Soy 'Milk' ≠ Milk

Random Thought of the Day:

Soy milk is not milk. It doesn’t really look like milk. It doesn’t taste like milk. So how can soy milk’s marketers get away with calling it “milk?”

According to Webster’s Online Dictionary, milk is either “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young,” which soy milk most definitely is not, or it can also be “a liquid resembling milk in appearance,” which is a stretch in the case of soy milk.

It could just as easily, and accurately, be called “soy juice.” But since soy milk is touted as a healthy substitute for the real thing, calling it juice wouldn’t do. Who’d buy it? Soy juice sounds disgusting. It sounds, in fact, like what it is—soy beans soaked in water, ground and cooked before being “processed into a milky liquid,” according to the soy milk section of the Hormel Foods website.

The good people at Hormel also point out that soy milk needs no small amount of alteration before it can be passed off as “milk.” To wit: “Soy milk is often thickened to appear more like common milk (in other words it’s more juice-like in its normal state) and flavored with honey, vanilla or carob to alter a mildly bitter taste that would be noticeable without the flavoring.”

Not that milk isn’t altered chemically before it reaches your local store, but at least at its heart it’s milk, not bitter bean juice.

And another thing: Milk shouldn't be packaged in a box and stored at room temperature for five months, like soy “milk.” The Indignant Citizen was in his local Starbucks today and saw boxes of Silk soy “milk” with a “Best if Sold By” date of April 2006. That ain’t right.

(Of course, in Italy the Indignant Citizen saw milk sold in boxes and somehow stored at room temperature, but it was still real milk, and besides that's just Italy. Italians have espresso bars in their truck stops.)

There’s an old saying about how putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that the animal wearing the lipstick is still a pig. Likewise giving a bean a face transplant and an enema doesn’t change the fact it’s still a bean.

Soy milk will never be milk, no matter how hard its backers work to make it so.

Cultural Archaeology

Primitive man sought shelter in caves and spent his days foraging for food, hunting and getting busy with primitive woman in order to keep the population growing. We know this because these men and women left drawings on cave walls and cliffs depicting the world as they saw it and related to it.

The Indignant Citizen wonders: What clues about the way we live are we leaving for future civilizations to discover?

One clue might be the billboard the Indignant Citizen saw on Christmas Day. Looming over the Tri-State Tollway near the bridge over Pulaski Road, the sign showed a broad-smiling, dark-bearded man in a dark suit holding a pile of cash in his cupped, outstretched hands. He was wearing a Santa hat. Over him were the words “Need Christmas Cash? Borrow on your lawsuit!” Then there was a company name and phone number, but the Indignant Citizen missed them as we drove under the tollway.

No doubt for a certain sector of the motoring public, perhaps a sizable sector, this sign will resonate. It will hit them like bat to the head on clear blue day; a “Why Didn’t I Think of That Sooner?” bombshell, like the news of that guy in Colorado who printed out his own bar codes at home and bought a $150 i-Pod for $4.99.

Fucking brilliant.

If the Indignant Citizen were on the archaeology team that unearthed that billboard 10,000 years from today, here’s what the sign would say to him. That we were a culture obsessed with money and material possessions. That we believed in the doctrine of getting something for nothing, rather than through work. That lawyers and loan sharks occupied prominent positions in our culture. That our lives were so fast-paced only giant advertisements could get our attention.

If the archaeology team were to understand English the way we do today, the sign could confirm why we eventually perished, or offer a key clue that could lead the team to posit on our demise.

The Indignant Citizen is trying to notice these markers, our cultural detritus, more, and view them in this new context. Try it, it will give you a new lens through which to view the everyday.

Tired ... of war

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is rightly known as a repository of conservative thought, which is fine because even though many of the ideas presented there are straight out of the H.R. Haldeman Political Manual and borrow heavily from the Chicago School of economic thought, often the pieces are well-written and reasonably well argued.

On occasion, however, OpinionJournal.com spits out some truly bilious dreck that offends even hardened sensibilities. Brendan Miniter, assistant editor at OpinionJournal.com, used the Journal’s space on Dec. 20 to puke upon the paper’s readers what can be described only as the most twisted kind of a pep talk to rally the weary troops around our New Reality, the perpetual “War on Terror.”

Miniter’s basic point is that the U.S. public is tiring of the unending beat of the Bush Administration’s war drums, and that this fatigued condition has led directly to compromises in lawmaking and policy fortitude that have weakened the government’s ability to fight the terrorists. For example, there was delay in approving the defense spending bill, which of course pays for the gas that fuels the U.S. war machine; television gave expanded talk show and news coverage to Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture campaign and Rep. Jack Murtha’s proposal for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; extension of certain Patriot Act provisions was held up on Capitol Hill amid wrangling over civil liberties concerns; and Bush was forced to defend an indefensible policy of domestic spying.

In Miniter’s eyes, each of these represents an ax chop at the base of the domestic security tree trunk. Enough chops and the base will weaken and the tree will fall, presumably leading to a terrorist attack.

Then Miniter begins the inevitable conservative lubing up of the executive powers penis, preparing for the blowjob du jour. Bush, he said, reminded citizens on his weekly radio address (does anyone listen to those anymore, or are they just recorded so that snippets can be played on the evening news later?) that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers communicated with Al Qaeda members outside the United States prior to ramming planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“Had the National Security Agency been running its secret program then, the authorities might have known that the two were planning to board a plane and ram it into the Pentagon,” Miniter wrote.

Which is fine, and maybe true. But it’s equally true that if about two dozen other things had happened or not happened the hijackers’ plot might have been foiled either in the planning stages or early in the execution phase. To pin the blame for Sept. 11 on the fact that the NSA was not eavesdropping on American’s phone conversations at will and without review by the judiciary branch is telling much less than half the story. It’s telling 4% of the story. To Miniter’s way of thinking, we should be grateful to have the NSA listening in because they’ll catch the evil-doers. Benjamin Franklin said something about people willing to give up liberties to gain security deserving neither liberty nor security. The Indignant Citizen trusts Ben’s thinking more than a mid-level editorial hack at the Wall Street Journal.

Then Miniter gets really offensive, essentially calling for an end to debate about how we’re waging the never-ending war on terror. “The real danger here is that such debates will exhaust all of us, sapping the energy we need to fight a long and broad-based war,” he wrote.

Oh please, fuck him. Just Fuck Him. In dispensing this knob saliva in writing, Brendan Miniter disclosed something remarkable. He doesn’t think the American people have the stamina to wage war and scrutinize the waging of war at the same time. We’ll get too tired, he thinks, and lose focus. And so by all means, let’s advocate ending scrutiny of the war, not the war itself.

Who are these people? There are a damn lot of them out there; there must be for someone like Miniter to get prime space in the Journal. But there are signs that more Americans are discovering the stamina to be vigilant and critical at the same time, and they’re even applying extra brain power to considering the possibility that running the war machine 24 hours a day, seven days a week forever may be a bigger drain on energy than discussion.

Sometimes exhaustion produces clarity in thought.

Daybreak

On these frigid winter mornings near the solstice, when the Indignant Citizen’s alarm squawks and wakes him from deep, warm slumber, there is no light. It is dark outside, the kind of cold darkness that can make you believe all light has been extinguished from the universe forever.

But eventually the dawn comes, faintly at first, but determinedly. For the darkness cannot last forever. The light will not be denied.

In the Bible, when people are referred to as living in darkness the writers are referring to a darkness of understanding – a kind of intellectual darkness. Light – knowledge and understanding – is always in conflict with darkness in the Bible. People are always wandering from the darkness to the light, or allowing light to illuminate the darkness.

It is no different today, not just in the Indignant Citizen’s morning but also in life. Darkness has overtaken us and the light has been all but snuffed out. It is cold, and there seems no hope for spring.

Then, just when hope appears lost, the dawn breaks. Over Harrisburg, Pa., no less. On Tuesday, a federal judge – a Republican appointed to the bench by President Bush – ruled that a school board in Dover, Pa., acted unconstitutionally by presenting so-called intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in high school biology classes. The story in the New York Times does a good job explaining the ruling.

Just as good as that story, though, are the judge’s own words. In just this one excerpt, he destroys just about every potential right-wing nutzoid argument criticizing his ruling. The ruling is stunning in its rebuke of the “intelligent design” quacks and their disingenuous argument that no, they weren’t trying to promote religion, just have intelligent design taught on an “equal par.”

Here, then, is an excerpt of Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling:

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on [intelligent design], who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

Could it be? Morning in America?

Still the World Champions

The Indignant Citizen just finished re-watching Game 2 of the American League Division Series between the White Sox and Red Sox. You know the one: Tad Iguchi hits a three-run homer in the fifth off David Wells and Bobby Jenks pitches two innings for the save. Hmm, it's still so sweet you can almost taste it. Comcast SportsNet is re-running the entire playoff run through Game 4 of the World Series, bless the network’s heart. (Game 4 will air on New Year’s Day.)

The salute to the Sox comes at the perfect time for White Sox fans. With the holidays upon us, and nearly two full months elapsed since the World Series trophy found a home on the South Side, the Indignant Citizen, for one, was primed for a reality check, a little reminder that it was not a dream.

The IC has found that using the following phrase helps keep things in perspective: “The White Sox won the World Series.” Repeat as needed.

The IC’s good friend and former coworker Vince, who runs Exile in Wrigleyville, has done a nice job updating his site during this short off-season, providing news on the big trade with the Phillies for power hitting lefty DH Jim Thome, the re-signing of power hitting first baseman Paul Konerko, the trade with the Pirates for utility infielder and left handed batter Rob Mackowiak, the trade with the Diamondbacks for right-handed pitcher Javier Vazquez, and the contract extension for catcher A.J. Pierzynski.

