Your government (not) at work

 47th Street, Chicago, Oct. 4, 2013 

     In the furious exchange of partisan blame going on in Washington at the moment, no claim is too outrageous or unfair to be fired off by the Republican side, increasingly frantic at how the public is somehow blaming them for their shutdown of the government.  Arkansas Republican Rep. Tim Griffin, during the police chase of a disturbed woman who drove her car at blockades, tweeted, "Stop the violent rhetoric President Obama, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. #Disgusting."

     The Democrat side, as always, is more reality based and temperate. For instance, one thing I don't blame the Republicans for is their sentimental focus on the closing of the national monuments in Washington. Even though it's their fault, entirely, there is something so sad about the idea of people visiting our nation's capital, as a pilgrimage to honor this great country, and being thwarted. The country is so screwed up that it can't keep the Washington Monument open. Or trying to visit the national parks, places of extreme natural beauty created by nature and put off limits by our tottering politicians.

     I've felt that frustration first hand.

     Ten years ago, I took my family to Washington, as it happened, a few days after the war in Iraq broke out. I went because my oldest boy was in 2nd grade, and when I was in 2nd grade, my family had taken a memorable tour of the FBI. But the FBI Building was closed, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was closed, as were other national monuments.  It seemed cowardly, as if the feds felt they had to sandbag the National Archives in case Saddam Hussein's elite guard showed up to burn the Constitution. 

     The idea that this was happening because of a new war almost got lost. Small problems somehow have a way of burrowing into your mind more directly than the big picture disaster. Yes, cancer research is on hold because of the current shut-down, and poor children might not get food aid, and a hundred other problems, growing each day with no end in sight. But long-planned weddings being prevented from taking place at Yosemite! Isn't that heartbreaking? 

     When this crisis was still only looming, at the end of August, I was being bothered by the approaching helium cliff. I wrote this column, about how the United States government for decades squelched the market for helium by selling it too cheaply, and now threatened to send shock waves through a variety of industries that use helium, from semi-conductors to medical imaging to aerospace, due to a short-sighted 1996 law forcing the government to pull out of the helium business whether other suppliers had stepped up or not. The noble gas issue seemed a small but significant metaphor for how badly the government can screw up even something simple. Yes, the shutdown was certainly on the radar, but we hoped it might not happen, and I preferred to worry about something that literally could not be seen. 

     Now, in one of those minor but delicious ironies, Congress, in the middle of all this shut-down business, actually took the time to slap a bandage on the helium problem. The government was allowed to close down, but we're okay, helium-wise. The necessary stopgap fix was passed by Congress. All the president has to do now is find a moment to sign it. So the one thing that I worried about specifically and at length is going to be just fine. It's the rest of the government that has come crashing down. It's like one of those cartoons where the character saves a lone china cup while the whole house collapses around him. 

     Still, the law didn't come soon enough to prevent widespread helium shortages, and this sign, spied on the door into the Hallmark card shop in Northbrook last week made me sad too. "I'm sorry Chrissie, no birthday balloons for you, because the United States government somehow found a way to create a shortage of the second most abundant element in the universe." 

     In 1969, the United States landed men on the Moon. Now we can't even fill party balloons in Northbrook. We seem to be sliding backward at an alarming rate. 

 47th Street, Chicago, Oct. 4, 2013 

If I say something will he kill me?

    If you walk down the streets of Chicago long enough, you'll see just about everything. 

    In all my years commuting to the newspaper—26 and counting—I've never, as I did Wednesday morning, found myself behind a man wearing his shirt inside out. 

     This is something new, I said to myself, standing behind him at the light, waiting to cross Madison. 

    A brown polo pullover with yellow and white stripes—not the best look when worn properly. To me, they're the kind of shirts I wore when I was 7. A child's shirt. It's jarring to see grown men go to work in them.  I briefly considered saying something. "Hey pal," or words to that effect, "do you know you have your shirt on inside out?" 

     But he was a big strapping guy, with a healthy gut hanging over his belt. As I imagined saying those words, as I formed them in my mind, trying them out, my next image was him turning with a snarl and plunging a steak knife into my chest. Or screaming in some thick Eastern European tongue as his hands close around my throat. That kind of thing happens. Mind your own business, I told myself, hurrying up Wacker, crossing at Washington. 

