The Indignant Citizen

Blagojevicted

2010-08-18T08:33:00.004-05:00

What you call someone who's been found guilty by a jury of the least serious of a number of charges against them and had the most serious charges end in mistrial after one juror refuses to convict. Blagojevicts and their attorneys often mistakenly and vociferously equate "hung jury" or "mistrial" with "not guilty." In general the more tenuous the jury poll to acquit, for example 11-1 guilty, the louder the Blagojevict and his attorney(s) scream that he was found innocent.

I would like to claim credit for coming up with this term, but a Google search revealed one earlier instance of its usage, in a comment on Huffington Post two years ago.

Iron(y) deficiency

2010-04-08T16:29:00.008-05:00

From the Tribune's sports page Thursday afternoon. I'd like to think the headline under the photo of Tiger Woods was intentional, but probably not. At the N.Y. Post, it would have been, but not at the Trib. Tip o' the cap to "Scoop" Davis.

One more thing on CTA parking

2010-03-25T12:10:00.004-05:00

This is the sign that greets customers entering the Western Ave. lot on the Orange Line. I guess to the CTA, "All Day" means 12 hours.

CTA Parking – A Missed Opportunity for Change

2010-03-24T17:03:00.007-05:00

Today I have been engaged in a fruitless battle to promote logic and transparency in a tiny corner of the universe: Chicago Transit Authority parking lots.

To set the stage, since 2004 I've used park-and-ride lots along the Orange Line as part of my daily commute. It used to be you'd pull into a numbered space and slip your $2, folded neatly, into the corresponding numbered slot in the metal pay boxes located in each lot. In 2009, the fee went up to $4. The parking rates were listed on signs in the lots as being $2 or (later) $4 "Per Day."

One could park in a CTA park-and-ride lot along the Orange Line in the morning, ride the train into downtown, work all day, go to a sporting event or a concert or a movie at night, and return to one's car at 10:30, 11, or later, to find the car still in the lot and ticketless. I can't speak to the odd broken window, because I don't leave anything that even appears to have value in sight in my car. Hence I have never been broken into. Someone did mess with the valve stems in my car once, though, but I digress.

Then in late 2009, the CTA awarded the parking lot management contract to Central Parking Services. CPS eventually installed new electronic pay boxes, making the old metal ones obsolete.

A few weeks ago, shortly after the new electronic pay boxes were installed, new signs were installed above the electronic pay boxes at the Western station indicating the $4 parking rate was for 12 hours. This seemed like a pretty big change, since as I mentioned the old signs indicated the fee was "per day," which to me means 24 hours. A CPS employee checking the boxes one morning said not to worry, that CPS checked the lots after the morning rush hour and later in the afternoon. No one checked them at night.

Then on March 17, as we had many times before, my wife and I parked in the lot at 7:30 a.m., went to work, did an after-work thing and returned to the lot at about 8:20 p.m. Only this time someone named "Fabian" had carefully placed a computer-printed $49 ticket in an envelope under the driver's side windshield wiper. We had overstayed our 12-hour limit, according to the ticket.

I was fuming. I thought the CTA had just doubled the parking rate again after doubling it in 2009 from $2 to $4. I began poking around the Internet and found this story about the new pay boxes, which makes reference to the $4 "per day" rate. I looked around the CTA web site, but somehow missed this item from 2008, which clearly mentions the 12-hour limit at Orange Line and other lots, and this page, which details parking rates. Had I found either, it would have come as a shock, given that I'd never received a ticket for exceeding a 12-hour time limit on parking.

I fired off an angry email to the CTA Tattler's Kevin O'Neil. He asked the CTA about it and was told that Orange Line lots always had 12-hour time limits, and thus there had been no change in rates or policy. Which is technically true, so I really don't have much on which to hang my hat of indignation.

Except for this: As I mentioned, up until a few weeks ago none of the parking signs that I had seen in the CTA Orange Line lots included a reference to a 12-hour limit. They all read "Per Day." Even the CTA's own 2009 announcement of the change in the parking lot servicing vendors makes reference to the $4 figure, but without including a time frame:

"Parking is available for approximately 6,600 cars at facilities adjacent to 17 CTA rail stations throughout the CTA system. Rates are $5 at Rosemont and Forest Park and $4 at all other locations."

Not "$4 per 12 hours," not even "$4 per day." It's as if it was intentionally left vague, but more likely whomever wrote it didn't feel the need to explain further. The rates are what they are, everyone must already know the time frames, or have access to the Internet to look them up.

So I'm going to have to eat it on the 12-hour thing, because even though it was not well-publicized in the lots, to put it mildly (a more jaded person might say "even though the CTA misled people"), there is in fact documentation on the Internet in which the CTA notes the 12-hour limit. So I'm wrong.

But here are a couple of questions I've been thinking about as I have pondered my wrongness:

1. Where is the logic in the 12-hour time limit? A CTA spokesperson told the CTA Tattler's Kevin O'Neil that the CTA wants to discourage overnight parking by airport users, so as to make more spaces available to morning commuters. OK, fine. Good intent. But what difference does a 12-hour time limit make? Just make the cutoff midnight and ticket everyone in the lot at 12:01 a.m. who hasn't yet paid for that day. Problem solved.

2. Once the CTA applies No. 1, it could easily throw out the antiquated notion of only allowing customers to purchase time in 12-hour blocks. This supposes that the only people using mass transit work 9-to-5 jobs downtown and want to get home for dinner. And maybe that was true, but not for at least the last decade or so. Today's mass transit users likely to want to stay downtown after work and enjoy its amenities, or just as likely they may be unable to fit their commute and workday into a 12-hour window. A 12-hour time limit on parking only serves to drive them into their cars and onto the roads.

If we're following the hard midnight cutoff rule, as long as there is more time between when I park and midnight than time I want to buy, I should be able to buy that time. Obviously the technology exists to make that happen. Chicago Parking Meters LLC, the company that won the right to lease the City of Chicago's street parking system, just got through installing machines that allow people to buy time in 15-minute increments. I suspect these new CPS machines in the CTA lots could be programmed to dole out time by the hour. They've somehow figured it out at the Cumberland lot on the Blue Line.

Think, people. Just a little bit. Is there any room left for common sense and logic?

I'm not under any illusion that writing about this will accomplish anything. I don't have that kind of reach or influence. I'm sure I've worn out my welcome with Kevin O'Neil. I sent a note to the Tribune's transportation writer, Jon Hilkevitch, earlier this afternoon hoping he'd write about this parking thing in his "Getting Around" column, but I repeated some of the same misinformation in that note that I sent to O'Neil. I've come across as exactly the kind of ill-informed hothead I used to hate when I was a reporter, and I've fucked myself into irrelevance on this issue in the process.

And so the CTA will continue to charge $4 for 12 hours of parking, thus requiring commuters to plug the meter again after 12 hours. That will force at least this proponent of public transportation into his car on any day he has after-work plans. It's just so stupid and short-sighted. And for what? So that a few people won't park overnight in CTA lots? Jesus Christ, the lots along the Orange Line are more than half-empty these days as it is. Besides, prohibiting people from parking overnight is an easy enforcement issue; it doesn't have to be a rate issue.

But nothing will change. Institutional myopia.

If the CTA doesn't learn anything, though, at least I have. Instead of firing off angry and indignant emails looking to right what to me are obvious wrongs, and making incorrect statements and assertions in the process, I'm going to back off, calm down and come correct. The only real way to fight the avalanche of injustice and stupidity we encounter every day is with facts and reason. Passion is essential, but it must be rooted in truth.

It is from this point that I march forward.

The Indignant Citizen

Secret Senate, Part Deux

2010-03-08T11:42:00.006-06:00

"America's politics remain corrupt, populated by nonentities whose main concern once elected is to stay elected...."
- Simon Heffer, writing in the London Telegraph

In this edition, I extend an olive branch to Senator Cullerton, and ask a few more pointed questions.

Dear Senator Cullerton,

It's been more than two weeks since I wrote you about the closed-to-the-public caucus meeting to discuss state and national budgeting issues. I had also written to my state senator, Ed Maloney, asking whether he supported your reasoning behind closing the caucus meeting. I never heard back from either of you.

Admittedly, I didn't really expect to. You're both busy with state business … or maybe in your case with your lobbying business. If I were a cynic, I'd say your failure to respond is tied to the fact that neither you nor Sen. Maloney is up for election this year. In the political calculation it seems constituents are only worth paying attention to when they can offer something to a politician. For those of us constituents without money or connections, that "something" is a vote, and in an off-election year a vote ain't worth much. Certainly not the time to craft a response to a question, much less a complaint.

What am I saying … "if" I were a cynic. I AM a cynic! I used to be just a practiced skeptic. Lately, though, I've fallen off the wall and landed with a thud among the cynics. They are My People. Perhaps that came through in my earlier note to you, and probably this one, too. So maybe we've gotten off on the wrong foot, here.

After all, as someone who doesn't live in your district and doesn't contribute to your political campaign, what right have I to address you and expect a response? None. Sen. Maloney is another matter. I do expect a response from him, and I'm sending him a separate note telling him so. But you, Sen. Cullerton, you've got no reason to reply to one of what I assume had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of emails and letters and phone calls criticizing your decision to call the Illinois State Senate together in a closed session under the guise of calling it a "caucus meeting." No doubt there was a good amount of criticism leveled at your defense of the meeting, as well.

Although frankly I don't understand why you didn't have your staff draft a generic letter reiterating your defense of the meeting and at the same time acknowledging the public outrage and vowing never to do it again. Then I figured you probably plan to do it again, so why bother lying? In political terms, that's pretty stark honesty and in a way I oddly respect it; in the same way that some people come to understand that happiness is merely the remission of pain.

Perhaps that's some ground upon which we can forge a new relationship.

Wow, OK, that feels better. I feel less like a demanding ogre and hopefully you don't feel like I'm unfairly attacking you this time. So with the figurative goodwill hug and mutual back patting out of the way, let me ask you: What did you and your senate colleagues learn from that meeting? In corporate parlance, what was the take-away? And how will whatever you learned affect how you approach the upcoming budget negotiations?

Please don't feel like you have to respond to me directly; lord knows you don't have the time for that. But an op-ed in local newspapers would do, or a position paper distributed via your web site. After I'm just a person, like many others, trying to understand the process, and concerned, as I'm sure you are, about a $13 billion deficit in a $53 billion budget.

Sincerely,

The Indignant Citizen

The Secret Senate

2010-02-17T13:22:00.004-06:00

In response to this story today in the Tribune - Illinois Senate holds private meeting at statehouse - I drafted this letter to Senate President John Cullerton:

Dear Senator Cullerton,

I read with interest in today's Chicago Tribune news of the Illinois Senate's closed-to-the-media (and by extension the public) caucus meeting to discuss state and national budgeting issues. In particular I noted this quote, attributed to you:

"You're missing the whole point," Cullerton said.

"This is meant to be one where just the senators are there to get information, but where they can also feel they can ask questions and ...have a free exchange of ideas without having to be worried about what the press might report."

With all due respect, sir, it's you who is missing the point; you and any of your senate colleagues who support a closed-door meeting to discuss issues clearly of interest to the public. I'm not sure which made me more angry: the meeting itself or your lazy, stupid and contemptuous justification for it. Ideas are free to be exchanged in any setting, regardless of who's nearby and whether or not they're carrying notepads and recorders. The only thing that prevents the free exchange of ideas in any setting is a lack of courage. The idea that elected officials need to be sheltered from the press to speak freely is laughable. Or maybe just cowardly.

You're not there to sound good; you're there to run the government ... in the open, not in secret. When government operates in secret, the seeds of distrust are sown. It should be evident by now that the long tradition of secrecy in Illinois government hasn't worked, at least not fiscally, and certainly not for the majority of us who aren't politically connected. It's time to try openness for a change. Rest assured I will work with whomever I need to - in the 6th District, the 18th District or anywhere else - to ensure you and any other senator who believes in the justification for this closed-door meeting today are voted out of office. You don't represent me, and for that I am thankful. (I will be contacting Sen. Maloney and asking whether he favored this meeting today and supported your feeble justification.) But as the Senate President, you are responsible to constituents outside your district. In this act today you were irresponsible.

Sincerely...

The Indignant Citizen

The 80-20 rule of Public Service

2010-01-05T21:53:00.002-06:00

The Tribune today published a story about a conviction in the case of a plumbing inspector accused of taking bribes to look the other way at a condo construction site. I posted a comment about the story: "This is dog-bites-man stuff. Find me the city inspector that's NOT on the take, and write a feature story about that person. If he or she exists."

Later, "Anon" posted a comment about the same story that partly responded to my comment. "Indignant, there are some great inspectors and honest people at City Hall. And then there's the slime. But don't paint everyone with such a broad brush."

True enough, Anon, and I apologize for using my broad brush. Look, I know 80 percent of the people in the world are either honest and caring or at least benign enough to not be overtly harmful. But the sheer greed, arrogance, stupidity and indifference of the other 20 percent is blinding sometimes.

The bald truth is that corruption is allowed to fester and infect an organization because it's accepted at the top, either openly (Cook County, the State of Illinois) or tacitly (the city of Chicago). From where I sit, at the table with the other everymen forced to watch the accelerating decay of the institutions through which we govern and serve, it's a sickening thing to read about another in a long line of corrupt officials more concerned with lining their own pockets than serving the public. And it's easy to forget the 20 part of the "80-20 rule."

So to all those public servants actually serving the public, and not expecting anything but gratitude and a government paycheck in return, thank you. To the Mario Olivellas of the world, go fuck yourselves.

The Indignant Citizen

Flashback

2009-08-18T12:35:00.004-05:00

Admittedly, it was an easy call. But still, it feels good to be right. Specifically, this part:

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.

The Indignant Citizen

John John Mackey Takes You Inside Healthcare Reform

2009-08-17T14:22:00.003-05:00

And I thought I was indignant.

The healthcare reform debate has brought out two distinct groups of Nazi finger-pointers: on the right are those who paint President Obama as Hitler and his healthcare plan as the second coming of the Third Reich, while on the left are those who think the anti-reformers disrupting town hall meetings are using Nazi tactics. It's out of control.

The Nazis were worse than motherfuckers. They plotted to take over the world and exterminate an entire race of people in the process, and they got a good way toward those goals before getting bitch-slapped so hard the German people have been stigmatized for two generations. Well Germany is back, and fortunately the Nazis did not come with it. So—and I know this is a lot to ask in today's America, but—let's leave off the Nazi name-calling (unless you really are one) and engage in real debate.

But where to start? An issue as big and complex as this one tends to trigger the worst of our culture's verbal diarrhea. It's my opinion that yes, we should find a way to make sure everyone has access to health insurance at a reasonable cost. The government should have a role in that. But I don't necessarily think a giant, single-payer system is the best option right now. It could be, in the future, but not now.

One set of talking points that has received a lot of attention lately is the op-ed piece Whole Foods Chief Executive John Mackey wrote for The Wall Street Journal last week. Mackey drew a lot of criticism not just for his pro-business, anti-reform-as-proposed stance as for infuriating his biggest customer base: wealthy liberals. Oops.

But in a sense Mackey has been the recipient of the same kind of over-the-top antagonism that has been directed at Obama and Democrats. I don't agree with everything Mackey wrote, but at least it's a reasonable entry in the debate about health care reform. Let's take it point-by-point:

"While clearly we need health care reform…."
That's a good start.

"… the last thing we need is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars in new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system."
Actually the last thing we need is inflamed and hyperbolic rhetoric that obscures the issues and stokes people's unrealistic fears. But it's a fair point that you don't support a government-run health care system. I don't necessarily agree for the long-term, but as I said for right now a single-payer, government-run system is not feasible.

"Remove the obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts."
Spoken like a man who's never had to worry about health insurance ever in his life. "High-deductible health insurance plans" coupled with the phrase "health savings accounts" essentially means poor people will still be forced to fork over thousands of dollars they can't afford for medical care. Such a plan would likely lead participants to put off exactly the kind of preventive medical care we're talking about and they'd wind up in the hospital anyway. Mackey even tacitly acknowledges this when he writes, "This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully."

Yes, participants in a Mackey plan would be able to set up health savings accounts funded with pre-tax money, but when you're making minimum wage, it doesn't really matter whether the dollars are pre-tax or post-tax; you can't afford it anyway.

"Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits."
Agreed.

"Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines."
Agreed.

"Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year."
Vague, but I agree.

"Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost."
Agreed.

"Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility."
You mean like, encourage seniors to meet with their doctors periodically to discuss care as they age, and what care seniors would like to receive as they approach the end of their lives? Oh, wait, that's a "death panel." Now see, I've just engaged in exactly the type of sarcastic, nonproductive rhetoric about which I've been complaining. On a serious note, wouldn't it be great if health care reform obviated the need for Medicare and Medicaid altogether? The processes could be reformed—and the wasteful, old and inefficient parts eliminated—as it was absorbed into a new entity that covered everyone.

"Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program."
Naturally, this would make sense to someone making enough that he's looking to reduce his tax burden. Every little bit helps, I suppose, but I hope Mackey isn't proposing this as the funding solution.

See what just happened? John and I just engaged in a little exchange of viewpoints there. I agree with some of his proposals, but not all of them. I'm certainly not willing to dismiss his entire piece simply because he offended me with the first point he made.

There's room for compromise, people, and debate, without resorting to blatant distortions and lies. This is a serious issue and it should be debated by serious people with serious ideas. Unfortunately that eliminates 90% of the coverage and commentary in the mainstream media (read: Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann) and about half of what one reads on the Internet (Sarah Palin's Facebook page).

But serious people should be able to muddle through anyway.

The Indignant Citizen

Debt Watch

2009-08-14T09:38:00.003-05:00

A couple of seemingly unrelated stories in the local papers today are, in fact, related by one common thread: debt.

First up, the Chicago Tribune. The only thing worse than shareholders owning newspapers is the thought of banks owning newspapers.

And second, I can't say I'm surprised, but here's news of more trouble for Garrett Kelleher's Chicago Spire boondoggle. Bank of America is suing Kelleher's Shelbourne Development, claiming the developer defaulted on the terms of a loan B of A extended to him.

The Indignant Citizen

Jim Oh-fer-five

2008-11-05T15:49:00.007-06:00

Democrat Bill Foster defeated Republican dairy magnate Jim Oberweis for the second time in the 14th Congressional District Tuesday night. That's Dennis Hastert's old seat. Foster won a special election to replace Dennis Hastert in March, and this time around Foster's margin of victory was even bigger than it was in the spring. Oberweis, for those of you who don't know, is the hypocritical anti-illegal immigration crusader who has now lost five elections: for U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004, for governor in 2005 and now twice for Congress this year in Hastert's district.

Again I say it's time to hang it up, Jim.

The Indignant Citizen

President Barack Obama

2008-11-05T01:12:00.003-06:00

How fucking cool is it write that? Turns out I needn't have worried. Truthfully I was apprehensive about the American public's capacity to focus on the issues facing this country and ignore the noise. But score one for for my fellow citizens.

I'm exhausted, but over the next couple of days I'll try to put together some thoughts on what it was like to be in Grant Park tonight, with 125,000 other people, cheering for a candidate that maybe not everyone believed in at the beginning, but who we gradually infused with our hope for a better future. I'll tell you this, the call by CNN on the big screen TV that Obama had won came suddenly after a commercial break at 10 p.m. Central Time. The crowd where we were standing, near the Petrillo Bandshell, erupted in shouts and whistles and hugs, along with shouts of "O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma" and "Yes we did!" People were jumping up and down; groups of people bounced with their arms around one another, flashbulbs popped. It was as much a sense of relief as it was joy that swept across the crowd in Grant Park. Relief that Obama had won and relief that the result was known relatively early.

I'm filled with optimism tonight. The historical magnitude of what's occurred will take some time to sink in completely. But the emotion of it all hit everyone in Grant Park upside the head immediately. It's good to feel ... good about the president again.

The Indignant Citizen

A Long Day Turns to Night

2008-11-04T17:04:00.002-06:00

I know a lot of folks are feeling optimistic about an Obama victory tonight in the presidential election, but I can't shake this sense of foreboding.

Shortly after polling places opened there were reports of long lines, inept election officials, the Black Panthers patrolling one precinct in Philadelphia, wet ballots in Virginia and myriad other problems in swing states that either Barack Obama or John McCain must win to win the White House.

Here in Chicago the day dawned sunny and there was a giddiness in the air. The stage seemed set for an election night party, with warm temperatures, no rain and an entire lakefront park waiting to be filled with folks eager to be as near as possible to history—an Obama win. Or at least, that was the Hope. The reality could still turn out to be quite different.

If these reports of lines and faulty electronic voting machines and wiggy ballot handling persist, and some of these swing states that have looked for weeks as though they were leaning toward Obama start showing McCain tendencies instead, I think we'll see protests in Chicago and plenty of people hollering "disenfranchisement" and "fraud" and maybe even "revolution."

We should know not long after, say, 8 p.m. in Chicago whether voting irregularities in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia are serious enough to merit legal challenges. If so, this election may well be decided in the courts. If by, say, 10:30 p.m. in Chicago the electoral vote dominos haven't begun falling pretty clearly one way or the other, the night will likely end in an anticlimactic sense of frustration. What to do, then, with 200,000 or 500,000 or a million people with enough political conviction on one side of the ledger to wait for hours outside in November in downtown Chicago for a sense of resolution that never came? That's a scene that could get ugly in a hurry. Imagine July 3rd in Grant Park if 9:30 came and went with no fireworks, and no explanation. By 10:15 it'd be time to high-tail it out of the line of fire, bubba.

There is a chance that this election will be a landslide win for Obama. Personally, I hope so. A win by Obama would be a victory for intellectualism, for diplomacy and for racial advancement. It would be a repudiation of class warfare, demagoguery and this weird celebration of ignorance in which we've been engaged since the mid-1990s. If Obama ends up being half as good as I think he could be he'll still be twice as good as McCain at his best.

But there's a long night ahead before all that. My fear is that it will be a long night followed by many more long nights and days.

The Indignant Citizen

Spire Spike

2008-10-22T16:10:00.004-05:00

I hate to say "I told you so," but I told you so.

Even my economic predictions were remarkably prescient, although perhaps I hedged my bets a bit too much in terms of the the downturn's severity. But in fact, my worst prediction appears to have come true: Kelleher actually managed to build some of the Spire before having to stop. The accompanying photo, along with many other fine shots, can be found here on the Boca del Mar Chicago Spire page.

The Indignant Citizen

Live Blogging the Last Presidential Debate

2008-10-15T20:03:00.030-05:00

We had so much fun the last time, we're trying the live blogging again. Same rules apply, all times Central Daylight Time.

8:04 p.m. - Good start, John McCain remembered Barack Obama's name. But before that, this is two out of three debates that McCain has felt the need to give us a medical update of a prominent political figure. During the first debate, it was Teddy K., tonight it was Nancy Reagan.

8:06 p.m. - The debate comes on the evening of one of the worst days for the stock market since 1987. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 733 points, about 7.8%, the S&P 500 was down 9% and the Nasdaq was down 8.5%. Mostly this was due to bad economic numbers in terms of retail spending and the realization that consumers are cutting back. So now we open with a question about the two candidates' economic plans, and naturally the conversation comes around to tax policy. It's pretty straightforward: Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and McCain wants to cut their taxes.

8:13 p.m. - John McCain: He wants to cut everyone's taxes! Cut business taxes! Cut, cut, cut. Of course, that sounds good but the reality is you do have to pay for stuff eventually. Maybe Bob Schieffer is going to get at this with this next question about the deficit.

8:14 p.m. - Obama is talking about "pay as you go" spending. McCain has a look on his face that's a combination of a smirk, bowel discomfort and anger that he's got to sit next to this guy.

8:16 p.m. - McCain: "We have presided over the largest increase in spending since the Great Society." Um, dude, that's you you're talking about when you say "we."

8:18 p.m. - Good grief, the "overhead projector" line again. It's not an overhead projector. Is he really an idiot, or does he just play one on TV?

8:21 - McCain: "Senator Obama, I'm not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." It took him this long to come up with that? Try as he might, though, he'll never be able to run away from that photo of him hugging George Bush. And try as he might, he can't change the reality that he's voted with Bush 95% of the time.

8:27 p.m. - Schieffer asks about negative campaigning. McCain talks about Obama's spending and the John Lewis commnents. Obama says "one hundred percent" of McCain's ads are negative. McCain has completely misconstrued what Lewis was saying and I seriously doubt that all of McCain's ads are negative.

8:35 p.m. - McCain: Acorn is on the verge of perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in the history of the country? You mean bigger than the subprime mortgage fraud? (Addendum: OK, upon further review, he said voter fraud. But that begs the question: bigger than the voter disenfranchisement at the hands of Republican administrations in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004?)

8:36 p.m. - Why is John McCain smiling? Because he's got Barack Obama defending himself against Bill Ayers, Acorn, negative campaigning, etc. "The fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, John, I think says a lot about your campaign."

McCain: My campaign is about getting this economy back on track, creating jobs and not raising taxes like Senator Obama wants to do. Kind of a weak exit there. He's got some fight in him, but the rumble road runs out pretty quick when it comes to facts. The important thing here tonight seems to be to engage in a kind of "political terrorism" that the old Bill Ayers would be proud of: throw bombs at your opponent, run away and hope some damage is done in the process.

8:46 p.m. - Talking about energy now. McCain is clearly taking a chance tonight. Every answer includes an attack on Obama of some kind. This is an all-or-nothing strategy at this point. McCain's body language, his facial expressions, the tone of his answers all point to direct confrontation. His goal tonight is to tear down Obama at all costs. Seventy-five percent of his answers, to me, are about discrediting what Obama has said or proposed, with a 25% "and I'll do it differently and better" thrown in somewhere almost as an afterthought. Even on the energy issue, it's all about tearing down what Obama says about offshore drilling ("we have to look at it," as opposed to we can do it now) and free-trade agreements ... very little on what his position is, other than "we can do nuclear, we must drill now and I'm a free-trader."

Also, just an aside, conservation, anyone? Anyone?

8:55 p.m. - McCain: Senator Obama doesn't want to sit down and negotiate a free trade agreement with our best ally in the region and yet he wants to sit down across the table, without preconditions, with Hugo Chavez. It's clear he wants to restrict trade and raise taxes. Balls-to-the wall. It'll be interesting to see how McCain responds to this next question about health care. Obama is talking about the merits of his plan now.

8:58 p.m. - McCain's response: OK, he's starting with stuff he wants to do. About 20 seconds, maybe 30. Now it's on to attacking Obama's plan.

9 p.m. - Christ, enough with Joe the plumber.

9:02 p.m. - Obama responds, sort of, to McCain and then starts criticizing McCain's plan. Maybe it's time during this last half-hour to start ballin' with McCain.

9:05 p.m. - McCain: "Senator Government ... Senator Obama." Senator Government. That's funny.

9:06 p.m. - McCain says he never has had and never will have litmus tests for judges. That's not going to make the Roe opponents happy. "I will consider anyone and their consequences." Obama: I would not provide a litmus test, but I am someone who believes Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. I will look for those judges that have an outstanding judicial record, the intellect and a sense of what real-world people are going through.

9:16 p.m. - I'm still intrigued by McCain's tactics. He's even done some eye-rolling during Obama's responses. It still seems like a 70-30 ratio of attack Obama-promote his own policies. We could have saved a lot of time if McCain had just said at the outset: "Obama wants to spend more of your money, raise your taxes and control your health care. He pals around with ex-terrorists, which I don't care that much about but it speaks to his judgment and the fact that he's a dangerous man who we don't know much about. He doesn't understand how the world works and would be a foreign policy disaster. He's agaisnt all forms of alternative energy and drilling for more oil and wants you to ride mules to and from work." It would have taken about 60 seconds and then we could have spent the rest of the time talking about the issues.

9:23 p.m. - Vouchers. McCain supports them, and cites as the example the Washington, D.C. school system where apparently parents love them. Obama doesn't support them. Personally, I think the best remedies for education are improving schools so that there aren't such wide disparities between them, and encouraging parents to be more involved in their own childrens' education.

9:26 p.m. www.mydebates.org, to watch this debate and the previous debates.

9:28 p.m. - I think McCain just snort-laughed when he was mocking Obama's response on vouchers.

9:29 p.m. - Only Obama in his closing statement said simply and plainly, "I ask for your vote." McCain said we need "a new direction" and that he is that new direction. Unfortunately saying it often doesn't make it so.

9:31 p.m. - On pure raw politics, I'm tempted to give the debate to McCain. He attacked relentlessly, and backed up his promise to lay into Obama. But in the end Obama just comes across as more dignified, more composed, more diplomatic, more presidential. McCain dragged him through the mud, beat him repeatedly, and Obama smiled the whole time. Did Obama play it too cool? I don't think so. But McCain's only play was to lay it all on the table, to be exasperated, to be angry, to roll his eyes and sigh and constantly point out Obama's faults. It was his only move and he made it strongly.

In the end, though, I don't think that's going to change the momentum for him. Or rather against him. But as I've said my mind is made up. I like my presidents to act presidential, not like a crotchety old man.

The Indignant Citizen

Live blogging the town hall debate

2008-10-07T19:47:00.026-05:00

Tonight we are hunkered down on the couch with a plate of pasta watching this second of three presidential debates. Thoughts follow below. All times are Central Daylight Time.

8:02 p.m. - Looks like I missed my opportunity to submit my question online. For the record, here it was: Senator McCain. Last month, as the financial crisis was beginning in earnest, you gave a speech in which you said the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Without falling back on the assertion that you meant workers when you said "fundamentals," how would you describe the state of the economy now. I'm referring specifically to the fundamentals of the capital economy, not the workforce economy, since without capital workers do not get paid. How do you view the state of the capital markets and what if anything do you think needs to be done to shore them up? Please be specific and do not ply us with empty campaign rhetoric. The same question to Sen. Obama, minus the reference to the fundamentals being strong.

8:04 - A question on the economy, about bailing out regular folks. Obama says this is a verdict on the last eight years of free market policies. You can't regulate greed, Barack.

8:06 - McCain tells Obama it's good to be at a town hall debate with him. He says this without looking at him.

8:07 - Is McCain going to sit in the questioner's lap? He knows how to get the economy going for working Americans.

Brokaw follow-up - who will you appoint as Treasury Secretary? Warren Buffet. Meg Whitman. Someone who inspires trust and confidence. Actually a good answer. Obama agrees about Warren (another agreement with McCain). Now Obama is talking about middle-class tax cuts. "Senator McCain is right that we have to stabilize housing prices, but...." But Obama didn't answer the question.

8:14 - Obama: The biggest problem is deregulation of the financial system. Again, you can't regulate greed. The derivatives themselves weren't the problem; it's much more complex than that. And additional regulation will require additional resources for the regulatory agencies, which equals more government spending.

8:20 - Obama says he's proposing a net spending cut, in response to a question about why we should trust either candidate with our money given both parties' roles in the current financial crisis. McCain beats the reform gong. He suggests people visit "watchdog organizations" such as the Citizens Against Government Waste, National Taxpayers Union. CAGW is a conservative organization, while the NTU advocates for a flat tax.

8:26 - Obama's spending priorities: energy, healthcare, education. Also have to prioritize income, including tax cuts for the middle class but not continuing the Bush tax cuts.

8:29 - So far I can't say that any of these people are learning much about either candidate that they didn't know. All the familiar themes are being echoed, the same little potshots taken. Both men know how to move around the stage, address their questioners, show empathy. Both men are also going way over the agreed-upon time allotments, which is clearly getting on Tom Brokaw's nerves. But Obama is by and large being much more clear with specifics, as opposed to McCain's "I know how to do it" answers. The only question McCain has answered directly and clearly was who he would appoint as Treasury Secretary.

8:33 - A good follow up question from Tom Brokaw about what as president Obama would do about the culture of easy credit is an opportunity passed. Obama is talking about reining in Washington spending to set an example. That's a Beltway-centric viewpoint. McCain responds by accusing Obama of wanting to raise taxes on small business, more discussion of his tax own tax policy. More D.C. rhetoric. Why not talk about using the bully pulpit to encourage people to be more fiscally responsible. Washington didn't create the mortgage securitization industry, and aside from the suggestion by then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan that homeowners seek out adjustable-rate mortgages, Washington didn't make homeowners take out mortgages they couldn't afford or buy houses that were doomed to lose value. My mortgage isn't in danger of default, and I don't have oppressive credit card debt. I've been fortunate to have a good job but more importantly I've kept my spending under control. I don't buy things I know I can't afford and if I do have to buy a big-ticket item I cut spending elsewhere. It's about personal responsibility. Government regulation and bailouts won't change behavior in any real or lasting way.

8:45 - I wasn't listening to the question, because I was typing the previous entry, but the candidates are talking about energy policy. One thing nobody has mentioned yet is that we could, you know, use less. We can drive less, live closer to work and school and shopping. This is one place where government actually could be helpful - in terms of more strict land use planning policies that encourage density in urban areas and redevelopment of suburban areas into less zoned, more dense developments and the funding of public transportation initiatives as opposed to highways.