Watching the games again on Comcast SportsNet obviously doesn’t hold the same drama that watching them live the first time did. But it does allow the IC to record them on VHS (remember that technology?), including all the post-game breakdowns. It’ll make for a nice video library and a fine set of companions to the World Series and Sox Pride DVDs that already inhabit the IC’s TV room bookshelf.

Watching the games again without the stress of an uncertain outcome has also allowed the Indignant Citizen to focus on the abject homerism of ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman. This has been discussed in great detail on all manner of White Sox blogs and message boards, but Berman was so obviously for the Red Sox that even casual baseball fans watching the ALDS purely for shits and giggles must have sensed it.

Fuck him. The Red Sox are finished for another 87 years, and New Englanders should feel free to resume their stoic defeatism as it relates to their baseball team.

Meanwhile the IC will continue to roll on his back in the sweet green grass of the White Sox world championship, arms and legs in the air, reveling in the sweet silliness of it all.

Where's the warmth in global warming?

Interminable winter. Season of searing flesh, frozen feet and unending layers. Winter – cold and dark in the morning, cold and dark at night. Winter – when the cold seeps through any opening in your clothing or your house. Winter, when you’d just as soon crawl into the furnace as wait for it to blow air to warm a room. Winter. . . .

Whoops. Scratch that. It’s only Dec. 19, which means it’s still officially fall. And yet … and yet, it feels like winter. It has for weeks. Chicago, and much of the nation east of the Rockies, has been in the deep freeze since November. So far this December, only three days have managed to make it to freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Snow covers the ground outside the Indignant Citizen’s home to a depth of around five inches, adding a special kind of evil chill close to the ground, where feet live.

When it gets cold like this, the kind of cold that numbs your entire body after just a few minutes’ exposure – fully dressed, of course – we must always hear from the sanctimonious anti-global warming crowd. They crow that the cold is sure proof that global warming is a myth, a ruse perpetrated on slow-thinking citizens by the overzealous, doomsaying environmental movement.

They write letters to newspapers, mostly. Occasionally one of these kooks will end up on an editorial page someplace. These outlets don’t even take into account the multitude of blogs that populate the Internet and that serve as a pulpit for all manner of uninformed opinion. There’s just one problem: The fact that it’s really, really cold so early in the season, both in the eastern U.S. and in Western Europe isn’t proof that global warming is a myth. There are some signs that the opposite is true, that the presence of cold air so early is actually proof that global warming is melting the Antarctic ice sheet into the Atlantic. That cool fresh water is being pumped along the oceanic conveyor belt that runs north-south between the Americas and Africa-Europe, weakening the current and over time changing the atmospheric setup.

While there is little doubt among reputable and thoughtful scientists that the earth’s temperature is rising, there is plenty of debate about exactly how fast the temperature is rising in an historical context and whether the rise is a sign that man is fucking up the planet or merely a cyclical occurrence – another of Earth’s periodic mood swings.

But really, what difference does it make? Say half the scientists think it’s cyclical and half think it’s man’s fault. Who’s to know? We may not learn anything conclusive for hundreds of years, and by then it’ll be too late if the scientists who blame civilization turn out to be right. So why not start treating the planet with a little more respect today? Use a little less energy, recycle a little bit more.

On the way to work this morning, the Indignant Citizen saw a CBS2 TV truck parked on a side street near the Dirksen Federal Building, engine running and the driver asleep inside with his feet up on the dashboard and the heat on. This is an especially ridiculous kind of consumption, and the IC briefly considered removing the truck’s valve stems as a kind of punishment. He thought better of it, though, because no doubt whatever tow truck or repair vehicle that showed up would have left its engine running, too.

In a way, it’s disappointing global warming doesn’t really mean “warming.” It might be easier to stomach if it did. Now all we seem to have to look forward to is the return of the glaciers.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

There’s stupid and then there’s Christine Barnes.

Barnes, 30, lives in Elmwood Park and was one of the imbicles who stopped on the tracks at a railroad grade crossing on Grand Ave. the night before Thanksgiving. An outbound Metra express train rounded a curve at about 70 miles per hour and slammed into six of the cars on the tracks, throwing those into five other cars. In all 11 cars were destroyed. No one was killed, although Barnes and a few others ended up in the hospital.

Investigators quickly determined the Metra engineer did everything he could have and that two factors contributed to the accident: the design of the intersection and the fact that the drivers stopped on the tracks.

The intersection is bad. The tracks cross Grand Ave. at a diagonal, meaning there’s more track across Grand than if the tracks crossed perpendicular to the street. Additionally, there is a stop light nearby that can cause traffic to back up past the tracks. Which is why the village or Metra or the railroad that runs that line, perhaps all three, paid for giant yellow signs that hang over Grand Ave. warning drivers of the long crossing and admonishing them not to stop on the tracks.

Stories on Friday and Saturday in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, as well as on local TV, clearly conveyed the frustration police, Metra and crash investigators felt. Of all the steps that could have been taken to prevent the accident, the most basic and least expensive was the exercising of just a little common sense on the part of the drivers. Simply put, they shouldn’t have stopped on the tracks.

So, of course, Barnes stopped on the tracks. That’s dumb enough, but what garns her the Gold Star for Stupidity in this case are her comments in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. In the story, by Lolly Bowean, Barnes makes clear she takes no blame. The light should have changed or the train should have stopped. But she has no culpability for stopping on the tracks. Barnes told Bowean she is tired of officials blaming the drivers. “What do they think,” she asked. “We really want to be hit by a train? I could have died.”

Of course, no one ever suggested the drivers stopped on the tracks because they wanted to be hit by a train. They’re saying the accident wouldn’t have happened if the drivers had not stopped on the tracks. They’re saying the drivers stopped on the tracks because they failed to use common sense.

They’re saying Barnes and her fellow drivers are idiots.

Every one of those drivers should be ticketed and should have their licenses suspended. But you can bet they’ll sue Metra and the village and the Illinois Department of Transportation and anyone else they can think of in a desperate, flailing attempt to assign responsibility for this accident anywhere except where it rightfully belongs – with the drivers.

Overflowin’

Sometimes the amount of shit in the toilet exceeds the toilet’s ability to process it. This can occur for one of two reasons. Either someone has laid down one ginormous poo, or several people pooed in succession, each one failing to flush and thereby growing the cumulative shitblob to a size the toilet drain is unsuited to dealing with.

Lately the rhetorical toilet has been getting pretty full on a regular basis and overflowing onto the Indignant Citizen’s nice, clean floor.

Case in point: Bill O’Reilly. On Tuesday he said on his radio show that because San Franciscans voted to oppose military recruitment in public schools and to ban handgun ownership that the United States government had no responsibility to defend that city from a terrorist attack and that it should be effectively cut off from the rest of the country and denied any federal funds.

Occasionally O’Reilly will say something that the Indignant Citizen can stomach, but that usually happens when O’Reilly is advocating a common sense approach to dealing with some stupidity like Wal-Mart asking employees not to say “Merry Christmas” this year.

Tuesday’s hyperbole serves no one’s interests save Bill O’Reilly’s, however. It’s just a stupid thing to say. And it could be easily dismissed as such were it not for the fact that the three to five million people watch his TV show on any given night, and Lord knows how many listen to the radio program, believe he’s operating in what he calls the “No-Spin Zone.” Which of course is bullshit because if he wasn’t spinning he wouldn’t be on TV. Everyone spins, especially on TV. By having an opinion, you spin. By choosing guests, you’re spinning. It should be called the “No One Else But Me Can Spin Zone.”

Reading what O’Reilly has to say about San Francisco is stomach-turning and illustrates the depths to which discourse in this country has sunk. Apparently you can’t get on TV anymore unless you’re advocating for terrorists to blow up landmarks in cities whose policies you disagree with. Hey, Chicago bans handgun ownership, too. Got sumpin’ to say about dat, Bill?

O’Reilly’s over-the-top idiocy ranks right up there with Pat Robertson saying on his “700 Club” show Thursday that residents of Dover, Pa., shouldn’t look to God for help if a natural disaster hits the town because voters there dumped the school board members who favored teaching intelligent design in public school classrooms. “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city.”

Later, Robertson clarified his remarks: “God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in his eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.”

Oh please. For chrissake, Robertson, you have the reasoning ability and the vindictiveness of a 13-year-old girl. This whole intelligent design brouhaha has gotten entirely out of hand. Someone needs to reign these Christian wackos back in. They’re becoming as militant as Middle Eastern terrorists. And that might be the next step. We already have fundamentalists and Catholic extremists killing abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics. How long before they start shooting school superintendents who don’t support intelligent design and blowing up natural history museums?

People, it’s time to cool it the fuck down. San Franciscans pay taxes that support the federal government, and probably get back way less per dollar than they contribute. San Francisco’s infrastructure could use some upgrading, its less fortunate citizens more help from government programs; instead the city has to watch Alaska build bridges to nowhere for people who will never use them.

And by the way, Bill, in America voters make decisions. It is the American way. In fact nothing is more American. The fact that you disagree with it is irrelevant. An election was held; a decision was made. Live with it like a grownup. The Indignant Citizen has had to live with this Bush fucker, and he wasn’t even duly elected the first time. So shut the fuck up about San Francisco and concentrate on real issues.

Pat Robertson: You are going to hell. Plain and simple. God hates hate, and it’s clear you’re a hater. Buy some shorts and get ready for the trip, bitch. The Indignant Citizen will see you there and he will be coming for you.