     I thought about other things. But at Franklin, he was back, coming north. We had taken different routes, but were now converging, intersecting, and I had the chance to say something again. Could this, I wondered, be a style? No, it had to be some sign of disturbance, some person in the grip of a mania, who just put their clothes on in a disordered fashion. Do not enter into his world. Flee.

     He crossed Franklin, and now we both were going north, paralleling each other. I tracked him out of the corner of my eye; he walked with a certain bearish, rolling gait. And suddenly I felt like a coward. This man needed an outside opinion. This man needed my help.

    I crossed the street in the center of the block, hurried to catch up, fell into step beside him. Approaching Lake, as we passed under some scaffolding, I made my move.

    "Excuse me," I said.

     "Yes?" he said, brightly, pleasantly. "Can I help you?"

     "I was wondering if you knew that..."

     "Yes, my shirt," he laughed—his voice regular, friendly, not the guttural bellow I had anticipated. "I put it on backward. I'm going to change it as soon as I get to the office. Thank you though." He smiled.    

     "Well, that happens," I said, trying to be comforting. "I once spent the day wearing a kilt backwards, with the pleats in the front. Nobody told me." 

    "I noticed some odd looks at the train station," he said. "I thought maybe I just looked extra handsome today..."
     "I'm lucky to have my wife give me the once over before I leave."
     "I live alone," he said.

      And we exchanged a few more words, until we got to Wacker again (for you readers in Indonesia, Wacker Drive curves through downtown, in a gentle right angle, so you can travel in a straight line and still cross it twice. It has North, South, East and West addresses, which can be confusing to newcomers). I bid him farewell, and he bid me farewell, and I walked north puzzling: Why are we so afraid of each other? Why are we so reluctant to talk to strangers? Why do we assume the worst, the very worst, about those we don't know? Most people are not fiends. Most people are nice. So why the excess of caution? Is it just me? No, that seems to be the common practice. I spend two hours commuting most days, and people are loath to look at each other. I could show up at the train station wearing a Carmen Miranda fruit hat and the people I see every day would edge away but not say a word.  A little wariness is necessary in a city like Chicago. But too much, and you live in your own personal desert, a lonely island in a sea of humanity. No need for that. No need to cringe in your little protective bubble, alone. He was a nice guy who happened to put his shirt on the wrong way.  If I hadn't had talked to him, I never would have known. 

The Never-Ending Goodbye

     Mocking Oprah Winfrey is a dirty, thankless task, but someone's got to do it.  I've cheerfully assumed that futile but fun burden for nearly 20 years, and while it hasn't made a dent on the vast, sky-hogging, culture-spanning, armor-plated Death Star edifice that is Oprah Winfrey, objections were raised, and that counts for something. At least someone once referred to her as "that froglike dominatrix presiding over her Theater of Pain." As a rule, I try not to curse the inevitable, try not to shake my fist at the sun and decry the omnipresent. But with Oprah, I make an exception because, really, otherwise the chorus of praise, much of it from herself, is just too damn nauseating to endure:

     Oprah, Oprah, Oprah...

     How can we miss you if you never go away? It seems only minutes after your painfully protracted, celebrity-spattered farewell to when your talk show shut down Michigan Avenue for days — OK, it was in 2011, but it feels like yesterday — and now we’re being called upon to bid you goodbye yet again, this time as you put your West Side studio complex on the market, and maybe your swank Gold Coast duplex, too.

     Well, ta-ta. It’s been fun. Don’t let the door hit you in your ...

     No, no — positive thoughts. The high road.

     Well, ta-ta. Don’t be a stranger ...

     Oh, right, you were a stranger. As much as you liked to float your Chicago street cred when basking in the endless celebrity limelight that trailed you like your own personal sun, it wasn’t as if you were ever really here beyond the confines of your 15,000-square-foot Water Tower Place duplex. Not a lot of Oprah sightings in all those years you did that hall-of-mirrors show of yours. No river of Oprah bucks watering thirsty Chicago charities. More like a trickle.

