05/21/2024
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Equality, Late Stage Capitalism, Race

992 Words: Insurrection

It was the first week of April. The weather was unusually warm as the weekend approached.

I’d turned 12 years old a month before and I was already a news junkie. I devoured the Chicago Sun-Times every day and the Chicago American on Sundays. I watched Fahey Flynn on the WBBM Channel 2 ten o’clock news and Carl Greyson on WGN-TV Channel 9’s “Nightbeat, a brief recap of the day’s events between the late movie and the late, late movie. The news, those years, seemed always huge to this not-yet teenager. The Blizzard of 1967. The Apollo 1 astronauts dying in a launchpad fire. McCormick Place burning to the ground. Vietnam. The Tet Offensive. The hippies and the Summer of Love. The Democratic National Convention coming to Chicago that very summer. The Cubs, by some miracle, coming alive after a decades-long slumber. I ate it all up.

I alone (I’m sure) among my classmates at Lovett School knew who the president, the vice president, the governor, Illinois’s two US senators, the mayor, the alderman, the ward committeeman, and for chrissakes, even the precinct captain were.

The answers, in order:

  • Lyndon Baines Johnson
  • Hubert H. Humphrey
  • Otto Kerner
  • Everett Dirksen
  • Charles Percy
  • Richard J. Daley
  • John Aiello
  • Louie Garippo
  • Barney Potenzo

Hah! Half the kids in my class probably didn’t even know their mothers’ maiden names. This, by the way, is how an aging coot thinks after “not living up to his potential” as a kid. John Biancalana and Joe Piombino got all E’s. I got mostly F’s and the occasional U (for a time the Chicago Public Schools graded on the E-G-F-U system — Excellent, Good, Fair, and U’re grounded until you get your grades back up). John Biancalana, I should mention, the top student in my class, once cheated off me on a science test once. That gave me great satisfaction.

Anyway, the news was huger than ever that early April weekend. The sky was darkened by smoke from hundreds of major fires roaring through the West Side. Any number of my neighbors sat on their front porches, pistols or rifles (or both) in their laps, in jittery expectation that hordes of Black men were about to sweep through their streets. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated at dinner time Thursday. Chicago’s West Side Black neighborhoods had erupted in rage the next day. Miles of West Madison Street and Roosevelt Road were leveled. All off-duty firefighters were called in to work. The police commissioner cancelled all off-days and vacations for his force. Mayor Daley imposed a 24-hour curfew for anyone under 21. He ordered a moratorium on the sale of guns and ammunition.

Police dispatchers sent more than 10,000 officers into the riot-torn area. Gov. Kerner ordered some 6700 Illinois National Guard soldiers into the city. President Johnson sent in 5000 US Army troops. At the height of the mayhem, Mayor Daley flew over the battle zone in a helicopter with his police commissioner, James B. Conlisk. An enraged Daley watched as rioters ran rampant through the streets, carrying loot and tossing incendiaries. He turned to Conlisk and ordered him to direct the police “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand (and) to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting stores in our city.”

The front page of the Sun-Times that Saturday morning carried a dramatic photo of police officers kneeling behind a squad car in front of the Cabrini-Green housing project on the Near West Side, aiming their guns at snipers leaning on windowsills in the high rises. Lieutenant Governor Sam Shapiro called the riot an “insurrection.” I wouldn’t hear that word breathed again in this holy land for another half century.

By the time a cooling thunderstorm quelled the violence on Saturday night, 11 people were dead, 500 injured, and 2150 had been arrested. More than 200 buildings had been destroyed.

Chicago was only one of more than 100 cities wracked by riots after King’s killing. From New York City to tiny Cairo, Illinois, Black neighborhoods erupted. Black people, pent up in their slums, denied mortgages, schooled in dumps, living in dilapidated fire traps, by “gentlemen’s agreements” kept from jobs and public office, cuffed, clubbed, harassed, and too often persecuted and tortured by white cops, had been seething for decades and were ready to blow.

That word — insurrection — wouldn’t pop up again in the United States until January 6, 2020, when a mob attacked the US Capitol as the House and Senate attempted to certify the November presidential election. The mayhem, the damage, the casualty count, the horror really, of January 6th paled in comparison to April 4-11, 1968. Yet the anger — the rage — seemed as deeply felt.

Why were Whites — why are Whites — so enraged? A lot of us — me included — like to dismiss the January 6th mob as dickheads. And, yeah, they are. But there’s no denying their anger. Their feeling of powerlessness. Their gut urge to lash out against anyone and everything that’s been crushing them. Sure, the 6th people were dickheads but what of the millions, the tens of millions, of other White non-dickheads who feel just as crushed?

They have been crushed. The wealth gap, the inability to get ahead, the realization that the young will be worse off than their parents, big money control of the electoral process, corporate takeovers of everything else, and the end of the American Dream all have radicalized Whites. Many — too many — place the blame, wrongly, on Mexicans and Central Americans seeking asylum, on drag queens, on liberals, on women, on Blacks, on Jews…, hell, pick a straw man.

They’re wrong but they’re right. Too many of them don’t realize they’ve been pushed down by a corrupt system gamed by a clever, moneyed class. They’re now as contemptible to their crushers as Blacks were to Whites in April, 1968.

