Landscapers hit hard by ICE blitz, '...accused of the crime of working'

Barbara Kruger, The Art Institute

     Rey was just doing his job — cleaning up a yard in Rogers Park one morning at the end of October — when a Black Jeep Wagoneer slowed down, a group of masked men jumped out, slapped on handcuffs and dragged him into the vehicle, then drove off, taunting him as they did.
     News spread quickly.
     "I was heading downtown with my husband," said his boss, Kristen Hulne, owner of Patch Landscaping, with her husband Patrick, a newly-retired Chicago firefighter. "We get a call from a guy in the office: 'ICE just picked up Rey.' My other employee ran away and hid. The customer called and said, 'I'm sorry this happened; I took all your equipment off your truck and locked it away in the yard, safe.'"
     It's hard enough to operate a small business. Never mind a landscaping business in a city as weather-scoured as Chicago. The federal government's war on immigrants these past few months made that task even harder for landscapers here, a "cat and mouse game" Hulne calls it, trying to both rake leaves and avoid capture.
     "It's such an incredible burden on this industry," said Marisa Gora, owner of Kemora Landscapes, adding that ICE withdrawing recently is of limited comfort. "We don't know if they're going to come back in the spring."
     "As landscaping contractors, we're a targeted community," said Lisa Willis, owner of MINDSpace, "Our industry associations really haven't spoken up about it. It was really disappointing."
     The executive director of Landscape Illinois declined comment beyond, "we need to keep a low profile to protect as many of our workers as possible from additional enforcement."
     A worry everyone I spoke with raised — if I exercise my right as an American citizen, will our increasingly-vindictive government come after me or my business? It's like living in Russia.
     When a worker was abducted, everything else stops —for Hulne, it took time to locate the terrified worker who fled. The abandoned truck and equipment had to be collected. An increasingly Kafkaesque police state confronted.
     "We got a lawyer that day," Hulne said. "Before I could turn around, Rey's wife was in my office crying. Fifteen minutes after that I had a call from our alderman —'Oh my God I just heard what happened....' There was this immediate mobilization of the neighborhood. It was incredible."

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"Beauty emergency"

      Tuesday morning, after our walk, I went up our driveway to toss Kitty's morning contribution into the trash can by the garage and spied half a rabbit. Our dog, who, truth be told, can be slow on the uptake, didn't notice the offal, thank God. 
      After I squired Kitty into the house, I went into the garage, got a shovel, and returned to what indeed turned out to be the hindquarters of a bunny, the upper portion cleanly snapped away mid-spine, as if cleaved in two with an axe. I considered taking a photo but, yuck, right? I buried the lower half in the strip of woods running along our property, covering the grave with a log, to deter it being dug up.
    It was clear to me what had happened: an alien spaceship had bisected the rabbit with a space laser, taking the upper half for study, or whatever nefarious purpose inspires extraterrestrials to flit about our planet in a way that manages to be both omnipresent and elusive.
     I considered reporting my confirmed alien sighting to the proper authorities, but realized that, without tangible evidence, my information would not be given the weight that it deserves ...
     Okay, okay, not being serious here. With so much rampant credulity — really, we live in the Golden Age of Gullibility —  I don't want you thinking, "Oh no, not Steinberg too." I've gone on record about what I think regarding the tendency to automatically view UFOs as visiting aliens, for all the good it does. (The wistful, who want so much to believe, try to skew the issue into, "You don't believe there could be life anywhere in the vast galaxy?" A red herring, and not the relevant question, which is: "Are they here, now?" The answer to that must be a resounding "No!"  The whole UFO phenomenon is based on people not grasping the hugeness of space, nor the expanse of time. "Star Wars" nailed it: if there is life in the galaxy, the overwhelming odds are it was both "long ago and far away.")  

