04/10/2026
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American Schizophrenia

777 Words: American Duality

Franklin. Washington. Jefferson. Jackson. Brown. Calhoun. Lincoln. Davis. Morgan. Roosevelt. Wilson. Hoover (J. Edgar). Fr. Coughlin. Lindbergh. Roosevelt (another one). Truman. McCarthy. Kennedy. Kennedy (his brother). Wallace. Nixon. Reagan. Limbaugh. Obama. Trump.

All huge figures in American history. All left deep, indelible marks on the country and the world. And the lot of them constitute a range of morality that stretches from saintliness to arch-villainy.

Americans: Lindbergh (L) & Limbaugh.

Even the saints, though, whomever you wish to characterize in that fashion, possessed some level of mischief or even depravity.

There really are no saints. But there are sinners galore. Each of us carries within the capability to hurt, to harm, to rob, to lie, to shun, to insult. The best of us stand on our heads to resist the constant temptation to do any of those things.

I asked a guy once, Say you found a purse on the sidewalk. You look inside and see that it belongs to a 98-year-old woman and in it are any number of premium credit cards and a thousand dollars in cash. How long would it take for you to decide to do the right thing?

My thinking was, I’d fantasize for about seven seconds keeping the cash and rationalize it by saying obviously the woman is loaded and, anyway, she hasn’t got much time left on this planet, whereas I’m young, broke, and…, well, sure, I’d turn it in. Eventually. But I wouldn’t sprint to the police station to do it.

The guy, though, said I wouldn’t have a second thought about it. I’d turn it in immediately.

I didn’t believe him. I still don’t.

I’ve always felt it’s the second thought that makes us human, that makes us good people.

The worst of us obey only their first impulses.

That gang I listed above? An uncomfortable number of them are among the worst of us.

You can take any culture, any nation on Earth and create a similar roster of notables particular to it and say the same thing about them. There were great Indians and rotten Germans. Pious Thais and reprobate Congolese. Japanese capable of angelic love and hateful Brazilians.

Humans. Need I say more?

The United States of America, 250 years old this summer, is the most diverse country on Earth. People from every race and every nation live here, either because their parents or grandparents immigrated here or they were naturalized or their families have been here since the days of the Revolutionary War. Some Americans can even trace their lineage back to the Clovis people or the very first Asians who crossed the Ice Age land bridge at Alaska.

30,000-year-old human footprints found at White Sands, New Mexico.

America is home to Indians (Asian variety), Germans, Thais, Congolese, Japanese, Brazilians, and natives of every corner of the globe. There is, for pity’s sake, a community of Lhotshampa — Nepalis from Bhutan — living in and around a small Vermont village. Who knew?

Lhotshampa woman.

Because this holy land is home to every stripe of human, more so than any other land, holy or not, the United States of America embodies every possible quality of humanness. We are the best and the worst. The scales of our history teeter from one extreme to the other. We wrote a national charter forbidding royalty. We drew up a Bill of Rights previously unheard of in human history. We committed genocide upon Native Americans. We imported, bought, and sold slaves from Africa. We fought a war to put an end to slavery. We invented fantastic, fabulous machines. We brought electricity to the hills and hollows of Tennessee. We, slowly but surely, guaranteed freedoms and rights to nearly every citizen. We occasionally rescind those freedoms and rights. We welcomed immigrants from all over the world. We beat and robbed and scammed and imprisoned many of those immigrants. We helped crush the Nazis. We destroyed the Japanese warlords. We installed or propped up despots and tyrants in Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other places.

Nothing illustrates this weird, contradictory, essentially schizophrenic way of life than today’s headlines. Not just today, as in these days, but actually today as in Friday, April 10, 2026. Just as four astronauts are scheduled to land in the Pacific Ocean off the San Diego coast after traveling farther out in space than any other humans ever have, this same nation stands arm in arm with a murderous Israeli regime in strafing, bombing, displacing, incinerating and, for all intents and purposes, committing genocide in the Middle East.

We can explore the heavens while at the same time slaughter other human beings. No nation is both as good and bad as this one.

03/27/2026
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ICE, Sheridan Gorman

953 Words: Democrats, Progressives: Stop Apologizing!

A terrible thing happened in my beloved hometown, Chicago, last week.

An 18-year-old freshman at Loyola University named Sheridan Gorman was out walking with a group of friends along the city’s far north side lakefront at 1:30 in the morning on March 19th. They’d hoped to take pictures of Chicago’s distant skyline from a pier.

The Jetty at Pratt Avenue on Lake Michigan the Next Morning.

Gorman, according to a Chicago Sun-Times story about the incident, was the first to reach the end of the pier. She turned around and saw a masked man, carrying a gun. The group began to scatter and then a shot rang out. Gorman was shot in the back. She died.

