Tracy Morgan and the Eggshell Skull Rule

     The law gets a bad rap, but has its fascinations.
     For instance, TV comedian Tracy Morgan and five other passengers were in a Mercedes limousine that slowed because of traffic congestion on the New Jersey Turnpike June 7 and was rear-ended by a Walmart truck.  Morgan's friend, James McNair was killed, and Morgan, who starred on NBC's Saturday Night LIve and 30 Rock, was badly injured.
     Before rear-ending the limo, the driver of the Walmart truck, Kevin Roper, made several mistakes: he was traveling at 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation. He ignored warning signs. And he had been driving for nearly 14 hours, the federal limit.
     The driver faces several criminal charges, including vehicular homicide and Morgan of course filed a civil suit. 
     A layman might be forgiven for assuming Walmart would just hand Morgan a blank check at this point. But that isn't how it works. The law is a battle. Parties clearly in the wrong—particularly giant corporations in the wrong—must mount a defense, and it should be no surprise that Walmart lawyers are seeking to pin the blame on Morgan, saying his injuries were  "caused, in whole or in part, by plaintiffs' failure to properly wear an appropriate available seat belt restraint device"and so, by not wearing a seatbelt "acted unreasonably and in disregard of (their) own best interests."
     News reports focused on Morgan's incredulous response.
     But I was more interested in what the law says. 
     At first blush, it would seem an 0pen-and-shut case.
     There is a queasily-named principle in law called "The Eggshell Skull Rule" that says, in essence, that a person who does wrong is responsible for any harm done to a person, even if that person is in an unexpectedly precarious state. "A defendant takes a plaintiff as he finds him," is the way it's usually phrased; meaning that you are on the hook for the injuries you inflict, even if they could not be foreseen. Morgan's carelessly being in a vulnerable, seatbeltless position shouldn't matter. Heck, if every evening I bathe in a tub filled with gasoline, and you malicious toss a lit cigarette into my open bathroom window, assuming the tub is filled with water, you are responsible for my horrific burns. That bathing in gasoline is stupid doesn't enter into it (the "eggshell skull" comes from another hypothetical. If I push you down, and your skull shatters because it's an eggshell, I've murdered you. The argument that a person with such a skull shouldn't go around without a helmet doesn't score many points in court).
     Unless it does. Walmart has to offer some defense, and in making the motion pinning the blame on Morgan, it shows that it is not going to roll over and pay whatever staggering, eight-figure settlement the TV star is hoping for. Walmart has deep pockets, and part of any lawsuit such as this is the filing of endless motions and continuances, the displaying of the legal fleet, as it were, to try to instill fear and expense, grind down the other side and reduce their expectations. 
     As with any situation involving law, it gets more complicated than that. Different rules come into play, and it is up to a judge and jury to decide which ones apply. For instance, there is a concept known as comparative fault, which is the new term applied to what was once called "contributory negligence" (in essence,the idea that if you've somehow done something to contribute to your injury, like not worn a seatbelt, you can't collect damages). 
    Only four states adhere to the idea of contributory negligence, and New Jersey isn't one of them. New Jersey does have a rule about comparative fault—the "51 Percent Bar Rule" that says if a plaintiff is more than half at fault in a situation, then he can't collect. 
    Which means that Walmart has to convince a jury that an exhausted, speeding, heedless truck driver is less at fault for Morgan's injuries than the comedian himself is, for not wearing a seatbelt in the back of his limo.
    A tall order. It isn't quite saying that you're at fault for not wearing a bulletproof vest when I shot you, but in the same ballpark. Or at least that's what I would argue, were I Morgan's lawyer (or, more likely, lawyers). 
    But wait. It gets even more complicated. Bathing in gasoline or having an eggshell skull are not crimes. But riding in a car without wearing a seatbelt is.  In 2010, New Jersey passed a law that all passengers, front and back, must wear seatbelts. A Walmart lawyer could argue that Morgan's commission of a crime, minor though it is, reduces the damages he could expect. He is like a burglar who breaks into somebody's house and then drowns in the whirlpool tub. Even if a jury decides that the fault is 10 percent Morgan's, that's 10 percent shaved off the top of a judgment certain to be in the millions. A Hail Mary pass worth trying. 
       Then again, speeding is also a crime, as is vehicular homicide.
       You get the point. It's all moot anyway because Walmart, shying away from the continuing bad publicity involved with its reckless employee injuring a popular entertainer, will no doubt, after showing  the stick of its legal muscle, choose the carrot of  some never-to-be-disclosed settlement. Morgan, tired of the whole ordeal and eager to get on with his life, will no doubt take the money.  Still, it's interesting to think about. At least I hope it is.
        Then again, I'm not a lawyer, and I know many readers of this are. Am I missing something here? 
     