      Still, there is something useful here. When we consider how smoothly people make the leap, from a flash in the sky to a mothership from Rigel 7, the whole Trump disaster should be no surprise. We knew long ago, or should have known, that too many people are eager to believe the most jaw-dropping nonsense based on nothing at all; why is it surprising that this tendency functions in realms beyond specks in the sky?

     Wednesday, standing in the kitchen, I though I saw something flash in the back yard. Looking harder, I saw nothing. "These microships are fast," I thought. Again, not really. Ten seconds later, my wife said, "Look!" and I saw I had left the grill open the night before, eager to convey our steaks to the table. 
     "I must have left the ..." I began.
     "The coyote!" she said. I redirected my gaze, and there was maybe 40 pounds worth of loping piebald manginess, heading around our house and west down Center Avenue. My wife alerted the neighbors across the street, who are watching a dog for friends and might conceivable let her in their fenced-in back yard. 
    They saw the coyote, parked in front of their house, and one let out a shout they've developed to alert the other that a momentary phenomenon demanding attention is something marvelous, not dire. A pretty bird, not a car accident. "Beauty emergency!" she said. I'm going to borrow that one. Her husband snapped the above picture but, being a more modest sort than I, waved off the idea of credit.
     Given this new information, I'd like to revise my theory about what happened to the rabbit. Space aliens didn't cut the rabbit in half: they left the rabbit carcass there, as bait, trying to attract the coyote. That must be it.

With 'Amadeus,' Robert Falls shocks by not shocking

 

Ian Barford

     We legacy media skew old. The grizzled goat in front of me, picking up press tickets at the Steppenwolf Theatre on Sunday night, asked, "Where's the bathroom?" That seemed a smart idea.
     We were about to see the Peter Shaffer play "Amadeus," directed by Robert Falls, and with Falls you never know what mayhem is going to be unleashed onstage. One certainly doesn't want to add to the pyrotechnics, unintentionally: "That old man who leapt up with a strangled cry during the quiet monologue and ran gibbering out of the theater — was that part of the show?"
     "Take a right," we were instructed. We confronted a blood red corridor and a single red door labeled, "ALL GENDER RESTROOM." The men in front of us tottered in. I began to follow, but my wife froze. She wasn't going in there after them.
     I diverted my path, as well. Solidarity. We found a "PRIVATE BATHROOM" tucked to the left, and once we established there were no ominous males lurking inside, I sent her on her way and returned to the brave new world awaiting me — well, not so new; Steppenwolf was remodeled in 2021. But I hadn't been there since then. COVID kneecapped my habit of going places and doing things, aided, I suppose, by gathering senescence.
     What do you expect in a bathroom? Urinals, correct, if you're a man? Stalls with toilets in them? Ah, ha-ha-ha. There was none of that. A blank white corridor that seemed like a set from "2001: A Space Odyssey." I walked the length, found myself among the sinks, figured — hoped — that I'd missed something, that these weren't the new sink/toilets I hadn't yet heard about. So turned and tried a metal door handle I'd missed. Success!
     Something new. But a change that can be adjusted to. I've never felt the overpowering bathroom shame that seems a major force in American politics. Then again, I've traveled internationally, which is fatal to such prejudices. I remember standing at a urinal in Tokyo, hat in hand, so to speak, when a grandmotherly cleaning lady with rubber gloves and a bucket came in, knelt and began to scrub the floor, almost at my feet. What can you do at that point but shrug and proceed? The sort of cultural enrichment one roams the globe to experience.
     Then again, I'm a connoisseur of unease. On the drive in, I'd mused over the shocks that Falls has presented in the — geez — 40 years I've been seeing his shows, since Aidan Quinn slowly spray-painted, "To be or not to be" on a brick wall onstage at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre in 1985, turned to the audience, jerked his thumb at the dripping red paint, and said, "That's the question!"
     Full-frontal nudity, as in the "The Tempest." Gloucester's gouged-out eyes sizzling on a grill, from "King Lear." And the zenith of Falls' theater-as-a-thumb-jammed-in-the-audience's-eye splintery-stick-to-jam-up-the-audience's-backside directorial style, the surprise stabbing of Isabella at the end of "Measure for Measure." I thought patrons were going to rush the stage. The Goodman had to hold formal "conversations" immediately after each show, which were really just therapy sessions designed to help the audience find the strength to leave the theater and go about their lives.
     "Amadeus" seemed fresh meat for Falls, with the pompous, plodding Vienna court composer, Antonio Salieri, passing judgment on the giggling, carnal man-boy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. What Grand Guignol thrills were in store?