The young woman’s life was snuffed out at what might have been one of the most joyous, hopeful, promising moments she’d ever experienced. On her own at a university with her new circle of friends, taking in the sights of the big city, her entire adult future before her. I bet she was, in the words of the song, “as giddy as a baby on a swing.”

And some no-good son of a bitch took it all away from her.

The alleged shooter has been apprehended and charged. Of course, in this deranged American day and age, he turns out to be an immigrant in this country illegally. The White House and countless Trumpists on the internet all have become tumescent over the tragedy. You see, they’re bleating, that’s why we’ve got to round up all the illegal immigrants before they shoot us all.

Sheridan Gorman’s parents have issued a statement imploring people to stop using their daughter’s tragic death as a political talking point. Good luck with that.

Maria Hadden, the alderman of the 49th Ward where the killing occurred was asked about lakefront safety. She tried to assure neighbors and tourists that the lakefront is generally safe. She attempted to position the tragedy as an isolated incident. Gorman, she said, “was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It would be impossible for her to utter a more innocuous statement. Sheridan Gorman, indeed, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her death was the definitive example of that old saw.

Yet, a disturbing number of media commentators have expressed outrage and callers to Hadden’s office have informed her that she should die for saying that. Their reasoning? She’s blaming the victim. Fox News and the New York Post have jumped on the fury bandwagon.

Hadden had to shut down her ward office for a few days this week because she and her staff were made jittery by the threats and the overall rage. In announcing her office’s temporary closing, Hadden apologized for saying what she did.

Let me repeat that. She apologized. It’s like the ghost of Sheridan Gorman apologizing to the man who pulled the trigger for getting in the way of his bullet.

This promiscuous apologizing business has got to stop. Especially that being done, obsessively, by Democrats, progressives, liberals, and pretty much everybody with whom I identify. Those on my side of the fence spend more time apologizing than coming up with effective strategies to prevent the Trump Party from turning this holy land into his personal fiefdom.

Just stop it.

But it ain’t gonna happen soon. Lest you think it’s just the MAGA mob who are pushing the memory of poor Sheridan aside to make room for their own gotchas or other tribal blatherings, keep in mind my old maxim: the worst thing about democracy is the people.

Another party felt the need to apologize in the fallout from Gorman’s killing.

The headline over a story on the apprehension and charging of the alleged shooter in the Loyola Phoenix, the university’s student newspaper, on March 23rd read: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved.” Again, it’s awfully hard to quibble with the headline. The man being charged was indeed an immigrant and, while many people who have come to these shores from other lands are law-abiding citizens or guests, a man who’s here without due authorization killing someone does indeed ring an alarm. If this nation had a reasonable, logical immigration policy as well as equitable, efficient enforcement thereof, the alleged shooter might not have been lying in wait for his innocent victim.

Instead, we have ICE, Trump’s schutzstaffel, busy rounding up as many brown-skinned souls as can fit in their unmarked vans to be sped off to some holding cage with few human comforts and next to no medical care. ICE was in Chicago this past winter, corralling scores of suspected illegal immigrants with impunity and killing at least one. Sheridan Gorman’s alleged shooter, by the way, somehow escaped the notice of ICE, despite its stated goal of apprehending “the worst of the worst” among undocumented immigrants. He, acc’d’g to reports, was arrested for shoplifting in 2023 and subsequently did not appear in court on that charge. Sounds like someone ICE ought to have been zeroing in on from the get-go.

Anyway, among all this tragic murdering, undocumented illegality, and private presidential police forcing, the Loyola Phoenix found it necessary to apologize for pointing out in its headline that the alleged shooter was an immigrant. Even worse, acc’d’g to its mea culpa, the newspaper referred to him in the body of the story as “illegal.”

The Loyola Phoenix got down on its hands and knees, as it were, groveled, and begged for forgiveness for using such horrifying language.

Meanwhile, ICE is taking over America’s airports in addition to Democrat-run cities. Its holding cages are still bursting at the seams while undocumented immigrants with criminal records are still at large.

And Sheridan Gorman remains dead.

Sheridan Gorman.

03/21/2026
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Bari Weiss, CBS News

852 Words: No News Is Bad News

I was a kid when this holy land was tearing itself apart over civil rights, women’s liberation, and the war in Vietnam. So, from my earliest days I understood this semi-united nation was rife with hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist, blissfully unread homunculi plopped before some tens of millions of TV sets.

That said, I also understood the United States was equally chock-full of caring, serious, just, peace-craving, fully-evolved human beings who, if they, too, were plopped in front of their TVs, at least had the decency to grasp that there were better things to do with their lives and felt guilty about it.

Now, of course, we carry our TVs around in our pockets, everywhere we go. We have instant access to hundreds of millions…, nay, billions of people around the world through social media, instant communications, and 24-hour news sites. And the United States is still rife with hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist, blissfully unread homunculi. And it remains also chock-full of caring, serious, just, peace-craving, fully-evolved human beings.

