Category: Commentary

I don’t know what I think about the primary results yesterday. It’s good to see Hillary confound the conventional wisdom and refuse to die, and good for Obama to see he’s not anointed yet. It’s good to see voters come out in record numbers. And I like to watch a good fight as much as anyone.

But I don’t think an ongoing struggle between them is going to do any good for the Democratic Party. It won’t help them refine their issues, it will just inspire the candidates and (mostly) their advisers to bring out the throwing knives and poison pills. It’s already happened with Hillary’s campaign, the “Kitchen Sink” strategy, and behold! It worked! Prepare for a whole lot more of that. And months of continual backstabbing will make it a lot harder at the convention for people to rally round one candidate. Bitterness will linger and dilute the party’s strength, money and energy. And McCain can cruise from fundraiser to fundraiser, looking like an elder statesman and selling his soul for evangelical endorsements at his leisure.

Good lord, when are we ever going to shrink this campaign season? It’s nearly eight months between the Iowa caucuses and the convention. Have these schedules changed since the advent of the horseless carriage? How much money, time and air space has to be spent over this thing?

Not trusting the touch-screen voting machines (wonder why?), many voters in Ohio asked for paper ballots yesterday, causing shortages in many areas. Why do they have such trouble holding elections there? It’s starting to shake my faith that the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame inductions aren’t on the up-and-up. You can’t tell me that some conspiracy hasn’t been keeping .38 Special from the Hall all these years. “Waitin’…Anticipatin’….”

Ohio, listen, it’s not so hard to fix an election. People do it all the time, especially here in Chicago. The trick is, don’t make your move too early. That’s when the reporters, hungry for a story, are around. Don’t make it hard to vote in the beginning, with dodgy computers and too few paper ballots. Let everyone vote. Grease the skids. Make it easier than using an ATM. Then, just lose the results. Toss the proper number of ballot boxes in the river, screw up the electronic transmission of results by never testing the system, erase hard drives with magnets. Come on, it’s like you guys want to rewrite the book on this or something. Get over yourselves and use the groundwork that’s already been laid.

This year’s campaign has had its share of funny moments, but the funniest so far HAS to be the footage of Mitt Romney’s dropping out of the race yesterday. If you watched it with the sound off, you’d swear someone had just surprised him with a birthday cake. Instead, he used all his used -car salesman charm to admit to a bunch of charged-up campaigners that he was tired of spending his own money and getting trounced by Mike Huckabee. If he stayed in the race, of course, the Republican party would be rent asunder, and a Democrat would be elected. Ex post facto, the terrorists not only will have won, but will print T-shirts and hats and be telling Terry Bradshaw on camera in November about that wonderful feeling, after 1300 years, to finally win one for Allah. So he’s backing out for the good of the country. Oh, if we can only survive all the people who act “for the good of the country.”

Yesterday I flicked on CNN to see if they were broadcasting the space shuttle launch. Instead, I got to see Bay Buchanan, senior adviser to Romney and Imperial Dominatrix of the Ice Planet of Doom, tell the anchor that she was “very excited” about the bailing out, b/c it shows that American conservatives have found their new leader in Romney. Oh, if only her inane prattle were true. If Romney really is the leader of true American conservatives, then his sickly showing in the primaries can give us all hope, indicating that that little barrel of monkeys can keep clawing and tearing at each other while the rest of us get on with the business of living in the 21st century.

“True believers”, as conservatives often call themselves, does describe them quite well, I think. They do believe in their cause, even though the cause can only be advanced by human beings, flawed, weak, susceptible to the temptations of the world and the flesh. No amount of failure will dissuade them from the notion that the only valid government is the one that works actively for its own demise. For the past eight years, Dubya was their champion, but now, with the stench of death, torture, economic failure, corruption, and national decline finally wafting from the kitchen, they say he wasn’t a “true” conservative. There must be a new champion, because their cause is just and true. It’s just that the people they’ve been electing have been too busy steering business to their buddies and tapping shoes in men’s bathrooms to get the job done.

I’ve been trying to figure out a proper analogy for this kind of behavior, but I’m having trouble. The closest I can come is a guy who catches syphilis from sleeping around, then gets it in his head that there is a “magic vagina” somewhere that will cure the disease if only he can dip his wick in it. So every new lay brings with it hope and elation that happy days are here again, and ends with the guy bitter, the woman infected, and the idea stronger than before.

You’ve heard of that guy, right? Or is my imagination just getting a little sicker every day?

