The Indignant Citizen's Election Night Observations

It is 10 p.m. on Election Night in Chicago, and a fog has descended on the city and the suburbs. Fog has a tendency to distort reality. Sounds shift, so that a thing making noise in one place is actually someplace else. On a night when Democrats wrested control of the House back from the morally and intellectually bankrupt Republican elite, Cook County voters appeared blind to the realities of local politics.

Democratic half-wit Todd Stroger’s lead for the Cook County Board President’s seat stood at 55% to 44% over Republican wing-nut Tony Peraica. Technically voters had a choice, but it was kind of like choosing between prison rape and a proctological exam by Andre the Giant. We could have elected Stroger, the son of the former county boss and stroke victim John Stroger , who hasn’t had a thought that wasn’t planted by the Machine, or Peraica, who’d probably reform government just fine but who’d also like to ban abortions.

At 10:22 p.m., Stroger’s lead has shrunk to nine points, 54% to 45%.

Shortly before that, Gov. Rod Blagojevich told his supporters during his victory speech that Illinois residents “ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.” He’s probably right. We haven’t seen a sitting governor indicted in a while, for instance, and we ain’t seen “Gov. Pat Quinn” yet, either.

At 10:43 p.m., Melissa Bean is delivering her victory speech in the 8th Congressional District. She wished David McSweeney, her Republican challenger, and Bill Scheurer, whatever the fuck party he represented, all the best in their future endeavors. Translation: “McSweeney, you rat turd, I hope you get hit by a piece of frozen shit from a high-flying jetliner.” Kevin Roy interviewed David McSweeney, who blamed his loss on the fact that it was a “bad day for Republicans.” Yep, just got caught up in the tide. Not my fault. By the way, Roy, the ABC-7 reporter who interviewed McSweeney, used to work KGW in Portland, Ore.

CNN is projecting Democrats have officially taken control of the House of Representatives.

Fat Fuck Dennis Hastert can now ooze his way out of his Speaker of the House role. If he’s lucky he’ll get a defibrillator as a lovely parting gift.

At 11:09 p.m., Republican Peter Roskam is on TV claiming victory, in the 6th Congressional District over Democrat Tammy Duckworth. Duckworth has apparently called to concede. With 78% of the precincts reporting, Roskam has 51% of the vote to Duckworth’s 48%. This is not unexpected, given that it’s Republican Henry Hyde’s old seat, but Duckworth has to be disappointed to lose such a high-profile race. The national boys brought in the heavy artillery for this one.

Scandal-In-Waiting Alexi Giannoulias, a Democrat, has won the Illinois Treasurer’s race, with 52% of the vote. Looks like all major statewide offices will be in Democratic hands. The Indignant Citizen would predict a Republican backlash in four years, but it isn’t clear at this point that Illinois Republicans can even organize a simple phone tree.

At 10 after 11, it’s shocking, but apparently Cook County precincts are having trouble transmitting results electronically.

At 11:29 p.m., Stroger’s people are worried about their 11-point lead. Most of the 1,000 precincts left to be counted are in suburban Cook, where Peraica could out-draw Stroger 2-to-1. If Stroger’s people are holding off declaring victory with an 11-point lead, you know they’re worried. Peraica’s people are hearing from their township committeemen that the suburban precincts have yet to report, and they expect to win those 7-to-3. If some of the “white ethnic and lakefront liberal” votes come in for Peraica, the Machine may yet be crushed. ABC 7’s Chuck Goudie says at 11:32 p.m. that there are still problems at the county in terms of counting votes. Couldn’t they have tested this system beforehand? And aren’t these the same problems they had in the spring during the primaries? WTF?

At 11:41 p.m., Cook County officials have finally thrown up their hands and asked Cook County precinct workers with results yet to be tallied to actually load all the computer equipment into their cars and drive them down to the county headquarters in the Loop. Insane. This is exactly what happened in the primaries in March. Meanwhile half the precincts haven’t reported yet, and voters are left twisting in the wind as to who the new county board president will be.

If this results fiasco isn’t enough to convince people change is needed in Cook County leadership, then we deserve Todd Stroger.

Republican Mark Kirk won re-election in the 10th Congressional District.

More tomorrow when maybe Cook County officials will announce that for the next election voters will cast ballots using crayons and wide-ruled paper.

The Indignant Citizen

Montreal's Black Eye

Recently the Indignant Citizen and his wife joined the West Side Critic and his wife for a weeklong vacation in Montreal. Beautiful city, Montreal. It’s like being in Europe, without having to leave North America, which is a very American way to look at things.

There is a lot to say about Montreal, most of it positive. So let’s get the negative out of the way. The Old City in Montreal has some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, inspired by French and Italian styles. These are wonderful, human-scale, ornately decorated buildings. Many of them in the old city were originally offices and are now being converted into luxury condominiums.

And then there’s the Black Box and its Growth.





The Black Box is a nondescript Modernist structure, clad in black granite with dark windows. Unbelievably, it faces onto an historic square that is framed on three sides by the Basilica of Notre Dame de Montreal , a wonderful old Art Deco building, a red brick structure from 1888, and what looked to be an old government building.

What this moronic piece of crap is doing here in this beautiful setting is anyone’s guess. Apparently Montreal’s city planners wondered how it got there, too, because after it was completed, and people had time to contemplate what was lost to build it, the city passed much more stringent requirements for new construction and renovation.

It was too late, however, to save millions of eyes from this monstrosity. The building itself is bad enough, because of its banal design and its incongruous location. But as bad as it looks on its own, it gets worse. Check out the main entrance to the building in the photo to the right. It is on the side of the structure that thankfully does not face the Place d’Armes.

What in the name of Mies van der Rohe’s bunghole is that supposed to be? Is that floating black box supposed to mark the entrance? Is it meant to be inviting? Is that supposed to be a plaza under there? Few things, other than picking out your own casket, would be as depressing as ducking under that pointless box stuck on a box to get to and from work each day. I think the clinical term for a structure like that is “malignant.” Only seriously invasive surgery or some kind of detonation could correct a hideous attachment like that. The architect should be ashamed, and probably flogged. And maybe he was. The Indignant Citizen has never seen anything that bad anyplace else, so maybe the Black Box was this architect’s—and that term us used loosely here—only building.

Montreal certainly should have known better, given what it had to work historically. But then other cities also should have known better than to build some of the same kind of crap that fouls their skylines.

Buildings like the Black Box suck the soul out of wonderful public spaces like the Place d’Armes and historic downtowns like old Montreal. Maybe one day we’ll tear them down to make room for humanly-scaled and artistic buildings, the same way they tore down whatever was there before the Black Box to make room for it.

Next Time, Boys

There is a scene in the movie Cinderella Man in which the hero Jim Braddock’s character confronts a New York sportswriter who had written some nasty things about him when he lost a championship bout early in his career. Braddock, played by Russell Crowe, recounts the sportswriter’s words, which included this closing line:

“… A sad and somber funeral, with the body still breathing.”

Although the mood at today’s White Sox game—the home finale for the season—was not necessarily sad and somber, it was bittersweet, and it was most certainly a funeral with the body still breathing. Barring an unprecedented collapse by the Minnesota Twins this week, the White Sox will join the ranks of teams that failed to make it to baseball’s postseason the year after winning the World Series. This situation has been a long time coming—as of Sunday the Sox were 30-38 since the All-Star Game—and nearly 3 million fans paid for the privilege of watching it all unfold. The Indignant Citizen was among those fans, for 13 games, anyway.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Sox were supposed to win it all again this year and prove they weren’t just a one-hit wonder. This was supposed to be a dynasty, overseen by players with good contracts: not too long, not too expensive. Instead, they teased us. They cast off some of last year's players that were considered expendable (center fielder Aaron Rowand) or dead wood (pitcher Orlando Hernandez) and brought in exciting new faces (designated hitter Jim Thome and pitcher Javier Vazquez).

None of it quite clicked, though, not the same way it did last year at any rate. Not that the team stunk up the joint. Sure they lost some games they should have won, but plenty of good teams go through funks. These guys just never managed to put it all together at the same time. When the pitching was on, the bats disappeared. When the runs piled up like bribe money at city hall, the pitching imploded. The result was a mediocre season with winning streaks that occasionally conjured the old magic and that was punctuated with magical plays that we all felt would be “the turning point.” None turned out to be that point, though, and as often as not the Sox followed up big wins with emotionless losses, often to the same team they had demoralized and embarrassed the night before.

A season of that led to today’s contest, the last home game of the year, against the Seattle Mariners. Although the scoreboard announced the crowd at 37,518, at least 10,000 seats were empty. After all, the Bears were on and looking to go 3-0 on their young season. They are going to the Super Bowl, Bubba. Screw the White Sox. But the fans who went to the Sox game saw a good one. The Sox won 12-7 behind good pitching by Freddy Garcia, two home runs by Paul Konerko, a home run by Joe Crede, one by struggling Brian Anderson, and a grand slam by the streaky Juan Uribe. There were lots of fireworks and a nice video montage tribute after the game. The team stuck around after the final out to acknowledge the fans, who gave them a standing ovation and loud cheers.

But unlike last season’s final game, when the cheers were meant to propel the team into the final week of the regular season on the road, and on to the Central Division title, Sunday’s cheers had a strong “thank you and see you next year” feel about them. Some of the players won’t be back. Scott Podsednik is probably gone, so is Freddy Garcia, possibly Javier Vazquez, maybe Joe Crede. . . . This is what happens to teams that fail to repeat, or even make the playoffs, after winning a championship. They get broken up. Old pieces get shipped off and new pieces are brought in. This is professional sports.

