Letters from Kamp Krusty

Awesomely Awesome Non-Satire Here

Terri asks a great question after the last blog entry, with the 417 Rules of Awesomely Bold Leadership:

Maybe I am a moron, but I do not get what is being satirized in this post.  Usually I get you and love this blog.  I feel left out since I don't get it.  Can someone explain?

Terri, here's a long answer:  I just read a "leadership" book a friend gave me.  He was laughing when he handed it to me, last week, because he knew I would get a kick out of it.

It starts with a great story, typical of the genre:  Essentially, "So there I was, on the football field, and I just got my arm broken after I smashed the running back.  My coach said, "You get back in there," so I did.  I finished that game with a broken arm and 16 tackles.  It was right then and there when I learned you have to be tough to be a leader..." 

The rest of the book is loaded with anecdotes about how awesome the author was and remains and forever will be, amen.

And in the forward, essentially this, about the author:  "This man has won in high school football, won in college, won as a coach, and he wins at church, so you should be thankful he's taken the time to share his winning ways with you..." etc.

These books are largely self-congratulatory, and will make you come away saying, "Wow, that guy's quite the man!"  And -- far worse -- given their understandings of leadership, Jesus Himself would need to read them, because He clearly didn't succeed.  He was homeless, had only a small band of followers (who deserted him) and wound up lonely and then killed by the authorities. 

Ah, success! 

Few are the "leadership" books and seminars that would reinterpret leadership in light of Jesus.  (Though, I'm sure there are, out there, some redeeming ones.)  Instead, they tend to celebrate an American corporate idea of what a real man should be.  Of course, I loves me some America, and obviously, I'm a real man (hello, I play accordion) but flexing one's "success" muscles in front of a paying public?  Let's call it for what it is. It's isn't leadership.  It's an ego trip.

You can read the series (click here) -- but I can tell you, there's not one thing I've satirized that isn't echoed in the leadership materials out there.  They do it with a straight face, which is why people who've read these books can read my satire with a glint of pained recognition.

I once read an audacious book that tried to synthesize Jesus' leadership example with the typical Alpha-Guy American one.  (Hey, at least the author tried.)  One "rule" was, "Make time for everyone.  Jesus always did, etc." and another "rule" was, essentially, "Don't waste time with nobodies, you have to prioritize who's important," etc.  Okay.

It's my belief that Jesus is the Greatest Leader Ever.  But he was, by any reasonable American standard, one real big failure as CEO. 

But, overall, the books really don't tend to deal much with Jesus.  We're supposed to just presume that being an Awesomely Awesome Leader is what Jesus wants, because Jesus loves big successes in the church world, and why wouldn't He?  Right?

And if you aren't succeeding, Pastor Man?  Well, you haven't applied all the rules.  Or haven't read them all.  Or didn't subscribe to the series on CD.  Or, if you have done those things?  Well, let's face it:  You're not the man the Leader of Leaders is.  On Saturdays, while you're trying to fix your minivan?  He's golfing with Big Christian Athletes.  You're not him.  You're little you.

I say if that's "success", here's to the faithful failures;  people with true pastoral hearts, serving people God has brought across their paths, never getting book deals, never selling motivational CDs, and always aware that God humbles the proud, and exalts the humble.

Too Skeptical for Skepticism

Turns out, you are pretty amazing, as far as, you know, meaningless collections of dust particles go.

As before noted here, you are "more wave than particle", given that you're always exchanging particles with the rest of the universe.  And you don't mess around:  You're all new every seven years.  There's nothing left of you that was you a decade ago. 

Materially speaking, it's "Extreme Makeover:  You Edition", except without the annoying sleeveless guy. 

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My brother and I used to argue over who got to read the Cap'n Crunch box during breakfast.  We talked our mom into buying it because it was -- and REMAINS TO THIS DAY -- fortified with eight minerals!  I thought it was funny that they called whatever these were "minerals", because it almost sounded like we were eating rocks! -- until I realized, I think at age 32, that we were eating rocks.

You see, you eat rock-specks because we are made out of the ground.  You keep losing ground, and the Cap'n helps you gain it back. 

