Category Archives: Neil Steinberg

1000 Words: Evidence

So, the Big Hearings continue today. As more and more truths are revealed, so the thinking goes, more and more people will come to the realization that the 45th President of the United States of America was a bad man.

The Committee Even Has Its Own Logo.

But, kids, that ain’t gonna happen.

Fealty to the Commander-in-Chief between Barack Obama and Joe Biden is not based on any kind of rational thinking. That is, of course, unless you consider getting corporate deregulation; increasingly restrictive voter access; climate change denial; an administration based first, second, third, and last on nepotism; dog-whistle, code word, and outright racism and xenophobia; purely self-interested erosion of the citizenry’s faith in the electoral process; cozying up to the world’s strongmen; and…, and…, oh, you can fill in the rest, more important than any notion of a healthy democracy.

If you believe that these House hearings on the January 6th Insurrection will sway minds and loyalties because folks will weigh the evidence and come to a considered conclusion, you’re living in a dream world. That type of thinking would be definitive of the term rational thinking. And — let me iterate —  love of the sole president ever to be impeached twice is flat-out not in any way evidence of a voter’s rational thinking.

As Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg writes this AM:

Remember when Donald Trump bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote? An uncharacteristic thing for him to say, in that it was true. But subsequent events bear him out, and we free of his mesmeric influence should never forget it. He doesn’t lead a party, but a cult.

That, in a nutshell, is one big diff. between today’s major American political parties. When a smart, effective senator like Minnesota’s Al Franken got accused, scurrilously, of molesting model and radio broadcaster Leeann Tweeden back in 2017 (the alleged incidents took place in 2006), his party cohorts threw him under the bus immediately. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand demanded he resign. And what did he do? He ran. And not for office, but for the hills.

Score one less smart effective member of the Santa Democratic Caucus.

It didn’t matter that the allegations were amplified and broadcast by right wing provocateur Roger Stone and radio loon Alex Jones, both of whom turned the charges into worse sins than any ever committed by the Nixon White House, the Nazis, Attila the Hun, or the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Stone (L) & Jones.

A good Republican would have said, Who ya gonna believe, me or some slutty ex-Hooter’s hostess and Frederick’s of Hollywood mannequin who once appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine? And, whoever he was, he wouldn’t have run for the hills. It’d have taken some 25 or 30 more similar allegations from other women before his party tired of defending him and he’d be compelled to depart Washington, tail between his legs.

See, Republicans defend each other. Democrats? Well, the first time they hear a hint of untoward behavior about you, they turn on you with a vengeance.

Even when the hint turns out to be untrue. Tweeden’s charges actually described comedic skit bits the two were performing on a USO tour in the Middle East. I notice even after that’d been established, Gillibrand and Co. neglected to say to Franken, “Oops, our bad. Come on back and caucus with us once again.”

Had Franken been a Republican and the same story played out against him, he’d be in line for the 2024 nomination for president. And his biggest selling point would have been the fact that he’d whupped the slutty ex-Hooter’s hostess and Frederick’s of Hollywood mannequin who once appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine. She and the liberals who believed her.

That’d be good enough for an additional 10 to 20 million votes.

We’re learning very little that’s new in the hearings. They are more theater than criminal trial. And that’s fine by me. I’ve always held that politics is more theater than anything else. Need I point to a more illustrative example of that than, say, the very man who’s being investigated by the House committee?

Spiderman’s Foe.

About the only revelations that I hadn’t heard before were that Ivanka Trump told her old man she believed the president’s loyal Attorney General William Barr when he said there was absolutely no evidence the 2020 election had been stolen. And that her loathsome husband, and in another world Marvel Comics multimillionaire arch villain Jared Kushner, told her the night of the election the two of them had better pack up and ditch DC because the Trump run was kaput.

Rats, I’ve heard, tend to desert sinking ships.

In any case, there are exactly two types of people in this holy land these days: those who despise Ivanka’s old man and those who idolize him. Now, that latter category might only amount to 35 percent of the electorate but they’re solid as a rock and they vote, braving pandemics, hurricanes, mass shootings, and mobility scooter breakdowns to show up at their polling places the first Tuesday every November.

But if you’ve got 35 percent of the nation’s voters in your back pocket, you only have to sway another 15.1 percent to your side in order to win.

Even if a majority of people believe the 45th president is a clear and present danger to democracy, and his party a cult in thrall to him, if they all don’t get out and vote every single election, then whatever they think is irrelevant.

Hearts and minds aren’t going to be changed by these nationally televised hearings. Everybody’s already dug in their heels. And, again, when it comes to the electoral numbers game, it isn’t the total number of people who believe or advocate for anything, only the number of people who vote.

The Dems do have a couple of things going for them this year: the US Supreme Court’s expected rejection of Roe v. Wade and the epidemic of mass shootings by mentally ill individuals with easy access to military-grade weapons. Anger over those two issues just might swing the 2022 off-year elections.

I’m not holding my breath.

Hot Air: Everybody’s Black! Everybody’s Gay!

I’m a couple of days late with this one but that’s no news — I’ve been running slow ever since this pandemic lockdown became the new norm. As, I’d imagine, have you. In any case, here’s a musing on St. Patrick’s Day, a fete about as relevant to its purported national celebrants as Columbus Day is to the Italians. Neither honoree brings untainted esteem to his respective land. Not that anybody on Earth throughout history can claim to be untainted by human foible, weakness, or outright assholiness, but, for pity’s sake, there have to be some standards. I draw the line at genocide and slavery. How about you?

