God bless Father Pfleger for being on hand to console the grieving mother over the murder of her son outside a South Side community center.

And our condolences to him on having no reason to bus kids and mothers down to the State of Illinois building to protest inaction on new gun controls to go with unenforceable gun controls already in place. 

He would have to protest against easy accessibility to lethal two-by-fours.

He did manage something quotable, however:

“No longer should our children be living in this kind of fear,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina’s Church. “It’s time to forego guns and two-by-fours and have that stop being the way we treat and handle each other.”

Note he said “forego,” not “ban.” Nothing profound there, but enough to head off a new slogan, “Two-by-fours don’t kill, people do.”

The drums, they are a-thumping for 2016 in Chicago:

The 2016 Olympic Games in Chicago would bring the world to our doorsteps.

The games would bring sorely needed development to the near South Side.

The Games would bring jobs.

But perhaps, most importantly, the Games would bring magic.

Thank you, Sun-Times, for my favorite editorial today in the whole, wide world.

When Chicago’s businesslike 2016 Olympic bid team makes its final presentation in Copenhagen on Friday, expect to hear its purposeful pitch softened by emotional chords, with first lady Michelle Obama, and perhaps her husband, President Barack Obama, bringing the appeal to its crescendo.

After 2 1/2 years of working to convince International Olympic Committee members that Chicago can deliver a compact Summer Games in the heart of the city, the bid team needs to warm it up to slide past emotional favorite Rio de Janeiro, as well as well-connected Madrid and well-financed Tokyo, observers say.

Thank you, Chi Trib, for this Front Page above-fold right-hand column BIG-NEWS item. 

P.S.: I love that “purposeful pitch,” which in another context would have been a slider just nicking the outside corner, down and out.

An oracular explanation is sought at Chicago’s long-overdue Department of Zoning Oversight Fellowship Forum for a favorable outcome at City Hall.  First, PDB channels keys:

If you lose your keys, you might put yourself in their place and ask, where would I be?  Then you might be able to find your keys through a sequential path of logic, or you might just stumble across them by dumb luck.  Both result in a found set of keys, but only one path demonstrates that something is at work here beyond your understanding, a higher order.

Fair enough.  As for the long-sought favorable outcome in which the zoning administrators gave approval for three (3) sets of drawings, leaving the architect with incomplete “cosmic understanding” of what happened:

Since there appears to be no sequence of logic here, it fits that Zoning exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.  Some might call it divine.

He thanks “the oracle,” likening the challenge to “trying to take the white out of rice.”

I appreciate Chi Trib’s Clarence Page because he tells me how libs are reacting to this or that issue of the day, like the recent guerilla journalism practiced in l’affair ACORN.

This catching of ACORN people in the act was done by “pranksters,” he says. Conservative objections to ACORN demonstrate an “obsession.” Fox News’s Glenn Beck becomes “deranged” at the mention of it, as in his anti-newspaper crusade: “Pick up the phone” and call one to complain, urged Beck.

All in all, the video prank became an “embarrassment [that] sends to the world the worst possible picture of low-income Americans, the very people whom ACORN is supposed to help.” (No fair!) It “spurred Washington’s usually sluggish funding gears to spin into warp drive,” says Page, stretching metaphorical possibilities. How about, It turned off the spigot?

Page alludes to ACORN’s voter-registration fraudulency, finding consolation in a claimed lack of voting by Mickey Mouse and others. He notes Obama’s legal pleading for ACORN in a motor-voter case in 1995 but says nothing of his teaching ACORN people how to do things the Alinsky way.

Neither does he say anything about ACORN’s Alinsky-style picketing and muscling of bankers in its push to give out mortages to people who later defaulted and helped the real estate market sputter and slow to a crawl. Nor of Obama’s recent professing ignorance of ACORN’s prolific funding by the feds over many years. Nor of Obama’s presidential campaign’s hiring ACORN for millions within the last two years.

But one does not read Page for that sort of information. One reads him to catch the latest on what libs are saying, and one should not complain but be thankful for what one gets when he opens up his Tribune op-ed page on any given Sunday.