I’m going to throw out this sliver of optimism. It seems the boundary line between the couch-dwelling homunculi and the fully-evolved Homo sapiens sits smack dab in the middle of the populace. Witness the last three presidential elections. Each was a nail-biter. Each was fought tooth and nail to the last voter in the last polling place about to close its doors at 6:00pm. Or seven. Whenever this state or that closes its voting booths on election day.

Back when I was a kid, the numerical borderline stood far to the right. In the 1968 presidential election, the hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist candidate Richard Nixon, along with the even more reprehensible George Wallace, amassed nearly 60 percent of the vote. Four years later, Nixon was reelected with more than 60 percent of the vote. So six of every ten voters preferred the demonstrably more awful candidate in those years.

Now, it’s 50/50.

Huzzah.

Even so, we’re still stuck with a hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist, blissfully unread homunculus in the Oval Office. And we’re way more addicted to our screens than people ever were in 1968 or ’72. At least back then people did things like go to work, go shopping, mow the lawn, and drive their cars without watching, slacked-jawed, half-lidded, and stupefied, their TVs.

And, sure, tens of millions of people in 1968 watched brain-mushing, narcoleptic fare like Gomer Pyle, USMC and The Beverly Hillbillies, but when they watched the news, they tuned to Walter Cronkite, many of them. Maybe even most of them.

Cronkite Announces Kennedy’s Death.

Walter Cronkite walked us through Alan Shepard’s space flight, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination and, yes, the Vietnam War. He explained it all calmly, authoritatively, and evenly. When he realized the Vietnam War couldn’t be won by the US, he didn’t gloat or say Gotcha! He even feared he would lose viewers by saying so. That didn’t matter. Ever the reporter, he saw something and he reported on it. Simple as that.

Cronkite was the primary news anchor for CBS. People called it the Tiffany Network back then because its reputation as a news source was sterling. CBS, for pity’s sake, had been the home of Edward R. Murrow, as dedicated, important, and effective a journalist as ever lived or even imagined. Murrow broadcast live from the rooftops of London as Nazi Luftwaffe planes bombed the city during World War II, Murrow later took on the demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy, exposing the rabid anti-communist as a five-star bullshitter.

Murrow In London.

CBS News. The phrase itself sounds weighty, consequential. trustworthy.

Well, that was then. Now, nah.

The superlatively breezy Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025. She has never worked as a journalist. She made a name for herself as a commentator, a click-baiting, headline-grabbing, shit-slinging commentator. In fact, her vocation has never been reportage but…, well, making a name for herself. Period.

The fact that anyone knows her name is a testament to the fact that, as mentioned earlier, we carry our screens around in our pockets, everywhere we go. She’s been a genius at making her name pop up on our screens, not for anything she has done, or anything she reported on, but for things she’s said. She’s a professional loudmouth.

In that sense, she’s a sibling of the President of the United States.

Weiss and her corporate gruppenführer, Tom Cibrowski, announced Friday that CBS News was cutting some 70 jobs and, while they were at it, shutting down its radio operation. CBS Radio was where the whole Tiffany Network thing started a hundred years ago. It was where the voice of Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London roofs in 1940 could be heard.

It is now no more.

This follows last May’s presidential ukase ending federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You know, the money source for the broadcasters who taught you and your kids how to count, who aired Ken Burns and Carl Sagan, who made Mister Rogers and Terry Gross and Ira Glass household names.

That sliver of optimism I mentioned earlier? It’s getting harder to see each day.

03/13/2026
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Benito Mussolini, Donald Trump

247 Words: Prescient? Please.

William L. Shirer wrote the first definitive history of the Nazis’ rise to power and their awful comeuppance. His book is titled, appropriately enough, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

After the Allies made spectacular gains in North Africa and then invaded Sicily in 1943, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini fell into a deep funk. He knew the jig was up. The Italian citizenry demanded “food, freedom, and peace.” He had to be bucked up by his pal, Adolf Hitler, several times that summer before he was summarily deposed by his opposition (including his son-in-law, Count Ciano) and King Victor Emmanuel III. Germany was forced to transfer many divisions from its fight with the USSR into Italy in order to halt the US/UK advance. It can be said the European war was essentially won at that point, only Hitler and his toadies refused to see it.

Anyway, Shirer, in his book, wrote of Mussolini after Il Duce had been arrested:

So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the 20th century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who, underneath the gaudy facade, was made largely of sawdust.

Now, about a hundred years after Il Duce took power in Italy, another bellicose-sounding leader who knows how to profit from his century’s confusions and despair and who, similarly, presents a gaudy facade, has emerged. I can only hope Li’l Duce‘s fate will be the same.

