"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
My father used to call my mother by one of two names: Sue or Daig.
Daig was short for Dago. Back in their times, when they were young kids, people called Italians they liked Daig. Then one day I read that some members of the New York Yankees used to call Joe DiMaggio Daig. I was very put out about that. That’s Ma’s name, I said to myself.
I couldn’t figure out why Daddy-o would call her Sue or Daig when her name clearly was Ma.
I would come to learn, of course, that there are hundreds of millions of Mas in the world. But I only had one.
And she’s gone.
My brother Joey was driving to the hospice this evening when he got the phone call. You know, the phone call.
She’d only been there a couple of hours. Somehow I’d figured she wouldn’t survive the trip.
We’d been making arrangements to move her from the hospital to a skilled care facility the last couple of days. We’d found a nice one. She would move within the next few days.
Then Joey got a call early this morning. The doctors said she wouldn’t need a skilled care facility. She’d need a hospice. They didn’t need to say anything more.
So she was moved by ambulance late this afternoon. I was right. She didn’t survive the ride. Not by much, at least.
The good thing is, she’d been out of her misery since last night. The docs had been pumping her full of morphine. They’d disconnected everything else. They let her go.
Now I have to let her go.
Wherever she is — if anywhere — it’s better than the place she’s been in the last few months.
She had a good long life. Now I’ve got to make sure I make her proud.
She’d always said to me, You’re gonna make us proud, Mike. She’d even say that when I was bound and determined not to make her proud. Mothers are funny that way.
What shame it is that our political discourse has degenerated to its current low point.
Earlier this century, lefties called George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cronies Nazis. Gun fetishist Ted Nugent the other day called Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel” and a “chimpanzee.”
Oh, for those glory days when people on opposite sides of the political fence addressed each other with great respect and dignity. Take the more genteel 19th Century, for instance. After the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln received a letter from a member of the loyal opposition who wished to convey his feelings about the president-elect. In ensuing years, Lincoln often took the letter out of his breast pocket and showed it to White House visitors. It read:
[G]od damn your god damned old hellfire god damned soul to hell god damn you and god damn your god damn family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell.
The God Damned President-Elect
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That’s one god damned civilized political argument, no?
Earlier this month, Miller had advanced a plan to segregate students in classes by academic achievement. Parents blew a collective gasket and, during a hastily arranged meeting, pressured Miller to drop her plan for the nonce.
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Later, whispers reached my ear that Miller suspected one or more Monroe County Community Schools Corporation payrollers of fomenting — or at least aiding — the parent revolt. Further, the whisperers added, Miller’d even sought to view said staffers’ email records.
I have my doubts Miller will be able — or will even want — to respond. But the offer’s out there so I’ve done my job. And, again, I remind Pencillistas that I’ve seen no evidence backing up these rumors, although my sources within the MCCSC are generally dependable.
A total of 85 individual human beings control as much wealth as half of the rest of humanity!
From Oxfam’s “Working for the Few” (Fuentes-Nieva & Galasso)
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So, stop telling me about how certain fiscal policies do or don’t make sense, according to this or that economic theoretician’s pronouncements. A planetary economy that allows hundreds of millions to exist in crushing poverty while a blessed few have more dough than they or any of a hundred generations to follow them could ever spend is irretrievably broken.
[*A line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Rich Boy.” It is preceded by the sentence, “Let me tell you about the very rich.”]
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What? Me? Pay Taxes?
Meanwhile, our friends the Republicans want to make it ever so easier for the rich to keep their precious cash out of the filthy hands of the needy, the starving, and other miscreants.
In 2010, Congress, with the support of Prez Obama, passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It was designed to prevent this holy land’s uber-rich from hiding much of their wealth in off-shore banks where it’d be protected from federal taxes. See, wealthy patriots had salted their greenbacks away thusly just so’s their many, many millions wouldn’t become slightly fewer many, many millions. Even rich men’s families gotta eat, after all.
It was learned in the summer of 2012 that presidential candidate Mitt Romney had hidden away up to $30 million in Cayman Island accounts as a way of avoiding paying US taxes. It was at that point that Democrats wondered aloud how patriotic Romney could be if he was indeed secreting so much money just to avoid paying his fair share. Romney, et al, countered that the essence of American patriotism is the making of obscene amounts of money and subsequently keeping it out of the hands of the gummint.
