The Night of the Christmas Ninjas

This is a story about my father, the Christmas Ninja. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from this story. Maybe not.

You will have to be the judge.

For some reason that could not be adequately explained in hindsight, my father thought it would be a grand gesture to steal a Christmas tree. Not from a store or some commercial lot, for that would seem petty and venal in a low, common way.

No, he seemed more inclined to a grander gesture of protest against the commercialization of the holiday season. Something devilish. Something in a Guy Fawkes motif.

Then, there were several other factors at work. I do not recall if the Rock Island and Frisco Railroad had ever done anything to my father that would provoke retribution.

Though he generally had a jaundiced, disdainful view of large commercial institutions, the aligned events may have been more random. He was living on the Southern Plains where there were few stands of anything that looked like a fir tree, except the ones planted along the right of way of the Rock Island.

Thus, the railroad and its assets became a target of opportunity.

The plot was afoot with its shape gradually forming. From wild, loony idea eventually to wild loony idea with s good plan of execution.

He would wear all black. Naturally. Black ski mask, black sweater, black pants, black socks, black shoes. Black underwear, as far as I knew. He would drive a black pickup. He would be the Christmas Ninja. Striking a blow against The Man. Honoring the Little Lord Jesus in the most appropriate way possible – stealing a Christmas tree.

It was both noble and spiritual. And, besides, it sure beat spending 40 bucks for a Christmas tree at Kmart.

He would wait until several weeks before Christmas before launching his protest commando raid. All the while carrying his well-sharpened and trusty “Babe the Blue Ax”, he’d drive down the rural railroad frontage roads with his lights turned off. He would carefully assess the Rock Island trees and when he found the exact right one, he would alight from the pickup truck, scamper up the gravel-filled gradient, whack down that tree in two or three powerful swings, haul it trunk-first back to the truck, toss the ax into the back bed and hightail it down the darkened road, all the while cackling in felonious glee.

This was the plan.

You would have had to know my father well to understand how this plan would have seemed perfectly natural and workable to him. First, he had always been a meticulous planner and at some point in his golden years – “Mine are brass,” he told me – he had lost completely his fear of bad outcomes. He referred to his new-found freedom as “my give-a-shit threshold.”

In this new plateau of life, he liked to measure how much trouble would be levied upon him if something were to go askew. Like, getting caught. After all, how much effort do you spend on throwing a 65-year-old grandfather war hero in jail, no matter what he’s done?

As far as I know, my father never knowingly did anything wrong before the Night of The Christmas Ninja or thereafter. It was simply that he liked to calculate limits, risks and benefits. He measured what the boundaries of his imagination could afford.

On this blessed Christmas, he had decided that a free Christmas tree was worth the risk. And further, it would be fun.

When all of this was explained to me afterward, none of it, except for one fact, seemed surprising in the slightest.

The singular exception was how he convinced my normally responsible sister to join him. Now there were two Christmas Ninjas. My father’s lunacies could be contagious.

Though it’s been 20 years, she’s never totally come clean about her role in this family episode. Maybe she decided that Dad could hurt himself in the dark and that cutting down trees was at the far perimeter of his physical skills.

Plus, if Dad was going to get handcuffed by a deputy sheriff for destroying Rock Island property, she’d just as soon be in the county calaboose with him to offer moral support.

And to be fair to her temperament, the entire Black Ops would have seemed like a perfectly swell concept to her, too. She was the Ninja Apple that did not fall far from the Ninja Tree.

Thus the Christmas Ninjas headed out on their raid, bouncing along county roads on their path to criminal destiny.

At this point, my sister informed Dad of several pertinent safety facts that he had failed to incorporate into his planning. It’s midnight in Central Oklahoma. There are snakes with big teeth. Walk carefully. And skunks. Don’t forget the skunks. And also, if we get caught, don’t run. Oklahoma deputies shoot first. It’s their way.

The proper howevers and whereases having been dispensed, they went speeding down the county road in the dark. When it’s midnight dark on the plains of Oklahoma, it’s in-the-bottom-of-the-coal-mine dark except for the glorious stars. If you had shined a flashlight into the truck’s cab, all you’d have seen were four luminous eye-whites staring back.

They ran off the road only twice and never so far they wouldn’t get back to the proper path. Pavement is a civic amenity having come only recently to Oklahoma and not yet to its county roads.

But eventually they came to a stand of trees, outlined against the stars. This was to be the scene of the crime. And together like the Lone Ranger and Tonto on a mission of justice they climbed the little hill near the railroad tracks, spotted a likely tree, and began to whack.

