & Poole Economics, is $185,993.

"People look at the prices - they're stratospheric - and they think that that's a bubble," said John Marchant, one of the economists who wrote the Business360 study. "But if they looked at what people are earning in New York, they'd think that's outrageous too."

Ingrid Gould Ellen, the co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University School of Law, said: "It really depends on who your target is when you talk about affordability. For the median earner in Manhattan, those apartments are going to be less affordable, but somebody's buying them."

The truth is, the economy’s growing great. You’re just not benefiting from it. And what happens to the rich affects everyone else. Not only does their increased wealth not “trickle down” to everyone else, it makes life worse for everyone else. The fact is, a fraction of their money could meet whatever needs they have for the rest of their lives. Between the misshapen economy and 5 years of tax cuts, they now literally don’t know what to do with the piles of cash. $1 million for a one bedroom co-op apartment. Sounds reasonable! $2,460 for a really ugly lopsided Marc Jacobs sweater? Sure, whatever.

This kind of behavior drives up prices for the rest of us, making us relatively poorer. This doesn’t show up in government accounting because things like rising real estate and health care prices are arbitrarily counted as economic growth rather than inflation when GDP is calculated. (It’s sort of like the problem that occurs when your house is totaled by a flood. Both the cost of demolishing it and rebuilding it are counted as an economic positive rather than a cost – even though you are spending a lot of money just to get back to where you were – but I digress.)

If you separate their economy from our economy, you will find that they are doing great while we are experiencing stagnation and inflation. Part of the reason is simply that they (owners) are increasing profits by forcing down the wages of everyone else (workers – us). They are breaking unions, dismantling pension systems, cutting back on health benefits, all to increase the share of revenue that goes to owners rather than workers.

We’re not a unified group – some of us are poor, others are clinging desperately to “middle class” status – but we are all getting screwed. If you’re not one of them, it’s getting much harder to support a family on the scraps they leave us.

What’s the solution? Raise their taxes. For now, I don’t even care what you do with it. In spite of Mr. Madigan’s protestations, we have not tried giving money to people “a lot of different ways.” This country has never guaranteed a basic living to its people. Instead we have offered a pittance of social benefits to those so desperate they are willing to humiliate themselves to get them, then take them away at the first sign that the recipients may be working towards self-sufficiency.

But let’s say we had tried it and it didn’t work. Taxing the crap out of the rich would help, even if we just flushed the money down the toilet. Why? Because if we strip away their surplus income, there won’t be anyone left to pay a million dollars for a crappy condo. Then maybe the market will collapse, and I can afford to own a home, too.

If this approach were tried, the media would carp about recession, but you would actually be better off. Just like now, they say there’s growth, but it doesn’t help you any. The media people say that stuff because they’re rich. We’re not, and I harbor no illusions that I’m ever going to join the $800 million herbal tea set. We’re not all in this together. The rich are the class enemy, and no matter how much you admire their threads, what’s good for them is probably not good for you.

Some Idiot

2005-10-03T18:27:00.000-05:00

Some idiot stole our basil plant this morning.

Yes, the whole fucking plant. It was there last night when Trope got parsley for the mashed potatoes, and this morning when I left for work it was gone. I doubt the construction guys next door took it - where would they put it? We did talk to a couple homeless guys in the alley about our "crops" one day. But why would they take the basil rather than, say, the rhubarb, which you could actually make into a meal?

Who the fuck steals a basil plant out of the ground? What, they needed to feed their pesto addiction right fucking now?

This is the kind of bullshit that can turn you against a community. Let's just say I like this place, but I'd like it more if I had a gate with a lock on it by the alley and between the houses, like we had across the street.

Be warned, if I catch you tresspassing in my backyard, I'm not going to ask you why you're there. I'm going to beat you to death with a shovel and dump your body in Lake Calumet. So stay out.

The Basil in better days.
April 2005 - October 2005

Tied Up in the Cell

2005-09-23T16:34:00.000-05:00

We had free tickets for last night's Sox game vs. the Twins, so we took the El down to 35th Street to check it out. The sausages, as usual, were great. At the Ballpark Formerly Known as Comisky, you can get Brats with brown mustard, saurkraut, and grilled onions. The onions get a little soggy by the late innings, but if you get a brat in the 1st they've just started to carmelize . . . my mouth is literally watering as I write this. Anyway, the food's better on the South Side.

The baseball is actually a familiar flavor. A tense pitcher's dual, with a 1-1 tie persisting into extra innings. The Sox bullpen finally collapsed in the 11th, and the Southsiders got spanked 4-1. They left the bases loaded in the 9th and a man on 2nd in the 10th. Chicago baseball in all its glory.

But the fans? I just don't get it. The guys behind me started carping and demanding that Sox manager Ozzie Guillen be fired, after the first out. They screamed "You Suck!" and other obscenities at their own team. They had all but written off the game in the third inning, while it was still tied 0-0. After the Sox went up 1-0, they prayed for rain (and got it, although the game was never delayed).

Keep in mind, while the team has been sagging in recent weeks, they are still in first place. What are these people like when they're trailing? For some of these people, I think a record of 161-1 would not be good enough. "You suck, Guillen. How could you lose that game?"

Worst of all, a group of "fans" in front of me were training an 11 year old to scream along with them. So nice to see a community passing on its values to the next generation.

Sox fans like to mock Cubs fans as wine-drinking elitists who don't know anything about baseball. Guilty as charged, man. And as for the shirt being peddled on 35th Street proclaiming Wrigley Field to be the "World's Largest Outdoor Gay Bar," that's probably true, too. So what's you're point? I'm having fun at the ballpark. My girl, my beer, my brat, the first evening of Autumn and still not cold yet . . . if you're idea of fun is screaming obscenities at your own team, I feel sorry for you. As for the alleged rivalry, there is no rivalry. They envy us, because we know how to live.

Maybe I should have bought a T shirt.

Brave New World

2005-09-20T23:07:00.000-05:00

Just a little update on what's been going on with the neighborhood. I've stopped posting pictures of demolished buildings recently because I never seem to have the camera handy. But I thought I'd post a couple bfore and after pictures of some of the sites I've talked about in the past so you can see what's happening to the neighborhood and the new world that's emerging on the Near West Side.

Before

This building was a neighborhood landmark and a favorite. It was demolished because it was too small, and didn't feature any condos with balconies like the rich people like. They are willing to accept less footage to be able to live close to cool people like me, but they demand a view.

