I was introduced to the news of Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick by reading a Yahoo! news headline after waking up on Saturday. It said something like “Obama Picks Ultimate Washington Insider.” A Google search on the phrases “Joe Biden” and “ultimate insider” (as of Monday morning August 25, 2008, when I am writing this), produces 4,820 hits. I’m sure the narrative on Biden will evolve as times goes on, but I found it surprising that the immediate response was “insider” (read: bad) rather than “experienced” (read: good). I guess we can now dispense with the notion that the media fawns all over Obama all of the time.

Ultimate Washington insider or not, I will always have an emotional soft spot for Joe Biden. It’s not because of his policies or his experience, or because he does such a good job of calling people out on their idiocracy — for example, his money quote on Giuliani: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11”. No, Joe will always get the benefit of the doubt from me because he is an important part of my 9/11 story, which I hope not entirely to bore you with right now.

The Olympics are already more than halfway over. As usual, they have provided valuable life lessons for athletes and viewers alike. A small sample includes:

• Sports are more interesting and broadcast-worthy when Americans are good at them.
• The love of sport and competition is important, but the big endorsement deals don’t go to losers.
• Individuals need skill, determination, hard work and sometimes luck to win. Nations sometimes need forged passports to win.
• China is concerned with worldwide attention on human rights, but not so much that they are going to give Tibet back to the Tibetans.

These are all fine lessons, and I am wiser for having learned them. However, the single biggest lesson I learned from these games turns out to be one of my favorite Stephen Colbert lines: The market has spoken, and global warming is real.

I am a member of Coop America, which is one of those liberal, save the planet, use your economic power to buy green and socially conscious stuff organizations. Being a member means that I pay them a small annual fee, they send me a “green pages” book that contains guilt-free products, and then I put the green pages book in with the bills that I see once a month, and thus consistently forget to buy stuff from them.

But it just so happened that on bill day this month, I decided to buy a knife magnet, and remembered Coop America. By knife magnet, I don’t mean a magnet in the shape of a knife. That would be both useless and dangerous (unless there was a shiny, metallic robot coming after you, in which case you would have bigger problems than a magnetic knife could solve).

Here’s a half-baked thought: Perhaps Michael Scott is a contemporary stereotype of a white person.

Michael Scott is the ultimate nightmare boss, played by Steve Carell on The Office. But he’s not the mean kind that yells at you and demands unreasonable production and hours. He’s the kind that wants to be your friend while being completely clueless about how to interact with others.

I had always thought of Michael as representing bad bosses or buffoons, but not necessarily representing (or caricaturizing) his race as a white person. Perhaps this is because I watched The Office only intermittently until this summer. Then the miracle of DVD season releases gave me a more complete picture of him. His main qualities seem to be 1) he wants everyone to like him 2) he’s unwilling to let go of any privilege or power that he has, and 3) he’s generally unaware how his actions negatively affect others. This is uncomfortably close to how a lot of white people generally behave towards minorities.

I may have grown up in suburbia, but I’m not completely ignorant about farm life. After all, some years I spend an entire afternoon at a county fair. As a child I played some wicked games of hide-and-seek in my cousin’s barn, which was the old-fashioned, wood and red-painted kind, not the corrugated metal atrocities they now use. I’ve also fished out of ponds that were pre-stocked, and to this day still enjoy listening to Jeff Foxworthy.

I say all this to provide some evidence, pathetic though it may be, that I do venture out into the country at times, and usually do not run screaming back to suburbia. And yet, I learned something this weekend that I feel I should have known, and also that I feel is kind of gross, in a city slicker kind of way.

The News-Gazette commentary section gave us a double helping of crazy this past Sunday from nationally-syndicated columnists. On the whole, that makes it a light day of crazy for the News-Gazette commentary section, which is often capable of reducing my faith in humanity to a point where I look forward to robots, aliens or even apes taking over.

This week’s entries are from Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Cal Thomas, far right-wing Christian apologist.

In his column Single People Suck last week, Ryan touched a nerve among single people when he highlighted a billboard in Champaign that praised the economic advantages of being married. He believed this was an overt message disparaging single people because they are not married.

As a married person, I think I should chime in. It is unfortunate that Ryan should get this message directly from the billboard. Married people often have long discussions on this topic in their monthly cabal meetings, and we all generally agree: The message that single people suck should be subliminal, so as not to arouse heated arguments. Heated arguments just distract people away from their sole purpose in life, which is to get married as quickly as possible to the nearest person they can find.

Every parade should be like the Washington Street Parade.

It should be led by a single fire truck, followed by a homemade sign.

The band should be filled with neighbors who value community and know only one song: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

During a trip to Colombia this spring, I heard a common theme from a number of Colombians with whom I spoke: In order to help Colombia’s drug violence problem, I should, as an American, work to reduce drug demand in the United States. It is our demand for drugs that produces their supply of drugs and the violence that comes with it.