Anyway, here’s Neil Steinberg, from his blog:

My sympathies to the actual Irish. Being Jewish has its downsides, true, but at least we don’t have to put up with a lot of crude expropriation of our religion (by people other than ourselves, I mean). I wouldn’t want to walk to synagogue for Yom Kippur through a crowd of rowdies swilling Manischewitz from blue and white plastic cups, wearing fake beards and rubber noses and big black foam Borsalino hats, chanting, “Re-pent! Re-pent!”

It’s the intro to a reprint of his 2015 Chicago Sun-Times column about that year’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations. I love the image of Jews getting bombed on Manischewitz and marauding down Chicago’s streets. Woody Allen would have had a field day portraying that imaginary event — that is until he self-immolated due to his own human foibles, weaknesses, and outright assholiness, emphasis on assholiness.

Steinberg’s piece brought to mind Mike Royko’s hilarious column, years ago — many, many years ago — about Mayor Richard J. Daley’s annual embrace of his Irish roots on this March slosh-fest.

Daley, the first of the two so-surnamed Windy City pharaohs, every year led Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade down State Street, wearing a green top hat, strutting with a shillelagh, and festooned with an emerald sash proclaiming him the Grand Marshall and implying he was this nation’s King of the Irish. He’d be accompanied by one or more Irish-American celebrities like Pat O’Brien. Daley never grinned more broadly than when he led those parades. It was as though all the cares of running a big city through challenging times had magically dissipated as tens of thousands of already inebriated revelers roared when he and his party passed.

I recall being amazed as a teenager, witnessing so many people half in the bag already at the parade’s 11:00am start time. Within an hour many of the sloppy, polluted, grinning parade-goers would have begun to take offense at some imaginary slight or another and the fights would start to break out. The cops usually waited until the combatants had punched themselves nearly unconscious before wading in to restore the peace at seemingly every downtown corner. Hey, the cops were no dummies; they knew fighting drunks rarely were constrained by the sight of their blue uniforms and likely would take big swings at them. Better to wait till the pugilists were on the verge of mutual kayoes before putting their own noses and chins on the line.

Royko wrote his piece in 1972, a few short years after civil rights leaders and prominent black activists and celebrities began to embrace their own roots. Prior to the late 1960s, the dominant media portrayals of blackness were either cartoonish, wide-eyed, happy-go-lucky buffoons who were likely to break out in song and dance at the drop of a hat or, less so — much less so — pomaded, hair-straightened, exaggeratedly well-behaved Negroes whose speech more resembled that of Oxford dons than actual southern emigres to the northern cities of the Rust Belt. The embrace of Black pride was refreshing to many and alarming to the vast majority of white people who’d been quite happy indeed in the knowledge, fast slipping away, that “those people” knew their place and kept to it.

By ’72, Black power and Black pride were watchwords, causing some people to swell their chests and others to run and hide in the basement. By that year, anybody with a finger in the wind was aware that the United States had become not one nation but two. In the words of of the Kerner Commission Report, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.” The report was the result of the establishment of a commission set up by President Lyndon Johnson in response to the countless riots of 1967, the “long, hot summer,” that devastated cities big and small across the country. The commission found that urban blacks had long been denied basic rights and privileges afforded to whites and so, naturally, many of those black people were boiling mad and ready to tear down whatever citadels they could.

Yet, every March 17th, Old Man Daley proclaimed all Chicagoans Irish even as a significant population of the city was hard-pressed to consider itself American. Daley liked to crow that everybody loved the hell out of each other in Chicago and our shared local roots made any divisions between us — skin color, religion, political party affiliations (no, let me amend that: Daley had little tolerance for Republicans, but I digress) — magically disappear. St. Patrick’s Day was the No. 2 holiday on Daley’s yearly calendar, second only to Election Day. Everybody in Chicago, Daley preached, came together on March 17th.

As Royko wrote 49 years ago:

Few days are as festive and joyous for all Chicagoans as St. Patrick’s Day.

Although it is an Irish observance, people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds take part because, as Mayor Daley is fond of saying:

“Everybody is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.”

And to a visitor, that might appear to be true. In City Hall and other government offices, just about everyone wears a touch of green, whether they are Irish or something else.

The Chicago River is dyed green, and green water spurts from the fountain at Civic Center Plaza.

Regardless of what they usually serve, most restaurants add corned beef and cabbage to their menu, and some put green coloring in the beer.

But the true spirit of the day can be seen at the great parade down State St., with a green stripe painted down the center of the road.

Royko went on to write that the Mayor would lead Puerto Ricans down State Street every San Juan Batista Day. He and all his fellow marchers would wear the pava, a Puerto Rican straw hat. Restaurants would serve roast pig and boiled green bananas. Daley’s cronies would crack, “There are only two kinds of people: Puerto Ricans and those who wish they were Puerto Rican.”

Of course, Mayor Daley never led any Puerto Rican Day parades, nor were most restaurateurs even aware of the existence of Puerto Ricans in their city. But Royko, in his fertile imagination, went on. Every January 15th, he wrote, the Mayor led a parade of Black people celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday:

[A]s Mayor Daley is fond of saying:

“Everybody in Chicago is an African on Martin Luther King’d birthday.”