After

The big problem with this building is that it faces the wrong way. It ignores Damen, Bucktown's main thoroughfare, in favor of Shakespeare, which at a quarter-block south of Webster is not even a real street, since it doesn't fit the grid. From it's balconies, the moneyed classes will be able to gaze south along Damen and see the trendy business district with its boutiques and restaurants and funkily dressed babes, oblivious to the way their homes have deteriorated the quality of life for everyone around them. By facing south, the building presents a side view to Damen Avenue, with little bathroom windows that are asymmetrical, too much empty brick, and the edge of the balconies visible on one side only. In short, it's lopsided, deformed and ugly. The designers apparently decided that if they put retail with an attractive awning on the ground level, nobody will notice how the little group of buildings has become scarred and disfigured.

The new condo building at the corner of Damen and Webster, by contrast, faces the right way and even manages to present an attractive and fairly symmetrical face to the residential side street.

Before

An attractive two-story commercial-residential building with decorative 19th Century iron metal details. Not enough units on the property, once again no balcony for rich people to store their bicycles and gas grills.

After

Fairly attractive modern commercial-residential condo building going up on a portion of the site. This building pays more attention to detail than do most new condos I've seen, the splash of color brightens up what is quickly becoming another shopping/residential quarter. I am pleasantly surprised. An identical building will rise next door, and then a skinny half-building that will look like the right half of this one, on the site ofthe old building. Unfortunately, this four-story complex will pretty much overwhelm the pretty Victorian turret next door.

Still, as industrial uses fade from the area, they are trying to extend the Wicker Park trendiness all the way up to the Congress Theater and beyond. Unfortunately, retail jobs do not pay what industrial jobs did, and people who work in these buildings could never dream of living in them, or increasingly, living in the neighborhood at all. Fortunately there is an El stop a couple blocks NW on Milwaukee.

Well, another digger, signifying another teardown is about to take place. I took pictures of all the likely suspects, but I was wrong. A little house that used to be a storefront was the victim. I don't really remember it and I walked by it several times a week for three years, so it's probably not the biggest tragedy ever. Still, I wish these people would leave my neighborhood alone. They are filming a movie here tomorrow so we won't be able to park on our own street. Maybe once people see the 'hood on film, someone (like the Alderman) will conclude it is worth something more than the value of the land underneath it.

This doesn't really mean anything, Trope took it and it's just cool (I played with the color a little to make it pop more). If you have any idea what it might represent, drop me a line.

Dogs and cats, living together

2005-09-16T08:45:00.000-05:00

Apparently President Bush made a big speech in New Orleans last night during prime time. I wouldn’t know, I don’t watch much prime time TV, especially not when there’s a Cubs game on the radio. Pat and Ron do a pretty good job of explaining what’s going on, so you can get other stuff done while you listen, something you can’t do with the TV guys. Listening to Bush, but contrast, makes me want to throw and smash things. Which, now that I think of it, is exactly the way many Cubs fans are reacting to the game. The game was rained out during the last out of the Cubs’ 6-1 loss to the Cardinals, which rather than regarding as a mercy, fans are viewing as another example of the dreaded Curse. See, the Cubs had just scored one run, and had a couple guys on base, so obviously if it hadn’t rained, they were going to come back dramatically, beat the Cards and get back in the wild card race.

“The Cubs Fan Universe,” as my wife put it last night, is “disconnected from reality.” A prime example of this is the little jingle WGN plays during commercial break, the one that gets stuck in your head for the next couple days: “Everybody loves the Cubs. Every-Body loves the Cubs!” In addition to being an annoying little earworm, it’s obviously untrue. Just the sound of the jingle is enough to get your neighborhood White Sox fan worked up into a foaming lather. Which, now that I think of it, is probably intentional on WGN’s part.

Speaking of the White Sox, the team that spent most of the year as baseball’s best team just lost a series to the Kansas City Royals, universally regarded as baseball’s worst. They have squandered a 15-point lead in the AL Central to just four and a half games ahead of Cleveland, a team they will be playing for six of their remaining 17 games. The Tribune has (gleefully) stopped printing their “magic number,” at least for today.

In another astounding development, the East Village Landmark District is becoming a reality. In spite of the overwhelming presence of neon orange “Stop the Landmark District” signs in neighborhood windows, 53% of property owners voted to approve the district, which covers 195 properties in the heart of the East Ukrainian Village (the quarter mile square boxed in by Ashland, Chicago, Damen and Division). Proponents of the landmarking have been called “cultural elitists.” Early meetings on the subject were marked by complaints about “condo people and their SUVs.”

Well, what of it? Many of the people who live here do so because they like it the way it is, and think it’s better than other places. They don’t want it torn down and replaced by giant, bunker-like condos that look more like the barrier wall in the West Bank than Chicago three-flats. As for people who just moved there in the last couple year because it’s close to the highway, or to work, but would really rather have more room for their SubZero industrial kitchen appliances, they can get in their big, black SUVs with the W04 stickers on the back window and go back to Aurora. As for owners disappointed they won’t be able to cash in as much on the development craze, your desire to make a buck doesn’t give you the right to destroy everything in the neighborhood. But I digress. We won a fight, which makes the world turn upside down.

In more news of a world gone mad, there's the weather. It's cool, cloudy and raining, and the people are ecstatic about it. Our first week of 80 degree plus weather was in April, and over the next five months we have had fewer than 20 cool days, and virtually no rain to speak of. The grass in many neighborhoods hasn't so much turned brown as crumbled into dust and blown away. Add to that the fact that a large proportion of the younger set moved to a colder climate just so they could walk around all day looking cool and brooding in their black leather jackets, and you begin to understand how much five solid months of nice weather has been cramping our style.

Speaking of upside down, there’s the President. I guess in his speech he promised to rebuild New Orleans out of federal money, send cash to displaced workers, and proposed something called the Urban Homesteaders Act, which would give abandoned urban land to low-income people who agreed to build a house there. I’m not sure whether it applies only to New Orleans or to all of our abandoned urban areas, but still – a good idea out of the Bush Administration! And a big government, pro-city idea at that! I think my head’s going to explode.

What’s he going to do next, officiate at a gay wedding in the Rose Garden?

ripples in the upside down lake of the void

2005-09-15T21:23:00.000-05:00

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been spending my time doing other things besides blogging over the summer. I’ve done a lot of gardening, I took trips to Wisconsin and Virginia with Trope, saw the Violent Femmes, went to Around the Coyote, a kick ass arts festival . . . It’s been a good coupla months.

I’ve also been fighting off an unhealthy little addiction. I started surfing the net and stumbled upon a website where people come to talk about TV shows. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be interested, because I don’t watch a lot of TV – at least not a lot that’s actually on, rather than on DVD. But this year there’s a show I’m actually interested in, so I started reading the discussion there, and eventually posting some of my thoughts.

Well, okay. I started posting things that I thought would provoke a lot of argument, which they did. But that’s what I do. Professionally, personally, whatever. Provocation is my stock in trade. I’ve recently been seen having a loud argument about terrorism, oppression, and democracy at the Gold Star Inn, during which my lovely wife was afraid we’d come to blows. Actually I was arguing with someone I like and respect, and we parted friends. I think we just missed Jimmy’s.

