Works in progress: Jack Clark

 

Sun-Times delivery truck, 1961 (Photo courtesy of John Chuckman)

     This was a bad week for newspaper fans, with the Washington Post cutting a third of its staff so Jeff Bezos can firehose more money at Donald Trump. Though honestly, the place is supposedly losing $100 million a year, which even to Bezos starts to add up. Today's offering is from our periodic correspondent Jack Clark. I've just begun reading his new memoir, "Honest Labor: Writing & Moving Furniture" — great title, right?

     I’m a newspaper junkie. Every morning I take a walk to my local Walgreens to pick up the Sun-Times and the New York Times. Six dollars. It’s a small price to pay for my daily fix.
     I read the Sun-Times with breakfast but I save the New York Times for late at night, usually just before bed. I got into this habit back in the days of old when you could pick up the early edition of both morning papers the night before.
     When I was a kid, my father would sometimes send me to the local newsstand around 10 p.m. to pick up one or both papers. So, like a lot of other addicts, I blame it all on my upbringing.
     Sometimes, the papers would be late, and a line would form, usually me and a bunch of old guys waiting for those speedy trucks to arrive. Remember those posters on the side promoting Royko or Ann Landers, or some other newspaper star. Neil must have got there a time or two.* The Tribune trucks were white, the Sun-Times blue. (I think the late, great, Daily News trucks were red, but I’m not certain anymore.)
     When I was a teenager, up to no good in the middle of the night, I used to love to watch the newspaper trucks as they came west down Madison Street, hopping from one side of the street to the other, paying no attention to traffic laws as they made their deliveries. They’d drive for blocks on the wrong side of the street if that’s how the stops worked out. The cops never bothered them, except to get a free paper or two to help while away those slow overnight hours.
     As years went on, the papers came out later and later, 11 o’clock, midnight, one in the morning, and then they stopped coming until dawn. I was not happy about this, but I had no one to blame but myself.
     One day the Tribune called. No. They didn’t want to hire me. They’d already explained that they didn’t hire guys like me anymore — guys without a college education. The days of Ben Hecht and Mike Royko were gone. Instead, they wanted to talk to me about subscribing.
      I’d been getting these calls regularly for decades. I was always polite when I declined their offer. If they pushed, I’d give them various reasons: I like to get a little exercise in the morning or I pick up the paper on the way home. I made it a point to tell them I read the Trib every day, and I did until the Zell years came along. (I had friends who’d read the New York Times but not the Chicago papers. I could never understand it. Didn’t they want to know who died?)
     But this one day, the Tribune would not take no for an answer. “Do you know how much money you could save with a subscription?” the guy asked. This was always their biggest selling point, that I was needlessly throwing my money away.
     I explained that I’d been needlessly throwing my money away my entire life. It was now well past the point where saving a couple of bucks a month on newspaper consumption was going to make any difference to my standard of living.
     “Okay, I’ll throw — in Sundays free for the first month,” he said.
     “Look, I’m out of town a lot. I don’t want the papers piling up on the porch.”
     “You just call. We’ll hold the deliveries until you get back.”
     “Yeah. But all I have to do is forget to call one time and every thief in the neighborhood will know nobody’s home.”
     “Look, what can I do to get you onboard here?”
     “Nothing.”
     “If I gave you the paper for free, you wouldn’t subscribe?”
     “That’s right.” And then I made my mistake. I decided to show him how smart I was and explain the real reason I would never subscribe. “Look, why would I want to read the home edition?” This was the one you got with your subscription. It was the very first printing. “It doesn’t come until six in the morning. I can pick up the late edition at one?”
     There was dead silence on the line for a while. I thought he’d actually given up. My genius had won the day.
     “Would you say that again?” he said very slowly, and I had a sudden feeling of nausea.
     I knew I was compounding my mistake but I couldn’t stop myself. I said it all over again.
     I’ve never admitted this publicly before. So before we go on, I’d like to apologize to all the old-timers who liked to read the paper before bed, to all the insomniacs waiting for the sun to come up so they can finally get a bit of sleep, to the newspaper truck drivers, to the cops and cab drivers, to the doormen and security guards, and late-night waitresses and short-order cooks, all those night owls trying to kill a little time before dawn. I’m truly sorry.
     I done it. I confess. I’m the guy.
     Within a week, the Tribune stopped sending the late edition out overnight.
     I was driving cabs at the time and hanging around a White Hen Pantry on Lincoln Avenue. It was a good stop for fresh coffee, a friendly place where they’d let you use the washroom. You could hang around and take a bit of a break and talk to the cops, fellow cabbies, and the newspaper-truck drivers who were all doing the same thing.
     “Where’s the Tribune?” Everybody wanted to know.
     The Sun-Times drivers didn’t know but they knew something was going on, and they looked worried.
     A couple of days later, a Sun-Times driver told me the Tribune was now waiting to deliver the late edition until after the home edition was out. The drivers were still starting at their regular time, but the Tribune was holding the trucks at the loading docks. Nobody knew why and I didn’t say a word. A week later, the Sun-Times trucks disappeared too.