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It's funny:  I just learned "Adam" means, essentially, "Guy made out of the ground", or "Dust Guy", or "Ground-Boy".  But there's no naming ceremony for Ground-Boy in Genesis.  The first mention of his name is all casual-like, as he's naming other stuff.  It's in Genesis 2, which goes a little somethin' like this:

So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.  But for Ground-Boy, no helper was found.

You, too, are Ground-Boy.  Unless you're a girl.  The name "Eve" is classier.  But you still need Cap'n Crunch.

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So let's face it.  It's already remarkable enough that you retain consciousness, you retain a constant identity, you are "yourself", in spite of the fact that, materially, you are completely different, and always changing. 

But now things get crazy:  They just discovered that your skin cell can be "reprogrammed" to become a pluripotent stem cell.   They used to think only embryonic stem cells were capable of this.  "Pluripotent" means they can use the cell to create any other type of cell in the body.

(Think of it this way:  You used to be a single cell.  You'd think that by dividing and multiplying, you'd just have a bunch of copies of you.  But something amazing happens:  Switches get pulled that convert cells into other types of cells that you'll need, from white blood cells to brain cells.  That first cell was "pluripotent".)

So now, your ADULT skin cell can be reprogrammed, and they can grow other kinds of "you" cells from it. 

That skin cell, made of stuff that wasn't you seven years ago, has a "memory" of how to create you from the beginning.

(For further marveling:  Richard John Neuhaus, in First Things, notes how DNA information now seems to travel "backward", as well as forward.  Far out.)

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Like everybody else, I'd sure like to not be a freak.  I'd love to be hip, and enlightened, like one of those Freethinkers.  (Remember: "Freethinking" means ruling out the supernatural without evidence, while being "Closed-Minded" means allowing that it's possible.) 

That would mean explaining all this with the wave of a mechanistic hand.  Just matter in motion, laws of physics, chance mutations, survival of the fittest, etc."  I could do that, but...

Zzzzzz.

Meanwhile, you are dust in the wind, more wave than particle, constantly inconstant, and yet...somehow...you.  Almost like you had a soul.  Almost like things really did matter, like beauty isn't mere construct; almost like goodness is truly Good, "evil" seems evil because it's actually Evil, and almost like love isn't just brain chemistry.  It's almost like something keeps us together. 

It's almost like the world remains enchanted.  And wouldn't that be fascinating?

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I'm sorry.  This walking wave of dust, this Ground-Boy, is so skeptical, he's skeptical of skepticism. 

This one admits there's a God.

We "Quit Going to Church" a Year Ago

It's been a year since I posted "We Quit Going to Church".  People fairly ask, "Well, what's the alternative?  You can't follow Christ without the church."  And, of course, I've never considered doing that.

It's just that "going to church" is incoherent, I said.  You can read about it here.

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"T" made a great point in his comment on the Barna book, noting that some might think I want to destroy the sweater (of church) by holding this thread while you walk away.  He didn't put it just like that.  But people wonder, understandly, "Okay -- but now what?"

I can't answer that for you.  But T's suggestion of merely asking, "What does God want His people to be doing?" is a great one.  We start there.  Not, in my opinion, with the power of tradition, whether personal or writ large. 

This said, I write the below hoping that you don't see it as prescriptive.  The first thing people want is a how-to, and I can't give it to you.  But we gave up on "going to church", and found the church to be more exciting, more difficult, and -- ironically -- far more attractive than anything we'd experienced before.  Many have asked, "So just what is it you do now?"  I try to answer, in brief, below.

By the way:  Friends, if you "go to church", one of those event-hosting, didactic sermon-centric, or attractional models, God bless you.  Even as I loooooooong for a body of Christ that is free of the trappings I critique, I'm fully aware that there are many in "typical" churches who dwarf my maturity.

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We started getting together with a couple other families, at least twice a week.  They'd been meeting for some time, in different forms.  We ate dinner together on, say, Wednesday, and we had a time devoted to praying and singing and listening and discussing on Sunday afternoon, followed by some more eating.

Another friend joined here, another family-just-met there, and now there's fifty-plus.  Our Sunday thing grew so large, it made it daunting for everyone to be involved.  We've birthed a couple other gathering opportunities in other homes, including ours.  We also still get together for a big meal/party late Sunday afternoon.