Funny thing: good people dreamed of equality for Blacks fifty-plus years ago. It has become nearer a reality not by elevating Blacks but by debasing everyone else.

04/30/2024
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Campus Protests, Indiana University Bloomington, Israel-Hamas War

1109 Words: The War Goes On

I began writing this just as a fairly good sized crowd was gathered on the Indiana University campus. They spilled out onto the streets and completely took over the intersection of Indiana and Kirkwood avenues. I’d been on my way to the Monroe County Public Library but had to divert because the campus police had barricaded both streets.

That was yesterday. I’d figured I’d be finished writing this thing within an hour or two. It turned out to take a day or two because…, well, because.

This Israel-Gaza War and the resultant college campus protests don’t lend themselves to easy answers or pat opinions. In fact, as far back as October, days after the Hamas raid that triggered the current mess, I wrote that I took neither side in it because both sides were assholes. Are assholes.

And by sides I mean the dudes who are giving orders to their minions to kill the minions “enemy” leaders have ordered to kill them. The innocents being displaced, the mothers and children starving and being killed and maimed, the victims of the original terrorist attack, the people mourning their dead, and the hostages who to this day remain in captivity — they’re not part of any side. They are, like so many hundreds of millions throughout the reign of Homo sapiens, casualties. Collateral damage. Unfortunate victims for whom we devote our thoughts and prayers. It’s too bad, really, but whaddya gonna do?

That’s war. The way it is now. The way it was last year and last century. The way it’s been for all of human history. The way it’ll be tomorrow.

I’ll settle here for a few random thoughts and pontifications. I can only hope smarter people than I am might correct me should they find that any of these observations are full of shit.

● I needed to return an overdue book to the library yesterday morning. 1968: The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution, by Robert C. Cottrell and Blaine T. Browne. How fitting. It’s a comprehensive recap of that dramatic, violent year when students were gathering in fairly good sized crowds on college campuses and spilling out onto surrounding streets. Among other horrors, Martin Luther King was killed. Bobby Kennedy was killed. More than 160 United States cities went up in flames. Protesters took over the Columbia University campus. Chicago police rioted, beating protesters and bystanders senseless during the Democratic National Convention. White supremacist George Wallace was running for president and looking almost formidable. Tanks rolled into Prague. The Tet Offensive. Half a million US soldiers in Vietnam. And just as a reminder that we humans occasionally can do something wonderful, three NASA astronausts took a joy ride around the Moon.

2024 is no 1968. That doesn’t make it any less scary.

● Speaking of scary, I’ve always been frightened of crowds. When I was a kid, my father would occasionally get box seat tickets to the Cubs game from trucking companies who hoped to sweeten him up. He was a shipping and recieving foreman at a corrugated box manufacturer. Ironically, that was the same kind of job Archie Bunker had in the early ’70s sitcom, “All in the Family.” Dad would idolize Archie, which, I suppose, was not Norman Lear’s intent in creating that character.

Anyway, the crowds at Wrigley Field, scared me. The sounds. The emotion. Too much. The crowds could, I feared, steamroll me.

● What does that have to do with today’s events? Simple. Any crowd gathering, thinking the same thoughts, spouting the same slogans, scares me. As did the crowd at the IU campus, spilling out onto Kirkwood and Indiana avenues.

Ironically, I agree with a couple of their basic sentiments. Israel’s gone too far. Way, way too far. Not only that, Israel for 75 years to one extent or another has run its own version of Jim Crow, isolating, disempowering, dehumanizing, crushing a group of reviled people within its claimed borders.

But too many protesters seem to conveniently forget that Hamas, the other bad actor in this hellish scenario, would love to wipe Israelis and Middle East Jews off the face of the Earth as much as or more than the Netanyahu gang would like to do the same to Palestinians. Each side wants to commit genocide upon the other; only one has the means to do so right now.

Any comparisons between Hamas and America’s Blacks for hundreds of years or Europe’s Jews up to and including World War II fall short because neither of those reviled, isolated, disempowered, dehumanized, crushed parties wanted to return the favor to its oppressors.

● I read this morning that former Bloomington mayor John Hamilton visited the campus protesters yesterday at the encampment in Dunn Meadow. An Indiana Daily Student reporter  wrote, “Hamilton said the Dunn Meadow encampment will play a part in what happens in Gaza.” Yeah, sure, I thought, Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces have been dying to find out what the college kids of Bloomington think. A friend of mine, after reading the line, responded simply, “Is he nuts?”

● Speaking of Bloomington mayors, current boss Kerry Thomson the other day released a video statement rambling on about free speech, peaceful protest, the threat of violence, and “unauthorized” encampments. The fallout was immediate. It was so negative that a day later she issued a statement in which she stepped back from her first utterance. Sorta. She’d stuck her hand into a hornets nest and got stung. She should have stayed away from it. Indiana University is essentially a sovereign mini-state within the city limits. It has its own police force and rules. When it cleared out the encampment, resulting in arrests of students and faculty, it called on the State Police for help. The City of Bloomington hjad nothing to do with the contretemps. Thomson should have kept her nose clean.

● The only way IU could have looked worse during this whole thing would have been if the cops had beaten the bejesus out of the protesters and/or opened fire on them. For pity’s sake, the semester’s about to end; why couldn’t the Whitten administration simply negotiate terms with the protesters, let them sleep overnight in their tents, and wait until people started going home for the summer? To make things immeasurably worse, those pix of a police sniper atop a building overlooking Dunn Meadow were horrifying.

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Then again, horrifying is the wrong word. It should be reserved for what’s been happening to the innocent civilians of Gaza. Funny, isn’t it? The mostly White crowds protesting on college campuses have essentially turned all the attention away from Gaza and redirected it to themselves.

Meanwhile, the Israel-Gaza War goes on.

04/20/2024
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Donald Trump

907 Words: Burning for the Cause

The term for it is self-immolation. That particular phrasing doesn’t begin to convey the horror of setting one’s self on fire, burning to death in a public space, to demonstrate opposition to tyranny, oppression, any number of -isms, or simply, people’s urge to to crush others.

When I was a little kid, I read about a man who set himself on fire on a street in Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City). A Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức, was part of a procession of 350 fellow monks originating at a nearby pagoda in June, 1963. Đức, in a car with two others, led the marchers to the intersection of Phan Đình Phùng Boulevard and Lê Văn Duyệt Street where they stopped. Đức emerged from the car and calmly walked to a spot in the middle of the street. One of his car-mates placed a seat cushion on the pavement, upon which Đức sat, assuming the traditional lotus position. The other car-mate doused Đức with the contents of a five-gallon can of gasoline.

Đức then lit a match and set himself on fire. Here’s New York Times reporter David Halberstam’s account of the scene:

Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up., his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me, I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering…. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.

An Associated Press photographer named Malcolm Browne snapped images of the burning monk. I saw one of the pictures on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times. I was transfixed. Why, I wondered, would anybody kill himself in such a horrifying way? President John F. Kennedy saw the photos as well. He reportedly remarked, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”

Later I would learn that Đức killed himself to protest the treatment of South Vietnam’s majority Buddhists by the corrupt regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm. A Roman Catholic, Diệm harbored a particular hatred for Buddhists. Catholic priests hoping to curry favor with Diệm ran private armies to suppress the Buddhist majority in the country. South Vietnam’s Buddhists suffered forced conversions and resettlements. Their property was looted, their pagodas destroyed. Kennedy was appalled by Diệm’s persecution of them.

The US president allegedly directed the CIA to stage a coup to oust Diệm. He was toppled by a military junta five months after Đức’s suicide. The coup, of course, failed to make South Vietnam any kind of a beacon of democracy or even basic decency. South Vietnam would fall 12 years later despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers in the Vietnam War. In an irony that would be laughable if it weren’t so blood-drenched, the now-communist nation of Vietnam is an American ally, an important trade partner, and cooperates with the US in resisting Chinese expansionism. Among all the remaining communist populations on Earth, Vietnam’s people today view the United States most favorably. I had a guest on Big Talk some years back, a clothing designer from Vietnam who’d moved to this country as a little girl with her family. Vietnamese people, she told me, actually like Americans.

I wonder what Thích Quảng Đức would think about all this, were he still alive.

In any case, self-immolation as protest seems to be the last resort of a person attempting to speak for a desperate people. A Time magazine article dated February 26, 2024 quotes Temple University history professor Ralph Young: “It’s an act of despair. You feel that there’s nothing that you can do, or that people are willing to do, so this is the ultimate sacrifice — yourself.”

Đức was viewed as a martyr, a hero in a sense, for his selfless demonstration against inhumanity. Only something as dreadful as a tyrannical government’s oppression of a people would drive a normally rational person to such an act.

Now comes word that a man set himself on fire yesterday outside the Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald Trump is on trial for several criminal actions surrounding his payoff to a porn star to keep his affair with her under wraps. The man traveled to New York City from St Augustine, Florida and had lingered outside the courthouse for much of the past week. He was a conspiracy theorist, apparently, who posted this declaration online some time before his act: “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump trial.”

As of yet, it is unclear what tyranny, oppression, -isms, or inhumanity drove the man to set himself on fire. He died yesterday night in a Manhattan hospital.

Of course, not every suicide is politically driven. In fact, very few are. That’s why self-immolation as a protest is such a dramatic, history-altering act. Suicide can be caused by any number of things, including:

  • Mental health problems
  • Bullying, prejudice or stigma related to race, gender, disability or sexual identity
  • Domestic, sexual, or physical abuse
  • Bereavement or grief
  • The end of a relationship
  • Chronic pain or illness
  • Retirement
  • Money problems
  • Housing problems
  • Isolation or loneliness
  • Being in prison
  • Addiction or substance abuse
  • Pregnancy, childbirth or postnatal depression
  • Confusion about sexual or gender identity
  • Forced marriage

Do we now add Demonstrating devotion to Donald Trump?