Beheading wasn't invented by ISIS

     Humans are social animals, traveling like wolves in packs that became families, clans, communities, nations.
     As such, we have a tendency to mimic each other, and generally this is a good thing. Ogg wraps himself in a bearskin, we all wrap ourselves in bearskins, and find that doing so offers protection against the arctic cold. And so civilization advances.
     But sometimes it is not good. News this week told of a fired nursing home employee in Oklahoma who threatened to come back and behead his former coworkers, inspired no doubt by the atrocity that happened days earlier and 20 miles away.
     Is this going to be a trend?
     You could argue it already is. Three times makes a trend in the newspaper business, and so cutting off heads must be in vogue, what with ISIS beheading two freelance journalists and posting the videos, the horror leaping the globe to pop up in Oklahoma, of all places (or maybe that should be, “pop up in Oklahoma, of course” that state having established itself in 1995 with the Murrah Federal Building bombing as a sort of port of entry for foreign terror techniques).
     Not that it’s anything new. Beheading holds a special place of horror in our culture, as cold-blooded murder and desecration of the body paired in one awful act.
     Which is ironic, because when history picks up on decapitation—”caput” is Latin for head, it’s also where “capital” comes from—it was the kinder form of execution, compared to crucifixion, which took longer.
     Those hot to tar Islam with any brush available will leap to cast beheading as a particularly Muslim practice. The Q’uran certainly endorses it at several points, such as verse 8:12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
     And history is rife with Islamic beheadings. Legendary Muslim warrior Saladin ordered the beheading of 230 Knights Templar in 1187; Turkish invaders beheading 800 Catholic martyrs in Otranto, Italy in 1480.
     Saudi Arabia still allows beheading and had a surge of such executions in August.
     But in order to consider decapitation an Islamic atrocity, we have to ignore a solid thousand years of other history; England kept its headsmen busy for centuries, even managing to behead its king, Charles I, on Jan. 30, 1649 (a groan went up from the crowd when the ax fell, but onlookers still lined up to dip handkerchiefs in the royal blood, as mementoes, a 17th-century version of the selfie).
     No Muslim nation embraced decapitation with the zeal shown by those arbiters of Western culture, the French, who invented the guillotine and then kept it busy on what is now the Place de la Concorde, using it to kill as many as 40,000 French citizens. Beheadings became entertainment, with programs sold listing the condemned for that day, and Parisians brought their children to watch. The French continued using the guillotine; the last official beheading in France was in 1977. England beheaded a trio of would-be traitors in 1817, though they were hanged before their heads were displayed.
      Nor should we be too smug in the United States. True, legal decapitation was never in vogue here (briefly on the books in Utah, never used). But that doesn't make our history free of the practice.
      In 1623, Myles Standish, of Pilgrim fame, cut off the head of an Indian chief and impaled it on a spike outside his fort, only two years after the first Thanksgiving. "That's the part we typically omit from our Thanksgiving myth," NYU history professor Jonathan Zimmerman dryly notes in his account of the incident.
      Given the number of protracted, botched executions by lethal injection, it could be argued that a swift decapitation is more merciful. No matter. Beheading is seen as repulsive, evoking visceral horror, shocking enough that a nation that had just extracted itself from the bloody quicksand of Iraq would go galumphing back.
      Murder is murder, and the dead are dead. While cutting someone's head off shows far greater zeal on the part of the killer than, say, shooting someone, we should by now be finally adjusting ourselves to the notion that the Middle East is an area where passions run high.
     I hope this doesn't become a true trend, that the news isn't filled with moments-before footage, and heads don't start being impaled on the wrought-iron fence around the White House. Because we've been there before. And the sad thing is, we'd get used to it. Again.
  

