The Electron Pencil

With a new wartime consigliere installed at the White House there’ve been scads of references to a heretofore ignored species known as the New York douchebag, or, using the Linnaean system of taxonomic classification, Novo Yorkus lavandi calicis.

In the movies, Michael Corleone ousted Tom Hagen when the going got roughest and selected the Don, Vito Corleone, his daddy-o, to take over poor Tom’s job. This current administration’s updated intrigue goes like this: Sean Spicer (AKA Hagen) is out and it’s The Donald’s spiritual son, Ant’ny Scaramucci, who gets the job.

Michael & His Dad

Donald & His Kid

Gangsters

●

Anyway, you want to know all about crass, pathologically greedy, borderline sociopathic, barely civilized, aggressive-as-makos New Yorkers who’ve excelled in the financial world? Pick up Michael Lewis’s now-30-year-old book, Liar’s Club. Lewis limns specimens like Louie Ranieri to a tee. Lewis S. Ranieri was a superstar at the old Salomon Brothers investment banking outfit. He, essentially, invented the mortgage-backed securities scam and, as such, is one of the primary villains in the worldwide economic collapse of 2007-08.

Louie and his acolytes tried to make Patton, Napoleon, and Johnny “Wad” Holmes look like Francis of Assisi. They fought tooth and nail to outwork, outearn, outdrink, outfuck…, hell, outeverything each other to a pathological degree. An example: Every Friday, they’d order lunch from some nearby joint. Each was so desperate to prove to his co-workers that he could eat more than they, that their lunch tabs amounted into the hundreds, even the thousands, of dollars. They gorged themselves to the point of emesis just so they could say they ate more than the other guys.

Both Li’l Duce and The Mooch are, indeed, Big Apple-ers from birth. Millions of Big Apple-ers are cringing at the thought.

The news today reads like the script from a bad Godfather rip-off, of which there were a scandalous many in the ’70s following the original’s success. None of them was any good. And neither is this administration.

▼

Strat Talk

Here’s the link to Thursday’s Big Talk featuring Bloomington legend and man about town, Spyridon Stratigos — Strats.

Next week, we do a live bit with Liz Watson, who has declared herself in on the 2018 race for Indiana’s 9th District US Congress seat.

Watson

▲

Katherine Boo wrote the bestseller, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. She’s won a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur genius award, and a National Book Award for Nonfiction. She has a rep for illuminating and explaining important issues while at the same time telling a good, tight story. She gave a talk the other day at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, sponsored by the journalism school of the University of North Texas. In it, she laid out her 15 rules for narrative nonfiction. They’re a must-read not only for journalists, writers, filmmakers, and radio people but for all those who consume the nonfiction works produced by them. (I’ve purposely neglected to mention TV “news” people because, frankly, I don’t give a good goddamn about them. Few, if any, of these rules would be acceptable in that medium, so there’s that too.)

Katherine Boo

[Image: Outlook India]

●

Anyway, here are the rules:

1) It’s not enough to tell the stories of victims. I also need to investigate perps.

2) I let what I hate give me wing.

3) I’m not the sum of my best or most difficult circumstances, and neither are the people I report on.

4) When I’m first settling into a place, I tell myself that strong presumptions will make me miss what’s happening.

5) Memory sucks.

6) I ask myself: “What would really get lost if this story never ran?”

7) Don’t be a whiner.

8) I don’t try to find simple characters.

9) I try never to forget that my “subjects” are really my co-investigators.

10) Though I seek out the public record maniacally, I don’t assume that it’s accurate.

11) To calibrate my compass as a writer, I share my work widely and not only with journalists.

12) I often tell myself that editors and publishers don’t know what’s going to sell.

13) Even if I’m telling urgent stories, I can still experiment with form and make it a creative process.

14) When after a lot of effort I can’t pin something down, I force myself to put that uncertainty on the page.

15) If my work is successful, I don’t go and get high on my own supply.

Want to read more about these rules? Go here. Thanks to Chip Berlet for pointing this out.

▼

Repartee

Scoot down your radio dial to 91.3 FM today at 5pm for WFHB‘s Daily Local News. Today, as every Thursday, is Big Talk day. My guest this week is none other than Spyridon Stratigos — Strats!

Strats

●

If you don’t know who he is it’s imperative you listen. Strats is more Bloomington than Letters to the Editor, the Trojan Horse, and all the horking college kids outside Kilroy’s put together.