And we stay in touch via a Yahoo group, plus many informal get-togethers and help-each-others.

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There is no master plan, and no Giant Vision.  We do not have 501c3 status, though there's nothing wrong with that, and we don't take up a collection, except when there's a need, and there have been several.

We shy away from, "Here's a big project of program I'd like us all to do together..." and instead concentrate on, "How can help each person use his or her gifts in Christ, in their own contexts?"

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There are several leaders, to varying degrees.  If any of them go on an ego trip, they will be rebuked...after everyone stops laughing.  One of our leaders, Mike, says leaders shouldn't be viewed glamorously, as the "eyes" or the "head" of the church.  Instead, the spleen or small intestine come to mind:  Absolutely not glamorous.  Often unseen.  And completely, without question, unarguably, necessary.

Our gatherings are heavy on laughing.  And -- get this -- teaching.  No one "planned" this, but our back-porch conversations are invariably challenging and provocative.  When you hang out and do things with Kingdom people, you will learn.  You can't avoid it.

It's another odd thing this past year:  I've sat through no sermons.  I've learned more about Jesus, and more about the Bible, oddly enough, than ever before.  I'm thinking in new ways;  ways that have me seeing the forest, rather than mere trees.  I know many in our group would second that.

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Money is a challenge.  Not because we have to "tithe", but because we don't.  Because our group's overhead is $0.00, our money now becomes a relational issue -- wtih God.  I have to ask, "Lord, what do you want with us?  Send people across our path who need what we have..."   

We are now able to sponsor more kids through Compassion -- something that's come across our path in a personal way -- and we can walk around with Target or Publix gift cards, for whomever crosses our path in need.  Giving is alive.

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People are a challenge.  With no paid staff, we all see ourselves as pastors, to varying extents.  And this can be draining.  The drag about getting to know people, and knowing they can't turn to some professional in your midst, is that the onus is on us (ooh:  "onus" is "on" "us" -- that's so true) to follow-up. 

The gatherings are not smooth.  People say things out of turn, not everyone naturally socially connects, and there are rough transitions.  It's challenging, as someone who knows how to plan an emotional, get-you-right-there "worship service", to just let...things...be.  This doesn't mean to refuse to correct error -- I'm not talking about that.  It's about allowing silence, letting kids ask questions that have nothing to do with what we were just talking about, knowing when to be done, and knowing when to stop everything and say, "Please pray for me." 

Like I say, not smooth.

We get together for campouts and poker games and cookouts and airgun fights and fishing and white elephant exchanges and moving parties and sometimes some of us have to live with each other, under one roof.  The neighbors think we're a little loud, and we are, but we're trying to be nice.

It's a big mess.  A year ago, a smaller mess.  Like I say, no plan, no Visionary.

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I've been wondering, for my personal life:  Is it possible to just go one day at a time, as cliche as it sounds, and try to be faithful with what God puts in front of you, that day? Would He, in turn, be faithful to hold the future?  Or should I get anxious, take matters into my own hands, and worry about five, ten years hence?

I think I know the answer, hard as it is to live.  The past several months, I've wondered the same thing about us, as a people, here in Jupiter.  Can we just try to be faithful with who the Lord brings before us, including our neighbors, each day, and see what happens?  Or do we need a master plan?

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Not everyone's going to be comfy with this.  I'm not even comfy with it.  It's hard.  And fun.  But hard.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments, and I'll try to answer what I can.

My Probably Last Cooking Show

Sometimes, I come up with my own kitchen creations.  This is something I'm kind of proud of.  It's like Chex Party Mix, except you make it at home.   It's really good.

My friend Paul said I should show my radio listeners how to do it, so we taped it on one of those new "digital" cameras.  Then Paul edited it and superimposed text to illustrate what I'm doing.

I'm pretty proud of how helpful this turned out to be.  I don't know why everything is squeezed horizontally.  You don't have to do that in real life when you make this recipe.

Serve, and enjoy!

Unresolved Chicken Soup for the Soul

There's a story about Bach -- or maybe it was Mozart -- and how, even as a little kid, he had to hear resolution.  He was in bed, upstairs, and someone was playing the piano, and that someone got distracted and stopped, just before the last chord.