"They are the effect and not the cause"

Library exhibit, Vanderbilt University

    The benefit, and drawback, of writing for publication in a newspaper is that you have a finite space. About 800 words, of late. Thats good because it encourages brevity. You make your point in 1000 words, and then cut 20 percent which, when you're done, usually makes the column better, sharper. 
     But it is a detriment as well, in that you can only say so much. For instance, in yesterday's post about Simone de Beauvoir's views on race in the United States, I really could only introduce her, talk about her visit to Harlem which I found so illuminating, then wrap it up. Time to move on. 
    But thankfully, a number of readers stuck their feet in the door before I could close it.  I wanted to stride off to a new topic, but they yanked me back.  Joe Schiele, of Ravenswood, struck the archetypical tone—and truly, each is almost identical ("They don't have to conspire," as Gay Talese once said of the rich, "because they all think alike"): 

Hi Neil,      Great column today!!! You as a white Jew from Northbrook, and me as a white Roman Catholic from Glenview, how about we take our wive's and children on a nice weekend stroll around 49th and State. I hear it's especially nice around midnight :-)     Wish Madame Bouvier(sp?) could join us, but since she's long gone and obviously unaware how much Harlem and the AA (generally) demographic has de-volved in our country, I'm not quite sure what the point of your column was.       I can't leave Mr. Schiele dangling in uncertainty, and Beauvoir addresses this very point, at a length that I could only allude to in the paper.        But here, online, we can let her build her argument to help illuminate Mr. Schiele. And though it will certainly be lost on him, we can still benefit:        "The black problem,' Beauvoir writes, "is first of all a white problem. To understand it, you must start there. It was whites who brought black slaves to America (around four hundred thousand of them in 1802, when the slave trade was legal and nearly as many—illegally—between 1808 and 1860). It was whites who fought each other to decide whether to maintain or abolish slavery. Today, there are thirteen million blacks, but they possess only a tiny portion of the country's economic wealth, and they have almost no political influence. It is whites who assign them their place: their way of life is a secondary reaction to the situation created by the white majority."       Of course she wrote this in 1947, and things have changed. Now there are 40 million African Americans, and a black president, but otherwise what she said about wealth and political power hold true. There has been a struggle for Civil Rights and things are different. But they are not—as Mr. Schiele's comments reflect—really that different, and in some ways they are worse, as it is easy for people such as my complaining readers to dismiss the current situation of African Americans are entirely their fault.        Even though, as Beauvoir continues:      "No one claims that their conditions or opportunities are equal to those of whites..."      Inferior schools, lack of capital, lack of access to jobs, uneven law enforcement, judicial system stacked against them, all of these are shrugged off—how else otherwise could we see a return to voting restrictions? Not quite the cynical poll taxes and "grandfather clauses" which Beauvoir details, but close enough. None of this keeps my readers such as Mr. Schiele from mockingly washing their hands. That too is part of a long tradition.     "But many racists, ignoring the rigors of science, insist on declaring that even if the physiological reasons haven't been established, that fact is that blacks are inferior to whites"—the term Schiele uses is "de-volved"—"You only have to travel through America to be convinced of it. But what does the verb 'to be' mean? Does it define an immutable substance, like oxygen? Or does it describe a moment in a situaton that has evolved, like every human situation? The best answer to this accusation was provided by Jefferson, speaking of white Americans, who had been put down by Old World Europeans for lacking a historical past or any constructive force, for not having produced any outstanding figures in the arts or sciences. "We have not yet had our opportunities," he essentially said. "First let us exist; then we can be asked to prove ourselves."       That in essence is my view of the situation of blacks today. Not enough time has passed since the enormous wrongs visited upon them. The little change we've managed, at enormous effect, makes us fancy that much has changed, and it hasn't.       She goes on, but my newspaper training tells me it is time to draw to a close. You really should read the book. But a final thought, addressing my reader's sneer at crime in black areas—all of which I have spent time in, with no ill effect, doing my job. (And yes, brought my wife and kids, after dark, to no ill effect).      "Their crime rate is a little higher than that of whites in part because they are treated with unequal severity, in part because their poverty allows them neither legal nor illegal defense against the arbitrariness of the police, and in part because they almost all have a wretched standard of living and a social status that makes them view the white legal system as merely a detested constraint," Beauvoir writes. "Finally, if in the big cities so many blacks are found in the lower depths of society, it's because there are so few economic outlets open to them that they're forced to live by their wits. The faults and defects attributed to blacks really are created by the terrible handicaps of segregation and discrimination; they are the effect and not the cause of the white attitude toward black people."      "They are the effect and not the cause of the white attitude toward black people." If that, if the entire final paragraph, is not as true today as it was in 1947 well, then maybe Mr. Schiele or one of his identical soulmates can write a second time and explain to me why it isn't.             Photo atop blog: Vanderbilt Library, Nashville, Tennessee.

