Stop the presses! I gotta mourn the REAL Ernie Banks!

Ernie Banks was a spectacular ballplayer and special guy.  But, Ernie, with all respect, I'm getting the idea from media response your passing, and the recent passing of Mayor Byrne as well, that Chicago is living in the past. Makes me wonder: have Chicagoans (and/or its media) simply given up on the city's future? Instead of informing, inspiring and mobilizing Chicagoans to solve critical problems like youth violence, media spend so much time these days celebrating fallen heroes and merely mourning murder after murder of innocent teen victims like Hadiya Pendleton . . .

Anyway, so does it feel high up there in firmament of the media-driven Star System that gives Chicagoans such an imperfect idea of how people actually think about the issues of the day? It listens only to you stars, seldom to the people. And it remembers you only in certain idealized, superficial ways. In your case, you were always smiling, always full of love, always boosting baseball, the Cubs and Chicago. That was you! Of course it was a role you played, and played to perfection, no doubt enjoying it most of the time. But Ernie: did you want to be remembered only for this role?

Your own words, below, reveal the man behind the role, a black athlete deeply concerned with the issues of the day. But before hearing them, let's pay homage to your deification in Chicago's daily newspapers. In the Tribune in began on Saturday:

And in  the Saturday Sun-Times:

Then I saw the Sun-Times front page for Sunday:

The Sunday Tribune did likewise. But its front page was missing from Newseum site. So here's the front page of the Sports section:

Get the idea? Seen enough? Was this the REAL you? I'm sparing you soupy clips of reverential talking heads on TV news and talk radio shows. It was all the same thing, over and over again.

Isn't all this hoopla overdoing it just a bit? Makes me wonder: are Chicagoans living in the past - or is it just Chicago's media? At the poll at the toolbar on the right, you (and others) can vote your opinions.

And now, for anyone who wants to see and hear the REAL Ernie Banks, here are two clips from a terrific 2004 interview. You are looking fine and sharp as a tack at the ripe old age 73. These clips? We certainly aren't seeing them anywhere in Chicago's media today.

In the first clip you talk admiringly about what you yourself did not do: about how Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood stood up and made a difference and fought and paid the price - Flood especially for challenging baseball's reserve clause - for what all of you knew was right and just. You also discuss the cautious "Listen and Learn" image that you picked up from Robinson, an image that white Chicago chose to interpret as your joyful affirmation of a status quo about which you actually had severe misgivings.   

In this second clip you bring us up to date about alarming changes in American culture that have resulted in fewer blacks in baseball and given us gangs and drugs: what today we call "youth violence".

Your thoughts in these and other great Visionary Project clips of Ernie Banks on YouTube make me think that in addition to the media-driven Star System that pretty much calls the shots in Chicago you would have liked to see a future-oriented, media-driven People System committed to informing, inspiring and mobilizing young people and adults in Chicago to address and resolve gigantic, systemic problems like youth violence.

"Let's Play 2!"  

R.I.P. the REAL Ernie Banks

Pro Football and Youth Violence: What Do They Have in Common? (Papa Bear George Halas had the right idea)

Nothing, you might think, nothing whatsoever. Chicagoans live for pro football. And they run like hell from youth violence. Case closed.

But look again. Look at Chicago's media. Think about how they make money: how they use both pro football and youth violence to create huge audiences of consumers - of sports fans and frightened citizens - which they then deliver to advertisers. That's how they make money. And they don't do it individually. Media do it collectively! 

But there's more. Ask yourself: what are Chicago's media doing collectively today to empower Chicagoans to solve youth violence and to create safe neighborhoods? All this by contrast with the  nonstop disempowering accounts of dangerous neighborhoods that presently dominates media coverage of youth violence in Chicago.