04/09/2024
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Literature

442 Words: The Pen Is Mighty

I’m gonna put this out there with little comment. The other day I got to thinking about the most influential American books. That is, those books that defined us or changed us. Those books that, should visitors from another planet drop in, would give them a pretty good idea of who we are, who we’ve been, who we think we are or pretend to be, and what it’s been like reconciling all the realities, aspirations, and myths contained therein. Note: The books don’t have to be written by an American or in Americe. Okay? Here goes, in no particular order:

  • The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), proclamation by Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five, with editing by the Second Continental Congress, 1776
  • Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851
  • The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, 1906
  • Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, 1956
  • Unsafe at Any Speed; The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, by Ralph Nader, 1965
  • Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, by Jim Bouton, edited by Leonard Schecter, 1970
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling, 1997
  • The Bible, anthology in several languages by multiple authors plus compiled oral lore, from c. 500 BCE to 1st century CE
  • Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, 1966
  • The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, 1963
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, 1960
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, 1885
  • The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, 1939
  • Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952
  • Common Sense, pamphlet by Thomas Paine, 1775-1776
  • Democracy in America, (De la démocratie en Amérique), by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1935 and 1840
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 1845
  • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, 1776
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852
  • Beloved, by Tone Morrison, 1987
  • Walden; or, life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, 1854
  • Native Son, by Richard Wright, 1954
  • Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, 1962
  • All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, 1946
  • All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, 1974
  • The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
  • Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, 1952
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, 1943
  • The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, 1982
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, 1985
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, 1979
  • Catch-22, by Jeseph Heller, 1961
  • Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin, 1978
  • My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, 1918

As an added bonus, I offer you my choice as the greatest American novel ever written: Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger, 1964.

Feel free to let me know how wrong I am about any of this.

03/28/2024
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Narcissism

784 Words: Me!

The 1970s were known as the “Me Decade.” Author Tom Wolfe coined the term in an August 23, 1976 essay in New York magazine.

Wolfe was a practitioner of what became known as the “New Journalism,” a subjective form of reporting and writing that revolutionized the field. Wolfe actually coined that term, New Journalism, too. The genesis story of both terms is a perfect meta-illustration of both. Wolfe included within the club of New Journalists star scribes Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, and others. Their works, very long-form and immersive, appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Playboy, and more. New Journalism pieces were as much about the writers as they were about the writers’ subjects.

For his part, Wolfe penned a number of nonfiction books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Painted Word, The Right Stuff, and From Bauhaus to Our House. He wrote five novels including The Bonfire of the Vanities. His byline appeared over countless magazine articles. He became famous, in addition to his keyboard output, for dressing foppishly, in a signature style. In a post-mortem article in Esquire (Wolfe died in 2018), Jonathan Evans wrote:

Just hearing his name conjures up images of an immaculately put-together man with bright eyes, a boyish face, and a suit—almost certainly bespoke, and almost certainly a rich shade of cream.

Wolfe was essential to the story, as were Thompson, Mailer, and the rest. Over the next four or so decades, not only writers but their readers were swallowed up in New-ness and Me-ness. It has become a Me World.

Let me put it another way: the story didn’t exist without Thompson, Capote, Mailer, et al. This book, this magazine article, they were saying, isn’t so much about the presidential campaign of 1972, the gory murder of a family in Kansas, or the execution of Gary Gilmore as it is about Me.

Americans not only celebrated Me-ness, they came to worship it. The 1960s might be viewed as a sort of Kumbaya Decade, when we all held hands and worked like hell for civil rights and against the Vietnam War (even though that view is mostly mythical). Our fuzzy memories of the ’60s produce images of the community ascendant, so much so actual communes became big things — that is, until one commune produced a psychotic, drug-addled, spectacularly murderous clan, the Manson Family. Next thing anybody knew after Charlie and his acolytes became known to America, togetherness was not only out but dangerous. That pushed us along to becoming more Me-ish, too.

Books and magazine articles came out by the score starting in the early 1970s and continuing to this day telling us how to be true to ourselves, how to find the real Me, that Me was OK, that you can’t love anybody until you love Me, that Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, is the center of the known universe.  I’ve even found an essay on LinkedIn, of all places, titled, “Focus On Yourself and Everything You Want Will Fall Into Place.” Someone named Rhonda Byrne became a jillionaire in 2006 after her book, The Secret, was published. Its basic premise was if you think it, it will be.

The universe, if all these spiels are to be believed, exists within your own cranium. “What is life?” George Harrison asked in 1970; the answer, repeated ceaselessly over the next half-century-plus, is Me.

Truth eventually became secondary to Feelings. By the turn of the century, arguments could be short-circuited by one side or the other declaring, “Well, that’s my truth.” Do angels exist? Does god answer prayers? Can Uri Geller bend spoons? Can we contact the dead? Forget evidence. Forget proof. All that counts is My Truth.

An aside: Larry David tackles the idea of prayer — for my dough, the ultimate Me exercise — in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Let me put myself in god’s shoes for a second,” he begins. Well, just watch…

Anyway, the history of this holy land now is dependent on tens of millions of voters’ Personal Truths. Crime is rampant, a lot of them say despite the fact that crime statistics show otherwise. Global warming, institutionalized racism, gun violence, all bacteria are bad, one human year is equivalent to seven dog years, people use only 10 percent of their brains — all are argued over by people citing that infallible authority, My Truth.

An entire major political party in America now is steered by an insupportable charge, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Again it doesn’t matter a bit that there’s no evidence it happened. People believe it.

It’s Their Truth. My Truth. Me.

That’s all that counts.

03/22/2024
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Cancel Culture, John Hinkley

689 Words: Cancelled!

Cancel culture. Do you buy it? I mean, when you hear the term do you think, Aw, they’re full of shit, or do you gnash your teeth and curse the Woke Mob?