     That persistent salesman probably got promoted to Vice President.
     In my defense, I’d like to say, shouldn’t they have known this without me telling them? How could they not know what time the various editions of their own newspaper went out? Well, that salesman probably didn’t read the paper, only the balance sheets.
     I’ve often wondered how many new subscriptions they got and how many readers they lost in the process. Was it really worth it?
     It was a bad couple of years for me. I finally solved the problem by buying both papers in the morning and saving one for night. That didn’t alleviate my guilt, of course. But with enough time you can get over almost anything.
     And then there was a wonderful period, which I obviously didn’t deserve, when I could pick up the next morning’s New York Times at my local 24-hour Walgreens as early as midnight. This was especially wonderful because it was printed at Freedom Center, the Tribune’s printing plant. This was so funny, that I could get a New York paper hours before any Chicago paper, that I thought of writing about it. I managed to stop myself. Too late I’d learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes you’re better off not showing people just how smart you think you are.
      Some of my favorite memories of my North Side neighborhood were walking out of the great Monday night jazz jam at the old Serbian Village and walking across to the Walgreen’s to get the New York Times on the way home.
     I got to be friendly with the driver. I’m pretty sure he worked for Chas. Levy Circulating Company. If he saw me crossing the street, sometimes he’d hand me a free paper and I wouldn’t even have to go into the store.
     Those days are long gone now, and my crime hardly matters with all the other crimes that have beaten the newspaper business into the ground.
     I haven’t seen a newspaper delivery truck in years. At the Walgreens, which is no longer 24 hours, the newspapers now arrive in ordinary cars.
     The other morning it was two degrees. I was bundled up in layers under a down jacket, with a hat and two hoods on my head. When I got to the Walgreens there was no New York Times. This happens now and then with both papers. Personal cars break down, delivery people get sick, or somebody steals the papers from where they were left in front of the closed store.
      It’s not a big deal. I don’t need my NYT fix until night. So I try to remember to pick one up in my travels that day. But at two degrees, I wasn’t planning to do any traveling, so I picked up the Tribune instead.
     This is something I almost never do. It’s not because I don’t like the Tribune. It’s a pretty decent newspaper again and I do have a dirt-cheap online subscription for when I’m out of town. It’s not even the price. Four-dollar is twice what the Sun-Times cost. It’s the same price as the New York Times.
     And there’s the rub. Later that night, when I turned to section two of the Tribune, there was a story about Trump’s deportations. Not only had I already read it the day before in the New York Times where it originated, I’d already paid four dollars to read it.
     The New York Times is worth four dollars even on their worst days. They have reporters all over the country and all over the world. They don’t rely on other newspapers or wire services to fill their pages, and that comes with a cost.
     And then, to top it off, when I got to the sports section, the Trib didn’t have any coverage of the Bear’s game the night before. You want four bucks and you can’t even stay up a little late for the most important Bear’s game in years? And I’m supposed to give you four dollars. Dream on.
     And the Sun-Times has had its own problems with pricing. I don’t usually buy the Sunday paper. The New York Times is six dollars that day, and that’s really about as much as this junkie wants to spend. I’ll take a quick look at the Sun-Times headline and if it’s something especially interesting, I might pick up a copy.
     The last time I did this, the Walgreens tried to charge me six dollars. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. There’s no arts section. No book section. The comics are a joke. Bring back Willy ‘n Ethel and I might give you a few extra dollars. The way the paper is now, it’s no different than a normal daily edition. It’s only a bit thicker because it’s stuffed full of advertising inserts. I wondered if those advertisers realized how many readers they were going to lose with the new price.
     I took a closer look at the front page and then pointed to the price on the cover. $5 Chicago. $6 elsewhere. “I think this is still Chicago,” I said to the clerk.
     “But that’s how it rings up,” the girl said, and she had this helpless look on her face. Here was another geezer talking in some incomprehensible language. I knew it was a hopeless battle and told her to keep the paper.
     I was going to complain to the Sun-Times about their new price but I knew I wouldn’t have to. Many other people would do the work for me, and the price has since gone back to the more reasonable three dollars.
     I could write on and on about my love affair with newspapers, but this is probably enough for now.
     I know I’m lucky to have the Walgreens so close. It’s only a block from home. And it’s more luck that they carry the New York Times. Some Days they only get one or two copies. I’m pretty sure I’m their steadiest customer at least some of the time. I’m out of town for months on end and I know that one of these days, I’ll come back and the New York Times won’t be there waiting for me.
     Of course, before long, it will all be gone. The age of the newspaper will be over. The only real question is, who dies first?