What else? Oh, Bush’s latest attempt to rally support for this sad war in Iraq. This is a no-win situation. Democrats in congress have no room to criticize, here. They voted to give Bush the authority to wage this conflict, and they have no rhetorical standing to come back now and say it was wrong. To them the Indignant Citizen says: You should have stood up to Bush before. Now it’s too late. You’ve lost credibility. Step aside and let new leaders engage the fight.

As for Bush, he has, apparently, lost his mind completely. “We will never back down, we will never give in, we will never accept anything less than complete victory.” Holy shit, he sounds like Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now.” Maybe he means to. But someone should tell him that we’re fighting an unwinnable war. How does one measure “victory” against a slippery enemy like terrorism?

The tactic is brilliant from a rhetorical perspective, though, because it sets the stage for perpetual warfare. We’ll always be at war with terrorists because there is an inexhaustible supply of them, they have unmeetable demands and simply by fighting them militarily we make more of them.

Life must be strange for Ray Bradbury these days, because we have achieved the perpetual warfare he envisioned. We don’t even notice the bombers flying overhead any more, we have grown so used to the noise. In fact this Bush administration has managed to do what no other has ever done—push the bounds of the war debate beyond whether or not we should even be at war. That has already been settled. We are at war and will be for a long, long, long, long, longlonglong time. It is accepted. To end the war and seek a peaceful solution is to admit defeat, and we can’t do that.

Just one question, though. Wasn’t this mission in Iraq already accomplished?

Anyway, there’s a lot of shit in the toilet. Most of it doesn’t need to be there; it is a result of overeating, and eating the wrong things. But there it is. And so the Indignant Citizen asks: Where is the plunger? What plumber might act to drain the swirling, unflushable shitwater? The world dances and squeezes its ass cheeks together, trying to hold it in, as it awaits an answer.

It’s About Transit, Bitch

For a week now the Indignant Citizen has tried to write about something other than the White Sox. For a week he has failed. Yes, we have this war going on, with new revelations every day about how the Bush administration duped us into sending our sons and daughters to die in the desert.

So what the hell? While the Indignant Citizen keeps replaying the audio and video portions of the Sox World Series highlights—including Paulie’s slammer, Podsednik’s walk-off, Blum’s bullet and Uribe’s unspeakable glove work—we’ll let the West Side Critic work us back into the mix a little bit:

The planets must have misaligned, the sun must be skulking off to some black hole, because it’s just not right that the Seattle Seahawks have a good football team and the Chicago Bears do not.

Let The West Side Critic explain.

On Oct. 16, The West Side Critic, his Lovely and Brilliant Wife and Father-In-Law traveled to Qwest Field (Seahawks Stadium to those who rightly reject the vile, corporate-ass-kissing name) to watch the Seahawks battle the Houston Texans.

It wasn’t much of a battle. The Seahawks monkey-stomped the Texans 41-10, with running back Shaun Alexander running roughshod over every poor bastard sheathed in a blue-and-red jersey. You could say Alexander looked for holes to run through. You could also say he looked for opposing players to run over. He didn’t fuck around. No. 37 truly is a Tall Walking Bitch.

Anyway, sitting in the bleachers, munching on kettle corn, The West Side Critic couldn’t help but think of the current state of sports. The Seattle Seahawks are pretty good. The Chicago Bears kinda suck. The Seattle Mariners suck, too. But the Chicago White Sox won the World Series. Huh?!

At least the Chicago Bears have won a Super Bowl in the last goddamn half-century. Who doesn’t remember the 1985 Chicago Bears? The West Side Critic will never forget the Fridge, the Cro-Magnon looking QB McMahon and their teammates shaking like wounded animals as they “danced” to the Super Bowl shuffle.

What The West Side Critic means is, the Bears should have a good team—they should be dancing to the Super Bowl Shuffle II—the Seahawks shouldn’t be that good (they really never were until Mike Holmgren brought himself and his meaty mustache to town), the White Sox sure as hell shouldn’t have been in the Series and the Mariners shouldn’t suck so damn bad.

Instead, everything is in reverse. Something definitely is wrong with this picture. Next thing you know, Chicagoans will start making eye contact on the street and Seattleites will starting giving each other the ol’ fuck you very much.

OK. OK. The West Side Critic is aware of The Indignant Citizen’s love of the White Sox, and therefore honestly wished the team all the best. After all, the White Sox have Freddy Garcia, that go-all-the-way-nine-inning-killer pitcher and ex-Mariner. Really, The Astros can go fuck themselves. They’re from Texas. The West Side Critic wanted the White Sox to mess with Texas. The Seahawks did.

But The West Side Critic digresses. In fact, The West Side Critic has a completely different point to make that is only marginally connected to the sports rant unleashed several paragraphs ago.

Because what’s important is how The West Side Critic, his Lovely and Brilliant Wife and his Father-In-Law got to Seahawks Stadium. We didn’t drive. We took commuter rail, run by Sound Transit, Puget Sound’s three-county behemoth of a transit agency that’s trying to run light rail, commuter trains and express buses all over urbanized Puget Sound’s ass.

Anyway, it was a pleasant trip on Sounder, the name of the train. Cushy seats. No traffic congestion. No road rage. No sea of brake lights braking. No furrowed brows. No fidgeting with the radio station to find something to distract from the clusterfuck ahead.

Smooth sailing, really. $8 roundtrip. Still, Sound Transit has its problems. It’s gone over budget in its early days and reneged on its promises. It’s supposed to run nine daily roundtrips of Sounder, from Tacoma to Seattle with several stops in between.

It runs four roundtrips. Weekdays, with weekend service for sports events like the Seahawks and Mariners. The agency says it’s going to get to nine daily roundtrips ASAP. It says it’s trying to clean up its act. We’ll see. For all of you outside the West Side (everything west of Chicago, that is), you can take all of this as the West Coast’s way of trying to do high-speed, efficient transit and kind of coming at it slowly, somewhat ineptly. It’s tough. We sprawled a lot in the early days. We like our cars.

But we also like our natural environment. We like our trees. We like alternatives, options, choices. That includes transportation. We’ll see how it goes. Certainly, energy prices seem to be conspiring to force us to rethink our way of life. A good, efficient, cost-effective passenger rail system – if we can ever truly get one in Puget Sound – would be a good thing.

Certainly, it would be far more useful than a quick, pleasant way to get to a ball game.

Peace, out.
West Side Critic

Back to Business ... Almost

That was fun.

Now that the Indignant Citizen has wiped the champagne and beer from his tired eyes, washed the smoke from his clothes and regained his voice after the White Sox stomped the holy living shit out of the Red Sox, Angels and Astros to win the World Series, it’s time to cast a glance across the charred and smoking landscape of life in these United States.

So much crap has piled up on the river banks as White Sox Nation cruised by on the good ship Championship.... There was the high school cheerleader with a crush on the football captain masquerading as a Supreme Court nominee. Someone in government actually got busted for lying. The 2,000th U.S. soldier died in Iraq. And the former governor of the State of Illinois continued to attend his corruption trial. That’s a lot to deal with. But let
us start where we stand, for that is almost always best.

For those who didn’t catch it, Tribune Columnist and cub fan Eric Zorn filed an I-Was-Wrong dispatch from the bottom of the crater that was the Cubs season, a crater that was only made deeper by the White Sox postseason success. Later, in a blog entry that will go down in history on the South Side, Zorn exposed the six-sigma hypocrisy of Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti over the past year as it related to the White Sox.

Not only is Zorn’s roundup the stuff of instant legend in Sox Blogland, it may be enough to get Mariotti fired. Mariotti, more popularly known on the South Side as Windsock for his tendency to shift positions with the fickle breezes, didn’t file his regular Tuesday column. Instead his spot on the next-to-last page was filled by Carol Slezak, with a note at the bottom of the page informing readers that Mariotti was "Taking the Day Off."

That’s the same tag line, by the way, that the Sun-Times insists on using each time another column by Neil “I Beat My Wife Because I’m a Pussy” Steinberg doesn’t see the light of day because Steinberg is in “therapy” trying to exorcise his demons.

While the Indignant Citizen appreciates Steinberg’s acerbic style and perma-frown outlook on life, the guy hit his wife. He should be fired and forced to attend anger management and world history classes taught by Carl Everett.

When Juan Uribe fired that final bullet to Paul Konerko to record the final out in Game 4 of the World Series, the Indignant Citizen, in the euphoria of the moment, thought perhaps he might have to retire his indignation. Life just seemed too good. Everyone was happy; strangers hugged, joy was everywhere. The sun seemed brighter, the birds chirpier.

It took about four days for the joy to fully wear off. The Indignant Citizen is still happy about the Sox, mind you, but more pressing issues have asserted themselves. And we will get to them shortly. In the meantime, join the Indignant Citizen in congratulating once more the 2005 Chicago White Sox, World Series Champions .

That’s a White Sox World Series Winner!!!

Three series: Boston, Anaheim and Houston. Good afternoon, good evening and good night! The White Sox are World Series Champions!

They are predicting cold weather this winter in Chicago. But not for us, not for White Sox Fans. Memories of this fall will keep us warm.

And yes, it feels every bit as good as the Indignant Citizen thought it would.

Cinch it Up and Hunker Down

In every sports fan's lifetime, there are dates that are seared into the memory. Those dates mark the paths to elation and depression. Which path you are on is often determined by one crack of the bat, one swish of the net, one hard cut to the left or right.