Anyway, for a brief moment in time, the Dems ran both houses of Congress and so were able to pass the Act. Now, though, the Republicans, led by the Me Party-ists, are working like busy bees to overturn it.
The annual Republican National Committee winter meeting, going on this week in Washington, will vote today to approve a resolution calling for an end to the Act. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) called for repeal of the Act last year. Now, RNC bigwig Solomon Yue is spearheading the repeal effort.
They must figure half the world’s wealth is plenty enough for virtually 100 percent of it’s inhabitants. That, I suppose, is patriotism.
Texas, home of many, many, many fiercely proud, independence-minded, anti-government types, has killed more than 500 people since the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1976. Today, some 298 prisoners languish on death row in Texas prisons.
The guy who took the collar last night was a Mexican national. Few people would suggest he didn’t pump three slugs into the skull of a cop who’d arrested him after a drunken brawl in 1994. The only real controversy in the case was why Texas prosecutors denied him the opportunity to get legal help from the Mexican consulate.
Texas long has been known as the execution king of this holy land. Them good ol’ boys sure love to tie nooses, aim rifles at people’s hearts, or watch with glee as doctors inject lethal drugs into people’s arms.
Your Room Is Ready, Sir
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Which is really ironic since everybody involved in a state-sponsored execution is…, well, an employee of one government or another. Papers must be shuffled, reams and reams of them. Food must be served to death row inmates. Their medical needs must be taken care of. Arrangements must be made, deadly drugs procured, and undertakers must be called.
All done by bureaucrats. From the time a suspected capital criminal is hauled in to the time he or she is separated from this vale, payrollers from the city, the county, the state, and, eventually, the federal government* get involved.
[*Capital punishment cases almost invariably are reviewed by the US Supreme Court.]
Funny that Texans — who are well-known to be suspicious of government-run health care, are petrified that the government has a secret plan to seize citizens’ shootin’ irons, absolutely loathe the fact the tax moneys are spent on food, education, and housing assistance, and, in general, fervently wish all governments would simply disappear from the face of the Earth — depend so passionately on bureaucrats and operatives paid for with our precious tax dollars to carry out state-sponsored homicide.
Texas, babies, is a weird country.
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Cabin Fever
I will brook no argument against the following pronouncement:
This has been the worst winter I’ve experienced since The Loved One and I left Chi. in March, 2007.
Kirkwood Avenue (Herald Times/Jeremy Hogan photo)
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One of the reasons I was convinced to leave that November-through-March hell was the prospect that I wouldn’t have to endure sub-zero temps and crushingly gray January days.
I’d always said that if my beloved former hometown didn’t have depressing, dangerous, often fatal winters, its population would at least double and possibly triple.
There’s nothing in the world like a late spring morning walk along Chicago’s lakefront. The waves lapping the shoreline, the sun rising over the distant watery horizon, the spectacular skyline opposite — why, it’s a slice of heaven. There are, I might reasonably estimate, two, perhaps three, such days to be had in each Chicago year.
So, my two years in Louisville followed by four mild winters here in Bloomington have convinced me we made the right move. Until now.
Science Cafe czar Alex Straiker sez Mura is “quite passionate” about obesity. Odd that: she’s as thin as a rail. I probably could fit three of her into a single pair of my billowy dungarees.
The Science Cafe Gang*
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In any case, I’ll be dropping by the Root Cellar to find out the scientific reason why I warp the floorboards. I hope to see you there, too.
[* (l to r) Jim Wager-Miller, Alex Straiker, Natasha Mura, and Marta Shocket.]
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Much Appreciated
Thanks to everybody who has extended warm wishes and support as my family and I facilitate my mother’s journey out of this mortal coil.
To refresh, Miller wanted to group the smart kids with other walking brains and the dumb kids with other terrorists and juvenile delinquents. See, that’s the way we saw things when kids were segregated by standardized test scores at my old elementary school.
And, since the kids of 2014 bear at least a little resemblance to those of 1965, their parents know that there’d be plenty of playground stereotyping going on if Miller’s plan went into effect.
So, they stamped their feet at an impromptu meeting last week and got Miller to withdraw her plan.