And to a visitor that might appear to be true. In City Hall and other government offices, just about everybody is wearing an African dashiki.

Again, that never happened.

If only.

Royko doesn’t stop. He cites Hanukkah, writing:

Although it is a Jewish observance, just about everybody else joins in, because as Mayor Daley is fond of saying:

“During Hanukkah, everybody in Chicago is a Jew.”

Finally, Royko gets to the kicker. He concludes, “When you think about it, these special days, which every ethnic group has, are one of the reasons the people of Chicago get along so well together.”

See, that’s the punchline. Because in 1972, the people of Chicago didn’t get along so well together.

And the funny/tragic thing is, the divisions between us, not only in Chicago but in the United States and the world for that matter, have only become more stark.

It makes me wonder, what if Mayor Daley I was alive today? Would he lead a parade up Broadway on Chicago’s North Side to mark Gay Pride Month? And would he proclaim, “Everybody in Chicago is gay on this day?”

Chicago’s 48th Annual Gay Pride Parade, 2017.

Even better, would he proclaim, “Everybody’s trans on this day!”

[Image: Jessica Griffin/Richard Louissant/The Philadelphia Inquirer]

Oh, well. Drink up. Let’s not kid each other: that’s the whole idea of St. Patrick’s Day anyway.

Hot Air

Money For Nothin’

Try as I might, I can’t seem to find a Las Vegas over/under line on when the first Article of Impeachment against Barack Obama will be passed by a House committee.

Inpeach

You know it’s coming as well as I do. I just want to get my smart money down on it now.

A Good Woman For The Job

Congrats to Efrat Feferman on her promotion to Assistant Director in charge of finance over at Pat Murphy’s City of Bloomington Utilities Dept.

Feferman

Feferman

With Efrat keeping an eye on the operation’s checkbook don’t expect anybody to get away with purchasing $100,000 oriental rugs for their offices or solid gold sinks for the exec. washroom. She started off in the accounting department when she first went to work for Utilities some years ago and has been handling Utilities Board relations of late. Her new gig begins Dec. 1st.

Brrrrrr…, GRRRRR!

Hey Bloomington, WTF? I left Chicago to get away from this kind of weather!

Frost

Just in case you’ve forgotten, the official start of winter is more than a month away.

Self Abuse

You know those ridiculous “ear plugs” — AKA “lobe gauging,” or “tribal piercing” — where people, mostly guys, get their earlobes punched out and stretched by inserting cylindrical thingies into them? Well, a number of people who’ve had it done are now regretting their decisions. Duh.

Cosmetic surgeons in Great Britain say trade in earlobe repair due to this misguided mutilation is robust. And even though Brits report more gauging ruers than their American counterparts, plastic surgeons here have noticed an uptick in the procedure as well.

So far, the only thing docs can do is slice the saggy, droopy lobe loop off and refashion the remaining flesh to look somewhat natural.

Lobe Loop

Loopy

My back office at Soma Coffee affords me ample opportunity to see guys with ear plugs. They don’t put me off my feed as much as they once did, familiarity breeding numbness, as it were. I do remember a guy who took the gauging thing to a whole new level of bizarre. One of my old coffeehouse hangout/back offices was called Bic’s Hardware Cafe on Halsted Street down by 18th Street in Chi.’s East Pilsen neighborhood. A fellow who came in to the place on occasion not only had ear plugs but his loops were so big you could have fired a gun though them and still missed hitting him in the head. He’d looped the septum of his nose as well. He was, I’d suppose, a gauging savant.

So much so, in fact, that he’d actually had his ankles looped. Yep. Here’s how it worked: He’d pierced the skin and flesh between his Achilles tendons and his lower leg bones. Somehow — perhaps surgically — he’d had the apertures looped so that you could actually see the space, perhaps an inch or so, between sinew and bone. Natch, he had a cylindrical bangle dangling from each hole.

Ankle Hole Location

I was wearing a hat the first time I saw him; it popped up the top of my head.

Now, defenders may say these gaugers have a right to do whatever they wish with their bodies and I guess that’s true. On the other hand, it’s like a developer building the ugliest skyscraper in the skyline. It’s an imposition on the senses and sensibilities of the rest of us. Just as I’m forced to have my eyes violated by the architectural monstrosity below, the man at Bic’s Hardware Cafe forced me to view the gap between his Achilles tendons and tibiae.

Grand Lisboa

The Grand Lisboa Hotel In Macau

Love & Hate

My pal Susan Sandberg has a dame crush on IUPUI prof and blogger Sheila Kennedy. Not to be outdone, I have a guy crush on Chicago Sun-Times columnist and blogger Neil Steinberg. Of course, you would know this if you’ve visited these precincts the last…, what is it now — two and a half years? Yeah, that’s it. I left The Third City in August 2011, circumnavigated the globe as a merchant marine for six months and then started up this communications colossus.

Anyways, Steinberg thinks much like I do, meaning he’s sensitive, intelligent, rational, and right. He pointed out yesterday a bumper sticker he saw on an SUV in a northwest suburban restaurant parking lot. It read GTFO.

The O was Barack Obama’s old campaign logo. Meaning the prez of this holy land should Get the Fuck Out. Which, I suppose, might disappoint in some slight way the plurality of voters who twice elected him to park his wingtips on a desk in the Oval Office.