In any case, addiction. I got to where I was posting a couple times a day or more, when I had better things I could be doing. Like working. The cause was mostly a heated debate on ethics, one worthy of a weeknight at Jimmy’s. At issue were the “ethical issues” involved in the extra judicial execution of an enemy soldier who is trying to defect. Yes, my controversial and provocative position boils down to "murder is bad, so you should only kill people in self defense." But if you read the paper, you're probably aware that there's a certain amount of disagreement on this issue.

Debating it got me to delve deep into why killing is a Bad Thing, which was useful and productive. But it also got me to the point where I really, really wanted to convince people that murder is wrong, which is frankly insane as well as pointless and silly. People on these boards had previously defended a military overthrow of a democratic government, and the torture and killing of another prisoner. They comment how "cool" and "strong" characters are when they take swift, violent action. Didn't I learn anything from the last election?

Apparently not. I ranted on until I got booted off the board, at least temporarily. Which was fair, because they have clearly posted rules, which I broke. I don't like those rules much (I'll get to that in a minute), but that's not really the point. They have to have some rules, and enforce them, it they want to keep it a nice and reasonable place. That's why I was posting there, and not at other places, where the last time I checked, madness reigned. If I weren't so lazy I could start my own board. But I don't really care, so I won't.

The thing I don't like about the rules is you can't really engage someone else's arguments. Reasoning by analogy, trying to restate someone's arguments to clarify them, is considered rude. Unfortunately (from a certain point of view), that's what I was trained to do both as a crisis counselor back in the day, and as a late-night debater at the U of C. So when I finally said stuff that worked, in the sense that it drew out replies that clarified other people's arguments so I could understand their premises, etc. I also got banned for rudeness.

I see where they're coming from, but to me this kind of politeness is a lot like the "fairness" you see from the mainstream media. One 'side' states an opinion, the other 'side' does the same. Without engaging in real dialogue, nobody ever mentions it whan one side is complete horseshit. The right gets away with passing off complete balderdash as fact. Saddam has WHDs. Gay parents are bad for children. On and on and on. What good't the internet if you can't be more participatory than that?

And I was trying to be polite. Here’s what I didn’t say:

What the hell is wrong with people? Here, in this country, with our history and Constitution and all this blabbering about freedom we do on flag holidays, why the hell did only 73% of Americans believe that the kind of abuse that went on at Abu Ghraib was "never justified?" Why do we sit here and allow people, some of them American citizens, to be detained by the government without charge, without showing any evidence to anyone, for years? Why do we tolerate tens of millions of people living in poverty in such a wealthy country? Why do we have a religious leader revered by millions on TV advocating the assassination of a foreign leader. Why did 59 million people vote for this bullshit?

And why, oh why, do we have people who sit up day and night at their keyboards and argue that torture is justified, that a country in crisis can't "afford" democracy, and the killion someone is not only permissable, but necessary, if you suspect, without evidence, that she might, at some point in the future, be a threat. What the hell is wrong with such people? What guilt are they running from that the feel such a need to spend so much time justifying murder, arguing that we owe nothing to anyone but our own, that self-interest and perceived safety justify destroying whatever we fear. What kind of society are we that we produce people so threatened by the idea that a life is a life is a life?

Should I have said that?

No.

Ripples in the upside down lake of the void, is what I should have said.

Let it go already. The whole thing is meaningless and bizarre. It's another fistful of peas that this monkey should let go of. And anyway, antagonizing people by calling them names isn't likely to change anything they think about killing people, other than possibly to start daydreaming about killing me. The thing is, the show was designed to provoke debate on these issues, but at some level it just doesn't work. According to the creators, many of the events in question were written precisely to

embody one of the main allegorical themes of the show, which is the tendency to dehumanize the enemy in times of war. This has been going on since the dawn of time. We convince ourselves that the enemy is somehow less than human, does not value life the way we do or share any of our common values. This enables us to rationalize and justify the terrible things we do to our enemies such as kill and torture them."

But many people are not terribly bothered by dehumanization. They intended to hold up a mirror to our own times and show us our nobility, but also our pigheadedness, our flaws, our failure to understand that there are other perspecives out there besides our own. But people are not necessarily disturbed by what they see. Kick Ass! they say. Woo Hoo!

I’m not sure whether it says more about the moral blindness of the population or the utter irrelevance of artists in the modern world. It’s like Picassos hanging on the walls of banks or corporate office buildings. Are the bankers and businessmen dupes, or was Picasso? He died a rich man, so maybe it's just me that's the idiot. Probably. Perhaps his radicalism was never relevant, and his legacy is just that rich people will pay a big chunk of money for a piece of canvas.

The failure of art to reach people shouldn’t be surprising. Intellectual debate on ethics doesn’t mean much to most people, either. Which is all right. Compassion and humility will steer you the right way nine times out of ten. But how to deal with people when they won’t be guided by those values, that’s where the trouble starts. Frankly, I'm at a loss. With acquaintances and family members, it's often a choice between awkward silence and yelling matches when it comes to the issues of the day. Neither option is very comfortable.

I promise I won't post about anything this geeky for at least a couple months. In the mean time, a new neighborhood paper showed up on my doorstep this afternoon. Check it out.

Coyote Beautiful

2005-09-14T20:21:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend I finally had the opportunity to do something useful rather than sit around fuming. The City has set up a shelter and service center at Fosco Park for hurricane evacuees from the Gulf Coast. Fosco isn't really a park at all, it's just a fieldhouse that normally offers community activities, basketball and stuff to residents of what used to be the ABLA housing projects (the Jane Addams Houses, Robert H. Brooks Homes and Extension, Loomis Courts, and Grace Abbott Homes). Now the area's one big construction site as ABLA gets replaced by a new mixed-income development called Roosevelt Square. Actually, I'd kinda hoped I might find something I could buy down there, but poking around their site I didn't see much that an ABLA resident, an evacuee, or I could afford and make it work.

Anyway, the fieldhouse is the designated shelter and referral center for people arriving from Louisiana. As of last weekend while I was there, FEMA hadn't got their act together enough to actually send a plane full of people up here yet, but many people have been arriving on their own, to stay with family or to look for a familiar face. I only saw a few dozen cots that looked occupied, mostly people were coming in looking form services from the city, the Salvation Army, or more permanent housing. Most people are quickly referred out to other organizations offering to put people up for a while, since nobody really wants to sleep on a cot, in a gym, in the projects. Obviously Jesse Jackson's people are a big help in that area, as is his protege Rev. Meeks, who manages to be both a state senator and the leader of a mega-church ("The Greatest Church in the World"). I'm not sure which hat he's wearing here, but his flock have been very generous in opening up their homes to the newly dispossessed.