* Editor's note: Never. Who do you think I am? Jay Mariotti?
 

Epstein files circus hides sex abuse horror in plain sight

"Char Dolly" by Parsons & Charlesworth (Chicago Cultural Center)

      Sure I'm in the Epstein files. Big city columnist, jiggling the ice in my glass aboard the Hollinger corporate jet as it winged its way toward...

     Maybe I shouldn't even mention it. But Jon Stewart confessed his cameo in the scandalous files — a tossed-off suggestion that he narrate a documentary being contemplated — and as my lone appearance is similarly benign, perhaps I should.
     The risk is that doing so further perfumes this true horror with another spritz of triviality.
What the heck, we're on the topic already. I'm not a fan of trigger warnings. But this subject is so grim without the warm glow of celebrity and euphemism the media habitually slathers over it. I like to be direct. If that might upset you, many interesting articles await elsewhere in the paper.
     Jeffrey Epstein was a rich pedophile who raped children, secured for him by his pander, Ghislaine Maxwell, who went around seducing vulnerable girls with tales of money and power. They were debauched by Epstein and a revolving cast of famous pals who no doubt imagined that the girls were consenting. But children can't consent to their own molestation. It's still rape.
Epstein initially got a tap on the wrist, until the Miami Herald ran a three-part series in 2018 that sent Epstein back to prison, where he killed himself, most likely.
     The Epstein files would not die, however, and became a hobbyhorse of the lunatic right, when they thought the case would besmirch Bill Clinton. When it turned out that their beloved hero was also involved, big time, their interest waned.
     My instinct was to pass on the tawdry mess. Who cares if Bill Gates supposedly cheated on his wife? Nothing in the Epstein files could lower my rock bottom opinion of Donald Trump. If you haven't figured him out long ago, you never will.
     Only two things are worth observing here, and since I haven't heard either said among the 24/7 media chicken ranch squawking on the subject, I will point them out.
     First, evil needs a framework. The ICE agents who shot Renee Good in the face and put 10 bullets into Alex Pretti would not, I believe, have done so independently, had they strolled out into the street last summer and encountered these two on their own. The federal government first had to hire them, train them, supposedly, outfit them with weapons and, crucially, give them permission to suspend any sense of basic human decency.
Permission is key to hurting others. Bullies are cowards, and must be reassured it's okay. Think.      Why would any super rich guy need to visit Jeffrey Epstein? They have their own planes, their own willing assistants who could scour local roller rinks for underage victims. But they didn't do that. They needed Epstein to assure them that is allowed, on his plane or island. He created a setting where they could be as awful as they wanted to be.

