Don't call them patriots

On U2’s 1988 album, “Rattle and Hum,” singer Bono intros “Helter Skelter” by saying, “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”

Well, the dangerous and delusional fringe of the far right has stolen the word patriot from all of us.

And I’m stealing it back.

News out of southern Michigan keeps referring to what is becoming known as the “Patriot Movement.” It implies these people love America so much they will kill to restore it to a presumed purity that never existed.

There’s nothing patriotic about wanting to kill a police officer to set a trap to kill more police officers.

My first thought when I saw the Hutaree group mugshots was, “I’ll bet we won’t see any Obama/Biden signs out in front of any of their trailers.”

So far all we know is that the group were preparing for war with the anti-Christ. Want to take a wild guess on who they think he might be?

It’s people like this that make it so easy to caricature the entire Tea Party movement, whose spiritual godfather is Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh.

And, as I’m sure we’ll see, an ugly mix of racism and righteousness will be at the heart of Hutaree.

I’ve yet to see a single white supremacist that makes me, a fellow white, feel the least bit supreme. These are the chosen ones? Who’s doing the choosing? Jerry Springer?

This is going to sound like a joke, but these guys give trailer trash a bad name. I know and am friendly with lots of trashy people who live in trailers. In fact, one of my pop culture heroes, Earl Hickey, is proud trailer trash. His show, “My Name Is Earl,” is to modern family life what “The Waltons” were to the 1930s.

There’s nothing at all redemptive about groups calling themselves patriots. It’s an insult to our proud history.

America’s Founding Fathers were educated men of grace, class and wit. Egged on by the savants at Fox News, the men and women who today call themselves patriots sneer at anyone with with those nobilities.

Our Founding Fathers weren’t bloodthirsty. They weren’t hot headed. They were cool and deliberate. War was a last resort.

It was an age of reason. They didn’t want to kill all the British. They wanted them to just go away.

It’s wrong to take on of our most proud and cherished words and apply it to groups that have nothing in common with the inspiration.

Want to hear about a real patriot?

Let me tell you a little about the father who founded me.

Paul Rodell was an optician who never earned more than $20,000 a year and worked until the day he died. He loved his wife, his children and I doubt the world’s ever seen a happier grandpa.

A Pittsburgh Steeler season ticket holder for four decades, he’d stand with his hand over his heart and sing the national anthem with a gusto so loud, off-key and joyful beer vendors would turn their heads in slack-jawed amazement.

He paid his taxes without complaint, bitched about potholes and wars he didn’t think were justified. He was happy when men like Nixon and Reagan won elections and chagrined when men like Carter and Clinton did.

He loved this exuberant country with his whole heart. Things like reflexive racism and religious intolerance confused him. He couldn’t understand hating a man he’d never met and every man he ever met became his friend. If it was raining, he'd offer soaked strangers a ride from the bus stop into town.

He believed God had blessed him and wondered what the golf courses in heaven will look like.

He’d rather have spent an hour reading a good mystery than watching partisans harangue each other about politics.

When he died, the government he served without complaint in World War II sent us an American flag in gratitude for his service.

He was the greatest man I’ve ever known and he’ll always be my idea of a true American patriot.

So, please, when it comes to hate-spewing traitors who cherish their access to automatic weaponry more than their flawed fellow man, don’t call them patriots.

They’re just morons with basic cable service.

And save all your hatred for the really despicable Patriots. The ones who play football in New England.

Do it out of remembrance for men like my father.

As I said, Dad was a Steeler fan.

In praise of profanity

At least once a week I regret my vow to make this a family-friendly blog. See, I’m pro-profanity. I love to swear and my life is enriched with ample provocations to do so.

Happened just this morning.

For reasons of economy, taste and snobbery, I’ve pretty much kicked the fast food habit.

But sometimes the body simply needs fuel. Today I wanted to accomplish a lot in a little time so I swung by the nearest McDonald’s and ordered a sausage biscuit with cheese. The place is notorious for its inefficiency and I hadn’t been there in probably two years.

I zipped through the drive-thru and made it back to my office in under two minutes.

I was pleased to think that maybe my faith in humanity was being restored in that they’ve evolved and learned to work together more efficiently and, yeah, I gave all the credit to Barack.

That will please conservatives because of what happened next.

I unfolded the paper and inside was just the biscuit with cheese.

