The Ecstasy of Defeat, Part III

Hello. Today we will explore the cranial breakdown of Donald Trump — shamefully ignored by the major media, plus the answers and near-answers to a simple desert-island logic puzzle that flummoxed so many of you, plus things you’d happily pay much more for than you do, plus, of course, farting elderly dogs. But first:

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Exactly a week ago, just moments after the publication of The Gene Pool about the dreadful, historically awful season being excreted by The Chicago White Sox, I received  a communique from my good friend Peter Sagal.   Peter is a Renaissance Man -- an avid runner at 59 who wrote a book about it, a produced playwright, and (not incidentally) host of NPR's sardonic weekly news-quiz comedy show "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me."   Peter was writing to ask a question about that day's Gene Pool, which was largely a conversation with Neil Steinberg, another good friend of mine who is the city columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times.   Peter is an admirer of Neil's work, and liked the interview, but wondered, politely, respectfully, just idly curious ....  

"WHY DIDN'T YOU INTERVIEW ME?"

Peter had a point.  He, too, is a smart, funny, middle-aged Jewish man from Chicago, but unlike Neil, he is actually a fan of the currently hapless, feckless, sockless Chicago White Sox. To Peter, I suspect, it was as though I had a question on the subject of whether women still feel sexual discrimination, and interviewed a man. 

In my defense, I do not think of Peter in terms of Chicago.  He does live there, and his show broadcasts mostly from there, but I think of him as a man of the world who exists everywhere simultaneously, once a week.  Sure, "Wait, Wait" can be found on radios in Chicago and your city and my city but also in Buckhannon, W. Va. and Spearfish, South Dakota.  Peter Sagal belongs to America.

Anyway, I informed Peter, "Sorry, this ship has sailed," and urged him to get back to me when he has an actual original idea.  

No, I did not.  This is Peter Sagal, one of the funniest guys on Earth.   You there, Peter?

Peter:  I am.  

Me: Have you noticed the Sox thoroughly trounced the Yankees last night?

Peter: I have!

Gene: Have you noticed they are still on track to finish the season as the worst team that ever existed in the entire gigantic modern world of baseball, going back to the era when uniforms fit like pajamas and everyone had crummy teeth?

Peter:

Yes.

Me:  Good.   So I am going to ask you the same question I put to Neil Steinberg:  Can Chicago embrace the ecstasy of defeat?  Is there not glory in being the worst team that ever played the game?  Can Chicagoans -- and you -- root against your beloved team, simply to achieve this distinction?   

Peter: Short answer: No, no more than we have reveled in the miseries and failures of all of our teams in this past decade or so -- the irrelevant Bulls, the hapless Cubs, the once great Blackhawks, and of course, the perennially maddening Bears, who year after year exasperate this football-mad city with humiliations like the infamous "double doink" of 2018. This is Chicago, meatpacker to the world. We're not known for our enjoyment of piquant irony. 

Me: The double doink is GREAT.

Peter: Yes, it is. My longer answer is … Yes, but not in the way you presume. The Cubs, as everyone knows (even Mr Steinberg, who for all his remarkable qualities is, as he admits, not a sports fan), are a national brand, the team with the adorable name -- the Cubbies! -- the antique bandbox of a park set in a vibrant neighborhood, the legend of being eternally cursed by a billy goat 

… and then,  finally, redeemed. Tourists who don't even particularly care for baseball make sure to take in a game at Wrigley Field, just to say they've done it. 

In contrast, nobody makes the journey to "Guaranteed Rate Field" -- real ones still call it Sox Park --  to see the White Sox except out of a sense of obligation. Or resignation.

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Urgent interruption from Gene: I still refuse to call “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport” by its official name, because Reagan broke the air-traffic controllers strike by firing ‘em all. Re-naming the airport for Reagan was as though they had renamed Phnom Penh “Pol Pot City.” The airport will always be just “National” to me.

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Peter, cont.: The White Sox are a bizarre anomaly in big-money sports: a small market team in a major metropolis. I once saw a map of baseball teams's fandoms: Cubs fans are spread out through the Midwest, while Sox fans are located in the South Side of Chicago -- the heart of Black Chicago,  plus the remaining White working class neighborhoods like Bridgeport, the affluent and educated enclaves of Kenwood and Hyde Park (home to the nation's most famous White Sox fan, Barack Obama), and into the south suburbs. Then it's Cubs fans again all the way down to the environs of St Louis. 