And next year, long about February, the White Sox will again begin pushing their ticket packages. Nine games, 13 games, season tickets. The Indignant Citizen likely will not be among the buyers next year. Three years of planning summer weekends around baseball is enough. Last year baseball seemed like the most important thing in the world. This year, not so much. There are more important things, better ways to spend time. The Indignant Citizen is still a Sox fan, he always will be. But he will catch his games in person less frequently next season. Baseball will be background noise, not the main attraction.

There is a big city out there, lots of things to do and see. Many things to write about. There will be less time for baseball, less time for the White Sox. But they will understand. Hopefully they won’t even notice the Indignant Citizen isn’t there. Hopefully they will be too busy winning.

It’s true what they say. There IS always next year. That is the magic of sports. And the magic of life is that there is always tomorrow, there is always this afternoon, there is always next hour, there is always the next word; there is always another opportunity to do it just a little bit better than you did it before. Seizing those opportunities separates the contenders from the also-rans. It is the difference between the playoffs and a long off-season; between fulfillment and frustration.

We were, of course, talking about the White Sox, not about Life, and the two are not synonymous, or analogous. So since the Sox’ season is effectively over, and since the home fans had a chance to acknowledge the end in person today, it seemed appropriate to eulogize the season. But what to say? They didn’t really “give it their best,” nor did they “valiantly come up short.”

No, in order to turn disappointment into hope, we must look ahead, not backward. So in that spirit: “Next time around, boys. Next time around.”

Unsafe From Any Angle

Monday marks five years since those treacherous bastards exceeded their own hopes and everyone else’s fears by bringing down the Twin Towers. These milestones—one year, five years, 10 years—are arbitrary, but unavoidable. The media make sure of that. One year since Katrina, five years since 9/11, and what difference does any of it make? One year on or five years, the stark realization is the same: nothing has changed.

Well, it isn’t that nothing has changed. The Indignant Citizen can’t take a bottle of water or an electric razor, or toothpaste on an airplane. In order to get into an ordinary office building these days you have to empty your pockets and pass through a metal detector that still beeps if you’re wearing a nice belt. And 2,658 U.S. soldiers have died fighting an endless war against a vague enemy in the sands of a country that isn’t a country anymore and that had nothing to do with either 9/11 or Katrina. And don’t we feel safer for all that?

Shit, the Indignant Citizen thought he could never feel more unsafe than standing on the Brooklyn Promenade, with the smoke and flames from United 175’s plunge into the South Tower of the World Trade Center billowing overhead and the echo of the twin concussions still echoing in the Wall Street canyons across the river. The Indignant Citizen was wrong. Because actually now things feel very unsafe. Despite all the security precautions we’ve taken, despite all the Jersey barriers we’ve plunked down around Important Sites, despite all the times we’re required to show identification, despite all of it, isn’t it just a matter of time before some other wing-nut blows up something else here, killing even more people?

Really, what’s to prevent an explosives-laden truck from pulling up outside the Indignant Citizen’s office building in the Loop? Or plowing into a department store, or a mall? The Indignant Citizen could show three forms of identification and be subjected to a strip search and a rectal exam just to order a Big Bacon Classic at the Wendy’s and none of it would keep some band of unhinged Jihadistas from taking out a couple hundred elementary school kids in Wheeling with a few automatic weapons and some grenades from the surplus store.

Meanwhile our goofy president goes on TV and tries to convince us that we’re safer because we had some bad guys locked up in secret and probably illegal prisons in foreign countries, where we most likely tortured them to get them to tell us what they know. We have no way of knowing for sure whether any of it worked or not, we can only take the goofy president’s word for it, since none of the proceedings are public, nor any of the information.

The Indignant Citizen will be in New York on Sept. 11 this year. This was not planned, things just worked out that way. Barring some other catastrophe between now and then, he expects to find a city functioning very much as it did on Sept. 10, 2001, and very much the way the rest of the country functions today. As traumatic as Sept. 11 was five years ago—and make no mistake, it was a gut-wrenching event at the time—it turned out to be a blip on the radar screen for most people.

Whatever feelings of community and patriotism we felt broadly in the days and weeks after 9/11 have faded amid the constant drumbeat of war and the increasingly vapid and ridiculous culture we are building for ourselves, a culture in which the death of an entertainment figure who wrestles crocodiles can knock off the front page stories about how the Taliban are enjoying a resurgence in Afghanistan. Oh, remember the Taliban? Remember Afghanistan? The War on Terror and all that? It’s so easy to forget, what with all the stories about new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico that could supply U.S. demand for all of one to three years.

In case you’re interested, there’s a little story in USA Today about how unprepared the U.S. is for its next catastrophe. Well, unprepared in a response sense. We’re certainly prepared in a viewership sense. Hundreds of TV stations are ready to send reporters and cameras toward the danger at a moment’s notice, to feed our visual stimulation addiction.

Then, once again, we can look at the pictures and say how terrible it all is, how everything has changed now. And this time we’ll mean it. Really.

They Hate Us; Good Thing They’ve Got All The Oil

The Sunday Chicago Tribune story, “Twilight of the Oil Age: A tank of gas, a world of trouble”, also broke down where the Marathon station got its gas. On one night in September 2005, the gas came from the Gulf of Mexico (31%), Texas (28%), Nigeria (17%), Saudi Arabia (10%), Louisiana (8%), the Illinois Basin (4%), Angola (3%), and the Republic of Congo (0.01%).

Those figures do not exactly align with recent import statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which paint a picture of where the U.S. in general gets the bulk of its oil over the long-term. According to the EIA’s May 2006 Import Highlights , Canada—yes Canada—was the top oil exporter to the U.S. based on barrels per day. Year-to-date through May, Canada was sending 1.76 million barrels per day into the U.S. Next was Mexico, sending 1.67 million barrels per day. Rounding out the top-five are Saudi Arabia (1.42 million bpd), Venezuela (1.19 million bpd) and Nigeria (1.13 million bpd). By comparison, the U.S. consumed 20.7 million bpd in 2004.

Others on the list of exporters to the U.S.: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Russia, Ecuador, Kuwait, Columbia, the United Kingdom, Norway and Brazil. How many of those countries are we on friendly terms with? The U.K.? Norway, maybe? Most of the citizens of the other countries on that list would probably just as soon see us running around on fire punching ourselves in our own heads.

The reality is that most of the world’s easily recoverable oil lies underneath places where people don’t like us very much. And a good portion of the less easily recoverable oil—think tar sands, here—also lies underneath places like Venezuela and Canada. According to the Tribune story, Canada has about 174 billion barrels of oil sands reserves; Venezuela has as many as 270 billion barrels of other versions of so-called heavy oil reserves.

Canada pretends to be our ally, but many Canadians can’t stand America. The Indignant Citizen gets the impression Canadians think the U.S. is dragging down the collective culture of North America. And Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ feelings for the U.S., and our goofy child-president (to borrow the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s characterization) in particular. Paul Salopek, the author of the Tribune stories, makes special of Chavez and his fiery rhetoric.

In July, Chavez announced an “anti-imperialist” agenda through which he said he was cutting off sales of gasoline to 1,800 independently owned Citgo stations in the U.S. The Venezuelan government owns Citgo, Salopek writes. Chavez also refers to President Bush alternately as a “mass murderer,” a “drunkard,” and a “donkey,” according to Salopek.

And in the Arab world, the growing gap between those who have access to the oil wealth and those who do not is fostering intense hatred of the West, and of America in particular. Salopek’s reports from Nigeria, where resentment toward oil companies runs high in the poverty-stricken communities nearby; from Iraq, where the war seems to have been just the beginning of the violence and where Islamic extremists are fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites; and from Venezuela, where farmers tolerate the oil companies and the spills because Chavez is a socialist and for now he is placating his people with money.

In the multi-media section of the website, James Howard Kunstler makes the point that—as he has on his own website and in his books, most recently “The Long Emergency”, that all it’s going to take for world oil supplies to be disrupted is a handful of jihadistas with a few pounds of Semtex and some determination to detonate some oil pipelines, or sink a barge or something in the Strait of Hormuz and block oil shipping lanes.

The United States has set up what is essentially a Middle East police station in order keep tabs on the disorder in that part of the world. Nigeria, Salopek writes, isn’t far from falling into the same kind of violent chaos as the Middle East. “The bloodiest chaos unfolds mostly unseen, however, out amid the syrupy brown rivers that braid the mangroves before sliding into the Atlantic. There, armies of the poor battle the government, foreign companies and each other for a fair share of oil wealth. The impulse is understandable. According to the World Bank, 80 percent of Nigeria’s staggering $340 billion in oil revenue has been pocketed by 1 percent of the population—a cast of thugs who include the world’s most venal politicians and generals.”

Later, Salopek quotes a young Nigerian with few good prospects: “No jobs, no running water, no electricity, no opportunity, no dignity. . . . I am going to carry a gun. I am going to blow up some wells. Otherwise you get nothing in Nigeria.”

That kind of talk could easily be dismissed as angry grandstanding, but the fact is as the number of young men who feel that way and talk that way grows, more of them will start following through on those kinds of threats. They could quickly disrupt what is a fragile oil delivery system, and throw the Western Hemisphere into chaos.