     Eighty years after Al Capone went to prison, he’s still associated with Chicago, too much. Two years after you left, well, as much as you must think of the city as one vast cargo cult, sitting in the lotus position learned from one of the endless chain of sham gurus you ballyhooed, scanning the skies for your return, well, we’re not.

     But let's not go negative. Let's be positive. Let's wish you had been more supportive of your adopted hometown, in real, tangible ways beyond all that self-serving blah-blah, and then, why it'll become true, right? That's how "The Secret" works, right? Factual, tangible reality is for the soulless, the unspiritual. It's what's in our hearts that counts, and in my heart, you were a fixture each summer at the bake sale at Misericordia . . .
     Whoops. Negative again. Maybe you did us a favor by not associating too much with Chicago, a practical city, a hardworking city, not given to crystals and magical thinking and the brand of snake-oil quackery that your program daily injected right into the brainstem of the American body politic. Why blame you if people bought it hook, line and sinker? "OWN" —the Oprah Winfrey Network, a vanity project on steroids. I guess "Me Television" was already taken.
     Or, in your defense, the public's gullibility was already there, and you just reflected it. You had your moments. Sure, too many were spent in squealing worship of brand materialism at its basest. But sometimes you rose above: One show, you sent a family from St. Louis to live in Mongolia in yurts. It was interesting.
     (I should probably say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I was a guest on Oprah's show once, nearly 20 years ago, promoting my second book. A four-hour ordeal I remember as a blur of endless waiting punctuated by frantic assistant producers with clipboards lunging past, of fellow guests blinking in wonder at indoor plumbing, of cheap vending machine muffins sweating oil in their plastic wrap, piled in the Green Room by minions of the richest woman after Queen Elizabeth II. Of how flinty, disinterested and queenly in a bad way you were in person. It is not a happy memory).
     But let's not be negative. Let's not. Let's be positive. Our thoughts become our reality. The bullets will not harm us . . .
     Credit where due: The West Side was a blighted war zone interspersed with pickle factories and sheet metal companies in 1990 when you opened your studio. Six years before Rich Daley snagged the Democratic National Convention and put in all those wrought iron fences and planters. So kudos to you, a true pioneer, if buying distressed real estate and putting in a TV facility that has no interaction with its neighbors is pioneering.
     At least you'll make money selling this one, probably, as opposed to the store you sold earlier this year, at a $1 million loss, or the condo last year, losing $2.9 million (though really, what is money to you at this point? Which is another talent of yours we must marvel at: the ability to make lumpen, hair-in-curlers America feel that you were relating to them in the 46 minutes you spent gazing at their representatives sympathetically, a human version of Nipper, the RCA hound, except of course when you were always happy to cavort with the celebrities who beat a path to your door.)
     So yes, off to Los Angeles with you, as if you weren't there already. Chicago will, let us say again, get by just fine without you, in a fashion remarkably similar to how we got along with you. Sort of how the TV-watching public adjusted to the loss of your program by emitting a complacent "moo" and flipping to whatever was on the next channel.

One Thing You Must Do Before You Die

     I hate the phrase "bucket list"— the idea of having a checklist of accomplishments and highlights you must do and see "before you die." Places you must visit, achievements you must reach. There's a certain grim conformity to it—a stations-of-the-cross obligation. The old top-of-the-class mentality translated to old age, one more hoop for you to jump through, landing in the grave on the other side. You must see the Blue Mosque. You must try the Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine's. 
     There's nothing wrong with having concrete goals—you'd like to climb Mount Fuji, or have a drink at Harry's Bar in Venice someday. And there's nothing wrong with trying to achieve those goals. But the implication that doing these things will add some kind of meaning to your life is dumping too much significance on what are in essence, exotic peak experiences.  You have to always keep in the back of your mind that even if you achieve these life pinnacles, you will not necessarily be transformed. Realize that your big deal dream might in reality not be such a big deal. My brother climbed Mt. Fuji. It's unpleasant. I've had a drink in Harry's Bar in Venice. It's small.
     Your life isn't defined by its high-points, unless you're Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon, and then the struggle is to not let your high point define and destroy you. There are only two tragedies in a man's life, to trot out Nietschze: the first is not to achieve your dream. The second is to achieve it. 
     Given the inevitability of those two tragedies, what seems to truly define a life well spent, is not gaping at the Taj Mahal, but nailing life's daily, small moments. They add up. They aggregate. How you feel every day when you open your eyes is a lot more important than being able to post pictures of yourself snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef on Facebook. An asshole is still an asshole standing at the summit of Mount Everest. Maybe even more so. 