Beauvoir's thoughts on race echo today

Simone de Beauvoir, 1948 (photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson)

     Every night I go to bed with a French woman. My wife doesn’t mind, because the French woman is dead.
     So I’m not climbing under the covers with Simone de Beauvoir, herself, alas, but with her book, “America Day by Day,” an account of her visit to the United States for a four-month lecture tour in 1947.
     To be honest, I was only vaguely familiar with Beauvoir: some kind of existentialist, lover of Jean-Paul Sartre, pioneering feminist author of “The Second Sex” — still more than most know (“She’s related to Jackie Kennedy, right?” a friend asked). I can’t put on airs; I hadn’t read a word of hers. But my co-author, Sara Bader, has, and in checking sources for our upcoming book, I called up “America Day by Day” on Google. I started to read around the lines we quote and was hooked. I married a really smart woman, but Beauvoir is a really, really smart woman.
     Off to the library I trotted. And they say you can’t find books serendipitously online.
     At first I thought the book’s charm would be her quirky Gallic views on American life, such as her delight at drinking scotch, which she calls “one of the keys to America,” or her baffled rejection of ear muffs:
     “Men remain bareheaded. But many of the young people stick fur puffs over their ears fixed to a half-circle of plastic that sits on their hair like a ribbon ­— it’s hideous.”
     Her timing is excellent. She finds Los Angeles in the grip of the Black Dahlia murders. She can’t turn around without bumping into someone famous, whether touring Madison Street dives with Nelson Algren, who heard her voice on the phone and hung up the first two times Beauvoir called — she had been given his number by a friend. She called back again, and they became lovers.
     But that isn’t why I’m writing about her.
     Barely two weeks in this country and she’s at New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church with her pal, Richard Wright, listening to Adam Clayton Powell preach.
     “I’m struck by the social aspect of his sermon,” she writes. “It seems less like a religious gathering than a political meeting.”
     That’s the first of easily 10 solid pages of observation and comments on race relations in America in 1947, and what really struck me, reading them, was how spot-on they were then and how sadly apt they are today.
     I can’t even summarize all she says, but her solo visit to Harlem must be shared. First she catalogs the various warnings she received: “Never go on foot” and “Avoid all side streets” and promises that whites venturing there risk the next morning being “found in the gutter with their throats cut.”
     Beauvoir walks alone into Harlem, noting “a force pulls me back, a force that emanates from the borders of the black city and drive me back — fear. Not mine but that of others — the fear of all those whites who never take the risk of going to Harlem.”
     Shaking that force off, she sees children playing, adults sitting or strolling. “There is nothing frightening in all this,” she notes. “I even feel a new kind of relaxed gaiety.”
     As far as her being attacked, “No one seems to pay attention to me,” Beauvoir writes. “It’s the same scenery as on the avenues of [downtown] Manhattan.”
     As she walks, she realizes something.
     “There must be some strange orgies going on in the heads of right-thinking people. For me, this broad, peaceful, cheerful boulevard does not encourage my imagination. I glance at the small side streets; just a few children, turning on their roller skates. … They don’t look dangerous.”
     Then it occurs to her what her white New York friends had really been afraid of.
     “The average American, so concerned with being in harmony with the world and himself, knows that beyond these borders he takes on the hated face of the oppressor, the enemy,” Beauvoir writes. “It’s this face that frightens him. He feels hated, he knows he is hateful. This thorn in his conciliatory heart is more intolerable than a specific external danger. …It’s themselves they’re afraid to meet on the street corners. And because I’m white, whatever I think and say and do, this curse weighs on me as well. I dare not smile at the children in the squares; I don’t feel I have the right.”
     Throughout the book she returns to black topics and areas, heartbreakingly in Savannah, where she and a friend do get angry glares and children running ahead of them, shouting, “Enemies! Enemies!”
     I thought, “I’ve got to tuck this away for Black History Month.” But that’s half a year away. Besides, one of the criticisms is that it’s wrong to consign black history to a single month. It should be year-round. Quite true. It can pop up anywhere. Even in late September in a French woman’s memoirs.