Here’s where the rumor mill kicks in. People are whispering that Miller believes some school system staffers might have lit the fire under the Fairview parents. The whisperers even go so far as to claim Miller has asked for certain staffers’ email records.
Golly gee, I’d hate to think a principal might stoop to such spook-like activities. Hell, if these rumors are true, you’d think Miller was working for the feds rather than the county.
In any case, I’ll try to get a statement out of Miller as soon as I can. In the meantime, keep in mind these are only rumors.
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[BTW: I wrote that Fairview was on the East Side of our town last week. The inimitable Marc Haggerty corrected me; it’s on the West Side. Thanks, Marc.]
We are a diverse group of some 320 million souls, passionately concerned with things like guns, football, which movie had the highest box office figures this past weekend, whatever Kanye West has to say, the Kardashians, and those idiots who sell duck calls.
Oh, we care, deeply, loudly, and, often as not, irrationally.
One thing we don’t care much about is what happens to our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, husbands and wives, and any others who’ve had the poor foresight to grow old.
And the funny thing is, we’re all headed, inexorably, toward that moment when we are unable to lift ourselves out of bed, unable to recognize our children, unsure of what day, month or year this is, incapable of contributing to and participating in this competitive, free market world.
That is, unless we’re lucky enough to go to sleep one night and fail to wake up in the morning. Many people consider that a tragedy. But it pales compared to watching a human being waste away as one health care facility after another says, Hey kids, you’ve gotta move your mother now! Her insurance is running out. Her bank balance is approaching zero.
My mother, for one, won’t ever vote again, so no politician really cares about her. She won’t ever be able to contribute money to any lobbying groups or professional associations or advocacy organizations, so no one with any clout will speak up for her.
She’s superfluous. A drain on society. A taker.
And many of us loathe takers. So many, in fact, that we’ve elected to Congress a whole raft of men and women whose whole purpose as public servants, it seems, is to protect the rest of us from takers.
They’ll be damned if they’re going to spend our precious tax dollars on all those takers.
So rather than provide reasonable, comfortable, resting spots for our fellow aged human beings, rather than financing dignified send-offs for those preparing to take that mandatory plunge into heaven or hell or the chilling nothingness, we instead give them…, well, nothing.
Because we don’t care.
A friend of mine comes from the Netherlands. Her parents were elderly and sick. They were in pain with no hope to ever lead productive, fulfilling lives again. So, in their homeland, they were given the option of convening all their friends and loved ones for a big going-away party where they could say goodbye and tell everybody how much they loved them. People ate and drank, there were laughter and tears, embraces, and closure. Then each of the parents was given an injection and within moments, was dead.
What a way to go.
We don’t do that here because we care about something called the sanctity of life. I wouldn’t argue with those who espouse that, only every time I see my mother, I pass roomsful of people lying in their own shit, their eyes aflame with dementia, their sleep disturbed by three or four other hapless souls down the hall wailing like banshees, their rooms flooded with harsh, fluorescent lighting, their arms pierced with needles, and tubes coming out of their urethras so that the janitorial staff won’t have to spend all day mopping up piss. I’m not seeing much sanctity when I go see Ma.
The closest things come to that is when Ma stirs out of her private misery long enough beg her god to take her, now.
I’d love to throw Ma a going-away party, the way they do it in the Netherlands. I’d do it because I don’t care about any “sanctity of life.” I care about Ma.
The opening line of The Stranger by Albert Camus goes like this:
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.
That is perhaps the most deft and revealing introduction to a character in the history of the literature. With those two short sentences, Camus tells us everything we need to know about Meursault, the eponymous l’étranger. The rest of the book is detail.
Maman, of course, is the informal French for Mother.
I don’t know when Sue Glab is going to die. But I want it to be now. This minute.
I’ve been in Chicago the last few days. My mother, who had a terrible fall in August and has been bedridden since, is hanging on to life by a slender thread. She’s suffering physically, mentally, and in her spirit.
An infection is beginning to cause her body to eat away at itself. Her mind is going. She hardly recognizes me.
Now and again, she slips into a brief lucidity and begins praying to god to take her away. Thursday she looked heavenward, raised her hands (as much as she could), and wondered aloud, “I’ve been a good woman; why are you doing this to me?”
Throughout the years she’s had a spotty relationship with her god. She’s never renounced him or stopped believing he could help her. But at times, I think, she wanted very much to tell him off good.
Now, she feels she’ll be getting the chance to talk to him face to face very soon.
Happier, Healthier, Younger
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When I go back to Chicago later this week, I’m going to bring her a rosary. It’ll make her feel a tiny bit better.
Then again, I hope I get the call that tells me she won’t be needing anything anymore. Tonight, maybe. Or tomorrow. I don’t know.
I envy her the capacity to appeal to her god. If I was a believer, I’d say, “Listen, big boy, quit playing around with my mother! Take her away. Stop being such a goddamned bully.”
Hah. Goddamned bully. As if he could damn himself.
My mother, at times, was as tough as nails. I could no easier get a fib past her or change her mind about a grounding than I could flap my arms and take flight. Physically, she developed a pair of guns by making a weekly batch of homemade bread loaves. She’d knead an enormous panful of dough for long, long minutes every Friday.
Believe me, I didn’t want to mess with her.
Now, she’s skeletal. She resembles nothing more than a bony robin fledgling who’s fallen out of a tree. She can’t even hold up her pencil and one of her beloved crossword puzzles. She hasn’t been able to do that for months.
She is, in fact, dead already. Only her lungs and heart don’t know it.
Woody Allen once said, “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering — and it’s all over much too soon.”
A joke, sure. But humor at its highest level works because it’s undergirded by truth. And today Allen’s evaluation of life is borne out in spades by my mother’s continued existence. She is miserable, lonely, and suffering. That is the sum total of her life at this moment.
Fairview Elem. School Principal Tammy Miller figured she’d shake things up at the East West Side kid factory by reassigning students to new teachers.
Apparently, Miller grouped students by standardized test scores so that like-scholars would all learn together.
Reminds me of my old days as a trouble-making little shit at St. Giles School. Each grade had three classes: advanced, intermediate, and remedial. Natch, I was in the advanced classes (although by the second grade I’d already subscribed to a no-homework policy — my thinking being, I give you six or so hours, the rest of the day is for me.)
Anyway, we all knew the kids in the remedial classes were dopes. Even before we’d learned about evolution, we’d instinctively recognized that remedial kids were somehow less evolved. Their capacities to learn were akin to those of the lower primates.
Remedials?
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In fact, we called those kids — what else? — remedials. Which was about as insulting a thing as a Catholic primary school kid would call another in those days.
So, according to a petition that was forwarded to me by a loyalPencillista who’ll remain nameless, Principal Miller, in an effort to goose test scores, would effectively subject Fairview kids to that kind of delightful stereotyping and verbal abuse.
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Hey, you wanna make an omelet, you have to crack a few fragile, undeveloped egos, right?
Huzzah, the people have spoken. Although I’m always suspicious when parents want to get into the educ. act. The loudest ‘rents oft. get the grease, and they generally are those who call for more Jeebus in the classroom or for the elimination of such commie teachings as, well, evolution.
I only had time to type out a couple of pontifications this morning. So there aren’t any pix or other images. If I have time later, I’ll plug them in. If not, you’ll live.
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Freedom
Just wondering: Now that merely drinking a glass of water in the city of Charleston, West Virginia, might make a thirsty soul sick as a dog, is there anybody out there in this holy land who still thinks the EPA is an undue federal gov’t intrusion on our freedoms?
See, coal is king in W.Va. And as such, that state’s legislatures, executive mansion, and regulatory agencies are in thrall to the coal tsars. So, say, if some 30-year-old Charleston woman with a couple of kids needs someone to guarantee that coal operations won’t dump poisons into her family’s drinking water, can she really, honestly trust her state’s watchmen and -women?
Ixnay.
The Environmental Protection Agency was created to try to prevent the machinery of our modern society from, well, killing us. Air, water, and soil pollution were threatening to become intractable back in the late 1960s. Big city stone skyscrapers looked black after years of being shrouded in smog. Lake Erie was virtually dead. Strip mining, soil erosion, and clear cutting were radically transforming the nation’s topography.