For the Indignant Citizen, the first date was Oct. 12, 1986. That's when his team at the time, the California Angels, one strike away from the World Series, instead surrendered a 6-2 lead in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox. The Angels, of course, went on to collapse in a red, white and blue heap, handing Boston the AL Pennant. And a few years later Donnie Moore, the Angels relief pitcher who gave up a two-run home run to Dave Henderson in the top of the ninth, killed himself in part because of his despondency over blowing the save. Few remember the Angels rallied to tie in the ninth and had the bases loaded, but failed to score, losing in extra innings.

Every major sports date from then on that has involved a team the Indignant Citizen cheers for has been a variation of that one day, a seemingly endless procession of white flags marking a path to doom and failure on the playing field.

April 24, 1986. The Portland Trail Blazers lose Game 4 of a best of five series to the Denver Nuggets, ending a sub-.500 season. It is the last game coached by Jack Ramsey, who had coached the Blazers to their first and only championship nine years earlier. Yes, this happened earlier in the year than the Angels series, but the Blazers ended the regular season with a 40-42 record, 22 games behind the Lakers. Not much was expected. And they never led in the series.

June 4, 2000. Portland blows a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 7 to lose in the Western Conference Finals to the Los Angeles Lakers. This one was particularly painful, as the Indignant Citizen had invited an apartment full of people to celebrate the pending trip to the Finals.

June 6, 1999. Portland loses 94-80, its fourth loss in four games to the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference Finals. The sweep ended an improbable run in the playoffs for the upstart Blazers.

June 14, 1992. After splitting the first two games in Chicago, Portland loses two of three at home and eventually loses to the Bulls in the NBA Finals. Hey, at least they got there, right?

Wrong. June 14, 1990. After splitting the first two games in Detroit, Portland loses three straight games at home and loses to the Pistons in the NBA Finals. Portland becomes the first team in NBA Finals history to lose three straight games at home.

Oct. 2, 1995. The Angels complete one of the biggest regular season collapses in Major League history by losing a one-game playoff for the AL West title to the Seattle Mariners, 9-1. The Angels at one point had a 10.5-game lead in the division.

You get the picture. It is a trail of tears that has left the Indignant Citizen's feet tired and bloody. And so it is with Fear and Trepidation that the Indignant Citizen prepares himself for this year's baseball playoffs. His association with the Angels faded after he left the West Coast (which is of course when the Angels finally won the World Series, in 2002), and now the Indignant Citizen is a proud Chicago White Sox fan.

Generally the Indignant Citizen prefers to leave the Sox commentary to his good friend and former coworker Vince over at Exile in Wrigleyville. But this is the Playoffs and the Playoffs cry out for comment. So here it is. The White Sox will open today against the defending world champion Boston Red Sox. Here's what Boston has: playoff experience and hitting. Here's what our Sox have: pitching and a chip on their collective shoulders. The winner will play either the goddam Yankees or, of course, the Angels.

This is going to be a frightful, nail biting ride. Goats and heroes will emerge. The Indignant Citizen almost can't bear to watch. Hope is dangerous if not used in moderation, and there are hope pushers giving away massive quantities of the stuff on every street corner in Chicago right now. So far this season, the White Sox have shown an uncanny ability to respond to the full-throated roar of their crazed home fans by laying a giant turd on the U.S. Cellular Field grass. What will happen now, in the Playoffs? How will they respond to the hooting, hollering, arm-waving army of Sox fanatics descending on the South Side to cheer them on?

The Indignant Citizen prefers not to look to history as a guide. Instead, he hopes this season will plant a series of new markers along a new path, one leading to vicarious gratification, vindication, elation and maybe, just maybe, Playoff victories - preferably 11 of them.

The Indignant Citizen is nervous. He is excited. He wants it to all be over soon. He wants to savor every moment. Is it possible to both love and loathe hope? There is nothing left to do now but Get It On and find out.

As the Hawk says, it's time to Cinch it Up and Hunker Down.

Go White Sox.

R.I.P. Marshall Field's

An open letter to Terry J. Lundgren, chairman, president and CEO of Federated Department Stores Inc.

Dear Mr. Lundgren,

You possum fucker. You should be dunked in raw sewage and gasoline, locked in a steel cage on the corner of State and Randolph and set on fire.

You and your executive team should be flogged, not praised, for your decision to sacrifice yet another piece of Chicago’s history to the almighty Gods of the Share Price. Dropping the Marshall Field’s name from the sad collection of mall stores scattered throughout the Midwest might be forgivable. But stripping the Chicago flagship store of that proud name has earned you a city full of enemies, no matter what your twisted research told you.

It was wise of you to announce the change in a cowardly news release from the safety of Cincinnati and to brief the Chicago media in their buildings, above the streets. Once you leave town you’d better not show your face in Chicago ever again, you soft turd.

How dare you profess “great respect for the legacy and traditions of Marshall Field’s.” Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. You don’t show respect of any sort for legacy and traditions by throwing them in the trash. The legacy and tradition aren’t solely in the building or the merchandise, you flunky. They’re in the name, too. I heard you talking about how Marshall Field’s wasn’t “moving forward.” But later you said the merchandise, which was selling well, and the sales associates, who sell the well-selling merchandise well, will remain. So what’s the problem? You want to increase your profit margin by cutting marketing costs? Fine. Keep a skeleton staff to market the State Street Store as “The Original Marshall Field’s Store” or something. How much could that cost? Then you can get your precious economy of scale and still give a little nod of respect to Chicago.

What are we supposed to do, meet under the Macy’s clock? Ain’t gonna happen. And you can’t go to the Walnut Room at Macy’s. The Walnut Room isn’t Macy’s. It’s Marshall Field’s. Or maybe you’re planning on converting the Walnut Room to a McDonald’s; you know, to “better serve [your] customers in this highly competitive retailing environment.”

And exactly how do you plan to, as you stated in your press release, “do everything we can to honor the Marshall Field’s heritage, particularly in its Chicago birthplace” as part of the name change process? Honor it how? By dropping the very name you say you plan to honor? What kind of corporate doublespeak babble is that? Look, this isn’t Cincinnati or Ohio for that matter. Most people here are sophisticated enough to easily see through your empty homage. When you rip the brass Field’s nameplate off the State Street store and replace it with a cheap plastic Macy’s sign, people will notice. And they’re going to be pissed.

Already the immediate reaction has been swift. Although you claimed your “research” showed two-thirds of the respondents felt “neutral to positive—largely neutral—about the name change,” according to your quote in the Tribune, an unscientific poll conducted by the same Tribune showed DISapproval in the high 90-percent range after the news hit the streets.

Alas, we are a people with a short attention span. By the time the Field’s name is stripped from the State Street store, many folks will likely have lost their rage. People will continue to shop there, as they should, because the employees shouldn’t be punished with losing their jobs just because Federated is focused on competing with Wal-Mart.

But in the interim, some of those pissed off people might get in their cars and drive to your corporate headquarters at 7 West Seventh Street in Cincinnati. Others may call your company switchboard at 513.579.7000, or inundate your troglodyte manager of community and public relations, Jean Coggan, at 513.579.7315. Coggan, by the way, should be stripped of that title. Instead, she should be Manager of Community and Public Violations. Because that’s what her employer has done to Chicago.

We’re supposed to be grateful, I guess, that Federated won’t lay anyone off at the State Street store, or shut it altogether. More than six thousand other employees, of course, won’t be so lucky. That’s consolidation for you, eh? Companies like Federated can buy a store, strip it of its name and then imply we should thank them for saving some jobs. Even Chicago Mayor Richard Daley got into the spirit Thursday, calling the name change a business reality and saying, in effect, that at least we get to keep the jobs.

Well fuck that. That’s like being robbed and beaten and then having to thank the perpetrator for not killing you. It’s worth remembering here that neither Dayton Hudson nor May felt the need to change the Field’s name when they bought the retail chain.

Next time you come to Chicago, Mr. Lundgren, if you ever manage to screw up the courage again, you’d better wear a haz-mat suit, because when word of your incursion leaks out—and it will—Chicagoans will line the route from the airport to the Loop and hurl all manner of foul, toxic and smelly objects at you. And you’ll deserve to swallow every one of them.

You are the worst kind of slime. You should be stripped naked and forced to run a gauntlet of hoots and jeers from the ghosts of Potter Palmer, Montgomery Ward, Richard Sears and, of course, Marshall Field—Chicago’s captains of industry, men who understood what it meant to BUILD, to create things of value.

If there is any justice in this world, you will be exposed soon as another in the growing line of corrupt chief executives. You will be convicted, stripped of your $1.2 million salary and your $3 million bonus and sent to the prison at Joliet where you’ll bunk with a large, sexually frustrated man with an image of a “Thriller”-era Michael Jackson tattooed on one arm and “Fuck You” tattooed on the other. There, your screams will fade until eventually they are silent, lodged in your throat. The everlasting pain will cause you to
forget your own name and when you are released someday you will stumble blindly through the streets, eventually falling into a canal full of raw sewage where you drift in and out of consciousness before washing up next to a scraggly homeless man living in a shit-smeared Macy’s mattress box, a man you will recognize as H. Lee Scott Jr.

Best wishes in your new “venture,” you Sam Walton supplicant.

Sincerely,
The Indignant Citizen

It’s just cheese

It might be difficult to believe that cheese could be a yardstick for measuring the decline of the intelligence of the American workforce. But it can. Oh, how it can.

To prove the point, the Indignant Citizen will pick on the sandwich chain Au Bon Pain. This is not to suggest that ABP, as we’ll affectionately call it, is alone in its cheese ineptitude. Far from it. The Indignant Citizen has found similar levels of ignorance at the Cosi sandwich chain and at several deli sandwich shops in the Midtown Manhattan area.