It occurs to me to wonder what's stopping us from mounting such an effort on behalf of the homeless people who wander our alleys every day.

Anyway, I mostly worked with kids, which was nice. Kids are very resilient and these seemed to have come through all the chaos pretty much intact. Their parents, on the other hand, seemed very stressed out. I helped make paper hats and played air hockey while the parents filled out paperwork or just took a nap or whatever. It wasn't much, but it was something, and being constructive tends to soothe my incoherent rage dcwn into a fitfully napping, fuzzy little fire breathing monster. I highly recommend it. If you live in Chicago and want to help, you should call 311.

Later on Saturday the Violent Femmes played a kick ass block party on Division Street east of Damen. Guinness paid for the whole thing, there was beer, oysters, and crab meat. Also there was an awesome local Irish punk band called the Tossers. I have no idea what the occasion was. I was just there because the night before I was playing Trivia at the Riverview and Lowell said it would be cool. And it was.
And Lowell's pretty damn good at trivia. So's my wife.

Suday was Around the Coyote, a huge neighorhood festival of visual arts, theater, music and poetry. There are still a lot of working artists in the neighborhood, mostly painters, and other artists come and set up in the hallways of the Flat Iron studios, the Northwest Tower, and other neighborhood landmarks. Paranoid Girl was there, which was very cool. She asked me to draw a postcard for her collection. She was sort of disappointed that more people weren't doing this, which puzzled me. I was thinking that any weekend where I had perfectly valid reasons to play with crayons two days in a row was a pretty good weekend. Later on I caught some one-acts down at the Chopin Theater, including an interesting piece by a new high school company, and a performance/dance thing called Inventing Eve about women in the Old Testament.

I love this neighborhood, and this town. But recently I see it destroyed again and again in my imagination. I asked some of the emergency workers at the shelter if Chicago has an evacuation plan. They said there was a plan, and they'd recently participated in a drill. But I got the impression that they felt it could have gone a lot better. Chicago has six times as many residents as New Orleans, a million of whom do not have access to a car. How the hell would you evacuate Chicago? Food for thought.

The last, hard core hunker down in surreal city

2005-09-08T17:37:00.000-05:00

Chris Rose, from the news blog at nola.com:

They're telling the people they have to go. They're going door to door with rifles now.

They came to our little hovel on Laurel Street Uptown - a dozen heavily-armed members of the California National Guard - they pounded on our door and wanted to know who we were.

We told them we were the newspaper, the Big City Daily. I admit, it doesn't look like the newsrooms you see on TV. I suppose if we wore shirts, we'd look more professional.

The Guard moved on, next door, next block.

They're telling people they have to go.

It won't be easy. The people who stayed here have weathered 10 days of unfathomable stench and fear and if they haven't left yet, it seems unlikely that they're going to be willing now.

In a strange way, life just goes on for the remaining. In the dark and fetid Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas, an old woman I passed in the pet food aisle was wearing a house frock and puffy slippers and she just looked at me as she pushed her cart by and said: "How you doin', baby?"

Like it's just another afternoon making groceries.

I love the way strangers call you baby in this town.

Outside the store, there's an old guy who parks his old groaning car by the front door from sunup to sundown. There are extension cords running from his trunk into the store, which still has power - don't ask me how; I have no idea - and he watches TV in his front seat and drinks juice.

That is what he does, all day, every day.

At this point, I just can't see this guy leaving. I don't imagine he has anyplace else in the world but this.

A young guy walked up and said to him: "I hear you can charge your cell phone here?" and the old guy said "Yes, indeedy," and walked him into the store and showed him a plug that still had juice.

And life goes on. Down on St. Claude Avenue, a tribe of survivors has blossomed at Kajun's Pub where, incredibly, they have cold beer and cigarettes and a stereo playing Elvis and you'd think everything was in standard operating procedure but it is not: The Saturday night karaoke has been indefinitely suspended.

The people here have a touch of Mad Max syndrome; they're using an old blue Cadillac for errands and when parts fall off of it - and many parts have fallen off - they just throw them in the trunk.

Melvin, a bar owner from down the block, had the thing up for sale for $895, but he'll probably take the best offer now.
Melvin's Bar and Kajun's Pub have pooled their inventories to stay in business.

"We've blended our fortunes together," said Renee dePnthieux, a bartender at Melvin's. "We carried everything we could down here, and we'll make the accounting later. What else are you gonna do? In case you haven't heard, Budweiser ain't delivering."

A guy with a long goatee and multiple tattoos was covering a couple of aluminum foil pans of lasagna and carrying them up to the roof to cook them in the sun on the hot slate shingles.

Joann Guidos, the proprietor at Kajun's, called out for a game of bourre and they all dumped their money on a table and sat down and let the cards and liquor flow.

A National Guard truck pulled up and asked if they were ready to leave yet. Two guys standing out on the sidewalk in the company of pit bulls said: "Hell no."

DePonthiux said: "We're the last fort on the edge of the wilderness. My family's been in exile for 300 years; this ain't s---."
I just don't see these people leaving.

Uptown, on what was once a shady street, a tribe is living in a beautiful home owned by a guy named Peanut. There is a seaplane in his driveway, a bass boat in the front yard and generators running the power.
Let's just say they were prepared.

All the men wear pistols in visible holsters. They've got the only manicured lawn in the city. What else is there to do all afternoon, really?

Christine Paternostro is a member of this tribe and she is an out-of-work hair stylist from Supercuts in a city where no one shaves or bathes. Not many prospects for her at this point.

"Everyone will need a haircut when this is over," I offered.

While members of this tribe stood talking on their street, a woman came running out of the house, yelling: "Y'all, come quick. We on WWL! We on WWL!"

Everyone ran in the house and watched a segment about how people are surviving in the city. And these guys are doing just that. (Although I think the airplane in the driveway is a little over the top.)

As I was leaving, the WWL woman said to me: "Are you staying for dinner?"

I was not, but I asked what they were having. "Tuna steaks," she said. "Grilled."

If and when they rebuild this city and we all get to come home, I want to live near people like this. I just can't imagine them ever leaving.

They make me wonder if I ever could.

To contact Chris Rose, e-mail noroses@bellsouth.net, or call (504) 352-2535.

Lake George

2005-09-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

The one thing all of the Bush Administration's failures have in common is that they just don't give a crap about people like us. Regular people, stripped of their retirement, send to die in the Middle East, or left to drown or starve in their flooded homes, all for the same reason.

Conservative ideologues like the guys who run the Bush Administration just don't want to admit that government can do any good in society. Why? Because they're rich, so they want to end the redistributive function of government - they don't want rich people like themselves to have to pay for any services for the not rich. They want people to get what they pay for out of government services, which means that the poor, who can't afford to pay for anything, don't get anything.