Which means that Sox fandom isn't a club, it's a tribe: You are born into it, gifted or burdened with a legacy that goes back to the embarrassment of Disco Demolition Night or the softball uniforms of the 70s, or in the case of some families, all the way back to the worst scandal in baseball history.  It is an insular tribe and a prickly one, but one that welcomes the occasional convert, like a native Red Sox fan who, upon relocating to Chicago in 1998, found the agonized atmosphere at Sox Park, where the sparse fans lived and died on every pitch, far more comfortably familiar than the packed all-ages frat party that was Wrigley Field. 

White Sox fans remain an uncivilized and remote tribe for a number of reasons: One is geography: the north side of Chicago (home to the Cubs) has flourished far more than the South Side since the 1970s, so people tend to want to go there. Another is mass media, as for many years Cubs games were broadcast (for free, believe it or not, kids) on WGN, a "superstation" carried by many cable networks, while White Sox games... were not. Then there's architecture: Mr. Steinberg noted that the next stadium built after the suburban-style concrete toilet bowl surrounded by asphalt that is now "Guaranteed Rate Field" was the magnificent Camden Yards, but what he doesn't know is that the White Sox could have had the very first modern/retro park, one that would have preserved the neighborhood around it, if a certain Jerry Reinsdorf, principal owner of the White Sox, hadn't just wanted to make a lot of money instead. 

Ah, Jerry Reinsdorf! Say his name with spite, with venom, with disdain.  In certain sports bars south of the Loop, don't say his name at all unless you add a healthy bracketing of profanity. A man with all the verve and showmanship of the IRS accountant he once was, all we need say about Jerry Reinsdorf is that even after he bought the Chicago Bulls and signed Michael Jordan and then oversaw their six championships in the 1990s, everybody in Chicago still hates him. 

Or perhaps we do need to say more. Jerry Reinsdorf, who blackmailed the city and state to pay for that giant spitoon of a stadium! Jerry Reinsdorf, who routinely overrules his own executives in every major decision! Jerry Reinsdorf, who last year let the only remaining reason to watch the games, play-by-play announcer Jason Benetti, leave for Detroit! Jerry Reinsdorf, who once again is trying to blackmail the city and state into building him yet another stadium! Because otherwise he (or his heirs, the man is 88 years old) might have to move the team somewhere else!

Yet here we still are. A team where so many chickens have come home to roost that they outnumber the fans in the stadium. A team where almost every great player dealt away during the last year is thriving on their new teams, while the handful of beans each were exchanged for have yet to grow any fruit in Chicago. A team which, finally, fired its latest, hopeless manager but has already announced the replacement guy won't be a candidate for the permanent position. (Maybe that was his condition for taking the job.)   

White Sox fans hate all of this. They hate it the same way you may hate the Starbucks that replaced your local cafe, the developers who bulldozed your old neighborhood, or the hedge fund vultures who bought your hometown newspaper and stripped it for parts. They want what some enterprising fans paid to have painted on a building near Sox Park last winter: SELL THE TEAM, JERRY. 

Sell it to a benevolent local billionaire -- we have a few -- who will see the team's fans as more than just a series of graduated entries on a spreadsheet. Sell it to a consortium of former players. Hell, sell it to the public, a fan ownership collective like the one that owns the Green Bay Packers, but only to people who can identify each of the 9 statues in Sox Park, and only, of course, people who still call it Sox Park. 

So do the beleaguered, depressed, but still, fiercely loyal White Sox fans, enjoy the team's current woes? No. But they -- we -- hope that finally, at long last, when things can get no worse, Jerry Reinsdorf will abandon his throttling grip on our team -- and yes, goddamnit, it is our team -- and then, and only then, can things begin to get better. 

—

Me: Thank you, Peter. Note that because of my de rigueur gratitude, I get the final word.

Peter: No, you do not.

Me: Okay.

Peter: No, you do not.

Me: Okay.

Peter: No, you do not.

Me: Okay .

Peter: So, I guess you'll keep this colloquy going ad infinitum, whatever it costs you in data charges?

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So, we are in week three of Donald Trump’s fulminating Harris-Walz meltdown and there are two points I’d like to make. The first — implicating the unfortunately timid and prissy Major Media — is about The Helicopter Crash that did not happen. The echoes of Trump here are malign and malignant and frankly demented; the compliance of the legacy media is shameful.