As always, I’ll post links to the podcast as well as the uncut original interview with Strats here tomorrow.

Next week, we’re planning a live Big Talk with Liz Watson, another of the Democratic candidates for US Congress from Indiana’s 9th District.

▼

Home Runs

Oh, hey, remember how deliriously happy I was last Nov. when my beloved Cubs won their first World Series since proto-humans descended from the trees in the African savanna? An objective observer might have described my mood as well…, orgasmic. Now we learn I wasn’t the only one.

Acc’d’g to hospital sources, there’s a baby boom happening in the Chi. area as we speak — nine months after the climactic event.

Unprotectedly

●

[h/t to Pencillista Chris Paputsas]

▼

The Nature Of Nature

[Yet another in an occasional series of pontifications and screeds about words.]

Nature. That edenic place. Birds flutter, butterflies flit, brooks babble, the sun shines, and all is well under god’s loving, watchful eye.

I love nature. I assume you do too. Who doesn’t? The other day, when I arrived at Charlotte Zietlow’s house for our regular weekly book writing session, as I stood on her back porch waiting for her to unlock the door, I noticed a brightly colored bug, maybe an inch long, with the huge hind legs of a cricket or a grasshopper, limbs built to propel it yards downfield, perhaps when it senses it’s being eyed by a red-winged blackbird who’s clearly salivating — or whatever it is birds do when they’re famished. It was a gorgeous bug, its green so rich, nearly neon, that it could have been an artist’s conception. Its antennae were longer, relatively, than any I’d ever seen on another bug, two or two and a half times the length of its body.

I bent over to peer closely at it. It waggled those antennae in my direction as if to say, Watch it, buddy, I’ve got my palps on you.

I do that kind of thing every day. I scan the foliage for those telltale three-leaf red stems, their leaves notched symmetrically, that signify poison ivy. In the process, I take note of all the other kinds of leaves, greens of every shade, long and short, broad and narrow, succulent and dull. When The Loved One and I drive through Brown County State Park, I stop the car in the middle of the road and just listen for the symphony of birds, frogs, and insects. It would be so easy not to hear them, to ignore them, but they’re always there, creating a music the likes of which humans have yet to be able to replicate.

I stop, every chance I get, in other words, to sniff the Rosae synstylae.

●

In this year of somebody’s lord, 2017, the lucid among us acknowledge that our human industry, our jones for consumption, is doing real, measurable damage. Op/eds, websites, advocacy groups, grid-fleers, and anybody else similarly concerned with the continued health [don’t say wellness] of this mad planet’s flora and fauna extol, like me, the wonders of nature and shake their collective finger at ourselves, the dopes who are doing our level best to eff it up.

But are we effing it up?

We view the world as if it’s home to two competing, irreconcilable forces: nature and humanity. Humans, a lot of us seem to hold, are interlopers on this globe. We’re intruders, second-story guys jimmying the windows and invading the heretofore safe and comfy home of, well, nature.

Only that’s not quite true. In fact, it’s not true at all. We belong here. It’s not, after all, like we came here in so many spaceships from Xenu’s doomed planet, infecting the Earth with our presence.

We are, in fact, nature. We’ve evolved from the same unicellular wrigglers that occupied the warm oceans some four billion years ago that the toad and the red rose have.

In a perverse sense, our despoiling of the environment is, in itself, natural. That’s what we were meant to do. All of our actions — the obsessive burning of fossil fuels, the packaging of anything and everything in plastic, the mowing down of rainforests, the robbery of our fellow critters’ habitats, and more — were the result of our  our wants and needs as natural beings. We couldn’t have acted any other way because, naturally, that’s who we were.

Now we’re faced with a choice. Stop the burning, knock off the plastics, save the trees, let the critters roam, or keep going the way we’ve been since the first Homo erectus applied for separate species designation. Now we understand, we’ve got a choice. But whichever path we choose, it will be natural. As George Carlin reminded us, “The planet is fine; people are fucked…. The planet has been through worse than us. Been though earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere; we are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, folks.”

It just may be in our nature to commit suicide. And the Earth, naturally, will go on without us.

▲

Author John Irving on Bob Dylan and Neil Young: “They’re not afraid to embarrass themselves — and you’ve got to be able to do that.”

Irving

Dylan

Young

That’s my mantra as an artist. When I first applied pen to paper as a dopey kid, I fretted constantly about how I’d be received. It took years for me to rid myself of that ill-fitting hairshirt. Thankfully, I came to the realization that if I worry about making a mistake or incurring the ridicule of whatever audience I have, I’ll never put anything out there.

