I don't "see" Illinois

Perhaps I was just one of those children who sadly grew up with an insufficient imagination.

But when I look at eBay to see how the bidding is going on a cereal flake shaped like the state of Illinois, I shake my head in amazement because all I see is a corn flake.

THE NOTION THAT bidding was at $200,500 (as of the first minute of Tuesday) to buy a nugget of food that, by now, is so stale as to be inedible strikes me as ridiculous.

What is our society coming to that people are willing to throw away perfectly good money to buy a cereal flake. If I wanted a flake that badly, I would go out to my local supermarket and buy a box of Corn Flakes for $3.59.

The odds are overwhelmingly good that I could find at least one flake (if not several) in the box that would come just as close to resembling Illinois as this flake allegedly does.

Part of my problem with this so-called news story is that it is just so blatantly pointless. Even if the cereal flake does resemble Illinois (and it doesn’t), who cares? It isn’t a terribly significant story. Nor is it particularly interesting.

TWO WOMEN FROM Virginia found a cereal flake in their box of corn flakes that they want to believe is some sort of vision. Of what, we don’t know. No one has said yet what, if anything, it is supposed to mean.

This is just the kind of trivia that takes up television airtime and newspaper space from issues of more significance.

I wish I could take a whack at a particular news organization for wasting time and space on this story. But the Illinois cereal flake is a perfect example of what is wrong with the news business these days – an over-reliance on the (ugh) Associated Press.

It was the (ugh) AP that picked up on reports out of Virginia that local people were making their absurd claim. That caused it to get spread across the country, and probably around the world.

WHILE OTHER PARTS of the world see the Virgin Mary in newly washed windows or the Virgin of Guadalupe burned into the surface of tortillas, we see Illinois in a cornflake.

Personally, I couldn’t help but notice that a newspaper in neighboring Indiana – the Times, based in Munster – put the story on their front page, with a full-color photograph of the cornflake that allegedly gives us an Illinois vision.

That probably means we have a batch of Hoosiers laughing at us now, wondering why our state would turn up in a cornflake. Now if we were to get a vision of the state of Indiana, it would probably turn up in the exhaust fumes emanating from racecars at the Indianapolis 500.

Now that would be a vision worth seeing, although the smell of so much exhaust would likely smell something fierce.

I COULDN’T HELP but think back to that moment three years ago when residents of a northwest side neighborhood along the Kennedy Expressway noticed something unusual about a salt stain on the concrete walls of an underpass.

To them, the image looked like the Virgin Mary in her shroud, taking a break from appearing on tortillas across Mexico to bless us Chicagoans with her image.

I remember the way that wall became an informal shrine, with devout Catholics setting up religious candles and flowers and more artistic renditions of the blessed virgin – for those of us who could not see the image for ourselves.

It’s a good thing those paintings were there, or else I never would have been able to figure out how anyone could possibly think the oval salt stain could resemble the Virgin Mary.

THE BEST I can come up with for an answer to this great visions question is that some people just want to believe. It doesn’t matter what, but they want to.

The religiously devout want to think that the sighting of the Virgin Mary is evidence that a miracle is about to happen, or that we are blessed, or maybe that we should take the time to watch our surroundings so as to reduce the chances of something bad happening.

It’s almost like the Rorschach tests – those ink blots that different people see different images in, and what you see says something about our individual personalities.

SO WHAT DOES it say that we now have a vision of the state of Illinois turning up in a corn flakes box?

Does this mean that the Land of Lincoln is destined to be the home of the next president of the United States? Personally, I’d have been more impressed if someone had produced a corn flake in the shape of Barack Obama’s head – ears and all.

That would be a sign worth seeing. And what does it say about my personality that the first thought I had about an Illinois vision was to associate it with Obama?

LIKELY, IT MEANS I’m paying too much attention to this year’s presidential primary season – particularly since it has already come and gone here in Illinois (but there’s always the chance that the candidates will come to the portion of the Chicago-area that falls in Indiana – their primary is May 6).

But my final thought upon seeing the alleged Illinois vision in a cereal flake is to start feeling a rumbling in my stomach. Perhaps I’ll get a bowl of cereal.

Just not corn flakes. There’s no way I’d pay that much money for a flake, especially since I could easily envision it falling on the floor and getting stepped on – thereby reducing that thousands-of-dollars purchase to corn dust within seconds.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: One can check out the eBay auction (http://cgi.ebay.com/The-Great-Illinois-Corn-Flake_W0QQitemZ110233337338QQihZ001QQcategoryZ1467QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) for themselves, just in case they think I’m exaggerating the amount of money that someone is willing to pay for an alleged vision of Illinois.

A news blast from the past – the Virgin Mary spent a summer living in a Kennedy Expressway (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/20/national/main689630.shtml) underpass in Chicago.