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Flashback 2006: Alanis hijacked my son's iPod

     Talk about eerie synchronicity. I dug this up last August and set it aside ... for reasons I can't recall. Looking for something to run tomorrow —working on a big project, no gas in the tank — it appealed to me because my wife and I were just talking, yesterday, about whether we had spoiled the boys. We decided, no, we did not. Loved them, yes. But didn't spoil them, and failing to get them exactly what they want for Hanukkah seems to reinforce that. 

    In addition: a couple weeks ago, a reader was trying to think of the name of a person I'd written about "once married to the futurist John Naisbitt." I dug around, and she turned out to be Noel Brusman, mentioned in the third item. 

     And finally, the real icing on the cake, wondering how I should illustrate this, I looked around my desk, and noticed the self-same blue 2006 iPod, sitting within arm's reach. I have no idea how it got there. Cleaning out a drawer, probably. Nor how long it has sat there. But it came in handy.

OPENING SHOT

     Like every youth in the U.S. not yet old enough to drive, my boys asked for a Nintendo Wii.
     They didn't get one. Oh, I dutifully went to Best Buy a week after the frenzy of the game system's release, assuming that, as per plan, there would now be plenty on hand. The clerk gave me a strange look, as if I had asked him to snip off his pinkie finger with a cigar cutter.
     No Wii, no way.
     "I'm not lining up at midnight," said my wife, a sentiment I shared. So we — and this will seem like child abuse to some — didn't get the boys what they wanted most. We gave them other things.     

     The older boy got an iPod Nano, of which we'll hear more later. And a set of Dante/Beatrice bookends. And other cool stuff — there are eight nights of Hanukkah, remember. The younger one got an electric keyboard and a tennis racket and more.
     I mention this just in case you are planning to spend the weekend in frantic search of whatever your child's heart desires for Christmas. Because children are mercurial. Yes, it is disappointing not to get what you want. But getting what you want sometimes only defers disappointment for the 10 minutes it takes for the kid to realize what a pile of junk he has been pining away for. An adult can exert judgment — we are allowed, though we forget that sometimes, in our quest to give our loved ones the perfect childhood that we didn't have either.

YOU WANT IT TO WHAT?

     Imagine the spoon was invented recently — say a few years back. What a marvel. No more complex and cumbersome mechanical devices conveying soup to your lips with a linked series of little buckets. No more sputtering suction pumps.
     A "spoon'' — what a great name for a product. So sleek. So well-designed. We'd all go spoon crazy. You buy your spoon, take it out of the box, admire its pure lines, then hurry to your steaming bowl of soup and — splat — it doesn't work. Hey, this isn't right! You try it again. Sploosh! Maybe you're using it wrong — maybe it isn't the narrow end, but the convex side. So you try that, the gentle dome of the spoon facing up, of course. More Campbell's Cream of Tomato in your lap.
     That was me with my son's iPod Nano. No sooner did we give it to him, then he wanted to open the plastic box it came in. Kids are funny that way.
     The job was quickly delegated to me. At first the box seemed seamless, as if the device was imbedded in a lucite brick. Then I studied it under a bright light, found a discreet little tab— designed by Swedes, surely. I pulled it, and the brick opened. Magic!
     Flush with success, I linked the gizmo — the size of two matchbooks laid end to end — to my kids' computer downstairs. That computer told me that I would have to download iTunes 7.0. But the program wouldn't download for reasons mysterious — the computer gave me one of those useless messages, telling me to go into my system's administrator. Huh? What? Like go into his office?
     Instead I went upstairs, where my computer downloaded iTunes fine. It also took the liberty of starting to load the songs from my own iPod file onto my son's new Nano, starting with A, as in Alanis Morissette.
     "Not age appropriate?" my wife said, all sweet naivete, when I ran to her frantically.
     "'And are you thinking of me when you . . . ' " I sang, and here I put a little oomph into the obscene verb, just like she does, "f - - -  her?"
     "Oh," she said.
     Of course the songs wouldn't come off. There's a "RESTORE" button that's supposed to wipe the slate clean. In theory. In reality it didn't. My older son kept popping in from time to time.
     "Got it going yet, Dad?" he'd say, brightly, his face shining with love and trust, while I fussed and sweated.
     That was three days ago. The good news is it didn't become the Hanukkah when Dad went gibbering down into the basement, grabbed a 4-pound drilling hammer, and pounded a brand new $149 iPod Nano to flinders.
     The bad news: It still won't play music. Except Alanis Morissette.