And whack. And whack. And then whack some more.

A half hour later, they were drenched in their sweat-soaked Ninja garb. Dad had assigned himself the role of lookout. So he stood in the dirt road and watched for approaching phantom vehicles, and she dragged the tree foot by foot down the incline. Every few seconds, he would claim to see a coming vehicle and signal for her to duck behind another bush. So down the hill she came, tip-toeing in tiny steps from one hiding spot to another, like Bugs Bunny sneaking up on Elmer Fudd.

She dragged the noble tree to the truck, and they heaved it over the side with a loud, joint ha-rumffff! Dad reached into his pocket and withdrew the coup de grace, a large red plastic “SOLD” sign which he wrapped around the end with a cellophane sleeve. He had expertly scissored the sign from a Grippos Potato Chip sack.

And then they headed off. The crime was done. The Ninjas had escaped.

It would have been unkind to be too critical of the tree they acquired that night. After all, the tree was a statement, a matter of protest. The two Ninjas spoke of the tree later in the barest of detail.

They piled layers of sparkly garland and dozens of glass ornaments, and twinkling lights both large and small and filled every crevasse and thinly foliated branch with decorations. It was a Tammy Fay Bakker tree makeover if ever there was one.

In fact, the night had deceived them; It was not a fir tree at all. It was a cedar. And when they were done, and Mother got a chance to carefully assess the handiwork, all she could do was look woefully at the tall bush and shake her head in dismay. “That’s not a fir tree,” she said. “It’s a cedar, for pity sake. It’s a tall bush!”

It was the most forlorn, ugly, bedraggled Charlie Brown Christmas tree she had ever seen. It was barely 5 feet tall. This was a Christmas bush that starving Ethiopians would have pitied.

Where did you buy THAT thing? Mother demanded to know with sudden curiosity. She mumbled something under breath that “you couldn’t have done worse if you’d just gone into the woods and chopped one down.”

The Two Christmas Ninjas said nothing. There are times when the truth is simply not a useful choice. And besides, they were too busy scratching their arms. The cedar’s sticky residue had soaked into their forearms, like a fiberglass body lotion.

I’m almost sure the Two Christmas Ninjas had learned their lesson. Learned it once and for all.

Or maybe not.

Why men give bad gifts

As the holiday thunderheads come creeping over the horizon, I am hunkered down in my festive foxhole on the off chance they will skim over my head, and I will escape their notice.

I think that was a trilogy of mixed metaphors in one sentence.

Lack of writing skill aside, I am always fearful of the holidays because they expose one of my most obvious human flaws.

Being a man, I am terrible at giving gifts. If I’d been one of the Three Magi, I would have brought zinc, or maybe some of that vanilla potpourri. It seems entirely plausible to me that the Three Wise Men actually were the Three Wise Women who, like millions of others of their gender, were oppressed in history’s literary annals for no other reason than men were writing the Bible, and we weren’t going to give women the credit for a cool Christmas gift.

Trust me. I’ve given every sort of gift imaginable, and never with much success at Christmas. And now I have to deal with Hanukkah, too. There is no mercy in religious revelry.

That I am a lousy gift giver is no surprise to anyone who knows me. Did I mention I was a man? Yeah, I thought so.

When you are 10 and charged with picking out a present for Mom, the rules allow you great latitude, and almost any gift that doesn’t look or smell like a small animal run over on the highway will win you credit and huggable reward points. But this is a cruel illusion, foisted on males mostly by their mothers and aunts.

You learn the erroneous and almost cruelly inverted lesson that almost any gift to a woman will not only be acceptable but be considered endearing and darn cute.

Then you have girl friends. They’ll put up with almost any gift as long as you own a car. Because I never owned a car in high school, I resorted to the traditional teenage gifts that boys give to girls – sparkly but worthless trinkets of a kind the Dutch traded to the Indians for Manhattan, John Cameron Swayze watches that told time for about an hour before dying and spray “French” cologne strong enough to make a skunk weep.

The stakes are higher now. The crash more tragic. While before you only hoped for tender congratulations on your wonderful taste and generosity, now there is the hidden but fervent hope. Inside these gifts might be the key that will prompt your paramour to like you better, forgive a run of doltish bad behavior and perhaps have sex with you. In this vain quest, some of us “went steady” in school but were only steadily abstinent. There ought to be a different word for “abstinence” when abstaining is not your choice and you are, in fact, quite against it.