  

Hope is the thumb you suck waiting for things get worse

    Sharp-eyed readers noticed (okay, they didn't notice, or at least didn't mention noticing, but a guy can dream, can't he?) that I had two columns in the paper Friday. The first was about Rahm's ill-advised bragging about the busyness of O'Hare—proved all too true that day, when the place was shut down by a lunatic who set fire to the air traffic control center causing thousands of flights to be cancelled. Very busy airport, in a bad way.

     But there was a second column, that I wrote earlier in the morning, on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. I thought the airport column would replace it, but both ended up running.

     I didn't want this column to be overlooked, as I think it makes some good points, and am particularly pleased with the hope-is-the-thumb-you-suck line at the end. 

     Happy 5775, for those of you who celebrate Jewish New Year, if “happy” is the proper word to describe this particular, anxious moment in Jewish life.

     (“Really, the Jews are anxious?” quips the potato-nosed wisenheimer in my head. “As opposed to their usual tranquil state?”)

     Shhh, I say. I’m trying to be serious here.

     (“Oh, a Jew is being serious. Now we’ve really sailed off into uncharted waters ...”)

      Ignore him. Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe. Jewish stores burn, Jews are killed in the street, Jewish centers attacked. Maybe not that much on historical terms, or compared to the massive horrors currently being inflicted in, oh, Syria, or South Sudan.

     But alarm can’t be written off to reflexive catastrophization either; ignoring deteriorating world conditions is not a survival mechanism for the Jewish people. To make sure it wasn’t just me being jumpy, I checked in with Richard Hirschhaut, founding executive director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

     “This is a moment of deep and lingering anxiety and frustration,” he agreed. “This was an ugly and sad summer. The world has gotten uglier in the past year.”

     Why now? That’s easy, no expert needed. The war in Gaza. Its leaders, the terror group Hamas, fired rockets into Israel, and Israel blasted them back, killing lots of civilians, to the shock of the world, which then let the beast of anti-Semitism off its chain.