So, laugh at me if you want, but I’ve got to be able to do what I do.

▼

The Bane That Is Bannon

Just heard the author of the new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, on Democracy Now. Lemme tell you, this book is a punch in the gut. It chronicles how Bannon read the Fascist theorist Julius Evola and the religious regressivist René Guénon and has absorbed their assertions that the Enlightenment has perverted humankind’s progression through history and moved our species away from a traditional spirituality. This exodus from ancient morality myths threatens to make our species extinct, both Evola and Guénon implied — and now, Bannon flat-out believes it to be so.

Li’l Duce

Bannon

Bannon’s mission in life mission in life is to save all mankind (emphasis on man-) from itself. A rather megalomaniacal ambition, no?

The author, Joshua Green, tells a fascinating story about how Bannon essentially created the alt-right, an agglomeration of youthful, aggrieved, helpless, hopeless, pathological self-pitiers that just may have been the difference in the 2016 election (one that, I must remind the world, resulted in Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote). The story goes like this. Some years ago, Bannon heard about a nascent grift called “gold farming.” He saw that tens of millions of young people worldwide were playing massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft that offered successful participants the ability to amass points and virtual wealth, so that they could advance even further as they continued to play over the weeks and months. So Bannon got in on the scam. He formed a company that hired Chinese laborers to play the games all day long and accumulate in-game currency. Bannon then took all those spoils and sold them at great profit to people who wanted to be big shots in these online games but didn’t have the time, energy, or smarts to earn the swag under the rules. The company was wildly successful.

Except that serious players got wind of the scheme and started banding together, pressuring the game licensees to bar this kind of chicanery, which they did. Bannon’s company immediately collapsed. Rather than cry into his beer, Bannon took it as a business lesson — young, disaffected obsessives who live on the internet could be corralled and channeled into a massive, mighty political force.

When he became a big shot at Breitbart News Network (Andrew Breitbart himself once called Bannon “the Leni Riefenstahl” of the Tea Party movement) Bannon realized that, although Fox News had wrapped up the older aggrieved, helpless, hopeless, pathological self-pitiers of this holy land, nobody had tapped into the younger generation of similarly sad sacks. Accordingly, he went out and hired internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos and thus began the successful courtship of that hateful young crowd by Breitbart. That group eventually became its own political bloc, tied together by their fears, their loathings, Breitbart News, and dozens — even hundreds — of other fascism-loving, white-skin-revering sites.

Breitbart

Riefenstahl

Green, BTW, began his career as an editor at The Onion. He went on to work for the The American Prospect and Washington Monthly, and has contributed to Slate, the The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

▼

Careful What You Wish For

Personal to all those dreaming of the impeachment of President Gag (me included):

If, by some miracle, both the House and the Senate turn Democratic in 2018 and, through some further magical intervention, articles of impeachment are approved, a trial is held, two-thirds of the Senate votes to convict, and Li’l Duce is tossed out, there will be — mark my words — blood in the streets. The anencephalics who love the current president will be enraged, and they have guns.

Ready, Aim…

●

Come to think of it, there just might be blood in the streets if P. Gag loses the 2020 election. Call me cynical if you want, but I see nothing good resulting from our current state of Gag-ian lunacy.

▼

Hee-Hee

▲

Wee, Whee!

Put aside all your plans for Wednesday evening. Weddings, funerals, emergency room visits, drop-ins to your parents’ house in hopes one or the other will slip you a couple of twenties — everything. Go instead to Bear’s Place for this month’s edition of Science Cafe.

Subject: Tiny Is Beautiful: Science and Emerging Technologies of Nanocrystals.

Atomic Structure Of 5-Nanometer-Diameter Nanocrystal

[Image: Berkeley Lab]

●

Speaker: Xingchen Ye, chemistry prof at Indiana University’s Chemistry Dept.

The gray-matter orgy begins at 6:30pm. Be there. I will.

▼

Bad Guys

Time for an update of my list of American Villains (1901-now):

• Father Coughlin: The very first electronic media personality to become a superstar by pandering to the deep-seated hatreds and panics many Americans — too many — harbor in their hearts.
• J. Edgar Hoover: The pathologically sexless inventor of the FBI; he repressed his natural carnal urges resulting in his reign of terror upon civil rights, dissenters, the harmlessly misinformed, and, in the words of author/baseball player Jim Bouton, “little old ladies in tennis shoes” who dared speak out against the Vietnam War.
• Joseph McCarthy: A sick little man who devoted his life to rooting imagined commies and perverts out of US Gov’t, academia, newsrooms, and from under everybody’s beds during this New World’s second and more brutal witch hunt.