DEPT. OF CORRECTION

     In my item Wednesday about "Noel Brusman's son Dave," a photo caption mistakenly identified the Chicago airman serving overseas.
     He's actually Dave Naisbitt, brother of John Naisbitt, a social studies teacher at Hinsdale Central, himself a noteworthy personage.
     "He is a wonderful guy, a terrific guy," said Dr. James Ferguson, principal of the school, when I called to make sure John Naisbitt is really there, so as to reduce the risk of having to correct a correction.
     Not only is he there, he's busy. Naisbitt helped form the school's "Citizens Club," which this year collected 300 boxes of medical and school supplies, blankets, Beanie Babies and assorted items and shipped them to Afghanistan. (And yes, both are the sons of the bestselling author of Megatrends, also named John Naisbitt -- John Harling Naisbitt, while his son is John Senior Naisbitt, which is why I didn't refer to him as John Naisbitt Jr.)
     Whew! Now you see how these errors get in the paper . . .

TODAY'S CHUCKLE:

     This one -- sent by Larry Brody -- is too funny not to print.

     A lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw a man along the roadside on his hands and knees, eating grass. He ordered his driver to stop and got out to investigate.
     "Why are you eating grass?" he asked.
     "I don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass."
     "Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the lawyer said.
     "But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there, grazing under that tree."
     "Bring them along," the lawyer replied.
     They all climbed into the car, and the lawyer instructed the driver to proceed to his house.
     "Sir, you are too kind," said the man. "Thank you for taking us with you."
     "Glad to do it," the lawyer replied. "You'll really love my place. The grass is almost a foot high." 

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times,  Dec. 22, 2006

People still exist even if the Trump administration refuses to see them

     If the phrase "object permanence" doesn't mean anything to you, then you probably haven't spent much time lately sprawled on the floor next to an infant.
     My granddaughter has, among the phalanx of educational toys vying for her attention, an object permanence box, which is basically a wooden cube, a little smaller than a square Kleenex box, with a hole in the side. Colorful cloths are tucked into the hole and disappear. Then they're pulled out of the box, and reappear. Voila!
     Why is this important? Let me pull a few lines from a recent academic paper:
     "Knowing that objects continue to exist when they cannot be directly observed or sensed is called 'object permanence.' This fundamental cognitive skill is important for working memory and allows us to form and retain mental representations of objects.
     "For example, when a ball rolls under a couch and out of sight, infants who have object permanence understand that the ball exists. They may persist in attaining the ball by moving their body in various ways to look for and reach it even though it is hidden from view."
     Wobbly object permanence skills is why peek-a-boo is so entertaining for very young children. The beloved grandma mysteriously vanishes behind a wall of hands and then — peek-a-boo! — she magically appears, out of nowhere! It's great fun.
     Once mastered, object permanence stays with a person. Your keys fall into the couch, you retain an idea of where they might be — between the cushions — and look for them. You don't shrug and forget the keys exist.
     But object permanence is failing at the highest levels of government, where the current administration seems convinced that if certain narratives, or group of persons, are hidden from view, then they — and the challenges they present to whatever homogeneous white straight society they obviously hope to build — magically vanish.
    Does violent racism constitute a significant thread throughout American history? Delete a few web sites, scrap a few plaques and — presto chango! — never happened. Our kids are back to learning about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
     Do trans people trouble you? So vexing, what shall we do about high school girls swim meets? The Trump administration is vigorously trying to scrub trans people from public life — from passports, from the military. Medical care they need to live their lives is being criminalized.
     In July, the Trump administration ordered the LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline shut down, an astoundingly callous act.

