Bushfucked

The Indignant Citizen did not watch George W. Bush’s speech to the nation from Fort Bragg, N.C. on Tuesday night, preferring instead to water the yard, keep tabs on the White Sox-Tigers score and read a transcript of the speech later. Bush is a man whose speeches are better digested in print than in person because he is, quite simply, one of the worst public speakers ever to be elected. The tortured syntax and smug smile get in the way of the message.

To the surprise of no one, Bush asked the American public to stand behind the soldiers as they carry out their mission to make Iraq free, thereby securing America’s shores. What he was really asking for, but could not say, was for people to stand behind him. Could he seriously believe Americans don’t support the troops? They just go where they’re told. He sends them. It’s nothing but a bilious misrepresentation by the Right to suggest that anyone who criticizes the war or the way it has been waged is undermining the military. It’s ludicrous, in fact, but careful research has shown that saying it often enough works on a certain segment of the slack-jawed, ass-scratching public.

There were so many things about this Important Speech that the Indignant Citizen found distasteful upon reading it … tops among them were the SEVEN references to Sept. 11. This administration has continued to flog that same tired ox every time it needs to do a little heavy lifting in the public opinion fields. It is way beyond exploitation at this point, bordering now on a sick obsession.

What the Indignant Citizen hates most about the continued use of that tragedy for political purposes is that the emphasis is always it could happen again and only Republicans can stop it. Sept. 11 laid low for a while after the election, and the Bush campaign’s insistence on using the image of the flag-draped coffin coming out of Ground Zero in one of its ads. Then Cheney, Bush’s mangy attack dog, said another Sept. 11 could happen if Democrats won the White House. As unbelievable as it was that he said it in the first place was the fact he got away with saying it, and won the fucking election.

Anyway, now 9/11 is back, conveniently on schedule when the President’s approval numbers are dropping and support for a war that was launched under false pretenses is faltering among a public that seems to be waking up, slowly, to the fact that the cost of just about everything is going up while their salaries are not.

After 9/11, the Indignant Citizen and his Smart & Beautiful Wife put a little paper flag in the window of their Brooklyn apartment. They sang patriotic songs on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade as the stinking hole burned across the river. When we went to war, we took the flag down out of disgust. Sept. 11 presented this country with an opportunity to come together, to foster community, to consider its place in the world. Instead this goofy child president took us to war and told us to keep shopping. There is no better illustration of the shallowness of Bush’s intellect and his policies than our national reaction to Sept. 11.

Ah, but the Indignant Citizen has ranged off the topic at hand, which is the President’s speech. Bush opened by telling a lie. "My greatest responsibility as president is to protect the American people." Maybe it’s not a lie, but he certainly has not fully lived up to that responsibility. To say it in the context of this speech implies that the only threat from which we need to be protected is terrorism. Not true. There are economic and environmental threats that this president has ignored while he has pursued his war and sought to inject religious doctrine into public policy.

He told another lie midway through the speech when he said “Today, Iraq has more than 160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions.” Later in the speech he admitted only “some” of those forces are capable of carrying out missions against insurgents and terrorists. “Some” in this case is probably around 2,500, according to educated guesses. But the rhetorical effect is brilliant. Bush says 160,000 can handle a “variety of missions,” and the implication is that 160,000 are trained. He never mentioned a lower number and his clarification that only “some” could carry out serious missions occurred 12 paragraphs later.

This a pattern in this administration. State something demonstrably false as fact and then either never acknowledge its falseness, or clarify it much later with no specifics, thus leaving the imprint of the original falsehood burned into the public consciousness. It is a shrewd tactic not invented by this administration, but certainly perfected by it.

In attempting to show Bush is doing all he can for the troops, but that sending more troops sends the wrong signal, Bush said “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job.” Really? Which commanders is he listening to? Certainly not the ones leading the expeditions in western Iraq back in May. A report in the Los Angeles Times on May 10 quoted one military official saying that since no Iraqi forces joined the Marines on their mission to root out terrorists coming into the country from Syria, the four battalions sent out there were severely outmanned. “We require more manpower to cover this area the way we need to,” the “military official” said.