The latest complainant to shriek he’s a victim of the dreaded CC is — wait for it! — one John  Warnock Hinkley, Jr., the noted Jodie Foster fetishist and gunslinger who used President Ronald Reagan as a moving target on March 30, 1981.

Yep. Hinkley, who’s now a free man after being declared no longer deranged by shrinks and a federal judge in 2016, has been trying to break into the music biz as a folk singer/songwriter. Hinkley’s YouTube channel boasts some 36,000 subscribers. He’s also been booked to play at several small venues and therein lies his grievance.

The New York Post on Wednesday reported that Hinkley’s bent out of shape because his gig at a Connecticut hotel had been scrubbed. That concert, coincidentally or not, was to occur on the 43rd anniversary of his attempt to kill the President of the United States. “I’m a victim of cancel culture. It keeps happening over and over again,” Hinkley told a Post reporter.

Imagine that! This cancel culture stuff has gotten out of hand when a would-be assassin can’t make an honest living anymore.

Hinkley first was blacklisted in 2022 when his scheduled show at Market Hotel in Brooklyn was…, y’know, canceled. Since then, he claims, he’s been slated to appear at a total of a dozen venues. “They book me and then the show gets announced and then the venue starts getting backlash. The owners always cave; they cancel,” he told the Post.

The question arises: Do the bookers know, when they schedule John Hinkley to perform at their places, who he is? Or was? Are there folks unaware that he’s far more notable for that horrible moment in time than for his ability to croon the tune, “You and I Are Free”? Yeah, that’s the title of one of his ditties. Fitting, I guess.

Or, do they book him mainly because he pumped lead into Reagan, press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and DC cop Thomas Delahanty. Such a notorious figure ought to pack the house, no?

Reagan, of course, swiftly became mythologized in the aftermath of the shooting. Whereas other presidents might have been such snowflakes that they died after being shot up, old Dutch took a bullet to the chest — and lived! USA! USA! USA!

Hinkley was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. He wrote an undelivered sentencing speech saying the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” He also compared Foster and himself to Romeo and Juliet and Napoleon and Josephine.

Hinkley was released from a mental institution, having been diagnosed sane 35 years after pulling the trigger. He immediately set about to establishing himself as a professional musician. Only cancel culture thus far has quashed his dream. So he says.

Hidden in plain sight within the two words, cancel culture, is the nightmarish hallucination of a seething mass of bullies silencing all who dare to dissent, be that dissent from the Left or from the Right. Although it seems those on the Right wail and wring their hands the most while crying cancel culture. And then there are people who make the whole idea a farce. Like John Warnock Hinkley, Jr.

People have indeed been silenced, from Milo Yiannopoulos to Al Franken. Some of them regain their voices. Some never do. This may shock you, but I was made awfully uncomfortable by the then-Twitter kicking Donald Trump off its platform. Edit his distortions, misrepresentations, smears, and outright lies? Sure. Silence him? Uh-uh. Of course, weeding the deceits out of his rhetoric would leave his speech sparse. That’s his problem, not mine.

But cancel him? Nah. As for Hinkley, well, there are scads of folk singer/songwriters we can listen to. Refusing to provide a venue for one who happens to be the attempted murderer of a world leader and three other innocent souls and is now technically rehabilitated isn’t a terribly disturbing violation of the principle of free speech..

03/19/2024
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2024 Total Solar Eclipse

1000 Words: There Goes the Sun

Chatting with a couple friends at my back office HQ, Hopscotch, this AM about the eclipse due April 8th. Both are lettered academics; one’s a researcher in a hard science field and the other a professor in a history/culture/social discipline. I learned that Indiana University is shutting down for the day of the eclipse.

Some 300,000 visitors are expected to flood into Bloomington that day to see the big sky show so getting around town will likely be nigh impossible. And, I suppose, it’s nice that the U’s students, teachers, and janitors will be able to stand outside that mid-afternoon and see something they might never have seen before and probably never will again. Hell, eclipses have changed history, for pity’s sake.

Herodotus wrote in 430 BCE of a lengthy war between the Lydians and the Medes in modern-day Turkey that only concluded after a total solar eclipse scared the bejesus out of both sides. In 1504  Christopher Columbus convinced the people of modern-day Jamaica not to brain his savage, marauding crews by accurately predicting a lunar eclipse. The islanders thought him in cahoots with some divine power and so they spared his hoodlums.

There’ve been, of course, countless critter myths explaining eclipses, both solar and lunar. The ancient Vietnamese in the wake of one solar eclipse believed a giant frog had devoured the Sun and only the intervention of its master, the lord of Hahn, persuaded the amphibian to spit it back out. The ancient Chinese opted for either a dragon or a dog, depending on the era, as the greedy critter snacking on our star. The Norse blamed that old trickster Loki for unleashing starving wolves on the Sun. Then there’s the old German myth that the Sun is a bride and the Moon a husband and the two normally keep to their respective days and nights except occasionally, the husband gets a little hot to trot and attempts to do his thing with the wife in broad daylight — until, that is, she throws him out of her boudoir.

The Navajos had a more practical view of solar eclipses. They insisted people stay inside their hogans during totality, mainly because looking up at the Sun in an attempt to figure out what in the hell was going on was harmful. They were right, of course.