Paragliding atop Rendezvous Mountain, Wyoming

     Besides, all lives are different. My bucket list would involve taking naps, raking leaves, drinking coffee, reading books. I wouldn't actually create that list, never mind force it on you, because the things that embroider my life could leave you flat. Most likely they would. And visa versa. Rafting the Snake River is fun. Must you do it before you die? Well, that depends on whether you like water. The whole idea of offering up a template for another person to measure his or her life by is ludicrous. You know whether you've used your time well or not, and if you don't know, well that should be number one on your list: figure that one out. "Tell me," as Mary Oliver writes, "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
     Or don't tell me. There is an element in bragging in these bucket lists. You're not doing things for yourself, but to impress other people. How sad is that? If you achieve your life goals, and don't tell anybody, do they still mean something? People don't pay $500 a ticket to see the Rolling Stones, they pay $500 a ticket to tell their friends afterward what great seats they had.
     Maybe that's too cynical. Not that I'm against telling people things, obviously. Do fun stuff, show off to your friends about it. I'm there too. But I don't pretend that I'm having a transformative life experience while I'm doing it. That's an important distinction.  
     Why couldn't your bucket list be things you failed to do? Your life can be just as easily defined by what you avoided as by what you attained. Dante never got the girl—Beatrice married someone else and died. He never got a chance to return to his beloved Florence, never mind be crowned with laurels there. But he made do, writing his great masterpiece.
     So my list would include things I'm never doing: I'm never putting a Christmas tree in my living room. I'm never having plastic surgery. I'm never wearing cargo shorts and shower clogs to work. I consider those life-affirming accomplishments.
     And my list, by necessity, would be endless; there will always be more places to see, more books to read and to write. The idea that you can get some portion of them, in a methodical way, seems to be willful denial of how much you won't. Besides, the peak experiences tend to be things you don't plan, that just happened. The family was in Monterey. Ross saw a brochure for whale watching, so we took a boat and went whale watching. Was it fun? Sure. Do you have to do it? No. I would say it depends whether you are in Monterey or not.
     Focus on what you can do right now. My bucket list would include dozing under trees -- never enough of that in a lifetime. It would include walking the dog whenever the dog wants walking. The great achievements that make up our lives are not those that require we travel to India, or big down payments. The point is not to impress people. The point is to impress yourself.  No matter how well-travelled, no matter how adventurous, we finish our lives having done practically nothing, having met practically no one.  The number one item on my bucket list is to understand and accept that.

A shameful moment in American history.

    The way I explain the need for some kind of national health care—not that anyone is listening, but assuming people were—is like this:
     Say a baby shows up on the curb in front of your house. Your wife—or husband—looks out the window, says, "Hey hon, there's a baby on the curb." You go out and bring it inside. How could you not? Six months old. Wrapped in a blanket. Flushed in the face. Looks sick. Croupy cough. Sounds sick.