     The logic appears to be, well, if Jews are going to attack people in the Middle East, well, we’re going to attack some Jews right here, give ’em a taste of their own medicine. Nuts, but there you go. Remember, to a bigot every member of the hated group is fungible, interchangeable, and if you can’t lash out at the bad Jews in Israel, well, this Jew walking down the street will suffice.
     Israel's actions are no more the cause of anti-Semitism today than a black person failing to doff his hat to a Southerner in 1935 was the cause of his being lynched. It might be the spark that touches off an explosion of hate, but the poisonous gas had to already be there, and for the Jews—spoiler alert—it's always there. A hundred years ago, when there was no Israel and Jews were isolated in villages in Eastern Europe (and, remember, in Palestine) that didn't keep the world from assigning world control to them, and cooking up blood libels and mad plots to rationalize hatred. What makes Gaza bloodshed unique is that it actually happened.
      The Palestinian tragedy isn't a cause of anti-Semitism; it's a result. If Israel's neighbors had not tried to destroy it in 1948, or in 1956, or in 1967, there would be no occupied West Bank and Gaza. Israel's neighbors didn't turn upon it because it was a new nation formed by the withdrawal of British forces (just like Iran, Iraq and Jordan, which somehow seem to be OK). It was because it was a nation of Jews.
     The sad irony of course is that Jews are deeply divided over Israel. No pro-Palestinian rally is complete without a contingent of "Not in My Name" Jewish traitors denouncing Israel for behaving like any country would. ("We're bombing the heck out of Syria right now, going after our enemies," the voice wonders. "Hitting any schools?") They remind me that in the late 1940s some Jews still found a way to stand with Stalin.
     The Palestinian conflict will end when the Palestinians are ready to form a country and live at peace. Don't hold your breath.
     "Hatred is so much easier than reconciliation," Lawrence Wright notes in his new book, "Thirteen Days in September." "No sacrifices or compromises are required."
     Thus the problem will come roaring back, if not in 5775, then 5776 or 5777...
     "Thankfully, this is a period of relative quiet now, but I don't think this is so much a day after as a moment in-between," Hirshhaut said. "The hostilities by all indications may come back, until the stranglehold Hamas has over Gaza is somehow changed. This does not mean there ought not be a cause of hope. There are moderate voices. We need to encourage them to make right choices."
     Sounds like something you'd say to a bunch of kindergartners, right?
     I told Hirshhaut that both ends of the Jewish spectrum—knee-jerk praise for Israel and dismissal of Palestinian suffering on one side, embrace of their cause and nullification of Israel on the other—mystify me.
     "You have to see the humanity," Hirshhaut agreed. "When seeing that humanity in the other takes hold and manifests itself, and begins to have traction in our daily lives, then I think there's hope."
     ("Hope," sneered the little smart-aleck voice, "is the thumb you suck when you realize things are about to get much worse.")

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

      As a fan of enigmatic signs, this of course caught my eye. Once I might have thought this was too minimal a hint to make for a fair contest, but after the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder was guessed by its "cash-only" sign, I feel this distinctive treat should get you in the right area.
      Or not. I took the liberty of Googling "Palabok," and, well, that isn't going to lead you straight to the doorstep of this place. Though I found it easily enough. 
      Anyway, enough hints—the hive has never been thwarted, and I assume you won't be thwarted now. Though to be honest, at this point, I can't tell if I'm trying to stump you, or pulling for you to extend your streak. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
        I've got a good prize: this attractive Iron Man figurine, which I plucked off the free table, thinking he could guard over my office. He's done a fine job—no security breaches on his watch. But he somehow isn't quite worthy of moving up to the my new office on 10 ... this Wednesday. I'm trying to make something of a fresh start. Well, as fresh as a start as you can while still dragging all 17 volumes of the New Catholic Encyclopedia along with you. 
      Where is this place? Make sure to post your guesses below. 

    Postscript 

    Well, since this was cracked so easily — 12:08 a.m. — I might as well put in a plug for (spoiler alert, if you want to try to figure it out, stop reading now, because I'm about to say where it is ... really, I mean it ... okay, you've been warned) ....
      The Village Creamery in Niles. A purveyor of Filipino ice creams in flavors like lychee, avocado, jackfruit and yam, I just can't drive past the place without stopping in and picking up a few pints, most recently some green tea and a flavor called "Halo Halo Fiesta." It's on Waukegan Road, right across the street from the King Spa, the deeply weird Korean recreation that is also worth a few visits.  Try the maize. And the green tea. And the birthday cake flavor. 