The Indignant Citizen likes turkey sandwiches with mayo, mustard, cheddar, Swiss, lettuce and tomato. It’s really pretty easy. There are six ingredients, and the Indignant Citizen often pairs them up and groups them when he orders, to be helpful. “Mayonnaise and mustard, lettuce and tomato, cheddar and Swiss.”

You spread the mayo and the mustard, lay on the turkey, top with lettuce and tomato and add one slice of Swiss and one slice of cheddar to each half of the sandwich. You’d think it’s simple until you try and order one at a sandwich shop. Suddenly it’s like you’re asking the staff to prove the Universal Coefficient Theorem for homology as they deliver the sandwich.

The Indignant Citizen has gotten mayo but not mustard, Swiss but no cheddar, lettuce but no tomato. Once he got ham. Occasionally he gets two slices of cheddar on one side and two slices of Swiss on the other, a messy problem, but at least it’s something to work with.

Today at Au Bon Pain typified the experience. ABP, if you haven’t been, gives customers sheets of paper which they can use to order from among the various specialty sandwiches, or create their own sandwiches. When the Indignant Citizen first saw this sheet a few years ago, he thought it would be foolproof. It has not turned out that way. What usually winds up happening is he checks “whole sandwich,” “smoked turkey,” “croissant,” “mayo,” “Dijon mustard,” “lettuce,” “tomato,” “cheddar” and “Swiss” (sometimes writing “both” in the margin and drawing lines from the two cheese boxes to the word “both”). When they charge the Indignant Citizen, they charge him for two kinds of cheese. When he opens the sandwich, there are two kinds of cheese, one slice of cheddar on one side, one slice of Swiss on the other.

Now think about this: If you order a sandwich and check Swiss cheese, you would logically expect one slice of Swiss on each half of the sandwich. Anything less and you’d take it back and say “They only gave me cheese on half the sandwich,” and demand either half of the 79-cent cheese surcharge back or that cheese be placed on the other half of the sandwich.

Let’s extend that logic: If you order two kinds of cheese, each of which will cost you 79 cents, you expect both kinds of cheese on both sides of the sandwich.

So today, the Indignant Citizen walked into the ABP on N. Wells Street, between Adams and Monroe. There, a helpful employee took the Indignant Citizen’s order, which seemed a little strange since the store had provided multiple order pads and a cup full of little pencils on a stainless steel table right in front of the prep area. But who’s to quibble? A dude’s gotta earn a living and if taking folks’ sandwich orders and handing them to guys actually doing some fucking work—you know, making the sandwiches an’ shit—is how you earn a buck, more power to you.

Anyway, the Indignant Citizen watched as this helpful fellow took the order, paying particular attention to the part where the guy checked the cheese selections. He checked both cheddar and Swiss, writing “1/2” beside each. In hindsight, he should have been stopped there, since it’s now obvious that meant “half-order on each side.” But since this whole process reached the point of being ridiculous long ago, the Indignant Citizen will consider it a work in the process of refinement. That means: next time he’ll know to clarify before the order is handed across the counter.

The Indignant Citizen got just what he expected, one slice of cheddar on one side, one slice of Swiss on the other and a receipt showing he’d been charged for both kinds of cheese at 79 cents each.

He considered going back, but he’s done this before and the employees invariably stare at him in their gap-toothed way as if he’s some kind of freak. “I don’t understand the problem, sir.” “Well, the problem is you charged me for two kinds of cheese.” “You got two kinds of cheese.” “Yes, but in total, I got only as many slices of cheese as if I’d paid for one. Two halves of the sandwich, two slices of cheese. If I ask for two kinds of cheese, there should be four slices of cheese total, two on each half of the sandwich.”

[Long pause, and alternate stares exchanged with the receipt, the open sandwich and the Indignant Citizen, then around again.]

“But you got two kinds of cheese.”

It just doesn’t seem that difficult. It seems logical. If the Indignant Citizen were making the sandwiches, he’d get it. Why can’t these people?

The answer, the Indignant Citizen fears, can be one or both of only two things: Either the employees are stupid, they don’t care, or both. It signals a decided drop in the barometric pressure of commerce. The only thing many of these shops like Cosi and ABP have going for them is that someone else makes a sandwich the customers didn’t have time to make in the morning before trudging off to work. If the employees of these stores can’t get it right, you would think business would drop off.

But then, the Indignant Citizen keeps returning … what to make of that? It’s a kind of entertainment at this point. And these places remain crowded, so either others have resigned themselves to inferior sandwich making, or they’ve chosen to order only the sandwiches with ingredients that are predetermined—a turkey club, for example.

And so we slide down this slope of mediocrity, toward a world where “build your own” sandwiches are a faint memory and where restaurants lower the quality and quantity of their offerings to suit the intelligence level and/or work ethic of the employees they can manage to coax through the doors at meager wages.

Customers will resign themselves. Or learn to make their own sandwiches.

September 11

Today’s topic is September 11.

Not “nine-eleven” as it’s commonly referred to, September 11. September for the month, 11 for the day. Let’s give the date the respect it deserves by at least calling it what it is, not some ill-conceived abbreviation designed for easy media packaging.

For those who don’t know the story, the Indignant Citizen and his wife were living in Brooklyn Heights and getting ready for work and school the morning of Sept. 11 when word came over WNYC that there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. There wasn’t any particular note of alarm in the announcer’s voice, and we hadn’t heard anything in our apartment, which was about a mile from the Trade Center site as the seagull flies. We continued getting ready, tying ties, making breakfast, looking for shoes. At about 10 to 9, the announcer came back on after a break to plug upcoming programming and said reports were now coming in that a plane had hit the north tower of the Trade Center. This was interesting enough that the Indignant Citizen flicked on the TV and turned to NY1, the local all-news station, to see if there was any footage of what he assumed would be the tail of a small plane sticking out of the building.

The image on TV was from the north, and it showed a gaping, flaming, smoking hole near the top of the tower. That was no Cessna, the Indignant Citizen remembers thinking, and perhaps saying out loud. At about that time, the Indignant Citizen’s wife came into the room and saw what was on TV. Expletives were exchanged. One of us suggested we should grab our cameras and walk three blocks out of our way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to snap some pictures before we went into the subway and to work. Each of us took our 35 millimeter cameras and started walking toward the river.

We were not alone. By this time word of the crash had spread, and others in the neighborhood were making their way to the promenade, among them our upstairs neighbor, an off-duty New York cop. It was about a block from the ramp leading from Columbia Terrace to the promenade when the Indignant Citizen first glimpsed the gray smoke, and then millions of sheets of paper fluttering in the blue sky across the river, kind of toward us but just to the south. The sound of helicopters and of emergency vehicles’ sirens filled the air, mixing with road noise from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway underneath us and the hum of boats on the East River. Both of us broke out our cameras and began taking pictures. The Indignant Citizen quickly shot up the 10 or so frames left on the roll of film in his camera, which he had started four days earlier on Saturday, when we spent the day around the World Trade and World Financial centers, shooting the buildings from different angles.

As the Indignant Citizen dropped back, away from the railing and under the canopy of sycamore trees, he noticed for the first time people on cellular phones with worried looks on their faces, staring achingly at the smoking tower and pleading with whomever was on the other end for information, or to get out. One woman close by was asking if whomever she was talking to had seen her husband that morning.

Just then the Indignant Citizen noticed another plane moving across the harbor. His first thought was that it was a flight on approach to LaGuardia. It was not uncommon to see planes fly up the Hudson or over Brooklyn. Still, something seemed odd about it. It was too low, or it was on a strange trajectory. Something prompted the Indignant Citizen to say, out loud, “I’m surprised they haven’t closed the flight pattern.” Then time seemed to speed up, the plane appeared to go into a kind of fast forward for a moment, quickly closing the gap between it and the Lower Manhattan skyline. It banked, and the morning sun clearly revealed that it was a United Airlines jet. We could hear the whine of the engines, a sound that continues to haunt both the Indignant Citizen and his wife to this day.

Then the plane disappeared behind some of the taller buildings along the East River. Although it should have emerged and continued up the island, instead we saw a fireball, followed almost instantly by two distinct concussions—boom ... BOOM! As the black smoke mushroomed up upward, the Indignant Citizen’s wife turned into his shoulder and sobbed, but only for a moment. People gasped. A woman screamed. Next to us, a New York cop who had been on a bike talking on a pay phone yelled, “The plane hit the building. It flew into the fuckin’ building!” Then he slammed the phone down and rode away, presumably toward downtown. With his arm around his wife, the Indignant Citizen turned and looked for his neighbor, who had been standing just over his left shoulder seconds ago. He was gone.

“Where did the plane go?” the Indignant Citizen's wife asked. In hindsight, the question seems surprising, given her initial sobs. But the brain is a funny instrument. Sometimes, when you see something like a plane fly into a building and explode, you instantly recognize it for a tragic event, but only moments later you have reduced it mentally to a best-case scenario. We didn’t just see that. The plane must’ve been empty. It wasn’t as large a plane was we thought. Nobody was in the buildings.

“It’s in the building,” the Indignant Citizen responded quietly. We stared at the now two buildings on fire. More paper was fluttering through the air around the towers, and the sound of emergency sirens filled the air. Murmurs among the growing crowd now turned into shouts. “That was deliberate. This is an attack!” Sounds of panic began to swell, joining sobbing and unintelligible screaming. All the while more people were arriving at the promenade. The Indignant Citizen asked his wife if she had more pictures left. Yes. You should take some. She did.