Even in our so-called enlightened age, many myths persist about eclipses. The NASA website lays out a few of them. They include:

  • Pregnant women risk harming their fetuses by viewing an eclipse
  • Any food prepared during an eclipse will be toxic
  • Eclipses are omens of bad luck
  • If an eclipse occurs on your birthday, bad health will ensue

And so on.

That professor I mentioned earlier told me she dreads the coming eclipse because it’ll cause her to have a migraine. I tilted my head like a puzzled dog upon hearing this. What, I wondered, could be the connection between a celestial event and a vascular headache? The exchange got me googling and eventually led to writing this.

I was all ready to believe my prof friend was batty, or at least credulous. Turns out she’s on to something. The first thing I found, speaking of googling, is during the lead-up to any total solar eclipse, Google itself  is flooded with inquiries about headaches. “According to Google Trends,” a Mashable reporter wrote in 2017, “right now most of America is worried they have eclipse headaches.” Dig this Google Trends graph tracking searches for “seeing spots”:

Seeing spots is one of the top symptomatic auras preceding migraines. The graph covers the two days before and the day of the last American total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.

An article published about the same time in Bustle reported “…you might experience everything from headaches and fatigue to vivid dreams, sleepwalking, flu-like symptoms, and sensitivity to electronic devices” in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 eclipse.

After allowing for the usual psychogenic statistical noise, these post-eclipse maladies are largely real. People’s normal behavior changes during an eclipse. We rarely look directly at the Sun or even anywhere near it as it’s too uncomfortable to do so. But it’s almost irresistible to pull a Trump and gaze at the Sun as the Moon’s disc passes before it.

Trump Looking At The 2017 Eclipse.

By the way, approximately half the American voting populace still wants this man to be Leader of the Free World. Go figure.

Anyway, even the flitting, fleeting glances we turn toward the Sun during an eclipse can, honestly and truly, trigger real physical symptoms. The Sun, after all, is a thermonuclear fireball more than 860,000 miles in diameter, the emanations of which are bound to be a tad disagreeable at times.

I feel bad for doubting, if ever so briefly, my professor friend. Then again, this is the YouTube age and misinformation, myth, nonsense, regressive fables, and all other sorts of blather are ascendant. It’s almost a fallback position for me to cast shade on people’s self-diagnoses and/or descriptions of their pathologies.

What cannot be argued is the 2024 total solar eclipse is already an omen of bad luck. This town that under normal circumstances strains to meet the needs of 80,000 people during the school year will be experiencing the food, water, waste, personal space, and traffic demands of a place four times its size on April 8. It’ll be as if Bloomington suddenly is transformed into Tampa or New Orleans while its police and fire forces, its garbage trucks, its sewers, its tap water delivery, and its grocery stores all remain relatively small-townish. Yikes.

Still, I wouldn’t wish the eclipse away. It’s a once in a lifetime thing, even though it’ll be my second such total solar eclipse in the last seven years. It’s my most passionate hope that this second rarity in my experience is not a harbinger of another improbable repeat as embodied by the guy staring into the Sun, above.

03/15/2024
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Conspiracy Theory

1000 Words: You Can’t Fool Me!

A few years ago, some star National Basketball Association players made headlines stating they don’t believe the Earth is a globe and that they reject the idea of gravity. The moon landings, some said, was faked. During the pandemic, the great National Football League quarterback Aaron Rogers told the world he’d been “immunized” against COVID-19 after being asked if he’d gotten the vaccine. It turned out Rodgers had dabbled in some woo-woo alternative treatments; lo and behold, he was stricken with the coronavirus in 2021. And then, a few weeks ago, some college football player told reporters he didn’t believe in space or the other planets.

Sports. I’ve ranted about a few of these loons now and again on this global communications colossus. My point being, mainly, that we ought to stop paying attention to these rambling ejaculations by high-profile pro athletes or any other celebrities for that matter. We worship celebrity in this Holy Land and scads of us hang on their every word. Just stop it is generally my advice.

Before Thursday, I’d figured I’d plumbed the depths of the sportsworld nuttiness. Then, along came an article in a conservative website called The Bulwark alerting me to the existence of a very popular and hotly argued conspiracy theory that Wilt Chamberlain’s famous 100-point game never happened, that it was a false flag op concocted by the NBA to goose interest in the game.

Wilt the Stilt’s big game is one of the touchstones of league history. It’s the highest point total ever scored by an individual player. It ranks with Franco Harris’s “Immaculate Reception,” Carlton Fisk’s World Series game winning home run, and the USA hockey team’s upset of the USSR in the 1980 Winter Olympics as a cherished, spectacular moment in American sports history.

But, no, it didn’t happen. So say countless smart guys on X, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and all the other usually suspect social media. It’s one thing for there to be a segment of the population that thinks 9/11 was an inside job, JFK was killed on orders of LBJ, or that the Queen of England put out a hit on Princess Diana. All of those were Earth-shaking happenings and social scientists and skull jockeys have long held that we humans have a tough time accepting simple explanation for enormous events, especially if those explanations come from those in governments.

Funny thing is, I’ve long held that the American public loves being lied to. Craves it. Demands it, for chrissakes. The very first sentence of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims all men to be created equal. This even as the fledging United States’s economy was based in large part on the ownership of one set of “inferior” human beings while our westward settlers and our army went about the business of exterminating another set. The wish to be lied to is in our blood.

Naturally, those who eat up political hogwash are convinced only they are privy to the Real Story. Internet entrepreneurs have made billions catering to the credulity of the American public, tens of millions of whom know in their bones everybody else has been bamboozled.

This trend now has descended to trivial things, like an NBA basketball game played 62 years ago this month. I suppose all the other really important events and phenomena have been run through the conspiracy wringer. All that’s left now, probably, is McDonald’s has been bankrolled by cardiologists or thirst is a fraud the water industry wants us to believe in. I’d bet plenty of people are working on those theories as we speak.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on Americans. After all, the people of every country on Earth believe their homeland is the greatest, the happiest, the freest (yep, it’s a word) and the apotheosis of human civilization. This is demonstrably false, as pro athletes can attest: there can only be one champion. Then again, maybe they’re wrong. Maybe no country is the greatest, happiest, freest. Maybe we’re all tied for last place.

Sifting through the sports record books for evidence that The Man has once again tried to pull a fast one seems a laughable hobby. Yet it illuminates the sickness that has pervaded our culture, thanks to the internet. You know what? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if social media tycoons invent half to three quarters of the bullshit oozing throughout their sites.

Now there’s a conspiracy theory I can get behind.

(That was only 741 words; so I lied.)

03/09/2024
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Peter LoPilato

1000 Words: So Young

My mother, in the last thirty or so years of her life, would turn to the obituaries first thing every day when she got the newspaper. I was in my late 20s when she started doing this and it never failed to irk me.

“Ma,” I’d half shout in that impatient way kids confront their parents, “that’s creepy!”

“Don’t say that,” she’d rejoin in that barely patient way parents respond to their kids. “Someone I know  might be in here.” And she’d go right back to running her finger down the alphabetical list of the recently deceased.

This exchange did nothing to clear things up. Why in the hell would anyone want to go looking for news about dead people? At one point, I played armchair shrink and concluded she was succumbing to some deep depression similar to the one daddy-o had tumbled into toward the end of his time on this planet.

Every once in a while she’d come across a familiar name. So-and-so died, she’d announce, as if the news meant anything to me. “He was only 60 — so young!”

So young? Sixty years old? He was a dinosaur!

There’s a progression in how people view the years, a sort of time dilation. When I was nine years old, I thought kids who were 12 and 13 were grownups. One night when I was 21 and out dancing at a punk nightclub, I spotted a couple hanging around the periphery. They must have been thirty or so. I was mortified. What were such weird old fossils doing around here?

When Ma got to a certain age, any time someone who was a day younger than she was died she’d lament, again, “She was so young!” Ma said this every time even as she hit 90 and the dead person was 88 or 89.

I’m now at the age Ma was when she was already regularly scanning the obituaries.

My contemporaries are keeling over left and right.  Celebrities born the year I was are collapsing seemingly every day. It makes me think of the first rock ‘n’ roll era star I can recall who died naturally. Bill Haley, who, with his band the Comets, kick started white acceptance of R’n’R back in 1954 with their single “Rock Around the Clock.” That was two years before I was born and by the time I became a transistor radio geek at the age of eight, Bill Haley was as passé as Rudy Vallée. When Haley croaked in 1981 at the age of 55, I figured, hell, he’s an old man, what’s everybody so surprised about?

Of course, it isn’t just the years that appear to shrink or contract as we age. The four or so weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed to be an eternity when I was a fifth-grader. Summer vacation was endless. For four years I dreamed, almost wetly, of the day I could get my drivers license and start wheelie-ing around the neighborhood in Dad’s car. That span of time from age 12 through 16, as I experienced it, was as lengthy as the Paleozoic Era. When I was grounded for a week or two, as I was more times than I could count, I may as well have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Now, as any who’s reached my age knows, the seasons are as weeks and weeks are snaps of my fingers. This is a phenomenon impossible to convey to anyone still callow.

I figure if I’m lucky I might have a good 25 years left hereabouts. That is, if everything goes well, I avoid getting hit by a truck, cancer doesn’t come back, my deformed heart doesn’t start fluttering madly, and the nations of the world don’t start lobbing nuclear-tipped missiles at each other. That quarter century, I’m guessing, would be the maximum I have left. My earthly stint likely will end sometime before the year 2049.

But I like to think optimistically so twenty five years it is. That’s as big a chunk of time as the span since I was hanging out with the Lampreys in the East Pilsen artists’ enclave on the near south side of Chicago. Yeah, those were great days. Such fun. Such creativity. Such scintillating friends. Such a wide world and a big city to explore. Stories to write. Galleries to browse. Parties to attend. Grants to apply for. Life to gobble up. Another world, another lifetime ago.

But, oh god, that was 1999! All of us are gray-haired, thicker around the waist, our faces creased, our steps so much slower. Some even dead.

My new life, my new world, is in Bloomington, Indiana. New work. New friends. New challenges. Yet 1999 seems like last summer. But within even that snap of my fingers I’ve met people and had to say goodbye. People like Peter LoPilato. He was the editor and publisher of The Ryder magazine, the first publication I wrote for after I arrived in this town. He and I shared a love of baseball and every time we’d meet we’d regale each other with memories and statistics and predictions about this team or that player. He was a New Yorker, originally; I a Chicagoan. We didn’t let that come between us.

