Pope mania and Illini fever

Actually, I have tonsillitis. Or so the physician’s assistant told me. But it’s the maladies around me that I can rant about. For the other, there’s omoxycillin.

The Illinois thing was fun while it lasted. To a point. Actually, five points. (Rim shot here). But seriously folks. They were a fun team to watch regardless of your opinion of the U of I, the largest Greek system in the country which by my stereotypes means it produces the highest quotient of assholes of any college campus, excluding the Ivy League, the ski-U’s of Colorado and any places founded by a right wing nut minister.

But U of I also is a place that’s given us many a scientific and technological innovation, from transistors to the Internet and numerous Nobel Prizes in between.

It’s also Hugh Hefner’s alma mater. I wonder if he wore a bath robe to class. Was he always as creepy as he seems now? Does anybody still think his shtick is or was really sexually liberating?

I wonder if Hef watched the big game from his highly chlorinated hot tub?
TV would have liked that. TV loved the Illini. What wasn’t to like?

They seemed like a nice bunch of guys, unselfish ballplayers with a flair for the dramatic. And even though they were # 1 most of the season, this being Illinois, even here deep down in our hearts we sort of felt they were overachieving underdogs.

Now the world is supposed to love a Cinderella story. But the world loves success more, which is why the street kids wear North Carolina blue not Illini orange. It’s why you see Yankee hats in Chicago or London or anywhere you go and not too many Milwaukee Brewer ones.

The Carolina win was depressing that way, because it showed Darwin’s laws at work. The deck is stacked in favor of a team like that. If you want to get the best basketball jobs you, if you have to go to college you go to a place like there as your first choice, much as a business bastard would go to Harvard.

And didn’t Cinderella, after all want a Prince Charming, to become royalty, too.

The world is filled with contradictions like that (ooh deep -- like a Chicago Tribune Pulitzer nomination, you’re saying, I’m sure).

Actually, it’s a lousy segue to this whole Pope frenzy. Now granted there are a billion Catholics in the world. But would you know it by how the place is run?

I mean, if every Catholic really did what the Pope said, this might be a peaceful yet quite sexually repressed and even more overcrowded planet.

It’s odd how beliefs seem to split themselves into patterns. Typically when you think pro-choice, pro-birth control, gay tolerant, anti-death penalty, anti-consumerism and antiwar, you think LIBERAL. Conservatives are usually the opposite on these. Duh.

So it gets confusing when you have a religious leader who is pretty much anti-sex but the marital kind and then pretty much for making babies, but who is against not only abortion, but war, pig-like consumerism and the death penalty.

Which is why I found it weird when I heard churchgoing Catholics I know telling me it was pretty much implied by their allegedly chaste priests that they should vote for George Bush. I mean W only had part of the list right, too.

But being Pope is filled with contradictions. I mean you’re supposed to be Jesus’ man on Earth, which is to say a humble if preachy sort, but you get to live like a king of kings. You get to tell people how to run their sex lives, sex being something you allegedly never tried.

You pretty much tell gay people they are on the disco floor to hell, even though there is considerable evidence a good many of your fellow priests are gay. You talk about freedom, but women can’t be leaders in your church and freedom doesn’t include a discussion of sexuality (like you don’t think Muslim terrorists are the most sexually fucked up people on the planet and that has a lot to due with their violence?).

You preach about the need to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and the dangers of livin’ large, then you get to stay in Vatican City, one of the richest places, one so over the top I’m surprised the fortress of good taste that is Las Vegas hasn’t at least thought about basing a hotel resort casino around it.

You just wish once somebody in a position like that would talk more about the yin and yang of it.

And this is not to speak ill of the dead. I’m finding some of the stories of JP II fascinating, that a man from such a background could survive what he did and rise to such heights.

But now he is beyond real. He is a superstar, mourned by the world. That, too, is fascinating, how events take on lives of their own, especially in the media age. And I don’t mean this glibly, but there’s a good chance if the Pope didn’t die when he did, there would almost have been as much attention on the the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowel Movement.

It’s like the end of the Great Gatsby, the line about ceaselessly rowing our boats into the past.

No one reads anymore, anyway, just what suits them.