And then you’re married. Maybe several times, depending on your tolerance for pain and poverty.

The boys who give skunk-choking cologne grow inevitably into the men who give the same sorts of ineffective and often repugnant gifts. But now they just cost a lot more.

You’re still hoping against hope to provoke her into a fit of unrestrained sexual exuberance, but you will be disappointed.

Men tend to give holiday gifts to women in a narrow and predictable range of badness because, in a general sense, we have no taste. To us, taste is a defining characteristic of good beer.

This range of bad gifts to women includes but is not limited to:

1: Lingerie so sleazy it would damage a hooker’s self-esteem: It took me 20 or so years to figure out the ineffective nature of buying lingerie for a wife. Sure, I seem to have kept Frederick’s of Hollywood in business singlehandedly and each year I was more positive than the last year that THIS would be the one see-through inspirational negligee that would turn her into Ann-Margret’s lusty cousin. This lingerie generally filled drawer upon drawer on her side of the bed and was never seen again after the gift box was opened. Now I give flannel nightshirts that lumberjacks would wear and not feel too feminine.

2: Jewelry a clerk talks you into buying because the good stuff has been sold: The ancillary to this error is spending too much on a piece of good jewelry that she assumes is a cheap knockoff. I once spent $1,000 on a pearl necklace (REAL PEARLS, for crying out loud) and she thought I got them at the Rexall Drug Store at the strip mall for $9.99. You get three points if you remember Rexall Drug Stores.

3: Singing Fish Plaques: You hit the button in the back of the fake wood mounting, the lips move while the small-mouthed bass sings “Take Me to the River.” It seemed like a good idea at the time.

4: Any item of apparel that is too big for her or too small: Here’s the rule of clothes. You must know exactly how each item you buy will fit her, and no man knows that. It’s harder than being asked to recount the Periodic Table of Elements off the top of your head. I barely know what size my own underwear is. As for her gift, if it’s too small, she’ll whimper that her current proportions have changed for the worse and you’ve just made a point of reminding her of it. If the item is too large, she’ll demand to know why you think she’s THAT size. Neither of these questions will produce a happy exchange of ideas. And they certainly won’t produce sex.

5: Money (cash, money order, or check). This always seems like a swell idea to men. Unfortunately, this gift only proves to her what you already knew and she suspected. You expect sex. And are prepared to pay, if that’s the only way.

Climb aboard the Abstinence Express, my hapless brothers.

It’s always full on the Express. But don’t worry. I’ve saved a seat for you. Just consider it my Christmas present.

Albanian spies and their white Luminas

I had never seen the man before, but his car, as it came swerving up behind mine at the stoplight, was both ominous and recognizable.

It was one of those hideous white-on-white Novas or Luminas that Chevy used to sell to Communist spies – especially Albanians whom the Russians hooted at as the dumbest spies in the world. The Russkies would send their Albanian cousins out on snipe hunts and then spend the bleak, black Soviet winter laughing out their ass.

Albanians never caught on to the “do you have Prince Albert in a can?” joke. The KGB’s sense of humor when it came to spooking Albanians was legendary.

The Albanians always bought white Luminas or Novas — didn’t make any difference to them – because the Russians had told them that everyone in America drove these white cars as another way to blend into the capitalistic sameness. In fact, 75.5 percent of all white Luminas sold in the ’90s were sold to Albanians. The rest went to Bulgarians.

The white car behind me was a 1989 model, or maybe 1974 or perhaps 2007. You can never tell with old Chevy Luminas because they all look the same, like a crowd of really dull white people waiting for something interesting to happen. No emotion and even less distinction marked their faces.

But this spy car was different, and I sensed that difference right away. It was not so much that the guy behind the wheel looked just like Ricky Gervais’s twin brother. Round face. Slick black hair. Pretty clever disguise, I thought, and it was Halloween week. Genius. Who’d think a British comic was an Albanian spy?

But the Ricky Gervais lookalike behind the wheel of the white Lumina, or Nova, wasn’t what caught my eye.

No, it was something else altogether. The Albanian spy behind the wheel was weaving to a stop from what apparently had begun as a high rate of speed.

And more to the point, my Cold War friends, he was playing a harmonica. Playing that baby for all it was worth. His cheeks were puffed out in clear musical exertion and his head was bobbing like Johnny Puleo at the command of his famed Harmonicats. All the scene missed was a Harmonicat sidekick keeping tempo with his bouncing knee, upon which Johnny would inevitably find his ass being bounced to and fro and back to the even higher fro position.