J.S. -- or W.A.? -- couldn't stand it.  He tromped downstairs, pounded out the resolving chord, and then went back up to bed again, without a word.  He just had to hear it.

We're all like that.  I think about all the stories I've heard, and then all the ones I've lived, and there's the big difference:  We get resolution in the former, but the other just...lay...out there, somewhere, and, much as we pretend, there are no finish lines, no final chords, no official victories, no ends-of-story.  Not yet, anyway. 

I took the yellow bus home from our country school in St. Berniece, Indiana.  One day, I sat with my best friend's brother, Eric.  He was in second grade, I was in third.  We talked and joked about my lunchbox and a puppet I played with.  Then we got off at the bus stop in front of his house.

I stepped to the right.  But Eric ran alongside the bus, slipped, and fell under the wheel. 

Two weeks later, my mom suggested I go over to my friend's house, to visit him and his little sister.  She told me they probably hadn't had any visitors since Eric was killed, and may be lonely.  So I got on my bike.

Mark, my friend, and his little sister met me at the door, excited to see me -- or anyone, for that matter, I gathered.  We laughed and played with a top on their hardwood floor.  It was one of those that spins and makes noise and lights.  I could see their mom in the back room, smoking a cigarette.  Staring at me.

We played for an hour, until she came in the room, and started screaming at me.  She said something about how all I was doing was reminding them of what happened to Eric, and I should get out, like, now.  Her kids were stunned, and started crying, and so did I, and I ran out the door and got on my bike bawling with guilt. 

I never went back.  And we moved away.  I don't know what happened to them.  When I think about that day -- this is almost thirty years ago -- I still get a knot in my stomach.  There's no ending to the story.  So it's a story I've almost never told.

Most examples aren't this painful, but almost all the "great stories" of my life are this way.  When I speak to people, try to motivate them, try to teach them, I pull a bit of a sleight-of-hand, presenting stories that are edited just-so.  They're not "untrue", they're just dishonest, in a pedestrian way, I suppose, presenting real-life stories like Aesop's Fables, with certain resolution, as though the story were over. 

(Maybe  -- I don't know, I'm musing here -- this is a reason why Jesus's stories aren't specific "victory" testimonies, they're metaphors of the Kingdom.  Maybe he didn't want a specific "Look-at-what-happened" story to ultimately get mis-used, or give the wrong impression.)

I tell about a smashing, eye-opening missions trip for some high schoolers, but I don't include the boring stories, or the stories where some kids just really weren't impacted, how that one inspiring kid wound up getting some girl pregnant two months later.  I tell -- and hear --  "and then he became a believer!"-type stories, but don't include, " -- and yeah, okay, he's still battling addictions."

I read "look what our church is doing" accounts in newsletters, but don't hear the invariably messy follow-ups.  We get the "victory" stories over sin and depravity, but no one publishes books called, Wups, I'm Totally Messed Again.  Yet, that's where the stories of my actual life are.  We don't like our stories open-ended.  So we clean up our stories, and act like they're finished.

They're not.

I used to be a youth minister, and the conventions would feature one impressive guy after another, with remarkable stories about what happened in their youth groups.  It was really amazing!  Why was my youth group kind of a mess?  Why wasn't I inspiring anyone like that?  It was impressive!...until I realized I could pick and choose stories, make believe they were final, and, presto -- I'm awesome. 

And that inspiring day when Big Joe the Football Lineman cried and prayed?  Well, that was the end of the story!  But in reality, it wasn't.

We like resolution.  But we don't live in resolution-time.  Forgive me for ever giving the impression otherwise, that I believe myself fully resolved, fully arrived, somehow finished.  The story isn't over. 

Not everything makes sense, not everything gets explained, not every story is inspiring and ready for Tony Campolo to tell it.  Talk about "inconvenient truth":  We're living in the in-between. 

I think about Eric, his mom, or a thousand other people I've known, and I feel like I'm lying upstairs, and someone just left the piano bench, right before the C chord.   I'd walk down and play it, if I could.

You Get the Christian Radio They Deserve

As always,  I speak only for myself here.

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Next time you tune into a Christian CCM station, and wonder, "What planet, exactly, is this 'air personality' from?" please know it's -- amazingly -- Earth.