Since yesterday’s announcement, the news has been chockablock with interviews of conservative voters gnashing their teeth and beating their brows, faced with the prospect of campaigning for John McCain. His sins are well known. He had the temerity, the absolute gall, to do such things as sponsor bipartisan legislation, vote against the Bush tax cuts, ignore their calls for an amendment to ban gay marriage, and endorse an immigration policy that didn’t involve raids, shackles, and branding. Give it up, you bunch of drama queens! Vote or stay home! If you want to bring Reagan back so badly, you should stop opposing scientific research! Regeneration of the dead doesn’t just HAPPEN, you know!

Those beautiful, leggy, boring people who search for a Fountain of Youth by moving to warmer climes may have the right idea. The rest of us, realizing that our time on earth has been written down before we were born, have no problem living in the colder parts of the country. We see it as the natural order of things. Winter, along with Children, Disillusion, and The Crap They Call Music These Days, is what turns us old.

I gave a jump-start to the aging process last winter, when I bought a new winter coat from the Woolrich catalog. I didn’t want some slick space-age number; I’ve had enough of those. I went for the classic red-and-black plaid hunter’s jacket. A “Pennsylvania Tuxedo” is what the catalog called it, and that’s how I describe it too. (An important question: Is this possibly the source for the name of Don Adams’ cartoon character, “Tennessee Tuxedo”?) Weighing in at 435 lbs., it’s a classic coat for deer hunters and crusty old coots of all kinds. Although I couldn’t kill anything that hasn’t already chewed through my siding and started eating my Lorna Doones, the coat does lend me that certain air, of kerosene, dried blood, Lucky Strikes, and domestic (as in, local county) whiskey. I was tempted to buy the pants that go with it, but frankly, with global warming, I don’t expect I’ll ever need to get that warm outside again.

The next step is choosing a hat. For warm ears, I haven’t bothered with anything but a watch cap for years now. Simple and unadorned. So simple, in fact, that they get grabbed, used, tossed around and lost like water bottles. Chicago has endured a lot of cold weather so far this year, and apparently we’ve had three times as much snow as last (still a pitiable amount, unfortunately). Thus the ear protection situation needed to be addressed with renewed vigor. Luckily, when my in-laws returned from a trip to Peru this fall, I added a cap woven from Andean alpaca wool. The kind that anthropology majors sport around college campuses, with bright geometric designs, drawstrings for the ear flaps, and some type of tall finger emerging from the very top. (Never been able to figure out what the finger is for. Maybe you can store jerky in it, or rescuers can use it to pull you out of snowdrifts.) I’ll wear it on occasion, but at times I think it appears that I’m trying to recapture lost youth, a time when pulling up stakes and climbing the mountains of South America seemed like a reasonable way to spend the winter months. (It was also a time when looking like an anachronism gave me a feeling of achievement, unlike now, when that feeling only comes when I turn down dessert.)

So leave it to my wife, who has the enduring patience with online catalogs that I have with Monty Python sketches, to get us a couple of the perfect winter hats. Dark wool, sturdy top, long bill, ear flaps that tie down the front with authority. If you want to drop names, it’s a Stormy Kromer, although I’m instantly suspicious of crusty old characters mentioned in mail order stuff. I have a similar model that has earflaps tucked up inside. It may fit too loosely for a mountain railroad engineer like ol’ Stormy Kromer to rely on, but it’s warm, durable and irony-free.

My winter transformation from sardonic satirist to crusty old bastard is almost complete. What’s missing? A healthy dose of self-righteousness. Never fear: the weather itself provides that self-righteousness every time it snows. My neighbors to the north aren’t able to shovel their walks. One is an obese diabetic who has trouble walking around, and the next one is 85 and probably weighs 100 pounds (she’s living in the house her father built in 1916, which is pretty and kept up and will be torn down by condo developers in an eye-blink when she dies). I’ve shoveled their sidewalks for five or more years now, and don’t mind it a bit. I need the exercise, but most importantly, it’s “what you do.”

To the south of me is a three-flat, owned by twin brothers who are always on the hustle. Own a half-dozen rental properties on the North Side, in addition to their work in offices. They leave at six and come in at eleven. I never shovel their sidewalk, because in the 15 years I’ve lived here, they’ve never reached out to do a thing for me. The first couple winters, I shoveled their sidewalk, thinking they’d do mine when they had the chance, reciprocate, do the neighborly thing. But it never happened. On those snowy days when I didn’t get out their first, the extent of their clearing was one shovel’s-width from the front door to the street, with nothing done to the sidewalk. This happened even when the snow totaled half an inch. That’s a grand total of 45-seconds of work, versus the four minutes it would take them to clear their sidewalk. Not even any part of mine, just their own. The intention is clear, the rest of the world can go to hell, so I don’t do them any favors.

