Thunderbolts and Madness

There is a scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone, hiding out in Sicily after killing Sollozzo at Louis' Italian American restaurant, first sees his future wife. He is overcome. The guys with him start to give him a hard time, telling him that he has been struck by the thunderbolt. The thunderbolt hits when a man is struck dumb and weak in the knees at the sight of a woman.

Over Thanksgiving this year, I was struck by the thunderbolt. It had been over three weeks since I had seen my wife. This was the longest separation in our marriage. She came home for the holiday from serving our country and our new president. She walked in the house and the family rushed to the front door to greet her. When I saw her, I went weak in the knees and felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I could not believe how incredibly beautiful she was. Strangely, I was also hit by regret and longing. It was the longing you feel when you look at an incredibly blue sky or perfectly still lake and want that moment to last forever, to embrace and own and devour it so that you can keep it and recall it whenever you want so that this intense feeling is yours to control. But you can't.

One of the lines from A Winter's Tale that has always stuck with me is that "To be mad is to feel with sadness and joy the intensity of a time which has already been or has not yet arrived." I looked at my wife, was struck by the thunderbolt, and felt I must be mad, lost in emotions and feelings and thoughts I had not experienced in over twenty years.

Maybe these are the feelings I felt when I was in Detroit in 1985 and saw her for the first time. Too much time has passed for me to remember. I hope they are - but if they are, they must mean I am losing my mind. Feeling with intensity a time which has already been. Lost in the feelings of the past and feeling them with intensity now, hoping now as an older man that I can bring these feelings back at will, but also knowing they come at unexpected unplanned moments over which I have no control. Happy to have felt them again, so painful, so exquisite, so unbidden, so intense. And fleeting, uncontrollable. Madness.

Dope

Jon Stewart made a public service announcement last night. After Rod goes to jail, we will have seen 50% of the last eight Illinois governors go to jail. 48% of murderers end up doing any time.

So kids, if you are trying to choose between becoming Governor or Illinois or a murderer, please keep the above statistics in mind.

Happy Together

“I’ve got this thing,” Mr. Blagojevich said on one tape, according to the affidavit, “and it’s [expletive] golden. And I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not going to do it. And I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”

Mr. Blagojevich (pronounced bluh-GOY-uh-vich), a Democrat, was arrested at his home at dawn Tuesday on charges of conspiracy and soliciting bribes. A lawyer for the governor said he denied any wrongdoing.

People who live outside of Chicago, or Illinois, probably have a hard time appreciating the anger and joy we feel at this development. Blago (as we affectionately call him) has been under investigation for three years. Everyone knew he was a scumbag. What we didn't know is how incredibly stupid and/or narcissistic he is.

Would you, knowing the feds have been after you for three years, then go on to try to sell the President-elect's Senate seat to one of his closest friends? One of my colleagues said that Blago regularly walked around the office talking about how he would be the next President of the U.S. This is how we define narcissism. Blago was so taken with himself that he could not see how any of us would view his behavior as anything other than corrupt.

I have a hard time deciding whether he embodies pure stupidity or evil. Hannah Arendt had the right term for him - "The Banality of Evil."

I suppose we in Illinois are fortunate that the worst this Governor did is line his own pockets. Our last Governor's actions, in selling licenses to unqualified truckdrivers, led directly to the deaths of six children of a minister. An unqualified driver using a license Ryan allowed him to buy ran into a minivan and killed 6 of 8 children of a pastor and his wife. Truly evil. Blago was just selling favors. But it gives you an appreciation of the banal behavior that can lead to truly evil outcomes.

Ryan and Blagojevich let the people of Illinois down, they have taken actions which have led to the deaths of innocents, and they have shown themselves to be beneath pity and sympathy. Hell was invented for men like them. I hope they are happy together. In Hell.

And for the six children killed by Ryan's greed, and the countless of other Illinois citizens who have suffered for their banality, please know that in electing Barack Obama Senator four years ago, we showed America we are not stupid. We want to believe in Hope, and Greatness, and the best of what this country has to offer. But we have been deceived, twice in six years. Let us hope we have the wisdom to take the higher road when next given the chance.

The Advent Conspiracy

A good friend of mine had this video posted on her blog. It is so compelling, I have to share it.

I hope to spend my Christmas taking lots of long walks with my family and making lots of yummy food in a toasty warm kitchen surrounded by the smells of cookies baking and turkeys roasting and coffee brewing.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

This is the Foster Avenue exit from Lake Shore Drive in January 1967. You can find the story at the Tribune here: TribPhoto

I'm a Loser

I watched a TV show called "The 10 Worst Football Teams of All Time" today. I was looking for a diversion from studying and paper-writing.

Number five on the list was the 1968 Philadelphia Eagles. I found myself transported back to my childhood.

Children start developing conscious memories they retain into adulthood around age three or four. These tend to be random and when recalled are like grainy video with scenes missing. By the time I turned seven, however, the video was high def. And my passion was the Philadelphia Eagles.