Documentation can be found here (http://members.aol.com/bjw1106/marian.htm) about the many past visions around the world of the Virgin Mary.

For people who are willing to spend so much money for a single corn flake, here are a few more cereal-related items (http://www.kelloggstore.com/Collectables.aspx) one could purchase. And no, Kellogg Co. did NOT pay me anything for this promotional plug.

"The Fugitive" preserves memories of real Chicago St. Patrick's Day festivities

When it was released in 1993, “The Fugitive” received fairly positive reviews for the way in which the film resurrected the imagery of a hit 1960s television program while not being completely tied to its memory.

The film starring Harrison Ford inspired a sequel based on the activities of minor characters – the U.S. marshal’s agents who “heroically” stand up to an attempt by corrupt Chicago cops to cover up a crime by one of their own (only a Dirksen Federal Building geek could dream up that scenario).

BUT TO ME, the memorable part of “The Fugitive” was the way in which it showed off Chicago. Despite its oversimplification of the way the legal system works in criminal cases, it showed off elements of life in Chicago and its seedy underbelly.

And it also showed off a ritual that has become a part of the Chicago cultural landscape – the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

According to the storyline, the “Richard Kimble” character (played by Ford) is trying to elude federal agents after he escapes from a jail at City Hall. He flees and happens to wander into the parade, which is taking place at that very moment.

A couple of scenes of Ford milling through the crowd were shot specifically for the film. But the bulk of the parade scenery used in the film is a real version of the parade – specifically the one that marked the 1993 version of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday.

WHEN THEY WANTED to show off Irish dancing girls in ethnic costume doing their slip jig dance, we got to see the real girls dancing down Dearborn Street.

When we needed to see parade floats, we got to see the real thing. Ditto for a sea of people dressed in Kelly green articles of clothing and girls with shamrocks tattooed on their cheeks, and guys sloshed from drinking too much green-dyed beer.

When the film wanted to show a political person using the parade to attract attention for themselves, they showed a real Chicago politico walking down Dearborn and waving his hands to the crowd with a dorky smile on his face.

That is how then-Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris got his three seconds of cinematic fame. That’s not an actor, Roland was the real thing (which has since inspired him to joke that he should use his royalty payments for his cameo appearance in the film to finance his future political campaigns – the punch line of that joke being that his cameo was an unpaid appearance that he had no clue would happen until he saw himself on the screen while watching the film in the theater.)

AND WHEN THE film needed to give us the appearance of a mayor being hounded by reporter-types, trying to ask him questions while he’s marching down the street, they included a shot of Richard M. Daley surrounded by the City Hall press corps.

I actually covered that particular parade for United Press International (no, I don’t turn up on camera) and was vaguely aware that some sort of film was being shot. But no one had any clue just how prominent the imagery would be in “The Fugitive.”

What makes this cinematic moment so special is that it preserves (in a sense) the way the parade used to be – back in the days when parades were literally held in the heart of downtown Chicago.

Since then, Chicago has shifted its parades from Dearborn Street cutting down a canyon of skyscrapers and other century-old office buildings to the generic confines of Columbus Drive.

ADMITTEDLY, THE CURRENT location of the parades (which was used by the city again on Saturday to celebrate the image of St. Patrick) provides a space that can more easily be isolated from traffic than Dearborn Street.

It also is on the edge of Grant Park, which means that there is more open space, thereby making it more comfortable for people who come from all around the Chicago area to see the parade that is supposed to be the chance for Irish Chicago to show off its numbers, but often turns into a multi-ethnic drink-fest.

But to me, the St. Patrick’s Parade (and all the other citywide parades held on Columbus Drive) lost something when they were taken off Dearborn Street.

Watching the parade go south on Dearborn through the heart of the business district (literally inside “the Loop”) gave the event a feel for being in the strong part of Chicago. One could see the mightiness of the city, could almost feel its strength just by watching the event. One could almost see just what Carl Sandburg was talking about when he labeled Chicago the “City of Broad Shoulders.”

WATCHING A DVD of “The Fugitive” these days and seeing the parade scenes makes the powerful impact of Chicago just jump off the screen.

Now, the current event feels like it’s being held in the park, with trees and nature around it. If one looks off in a certain direction, they can see the downtown Chicago skyline looming over.

But if they look in any other direction, Chicago almost disappears. It’s almost like the parade could be held anywhere.

That was the feeling I got the one other time I covered a Chicago-style St. Patrick’s Day parade. The year was 2003, and the event consisted of a four-block walk along Columbus Drive.

THERE WERE SOME groups that were long finished with their portion of the walk, packed up and gone home by the time other groups at the end of the line were just beginning their part of the parade.