I’d been awake barely 20 minutes and I screamed my first profanity of the day.

My entire order was just four words long: “sausage biscuit with cheese.” And only three of the words involved food.

I understand in these busy times that many people are distracted and that many of our attention spans have shortened to jiffy fractions. So if the wrapper had contained just a sausage biscuit, I’d have understood.

But how Person A says or prints “sausage biscuit with cheese,” and Person B omits the sausage is incomprehensible.

It is the very essence of any sausage sandwich. I’d wager in the history of McDonald’s history no one’s ever said, “I’d like a biscuit with cheese.”

So now I’m on a mission. I grab the inedible mistake and dash straight back to the drive-thru determined to keep my cool.

I like situational profanity, but using it at someone always makes me feel small. Plus, the store was clearly staffed with idiots who’d have responded to my barbs with either gunfire or dumbfounded stares.

I politely explained to the girl I needed to see the manager. She said, sure, and asked me to pull up to the second drive thru.

No, I’ll wait here, I said.

It was a small act of civil disobedience, but I have a pet theory about the progression of drive thrus and here was an opportunity to perhaps further its potential.

See, there were no drive thrus when I was a boy. Now each restaurant has two. My theory is that in 20 years it will take four drive thrus to screw up each order.

The manager, a sweet grandmotherly lady, approached and heard my complaint. I said I wanted a new sausage biscuit with cheese and compensation for the inconvenience.

“Well, we don’t have any gift certificates here, but I can give you some pie!”

Pie?

As I said, I’m not a frequent patron so I don’t know what McDonald’s breakfast pie would entail. I’ve had and enjoyed quiche, which is a pie-shaped entree. But I’d already ordered my breakfast entree.

I said no thanks. She took my address and said she’d send some gift certificates. Soon she handed me a sack and said, “Here’s your sausage biscuit with cheese -- I put a free hash brown in for you!”

She said it in a way that led me to believe this gesture led past disgruntled customers to emerge from their vehicles and do handsprings around the parking lot.

I just said, “Thank you for your consideration.”

I get back to the office. Opened the sack and unfolded the wrapper. Know what was inside?

Biscuit with cheese, egg and bacon.

I shouted the day’s second profanity with such a reverberating gusto that I imagined flocks of birds simultaneously lifting off from branches all across distant savannahs.

It helped relieve the strain.

That brings me to Joe Biden’s profane gaffe. I was so pleased to see it didn’t inspire the usual holier-than-thou back and forth that’s become so common in our over-heated political climate.

We’re all becoming more comfortable with profanity.

It gives me hope that someday I’ll be able to use all my favorite swear words right here in this family-friendly blog.

And on that day, I’ll tell you exactly what I thought when I bit into that bacon mistake I was too furious to return a second time.

“Hey, this is pretty #@$*-ing good!”

Justice and John Grisham

Here’s another indication of just how massive my ego is: Wednesday night I had an opportunity to forfeit one night of professorial instruction in favor of letting my students hear another writer speak.

It was not an easy call. I had to carefully weigh whether they would benefit more from a ninth three-hour class with me or one hour with a writer who might shed some insights into aspects of the writing profession. The other writer?

John Grisham.

He was invited to speak to The Innocence Institute at Point Park University in Pittsburgh where I teach creative non-fiction. Two of my students, Matt Stroud and Marie DoRego, are pillars of the program that painstakingly researches cases of death row inmates who claim to have been wrongly convicted.

They devoted long hours with grizzled program director Bill Moushey, a legendary local reporter, and thought, gee, maybe other aspiring journalists would benefit from the experience.

Partly out of laziness, I decided, yeah, well, let’s let them hear what a guy who’s sold more than 250 million books has to say. The students would have to write about the evening.

Twelve hours later, I’m convinced I made the right decision. But not for any of the reasons you might suspect.

Sure, Grisham was great. He was funny, handsome and spoke with a drawling eloquence that made everything he said compelling.

In short, he was everything that the three men who told unforgettable stories are not.

They are Greg Bright, John Thompson and Douglas Dilosa.

You may never have heard their names and but for saintly work by people in other Innocence Institutes you never would have. Thompson was five days from a date with a Louisiana electric chair.

The men spent a combined 58 years in Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary, one of the most notorious, soul-devouring prisons on earth.