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Flashback 1985: "Mom, do I have to go to school?"

 

Boy on the floor playing with a toy car, by Charles Ray (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Some stories stick with you. Almost 30 years later, I remember standing next to the first Cook County Medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, looking through large crime scene photographs of the bodies of children. Stark black and white shots that I won't describe, though I can see them clearly as if they were in front of me now.

     There were the days at the University of Illinois Craniofacial Center, talking to patients who were having facial prosthetics made. One man, who was having a silicon nose and upper lip to go over the big hole in the middle of his face. The nose was held on by four titanium posts.
     Or the first such jarring story, written back when I was the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal. A single mother wrote a letter to the paper. Her 4-year-old son had been raped by the school janitor. She phoned the police, expecting them to show up with lights flashing. Instead it began a legal crawl that ended up heading ... nowhere.

     Not quite nowhere. I wrote a series on child sex abuse that ran for a week on the front page of the Journal. I spoke to her, met her son. Assistant DuPage County State's Attorney Brian Telander was convinced the crime had happened, but the evidence just wasn't there. I looked at other aspects of abuse, interviewing a man in prison who'd started raping his daughter when she was 11. I asked him how he could do it, and he answered me. I also talked to a an older teen who'd been molested as a child, about the devastating damage it did to her.
    Now that I look over the stories, it's the sort of thing that doesn't run in newspapers much anymore. I'm not sure why. Journalism has fashions like everything else, I suppose.
     The stories themselves ... start quite slowly. I think because I was 25 and had never had to process this sort of thing before. The one about the pre-schooler begins this way:

     No one wants to say that four-year-olds are open game for sex abusers. Talk to almost any professional, and he will try to find ways around it.

     Laws are changing. Confessions are frequent.

     But after a while, they'll say it outright. It's open season. Afterward, they'll ask you not to print it. So as not to tip off the perverts, they say. But if you talk to them a little further, they will admit: the perverts already know. The people who don't know are the parents.

     Charlie's mother didn't know. A single mother, living in DuPage County, she sent her son Charlie to a school while she attended a professional school.

     It was late August, early September 1984, when she first noticed something was wrong with Charlie.

     Usually an energetic, confident four-year-old, he started not wanting to go to school.

     If I were writing it today, I might begin with the sentence above, and save the jarring opening paragraph for the end of the story. 

     "He was very outgoing, a very sociable child," she said, later. "That made it all the more incongruous."

     He asked me 20 times a day, 'Do I have to go to school today?' Even on the weekend, he would ask, 'Mom, do I have to go to school today, do I have to go to school?'"

     His mother was concerned, but no amount of coaxing would get Charlie to tell her what was bothering him about school.

     This went on for months. Charlie's mother was concentrating on getting her diploma, and began to automatically answer her son's complaints by assuring him that, as soon as she graduated, he would be able to stop going to school.

     "Be a good boy for a little longer," she pleaded. She comforted herself with the thought that Charlie's difficulty was due to "separation anxiety."

     It made sense. I could justify it — I was away from him now," she said.

     Charlie started to adopt mannerisms that struck his mother as uncharacteristically mature, such as drumming his fingers like an adult. He also had the annoying tendency to punch her father or brother in the crotch when they were around.

      When Charlie came home one day and told his mother that a teaching assistant, "Mr. Smith"...

     I made the janitor into a teaching assistant, one of several changes — mentioned at the top — to protect the identities of the subject. The man had not been charged, never mind convicted, of any crime.

...kicked him, his mother didn't pay much notice to it. She couldn't find any marks, and decided Charlie was probably making it up. He did that sometimes. She didn't report anything to the school.

     "I should have reported it," the mother said. ""I respected an adult more than my own child."