Steinberg went on to muse about people who are so madly in hate with Obama. In the process of which, he pointed out that there’s a whole cottage industry of products, services, and miscellaneous shit revolving around said hatred and the countdown to that sacred day when the current C-in-C leaves office, January 20, 2017.

(As an aside, my guess is they won’t be happy that day either as the next president — a human being with a vagina — takes office. Then again, the entrepreneurial spirit being what it is, a whole slew of new products, services, and miscellaneous shit will come to market counting down the days until January 20, 2021.)

So, I figured I’d embark on an interwebs reconnaissance mission to search for things similar to that GTFO bumper sticker (as Steinberg himself did; although he did not itemize his findings.) Here’s what I’ve found:

More Bumper Stickers

Bumper Sticker

Bumper Sticker

Bumper Sticker

Emphatic

Bumper Sticker

I Must Be a Double Asshole!

Bumper Sticker

Naw — This Isn’t Racist One Eensy Bit!

Bumper Sticker

Huh?

Countdown Clocks

Countdown Clock

Countdown Clock

T-Shirt

T-Shirt

Simple & Elegant

Mints

Mints

 

For That Bad Taste In Your Mouth

Toilet Paper

Bumper Sticker

Toilet Paper

These last two are fascinating. Imagine, every time a guy goes into his bathroom — even if it’s only to wash his hands — he sees the face of Barack Obama staring at him. How much hate does one have to have in one’s heart to want to see the object of his odium every time he brushes his teeth, clips his toenails, or drops a deuce? The bathroom, in my world, is the second most important room in the house. I desire peace, tranquility, surfaces free of muck and mire, a clean towel or two, and some comforting reading material in that special place. Anything that might roil my blood would be taboo. Then again, perhaps I don’t hate enough.

Presumably, all the people who buy and display these tchotchkes would profess they’ll be happy — deliriously so — when Barack Obama leaves office. I get the feeling, though, that they’re never happy.

Hot Air

Yes And…

“Life is much richer when you say ‘yes’ than if you say ‘no.'”

So said Richard Branson to the Chicago Sun-Times some years ago, as reported by Neil Steinberg in his column today.

Branson

Richard Branson

Apparently Branson’s bank account (accounts?) would bear this out. He’s one the the richest guys around, natch, making his dough through such ventures as Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic Airways. It isn’t just money, though, that makes for a rich life. As long as you have enough to eat, a roof over your head, health care, an education, friends, and family, your life can be as rich as Donald Trump’s (or richer because I can’t imagine Trump’s world being at all fulfilling — either to me, theoretically, or him, in reality.)

Anyway, Branson appears to be one of those guys whose def. of success does not include the annihilation of you, me, or anyone else. He’s a win-win type of primate. Capitalism of late seems a hyena-versus-lion proposition, as in I’m eating and if you’re starving, what do I care?

Today’s world, as defined by Trump, the Kochs, the oil companies, and the Wall Street banksters, is a win-lose prop.

So huzzah for Branson and his riches, pecuniary and otherwise.

Saying Yes has been a philosophy I’ve tried to adhere to (often with success, even) ever since I studied comedy improvisation under the late Del Close and Charna Halpern at the improvOlympic (since renamed, thanks to trademark lawyers, iO Chicago). I started going up on stage to create skits and scenes without a script back in the winter of 1986. I even was part of an improv troupe that put on a weekly stage soap opera called “Children’s Hospital,” along with such notables as comedy guru Mick J. Napier and musician Jim Tomasello. At the then-improvOlympic, I worked with and watched such future Hollywood stars as Mike Meyers, Chris Farley, Lili Taylor, Joel Murray and a raft of others.

Close/Halpern

Del Close & Charna Halpern

The single defining commandment of iO was “Yes and….” In fact, boss Charna Halpern‘s business card read “Yes and….”

It’s a simple idea. Whatever suggestion or proposition someone makes on stage, you go along with it. You build on it. You say to the person who proposed it, “Yes, and…,” and then you build an even taller skyscraper of imagination. If your stage mate says, for instance, Here we are an a spaceship to Mars…, you don’t say, Aw, that’s crazy. You say, Yes, and when we get there, we’re going to hunt for extraterrestrial badgers with our ray guns. Won’t that be fun?

On our first day in class Charna (who taught the intro course) told us the Yes and…. thing not only would make us good improv performers but would actually help us in our daily lives. It sounds almost cultish or at least self-help-ish to say this, but she was right.

I’ve striven to say Yes rather than No as much as humanly possible in the ensuing three decades. Think of all the arguments you’ve ever had; as a rule, they arise when someone, maybe you, says No.

Some examples:

  • Wife: You know, sometimes I feel you don’t pay attention to my issues.
  • Husband: No. You don’t pay attention to my issues.

  • Person A: Life is bleak. I wonder why I should go on.
  • Person B: No, it isn’t. You just need to snap out of it.

  • Person X: The Israelis must be able to defend themselves.
  • Person Y: No. They’re murderers!

  • Person 1: The Palestinians must be able to defend themselves.
  • Person 2: No. They’re murderers.

On the other hand, one can go too far, albeit rarely, in saying Yes to everything. To wit:

  • Rush Limbaugh: Sandra Fluke is a slut.
  • Sane person: No she isn’t. You’re an asshole.