I know, it's hard to believe.  While he sounds utterly non-human, completely removed from our biosphere, he's actually a bipedal hominid, and, in many ways, like you and me.  He's omnivorous.  With opposable thumbs, he employs "tools" to accomplish tasks.  And, most encouraging, he has verbal skills, forming sentences that a normal human might also form.  He expresses plausibly human "emotions" and reactions to external stimuli.

He's actually pretty cool.

That's when he's off the air, anyway.  When he's on the air -- forget it.  When he's on the air, talking between those songs about how you should "prayerfully consider" going to a concert, about those "video games 'the kids' are into these days", and using only the most obvious humor?  That's not him.  It's not him, because the most vocal listeners just don't want him to be him.  He's been beaten into submission, by Christians immersed American evangelical church culture. 

And these people are getting the Christian radio they demand:  They're not asking for real life.  They want a dose of church culture, on the go.  And the twain may rarely meet.

If he slips up, if he's real, they bombard him with judgment, scriptures that they think he's never heard, suggestions that he should pray about it -- he's never considered that! -- and quick answers to make everything better NOW. 

If he doesn't use "I'm-on-the-team" code language, they call to point it out.  ("I notice you don't say the word 'saved' very much, and I'm concerned that...")  If he acknowledges that he's a sinner, but is specific and present-tense, the phones ring.  Whatever his show was before, it's now "Platitude Open Line", something he didn't encounter when he worked at a mainstream station.

If he makes a spiritual point, one perfectly in keeping with a teaching of Jesus Himself, but doesn't connect the dots for the simplest listener, the phone lines will ring again, with those anxious to connect the dots for him, to end the mercilessness of ambiguity once and for all.   He hears the callers channeling last week's sermon that summed it all up:  The Bible has all the answers, and why don't you read it?

He could be honest.  He could be real.  He could be human.  He could even be smart, engaging, and delightfully quirky.  He could point out the redeeming aspects of a rated PG-13 movie.  He could see all of life, enlivened and entwined with his faith.  But that's not what many church-encultured tune in for.  You get the radio they deserve.

(Please note:  The caller/complainers don't talk that way, either, in real life.  And they saw the movie, too.  But they expect this sort of posturing in Christian contexts, and, by golly, they tuned in for a Christian context.)

So he doesn't bother trying all this stuff.  He keeps it innocuous, uninteresting, over-simplified, obvious, and -- above all -- drenched in specific church culture-talk. 

What he means:  "Please don't call.  I'm on the team, okay?"   

And now the rest of the humans on Earth know, once and for all, loud and clear, at 50,000 watts:  They're not.

Here's to Nothing!

(John Santic asked me to offer a rejoinder to his bright post, to flesh out a comment I'd left about the counter-cultural nature of simplicity.  Sorry about the length here.)

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Nothing is counter-cultural. 

We figured this out not long after moving to trendy Palm Beach County, where we took up residence in a condo development that forms a ring around a pond.  Thing was, everyone could pretty much see eeryone else.  Everyone's sliding-glass back doors face everyone else's.  We started getting comments from neighbors. 

One evening, standing by the pond, a tipsy Finnish guy (he and his wife were drinking while moving out, tired of the inhospitable hood) told me -- I swear I'm not making this up:  "When I look at your family, I think about God."

I'd never talked to him before. 

"I watch you outside, and your wife, and your boy, and when you walk with your girl, and I see how your wife makes people feel -- very welcome," he said.  "It makes me think about God.  I know that's strange."

Once, a single man, a Jewish guy named Steve, stopped by with his dog as Carolyn and I sat on our little back patio.  Carolyn had talked with him some.  Me, not so much.  I have a long history of being shy...and selfish.  I'm getting better.

"You guys ought to be in a museum!"

Uh...what?

"Seriously.  You got the mom, the dad, the kids, hanging out.  When it gets dark, I can see you inside, eating dinner around the table and stuff.  You ought to be in a museum somewhere!  I love it!"

In our society's terms, what we do is a lot of "nothing".  For one, we don't send our kids to school.  (Forgive us, culture, for we have sinned.)  Carolyn's a brilliant teacher, and home-schooling fits nicely into the rhythm of our home.  I've heard the objections.  One of the more awkward, I think, is this:  "What about being 'salt and light'?  What about sending your kids into the dark places to redeem them?  What about the schools?"

