It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt...

Last weekend on a rightwing talk radio program Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) declared herself a foreign correspondent, behind enemy lines, hoping to keep her constituents "armed and dangerous" against the impending "energy tax," as she refers to the proposal of industrial cap-and-trade carbon emissions regulations. Clearly, as Bachmann's spokesperson explained, the Representative was speaking metaphorically. But there is a pattern of violent metaphor developing in the rhetoric of the minority party's leadership.

Last month, Sean Hannity's website featured a users' poll discussing the best ways to violently overthrow the government, given the choices of military coup, armed rebellion or war of secession. Now a reasonable interpretation is that this is all just fun and games. But if we stop to consider the size and tempramental diversity of their audiences, the proliferation of firearms and the passions animating the margins of our politcal discourse, it is not beyond the range of possibilities that individuals and/or groups will eventually act out these goofy fantasies with violence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports a rise in the organization of active hate groups in the United States from 888 in 2007 to 926 in 2008. Americans are no strangers to our own brand of modern terrorism, from the anti-government militias that produced Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh who slaughtered 168 people with a truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to racist pseudo-religions like the World Church of the Creator that produced Benjamin Smith who murdered Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Birdsong and shot up ten other people in a shooting spree from a north side Chicago Jewish neighborhood to rural Indiana.

Not long after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) had a wild idea. On Friday, January 30, at the House Republican retreat at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, Rep. Sessions said that Republican legislators ought to start thinking of themselves as "insurgents." Spurred on by the angry debate over the finer points of the economic stimulus bill, Sessions went even deeper into his quest for a GOP structural model telling editors of National Journal's blog Hotline, "Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes."

Pressed for clarification, Rep. Sessions clarified, "I simply said one can see that there's a model out there for insurgency."

I admit to thinking it's clever, if even a little bit hyperbolic, to draw comparisons between the Republican Party and Hezbollah. The self-righteous faith and aggressive dogma shared by both Lebanon's "Party of God" and our own GOP remain something of an open invitation to comparison. Both parties tend to elevate religious dogma over civil law and both parties tend to indulge their militant nature, but only Hezbollah clearly did not care who got hurt. Reps. Bachmann and Sessions, however, wander carelessly from their public responsibilities the more comfortable they get with their metaphors. And their colleagues and constituents ought to say so now.

Meanwhile, Blackwater Worldwide, the private security firm of Nisour Square massacre fame has rebranded itself as Xe, and is still trying to open a training camp in Illinois.

My Bloody Valentine

Happy Valentines Day, sports fans....

As pitchers and catchers for the Chicago Cubs reported for spring training yesterday, Friday the Thirteenth, Manager Lou Piniella held forth with what the monumentally dysfunctional Cub Nation may appreciate alternately as hope, excitement and furiously bitter sarcasm,

"I learned a lot," Piniella said. "I'm 0-6 in the postseason [with the Cubs].
There's room for improvement."

At the start of the last year of the first decade of the 2000s, this much we know. Hot on the heels of the Cubs' best regulation season in a hundred years, only to forget how to pitch, hit and field just in time for the playoffs, we now have a strong nomination for the understatement of the 21st Century.

Roll With It

On August 13, 1935, at the old Chicago Coliseum, Roller Derby was introduced to the world of American sports. The brainstorm of promotor Leo Seltzer, the first roller derby took the form of a race between one man and one woman on a banked track.

As a kid, I remember watching the roller derby on its banked tracks featuring brutal clothesline hits on the "jammers" and theatrical fights on the grainy UHF channels of our black and white portable TV.

The derby has come a long way, through the twisted peaks and valleys of American culture, from adolescent guilty pleasure to righteous competition. Today, Chicago features not one, but two roller derby leagues. Both Windy City Rollers and Chicago Outfit Roller Derby race on a flat track, which liberates the new game from much of the pro-wrestling aura of the old game while preserving a wild spectacle of controlled abandon.

Whether you have to ask some old geezer like me what a UHF channel is, or if you have your own memories of the ultra-high frequency broadcast spectrum, nowadays you can catch up with the Roller Derby action on the Windy City Rollers' YouTube channel.

[Pic h/t National Roller Derby Hall of Fame]

16-Inch Patron Saint

While pulling coats, looking for interested players for a softball team in Chicago's western burbs as registration for the 2009 season approaches, the mind conjures thoughts of legends. Check it out...

UPDATE: For clues and speculation on the identity of some of Royko's fellow patrons at The Billy Goat, click here.

SON OF UPDATE: You may order a copy of Royko at the Goat for your very own at The Week Behind.

A Respectable Loss

The Fighting Huskies of Northern Illinois University were fortunate enough to achieve a bowl bid in coach Jerry Kill's first season in DeKalb. But the luck ran out with the game clock as the Huskies fell to the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs, 17-10, in the dog fight that was Independence Bowl XXXIII. Despite Northern's domination of the game stats, turnovers and special teams breakdowns ultimately told the full story.

NIU loses alot of seniors in some key positions, but Coach Kill and freshman quarterback Chandler Harnish give Huskie Nation much to look forward to in the coming seasons.

"Forward together forward...."

"Happy Krimble and Merry New Year"

But seriously, folks. Even as we remain a long way from spring training, Clincher really enjoys Christmastime. From the colored lights across the neighborhoods and stores, and the extra effort that most folks put in to make the season joyful, to all those classic TV reruns of Burl Ives and Charley Brown. Even the long-familiar carols make the season uniquely enjoyable, year in and year out. About the only thing that comes close to ruining it is the traditional "War on Christmas" trash talk. But there will always be killjoys who feel some nagging need to exploit any reason to accentuate our differences and advance a divisive agenda to make some asinine point that ends with their moral superiority over the rest of us. They will never go away. Indeed, they belong in the palate of free and vibrant societies as much as blizzards and wind chill factors and hazardous driving conditions belong to this holiday season.

Perhaps no modern expression of Christmastime spirit is stronger for its unrestrained comfort and joy than those old Fan Club holiday recordings by the Beatles. I have never been what you might call a Beatlemaniac, but a big part of what I look forward to each Christmas is DJ Terri Hemmert spinning those old 45 RPM flexidiscs on WXRT:

Hello! This is John speaking with his voice. We're all very happy to be able to talk to you like this on this little bit of plastic....

This is Paul here. Everything that John said goes for me, too.... So, I'll finish now with a wishing everyone happy Krimble and merry new year, and especially all the ones who paid the subscription.

Even the Xmas war drum triumphalists can't ruin a good Krimble.

[Krimble pic h/t, The Adventurer's Club]

The Dark of Sun & Moon

While lacking all the popularity, marketability, pageantry and controversy of winter's Official National Holiday, Chanuka fortunately retains most of its modest charm as a traditional solstice festival....

The Hebrew calendar being guided predominantly by lunar phases, the eight-day Chanuka festival consistently brackets the new moon closest to the winter solstice; or, the darkest part of the northern hemisphere's year. For each of the eight nights of the festival, an additional flame is lit in a nine-branch candelabra called a chanukiah.

In some narratives, the sequential lights commemorate a miraculous day of life to what should have been an insufficient supply of sacramental oil in the old Temple in Jerusalem following the victorious Judean-Hasmonean revolt against Greco-Syrian occupation of ancient Israel. Others may find a hopeful primordial satisfaction from the ritual increment of lights as daylight slowly begins to last longer, and the Hebrew calendar's Tevet moon reveals its first slivers in the nighttime sky.

However anyone chooses to approach it, may we all enjoy the warmth of hope and home at this season of our planet's orbit around its star.