The No-sayer (in most cases) puts a halt to the progress of any conversation or plan. The word itself is combative. It’s fearful. It stops time. I try to say Yes whenever I can (and, as I say, I occasionally succeed.) Yes is freedom; No is not.

Try saying Yes all day today. You might be surprised.

Career Counselor

Who is this son of a bitch, Abdul Hakim-Shabbaz?

That was the first thing that jumped into my mind when I read his horribly mean-spirited piece in Tuesday’s Indy Star recounting his clever, fun prank of asking panhandlers for money.

Hakim-Shabbaz

Abdul Hakim-Shabbaz, Social Reformer

He wrote:

There is nothing more annoying than trying to enjoy a meal, cigar or just some quiet time and have people come up to ask for money. And since the City-County Council Democrats continue to block any meaningful proposal to get these guys off the streets, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to turn the tables on the panhandlers and start asking them for money.

So he hectored panhandlers for money. What a wit, no?

No — as if it’s necessary for me to answer that for you.

In order to put these poor, homeless bastards in their place, he actually asked them for a handout. Pardon me, while I catch my breath; I may laugh myself into a heart attack.

And that would be because I, unlike Hakim-Shabbaz, actually have a heart.

He thinks a lot of the panhandlers he must endure as he digs the good life in downtown Indianapolis are really frauds and leeches. There’s the woman who “claims” she’s disabled but is able to push around all her Earthly belongings in a shopping cart (now there’s a great con job, eh?) Then there’s the kid who’s selling candy for charity but the sharp-as-a-tack Hakim-Shabbaz notes the charity is a different one every day.

Hoohoo, haha! — he began asking them for money. Oh man, he’s killing me!

So who is this social observer on a par with Wilde, Dickens, Sinclair, or even Marie Antoinette? Turns out he’s a talk radio host/attorney/standup comedian/college law instructor. Here’s his own bio on his website.

I suppose Hakim-Shabbaz might advise Indy’s crew of panhandlers to do as he did; that is, get jobs as talk radio hosts/attorneys/standup comedians/college law instructors. Then they wouldn’t ruin his day by asking for money.

You know, it may be easy to become a talk radio host/attorney/standup comedian/college law instructor just like him. All you have to do is work hard at being an asshole.

Paris

Here’s the latest on the passing of RE Paris.

Paris

According to her son, Eric, she began having trouble breathing at home Wednesday morning. She managed to call for an ambulance but by the time it arrived, it was pretty much too late. No details yet on why she had trouble breathing, although she’d been physically ill for a while, thanks in large part to being too broke to afford health insurance premiums.

Hot Air

Rape, Redux

My man-crush newspaper columnist Neil Steinberg addresses that stickiest of topics today: rape. I jumped into the same morass the day before yesterday on the Pencil.

Both columns in q. deal with rape on campus. Kids, you couldn’t get into a stickier mess than that of campus rape. Tons of frat boys and their running partners seem to believe all women want them in the worst way possible, and they only say no initially in some kind of perverse charade of chastity. No, to too many young males, means yes — after some strong persuasion that may or may not include physical intimidation.

Frat Boys

Surely They’ll Be Caring, Sensitive Lovers

Some college females, it’s been argued, seem to be defining rape as something they feel uncomfortable about only in retrospect. For my part, I asked some pointed questions in these precincts. For instance, why would a college-aged woman sleep in the same bed as her accused rapist and even make him breakfast the morning after the alleged act occurred?

Recently, many colleges have re-written their policies concerning rape accusations. One or two are even recommending negotiations in flagrant delicti along the lines of “May I now touch this?” which, I imagine, might throw a splash of cold water on the proceedings.

Sadly, way, way, way too many of our male college students haven’t the foggiest idea how to read the non-verbal signals a young woman is issuing. Those boys, of course, can’t see the forest for their wood.

Anyway, Steinberg says the efforts by colleges and universities to control the problem misses the point. He refers to a big front page article in today’s New York Times about how Hobart and William Smith Colleges mishandled one student’s accusation that members of the Hobart football team gang-raped her. [Males attend Hobart and females go to W. Smith, even though the two are considered part of one institution.]

NYT Front Page Story

The accusing student was harassed after the football players were exonerated in an apparent whitewash. Other students were enraged that she’d accuse the football guys of such a heinous crime even as they were on their way to an undefeated season. Winning, you know, excuses many crimes and misdemeanors.

Steinberg says rape victims are fools for turning to colleges for satisfaction. He writes:

[C]olleges have a hard enough time fielding competent professors. They are not in the crime-detection business, and while their bobbling such an investigation is not acceptable, it’s not surprising either.

He concludes:

The message from this story, a message that I believe is not driven home enough, and should be, is that if someone rapes you — a football player, a priest, a friend, anybody — you should always call the cops. Immediately. The cops might mishandle it, God knows they do that. But they’re the ones with experience in investigating crime, the ones in the best position to have a chance to get it right. Calling the police, I believe, is an important step in a crime being taken seriously.

Both Steinberg and I admit that we’re men, so what do we know? Again, I call for comment from loyal female Pencillistas.

Hot Air

Working Women

I’ve always cracked — and not facetiously, either — that if women had run the world from the outset, prostitution not only would be legal, it’d be the most respected of vocations.