Yes.  What about them?  And -- while we're at it -- what about our neighborhoods?  What about not just getting mail there, but actually living where you live?  Kids leave schools and change classes.  People change churches and never see each other again.  But where you live?  Now, there's a bit more there there.

A famous study of Chicago neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s concluded there is one thing, more than any other, that made for the "glue" of a neighborhood:  Women.  At home.  (Again, forgive me, etc.)

Turns out, when you have time to do what, culturally-speaking, is "nothing" (like walking the baby around, chatting with neighbors, letting the kids play together) neighbors get to know each other.  It doesn't happen when everyone's at breakneck speed and, when home, exhausted.

Nothing is quite something -- a very attractive something.  People long for it;  even admire it.  (One lawyer friend told me over coffee, "I hear what you're saying, about not working like crazy to buy stuff, and I want to live like that.  But -- forgive me -- you're the only one I know who actually does that.")

In this culture, "nothing" sticks out like crazy, like a...light...on a hill, or...something.  It wasn't just those two guys.  Our neighborhood knew we were odd.  The dad's home a lot, walking around with his daughter, catching lizards?  The mom is home a lot, too, talking outdoors with us about the ducks?  They waste time together.  They waste time with us.  Something's odd, here...

So:  Nothing made a man think about God.  In the U.S., right now, maybe that's not hard to explain.  We did nothing, and nothing is shockingly out of place.  Nothing means not everything, not running around infernally, not getting our kids this-lesson-and-that, not trying to sustain a lifestyle we "want" -- but not deep down. 

Maybe Jesus's offer of "rest" is not an "after your dead, rest in peace"-type rest.  Maybe it's a lifestyle, now, that invites other people out of the maelstrom.

Here's to nothing.  I don't want to sound cocky about it, but I can do nothing pretty well.

Stuff to Check Out

I've been way-busy (after a week off work, which gave me time to copiously blog) so I don't anything new just yet.

But -- check out the comment threads on the "Hitchens", the "Dinosaurs and Heretics", and the "The People Formerly Known as the Missions Committee" posts below. 

We've discussed (what I would call) the implicit hypocrisy of atheism, the faith-and-evolution thing, and a great question:  According to Jesus, which "paints a better picture" of Jesus, the Bible, or Jesus' own followers? 

As always, thanks for the civil discussions here, and your senses of humor.  It's hard in cyber-land to do that.  Especially, thanks to self-described atheist "Melquiades" for his kindness and level head. 

Krusty Miscellany

A roundup of Kamp Krusty Headlines, in lieu of actual thinking...

I'm still doing some baseball P.A. work.  I've done some major league games (Cardinals, Marlins, and Mets) but the minors are much more fun, in a postmod way.  Saturday night was "Dog Night" at the park.  Two wiener dogs got in a fight.  Shaun Groves showed up, and as he notes, I had to make many urine-oriented announcements.

Bill Kinnon, whom I love without meeting, rankled feathers with a little riff "The People Formerly Known as the Congregation." TPFKATC, for short.  That inspired some others, with varying levels of clarity in thinking, but all fun and provocative.  Here's to productive feather-rankling.

Don't ask me why we get More magazine.  But I skimmed the cover story on Katie Couric, who is a brilliant woman, a wonderful example, and we all love her.  She's no Don Imus, that Katie Couric.  She doesn't say bad things about black people, she just openly admires people who want to eliminate black people from the face of the earth. More approvingly notes her office features photos of her inspirations: Amelia Earhart, famed pilot, and Margeret Sanger, famed racist and eugenicist.  But it's okay -- she's Katie Couric, journalist.

Sammy Stephens just posted another comment this blog, announcing he's going to be on ABC later this month.  Flea Market Montgomery is still blowing up, metaphorically.  Sammy continues to rule.

Speaking of Sammy and Shaun:  Shaun performed in SoFla over the weekend, and performed his version of the Flea Market song LIVE for a befuddled crowd...that then began to sing along.  Shaun closed the song by saying, "If that song reached just one person..."