Their approach to Social Security is a good example. Basically, their plan is to take the risk-pooling social insurance function out of Social Security, turning it into an investment in which you receive a return on what you put in. The problem with this is, of course, if you're not one of the lucky ones who can put a lot in, you're return will probably be small or run out before you die, meaning the program will no longer function as a solution for the problem of poor people living in poverty.

The disastrous response to hurricane Katrina is the result of the same ideological thinking. Basically, the conservative argument is that it's not government's role to take care of people in need, it's their responsibility to take care of themselves. If government action is warranted at all, it's warrented at the local level.

Now, it should be obvious that poor families are not really capable of protecting themselves from a deadly hurricane. But the same is actually true of local government. Like most big cities in today's America, New Orleans is actually quite poor. That's because most of the white middle class has fled to the suburbs, where they can hoard their tax money for their own, better school districts and such while leaving lower-income African Americans to fend for themselves. Again, the goal isn't really to give people more control over government, it's to prevent the redistribution of resources from one group to another. In other words, to make sure the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor. Add to this the fact that the two states hardest hit by the hurricane, Louisiana and Mississippi, are also quite poor compared to most states, and quite unable to guarantee an adequate level of services to all of their residents, and you see that any attempt to protect their citizens organized and funded only at the state and local level is doomed to failure.

If George Bush represents anyone in this country, it's big corporations and well to do suburbanites. His goal has been to allow them to hoard as many resources to themselves as possible, by minimizing the amount redistributed to the less fortunate through taxes and government spending. How ironic that he has drawn so much of his political support from regions in the American South filled with precisely the kind of working-class folk he's been so determined to dick over. Maybe that will change someday. Survivors and rescue workers have nicknamed the new body of water submerging much of the Gulf Coast "Lake George" after the do-nothing president who stood by and watched as so many died there.

In Monday's Tribune, Dennis Byrne argues that

Maybe the finger-pointing comes from today's mindset that someone else always must be ready and in charge of ensuring our safety and comfort. Or from an arrogance that we can plan in advance for every imaginable catastrophe.

"It's your own responsibility to save your own ass. There's nothing the government could possibly do to protect its citizens from natural disaster." It's exactly the kind of argument you'd make, if your top priority was reducing taxes on the wealthy, rather than building a better society for everyone. The sad thing is that so many people who aren't rich, have bought into this crap.

Some other random notes on the disaster

I am dismayed to hear so many otherwise intelligent people immediately start declaring that all foreign aid should end because we have our own problems now. The fact is, aid like that we gave to Asia after the tsunami builds up a great deal of goodwill around the world. And we're getting paid back - many countries around the world have offered aid to Katrina's victims, both in money and personnel. Even ostensible enemies such as Iran have offered to help. After all, we helped them after the 2003 earthquake in Bam, disregarding the bad blood that lingers between our two countries.

There's been a lot of discussion about the wisdom of too much development in vulnerable coastal areas. In 1960, there were 180 people per square mile in the coastal United States; by 1994, there were 275 per square mile. And Michael Powell and Michael Grunwald point out in the Washington Post

In 1998, Deputy Assistant Army Secretary Michael L. Davis tried to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from rubber-stamping casino applications without studying the impact dredging would have on marshes that shelter wildlife, purify drinking water and help prevent flooding. This angered Lott, then Senate majority leader, who had recently flown to Las Vegas in a casino executive's jet and had raised $100,000 for Republicans at a casino-industry fundraiser.

Lott got the moratorium lifted, then he got the Army to launch an investigation of Davis. No wrongdoing was found, but Davis was removed from Gulf Coast permitting issues.

So even suggesting that overdevelopment might be a bad idea is enough to get you blacklisted. Personally I think that the lure of the ocean is too overwhelming for government policy to effect it too much. But in terms of spending public resources, shouldn't our focus be on shoring up and protectin existing communities rather than subsidizing the construction of new ones?

This blog entry on the history of New Orleans is too cool to describe. You should just read it.

Louisiana and Mississippi Guardsmen whose homes have been destroyed in the disaster are being reassured that their families will be guaranteed housing at Fort Polk, if they choose to remain on active duty or enlist in the regular Army. How's that for a novel way to improve recruiting?

When the Levee Breaks

2005-09-02T11:16:00.000-05:00

For anybody who was worried, Fats Domino has been found alive and safe. But the rest of the news is bad, as New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast has spiraled downwards into anarchy, violence and despair.

The death toll is unknown as decaying corpses are shoved aside by rescuers still trying to reach survivors stranded by floodwaters. Conditions are grim even for those who have managed to make it to shelter. For some reason the government had been unable to get food and water to refugees gathered at the Convention Center in downtown New Orleans by this morning. People are dying of heat stroke and dehydration as they wait in line for a seat on a bus out of town. Their bodies are left on the curb or tossed in dumpsters. In Gulfport, Mississippi, National Guard troops arrived with truckloads of water and MREs to find that no one was there to meet them and no system of distribution had been put in place. The situation is the same throughout the affected area - there is no plan in place, no one is in charge, there are not enough supplies, there is public disorder, hopelessness, desperation, death.

It's not as if the disaster comes as a complete surprise. People have been warning of the looming danger to New Orleans and the region for years. As Paul Krugman puts it in the New York Times:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

So why was nothing done about it? I'm not even talking about the long and expensive process of improving New Orleans' defenses against natural disaster. I'm just talking about putting in place a plan to deal with disaster, including a comprehensive evacuation plan to be put in place before the storm hit. It was clear by Thursday or Friday of last week that large-scale disaster was possible. Why wasn't the National Guard called up last week to assist in the evacuation? Not to mention that a third of the Louisiana Guard is in Iraq, along with much of their watercraft. Authorities ordered a mandatory evacuation of the area but did not organize transit for poor residents without cars. FEMA rejected a plan to buy a sizable piece of land and prepare for the construction of a tent city for refugees in just this sort of situation because, in the words of one administrator, "Americans don't live in tents."

Why is this happening? Because we have a government and ruling party that believe that a strong state is not necessary to provide support and assistance to the poor and disadvantaged. They believe that low taxes and less government "interference" will allow citizens to take care of their own needs. The whole idea is ridiculous. No individual can weather a storm of this magnitude alone. Societies overcome these traumatic events by banding together, working as a team, and organizing. Our leaders are not there to lower the state's "burden" on wealthy and privileged individuals. They are there to organize the resources of state and society to serve the public. That's their job. And they didn't do it.

