IF WE CAN LEARN ONLY ONE LESSON IN HISTORY

If we learn only one history lesson in 2010 it better be this: Generals are usually fighting the last war....!

Unlike WWII, this is not force-on-force. Like judo, this is the opponent using our force against us. Translated: The US is so big and so large, we offer an infinity of targets; our military is so big and so large, we're burdened with the problem of trying to move it quickly enough to be in the right place at the right time.

Then fueling this new kind of asymmetric warfare is our enemy's ideological passion -- a thousand years of anti-Western Islamic resentment, now inflamed by Israel's and our presence felt throughout their lands.

President Obama nailed it a few days ago when he said the jihadists only have to be right once (in our skies or in our military bases) to ignite screaming, unnerving headlines. We, on the other hand, have to be right all the time to prevent such consequences. Bad odds...! Especially with hysterical critics who want to spend their time scapegoating each individual failure, rather than spend their commitment supporting the overall strategy.

As I remember it, that's the only way we finally won the last war which we clearly won. Clear back in 1945....

BLAMING GOD GETS BORING

Here's a thought for our confusing times -- God is becoming all too handy as the fall guy. Take His/Her take on gays and disasters. We're always trying to read into Him/Her the blame for these. Not fair. If you believe in God, He/She doesn't need me for any defense. But let me try anyway...!

* People's hangup with homosexuality is neither inherent nor historical. Societies have been co-existing with homosexuality from the get-go. Some of our greatest heroes (Alexander the great, Michelangelo the brilliant, Nathan Lane the hysterical, Ellen DeGeneres the engaging, a few unnamed NFL stars) are pretty good examples. The big deal comes from a few tortured passages in books like the Bible and the Koran. God has never really confirmed these rumors!

* People's anger about disasters is understandable yet not especially rational. If you've lived past puberty, you've lived long enough to know bad things do indeed happen to good people. To suggest God is aiming thunderbolts at the victims is about as logical as suggesting parents enjoy gouging their children's eyes out!

Conclusion -- I leave it to the philosophers to do a proper job with these complex topics. For me, I'm of the mind that God has better things to do than curse any of His/Her children. Heck, He/She has Hell for that!

CHICAGO TAKES A SECOND BIG HIT!

Now, look, Chicago took a big hit to the heart when Macy's took away our Marshall Fields. But now the Great Recession is taking away our Pump Room too? Can the urban gods be this cruel! Can our all-powerful Mayor allow such desecration! In your story (Jan 5) you say, "It thrived on a celebrity culture that no longer exists." But that misses the point to our pain. Just having the Pump Room made us all feel like celebrities....

When Fields was closed, your own Roger Ebert led the parade of credit card protesters. Somehow, though, both Macy's and we seem to have survived. But can we survive this second blow as well?? I'm having stomach churning doubts.

I remember staying at the Ambassador East on our honeymoon...I remember returning for our 50th anniversary ...I even remember having lunch with Kup at the celebrated table one. Now are all these moments and memories to vanish in a puff of recessionary statistics? Someone please say "no."

But somehow I don't hear anyone offering to rescue the Pump Room....or the economy...or our city's love affair with having a Pump Room to attend at least every few years where you could feel like a celebrity. Does this mean that from now on the only way I can sense a feeling of celebrity is by looking at Bill Swecker's coverage of Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan? The gods just can't be that cruel...!


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GOD MUST BE LAUGHING IN CAROLINA RIGHT NOW

Cecil Bothwell, 59, was recently elected as councilman in the leafy little town of Asheville, in the Caroilina's. You know, the state featuring the congressional "You lie" taunter, and the "I loved her soul" governor. Well now, true to form, the council just fired ol' Cecil, because he calls himself a "post-theist." The gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight is dumping him based on an 1868 law that disqualifies anyone who "denies the being of Almighty God."

Well, you just know that the zealots on both extremes are fuedin' and fussin' over this. The southern fundamentalist have raised their voices in a mighty Hallelujah. The few atheists in town are writing letters to the New York Times.

Here's what this God-believing seeker believes. God doesn't read Carolina statutes...He/She doesn't care what the Asheville Council thinks....He/She doesn't even care that the atheists don't believe in Him/Her, because He/She still believes in them.

So I'm neither going to rally to the God-fearing Council, nor the God-denying New York Time letter-writers. I just plan to go to bed tonight, pull up the covers on this chaotic world, and figure that if I wake up tomorrow morning, something or someone good was responsible...!