To prevent this, Americans are paying a heavy price. Milton Copulos, an economist with the National Defense Council Foundation, which Salopek describes as a “right-of-center Washington think tank,” has calculated what he says is the true cost of gas, per gallon, with counterterrorism measures and various wars thrown in. If you think $3.50 a gallon is expensive, hold on. Copulos says in the article that when you factor in oil-related defense spending, jobs and investments lost to high crude prices and medical bills for U.S. troops injured in Iraq, the real cost per gallon of as should be closer to $8 per gallon. That’s eight as in almost 10.

But consumers, Salopek writes, remain unaware. “Consumers don’t dodge the bill for all these masked expenditures. Instead they pay for them indirectly, through higher taxes or by saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt—one that’s increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs of their oil habit, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their energy gluttony.”

But, as Salopek writes elsewhere, “Our nation’s energy-intensive joy ride, powered by 150 years of cheap petroleum, may finally be coming to an end. This could be as good as it gets.”

There’s far more in Salopek’s exhaustive series. More on Iraq and the fiasco there, more on the cluelessness of American consumers, more on the hardships faced by those who live and work in the countries that supply us with our black heroin. There is too much more to get into here. Read the series, check out the multimedia features on the Tribune’s special page, and draw your own conclusions.

Uh Oh

The Chicago Tribune on Sunday published a remarkable special report, contained in its own section, titled “Twilight of the Oil Age: A tank of gas, a world of trouble” The 13-page-long series of stories, sidebars, photos and graphs is remarkable for two reasons: First because the Tribune correspondent, Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Salopek, managed to actually trace the origins of oil that went into vehicle gas tanks at a Marathon gas station in South Elgin, a task the oil industry has for a long time said was impossible; and second because it is to the Indignant Citizen’s knowledge the most extensive and direct warning yet offered by a mainstream media outlet about the perils of the impending end of the cheap oil era.

James Howard Kunstler, the prolific and sometimes acidic urban critic whose “Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles” should be required reading every Monday, has been writing and speaking on this topic for years. Often he recounts stories of laying his heavy message on SUV-driving crowds where the reaction ranges from denial to derision. But as detailed as Kunstler’s arguments are, and have been for some time, he was always out there on his own, a wing nut from upstate New York spouting end-of-days gibberish about the death of suburbia.

Now comes the Chicago Tribune, a paper with its own problems to be sure, but a generally respected news outlet and one with a vast reach throughout the Midwest, and beyond. And believe this: When readers found this section on Sunday, despite its obvious length, many probably set it aside and also set aside the time to read it, or parts of it anyway, fully intending to eventually read all of it. This story comes at the perfect time. The Indignant Citizen saw gas being sold at stations along S. Pulaski Road going for upwards of $3.20 a gallon for regular, and over $3.50 a gallon for premium. People are paying a lot for gas and they’re pissed. They’re starting to look for someone to blame. One-third of the U.S. Senate and the entire House will no doubt feel some of that blame landing on them this fall, like pigeon shit underneath the el.

But before they go pulling the lever, or punching the button, or touching the screen for all the challengers out there in November, as a way to punish the incumbents, they should read this package carefully, and then take a close look at how they’re living their own lives, and how what they do every day is contributing to the problem.

Salopek and the Tribune pull no punches. There are blunt statements here, particularly blunt for a so-called objective newspaper. “This is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America’s vast and troubled oil dependency,” Salopek writes. “And what it exposes is a globe-spanning energy network that today is so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever.”

“Unsustainable.” When was the last time you read a word like that to describe, in essence, America’s entire culture; it’s lifestyle? But didn’t our vice president say the American way of life is not negotiable? Hmm. A statement like that doesn’t fit well with “unsustainable.” Well, if it’s unsustainable, then by definition it’s not negotiable. No negotiation necessary, the decision has already been made – by nature.

In a sidebar story on the theories behind so-called peak oil, or the idea that the world is rapidly approaching the point at which it will have recovered half or more of all the recoverable oil there is, Salopek offers some sobering statistics from a six-year-old study done by the U.S. Geological Survey. China, who many view as the United States’ main global competitor for oil in the coming decades (that theory assumes China’s economic growth continues unabated, which is debatable), has been using oil at a rapidly increasing rate. The original survey, completed before China’s big ramp-up in oil use, surmised that peak oil production would occur in 2037. The figure was mysteriously revised last year to 2044, even though China is using more oil now than it was when the original study came out.

“Even that assessment is jolting,” Salopek writes. “The fuel that powers our cars, our military, our technological way of life and our frenetic consumer culture likely will have to be replaced before today’s preschoolers turn 40.”

That’s going to be a bitch-slap to a lot of little kids out there, who will already be smarting from yearly lashes administered by the tax man. These monetary whippings will be required to pay down the massive amount of debt the youngest generation is being saddled with to fund a never-ending war—go ahead and call it a Crusade; the president did—and the neo-Colonialism required to police the growing and increasingly disenfranchised and volatile underclasses in the Middle East.

Salopek, perhaps unfairly, uses a nice upper-middle class family from St. Charles, the Binnings, as the clearest illustration of the cluelessness with which Americans are sleepwalking into the misery of the post-cheap oil era. Early in the article we meet Laura Binning, 37 and mother of three, driving her 10-mile-per-gallon Hummer H2. Like many of their neighbors, and like half of all Americans today, the Binnings think nothing of driving all over the suburban landscape for activities, food and entertainment. Their swimming pool heating bill was $2,000 in October 2005. They live on 2.7 acres that they do not farm, land that, once fertile, now sits fallow so they can enjoy the view. Are they concerned about the price of gas, about their energy bills? Sure. But only to a point.

“In the end, like most Americans, they were optimists,” writes Salopek of the Binnings. “They had little choice. Their livelihood—selling property in suburbia—rests primarily on a dubious supposition: the continuing abundance of cheap crude. Laura faces this reality every day. Shuttling the boys across the suburbs to piano lessons, floor hockey practice, Little League and hip-hop dance classes, she can rack up 40 miles or more in the Hummer.

“‘Are there problems coming? Maybe. But I prefer to think the glass is half full,’ said Tim [Binning, Laura’s husband and a real estate broker], 37, arriving home from his office one afternoon after a commute of 19 miles each way. ‘When shortages jack up oil prices permanently, someone will have the incentive to invent another fuel. That’s how the market works.’”

This belief that technology, or alternate fuels will magically step in and allow the easy motoring culture to continue unabated is a fantasy. It’s already been discussed here, and further discussion isn’t hard to find. The Tribune’s story includes a helpful chart of all the alternative fuels and the likelihood they’ll be able to pick up the slack. It’s informative.

Throw in the rising tide of anti-Americanism felt by people in places where the United States gets its oil, and the prospects for continuing this arrangement for the long term seem bleak, indeed.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how Salopek’s article deals with that issue.

Subway Sociology

A hypothesis has been posed by a FOTIC (that’s Friend of the Indignant Citizen) that the possible rearrangement of seating on Chicago el cars from the current dual forward/backward facing configuration to dual rows of inward facing seats will change not just the el riding experience but the entire climate of human relations in the Chicago area.

Chicago, the FOTIC suggested, has a reputation as a friendly Midwestern city where people look you in the eye and aren’t afraid to strike up a conversation. Switching the seating configuration on the el could change that by forcing people into almost confrontational situations in which they stare at each other across the cars, fostering a culture of floor-gazing much like what the FOTIC has heard New York is like, and turning el riders from borderline friendly to surly. So the question is: can simply rearranging seats on a subway car alter the social contract in ways that change a city’s character?

The Indignant Citizen is no expert on transit sociology. But having lived in Chicago and New York, and relied on both the subway and el systems for daily transportation, the Indignant Citizen feels he is qualified to at least explore some possibilities.

To start let’s lay out some possible ways the seating configuration could change social interaction. Riders are going to be facing each other across the aisle now. Also with the new seating configuration the cars can carry more people; more people means more crowding. And with the new seats come new poles and bars to hang onto, and in New York at least, that particular configuration means you’re more likely to get someone’s stinky armpit in your face than with the current el car setup. You’re also more likely to find yourself knee-to-knee with whomever happens to be grabbing the bar if you're sitting or seated right in front of you if you're standing. It can be confining to be sitting on the bench when a longitudinally oriented car gets full. You’re shoulder-to-shoulder with other seated passengers and then somebody stands right in front you. If you’re not careful you can find yourself staring at some guy’s package or a woman’s belly button. It can make for an awkward realization, but at that point there’s usually no place else to look. Bums on benches are also an issue. Depending on the stink factor and whether the bum is upright or laying down, an entire section of seating may be off-limits.

(It should be noted that not all NYC subway cars have exclusively longitudinal seating. Some routes on the BMT and IND lines have some two-across seating.)

Here are some handy rules for riding the subway , New York style, courtesy of New York Magazine. It was easy to find, the Indignant Citizen just typed “subway etiquette” into the Google search engine and there was the magazine entry.

Finding tips on “el etiquette” was more difficult, mainly because typing “el etiquette” into Google brings up a number of Spanish language websites unrelated to proper decorum on public transit. However Tom Sherman has a short post from 2004 on what not to do when you’re on the el. Nos. 1 through 4 apply equally well in either a subway or el environment, but No. 5 highlights a key difference between the longitudinal seating of the NYC subway and the side-by-side seating on the el. On the subway if there’s an open seat, you sit in it. On the el, human interaction may be required to ask someone to move over. This can initiate conversation.

“Excuse me, do you mind if I sit there?” or “Would you mind moving over so I could sit down?”

This could be followed by the response, “Why certainly, I’d be happy to” or maybe “Why don’t you sit by the window, since I’m getting off at the next stop,” either of which could provide an invitation to further conversation.