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Is there an unsullied spot for new filth to spatter?

      There is a chance — slight, but delicious to consider — that at this point, one can err too far in caution. Resignation even. The belief that nothing can touch Donald Trump, while valid, based on hard experience, might be old hat. 

      Yes, the default has to be: his cult doesn't care, hasn't cared for years, that he's a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.  Nothing, most likely, can change that. A century after death, they'll be worshipping him like Christ, sitting cross-legged on the ground outside their temples, chanting, scanning the skies for his return.
      Nothing upends that. What are the Epstein revelations compared to, oh, sending a mob to trash the Capitol? Or unleashing masked federal thugs on innocent immigrants? Or failing to do what he can to stop Putin from crushing Ukraine? 
      Not much. Certainly not much new.
      So yes, social media blows up for a few days with the latest accounts of Epstein's emails. The juicy tidbits. Do they tell us something new about the man who bragged about groping women against their will? Who ogled teen pageant contestants undressed and speculated on the sexual appeal of his own young daughter? Who slept with a porn star, cheated repeated on each of three wives?
     Not really.
     But there is the straw that broke the camel's back. The possibility, anyway. Is this it? I doubt it, mainly because history commands otherwise, and hope is a luxury we can't afford. Or as a wit —okay, me —put it years ago: once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     Until it does. 

Flashback 2008: Like the first nick in a new car

     Yesterday being Nov. 14 led to the column on World Diabetes Day, so why not take that lead, and also pivot today's post off today's date? This ran in the paper exactly 17 years ago. It's notable for several reasons. The opening observation holds true for people who are NOT being dragged off the street and muscled into a van. Yet.

    The number of papers sold announcing Obama's election is worth the price of admission — I won't give it away here. But DAMN! 

     Though my primary takeaway from this is: the wheel turns. It sure turned from the first week of eight years of Barack Obama to the current nadir — O were it so! —of the Trump enormity, with Megyn Kelly actually trying to defend Jeffrey Epstein by pointing out that "he wasn't into, like, 8-year-old girls." Those MAGA sorts, always managing to limbo below the moral bar, no matter how low it is set.

     The problem with grasping a crisis is that while it's going on all over, it can still seem contradicted by localized events — thus, on every cool day in July, those ideologically opposed to the idea of global warming get to shout, "See? Fifty-nine degrees in July — some warming, huh?"
     Or last week. We went to Abt, the electronics and appliance giant in Glenview.
     A mass of humanity that defies description. Police cruisers parked on Milwaukee Avenue, cops using flares to control traffic. I think we got the last open parking space, a quarter mile from the entrance.
     "What is this, 'Free Day'?" I asked my wife as we struggled like salmon to get in. "Isn't there supposed to be a recession going on?"
     There is. Looking at Abt as evidence of financial hardiness is like pointing to the freezer compartment in the kitchen of a house ablaze and saying, "Fire? What fire? Look at all this ice." It's something they should teach in school, along with the alphabet, but don't: One example isn't proof.
     Newspapers are too self-referential. The guy who delivers your milk doesn't pause to expound about the magnificence of the dairy profession, the gorgeous red sunrises, the solemn dignity of cows.
     So I held back on the following, tucking it into columns and then plucking it back into the electronic limbo where bits and pieces wait for their chance at life in print.
     But a marvel should not go unremarked upon. And now that the phenomenon is waning, I have to add it to the record.

