WHO ARE YOU? REALLY??

Life bristles with ironies. Sometimes life is the irony. Consider how video-cams, iPhones, and Clouds pledge to permanently store and treasure everything we ever say or do. And yet we're losing treasures every day. Our last WWI veteran died this year...WWII veterans are dying by the hundreds every day...and what about all those lives now and forever missing in our lives?

They were the cast members in the great drama of our life who have now left the stage. Never again to be seen, only remembered. More of a loss than we may have at first realized. Think of it!  For instance, Mom will never again be able to answer those little questions you forgot to ask. About the night of your conception...her pregnancy...the important moments teaching you how to speak...the aunts and teachers about whom only she could have explained their remarkable roles in your childhood.

All those moments, those insights, those secrets now remain forever sealed with her. Just now when you could learn so much from their details. We probably know more about such matters in the heavily   biographied lives of Roosevelt, Church, Hitler and Lennon than we do about ourselves. There's something enormously dissatisfying about that.

We've been advised [warned?] that soon we can be implanted with a chip that will record everything we do, say, and hear throughout a lifetime. A kind of bequest to our children who may, after the wake, wish to sort out who we really were. My question: Why should they know when I still don't...?

Or to put the question in historic context -- is it time the wunderkind from Silicon Valley reconsider the lofty mantra: "If the mountain is there it must be climbed!"

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK...? HELL NO!

Richard Nixon was infamous for his enemies list. Frankly we all have one. Sometimes closeted in our hearts; other times, splashed across our headlines. I can't tell you the ones in your heart, but I probably share many of the ones in our headlines.

Boston Fans Boycott Yankee Games...Cub-Sox Rivalry Spills Into Street...Border Patrols Gun Down Mexican Drug Lord...Cops Tangle With Protestors...Pentagon Warns China About Naval Exercises. Lets admit it, the Bible itself is crowded with enemies the chosen people are always being asked to smite. We are advised that love is the most powerful human emotion, and yet what crowd can't be ignited by pointing to an enemy. What enemy...? Whataya got...!

An enemy is anyone perceived as a threat. Which can range anywhere from a loud neighbor or loony mother-in-law all the way to Hitler or Islam. But here's the quirky thing about enemies. If they don't actually exist, we'll find reasons to create one.

Ask any football coach. Nothing churns the blood like a good dose of high-fiving hatred. Psychiatry has even shown how the hate card gets played in some unusual ways. The resentment among the guys on campus trying to win a date with the reluctant beauty queen....the sense of combat with the audience as the backstage cast starts with the traditional "lets get out there and kill 'em tonight'....not to mention the ancient Oedipal complex in which son hates father in repressed love for mother.

Hallmark and homilies rarely dedicate anything to the emotion of hate in us. Oh, but its there. And it's exploited whenever some segment of the population needs the support of our hatred. Say like the military munitions complex which keeps its profits high by keeping the rest of us hating someone enough to want more munitions. Kaiser, Hitler, Tojo, Korea, Vietnam, and Hussein are over with; but don't relax, we've found another one for you.

If you really need any enemy, my vote is for the farmers who have fooled around with our tomatoes. Current breeding has made them an appetizing bright red at the expense of their original sweet taste. I hate that. These are the guys really worth hating...!

FLASH! MATT FORTE RAISE PROVES FOUNDING FATHERS RIGHT

Sports fans can debate the new deal between the Bears and runner Matt Forte. But to political science fans there's no debate. His $31 million proves our Founding Fathers were right. They anticipated  confrontations like management & labor...Democrat & Republican...church & state...rich & poor. The Founding Fathers called them "factions," and created checks & balances to keep confrontations from turning into rebellions.

Right about now it's safe to assume Matt doesn't give a damn. I mean, he got his; let the other classes work it out for themselves. But when you hear about class warfare, hasn't the rich class already won the war? They say: not necessarily. While the poor class can talk about the 99:1 %, the rich class has their own target: Entitlements.