I even recall President Bush, whose participation was the highlight of that year’s event, only marched the first half of the parade, before getting into the heavily-armored limousine and driving off with Mayor Daley for lunch at an overpriced Rush Street restaurant.

My point is that the modern event has become a made-for-television production (literally, it was broadcast live on super station WGN-TV). It has lost much of its feel for the city, which is what made the event so special to begin with – and what made it worthy of comparison to the St. Patty parades in New York and Boston, the two other big festivals that give the Irish in this country a chance to flex their Irish muscle.

FOR A TRUE feeling of what the character of Chicago is about, one has to pay attention to the South Side Irish Parade along Western Avenue (which was held a couple of weeks ago, due to the fact that Easter Sunday is approaching and parade officials did not want their Irish event coinciding so closely with one of the holiest of all Christian holidays), or even some of the parades held for the holiday in surrounding suburbs.

So even though this year’s parades are over, I’m sure the bars – both real Irish and pseudo-Irish (Bennigan’s anybody?) – will be overflowing with people enjoying the drink specials and creating memories for future generations.

They’d be better off celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by getting a copy of “The Fugitive” for a holiday viewing, instead of being the star of a film made by someone with a video camera built into their cell phone that shows them staggering around intoxicated while wearing too much green.

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Wright not wrong on question of race

Listening to audio of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he sounds almost like Adolf Hitler – in that I mean both men have a commanding presence that forces you to listen and a gravelly voice that can reach such high decibel levels that makes everything they say sound so harsh.

But when one actually reads the words spoken on video tapes that are causing some people to say that Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has a “racist” minister, anyone of sense would have to conclude the Rev. Wright is justified in much of what he says.

WE HAVE A race problem in this country. It is a blot on what otherwise is the great existence of the United States of America. While it might not be as blatantly violent as it was decades ago, we’re not going to be able to move beyond racial issues until we honestly address how bad the problem was.

Too many of the people who are trying to turn the retired Rev. Wright into a political issue seem to be of the type who would prefer to ignore race out of some hope that the issue will go away and things can go back to the way they used to be – before all the loud-mouth civil rights types forced us to pay attention to the problem.

That’s basically what Wright is making us do when he says things like, “Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single-parent home. Barack was.” This VHS cassette of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's vitriolic sermons was once commercially available on Amazon.com, although the Internet-based service is currently out-of-stock and unsure if it will ever have access to more copies.

And when he talks about the United States’ involvement in activities that are construed by some people of the world as just as harsh and violent as any of the terrorist activity we condemn, he is touching on a vein of thought with some validity.

LET’S NOT FORGET the reason former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein ever rose from the ranks of third-rate dictators to become a serious threat to world peace is because the U.S. military backed him against Iran when it served our country’s interests during the decade-long Iran-Iraq War. Then, that fully armed pit bull turned around and bit us on the tushy.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we’re indignant,” Wright said. “Because the stuff we have done overseas has now brought right back into our own front yards.”

And giving us a touch of Malcolm X beyond the version that filmmaker Spike Lee tried giving us several years ago, Wright adds, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Now some people are going to be upset that Wright has compared the 1945 U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons to the 2001 terrorist hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How dare he make such an “un-American” statement!

BUT IT IS not a new thought. It’s not even terribly original. I recall a professor two decades ago at Illinois Wesleyan University (then and now, a very Midwestern place) tell us during a U.S. history course that when it came to deadly use of nuclear weapons, the scorecard for mankind read, “Harry S Truman – 2, Rest of World – 0.”

Admittedly, this professor wasn’t a Truman fan, and I know the arguments that use of the bomb saved lives by ending World War II more quickly. But the statement was a valid attempt to force us to consider the consequences of actions and judge for ourselves whether a positive outcome ever justifies the use of horrific means.

Now I understand that Obama on Friday made something of a public statement intended to put some distance between himself and Wright.

He said the private conversations the two men had were for personal guidance and never delved into the type of fiery rhetoric being criticized now. He said he would have publicly criticized such talk had he ever heard it personally.

BUT I REALLY don’t think Obama has anything to be apologetic about. I was glad to hear that he is not totally denouncing Wright.

In listening to the so-called controversial recordings that some people would like to think of as more offensive than the Nixon tapes, the closest I can come to a statement to criticize Wright on is his comments about race and gender.

“Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people,” Wright said, adding later, “Hillary has never had her people defined as a non-person.

“Who cares what a poor black man has to face every day in a country and in a culture controlled by rich white people?”

WHILE HE’S RIGHT about the situation of African-American people in this country, there have been eras in our country’s story when people of Hillary’s gender were considered little more than non-persons.

One could just as easily make the statement that Barack has never had his gender defined as a non-person, and it would be just as accurate. Of course, that’s what we count on Michelle to be there for – to give him that bit of an intelligent female perspective whenever the testosterone levels of Team Obama get to be a little too high.