Suddenly the Indignant Citizen was overcome with the sense that we—everyone on the promenade—were in danger. We had to leave immediately. It seemed like we were exposed, an easy target for whatever further evil would come hurtling from the sky. Behind us was a wall of oncoming onlookers. We headed north along the promenade. Close to the end, we encountered a crazy person, yelling about the apocalypse and how our sins had wrought this destruction.

There was no thought of going to work now. We had to get inside. As they walked hand in hand through the filling streets, the Indignant Citizen and his wife did not speak. Along the way we heard snippets of conversation, but nothing that stuck with us. We went upstairs and turned on the TV.

Subways and roads into Manhattan: closed. There would be no going to work. The Indignant Citizen called his parents in Oregon. 7:30 a.m. there. His mother answered. Hearing his voice, she asked if he was OK. “Yeah, I’m OK. We saw the second plane from the promenade.” “What are you talking about?” his mother asked. “You haven’t been watching TV?” “We just got up.” “You should turn on the TV. We’re safe. I have to go. I love you.”

Then the Indignant Citizen called a coworker in Midtown. As he was making arrangements to coordinate some kind of coverage for the magazine, he heard a roar like another jet. From the other room, his wife called out, “I think the building just collapsed.” The Indignant Citizen hung up and went to the living room. Indeed, the South Tower had just caved in, reduced to a smoking pile of metal and dust. The North Tower fell a short time later, in the same way. Later, workers clearing the debris described their amazement at clearing rubble from two massive office buildings but not finding a single desk, or even a phone. Everything had been pulverized or smashed beyond recognition. One chunk of debris four feet thick comprised four floors of one of the buildings—more than 40 vertical feet, plus everything in between.

We spent the rest of the day stupefied watching TV. The Indignant Citizen spent a good part of the following night, and many subsequent nights watching TV. Later that afternoon, after the skies above our apartment cleared, we walked down to the promenade again. Just as we arrived, 7 World Trade Center collapsed, the drifting dust and smoke driving us back inside, and we again cranked the windows shut.

As summer faded into fall, and northwest winds brought cooler air, they also brought the stink of ever smoldering Pile into our bedroom. Closing the windows helped, a little, but the stench of burning oil and tires and God knows what else seeped through the cracks. It was stifling and we couldn’t breathe.

Why bring all this up now, four years later? Because we can’t forget. We were lucky. Everyone we knew in the towers got out. Some people we know well knew people who didn’t. The firehouse on Middagh Street, a few blocks from our apartment, Engine 205, Ladder 118, lost eight firefighters. They were guys we’d see around the neighborhood, in the Key Food, hanging out in front of the firehouse. The New York Daily News ran a photo on the front of its Oct. 5 of Ladder 118 racing across the empty Brooklyn Bridge with the two towers burning in the background. Someone in a high rise had taken it by chance. It is a haunting image, like so many from that day.

It is a day that haunts all of us still; and will perhaps forever. The day is gone, but what it wrought has sent us hurtling in a direction perhaps none of us could have imagined. War. More death. Fiscal hardship. Censorship. Government encroachment upon civil rights and personal liberties. Fear.

Ah yes, The Fear. In lighter moments, the Indignant Citizen tells people Sept. 11 is proof that the sun will shine even on a dog’s ass some days. His personal opinion: the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and will never again be able to pull of a similar stunt. The odds are against it. One wind shift here or a solar flare there and Sept. 11 never happens at all. But it doesn’t matter if Al Qaeda or some other group ever attacks the U.S. again. They’ve already sown The Fear, and that Fear is causing us to do strange things.

At this point, the Indignant Citizen fears The Fear more than he does the terrorists.

Sold Down the River

With each day that passes under the persistent cloud cover that Hurricane Katrina has left over the United States, it has become increasingly clear to the Indignant Citizen that life as we have known it here in this country is over. Gone. Never to return.

When the Indignant Citizen says this, he is not employing hyperbole. Quite simply, the delicate house of cards that passes for our economy is falling in on itself, a few cards at a time. The reason: The card house is built on cheap energy. In case you hadn’t noticed, energy is suddenly quite expensive in relative terms.

A few cards started to collapse when crude oil hit $70 per barrel. That means down the road, everything made from crude oil—gasoline, motor oil, plastics, jet fuel—will be more expensive. That’s down the road.

Presently, however, gasoline futures spiked in late August at more than $2.60 per gallon because Katrina clobbered the Gulf Coast oil refineries. Gasoline futures prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange had been climbing steadily since late May/early June, when they were around $1.40 per gallon. Now, gas stations near the Indignant Citizen’s home consistently post prices above $3 per gallon for regular unleaded, and in some cases it’s around $3.50 per gallon. That means to fill up a Ford Explorer, currently the best selling SUV, with its 22.5-gallon tank a driver could conceivably have to fork over about $60, assuming that driver filled up when the tank got down to about a one-quarter full.

That’s not an insignificant amount of money, particularly if one is paying it out several times a month, or more, depending on how much suburban running around one has to do with kids and shopping and jobs. Ford says its Explorer averages 16 miles per gallon in the city and 21 on the highway. So let’s figure a mix of two-thirds city and one-third highway driving. That should average out to about 19.5 miles per gallon. Assuming, again, the typical driver fills up when the tank gets down to about a quarter, that gives an Explorer driver 16.9 gallons to work with, roughly 330 miles. If that seems like a lot, keep in mind the average American drove 29 miles per day according to the 2001-2002 National Household Travel Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Surely that number is higher now, but even at the old figure that’s about 11 days worth of gas, if a driver is average, or about $180 in gas each month.

That’s money spent just on gasoline, and just for one car. Most families have more than one car, and more than one daily commuter. It translates to less money to spend on groceries, less on clothes, less on cheap plastic crap at Wal-Mart, less to spend on home entertainment systems … you get the picture. Remove a few more cards from the economic house.

Now just this morning (Thursday), the Indignant Citizen learned via the morning news on the radio that his natural gas home heating bill is set to increase by 70% this winter. Seventy percent! People, that’s nearly double. You know what that means? Last winter, after enjoying for years the free heat that often comes with renting, the Indignant Citizen experienced severe sticker shock when he opened his Nicor gas bill and found that, with the thermostat set at 68 degrees and new energy efficient windows throughout the house, his gas bill topped $200. Immediately the Indignant Citizen cut the thermostat to 65, began wearing layers in the house and cuddled with the missus for warmth. The direct and pleasant benefits of cuddling aside, the gas bills dropped to the $160-per-month range, which was tolerable.

But a 70% cost increase this winter means the Indignant Citizen will be paying in the neighborhood of $275 a month to shiver in his own home.

Upon hearing this, the Indignant Citizen immediately slashed his daily coffee budget by 80%. That means no Starbucks four days a week. Now just think if everyone reacted the same way. Suddenly we see something we’ve never seen before: Starbucks stores closing.

Flick a few more cards out.

The ripple effects of higher energy prices do not stop at Starbucks, though. Higher oil and natural gas prices mean it costs more to move goods from place to place, and to keep the lights on in stores. Retailers aren’t going to just absorb those costs; they’re going to pass them on to consumers. For the Freedom Fries-loving crowd out there, “consumers” means you and the Indignant Citizen, in other words, people who buy shit.

Higher prices might cause people to put off purchases, which means inventory piles up, which means factory orders decline, which means factory workers (the few still employed here) get laid off, which means less spending, which means more layoffs. Can you say “Depression?”

Oh, the Indignant Citizen can hear you snickering out there. “Depression. HAH! He’s lost his fucking mind. I’m clicking over to MLB.com. I want to see what the Yankees magic number is.” Well fuck you. The Yankees magic number is a big, fat, sweaty Z-E-R-O, because they’re not going to do shit in the playoffs, if they even make the playoffs. That team is on a hundred-mile-a-hour bus ride down a dead-end road, and the crash at the end will not be pretty. All that will be left will be 206 million one dollar bills slowly blowing away in the breeze of a swinging third strike. Fucking Yankees fans. . . .

But we were talking about the Depression. Think about this, people. Don’t you see the connections? The lines between the dots are thick and black. When energy becomes expensive, everything becomes more expensive. When everything suddenly costs more, but salaries do not increase at a rate sufficient to cover the additional expense, people cut back on spending. When that happens, the economy slows down.

We’ve been sold down the river by morally bankrupt politicians and their appointed policy makers. They told us the future was bright and full of promise. But they squandered tomorrow on yesterday’s votes. The Indignant Citizen fears, and with good reason, that the days of hopping in the car and driving to, say, Madison, Wis., for a long weekend on a whim are near an end. So, too, is getting on an airplane and flying coast-to-coast-to-coast (that’s “round trip” for you Operation Iraqi Freedom believers) for less than the cost of two courtside seats at a Bulls game.

Can we live with that? Sure. But it wasn’t part of the contract. They promised us our way of life was “not negotiable.” In a way, they were right. Turns out no negotiation was necessary, or even offered.

Katrina Exposes The Great Divide

For a week, now, the Indignant Citizen has struggled to find words to describe what occurred on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“Cataclysm.” Check.

“Catastrophe.” Double check.

“Clusterfuck.” Triple check.

And that’s just the C’s. Other words that have been tossed around in the same careless manner with which the storm, Katrina, tossed boats and houses and lives include “racist,” “incompetent,” “heroic,” “lawless,” “squalor,” and let’s not forget “toxic.”

And certainly all of those words have applied in one way or another following the costliest (likely in terms of both money and lives) natural disaster ever to strike the United States of Petroleum … oops, I mean America: Hurricane Katrina.