A pretty explosive term, focusing on those factions of the population who are getting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, disability checks, and public pension checks. [The dreaded Welfare State]. No lack of infuriating headlines to make the case. Every day poor people falsely getting Social Security, cheating Medicare & Medicaid, not to mention those outrageous teacher/cop/firefighter pensioners raping the system with their ill-gotten, double-dipping payments!

The headlines should make anyone angry. Only the headlines are referring mostly to the 10% who cheat the system, not the 90% who earned their modest monthly checks via years of modest public service.

We're witnessing another prickly chapter in our democracy's history of class confrontations. Matt Forte is just fine, folks. Really. It's the rest of us who need to sort this out to find whatever disinformation is coming from both sides. Until then, here's a question for you: Is Matt Forte as "entitled" to his $31 million/year as the 85 year old widow in Florida is to her $3100/month....?

ELVIS AND SPUTNIK ARE STILL BATTLING IT OUR IN OUR HEADS

All stories are true; some even happened. The American story  has happened schizophrenically, with its very first settlers a mixed bag of brains and brawn. A division among us which has helped shape our national psyche throughout the centuries.

In the 20th, conventional wisdom reported a particularly schizoid split in the Woodstock Sixties. For the better or the worse, depends on which side of the split you stood. But once again conventional wisdom was wrong, for perhaps an even more epic split had already erupted in the Pleasantville Fifties. A pair of dueling icons: Sputnik [brains] and Elvis [brawn]. What's more, the icons still duel in our heads today.

In 1957 the Soviet Union shocked us out of our post-war supremacy by getting their sputnik into orbit before we did. About that same time, a singer named Elvis shocked us out of our white-bread-ballads with let-it-all-hang-out rock n roll. At first, most Americans disliked both arrivals.

Actually, the two would unleash old genies that had been dueling in our heads from the get-go. Sputnik stirred the nation's brain [new appeal to the rigors of math & science] while Elvis stirred its brawn [revived appeal of the rawness of feelings & freedom]. In effect, re-booting the old cultural counterpoint between -- what shall we call it? -- genius-America and gusto-America.

Looking back, consider the way Eastern bankers and Western gunslingers, campus academics and campus jocks, Silicon Valley performers and Hollywood performers have each written the American story in such opposite ways. In effect, the Fifties were mostly a new edition to America's long-standing schizophrenia:  Always admiring but resenting our best minds all at the very same time.

 In politics that's been a recurring problem for high-IQ pols like John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Adlai Stevenson, and George McGovern. Meanwhile, press-the-flesh pols like Andrew Jackson, Warren Harding, and Ronald Reagan have done much better. Today's campaign re-echoes this story as both candidates try to satisfy both the brainy and the brawny side to a fickle electorate.

In the coming months, track the campaign-ads. study the fact-checkers. trawl the gaffe-counters. analyze the TV-debates. There will be an avalanche of information and dis-information from both sides. Behind it will be two teams of experts each trying to find that magic chord voters love to hear. The sound of a really smart guy with some really smart answers to our messy problems.

But...

He can't sound too smart, look too smart, act too smart. Instead, he has to be able to present us with an easy-to-understand package of smart answers while at the same time sharing a back-slapping cup of coffee with us at Emily's diner in the morning, and a bottle of beer at Gus's saloon in the evening. You know, sputnik-genius side by side with Elvis-gusto.

Almost sounds like casting for a billion-dollar movie. Come to think of it, it IS!













 

WHEN YOU CAN'T SLEEP AT NIGHT, WHAT DO YOU PUZZLE OVER?

Winston Churchill had a way with words. Take his: "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." If you think he was referring to a woman, well, so do most men. In fact he was referring to the old Soviet Union. Actually, it can fit a rash of riddles. While I don't know the ones that plague you, these are some of the ones that do me: Kids & pets...cops & crooks... liberals & conservatives...coming & going:

* Lately sociologists have confounded us with a pair of conclusions. People love their pets [I knew that] but have their doubts about whether children add to their lives. The riddle here is what can pets do for me besides cost me less...?