Peter played softball in a league up until a very few short years ago. I wished I could have joined him but I was crippled by arthritis in my hips. I have two new titanium and plastic hip joints now but I’ll never be able to play catch with Peter LoPilato because he died this week. He was about 72, by my math.

Damn. He was so young!

03/01/2024
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Celebrity

1000 Words: Don’t Ask!

In celebrity-obsessed America the most respected people speaking on the subjects of world events, social justice, human relations, economics, politics, and even hard science are Hollywood actors and pro athletes.

I mean, honestly, a man whom Matt Groenig and Co. characterized back in 2000 as a joke future president actually became the President of the United States, largely because he was a TV actor in a reality show. The American electorate voted him into the White House in 2016 almost solely because he’d become famous saying “You’re fired” countless times in NBC-TV’s “The Apprentice.” He’d never been a legislator or a diplomat or a student of global affairs or prepped any other way to become Leader of the Free World. People knew him because he came into their living rooms every Wednesday or Thursday night and that was plenty enough for them to say, “We’ll follow you.”

No movement, no idea, no cause gains traction if it doesn’t have Glenn Close (mental health), Angelina Jolie (refugees), Seth Rogen (Alzheimer’s), Gary Sinise (veterans), or, way back, Jenny McCarthy (antivaxx) stumping for it. In an April 2020 New York Times piece on celebrity activism headlined When Did We Start Taking Famous People Seriously? reporter Jessica Grose wrote that Al Jolson was the first celebrity political endorser, throwing his weight behind then-presidential candidate Warren G. Harding in 1920. Celebrity activisim has only grown in leaps and bounds since that time.

Donald Trump shilled for himself, natch, bringing the phenomenon to its current nadir.

An item I caught in Deadspin this AM got me to thinking about all this, for the umpteenth time. Deadspin is a gotcha-type daily sports news roundup that I read mainly for giggles. Today, reporter Cale Clinton broke the earthshaking news that NFL prospect Tyler Owens, late of Texas Tech University and soon to become a wealthy young lad after April’s pro football draft, has expounded on the nature of the cosmos. The cornerback/safety, Clinton reports, was quoted as saying, “I don’t believe in space.” Journalists furiously scribbled his pronouncements this week during the annual NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis where erstwhile college jocks show off their biceps and cartilages for the league’s general managers and head coaches. Owens was asked about his beliefs because he ran the fastest 40-yard dash among the hopeful pros gathered in Lucas Oil Stadium.

Well, golly, I too want to know what such a speedy defensive back thinks about the universe!

Owens explained: “I’m real religious so I think we’re in a dome right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” He went on to say he’d caught some flat-earth chat on YouTube, causing him to come to his conclusions. Other news sources report he actually said “…I think we’re alone right now,” rather than “in a dome.” No matter. His meaning is crystal clear either way, and it has nothing at all to do with space, planets, loneliness, or geometric structural forms.

The NFL decision makers at the Combine regularly assess the hopeful players in batteries of physical and intellectual tests designed to establish who the top greyhounds, acrobats, tightrope walkers, strongmen, throwers, rushers, tacklers, and field strategists are in each year’s crop of exiting college football players.

Yep, each and every participant in the 2024 NFL Scouting Combine is a college man, Owens among them. You know college, right? That place where the smartest scientists, researchers, philosophers, and professors prepare your teenager for the rigors of modern life, imparting the latest information about the nature of everything and anything.

Young Tyler Owens, presumably, having been thusly prepared by the faculty at Texas Tech, is now ready to take his place among the leaders of today and tomorrow.

“I thought I used to believe in the heliocentric thing where we used to revolve around the sun and stuff,” Owens continued. “But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points….”

I caution you not to dismiss young Tyler Owens for his utterances. Well, not too much, at least. He’s 22 years old, for pity’s sake. Do you want to be defined and/or condemned for the goofy stuff you did, said, or believed when you were 22? I think I was 18 when, one time, I told my mother I was a communist. Poor Ma. She gasped and wrung her hands. Which, now that I look back on it, was the main reason I said it. Many people believe a 22-year-old should be a tad more circumspect than an 18-year-old, but a guy devoting his life to the goal of becoming a pro football player can be excused for developing a bit more slowly in the realm of existential thought, especially one capable of running the fastest 40 yard dash at an annual NFL Scouting Combine.

For all we know, when he hits the age of 40 or 50 Tyler Owens may look back on his words and cringe.

If you care to rail against anybody, it should be whoever the reporter was who put a microphone in Tyler’s face and prompted him to tell the world about the cosmos.

It shouldn’t matter to anybody with a clear conscious and a rational sense of priorities what even the best cornerback/safety in the NFL today thinks about anything other than the nuances of playing cornerback/safety. We don’t quiz plumbers or bus drivers or McDonald’s managers or IT geeks on their views concerning the solar system and other such things. So why does anybody care what a potential NFL player thinks about it?

Or an actor? Or a rock star? Or the star and producer of a reality TV show?

Of course, I’m bashing my head against a brick wall because the vast majority of us are dying to know what the likes of Beyoncé and Harry Styles think about the Israel/Hamas War, global warming, AI, and substance abuse. Hell, Beyoncé might even become president one day.

In that case, I wonder what her thoughts about space and the planets are.

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