They took turns telling their stories from stools behind metal podiums on a barren stage. Their demographic breakdown roughly equalled that of our nation’s prisons. Bright and Thompson were poor blacks from challenging backgrounds convicted of murdering strangers.

Dilosa on September 27, 1986, was a lot like me. He was a happily married father of two young children he adored. He was convicted of killing his wife for insurance money and then, according to prosecutors, staging a crime scene to make it look like it had been done by two intruders he swore were getting away with murder. Prosecutors said he’d strangled his wife, mangled himself and tied himself up to foil investigators.

Each was sent to Angola, Dilosa for 14 years, Thompson for 17, and Bright for 27.

Eventually, all were exonerated. A system that in every way was stacked against them said oops. Oops, but not sorry. None of the men were compensated for the lost years.

They talked about the indelible stigma that comes from being wrongly convicted in a society that smugly assures itself, hey, the dude had to be guilty of something.

But as Grisham’s 2006 non-fiction book “The Innocent Man” details, our criminal justice system is rife with laziness and outright corruption. It happens with police, lawyers, junk science, snitch testimony and indifferent judges who mars a system that strives for fairness.

Wrong men are convicted while guilty men roam free.

Later, I coaxed my students to talk to the men at the follow-up reception. It’s where I always get the best stories, I said.

And I couldn’t resist. I cornered Bright. He told me even after 27 years in Angola, he never stopped believing the system that put him away would eventually free him. He said he has no bitterness, was thrilled the Saints won the Super Bowl, and that he hadn’t seen “The Shawshank Redemption.”

He said the worst thing about being in prison was hearing the prison chaplain tell him his mother died thinking her son would be executed for a heinous crime she knew he did not commit. He said the best thing about being free is just being free.

Me and two of my young male students were talking when I saw Dilosa talking to one of their female classmates.

They thought it might be rude to interrupt. Nonsense, I said. Your job is to get a good story out of this. It can be done without being rude.

Maybe by them, but not by me. I went over and swamped the whole conversation. I just had too many questions.

He said he thought of committing suicide to spare his sons the indignities of prison visits. He said they found the “expert witness” who showed the jury how any man could tie himself up without assistance at a state fair. The guy was a professional contortionist.

As he was about to leave I had one last question: “How ‘bout them Saints!”

Dilosa fairly quaked with rage.

“I was furious they won the Super Bowl,” he said. “It deludes the people of Louisiana into thinking everything’s all right when innocent men are going through absolute hell every day of their lives.”

When it was over, I drove to my mom’s apartment in the South Hills where I stay with my 3-year-old daughter on nights when I teach class. I hugged mom, told her I loved her, then climbed into the bed where my father slept before he died in 2004 and later my grandfather before he died in 2008.

I cuddled my sweet little darling and said a prayer that someday a loving God will bring justice to all the wrongly convicted men and women who survive in prisons on the slim hopes that one day they might enjoy a single moment like the ones I enjoy throughout each and every day.

And I prayed that He will show a mercy undeserved to men like me for not doing more to help men like them.

Conservatives wrong . . . again

It’s always surprising to me that a political party that lavishly embraces creationism always resorts to Darwinism when it comes to caring for the weakest among us.

With conservative Republicans it shouldn’t, I know, and here’s why.

I don’t listen to popular talk radio because I understand it’s the greatest obstacle to clear thinking. I try and stay informed, but when something as massive as Health Care Reform comes along, I am overwhelmed and turn to the one reliable bellwether in an obfuscating world of spin.

I turn to history. And if there’s one thing being a student of history has taught me, it is this:

The most conservative people in the nation have been wrong about every major issue since the movement in America was founded by Benedict Arnold.

That’s why I was so pleased by the passage of Health Care Reform. Because the vitriolic opposition of the most shrill conservatives convinces me that in the very near future, the bill will be deemed such a stunning success that Americans will wonder how we ever did without it for so long.

It happens with wars, with great social issues and with the very founding of the country these alleged patriots contend they revere.

It all started with America’s most notorious traitor, Benedict Arnold. He was the Revolutionary War general who plotted to forfeit the fort at West Point, N.Y., over to the British. He escaped to Britain where he led the conservative Tory movement that believed America should remain under the oppressive thumb of King George.

Beginning a trend that endures through John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy, conservatives like Arnold despised liberal Massachusetts agitators like Founding Fathers John Adams and John Hancock.