* Lately the media send us mixed messages. They feature the rate and roar of gangland crime every day, imploring the police to get aggressive. And yet when they feature the police getting aggressive they call it brutality. The riddle here is how are the police to get aggressive politely...?

* Lately the Wall Street Journal reported conservatives are happier than liberals. Coming from a conservative paper, that's no surprise. What is a surprise is their reasoning. Their research shows liberals are too open-minded to alternatives to feel as secure as single-minded conservatives. The riddle here is does this mean a closed mind is a terrible thing to waste...?

* Lately I find myself studying the second wedding ring on my finger, because it's a family heirloom going back to an 1803 wedding of a "J to J with love." Whenever I look at this band of gold from so very long and far away in our family, I ponder all the joys and fears that passed between J and J; and all the others down the generations. The riddle here is almost an aching one, for I struggle to believe all those feelings among all those Spataforas are simply a blip on the cosmic screen. Here today and gone forever tomorrow. Our species has forever struggled with this Is-there-an-afterlife-after-all...

Oh, you thought I had the answers to these riddles...? Please...!!

THERE'S ONLY TWO WAYS TO SURVIVE THE VULTURE CULTURE

Joe Paterno is in a grave and Jesse Jackson Jr in a treatment center, yet the vultures continue to circle. It's the way modern society functions. First build a pedestal, then crush it. You get a high twice!

While alumni and voters join the media in swooping in to pick the carcasses dry, there's this hypocritical squawk about justice.  Nothing wrong with justice so long as we wear its weight on our own shoulders as well. Anyone remember that great punchline: "He who is without sin let him cast the first stone..."

No sense here in defending the victims or in victimizing their defenders. We're all part of this vulture culture. At one time such things as family honor motivated us to take up the sword in noble revenge. Now we do it with pen. It's really true: The pen can be mightier than the sword.

Whether the media, the paparazzi, or we are right or wrong, the vulture in us needs satisfaction. Gnawing on some occasional sun-drenched body parts fills that need very nicely. Only even vultures only devour what they find, they don't manufacture their own prey like we do.

How to survive these winged monsters? There's the Donald Trump Way: You thrive on it. There's another but long neglected way:You act with such strict honor that there's little for the vultures to find. Lets see, looking around the field of battle, it's easy to spot the Trumps thriving in the glare of attention. They proudly live by the rule: "Survival of the fittest because let face it we're best fit to survive!" As for that other way, that honor thing: "If that's your best hold card in this game, you lose!"

Footnote > At the end of the game, the vultures get all the players. The only difference then is some of the carcasses are wearing finer clothes.

CHICAGO'S HOT SUMMER 2012: POSSES & PREACHERS

If you're an American male, you've been lapping up shoot-em-up Westerns all your life. Oh, sometimes we update them by substituting 6-guns with missiles, but it's always the same good-guy-beats-bad-guy-and -gets-girl-in-the-end. The formula was patented long before even John Wayne or Tom Cruise.

But if you remember, just about the time the hard-charging posse was ready to throw the rope around the dirty varmint's neck to gratify our lust for vengeance, that damn preacher [or maybe school ma-rm] would show up to heal their rage with the balm of justice [see The Oxbow Incident for details].

It's not all that different today in another hot-summer Chicago. The passionate posse of our rage spills over in the sports bar and at the 19th hole with: "How long are we going to lets these punks get away with it! In my day, the cops came in shooting first, reading their Miranda Rights a helleva later!"

And you know what...? Often that was true. Only the facts show that killing the bad guys often only spiked the gang rates. Posse-police didn't succeed any more then than they do now. Because the same facts show there will always be more breeders than bullets.

The "breeders?" Everyone knows who they are: the broken families and busted neighborhoods where the good kids die young. Only not everyone knows what to do about it. Sure, better rearing, schooling, and caring. But each of these institutions -- the family, the school, the church -- is almost in as much disarray as the breeders.

Now what? To be perfectly and dismally honest, humanity has been asking that very same question ever since Cain killed Abel. Psychiatry calls it the libido...sociology calls it the environment...theologians call it the human condition...big city mayors call it another hot summer!