Their tenants might think we’re selfish, since we’ll shovel 125 feet of sidewalk to the north and not do an inch to the south. But they’re all 20 years younger than us, and I’ve never seen them do a lick to keep the place up. They’re a bunch of slackers anyway, with the social graces of a beaten dog. They don’t even say hi over the backyard fence, like we’re some FOB family with goats and a crazy violent grandma in the garage. I pass one of them walking the dog at least two mornings a week, and the grandest salutation I can elicit from him is a nod and a grimace.

So thank you, cold weather. And you too, snotty slacker neighbors. With your help, I have achieved my destiny in codgerhood many decades earlier than I would have in a milder climate. Uncertainty has been removed, allowing me to get on with other things, such as buying a yappy little dog, getting a pellet gun for the squirrels, and devising a clever retort for questions about how I’m doing that references illness and death.

For the sake of family, we all do things during the holidays we’d rather not. One thing I did for the kids’ sake was go and see “Alvin and the Chipmunks”. They enjoyed the hell out of it, because basically there’s nothing funnier than little scurrying things making huge messes. It could have been a lot worse, and I mean that sincerely. That’s usually strong praise from me lately, as I exit the theater.

Drama needs conflict, so for this movie, David Cross plays a smarmy, ruthless record exec who turns the Chipmunks away from no-fun Dave, who insists they go to bed on time, eat right, save their money, etc. “Dave’s a drag,” the fuzzy protagonists are told, “you’re huge, you deserve to have fun all the time.” So they begin to morph into the Backstreet Boys. They get a mansion, start tour the country in silver jumpsuits, ride in limos, go to parties (thankfully there are no groupies, only fans–albeit fans with tattoos and piercings). Chipmunk fever spreads across the globe.

Do they keep it up? Are they happy that way? What do you think?

One problem with the movie is, despite the sweet message, the touring, recording and partying looks AWESOME. It’s a huge part of the storyline, takes up a lot of minutes, and a lot of effort was put into making it look realistic. There’s no indication at all that the Chipmunks aren’t having the time of their lives, until the requisite time when one of them says, “I miss Dave, we should go home.” Following that are some action sequences of Dave trying to rescue them, slam bang, haha, all’s well that ends well. Hollywood hype and showbiz values don’t stand a chance against the simple pleasures of home.

Except, of course, the movie makes those showbiz values looks completely marvelous. The tinny insincerity made a likeable movie completely senseless. It’s no big revelation, but it makes me wonder about the nature of communication. How do values get transmitted? Why should any of us for a second believe a product of Hollywood that rejects Hollywood values? How can any screenwriter or director or producer arrive with a movie that tells us that Hollywood values are destructive, when all their lives these people have striven to attain the fruits of those values? Why doesn’t someone’s head explode at some point? THAT would be entertaining.

Alone among art forms, movies and television are a product of a certain place. Books can be written anywhere, music erupts in unpredictable places and with luck the musicians stay true to their native muses even after they end up in LA. But movies and TV come from Hollywood, a ‘little town” according to everyone who works there. And Hollywood runs on Hollywood values–live fast, trade up, project an image, spend spend spend, don’t be seen with anyone who’ll pull you down, product is king.

It takes certain skills to put out a TV show, among them monomania and the ability to work 18 hour days. The goal is to create a good show and a gazillion dollars, and if push comes to shove, the gazillion dollars wins. It stands to reason that this mindset of the world will shape the stories the creators bring to the public. (I would argue the shows of unique quality–Seinfeld, The Sopranos–somehow transcend this mindset and bring us something else, something other, while the basic crap on TV runs on nothing but the Hollywood mindset. It reminds me of the TV development exec who told me that my first step if I wanted to write for TV was “watch a lotta, lotta TV.” The treatment is worse than the disease.) It’s no wonder that so many millions of young people believe that the key to happiness is to become famous. The Hollywood machine doesn’t just deliver messages–it IS the message. Fabulousness is all.

Having “Alvin and the Chipmunks” tell me that only family can bring me happiness is like having Dylan Thomas tell me that only a well-tempered life will bring satisfaction. It’s enough cognitive dissonance to induce a headache, even more than the speeded-up version of “The Witch Doctor Song.” Yet another reason to set EXTREME limits on how much Hollywood product your kids consume. (As well as yourself. When the “Hannah Montana” express rolled through Chicago last month, it was the adults–NOT the kids, as every newspaper story specifically pointed out–who paid $800 a ticket, called the radio stations, sold their souls for the latest thing. )

This morning’s Chicago Tribune has a reflection I wrote about gentrification, the passage of time, and working the parish Christmas tree lot. If you’re interested, you can click for the article right here.

But don’t ask for a discount at the lot. I don’t set the prices. They’re non-negotiable.

If you’d like to hear some warm and folksy observations of our most American holiday of Thanksgiving, check out the mp3 of my essay that aired this morning on WBEZ’s “848”.

Then keep looking for the schmaltz by browsing for something by Garrison Keillor or sumpin’.