I was transfixed by the Albanian harmonica-playing spy in the white Lumina, or Nova.

And as the light turned, I sped up and headed for home and safety of a garage.

Though I have lived in six states, this was the first of my garages in which I could actually park my car inside without destroying all the boxes containing Christmas ornaments, old bicycle parts, equipment for sports that no longer exist, and clothes that not even the Salvation Army would take.

Thus, I sped down the street toward refuge. My darting eye caught the image in the rear view mirror. I froze in terror. It was the Albanian harmonica-playing spy in the white Lumina, or Nova. He was close.

I turned sharply, tires squealing. He followed, matching my every move. I floored it. He did likewise.

Then down another street we went.

He crept closer. Ever closer.

And finally I wheeled down my home street in a chilled sweat, and swerved into the driveway on two wheels. At the end of the little pavement, the garage waited.

He roared past the driveway and veered east down a side street a block away. I could almost hear the cackle of the little man’s demonic laugh.

But he’ll be back. I know it. Those 4-foot-6 Albanian harmonica-playing spies in the white Luminas, or Novas, are devils. They are short but fiendishly clever.

Now he knows where I live. Damn.

He tricked me into divulging where I lived. Double damn.

So, this is what I say to my Facebook friend who asked recently about the difference in writing fiction or non fiction. There are facts and there is truth. Sometimes they are the same thing. Sometimes not.

Sometimes they are just a really short Albanian spy in the white Lumina.

Or Nova.

The sweet smell of cabbage soup

Mother was Rose McGlone Brown, though her mother also named her Juanita in the terribly errant judgment that Juanita was a well-established Hollywood name that might lead to stardom if all the planets aligned properly. Probably 1920s cinematic va-va-vavoom girl Juanita Hansen who had her own trading picture card just as Ty Cobb did.

Ultimately, the Juanita Naming Experiment was of no concern because all the generations of my mother’s family held up an Irish Rose as their standard bearer, sometimes several in the same time span. It was the family’s signature, ratified by the family home, Rose Hill, Ky.

Rose McGlone Brown’s grandfather came to America from the greenest island on earth with 10 relatives and all that he had earned and owned.

She was a wonder and an empress in her kitchen and grew a family on tightly-trussed beef roasts and chubby potatoes transformed into crispy mahogany treasures. She could make her meals endure and evolve for a week.

And then on some days, some wonderfully amazing days, she would spend the day cooking cabbage soup, and its smell would envelop every corner of the house and, if she weren’t careful, it would circumnavigate the entire neighborhood. And while some sniffed critically at the airborne signal, I did not, for it was the grandest smell I could imagine. Rich and deep and heavy in foretelling and enriched with grease from a large can she guarded near the stove.

While I never knew the components of the soup, it seems upon reconsideration to have contained meat and potatoes and possibly fresh onions from her garden.

Whatever the precise details of its construction, there was no other food that smelled quite as it did. It was the smell of my mother’s kitchen, and I adored it.

And sadly, I grew up to be a man and went away to a man’s life and had no time for cabbage soup and cornbread. And though I always meant to ask for more, please just a little more Momma, time would elude me before I could ask. For what it may say about life’s choices, I never learned to make it for myself or found a companion for whom the idea of Irish cuisine seemed a naturally good idea worth pursuing.

After all, Irish food is much like British cuisine, which is to say, it’s not really cuisine at all. It’s highland camp food in nicer bowls.

Then Momma fell ill, deeply ill, and there would be no more cabbage soup or tightly trussed beef roasts or salty mahogany gravy she could make last a week.

I do not really know the difference between good cabbage soup and bad cabbage soup for I never ate any other but hers. After all, many Irish people believe bagpipes constitute good music. So it might well be that I am saddled with a permanently tin palate.

But, in the end, that makes no difference either.

I still search for homemade cabbage soup and long for its scent upon the evening air because this soup means more than well-flavored broth.

There truly is something of an elixir held inside its rich, thick liquid. Not everyone can taste as I do, for being Irish is sometimes a hard, inexplicable task.

And should it come to pass that anyone would offer me a bowl of the genuine ancient gumbo of my childhood, I would treasure the gift more than anyone can imagine.

For cabbage soup steeped and brewed in the country kitchen of an Irish girl is no small matter.

If you tend to it properly, the smell of cooked cabbage over a slow, blue flame lasts a lifetime.

The trouble with woodpeckers

The world, I believe, is divided into two camps.

In one camp are people who think about woodpeckers and worry about them and like them. They are woodpecker huggers.