      The week before Thanksgiving, Charlie was caught in a closet touching a playmate sexually. His babysitting announced she would no longer watch Charlie because of his aggressive sexual behavior.

      Distraught, the mother told the psychologist at her dental school about her son's problems. The psychologist said Charlie was exhibiting the classic signs of sexual abuse, and recommended she call the Child Abuse Hotline.

     "When I look back, all these things fit in like puzzle pieces, but at the time ..." Her voice trails off.

     Cathy called the hotline on Nov. 30. On Dec. 4 an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services caseworker was sent out to interview Charlie, along with a detective from a municipal police department and Lori Chassee, an investigator for the state's attorney's office. He didn't tell them anything significant.

     Two weeks into December, Charlies mother suspected but did not definitely know that something had happened to her son. Despite her fears, she continued to send Charlie to the school. She had the pressure of examinations, and really didn't know what else she could do.

     On the night of her graduation, Dec. 15, Charlie said, "I don't have to go to school, right? You don't have to go to school, and I did my job , and don't have to go to school either." Cathy said yes, he did not have to go back to the center.

     Then it all came out.

     "He talked for three solid hours," said Cathy. "In gross detail. Everything hat happened in that school. I was in shock. I was shaking, thinking, 'It can't be true.' Everything caved in. I had no idea it was like this. I thought my kid had been fondled. I had no idea it was like this." 

     Charlie described being forced to commit oral sex, of having his mouth stuffed with Kleenex and taped shut and then being sodomized and other acts committed by Mr. Smith.

     Cathy called the police immediately, at 4 a.m. She expected the police to arrive with flashing lights. She expected Mr. Smith to be yanked out of bed and arrested.

     Charlie's mother did not know it at the time, but she was about to be plunged into another world, a world of policemen and lawyers, therapists and administrators. her days would be filled with phone calls, with meetings, with notes and documents and procedures. For the next eight months, she would doggedly purpose a single, elusive goal: justice for her son.

     The policeman who took her call was sympathetic, but told her to call back Monday morning and talk to a detective.

     That's enough, right? It's about the first third of the story. Another student was found to have been abused, and in that case, there was physical evidence. But his parents did not want him to testify. Without his evidence, the case went nowhere. Charlie was a terrible witness, adding all sorts of flights of fantasy, contradicting himself. The case went before a grand jury, which did not find enough evidence to press charges. Mr. Smith went off scot free. Cathy said she felt as if her son's personality was murdered. I follow the frustrating odyssey like a dim bloodhound tracking a false scent to nowhere.

     Charlie would be in his 40s now. I wonder what happened to him. And how many more victims Mr. Smith had before he was finally brought to justice, assuming he ever was. This is a very long way of explaining why I didn't join the media party dancing around the Epstein maypole. I thought they were missing the point, blinded by celebrity and spin, and ignoring the underlying crimes, again. A situation I hope to address in Friday's column, where I refer to this story. So I figure, put it up here, ahead of time.