Here’s a handy clip ‘n’ save list of all the things seasoned conservatives have opposed and the ones they thought would make the world a better place:

They thought U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy would have been a fine president; many of them cheered when John F. Kennedy was slain. And I think we all can surmise how many of the most conservative Americans immersed in the Tea Party movement would feel if anything bad befell President Obama.

They're saying the same things about Obamacare as they said about Civil Rights, Social Security, Medicare, and extending the right to vote to women.

The most conservative people in America cheered when South Carolina triggered the Civil War by seceding from the Union. Echoes of those sentiments were recently shouted to thrilled conservatives by Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

They were outraged by things like the Emancipation Proclamation, Jackie Robinson playing professional baseball and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

They thought losing Vietnam would trigger a dominate effect of countries falling to communism and sneered when shots fell long-haired war protesters at Kent State.

They led demonstrations to burn records by people like Elvis and the Beatles.

They worked tirelessly to keep Richard Nixon in office and tirelessly to throw Bill Clinton out of it.

They’re outraged that people like Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres are involved in long-term monogamous same-sex relationships, but consider a thrice-married recovering drug addict like Rush Limbaugh a paragon of family values.

They thought the Iraq War was a really swell idea and that those of us who opposed it were sissy traitors afraid of an easy fight.

They thought Sarah Palin was qualified to be John McCain’s veep and that Barack Obama was a Muslim tourist who’d spend his days palling around with terrorists.

Of course, some of these could be fairly considered overwrought generalizations. So I’ll stop here.

Any more overwrought generalizations and somebody might accuse me of being conservative and I wouldn’t want that to happen.

Merry March Madness!

You can judge how much a guy dislikes any given holiday based on the number of greeting cards he has to send or see.

So far, there are no “Happy March Madness!” greeting cards.

And, make no mistake, March Madness is the number one guy holiday on the whole guy calendar. It has gambling, drinking, saturation coverage and the kind of buddy-buddy camaraderie that’s been absent from even professional football ever since the NFL decided to feminize the sport with women’s outreach programs and things like Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.

I have gainfully employed friends who are taking the day off because their employers don’t put March Madness on equal footing with all the repressive religious holidays that involve sermons and in-laws.

So, of course, I’m taking today off, too. Instead of falling short of my thrice-weekly goal to write one coherent 750-word blog post, I’m posting this multitude of shorter, equally incoherent ones.

And I’ll leave it to you gainfully employed folks to wonder what a guy who doesn’t do or earn anything does differently when he takes a day off from whatever it is he does or doesn’t do.

• If the people who sold beer and booze with ads that earnestly urge “Please Drink Responsibly” were the least bit honest they’d say, “Please drink lots -- just don’t get caught breaking anything!”

• There are well-regarded sitcoms with million-dollar budgets and squads of witty writers that fail to produce anything as funny as either of the Old Spice deodorant commercials involving the black guy on the white horse and the dashing gent who makes an elegant meat portrait out of carved turkey for his girlfriend. If I didn’t already use Old Spice, I’d be switching.

• As a proud alumnus, I couldn’t be more thrilled about the Ohio University upset over Georgetown. It’s the biggest victory in the school’s history. I just had to fill out a questionnaire that asked the offbeat query: “Where would you most like to be?” I put “1985” because it was my senior year at OU in Athens, Ohio. I don’t want to diminish all my other years, but it was just such a great time and, for better or worse, Athens was where I became who I am. Still, I’m happy right where I am. But putting “1985” sounded like a more creative answer than “Outer Banks” or something new agey like “Stuck in a Moment.”

• I like to joke that the only thing I learned during my four years at OU was to never mix Ouzo and beer. It’s an exaggeration, of course, but the essence of the wisdom should not be overlooked: Mixing beer and the volcanic Greek liqueur will inevitably lead a foolhardy drinker to wake up in a strange place, with a killer hangover and no recollection of what happened to his or her pants.

• Anyone who thinks the election of our first black president has done anything to dent our historic racism ought to spend an afternoon watching college basketball in a bar full of rednecks like the one where I imbibe. Your average redneck bases for whom he is rooting solely on the number of blacks on each team. It doesn’t matter if they look like gansta rappers or young Denzel Washingtons. If they’re black, the redneck wants them to lose.