Now, I’m under no illusion that the four decades since the birth of the EPA have brought us a fresh, sparkly Garden of Eden. Nor do I believe federal officers from the agency itself are immune to the pressures and lures of big business, for whom dumping poisons is nothing more than a nasty necessity in the pursuit of dollars. And, clearly, too many — far too many — US Senators and Representatives are in the pockets of big biz.
Still, the mere existence of the EPA is another needed weapon in our battle against the desecration of our corner of the planet. Lake Erie is no longer dead. The nation’s big cities all have significantly cleaner air. We, using the power of the EPA, have cleaned things up a bit.
West Virginians are being told to keep their taps shut for the time being. They’re also being told to watch for signs of skin irritations, nausea, vomiting, and wheezing. The people around Charleston all drank, bathed, and brushed their teeth in water tainted by something called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM), 7500 gallons of which spilled from a storage tank near that city’s water treatment plant.
Might a more active federal overseer have denied the placement of a poison storage tank so close to a water filtration plant? Maybe. Maybe not. But the odds would be much better than counting on W.Va. regulators to do so, considering that this MCHM stuff is a key component in the production of coal.
BTW: the company that owns the poison storage tank that began leaking Thursday? It’s called Freedom Industries.
Freedom, my ass.
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How To Win While Losing
I’ve made myself clear regarding my feelings about the Olympics.
I hate them.
They’ve long ago outlived their usefulness. Each Olympic sport stages its own world championship every year, except for the Olympiads. So athletes on an annual basis can brag that they’re the tops in their fields. It’s not as though nobody knows who the fastest miler when the Olympics aren’t being staged.
Add to that the seemingly irresistible lure each Olympics offers to those who are convinced the quickest, most efficient way to improve this world is to blow up a bunch of innocent folks.
The amount of money spent on building venues and Olympics villages is astronomical. And few can argue that host cities get an equitable dollar return on their investments. I know that my beloved hometown was prepared to parlay a combined municipal, state, and private bankroll totaling billions to entice the International Olympic Committee to stage the 2016 games in Chi.
Money, BTW, that the Chicago Public Schools might have used to keep some neighborhood schools open. Or that the city itself might have directed toward warding off its looming bankruptcy.
Back to the sports themselves, too many of them don’t at all lend themselves to real competition, you know, where objective goals like scoring more goals than the other team or jumping higher, running faster, or lifting more weight than one’s competitors makes you the champion.
When a sport depends on the athlete’s choice of music for her or his solo performance, or, worse, how many spangles and bangles her or his costume dangles, it’s closer to a beauty contest than a physical trial.
Again, not that figure skaters, for instance, aren’t athletes. They are. Only how does one choose the best figure skater in the world?
We know know how one chooses the best miler in the world. She’s the runner who crosses the finish line first.
The US this weekend held its competition to determine the best figure skater here. Usually, the medal winners in that contest go on to the Olympics for that year. Makes sense, as much as anything having to do with judging figure skaters can make sense.
Anyway, the big favorite to go to Sochi this year was Ashley Wagner. She once ranked fourth in a world competition and, apparently, is a popular skater who’s expected to draw tons of viewers to NBC’s coverage of the Sochi Games. Only she had to skate the weekend in Boston to earn her spot on the team.
She went out on the ice — and promptly fell down twice.
In case you didn’t know, falling is frowned upon in the figure skating world.
It’s the equivalent of the clean-up hitter striking out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of a tie game. It’s like a running back fumbling at the goal line. In short, it’s bad news.
Accordingly, three other skaters finished ahead of Wagner when the judges votes were tallied. Again, normally, those three would go to the Olympics. Sadly, one of them won’t.
That’s because to USOC tabbed Wagner to go anyway. Mirai Nagasu, who finished third, wept openly on the medal stand yesterday, having already learned she won’t go to Russia.
I suppose Ashely Wagner is prettier than Nagasu. More TV camera-friendly. A bigger draw, meaning bigger ad revenues for NBC.
We on the Left should not gloat too much about the apparent car wreck that NJ Gov. Chris Christie’s political future is becoming.
As you know, a couple of his underlings and a few of his hack appointees screwed over hundreds of thousands of commuters last fall and might even have been responsible for an old lady’s death when they shut down lanes to the George Washington Bridge.
Christie’s Bridge To Nowhere?