TUT'S TOMB IN MY BASEMENT

Have you ever excavated an Egyptian tomb? Well, neither have I. Until last month. A cousin found an old photo album of our extended family which we had never before seen. Let alone experienced. The experience was stunning...!

There -- in a wide-frame, long-shot -- were 24 members of my maternal ancestors looking up from their long summertime picnic table. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, aunts, uncles. Now long dead, but here magnificently rediscovered in all their youthful vigor. It is their DNA, their dreams, their wounds that have helped make me me. You know the feeling too.

I was a pink, two-year-old cuddled in my Mother's apron. And yet, seeing oneself that young and that innocent does not so much make you think of the untombed past, but of the unfolding future. Their genes and my genes and my children's children's genes flowing on into what I expect to be an eternal community.

That frozen summer moment was more than three generations ago -- a very different, simpler America. Today Nancy Gibbs reports: "Half of us live in suburbs, the center of the population has shifted 324 miles west and 101 miles south to Phelps County Missouri, America used to be majority male but by 2000 only seven states had more men than women, the average household [in that photo] contained five people which has now dropped to three."

So where is my country -- my family's DNA -- moving toward today?

On June 27 1937, President Roosevelt accepted his party's nomination for a second term with these words which may answer that question for our generation: "The economic royalists complain we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain is we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and Constitution.

"In their blindness they forget what Flag and Constitution stand for. Now as always for democracy, not tyranny; freedom, not subjection; against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike....there is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny!"

Mom, Dad, my dear departed family -- I only hope we can realize that destiny as well as you did!

WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING WITH OUR CAMERAS

January is the prescribed month for resolutions. OK, how about this one...? Since art imitates life, can our camera pros (print & video) resolve, for heaven's sake, to try something fresh and new...? They've been using the same warmed over shots and angles since forever!

Sports...? The same bared teeth and jutting index fingers. Celebrities...? The same glamor poses and caught-off-guard-at-the-beach fatty shots. Tragedies...? The same intrusive closeups of the victim's weeping family. Candidates...? The same carefully planned casual look. Advertising...? The same smiling faces grinning into the camera or romping lyrically across meadows.

If this seems cranky, look at it this way. Today's cameras -- large and little -- are everywhere everytime everyday. We're drowning in this stuff, every gene in our body titillated with images, every circuit in our brain stimulated by what someone with a camera has decided we should see. OK, if that's the deal, can they please please resolve to give our poor battered senses something different...

....say like they always do on those pretty Hallmark Cards?

AT LAST CRACKING THE GREAT BANANA CODE

Forget the "DaVinci Code." I've recently cracked an even bigger code lurking no farther away than your refrigerator. For generations, the powerful (imperialistic?) United Fruit Company got bananas out of South America only to mesmerize us with the cute little Chiquita Banana song: "Never put bananas in the refrigerator." I tremble at the brink of daring to suggest they lied to us. Seems they just want us to keep buying, not preserving, their bananas...!

I'm not saying this arguable deceit damns Capitalism to the many Socialist hells Wall Streeters warn us of. Lets face it, without the creative greed of entrepreneurial Capitalism, I wouldn't have this computer to write with or the meds to live by. On the other hand -- and really, Mr Beck & Ms Palin, there is one -- some of us find it either dumb or dumber to explain away our economic woes with the ghosts of encroaching "big bad government."

From philosophers to theologians to popes, our less pre-fixated minds have argued for years that neither Capitalism nor Socialism is bad. Or good. Rather, that a creative blend of both is the answer. Freedom laced with planning....individual entrepreneurship matched with collectivized programming....in other words, the best of both.

For anyone paying attention to history -- in contrast to the single-minded zealots from either the extreme right or left -- it's self-evident that ever since Bismarck in Europe and FDR in America, the mythic Capitalism of the raw-frontier has mutated into various forms of what can be correctly called State Capitalism. The so-called arrogant takeover of Detroit by the government was hardly a dangerous new leap, but rather a logical extension of how government has worked with & against industry for generations. And for the most part with reasonably good results. Most industries, from 19th C railroads to 20th C communications to 21st C energy wouldn't have succeeded as they have otherwise.

So a modest suggestion, please. Lets enter the new year without the angry rah-rah passions of the alumni at the big game with "the enemy" from the team "we love to hate." Instead, lets grow up and start realizing our best chances of "winning" this historic game start with learning rather than despising each other's playbook.

You want something to despise...? Maybe the upcoming Chicago winter can feed your hate gene...!