 

03/07/2026
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Hope, Love, War

753 Words: Crazy

I’m trying to wrap up my book, a history of WFHB now titled How Hard Could It Be? The Stories of WFHB, while simultaneously trying to keep from screaming into my pillow over the president’s little war in Iran. All big wars start as little wars. So even the tiniest conflict can swiftly spiral into a nuclear exchange.

So, personally, things are dreamy. All I have to do on the book is finish the introduction, itself titled “How & Why.” I’m working for both the Limestone Post and Bloom magazines. My radio interview program, Big Talk, is chugging along. The cats are healthy. The Loved One is still hot as a pistol. Glabworld, right now, couldn’t be better.

The non-Glabworld, though, is scary as hell. Wars. Creeping and overt fascism here in America. AI spreading as malignantly as COVID did some six years ago. Climate catastrophes ramping up as we approach the ’30s. Out of control wealth inequality causing widespread poverty. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. The Saudi Crown Prince. Viktor Orbán. Vladimir Putin. Pete Hegseth. For chrissakes, today there are enough global villains to menace three or four different eras.

I hit a landmark birthday the other day. 70. Sheesh! Honestly, once you hit that number, you can’t pretend any more. You’re old. Way old. Every year that passes now — every day — is a gift. Icing on the cake. There was an old Native American saying — I forget where I first read it, either in Black Elk Speaks or Little Big Man or maybe even some other book — where a young man says to his elder, “Grandfather, today is a good day to die.” Meaning: life is good, I feel able and robust, and if worse came to worse, if this were to be my last day on Earth, I’d be happy.

That’s the way I look at life now. As an old coot. A very old coot.

Yet, this world is as threatening and dangerous as it’s ever been. Nuclear annihilation can happen in the next hour. Climate calamity in the next decade. What right do I have to feel content?

Every right. The only message I’ve ever valued from my Roman Catholic upbringing was this line from a sermon I heard once: “We are here to love and to hope.”

If all I can control are my sanity and my disposition, then I’ll do so to the best of my ability. I’m not listening to radio news anymore. I’ve long since given up on TV news. I have no news feed on my smartphone. I’m not harangued by breaking news alerts. I do scan several newspapers (online, of course) each day to keep up but, otherwise, I’ve more or less quit gobbling up every shred of horrifying bulletins as I once did. I don’t slip into op/ed rabbit holes warning of impending doom.

I haven’t separated myself fully from the events of the day. I’ve simply erected a guard rail so I don’t tumble into an abyss of despair.

One thing I’m doing is listening to upbeat music. Sunshine pop from the ’60s. Soul and funk from the ’70s. Hell, even Glenn Miller pop hits from the 1940s.  Here’s a tune that might buck you up, as it does me. It soars. It celebrates joy. It’s needed today more than when it was a hit back in 1979:

Or even this, a song that acknowledges the evils in this world but urges redemption:

Of course, a simple, joyous love song will do:

If today’s the last day for me — or for all of us — at the very least we can go out singing about love and hope.

By the way, I was just reading about the exoplanet K2-18b. It orbits a star some 124 light years away from us. The James Webb Space Telescope has been keeping an eye on it. and has turned up evidence it may very well harbor life. No, the ‘scope hasn’t ID’d intelligent aliens scooting around the planet just yet. It has, though, turned up chemical signs of life. How cool!

Here’s a European Space Agency artist’s conception of the globe:

K2-18b.

It’s blue and cloud-swirly, just like our planet.

Do creatures live there? Are they intelligent. Do they love and hope? Do they fire nuclear missiles at each other.

Hell, for all we know they once may have populated the entire planet, and then found themselves embroiled in a global war. They may have wiped themselves out. Of course, I doubt they intended to. That’d be crazy.

02/02/2026
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Flock Technology, ICE

834 Words: On the Square or Around the Bend?

Dave Askins, who runs the excellent B Square Bulletin, seems to be everywhere. To that end, I googled, “superhero who can be in several places at one time.” It turns out several such characters from the Marvel and other universes have existed on comic book pages. There’ve been Multiple Man, who had the ability to split into several copies of himself from birth; Doctor Strange, a neurosurgeon who learned about astral projection and cloning; and The Flash, who was so speedy that he could seem to be in two places at once.

Multiple Man.

By the way, slogging through the various wiki and fan-sites dedicated to superheroes and the like, I was reminded how much I don’t care about the Marvel et al worlds. So many of the storylines and character descriptions in them depend on what’s called “the anything machine.” That is, whenever a character finds her or himself in hot water, there’s always some kind of device that they pull out of their…, well that they pull out, that saves them or humanity or whatever’s in peril that month. It all strikes me as a big cheat. Rather than digging into human behavior for answers to conflicts, comic book superheroes just get imaginary machines or powers that produce the Hollywood ending.  Or the cliffhanger, whichever is called for.