O'Hare is the World's Busiest Airport (this week)

Heathrow Airport, London — 2009 

     Willis Tower is the tallest building in North America, still, if you consider its roof as the top and ignore the dubious antenna stuck atop One World Trade Center in New York.
     Not that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ruled that way.
     Of course, if you consider the altitude of buildings, then any warehouse in Denver beats our tallest building, since their ground floors start a mile up, and Chicago is a paltry 600 feet or so above sea level.
     Not that people measure buildings that way; it’s a complicated business.
     As is “world’s busiest airport,” a title that our reflexively proud Mayor Rahm Emanuel reclaimed for O’Hare International Airport.
     “Busiest airport in the world,” the mayor said Wednesday. “O’Hare International Airport has regained its status as the world’s busiest airport for flight operations,” the Department of Aviation announced.
     Which is odd, because just last week, CNN reported that Atlanta’s Hartsfield is busiest for the 16th year in a row, with 94.4 million passengers passing through in 2013.
     Sharp-eyed readers will note different measures being used here: The mayor is referring to “flight operations” while CNN is talking about passengers.
     From January to August 2014, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, 580,000 flights took off or landed at O’Hare, nudging us past Atlanta, barely.
     But before we start printing up celebratory T-shirts, maybe we should squint a little harder at those stats.
     First, notice they're only for eight months. Atlanta squeaked by us in 2013, even in flight operations, with 911,000 takeoffs and landings to O'Hare's 883,000. The race isn't over.
     "There's still more year left," noted Tony Molinero, spokesman for the FAA in Chicago. While there's nothing wrong with feeling victorious in first place while the season is still going on - baseball teams like to enter the All-Star break on top - you don't want to chill the champagne either.
     Because that's a game other people can play. Tiny Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wis., also claims to be the world's busiest airport, and they, too, have facts to back them up, since there are 25,000 takeoffs and landings during the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual convention there in July. Slice the time window small enough, and any given airport can, for the moment, be the world'sbusiest.
     So which airport metrics are the best? My gut tells me, when Joe Average Flier is thinking about busy airports, he's not thinking of how many FedEx planes are taking off and landing empty, but how many passengers are thronging the terminals. On that measurement, Chicago is not only currently being creamed by Hartsfield, but we're in sixth place, behind airports in Beijing and Dubai, London's Heathrow, Tokyo's Haneda and - prepare yourself for a shock - Los Angeles International, which snuck ahead of us since last year, serving a million more passengers than O'Hare so far in 2014.
     Not to be Debbie Downer here. O'Hare's nosing past Atlanta, even for a few months, is not insignificant. This is a horse race.
     "For the first four months of the year, Atlanta had more, the next four months of the year it was O'Hare, so it's been fairly close," Molinero said. "It's been many years since O'Hare had more monthly flights than Atlanta."
     He noted that the FAA does not track people.
     "Whether a plane has one person or 100" doesn't matter, he said, for FAA purposes. Putting more planes through the place is a sign of health.    
     "A busy airport is good for the economy," Molinero said, noting that the mayor's boast does represent "good, legitimate, real numbers. There's strong data there, absolutely."
     Maybe that's the problem: Chicago is boasting about passing Atlanta in one of three airport metrics over an eight-month period, as if hurrying to do it before we slip back again. Has it come to that?
     The key is to make sure O'Hare is the best transportation hub it possibly can be, not to make red circles around whatever stats tell ourselves we're No. 1. Believing yourself to be tops is dangerous in business. Galena was once No. 1, considering itself superior to Chicago. It had that all-important lead ore mine and the mighty Mississippi. So when the Illinois Central wanted to go through Galena, the city refused. Chicago, less proud, welcomed the railroad. Good call.
     Telling yourself you're No. 1 might feel good, even on flimsy evidence. But I'd prefer a mayor who says we're not No. 1 and need to fight like hell. That's closer to the truth.