McCarthy (R), With Attorney Roy Cohn

●

• Andrew Breitbart/Steve Bannon/Roger Ailes: These three pishers don’t even deserve their own individual bullet points, the cucci, even if their sins against the truth and reason have turned this holy land into the planet’s punchline.
• The brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles: — “Deep state” spooks in the Eisenhower years — Allen was the CIA director and John Foster the Sec’y of State — who orchestrated numerous coups around the world, including the sacking of democratically-elected Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, sparking a decades-long campaign of Middle East terror and fundamentalist radicalism that bedevils us to this day.
• Lil Duce: You know who he is.

▼

Lickspittle Spat

A fellow on Democracy Now! this AM characterized a lot of the top-level in-fighting in the President Gag administration as a battle between Cabinet officials with “diehard business interests” vs. Gag’s “incoherent ideology.”

I buy it.

▼

Power Mad

News Item: President Gag says he has “complete power” to issue pardons.

Dig: No sitting president should be talking so cavalierly about granting pardons — to others, to his family,  or to himself. In fact, no president should ever even bring up the idea of pardons except when s/he issues them. That’s it.

The real granting of pardons is not some funny-haha power like that silly ritual presidents traditionally engage in around Thanksgiving. You know, where the sitting Law-Enforcement-Officer-in-Chief pardons some big white turkey. [And, by that I mean, Meleagris gallopavo, not any of the 63 million-plus jerks who voted for Li’l Duce.]

M. gallopavo

Pan troglodytes

This (L), Not That

●

See, just throwing the word pardon around sends the wrong message. Y’know, like, Hey, just come to me for your Get Out of Jail Free card.

It’s like Kohl’s posting a big sign where you walk in, reading: “If you raise enough of a stink, we’ll refund your money on anything, no matter what.” That may, indeed, be the store’s policy but its managers don’t want to plant the idea in your coconut.

▲

The vast majority of men on this psychotic planet don’t understand women, mainly because they don’t care to.

Women, a mighty plurality of XY chromosome-bearers on this Earth believe, are silly and weak and they’re starting to get above themselves, you know, wanting to control their vaginas and uteri, running for office, being workplace supervisors, and other lunacies.

Me? I’ve always tried to stand on my head trying to understand those people whose genitalia are slightly different from mine. (Really, read up a little on the development of male and female sex junk as embryos develop in the womb; when all is said and done, there ain’t much diff. between this one and that).

I’ve always been more fascinated by women than men. By and large, growing up as a male, I was baffled from the start by the proscribed and compulsory ways we guys are supposed to act and be. We’re expected to strut around like peacocks, hiding our emotions, never listening, only barking, pretending not to feel pain or hurt, ready at the drop of a hat to use violence to solve problems or settle arguments. What a bunch of bores!

Women, though, are allowed to feel. To care. To caress. To nurture. To hold things together. To be strong when everybody else is falling apart. To be, in other words, decent human beings.

[Image: Chicago Tribune]

●

Which gang would you rather hang around with?

Anyway, I’ve done scads of reading and questioning and contemplating on the topic of who woman are. I’ve familiarized myself with the likes of everybody from Émilie du Châtelet to Virginia Woolf to Adrienne Rich to Roxanne Gay. I’ve watched and noted all the many women of my life. I like to think I know a little something about them but the reality is I probably know next to nothing. That’s okay, as long as I keep digging.

Here a quote I dug up this AM, from Sarah Vowel’s 1997 book, Radio On: A Listener’s Diary:

I took back the night. And it’s all mine until I get stabbed, raped, mugged, shot.

My guess is if you can grasp all the meanings behind that line, you might be able to know, just a bit, what it is to be a woman in the year 2017.

Vowell

▲

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

— Neil Postman

Huxley

Orwell

▼

Integration

I wonder if Bloomington will soon have its first African-American City Council member since seemingly forever when the local Democratic Party meets next month to select a replacement for the outgoing Tim Mayer.

One of the talked-about possibilities is a fellow named Jim Sims. He’s an area manager for Indiana University’s Residential and Environmental Service operation. He’s also the newly-installed president of the Monroe County NAACP. His wife Doris Sims is a big shot at City Hall, serving as director of Bloomington’s Housing and Neighborhood Development dept.