8:47 - Tom, if you're so worried about the time limits, cut the microphones. Shit, at the Academy Awards they cut the mike and start the music.

8:50 - "Should health care be treated as a commodity?" What does that even mean? The questions are, how do we cover all Americans with healthcare and rein in healthcare costs? McCain: What's at stake here in terms of healthcare is the fundamental difference between myself and Senator Obama. No, actually what's at stake is how it is that the United States does not ensure that all its citizens are covered by healthcare. And it's not about choice. Those covered by private healthcare should be able to choose their doctors and their level of coverage. Those consigned to a government healthcare plan should still receive high quality care but will probably have less of a choice.

9:06 - I hope someone is keeping a running "my friends" count. Can we get a dollar donated to the U.S. Treasury every time McCain uses the phrase "my friends?" We'll solve the credit crisis in about an hour.

9:11 - First McCain "Teddy Roosevelt" reference. I think there was a Reagan reference earlier. I love McCain's answer on this Pakistan issue. He accuses Obama of threatening to attack Pakistan, which he believes is a dangerous mistake. First off, Obama isn't threatening to attack Pakistan at all. Second, even if he was his rhetoric wouldn't be any more threatening than Sarah Palin telling Charles Gibson that we might have to go to war with Russia.

9:18 - Did McCain just say Obama was "correct" on some things with respect to Afghanistan? Hey, there's a unicorn in my living room....

9:19 - Russia discussion. McCain gets off his Putin-KGB line. Yawn. Moral support should be provided to Georgia and the Ukraine. Obama: Russian resurgence is the central issue we'll have to deal with in the next presidency. Russia's "resurgence" is transitory and dependent totally on energy prices, which fluctuate with the global economy. If the world enters a global economic downturn, Russia will find its finances sorely crimped. This could actually make it more dangerous, driving popular discontent and possibly a resurgence of communism or even some kind of civil war that puts Russian nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

9:24 - Six minutes to go, two more questions. Good effing luck, Tom.

9:29 - The Iran discussion has taken up five of the remaining six minutes. Nothing new offered.

9:30 - What don't you know, and how will you learn it? That's the last fucking question? Jesus, well that's a fitting question on which to end this debate. Predictable questions, predictable answers, the same rhetoric we've been hearing. I guess that's the town hall format. Predictably, Obama talks about what he does know - the opportunity of America - and uses it for his closing statement. McCain says what he doesn't know is what will happen at home and abroad. "What I don't know is what the unexpected will be." Somehwere Kant is scratching his head. And now McCain moves into his closing, after a transparent attempt at answering the final question.

9:34 - And so endeth the least informative debate I've ever seen. I'm biased, but I think Obama won in terms of completeness of his answers and his insistence on clearing the record when McCain would mischaracterize his positions. McCain kept his answers shorter, but largely because they were meaningless and empty.

Now the pundits and spinmeisters will take over and tell us who won. Me? I've already made up my mind, so this debate wasn't about convincing me or even reinforcing my decision.

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews is telling me what I think ... I mean, what he thinks, and he makes an interesting point: McCain never brought up Bill Ayers and how Obama is a terrorist, which Matthews thinks indicates he's backing away from it and is embarrassed by it. I doubt it. These attacks are all about context, and the proper context to accuse a mainstream political candidate of being a terrorist is not in a nationally televised debate, but on the campaign trail, in sound bites. And that drumbeat will no doubt continue, safely out of the reach of questions from ordinary citizens.

Weapon of Mass Folksiness

2008-09-09T23:16:00.001-05:00

I’m getting that uneasy feeling that in the person of Sarah Palin, we are seeing the folksy hijacking of the presidential election by the same gang of political terrorists who managed to install the illiterate George Bush as the leader of the free world and destroy the American Dream.

The Palin Phenomenon shows no sign of letting up, now nearly a week after she burst on the scene with a rollicking speech at the Republican National Convention. The main characteristic of this self-proclaimed hockey mom’s meteoric rise in popularity among hard core Republicans and even independents seems to be her ability to deflect any and all criticism back onto her critics. She’s not just the Teflon candidate, she’s rubberized, and if you sling something at her you’d better be prepared for it to come right back at you. Take the truth, for example.

In Palin’s standard stump speech, she claims she “told Congress ‘thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere.’” Only problem is she supported funding for the bridge, and a host of other earmarks for Alaska. Her opposition to the bridge started about the same time Congress removed it as a possible project. They still sent the money to Alaska, though, and Palin spent it.

She also claims, along with McCain, to be anti-lobbyist. But her campaign (can John McCain really claim it at this point?) employs dozens of lobbyists, and as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin employed the town’s very first lobbyist to help secure funding for local projects. And she claims she had no role in firing an Alaska state trooper who was also her brother-in-law (and apparently a wife beater), but an investigation into that is ongoing.

But because the Obama Kool Aid-drunk left immediately lashed out at Palin on blogs and elsewhere shortly after McCain selected her, claiming her pregnant teen daughter showed Palin’s hypocrisy in advocating abstinence-only sex education, mocking her daughter’s decision to have a baby at 17 and marry the father, criticizing Palin’s decision to seek the vice presidency despite recently giving birth to a special needs child (and some even suggested it wasn’t her child but her daughter’s) and insinuating she was a book-banner, among dozens of other questionable assertions and critiques, the left ended up fueling a new McCain campaign strategy: link Obama and the liberal media.

It was only a matter of time before the media’s deification of Barack Obama backfired. For months we’ve had Obama shoved down our throats. His campaign rallies were like rock concerts—teens screamed, women swooned, men wept … and it was all shown on nightly on the news and slapped on the front pages of daily newspapers. It was as if Obama was a steamroller on a mission of change.

But folks don’t like to feel they’re being steamrolled, especially by the media. And so when McCain chose this unknown Alaska governor and former small-town mayor, who also happens to be an evangelical Christian, to be his running mate, well, as they say, it was On.

And so here we are, less than a week after the RNC and fewer than 60 days until the election, and Obama and Palin … er, excuse me, Obama and McCain … are virtually tied in the polls. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin continues to claim she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, was uninvolved in the firing of her brother-in-law. She also claims she fired the Governor’s chef when in fact news reports indicate the chef was reassigned.

So far, Palin’s only exposure has been through a carefully choreographed rollout by the Republican Party. She’s taken no media questions. That will change on Wednesday when Palin is interviewed by ABC News’s Charlie Gibson. Liberals waiting eagerly for Palin to be “exposed” as a northern rube in her first TV interview are, I fear, going to be sorely disappointed. You think Charlie Gibson … “Good Morning, America” Charlie Gibson is going to fluster Palin after she’s had a week to prepare? You think they put her on the ticket knowing she’d get knocked off message so easily? No way. I can see the exchange now….

Gibson: “Governor Palin, can you respond to those who say you supported the so-called bridge to nowhere before you opposed it?”

Palin: “Charlie, you know the liberal media has said a lot of things about me since I was fortunate enough to be asked to run with Senator McCain. I’ve always opposed the bridge. When my grandmother came to America on the Mayflower to seek the American dream, she told me never compromise what you believe in. I think those are small-town values, and they are my values.”

Gibson: “Well, Governor, of course you know it’s impossible for your grandmother to have come over on the mayflower, as that occurred nearly 400 years ago. And there was no ‘America’ then, of which to dream.”

Palin: “Charlie, you know I really can’t believe you and Senator Obama would criticize the American Dream in this way. I mean, I know that you’re both Muslim, but….”

Gibson: “Governor Palin, what are you talking about?”

Palin: “I’m talking about the American Dream, Charlie. I’m going to Washington to fight for that dream on behalf of all Americans.”

Gibson: “Governor, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Thank you so much for not stomping on my balls and unleashing your Republican Feministas on me and my network. God bless you and all your folksiness.”

That’s it, isn’t it? Sarah Palin comes across as folksy, and therefore relates to everyday Americans.

Well, folks, I don’t want a folksy president, or even a folksy vice president. I want my president and vice president to be the smartest people in the room. I want to feel stupid next to them. I want my president and vice president to be the fucking president and vice president, not my goddam drinking buddies.

Obama’s not perfect. But to me he’s a lot less imperfect than McCain and the Obama-Biden ticket has more gravitas to it than McCain-Palin.

Do both sides fudge the truth sometimes? Yes. But Palin and McCain are outright lying right now about their record of “reform.” It’s outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, even politically. This isn’t just stretch a few facts and let the people sort it out. These bastards are speaking plain untruths about important shit and then attacking anyone who calls them on it. It’s absurd!

What’s more absurd, though, and frankly more worrying, is that it seems to be working. A certain segment of the population is eating this stuff up. I guess if nothing else, this election will answer an important question: how stupid are we, really? The answer, I’m afraid, is too close to call right now.

The Indignant Citizen

A Payne in the….

2008-08-29T16:07:00.004-05:00

Turns out I am not the only one who noticed WGN-TV anchor Allison Payne’s disturbing behavior (for a journalist, anyway) this week at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. On Monday I mentioned that Payne gave Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin a hug when he landed at the Denver airport on Sunday.

Today, Sun-Times media columnist Roger Feder noted the surprise among other Chicago reporters covering the convention when they saw Payne “cheering and applauding for speakers Wednesday night while she was seated with the Illinois delegation at the Pepsi Center.” (Second item, "Anchor's cheering section.")

This is the kind of shit the Republicans will dig up and gleefully use during this election. Few things could better illustrate conservatives’ point that the media is ga-ga for Obama. No doubt you’ll be voting for Obama in November, Allison, but maybe you should stop to consider how many potential Obama voters you’re driving away by abandoning your journalistic integrity alongside the road. Please, for all of us, stop yourself.

Crazy Karl

2008-08-27T23:21:00.003-05:00

As part of my Democratic National Convention watching, I will sometimes tune over to Fox “News” after important speeches. I know that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews will be slobbering all over themselves praising whatever speaker has just finished. I know this. I want to hear what conservatives think, how this convention is playing on the right, or if you prefer, how the right is playing this convention.

So I turn over to Fox “News” and lo and behold there’s Karl Rove, hooked up to a microphone and spewing his bilious views into my cable box and onto my set. And I thought to myself, “Rove, you sick pervert. You and your band of stupid religious zealots and flag sucking fear mongers hijacked the American Dream. You beat honest people over the head with the cudgel of white-knuckled greed. You suffocated reason and enlightenment in the embrace of symbology. You substituted ideology for history. You replaced culture with cultishness. You don’t belong in the broadcast booth you smug bastard; you belong in jail. And we … we let you get away with it. Twice. We deserve what we got. But not any more. Fuck you, Karl Rove.”

Stick a Fork in It, Part 2

2008-08-26T17:16:00.005-05:00

Here’s a scary glimpse into a bleak future for newspapers: Crain’s Chicago Business, citing Editor & Publisher, is floating this possible redesign for the Chicago Tribune. I would have posted the E&P story, but the site wasn’t opening this afternoon.

Note the exaggerated “Trib” in the flag at the top of the page, playing off the paper’s nickname in a hopeless grasp at hipness; the extensive use of oversize images, text and graphics aimed at the short-attention-span crowd; and the absolute dearth of actual copy, a clear nod to the fact that TribCo believes there’s money to be made catering to the illiterate.

All you need to know about TribCo’s approach to journalism can be found in Chief Operating Officer Randy Michael’s order, as quoted by Crain’s, to cut editorial output and staff at the same time it’s considering these comic book-inspired redesigns. It’s all about saving money and making things look cool, look more like the vapid RedEye free tabloid (above). The flossers in charge over at the Tower think this is the future of journalism: flashy graphics, celebrity-ized “news bits” and a sense of tragic hipness. “Content” replaces “stories” as the stuff that fills the (shrinking amount of) space between the ads. The theory seems to be readers don’t necessarily care what they’re reading or where it came from, so long as it looks nice.

And maybe TribCo is right. Maybe they’re just giving the people what the people want. If so, this next decade or so is going to be pretty miserable. It might be anyway, with financial Armageddon hanging over us and common sense on holiday at seemingly every level of society. But without an informed Fourth Estate to provide context, check the power brokers and shine light into the dark cracks of apathy we will be left prone in the path of the spin machine. That’s not the way I want to go, but if the best I can do to inform myself at the local level is pick up some comic book version of what a newspaper used to be, or watch the local “Entertainment Tonight” masquerading as the local newscasts, how do I fight my fate? How does anyone?

If This is Journalism, Stick a Fork in It

2008-08-25T10:50:00.003-05:00

The closing gavels haven't even fallen at the two major political conventions yet and already the presidential campaign has degenerated into a tit-for-tat about who owns more houses and who is associated with more unsavory characters. Barack Obama and John McCain have both allowed their campaigns to be hijacked by political hucksters racing to find the lowest road, to serve the lowest common denominator. Until the candidates actually take control of their campaigns and insist they be run in a manner consistent with the timber of a presidential race—as opposed to a school board race—we'll continue to have this kind of trash.

Meanwhile, over at WGN, anchors Mark Suppelsa and Allison Payne are "covering" the Democratic National Convention in Denver. I use quotes around the word covering mainly because of Sunday night's segment, which featured lots of gushing about how it was really an "Illinois convention." Payne even took time to wax poetic about that hack Emil Jones, "… a gentleman who calls himself Obama's godfather…. Emil Jones always such an affection and affinity for Obama, and it would be hard … be difficult to imagine that the audience wouldn't get a chance to hear the story from Emil Jones on just how he and this young man hooked up and had a great success together," Payne said.

Eew. If I were Obama, I'd be holding Emil Jones at arm's length right about now. Jones has become the latest in a disturbingly long line of Illinois politicians to announce their retirement and quickly install their offspring in office. There's not much about that move that says "change" to me.

More disturbing, however, was Payne's segment on her interview with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. The fawning nature of the Durbin profile was bad enough, but it got off to a particularly odious start when Payne met him downstairs at the Denver airport and gave him a hug … on camera … thus shedding the last threads of journalistic integrity that were covering the Chicago press corps' otherwise naked glee at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

More Kool-Aid, Allison?

The Indignant Citizen

Jay Mariotti is a Tool

2008-06-21T00:54:00.003-05:00

[Update as of Aug. 26: The Chicago Tribune reports Jay Mariotti resigned, saying the future of sports journalism is on the Internet. Funny, I thought the Sun-Times had a web site. I mean, they don't know how to use it, but still.... Oh well. I claim (almost) no credit for the tool's departure.]

Anyone who reads Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti, including his coworkers, knows he is a tool. What do I mean by that? Let us consult the the Urban Dictionary.

The Urban Dictionary defines a tool in several ways, none of which exactly apply to Mariotti, but some get close. Actually first off, a number of the related words seem to fit, the most appropriate of which being “asshat.” In fact, if I figure out how to do it I may try to add Mariotti’s picture to the asshat illustrations. He’s a public figure, it’s fair comment and best of all from a legal defense standpoint it’s true. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes. Jay Mariotti is a tool. The second definition of “tool” in the Urban Dictionary fits Mariotti. He is certainly posing as a sports columnist, trying way too hard to be edgy. I doubt he dresses like Avril Lavigne, but the velour sweat suits I can see in those “private moments,” when he’s watching the TiVo recordings of himself over and over. Definition 7 would also seem to fit, except that the more I read him the more I believe he really is that unbalanced, to the point of nearly being unhinged.

It would be impossible to count Mariotti’s bombastic and self serving columns, or all the flip-flops he’s made in print, or the scandalous things he writes under the guise of “journalism” which are merely intended to garner attention for himself. On the one hand, it’s baffling to me that a major newspaper like the Sun-Times gives Mariotti space to vent his sad and vituperative commentary. Then again, it is the Sun-Times.

I’ve often thought that I should write about Mariotti’s toolness. Today’s rant about White Sox General Manager Ken Williams, and the increasingly hostile relationship between Mariotti and other members of the Sun-Times sports staff, convinced me it was time. I’ll deal with the column in a moment.

First, Mariotti likes to give the impression that he’s the only sports journalist in town with the guts to “tell it like it is.” He seems to stake most of this hard hitting reputation on his frequent willingness—some would call it eagerness—to criticize Ozzie Guillen, Ken Williams, Jerry Reinsdorf and the White Sox organization in general. Now, Guillen says some stupid things from time to time. No one would dispute that, not even Guillen. Is he crude? Yes. Does he have a foul mouth? Yes. Can he be immature when it comes to taking criticism? Absolutely. But he is hardly the only person in professional sports to exhibit these characteristics. I wish Guillen and the rest of the White Sox brass would just learn to ignore Mariotti, but they can’t seem to.