But not only does our national "leadership" not take responsibility for their failure, they instead appear to blame the victims. Illinois' own Speaker Denny Hastert remarked to the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., that it makes no sense to rebuild New Orleans where it is. "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," he said. The Waterbury, Connecticut Republican-American goes further, suggesting that it's a waste of taxpayer money to rebuild a city below sea level. It's true that the sprawling of the American public accross former wetlands, into areas with no local water supply, and so on is inviting all sorts of evironment problems of potentially catastrophic proportions. But that's not what has happened in New Orleans, which has long been one of the jewels of American civilization, mired though it has been in recent decades in the poverty and abandonment that have afflicted many of our urban centers as wealth whites have moved away to avoid paying their taxes. And there's the true cause of the disaster - a nation which, once again, has refused to supply the basics of shelter, food, public health and safety to its poorest residents.

Music: When the Levee Breaks, Led Zeppelin. "It's got what it takes to make a modern man leave his home . . . "
Mood: Angry

Fats Domino is Missing

2005-09-01T14:02:00.000-05:00

I still have few words for all the tragedy and horror of the past few days, but if there's one story in particular that's caught my attention today it's that rock'n'roll legend Fats Domino is missing. The 77-year old musician was last heard from on Sunday night, when he said he planned to ride out the hurricane in his 9th Ward home. As most of you probably know by now, New Orleans' lowlying 9th Ward has been flooded, covered by as much as 12 feet of water the past couple days, with potentially many people trapped on rooftops or in attics, with no food or potable water. Of course, almost nobody's been heard from for days, since all telephone and broadband service, as well as electricity, has been down for days at this point.

Send Help
American Red Cross
P.O. Box 37243
Washington, D.C. 20013

The Fall of New Orleans?

2005-08-30T23:24:00.000-05:00

Up here we feel a bond with our older sister to the South. Legend has it that it started with Louis Armstrong, tired of the racist Jim Crow South, getting on a train in New Orleans and riding it to the end of the line, at Chicago. He was followed by wave after wave of migrants from the Delta, usually getting off at the old 63rd Street Station (nothing there but a church parking lot now). They brought with them the religion, food, dialect, and most famously music which came to define so much of what 20th Century Chicago. Passenger rail isn't so important anymore, but the railroad still forms a kind of steel umbilical cord tying Chicago to a region millions of its residents or their ancestors once called home.

A region which is currently enduring what must be the worst natural disaster this country has seen in my lifetime. Whole towns have been destroyed. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people have died. And our sister city to the South? Floodwaters laid seige last night, but her walls held for a time, even as the highway bridges spanning Lake Pontchartrain were swept away. But this morning the levees broke in three places, and most of the city is now underwater as the Army Corps of Engineers desperately struggle to full the gaps. At this point it's unclear what will remain of our beautiful sister, but it's clear the loss of life could be severe. We're not even dealing with dead bodies," Mayor Ray Nagin said. "They're just pushing them on the side."

I really have nothing insightful to add to all the horrible news you've doubtless already heard today, but it's on my mind and I felt like I had to say something on the day New Orleans fell. I haven't been there in years, not since my high school marching band joined a few Mardi Gras parades when I was 15, but it sure left an impression.

Wells, I hope you took pictures.

If I hear about anything we could do to help, I will post it here.

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

2005-08-23T22:12:00.000-05:00

Air show this weekend. We didn’t go this year (not in the mood for militarism) but you could hear the blasting jet engines all over time. The sound reminds me of the days after 9/11 when all civilian flights were grounded and NATO fighters were patrolling the skies over Chicago.

We watched the disaster unfold on television in a friend’s seventh floor apartment in Hyde Park. When the first fighter planes cruised overhead, she yelled OH MY GOD THEY”RE COMING!!! And hit the floor. No, it wasn’t funny later, it was funny right the fuck then, you could feel the tension breaking like ice snapping in a glass of gin.

Anyway, I haven’t been writing lately. For one thing, much of the interesting stuff that’s gone on in the last couple weeks has been at work, and I just won’t blog about that. It would be damned unprofessional. But it leaves me drained, and it’s hard to find the energy to talk about other things.

Big things are up in the neighborhood. Developers’ minions have torn down the apartment building next door and are pouring the foundation for a new one, all without the benefit of a valid city permit!

The street that was . . .

The demolition made a big mess. Debris fell in our back yard, and the fence caved in and blocked the sidewalk which leads to the entrance to our charming upstairs neighbor's place. They have stopped delivering her mail. Did I mention they don't have a permit? Trope has informed the Alderman's office.

Still, I hope they aren't stopped from finishing the project because the big hole is ghastly.

The Pit

I hated to see the old place go, it had class, and really nice woodwork. We walked around in there the week before it was demolished and took some nice little souvenirs – the little manual doorbells from the back stairwell, you spin the wind-up key and it makes a ring like an old telephone with a real bell – most of my readers may not even remember what that sounds like, although a coworker has a sample of one as a ring ton for his cell. I wish the place had been rehabbed or condo-ized rather than demolished, but I don’t know if we could start a family in so little space either. All this new construction is adding larger units to the city, which is good, but it’s doing so in such a way that makes it almost impossible for regular people to afford housing. Unfortunately, the kind of reform that would make a decent place to live in a decent neighborhood affordable for the rest of us will never be untertaken, because Americans count on rising home prices to finance their retirement. In other words, people who are already homeowners see rising property values as a good thing, and will fight any effort to drive prices down. So those of us who were born too late are S.O.L., I guess.

This picture says it all and doesn't need a caption. Yuck. This is what's happening to our neighborhood, which used to be cool.

Didn't mean to end on a grumpy note but I'm tired. Tomorrow there will be happy fun garden pictures, as well as some "what I did with my summer vacation" stuff.

you can't stop the signal

2005-08-03T22:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal, especially it's editorial page, but I've been following the work of their man in Basra, Stephen Vincent, for several months. I found his perspective very informative, he seemed to be somewhat of a conservative who would like to be a war supporter, but also very honest in his depiction of what has been going on in Basra, supposedly a bright spot on the dreary Iraqi horizon. He was quite disturbed by what he saw and in the past couple months I've read some very intersting pieces by Vincent, which were trying to draw attention to what he was seeing there.

On Sunday, he had an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times depicting the overarching, repressive power wielded by Iranian-backed Shi'ite fundamentalist religious parties and militias in Basra. Yesterday, he was murdered. He was not a journalist caught in the crossfire of some clash between soldiers and insurgents, he was assassinated because of something he'd written. Since his recent work has focused on the penetration of the Basra police force, militiamen riding along with police and "disappearing" political opponents of the regime, it is likely that his murder was committed or ordered by Basra police.

The New York Times piece will go to archive in a few days, so I'm taking the unusual step of reprinting the whole damn thing here. He can't get royalties for it anyway, he's dead, and I figure if someone's going to kill him to shut him up, I want to make sure everyone hears him loud and clear. Also, here's a link to his blog, In The Red Zone. Check it out while it's still up.