Now, we can debate all day and into the night about this particular official’s motives. But this wasn’t the first published report to indicate that commanders on the ground in Iraq are wanting for men. Or supplies for that matter. If Bush is willing to send men, how about some fucking armor for the Humvees that keep getting blown up? That seems like kind of a basic necessity the President might want to look into providing while he’s busy supporting the troops.

But of course, the Indignant Citizen is not in the military, has never been in the military, a fact that according to Bush means the Indignant Citizen has missed out on the highest calling possible. In a blatant plea for bodies—and good money says this was a first step before reinstituting the draft in some form—Bush said, “And to those of you watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces.”

And of course the president would know all about that, having gotten a free pass into the National Guard during Vietnam, where his attendance record remains in question and during which time he did political work. But he did land that plane on the aircraft carrier for the big “Mission Accomplished” speech. Except he didn’t land it and the carrier was close enough to the coast for him to have flown in on a helicopter. The plane was an unnecessary prop. In fact they had to turn the ship so the cameras wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the looming Southern California mountains in the background.

But let’s forget about all that, just as we’ll forget about the fact that the “mission” Bush urged the American public to support the troops in completing was supposedly completed two years ago.

One other outrage from the speech Tuesday night. Once again Bush implied that Libya abandoned its nuclear program because the U.S. invaded Afghanistan (Whoops! Remember Afghanistan? Shit, there’s a war going on there, too!) and Iraq. It is false to imply that was the only reason. The Clinton administration previously had been talking with Ghadaffi about giving up his nuke ambitions. The dialogue was already open. It’s not as if the good colonel saw the smoke rising to the east, soiled himself in Fear and surrendered. He also saw economic benefits in better relations with the West.

The Indignant Citizen supports the troops. He opposes the president. However the president has been elected—albeit by the slimmest of Gump Whisker margins—and therefore there is only one lawful recourse. Impeachment. The Indignant Citizen hereby proposes a new slogan for the Left, suitable for bumper stickers (or bumper magnets):

“Support the Troops: IMPEACH BUSH.”

Wake Me When One of Them Wins the World Series

Normally the Indignant Citizen prefers to leave the baseball commentary to his friend and former coworker Vince at Exile in Wrigleyville. You won’t find a more informed blog about White Sox baseball anywhere on the Net. That being said, the Indignant Citizen feels compelled to offer some commentary on the recent Cubs-White Sox series, which concluded its 2005 regular season run today with a Cubs win.

The Indignant Citizen considers himself a White Sox fan. He is not one by birth, but by choice. And he made the choice in 2003 when the Cubs were the darlings of baseball; not that it’s any of your business but I mention this to dispel any notions that the Indignant Citizen is some kind of bandwagon jumper. I made a well-reasoned decision to choose one team and I will stick with that team whether it wins or loses. This weekend it lost.

It seems necessary after the behavior observed at Sox Park on Sunday to offer some perspective on this series. In short, it’s meaningless. That’s right, it means nothing. Bragging rights? Bragging rights for what? The best loser team in Chicago? Nice title. Not that anything has been settled with respect to any kind of title. Although the Cubs won the series at Sox Park 2 games to 1, the White Sox took two out of three at Wrigley in May, leaving the season series tied at 3 games apiece. In the history of the series the White Sox lead 25-23, not exactly dominating.

I wanted the White Sox to win on Sunday, not so much because beating the Cubs was anything special but because Minnesota beat Milwaukee and it would have been nice to maintain that 10.5-game lead in the AL Central. These interleague games are for the fans, and even more so the cross-town rivalries. But in the grand scheme of the season, particularly for a team with a chance to win its division like the White Sox this year, the outcome of a series like this is almost meaningless. The White Sox lost the last two games against the Cubs, but Minnesota only picked up one game over the weekend. During the entire 12-game homestand the White Sox went 8-4 and picked up 4.5 games on the Twins. I’d call that a success.

