Wet Top Guns: An afternoon at the Chicago Air and Water Show

Illinois apparently has a monsoon season now – or maybe God is just crying mad at the politicians in the state for all their posturing about the budget. Or maybe the governor’s hair care products have done something funky to the atmosphere.

Either way, August has been as dreary as November but with mold and mosquitoes.

To look on the bright side (ouch), a cloudy sky makes for a better backdrop for an Air and Water Show. Saturday I went to the huge one along Chicago’s lakefront, an event I had never attended. When I hear 1 million people are somewhere I tend not to want to be among them.

But, in my efforts to change my mopish ways, I headed down with my new pal Tom and met his pals for a day at the soggy beach. Tom knew what he was doing: We left early enough, but not too early as I had been out drinking the night before, and had no traffic to deal with. And he knew a parking deal which I will keep a secret.

All I will say is it was just $12 and maybe a half mile walk, while if you wanted to park close – assuming space was left – the fee was $30.

We were off Fullerton, a good distance north of the main staging area, but it was a great place to see the planes. That is, there were trees and a building for cover during the intermittent showers sprinkling between the stunts.

I readily admit to knowing little about aircraft. My guy hobbies are music and sports. But it almost made me want to rent Top Gun. Almost.

Even the most vegan of liberals has to admit there is something cool about watching planes buzz above you performing seemingly death-defying stunts, running toward each other, flying straight up and dropping into a spin and making vapor trail hearts because, after all, there is a romance to flying. And I stole that line from the PA announcer.

Another radio voice would not let anyone forget how cool it was to jump out of a plane with a military unit, the Golden Knights. It almost made you wish a stiff wind would have drifted him over to Michigan.

Watching high tech military planes seemingly defy the laws of physics raises some interesting questions.

First, the people who design the planes actually do know the laws of physics, which seem like magic to the rest of us. I just throw words on a page and hope some stick.

Second, think of the long, tedious work that must go into creating such beasts and the hours of training over and over on maneuvers it takes to fly them.

Things that look effortless are not. We are programmed to forget that, to think it is all glamour, not hard work. There is grunt work behind everything well done.

Another thing: it is amazing the things these planes can do, flying straight up, seemingly stopping on a dime and heading off on a right angle, or heading out past the speed of sound.

Yet, with all this military might, here we are bogged down in Iraq. If we really were the Great Satan we would have just gone with these killing machines and carved out new boundaries and wiped out masses of people and have been done with it.

Humans that we are, we stumble and bumble, with virtual kings of sumbling and bumbling in charge at the moment. There is no technology that can eradicate the irrationality of the species.

Maybe they should be doing variations of the stunt that the Thunderbirds performed to break the will of the bad guys. The team sent all but one plane forward, then the last one snuck up from behind silently, then with a whoosh, a “boo” that sent a shockwave of shudders through the crowd.

Do that 100 times a day and see what happens.

Or just send daredevil Sean Tucker over the caves of Afghanistan. In his Oracle stunt plane, Tucker takes more G-forces than a fighter pilot. Whirling and twirling through the air, it is obvious Tucker has no stomach – or is addicted to Dramanine.

Still Tucker wasn’t the craziest attraction of the day. There was this guy with his shirt off just down the beach from where we parked out lawn chairs. It was kind of cold not to be wearing a shirt, which is what made me notice him.

Well, that and because it appeared he was sexually assaulting himself, either licking or biting his nipples.

Maybe he rented Top Gun the night before and was just acting out a Tom Cruise fantasy.