In the other camp are those of us who don’t. We in the other camp didn’t even think Woody Woodpecker was particularly funny.

The topic was relevant only recently because the universe of ornithologists and the general gaggle of less-effete woodpecker fans are aflutter over news that the giant ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct after all. Seems it was spotted in some dank southern swamp when all believed it had joined the dodo in extinction.

As for me, I didn’t even know what an ivory-billed woodpecker was; so the news that it wasn’t doomed as a species had less positive effect on me than it might have.

The only good woodpecker is a dead woodpecker. That has been my general attitude toward woodpeckers. Among my professional colleagues, however, a non-woodpecker person runs the risk of communal disdain by announcing indifference.

My enduring view of woodpeckers was shaped during my 14th summer. It was the Summer of the Woodpecker in my family’s history.

It was not a happy summer.

Until that summer, I believed in peaceful co-existence with both Commies and woodpeckers. I didn’t bother them; they didn’t bother me.

The house of my teen years was a wood-frame structure of goodly proportions. For some reason that was never adequately explained, it was not painted, but rather stained a dark brown and soaked for color and bug resistance with creosote, a particularly noxious tar concoction.

Railroads treat their wooden ties with the same stuff. It’s a foul and long-lasting brew, but it has unique properties. With one whiff through their little bug whiskers, mosquitoes keel over in adead faint. Termites theotrically don’t like the scent much, either.

But no one told my dad that creosote holds some strange, alluring fascination for woodpeckers. It was a lesson he and the rest of us would learn in the Summer of the Woodpecker.

Apparently, woodpeckers are drawn to creosote like suckers to a nickel slot machine.

One fell deeply in love with our house that summer and attacked it with unwavering voracity. There were neat, round holes from one end of the building to the other.

This woodpecker — it was a big red one, but I never knew the particular genus — was peckish, pernicious and persistent. And loud. Though I’ve since been told that woodpeckers don’t generally peck at night, this one was resiliently nocturnal.

Our trips into the darkness to shoo it away were never lasting in their success. And finally, my father had enough. We knew that because he bellowed: “I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!”

He oiled up our family’s hand-me-down Daisy Repeating BB Gun and armed it with the supersized pack of ammunition. This bird would eat lead.

Over the course of weeks and then months, dad would traipse into the darkness and fire off 30 or so shots and then yell curses at the bird. We would all be required to stay inside during these pre-dawn hunting forays because he would shoot wildly in every direction, like an anti-aircraft howitzer gone berserk.

We always believed the chance he’d actually hit the bird decreased exponentially with the number of his shots. Ten thousand or so shots later, November arrived.

The woodpecker stopped assaulting the house. Dad believed that he had put an end to the creature, but no one believed him.

In fact, I believe there is one woodpecker family that still fondly recalls the long-ago Summer of the Creosote House. And how that crazy man with the BB gun was such a bad shot that couldn’t hit his own house.

The trouble with fish

Fish have never been my friends.

Until very recently, this inter-species indifference has never been an issue in my life, but I suppose it is now.

My domestic situation decreed rethinking of the me-fish issue because she owns a fish, a very large blue fish which she tells me is an African Cichlid. I brought my collection of 48 pairs of worn out khaki pants to our shared abode. She brought culture, taste, art and the large blue fish.

She gives everything living a name. In fact, most of her pets have at least four or five names which she uses interchangeably as if they understand any word besides “FOOD.”

If I were one of her dogs and she did this to me, I would be more confused on a regular basis than I am now, and I am perpetually confused enough as it is.

The fish does not have a real name. She calls it “Fish” which seems sufficient.

She’s had this fish for years and claims it knows her. Because fish don’t wag their tails in happy humor, it’s hard to figure why she believes this.

She is cosmically generous in her belief that all beings are good, even when there is no evidence at all for this buoyant spirituality.

The “Fish” is the only living thing in a 30-gallon tank.

It does not move much, except when you sprinkle food on the water’s surface. Then it charges briskly and suddenly. Carnivores don’t nibble food. They devour it.

Otherwise, it sits and looks at you ominously. “Fish” gives me the creeps. She laughed when I told her, but I stood my ground.

There’s evidence.

There once was a second fish in the tank but an unknown, unfortunate event befell it, and it is no longer with us. We never got to know one another, though I empathized with it much more than the other “Fish.”

I have no specific evidence that big “Fish” did anything to the little orange fish to cause this cessation of existence. But I know the little fish was in constant, mortal terror for itself and hid in the only safe spot in the tank.