And no matter how smug the sun-baked and booze-soaked Cubs fans were leaving the ballpark today, they will wake up tomorrow still trailing the St. Louis Cardinals by 8.5 games. One could argue that two wins in a row over a good club like the White Sox could launch the Cubs on a winning streak. And that’s fine if it happens. But it hasn’t yet.

Meanwhile the White Sox have Buehrle starting for them Tuesday in Detroit, and they should win that game. They should sweep the Tigers, in fact, and they may manage to take two out of three from the A’s, who are struggling in the West. Then they come home again for three games against Tampa Bay, baseball’s second-worst team, and three more against the A’s. We’re looking out a long way here, but the next couple of weeks could produce a lot of wins for the White Sox, and nobody will remember that they lost these last two games to the Cubs at home. It just won’t matter.

That’s the thing the fans at these games tend to forget. The Big Picture goes out the window during these crosstown series, and the fans sink to a stultifying level of name calling and chest pounding. It happened on Sunday, fueled by beer, of course. Luckily no blows were exchanged in Section 101, but there was plenty of swearing and finger pointing. Which brings the Indignant Citizen to the subject of taunting. People, first off when kids are around we should try and keep it clean. Sometimes profanity can be used to make a point. But often I find it misused as a cheap substitute for coming up with something truly clever or used at inappropriate times, i.e. with children nearby.

Also, I have a problem with anyone taunting any player or team by saying he or it they “sucks.” Here’s the deal on that: If you’re taunting that way at a game, it means you’re in the stands. Get it? You’re not on the field. The guy or team you think sucks is on the field making millions of dollars and engaging in hot jungle sex with beautiful women or men every night. Chances are they don’t suck nearly as much as you do. What really kills me are the fans who taunt really good players by telling them they suck. I was at a White Sox game one time when they were playing the Twins. Torii Hunter hit a home run in that game for the Twins and made a great running catch in the outfield that nobody in the ballpark thought he would make. And yet, late in the game, fans were still yelling “Torii, you suck!” from the stands. What’s that about? Hunter do many bad things—he may be a dirty player, he may cheat on his wife, he may be a lousy teammate—but one thing Hunter does not do is suck.

I hate the New York Yankees, but I give their fans credit with being creative while not necessarily being profane. Two classic examples are last year when Yankees fans picked up on something former Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez said after losing a game at Yankee Stadium and turned it into a taunt. Martinez said something to the effect that once in a while you have to tip your hat to the Yankees and call them your daddy. Next time Pedro pitched, “Who’s Your Daddy?” rang through the stadium over and over.

Another time I was at a Yankees-Red Sox regular season game in 2002. The Red Sox were winning, and their fans, of which there were quite a few, started chanting “First Place Red Sox.” This went on for about an inning before Yankees fans started chanting “Nineteen-eighteen” in reference to the last championship the Red Sox had won at that point.

I guess the bottom line with the Cubs-White Sox series is I enjoyed the game, enjoyed seeing two of the game’s premier pitchers in Jon Garland and Mark Prior, wished the Sox would have won but don’t think the outcom of this season's crosstown rivalry will affect either team in the long run. Whichever team finally wins a World Series first will have true bragging rights, the only bragging rights that really matter.

America from the Highway

Recently the Indignant Citizen and his Smart & Beautiful Wife drove from Chicago to North Carolina for a family reunion of sorts. Four days behind the wheel took us through a varied landscape of cornfields, mountains and densely-wooded hill country. It also took us from the Loop through the ‘Villes–those being Louisville, Nashville, Knoxville and Asheville, N.C.–and every conceivable type of settlement in between. We were left with the following impression: Based on what one can see from the interstates, and from significant side roads, America as it is currently situated is fucked.