Anyway, Dave Askins. He, or one of his minions (don’t all superheroes have minions or acolytes or apprentices?) was at the Friday anti-Flock, anti-ICE protest at courthouse square. Flock, BTW, is a high-tech surveillance software/hardware outfit, one of whose products these days is automated license plate recognition. It’s the tech that allows cars to zip through toll locations on Interstates and expressways without stopping to fling coins into collection boxes but also is being used by thousands of police departments around the world. These so-called ALPR gadgets let the cops find out, for instance, if a car is properly registered; civil libertarians worry it can be used as a mass-surveillance tool. Bloomington’s got the product but outcry from protesters and warnings from city council member Isak Nti Ansari have urged mayor Kerry Thomson to reconsider the city’s Flock contract.

[Dave Askins has appeared on Big Talk several times: here, here, and here.]

A similar outcry arose a few decades ago when Chicago started putting up 360º-range video cameras on street corners in rough neighborhoods. Back then, the outcry came from people who didn’t live in those neighborhoods. Those who did might have been made itchy by the initial appearances of the cameras but eventually came to embrace them when crime stats went down.

Thus far the government hasn’t used the cameras to track the movements of individuals but, who knows, some authoritarian mayor or police superintendent of the future may well shrug and say as long as the technology is available, why not use it?

That’s the argument protesters advanced Friday.

As for ICE, well, I needn’t explain why hundreds of thousands took to the streets around the nation Friday in opposition to it. By this late date, if I have to explain to you why ICE, as currently constituted under Li’l Duce, has to be resisted, you’ll never get it anyway. Like jazz.

Askins (or someone in his employ) took photos at the protest. Lo and behold, there appeared a fellow who’s made his presence felt at rallies and protests the last few years. He carries a big assault rifle; Indiana, of course, being one of the states that allows open firearm carry. Here he is:

Credit: B Square Bulletin

The fellow told B Square he’s carrying the artillery to protect the protesters. He did the same thing during 2020’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the courthouse. Back then, as well as Friday, no gun battles erupted which, I suppose, he can say is due to his armed presence.

It must be noted, though, that should gunfire break out at a mass protest, one holy hell of a lot of people are going to become what military planners like to euphemize as “collateral damage.” Only dumb luck can explain why such an unholy situation hasn’t developed yet in recent years.

This holy land of late has been experiencing a flip-flop regarding guns. After ICE iced that Good Samaritan protester, Alex Pretti, a little more than a week ago, the Trump-Reich’s line has held he was armed and dangerous so therefore had to be summarily executed. The anti-ICE contingent suddenly found themselves born-again 2nd Amendment enthusiasts, which I might have found laughable, save for the fact that somebody got riddled with bullets.

It’s another example of how today’s black and white can become tomorrow’s white and black. I mean, for example, the Democrats during and immediately after the Civil War were the party of segregation and state’s right. The Republicans — Lincoln’s party — had  fought for federal supremacy and the end of slavery. Flash forward to the post World War II era the parties’ identities were reversed.

It’s as though Lewis Carroll was a documentarian.

01/30/2026
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Operation Varsity Blues

716 Words: Your Grade or Your Life

In a simpler day, say, a few decades ago, the typical person who might threaten your life was a mug with a gun emerging from a dark alley. “Your money or your life,” he might snarl.

How quaint.

He might be wearing a mask and have suddenly popped out from around a corner and shoved his snub-nosed Saturday night special into your ribs. He’d unburden you of all your valuables — your watch, your wedding ring, and necklace, too — if he was a conscientious crook.

Of course, I’m describing a comic strip characterization. Back in those “simpler” days there were many ways people made you fear for your life. Hell, in October 1962, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, and John F. Kennedy scared the excrement out of the whole world for about 13 days. And, of course, there was the usual array of psychotics and hooligans for hire who might put your continued existence in peril.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here, though, and say it’d have been highly unlikely the person threatening your life would be the parent of a student you were teaching because your grading criteria were more stringent than he’d want.

But that’s life in this godforsaken year of 2026.

A friend of mine who teaches at Indiana University confided to me that he’d received an email from a student’s parent last night that, yep, threatened his life for the grade he’d given the sender’s kid. I won’t reveal any details about this instructor for obvious reasons. I wish to hell I could give you all the possible details about the email sender so that the whole goddamned world could pillory him.

This is where we are today.

I’ve long been baffled by the outsized importance people place upon the prestige of the college or university they’re sending their kid to and the perceived vital nature of each GPA decimal point said kid earned there. Scads of people would sell their souls to the devil to get their kid into, say, Harvard or Smith or Brown. Hell, a passel of parents — the actor Lori Loughlin famously among them — went to jail a few years ago for bribing and cheating their kids’ way into this or that jewel of learning. Some institutions of higher education — Indiana University is one — rake in tuition dough from folks whose kids couldn’t make the cut into Yale or Penn. They send their kids to these second-, third, and fourth-choice colleges and stew because their darlings have failed them.