On a crowded train, say, on the Red Line, aisle standers don’t have poles to hang onto unless they’re near the doors. You have to grab the stainless steel handle sticking up beyond the seat back. With the jerky motion of the train, it’s possible the head of the person sitting in the seat could smash your hand. Another opportunity for conversation, especially with someone you find attractive: “These fucking bastard drivers are trying to kill us all. Hey, how YOU doin’?”

See, the possibilities for conversation on the el as it is currently configured are almost endless. Change the seating, and you change the dynamic. Change the dynamic and it’s conceivable you could change the atmosphere, reduce conversation and relegate riders to staring out the window or at one of the ads that should have been removed in 2003.

Now, this is all interesting to think about. But another viewpoint might be that the city’s social conventions are set at a macro level, and merely carried onto microcosm of the el. In that case, seating configuration shouldn’t matter. Friendliness will override whatever uncomfortable social situations arise from looking up and finding some guy’s unzipped package in your face, or having that empty seat next to you filled by a 300-pound woman with a beard.

Midwesterners are generally considered more friendly than their East Coast counterparts, and even Chicago, the largest of the Midwest cities, and a town with a bit of a rough past, has a reputation today as a down home kind of place, a big small town, almost. Some of that may well be rooted in the reality that people here aren’t crammed on top of one another the way they are in New York, a city with an international reputation for abruptness and even rudeness. Metropolitan New York has a population of about 8 million (people, not rats; the rats are more populous) crammed into roughly 300 square miles. That’s roughly 26,700 people per square mile. Chicago has roughly 3 million people spread out over 228 square miles, or about 13,150 people per square mile. That’s about half the density of New York.

Now with almost 26,700 people per square mile, New Yorkers could be excused for being rude on occasion. But the Indignant Citizen found New Yorkers by and large to be pleasant folks, eager to help newcomers or visitors get around. And if you haven’t been, you need help, particularly in the subway system. New Yorkers can be abrupt, or maybe they just like to get to the point. It’s ingrained in them. No lollygagging, no time for small talk or chit-chat about the weather or the kids. If you’re in line, there are probably a dozen people in line behind you, waiting for you, staring at the back of your head, waiting for you to fuck up so they can curse you or throw batteries at you. There are lines in Chicago, but it’s not as oppressive. There’s almost always a shorter line nearby. You can breathe here. Plus, you can see the horizon here, and the sky. All that makes people less on edge. It’s got nothing to do with transit, people here bring their better attitudes with them onto the train.

Extending the thought process further, though, it’s possible to speculate that even a good attitude could turn dark quickly on a crowded el car if you’re forced to stare across the aisle at some guy’s nose ring from Belmont to Jackson on the Red Line, or contemplate the merits of birth control as you ride across from an overwhelmed woman with six wild children traveling from Adams/Wabash to Pulaski on the Orange line.

So after rambling on, where are we? The Indignant Citizen does not think the sociological differences between Chicago and New York are caused by seating configurations on public transit, but they may be affected it. If the Chicago Transit Authority changes the seating on all el cars, there may indeed be a difference in the vibe on the trains. At first it will probably be confined to the cars, but given enough time it could spread to other parts of the city, and could lead to Chicago becoming less friendly. Any change, though, will likely take decades to be widely perceived and the Indignant Citizen, and the FOTIC, will probably be dead by then.

In the meantime it’d be nice to be able to get more people riding public transit rather than driving on the streets and highways. If longitudinal seating will accomplish that, the Indignant Citizen is for it. Bring it on, and we’ll worry about the decline of civility later.

Getting it Good & Hard

John Stroger’s manipulation of the Cook County Board, and of the county itself, has not been hindered by the fact that the man can’t sign his own name to the resignation letter his handlers distributed last week because he remains paralyzed following a stroke in March. Stroger and his political henchmen—including Chicago 7th Ward Alderman William Beavers, Stroger’s son and 8th Ward Alderman Todd Stroger, and Cook County Commissioner Bobbie Steele—have continued to run roughshod over the democratic process, if not Democratic Process, even as the Chicago media have, after months of taking it up the ass, stepped up and begun to seriously question how it is a 77-year-old half-paralyzed stroke victim can claim to be running Cook County government.

More accurately, papers in their editorials and TV news in its stepped up coverage of the opposition, have chafed at the blatant lies being told to them by Stroger’s family, staff members and political supporters. Todd Stroger had a particularly trying two weeks in mid-June during which he had to face skeptical questions from reporters every day about his father’s condition, whether he was back in the hospital, and when he would bow out of the election and resign from the board and the board presidency. Todd Stroger tried as best he could to stonewall the press, but he is a politician with limited skills, and once the tide of public opinion began to turn against him he quickly broke up on the rocks of reporters’ persistent questions.

The low point probably came when Todd Stroger claimed he would not talk any more about his father’s health condition until July, and cited patient confidentiality laws as one reason why. This was seen by many as ridiculous and within two weeks—before the July deadline originally set by Stroger’s family—the announcement came that Stroger would not only not seek re-election but that he would step down from the County Board President position.

Of course the jockeying for John Stroger’s various jobs had already begun months earlier. Todd Stroger had held himself out as one possible candidate, even as the family and Stroger’s staff maintained he would someday be back, and chastised others who expressed interest in the job. Eventually even Todd Stroger was forced to back off lobbying for the job and return to spreading the lie that his father still hoped to return one day to run the county board. Even that wasn’t good enough, though, as various John Stroger staff members, when peppered with questions about who was running the county is John Stroger’s absence, tried to convince reporters that John Stroger was alert and running the county from his bed.

Finally the load of lies became too heavy.

Which brings us pretty much up to speed. There is ongoing speculation about who will take over for John Stroger in his various jobs, including Cook County commissioner, board president and party boss. One school of thought holds that Dems will appoint a caretaker board president —possibly John Daley, Mayor Richard Daley’s brother—to do the dirty work of ramming through what’s sure to be an unpleasant county budget that will include tax hikes to close an estimated $44 million gap. That would leave Todd Stroger to run for county board president, and possibly his father’s commissioner seat, with a clean slate.

It would be, of course, a classic bait-and-switch and if it were to succeed, another black eye for Cook County voters.

The real travesty from the public’s perspective is not that Stroger suffered a stroke, or that he’s paralyzed or even that county board leadership has languished in his absence. The stroke and paralysis are terrible physical issues for anyone to have to deal with. But what’s appalling is the way his family and the Cook County Democratic Machine have treated his positions as some kind of property, to be inherited or bestowed as they see fit. Equally appalling has been the county board’s lack of action in the face of an impending fiscal crisis. Rather than do something that might be “disrespectful” to John Stroger they chose to do nothing. This is about par for the course for Cook County government. You never get the smart ones on the county board; it’s always the wannabes and the hacks, and now we’re all going to pay the price.

This equates to paralysis of a different kind, exemplified by Bobbie Steele, who actually said at a county board meeting when asked about acting to replace Stroger, “July is just around the corner. We waited this long. . . .” What a bumblefuck thing to say. It’s like if Joseph Hazlewood had been awake at the controls of the Exxon Valdez, known he was about to hit the reef and said “Oh fuck it. We’ve gone on this long, may as well ground the bastard.”

Of course, Cook County voters chose Stroger over Forrest Claypool in the primary election, and they knew they were getting an invalid when they did so. They also knew, or certainly should have known, that Stroger’s replacement would be hand-picked by Democratic ward bosses and party hacks following extended back room dealing. That’s exactly what’s happened. Now in order to repudiate these slimy tactics the only recourse is to pull the lever for the wing-nut Republican challenger, Tony Peraica. County Dems are betting most voters won’t be pushed that far. Here’s hoping they’re wrong.

Etha-NO-l

Hurricane Katrina delivered a nut-sack blow to the United States’ petroleum refining and supply systems, exposing not only their fragility but also the fraud behind the fantastical mechanisms that had kept prices comfortably in the $2 to $2.50 per gallon range. Katrina supplied the fuel, if you will, to rocket fuel prices through the $3 per gallon glass ceiling. With a couple of exceptions we haven’t really looked back.

Post-Katrina, the corn pushers saw an opening quickly mounted a massive campaign to ram their cobs up our gas-addicted asses. Car companies have gotten behind the movement, in particular GM, which by the time the major auto shows began opening after the first of the year, had devised an elaborate marketing campaign touting its fleet of so-called flex fuel vehicles, which can run on a blend of ethanol and gasoline. Now it seems like every commercial break features at least one “Live Green, Go Yellow” ad.

You’ve seen them, no doubt. In the ads, corn pellets (“Go Yellow”) fall out of a burlap sack on an old flatbed Chevy pickup truck and onto a hot asphalt road, where through the miracle of digital animation they magically “pop” into all sorts of cars and trucks. The idea is that ethanol supposedly burns cleaner than gasoline, and its widespread use will improve air quality (“Live Green”). A side implication is that using ethanol, a Home Grown fuel, will reduce dependence on “foreign” oil, which of course is code for any petroleum coming to the U.S. from so-called troubled regions, which today include most of the “Middle East” and “Africa.”

Folks in those parts of the world just can’t get along. Which is why we’ve set up a couple of police stations—one in Iraq and on in Afghanistan, in case you were under the mistaken impression that our goal in spending a billion dollars a day over there was to “free” the Iraqi people from the insane tyranny of Saddam, who we used to like very much when he served as the business end of the bitch-whip we used on those treacherous freaks in Iran. We bombed Afghanistan apparently to send the message that a country in ruins can always be ruined a little bit more.