Not just politely "Oh I had a lovely time tonight would you like to come up for a nightcap" fucked. We’re talking Joliet fresh meat pound me in the ass prison fucked. Parts of the trip were jarring. Mostly we encountered the kind of America you’d expect to find along the interstates—sad collections of gas stations, fry pits and knickknack stores clustered around freeway interchanges. Their purpose is commerce, nothing else. These are not communities, and there has been no attempt made to build a "there" there. One looks pretty much like another, in fact many of the Shell stations where we stopped for gas were oriented identically to the interchanges. Heading south, they were just off the freeway and to the right, easily spotted by the giant Shell logo atop the standard interchange 100-foot-tall pole.

There wasn’t much difference between the collection of businesses from one exit to another, either. Get off in Lafayette, Indiana and you’ll find all the same major gas stations, the same sad collection of the same fast food enterprises, the same car wash sheds, the same crappy kitsch stores selling "Support the Troops" magnets and "These Colors Don’t Run" bumper stickers and the same sad locals who drove in from some trailer court a few miles down the road to work the same low-wage service jobs selling shit to people they’ll never see again that you’ll find in any roadside town in Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina.

These are communities of convenience, built of cheap materials and selling cheap goods to a perpetually transient clientele. They are nowhere, and yet everywhere. They are noplace and everyplace. They dull the senses. In a few years, when the price of gas has risen to the point where only the wealthy can afford to drive, they will for the most part wither and die. A few may manage to stay open and cater to the occasional passerby, but by and large these areas will fail. People in the towns a few miles away will forget about their existence once they have scavenged what useful materials they can find from the abandoned buildings. No one will even bother to pass an ordinance requiring that they be torn down, mainly because doing so will cost too much money.

If that sounds a little "Mad Max" to you, then you haven’t bothered to chart oil prices the past few years, or read the little that has been written about the oil reserves accounting scandals, or take time to understand the interplay between oil and financial markets. This is your problem. The Indignant Citizen cannot take the time now to explain it to you. Try turning off the TV and reading a fucking book or the Wall Street Journal, bitch.

Now, as mind bendingly banal as these interchange economic centers were, there was one point during the trip when the Indignant Citizen and his Smart & Beautiful Wife encountered a transition so jarring we have been talking about it for days. Leaving North Carolina, we decided to skip Interstate 40 and take the Great Smoky Mountains Scenic Byway instead. It heads southwest out of Asheville, N.C., and into the heart of the Smokys. The road winds along the edges of some of the oldest mountains in the country, and tops out at about 6,200 feet before dropping into Tennessee. This was high enough, apparently, to starve the Indignant Citizen’s otherwise sweet German-engineered automobile of oxygen and cause the "Check Engine Light" to blink on and stay on for the remainder of the trip. German-engineered, built in Mexico.

Anyway, the road drops out of the deep, deep mountains, through some wicked diminishing radius-turn switchbacks, across a couple of creeks and then … BLAMMO! … into a thistle-pricked whore of a place called Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The first sign of trouble was the stoplight we came upon in the woods. Right then we should have turned around and driven back through the mountains, back through the King Hell hailstorm, back through the fog and into the strip mall land along Hendersonville Road outside Asheville. We should have, but we didn’t.

We also should have taken the poorly-marked turn labeled "Gatlinburg By-Pass," but when we saw the sign we were still in the woods and we thought, "By-Pass? By-Pass what? It’s just fucking trees! Fuck it, we’re goin’ through." Bad move.

Gatlinburg probably was a quaint town in the foothills of the Smokys once upon a time. But, as with many things that once upon a time were quaint, commercialism and greed took hold and today Gatlinburg is an automobile-choked three mile-long stretch of commercial diarrhea. If Coney Island, the Vegas Strip and Winter Park, Colo., did a three-way and somehow a child resulted, that child would be Gatlinburg.

Populated by Southerners looking for a mountain vacation, Gatlinburg in the summertime features a frightening collection of haunted houses, greasy spoon restaurants, motels, bars, Nascar and WWF stores, boot warehouses and western wear outlets, and various other commercial establishments, all crammed along the sidewalks lining the main street through town. These sidewalks are themselves crammed with overweight pedestrians unused to walking anywhere and attempting to do so in Gatlinburg towing their six fat children and munching on something fried on a stick.