For ICE protesters, high-tech punishment for standing up for what's right

     "Social credit" is a bland phrase in English. What does it even mean? The slight rise in status you experience after throwing a party?
     In China, however, the term — 社会信用体 shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì — while also vague, refers to a ranking system used by officialdom to reward or punish citizens based on their behavior. It is not a single score, but an ad hoc, varying assemblage of carrots and sticks the totalitarian government deploys to keep 1.4 billion citizens in line.
     In 2018, then Vice President Mike Pence warned about China’s social credit system.
     "China has built an unparalleled surveillance state, and it’s growing more expansive and intrusive," Pence said. "By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life — the so-called 'social credit score.' In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.'”
     Be a good party member, don't cause trouble, and your score rises. You can rent a bike without a deposit, or get higher placement in a dating app. However, if you complain to co-workers, post snarky comments online about official policies or, Mao forbid, attend a protest, your social mobility score will plummet. Suddenly, you have trouble boarding a train or airplane.
     That echoed ominously with one aspect of the ongoing ICE clashes in Minneapolis. One protester, Nicole Cleland, said in a declaration supporting a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, that ICE agents, whom she did not know, nevertheless called her by name, thanks to facial recognition programs they use. Three days later, she received an email from Homeland Security, saying her membership in Global Entry, designed to speed fliers through TSA airport checkpoints, had been suspended.
     "I travel frequently," wrote Cleland, a director at Target Co. "I am concerned that I may experience other complications while traveling stemming simply from the exercise of my rights." Cleland, 56, had not committed a crime and didn't pose a threat beyond showing up and exercising her Constitutionally protected right to protest a policy which she, and the majority of Americans, find cruel and destructive. President Donald Trump said he was going to go after murderers and rapists. He did not promise to send masked thugs rampaging through Home Depot parking lots, accosting American citizens trying to pick up a cordless drill.
     With cherished freedoms fluttering to earth like maple leaves in a November gale, it might seem odd to focus on this particular bit of oppression. But as horrifying as it is to be shot 10 times for recording something on your phone, most of the general public does not attend protests, so their risk of being murdered by ICE is still low. However, they might post something on Facebook. Or send a text to a colleague. With technology, the ability to oppress increases exponentially. China has an estimated 500 million public surveillance cameras, one for every three people. And while those were of limited use when government drudges had to monitor them, facial recognition software changes all that.

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Dante, love and cheesecake

     

     Valentine's Day looms — a week from Saturday. You've done nothing, of course. It helps to have a plan. For starters, what is Valentine's Day about, anyway?
     Love, right?
     Yes, clearly. All those hearts and flowers. Kind of a a giveaway.
     Of course, you could argue that everything is about love, in one way or another. Sports. War. Success. All mating rituals gone mad. I just finished Prue Shaw's excellent "Dante: The Essential Commedia" and it reminded me that, in Dante's cosmology, love is the essence of belief. Asked — by Saint Peter in heaven, no less — to explain his own personal faith, Dante replies:

     "...I believe in one God,
      sole and eternal, who, himself unmoved,
     moves all the heavens, with love and with desire."

     Love drives the clockwork of the universe, from the beating of our hearts to the whirring of the cosmos. The epic masterpiece has 14,233 lines of terza rima, and — spoiler alert — the last five are:

      "Here my lofty imagination failed
      but, like a wheel revolving evenly,
      already my desire and will were turned
      by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.'

    So saying Valentine's Day is about love doesn't mean much, since everything else is about love too. Maybe Valentine's Day is more about gratitude — thanking the people whom you love and, mirabile dictu, love you back, not only despite who you are, but because of it.

     In the 43 years my wife and I have been an item, I've been famous for nailing Valentine's Day. One year, when we were dating, and had separate apartments, I used my new key to slip in her place while she was away and clean it, top to bottom, as a present. I suppose some gals might be horrified at that, but, given our situation then, she knew it was the perfect present: something thoughtful, that demanded knowledge of the recipient and considerable planning and effort. Plus I was broke, so it was the most elaborate present I could afford.
     And, like all the best gifts, it was kind of a gift to myself, too, since the place clearly needed cleaning. She married me anyway.
     Speaking of love and gratitude, I've always been grateful for the love shown to this blog by Eli's Cheesecake. From the very beginning of Everygoddamnday.com, the classic Chicago dessert ran holiday advertisements here, from Thanksgiving through February.
     Gratitude being important, to me anyway, I felt I should thank them for their support. 
     Over the years, these pieces developed a certain tone of elaborate, almost theatrical appreciation I think of as Cheesecake Hysteria. Such as 2016's "Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake," (its suggestion that you " stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into" grows more on point as the years pass) or 2020's "We will eat the good cold cheesecake, browned by the sun and be men" and 2o19, perhaps the ultimate, "Have you done your duty, cheesecakewise?" with its pointed opening sentence, "Hey, parasite!"

     Maybe because I'm a journalist, and thus supposed to be impartial. Immune to such considerations. I wanted to make sure that the reader clearly understood what was happening — I am being paid and celebrating my benefactor. Sunlight is a disinfectant.