Trump told the world he was once on a helicopter that forced down in an emergency landing; onboard, he said, were himself and former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, former mentor to, and lover of, Kamala Harris. As the copter wiggled toward a risky crash-landing, Trump said, Willie snidely criticized Kamala, who is apparently an incompetent slut-slot. Now, what became instantly apparent was that this story was either misremembered, or total bullshit. Brown denied ever having been on such a flight. And another black California politician, Nate Holder, said he HAD been on such an imperiled flight with Trump, but that the subject of Ms. Harris — whom he had apparently barely known — never came up.

Consider this: It is not surprising that Trump might have conflated two people, especially because people like him sometimes see all black people as looking alike. I admit I have frequently conflated Bob Seger with Bruce Springsteen, but I would not ever have misremembered the non-fact that Springsteen once told me Tony Kornheiser was a serial rapist of chickens.

The mainstream media has made a great deal of the apparent mistake about the actual person on the helicopter with Trump, but has not adequately addressed the overriding question of the fact that it means he obviously totally made up — pure slander and libel — the slut-slot incompetent stuff, for his own pathetic benefit. It’s nucking futz. How the hell do you not demand a coherent answer from the Trump team?

So.

The second one involves Trump’s bizarre accusation that the Harris campaign used Artificial Intelligence to enlarge the crowds in the photos of her rallies, a completely demented allegation given that the photos were from places like Associated Press, attributed to a specific photographer, who, presumably, would have objected had the Harris team enhanced a crowd of 100 to look like 10,000. Trump has scene-us envy.

AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

That’s the scene, folks. It is real.

This is a sicko arena of self delusion that the media should be scrutinizing at least as fanatically, at least as daily, as they did with every fumfur or mumble issued by Joe Biden. And they should be demanding answers and making it super clear when they get stonewalled.

There is a weird delusional instability to the man. In his “interview” with Elon Musk yesterday, Trump noted, unbidden, that Harris was “a beautiful woman,” and compared her physical appearance to Melania’s — as Rachel notes, “He apparently ignored the light in Kamala’s eyes, and signs of an inner life.”

Trump is scared and going off the deep end. It is a huge un-confronted story because the mainstream media is, alas, leery of descending into being-accused-of-bias weeds, as though this were any ordinary election in any ordinary time. If you want to find out how deep this mental dysfunction goes, do not consult them, or psychiatrists. Consult Mary Trump, Donald’s estranged niece, who had a brilliant psychoanalysis of the origins of her uncle’s deeply deranged and deeply sad sickness in her substack blog just a couple of days ago. I quote:

“When Donald was a young child, his mother, my grandmother, was very ill. For about a year, starting when Donald was two and a half, he didn't have a primary caregiver because she was physically and emotionally unavailable to him. There was nobody there to do the essential parenting that children at that extremely crucial developmental period need. Toddlers need to be seen; they need to be soothed. He didn't get any of that, not only because my grandmother wasn't there for him, but because the person who replaced her, my grandfather, was a straight up textbook sociopath. My grandfather had absolutely no interest in nurturing children. He only cared about other human beings, including his own children, to the extent that they could be of use to him. Those are the circumstances in which Donald grew up, which as you can imagine, created some serious problems for him. He was never able to construct his own sense of self-worth,

And to get through it, he developed very rigid defenses against the world—against his loneliness, against the fact that there was nobody to soothe him. As time passed, the only way he could get his father's attention was to be hyperbolic. He had to be the best, the greatest, the smartest, the toughest—whatever it was his father required of him.

“The problem for Donald was that on an unconscious level, he knew that none of what he presented himself to be was true. He knew that none of what he told people about who he was had any validity. When you see him bragging about his crowd sizes, lying about the polls, undercutting vice President Harris's numbers, it's because when he was a very young child, there was nobody who cared about him telling him that he was worth anything. And that is a tragedy. We should have compassion for that child. But we have to accept that this man is a monster who means all of us harm. Remember, crowd sizes are completely irrelevant unless you're so desperate to prove that you mean something, you're willing to lie about them.”

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Trump’s insistence on stubbornly pressing on with obvious falsehoods and deny plainly obvious facts reminds me of the great old joke: A young woman is at home when she hears a radio alert that there is someone driving the wrong way on the Beltway. She knows her grandfather is on that highway at that very minute, so she calls him to warn him that someone is driving the wrong way. Grandpa says: “Some one?? There are a hundred of ‘em!”