The stupid Guillen-Mariotti feud hit a low point in 2006 when Mariotti wrote a column about Guillen’s demotion of pitcher Sean Tracy to the minor leagues after a game in Texas. Guillen took exception and called Mariotti a lot of names, including “faggot.” Things went downhill from there and have been in the gutter pretty much ever since.

As an aside, Mariotti said during the hubub that he refused to go to the White Sox locker room because he had been physically threatened. I remember thinking at the time that Mariotti was grandstanding. So what if he had been threatened? Did he actually think a professional baseball player would kick his ass in the clubhouse? Dude, where’s your reporting sense … THAT would be a good story. I don’t think any of the White Sox at the time would have been dumb enough to do that, although I do recall the time, in 2003, when Rasheed Wallace was suspended for allegedly threatening referee Tim Donaghy on the loading dock of the Rose Garden in Portland. Donaghy, of course, was subsequently accused of betting on NBA games, and has now claimed that referees manipulated the outcome of the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Sacramento Kings. Hey, this is pro sports these days; every twisted story has an even more twisted story connected to it.

But back to Mariotti. If I had a dollar for every time some lunkhead called someone he disagreed with a faggot, and then threatened to “kick his ass,” I’d buy the Sun-Times and … wait, that wouldn’t take much money. Bad example. Anyway, I suspect that the “faggot” insult crutch is often more a factor of a limited vocabulary than actual homophobia. Of course, we do tend to belittle what we fear, and we often fear that which is different from ourselves. Mariotti is certainly different. Not in an interesting or even intellectually challenging way, though. More just in an angry, lazy way.

Which brings us to Mariotti’s column today. It’s everything Sox fans, sports fans and legitimate journalists loathe about him. The hook for the column is an interview Kenny Williams gave, presumably Thursday night because the closest Mariotti comes to satisfying the “when?” question is “on the eve of” the Cubs-Sox series. Williams had some ill-advised comments about the differences between the two fan bases and the two teams. At one point, Sox beat writer Joe Cowley asked him if he would ever work for the Cubs. “That would be a betrayal,” Williams told him. “God, I would really, really have to need the job. Oh, wow, really need the job.”

And of course, Mariotti sticks it to Williams for his answer, ignoring the baiting nature of the second question and any reference to the question that elicited Williams’ comments about the two sides of town and the teams’ respective fan bases.

One thing that intrigues me about Mariotti’s columns is his total and shameless reliance on quotes collected by beat reporters and other columnists, which he then uses for his own purposes. Laughably (if you read the column), Mariotti even writes at one point, “This is why, as I've often concluded, that it's easy to like the Cubs and easy to loathe the Sox. I'm not talking about the fans or players but the people at the top. And I say that not as a fan of either team—repeat after me: media are not supposed to be fans—but as a neutral observer who continues to be amazed by the noxious fumes spread by Sox brass.”

“Neutral observer?” I thought you needed cable to get comedy like that. Here’s a sampling of what Mariotti considers “neutral”:

“… White Sox as the team no hotel concierge ever recommends.”

“…Sox still would be the second team in the Second City, a distinction that won't change in any of our lifetimes.”

“the Sox might make the postseason, they're clearly the auxiliary story as Chicago -- and America -- await the Cubs' fate in their dubious centennial.”

“classy Jim Hendry….”

“it's easy to like the Cubs and easy to loathe the Sox.”

“I guess it's better to play in a concrete blob with empty seats than a world-famous sports destination filled with bodies.”

Mariotti, swilling unrepentently from the Hypocrite Jug, saves his best for last, though. After spending the preceding 16 paragraphs and nearly 1,200 words being “neutral” in his criticism of Sox management, Mariotti writes, “For now, if you don't mind, I'd like to focus on a miracle I never thought I'd see in small newspaper type—CHICAGO atop one division, CHICAGO atop another division.”

Then he ended with, “The Cubs will let us do that this weekend. I'm not sure if Kenny and Ozzie have the ability to stay classy.” Neutral indeed. And definitely focusing on the battle of the first-place teams. I wouldn’t use him as an example of good journalism, but as an illustration of short attention span he’s perfect.

And it’s worth noting that Mariotti’s focus on the first-place teams lasted exactly that one sentence. After Friday’s game, which the Cubs tied and won on three solo home runs off Sox relievers, Mariotti retreated to his comfort zones: Criticizing Guillen’s management and pregame comments.

All Mariotti really accomplished on Friday, though, was to once again reinforce his lack of neutrality, his willful blindness as a baseball observer and his shortcomings as a journalist. Any consistent “neutral” reading of his work reveals that he is nothing but an angry, lazy hack.

Jay Mariotti is a tool.

The Indignant Citizen

Writings from CNU XVI

2008-04-22T22:50:00.002-05:00

Lest y’all think I’ve just been loafing (and there has been some of that), here is a sampling of writings from CNU XVI, the 16th annual confab of the Congress for the New Urbanism, held recently in Austin, Texas.

Retail Recipes: Finding What Sells
Conservatives and the New Urbanism: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Robert Caro on Robert Moses
Lessons From Booming Regions
The Art and Science of Great Streets

The Congress was a blast. I’ve always wanted to go, and this year I got the opportunity to blog the Congress for the CNU’s website. I have some pictures that I’ll post in the coming days.

The Indignant Citizen

Torture, Schmorture. We Got us a Sex Scandal, Bubba!

2008-03-10T23:06:00.000-05:00

Great news, Mr. President! The liberal governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has been identified as a client of a prostitution ring. As we all know, the mainstream media is obsessed with sex and will cover nothing else for weeks. That whole deal where you vetoed the bill that would have outlawed waterboarding – you know, torture – thus placing you in the same category as the terrorists we’re fighting, won’t see the light of the front page ever again.

Pop the bubbly!

The Indignant Citizen

Please Go Away, Jim Oberweis

2008-03-09T23:22:00.005-05:00

Who’s laughing now, Jimmy?

Hey Jim Oberweis, are you getting the message yet that voters in Illinois would prefer if you fucked off? Has it occurred to you yet that you’ve essentially spent $9 million to pay for research that indicates voters in this state want you to go off to your hateful, racist corner and seriously diddle yourself? You’re oh for six, man. Zero for six. A big, fucking doughnut hole for six. Maybe come Nov. 3 you should think about sacrificing a live chicken?

I guess there’s something to be said for sticking to your principles, such as they are, but Jesus, Jim, even David Duke had the good sense to know when to quit. Then again, Duke managed to win an election. Once. I’m not sure if that’s more of an indictment of the voters in Louisiana’s 81st District (who in fairness had just that one lapse – I mean, it was the 80s. . . .) or of you for being a six-time loser who refuses to accept the will of the people.

Jim, this is Illinois. You’ve tried six times to buy elections. If you were going to succeed you would have by now. It’s not like the electorate here isn’t predisposed to being bought off or bamboozled by misleading political ads. People just don’t like you, OK? They … don’t … like … you. If there was a box on the ballot next to “Just Not Jim Oberweis,” a majority of voters would check it.

The writing is on the wall, and probably a few other places. You’re not gonna win. So go on, now. Git. Buh bye. See ya. Adios. (Oops, that last one is Spanish for “goodbye,” in case one of your ice cream store employees hasn’t clued you in.)

I know you’re still on the ballot for the general election. I know that even though Democrat Bill Foster whupped you 53% to 47% in a district that Republican waterboy Dennis Hastert owned for years, we’re probably going to have to listen to you spew your malevolent rhetoric at least once more. But it’s going to be a tough year to peddle hate, Jim. We’ve had it shoved down our throats for going on seven years, now. People are tired of being told who to hate and why. They prefer to figure those things out on their own. And based on this weekend’s result, I’d say they’re doing OK.

The Indignant Citizen

Time to Mow the Lawn

2008-03-04T23:16:00.002-06:00

It appears that reports of Hillary Clinton’s political death have been exaggerated. Then again, what’s new?

As of 10:40 or so Tuesday night in Chicago, Clinton was leading Barack Obama in the polls in both Texas and Ohio, the two big prizes delegate-wise in today’s four-state primary contest. She and Obama split two appetizer states, with Rhode Island going to Clinton and Vermont to Obama.

It’s remarkable how often the mainstream press has written off the Clintons over the past 16 years. And yet … here they still are. The only example that’s of interest for our purposes is the most recent one, in which most political pundits have spoken of nothing else for the past two weeks other than Obama’s 11 primary wins in a row and how Clinton would have to drop out if she didn’t win Texas and Ohio. Now guess what: It appears Obama’s win streak reached 12 (with the calling of Vermont for him earlier in the night) and stopped there. And Clinton may well have won Texas and Ohio. In fact, the New York Times has called Ohio for Clinton, as of 10:47 p.m.

To hear the papers and the TV news tell it recently, Obama had this thing wrapped up. Now it appears the mainstream media got it wrong again.

Today was not journalism’s finest day in my eyes. I mean, it wasn’t a great day on a number of levels, starting with my experience on public transit this morning, during which I greeted no fewer than five people with a nod and a “Good morning,” only to have it returned with a blank stare and a turn-away or a silent pass-by in each case.

The I read this story in the Times, and figured maybe it was just time to give up on journalism. The worst part isn’t this story about the discovery of the fraud; no, the worst part is reading the book review from Feb. 26 and the fawning, credulous profile of the fraudster author published by the Times on Feb. 28.

In the profile in particular there were so many opportunities for the reporter to fact-check this story, to attempt to verify basic information—such as whether the author graduated from the University of Oregon, as she claimed—and yet in every instance the reporter failed to do so. It was disheartening.

Journalism is pissing itself into irrelevance. I mean, what are we doing? Where are we adding value to people’s lives? I mean, there are journalists doing good work every day; all one has to do is visit www.gangrey.com to see examples of it. But that good work just seems to be overwhelmed by a constant avalanche of stupidity and vanity shitting down on us from all levels of our profession. I get so depressed thinking about it sometimes, about the coiffed ass-clowns plying their trade on local and national TV, and the lazy hacks using up oxygen and ink at local newspapers. I mean, what’s the point of it all? So much of it is so obviously irrelevant, it’s no wonder readers regard the news profession with the same sad pity bordering on outright hostility that they do lawyers, politicians and used-car salesmen.

I always tell people the same story whenever a conversation turns to the pedantic content of local newspapers. This is what happens, I say, when businesspeople try to run news operations. They bring in focus groups, and the focus groups give feedback like, “I don’t have time to read your paper. I start to, but then I have to go mow the lawn.” The business school response is, “We have to make the stories shorter, or add more graphics, because our readers have too much to do. We need to give them only the information they need, and not waste their time.”

I guess when you gear school curriculum around making sure kids can score highly on standardized tests dreamed up by dullards in Iowa (note I did not say Iowa dullards, thus avoiding the implication that all Iowans are dullards), it shouldn’t be a surprise that critical thinking gets left out as a skill that’s taught. The result, quite naturally, is a group of business managers who respond to focus group comments like “I don’t have time to read the paper” with “We have to make the paper fit into people’s short attention spans.”

The more intelligent, and I think useful, question to ask there is, why is someone thinking about mowing the lawn not long after starting to read the paper? Could it be the story is not engaging in any way, or interesting? Could it be the person has already absorbed all of the most basic information in connection with whatever issue the story is covering on the evening news the night before and, finding nothing new—no analysis or context—in the paper, has decided to do something else?

I struggle with this in my own job. Is our little band of journalists providing anything of use to our readers, or are we just regurgitating cold facts that have already been absorbed? Are we writing just to write, or are we informing people?

Is it too late for journalism, or can it be saved somehow? Today I’m depressed, and I see no hope. I see mainstream journalism deteriorating into rumor mongering in an attempt to stay “hip” and “relevant,” or collapsing under the weight of its own bombast and self-importance.

With luck, the sun will come out tomorrow, and my mood will improve, and with it my outlook on my chosen profession.

The Indignant Citizen

The Super-est of Tuesdays

2008-02-06T00:15:00.000-06:00

Johnny Cash: Was it the gospel, or the way I sing it?
Sam Phillips: Both.
Johnny Cash: What’s wrong with the way I sing it?
Sam Phillips: I don’t believe you.
- Sun Records producer Sam Phillips to Johnny Cash on his gospel singing from the movie “Walk the Line.”

That certainly was a super Tuesday. The day proved anticlimactic for me in one sense, because I voted early. My horse was already out of this race by the time I punched my e-ballot on Jan. 31. I wanted to back John Edwards, but he quit the race the day before I voted. Edwards’ somewhat angry, populist message resonated with me. I think the most honest thing I can say about why I supported his candidacy is that I believed him when he spoke.

Edwards was never regarded as either the polished orator Barack Obama is, or the campaigning machine Hillary Clinton is. In any election year in which a woman and a black man weren’t running for president, Edwards probably would have done better than he did, but it’s hard this year to run as a campaign for change as a white southern male candidate.

For reasons that are two numerous to count, but that include the Iraq war mess and the fact that all the candidates on the Republican side are either religious zealots of one denomination or another or war-pushing sellouts, I’m voting Democratic in November. That means I’m left to choose between Clinton and Obama. I haven’t made up my mind yet. My problem is I don’t believe either one of them, not right now, not in the way I need to in order to give one of them my vote. Hillary’s message seems to be “I’m not George Bush” and Obama’s message seems to be “I’m not George Bush OR a Clinton. (Oh, and by the way, I didn’t vote for the war.)”

I know that a lot of Democrats wet their pants every time Obama speaks, but I have not found him to be a convincing, or a even particularly stirring, orator. It’s a personal thing, but something about his tone, or his mannerisms … something is conveying to me that he’s just reading good speeches; he doesn’t believe them. This is heresy among Democrats, who have anointed Obama the second coming of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., all rolled into one person. I listen to him speak and I hear generalities and good one-liners. I don’t get goosebumps.

Clinton gives me the same feeling: like every word has been measured and carefully placed to elicit a particular reaction. She’s overly packaged. I see her and I think she looks like someone who would prefer they just let her into the White House so she can get to work; she already knows the issues, she knows what she’s going to do and so why bother with all this handshaking and “listening” when she already has all the answers. I sort of expect that from her, though, and it’s good to exude that kind of confidence. Unlike what Mike Huckabee tells me, I don’t want my president to be like the people I work with, like an everyday guy (or gal). I want my president to be the smartest fucking person in whatever room he or she happens to be in, I want to be intimidated in his or her presence, I want gravitas. The folksy, “look-at-me-I’m-functionally-illiterate-just-like-you” approach hasn’t worked so well the past seven years.

I get that sense from Obama and Clinton. But like I said, I just want someone I can listen to and believe. Obama talks about everyday folks funding his campaign, but he’s also taking money from lobbyists and holding giant fundraisers for the Democratic elite. He talks about a “new kind of politics,” but he’s endorsed Machine candidates like Richard Daley and that nitwit Todd Stroger (who have also endorsed him). He’s the same politics in a new, more exciting wrapper, it seems to me.

Hillary is just old school to the core. There ain’t nothing new there, and she’s not pretending to be new. She’s a known quantity; we know what we’re getting with her and she knows that. She’s just betting that a) we know she’s better than what we’ve gotten the past seven years, or stand to get the next four with one of the Republican candidates, and b) we prefer the devil we know.

I’m hopeful that sometime before the convention, one or the other of ‘em will throw the switch and start speaking with real conviction. I don’t want platitudes, clichés and soundbites; I want honest, from-the-gut, passion.

I don’t want to have to hold my nose when I cast my vote in November. Is that too much to ask?

The Indignant Citizen

Crazy-Talk

2007-12-31T14:38:00.000-06:00

I have to give the Bulls some credit: They have rebounded and notched two wins in a row. Granted, those wins came against Milwaukee and the New York Knicks—not exactly your upper echelon NBA franchises—but hey, wins are wins and the Bulls just increased their win total on the season by 22 percent.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Will Ben Gordon be happy coming off the bench? Will they continue to play hard even if they go on another losing streak?

If the Bulls get it together enough to make the playoffs, there are sure to be people who will say the firing of Scott Skiles was justified and that the team is better off without him. But saying that misses the point. The point here is—and this won’t change with win streaks or playoff appearances—that this team of overpaid babies didn’t get their way and quit on their coach, which in turn got their coach fired on Christmas Eve. That’s a behavior trait, one that wins won’t alter.

The Bulls could go on to win it all, but that alone won’t change my perspective. What would change it is if the players collectively dedicated a winning season to Skiles, and issued a group statement saying they took responsibility for his firing, that they regretted acting like petulant adolescents who didn’t get to borrow the car, and called for him to be reinstated.

Skiles is gone for good, of course, but it would be a nice gesture. I’m not gonna hold my breath, though. It’d be more likely that Mayor Daley would start off the new year by taking responsibility for corruption in city hiring and in the police department, vow to throw the bums out, and then actually throw the bums out.

But that’s all just crazy-talk. The short days and lack of sunlight does strange things to my brain this time of year.

Happy New Year.

The Indignant Citizen

Bull $hit

2007-12-27T01:36:00.000-06:00

“I hope your firings go really well.”
--Peter Gibbons, Office Space

So, the Bulls fired head coach Scott Skiles and the team responded by laying a collective cow patty on the gleaming wooden floor inside San Antonio’s AT&T Center. The Spurs led by double-digits the entire second half and were up by 25 at one point. Nice job, Bulls players. So, should they fire interim coach Pete Myers now, too? How about the whole coaching staff? Would that make you happy? Shit, why stop there, let’s let go the entire organization, except you players. You can run the joint however you see fit. You can play when you want, negotiate your own deals, sign your own paychecks … whatever.

Of course, if that actually happened, you petulant pissants would devolve into waterhead bickering after two games, tops. There’d be eight of you out there at a time, all fighting to play shooting guard and score 30. It would come to blows in short order … but hey, we might actually see some hustle then, so it wouldn’t be all bad.

Look, I’m picking on the Bulls, but they don’t deserve it any more than most other pro athletes. Eighty percent of them are prima donnas, in it for their own glorification and to ensure above all that somebody, in the words of Rasheed Wallace, "CTC." For those of you who don’t remember, Wallace used to play for the Portland Trail Blazers. Back in 2003, when trade rumors were dogging Wallace, he let down his anti-media interview guard long enough to deliver this gold-tooth nugget: “I don’t give a shit about no trade rumors. As long as somebody CTC at the end of the day, I’m with them. For all y’all that don’t know what ‘CTC’ means, that’s Cut The Check. I just go out there and play. Again, somebody just ‘CTC.’”

A little hothead hoopster philosophizing from the ‘Sheedster. So special. Anyway, by and large that’s the attitude in the NBA these days—hell, that's the attitude throughout pro sports for that matter. Apparently Luol Deng and Ben Gordon bitched to the Washington Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas about the way the Bulls negotiated with them. Arenas recounted the bitching in his blog. According to Jay Mariotti’s column in Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times (which we must take with a grain of salt, given that Mariotti is insane, but he does appear to quote Arenas’ blog, and we should assume that he can at least copy and paste accurately). Note the part where Arenas says, “I ended up finding out that with Deng, they didn’t even offer him $60 million. No, they didn’t even come close to that money.”

Well shit the bed and call me Shirley. Not even $60 million?! Damn, broutha, you gotta be a stone cold bitch to make a slap-in-the-face offer like “not even $60 million” to a bona-fide NBA player. How’s a hoopsta supposed to live on only $50 million? How is a dude supposed to provide for his family, put food on the goddam table, for chrissake? It’s a fucking INSULT! And so Deng quit. He didn’t actually quit as in walk-out-the-door quit, which would have been the principled thing to do. Nah, he stopped playing for his coach, stopped hustling. So did Gordon, who was also pissed off about only being offered something less than $75 million. Oh, the indignity. How can you face all your NBA buddies with only 10 Hummers to their 15?

But we were talking about quitting … and principles. Which leads us to Honor, although that appears to be a dead-end alley in the case of the Bulls. So these players, either upset because they’re not getting Paid what they think they’re worth or because they just don’t like their boss, stop working. And what happens? The boss gets fired. That would be Skiles. He gets fired on Christmas Eve. Not that I feel that bad for him, because he’s walking away with a cool $7 million and will certainly land a sweet job as a TV analyst or a college coach somewhere. It’s not like he had to take all the Christmas presents back in order to make the house payment.

But how backwards is that? Where’s the Honor in it? The players get pissy and quit and the coach gets fired. I mean, that’s messed up, right? And it happens over and over, and has been happening for years ... hell, for decades. In my world if I quit on my boss they’d issue 10 warnings and then escort me out after six months. My boss would keep her job and hire someone else for less money who’d work harder.

Here in the real world, that’s how it’d work, anyway. But as gets reinforced every day, pro sports isn’t the real world. It’s a fantasyland of bling and boorish behavior, a utopia for a country and a culture that believes in the absolute power of entertainment, in the overriding notion that status comes from wealth, and that wealth is given, not earned. Win the lottery. Make a jump shot. Hit a ball. Straight flush. Booya, baby.

It’s fucking disgusting. I hope you’re happy Bulls players. You epitomize everything that’s wrong with pro sports and our culture.

The Indignant Citizen

All Blocked Up

2007-10-25T01:56:00.000-05:00

Someone asked me the other day why there had been no Indignant Citizen postings since April. I said, in my best Agent 86 voice, “Would you believe, a King Hell case of writer’s block?”

That’s a big part of it, the writer’s block. There is too much to write, and I often fear I can’t write any of it the way I want to, the way I see it written in my head. So I write nothing. Writer’s block, they say, can be tied to depression, to changes in the frontal lobe of the brain. Here’s what usually happens to me: During the day I get these great ideas for topics or plot lines. At work, I may jot them down or, if the inspiration has come from a magazine or newspaper article, I will put it in my bag, intending to take it out and write about it later. When I get home, I turn on the computer. Then I may make dinner, or watch a little TV to unwind. At some point I sit down at the computer and open a document. Almost immediately, sometimes before I type even a single word, I am overcome by fatigue. I stop. Then I begin surfing the Internet as a distraction, or I may return to watching TV.

Take right now, for example. Game 1 of the World Series is a blowout, with Boston killing Colorado 13-1. I have a load of laundry drying that doesn’t necessarily have to be folded before I go to bed. It’s 11:15 p.m. I am exhausted. I sat down to write about the transit funding clusterfuck in Springfield—an embarrassment on national and international levels—but all I can think about is how tired I am and how I have to get up and go to work in the morning.

And so what am I doing? Instead of writing about the transit funding fiasco, and how if the RTA entities are forced to carry out service cuts and fare hikes on the scale that has been discussed, someone will die—a kid forced to walk through gang territory because the bus he or she takes to school got cut, or a homeless person freezing to death waiting for a bus that never comes—and how as a result of that death or those deaths Gov. Blagojevich, House Speaker Madigan and Senate President Jones will have someone’s blood on their hands … instead of that I’m writing about writer’s block.

Writing about writer’s block may seem counterintuitive, but as it turns out it’s not that uncommon, they say. Hemingway did it. So did Freud and Kafka and Joseph Conrad. Look at Charlie Kaufman. He wrote a whole screenplay about writer’s block, a screenplay that was supposed to be an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief,” but that instead became the movie “Adaptation.”

I found “Adaptation” to be annoying. First of all, I enjoy Susan Orlean’s writing. I would have liked to have seen “The Orchid Thief” made into a movie that actually, you know, incorporated parts of the book. Second, how self-important does one have to be to turn a screenplay based on someone else’s book into a screenplay about oneself? And third … well, shit. What the hell? Who am I to write about what I didn’t like about “Adaptation?” I’ve just spent six paragraphs on my own writer’s block when what I intended to write about was transit.

And now it is 11:51 p.m. and I am totally awake, but can think of nothing but the fact that the alarm is going to go off in six hours.

Well maybe this is a start, at any rate.

The Indignant Citizen

The Most Important Movie of the Past 12 Months

2007-04-28T02:35:00.000-05:00

Hollywood produces a lot of crap these days, unoriginal movies following formulaic scripts designed to rake in as much cash in as short a time as possible before fading into obscurity. Every once in a while, however, a movie hits theaters and delivers a message. “Shut Up & Sing” isn’t fiction, it’s real. It’s the story of what happened to the Dixie Chicks, the best selling female country music band of all time, when lead singer Natalie Maines stood at the front of a packed London concert hall in 2003, on the eve of the war in Iraq, and said the group was ashamed President Bush was from their home state of Texas.

I’m not sure what took me so long to see this movie … the fact that it was in theaters in Chicago for what seemed like two days late last year might account for the delay. But I finally saw it, and as you can guess from the title of this post, I think “Shut Up & Sing” is the most important American film of the past year. It may end up being the most important free speech documentary of the 21st century. This movie reveals the ugly side of America, the mouth breathing flag-suckers whose first instinct is to lash out at anyone who disagrees with them, as well as the money chasing entertainers and pundits who pander to this simpleton audience.

Everyone should see this movie. Even if you disagree with the Dixie Chicks, even if you threw out their CDs at one of the backwards radio station destruction parties, you need to see this movie. At its most basic level, “Shut Up & Sing” is about the power of words. Up a level from that, it’s about rhetoric, or the art of picking and choosing words to string together to deliver a message designed to promote an agenda.

Natalie Maines spoke off the cuff at that London concert. In the context of the European mood leading up to this stupid and endless war, Maines’ comment doesn’t seem like a big deal at all. Plenty of people in this country were saying worse things about Bush in the run-up to the invasion. But a certain element in this country took what Maines said, cast it in the light of an American speaking her mind overseas instead of in America, and used the predictable outcome for its own divisive purposes.

Before long the neo-patriots had whipped the usual suspects into an anti-liberal, anti-entertainment industry, anti-antiwar crowd frenzy. Free speech, we learn in the movie, is fine for number of Americans, so long as the people doing the speaking stick to an agreeable script. Additionally, we learn that members of the entertainment industry, indeed musicians from the same genre, will turn on colleagues like a wounded puma if they smell a quick buck in doing so.

I won’t go into all the details, or attempt to summarize “Shut Up & Sing” more than I have already. Just see this movie. See it, and ponder for a bit the definition of real courage. Real courage is sticking your neck out on the line—including risking your life—for something in which you believe, regardless of the consequences, or even in spite of them. That describes the men and women fighting and dying in this pointless conflict, and it describes some of those who have spoken out against it, and continue to speak out against it.

Me? I have nothing of great value to lose by describing this perpetual state of war, our dimwitted president and the knuckle-draggers who voted for him in terms I have already used. I don’t make my living in a public way and this forum reaches maybe half a dozen people, on a good day. The Dixie Chicks, however, risked everything. Maybe in the beginning it was unintentional—as I said, an off-the-cuff remark. But very quickly the Chicks made a choice to support one another and to move forward in their own way, beholden to no one, apologizing for nothing, fighting for what they believe in.

That’s America, people. At least, it’s the America I want to be associated with.

The Indignant Citizen

The Reality Song

2007-03-13T23:12:00.000-05:00

I don’t want to beat up on Garrett Kelleher and his Chicago Spire all the time, but the guy makes it so easy. Monday night he and architect Santiago Calatrava addressed a full house at the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s headquarters, ostensibly to present the building Kelleher wants to erect just west of Lake Shore Drive across from Navy Pier. Give Kelleher credit; it was nice of him and Calatrava to spend the time with the CAF members and docents discussing the Chicago Spire.

But the reality is all he has are drawings, and even those aren’t in final form yet. He hasn’t sold a single condominium unit and he has no outside investors, other than the bank that financed the land acquisition. Despite this, he insists he will break ground this spring. Don’t hold your breath.

At the CAF forum, Kelleher did not come across as any kind of sleazy developer. He seems like a genuinely nice and charming fellow, and he obviously has a strong desire to see this project completed. After all, as proposed the Chicago Spire would be by far the biggest jewel in his development portfolio, a career capper that would take its place in the Chicago skyline—the world’s best skyline—in between icons like the Sears Tower and the Hancock Center. But Kelleher has one problem he can’t avoid: He doesn’t have the money to build the thing.

A project like this, with 150 floors and some 1,300 condominiums, built in an unconventional style close to the lake on what is essentially very old landfill, could cost $2 billion, or more. Monday night, Kelleher admitted he’s paid for everything thus far, although he said Anglo Irish Bank is “fully committed” to the project. He did not explain what that means. In fact, he didn’t say much about the financing at all, and it was at this point during the meeting, the question-and-answer session, that Kelleher effected his best impersonation of a typical developer’s sleazy non-answer answers.

When asked about the nature of the financing, he said, with an Irish lilt, “Debt and equity. That’s about it.” Gee, thanks, professor. Debt and equity. That’s funny.

So who are his investors? Who’s committed money to this thing? Well, there’s himself and … Anglo Irish Bank. That’s it. Kelleher hasn’t even begun pre-selling the condo units. Later he said all of the money that has been spent thus far, for land acquisition and whatever architectural and engineering fees have accrued, has come from his own pocket. Kelleher is no doubt quite wealthy, and by many accounts he is a gutsy and shrewd businessman who has been underestimated any number of times, perhaps none moreso than when he burst on the scene in London in 2004 as the winning bidder (at €355 million, or about $468 million at today’s exchange rate) for the Lloyd’s of London building.

Other than financing the initial purchase of the property, the nature of Anglo Irish Bank’s commitment to the Chicago Spire project is unclear. The bank has a reputation for maintaining a fairly conservative financing portfolio, but last year it took a chance on a major renovation of the Palmer House Hilton by arranging nearly $363 million in financing for developer Joseph Sitt.

Anglo Irish Bank is making a push into the Chicago real estate market after opening an office here in October. It is Ireland’s third-largest bank, and has been performing well financially. In addition to the Palmer House financing, the bank recently put up nearly $93 million as part of a joint venture with Golub & Co. to buy 625 N. Michigan Ave. Golub, you may have heard, has its own problems, having been “removed” from the job of developing the residential portion of the long-troubled Block 37 project, according to a story in Tuesday’s Tribune.

The bank and Kelleher apparently have worked together before, according to a news release from Kelleher’s Shelbourne Development issued when Kelleher bought the 400 N. Lake Shore Drive property last year. The story of how Kelleher came to own the property says a great deal about how he’s approaching this project, it seems. As he related the story Monday night—and he has told the same story in the past—he happened to be in Chicago at about the time Christopher Carley of the Fordham Company, the spire’s original developer, was supposed to be closing on the deal to buy the land. Carley hit a snag, though, and as Kelleher said, “Without getting into details, circumstances presented themselves that I could close on the property in a short time. . . . I could buy it.” So he did. He learned about the opportunity on July 12, 2006 and closed the deal on the 20th, having done no due diligence other than look at a previously prepared environmental report. Then he went on vacation.

The site, he said, spoke for itself. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build something grand in a stupendous location, and to work with Calatrava, who is generally referred to as one of these modern-day “starchitects” along the lines of Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry. Calatrava, for his part, had nothing but nice things to say about Kelleher, who is, of course, paying him. I suppose as long as Calatrava continues to get paid on time he will continue to have nice things to say about Kelleher.

Both men clearly see this as their big chance to impact the architecture and development worlds forevermore. A building like the Chicago Spire is the kind of structure that can define men, cities, even eras. If it gets built, that is, and there is still a mountain of evidence to suggest it won’t.

Last year Kelleher said he wanted to be in the ground with caissons by early 2007. In January he raised eyebrows, and a few hackles, at a meeting of the Grant Park Advisory Council by saying he would be starting to dig caissons within weeks, a statement that made it seem like he had the plan commission in his pocket and that approval was a slam dunk. Even in Chicago some folks—especially those who will live in the building’s shadow—didn’t take kindly to the notion that construction had already been approved. We do appreciate at least the appearance of due process here. At any rate, now here it is mid-March, nearly April, and still no caissons.

If I were a betting man, I would say this project would probably be approved by the mouth breathers at the Department of Planning and Development, despite the fact it’s totally out of scale with the surrounding area and will create a traffic nightmare in Streeterville. They probably like the renderings that show it in the skyline, and think it would perhaps add something to the city’s Olympic bid. But then the weeks will tick by and nothing will happen. Eventually the thing will die quietly and Kelleher will sell the land and something else, still probably too big and too expensive, will be built there.

And yet … and yet Kelleher keeps showing up in Chicago. Maybe he’s hoping to spur interest, and thus sales. More likely he genuinely believes construction will start any day. I think he’s sadly mistaken. A worst-case scenario would be he starts to dig, or maybe even gets a few floors built, before he runs out of money.

The world is about to change. We are groping through the twilight of the American Dream, or at least the perverted 20th Century version of the American Dream. It used to be the American Dream was that everyone could make it, could be successful, regardless of where he or she came from, or how poor. There were any number of different ways to measure “success” and somehow, probably through the co-opting of our lives by marketers, the dream morphed into just one measure of success: home ownership. As the century went, so went the American Dream and before long the dream became a McMansion in the suburbs and three SUVs.

And so it was that we became a disposable nation of cheaply-built strip malls, drive-through fried food emporiums, cinder block warehouse stores and slapdash houses. Everyone deserved a shot at this new American Dream, just like every student deserves an “A.” In the grand tradition of the American West, mortgage speculators appeared offering 100% financing to everyone at appealingly low interest rates. Well, they were appealingly low so long as the Federal Reserve didn’t get uppity. But the Fed did get uppity and now those so-called adjustable rate mortgages have adjusted—upward. One result of that is a growing number of defaults on what are known as sub-prime mortgages, in other words risky home loans that in any moderately intelligent climate never would have been approved in the first place.

And so now we get to ask which is worse: never having the chance to own a home, or having your home taken from you when your minimum-wage jobs as a clerk at Wal-Mart and a grillman at Wendy’s don’t provide enough money to keep up with the rising monthly payments?

Ah, but never mind. We were talking about the Chicago Spire, not the American Dream. Except that the Chicago Spire is Garrett Kelleher’s American Dream, and probably Santiago Calatrava’s, too. And for between $1,200 and $9,000 per square foot—Kelleher’s giggle-inducing price range—the condos could be versions of the American Dream for thousands of residents. That’s certainly what Kelleher is expecting. He said everywhere he goes around the world, the Chicago Spire generates interest. People apparently are excited to think about living there, although probably not full time. The answer to the oft-asked (at least by me) question, “Who’s going to buy all these condos they’re building all over the city?” is apparently “Very rich people who want a second, or third, home.”

There exists right now in this country a massive amount of disposable income, across various social strata. A great many more people have a lot of money now than did, say 10 years ago. And the elite who already had a lot of money 10 years ago now have a great deal more than they did then, provided they aren’t in jail.

Condos and houses are to the rich today what cars were 25 years ago. You own three or four, in different places, and use whichever one happens to be in the place you want to go at that particular time. You want a weekend in New York, you fly in and stay in your condo on Central Park West. Gonna be in Aspen? Fly in and drive to your cabin there. Coming to the Taste of Chicago, just come downtown and “check in” to your very own place, which otherwise stays dark 300 days out of the year. What a wonderful sense of community that builds, eh?

And when some or a lot of that wealth, much of it based on derivatives contracts that, in a financial crisis, won’t be worth the paper they’re printed on, evaporates, what will become of all these new high-rise condominiums? I suppose they’ll be dark the other 65 days out of the year.

But we’ve gotten off the topic again. My feelings about the Chicago Spire are no secret (see “Chicago Uninspired”). Nothing presented at the CAF meeting Monday night changed my mind. Calatrava is living in a dream world. He interspersed his rough watercolor renderings of the nearby planned DuSable Park with photos of Zurich, where he lives now. Many of the ground-level perspectives didn’t represent reality in terms of what effect the presence of a 150-story tower would have. Calatrava kept saying he wanted the lobby to be transparent. He wants glass walls and artwork inside and a big plaza. That’s fine. But what about that giant twisting dildo looming over everyone and everything? The height it, and its mass, do affect the surrounding area, no matter how glassy the lobby is.

Calatrava mentioned he wants seven massive building supports in the lobby. Seven. For the whole building. One bomb and suddenly there are six supports, folks. So, either the plaza isn’t going to be as accessible as it has been presented, or the lobby isn’t going to be as transparent. When you build something like this, security does enter into the equation. Just ask the folks in charge of the Freedom Tower in New York City. That thing is a 1,400-foot-tall obelisk sitting on a 300-foot high impenetrable pedestal. That should relate to the street nicely, don’t you think?

The other thing about showing slides of the park in Zurich, and of Zurich neighborhoods, is that it leaves out the bald fact that Zurich is a traditional old European city full of low- and mid-rise buildings. There are no 150-story skyscrapers casting shadows and looming over everything. Good planning is about context, and so far none of the renderings of the Chicago Spire have offered anything resembling context. Calatrava talked a lot about a “symbiotic relationship” between the tower and the site, but none of the drawings he showed explained how that would work. He showed some photos of his “Turning Torso” skyscraper in Malmo, Sweden, but those only served as examples of a stark out-of-context design. See for yourself.

The long and the short of it is Kelleher can’t build this as things stand now. I don’t expect circumstances to change much for the better. Economically things may actually get much worse, but I’d be surprised if they stayed the same or changed in a way that allowed this project to move forward. There is no doubt Kelleher and Calatrava are committed to the Chicago Spire; they proved that much Monday night at the CAF meeting. But sooner or later reality is going to collide with ambition. To paraphrase John Cougar Mellencamp, when you fight reality, reality always wins.

The Indignant Citizen

Chicago Uninspired

2007-01-30T00:28:00.000-06:00

It’s time someone called “bullshit” on this catastrophic waste of time and materials that developer Garrett Kelleher and architect Santiago Calatrava are trying to foist on Chicago. The “Chicago Spire,” a 2,000-foot drill-bit condo on the lakefront is an af-front to sensible planning and good architecture.

The fact that all the renderings of the Chicago Spire are from the same impossible perspective, suspended 1,500 feet above Lake Michigan, a mile offshore, tells you all you need to know about how poorly this project has been conceived. Buildings are about more than how they look in the skyline; they are about how they relate to the street, and to the buildings around them. This building doesn’t fit.

Let’s leave aside the practical obstacles Kelleher has to overcome, such as, oh, say, financing, and concentrate on it as a design exercise. Calatrava is one of these new “starchitects,” men whose projects elicit knee-jerk knob-slobbing reviews by architecture critics the world over, including here, based more on the name on the drawings than the substance of them. Sure, the Tribune’s Blair Kamin got huffy with Calatrava and Kelleher after a meeting of the Grant Park Advisory Council. There was some dispute as to whether the developer and the architect were showing the public the most recent renderings of the building, and whether Kelleher had changed the design and was now trying to ram it through the plan commission without allowing for a proper airing of this most public of projects.

Subsequent to that meeting, Kelleher and Calatrava sat down with Kamin and showed him the latest drawings, which Kamin deemed a huge improvement over the last renderings, proclaiming it “skyline sizzle.” Please, someone get that man a towel.

This thing is ridiculous. Kelleher wants to put 1,300 condominiums on a spit of land just west of Lake Shore Drive, in a neighborhood that until recently didn’t even have a decent grocery store. It is an insanely oversized project of exactly the type that will suffer the greatest hardship in a post-cheap oil economy. “Gee, honey, the power is out again today. Third time this week. Guess we’ll have to walk up to the 150th floor.” And I wonder how the water pressure will be up there during the rolling blackouts. . . .

Well, that all sounds vaguely doomsday, eh? Let’s be more practical. It is totally out of scale with anything around it. It fails to respect anything about its location. It’s twisting shape is a gimmick; Kamin writes that it whirls “into the sky with the same exuberant energy as the beloved, romantic skyscrapers of the 1920s.” BullSHIT. It still looks like a giant silver Twizzler stick. In fact, why not just paint it red and be done with it. They could even paint a Twizzler wrapper on it and call it advertising. A capitalistic move like that might even bring in enough advance money to start building the thing.

It’s out of proportion. And for those of you who tempted to say, “Yeah, well then so was the Hancock when it was built,” you’re right. It was. But that was another era, when super tall buildings took your breath away, and everyone was reaching higher. Now on the eve of a permanent energy shortage, projects like the Chicago Spire, and Taipei 101 and the new thing in Dubai seem more like last, wheezing grasps at a brass ring that’s moving a hundred miles an hour away from us.

What we need are not mega-tall structures with 1,300 luxury condos; we need to replace the affordable housing that’s been torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority and the reasonable rental units and housing being lost to creeping gentrification. (Not that gentrification is bad from the standpoint of improving neighborhoods, but the poor have to live somewhere—isn’t it better for them to be scattered among us than concentrated in pockets of poverty? That generally hasn’t worked out so well in the past.) And we need buildings that relate to the street and to the people using those streets.

The Chicago Spire does none of those things. Its sole attribute is that it looks cool in computer simulations of the skyline. People don’t live in the skyline, though. They live on the ground, and that’s where this building fails unforgivably.

The Indignant Citizen

Bearssss

2007-01-22T01:15:00.000-06:00

hicago will have to put off its collective nervous breakdown for another week. That Rex Grossman doll, waiting to be hung in effigy, stick it back in the closet. The Chicago Bears are going to the Super Bowl. They beat New Orleans 39-14 at a snowy Soldier Field Sunday afternoon to win their first NFC title in 21 years.

On Feb. 4 the Bears will play the Indianapolis Colts in Miami. Once again they will be underdogs. They already are. The strange world of sports betting and prognosticating has the Colts by 7. That’s a touchdown the Bears are giving up to the Colts, who needed to stage the biggest comeback in conference championship history to beat the New England Patriots in Indianapolis Sunday night.

Meanwhile, except for a brief time late in the second quarter and for part of the third, when the Saints made a game of it, the Bears monkey-stomped New Orleans. They ran the ball down their throats, and beat the holy living shit out of them on defense. All the while the glorious snow fell from the sky, adding another 10 years at least to the mystique of “Bears Weather.” Of course, at the rate we’re going, Chicago will have Miami’s climate by the time the Bears make the Super Bowl again, but what the hell? The Bears are in the Super Bowl.

The Indignant Citizen

The Weird Wisdom of Hal Slocumb

2007-01-17T11:58:00.000-06:00

Where has all the indignation gone, long time passing?

Well, it hasn’t gone anywhere, per se, it has been submerged beneath other issues, serious and real issues that remain issues and remain serious. But that pot of spaghetti sauce is starting to boil over. The stove is getting crusty.

Twenty thousand additional troops are headed to Iraq to fight in the War Without End, but Preznitwit Bush says it’s not an escalation. It is a “surge.” Perhaps “thrust” is a more appropriate word, because someone’s getting fucked here. Oh yes, it’s us, the American people. History will look back on us unkindly, no doubt, and quite possibly judge us more harshly than our dimwit commander-and-thief. Because while our overeducated ranch hand president deserves the blame for conducting perhaps the most poorly conceived military campaign since the opening of the Eastern Front in World War 2, we elected him. Twice.

OK, to be fair we didn’t elect him the first time, at least not by any kind of popular vote. But the second time around we gave him the green light, and not only that we cleared traffic off the streets and fired all the police. Since 2004, it’s been pedal-to-the-metal straight down Main Street belching flame out the exhaust pipe. History will remember us as the people that elevated a failed businessman and dimwitted evangelist to the most powerful office on Earth, and watched for six years as he and those acting on his behalf looted the country and declared war on rest of the world, in God’s name.

This is the man who, when his generals told him they needed more troops, tried to make do with fewer. Now, when the commanders on the ground say reductions in force are appropriate, he sends more, and replaces the commanders who disagree with him. What are we to make of a commander-in-chief who ties the hands of his own military? What indeed. . . .

Like it or not, however, we are stuck with him for the foreseeable future. Even beyond that, few viable options have presented themselves. Illinois Senator Barack Obama wants to run for president as a Democrat. But the only thing we can say with any certainty about Sen. Obama is that he is very, very good at being Sen. Obama. His judgment on other issues, such as choosing real estate partners (Tony Rezko), or endorsing candidates (Todd Stroger), or accepting support (Mayor Daley) is open to questioning.

There is something more than mildly distasteful about the amount of hype surrounding Sen. Obama. It isn’t that he doesn’t seem to be a likeable guy. No doubt he is. But he hasn’t done anything. The Tribune’s John Kass puts it very well in his column: “… all these people, who don’t really know him, pouring their ambitions into his empty vessel.”

Such is the condition in which we find ourselves today, nearly 22 months before the next election. We are so starved for real leadership, for any sign of electrical activity in the brain of the man behind the podium, that we will eagerly pour our hopes and ambitions into the empty vessel of the first best looking thing that comes along. The sad part is, Obama can’t even control his own fate any more. His candidacy is no longer in his hands; Obama’s future is now controlled by a pack of thin-skinned and eager political reporters and pundit hacks who will fawn over him so long as he pleases them, but who won’t hesitate to skewer him at the first perceived slight or sign of danger.

The pack also likes, on occasion, to tear down what it has built up, and so there is a real possibility that, six months down the road, the popularity pendulum will begin its movement back toward the center, inevitably missing the center, as pendulums always do, and swinging over to personal destruction. The ultimate outcome of an Obama presidential run may be decided before a single straw poll or caucus is held. This is the New America: faster and more efficient, able to weed out presidential candidates with the click of a mouse.

There are two main concerns about Obama: One is that he is all flash and no substance, and the other is that there is real substance there, but it will be burned up by the flash. But we live in a fantasy land here in America, with an imagined economy and delusional leadership. So it makes perfect sense that we would embrace Obama at this early stage. He is a fantasy, he is a dream. Right now, he is whatever we want him to be—a strong leader, eloquent, pragmatic, intelligent, sexy. Whether he actually is any of those things right now is irrelevant. It only matters what we perceive, what we believe. Maybe Obama is smart. Maybe he’s just been lucky. Maybe he’s smart and lucky.

Either way, the trouble with living in a fantasy land is that eventually reality intrudes. Like Harvey Keitel’s character Hal Slocumb said in the movie “Thelma & Louise”:

“Brains will only get you so far, and luck always runs out.”

The same is true for countries, as well as politicians and fugitives.

The Indignant Citizen

The Indignant Citizen's Election Night Observations

2006-11-08T02:07:00.000-06:00

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%.

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

2006-10-24T22:43:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-25T01:41:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-07T02:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-02T02:44:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-01T02:43:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-18T02:10:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-03T01:03:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-20T00:56:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-30T01:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-26T12:16:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-26T01:50:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-24T01:28:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-20T10:59:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-20T01:34:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-22T03:10:00.000-06:00

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’

2006-03-16T14:40:00.000-06:00

“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

2006-02-21T00:49:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-12T23:20:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-12T23:13:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-09T00:57:00.000-06:00

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.

We Want What We Want

2006-01-18T00:31:00.000-06:00

Once, when asked by a reporter what he thought of the vocal opposition to his plan for building an expressway across Manhattan through Greenwich Village, Robert Moses said, “The common man very often doesn’t know what’s in his own best interest; he isn’t smart enough to visualize what you’re going to do.”

Now, Moses was a Son of a Bitch of the highest order, and he had a myopic take on what made a great and livable city. But he was smart and in his own condescending way he was right. At least in this particular observation. For proof that Moses spoke the truth, look no further than the ever-expanding belt of cornfield development around Chicago. From Monee to Elburn to McHenry, developers are building ridiculous homes in places with no future in a world of $100 per barrel oil. And yet, they build. Why? Because the houses sell. Why? People want them.

And there, in those three words—“people want them”—is the foundation on which all attacks against so-called Smart Growth are built. Take Joel Kotkin’s recent column in the Online Wall Street Journal. The title says it all: “The War Against Suburbia.” Kotkin helpfully reproduces the entire bleating rant on his website, joelkotkin.com .

Kotkin is a Los Angeles resident, which helps explain why he feels his suburban way of life is under attack. L.A. is famous for its sprawl and you can’t have sprawl without people to populate it. More and more, however, there are voices other than those who would push the boundaries of development ever farther. Joining the chorus is Los Angeles’s new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, whom Kotkin quotes in his piece thusly: “This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know this 2,500 square feet, with a big frontyard and a big backyard – well, that’s an old concept.”

Kotkin disagrees, calling such viewpoints “imposed vision.” And it is here, in the second paragraph, that his argument begins to fall apart. “From Australia to Great Britain (and points in between), there is a drive to use the public purse to expand often underused train systems, downtown condominiums, hotels, convention centers, sports stadia and “star-chitect”-designed art museums, often at the expense of smaller business, single-family neighborhoods and local shopping areas.”

This is so far from the truth, and provably so, as to threaten Kotkin’s credibility and standing in the academic world. How many tax breaks have big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target weaseled out of cash-strapped villages, towns and cities willing to prostitute themselves for a ride to the end of the sales tax rainbow? According to one website, 244 subsidized Wal-Mart facilities in 35 states have received tax incentives totaling $1 billion.

And how much money have federal and local governments spent building and maintaining interstate and local highway systems, not to mention local roads serving sprawling subdivisions?

Oregon, and Portland in particular, rate special scorn from Kotkin. The target of his ire is the urban growth boundary that the state drew around Portland in the 1970s. It was designed to promote more dense development in the city limits and to discourage massive subdivisions on the urban fringe, preserving that land for farming. It was a move that envisioned the end of the 5,000-mile salad and the need for cities to grow more of what they consume locally.

There are arguments to be made that the urban growth boundary has had unintended consequences, among them pushing unchecked growth to the outskirts of towns beyond the boundary, towns like Newberg, Woodburn and Boring. This is part of the reason that Kotkin can claim that 95% of the region’s population increase occurred outside the city limits. No word on whether Kotkin includes Vancouver, Wash., in that statistic, and if so whether he accounts for the onetime annexation of a huge chunk of land in Clark County in the 90s that basically doubled the population of Vancouver overnight.

Kotkin’s point comes down to this: People like the suburbs. They have voted with their feet and with their money. In a capitalist society, money talks, and people should be allowed to live where they want and how they want. If they want to build communities in the middle of the corn and drive 80 miles each way to work every day, so be it. It is not government’s place to dictate lifestyle.

Which is a fine argument, except. . . . People are hypocrites. They want it both ways. They want government to leave them to do as they please, until something goes wrong, when they want government to fix it.

That, plus the fact that what people like and what’s good for them aren’t always the same thing. People like McDonald’s, for example. They like it because there’s a lot of fat in the food there and the fat helps it taste good. The Indignant Citizen likes the texture half & half adds to his coffee. That doesn’t mean he should go drinking half & half at dinner.

It’s about moderation, really, and as a culture we’re not very good at that. Is there anything wrong with single family homes? No, of course not. Is there anything wrong with the odd person here and there opting to live in the middle of nowhere? No. But when everybody decides he wants a single-family house on five acres, scarcity of land becomes a reality.

Kotkin tries to put the Fear into his readers by suggesting that a cabal of city planners has emerged from the anti-sprawl propaganda-spewing planning schools and are invading city halls across America, hatching ways to squash spawl—and property rights in the process. It’s another of the laughable conclusions he draws.

Contrary to Kotkin’s argument, city governments are not suddenly clamping down on sprawl. For evidence he need only drive through the hinterlands of Chicago. Despite the fact that dozens of condominium buildings are under construction throughout the city, houses are rising from the fields unabated. The push outward has continued with no ill effect felt from a resurgence in city building.

Kotkin also slams the media for writing stories about how some people think cities are still good. As an example he points to an article in the Jan. 8 New York Times headlined “Goodbye, Suburbs” about couples who moved to the ‘burbs, decided they didn’t like it, and moved back to the city, sometimes selling their suburban homes at a loss. Kotkin thinks this kind of reporting ignores demographic trends, and worse, ridicules them. But Kotkin’s own statistics suggest that people are choosing the suburbs despite newspapers occasionally writing stories about how some people prefer the city.

Kotkin, begins his screed by describing suburbia as “the preferred way of life across the advanced capitalist world,” and he concludes, “It is time politicians recognized how their constituents actually want to live. If not, they will only hurt their communities, and force aspiring middle class families to migrate ever further out to the periphery for the privacy, personal space and ownership that constitutes the basis of their common dreams.”

The bottom line is that the time is coming when living in far-flung suburban developments, with all that entails such as five-mile drives to the store, will be impractical. When that happens, all those people who insisted that the American Dream consisted of the right to a house, a yard, and SUV and a boat will be asking their politicians why nobody warned them the end of the cheap energy era was nigh. They’ll want to know why they were allowed to live in places that are no longer viable. They’ll be demanding compensation of some kind, no doubt.

Then the government, which Kotkin now complains is doing too much, won’t be able to do enough.

Soy 'Milk' ≠ Milk

2005-12-28T20:24:00.000-06:00

Random Thought of the Day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Archaeology

2005-12-27T19:43:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

Fucking brilliant.

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

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

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

Tired ... of war

2005-12-22T23:10:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes exhaustion produces clarity in thought.

Daybreak

2005-12-21T00:00:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could it be? Morning in America?

Still the World Champions

2005-12-20T00:39:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where's the warmth in global warming?

2005-12-19T23:58:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

2005-11-28T23:21:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overflowin’

2005-11-12T01:19:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s About Transit, Bitch

2005-11-06T22:21:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

Let The West Side Critic explain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, out.
West Side Critic

Back to Business ... Almost

2005-11-01T22:43:00.000-06:00

That was fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2005-10-27T01:04:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

Cinch it Up and Hunker Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go White Sox.

R.I.P. Marshall Field's

2005-09-21T01:27:00.000-05:00

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

Dear Mr. Lundgren,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
The Indignant Citizen

It’s just cheese

2005-09-20T00:48:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you got two kinds of cheese.”

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

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

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

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

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

September 11

2005-09-14T00:31:00.000-05:00

Today’s topic is September 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sold Down the River

2005-09-09T00:48:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flick a few more cards out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katrina Exposes The Great Divide

2005-09-07T02:36:00.000-05:00

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

“Cataclysm.” Check.

“Catastrophe.” Double check.

“Clusterfuck.” Triple check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Indignant Citizen wonders how Barbara Bush would spin that.

Wayne Gretzky: Anti-Christ?

2005-08-22T23:37:00.000-05:00

Memo from the Sports Desk:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hockey should consider itself warned.

Light vs. Darkness

2005-08-10T23:03:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing the West Side Critic

2005-08-09T21:01:00.000-05:00

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, bitches.

Giving us the Business

2005-08-06T02:27:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Fraying Social Fabric

2005-07-27T02:04:00.000-05:00

The Indignant Citizen took a vacation recently, and when he does that he usually returns to dis certain down in da Midwest with one of two feelings: 1) Chicago is the greatest city in the world; everyone else can go fuck themselves; or 2) Chicago is doomed. This time around, the Indignant Citizen is leaning more toward 2 for this simple reason: people in other places are nicer.

Case in point: Oregon. Specifically Portland and the Oregon coast. Very friendly people there. They smile at you in the grocery store, even at those awkward moments where your respective carts are trying to occupy the same space at the same time. They happily spend five or ten minutes discussing the weather, or which of the countless local beers they prefer, or the afternoon breeze that always cools the beaches in summer.

Of course, when your state’s unemployment rate is 6.5%, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a good argument can be made that you don’t have anything better to do. But the Indignant Citizen prefers to think that Oregonians, even in the afterglow of the decades-long ejaculation of Californians into the forested folds of the Beaver State, have retained their friendly sensibilities. In short, they remember how to interact with one another.

Compare that to Chicago, where restaurant workers glower and act as if you’re inconveniencing them by being there, employees behind the deli counter of the Jewel at 95th and Pulaski pretend they don’t know how to slice bread because they’re interested in doing the absolute minimum before clocking out for the day, and making eye contact on the street results in either steely stares or getting a half-empty cup of change shoved in your face.

This aloofness and occasional downright antisocial behavior is part of living in a big city. It’s a way to cope with the scale of social interaction. When the Indignant Citizen first moved here, he tried saying “hi” or nodding to most people he passed on the street. He was ignored and discouraged. And among a certain segment of the population he was quickly identified as a “sucker” and regularly asked to part with change, dollar bills or money of any kind. Once a guy hanging out at the Adams and Wabash el stop caught the Indignant Citizen in a generous mood. When the Indignant Citizen reached into his wallet to hand the guy the dollar he said he needed for the train, the guy saw a fiver in there and had the gall to say, “Just gimme the five, man.” Seeing no weapon, the Indignant Citizen declined in the most polite but direct terms possible.

For the most part, outside the small social circles we construct for ourselves, we city dwellers have forgotten how to be civil with one another. This tattered edge of our urban fabric will, the Indignant Citizen fears, continue to fray until economic or political forces beyond our comprehension today finally tear it to pieces. Have a nice day.

Daley Goes Down

2005-07-27T02:01:00.000-05:00

When Steve Warmbir and Tim Novak at the Sun-Times began bludgeoning Daley with the Hired Truck cudgel, I figured the whole mess would blow over eventually like so many others. It hasn’t, and Daley has thus far been incapable of staying ahead of the news cycle. He announces a change over here in the afternoon, but over there earlier that morning someone else got indicted or pleaded guilty.

I assumed early on that Daley would tough it out, that by the time the 2007 election rolled around all this would be forgotten. It won’t. And now I’m starting to wonder if Daley will even run again. Smart money would still have to bet on him to win, but his disapproval rating is on the rise and the media sharks are circling, waiting for someone with any kind of name recognition at all to announce they’re running.

This person, if he is out there, should be careful not to announce too soon. For instance, if someone were to announce next week, or even before the end of this year, it leaves way too much time for the media love fest to climax and subside. An announcement has to be timed for the middle of the third quarter of 2006, I believe, to most effectively ride the twin waves of scandal and disdain into office. No one will beat Daley by arguing Chicago is worse off than it was when he took office. No one will win by saying he’ll reduce crime that’s already falling. The road to City Hall will be paved with the bones of scandal, and they will have to be fresh bones, at that. There is still enough time for Daley to save himself if he isn’t indicted and if he can show he’s cracking the whip on patronage and waste and corruption. The prudent strategy for any challenger is to wait at least a year and see what happens.

Superstar? Superstar Archi-Clown, Maybe

2005-07-27T01:59:00.000-05:00

So Santiago Calatrava swaggered into town Monday, waving his big dick of a skyscraper in the faces of the drooling Chicago media, and they eagerly lined up to fellate him. Stories about Calatrava’s soaring, twisting tower appeared in both the Sun-Times and the Tribune on Tuesday, and both papers referred to the Spanish architect as a “superstar.”

Fuck that. Calatrava’s grotesque tower would mar Chicago’s skyline, but more importantly it would be a giant ass pimple on the lakeshore. His big “innovation” is rotating each successive floor two degrees clockwise from the floor below it, thus giving the building the twisting appearance. In one story, Calatrava tried to say the design was meant to evoke the first wisp of smoke from the first fire lit by natives along the lakeshore. Whatever. It’s an overly narrow, overly tall building that—at 2,000-plus feet tall—is too tall for the Streeterville neighborhood in which it will be built.

I doubt the city will allow it, but the slobbering knob job both the Sun-Times and the Tribune gave the initial design is as good a reminder as any that newspaper architecture writers and critics are writers and critics—not planners or architects—for a reason: often, they have little taste and no sense of sustainable, practical and scalable development.

Cudgeled by the Sunday Trib

2005-07-12T01:32:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, the Sunday Chicago Tribune will land with a particular authority on the front porch, and The Indignant Citizen knows it’s going to be one of those rare papers that delivers a treat of some kind in almost every section. This past Sunday, the 10th, was one of those.

Two sections in particular stood out: Metro (the South-Southwest edition) and Arts & Entertainment. We’ll start with A&E. Headlining the page was a Blair Kamin architecture review of the new Hyatt Center at Wacker Drive & Monroe Street downtown, “Throwing Tradition a Curve.” Kamin likes it, as he likes the Hyatt Center’s neighbor to the south across Monroe, 111 S. Wacker Drive. He argues they make an attractive western gateway to the Loop that offers visual rewards for pedestrians, much as the Tribune Tower and Wrigley Building do on southbound Michigan Avenue, and the University Club and Monroe Building do at Michigan and Monroe. The Indignant Citizen agrees.

However the design of the Hyatt Center, and more specifically the design of the plaza separating it from Monroe Street, is to The Indignant Citizen more significant than the architectural statement the fish-shaped building makes within Chicago’s right angle-dominated skyline.

Some history. According to Kamin’s story, Hyatt’s new headquarters was supposed to be a showcase building. First, it was to be in a prominent location in Chicago. Second, the Hyatt hotel chain is owned by the Pritzker family, which gives out an annual award for architectural excellence that is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for literature or the Pulitzers in journalism. Finally, the building was slated to be the first skyscraper completed in Chicago in the new Post-9/11 era, also known as the Time of the Fear.

After that wretched day, the Pritzkers knew hotels wouldn’t be making big money, at least in the short term, and they downscaled their dream. They told the original architect, Pritzker Prize winner Lord Norman Foster, that the “special shout” building project he had been commissioned to draw was dead. Instead the Pritzkers hired Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in New York. Cobb, whom Kamin described as a “distinguished elder statesman” was certainly more than capable of designing a quality office tower, having put his name on Boston’s John Hancock Tower. But one gets the impression that Cobb is to architecture what Shel Gordon was to sex in When Harry Met Sally. Sure, Cobb can do your taxes or give you a root canal, but humpin’ and pumpin’ out a hot building that leaves your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat ain’t Cobb’s job.

Nonetheless, his building has a certain grace, and it does one thing exponentially better than the much higher-profile, David Childs-designed “Freedom Tower” in New York City that will sit at Ground Zero: It relates to the street. Cobb’s Hyatt Center meets the sidewalk with a curving glass façade that gives pedestrians a chance to interact with the building. The “Freedom Tower,” on the other hand, meets pedestrians with a massive setback and a 200-foot-tall concrete pedestal that says, loudly and clearly “Get the fuck away!”

Argue all you want about how the “Freedom Tower” is a bigger magnet for Islamo-terrorists, but then face this fact: A truck bomb is a truck bomb, whether it explodes at the “Freedom Tower” or the Hyatt Center. The key is keeping the explosives away from the building’s structural supports. Childs did this by placing his building on a concrete turd. Cobb managed to effect the same protection using whimsically curved planters made of stone placed strategically in a pedestrian friendly plaza along Monroe Street. The planters are low, have ledges for sitting, contain grass and are curved to reflect the tower’s exterior. They allow pedestrians to walk in between them and easily access the building. And they are close enough together to keep any vehicle well away from the building’s lobby, where an explosion would cause the most damage.

Here’s Kamin: “Following the unveiling of the fortresslike Freedom Tower, [Hyatt Center] offers an alternative vision, one in which our fears—and, thus, our buildings—remain in proper proportion.”

Right on.

Now for Metro. There were four stories on the Metro front, each one worth reading. At the top of the page was the obligatory “public agency wastes taxpayer dollars” story about financial problems in the tiny but tax-rich Salt Creek School District 48 in DuPage County. It is the fourth-richest district in the state, thanks to a relatively low student population in proportion to tax revenue.

The discretionary income-drawing Oakbrook Shopping Center rests within its borders, and homeowners in the Salt Creek district enjoy the second-lowest school tax rate in the state. Yet the district still managed to spend $12,653 per student on 550 students in 2004. The Trib doesn’t include a current statewide per-pupil spending average in its story, instead saying Salt Creek’s spending is “far higher” than the state average. That is a lazy journalistic cop-out. Why not put real numbers in? Following a relatively simple Internet search, the Indignant Citizen found that Illinois’ total per-pupil spending in 2003, the most recent year statewide numbers are readily available, was slightly more than $8,400 per pupil. Half again as much could be “far higher” than the state average, but surely the state average increased from 2003 to 2004, right?

Anyway, the key to this story is the fact that despite this tax windfall, the district is going broke. It has prostrated itself before voters five times seeking tax increases, each time unsuccessfully. Meanwhile a teacher in the district has alerted the state attorney general’s office to some shady financing involving the use of Medicaid funds to pay for district administrators and board members to travel to winter conferences in places like Orlando, San Diego and Phoenix. At the same time the district is cutting teachers and programs. Parents are fed up, and berated the district at a recent meeting. District mouthpieces can’t get their stories straight about tapping the Medicaid accounts, but maintain the complaints about staffing and trips are coming from disgruntled teachers angry that their salaries have been frozen for four years and negotiations on a new contract aren’t going well.

The Trib reporter then helpfully points out that the “average” Salt Creek teacher salary is $63,065, “higher than all but a handful of elementary districts in the state.” What’s with the generalities again? Just give us the numbers so we can see for ourselves. And no shit the teachers are pissed. A four-year salary freeze is the same as a pay cut when you consider inflation, a point the Trib story fails to make, instead leaving the rhetorical impression that Salt Creek teachers are well-paid and should shut up and take it like good little whores.

To the Indignant Citizen, this relates back to America’s failure to properly compensate teachers for the work they do, which today includes babysitting as much as instruction. The problem isn’t teacher pay. The good ones aren’t paid nearly enough. (The bad ones should be fired, period. Unions defending lazy and stupid teachers are one reason the public regards teacher unions as it would a disemboweled squirrel falling from a tree onto the Sunday afternoon barbecue.)

For most districts, their problems revolve around bloated administrations and narrow mandates to teach children only what they must learn to do well on tests and earn the ho cash doled out by Pimp Daddy Bush and the Johns running No Child Left Behind. Add to that the fear of frivolous and/or zealous lawsuits against districts with teachers whose ideas challenge students to think critically and you have an education system that is surpassed in mediocrity only by our national public transportation system.

This Salt Creek story isn’t over. That money went somewhere, and not all of it went for $20,000 trips to warm locales. Someone’s got a nice house somewhere or a Mercedes in the garage that was paid for by the district. Just wait.

Then below that there’s a story about a freak murder near the University of Illinois at Chicago. The best anyone can figure, two punk bitches from the ‘burbs got their asses kicked or fell off a city curb late Friday night. When a UIC poly-sci student and his buddy noticed the two bleeding burbanites, they offered to help, an act for which one, Tombol Malik, 23, was beaten to death with his own bike lock and his friend tasered. The Indignant Citizen wonders what kind of fucking world we’re living in when a dude offering a hand gets beaten to death.