This seemed unfair to me. Asking me to reduce drug demand in the United States is about as realistic as me asking Colombians to ignore the profit on the supply side or to share it equally with everyone. We should do our parts on both sides, of course, but we shouldn’t be under the illusion that people’s desire for drugs and money is going to go away anytime soon.

Last summer, Sun-Times columnist Tom McNamee listed his choices for the ten best Chicago movies of all time. His list appears to be lost to history via a content-reshuffle at the Sun-Times Web site, but I thought it was a fun exercise, and decided to do my own last year. I’m on vacation this week, but summer is a time for re-runs, so I am shamelessly reprinting my list as a “column” this week.

Note that I would be perfectly willing to list the ten best Champaign-Urbana movies of all time, but I couldn’t even come up with ten movies that reference Champaign-Urbana, much less are set here. Perhaps local movie aficionados can weigh in with a good list.

One of the things I like about living in Champaign-Urbana is that you almost never have to contend with random, out-of-control, angry teenagers who throw rocks at your van while you drive the family home from a little league game.

And yet, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

My wife was driving us home from a game last week with the van window open. She felt a sudden sharp pain of something thrown into her leg, which she naturally assumed was the first volley of some kind of tantrum in the backseat. She yelled “Ouch!” then pulled the van over and glared into the backseat. While she found nothing amiss there, she did notice someone about a half-block down throwing stuff at us.

Now that Iron Man is almost out of the theaters, it is finally time for me to sing its praises. At the Schreiber house, we are often a month or more behind everyone else concerning popular culture, which is our way of disrespecting it. We pretend to be apathetic, but keep up on it, kind of, so as to be behind by just enough to be irrelevant.

So, I’ve come late to the Iron Man party. Usually, when people shout at me or beg me to go to a movie that they swear is the best superhero movie they’ve ever seen, I mumble some excuse and slowly back away. And yet, after finally seeing this movie, I find myself on the other side, shouting at people, and begging them to go see this movie. Maybe it’s because the hero is over 40 and acknowledges the myth of redemptive violence. More likely, it is the neato, super-cool Iron Man body armor suit.

Is there anything less American than a loyalty oath? A country that prides itself on freedom of expression and association should be embarrassed to require people to swear allegiance to itself. Sure, old Soviets would do this kind of thing, but Americans?

Strange as it may seem, a California State-Fullerton professor was recently fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. In fact, all 2.3 million California state employees are required to sign an oath promising to “defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Signing the oath is part of the California Constitution, instituted during the McCarthy red scare era of the 1950s. Yet, it just seems so…unconstitutional.

A couple weeks ago, Dubya lit a match near some oily rags when he compared holding talks with Iran to appeasing Nazis. This was a not-so-subtle dig at Barack Obama, who holds the apparently revolutionary idea that one should talk to their enemies rather than threaten them incessantly. John McCain quickly piled on by saying it was evidence of Obama’s “inexperience and reckless judgment.”

This was followed by a maelstrom of commentary, whose only endpoint could be a raving conservative talk show host revealing his basic lack of historical knowledge. Kevin James was on Hard Ball yelling over and over again that Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, while Chris Matthews was yelling at him over and over asking him what Chamberlain did that was appeasement. James obviously didn’t know, and it became a painful and sad spectacle to watch a man be so aggressively dumb. Matthews finally jumped in to explain that appeasement isn’t talking to one’s enemies, it is giving them things. Chamberlain wasn’t an appeaser because he talked to Hitler. His problem was giving away half of Czechoslovakia.

Suppose you are shopping for bananas and find two that are equal in every way except for price. Which banana would be the morally responsible one to buy?

This is a trick question, of course, because it is likely that one is a Chiquita banana and the other is a Dole banana, and the moral choice would be to buy neither. Both were likely harvested and packaged by workers being treated like chattel, and the profits will likely go to someone who looks a lot like Boss Hogg.

A case could be made for buying the less expensive one, in order to reduce the profit of Boss Hogg, and also to increase the amount of money in your own pocket, that you swear you will use for charity. But let’s face it, Boss Hogg will still make money, and you will probably just blow your extra money on something unnecessary, like bottled water.

I have bad news for just about everyone: As of Monday, May 12, 2008, the rapture index hit 170. If this seems like an arbitrary number to you, like saying the cloud index is 67 or the UFO index is 329, then it is likely you are not quite ready for the rapture, and could use a visit to Rapture Ready.

With our country so divided these days, it is good to note scraps of hidden unity among fellow citizens. I discovered one such example the other day as I walked my kids to Dr. Howard Elementary School in Champaign. No matter whether you wear a “Chief Now and Forever” or a “Racial Stereotypes Dehumanize” sweatshirt, we are able to agree on at least this: Motorists should not run over children while they are walking to school.