Little fish cowered inside one of those fake aquarium castles that people are lured to buy. Little fish hid every second of its life, except for 10 seconds every day when it bolted for the surface to catch a few crumbs of food, and then zoomed back to the bottom and its hidey-hole.

It was one of my new domestic duties to feed the fish, and I immediately discerned that the “Fish” needed distraction at one end of the tank, so little fish could be fed.

It was no way to live, even if you’re a fish. Maybe even fish have unmet expectations of a better life.

But then “something” happened to the little fish, and it was gone. Its pathetic, lifeless body was found bobbing one morning in the tank’s bubbling air filter. It wasn’t suicide.

I am no Poirot, but I have my suspicions about how this crime was done and who did it.

And then there was one.

Last week, she was feeding “Fish” when it leaped at her. Out of the water. Into the air. And bit her finger.

Aflutter, she came running to me. “Fish bit me!” she yelled. I was sympathetic.
Mostly.

After all, I warned her.

The Burris racial door prize

The ascendancy of Roland Burris to the Senate seat once held by people who had earned it is being blamed mostly on Rod Blagojevich’s stupendous cupidity.

Makes sense.

In this scenario, Blago is the unrelenting villain, while Burris plays the more-or-less semi-sentient but honest bystander. He’s playing Ethel Mertz to Blago’s Lucy.

When the people of Illinois eventually get to hear the unfiltered voice of the governor on wiretaps, they will make whatever decision they wish on his role in the current messification.

But why does Burris get a free pass, even if his worst crime is being a political cuckold? Has he no dignity?

And why do the black officeholders of Illinois, not to mention the nation, not see Blago’s clever manipulation as a newfangled version of Reconstruction carpetbaggery?

The same process that will allow Burris to take his job tainted the first two black senators in U.S. history.

Before Massachusetts elected Edward Brooke in 1966, the only two black Americans sent to the Senate were Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche K. Bruce. They got the job essentially the same way Burris will get the job, as he mostly surely will because there is no sound legal argument against it.

Someone will hand it to him. Here. It’s yours. Try not to drag it through the mud.

It’s a door prize for him because he’s black, but not among any of the black candidates who might have been worthy of it. Illinois has shown that its citizens will elect a black person of either gender to the U.S. Senate. But none of those candidates would have been Burris.

His path to the job is a snide, cynical punishment for everyone who has crossed Blago, and one that damages all black leaders.

Sham is an old ploy in this game. Both Mississippians were sham candidates meant mostly to punish Mississippi in particular and the South in general for cultural hubris in the Civil War. Northern opportunists took control of southern state legislatures as part of the Reconstruction and gripped them tightly until 1875.

In fact, Revels was the supreme punishment for Mississippi. He was a onetime Illinois minister who was appointed for a year to fill Jefferson Davis’ old seat. There are not many more defined “up yours’” moments in American history.

It was a delicious retribution inflicted on the old South, sort of like an evil step cousin being named the executor of your will.

And when Brooke was elected, he was hardly building on the inglorious history of Mississippi’s role in racial reconciliation. He was trying to run from it, or at least make it irrelevant.

Until the 17th Amendment in 1913, all senators were selected by their state’s legislatures. So, some case can be made that the U.S. Senate has always been tainted by political shenanigans.

Now we have Burris, whose vacant, vacuous smiling face confronts us at every turn on television. He thinks there’s honor in the job. He thinks he deserves it.

But Even Ethel Mertz wouldn’t stand for this.

Why Santo isn’t in the Hall (sorry, Cubs fans)

One of these days Ron Santo will make it to the Hall of Fame. Then we can all take a deep breath and figure out why the world plotted so insidiously to thwart him.

Until then, we must rely on the media/barstool cottage industry built around the “why-do-they-hate-our-beloved-Ron?” manifesto.

We have the usual suspects.

Idiot voters? Some of that. Misunderstanding of refined historical analysis that discounts his considerable achievements? Sure. Ron isn’t as beloved outside of Chicago as he is in the neighborhood? True. The Hall of Fame voting system is just screwy? Probably.

But now that he has been rebuffed by his playing peers for a spot in Cooperstown, maybe it’s time for a less teary-eyed view.

Famed baseball numerologist Bill James has given Santo his imprimatur but oddly forgot some of his own insight about such matters. The reasons some players don’t make the Hall transcend numbers and result from a cascade of psychological forces.

Sadly enough, Santo may be on the outside of Cooperstown as a punishment in general for being a Cub, and more specifically, for being a Cub in 1969.

