February 2009 Archives

THERE'S NOTHING FUNNIER than a bullet riddled chimpanzee corpse to make a humorous point about the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil logic of Washington deal makers. At least that must have been the considered the opinion of the editorial leadership of the New York Post when the best-and brightest at the Post agreed to run the dead monkey gag by cartoonist Sean Delonas on the the paper's saucy Page Six. On the pavement of the cartoon lies a great ape turned to swiss cheese by bullet holes. Behind the smoking gun, from the mouth of the police officer who shot him, come the words, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

Har-Dee-Har-HAR-Dee-Har-HAR!

Boy, did he skewer the Washington elite with that topical gag "ripped out of the pages" of this week's newspapers. See, there was this famous performing chimp in Stamford, Conn., that went nuts and almost killed an old lady. When police responded to a frantic 911 call from the animal's owner, the chimpanzee named Travis turned its anger on the men in blue who -- get this -- ran away and jumped inside their patrol cars. Tee-hee!

Eventually, the police fired several shots at the 200-pound primate, which has between five to seven times the strength of a man that size. Travis ran back into his house where he was found dead inside his cage. His 70-year-old victim lies in a hospital bed clinging to life. Meanwhile President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus package that was greeted by investors on Wall Street with a 300-point drop in the Dow.

It was a perfect storm of nonsequitors.

How you could possibly compare the desperate and brutal termination of a pet chimp gone willd with the most important economic legislation passed by Congress since the Great Depression? Let's start with that question before we proceed to the question of how Travis the dead monkey morphed into a cartoon advocating the assassination of Barack Obama, according to outraged protesters who see the cartoon as racist and more than enough reason to shut down the New York Post, which has published longer than any newspaper in the United States.

If I may quote Struther Martin, who was Paul Newman's chain gang warden in Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here, is a failure to communicate."

The outrage from the public about the cartoon -- as much because of the racist implications as the poor taste of making a joke about a cop shooting of a famous monkey -- was all caused by a bad cartoon. It wasn't funny. It didn't make a point. A parody or satire has a clear recognizable connection between two unalike people or ideas. What the cartoonist meant is still a mystery, despite the New York Post editors' response to the protests that it was a "clear parody of a current news event."

OK, the chimpanzee represents the people who wrote, voted and signed the stimulus package, one of whom happens to be the most prominent African American in the world. So who are the cops? Are they Republicans, Wall Street, Main Street, you and me? Why did they shoot the chimp dead? Did the chimp attack them? Are they trying to protect us from the homicidal chimp?

This whole contraversy is the result of imprecision by the cartoonist. We don't know what he's trying to tell us. We've got a dead monkey killed by cops and bleeding out on the concrete like William Blake's Red Dragon. We've got a wise cracking policeman whose symbolic importance is anyone's guess. And we've got a point of view that is both inpenetrable, racially suspect and in poor taste.

The perfect storm. And the New York Post brought all this on themselves for all the wrong reasons.

WE LIVE IN STRANGE TIMES, you and I. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Nothing is new that way. But the rich getting richer are doing so in almost unimaginable ways. And they've been doing it for so long that we don't even question it anymore. In 1931 durng the brutal early months of the Great Depression, Babe Ruth was awarded an $80,000 contract by the New York Yankees. Ruth, who would retire four years later with a lifetime batting average of .342, on top of the all the home runs and all the strike outs, was asked by a reporter if the Babe deserved to be paid an annual salary worth $5,000 more than the President of the United States. Famously, the Bambino answered, "I had a better year than he did."

Having a better year than Herbert Hoover in 1931 was the presidential equivalent of having a better year than (4-8) Phillies pitcher Adam Eaton in 2008. The difference is Hoover got voted out of office and Eaton got paid almost $8 million last year -- 100 times what Babe Ruth was paid in 1931 and 20 times what Barack Obama will earn as President in 2009. As obscene as everything that went on on Wall Street that has collapsed before our eyes because of the greed that inspired it, we live in a Lala Land when it comes to what we pay professional athletes compared to, for instance, the president of the United States. Forget about you and me. What's a President Obama worth? How much should he or any president get paid compared to an average ballplayer in any one of the major league sports.

The median or average salary of a Major League Baseball player is four times what the president makes, $400,000 a year. The only MLB club that pays its average players less, according to the USA Today database, is the Florida Marlins at $395,000. The average -- the union scale -- player in the NBA earns seven times more than the president. The NFL is modest by comparison. The average player in the National Football League makes two to three times what the president makes, which is not bad pay for offensive linemen. I was surprised to see that the average NHL player makes more than three times as much as the president. Let's call it the Obama Line.

Let's start keeping track of anyone's salary -- athletes, entertainers or bankers -- as it compares to the annual salary of the President of the United States. If someone is being paid 700 points above the Obama Line, he'd better have a very good year.

IT SMELLS LIKE VICTORY. Or springtime. Or the hint of the coming sun. A month ago I couldn't have gotten the sun and Center City into the same shot from this position atop Belmont Plateau where I see my share of dawns on my way to teach at Montgomery County Community College.

Day by day the sun is marching south (moving to the right) on the eastern horizon.. Sometime between today and the sumer solstice on June 21 it will rise right over Center City. I hope I'm there to take the picture.

IVE GOT NOT NO FINANCIAL GOALS. seriously. I don't think about money. Most of which I don't have but with a working wife survival can happen. When I see these TV commercials about money management it always seems to be about the anxiety of the people who have more money than I have, or the easy money available to people who have less money than I have. Either way, they all want to get their money now.