It’d be a nice gesture on the part of party sachems who are charged with replaced the retiring Mayer. Acc’d’g to state law, when an elected municipal official quits or dies — or gets thrown in jail, I suppose, as well — in the middle of her or his term, that person’s party meets in caucus to select a replacement. That’s going to happen next month, the day of the total solar eclipse, so a lot of folks who must participate in the caucus will miss the once-in-a-lifetime event.

Sims

Fraley

[Sims Image: Rodney Margison/Bloom Magazine]

●

Hint to county party boss Mark Fraley — switch the date. That’d be a nice gesture, too.

[Odd Piece of Trivia: Bloomington’s guy isn’t the first James Sims to be president of a city’s NAACP. Another James Sims, of Spokane, Washington, headed that town’s civil rights outfit beginning in 1956. Spokane’s Sims got heavily involved in the civil rights fight after he applied for a state job and scored well on the civil service test but was passed over largely because his skin was the wrong color. Even though it often seems our holy land’s progress on race relations moves glacially — and it usually does — it’s good to keep in mind it ain’t 1956 anymore.]

▼

Greatest Hits

I pulled a fast one — or so I thought when I came up with the idea — on yesterday’s Big Talk. I’d figured I would save myself some time and effort during these dog days by putting together a best-of show. And, considering this week’s episode would be the last under outgoing WFHB news director Joe Crawford, I could dedicate it to him.

Perfect, right?

Only it took me twice as long — at the very least! — to produce this week’s show as opposed to my normal one-guest offering. I was thinking I’d simply scan some old audio files, pick out the best clips, and mash them up into one full program. Easy.

Not so. I worked my poor fingers to the bone searching, placing, editing, smoothing, and sound engineering a half dozen clips from some of my fave guests. Don’t get me wrong, I loved doing the task. But in terms of my sked, I shot myself in the foot.

Ah, well, such is the life of a local radio superstar.

So, hey, here are a couple of links to yesterday’s Big Talk. Clip voices include:

• Nate Powell
• Charlotte Zietlow
• Jeff Isaac
• Nancy Hiller
• Doug Wissing
• Sue Rall

Enjoy. And tune in next week, ‘kay?

▼

Alone

All my adult life I’ve tried to run away from the crowd. I’ve hewed to this impulse, some might say, to a fault. Why do I do it? Because crowds scare me. They’re too big and powerful. They can swallow a single human — me — up.

Terrifying

●

If the majority thinks something, I’m almost automatically suspicious of it. I’d rather be wrong for it than for following the pack and watching it steamroll over some truth.

Anyway, Shankar Vedantem, the Hidden Brain guy from NPR’s Morning Edition, gave me a sort of imprimatur the other day.

Here’s a pile of quotes from his report:

Very simply, being around other people seems to increase our propensity to believe in fake news.

Groups trigger a certain attitude in us when it comes to evaluating information.

[Columbia University marketing professor Gita Johar] conducted a series of experiments…. People were presented with ambiguous statements. Volunteers could say they either believed it, disbelieved it or they could keep an open but skeptical mind and demand evidence, in other words, ask for fact checking. Here’s the catch. Some of the volunteers heard these claims while they were by themselves.

Others felt they were in a group setting or in a social media environment where other people were present and also hearing the same claims. In group settings, people quickly accepted or rejected claims that were in line with their prior beliefs. But compared to when they were by themselves, they were significantly less interested in being skeptical but open-minded.

Volunteers did 30 to 50 percent less fact checking when they heard information presented to them in a social media context compared to when they were alone.

I’m feelin’ smug right about now.

▲

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on Earth.

— Daniel Boorstin

Boorstin, an historian and contemporary culture observer, wrote these words in his 1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. They’re are true now as they were back then, almost 60 years ago. The only thing I’d change today would be his use of the present imperfect, “we risk being.” In this year of somebody’s lord 2017, the proper wordage is “we are.”

Still, in ’61 Boorstin observed that we’d already fallen into a fantasy world. He shared this possibly apocryphal anecdote:

ADMIRING FRIEND: “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there.”

MOTHER: “Oh, that’s nothing — you should see his photograph!”

And we wonder why we can’t convince President Gag’s fans that he’s a fraud, a trickster, a con-artist, a used-car salesman, the spiritual brother of Professor Harold Hill, Elmer Gantry, and Charles Ponzi.