Finally the Trib has a story about new lights being installed that will cast a tighter beam on the Wrigley Building. That’s nice as far as it goes. The new light towers on Michigan Avenue are ugly, though, and the Indignant Citizen wonders whether it’s even worth the energy to light up the Wrigley any more, but the real news is buried in the ninth graf:

“The modification comes at a time when the company [Wrigley] is studying its long-term real estate needs and a possible move from its historic headquarters, a development that has prompted some real estate speculators to suggest that the building could someday be turned into luxury condominiums.”

The Indignant Citizen is all for more people moving downtown. But he is also for jobs downtown. Is Wrigley preparing some cut-and-run maneuver in which it downsizes and moves its operations to Beijing? Try it, bitches. I got $50 and a Kryptonite bike lock that says you’re stayin’ right the fuck where you are. Additionally, who’s going to live in these luxury condominiums when the last pump in the Gahwar oil field in Saudi Arabia starts spitting seawater instead of oil, dousing the oil-fired “global economy?”

Opportunity Lost

2005-07-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

Originally written on Oct. 10, 2001 by the Indignant Citizen when he was ... um, the Pre-Indignant Citizen:

Lately there’s been a lot of discussion in architecture and planning circles about what to do with the site that used to be the World Trade Center. Personally, starting to look ahead has helped me put this tragedy in perspective and allowed me to move on emotionally. The towers were as much of a symbol of New York–perhaps more so–as the Statue of Liberty. You could see them from miles away and they helped orient you. Their loss as physical structures, while leaving a hole, doesn’t compare with the immense loss of life at the site.

For families or friends of those who died when the planes hit and the towers fell, memorial services can begin the healing process. But what about for the rest of us? It seems to me the best course of action is to start talking about the future.
Much has been said and written about what should be done with the site. To start, let’s boil the arguments down into two categories: rebuild the towers as they were, or do something else.

This seems to me to be an easy choice. Rebuilding the towers as they were would be a monumental mistake done for purely sentimental and patriotic reasons. Instead let’s be practical for a moment. The Twin Towers and their accompanying buildings supplied 20 million to 25 million square feet of office space and were considered at the time to be highly efficient uses of space. But their inefficiencies probably killed thousands. It takes more than an hour to evacuate a 110-story using stairwells. An hour after the first plane hit, the south tower had collapsed. The north tower followed a short time later.

Buildings that tall have proven to be unsafe, not just if planes fly into them and explode, but in the event of any kind of damage. They are too big to be practical. And consider for a moment that at the time the World Trade Center complex was destroyed, New York City had a glut of approximately 25 million square feet of vacant office space. Much of that has now been taken, as well as hundreds of thousands of additional square feet across the Hudson in New Jersey, in the northern suburbs and on Long Island.

We don’t need to replace every square foot of space lost at the World Trade Center site. Let’s rebuild much of it, but allow other neighborhoods to absorb– and benefit from–smaller businesses that were displaced. That will help neighborhoods that were in decline or that never cashed in on the prosperity of the 1990s.

Another argument against rebuilding the World Trade Center as it was is that in fact the complex used space inefficiently. Its elevated, windswept plaza was an underutilized, impersonal waste of space. The complex was closed off from the surrounding street grid, making it an island on an island. Its monumental scale discouraged pedestrian traffic unless you had business there. The nature of the business that went on in the Trade Center discouraged mixed-income housing in lower Manhattan. Sure, some of the professional people who worked in the Trade Center lived in nearby Battery Park City, but most of them had above-average incomes or two professionals in the home.

Rebuilding the same inefficient complex would present the same problems and waste an opportunity to weave the site back into the urban fabric of a part of New York that, prior to Sept. 11, was taking small steps toward becoming a vibrant, 24-hour community. It would also ensure that lower Manhattan would remain an area where only the wealthy could afford to live.

If we eliminate rebuilding the WTC as it was, we’re left with only one question: What should we build there instead?

To this question there are many answers. I’m not an architect, so I won’t attempt to sketch out any rough drawings of what may eventually rise from the World Trade Center’s ashes and twisted metal skeleton. But planners and architects who eventually work on the project should keep several things in mind:

Whatever is eventually built there should have a human scale. The World Trade Center was in some respects too big to comprehend. Standing at the base of one of the towers and looking up, there was no sense of where the top of the tower was. The hulking black office buildings that were 4, 5 and 6 World Trade Center, although they were much shorter, did little to help the overwhelming impact of the plaza. Everything about the complex was giant. Even the in the center of the plaza fountain was huge.

Obviously, some space needs to be reserved for a memorial. If we extend the street grid into the site, perhaps two or four of the central blocks could be turned into a park with a memorial at its center. The park needs to have grassy areas, plenty of trees, benches, curving paths. Perhaps a fountain at its center that incorporates part of the steel skeleton of the Trade Center. The memorial needs to inspire hope for the future while at the same time serving as a reminder of that day. But the park should not only be a memorial. It should bring the surrounding community together, serve as a focal point for gatherings like concerts and rallies. It should draw the area’s residents and serve as a tranquil place in the midst of the city for lunches, sun bathing, reading. Picture something on the scale of a Union Square. Perhaps it could incorporate an ice skating rink on a plaza and/or some kind of outdoor amphitheater for summer plays and concerts. Around the park would rise new office buildings, many with ground-floor retail. It would be Rockefeller Center on a grander, greener scale. We might also incorporate a new museum, one celebrating lower Manhattan’s history. This is an opportunity to continue introducing cultural institutions into the area, thereby broadening the mix of visitors.

Any new construction should encourage a mix of uses. The World Trade Center had its underground mall, but it catered almost exclusively to office workers and commuters wandering through its corridors between trains or on their way from train to office. It did not draw pedestrians from above. Of course, there is a need to replace lost office space. However as I mentioned there is no need to replace the entire 25 million square feet. One proposal to build four buildings varying in height from 50-60 stories is a step in the right direction. But these should not be clustered on plaza as was the previous design. Instead, build these buildings on the blocks formed by the street grid. Return car and–more importantly–pedestrian traffic to the area. On the ground floors of these new office buildings should be retail stores, restaurants and bars. Perhaps one building could be modeled on the Chicago Place mall, with eight or nine stories of stores topped by an office building or hotel. In the basement of this building could be a supermarket that stays open late to draw residents from nearby areas. Somewhere there needs to be a movie theater or some other kind of business that draws crowds after the office workers have gone home.

At present, many Battery Park City residents are frustrated by the lack of information coming from the city and federal agencies in charge of the cleanup around the Trade Center site. Their frustration is understandable, as is the authorities’ need to keep some information under wraps. This is, after all, still a crime scene. The real risk here is that these frustrated residents will pack up and move away once they’re allowed back in. To be sure, some of the remaining apartments may be uninhabitable. Either the landlords and developers are going to have to pay to clean these places up, or the city or federal government will have to provide some kind of subsidy. These apartments must be restored and they must be filled with residents as soon as possible. This was an area on the verge of becoming a viable, 24-hour neighborhood. Ironically, the destruction of the World Trade Center may help further this development–if the area is cleaned up and the right mix of development occurs.

The World Trade Center was a vital transportation hub, as we’re all learning now that the subway service on the 1,9, N, R and PATH trains has been disrupted for what may turn out to be years. It must be a hub again. However we should take this opportunity to expand service there. Along with improved connections between the PATH and other city subways, the Long Island Railroad should build a station underneath lower Manhattan. I envision an expansive underground network of passageways and subway stations, with retail stores that cater to commuters similar to what used to be under the World Trade Center, but less mall-like and easier to navigate.

When we talk of extending the street grid, we must keep in mind that this should be a pedestrian-oriented area, not a car-oriented area. The sidewalks should be wide, the streets should be narrow, in keeping with the feel east of Broadway. Unlike the area east of Broadway, sidewalks in the new development should have trees to serve as a buffer between pedestrians and the street.

July 6, 2005: That’s as far as I got. Needless to day, none of that came to pass and what has been proposed instead seeks to replace all of the lost office space, build a “monument building” on the site and completely ignores the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. This assumes anything at all gets built. The foot-dragging and appeasement that occurred early on, with squabbles among the families of office victims’ families and firefighters’ families, only set the table for the delays to come.

We’re approaching the four-year anniversary, and what have we got? We have a proposal for a poorly-designed, inartistic, over-large office tower sitting on a defensive pedestal with no relationship to the street. Replacing the Twin Towers with this boondoggle will send a clear message to the terrorists for sure. It says: “You win.”

On the Web: Lower Manhattan Development Coorporation

A Note on New York’s ‘Freedom Tower’

2005-07-05T22:46:00.000-05:00

Check out James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month for July. ‘Nuff said. For now.

Later the Indignant Citizen will explain what should have happened in Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

A Taste of Freedom

2005-07-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

This past weekend marked the Fourth of July, and the Indignant Citizen was filled with patriotic Pride at the sight of his fellow citizens marking the day in solemn fashion, contemplating War and our country’s place in the world and in history, pausing to remember those who died and who are still dying so that we might enjoy. . . .

Aw, who is the Indignant Citizen kidding? We celebrated the way we always have: by blowin’ shit up, guzzling beer, ingesting large quantities of fried food and leaving behind an immense fucking mess for the New Economy’s bottom feeders to pick up.

We are a nation of slobs. Lazy slobs at that, for one can be a slob and at least bring some energy to the job. We just drop our shit wherever it falls out of our hands and let it blow in the wind—into yards, into the lake, into the trees, into empty lots. Take for example the parade and fireworks display in the Indignant Citizen’s leafy, inner-ring Chicago suburb. Lots of people came out, folks who see each other every day at the grocery store, waiting for the bus, buying an ax at the Home Depot. Everyone brings the brood, some portable chairs and a cooler full of Icehouse and plops down along 95th Street. The fire department rolls by, lights flashing, sirens wailing and a big Stars & Stripes affixed to the bumper, in the manner of the FDNY trucks after Sept. 11. The Hoses are followed by a high school band, and then a tiny tots dance school, and some fucker in a green ’72 Eldorado with “Support the Troops” hand-painted on the side—a true patriot at nine miles per gallon. Then comes a giant RV with cheap red, white and blue streamers duct-taped to the side and a tattered old flag pasted across the passenger side front window. Yes, sir, the heart swells with Pride at a display like that.

And just when it looks to be over, when the last squad car has cruised by, why then the fun’s just startin’, Bubba. That’s because it’s time to pack up da fam-damily and head on up ta da park fer da fahr-werks! Eeeeeyyyyyaaaaahhhh! Whoops! When did Howard Dean get here? Send that Osama-loving fag back Vermont. The Fourth of July is for Men and for Patriots! And to prove it we will discard our empty Icehouse cans, our plastic bags full of barbecue sauce-stained napkins and gnawed-on turkey legs, and our Styrofoam plates here on the sidewalk, inches from where we sat on our fat asses and watched the parade.

Yes! Yes! Leave it all! Real Patriots don’t put their trash in the garbage. This is America, goddammit, and we’ve no time to be walking an extra 20 feet to throw garbage in some enviro-hippie trash can. We have places to go. If we don’t leave now for da fahr-werks Right Now, we won’t have enough room to spread out our soiled Flag Blanket, since doing so is a ritualistic way of staking our Claim to space we’ll need so’s papa can change little Johnny’s shitty diaper in full view of the world and mama can whip our her teat and suckle little Susie. Hoo boy, it’s a real American Fourth of JU-ly.

Whoa. Got carried away, there. Sometimes the Indignant Citizen gets caught up in the Patriotism of it all, see, and he forgets. . . . But we were talking about trash of the refuse variety. At the local parade, at the local fireworks and at Chicago’s July 3 fireworks at the Taste of Chicago, the Indignant Citizen was struck dumb by the sheer stupid laziness of his fellow Americans, and by the king-sized mess we manage to leave behind after our “celebrations.”

The ground at Grant Park was covered ankle-deep in trash after the fireworks Sunday night. The Indignant Citizen saw one single family actually throw its trash away. Walking along the lakefront afterward, the concrete walkway and the grassy hill were strewn with paper and plastic and glass bottles. One guy picked up a bottle and threw it away. He gave up after that, realizing that to continue would be like standing at the bottom of an avalanche with a toy sandbox shovel.

And so much for the trash. Another observation from the long Fourth weekend: We are inches from anarchy in this country. The Indignant Citizen felt on several occasions that only a razor’s edge stood between uneasy calm and riot—most notably, the crowds at the central Taste intersection of Jackson and Columbus. On the busiest day of the Taste, this intersection is gridlock. You can’t move. Why? Plain stubbornness, mostly. Nobody wants to yield, everyone is standing or walking where they are by Right, and nothing will make them step aside. Of course, even if they chose to step aside, there would be no place to go, thanks in no small measure to the logic-challenged parents who insist on wheeling strollers through the dense crowd. Where the fuck do they think they’re going?! And exactly how much room do they feel they and their offspring are entitled to?

In another example, a large crowd waited to cross Lake Shore Drive south of Buckingham Fountain. Cops manned the crosswalks and the traffic light control box, presumably to help traffic and pedestrian flow. But they never allowed the pedestrians to cross, even when no traffic was coming on the Drive. Eventually the crowd reached half a block deep waiting to cross. Then, suddenly, people started out in frustration. They quickly spilled into the street, filling all lanes. One old cop tried to stem the tide, pushing a couple of pedestrians back onto the sidewalk. But by and large we ignored him.

We love our men in uniform, except when they get in our way.

Smokys Serenade

2005-07-04T13:57:00.000-05:00

Lest you get the impression the Indignant Citizen is a curmudgeon without a helpful or nice word about anything, let us focus for a moment on what is left of America’s natural beauty. Take, for example, the Great Smoky Mountains.

As the Indignant Citizen mentioned in an earlier post, he and his Smart & Beautiful Wife drove the Blue Ridge Parkway through the North Carolina portion of the Smokys before turning onto Highway 441, the Newfound Gap Road, and eventually encountering the Shimmering Port-A-Potty in the Valley known as the greater Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge, Tenn., area.

Let it be known that the Smokys, when one is high up in them, are beautiful and awe-inspiring. The road through the Smokys offers stunning vistas around every turn. There are deep, densely-wooded valleys that bottom out in green carpets; smooth, tree-topped mountains rising into the haze and folded in behind one another as far as the eye can see; and above all, almost nothing else. No gas stations, no homes (or very few, anyway, we did see what appeared to be houses built into some hillsides but they were scattered and few), no restaurants, no outlet malls. Nothing. Even the occasional rest area with its bare-bones lavatory shack seemed like an intrusion.

It is nice to know places like this still exist in America—mile upon mile of wilderness. It’s easy to forget that they do. Growing up in the West, the Indignant Citizen took these vast areas of nature for granted. Intervening years spent in Chicago (now for the second time around) and New York City can leave one with the impression that man’s concrete reach has touched even the most remote parts of the country. Thankfully it has not and we have our predecessors to thank for that, at least in part. They recognized the importance of preserving open space from the country’s westward expansion. There’s even a Chicago connection, with Stephen T. Mather spearheading the creation of the National Park Service.

But back to the Smokys. Our drive started on a cloudy, cool day. We climbed into the clouds, and about a third of the way into the drive the fog was so thick we could barely see the lines on the twisting road. Occasionally we would round a bend and pop out of the fog for a moment, but the world around us was gray.

Then, as quickly as we were in it, we were out, confronted again with spectacular vistas (the road has pull-out points seemingly every quarter-mile, and each one is worth the stop). About the time we crossed over into Tennessee from North Carolina, we were hit by a dark and massive thunderstorm that forced most traffic off to the side of the narrow road, sent rivers of water and rock across the highway and dumped pea-size hail in a quantity sufficient to make the road slick and coat the sides of the hills in a winter-esque white.

The descent out of the mountains is quick, but the terrain takes its time flattening out. Not until just south of Lexington, Ky., does the landscape begin to yield to the glacially-smoothed topography familiar to most Flatlanders.

Something about the mountains is intoxicating. Perhaps it is the remoteness, the feeling that, once in them, one is disconnected from the world. Standing on the prairie, there is always the “out there,” the long thin line where the horizon meets the land. In the mountains, perspective is shortened—unless you’re on a peak, which is generally a temporary situation. In the mountains, there is only the here.

Bushfucked

2005-06-28T23:50:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Support the Troops: IMPEACH BUSH.”

Wake Me When One of Them Wins the World Series

2005-06-26T23:33:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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