Switched Off in Basra

By STEVEN VINCENT

Published: July 31, 2005

Basra, Iraq

THE British call it being "switched on" - a state of high morale and readiness, similar to what Americans think of as "gung ho" attitude. During the 10 days I recently spent embedded with the British-led multinational force in this southern Iraqi city, I met many switched-on soldiers involved in what the British call "security sector reform." An effort to maintain peace while training Iraqis to handle their own policing and security, security sector reform is fundamental to the British-American exit strategy. As one British officer put it, "The sooner the locals assume their own security, the sooner we go home."

From this perspective, the strategy appears successful. Particularly in terms of the city police officers, who are proving adept at the close-order drills, marksmanship and proper arrest techniques being drilled into them by their foreign instructors. In addition, police salaries are up, the officers have shiny new patrol cars, and many sport snazzy new uniforms. Better yet, many of these new Iraqi officers seem switched-on themselves. "We want to serve our country" is a repeated refrain.

From another view, however, security sector reform is failing the very people it is intended to serve: average Iraqis who simply want to go about their lives. As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Recruited from the same population of undereducated, underemployed men who swell these organizations' ranks, many of Basra's rank-and-file police officers maintain dual loyalties to mosque and state.

In May, the city's police chief told a British newspaper that half of his 7,000-man force was affiliated with religious parties. This may have been an optimistic estimate: one young Iraqi officer told me that "75 percent of the policemen I know are with Moktada al-Sadr - he is a great man." And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The fact that the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organizations is not lost on Basra's residents.

"No one trusts the police," one Iraqi journalist told me. "If our new ayatollahs snap their fingers, thousands of police will jump." Mufeed al-Mushashaee, the leader of a liberal political organization called the Shabanea Rebellion, told me that he felt that "the entire force should be dissolved and replaced with people educated in human rights and democracy."

Unfortunately, this is precisely what the British aren't doing. Fearing to appear like colonial occupiers, they avoid any hint of ideological indoctrination: in my time with them, not once did I see an instructor explain such basics of democracy as the politically neutral role of the police in a civil society. Nor did I see anyone question the alarming number of religious posters on the walls of Basran police stations. When I asked British troops if the security sector reform strategy included measures to encourage cadets to identify with the national government rather than their neighborhood mosque, I received polite shrugs: not our job, mate.

The results are apparent. At the city's university, for example, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and makeup are properly Islamic. "I'd like to throw them off the grounds, but who will do it?" a university administrator asked me. "Most of our police belong to the same religious parties as the monitors."

Similarly, the director of Basra's maternity hospital, Mohammad Nasir, told me that he frequently catches staff members pilfering equipment to sell to private hospitals, but hesitates to call the police: "How do I know what religious party they are affiliated with, and what their political connection is to the thieves?"

It is particularly troubling that sectarian tensions are increasing in Basra, which has long been held up as the brightest spot of the liberated Iraq. "Are the police being used for political purposes?" asked Jamal Khazal Makki, the head of the Basra branch of the Sunni-dominated Islamic Party. "They arrest people and hold them in custody, even though the courts order them released. Meanwhile, the police rarely detain anyone who belongs to a Shiite religious party."

An Iraqi police lieutenant, who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous, confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations - mostly of former Baath Party members - that take place in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of "death car": a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.

Meanwhile, the British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists' claim on the hearts and minds of police officers. This detachment angers many Basrans. "The British know what's happening but they are asleep, pretending they can simply establish security and leave behind democracy," said the police lieutenant who had told me of the assassinations. "Before such a government takes root here, we must experience a transformation of our minds."

In other words, real security reform requires psychological as well as physical training. Unless the British include in their security sector reform strategy some basic lessons in democratic principles, Basra risks falling further under the sway of Islamic extremists and their Western-trained police enforcers.

Steven Vincent, the author of "In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq," is writing a book about Basra.

Stephen Vincent was the 49th journalist to be killed in the Iraq conflict. He was murdered by police officers loyal to a fundamentalist religious regime installed in power by you government, a regime which intimidates, tortures and kills its political and religious opponents, a regime which your soldiers are being asked to risk their lives, every day, to protect. Hypocrisy is on the march!

. . . but the truth will out. Pass it on.

Hiatus

2005-07-17T00:05:00.000-05:00

Windy City Blues will be off line for the next ten days or so, since I'll be out of town and away from my computer. The next few days I'll be unreachable by e-mail or cell phone, as I'm leaving the civilized world behind to go fishing. After that I'm going to the beach. I've obviously been very cranky lately and a little time without thinking about anything should do me good. I'll start posting again by the beginning of August.

The Good Guys?

2005-07-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

So I'm a science fiction fan. I don't go to conventions dressed up like Greedo or anything, but if a movie comes out involving invading aliens, time travel, zombies, robots, or spaceships blowing up you'll often find me there. Mostly this has been a bit of healthy escapism from a stressful life that has me guzzling antacid and watching my blood pressure at the age of 33.

But recently, I'm finding that the genre has been a rare sanctuary for moral ambiguity in absolutist times. You may have heard that the final Star Wars movie came out a couple months back. I know the last few haven't been that great, but the orignial movie came out when I was five and I sort of imprinted to it like a puppy to its new owner. Since that tender age, I had always wondered about the big guy in black, why he would have betrayed his old friends and been so mean to everyone. The new flick was supposed to finally give an answer to my questions.

Well, it turns out that once I knew his reasons, I felt like I would have done the same thing. Switch to the dark side in order to gain the power to stop my loved ones from dying and hold on to what I have and fear to lose? It sounds like a fair deal to me. Not the "right" thing necessarily, but understandable. It turns out Darth Vader was not a madman seeking to stamp out all that is good and right in the world, but a guy who did what he thought he had to do and got taken.

I'm not gonna tell you it's the greatest movie ever - some of the line deliveries are like high school students doing Shakespeare - but it made me think about matters of ultimate concern. And that's a lot more than you can say for most things these days.

Which brings me to what is absolutely, undisputably the best TV show out there. A show that you should really watch, and that means something coming from me because usually I'm gonna tell you that TV is a waste of valuable time where you could be doing something with your life. I hear that Americans on average watch five or six hours of TV a day and I can't understand how it's possible, although I guess it explains a lot. Ordinarily, almost anything is better than TV. TV makes you fat and stupid. Boxing is better for you than TV. Shoplifting, polka, even just sitting alone in the dark and drinking heavily is better than TV. Hell, even golf, if it's a nice enough day.
But you should probably watch this. No, it's not the freakin' West Wing. Nothing annoys me more than people who know more about what Josiah Bartlett is doing than what George Bush is doing. Such people deserve to be oppressed. No, I'm talking about the remake of Battlestar Galactica. Yes, like that cheesy show from the 70s with the hair and the King Tut helmets and the robot dog who was played by a monkey.