Trump is grandpa.

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Okay, good. Time for the farting, middle-aged dogs. This is from The Oatmeal. It is brilliant humor. You have to know dogs. Read both parts.

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We are entering the real-time section of The Gene Pool, where you ask me questions or make observations, in real time, and I try to answer them in real time. So far today, we are hearing mostly about being marooned on a desert island, and things you’d happily pay more money for than you do, if you had to. Here is the magic orange button to send in more questions and observations, on any subjects:

Q: Isn't the obvious product for which we would pay a lot more … The Gene Pool?  

– J F Martin

A: Do you want me to test this thesis by seeing how many people drop out if we raise the price to $80 a year, which works out to $6.66  a month, instead of $4.15?   Would that kill you all?  Would you be freaked by the Devil sign?  

Anyway, you can buy us for the still-affordable price of $50:

And today’s second Gene Pool Gene Poll!

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: JUST CLICK ON THE HEADLINE IN THE EMAIL AND IT WILL DELIVER YOU TO THE FULL COLUMN ONLINE. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

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Oh, wait. One more thing. You know how the Web sometimes delivers a “best” or “worst” discussion that is all hype and blithe overstatement? Well this “worst call by an umpire in baseball history” holds up. No other nominee makes sense. It is from the Mexican leagues. Both umpires involved were suspended without pay.

NOW here we go.

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This is from my brother, Don:

Now we segue to the riddle we asked you in The Sunday Gene Pool.    There was a hemorrhage of guesses, mostly incorrect.  Here it is: 

A blind man is marooned on a desert island. He knows he will be rescued in two days. He also knows he has exactly four pills that can save his life till the rescue. The problem is that two of the pills are red and two are blue, but they are the same size and shape, and they smell the same. No name or number is etched into them. To stay alive, the man must take exactly one red pill and exactly one blue pill each day, no more, no less; if he doesn’t do that, he will die.

Alas, his four pills got jumbled together. How does he stay alive? There are two correct answers.

Your task is to:

1. Google it, and go “oh!” and keep it to yourself, or to …

2. Make a guess and send it in.

YOU MAY NOT DO BOTH. You are on your honor, which I happen to know is sacred to you.

– Okay, so, the submitted answers, below. 

They will take a minute to put in the right order.

Q: I’m guessing that if the blind man takes one pill every 12 hours, he will survive… regardless of the color of the pill.

A: So you are willing to gamble with his life? Horrendous. No.

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Q: He should line up the pills in a row, take a picture of them with his cell phone and send it to a friend. The friend can tell him which pills are blue and which are red. This is based on the fact that you did not say he did not have a functioning cell phone. HawkRapids

A: Do most deserted desert islands get cell phone service?   Still, I admire your effort, but no.

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Q: Nothing in the riddle says that the man is ALONE  on the desert island.   So my first answer is that he simply asks his companion(s) to dole out the red and blue pills correctly.   It would be good if they also tell him when rescue is about to occur, because otherwise, how would he know?   But maybe he is in fact alone.   His biggest concern in that case is potable water, not pills.   How will he take the pills?   Well, he will have to chew them.  Taste pill number 1 before chewing.  If pill 2 tastes different, then he will live.   If pill 2 tastes the same, do not chew it.  Put it aside.   If pill 3 tastes the same as pill 1, do not chew it.   Chew pill 4.  In short, on Day 1, chew pill 1 and the first pill that tastes different from pill 1.   Then chew the other two on the second day.   I really really hope that at least one of the two pills will compensate for the lack of water if he can't find any.

— Stephanie Smilay

A: Regarding your first point, look up “marooned.” He is alone. As to the absense ov water, he can crush the pills and take them under the tongue.  Regarding the third thing, death from thirst seldom happens before Day Two, and can be delayed up to Day Five. So, no, no, and no.

Q: When I read the riddle here's what I get :

  ” Two of the pills are red and two pills are blue.  The man must take one blue pill and one red pill. Since the riddle doesn't say the man is blind, so he can see which is which.  

So he picks one of each per day the same way I take my meds every day.”

Am I missing something?

A: You are missing something, which is the word “blind.”  It is the second word in the set-up.

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Q: Divide the pills in half, carefully putting the two halves of each pill in separate piles.  Eat one pile today, one tomorrow.