Why?

Do they teach better or different facts at the Ivy League schools or the Seven Sisters? If you want to be a doctor, will you be allowed to learn a secret way of treating a broken leg at Northwestern? Is the math taught at Stanford more accurate than that offered by the University of New Mexico?

Of course the real reason parents risk incarceration to get their kid into Dartmouth or Duke is their desire to ensure their 17-year-old will belong to the best, the right, club. Harvard alums help out their confreres. So do Elis and Blue Devils and Smithies. Your college’s alums will be more likely to hire you and put you up for membership at their country club and contribute to your campaign should you ever decide to run for office. Or even abet you in the skirting of the law.

In this sense, a lot of colleges and universities have morphed from schools into something like cartels. Or worse, crime syndicates.

And, their trophy children having failed to gain entrance to an Ivy League school, these pathologically competitive parents can’t shake the urge that drove them to crave their kids’ entrance to Columbia in the first place. So, when the kids study at IU or the University of South Carolina, the parents remain as cut-throat as they were when their kids were high school juniors. The result? Their kid gets a B in Math 101 and they feel compelled to issue a fatwa against the teacher. Have they so little faith in their kids? Do they think, because the little darling got that totally unjustified, unfair, devastating B, that the kid’ll never be able to get a job after graduation? What world do these people live in?

This world. I don’t have to like it.

01/28/2026
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Ilhan Omar

824 Words: I’m With Omar!

At long last, there’s a Democratic politician I can enthusiastically get behind.

Well, I exaggerate, of course. I’m four-square behind the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, JB Pritzker, Pete Buttigieg, and about a half dozen others. But loyal Pencillistas know I’ve been ragging on the party for years for its turn-tail-and-run ways.

Some three decades ago, Newt Gingrich distributed his GOPAC Memo, the meat of which was to turn the term liberal into a libel. And in making certain the Democrats would always be associated with that “slur,” Gingrich and company succeeded in turning the very name of the party itself into a smear. The Dems ran like rabbits from the word liberal, rather than standing up straight and proclaiming loudly, You’re goddamned right I’m a liberal!

How about John  Kerry being accused of falsifying his Vietnam War injuries during the 2004 election? This was back in the days when the Dems thought it best to “go high when they go low,” as Michele Obama would dub the philosophy a few years later. Kerry ignored the charges. He and his party didn’t realize at the time how powerful the then-nascent social media could be. The charges stuck among tens of millions of people who, by the way, were never going to vote for him in the first place. No matter. The impression grew and solidified that when pushed into a corner, the Dems wouldn’t fight. Kerry didn’t fight. Oh, how I wished he would have dramatically and effectively raised his trouser leg during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, shown his scars, and said, How dare you chicken-hawk bastards accuse me of lying?

Then another Dem pol I really liked, Sen. Al Franken, turned tail and ran when a member of his own party, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, pilloried him for sexual harassment, a charge wholly imagined by the Right Wing propaganda machine. Rather than say, Hell no, I didn’t do it!, he instead resigned. Again, it wouldn’t have swung any votes but it would have shown he was ready to rumble.\

Even Barack Obama played it oh-so-cool when haters charged he was born in Kenya, schooled in a terrorist madrassa, and therefore ineligible to be president. He never told his accusers to got to hell. He never equated their phony theories with flat-out racism. He went high when they went low.

America’s been watching this for decades now. Tens of millions of people see the party as a collection of eggheaded, kumbaya singers who wouldn’t fight for them because, well, fighting is bad.

Even pacifists recognize the need to fight on occasion and that occasion has been developing for a long time now. Li’l Duce is a plain speaker who isn’t afraid to throw verbal hands and those characteristics appeal to a huge swath of the electorate. The result is the teardown of the social, educational, environmental, scientific, cultural, artistic, and human service infrastructure of the federal government.

Just the other day, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota declared he wouldn’t run for reelection because his family’s been harassed by Right Wing lunkheads. For pity’s sake, what did he expect when he first ran for governor? The Fox News/4chan/Wonderland delusionalists had already long held sway. Of course they were going to doxx him and his family, threaten them, molest them, harass the kids at school, make up crazy accusations against him, and all the rest of the thing incels, the obsessively aggrieved, the theocratic supremacists, and the fascism advocates do. Minnesota became the new locus for America’s Polarization Wars and immediately the online hoodlums attacked. Just as immediately, Walz turned tail and ran.

Funny thing is, lots of Republicans and MAGA-ites are being doxxed and harassed, too. I assume they love their families as much as Walz loves his. But they’re not quitting. They’re staying in the fight and doing what they need to do to protect their families.