Go ahead, laugh. But it's still the best show on television. Not because it portrays deep and conflicted characters and relationships in the manner of the Supranos or Six Feet Under, although it does. Not because it's groundbreaking in the way it combines documentary-style cinematography with CGI to create a gritty, recognizable world, although it is.

The new model killer robots are way cooler.

It's the best thing out there because it takes our times seriously. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks we were all going to emerge from our soulless bimbo consumer culture and be a serious nation again. Remember that? It lasted about three weeks. Then we all decided to turn the videos back on, block out the world with iPod ear buds, stick a yellow ribbon magnet on our cars and stick our heads back in the sand. How noble.

In mainstream culture, the only impact the Age of Terror has had is to produce some TV dreck about heroic CIA agents and how they put their lives on the line to protect us even though sometimes they have to break the rules and go kick some ass to do it. Ah, fascist propaganda is so comforting!

And then there's Battlestar Galactica, with its religious fanatic suicide bombers, its senseless attack on the civilian population, it's wall of "Have You Seen Me?" pictures of the missing and presumed dead, its political prisoners dressed in orange and living in cages, its protagonists torturing and killing detainees, its paranoid understanding that the terrorists could be anyone in the room. On the one side, monotheistic fanatics who claim to know the will of God and are willing to sacrifice themselves to enforce it. On the other side, a faith-based administration led by a born-again President convinced that she's the one doing God's will. Yet both the Quaeda figures and the Bush administration stand-ins evoke a certain sympathy in me, which is quite an accomplishment since I'm not inclined to cut either party any slack here in the real world. When you find yourself watching an attempted coup and you don't know who to pull for, that's an accomplishment, too.

I'm not eggagerating when I say this is a space opera that can expand your moral imagination. When you know one of the characters is an enemy sabateur and you fear for her safety anyway, when you sympathize with traitors and warmongers and terrorists all, you know you're seeing a new classic being born. The key to its success is nothing more complicated than staying true to its premise. After genocide, innocence is lost.

In this country, our instinct has been to close our eyes to protect our innocence. To hide behind faith or ideology or outrage, but to look around, always, for the good guys crusadig to push back the forces of evil.

But there are not good guys in this life. Just people struggling to survive, and to get what they want. And the show is like that. It's not that they are dark anti-hero types. They're actually charming, funny, compassionate, lusty, normal people. But they're not embodying some ideal we should try to emulate. Mostly they're trying not to die, in trying times strikingly similar to our own.

If you think I'm reading too much into a TV show with spaceships, here's Mary McDonnell, who plays the embattled President Roslin on the show:

The thing I love most about "Battlestar" is the question it's raising – and this season, the question is more prominent – of how do we perceive ourselves in relation to 'the other'? That is the essential question to me of our planet. Until we understand that the other is us, we are going to be continually in these wars and do things that create divisiveness.

A lot of what I see in the world is us and them, the good guy and the bad guy. To begin to understand that there's a bit of projecting on the bad guy and that he's a part of us … That's kind of why this show is so compelling. Even when people don't quite get it, there is something in here that we need to evolved toward.

"Battlestar" airs at 9pm central time on Fridays on the Sci Fi Channel. The show's second season begins tonight, and you should watch it. And then turn off the damn tube before you get to the show with the dredlocked, life-sucking tick people. Boy is that not good.

Speaking of modern-day fears, coming back from a play last night I grew suspicious of a guy on the subway looking nervous and clutching a backpack. I told Trope about this and we got off the train and waited for another one. I know it's paranoid. If I really thought he had a bomb, shouldn't I have punched him in the face and grabbed the bag or something? But that would be rude and illegal, so I just got off and left the rest of the passengers to their non-fate. I know that's not the best or sanest way to deal with the situation we find ourselves in, but it made sense at the time. This is a truth about me, I plan on living through this whether the rest of y'all do or not.

Why I am not a libertarian part 762

2005-07-14T10:25:00.000-05:00

Horrible news coming out of Kenya today, which I'm sure no one around here is paying attention to because no one seems to care much about Africa.

Thousands of villagers in northern Kenya fled their homes in fear as new
inter-clan violence wracked parts of the remote region after at least 77 people
were killed in a brutal massacre and reprisal attacks this week, officials and
residents of the area said. . .

members of the rival Borana and Gabra clans, which have long-running
disputes over water and pasture, continued to clash two days after the attack on
Turbi which has been blamed on the Borana. . .

The death toll from three days of clashes had stood at 76 earlier Thursday
but after one of 10 Boranas reported killed on Wednesday was found alive but
critically injured, the two new confirmed deaths brought the total to 77 dead,
officials said.

The flight of the villagers and new killings came 48 hours after 300 to
500 heavily armed Borana raiders slaughtered 56 Gabra villagers, including 22
children, in Turbi on Tuesday.

At least 10 of the attackers were killed during and after the raid that
was followed by a revenge attack in which nine Boranas, including four children,
after Garbas pulled them from a car driven by a priest near Sololo.

I hear lots of people complain about government and blithely claim that people would be better off if they were allowed to fend for themselves or form noncoercive, cooperative communities in freedom. Unfortunately, that's just not what people are like. Whenever state authority is withdrawn, people quickly resort to violence to obtain the resources and power they think they need to survive.

In an organized state, disputes over water and land are resolved by laws and court systems, which provide a system for making these decisions which may not be perfect or fair, but at least doesn't involve machetes.

In other words, a core function of government is to play Solomon and hack the baby in half, so you don't go kill 4 of them.

You believe you would be different in a lawless world. You look in the mirror and all you see is the makeup, or the cool shirt, or the hair. You don't see the monster that lurks beneath the skin. That frightens me. Because I know it's in there.

One of the first steps in learning to live as a decent adult person is admitting to yourself that you just don't deserve to get everything you want by any means necessary. You're not that special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

Libertarians in essence believe that if everybody goes out and just selfishly tries to get whatever they want and works for their own happiness, that the result will be the greatest good for the greatest number. This is fatuous and false. In reality under such a system, the strong will take what they want from the weak. The greatest good for the greatest number is accomplished when the biggest dog on the block is not a wealthy individual or corporation but a government, which takes power from the strong and gives it to the weak to level the playing field. The problem with governments in practice is that they become corrupted by the wealthy and powerful, not that the trample the alleged rights of property.

Just because I make common cause with them when I feel our government is overstepping its constitutional bounds doesn't make me one of them. I'm not sure what you'd call me, but I'm closer to the New Deal than the Cato Institute.

Big Government now, Big Government forever.