We can’t because he is their fraud, trickster, con-artist, used-car salesman, and spiritual brother of Professor Harold Hill, Elmer Gantry, and Charles Ponzi. And how dare we try to rob them of their precious photograph?

●

For the umpteenth time, let’s hope with fingers and toes crossed they only comprise 35 percent of the voting public in this holy land.

▼

A Big Goodbye To A Cool Guy

Tune in tonight for a celebration of the first year anniversary of Big Talk. I mash up clips from some of my favorite interviews (see the slideshow).

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The whole shebang is dedicated to a very cool and professional guy, Joe Crawford, who’s leaving his position as WFHB’s news director. His last day at the station is tomorrow. When I call him cool, I mean it on a couple of levels. He’s a guitarist for a band called Ray Creature (it’s been called “pretty cool” by his sister). Even more importantly, nothing rattles Joe. He’s one of the most unflappable human beings I’ve ever met. During live broadcasts, when a piece of equipment goes haywire or a soundbite is misplaced and the rest of us are going into fibrillation, he’s as calm as a Tibetan monk contemplating a leaf on a tree. Then he presses a button or moves a slider and everything’s fine again. Don’t ask me how he does it.

He’s Even Cool In An IHOP

●

Anyway, Joe gave me the go-ahead to produce Big Talk some three years ago. After a few fits and starts we went weekly in July, 2016. I thank him from the bottom of my defib-ed heart for the opportunity and I dedicate today’s episode to him. Tune in at 5:00pm on WFHB, 91.3FM. Or, catch my links to the podcasts here, tomorrow.

▼

Metastasis

Hearing the news that Senator John McCain has a particularly pernicious form of brain cancer immediately made me think someone, somewhere, on one form of social media or another, is going to either rejoice in the news that he’s dying or use this malady to explain how he could have held his shockingly stupid positions.

[Image: CNN]

●

The democratization of mass media means even the troglodytes among us get to air their belchings to a wide audience.

Not that meanness or stupidity is anything new, of course. The revelation of McCain’s glioblastoma reminds me of a similar story back when I was a holy terror in the mid-sixties. At the time, my beloved hometown Chicago was undergoing the upheaval of integration. Civil rights activists were calling for some way — any way — to bring the education of the black kids from the slums up to par with that of middle-class white kids. If busing was the way to do it, then so be it. White Chicago had apoplexy.

The city’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Albert Cardinal Meyer, known as an intellectual among America’s archbishops, long had condemned racism and even gave a speech or two on the same dais as Martin Luther King. None of this endeared him to his white ethnic flock.

(L to R) Meyer, King, And Oklahoma City Bishop Victor Reed In 1963

●

Then one day in 1965 it was announced Cardinal Meyer had brain cancer. He would soon die during surgery to remove the tumor. A sad end for a decent guy — only an alarming number of white ethnic Chicagoans neither considered him decent nor his end sad.

Over the next couple of years as the fight over busing and desegregation grew uglier, lots of whites huffed at other whites who seemed sympathetic to those causes, “Cardinal Meyer had brain cancer; what’s your excuse?”

Of course, back in those days people who’d dare to say something like that were considered, among polite society, assholes. Today they may be lining up to be considered for positions in Li’l Duce‘s Cabinet.

▲

Here are some pretty good rules of thumb regarding what you should trust — and what you shouldn’t — when reading news stories with unnamed sources.

●

This piece ran in FiveThirtyEight. The author makes the New York Times look like the paragon of all that is good and great in journalism so it’s important to keep in mind that FiveThirtyEight itself was for a few years owned and operated by the NYT. It was sold to ESPN in 2013 and remains under the control of that company. That caveat out of the way, NYT is generally more dependable than most other news sources today. That is, when one takes into account the Gray Lady has a vested interest in maintaining whatever status quo is extant at the moment and it buys hook line and sinker into what is often — and lazily — referred to as neoliberal economics.

Nevertheless, this piece is particularly timely today. Whenever a major scandal is breaking in Washington, the months and even years of revelations come from unnamed sources. People like to keep their jobs even if they’re aghast at some cardinal or venial sin being committed by their bosses. The Watergate affair, for example, played out over a period of 26 months, from June, 1972 through August, 1974. Pretty much every single revelation originally was attributed to an unnamed source and then, eventually, verified either by primary documents or by officials speaking for attribution.

