Big Mike: The Greatest Feeling Ever

The usual suspects, plus some new ones, are screaming bloody murder over Barack Obama's invitation to address Notre Dame's graduating class next month. You'd be excused for thinking he'd submerged a crucifix in urine for all the outcry it has aroused.

Obama is wishy-washy about abortion, a stance not good enough for the extremists among the right and the Catholic church. They want our elected leaders to equate abortion with the Holocaust and the genocide of Indians in the Americas, something Obama won't do. Of course, there are probably quite a few who are a lot less agitated about the latter two issues than the first.

I'll make one pronouncement about this whole tempest before I go on to the meat of the post. I'm all for people hollering their fool heads off about Obama's invitation. I hope they protest, stage prayer-ins, and wave placards as passionately as if an ND quarterback had been jobbed out of the Heisman. That's the strength of the United States - our freedom to tell the President to his face that he's full of shit.

I only wonder if these same right-to-lifers were as outraged when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush spoke at Notre Dame commencements months after their elections, considering their giddy infatuation with capital punishment, a practice the Church considers as evil as abortion. I think I know the answer already.

Anyway, I was raised Roman Catholic. My parents sent me to St. Giles elementary school and then Fenwick High School, both in Oak Park. My parents and I attended church every Sunday at St. Giles.

The mass lasted an hour, which to my seven-year-old brain was the equivalent of the Holocene Epoch. I spent that near-eternity resisting the urge to giggle, enduring one or more waves of nausea induced by a nearby worshipper's excessive perfume or body odor, kicking my legs, staring at the pew back in front of me, and waiting for the blessed end of the ordeal.

That was signaled by the glorious moment wherein the priest would announce, "The mass is ended, go in peace," to which the proscribed response was, "Thanks be to god." Sometimes I'd be sitting within yards of my school chum Albert DiPrima. The two of us after a while started responding Thanks be to god in loud voices of dramatic relief, after which we'd giggle surreptitiously to each other. One day, though, we must have gone too far because I received a sharp rap on top of my cranium from my father's knuckle and Albert's father led him out of church by the ear.

After mass, we'd come home, Dad and I would strip out of our jackets and ties and Ma would shed her girdle and begin frying up bacon and eggs. My brother Joey would join us for breakfast. He'd reached the age allowing him to skip mass, a passage I anticipated as deliciously as receiving my first drivers license.

We'd sit around the kitchen table as Ma served up the grub, my father busy buttering four slices of homemade bread, one of which I'd invariably snatch away from him, which - now that I look back on it - must have been his plan all along. Those breakfasts were among the fondest of my childhood memories mainly because the torture of church was over at least for another week.

I never could figure out this religion business. The nuns at St. Giles taught me in catechism class that my first duty as a Catholic was to love god. Hmm, love god - what the hell did that mean?

I'd seen pictures of Michelangelo's fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel portraying god and various other hallucinations. So I adopted that image of the old bird. I was still left with the question, How do I love him? I tried hard to make it happen when I went to bed at night and said my prayers. I didn't exactly know which prayers to say so I silently repeated the mantra, I love you god, I love you god, all the while imagining I was kissing the cheeks of Michelangelo's deity.

One day, the St. Giles principal, Sister James Mary (don't ask me why she'd adopted a male saint's name - suffice it to say that catholics are just whacked when it comes to sex), visited our catechism class and informed us that loving god was the greatest feeling we'd ever experience. This was at odds with my own empirical observations based on my tentative forays into more immediate gratifications under the covers.

That moment completed a process that had begun a few years earlier when Sister Jerome (another gender-ambiguous nun - it's a wonder I'm not even more sexually fucked up than I am) ordered us never to watch or listen to the Beatles because, well, just because.

I knew that Sr. Jerome had to be wrong because the Beatles with their long hair and Beatle boots and cool suits were, well, cool. And if Sr. Jerome was wrong about the Beatles, what else could she be wrong about?

So, by the time I was 12, I'd quit the party, er, the church. Thank Michelangelo's deity I did, otherwise I might be one of those blowhards hollering about Barack Obama's invitation to speak to the Notre Dame graduates.

Letter From Milo: Alas, Poor Tommy

Every year toward the end of summer, I raise a glass and toast the memory of Tommy Granger. It was 367 years ago that Tommy became one of the first people executed in the American Colonies. He was also the first juvenile to suffer capital punishment. Tommy Granger was just 17-years-old when the Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony sent him to the gallows.

Now, you might wonder why anyone would execute a teenager. Was Tommy a murderer? Was he America's first serial killer? Did he commit treason? Was he a kidnapper, a thief, an arsonist?

No. Poor Tommy Granger was hanged because he got caught fucking a sheep.

I contend that Tommy's execution was an egregious miscarriage of justice. You see, I am of the unshakeable opinion that it was not Tommy's fault. He simply could not help himself.

The instinct to copulate, the urge to enjoy life's most basic pleasure, won't be denied. Men and women will risk everything - their reputations, their fortunes, even their lives - in pursuit of the sexual act. In certain nations and cultures where God's name is used to condemn the very instinct that God has given us, adulterers are routinely sent to the stoning field. Despite the risk of gruesome death and public humiliation, there is never a shortage of adulterers. I suspect they'll run out of stones before they run out of fornicators.

In the absence of members of the opposite sex, heterosexual men will turn to other men and women will seek pleasure with their own kind. Other humans aren't even necessary to satisfy the sex drive. Farm boys, like poor Tommy Granger, have been known to dally with their livestock and shepherds sometimes grow overly fond of their flocks.

Warm flesh isn't even a requirement to achieve sexual release. Inanimate objects - plastic, wooden, natural and manmade, electrified and manually operated - have all been used to simulate the sex act. If there is any possibility for sexual pleasure, no matter how remote or inconceivable, no matter how perverse or disgusting, you can be sure that someone has tried it.

The uncontrollable urge to copulate is not restricted to the young. Older folks have their needs, too, although certain delicate problems arise when the urge strikes someone of advanced years. As the great writer, Jim Harrison, once wrote, "The older a man gets the more weird things he has to do to get his dick hard." That's why Viagra is one of the most prescribed medications in this country. That's why ads for erectile disfunction remedies and male enhancement nostrums are all over the TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. When it comes time for older men to act on their fevered fantasies, they want to be able to rise to the occasion.

The lower orders are not exempt from the most basic of instincts. Animals will fight to the death for the privilege of mating. Once in rut, some animals will copulate themselves into states of total exhaustion, becoming easy prey for opportunistic predators. Certain insects live for just a few frenzied days, long enough to mate, if they're lucky, and create more single-minded insects. Salmon make epic journeys, swimming across thousand of miles of ocean to reach their spawning grounds, the only places on earth they can breed - and then they die.

So, this September, join me in raising a glass to the memory of Tommy Granger, a martyr to the cause of uncontrollable lust. He was a true pioneer in his field, a man who, by all rights, should be as well known as the Marquis de Sade, Caligula and the Mitchell Brothers.

And when you toss down that drink in Tommy's memory, say to yourselves, as I always do, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Note from the author

If you agree that a terrible injustice was done to Tommy Granger, please join me in a letter writing campaign to our Senators and Congressmen. It's high time that Tommy Granger's good name and reputation are restored.