In fact, it is this balance between the inequities suffered by women and black people that I see as being behind the whole flap earlier this week that resulted in Geraldine Ferraro having to step down from her un-paid post as a Clinton campaign adviser.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position (as front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary),” Ferraro said. “If he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is, and the country is caught up in the concept.”

ON A CERTAIN level, Ferraro (who herself was the first woman to be chosen by a major political party to run for vice president – remember 1984?) is absolutely correct.

The “country” is caught up in the “concept” of Obama-mania, which could result in the first non-white president of the United States. (I don’t want to hear about how he’s bi-racial, which makes him part white. Only half-wits who have a problem with it seriously bring that issue up).

Obama-mania is so intense that a segment of the liberal population that normally would be very receptive to the first serious campaign of a woman to be U.S. president doesn’t want to hear about her.

CLINTON, WHO HAD hoped to campaign as the Democratic darling who would advance the country’s gender preferences into the 21st Century, instead is reduced to having to be the candidate of the political establishment. The progressives have turned elsewhere to the point that if she does manage to win election in November – the bulk of liberal talk is going to be about how we lost the chance to have an African-American president, not how we finally have a woman.

That fact has to be frustrating to Clinton’s hard-core fans, and all I hear in Ferraro’s comments to a California newspaper is that frustration being articulated. I don’t hear a racist, the way some people try to portray it.

I also don’t hear a racist when I read the words of Wright. When I listen to the words of Wright, I might think that someone has gone off their medication, but then second thoughts make me realize his reasoning, and that he might actually have a legitimate point.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I realize Wright used the word “n----r” during one of his sermons. The UPI Stylebook (which I use as a guide in editing this site) says, “Do not use racially derogatory terms unless they are part of a quotation that is essential to the story.” I honestly believe that particular quote was NOT essential to understanding what Wright is about, and that the only reason you have heard it on television newscasts is because some half-wit TV producer is infatuated with so-called “dirty” words.

Here’s the official propaganda (er, uh, biography) published by the Trinity United Church of Christ, from which Wright (http://www.tucc.org/pastor.htm) is now retired.

Is Saturday Night Live relevant or not?

I find it ridiculous for people to complain that Saturday Night Live is somehow responsible for the Barack Obama campaign’s inability to “finish off” opponent Hillary R. Clinton’s presidential dreams.

The same people who say the show is kissing up to Clinton at the expense of Obama are the same ones who go around claiming the show is irrelevant because nobody watches (almost like the Yogi Berra-ism, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded”).

PERSONALLY, I CAN’T remember the last time I watched a full episode of the show (although I recently watched a DVD of episodes from the show’s first season and occasionally catch cable television reruns of earlier years), but I am skeptical that any portrayal of Clinton would be enough to sway the Mood of America.

Throughout the years, the NBC program of comedy sketches that in some ways is little more than a rip-off of that Chicago institution, “The Second City,” has incorporated the politics of the times into its humor.

Everybody still remembers Chevy Chase’s “impersonation” of then-President Gerald Ford, although it really was nothing more than Chase stumbling around and acting stupid – just because of the two times Ford fell on the airport tarmac. Chevy Chase and Dana Carvey are two of the few Saturday Night Live cast members who actually dictated the way the public perceived a politico. I doubt Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton is going to make this duo a trio. Just off the top of my head, I also recall Dana Carvey as President Bush the elder (and as whacked-out Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot), and the impersonations done by Dan Aykroyd and Norm MacDonald of one-time Senate leader Bob Dole that cemented the impression to many people of the Kansas politico as a mean, bitter old man.

BUT THIS IDEA that the show’s political humor somehow tars or praises every single politico is just wrong. Anyone who is trying to blame a television program for a political candidate’s flaws is just looking for excuses.

Ultimately, reality triumphs over dramatic interpretations, particularly when it comes to a political character with such a well-defined personality as Hillary Rodham Clinton. There’s nothing that Amy Poehler (the one-time Chicago actress who these days is doing a “Clinton” character on the show) could say or do to change their perception.

Now for those fans of the show (personally, I think it died after the Aykroyd/John Belushi pairing left in the late 1970s) who cite the examples of Chase, MacDonald and Carvey as examples that I’m wrong, I’d say they are proof that I’m right.

That is three actors during the run of a show that has lasted 32 years. That’s not many, even though the show usually tries to lead off every single episode with a sketch of political parody.

JUST LIKE MANY people only think of the name Brad Hall as “Mr. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss,” there are a lot of Saturday Night Live actors who did political impersonations, but nobody remembers.

Although people still remember the sketch when Ron Reagan Jr. appeared as himself and danced around “the White House” in his underwear as a parody of Tom Cruise in the film “Risky Business,” does anybody remember who played Reagan the elder in that sketch? (Randy Quaid, with Terry Sweeney as first lady Nancy – I had to look it up).

And while Phil Hartman kind of had the ability to parody President Clinton’s southern drawl, neither he nor any of the follow-up actors who impersonated Bill have really gotten his mannerisms down.

I’m sorry, but it just isn’t sufficient to say “I’m Bill Clinton” while wearing heart-covered boxer shorts and acting like a lecherous pervert around ladies of the twenty-something generation.

EVEN CHASE’S IMPERSONATION was more a product of its era (the mid-1970s), rather than any serious interpretation of what President Ford was really about. Watching those old Jerry Ford sketches is agonizing because they have not aged well – they are about as awful as listening to all 18 minutes of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

I wonder if the reason Obama supporters are looking to this lame excuse for the primary losses in Texas and Ohio is because Saturday Night Live has not come up with a quality Obama character.

“All publicity is good publicity,” and Barack as the focus of a humorous sketch every week would benefit him. They didn’t complain when The Second City devoted an entire series of their live comedy shows to an Obama interpretation entitled “Between Barack and a Hard Place.” Obama himself attended the show.

Obama has also had his share of pop-culture moments on national television. I still remember his spot from two years ago where he appeared to be declaring himself to be a presidential candidate, but all it turned out to be was a Monday Night Football spot that plugged the Chicago Bears.

JUST THIS WEEK, Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. For anyone who’s about to say that Rolling Stone is for old fogies, I’d argue so is Saturday Night Live. Obama-mania has had its share of high-profile moments. To claim he is somehow being neglected is silly.

I’d be more concerned if Jon Stewart were doing fawning Hillary bits on The Daily Show. Even though Stewart always makes it clear he is an actor (the fourth-male lead in “Death to Smoochy”) who does a “fake news show,” too many people take his comedy bits too seriously – as though one can get a serious understanding of the world from Stewart’s jokes.

Most of Poehler’s “Clinton” work is destined to be watched by people flipping around their cable channels who happen to stumble across the E! network just after midnight.

Eventually, it likely will turn out to be like Dana Carvey’s 1988 impersonation of J. Danforth Quayle taking the oath of office as vice president. The gag was that his intellectual capacities were so diminished that he had to be fed the oath word by word by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, but it is not among the more memorable.

WHEN IT COMES to Saturday Night Live political humor, there is one sketch I remember. It was the show’s parody of the 1992 presidential debate (Hartman as Clinton, Carvey as both Bush and Perot), which started off with long-time NBC announcer Don Pardo telling us that the ’92 presidential campaign was the, “challenge to avoid saying something stupid.”

To this day, I hear Pardo’s voice reciting that line in the seconds before I deal face to face with any political person – regardless of their party or views on the issues. Stupid statements just have a knack of rolling from the tongues of the politicos.

They even come from the lips of political followers who try to blame a comedy show that has seen its best days for Obama’s flaws of recent weeks.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Too many L.A. geeks take television way too seriously. It (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-snl13mar13,1,6959732.story) is just the “boob tube,” nothing more.

Is it that the modern media trivializes politics, or is it the trivial nature of modern politics (http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080313/OPINION05/803130304/1006/OPINION) that causes the content of too much news programming to be, for lack of a better word, stupid?

I never thought I'd be trashing the Chicago Sun-Times in the space of their own web site

For those of you who actually pay attention to every little detail about the Chicago Argus, you noticed earlier this week that this weblog became one of many across the country whose content is distributed by BlogBurst. (Their logo is at the bottom of the right-hand column of this weblog).

Their service (which doesn’t pay me a dime) takes the content of weblogs and distributes them to companies that publish websites, which then have the option of putting links to the posts on their own websites. Many of these companies are established newsgathering organizations who use the BlogBurst-distributed content to supplement their own work.

I OFFERED UP the Chicago Argus content (which does not yet provide me with any income) out of some hope that BlogBurst would expand the numbers of people who find, read and enjoy this site, since people who click onto a BlogBurst link can be taken from wherever they were on the Internet directly to this site, if they wish.

But I never envisioned what would happen next.

The Chicago Sun-Times website (http://www.suntimes.com/) is a BlogBurst client, and their site immediately latched onto eight commentaries I wrote here during the past month. Copies of all eight are now posted on the newspaper’s website. For all I know, more may turn up there in coming days and weeks (although personally, I’m more interested in seeing if Fox News websites have the nerve to run any of my commentary, which is more honest than a lot of the claptrap we hear from their loudmouthed, high-paid talking heads).

That is how it came to be that one who goes rooting around the depths of the Sun-Times website can find the commentary I wrote Feb. 19 about how ridiculous the newspaper’s coverage was of the Northern Illinois University gunman’s girlfriend and her teary interview with CNN.

THE COMMENTARY WAS a part of my occasional “Ink Stained Wretch” series of media criticism where I try to channel the ghost of the Chicago Journalism Review of old and offer explanations of how news coverage went awry, or could have been done more responsibly.

On that date, the Sun-Times (a newspaper I still enjoy reading, even in its current emasculated format) was my target.

Either some editorial staffers at the Sun-Times are secure enough in their jobs to accept the headline “Is the Sun-Times off-kilter in DeKalb coverage” on their own web site, or someone wrote a computer program that selected my commentary without really understanding its content.

I’d like to think it’s the former, but my personal experience with computers in the work world makes me realize it probably was a dumb machine rather than a clever person at work.

FOR FEAR OF sounding like a crabby old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to “Get Off My Lawn,” there are too many people in this world who are growing up thinking about how to find key words in an essay, rather than comprehending the content of whatever it is they are reading.

Reading this juxtaposition of critical commentary (http://tinyurl.com/22w8nk) published in the original source was the highlight of my day Wednesday, and one of the most unusual things I have ever seen turn up on a so-called Mainstream Media website.

And now, a month later, I still think it was tacky for the newspaper to over-hype that teary-eyed interview, which wasn’t even their own to begin with.

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Cubs to play at The Cell; What's the big fuss?

Am I the only person who has no problem with the Chicago Cubs playing a season or more on the South Side of Chicago?

Some of the rhetoric spouted by people who hate the idea of the Cubs playing some “home” games at the stadium built by the People of Illinois for the Chicago White Sox borders on the ridiculous.

CUBS FANS SOMEHOW think it beneath themselves to venture into the “real” Chicago (south of Roosevelt Road), while some Sox fans are so small-minded as to want to play mind games with the thought that the Cubs would be a homeless baseball club.

Let’s face facts.

The Cubs play in a 94-year-old-and-counting building that is in need of major renovation (it should have been significantly rebuilt three decades ago) if it is to remain the long-term home of the long-time-loser National League team.

Reconstruction calls for a significant amount of work that takes time, particularly since we in the Midwestern United States have to endure real winters (not some floofy San Diego version) that can put a cramp in construction schedules. (God is NOT a Cubs fan who will work a miracle to make it possible for the project to be complete in less than one year – like some fans are dreaming).

The South Side of Chicago likely will be the focus of all Chicago baseball for a short stint in the near future. Photograph provided by State of Illinois.

That means the Cubs have to find a temporary stadium, similar to how the Chicago Bears played one season at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Ill., and the Chicago Fire real football team had to shift to a college football stadium in suburban Naperville for two seasons when Soldier Field underwent its major renovation in the early 2000s.

No, the Cubs are not going to play “home” games in Milwaukee or St. Louis or Peoria (where the minor league Chiefs have a nice, new stadium in the downtown area on the Illinois River).

All this adds up to the fact that when, in the next couple of years, the Cubs move ahead with the renovation of Wrigley Field, the team will play at U.S. Cellular Field.

US WHITE SOX fans are going to have to get used to the notion of these ridiculous people coming to our team’s building and using it as the setting for a year or two of their losing ways.

What stands in the way is the possibility of White Sox team “pride,” where ball club officials might try some sort of legal move to prevent the act from taking place.

I can already hear the White Sox grounds crew registering their complaints that playing an extra 81 games on the field will cause additional wear and tear to the stadium’s turf.

Somehow, I think Roger Bossard and his crew (who have a reputation in baseball circles as being among the best groundskeepers in the business) are capable of handing the demands of a smooth, level field for 156 games played every week between early April and late September.

(DREAM ON CUBS fans, you’re not playing in the World Series on the South Side).

What gives the White Sox leverage in the use of the building is the lease they signed with the State of Illinois.

The state owns the building, but the White Sox have the upper hand if the matter ever goes to court.

Under the terms of the state’s lease, no event can be held in the building within 48 hours either before or after a scheduled White Sox game. The lease also gives the White Sox the right to veto any suggestion of holding events in the building at any other time.

THE ONE CONCESSION is that the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority does have the legal right to stage one event in the building every year and keep whatever proceeds they can raise, as part of the way of offsetting the cost of maintaining a stadium for the White Sox up to the standards demanded by Major League Baseball.

In recent years, the state has used that right to stage an event by holding concerts – usually in late summer. Remember the Rolling Stones and the sight of a geriatric Mick Jagger prancing around the White Sox turf?

There may very well be a way of negotiating a deal to allow the Cubs to use the building, particularly if the White Sox are cut in for a significant percentage of the parking and concessions revenues for Cubs games played in their building.

Also, don’t be surprised if White Sox officials then went out of their way to start putting up the Old-English script “Sox” logo all over every inch of the park so that it showed up in every camera shot for people watching Cubs games broadcasts on television.