Of course, this seeming unity can quickly fall apart once we decide to choose one method of achieving it over another. For example, most everyone agrees that poverty should be eliminated, but only some of us think that giving tax rebates to wealthy people is the way to get there. Child safety strategies can suffer from the same problem, especially if we work hard enough to shoehorn them into different political ideologies.

I knew FreeRice.com had hit the mainstream when my daughter came home all excited about it. She’s in middle school, and the paradox of middle school is that nobody does anything unless everybody does it. Since everybody is apparently doing Free Rice, I thought it would be good to try it out.

It’s pretty simple. You are presented with a word, and if you correctly guess the definition of that word from a list of choices, a hungry person somewhere in the world gets 20 grains of rice. If you get it wrong, the hungry person apparently gets nothing. You can play as long as you like.

If you’ve never been to an Ebertfest before, you can move along now, there’s nothing to see here.

Now that all the people with day jobs and lives have left the room, I’d like to make my nominations for The Quintessential Ebertfest Film, or the film that has best represented Ebertfest as a whole over the years. This can be followed by the rest of you telling me what a numbskull I am and how little taste I have. Then we can argue about film theory and other minutia. It’s all part of the Ebertfest experience, after all.

Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza was born with malformed hands in Germany in 1938. The story is told that her father recognized she would not make a good farmer’s wife with impaired hands, so he decided instead to invest in her education, and shipped her off to school. She has subsequently become one of the most influential feminist theologians in the world, and is currently the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard.

She was also at The Spurlock Museum Auditorium last Thursday, as the guest speaker for the annual Marjorie Hall Thulin Lecture by the Program for the Study of Religion at the University of Illinois. The lecture gives students and the general public a chance to interact with influential theologians of our day, such as Charles Curran and Stanley Hauerwas.

I lost my initial enthusiasm to see Horton Hears a Who when I heard the pro-life crowd had co-opted it. Although I’m pro-choice, I do know people who are honorably pro-life, and these days I generally try to stay away from useless argumentation about when a fetus becomes a baby. However, one thing I am sure about is that protesting at a children’s movie is creepy and unseemly. Nonetheless, my kids were gung-ho about going, so thought I would see what the fuss was about.

Horton Hears a Who is a Dr. Seuss children’s book about tolerance and care for all creatures. Horton is an elephant who hears an entire little city of people (Whoville) inside a dust speck on a flower. He is first ridiculed for his beliefs, then imprisoned in a cage, and then a mob of jungle creatures almost destroy the speck before the voices of all the Whos finally come together to be heard. The mob then realizes Horton was telling the truth, and they all decide to protect the little speck.

The tag line for the story is “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” and has long been a phrase used by pro-life groups. However, this was not Theodor Geisel’s intent with the story, and in fact he had threatened to sue these groups over the issue while he was alive.

When deciding whether to volunteer for a relief trip, you always need to ask the hard question: Would it be more useful to those in need if I simply sent money instead of myself? Sometimes this is obvious. If someone needs a new roof, it is far better in the short run to send them $1000 so they can buy materials and hire local workers who need a job, rather than to show up as an unskilled worker with no supplies who needs to be housed and fed for a week.

I recently got back from a learning tour of Colombia that cost my church and me around $1500. Should I instead have just sent the money to a human rights or service organization in Colombia? There are certainly roofs that need to be built there and, perhaps more importantly, human rights workers who need money to do their critical work. I know people always talk up the “human relationship” benefits from such a trip, but I want to justify my trip in purely economic terms. Shouldn’t Colombia see at least $1500 of value from my trip since I allegedly went there not just to learn but to be of assistance?

One advantage to being in a foreign country and not knowing the language is that a major political crisis can happen while you remain largely ignorant of how serious it is. I was in Colombia during the Chavez–Uribe standoff last week, and my lack of Spanish prevented me from following along with the local daily news. Since the only thing Colombians could personally communicate to me was “Chavez es loco,” at no time did I feel like war was about to break out. I wonder if this is how people who are kidnapped feel right before they get carted away by guerillas.

One of the most disturbing things about the Northern Illinois University shootings last week (aside from the actual carnage, of course) was the lack of any warning signs. Steve Kazmierczak, the shooter, did not seem troubled and he wasn’t described by acquaintances as many mass murderers are: quiet, keeps to himself, kind of creepy. His colleagues and advisors at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, where he’d been pursuing a graduate degree since spring 2007, described him as personable, engaging and motivated — and no one, not even his girlfriend, had any idea he would be capable of such a thing. He also did not leave behind any hint as to why he did this, even going so far as to remove his phone’s SIM chip and the hard drive from his laptop. He apparently intended to take his mysteries to the grave with him.