For those of you who don’t remember (But, WAIT, Cubs fans are doomed to always remember everything), the Cubs should have won the pennant that year and led by 8 1/2 games in mid-August. Then they came mortifyingly unglued, and fate let the Mets pull Excalibur from the stone.

It was amazingly awful for the Cubs. Every decade or so in the pre-Division Playoff era, the Cubs were good enough to juke their fans into realistic hope. Those Diaspora years made the pain of reality even more unbearable, except, of course, for those us who were not Cubs fans and delighted in the pain of others.

Indeed, 1969 was about as tragic and unrequited a season as the Cubs ever experienced, despite the superficial gleam of great statistics. For those of us who were not Cubs fans, it was like a trackside luxury box seat at a train crash. You hated yourself for liking the experience.

And finishing 22 games over .500 only made the pain more excruciating for the Cubs. Santo had 123 RBI that year. The Cubs had two 20-game winners. Those should all have been good omens. They weren’t.

But here’s what I remember about that season and more particularly about the breath of Santo’s career,

No matter what Santo accomplished, it was never enough to make the Cubs a winner and history has decided to punish him and them for that lack. Anyway, the Hall ultimately rewards winners and needs a better reason than glossy statistics to honor losers. History is merely the way we remember what happened. It’s not necessarily THE TRUTH. And history remembers Santo in a slightly different way than do Cubs fans.

Hall of Fame voters inducted Santo contemporaries Billy Williams and Ernie Banks for good numbers, and they grudgingly let Fergie Jenkins have a seat at the table, too. After all, you have to honor a good pitcher who singlehandedly withstood the worst agonies only his own teammates could inflict on him.

But Santo? Sorry. Generosity only goes so far. And apparently there’s no statute of limitations for 1969. Santo’s still doing time for it.

There’s a logic to the rejection. How many valid Hall of Famers can a truly terrible team have? If they were all worthy Famers, why was the team so often so hideously miserable?

As the peer vote suggests and contemporaries testify, Santo was always regarded as a very good player in his own era, but never a great one. Sorry if the truth hurts. (That was the first decade of my totally obsessed baseball awareness/immersion. I always thought of Santo as the guy who hit 3-run homers in the eighth inning to make the losing 10-6 score seem closer than it was).

And what I remember of Santo’s career may be what his peers most clearly recall now, too. And they should know. Santo did not make a bad team better enough to transcend its historic, meteoric awfulness. In the end, maybe there is a true Cub-borne voodoo that derives less from what the Cubs do or fail to do, than from simply being a Cub.

Unfortunately for Santo, those voters who hold his Hall of Fame fate now will have lived through those years as he did. So they are unlikely to forget or to judge him differently than they already have.

There’s always some hope. In Santo’s case, perhaps history’s harsh judgment will be reconsidered and remedied by kinder souls. I’m sort of hoping so.

Even those of us who are not Cubs fans grow weary of schadenfreude.

Falling short of the required perfection

Upon deep consideration, I have decided to neither seek nor accept my party’s nomination.

This announcement doesn’t carry all the heft it might for someone else, seeing as how I have no party, no one has inquired about my political aspirations, and the idea of running for public office appeals to me about as much as taking a Sioux war arrow through my windpipe.

But there’s always some crazy chance it might happen, no matter how remote. I believe in planning for the worst.

So making this pronouncement now saves me an eventual duty to denounce people in my life who have fallen short of perfection and are unlikely to ever achieve it.

The new model for political discourse is to defrock (or have them defrocked by opponents) the people in your life who have been like a pair of ill-fitting trousers in the wardrobe of existence.

And once these people’s conduct or words have been revealed, you must renounce them for the bad tailoring.

And then you pitch them over the side of the lifeboat into the waiting teeth of passing sharks.

This was the shark chumming required during the initial pugilism between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and you can be sure Sarah Pailin’s time is coming. There apparently is no such thing as loyalty, even if you buy it fair-and-square like John Edwards did.

Aside from the obvious reasons, I am unlikely to pursue public office because all the significant people in my life have been so imperfect that I’d have to dispose of the entire lot. Off with their heads!

This drive to Old Testament-style denunciation can produce a real waste in human horsepower.

As a matter of fact, I’ve been cataloging all the significant people in my life, and darned if they aren’t all disqualified in some way if you apply the current geo-political model for life influencers. Of course, some people have strayed so far into the Serengeti that there’s almost no chance of their return. Like South Carolina Appalachian Trail Traveler Mark Sanford, for example.