That's why I love Bruce Springsteen who is the richest man I love for all the right reasons. I have never met Bruce, but I know our meeting will go like this : "Hey." And we will be best friends forever. Because we believe in the same things and have spent our lives saying the same things about everything we believe in. Brian Wilson and Bruce Springsteen have been my guides through my musical adoration life. Bruce the rampant lion always; Brian the recumbent superstar restored.

How can I worry about money when I have these two nitwits to worship? I'm working on a dream.

I'm working on a dream.

How can I explain that better than Bruce sang it or Brian wrote it. I'm working on a dream. "Please don't make me argue anymore. I won't make you worry like before." I'm working on a dream.

Whoa, baby.

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WHAT DID I EXPECT? I walked down to the bottom of Regent Street at 45th Street near the top of the best sledding hill in West Philadelphia around one o'clock last night (this morning) to see what the rumpus was all about. By rumpus I mean loud happy noises made by loud happy people enjoying the unexpected and picturesque snowfall that transformed the natural bowl of Clark Park, once again, into a Currier and Ives postcard. The only thing missing were the sleds.

Call me old fashioned (Jesus, did I just say that?) but I believe that a great sledding hill swarming with between 30 to 50 merrymakers in the hour between one and two in the morning on the occasion of the first winter storm with big fat snowball-making snow flakes. . . I believe that the rumpus made by everyone hurtling headfirst, butt first or sideways down that sledding hill his should include at least one sled.

I saw everything but an American Flyer and Rosebud last night while watching a vigorous attempt by people half my age to navigate uncollapsed the snow-slicked western slope of the former pond watered by Mill Creek that now runs underground in concrete to the Schuylkill on its way to the ocean. Not once the entire time did I see anything resembling the device I grew up calling a sled.

You know, two metal runners or blades running beneath a slatted wooden body with a flexible cross beam enabling a kid to steer downhill with either hands or feet. A sled.

I didn't see a single sled. What I did see was an Our Gang/Litttle Rascals parody of Depression era ingenuity by college students and the dreaded thirtyish hipster element I found congregated at the top of the best sledding hill east of Cobbs Creek. You would have thought these kids grew up in Bangladesh the way they confronted the options of snow-assisted gravity-powered travel technology. They went to the local dump and pilfered plastic. They surfed on "Far Sale" signs. I saw a cheap kitchen table used as a toboggan. I saw a young man repeatedly try to urge snowboard-type tricks out of a restaurant-sized Amoroso'a rolls cardboard box.

And not a single sled amid the cell phones. I saw half-pipe highway barrier barrels, blue plastic cafeteria trays, mom's webbed shiny-plastic laundry basket, clear plastic, curved plastic, huge sheets of drop cloth quality plastic that could accommodate seven people at once, assorted trashcan lids, a four foot trampoline, 24-inch cymbals from a drum set -- Drump-CHISH! -- and a toilet seat which someone hung from a snow-covered tree.

TODAY IS GROUNDHOG DAY. But when it came to yesterday, didn't we wake up on Superbowl Sunday feeling like we'd already lived through this day before -- over and over again? It was Superbowl Sunday and, once again, our Eagles were bridesmaids dressed in green and silver as the hideous bride in feathered Cardinal red walked down the aisle to meet the waiting groom, dressed in brutal Steelers yellow and black.

That should have been our wedding day, an all-Pennsylvania Superbowl, from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, through Punxsutawney and Pottsville. North, South, East and West within the commonwealth. From Paoli to Penn State, from Panic to Paradise, Peach Bottom to Penn Valley, Pigeon to Pigs Ear, Pittsfield to Pen Argyl, for crying out loud, from Pithole to Promised Land. This was supposed to be the year of the power of P. Pennsylvania Rules!

We are a weird state, Pennsylvania. Complicated. Half Dixie, half Yankee. We share a border with the Mason-Dixon line and Canada. We are called the Keystone State because we hold it all together. The Union. America. Of the 13 originals we were smack in the middle. It was in Pennsylvania that the biggest battle of the Civil War was decided. It was in Pennsylvania where Washington crossed the Delaware. It was over Pennsylvania that the passengers on Flight 93 fought back against the terrorists on 9/11. It is in Pennsylvania that their remains are honored. Pennsylvania soil runs deep with blood and sacrifice.

And yet our loyalty to Pennsylvania is scattered. We care about "our part" of Pennsylvania. We tend to despise the "other" Pennsylvania. There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania, 57 of which are ketchup, meaning thick, rich, red state Heinz Republican. The vast majority of Pennsylvania territory doesn't "think" the way we do here on the other side of "Pennsyltucky", which is a dismissive label applied by the snarky eastern elite to everything west of West Chester, south of Scranton and east of Pittsburgh.

But you know something, I'm proud to be a Pennsylvanian. I remember how unexpectedly humbled I was the first time I watched "Saving Private Ryan" when the mysterious background of Tom Hanks' character was revealed to be an English teacher from Thomas Alva Edison High School, in a nonexistent town called Addley, Pa. And how the final shot from the movie was a push-in from the 80-year-old Private Ryan's salute to the marble cross in the green grass of Normandy bearing the name, "Capt. John Miller, Pennsylvania."

And I'll bet he's as proud of his state as I am today.