My reasoning? Well, lady-parts is the one commodity women have and men don’t. If our civilization wasn’t so dependent upon men exerting crushing influence over others through physical strength and violence, women would prob. happily peddle their singular wares in a peaceful, chilled-out marketplace.

But, of course, the guys of our mad, mad species needed to slut-shame women into hating their junk. Add to that the fact that men wanted to control their womenfolk, so sex was turned into the dirtiest of words.

In a woman’s world, I’m guessing, the sex worker would be as revered as, say, the late Mother Theresa or Angelina Jolie is in this one.

This past weekend, Amnesty International sponsored a colloquium in Chi., the subject being should sex work be legalized. Ill. Att’y Gen. Lisa Madigan picked up a placard and joined protesters in howling outside Amnesty Int’l’s get-together at the JW Marriot hotel west of the Loop. They claim sex work is by definition demeaning to women.

The protesters led by the state’s chief shingle fail to recognize that it’s not the act of selling sex that’s demeaning but the combination of society’s twin distastes for women controlling their own commodities and for even wanting to have sex in the first place. Keep in mind hundreds of millions of Catholics on this crazy planet honor Mary, the mommy-o of Jesus, for the sole reason that she was a virgin. (And we wonder why that particular religious gang — especially its priests — is so sexually eff-ed up).

Woman can be the gatekeepers of their sexual favors and they can make a good living out of it. But, man, that’d make so many people itchy in this holy land — and every other holy land, for that matter.

From SWOP-Chicago

Activist Sex Workers

My call for legalization of sex work doesn’t mean all sex should be commodified. Hell, I’m four-square in favor of clinical social workers, therapists, and grief counselors charging for their services; that doesn’t mean I think all the acts of a friend should be paid for. You wanna have sex, go ahead. You wanna present a bill for your services, that’s as cool as cool can be, too.

Lisa Madigan, presumably, wants hookers, massage parlor workers, call girls, and other such professionals locked up. Makes sense; she’s a sworn upholder of the law. When your tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I want our lawmakers to decriminalize traffic in the one product that only women can provide.

BTW: I want those who kidnap and coerce people to get into the skin game to be jailed or caned, or somehow pilloried to within an inch of their lives. And dealers who string junkies along in the street prostitution business should be doubly damned. See, it’s not the sex that’s evil, it’s the slave trade aspect of the whole thing.

There. Now tell me how wrong I am.

For further reading on the subject go to:

Hot Sunday Air

Old School

The fabulous historian Rick Perlstein has changed his Facebook profile picture. Now, when you go to his page, you see the one-time celebrity bank robber “Tania.”

That was the nom de guerre of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. To refresh, she was snatched by members of some rump revolutionary bunch of crazies who fancied themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. By and by, thanks to the psychological condition known as the Stockholm Syndrome, she fell in love with one of her captors, donned camouflage, and lugged a machine gun into a bank to help the gang finance its lifestyle.

Here’s the pic:

Hearst

“Tania”

I’ve gotta admit it: She looks pretty hot in that get-up.

Big Talk

Okay, Big Talk is moving forward, baby step by baby step. Thus far our new cross-media, multi-platform interview series has aired twice on WFHB. We’ve talked with cartoonist/graphic novelist Nate Powell and sound effects artist/actor/poet/roller derby announcer Tony Brewer.

Big Talk

The companion print piece for the Powell interview is in the current issue of The Ryder (it’ll go online in a week or so.) Brewer’s print interview will run in the May issue. And we’re working on a YouTube channel so you can actually see Big Mike grill his victi…, I mean, subjects.

Go to our new Big Talk page on this here interwebs site for links to the audio interviews. They’re only eight minutes each, so have fun. Quick fun.

Criminal Behavior

Back to “Tania” and her posse. I couldn’t figure out immediately why Perlstein was homage-ing her until I hit Neil Steinberg’s column today in the Chicago Sun-Times (and, concurrently, in his own blog, Every Goddamn Day.)

Steinberg recently got a call from a fellow who was up in arms about the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana employing one James Kilgore at its Center for African Studies. Kilgore, it seems, was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. He participated in a bank robbery where an innocent bystander was killed. Kilgore didn’t actually pull the trigger but, as a participant in the caper, he was subject to prosecution for the murder. Kilgore went on the lam in 1975, spent 27 years teaching at the University of Cape Town in South Africa under an assumed name, and was extradited to the US in 2002. He served six and a half years for the robbery/murder and when he was released, claimed to be remorseful and rehabilitated. Eventually, he got the job at Illinois under his real name.

Kilgore

The Stages Of A Man’s Life

The caller was aghast that such a man could be teaching “18-year-olds from Schaumburg and Arlington Heights.” He told Steinberg, “I don’t like bank robbers who kill moms in banks.”

BTW: My guess is a scant few 18-year-olds from Schaumburg and Arlington Heights are taking any course offered by U of I’s Center for African Studies. It’s doubtful they see that academic pursuit as helpful to their eventual goal of getting the highest paying job possible.

BTW II: The son of the murdered Mom, a fellow named Jon Opsahl, apparently has forgiven Kilgore.

Anyway, Steinberg goes on to ruminate about criminals and the possibility they’ll become productive members of society. He writes: “[W]hile we demand they turn their lives around, we seem to also resent the ones who do.”

Yep. That’s us.