     That said, I still felt guilty. How was I different than any other bought-off hireling? Yes, the cheesecake is great. Yes, I'd eat it anyway. But still. Money changes hands. There is no free lunch.

     Fast forward to the present day. I'm reading "Dante: The Essential Commedia," a unique sort of book, where the author walks the reader through the Commedia's three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, providing a running commentary, stopping the action to expound on what is going on. An excellent way to appreciate a book that otherwise can be puzzlingly dense and obscure. I plan to write my Sun-Times column about it Friday.

     At one point, Dante, Virgil — and I suppose we readers too — are heading up Purgatory's mountain, toward Heaven, where Dante will gaze upon the blinding white light glory of God. Angels are flitting about, too quick for Dante to process. A climbing soul introduces himself: 

      "My name was Currado Malaspina
      I'm not the old Currado, but a descendent of his
       the love I felt for my family is purified here."

     Shaw steps in to explain.
     "Dante pays the speaker an elaborate compliment: he has never been in those parts, he says, but the Malaspina family is famous throughout Europe for their courage and their liberality, the two quintessential feudal virtues."
      Dante outlines their renown.

      "The fame that honours our house
       celebrates its lords and celebrates its lands,
       so that even someone who hasn't yet been there knows of them."

     The soul makes a prediction.
     "The shade responds that, before seven years have passed, Dante will experience the family's generosity for himself," Shaw writes. "Dante was the guest of the Malaspina family in the Lunigiana in late 1306, one of the few securely documented sojourns in the early years of his exile. While there he represented the family in peace negotiations with the bishop of Luni. The document that names those involved survives in a local archive. In the time frame of the poem, these events lie in the future. here the poet repays the courtly hospitality of the Malaspina family with generous words, written long after the event."
     Ha. Double ha. So Dante Alighieri, master poet of all time, equal only, perhaps, to Shakespeare, pauses in his epic masterpiece to sing the praises of the house that put him up for a while after Pope Boniface VIII exiled him from Florence and sentenced him to death, should he ever return.

      In exchange for his room in the family estate, and — what? — a few months' worth of meals at the communal table, Dante celebrates the Malaspinas in a work that will circle the globe and remain fresh and current — and in print — for 700 years.
      So it's not just me. 
      I can't tell you how satisfying that is. 
      Between the world wars there was a skillful cartoonist named H.T. Webster who would draw various series of cartoons under a certain theme. "Life's Darkest Moments" and "The Timid Soul" (named Casper Milquetoast," a character that lingered in the culture for quite a while). One series was "The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime" and showed a young man holding a newspaper whose headline reads, "JOE DI MAGGIO LIKES CHICKEN CHOW MEIN."

     "Gee!" he says, cheeks flushed. "I like chicken chow mein too!"

      The almost unnecessary caption, "THE BOY WHO FOUND HE HAD SOMETHING IN COMMON WITH HIS HERO."

      I don't claim to have much in common with Dante — pervasive disappointment, a sense of my own worth not at all in keeping with my current state — but I do know on which side my bread is buttered on. Just like him.

      Oh, I almost forgot. Valentine's Day. Here before you know it. Go online and order your beloved a box of "Be Mine" Baby Eli's cheesecakes, or a Valentine's Red Cherry Vanilla Bean cheesecake. Do it right now, right here, before you forget and it's Feb. 13 and you're jamming yourself into a 7-Eleven to pay $10 for a limp looking single rose. Your long-suffering loved one will be glad you did. You'll be really glad you did. I'll also be glad you did. And Dante, if only he were around, would be glad you did.

     Okay, maybe not. Not a lot made the dour Florentine glad. But one can still hope, another important quality when you find yourself stuck in hell and trying to get out.