BTW: The biggest scandal that rocked the Obama administration was, natch, his reputed birth in Kenya or whatever other godforsaken hellhole where he was trained to take over our holy land and place the good among us in chains. Now, that scandal has lasted years and years. It began way back in 2004 when BHO ran for the US Senate from Illinois and has lasted through this very day. Yep, social media commenters still are calling for the ex-president to be jailed for forging his birth certificate and otherwise fooling the sheeple of America in order to lead them over the cliff.

Funny thing is, there have never been unnamed sources for this scandal. The whole shebang has been dependent upon the certainty among many that a brown-skinned guy with a foreign-sounding name must of course have been born in some other country — or even on some other planet — and possessed special powers to finagle his way into the White — emphasis on white — House.

Plus, He’s One Of The Lizard People

●

There are no rules of thumb governing that kind of news sourcing.

▲

[Another in a sporadic series of rants about language.]

I first heard (or, more accurately, read) the word some 25 or so years ago.

Wellness.

I hated the sound of it. Like all good readers, I sound a new word both in my head and aloud.

Wellness.

It’s clumsy. Contrived.

The more I saw of it, the more I realized it was a marketing tool. “Natural” food companies and alternative medicine hawkers seemed to fall in love with the word overnight. Buy their spelt bread or homeopathic remedies, these sellers said, and you’ll come ever so fabulously and wonderfully closer to the nirvana that is wellness.

Then the traditional medical establishment and the health insurance rackets caught up to the word. Doctor’s offices became wellness centers. HMOs urged their members to strive every second of the live-long day for wellness.

Oy.

We have, I said to the empty room, a perfectly good word already for it. We say health.

Health, though, was old hat. Health is what’d been pushed by those corrupt doctors who put guns to patients’ heads to get them to demand more pills that’d get them to sleep at night or relieve them of unpleasant thoughts of sadness or loss. By gosh, these new marketers swore, you don’t need Ambien™ to get you to sleep! Get off that Prozac™, you fools!

Ugh, pills! We’re all — doctors and patients — under the thumb of those sinister, mighty pharmaceutical companies. Instead, take our pills! Wanna sleep, pop a Nux Moschata. Depressed? Try curkuma longa.

Health is not just old school — it’s bad for you.

Wellness. Ah. Green leaves and flowing brooks. Fresh air. Nutmeg. And turmeric.

Yep. That’s what Nux Moschata and curkuma longa are, respectively. Nutmeg and turmeric. I wonder if spice cake bakers and mustard preparers discovered the miraculous benefits of those two key ingredients in their products.

I mentioned this bugbear to a friend. She said, Hey, whatsa matter with you? Don’t you want a lively, evolving language?

Sure I do. I just don’t want snake oil salesmen and health insurers’ advertising agencies driving that evolution.

▼

Two

Ever hear of a fellow named Two Stickney?

●

What’s that? You haven’t? Why, this is an outrage! He was, in fact, an heroic combatant in one of our growing nation’s lengthiest wars. From 1820 through 1836, the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan fought a bloody border battle, one of the participants of which was the future Confederate General Robert E. Lee, at the time a lieutenant in the US Army.

Background: Benjamin Franklin Stickney, for a time a Hoosier who lived near Ft. Wayne, has been described as an historian, linguist, author, mineralogist, land speculator, spy, postmaster, justice of the peace, Indian agent and newspaper publisher. He was the son of a niece of Benjamin Franklin himself. He went on to become one of the founders of the city of Toledo (Ohio).

Stickney was an oddball, too. Witness the names he bestowed upon his two sons: One and Two. He wanted to name his three daughters after states but his wife refused until the third girl was born. She was dubbed Indiana. He was one of the most powerful white settlers in northern Ohio. He proposed to flood a seven-mile-wide stretch of plain between the Wabash and Maumee rivers as part of a plan to create a waterway from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

That waterway would make his land near Toledo extremely valuable. But Ohio had hefty property taxes. So Stickney persuaded the residents of the area to secede from Ohio and become part of the Michigan Territory, where he wouldn’t have to pay taxes. He finagled getting himself named justice of the peace of the secessionist area and then when the people of Michigan exhibited no interest in having Toledo become a port on the proposed waterway, he threw his loyalties back to Ohio. He convinced the residents of the newly-attached part of Michigan to vote to reattach themselves to their original state. In any case, the issue of where the border between the two states should be became hot enough that militias were called up. For thirteen years, armed men faced off against each other — and shots were fired — in what would become known as the Toledo War. By the mid-1830s, militiamen from Michigan were rounding up leaders of the Toledo re-secessionist movement and throwing them in prison, Stickney included.