• Still, these are great guys and I prefer their company to that of many more fair-minded bores. It just says something about where the country is right now. And, yes, there’s this: They think Sarah Palin’s going to be a really swell president.

• I’ll be following the recent celebrity breakups of Sandra Bullock and the effervescent Kate Winslet. Too soon for me to play matchmaker, but I’ll figure it all out soon enough. I prefer Winslett to Bullock, but if either of them ends up with Jon Gosselin I’m canceling my People magazine subscription.

• Me and the boys back in Athens used to think we were great wits when we’d say things like, “You can’t spell Ouzo without OU.”

• I’d love to know how many days Tiger Woods devoted to saving his family. By his returning to golf so soon, it’s clear saving his family is driving him right back to the lifestyle that jeopardized it in the first place. I love my wife and kids, but one of the reasons I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize my family is because I know I’d be forced to spend more time with them. We already spend plenty of time together. Any more and they’d be sick of me and all those friendly rednecks would be the poorer without access to my enlightened insights.

• But I wouldn’t recommend the way I live to many others. It’s like the great Capt. Augustus McCrae says in one of my favorite books, “Lonesome Dove.” “Boys, what’s good for me, ain’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.”

• You can’t spell bourbon, voudka or Scoutch without OU either. See, I learned something in Athens!

• Merry March Madness to one and all!

Winter's over; Keith heads south

I yesterday bestowed upon a truly great man an insight that nearly moved him to tears.

He’s Keith. Like me, he’s a regular at the corner tavern where we go for giggles and boredom-bashing inebriations.

Other than that, we have little in common. He’s on my Mt. Rushmore of great personal friends because he volunteered and served with distinction during the Vietnam War. I admire anyone who fulfills that noble sort of duty.

I elevate Keith above even those honorable men and women because after he’d finished serving in the special forces he immediately volunteered for two years in the Peace Corp.

“I’d seen and done so much destruction in the war, that I wanted to do my part to restore some balance to the world,” he says.

So in the prime of his life, while bubble-headed young men like the one I was destined to become were making merry on riotous college campuses in the ‘70s, Keith was swatting mosquitos and installing sewer systems in poverty-stricken hamlets throughout Central America.

He does everything with an infectious joy that makes watching “The Price Is Right” with him over lunch as entertaining as attending any professional sporting event.

And he acts like he doesn’t mind that I always ask, and I always do, if his daughter, a FBI crime tech at the Quantico HQ, ever sits around and sings to the Disney melody, “Someday my prints will come!”

So, truly, this is a great man.

He told us the other day that after a year he’d sold his house and would be joining his wife in the home on the North Carolina golf course they bought last year. He’d been commuting every two weeks or so to house tend and tie up loose ends at a local company he’d over the course of a satisfying career helped build into a global powerhouse.

People have said how much they’re going to miss him and that they hope he returns often.

But it was left to me to freeze him with a statement so profound that this great man gasped.

“Do you realize,” I said, “that you’ll probably never have to shovel snow again for as long as you live?”

If I hadn’t said it in the sort of bar where people still make Brokeback Mountain jokes, I think he would have kissed me.

Keith’s a visionary man. He can envision things like world peace, lunar agriculture and the Pittsburgh Pirates being competitive (well, maybe not that last one).

But after the most miserable winter any of us can remember, I don’t think anyone can envision a future without snow.

Even this late into March, I still obsessively check the five day forecast and am stunned to see 60 degree temperatures and no indication that yet another monster storm is going close the schools, make roads impassable and maroon me 1.1 miles away from the bar I need the way worms do dirt.

For the first time in my life, I can honestly sympathize with what post-traumatic stress victims go through. The brutality of the past three months has me feeling mentally defective in ways that cannot be healthy.

I saw the snow shovel leaning in the corner of the garage the other day and it looked so forlorn that I began to pity it. For three months, I was as emotionally attached to it as many people are to their iPhones.

I’d pick it up three or four times a day and used it to heave so much snow that my lower lumbar still throbs. I don’t know if the pain will ever go away and am pondering chiropractic remedies.

That ergonomically designed green shovel was my Tonto. Together we waged so many heroic battles that I was seized by an irresistible urge: I grabbed the shovel with both hands and ran out into the driveway and started shouting profanities at the heavens.

It was just like old times.