    What do you do? You don't say, "Well, I guess we better raise it as our own." You don't shrug and go put the tot back on the curb. Someone needs to take care of this sick baby that appeared on your curb. Someone who is not you. 
     And who may that someone be? Well, you probably dial 911, which brings, the police, or an ambulance, or both. Which are representatives of—stay with me here, this is the big leap—the government. Now if the police officer, or ambulance driver, looked at the baby, and said, "Gee, we just do crime. Sick abandoned babies aren't our problem," and turned to go, you would be shocked. Because you think you live in a nation that cares about that kind of thing. Because you expect the government to do its job. Which at the moment includes doing something about this baby.
     That's about my mindset right now. I'm shocked. I'm shocked that such a minimal, meat and potatoes, in-every-country-but-ours health insurance plan like Barack Obama's is being met by this collective Republican mental breakdown. There is no other term for it. I hate condemning the other side so roundly—the Tea Party has given that practice a bad name—but it is the only way to describe what is happening here. The Republican House has doused the whole country with gasoline and lit a match. The government is shutting down over something every other industrialized country has wholeheartedly embraced, years ago. Even the Republicans, who hate Obama with a fierce and undying passion, at some point, you think they'd say: "Okay, we despise him, but the country really needs this. People get sick, they need insurance. It's immoral otherwise. And it's the law—passed by Congress, approved by the president, who not only won in 2012, but thumped us. The Supreme Court said it was okay."  
    Political rancor is nothing new, though it feels like we have sailed into new and unwelcome territory. The Republicans hated Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, but they still helped fight the Nazis. Would they do so again today?
    The baby, of course, is unfair; it puts a thumb on the scale of your judgment, because it's a baby. An appeal to your emotions. What if it were a 4-year-old girl? Same thing, right? How about a 12-year-old boy? You'd leave him to die on the curb? No, you take him in too, give him cocoa. How about if he's 14? 18? What if he's black? 
     You can shift the specifics of exactly what kind of person is out there, sick on the curb and feel your sympathy and concern drain away. Or maybe not. In my view of the world, whoever is out on that curb, sick, you want to live in a society that tries to take care of that person, at least a little. That's what makes me a left wing wacko liberal. Or maybe just less of a hypocrite than the Republicans. They'd sure want to live in that caring society if the sick person were their precious selves. Or their families. I have yet to hear anyone say, "You know, I lost my job, and lost my health insurance, so now I'm digging graves in the backyard for myself and my family because when we get sick we'll be too weak to. Nobody to blame but ourselves."
     Maybe they never think it through that much. Maybe they never wonder how they can be so fiercely certain that unchecked gun ownership is a basic civil right, but health care isn't. That seems a moral inversion.  
     The shutdown of the government is shameful and the pending default on our financial obligations is shameful. The hypocritical, unfair blame that the Republicans pour on their opponents make flinging the same back at them sound hollow, as much as they are worthy of it. Their wild partisanship corrupts the very idea of one side being wrong, and forces the thinking person toward an undeserved balance. Though in the end, there is no reason to divide the blame by party. That is our entire government shutting down, our collected leaders who are doing it, the Republican side pushing the crisis, the Democratic side weak enough to permit it. We can all agree on that, can't we? It's happening. It's happened, with no end in sight. Who's at fault doesn't ultimately matter. The American people are at fault. The buck stops there. It is we who elected these guys, who will re-elect most of them. It is we who should be disturbed and aghast, but somehow, incredibly, we aren't. It is we who hardly seem to notice or care, at times, which is how we got into this mess in the first place. Though I bet we will start noticing now. I hope we do.

Divvy Diary: A bike is a time machine.

Up to this point, my interest in the Divvy bikes was purely business. But Friday I started to really have fun with them. The latest entry in my Divvy Diary, running in the paper Monday:

     The 6:50 rolled into Union Station at 7:34 a.m. Friday. The plan was to stroll to the Hotel Palomar, 505 N. State, for an 8 a.m. breakfast economic talk.

     But I had my Divvy helmet with me.

     I realized I could jump on a bike at Canal and Madison, stop by the office, drop off my briefcase, noodle around online for 10 minutes, then bike to the hotel. So I did.

     Biking is about three times faster than walking. Distances shrink while time expands. I’ve milked Divvy for humor; anything that combines physical exertion, ridiculous headgear, public display and constant exposure to the very real possibility of being creamed by a bus, is inherently funny.

     But there is a practical, even joyous side.

     At the hotel, the Economist magazine’s U.S. economics editor, Greg Ip, painted the global scene: guarded optimism if Congress doesn’t explode our economy, with China’s state capitalism maybe running out of gas. I stashed my helmet under my chair.

     Next stop, Aqua Tower. Last time biking there, I made the mistake of taking Kinzie to Columbus, which I had forgotten goes underground. Pedaling furiously south along the lower span of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, taking a left onto Lower Wacker, this is a bad idea! gonged in my brain. But what can you do at that point? You're stuck. I took the first ramp up toward daylight, curving onto Stetson. It gave a pang of sympathy for the Divvy cyclists mocked for showing up on places like Lake Shore Drive. You don't plan that — I hope — it just happens.   Wiser, I took Wabash to Randolph.