I've been sick the last few weeks.  The problem?  I went to the doctor.  Seriously.  I went for a physical, to be a responsible grown-up.  I hate going to the doctor.  I got an infection.  You don't want details.  I wound up going to the hospital.  I'm never, ever going to the doctor again, onaccounta they tried to kill me, which I find offensive.

Someone, on Monkey Kick-Off, scoerd a 7555.  Insane.  Watch the replay:  It's ridiculous.  I never get an initial kick to go that high.  I'm T.O.'d   Brody thinks it's a setup.  He thinks someone's altered the game somehow.  The "replays" aren't accurate -- we've figured that much out.  Granted, it's still teh sport of kings, but...troubling. 

When I want, I can Etch-a-Sketch an entire map of the U.S. -- all 48 contiguous states included -- without looking at a map.  I'd like to use this superpower to fight crime.  You'll probably try and mock this, and act like it's not incredible, but that's because you're jealous.  I can see through you like a window that doesn't have curtains blocking it or, perhaps, blinds.

Chiefly Strange

My alma mater got rid of its mascot of 80 years, Chief Illiniwek.  You likely don't care about this.   This story was eclipsed by breaking international news (Anna Nicole Smith's embalming) so I thought I'd explain, just to make this simple. 

I'm pretty well qualified to do this, as someone who debated this numerous hours at the talk radio station that serves as the university sports flagship. 

I also sat at the scorers table and served as an on-floor emcee for Illinois basketball.  (One highlight:  Being personally booed by 17,000 people at once.  This paved the way to blogging.)

To explain:

The NCAA told the U of I to get rid of its mascot, or it wouldn't be able to host post-season stuff. 

Pro-Chief people say the Chief is really not a sports "mascot", he's a Symbol of the University -- a respected symbol that happens to be a white guy, dressed up like an Indian, dancing only during halftime on the basketball court or the football field, and nowhere else.  This Symbol, not mascot, was named by the football coach.

Anti-chief people say he propagates racist stereotypes.  They cite the real-life chief of the Peoria Tribe, considered descended from one of the tribes, who objects to the "stereotypical" use of Native American symbolism.  By the way, the Peoria tribe, (which has a rockin' casino) sells some cool stuff with their arrows-n-feathers logo: novelty license plates, dish towels, and medicine wheels, for around $10.

Pro-chief people say his dance is a tribute to Native Americans, who, in a fairly recent poll, approve of the Chief with an 81% majority.

Native Americans, who aren't actually native to America, also participated in another poll:  This one showed they disapprove of the Chief to the tune of an 81% majority.

Pro-Chief people tout the fascinating historical accuracy of the Illiniwek outfit, which is actually a Sioux outfit.  This tribe which had nothing to do with the Illiniwek, but did donate the outfit to the university for the Chief, before they were offended that the university was using it for the Chief.

Some anti-Chief groups and writers object, also, to the team name, "Fighting Illini", and "Illini", because the names themselves are insulting.  One newspaper objecting to the use of "Illini" was, and is still, named, The Daily Illini.

Pro-Chief people point out the authenticity of his dance, which dates way back into the 20th century, and features such tradition-grounded moves as the mid-air splits.

Various Native Americans have objected to the use of the Chief as a mascot, because it could wreak real harm on those it was intended to honor.  Among those are, say, the Iroquois, who may have wreaked some degree of harm on the Illiniwek by, among other things, actually killing them.

The Chief is an example of "goodness, strength, bravery, truthfulness, courage, and dignity," say pro-Chiefers.  This is apparently demonstrated by mid-air splits during basketball games.

The University could have pursued an FSU-style payoff arrangement with the honored tribe, except Illini Indians have the unfortunate circumstance of not actually existing.

The NCAA says the Chief has created a "hostile" educational atmosphere, and it's frequently cited that only .2% of the student population is American Indian.  This is a clear injustice, as the state's population as a whole is also .2% American Indian.

Pro-Chiefers love the Chief because they love to promote diversity.  Some demonstrated this humanitarianism by calling a vocally anti-Chief professor and threatening his life.

In sum, anti-Chief forces prevailed.  The end of this all marks a tragedy of epic proportions, for talk radio hosts.

The last halftime dance was Wednesday.  Native Americans are now better off.  Just kidding.