Forrest Claypool’s ‘Stroger Dilemma’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s no Substitute for Horsepower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Location Disclosed

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

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

Way to go, Dick.

The Olympic ‘Me’ Awards

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

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

Let the celebratory dick swinging begin.

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

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

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

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

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

Choices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have chosen the politics of division rather than inclusion.

We have chosen infotainment over news.

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

We’ve chosen the “me” over the “we”.

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

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

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

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

We Want What We Want

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

Random Thought of the Day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Archaeology

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

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

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

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

Fucking brilliant.

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

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

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