     Every day for a week after the election of Barack Obama, employees coming to work at the Sun-Times' building at 350 N. Orleans were greeted by an incredible sight: people lining up outside our store to buy back issues of the newspaper, particularly the one announcing Obama's election. Sometimes, the line has been 50 deep, and, yes, I counted, and asked, "Why wait in line?"
     "It's a piece of history," explained Haroon Rajaee. "He represents the true American spirit. This is what America is about."
     "So few [black men] on the cover they aren't looking for," added Gregg Parker, tamping down the protests around him with an indignant, "I'm just keeping it real!"
     The Nov. 5 issue of the Sun-Times shattered our circulation records — 900,000 copies, last time I checked. Nor is the phenomenon limited to Chicago -- across the nation, people are saving mementoes.
     A reminder of newsprint's role as official imprimatur of fact -- if it's in the newspaper, it's true, in theory. People who can scarcely believe Obama won want to hold the confirmation in their hands.
     "Give me the ocular proof!" Othello demanded, and a newspaper is just that.
     They also want something to pass along to generations unborn, as Michelle Holmes, editor of the SouthtownStar, said, "Nobody bookmarks a Web page to save for their grandchildren."
     Not yet anyway. There is an eagerness among some to embrace anything that squirts into their in-box as fact, however improbable. They'll get a text message, "SPACE BEES DOOM WORLD TUES." and start eating all the cookies.
     For the rest of us, we like verification in print. Which raises the troubling question: If there were no newspapers, how could we be sure that anything really happened?
     The stock market has been fluctuating wildly for weeks. Yet the Wall Street Journal on Thursday felt confident dubbing the latest dive a result of the market cringing away from Obama's "anti-growth" policies. Which raises the humorous possibilities of wondering what other quotidian woes can be set at the feet of the president-elect?
     I stamped inside Friday, brushing the rain off my hat.
     "This rain. ..," I thought. "It isn't natural, not for November in Chicago. It must be the heavens spitting cold disapproval down upon the Obama administration forming in Kenwood."
     OK, so maybe you can do better. But it's hard to top what people are offering up sincerely.
     "So what do you think will be his 'Bay of Pigs'?" asked the wise old city editor, and I nodded and pondered.
     The Bay of Pigs, for those just joining us, was the first big stumble John F. Kennedy made after he took office. The Eisenhower administration had cooked up a harebrained scheme to try to overthrow Fidel Castro by training Cuban nationals into a ragtag army.
      The invasion was set to go, and Kennedy, worried that he'd seem weak if he spiked Ike's Cuban D-Day, gave it the green light. The whole thing was an embarrassing fiasco, evidence that our bright young president had flaws.
     But somehow, the morning after Barack Obama's election didn't seem the time to speculate on future failings.
     They will come, of course. The Obama presidency will have highs and lows, like any other. But trying to anticipate them is futile — the weeks after Kennedy was elected, few knew about this lunatic CIA plot moving forward in the swamps of south Florida.
     Futile, and a little overly cynical, even for me, who has a tendency to stand in the back of weddings as the bride and groom kiss, feel that one moment of sappy sentiment, then bat it away by reminding myself the truth — that they'll both live their lives and grow old, and the man will die at 64 and the woman will go on another 25 years playing bingo and end up in an ammonia-scented day room somewhere, and the wedding dress she so carefully folded and preserved and stored on a shelf for 70 years will go into the trash.
     That's the truth — or, rather, it's a truth. The thrill of anticipation people are feeling now is also true, and one can embrace that, too, and probably should, because it was a long time coming, to quote the song, and it'll be a long time gone.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2008