The Blue Stained Dress…

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

 …Come on, how much do you really want to know?

Dow Off To Its Worst Start Since 1991…Bank of America Set To Bail Out Countrywide…Merrill Lynch Reports 15 Billion Dollar Loss…OJ Back In Jail…

For me at least, the concept of transparency in the media became evident the first time I watched The Wizard of Oz and that little dog pulled back the curtain. I think I was five. Then there was that pre-teen realization of what’s really in a (pick one): Hot Dog, Pepsi, Twinkie. This was long before 1994 government reforms mandated that food labels be readable on a fifth grade level.

And as best as I can figure, transparency in the modern Press probably blossomed with the Washinton Post’s breaking of the Watergate scandal in 1972.  Before that fateful event, editorial dictum pretty much suggested there were just some things the general public ought not know.  Unconfirmed rumors? Maybe. Back room whispers? For sure. But the butt ugly, hot dog ingredient nasty facts? Not so much.

If truth in reporting has taught me anything over the past 50 years it’s that the deeper one digs into a story, the gnarlier the unearthed details become. For the longest time we masses seemed content with mere Orwellian halfspeak from above only to discover through Newspeak (and Newsweek) that Big Brother may in fact, be gay and tapping his toes in an airport latrine near you. Rumor had it that those Kennedy boys would sometimes entertain a whole White House pool full of bikini clad Twinkies (of a different variety but just as unhealthy, I hear), sipping Cuba libres all (Coke, no Pepsi), and splashing about the presidential grounds while Jackie K was off riding horses in Northern Virginia. They say….the Press was also invariably present, in close proximity to be sure, and  sworn to unspoken secrecy in the name of patriotic duty and national security, if not fidelity; their collective eyes all glazed and bleary, no doubt, from looking the other way.

“That was when ‘off the record’ meant off  the record,”  I recently posed to a table of family and friends discussing this very subject after dinner. A moment of silence passed before the youngest attendee, a second grader,  posed a question of her own to the group of adults, “What’s a record?”  Oh yeah.

Having lived in the D.C area for several years I became familiar with a saying that is popular inside the Beltway…”‘fill in the blank’ is a lot like the Potomac River; breathtaking from a distance but the closer you get the dirtier it is. And to be sure, you don’t want to drink the water.”

The Double D’s

“There are only two words in that real estate glossary you really need to understand,” a wise man once told me as I submitted my freshly minted sales license to his brokerage firm, study books still under my arm. “Disclosure and Disclaimer, ”  he continued.

“As far as the Sales side of this business goes, it’s about what you know and what you don’t know. Be clear on where you stand in each regard.” I nodded, acknowledging the weight of his tone but not understanding at all what he meant. More would be revealed…

Actual, Counterfactual

I’ve always pondered the what ifs of this life I was born into. Even now,  I strain to recall my earliest thoughts, wondering how they were initially formed and where they might still, ultimately lead me.  I was tagged at an early age as a day dreamer in the classroom; no Einstein, mind you—just a skinny, bespectacled kid thinking about stuff in general and tossing around how it might all be different in another world, from a different point of view. In Philip K. Dick’s 1962 Speculative Fiction novel, The Man in the High Castle, post-war America has been occupied on the Eastern Seaboard by Nazi Germany for more than a decade while California and many Western states find themselves reporting directly to the Empire of Japan. The remaining sections of the nation; the  Midwest, the Mountain regions, and a handful of Southern states are retained by the former United States with Nevada being its central Capital.  In other words, we lost the war. That kind of different is what I’m talking about. Super-imposed boundries kind of different.

What if Hitler had been killed in World War I rather than simply encountering temporary blindness in the infamous mustard gas incident? What if the two soldiers carrying him off the battlefield that day stepped on a landmine instead,  forever changing the course of world history as we know it?  What if Brando never decided to hit New York or Zimmerman, leave Hibbing? Which events in this world really, truly count, and how many more are rendered eternally meaningless, without any social weight and carrying a megatrillion blank messages in a googolplex of empty bottles to our children’s children’s children? (Okay, maybe I exaggerate.)

All you mathematicians out there, no need to answer. Poets, either. Many of us recall the very moments JFK, RFK and MLK were shot and the headlines, big black mastheads, that hit our morning doorsteps. I happened to be in the hospital the day Nixon resigned. My nurse handed me the paper. NIXON RESIGNS. Pretty much said it all. More would be revealed there as well,  but not for a long, long time…

In recent times, and even as we speak,  there is so much more we are still reeling back from. Who would ever imagine hijacked jetliners flying into buildings on our homeland or how the recoiling effect of such an aftermath would nearly tip our financial world off its very axis? The real estate business for one, hasn’t been the same since that dreaded day 76 months ago. So I search for a literary beacon in the rubble, one who shares my point of view. One who can sum it all up it 25 words or less…

Alas!

P. J. O’Rourke says that The United States is a nation suffering from Adult A.D.D. ‘Just give us Americans a little time and we’ll forget most anything…’  I concur. I posted the headlines at the top of this piece but I didn’t actually read the articles. All this on the spot reporting is getting a little too transparent for my taste, these days.  For me, it’s kind of like Ms Lewinsky’s blue stained dress.  I don’t need to personally examine the spot in question. I think I’ll just take their word for it…