Ann Martin  and  K Johnson 

A: These were not the first correct answer, but they were the first to give their names.  There is an advantage to transparency. Just to be clear, and in the interests of transparency,  Ann and Keith are not an “item,” their entries came separately. 

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Q:  If the pills are tablets, the man could break them in half and take half of both pills on each day. If the pills are capsules, the man could open the capsules and mix the contents, then take half of the resulting mixture each day. — Ken Rosenbaum

A:  The perfect answer, and only perfect answer, I got.  Both solutions, efficiently explained. Clapclapclap.

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Q: I’m a little semi-old lady with a red wagon.  I am, luckily, able to walk to four grocery stores and two pharmacies.  The furthest is about 3/4 of a mile.  I often get compliments from other shoppers and queries of where I got the wagon.   I tell them it’s the best 75 bucks I ever spent on Amazon…. I’d pay more, cCause ain’t nobody want to schlep a gallon of milk or half gallon of ice cream 3/4 of a mile, especially a little semi-older lady.   Michele L. Uhler

A: I’ll be extra impressed if it says “Radio Flyer” on it.  

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Q: I am on holiday alone in Italy.  The lens fell out of my one pair of reading glasses and I could not get it back in despite valiant efforts.  I just started walking down the street, with faith that I would find a glasses shop and that they would help me, and within a single block I came upon a very elegant one.  I threw myself on their mercy (poor non-Italian-speaking old lady), and an assistant was called out to wrestle with the glasses.  He was triumphant and there was no charge.  Plus he was a cute young Italian guy.  I would gladly have paid a moderately substantial sum, since I could not even read my tiny guidebook map without them.  

A: Let’s test you:  What if they’d told you, in advance, that it would cost one hundred and twenty euros ($140)?

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Q: My taxes. I’d gladly pay more taxes I’m a CPA too but specialize more in controlling. My CPE is 80 hours a year, for which I have to take PTO if I don’t have enough at work or in my spare time. That doesn’t count the cost of courses, travel, and my $1000 annual license. My GF is a doctor who only needs 40 and gets them at work. I’ve traded options and didn’t have any idea how to do the return, $1000 is the minimum I would pay and maybe $3000 for what these people know to keep and defend my peace of mind from audits. The PTO they pay is probably worth $6000.

A: TKU.  I no someone wl undrst& this. Sgst FU-er ACKronyms.

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Q: Ever since you brought up Marv Throneberry on Tuesday, I've been trying to chase down a memory.  I pay no attention to baseball, and yet I've heard of Marv.  Where?  It wasn't the beer commercials that my e-search turned up.  I think some fictional character, possibly in a comic strip, was obsessed with him, but that memory might have crossed wires with Charlie Brown's hero Joe Shlabotnik.  Baseball cards were somehow involved.  Does this ring anybody's bells?

A; Here ya go.

Q: Concerning the renaming of the local airport, my wife and I used to joke that we should ask Jim Moran, who was then our congressman, to sponsor legislation to rename the Blue Plains water treatment plant to The Ronald Reagan Blue Plains Water treatment Plant. Then, every time the wind blew from the east into Alexandria, we could hold our noses and say, "Ewww, Reagan." - Greg Dunn

A: Thank you.

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Q: I think your opinion about spreading the couch joke has been permanently validated by Tim Walz's introductory speech. This will be fun.

A: Thank you. I agree.

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Q: Gene, I did not know I'd be auto-charged for another year (a practice below your fairness standards I'd suggest). It's OK this time round, but how do I handle that I want to be given a choice as to whether I want to re-up? I like your column--and for the most part, you,-- but still... Thanks, Linda

A: Hey, Linda. Substack does send a notice about ten days in advance. Or is supposed to. I've not gotten a lot of complaints like yours — yours might be the first — but I will stay alert to it. Can you check through back emails from substack?

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Q: As for someone driving the wrong way (luckily no one was hurt) my cousin was on her way to her wedding with the groom driving when he said “that guy is driving the wrong way!” Cousin’s response “that’s my uncle Ammon!” Groom: “ there’s another man right behind him!” Response “That’s my Uncle Ralph!” These were not stupid men- their brother Wilmer scored 170 on the military’s IQ test but everyone said Ralph was the smart one. And Ammon was an engineer who helped design the Boeing 707 in the 1950’s. This was in 1988. — Melissa

A: This is one of my favorite posts ever. We will end on it.

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PLEASE keep the questions and observations coming.

See you on Thursday with some fine Invitational results.