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The growing scandal is a classic. Christie’s coatholders are alleged to have plotted the lane shutdown to punish either the Dem. mayor of Fort Lee, NJ. for not supporting the Guv in last year’s election or possibly the Garden State senate majority leader who’d also displeased the Christie camp.
They figured that the monumental daily traffic jams that were sure to follow would be blamed on the mayor or the state senator. When the issue was first raised months ago by local reporters, Christie swore to god in heaven that it had nothing to do with politics and even excoriated questioners for suggesting it might be.
Future Former?
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He also told reporters the lanes were shut down for a surprise emergency traffic study. He then leaned on NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo to stifle a nascent Port Authority investigation.
Now we’re learning more and more about how Christie staffers and his Port Authority appointees conspired to make the snarl-up happen, that Christie lied about it, and that the various participants in the affair have been standing on their heads to cover the whole thing up.
As of today, the NJ General Assembly, the federal government (interstate commerce laws may has been broken), the Port Authority, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office have launched investigations.
Wits and wags now are referring to Christie and his 2016 presidential prospects in iffy tones. Stephen Colbert this week took to calling Christie “the future former Republican frontrunner.”
Dems, Libs, and others who quake in their boots at the thought of another Republican presidency so soon after the tragi-farce that was Bush II, are jumping for joy over Christie’s apparent downfall.
And, again, I saw, whoa.
Say what you will about Chris Christie, he’s pretty much the last Republican standing who has at least a modicum of connection to reality in the 21st Century. He’s a typical, big city, blue state GOP-er in that there’s next to nothing that distinguishes him from the likes of Rahm Emanuel or Michael Bloomberg.
These fellows displease both ends of the political spectrum by catering to the wants and needs of the Center-Right. As such, they’re neither for the beheading of Wall Street banksters nor for the establishment of White Christianity as the national religion. Most Murricans want their leaders to fall somewhere between those extremes.
My fear is if Bridgegate topples Christie as the GOP frontrunner, the person who follows him will make him look like a beloved statesman.
I’d work like hell for whomever might have opposed Christie in the 2016 beauty contest but if by some quirk he sneaked into the White House, I’d be able to live with it.
It’s common knowledge that not only has Barack Hussein Karl Adolph Fidel John Wayne Gacy Obama usurped the White House from under White America’s nose, he has taken away all our guns, forced all our daughters to become pregnant so that they must undergo mandatory abortions, and — horrors! — even pushed through a law requiring all of us to have health insurance.
The animal.
Worst of all, he has replaced all presidential appointees, federal court judges, letter carriers, Army generals, meat inspectors, and IRS accountants with his uneducated, unemployed, ex-con cronies from the black slums of Chicago.
Golly gee, I can’t even recognize my holy land anymore.
The Obama Cabinet
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So complete has been our transformation from a god-fearing, unread, untroubled by even the most rudimentary analytical thought processes populace to a lazy, commie, taker society that we can not even find escape and respite in what was once known as the National Pastime.
Yep. The Kenyan Dictator has now stolen baseball from us.
You see, the Baseball Hall of Fame announced its 2014 inductees this week. Three great ballplayers were tabbed for enshrinement: Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, and Tom Glavine.
And do you know what the Black Power-monger did? This makes all his other sins pale in comparison, if my reading of the voice of the Angry White Man is accurate. He telephoned his congratulations to Frank Thomas, a black man. Neither Greg Maddux nor Tom Glavine, both white, got a call from the White House.
You see? You see? Racist!
Yeah. Callers to Chicago’s sports talk radio stations have been wringing their hands and shrieking over this historic miscarriage of justice. The Angry White Men of Murrica will not go down quietly.
And heaven forbid you defend the president’s action by mentioning that Obama is a South Side resident and an avowed White Sox fan. (Frank Thomas played the bulk of his career with the Pale Hose.) Whaddya, some kinda socialist?
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Hard to believe that after five years of the Obama presidency, a reign during which the sane among us recognize that our great nation has changed, well, not much — arguably, not even at all — there are still sentient human beings certain that the Prez is the bastard child of Idi Amin and Jane Fonda.
And that he’s out to destroy the white race.
Yes, there still exist the Angry White Men.
Funny thing is, I can recall a day when I thought all men were angry and white. At least they were in the neighborhood I grew up in. My Daddy-o, for instance, could find the dark cloud surrounding any silver lining. Occasionally, when I’d hear him chatting with neighbor men, their rage was almost palpable. If it were possible to smell anger, my nine-year-old nose would have twitched.