I wish there were more of that kind of feistiness in the Democratic Party.

Lo and behold, one Dem pol has indeed shown some spunk. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was attacked by a man who sprayed her with some kind of noxious substance yesterday at a town hall she was holding in her district. Rather than cower or run, Omar went after the wretch and raised her fist as if itching to loosen a few of his teeth. Here, watch it:

Omar’s not quitting, nor is she fleeing. In fact, she said, “I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win.” She added, “I’ve survived war, and I’m definitely going to survive intimidation or whatever these people think they can throw at me, because I’m built that way.”

I’m swooning.

I hate fights. I hate war. I hate strife. But they’re here, like ’em or not.

I ‘ll tell you who I do like, though. I like Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

01/27/2026
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Apollo 1, Artemis II

727 Words: Risks, Here & Above

Gamblers

As a kid, I never realized how fraught with peril space travel was until this date in 1967 when three NASA astronauts were killed in a capsule fire.

The irony was, their Apollo 1 spaceship was on the ground and they were merely rehearsing for their scheduled flight the next month.

“Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were the first American astronauts to die in service. I was 11 when the tragedy occurred. I’d been fascinated by NASA and America’s goal of landing on the Moon before the end of that decade. I remain a space geek to this day.

(L-R) Grissom, White, Chaffee.

BTW, if you’re space geeky in any way, here’s a very cool site. Hosted by Amy Shira Teitel, The Vintage Space is a lively, informative, and entertaining bunch of videos in which the Canadian historian and science writer riffs on Moon missions, orbital sojourns, interplanetary explorations, and scads of other science-y things. She presents her takes in way that reminds me of myself the first time I ever saw a Saturn V rocket at the Kennedy Space Center’s big hall. My jaw dropped and I wanted to babble on and on about it like…, well, like an 11-year-old kid. I was 56 at the time.

Anyway, NASA’s sending another crew toward the Moon in a few days. The Artemis II mission is due to launch on or some time after February 6th from Cape Canaveral. The trip’ll last 10 days and the route will take it around the Moon and back. The first Black man, the first woman, and the first non-American to travel to the Moon will be among the crew of four. They’re going to travel farther away from the Earth than any humans ever have.

The Artemis II Crew: (L-R) Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, Jeremy Hansen.

Space travel remains a risky business. In fact, some observers are worried about this mission because a previous Artemis test flight revealed some problems with the capsule’s re-entry heat shield. NASA says the issue has been addressed but, honestly, we won’t know until we know.

That’s the thing about crewed spaceflights. There have been 411 of them since Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth a single time aboard the Soviet Union’s Vostok 1 capsule in April, 1961. That may sound like a good number of tries, enough to work out any conceivable kinks in technology and planning, but it’s the equivalent of the number of times airplanes were flown before the year 1910. And you know how perilous air travel was for the first half century (at least) of its existence. In fact, poor old Yuri Gagarin died, not in space, but in a routine training flight aboard a MiG-15 fighter jet that crashed in 1968. At the time, the MiG-15 was one of the most technologically advanced aircraft in the world.

As for lunar missions, there have been a scant total of eight of them with humans aboard since Apollo 8 first circled the Moon in December 1968. One Apollo mission, 13 for you triskaidekaphobics, had to swing around the Moon and limp back home because an oxygen tank exploded. The crew made it back to Earth by the skin of their teeth. Traveling to the Moon is still a crapshoot.

Then again, to put things in perspective, 40,000-plus Americans die every year in car crashes even though everybody owns a car, hundreds of millions of them have been manufactured, and we drive (literally) trillions of miles a year.

Nevertheless, I still think my daily drive to Hopscotch Coffee is safer than the trip the Artemis II crew will take.

A Lucky Pup

Let’s get back down to Earth for a minute. As you know, temps in Indiana dropped well below zero last night. Hell, I was shivering even in my comfy home with the heat turned up to 72º and with two blankets covering me in bed.

I noticed a heartwarming post on social media this AM. It seems a lost pooch made scratching noises at the back door of some guy who lives in Indianapolis. The guy let the mutt in and posted his picture. Here he is:

How lucky is this doggo? I mean, he was probably hours — or even minutes — away from dying of hypothermia. Now he’s in a warm home for the nonce. The Indy guy is now sifting through pleas from people hoping to adopt the dog.

01/26/2026
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Alex Pretti, Gun Crazy

1071 Words: Gun Crazy

Several things, today.

Armed Guards at Kroger

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece about a woman who was uncomfortable with the presence of armed guards at the Seminary Square Kroger. She told me she was going to make her feelings known at the next meeting of the McDoel Gardens neighborhood association.

That meeting did indeed take place and the poor woman found, to her surprise, she was in a tiny minority. The preponderance of opinion, she tells me, was four-square in favor of the armed guards. In fact, she says, she almost felt “attacked,” so boisterous and intense was the reaction to her objections.