But after so much searching for the right words to tap a theme here, to put this monumental tragedy into perspective—to offer some goddamn clarity—in the end perhaps our goofy child president’s mother, the Other Barbara Bush, said it best. Here she is quoted in an Associated Press story picked up by the New York Times: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” she said during a radio interview with the American Public Media program “Marketplace.” “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

Yes, it must be of great comfort to the tens of thousands of former New Orleans residents currently living on cots on the floor of the Astrodome in Houston that the former First Lady of the United States can relate so closely to their situation. Why, she seems to be the first to grasp the notion that that ol’ hurricane, Katrina, was a blessing in disguise, freeing these people from their underprivileged lives in the Bayou as well as, you know, their homes, their families and all their worldly possessions.

And right there, ladies and gentlemen, in the words uttered by the gentle “Bar” as she gazed over the sea of downtrodden Negros bused into Houston from another city, there lies the fault line neatly splitting this … this event neatly in half for this country of haves and, increasingly, have-nots.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama put it this way in the Sun-Times: “I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and [get some] Poland Spring water” and flee the storm.

But we can extend the attribution of those assumptions beyond “federal officials.” The Indignant Citizen overheard a conversation among coworkers last Wednesday that made his skin crawl and his blood boil. Partaking in this discussion were three “haves,” which is to say three white, middle-management males. It went something like this:

White Male #1: “Can you believe this shit on TV? These people are like wild animals.”

White Male #2: “I know. You didn’t see looting and that shit in New York after 9/11.”

White Male #3: “Who’s going to want to send donations to help those people after watching them go crazy in the streets on TV? I’m not. I’m not sending them anything.”

Revisionist history is always so nice. So perfect. In Revisionist History Land, the Indignant Citizen scored the winning goal in the state championship game for his high school soccer team. Of course the reality of an own goal in the last game of a 3-9 season was much different. And in New York cops and firefighters, the same heroes who saved thousands and were rightly lauded in the press, looted the stores underneath the collapsed Twin Towers even as the dust settled.

The Indignant Citizen also spoke with a former Red Cross employee who said, with conviction, that the media was overhyping stories about refugees trapped amid child rapes, shootings, feces-smeared walls and suicides at the squalid Superdome and Convention Center. “They’re poor, and they have a certain victim mentality to begin with,” the former Red Cross employee said. “Stressful situations just tend to exacerbate it, and you get stories like the ones you’re seeing on TV.”

As the water in New Orleans rose, the Indignant Citizen’s heart sank. This storm, which so ruthlessly and completely stripped the physical landscape, laid open New Orleans’—and the nation’s—social fabric, exposing us to one another for what we are: Haves and have-nots. It has illuminated the gulf between those two that has been hidden by the darkness of denial, and it has shown, clearly and decisively, that there are many more people on the have-nots side of the equation than on the haves side.

There is plenty of blame to be shared for the humanitarian disaster that followed the hurricane itself. Local government, at least in New Orleans’ case, was shown to be corrupt and inept at protecting its own citizens. Why didn’t the city evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves, using school buses, public transportation and any other means available? Why did it fail to protect its telecommunications system and why did it not have enough food and water at the Superdome to handle the flood of refugees?

How could local, state and federal officials all have so badly underestimated the damage Katrina would cause? How could they not have understood the limits of the levee system built to keep the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain at bay? Why did the Homeland Security Department, via the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wait three days to request airplanes from the airlines to evacuate flood victims? Why weren’t there enough helicopters stationed near the Gulf to deal with rescue and relief efforts?

As the media post mortem continues, papers are delivering disturbing revelations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, published a story on Sept. 6 that said FEMA, after being subsumed into Homeland Security in 2003, lost control of $800 million in disaster preparedness grants in the intervening years. The agency could give grants to local governments to buy chemical suits, but not to upgrade telecom infrastructure or to buy equipment to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters.

Additionally, FEMA apparently had to abide by Homeland Security rules when it came to chartering airliners to get victims out of the city. Those rules mandated that each flight have an air marshall and that passengers undergo full security screenings complete with metal detectors and X-ray machines. But it took days to arrange for enough air marshals and there was no electricity to power the screening machines.

When Louisiana National Guardsmen deployed to Iraq, they took special equipment that could have been used in New Orleans with them, including high-water vehicles, refueling tankers and generators. The assumption was that if Louisiana was hit by a major storm, National Guard units from Mississippi and Alabama could deploy to help. Katrina caused damage from Texas to Florida, tying up those adjacent Guard units in their home states.

U.S. Army troops at Fort Polk, near New Orleans, weren’t deployed by the Pentagon because a key unit there is preparing to ship out for Afghanistan this winter. Meanwhile it took the 82nd Airborne three days to arrive in Louisiana. It’s designed to be anywhere in the world in 18 hours.

The list goes on. As bad as the storm was, the pathetic post-storm response was a clusterfuck of monumental proportions that in the end may wind up killing as many people as the wind and rain.

You can say some of the victims failed to take care of themselves. Certainly there are those who could have left did not. But many who stayed had no choice, or saw no choice, which is pretty much the same thing. They had no access to a car in which to flee, and even if they did they couldn’t fathom leaving behind their posessions. Doing so would have been tantamount to giving it away, and people’s desire to not lose what they have is often inversely correlated with how much they have to lose.

Then there were stories of those who left with less than they could have. One woman interviewed on TV said other guests at the hotel where she and her husband were staying before the storm packed up their cars and drove off, declining others’ pleas for rides despite the fact they had plenty of room. There is a special plane in Hell for people like that, and the Indignant Citizen will enjoy projecting molten piss into their screaming mouths in the next life.

Socially, we have arrived at a crossroads. Forget for now whether or not to rebuild New Orleans and the fact that the Cheap Oil era just ended with a thud. Those are subjects for another day.

Katrina has exposed the canyon that separates the two sides of our society. One side grows in number while the other grows in wealth. How will we address this? Will we address it at all? In the answers to those questions lies the future of this country.

One final thought: The casinos along the Gulf, businesses to which many have-nots were drawn because the wages were decent and offered a chance to join the haves, were completely destroyed. Those jobs are gone. However a number of the casino companies have promised to pay their workers for 90 days, through November. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, that engine of the New Economy to which so many haves point as a beacon for growth and to which many have-nots have struggled in vain to get ahead; Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S.; Wal-Mart has generously offered its newly unemployed workers a whole three days’ pay.

The Indignant Citizen wonders how Barbara Bush would spin that.

Wayne Gretzky: Anti-Christ?

Memo from the Sports Desk:

With the NHL (Remember them?: the National Hockey League?) a week away from opening training camps for the upcoming season, now seems like a good time to discuss why Wayne Gretzky may be the Anti-Christ. Hockey purists will understand right away what we’re getting at here. Hockey’s history in North America can be traced to Canada. Canada is cold in the winter. Canada has winter. The sport’s migration into the United States came through cold weather cities like Chicago, Boston Detroit and Philadelphia. They call hockey jerseys “sweaters” for a reason.

Wayne Gretzky came into the league with Edmonton (that’s in Canada for all you Freedom Fries lovers out there). He played there nine seasons from 1979 to 1988. During that time he appeared in five Stanley Cup finals series, winning four. He is arguably the greatest hockey player of all time. He holds 61 NHL records.

And yet … and yet the Indignant Citizen can’t shake the nagging suspicion that Wayne Gretzky has turned into a sellout. Worse than a sellout, really. You see, Gretzky has taken the head coaching job for the Phoenix Coyotes. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Wayne Gretzky, the greatest-ever representative of that cold-weather sport played on ice called hockey has signed on to coach a hockey team located in a city where the average daily high temperatures in December, January and February are 66.2, 65.9 and 70.7 degrees, respectively.

Phoenix shouldn’t even have a hockey team. Neither should Tampa Bay, Atlanta, Raleigh, Miami, Nashville, San Jose, Dallas, Los Angeles or Anaheim. They’re not cold-weather cities. Hockey does not belong in those places. Neither does Wayne Gretzky, who of course left Edmonton for … where else? … Los Angeles for the 1988-89 season. He played there until he left for St. Louis about three-fourths of the way through the 1995-96 season. While in L.A., he played in one Stanley Cup finals series, losing, appropriately enough, to a cold weather team: the Montreal Canadiens. Although he returned to a relatively cold weather climate in New York to finish his career, his hockey mojo had been purged in the City of Angels and he never returned to the Stanley Cup finals.

Now he’s coaching a team that was stolen from a cold weather city, Winnipeg, and moved to a Sun Belt Sprawl Capital where ice is a non-naturally occurring state for water. What’s he thinking? Where’s his sense of history? Tossed in the back of some gas-guzzling SUV, no doubt, next to an obsolete road map of the Phoenix-Scottsdale-Tempe metroplex and a set of golf clubs.

Get rid of the aforementioned teams, the Indignant Citizen says. In the process, of course, we throw out the entire Pacific Division and four-fifths of the Southeast Division. Which may be the best thing for hockey. A little downsizing would be good for the sport. In hindsight, hockey’s impending crisis should have been obvious to everyone after back-to-back-to-back seasons featuring southern teams in the Stanley Cup Finals. Carolina and Anaheim both mercifully lost to cold-weather teams in 2002 and 2003. But in 2004, Tampa Bay broke through, and angered the hockey gods. Hence the lockout noticed by almost no one.

It will take an all-cold weather Finals this season to revive interest. Chicago-Philadelphia, for example. Or Chicago-Montreal. Anything less will risk total dissolution of the sport.

Hockey should consider itself warned.

Light vs. Darkness

Today we were supposed to talk about why Wayne Gretzky may be the Anti-Christ, however a more pressing issue has come up: this story in Friday’s Washington Post. Wayne will have to wait.