Your Daily Hot Air

Hiroshima Day

The nuclear bombings of two cities in Japan were the logical coda of the single most brutal enterprise the species Homo Sapiens sapiens has ever undertaken — and if we’re very, very, very lucky, will ever undertake.

Hiroshima

World War II claimed anywhere from 60-100 million lives. It doesn’t matter how they died; only that the people of this mad planet wanted them dead.

BTW: Shoot over to Neil Steinberg’s blog post today about the excruciatingly unlucky few who survived both bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. True story.

Nixon Resignation Day

Here’s Mike Royko writing Richard M. Nixon’s political eulogy in the Chicago Sun-Times the day after the president quit:

My personal reason for not wanting Mr. Nixon prosecuted is that he really didn’t betray the nation’s trust all that badly.

The country knew what it was getting when it made him president. He was elected by the darker side of the American conscience. His job was to put the brakes on the changes of the 1960s — the growing belief in individual liberties, the push forward by minority groups. He campaigned by appealing to prejudice and suspicion. What he and his followers meant by law and order was “shut up.”

So whose trust he did he betray? Not that of those who thought he was the answer. He was, indeed, their answer.

Nixon

Nixon

The Past Is Prologue

Ukulele savant Susan Sandberg points out this timeless observation by Lyndon Baines Johnson:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

LBJ

Johnson

Winning Isn’t Everything

Speaking of the 1960s, I just finished reading a biography of Vince Lombardi entitled When Pride Still Mattered by David Maraniss.

Lombardi was often portrayed as a brutal, tyrannical leader who’d have steamrolled his grandmother to win a football game. Many people felt he was a man without conscience or sensitivity toward his fellow man. As such, some figured he’d be a great political leader for the turbulent ’60s. In fact, soon after Nixon secured the Republican nomination for president 45 years ago this week, the candidate floated the idea of approaching Lombardi to be his running mate. Nixon’s aides took him seriously and looked into Lombardi’s background. What they found surprised them: The iconic Green Bay Packers coached turned out to be a lifelong Democrat who was particularly close to Bobby Kennedy and the slain senator’s family.

Lombardi

Lombardi

Anyway, the coach’s views on civil rights surely would have sunk a Nixon/Lombardi ticket. Here’s an anecdote. Early on in his term as boss of the Pack, Lombardi and his team traveled into the South for an exhibition game. They went to a large restaurant for a meal. Lombardi was told the black players on the team — only a couple of guys, really, in those days — would not be allowed to enter the place through the front door. They’d have to come in through the back door and eat in a special room for blacks just off the kitchen.

Jim Crow

Lombardi was incensed. He realized, though, he couldn’t smash Jim Crow all by himself that day so he did the next best thing. He directed his entire team to enter through the back door and eat their meal in the back room reserved for blacks.

Pretty cool, eh?

Add to that the fact that Lombardi had at least one player on his team whom he knew was gay. The coach said to his assistants, If I hear one insult or snide remark coming out of your mouths you’ll be fired before your ass hits the floor.

Vince Lombardi was no Spiro Agnew.

Your Daily Hot Air

A No Vote For Warren

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I love Elizabeth Warren. Love her.

Lo-o-o-o-o-o-ove her. I wanna marry her. Don’t worry; so does The Loved One. Wants to marry her, that is. We’d have a three-way marriage. We have a spare bedroom at Chez Pencil and Lizzie (as we’d affectionately address her) could sleep and change her clothes there in privacy.

Warren/AP Photo

Swoon (AP)

T-Lo and I would take turns making her breakfast. Then we’d sit there, just listening, our chins in our hands, as she, Lizzie, would expound on this or that problem or proposed law. Sigh.

So now I can say this without fear that someone would dare to think I don’t support everything she stands for:

Elizabeth Warren will never, ever, ever become the President of the United States of America.

There.

Not only that, Elizabeth Warren would make a horrifyingly bad president.

She’d be a one-termer. And, you think the Me Party wing of the GOP is dedicated to stifling the occupant of the White House now? Oh, babies, just wait until some dame who doesn’t genuflect before the banksters gets in there.

Again, I dig Lizzie the most. But she’s too smart, too eager to talk facts and figures rather than fairy tales and bedtime stories, and is too much of a hard-ass for the banksters and the Right to bear.

Anti-Warren Meme

They’re Starting Already

Look what they’ve done to Hillary Clinton over the past couple of decades. And she, Hillary, is pretty much one of them.

Hillary, IIRC, is a commie, lesbo, man-hating, murderer. What slanders could they come up with for my Lizzie, who is so much not one of them that I’m surprised they all came from the same planet, which they probably didn’t.

Honestly, I’ve been sitting here for the last ten minutes trying to think of worse accusations the wingnut Right could make against my Lizzie. So far, I’ve drawn a blank. Then again, I’m not as creative as the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Here’s the thing: Elizabeth Warren (sigh) is the polar opposite of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The current Prez and the former Sec’y of State would say or do pretty much anything to maintain their respective toeholds in the game. Dig: Clinton voted for Georgey-boy Bush’s Iraq resolution. And Obama loaded up his administration with so many Goldman Sachs unindicted conspirators that the investment bank now holds its company picnic in the Rose Garden.

Much as I loathe those developments, that’s how people stay in the game if they want to become/remain POTUS.

Thus far, my sweet baby Lizzie appears to be incapable of such machinations.