Prominent among the storefronts is an abundance of chain restaurants to provide comfort to those who like to travel but don’t enjoy being far from home.

To the left as we passed through town, we saw a lone ski lift running straight up a steep hill. During the summer it ferries folks to the top were they can look down into the garbage can that is Gatlinburg and presumably ponder their own sun belt existence in the waning days before the air conditioners kick off for good due to a power shortage.

Leaving Gatlinburg behind brings no relief, at least if you’re traveling north. What comes next is a desolate farce of commercial real estate that makes Schaumburg look like Midtown Manhattan in terms of density. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is Gatlinburg without the walkability. Nothing is closer than a tenth of a mile to anything else. The roadway is seven lanes wide, eight at the major intersections. On our way out of town, we passed a line of cars headed into Pigeon Forge from Interstate 40 that must have been five miles long. We were thankful to be headed the other direction. We wondered what those people were looking for, and how sad their lives must be to find it in either Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg.

Chicago has its problems—lord does it—but it looks like Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill compared to parts of America like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge and really just about anything we could see from the highways, which were nowhere for a long time and became somewhere only because of cheap oil. There is nowhere for places like that to go but down.

Mary Laney is a Craven Opportunist

Few things in life fill my heart with as much acid hate as seeing Mary Laney’s toothy visage peering out at me from the Commentary pages of the Sun-Times. Her insipid grin means S-T readers like me are in for another round of meandering, disconnected logic and ultra-conservative sensibility. Reading Mary Laney one gets the impression she walked into a North Side library one day in 1949, fell through a time hole, and just recently managed to claw her way out into the bright sunlight of the future.

You can draw your own conclusions by browsing her collection of columns, but her June 13 item is a real gem. Her point is that W. Mark Felt, recently revealed as Deep Throat isn’t a hero because he had a personal interest in bringing down the Nixon administration—essentially fucking his new boss who fucked him out of a promotion. Instead, Laney calls Felt a “vengeful opportunist” for using his position as the No. 2 man in the FBI to leak information about wrongdoing in the White House to local reporters, eventually bringing down a president who brought White House corruption into the Modern Era. Nixon also passed over Felt to head the Bureau following Hoover’s death, a job Felt believed was his by all rights, seeing as how he had been Hoover’s supplicant for years.

“It’s always disappointing to get to the end of a mystery novel and find out that the plot was not ending in as exciting a way as you had envisioned,” Laney writes. “So it was with learning who was ‘Deep Throat’ after 30 years of wondering.”

Then, in an attempt to explain why Felt is not a whistleblower, she relates an off-the-wall anecdote about when she used to work at a Chicago radio station and a reporter there let the higher-ups in New York know that the station manager was using station money as his own personal bank account. No names named, of course, because that would be Wrong. But the reporter dude is a whistleblower hero to Laney because he did the Right Thing at great personal risk. That, then, is the definition of a whistleblower for Laney.

Felt, meanwhile, doesn’t measure up, primarily we are to assume, because he had motivation other than doing the Right Thing and he didn’t go through Proper Channels, such as a special prosecutor or a grand jury.

Laney’s reporter hero-stud probably figured he was going to lose his job one way or another. Either the station manager would run the place out of business or he’d be fired for reporting the wrongdoing. It’s also probably safe to assume the reporter in this case thought the station manager was a real asshole, and flipped him off silently with both fingers every time the manager walked by.

What’s the fucking point here? Of course Felt was looking out for his own interests. But he was never appointed FBI director. So if that was his goal he screwed the pooch there. Is it possible he was motivated simply by a pure hatred of Richard Nixon and wanted to see the pig roast in a pit? Sure. But we’ll have to wait for that big book deal to bear fruit before we learn what his true motivation was, and why he chose Woodward as opposed to a special prosecutor or a grand jury. And even then we might not know. Have you seen pictures of this guy on the news? He looks like he thinks he’s in the library with Mary in 1949. There’s nothing there, behind the eyes, I mean. My suspicion is that the guy’s family, once they found out he was Deep Throat, saw the cartoon dollar signs in their eyes and figured it was time to cash in before dad died. If they’d waited, Woodward would have had the story all to himself, and the book and movie deals, too.