To sum up, residents in the Washington, D.C. exurbs are arguing over light and darkness. The longtime residents have lived their lives without artificial light at night and would like to keep it that way. New arrivals can’t understand why anyone would want to live without blazing street lights and security lamps, and are intent on installing them.

The Indignant Citizen grew up in the sticks. There were no streetlights and on many a night with a full moon the Indignant Citizen would kill the headlights on his Mustang and cruise by the milky light from above, which gave a bluish hue to hills, trees, anything dark, while turning fields and gravel roads silver. You may say, “Why, he was a damn fool!” And you may be right. But not because I drove by moonlight.

But the Indignant Citizen digresses. We were talking about the D.C. hinterlands. Better yet, let’s let 63-year-old John Eney talk about them. Here he is quoted in the Post story. “I think this county needs to join the 21st Century. It’s ridiculous that people have to fumble around in the dark under starlight.”

If Mr. Eney sounds a little bitter it’s because he is. According to the story, he spent two-and-a-half hours one winter night driving around on Maryland back country roads because an accident closed the only way home he knew and diverted traffic. “I found it easier to navigate the California desert than make my way through the pathetically dark roads of Calvert County,” he told the Post.

Even though the Indignant Citizen knew what this story was about when he started reading, it was at this point his blood reached the boiling point. Hey John, it’s not the darkness’ fault you don’t know where the fuck you live. And didn’t you notice the fucking roads were dark WHEN YOU MOVED THERE? Did you think they’d magically install lighting throughout the county JUST FOR YOU? Whether or not he expected a personalized array of rural route sodium vapor lamps when he moved (the Post doesn’t say when that unfortunate event occurred) he expects it now. As do others in the story who find it unfathomable that these back roads haven’t been lit up like downtown Washington since their arrival.

Twenty-eight year-old Melissa Harris, transplanted from somewhere near Annapolis, offered this original analysis: “It was so dark you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face. These people [longtime residents who don't mind the dark and haven't for decades] will push for darkness until their car gets broke into or their house gets vandalized. Then they’ll change their story.” Damnant quod non intellegunt.

You see Melissa, believe it or not there are people who don’t need street lights—or giant security lamps illuminating their homes at all hours—to get around. And the only reason longtime residents would have to fear a car break-in or vandalism is because transient self-important landsuckers like you keep moving farther into rural areas. It’ll be your kids conducting the break-ins and the vandalism, no doubt, because they will have been subjected to soulless suburban childhoods filled with endless TV, video games and babysitters; they will have been conditioned to fear the dark and to believe that owning and piloting a car is some kind of Right. The cheapness of their surroundings will have taught them that nothing has lasting value and that everything is expendable.

And by the way, Mel, who exactly to you fear? Roaming gangs feeling their way through the country darkness in the hope of finding a car to TP or a house to burgle? Don’t forget, without lights it’s kind of hard to see where you’re going … or maybe you should ask John about that. Anyway if you’re so afraid of the dark, move into the Indignant Citizen’s old apartment in Brooklyn, where the streetlight shone in the window all night and yet, failed to prevent several car break-ins and home burglaries on that very same street. If light were the answer, wouldn’t cities be safe? Lack of light isn’t the problem. Crime is, and crimes are committed by individuals.

This story is fascinating. Here we have people contentedly living in the country, without street lights, or lights of any kind save the ones in their houses. And now here come the land speculators, with their SUVs and their “pro growth” agenda, which is basically a reinforcing loop economic system whereby homes and businesses get built and then more homes and businesses are required to sustain this new hinterland economy. These are the same people who build cabins in the forest and then complain the government isn’t doing enough to protect them from forest fires, or move to homes near airports and complain about the jet noise.

The Indignant Citizen has a simple retort: Either move to the country and embrace the darkness, or move to the city and leave the darkness to those who understand it and can move easily in it. Either way, just please shut the fuck up.

Introducing the West Side Critic

In his perpetual mission to bring you the most relevant and biting commentary on our entropic and increasingly atavistic society, the Indignant Citizen is pleased to present for your viewing pleasure the first in what will be a series of occasional dispatches from the Western Front by our Special Correspondent, the West Side Critic . This is a large country, and the Indignant Citizen cannot cover it all by himself. The West Side Critic will offer his take on the flux of events and you will read with interest because he is intelligent and what he says makes Sense. So here, without further ado, the West Side Critic:

***

So everything west of Chicago is a lot of territory to track. But what can the West Side Critic say? The WC gets the fuck around. The WC reads voraciously. The WC observes closely. The WC is willing to spew venom at all the pricks, cowards and powermongers who would destroy what essentially is a pretty OK country with a democratic tradition and a few lovely places to live in and to visit.

Tops on the WC’s mind today is the relationship, or lack thereof, between Americans and the American media – print, TV or otherwise.

That includes elected officials’ “relationship” with the American media. The electeds think the fucking press is their vehicle to pour bullshit upon the populace. No wonder. The media haven’t helped. Don’t believe me? Then start wondering why your “local” TV news is reporting about an elephant in Wisconsin that took a shit in the world’s largest toilet. Or consider the standard formula:

BEGINNING: A three-car pile-up killed 16 people and maimed another 30 on the freeway today. Doesn’t that suck? But the blood on the video looked rad. Now let’s go to a commercial about getting rid of hemorrhoids. MIDDLE: The weather will be sunny with patches of rain next week. We won’t be reporting on actual environmental issues, because that might require you to think. END: Three duckies were saved from a storm drain today, so all is well with the universe. OK, folks, this concludes our broadcast. You may now take your brain-dead ass to bed to prepare to get up for your soul-sucking corporate job. Don’t forget your morning Zoloft.

And newspapers? Not aggressive enough. These days it’s all about packaging, cutting stories, scrimping on staff to cover legislatures, local governments and business, and writing “talkers," stories that allow people to gather around the water cooler and talk about meaty subjects like the two-headed bat from Madagascar that has a knack for humming songs by Dave Matthews Band.

(OK. Even the WC will admit that’d be pretty fucking funny if it were true.)

Anyway. There are good newspapers out there fighting the good fight. And, yes, even some TV news reaches beyond the makeup and the teleprompter to tell stories about real people. So. The WC is here to tell all the electeds: Don’t shoot the messenger, bitches. If you fuck up, then expect to see it in print. Expect hard questions. Don’t invert stuff. You fucked up and got caught. If you don’t want to get investigated, then respect the public, respect democracy, do the right thing and don’t act like an asshole.

Now, the public isn’t off the hook, either. Heads up, Captain Head-In-The-Sand. Stop stuffing Doritos in your pie hole, turn off the “Friends” rerun, put the PlayStation 2 controller down and pull your head out of your ass.

There’s a world out there. There’s a war out there. The USA isn’t the only fucking country on the face of the earth. And, sorry, it isn’t necessarily the best. Yes, increasingly, you are living in the United States of Entertainment. But that’s a bad thing! Yes, occasionally the WC likes to cut loose, have a little fun, watch movies with big ‘splosions. But, Jesus, fight it once in a while. Read. Feed your head. For fuck’s sake, think!

And check this essay out to understand why our media – not to mention our Republic – has been in a downward spiral for quite some time. There’s hope, too, suggestions on what we might do – if we care, that is – to restore civic-mindedness and the press’ role in fostering it.

We’re here for only a short time, motherfuckers. Do we want to live it with our heads up our asses or do we believe in intellectual honesty, in thinking critically and in trying to make where we live a better place? What the WC knows is this: You can’t find intellectual honesty up your ass. Not even with a Thomas Bros. guide and a flashlight. So, again, pull your head out of there.

Whew. That was deep. The WC will now go away . . . for now.

Peace, bitches.

Giving us the Business

Let us spend a moment in consideration of Shirley McMayon, former Chicago Park District bigwig and payola pimpess extraordinaire. Prosecutors alleged on Thursday that McMayon, who has since left the Midwest to join the high-net-worth crowd carving up the Park City, Utah, area into their own sprawling crack den, took more than $120,000 in cash and benefits in exchange for directing $8 million worth of park district business to certain firms.

We use the term “business” loosely here, given that according to newspaper accounts some of the work involved the landscaping firms turning the park district around and giving IT the business by billing for work that was never performed, sometimes in amounts suspiciously similar in size to recent bribes paid to McMayon. McMayon received cash payments, vacations and—are you ready?—tickets to Green Bay Packers games.

As the Indignant Citizen’s friend and former coworker Jon put it today, “So I’m reading about the Park District scandal, and what does it say that my main reaction is, ‘Packers tickets?!’”

What does it say indeed? And what does it say about McMayon that she would be working for the Chicago Park District and accept Packers tickets as a bribe? Loyalty isn’t what it used to be. Then again, maybe she enjoys a good sharp cheddar dildo now and then and the only place she knew of to obtain one without anyone recognizing her was through Billy’s Exotic Dancing in Green Bay. The Packers tickets were just a cover.

The photo of McMayon in the Sun-Times on Friday looked it was of her on a bike; apparently the photo department tracked down someone who knew her and had this picture in an album or perhaps even on his or her desk. She lives in Park City, where, coincidentally, the Indignant Citizen will be traveling next week. And guess what? She’s in the phone book! In case you want to give her a call and ask her yourself about her corrupt ways, anywho.com has her at 435.649.9144. There’s also an address, which the Indignant Citizen will not publish here. Instead he will perhaps try for a first-person interview.

Although she may be busy, what with the indictment and all. She might not have time to entertain callers. Plus you know, it’s almost football season, and the Indignant Citizen bets it’s hard to find cheddar dildos in Utah.