●

Hostilities only ceased when the US Congress in 1836 ruled Toledo to be part of Ohio and, to keep Michigan happy, gave it what’s now known as the Upper Peninsula when it applied for statehood.

BTW: Recall me mentioning the Toledo War being a bloody conflict? It was. In 1835, a Monroe County (Michigan) sheriff’s deputy grabbed Two Stickney by the shoulder in an attempt to arrest him. Two shouted “Damn you, sir!” and stabbed the deputy in the thigh with his pocket knife. Two escaped by horse to the safety of Ohio proper.

No one else was hurt in the war and no one was killed.

[Thanks to Steve Volan for the tip.]

▲

I don’t know if he can win in this congressional district but, given what he’s done in his life already, I’d hate to bet against him.

Dan Canon was raised by a single mother and then dropped out of high school because he was bored. He played in a rock ‘n roll band for the next ten years and then decided to put his life in order. He put himself through college and then law school. And — wouldn’t you know it? — he finished first in his law school class at the University of Louisville

Next thing anybody knew, he was arguing a landmark case before the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United Sates of America. Yep, Canon was one of the lead attorneys in Obergefell vs. Hodges, the 2015 decison that made same-sex marriage legal in this holy land. And now he’s running for Congress in Indiana’s 9th District.

Canon

●

Canon hopes to unseat Republican Trey Hollingsworth, who made a splash in 2016 by moving here so he could run for the House from this district and — wouldn’t you know it again? — won on the coattails of Li’l Duce. Hollingsworth knocked off one of my fave pols extant, Shelli Yoder, who is not running again in the 2018 race but, rumor has it, is mulling a dash for statewide office. Both Canon and his campaign manager, Dustin Collins, like this correspondent, dig Yoder the most.

In any case, Canon must face several Dems also hoping to bust Hollingsworth out of office in the May, 2018 primary.

Can anybody beat Hollingsworth with his war chest bursting at the seams, thanks to his daddy-o’s millions? Who knows? Somebody’s got to try, though. The first Q. I posed to Canon during my interview with him on Thursday’s Big Talk was, How can you win in this reddest of red states?

For his part, Canon took me — and anybody else who suggests Indiana is a die-hard red state — to task. He spoke of this Congressional district’s Democratic past. I didn’t have the heart to counter that the key word in that response is past.

Canon’s smart and earnest and determined. Plus, he’s energized some of the more progressive elements around these parts, as evidenced by the turnout for his meet-and-greet Thursday evening at the Uptown Cafe.

Anyway, here are a couple of links to my Big Talk feature with him and here’s one to the entire interview.

▼

Payday

Indiana University isn’t the only bad guy in this case. Pretty much every single big-time institution of higher education is committing this same mortal sin. That is, the amount of dough each spends fielding sports teams.

The Herald Times this morning lists The Top Ten Base Salaries at IU for this year. The big boss, president Michael McRobbie leads the way at $627,300 per annum. He’s followed by the athletic director, Fred Glass at $561,300, then brand new head basketball coach, Archie Miller — who hasn’t won a single game for the faithful yet — at $550,000. In fact, an academic doesn’t turn up on the list until No. 8, Kelley School of Business dean Idie Kesner at $400,289 a year.

But, immeditaely following Kesler is a fellow named Darren Hiller, just hired this past February. Hiller, the HT notes, makes a sweet $400,000 a year.

Now, let me repeat: He’s the assistant football coach. In charge of the offensive line and, acc’d’g to the IU Athletic Dep.t website, he’s also the “run game coordinator.”

●

Here, let me try this a third time: Darren Hiller is the assistant football coach. Assistant. Not even the top guy. A helper. A second in command, if that — I was under the impression such specialists as the offensive and defensive coordinators were co-seconds-in-command in the hallowed flow chart of football team leadership, the pantheon, as it were.

I’ll say this: Were I a top notch physicist, say, or mathematical genius, or a recognized authority on the works of the Beat writers, I’d be mightily pissed. Why some dude whose expertise in life is the proper formation that eleven guys must assume in order to facilitate a running back gaining, say, 3.7 yards per carry (the Hoosiers’ overall 2016 average; a figure, it must be assumed, Hiller is charged with improving) is scheduled to make something approaching half a mill a year while…, well, I’m not would be a question haunting me as I lay my head on my pillow each night of the 2017-18 school year.

Hiller

●

An assistant. Did I mention that?

▲