     

'Code of silence' no big secret in Chicago, where every cop is well-versed

     How disappointed are you that former Mayor Rahm Emanuel won't be testifying about the Chicago Police Department's notorious "code of silence" in federal court? At least not during a civil trial that starts Monday, stemming from cops bursting into the wrong home in 2018 and driving a woman, her four children and half-naked grandmother outside at gunpoint?
     Yeah, me neither.
     God bless Rahm — his tenure looks better every day. Emanuel didn't give away big chunks of city infrastructure in spectacularly disastrous deals that cost Chicago billions, like his mentor, Rich Daley. Nor did he flounder around in endless paroxysms of maddening, can't-anyone-work-this-crazy-contraption confusion, like his two successors. He should take his eyes off the White House and settle for the consolation prize of being mayor of Chicago, again. All is forgiven.
     But spilling the beans on the CPD code of silence in a speech in 2015 doesn't make him privy to some big state secret. Any cop stuck on the stand could say the same thing, in theory.
     Heck, they could subpoena me. I'd tell 'em. A week after Emanuel revealed the cop “tendency to ignore, deny or, in some cases, cover up the bad actions of a colleague,” I tapped Craig B. Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, a national expert in police ethics and the guy whose legal clinic got a tip about the existence of dashcam video showing Jason Van Dyke pumping 16 shots into Laquan McDonald.
     Futterman didn't mince words.
     "Chicago is the capital of the code of silence," he said. "If you break with that code, you get crushed."
     Cops will claim they must have each other's backs because no one else will. Thin blue line, yadda yadda, cue the heroic music. You have to count on your partner in that dark alley; your life depends on it. If the public only understood how incredibly difficult being a police officer is, they'd overlook any innocent, in-the-heat-of-the-moment mistake, or years of unchecked sadistic and racist abuse.
     The results speak for themselves. Chicago police shoot more citizens than almost any other department in the U.S., some years grabbing the No. 1 spot, and payouts for wrongful death lawsuits are staggering in a city circling the financial drain: $1.11 billion from 2008 to 2024, according to the Chicago Reporter, with another $300 million piled on in 2025.
     Not only are they expensive, but bad apples make police work harder — solving crimes takes the cooperation of neighborhood residents, who tend to become skittish and quiet if their only experience with police is being abused by them.
     I have to admit my bias here. Forty years of trying to pry anything out the department yap has taught me: The CPD doesn't just have a code of silence about misdeeds. It has a code of silence about everything.

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"Make it be spring"

Natasha

     Margaret Atwood didn't just write "The Handmaid's Tale," you know. She's also a poet — 18 volumes published, as many collections of poetry as she has novels. So today being the 1st of February, I feel permitted to dig out her poem "February," which begins:

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed

    We'll leave the watching hockey to her — Atwood is Canadian, after all, she doesn't have much choice in the matter. The poem — I can't print it in full, but you can read it here, on the Poetry Foundation site — is mostly about the cat, on its surface. Lounging in bed, on her chest,"breathing his breath/of burped-up meat and musty sofas."
    Perfect, right? But of course the poem is much more than that. The cat is a metaphor — plainly stated — for the male aggressiveness that is such a leitmotif through Atwood's writing. 

It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run.

     Can't argue that, not with President Grab-'Em-By-the-Pussy turning impotent geriatric rage into the driver of American policy, foreign and domestic. 
     The poem made me miss our Natasha, who we lost in June, an absence deeply felt — she was 16, and to this day I'll hear a purr-like-sound, or a certain kind of rustle, and look up, expectant, then disappointed. It was the very end, and mercy demanded we put her down. But also a sort of foreshadowing that would look trite in literature, but life has no problem grinding in your face. Natasha's parting was so quickly replaced by other, greater losses — my mother died two days later — that I never even bothered to write about it here before. "My cat died and then my mother and then my cousin Harry and a couple cherished friends" seems straying into bathos. We all got woes. Suck it up, buttercup.

    Atwood ends by beautifully capturing a situation very familiar to all cat owners, though none of us would think to express it so beautifully, or at all, followed by a directive I plan to repeat daily until April.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Atop blog: "February," by Hendrik Meijer (Metropolitan Museum of Art)