My father spent many Sunday afternoons either watching football games on TV or listening to them while raking leaves in the back yard or doing other chores around the house. As an seven year old boy eager to connect with my father, I decided to follow our hometown team. I had learned to read that year, and I now had a consciousness capable of following from week to week the events on the field. With each Sunday's game and each Monday morning's sports section, I experienced misery and tears.

The Eagles lost their first eleven games. They were a miserable team.

Several things stand out in my memory; many others were forgotten until the TV show. I remember developing a hatred for Joe Kuharich, the Eagles' head coach. Even as a seven year old, I knew he was incompetent. He also mangled the language, a sin I have a hard time forgiving as an adult. I don't remember how I felt as a child. Explaining during a press conference why the team looked so different in the first and second halves of the game, Joe said "Well, we had a horse from a different firehouse in the second half."

What I didn't remember is that fans hated Kuharich so much that he received death threats during the season. The Philadelphia police ringed the stadium and stood on the roof of Franklin Field looking for snipers. Players refused to sit or stand close to Joe when on the sidelines. They worried the assassin might be a bad shot.

The only redeeming aspect of the season was the potential that the Eagles would perform poorly enough to get the first-round draft pick and gain a star for the next season. Of course, the Eagles went on to win the next two games, blowing their chance at the top pick. Eagles fans were so angry, they booed Santa Claus when he appeared on the field in the game before Christmas. To this day, people talk about Philadelphia fans as so mean that they would boo Santa Claus. What the reports fail to mention is that Santa was clearly drunk. He meandered around midfield and almost lost his footing several times before he was yanked off the field.

Oh, and the player the Eagles lost out on in the draft? OJ Simpson. OJ would go on to become a dominant running back in the NFL before being acquitted of murdering his wife. Of course, OJ would then go on to participate in a spectacularly stupid robbery attempt. He was sentenced to 9 - 34 years in prison today.

I wonder how all of these events shaped my young tender psyche. Certainly, when friends ask me why I root for the Bears and am not a bigger Eagles fan, I flinch reflexively at the memory of that 1968 Eagles season. It is fitting that one of the players on that team was Mike Ditka. Ditka hated Kuharich, too. I consider Ditka my football redeemer. Ditka was the coach of the Chicago Bears in that magical 1985 season, when the Bears went to the Super Bowl and I watched each game on the couch in the apartment of my new girlfriend-to-become-wife.

I know it's just a game. Today, football is a pleasant distraction. For a seven year old boy desperate to connect with and impress his father, football was a lifeline. That is, until it turned into a toxic mix of murder, drunkeness, incompetence and hopelessness. As I learned, though, these are the characteristics of all Philadelphia sports fans. It is the only NFL team in the league that has a prison in the stadium so that unruly fans can be sentenced and jailed during the game.

My early Philadelphia fandom prepared me well for my current vocation as a Cubs fan. Without the threats of assassination.

Please Mr. Postman

We receive a lot of mail. Some of it is even ours.

We get a lot of magazines and even more catalogs. We get catalogs from places we have never heard from, let alone order from. And we receive a lot of first class mail and bulk mail.

Some of the mail is for us. Bills, of course, and invitations. Letters, rarely, but always appreciated, and cards more often. More and more solicitations for donations these days.

We also receive mail sent to us in care of the condo association. Allyson is the treasurer, and everyone in the association sends her their dues. But I don't think the condo association mail is a source of confusion for our postman.

The source seems to be all of the other people who live with us who do not share our last name. I have noticed this issue before, when our niece lived with us. That was in the old house. After she moved in and started to receive mail, I noticed that the volume of mail intended for other people started to rise. I had forgotten about it until recently, when campaign workers started having their mail sent to us.

So we get our mail, and the condo association mail, and now the mail for these other people who live with us temporarily who do not share our last name. This summer, a few people moved in, and some of them changed their address to our house. Shortly after, we started receiving their mail, and then random pieces of mail.

Some of it shares our house number, but is sent to a house on another street with our house number. Typically, the mail is intended for a house a block or two or three away from ours, which makes me think our mailman is making the error. Maybe the volume of mail going to our house number confuses him, and he just starts routing mail with our house number to our house, whether or not the street is right.

Recently I have noticed mail intended for people who live in the neighborhood and do not share our street number. This has been only a momentary setback for my theory, though, when I notice that this misdelivered mail is intended for people who share our first names.

I can see the mailman, sitting down to sort all of his mail, quickly throwing letters into piles, rapidly scanning the addresses, and every once in a while throwing a house number or first name match into our pile.