THINK THIS IS a petty way to do business? It is totally in character with the way baseball people think.

Baseball’s one precedent for a construction-related shift took place in 1974 and 1975 in New York when historic Yankee Stadium underwent a major renovation. That building was stripped down to the foundation, reinforced, then re-built with more comfortable plastic seating, high-tech (for the 1970s) scoreboards and video displays, escalators and other doo-dads.

The Yankees had to play for those two seasons at Shea Stadium, the Queens-based stadium that is the home of the New York Mets. Yankees officials of that era say the Mets put in so many ridiculous conditions restricting the ballclub and the extent to which they could use the building and its clubhouse facilities.

Some say part of the reason Yankees owner George Steinbrenner still hates the Mets so much is that he remembers just how much they messed with him for those two years.

DOES ANYBODY DOUBT that Jerry Reinsdorf could be equally petty, especially when he has the law on his side?

Let’s not forget that when Soldier Field was re-built, the Chicago Fire originally wanted to shift their matches (about two per month) for two seasons to U.S. Cellular Field. The White Sox vetoed the measure, which is why they ultimately wound up playing at North Central College – which has a nice stadium for a Division III football program.

I always thought that was a mistake on the part of the White Sox.

Letting the Fire in could have built up some good will, while also getting people who let their irrational fears about the South Side get the best of them. They would have come to see some soccer matches, realized the building the White Sox play in is a comfortable, functional building and may very well have returned to watch the Sox play.

BESIDES, THERE WAS a precedent to having the Sox share their stadium with soccer teams. The Chicago Sting, back when they were a championship-caliber team (North American Soccer League titles in 1981 and 1984), played their games at the old Comiskey Park located across the street from U.S. Cellular Field.

To my mind, Karl Heinz Granitza and Arno Steffenhagen are just two of the many quality athletes who took the field at Comiskey and enhanced its reputation as an athletic paradise for generations of Chicagoans.

So let the Cubs come to The Cell. Let’s not forget that current Cubs owner Sam Zell for many years was a minority partner of Reinsdorf with the White Sox. If anybody can reach some concessions, it will be those two.

IT WILL BE good to expose the suburban and rural Illinois types who are deluded enough to cheer for the Cubs to expose them to a part of the city many of them prefer to ignore and to a building many of them deride even though they may never have visited.

Perhaps exposure to a contemporary building with amenities is what it will take to get them to realize that their aging building has seen its best days. It is time to let go. Perhaps they will stop eulogizing the notion that cramped aisles and a funky aroma wafting from the men’s room is somehow a part of the character of baseball.

I have just one bit of advice for any North Sider who ventures to The Cell.

I KNOW LAKEVIEW neighborhood residents who don’t particularly care for baseball because of the boorish behavior of Cubs fans, particularly at those moments when “nature calls” and they use neighborhood lawns to relieve themselves.

Anybody who acts like that in Bridgeport or Armour Square resident will cause a reaction somewhere along the lines of a resident grabbing his “Bill Melton” model baseball bat (from Bat Day 35 years ago) and using it to try to teach you some manners.

Show some class, Cubs fans, and you will be welcome on the South Side. It’s as simple as that.

-30-

Chicago, N.Y. each have unique personality behind their brand of political corruption

When I learned the New York Times was making a big splash with its story that the governor of New York was a customer of an Internet prostitution group, I couldn’t help but remember a conversation I had years ago with a fellow reporter-type about news judgment and the difference between Chicago and New York City.

My counterpart said the choice of which stories to cover is rarely the old cliché of “man bites dog” (what is unusual), but rather is which stories feed our stereotype about what a place or person is like (what is all too predictable).

THAT PARTICULAR DAY, the two lead stories on the national newscasts came from New York and Chicago. The New York story was the ongoing criminal investigation into a woman who was mugged and raped while jogging in Central Park, while the Chicago story involved the modern-day “G-men” getting indictments against five political people (including one sitting Chicago alderman) who were tied to organized crime.

In New York, nice girls get jumped in Central Park, while in Chicago, The Outfit runs things and the aldermen are all crooks. They reinforced our stereotypes of the cities.

On Monday, I saw similar elements at work in what are now the big stories coming out of New York and Chicago. Both involve politics and consist of governors tainted by forces bigger than themselves to the point where some people think their futures are uncertain.

But that’s where the similarity ends. The essential character of Chicago and New York take over, providing the stories with their differences.

NEW YORK GOT to see the state’s first lady, Silda Spitzer, look totally miffed about having to stand at her husband’s side while he publicly apologized for his behavior. Federal prosecutors say they have the governor’s voice on a recording arranging to meet a call girl (just to “talk politics,” I’m sure) at a Washington hotel.