Not much. Next to  nothing. You see little bits and pieces here and there: the Tribune's commendably citizen participatory New Plan of Chicago. But not even other Tribune Corp media have shown any interest it it. Then, there are stories on Chicago Public Radio, but nonwhites in Chicago's rough neighborhoods don't listen to WBEZ. Finally, there's nothing meaningful on the city's mainstream TV stations, all of which are licensed in the public interest by the Federal Communications Commission.

Now contrast neglect of solutions for youth violence in Chicago's media with media's obsessive coverage of the search for solutions to the Bear's dismal 2014 season. It's mountains to molehills.

So here's my point: With all this in mind, would you believe that there was once a time in Chicago when George Halas' Chicago Bears couldn't beg, borrow or steal coverage of any kind in Chicago's media?

George Halas, back in his semipro days when media completely ignored pro football

The link of media neglect pro football and youth violence reduction hit me several weeks ago as I reading Tribune sports writer Don Pierson's terrific article about George Halas and the early days of pro football in Chicago. There was a time, Pierson says, when  

Bears founder George Halas, who practically invented play for pay, was his own press agent, writing articles in the 1920s for newspapers that thought the college game was the only pure and true football worth covering.

Pierson's source is Halas on Halas, Halas' 1979 autobiography. Thanks to Pierson, I just read it. There are books. And then there are Books. Books convey soul the writer. Halas on Halas is a Book. And a remedy the Bears' sorry 2014 season.

Get it for a buck at Amazon.com!

But Halas on Halas is much more than that. It shows how George Halas was able to create a symbiosis betweeen his Chicago Bears and Chicago's media. So do you want to work for safe neighborhoods in Chicago? Then do what Halas did: create a mutually beneficial symbiosis between the city's media and Chicagoans who want safe neighborhoods.

Halas, quoted by Pierson below, does a beautiful job of telling the story of how he himself initiated this symbiosis:

"At last the newspapers discovered the Bears. I kept writing articles about upcoming games, and by reading the papers I learned editors like superlatives. I blush when I think how many times I wrote that the next game was going to be the most difficult of the season, or how a new player was the fastest man in the West. I would write how fearless they were on the field, but what fine gentlemen they were at all other times.

"One glorious Monday I awoke to find the Chicago Tribune had made our game its top sports story. I went to the Tribune and thanked the young sports editor, Don Maxwell."

Leave it to Halas, of course, to point out the symbiotic relationship between his enterprise and newspapers: "Maxwell said, 'The Tribune and I should thank you. Sunday in autumn is a dull sports day. We need something exciting for our Monday pages.' "

Halas, in short, did the Tribune a big favor. He gave it a new way to sell papers. That's what proponents of violence reduction in Chicago can do with Chicago's media today: help media make violence reduction a profitable proposition.  

Sound impossible? Think again. This possibility could be inevitable.

OK, so there's no denying that "Pro football gives advertisers more bang for their buck than anything else, not even close", as Pierson observes. But that's only where things stand today.

So why would citizen-participatory violence reduction efforts give advertisers the more bang for their buck in years to come? There are lots of reasons. At this blog I talk them. Here's just two.

First, ask yourself: what really and truly matters more to the man on the street in Chicago and to the future of the Chicagoland region: the fantasy of a winning sports teams or the hard benefits, social and economic, of safe, prosperous, happy neighborhoods?

Second: Don Pierson concludes his piece by pointing to certain unsavory truths about pro football. These now threaten football's once-untouchable symbiosis with media. He identifies several: concussions, off-field violence and "Is football the next tobacco".

He calls them "cracks in pro football's golden egg, exposing an ominous core".

And he asserts that "truth always prevails, eventually".

What would George Halas say to all this? George Halas, who on page 321 of Halas on Halas lamented the decline of physical fitness in America and charged "Schools [with creating] elaborate sports programs, unfortunately designed not for the participation of all students but to develop the few super players. The great masses of students are moved from the playing fields to bleachers."

George Halas announces Mike Ditka as head coach, Jan 20 1982 (Tribune File Photo)