In my life, the first compadre I’d have to pitch is Dan Scism, my first boss more than 40 years ago. He’s long gone to Valhalla now, but even death doesn’t save you from being scorned these days.

Among the specific enunciated tasks in my first job was to make sure that when he tapped out his still-lighted pipe embers into the nearby metal waste bin, it didn’t turn into a fire that consumed the entire newspaper structure.

My running total of extinguished fires was six, which was the standing record for copy boys at that time and stands unmatched since because smoking has been banned in virtually every newsroom.

Dan drank too much and too often. He had odd political views and was not as enlightened on racial and gender matters as you might wish.

I once suggested that we should write about the emerging trend for females to engage in athletics. Not write more stories. Write A story. One. The thought of it produced one of Dan’s coughing fits and a string of grand eloquent cussing that still curdles the air over the cubby hole where he sat. The building in Evansville, Ind., is no longer there, but his ode remains etched in the ozone.

On the other hand, Dan was wise and funny and had a big heart for story telling. And he would never do you wrong, if he thought your soul deserved generosity.

Still, it took a decade from when I first asked before he would allow stories about “girls” in his paper.

So, clearly, he was too imperfect to avoid my denunciation. Sorry, Dan, over the side with ‘ya.

My personal pantheon of important people all seem like Dan, up to including my parents and siblings and offspring, aunts, uncles, teachers, priests, nuns, friends, coworkers, readers both ardent and casual, not to mention the remarkable women who have possessed my soul.

None of them was perfect enough to survive public scrutiny.

So, they’d all have to go, I fear, if I were to run for office.

A pity. But what’s an ambitious person to do?

She’s not going to shut up

Though she has lots of good reasons for it, Annette Zender is a pain.

Ask almost anybody in the local court system. She raises a stink. She won’t go away. She is relentless.

She’s a royal pain in the place where we all sit down.

She’s been told to sit down on that part of the anatomy and be quiet … or else.

She does not deal well with “or else”. Or the “be quiet” part, either.

So Zender dropped by our offices this week, as she has done in the past and this time she had a slightly different story.

You probably saw her picture on Page 1 recently. She came to the office proudly and defiantly wearing her own purple gag, occasionally emitted muffled strains of anger through it and _ and I hope the law isn’t listening _ took it off and chatted amiably.

She’s not supposed to do that, though she didn’t talk much about the specific legal imbroglio that ignited the most recent fuss.

Annette Zender tends to create a stir everywhere she goes and therein lies her great strength and her burden. Some people are energized by her message and fortitude; others (usually local judges and lawyers) are peeved by her rancorous obsessiveness.

I have no way of knowing whether the case of bias she makes against the Lake County, Ill., Family Court is valid, and that’s not really the point.

Her drive to regain custody of her now-14-year-old daughter is the essence of her life. This pursuit has metamorphosed into public advocacy for other children similarly trapped in custody purgatory. She even raises children as a foster parent, and the state thinks she’s trustworthy enough to raise strangers’ children.

But her failure to get the local court to agree with her about her own child has now produced a legal order gagging her from talking about it.

Evidence and facts aside, here’s my unsolicited advice to the local court.

Sorry, guys. It just won‘t work.

Men normally don’t possess enough backbone to do what Annette Zender does. Maybe it’s male alpha dog biology superimposed into human life. But guys often will shut up if someone in authority tells them to shut up. Just watch a football team sometimes.

Women are a different issue.

I’ve known women for a long time _ several of them starting with Mom _ and I can’t remember one who would respond favorably to being told to shut up. Not only will they not shut up, they’ll make you sorry you ever had the idea. Oh, buster, will you ever be sorry.

So, just from a functionality point of view, it’s a waste of time.

Plus, the last thing you’d want is to throw her in jail which the local judge insisted he’d do.

Remember the judge trying to prove Santa Claus was a nutjob in “Miracle on 34th Street”? That’s the doomed legal dynamic at work. Hizzoner is way overmatched. Plus, if he tosses Zender in the calaboose, it only gets worse. That invites Alan Dershowitz or Jesse Jackson to show up for the debate. Or even worse: Oprah.

Besides, I hate to lecture a judge, but ordering people to shut up hasn’t worked for 200 years in this country. National mouthiness is sanctified by our Constitution, and we’re addicted to telling off people who think they have power over us. It’s a genetic thing.

Just ask Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and Rosa Parks. They all have one thing in common with Annette Zender. They wouldn‘t shut up, either.