Seminary Square is not my Kroger but I stop in there on occasion on my way to the WFHB studios or the Book Corner after I’m finished writing at Hopscotch. The guards I see there, employees of a private security contractor, don’t often appear to be agile enough to chase or wrestle with any kind of troublemaker. That alone makes me wonder, if push comes to shove, if any of them might be more prone to haul out the artillery in response to a heated situation.

I generally catch the guard’s eye each time I leave the store (they stand, usually, near the windows in the front end). I nod and sometimes offer a salutation; they are, after all, human beings. And, I might add, they’re working women and men and my loyalty always rests with that class.

Speaking of class, it’s the homeless who camp in the little strip of parkland between Walnut and College avenues, adjacent to the grocery store, who comprise the class that many McDoel Gardens Neighbors want to be protected from. By artillery, if necessary.

Again, I understand a certain wariness — some of the habitués of the parkland appear hard and menacing. There are drugs and mental illness enough to make the strongest among us cautious when we encounter these folks. But I also feel a lot of people may be more afraid of becoming part of that class than they are of any individuals within it. That’s especially true these days with wealth inequality growing by the day and affordability more an aspiration than a reality. Hell, it’s becoming harder and harder to afford Bloomington’s rents. And if you want to buy a home, well, good luck; you’d better hope to win Powerball.

Perhaps the armed guards are a sort of symbolic bulwark against any possible slide into homelessness.

The woman couldn’t stop shaking her head as she told me about the meeting. She never thought she’d be so alone in her take on the situation. Then again, considering all that’s gone on around this holy land the last year or so, it shouldn’t have been all that shocking.

Fascist Fanboys

You think the ICE-stapo is scary? Try scrolling through the comments section under any Right Wing internet/social media post re: the killing of that Alex Pretti fellow in Minneapolis last week. Oh sure, they’re all twisting themselves into pretzels trying to vilify a person for carrying a gun after years — decades, for chrissakes — of advocating for everybody up to and including toddlers and convicted wife-beaters to carry guns at all times. And you’d have thought Pretti was rolling down the street in a tank, made in Venezuela, the way they describe the “threat” the man posed to Li’l Duce‘s semi-private police force.

I mean, all that is pretty much the same old boilerplate nonsense that the Right has peddled since…, oh, it seems since the beginning of time. But what’s especially alarming right now is the glee these commenters take in the mayhem, the violence, the death. These damaged males appear to be — dare I say it? — aroused by the killing. Sexually aroused. These guys get off on the videos of the Pretti killing as well as that of Renée Good.

Erik Larson, in his book In the Garden of Beasts, describes the everyday fascism people on the street exhibited in mid- and late-1930s Berlin. Pedestrians waiting at stoplights, Larson wrote, would spontaneously break into Hitler salutes and if someone didn’t raise his hand, he’d be set upon and beaten. Berliners could be walking down the street and the person coming the opposite way might Heil and salute. You’d have to respond in kind or suffer the consequences. Brownshirts and other lunkheaded sorts would be on patrol to make sure everybody saluted.

Fascism isn’t wholly a top-down phenomenon. It can only thrive if just plain folks help make it happen. Hell, at certain points, the last American ambassador to Germany learned, Hitler himself was a bit afraid of the rage, the seemingly uncontrollable viciousness of the people on the streets.

These American guys who salivate and even grow tumescent at the audio of a gunshot and the video of a resultant pool of blood are as terrifying as the Mad King himself. Maybe even more so because he’s old and unhealthy and likely not long for this world. They, though, seem to be evergreen.

The Headline

A bit of trivia. Gun Crazy was a 1950 film noir about a hapless kid, Bart, from some unnamed small town who’s been gaga over guns since he was a little boy. Despite this, he’s gentle and loath to harm any creature, even a rogue mountain lion that threatens the town. Nevertheless, he meets a circus sharpshooter, Annie, and falls madly in love with her. They marry and soon run out of money. So the two decide to rob gas stations and stores. The criminal life becomes addictive. Now they aim for bigger scores like banks and factory payrolls. It turns out Annie has no problem offing whoever gets in their way and, eventually, Bart…, well, I don’t want to ruin it for you.

Scene from Gun Crazy.

The movie is rightly considered one of the classics of the film noir era. One extended bank robbery scene is shot in a single take from a POV inside the getaway car. The scene ranks with the opening shot of Touch of Evil for masterful timing, direction and acting.

Anyway, the script for Gun Crazy was written by Millard Kaufman. If you’ve never heard of him it’s because there was no such person as Millard Kaufman, the pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, who at the time was blacklisted.

The Hollywood Blacklist. The last time (and not the first) this holy land nearly slipped into fascism.

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