They were enraged by women, college students, blacks, Latinos, politicians, eggheads, the rich, the poor, the priests, the atheists, garbage men, cops, the Mob, lawyers, tradesmen, the grocer, their kids, their wives, their siblings, hell, anybody and everybody. And when one of their number was absent from any given day’s chat, they were mad at him, too.
They were men who never — ever — said things like “I love you” to their wives, “I’m proud of you” to their kids, or “I’m sorry” to anybody. They were almost gleeful in their rage and disgust with that segment of humanity that wasn’t, well, them.
To hear one of them utter an affectionate word, or an encouraging word, or simply marvel at what a beautiful day it was would have been tantamount to catching them wearing a colorful, flowered dress, spinning around in front of a full-length mirror, and singing “I Feel Pretty.”
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And then when they became even crankier coots, they never missed a chance to remind one and all that it was hell getting old.
The rest of us would refrain from adding that it was hell being around them when they were younger, as well.
We talk about the Angry White Man as if he’s some new breed, just sprouted from the Body Politic since, oh, the 1990s.
Me, it wasn’t until I became a man myself that I realized one could be such a thing and not be angry.
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Firehouse News
That’s the name of the forthcoming newsletter to be publisher by community radio WFHB. The first issue will hit your LED screen on March 1st, that is, if you’re a subscriber.
Stay tuned for instructions on how to join the in-crowd. The WFHB interwebs machine geeks are working feverishly as we speak to add a Subscribe button to the station’s main web page. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s up.
Anyway, here’s the staff for the new publication:
Publisher: WFHB/Firehouse Broadcasting (Cleveland Dietz II, general manager)
Co-managing Editors: Carol Fisher & Maryll Jones
Marketing Manager & Designer: Karen Roszkowski
Copy Editor: Helen Harrell
Contributors: Helen Harrell & Michael G. Glab
There. Now cool your heels while we work on getting this thing out.
Yo ho, the first installment in my new series of interviews, jointly produced with WFHB radio and The Ryder magazine, came off without a hitch yesterday.
Media Conglomerate
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The series has no name just yet — I’m leaning toward something like The Big Talk. Interview Number 1 aired during the Daily Local News at 5:30pm on 91.3 FM. I’d sat down with Nate Powell, now a Bloomington resident and one of the top graphic novelists/cartoonists in the country. Powell illustrated Congressman John Lewis’s biographical graphic novel, March: Book One. Lewis was one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement and famously got his skull broken by an Alabama state trooper’s nightstick on Bloody Sunday, the day of the first Selma voting rights march.
The series includes both an 8-minute radio interview to be followed by a longer chitchat in the magazine. The Powell interview will run in Feb.’s Ryder, appropriately enough, during Black History Month.
Tons o’thanks to WFHB News Director Alycin Bektesh and The Ryder editor and publisher Peter LoPilato for their support. This is gonna be fun!
My pal, the retired IU prof of Southeast Asia studies (who, BTW, forbids me from disclosing his name in this communications colossus), suggests we need a word for the practice in coffeehouses and restaurants of combining two or more tables to accommodate a big group of people.
You know, something like schadenfreude¹ or zeitgeist² or doppelgänger³. The Germans, natch, are huge on that portmanteau-ish practice and, in fact, are notorious for coining words that go on and on and on. The language and writing blog Verbavores points out the 30-letter word Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkungen, which actually means nothing more complicated than speed limits.
Strassenverkehrsordnung-stuff
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A visiting German student working on his thesis here at IU was sitting with us in Soma this AM. We leaned on him to help us come up with such a word. Give us something with table and combine, we said.
He thought for a moment, then commandeered my interwebs machine to type in the following: Tischzusammenschiebungen.
Hmm. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it? We’ll have to keep working on it.
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[1: Harm-joy, finding pleasure in the suffering of others; 2: Ghost-time, the spirit of the age; and 3: Double-goer, a paranormal double of a living person or one who uncannily resembles someone else.]
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[Oh, one more thing: the name of this media powerhouse, in Teutonic portmanteau, is Elektronenbleistift. You’re welcome.]