     Leaving the Aqua — my third Divvy trip of the morning — I felt something unexpected: a kind of happiness. It bites to grow old. Life's opportunities dwindle. The future dulls, narrows.
     Then the city of Chicago abruptly installs this cool bicycle network and invites everybody to use it for nearly nothing (20 cents a day, if you join for a year). You get places fast. Your legs move, your heart pumps. Your senses grow keener because you're keeping an eye for doors about to be flung open, for pedestrians bumbling into you, for trucks bearing down. Nothing keeps you alert like terror, and alert is akin to young, and youth does stuff for the heck of it.
     At 4 p.m., the president of Mongolia was opening the country's honorary consulate. I might have skipped it, but a Divvy map showed a dock at Huron and Sedgwick, close to the new consulate at 368 W. Huron.
     By the time I got butt on bike it was 20 to 4. But cycling ate up the seven blocks. On Huron, I admired the Mongolian flags hanging off the consulate but didn't see a dock. Here is where I wished I had loaded the Divvy map app on my phone (note to self: load map app). Luckily I thought to double back, figuring there might be a rack on Chicago Avenue. A right on Sedgwick, 3:50 p.m., returning to the consulate. The dock was directly across the street. I was so busy ogling the flags, I missed it the first time.
     Chicago media did not turn out in force to meet President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj. It was just me, plus local Mongolian cable TV. The new consul, William Pintas, is a personal-injury lawyer. He took a moment to explain that his IT guy, a Mongolian, got him to visit Mongolia. The consulship followed.
     It was a small office, jammed. I found myself next to a woman who said she was one of the first Mongolian immigrants to Chicago, a community now of 8,000. She came to join the Ringling Bros. circus and dance upon elephants. How does that work? The trick, she said, is holding on until your hands bleed.
     "The Golden Swallow of Democracy" arrived and signed some papers. A bowl of beige milk was produced, which the consul gamely sipped. At one point the media, a k a me, was ushered up. I asked the president his take on Chicago. "I think I know Chicago from the movies," he said, then requested another question. Groping, I asked about Mongolia and neighbor China; are they concerned about being swallowed up like Tibet?
     "That is a stupid question," he replied, to general merriment. Interview ended, I figured my work here was done, skipped the toasting, retrieved my helmet and exited. I hopped a bike and headed down Kingsbury.
     I stopped back at the paper, retrieved my briefcase, shut the office down for the weekend. It was 5:10. I could make the train speedwalking. Or . . . I grabbed a Divvy at 333 W. Wacker. All I needed to do was shave a few minutes off the trip and I'd make the 5:25. But would there be an open dock at Canal and Madison? I stood on the pedals, flying, wondering: what are the odds?
     Eight spaces awaited. I glided my bike into one, saw the dock light go green and strolled to the train with time to spare.

Photo atop blog: Moon through the Picasso, Daley Plaza, 9/25/13.

You Pay For What You Get

This column is why people hate the media. It started innocently—I met a Freebie employee taking a Divvy bike out of the dock at the Mart. Of course I was interested in writing about Freebie.   Everybody wants to be present at the creation, and with fortunes being made in the tech world, nothing seems more exciting than to be working at a start-up. My idea was to see what the company's about, and I sat down with the founders. We had a fun talk—smart guys, going places—but Friday, as I was writing the column, I thought: I better try this thing, see if it works. The experience at the restaurant wasn't bad, but there was a gap between the aloof reception I received trying to cash in my Freebie, and the enthusiasm after I revealed myself as writing for the paper. Maybe I'm an unusual customer—maybe the average person would love a free lunch, even delivered with a bit of chill and followed by a Twitter blast disguised as a personal message. Still, I felt bad for ending on such a down note—I go in all glad-handy to write about the company, and end up sneering at them. I had to fight the urge to phone Ben Rosenfield Friday afternoon and apologize—it's nothing personal, it's just business, and my responsibility is to the readers, not to you—but thought better of it, and figured, maybe he knows that all publicity is good publicity. And indeed he did, emailing me a friendly note after the story ran—this is the first article ever written about his company, he said, and they appreciate it. Which was a relief, to me, and a good sign for his future. It takes a tough hide to get ahead in any business.