Here in Chicago, the federal court trial of Antoin “Tony” Rezko enters its second week, and we are expected to learn just how government officials pressure each other to do things that are meant to benefit their friends – rather than the general public

On Monday alone, we got to hear testimony from an official in charge of appointing people to low- and mid-level government posts, saying how she was pressured to put a wealthy attorney on the state pension board because he had been a significant contributor to Blagojevich’s gubernatorial campaign.

Prosecutors say Rezko himself may also have received some money from the attorney in exchange for the government appointment – which is where legal officials say the line was crossed from legitimate lobbying efforts to criminal activity.

SO IN NEW York, political people buy a girl, while in Chicago, they buy a job that can give them more influence which could make them more wealthy – and perhaps use that extra money to go out and buy a girl or two. Who knows?

The point is that a Chicago political scandal gets into the nitty-gritty of government operations and of a batch of people who want power, but not the public perception of it. Tony Rezko would have been more than content if he could have gone through life as an unknown to the public, but knowing in his own mind that he could get the politicos to jump whenever he gave the order.

In New York, the political scandal is about sex and public influence.

It is about flash.

IT IS ABOUT the outside activities of the politicos and whether they are morally inappropriate for people of power. It fits the mentality of the New Yorker who wants to think the world ends at Manhattan, and where everything is bigger and flashier there than anywhere else on Earth.

Let’s be honest. If not for Eliot Spitzer’s title (and former positions of prosecutorial authority with the U.S. attorney’s office), this story would be nothing more than cheap titillation.

It would be an excuse for television stations to take pictures of a computer screen with the Emperors Club VIP web-site, showing pictures of the girls and salaciously letting people know those girls’ sexual favors could be bought for between $1,000 and $5,500 per hour. It also would be something that even the New York Post would get bored with after one day’s worth of editions.

Now I’m not saying that Chicago politicos don’t mess around. But in the Chicago political culture, the out-of-wedlock sexual activity is more likely to involve an elected official and some sort of legislative aide or staffer, or even the good ol’-fashioned cliché of a secretary. (Remember former Gov. George Ryan’s chief of staff and his secretary, for whom he went to prison as part of a deal to keep her from doing any hard time?)

PERHAPS OUR POLITICOS are too cheap to “buy” it.

But the Chicago political scandal involves the actual government activity itself.

It’s as though our political observers view the scandal story as little more than a true-life civics lesson – one that people should learn so as to comprehend just why so many apparently silly decisions are made by politicos.

The Rezko trial will give us (if it lives up to its pre-trial hype) many details about just how political people are persuaded to support certain acts, and reject others.

WE’RE GOING TO learn of how Rezko used his connections to political people to get favors for his friends (particularly those who wrote out large campaign contribution checks) that politicos would never have considered doing – had they been thinking for themselves.

Supposedly, we’re going to learn that Blagojevich himself did nothing to stop Rezko, even though he allegedly was fully aware of how involved Rezko was in getting favors for his financial friends. Those people who didn’t like Blagojevich much to begin with want to believe this will be the start of a process that ends with the governor’s conviction and imprisonment.

Personally, I’m skeptical. Political corruption cases have a knack of producing expectations that are never met, and it could very well turn out that our governor is just a clueless sort – not a criminal mastermind.

I’M TAKING THE same attitude with the prospects of testimony that will show presidential hopeful Barack Obama to be a very close Rezko friend. Obama admits to ties to the man who wanted to be friends with everybody in politics. Testimony on Monday indicated that Obama was one of eight people whom Rezko once consulted about certain government appointments.

There’s nothing wrong with asking a sitting U.S. senator for political advice, although it puts Obama in a position where he looks stupid and appears to owe Tony, theoretically, a favor or two.

Stupidity. That’s the key word when it comes to many political corruption cases – both the Chicago and New York type.

A FORMER FEDERAL prosecutor should realize that cavorting with prostitutes is illegal. Corruption cases are filled with instances where political people were thinking with their heads in the clouds.

But one has to be careful not to judge their stupid thoughts for criminal activity in and of itself. Motive is everything, and it is often hard to prove.

It’s not like stupidity in and of itself is a federal offense. If it were, just think of all the people who would be locked away in prison; probably even yourself, at some point in your life.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Here’s the New York Times account (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/nyregion/10cnd-spitzer.html?hp) that caused cable television news operations to wet their pants with glee all afternoon on Monday.

He’s sorry. (http://www.chicagotribune.com/video/?slug=chi-080310spitzer-wn) He’s really, really sorry.

The Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-rezko-court-story,0,7957753.story) is attempting to use the timelessness of the Internet to provide running coverage of the trial of Tony Rezko. This link could be worth saving and checking repeatedly.

Tony Rezko, as perceived by political observers from outside the world (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/illinoisnews/story/5F5F2A18194B31328625740600191294?OpenDocument) of Chicago politics.