If, by some weird turn of events, she became the boss of this holy land, she’d spend her entire four years fighting just to keep her head above water. That is, the muddy, sludgy, slimy liquid that passes for water in which Tories, crypto-racists, gun lust-ers, and rabid Christianists prefer to swim.

Polluted Water

For all Elizabeth Warren’s fine and good intentions, she wouldn’t get a thing done. Nothing.

I like her better as a senator.

Fetal Positions

You’re missing something if you haven’t read Neil Steinberg’s new blog Every Goddamn Day.

everygoddamnday

In today’s post, he recounts bumping into Joe Scheidler, the national director of the Pro-Life Action League, on Madison Street in downtown Chicago late Monday afternoon. Scheidler was participating in the PLAL’s annual summer demo, during which they carry placards featuring huge enlargements of aborted fetuses.

I recall running into the PLAL-ers any number of times when I lived in Chi. One July day I was stopped at a red light on Wacker Drive next to the then-Sears Tower and an anti-abortion demonstrator standing on the center island put his fetal hamburger picket sign right in front of my windshield.

“Get that mtherfking thing out of my face,” I hollered as I reached out the window and tried to rip it out of his hand. He dangled it just out of my grasp as if he were toying with a cat.

“You’re a sick prick,” I yelled. I had been looking forward to eating lunch and the sign had pretty much taken my appetite away. Believe me, you don’t want to be the poor soul who messes with my lunch.

Chicago-Style Hot Dog

Never Mess With My Lunch

The guy responded, “God bless you.”

“I didn’t sneeze, idiot,” I cleverly riposted.

Then I thought, damn it, I’m all bent out of shape and he’s still standing their with that religious zombie smirk on his face. The light changed and I peeled away. I never did eat lunch that day.

Anyway, here’s the exchange Steinberg had with Joe Scheidler (all sic):

“You have to admit, that being against abortion is a religious scruple,” I [Steinberg] said.

“I wouldn’t say, ‘scruple.'” he replied. “It’s in the Bible, part of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shall not kill.'”

“….a person,” I added.

“A baby is a person,” he said.

“A fetus isn’t a person,” I parried. “I wouldn’t want to take one to the movies.”

“The mom could go to the movies,” Joe countered.

Steinberg concludes his piece with a well-deserved indictment against the so-called pro-choice movement. If you’re “pro-choice” you’re not gonna like it. And you shouldn’t. And I hope it moves you to action.

The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

“Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.” — EB White

THE SADDEST OBIT OF ALL TIME

Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times found this passing so sad that he actually gave a plug (and a link) to his paper’s competitor, the Tribune. The Sun-Times as well as every other corporate media outlet in this holy land were scooped by a Trib reporter.

Facts, the reporter has learned, are dead.

We must face the facts: there are no more facts.

We all knew they were lingering for a long while now. Still, their demise shocks us. They suffered terribly. Thankfully, they are in a better place now.

Sadly, nothing I write can do justice to this mournful turn of events. So, read Rex W. Huppke’s final notice for these very dear old friends.

Farewell

BE A SMART VOTER

Hey, have you checked out the April edition of Ryder magazine yet?

In addition to all the usual invaluable arts and culture stuff, editor Peter LoPilato dispatched an intrepid reporter to delve into the private lives of the five candidates running for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Indiana’s ninth district.

“The Chair Recognizes The Representative From The Great State of Indiana.”

(By the way, reliable sources are saying the reporter is handsome and charming as well as being intrepid. The Electron Pencil is working to verify these statements at this time.)

Anyway, the five running in the Dem primary, May 5th, are Gen. Jonathan George, John Griffin Miller, Col. John Tilford, Robert Winningham, and Shelli Yoder.

I pooh-poohed Yoder’s candidacy in this space previously. I fixated on her background as a beauty queen. Now she has amassed a batch of endorsements from local political and private heavyweights. Shows what I know, no?

Proving Me Wrong?

The five candidates reveal themselves in the Ryder piece in ways they might never have imagined before they decided to run for public office. We learn for instance, whose father once caught a foul ball off the bat of Bill Buckner at Wrigley Field, who can actually speak conversational Comanche, whose first album was the Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow,” and who dreamed of being a member of Doctors without Borders.

Early Endorsement?

The grilling LoPilato’s ace reporter gave each of the candidates was so thorough that one admitted he was driven to tears (when he recounted his favorite childhood memory).

Pick up the Ryder today. Unfortunately, you can’t get the issue online yet. The Ryder’s long awaited internet presence still is nothing but a dream. If you’ve got a spare minute, drop Peter an email and tell him you’d love to see him step into at least the 1990s.

Oh, and ladies, that handsome, charming, intrepid reporter? Forget it — he’s happily hitched.

TAKE FIVE

Speaking of fave childhood memories, here’s one of mine. I’d be able to stay up late on weeknights during summer vacation. WGN-TV would have two movies on after the nightly news. Between the two there’d be a half hour newsbreak called “Night Beat” featuring the somnolent Carl Greyson.

The poor guy — he could put you to sleep reporting on the end of the world. Then again, his hypnotic delivery might have been perfect for 12:30am.

The original theme song for “Night Beat” was this Dave Brubeck classic. It was my first introduction to sophisticated music. I was nine or ten and I loved it.

“Take Five” will forever remind me of those free, long summer nights.

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