==============

Instant response: Friendly challenge from Rick in Ann Arbor:

Clarence Page ought to check with his personal psychoanalyst, just to make sure that his parole from the Mental Hospital is still good.  . . .  HOw can he possibly judge that my objection to ACORN is an obsession ???  Beside being of dubious intellectual talent, is he also a Board Certified Psychiatrist ??

How obvious can you be?  This weeper was big on today’s Chi Trib front page:

When 17-year-old Brianna Rice was diagnosed with celiac disease in February, she had health insurance.

She doesn’t now.

In the months that followed her diagnosis, her insurance company, American Community Mutual Insurance, combed through her medical records and ruled that her parents lied on her application last year.

In May, American Community not only canceled her policy, but also rescinded coverage all the way back to the day it started — Nov. 1.

Etc. 

Add Georgie Ann Geyer’s column of personal trial-morphed into argument for ObamaCare, and you have a one-two effort to massage believers and seduce fence-sitters:

WASHINGTON — I am sitting here, filled with a disbelief so profound about those of my fellow citizens who don’t seem to believe that we are in the grasp of horrendous health-care and insurance problems that I could scream, were not so many others screaming!

I could buy the ensuing sentiment if it were about impending economic dissolution through national debt that throttles growth and inflates the cost of everything in sight:

[I]t would seem that many Americans still don’t believe we have a deadly serious dilemma. It’s the old “It-can’t-happen-to-me” theme, mixed up with the ridiculous idea that government can’t do anything good at all. So let me offer my own personal story.

It’s a sad story, well told.  But she urges on us a course that will lead to a much sadder one for most of us, being “deeply touched,” as she is,

by the overarching idea behind President Barack Obama’s speech last week. “It is wrong,” he said, for not all Americans to have health insurance, “and nobody should be treated that way in the United States of America.”

Or anywhere else?  Sad it is that a smart woman with decades of experience in analyzing and deciphering world problems would so judge a national crisis as to find herself

wondering whether those who are so perfervidly against government-run alternative health insurance care at all about those of us whom the private health-care system has treated with such errant and selfish shabbiness. Who knows? Maybe next time it will be one of them.

Maybe next time it will be all of us sinking into economic and civilizational mediocrity in a fond, foolish hope inspired by deeply touching oratory.

Meanwhile, how about a newspaper with editors who aren’t so obvious about where they stand?

Later, from Reader M.: I had the same impression you did when I got my Tribune Daywatch this morning.  Yes we need healthcare reform – I get it.  Let’s deal with unscrupulous insurance companies.  Better yet, let’s deal with ambulance chasing lawyers. 

But let’s not rush into something because of a tug at the heartstrings – whatever we decide to do in a moment will take years to undo, if it is poorly crafted.  My daughter lives in Canada, and has seen the real deal when it comes to government healthcare.  She is not impressed.  Neither am I. 

I am not happy with the status quo, but I don’t want a system that will ration care or limit my options if I choose to invest my own money in my health.

My Short History of Oak Park, Vol. 1, 2004-2005, announced on the first page, is based on my Wednesday Journal columns of those years.  They drew on my life-long affiliation with this, the world’s once largest village, home of Hemingway, Rice Burroughs, and Ray Kroc.

Ditto for Short History, which is in the self-publication tradition of

Margaret Atwood, William Blake . . . Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers . . . Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L’Amour, D.H. Lawrence . . . John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.

I am delighted to see Shelley among them. Blithe Spirit in this context is, of course, based on “To a Skylark,” as was Noel Coward’s play title. I make that clear enough on the third page of Short History, quoting:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert-

That from heaven or near it

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

— from Shelley, “To a Skylark”

Go Shelley.  Go Short History of Oak Park.

===========================

Later, from fellow Midwest Writers Assn. member Hal Higdon, in the matter of self-published authors, with a Hemingway-esque twist:

I hope you didn’t miss Rick Yager, the long-time Buck Rogers artist. His older sister was a friend of Hemingway, who once fired a revolver in the Yager house. The bullet may still be in the ceiling. Of course, I tell you this after the fact.

More about the industrious and adept Higdon, who ran seven marathons in his 70th year (he told me, and I believe it), here.  Indeed, soon to be published is his novel Marathon.

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