So we get Ethanol, the Patriotic Fuel. Ethanol will put hungry farmers to work. It will replace gasoline. It will make your car run better. Corn will Save the Earth.

Or, that’s the idea, at least. Except that the ethanol wonder-story has a few holes in it. For one thing, many smart people believe it actually takes more energy to refine corn into ethanol than the ethanol ultimately yields in energy when burned, say, in an engine. And now Car & Driver magazine has come along and in its July issue exposed a few other problems with the ethanol circle-jerk.

In an article notable for its placement in a magazine regarded as an intelligent source of automotive news, writer Patrick Bedard deconstructs ethanol’s promises and reveals some surprising facts. Here are a few of the more interesting points revealed by Bedard:

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which mandates that by 2012 fuel providers meet a mandated ethanol quota that translates roughly into a requirement that each gallon of gasoline fuel contain at least 5% ethanol. In reality, fuel blends like gasahol, which has 10% ethanol, and E85, which is 85% ethanol, count toward the quota, reducing the actual required percentage per gallon.

Given that quota, the promise that ethanol use will reduce the use of fossil fuels is largely bunk. According to Bedard’s numbers, the best-case scenario would see energy from ethanol replace a whopping 0.7% of the annual energy the U.S. obtains from fossil fuels. And the reality may be considerably worse than that. Given that wide-ranging estimates of the “new” energy provided by ethanol (i.e. the energy it provides on its own, after taking into account the energy required to refine it from corn), the absolute maximum reduction of fossil fuel use that could be achieved via massive ethanol production would be two-tenths of one percent.

Will ethanol reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Again assuming a best-case scenario, ethanol could potentially reduce foreign oil imports by 1.4% by 2012. If all the production were applied strictly to reducing imports from the Persian Gulf region, Bedard writes, they would replace about 7.4% of that supply.

In a head-to-head comparison with gasoline using a Chevy Tahoe SUV, ethanol cut fuel economy (not fuel consumption, fuel economy) by 30% in two of three tests. Running an E85 blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline reduced the Tahoe’s driving range from 390 miles to 290 miles. Good luck filling up more often, with fewer than 600 stations selling ethanol in just 37 states.

Bedard summed up: “The reality is that the federal mandate to increase ethanol use to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012 is eminently doable. But it won’t make much difference to the price fuel, foreign oil dependency, air pollution, or global warming. That’s because the primary fuel in six years will still be gasoline, and if consumption increases at historical rates, the extra ethanol will be lucky to offset the growth in gasoline consumption expected by then, let alone reduce it.”

Take it from the car experts, people. Ethanol is a political tool, not an answer to our energy dependency, and certainly not an option for running our motoring utopia at anything close to the level at which it’s operating now. The Indignant Citizen’s advice: Save $20,000. Don’t by a flex-fuel vehicle. Buy a bicycle.

Diseases of Leisure

Shit. It’s been more than a month since the Indignant Citizen’s last post. Where the fuck has the time gone? So many days, so much pent-up indignation. Thank God we’re Winning the War on Terror, the Economy is humming thanks to those tax cuts, and Americans are coming to their senses that the Drive-In Utopia is a failure. If it weren’t for those nuggets of good news, boy, things would look bleak indeed.

As it is, though, life is wonderful. Things couldn’t be going much better. Well, except for those poor bastards getting blown up in Iraq. That’s gotta suck for them. But what the hell? They died for our freedom, and a grateful nation thanks them … in between pro wrestling matches and video game marathons.

Plus, somewhere the names of the dead soldiers got read this past weekend at one of the countless Memorial Day celebrations. So right there that’s pretty cool, getting your name read out loud. And the families of the dead soldiers all get nice free flags to keep and maybe put on the mantle. Oh, and they get the eternal gratitude of our Commander in Chief, President Bush. That’s almost as good as having their loved ones still around. Maybe it’s better sometimes, ‘cause Bush doesn’t come home from his third tour in the Gulf all stressed out and eating everything in the house and beating the dog.

Yep, life is good here in the U-nited States. Which must be why we have time for meaningless diversions like the U.S. Paintball Championships, which aired Memorial Day on ESPN2. They were on TV at the restaurant where the Indignant Citizen and his wife ate Monday night. This restaurant, The Patio, in Bridgeview, had about 30 televisions hanging from the ceilings and tucked into the corners, to promote conversation, no doubt. About half the TVs were tuned to the ridiculous paintball tournament. In true ESPN fashion, there were slow-motion shots of the “teams” high-fiving, fist pumping and engaging in some kind of pre-tournament group chanting and rhythmic jumping ritual to get pumped up for competition. There was actually a crowd in the stands.

We are a stupid people who have cultivated a vapid, image-worshipping culture. When we are punished for this wasteful behavior, it will be swift and thorough, and no one will be spared. In the meantime, though, we pretend to occupy ourselves with “serious issues.” The TVs in the restaurant that weren’t showing the paintball “championships” were tuned to CNN, which was airing a special on eating disorders and the fabulously famous, wealthy and beautiful people who have survived them.

Eating disorders are serious issues for those who suffer from them. And plenty of people have died from the effects of bulimia and anorexia. But who are these people suffering from eating disorders? Based on a very small sample size, which includes the CNN show Monday night and other news programs that have aired previously, eating disorders appear to be a disease of leisure. Which is to say, the people suffering them typically are not portrayed as living paycheck-to-paycheck. They appear to be people with the time and resources to become obsessed with their body image. Teenagers, celebrities, athletes—people solidly in the middle class or above.

The Indignant Citizen would like to see a profile of, say, a single mother working two jobs to support her kid who suffers from an eating disorder. Or a married father of three working the swing shift at the steel mill who has an eating disorder. The Indignant Citizen’s suspicion is, again based on the evidence thus far presented, that neither of these two people would have time to develop an eating disorder. Who has time to obsess about body image or binging and purging when you’re worried about paying the electric bill next month, or coming up with enough overtime to buy new clothes for the upcoming school year?

Who wants to starve himself or herself when it’s uncertain exactly when the next meal might be eaten? Who wants to gorge and throw it all up when there’s no telling how the next meal might be paid for?

Diseases of leisure. Diseases which, while very real to those who suffer from them, are the product of an image-obsessed culture with too much time on its hands and no real desire or need to apply itself to solving serious problems.

Take the CNN report itself. Certainly Paula Zahn and the CNN production crew responsible for putting the piece together felt they were doing a tremendous service to thousands of people—informing them of potentially deadly disorders, disorders suffered by many in silence and shame. But what if CNN had applied itself equally to the task of informing home buyers of the dangers of adjustable-rate mortgages, which former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan famously and inexplicably touted in a speech in 2004? ARMs seemed like a great idea at the time, when interest rates were at record lows. But certainly Greenspan had to know that eventually rates would rise, and that anyone who had traded in a fixed-rate mortgage for an adjustable-rate mortgage would end up paying more in the long run, short-term savings aside.

Now millions of people who took his advice are paying more, and according to a story in the Tribune by Becky Yerak, mortgage defaults are on the rise. Rising interest rates and their impact on adjustable-rate mortgages are one reason why.

At the time there was plenty of discussion in the print media—although mostly in the financial pages—about whether Greenspan had lost his fucking mind. But would CNN have spent an hour, as it did with eating disorders, focusing on the merits and risks of adjustable rate mortgages? And if it had, would anyone have watched? How many more people would have stood to gain from an in-depth discussion of ARMs? Probably millions.

So when the Indignant Citizen’s across-the-street neighbors get evicted from their house because they can’t pay the mortgage any more, they’ll blame the government, the banks and probably the oil companies. But at least their 14-year-old daughter will know where to go for help to treat her eating disorder. That is, if she has time to have an eating disorder anymore once she’s working the 6 p.m.-to-close shift at the Culver’s or Wal-Mart to help her parents make ends meet.

Contact the Inidignant Citizen

At the risk of inviting spam and other crap, you can now send email to the Indignant Citizen at IndignantCitizen(at)hotmail.com. The Indignant Citizen will not necessarily care what you have to say, nor is there an implied promise to respond carried in the disclosure of the Indignant Citizen's email address.

But it's there for use by interested, thoughtful and honest people.

The Death & Life of Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs died Tuesday. With her passing at age 89, cities lost one of their most intelligent and eloquent advocates, and the world lost an important voice for truth, beauty and rational thought.

Jacobs made a life and a living thinking about cities—how they work, why they work, who makes them work. She had no formal training for this livelihood, which is to say she did not have an advanced degree in urban planning or sociology or economics. In her last book, “Dark Age Ahead,” Jacobs had hard words for modern higher education, writing that today it has devolved into mere credentialing. “… [A] degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous,” Jacobs wrote. “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.”

Instead of relying on credentials with no real education backing them up, Jacobs read on her own, observed, thought about what she saw and wrote what she thought. An early result was her devastating critique of Modernism and urban renewal, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It was Jacobs’s first major work and is today considered the bible of modern urban planning … which is ironic since Jacobs professed little use for professional planners.

The Indignant Citizen still remembers the first time he read “Death and Life.” It was a revelation. Jacobs put into simple words many things the Indignant Citizen had observed about his own environment but lacked the language to explain. The importance of lively sidewalks. The advantages of mixing building types and uses. The Indignant Citizen isn’t going to go into all the brilliance of “Death and Life.” Read it yourself. You’ll be glad you did. It will change forever the way you look at and think about cities.

Of the many things Jacobs wrote and said, only one sticks out as having seemingly been proved wrong. In “Death and Life,” published in 1961, Jacobs wrote: “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”

She was right on the first part. But we turned out not to be so deserving of her optimism. Jacobs was decidedly more pessimistic by the time she wrote “Dark Age Ahead.”

“The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears,” Jacobs wrote. “We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.”

Jacobs identified five “pillars” of culture she believed were in danger: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science and science-based technology; taxes and governmental power in touch with needs and possibilities; and self-policing by the learned professions.

“They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness.”

That’s so like Jacobs. Simple, elegant prose conveying highly complex and well-thought out ideas that make the reader react with forehead-slapping recognition. Who else would dare to write a book warning humanity of an impending Dark Age, and explain so clearly exactly what she meant?

Even in “Dark Age,” Jacobs managed to convey a sense of hope that perhaps if we were to heed her warning, the Dark Age could be avoided. The book was published in 2004. Recent events could not have provided much in the way of hope for Jacobs in her last days. Oil prices continue to rise, and in response we are using more gas this year than last. Elected officials should be talking about realistic alternatives to a mass motoring culture, like rebuilding the railroad infrastructure, but are instead calling for probes of oil companies to investigate possible price gouging. We seem to be blowing each other up with increasing frequency. Intolerance is on the rise.

And all the while our vapid culture celebrates style over substance and embraces ever more emptiness. The Dark Age looms. Thankfully Jacobs won’t have to see it envelop us. If we’re lucky her message will penetrate just enough to ward off the most serious effects. It worked with “Death and Life.” Urban renewal and the Garden City movements were exposed as frauds, and New Urbanism was born.

The pessimist in the Indignant Citizen says it’s too late to save ourselves. With Jacobs gone, a great advocate for us has been lost. Her voice has been silenced, and we are left with only her work to guide us. Will it be enough?

Reality Bites

Sometimes on days like Friday, when the tulips stretch toward the warm sun and the air is filled with the sound of chirping birds, it is possible to forget for a moment just how doomed our culture is. But then, like a wad of shit dropped from the ass of a passing pigeon, reality smacks us in the face.

Take Friday’s centerpiece story in the Wall Street Journal “Strangers on the Train: Highway Work Forces Chicagoans Off Road—Commuters Bemoan the Loss of Quality Time in Cars; Ms. Dennis Lugs In a Cake,” by Ilan Brat. (Note: The Journal is like that, with the long headlines and two-phase subheads. It’s kind of fun, actually.) The story is all about how car addicts, who used the Dan Ryan Expressway as their daily fix, have gone cold turkey on mass transit while the road is being rebuilt over the next two years. The $600 million Dan Ryan reconstruction project has essentially halved the capacity of the city’s busiest expressway while it is rebuilt from the road bed up.

Things are not going well for many of these new transit users. The quotes in the WSJ story make one wonder “How did they find these morons to interview and say these things?” But then, finding them probably wasn’t that difficult. In fact, all the Journal reporter probably had to do was get on the train and pick the first person he saw.

“‘This was a very, very big step for me,’ says [Ann Schue], 42 years old, who has never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service ,” according to the Journal story. “‘I’m still very. . . ,’ she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. ‘I miss my car.’”

As we learn in the article, Schue owns a 2003 Ford Expedition and makes a 90-minute, one-way commute from her home in Homer Glen to her job at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, a a distance of about 33 miles – one way.

At the end of the story we learn that Schue now gets her driving fix on the weekends, hopping in her Urban Assault Vehicle and driving 34 miles (one way?) to a mall just for the hell of it, even though there’s a mall six miles from her house. “I don’t even know why,” she says. “I went just to go.”

Such is the pathetic state of the American Way of Life. We are so addicted to driving that when forced onto mass transit by circumstances beyond our control we seek to retake control by making unnecessary car trips to malls 30 miles from our homes just to feel the contoured seats caressing our backs and the vibration of the road in our leather cradled asses. It’s our little way of sticking it to the man, except we’re really sticking it to ourselves.

The WSJ story takes a sympathetic tone toward those struggling to give up their cars. Brat observes that Chicago is an unusual Midwestern city in that it has a well-developed mass transit system, but it is a typical Midwestern city in that hundreds of thousands of commuters would just as soon stab themselves in their own eye with a rusty fork than abandon their gas-sucking commutes in heavy traffic and take the train or the bus. “The change for many of the new riders is wrenching,” Brat writes, observing that Schue was among those “forced to trade” her SUV commute “for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.”

Another poor soul, David Pettiford, gripes in the story about losing the cocoon of pleasure provided by his Dodge Durango SUV and having to take the Metra instead.

Frank Pierson lives five blocks from the el, but prefers driving to work and paying $18 dollars a day to park. Now he’s resigned himself to the train. Mary Dennis lives in Northwest Indiana and has been driving the 72 miles round-trip to and from her job in the Loop for the last 20 years. (The story, by the way, says her trip is 36 miles, but that’s misleading because 36 miles is the one-way figure. It’s the same throughout the story, which is to say it’s misleading.) In the article, Dennis complains of having to tote a three-layer cake in on the train for an office birthday party. By the time she got downtown, the cake had shifted and settled. Is there no bakery in the downtown area capable of baking a birthday cake and delivering it to the office? Maybe she’s just that stupid. But the Indignant Citizen thinks it’s not so much a question of intelligence. It’s habit. She never stopped to think outside the bubble of her 20-year experience, which has been to buy the cake in Indiana, put it on the back seat and drive in. When confronted with mass transit, she tried to apply her old behaviors to the new environment.

This is going to be a common problem as oil prices rise and people are faced with living lives very different than the ones with which they have become comfortable. In the post-cheap oil era, we are going to have to make other arrangements, as Jim Kunstler says. The old models for doing things aren’t going to work. Living five blocks from the el and driving won’t be a choice for Frank Pierson anymore. He’ll be lucky to be able to take the el to his same job. Driving won’t be an option, the choice having been made for him by market forces beyond his control, and perhaps beyond his understanding.

All of the people in the WSJ story, all of us for that matter, face the prospect of leading very different lives by the time the Ryan Reconstruction is finished. We are not prepared to hear this, to accept it or deal with it. Stories like this one in the Journal don’t help matters by airing the whinings of a few people who’ve grudgingly given up their cars for mass transit. Politicians, our elected “leaders,” aren’t preparing us, either. Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative to the bullshit and lies of the past six years by confronting Americans with the New Reality and offering Solutions, but there is no indication any liberal is up to that task.

Instead we will try to ride the status quo to the End of the Line, with people like Ann Schue leading the way in their SUVs and papers like the Wall Street Journal holding their hands. At the end of the article, Schue is told by the reporter that traffic on the Ryan hasn’t been as bad as forecast. “Really?” she says. “Can I go back?”

No, Ann, you can’t. None of us can. And we’d all better get used to it.

Never Saw it Coming

Well, well. What did the Indignant Citizen find when he opened his morning Sun-Times? Why, this story quoting John Stroger’s son , Todd, on his father’s condition. It’s the first hard update on the county board president’s rehabilitation in weeks, and not surprisingly it came from family. And not only that, family with something to gain by going public. Looks like Todd may end up being his dad’s successor. That is shocking. Just shocking.

Chicago News Media Stroger Grade: F

The Indignant Citizen doesn’t want to keep kicking John Stroger when he’s down. There’s only so much abuse one can heap on an elderly stroke victim before people start to call it Unfair.

So we will not kick John Stroger tonight. Instead the time has come to direct scorn and ridicule at the Chicago media. In one of the most shameful performances in the face of ongoing scandal since whatever “news” program just ran on Fox News, no one, not a single Chicago newspaper, TV or radio station has dug into the Stroger stroke to find out how the old man is doing.

In fact, a month after apathetic Cook County voters gave the addled Stroger another four-year term as the president of the county board, not a single member of the media has actually laid eyes on Stroger. The only reports of his progress have come from family members. As Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed wrote on April 9, “only family members and medical professionals have had visual access to Stroger, who is recovering at the prestigious Chicago Rehabilitation Center.”

She then went on to relate that she heard “via the Stroger grapevine,” that Stroger was cracking jokes about how when he gets out everyone he knows is going on a diet, him first. Right. If that’s not a planted story the Indignant Citizen has never seen one.

Meanwhile, some hack named James Whigham, the county’s chief of staff, is running day-to-day operations. Whigham is not elected. Yet he’s essentially running county government, with the help of the elected county board members, none of whom have yet brought up at a county board meeting the obvious problems with having the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar organization incapacitated and essentially on a leave of absence of uncertain duration.

According to this story by the Daily Southtown’s Jonathan Lipman, none of the county board members have brought it up “out of fear it’ll seem disrespectful to Stroger.”

Well fuck that. It’s way past time to throw respect out the door. If Stroger will be unable to serve, then Cook County taxpayers have a right to know. Sure, bubba. Just like we have a right to expect fiduciary responsibility on the part of those elected to run county government. That expectation and $2 will get the Indignant Citizen on the el.

Meanwhile Chicago’s news reporters should be ashamed of their performance on the Stroger matter. They can dig up the histories of jurors deciding the fate of the crooked and now convicted former Illinois Governor George Ryan, but they can’t find any sources or records to provide essential information on the condition of a man who may have fraudulently won re-election. They have no trouble breathlessly reporting that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, has had a tulip named after her , but they can’t grasp the fact that the man elected to head Cook County government may never walk or speak a coherent sentence again.

The Chicago news media have totally failed in their responsibility as watchdogs in this instance.

Death Rattle for the Good Guys

It was around 11 p.m. on Election Night, and Channel 7’s Alan Krashesky was interviewing Cook County Board Presidential candidate Forrest Claypool at Claypool’s campaign headquarters. Claypool spoke for just a moment, but his tone said everything that needed to be said about his chances at that hour. And if there was any room for doubt, it was erased when Krashesky asked Claypool what he thought of the numbers coming in.

They were encouraged, Claypool said. But you could tell they really weren’t. It was still early, he said. But actually it was quite late. They probably wouldn’t know the outcome until morning, Claypool predicted. Wishful thinking. By then the deal was done. John Stroger has retained his icy death grip on the Cook County Board.

As of midnight, only 39% of the precincts in Cook County had reported results. New electronic voting systems throughout the county and in the City of Chicago had had a rough day of it. There were reports of malfunctions, of voters being turned away, and of others leaving frustrated after long waits and erroneous information offered by incompetent election judges. Results were trickling in. The bad news for Claypool, who was leading 53% to 47% at the time, was that two-thirds of the suburban Cook County precincts’ votes had already been counted while fewer than half of the votes in Stroger’s stronghold—Chicago’s South and West sides, and the south suburban towns—had been counted. That meant that most of the rest of the votes would go to Stroger, and he would likely close the gap by morning.

What does that mean for Cook County? No one is sure, because no one other than Stroger’s family and close political operatives has been allowed to see him since he suffered a stroke last week and was wheeled into the hospital. Information on his condition has been closely regulated. His supporters and those delusional enough to believe them insist Stroger will be back humping county taxpayers … er, whoops … running the county in no time. Good as new. Doctors have been more guarded, insisting he will recover, but only to some baseline of greater disability than the overweight, diabetic, high-blood-pressure-suffering Stroger was at before.

In the background during a Stroger campaign headquarters stand-up by Channel 7 reporter Charles Thomas was a podium with a microphone sticking up like a bare and thorny winter rose bush on the prairie. The Indignant Citizen wondered if that would be a preview for upcoming County Board meetings—an empty microphone at Stroger’s Board President seat barking orders to the Patronage Army. Or maybe the Democratic committeemen will find a qualified replacement from among the ranks of the Chicago Department of Streets & Sanitation. Either way the Machine won. Again.

It has often been said that in its heyday the Machine could have run a dead man and gotten him elected. These, then, may be the new Glory Days for the Machine. An elderly stroke victim enters the hospital a week before the primary, no reliable information about his condition is released … & he wins, riding a wave of support generated from Democratic party regulars like Mayor Daley, Bill Clinton and Rod Blagojevich.

All three of them gave positively stomach-turning performances on Stroger’s behalf this last week, especially Daley. When asked at a press conference Thursday a very logical question about what would happen if Stroger couldn’t run in the general election if he won the primary, Daley reacted by accusing the reporter of “putting John Stroger in the ground.” Daley and everyone else then message-shifted into “Stroger’s Not Dead” mode and claimed the only Right thing to do for a man who had done so much for the county was to support him in the primary.

In the end, Stroger’s stroke gave his listless soldiers a rallying point. Claypool had been coming on strong, beating Stroger with his waste and corruption and mismanagement. What was beginning to sound like a death rattle for the Machine instead wound up choking off Claypool’s momentum.

By the time the sun sets on Wednesday, it’s likely John Stroger’s name will have more votes next to it. What will it mean? Nothing good for county taxpayers, that’s for sure. Either we get four more years of Stroger’s hacks, or the hacks get to choose a hack of their own after slicing up the county payroll and coffers in a series of back-room dealings to get everyone On Board behind a Stroger stand-in.

May as well bend over now, folks, here it comes again.

Forrest Claypool’s ‘Stroger Dilemma’

“Of course it’s not true! But let’s make the bastard deny it!”

— Hunter S. Thompson quoting Lyndon Johnson during a 1948 U.S. Senate campaign in Thompson’s Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.

Somewhere, the late Richard J. Daley is looking up—or down, depending on how things worked out for him—at Cook County Board President John Stroger and shaking his bald head in admiration. “There goes a real down and dirty SOB,” Daley is saying. “That man knows how to Get It On.”

Coming from Daley, the inventor of the Machine, that is high praise. If you’re not from Chicago, all you need to know about John Stroger is that he is the modern-day Daley, the boss of the Cook County Democratic Machine. Stroger commands an army of patronage workers amassed over the 12 years he has presided over the county board. His work history, according to his biography on the Cook County administration website, reads as follows: Cook County Commissioner, Attorney, Chicago Park District, Special Attorney to the General Attorney of the Chicago Park District.

As near as can be determined from that information, Stroger has ventured out of Cook County only once for an extended period in his 76 years on Earth: when he left town to earn a Bachelor’s degree at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He got his law degree from DePaul and since then has been a “public servant” in one form or another.

Stroger also happens to be black. Which would not be important except for two reasons: He is often cited as being a role model for young blacks and he has a tendency to remind people that he is black when it becomes politically necessary. Recently he has played the race card with abandon when one or another of the white county board members has challenged his bloated budgets, called attention to the astonishingly blatant nepotism and ineptitude he has brought to Cook County’s employment practices, or revealed yet another in the seemingly infinite layers of corruption poisoning the county’s public services.

It just so happens one of those white county commissioners, Forrest Claypool, is running against Stroger in the Democratic primary for county board president. Claypool has styled himself as a “reform candidate,” which these days just means he has not yet managed to use the County as his own personal employment agency and ATM—at least not to anyone’s knowledge.

Any Cook County resident (read: taxpayer) with half the average number of functioning brain cells would pull a Democratic ballot on Primary Day just to vote for Claypool. Stroger has run a down and dirty campaign, which is to be expected. In TV ads he has accused Claypool of everything except hating little old ladies, child molestation and kicking puppies. In one TV ad, Stroger claims Claypool has voted against funding breast cancer screenings, against a prescription drug program for seniors, against funding jail guards. Which is all true, technically, because Claypool voted against Stroger’s ridiculously oversized 2006 budget proposal. But in voting against it Claypool was taking a stand against waste and corruption. Stroger of course knows this but has no shame. In an editorial on March 14, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Stroger’s ad campaign is a series of lies. Not misinterpretations, not fudging – outright, bald-faced lies. He was playing Lyndon Johnson’s game—make Claypool deny he’d done those things. “If Claypool played this loopy game,” according to the Tribune, "he would say that Stroger, by supporting the 2006 budget, voted for continued abuse of children at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center.”

And maybe Claypool had an ad ready to go that said exactly that. Except that on the day the Tribune’s editorial ran, eight days before the primary, Stroger was taken to the hospital where doctors said he suffered a stroke.

The local TV media played the story for all the gravitas they could wring out of it, airing breathless live reports from serious-sounding reporters standing outside the hospital—not, by the way, the county’s brand new hospital with Stroger’s name on it, but a private hospital nearby. “His medical records are there,” as the news credulously quoted a county spokesperson. At any rate, there was much talk of Stroger’s condition, which no one really knew, and whether he would stay in the race. No one questioned the timing of Stroger’s trip to the hospital—a week before the primary—and no one mentioned the backdrop: Stroger’s flagging poll numbers in the face of Claypool’s persistent flogging.

If news watchers felt confused during the day by the conflicting reports on Stroger’s health coming from the county mouthpieces, and from Stroger’s own staff, Claypool’s campaign had to be suffering from whiplash. Early in the news cycle, Stroger had merely gone to see his doctor because he felt tired. Then it was fatigue. Then he had been taken to a hospital. It took until the end of the day, when Rush Presbyterian doctors finally spoke to the media, before anyone mentioned the word “stroke.”

By then Claypool’s campaign had scrambled to yank its own negative ads—such as they were—off the air. Stroger was doing enough race-baiting on his own, it would have been extremely bad form for a white challenger to have TV ads running that labeled an elderly black politician and recent stroke victim “sleazy” and a fraud. Accurate, but definitely in bad form.

Stroger is as corrupt as they come. A relative of his handles communications for the Cook County Forest Preserve District, perhaps the most inept and bumbling bureaucracy ever created since the dawn of time. To head the county’s troubled Provident Hospital, Stroger hired John Fairman, a man who has left a trail of mismanagement allegations and financial behavior bordering on, but apparently never crossing over into, criminal at nearly every executive position he’s ever held.

The list goes on and on. And we should be talking about it at length. Claypool could have run a head-turning campaign based simply on the premise that he’s Not Stroger. But he didn’t. And now it may be too late.

Stroger no doubt will stay in the hospital until at least the day of the election. Why not? He has effectively short-circuited Claypool’s campaign, which had been gaining momentum. Every major newspaper in Cook County had endorsed Claypool. Only old ward heelers and party hacks like Carol Moseley-Braun and Bill Clinton had thrown their support behind the tired old Stroger. Bill Clinton? Voters might rightly ask what the fuck Bill Clinton knows about Cook County politics. The answer is it doesn’t matter. He knows enough to know Stroger helped turn out the black vote for Bill in 1992 and 1996. It’s payback time.

As for Moseley-Braun, she too was probably reminded that Stroger had once backed her, even if he hadn’t (he backed her challenger in 1992). You see Stroger’s habit of bringing up race whenever he’s challenged on something extends to veiled exhortations for African-Americans to support their own at the polls. But, as with so many things Stroger says, his actions loudly contradict him. Aside from the Moseley-Braun snub, Stroger supported Richard M. Daley over the late Harold Washington in the 1983 mayoral primary (Washington won); in 1989 he backed Daley again over black candidate Tim Evans in a special mayoral election and in 1991 Stroger again snubbed the African-American candidate to back Daley. A more exhaustive list of Stroger’s “support” for fellow black candidates can be found on Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s blog .

When the TVs showed the grainy footage of Stroger being taken out of the ambulance, wrapped in blankets from head to toe, some in Claypool’s campaign probably thought “This is it. Ding dong, the witch is dead.” They’d have been crazy not to. Their candidate’s deficit in the polls had shrunk to 10 points, and it may have been dead even including the margin of error. The machine was grinding to a halt just as the campaign was entering the stretch run.

But now … ah, now. Now it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. If Claypool doesn’t ease up he could face a backlash not only from the black community but from senior citizens, stroke victims and anyone who’s ever felt disrespected by younguns. If he eases up he could lose the momentum he’s gained in recent days and wind up handing Stroger the primary win on a plate. Or maybe a hospital food tray.

Stroger will probably live. The question is if he does, can Cook County live with him for another four years?

There’s no Substitute for Horsepower

The Indignant Citizen recently spent some time at the Chicago Auto Show, where he managed to prove that not all of the useless knowledge banging around in his skull is worthless. Some of it was worth the cost of a T-shirt, or about $12. The Indignant Citizen gathered with a hundred or so slobbering fools around the Dodge Challenger concept car . The standard second-rate blonde model in tight black pants went through her presentation, ending with a trivia question: The manual transmission shifter in the original Challenger was called a Pistol-Grip. What was the automatic transmission shifter called?

Thanks to a youth spent driving a muscle car in a town of even more muscular cars, the Indignant Citizen knew the answer was the “SlapStik.”

Of course, if someone gave the Indignant Citizen the $12 instead of the T-shirt, it would have bought about six gallons of super unleaded gas for the 1972 Dodge Challenger Rallye the Indignant Citizen’s hometown best friend drove through high school. Those six gallons would get that particular car, with its rebuilt 340-cubic-inch engine, between 54 and 60 miles down the road.

Things might not be much different if Dodge decides to build the Challenger concept as a new model. Most likely Dodge will stuff its 345-horsepower, 5.7-liter Hemi engine into the Challenger. That engine’s fuel economy statistics are “not available” in the pickup truck section of Dodge’s website, but in the SUV Durango it’s listed as 19 miles per gallon on the highway, 14 in the city. The Indignant Citizen’s best friend’s 1972 Challenger got about 12 miles per gallon on the highway and something like 7 or 9 miles per gallon in the “city.”

The Challenger concept was voted best concept car at the Chicago Auto Show, and no doubt if it’s built there will be a riot outside Dodge dealerships the day they arrive, gas mileage be damned. Because given a choice, there are still many, many people who will choose horsepower. Who wants a hybrid Honda Civic that gets 50 miles per gallon but can’t get out of its own way when you can own 350 cubic inches of burbling, growling energy that will produce a roar loud enough to suck the doors off a Kia and frighten small children from a quarter-mile away?

On the macadam there is no substitute for horsepower; massive, pavement-rippling amounts of it. This is America, where going fast and hard and loud is not only acceptable, it is encouraged. It is the Law.

And for now it is still possible. The price of gasoline has not broken through the invisible point at which your average speed freak will drool over the Ram Super Duty, study the gas mileage, and amble dejectedly over to the Hyundai dealership. Judging by the ratio of pickup trucks, SUVs and muscle cars at the auto show to more fuel-efficient models, we are still living in a time when, for most people, the EPA fuel economy numbers on the sticker are not even a tertiary consideration.

Chevy, by the way, may bring back the Camaro for 2009. A concept model was on display at the show. Additionally, Ford displayed a Shelby GT-500. Which means that in the not-too-distant future, car consumers will be able to choose from the Mustang, the Camaro and the Challenger. Hot damn, it’s like the 70s again! And what about the 70s? About the middle of the decade, there was a Middle East oil embargo, gas shortages and skyrocketing prices.

Thirty years later, events are coming full circle. Iran is threatening to cut its oil exports in response to international pressure to halt a uranium enrichment program. Iraq’s oil program continues to struggle to regain its footing. Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez doesn’t much like the U.S. Attacks on oil workers in Nigeria sent gas prices soaring in Monday trading.

Maybe our way of life isn’t negotiable after all, even if someday we desire negotiation. It’s hard to deal when there’s no one willing to sit across the table.

Location Disclosed

Congratulations to Vice President Dick Cheney, the first and probably only winner of the Indignant Citizen’s Aaron Burr Award for Patriotic Marksmanship.

The Veep on Saturday accidentally shot a 78-year-old companion in the face while hunting quail in Texas . This, of course, being the Bush White House, Cheney didn’t even manage to kill the guy; he just injured the old man by pumping him with a few birdshot pellets. He visited the fellow in the hospital and then returned to Washington.

Way to go, Dick.

The Olympic ‘Me’ Awards

It’s that time again, Olympics time , time for the U.S. to pump up its psyche and measure its national virility in medal counts plastered on the front pages of lesser newspapers across the country.

The Indignant Citizen did not see the Chicago Sun-Times this morning, but the Tribune thankfully relegated the first day’s medal count to the front page of the four-page Olympic wrap around the regular sports section. The paper couldn’t resist throwing a three-column wide, 12-inch tall photo of a jubilant Chad Hedrick, a 28-year-old speed skater, in the middle of the front page, under the headline “First Gold.”

Let the celebratory dick swinging begin.

Actually, the Indignant Citizen has nothing against the national pride in Olympic achievement. The IC finds a lot to appreciate in the performances of most of the Olympians, with a couple of exceptions he has identified in the early going.

For starters, who the fuck is Shani Davis ? The Indignant Citizen opened his Olympic wrap this morning and read about this punk-ass bitch Chicago native who sold out his speed skating teammates by refusing to participate in the inaugural “team pursuit,” which according to the Tribune story is a two-day event. Davis, who has had some well-publicized differences with U.S. speed skating officials, has chosen the “me” over the “we,” severely limiting teammate Hedrick’s chances to win five gold medals this Olympics and more disturbingly effectively ruining teammate K.C. Boutiette’s chances of winning his first ever medal in what will be his final Olympic games.

Clearly, Davis is talented, but just as clearly he’s a self-centered asshole in this for himself. Being a self-centered asshole is not in the Olympic spirit. He’s just looking to get his gold and get paid, so fuck him. The best medicine for this prick would be to bite it on a corner (without injuring himself, of course) and leave the Olympics with no medal. Then maybe he can spend the next four years reflecting on his abandonment of his teammates.

Originally The Indignant Citizen planned to carp about how figure skater Michelle Kwan took a spot on the figure skating team even though she was injured and did not compete in the U.S. championships. Kwan’s injury carried over to Torino and she failed to land four of her first five triple jump attempts in practice on Saturday.

In sharp contrast to Davis, though, Kwan did what was best for the team: She withdrew from competition and left Torino on Sunday. Taking her place will be 17-year-old Emily Hughes, the younger sister of 2002 gold medal figure skater Sarah Hughes. Kwan bowed out even though it means she will probably never win the gold medal she sought for so long. A move like that takes class and guts. The Indignant Citizen tips his White Sox World Series Champions cap to Michelle Kwan.

Choices

It seems clear, moreso every day, that the world is hurtling toward an abyss. We live in a time of almost unprecedented fear and violence, yet most people seem not to care. They are more interested in picking up the latest issue of Vanity Fair to see pictures of nude Hollywood stars, or discussing why Britney was driving with her baby on her lap, or marveling at how Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a basketball game.

Meanwhile, as we breathe today, Muslims are rioting across Europe, the Middle East and Asia because newspapers in Denmark, France and elsewhere have published cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad .

Our own government, founded on the principle of freedom from tyranny, maintains it can spy on us at will without a court order, detain us secretly and indefinitely, and make laws based on the religious beliefs of the majority, all without checks or balances from the legislative or judicial branches.

We are fighting a vague, neverending war against terrorism, a war with no boundaries, no timeline, no victories—only casualties. To pay for it, we are issuing debt that will burden future generations and that threatens the financial stability of the government and the nation.

America is consuming its way to poverty, using ever more land and more energy in a quest to give each person exactly the life he or she desires, the greater good be damned. U.S. citizens live in a time of choice unequaled in human history. We can choose where to live, what to drive, how we get our news, who to associate with and who to ignore, and when to do any of it.

And given this incredible gift of choice, we have fucked up beyond the wildest nightmares of those who have fought to guarantee our right to choose. Look at us: We have chosen a sprawling disconnected suburban growth model that relies on inefficient personal transportation to function over compact, integrated, walkable communities linked by mass transit.

We have chosen to define the American Dream in terms of property and possessions instead of in terms of an ideal where everyone has an equal chance to succeed, regardless of background.

At almost every opportunity we have chosen violence over diplomacy; war over peace.

We have chosen the politics of division rather than inclusion.

We have chosen infotainment over news.

We have chosen a vague “essential truth” over the actual truth.

We’ve chosen the “me” over the “we”.

For as much as we brag about our freedom to choose, we’ve not done a good job showing we’re responsible enough to handle it.

The bitch about being able to choose, and constantly choosing poorly, is that eventually natural law will catch up, and deal the appropriate punishment. That time is coming, although we probably won’t know it until it’s here, since we’ll be too busy with ourselves and our silly lives to notice.

If we choose to listen, there are voices to guide us toward better choices. Voices urging peace and reason. They are hard to hear above the din of our clattering world, but they are worth listening for.

The Indignant Citizen will, in the coming days, examine some of our choices. He will pass judgment on them. He will suggest alternatives. People can choose to listen … or not.