     What is money, anyway? A unit of worth, printed on paper or tallied in electrons, given in return for something: your time working, usually.

     You can earn money in other ways. Interest on a loan. Selling something you’ve made. If you’re a celebrity, you can sell your endorsement. Michael Jordan sold his image to Nike for millions, allowing Nike to sell shoes for more than it would otherwise get because their sneakers came coated in the invisible aura of fame and victory linked with Jordan.

     Thanks to social media — Facebook, Twitter, et al — we are all stars of our own little or, in some cases, not-so-little universes. As with real celebrities, there will be chances to cash in on our popularity, the latest being a fresh-from-the-box Chicago startup called Freebie.

     “Everybody’s social connectivity has value,” said Ben Rosenfield, who founded the company in February. “What we do, is we’ve figured out how to automate word of mouth, the most powerful form of marketing. We’re a lead generator.”

     "Allow the product to market itself," added Hank Ostholthoff, the co-founder, at their Aqua Tower headquarters. "How many times do you hear businesses say, 'If I could only get somebody to try my product.' "
     Chicago is home to a miniboomlet of tech startups, the most famous being Groupon, another lead generator, offering a small bribe—$20 worth of pizza, say, for $10—to lure new customers through the door.
     Freebie thinks it has a better idea, first because you get stuff, not cheap, but free.
     "We believe discounts are bad," Rosenfield said. Those who get discounts expect them in the future, while no one given a free meal expects all their meals to be free. "That's against the psychology."
     Another advantage of Freebie is that while anyone with cash can buy a Groupon, even—shudder—old people with scant social media presence, Freebie is based on a person's social media popularity.
     Freebie takes the measure of just how big a ripple you make on online media, gives a rating based on who your friends are, then uses its mobile app to nudge you toward businesses that want people such as you.
     Rosenfield, 33, a Deerfield native, said the challenge for marketers in our media-saturated world is to find new ways of reaching customers. TV isn't working.
     "We know, we're all fast-forwarding through commercials, and no one's . . ." Here Rosenfield caught himself, showing surprising tact for one so young, and changed direction midsentence, ". . . and unfortunately less people are reading the newspaper to decide what they're going to buy. They're looking at the Internet."
     Alas, true. What Freebie is doing is taking the old invite-the-press-in-and-feed-'em-in-return-for-hype dynamic and democratizing it to regular folk, who can cash out their connectivity. If it works, maybe you didn't waste all that time on Facebook after all.
     A test seemed in order. I downloaded the Freebie app to my phone, giving it access to my Facebook and Twitter (something I wouldn't usually do, but this is work). It told me what my social media footprint is worth. Having posted on Facebook for five years with the plangent urgency of a lost baby opossum crying for its mother, and tweeting continuously, earned me a 477; enough, I was told, for a "Small Plate" at the Hubbard Inn.
     That's it? But free's free, right? I toddled off to the Hubbard Inn, which I had never heard of, and why would I? It's right next door to the excellent Slurping Turtle, which has served me many a steaming bowlful of fine chow that I was all too happy to pay for.
     At the Hubbard Inn—and this is the weak link in the system—I tapped my app telling Freebie I was here (prompting it to automatically inform all my friends, unbidden). I showed the phone to poor Tammi, the hostess, a week on the job. "I never heard of it," she said. "I just know how to seat people." She appealed to Jason Felsenthal, director of operations, at a booth. He did not leap up, emitting a Zorba-like cry of joy, and embrace me as a new customer. Rather, he took a menu with the grimness of man being robbed and ticked off the three small plates I was entitled to. The house-made ravioli. The chickpea crepe. The mussels.
     For all the eulogies being said over the pulpy media, Felsenthal certainly perked up when I identified myself and asked him whether Freebie is working out for him.
     "It's a pretty interesting app," he said. Is it driving in business? "Time will tell."