So what’s my point? I don’t much care what Felt’s motivation was. And I don’t much care that he went to the press as opposed to a grand jury or special prosecutor. He obviously had a relationship with Woodward and trusted him to handle the material the right way. I’m a realist and I understand that sometimes people commit good acts almost by accident in the course of looking out for themselves. Robert Moses, New York’s master builder and a first-class bastard in his own right offers perhaps the best summation of my feelings on the subject of Mark Felt: “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

In closing, Laney’s labels—and the prominent lack of one label—say as much about her myopic view of the world than anything. There are four action figures in Laney’s story: The station reporter, Felt, the station manager and Nixon. The reporter is a “hero.” Felt is a “vengeful opportunist.” In describing the crooked station manager, Laney says, “I’m talking about a man with an evil greed who almost got away with the worst actions I’ve seen.”

Really? The worst actions she’s seen? The station manager?! What about Nixon? He was possibly the most corrupt presidenet in modern history, yet he escapes without a label, and we are left to presume, without judgment in Laney’s wide eyes.

The Indignant Citizen Manifesto

If you can imagine the stupidity encountered during the course of a normal day to be like a simmering pot of spaghetti sauce, seemingly under control but in actuality very close to boiling over, then perhaps you can understand the motivation behind this blog.

Because sometimes a simmering pot of spaghetti sauce will, if unattended, produce a heat bubble that bursts through the surface, spewing sauce on the clean stove. Now someone has to clean that shit up. And if the sauce simmers unattended long enough, more bubbles form, breaking the surface over and over with increasing volatility and spitting spag spooge on the hot stove top. Eventually the hot stove top will make the spag spooge hard and crusty. Now whoever has to clean that shit up really has to work at it. And why? Because the sauce was never stirred, the heat never checked and nobody ever bothered to put a lid on it.

The Indignant Citizen is here to stir the sauce, cover and reduce heat as needed.

Indignation: n. anger aroused by something unjust, unworthy or mean. (Merriam-Webster online)

The Indignant Citizen is not angry. He is occasionally frustrated to the point of anger, but he is not an angry person by nature. The Indignant Citizen’s patience is tried by stupidity, hypocrisy, arrogance, laziness, corruption and poor grammar. The Indignant Citizen reserves the right to engage in any of these at any time, however, because when he does so, it is for effect. When you do, it’s wrong.

The Indignant Citizen sees you when don’t give up your seat on the el for the woman with three kids. He has cursed you for not stepping all the way into the car. He wishes you would just walk to the back of the bus, already. He has burned eyes in the back of your head for cutting into the bus line in front of people who’ve been waiting for 20 minutes, because you think you’re entitled to a seat. You’re not. So fuck off and get your lazy ass to the back of the line.

The Indignant Citizen is tired of suburban strip malls, big box retail centers and fry pits lining soulless stretches of roadway. He is especially tired of seeing these environments in the City of Chicago. He thinks planners who allow these steaming piles of crap to defile our landscape should be fired. We don’t need another Best Buy, we need walkable communities people can care about.

The Indignant Citizen thinks if people just used common sense and were considerate the world would function much better. For instance, who brings a hundred-dollar bill to a baseball game and expects change from a beer and a brat in the first inning? Please. Take you ATM card, go to the Cash Station, pay the fucking fee and get a twenty. There are people behind you in line, asshole.

The Indignant Citizen intends to use humor, sarcasm logic, superior analysis, loaded rhetoric and occasional profanity to expose the stupidity, hypocrisy, arrogance, laziness and corruption rampant in Chicago and elsewhere and ridicule those responsible. No one will be safe. Names will be named and he will call things what they are.

The Indignant Citizen wants what’s right.