I haven’t asked what Keith, that great humanitarian/warrior/vicarious Price is Right contestant, is going to do with his shovel.

But after this winter, I think I’ll be buried with mine.

I just pray to the God we both serve it doesn’t happen in eight months under another 106 inches of snow.

Trade Ben to Oakland

In a week when American Idol is planning to murder the Rolling Stones, Ben Roethlisberger is killing the Pittsburgh Steelers. It’s a bad week for my icons.

The Stones, now 50 years without a rape charge, will endure. They survived Vanilla Ice singing “Satisfaction,” they’ll survive this.

But the Steelers need to trade Roethlisberger to the Oakland Raiders while we can still get a good draft pick. That’s where he belongs.

I’m historically more comfortable in the role of defendant than judge. But I’m so disgusted by Roethlisberger that I want him gone. He’s making Tiger Woods look like a gentleman.

My rush to judgement is contrary to what I’ve heard from many fair-minded Steeler fans I’ve seen interviewed on TV. They say, hey, he’s innocent until proven guilty. Let justice take its course. Jurisprudence, blah, blah, blah.

Many of these were the same people who about 10 years ago were saying, “Kill Kordell Stewart. He’s gay! Schenly Park! It’s true! My brother heard it from a friend whose cousin’s a cop . . .”

It was the sort of rumor genealogy that would have caused “Roots” author Alex Haley to pull his hair out by the, well, fistfuls.

Kordell, by the way, is now a married father of a 5 year old boy. Maybe he’s on some sort of gay sabbatical.

Ben, on the other hand, is a disgrace. He’s suspected of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old college student in a night club bathroom. Lawyers are still sorting out another sexual assault charge stemming from an unseemly 2008 hotel suite encounter with a Lake Tahoe casino employee.

The Tahoe one sounds contrived. The claimant waited a year to seek monetary damages and told conflicting stories to friends.

So far, there’s nothing dubious about the current allegation. The woman didn’t call a lawyer or hold a press conference. She went to the emergency room and called the police.

Those aren’t the actions of a money grubber. They are the actions of a victim.

And the release of the police report is when things are going to really get ugly. The only possible chivalrous revelation to emerge will be maybe that Big Ben, who was wearing a Satanic t-shirt, held the bathroom door for her.

This is all happening as a bill from the Pittsburgh Steelers for $3,244 sits in my desk drawer. It’s for four season tickets that have been in my name for 15 years and in my father’s before me for 30 before that.

It’s crazy, I know, but Steeler fans like me like to think we’re better or certainly luckier than people who root for cheaters like Bill Belichik or pompous blowhards like Jerry Jones and Daniel Snyder.

When team founder Art Rooney died in 1988, he was hailed as one of the most beloved characters in sports. No one expected his son Dan would ever measure up to the old man. Instead, he’s surpassed him. He is the unrivaled conscience of a league whose “Rooney Rule” was instigated to promote minority hiring. In one of his first acts in office, President Obama appointed Rooney -- Happy St. Patrick’s Day! -- ambassador to Ireland.

Our teams have always been dominated by high-profile good guys -- Hall of Famers like Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Chuck Noll, Mel Blount and Rod Woodson.

They’ve been teams I’d be proud to root for if they played like hapless Cleveland Browns.

But they do not. They’ve won more Super Bowls than any other team and are one of the most envied franchises in all sports.

I’m hoping team president Art Rooney II, who continues to a family tradition of class and grace, will hold a press conference and say, “We’ve begun talks to trade Ben to the Oakland Raiders for draft picks we will use to compensate for the loss of one best quarterbacks in the game, someone we’d counted on to help make us winners for the next 10 years.

“We’re doing so because we’d rather lose with quality men than win with jerks. His consistent off-field recklessness convinces us this is a pattern of misbehavior a 28-year-old multimillionaire will not outgrow.

“Because there’s so much more to Steeler tradition than winning. I only wish Myron Cope were here to explain it to him in a voice so screechy that the only thing Ben will there after be able to hear will be the thunderous boos of stadiums packed with decent Steeler fans around league.

“And if talks with the Raiders fall apart, we’ll pursue a trade with the New Jersey Devils.

“Yes, I know they play hockey, not football, but as pictures posted on TMZ.com attest, Ben’s already got the uniform. And this much is becoming clear: He knows the Devil’s playbook.”