I take this mail to our neighbors. I worry about late birthday cards, urgent pleas from spurned lovers, loving missives from lonely grandparents sitting too long in our foyer waiting for me to get them to their rightful destination. These letters weigh on me, confronting me each time I arrive home, chastising me for my slothfulness. I refuse to be one of those people who are party to mail thirty years later arriving at someone's mailbox, spurring the TV news to do a report on the nostalgia of a long-lost letter finally reaching its intended recipient. After two or three days, or a week at the outset, I take the missing missive to our neighbor's house and drop it in their box or through their slot. And I feel once again all is right with the world.

Until last week. We received a letter intended for a woman who lives a mile from here. It looked like a birthday card. Or maybe a condolences card. Or maybe, worst of all, a get well card intended to cheer up someone who has just endured some awful surgery and who would be comforted that her old friend from Georgia (the return address) remembered her at this difficult time. The street number was way off. The names were not even a remote match.

This piece of mail really knocked me off my game. Maybe mail is really just a probability vector. 99.9%, or 98% of the time, you get your mail. But in some small percentage of the time, you don't. It gets stuck behind some machine at the post office or lodged in the bottom of a mail carrier's bag or delivered to someone too far away to feel enough of a connection to attempt to right the delivery wrong.

I went into a slight depression. This piece received my immediate attention, but I did not cart it the mile. I just wrote on the front, accusingly, I know, "Delivered to wrong address" and dropped it in the mailbox, hoping that maybe this time, they would get it right and Mary's get-well card would finally arrive at its proper destination. And as I did so, I said a little prayer.

Please, Mr. Postman, please, take extra care with those hand-addressed envelopes intended for sons and daughters and fathers, mothers, friends, cousins, bringing cheer, good news, comfort, celebration, please take extra care and get these messages to their intended recipients. Please take a second look at names, and streets, and cities, and in the bottom of your bag, and know that we are grateful for that extra time you take to get us our mail.

Fake Empire

As I stood in front of the stage Tuesday night, shortly after CNN had broadcast its projection that Barack Obama will be our next President, and shortly after Senator McCain made his gracious concession speech, I cried while watching a video the campaign had put together. It shows roads and people throughout the country discussing their dreams and hopes and flashing signs of hope. The video is entitled "Signs of Hope and Change" and can be found at the link on the BarackObama.com website.

I had seen the video first in the stadium in Denver the night President-Elect Obama accepted the nomination. That night, I sat next to my daughter, soaking up the pure Denver air and the atmosphere of hope. The video summed up the journey that the campaign and all of us supporters had taken on this road to a new country. This night, I stood with my wife and son and his girlfriend and 250,000 other Americans, celebrating the audacity of hope. I cried with joy and exhaustion and disbelief, that this country at this time elected this leader.

Suddenly, I was overcome with terror. I recognized the song on the video - it is "Fake Empire" by The National, remixed without the words.

I usually love the sly irony of music counterposed against visual images. My current favorites are the UPS commercials with that long-haired adverstising executive sketching his ideas in brown ink on a whiteboard, all to the music of The Postal Service. I love the delicious crosscurrent of UPS using a song from The Postal Service. And I love this song by The National. It is compelling and original. It supports the video well, the drumbeat insistent and moving forward. But the title suddenly hit me as inappropriate.

Fake Empire on our night of triumph? Was this some sick joke of a subversive new media Obama campaign staffer, undercutting the accomplishments of our new President-Elect? Is the title meant to imply the false hopes of the future, that we are building a Fake Empire?

I was desperate to find the lyrics. I tried listening on the tinny speaker of my iPhone, but I could not make out the words. I found them, and post them below for you.

I felt relief. The images in the song are gentle, heart-warming, inspiring. Maybe the new media staffer who had selected this song, captured by the beat and tune, after reading the lyrics, and acknowledging the potential danger of the ironic title, chose to believe that those who got the joke saw Fake Empire as a reference to the past eight years. We're half-awake in a fake empire. And now, maybe we are waking up from this nightmare. Despite the shape in which we now find ourselves, our American values and the simple joys of this American life are still with us. This song celebrates those joys, even in the midst of this Fake Empire that is now coming to an end.

I listened to President Barack Obama's speech even harder than I thought possible. I cried some more, this time hugging my wife so hard, missing her already as the thought of her flying away to DC to work for this President and the pain of that separation weighed on me. So proud of her for working so hard to end this fake empire, and her contribution to make this moment and this speech possible.

I loved the humility of the President-Elect's speech. I loved the rhythm of his words. Yes We Can. After reading the lyrics below, I noted the echo, from the song's "let's not try to figure everything out at once" to the President-Elect's caution that we won't get there in one year, or maybe not even one term, but we will get there.

We will get there. Here's to the end of our Fake Empire. Here's to celebrating this hope-full future, to the end of fake empire building, and to the hard work ahead of us, re-building this nation, with a renewed sense of purpose and hope and optimism and faith.

The National
Fake Empire
Stay out super late tonight
picking apples, making pies
put a little something in our lemonade and take it with us
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

Tiptoe through our shiny city
with our diamond slippers on
do our gay ballet on ice
bluebirds on our shoulders
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire