And that's why Trump is president

I don't watch Fox News. I don't have to, I can discern its talking points just by what my readers parrot back to me. For instance, on Monday I wrote about Trump's racist air horn—"dog whistle" implies a subtlety he no longer feels required to adopt—and I got in response emails such as this, thoughts planted in their heads by Trump and Fox News, sprouting as neatly as rows of seedlings in garden.

Neil,

President Trump definitely should not have sent the tweet, "they have to have everything done for them." PR suffers a catastrophe and his tweets never help any situation. He was wrong.

I think he is frustrated, as I am, with a US territory so horribly in debt caused by mismanagement and overspending by its local government. Didn't Congress just give them $100 billion of our tax dollars? They could have and should have since they are on an island, been better prepared for a hurricane, by improving their infrastructure over the years. Instead the local government borrowed and wasted billions. In effect, they didn't do anything to help themselves. The PR citizens seem to be completely different from the citizens of Houston, all over Florida, New York, New Jersey, etc. All those other communities and local governments seemed to have the "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" mentality, unlike PR

—Mike K. *

Yeah pal, I bet the fiscal management of Puerto Rico has been a big source of frustration to you...

Racists—and I haven no idea if this reader is one, though he does an amazing impression—are also cowards, so don't express their hatred directly. Rather they hock up reasons, even nonsensical, hypocritical reasons. Our national debt is $18 trillion. His reasoning—Trump's reasoning—that nations in debt should not get relief, or are somehow responsible for their own woes, would mean that nowhere in the United States is worthy of help. Which perhaps is what he's going for. Anyway, I had to share this.

But why stop here? Let's look in my Spam filter, for readers I've previously blocked because I just don't want to have their spew irritate my eyes.

Some 80% of them are on disability or welfare. 80 billion in debt. .  Federal oversight needed as bankrupt. 65% obesity rate .  Write about that.  So yes. These “ brown skinned “ folk. Are welfare dependent pigs .
—Bill G.

You want more? There's more. But that's enough for now, though I reserve the right to add more as the day progresses. Sheesh. 

* I decided to shield the writer from being publicly associated with his thoughts, as a kindness, because even if he isn't aware enough to be embarrassed, he should be.

Trump's Puerto Rico tweets show we are heading away from who we are

     UTICA, Ill. — Sometimes people ask if I ever write columns in advance, to have one in the can. I tell them the truth: You really can't, because they go stale so quickly. Events have a way of hurtling past.
      For instance. Say so you hope to slip away for the weekend by tramping around Starved Rock State Park. So you write a column Friday morning, oh, suggesting that Donald Trump will be president for another seven years and change, so the best thing sentient people can do, rather than howling in horror at each new jaw-dropped lapse, is to tend your own garden, live your own rich life, baking English muffins and keeping track of the slow-motion train wreck in Washington only periodically, out of the corner of your eye, through latticed fingers. Otherwise it's just too disturbing.
     Then Saturday morning arrives to find our president lashing out at the beleaguered people of Puerto Rico, writing a sentence so freighted with racism that will go down in infamy, or should:
     "They want everything to be done for them," Trump wrote. "When it should be a community effort."
     Ignoring that isn't an option; being disturbed isn't a distraction, it's a patriotic duty.
     "They want everything to be done for them." Let's unpack that sentence. "They" are . . . who? Not hurricane survivors in general. Not the people in Houston and Florida. "They" are Puerto Ricans, 3.4 million American citizens, a status Trump no doubt discovered a few days ago.
     "Everything." That would be recovery efforts, restoring electricity and rebuilding infrastructure after Hurricane Maria ravaged their island Sept. 20. "Done" that would be their government snapping into action, instead of the president mocking them from his golf course in New Jersey. "For them" — these lazy, entitled brown folks, the ones he's been ridiculing since Day One of his camp...

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And I didn't even mention the death of Hugh Hefner

     I had two columns in Friday's paper: a cultural look at Hugh Hefner (that had begun as an obituary and then morphed as the needs of the paper changed) and this reaction to Gov. Bruce Rauner signing House Bill 40, and thus spiking our state's 40-year-old "trigger law." It was one of those quickie, reap-the-clicks pieces ordered up at the last minute and batted out. But not without, I hope, a certain charm. I did think of tucking Hefner's passing into the lede as the third good thing that happened to women this week, but didn't want to risk  celebrating the man's death, though he may have deserved it.

     Talk about a good week for women. Talk about progress.
     On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia announced, in a royal decree, that next year it will tip-toe into the 20th century by finally allowing women to drive automobiles, as if they were fully cognizant human beings.
     Then on Thursday, Illinois' Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose record of inertia, wheel-spinning and fencepole-sitting is second-to-none, revealed that he would wrap his fingers around a pen and sign House Bill 40.
     HB40, you should know, is the law that establishes that should the religious fanatics that Republicans have been stuffing the Supreme Court with actually reverse the widely popular Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the "trigger law" that the bowl haircuts down in Springfield passed in 1975 would not automatically ban the procedure in Illinois.
     Most women in Illinois no doubt did not realize that the trigger law, formally 720 Illinois Criminal Statute 510, was dangling over their heads all this time, ready to ban abortion the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned,
     The only other states with such a law are Kentucky, Louisiana and South Dakota.
     The new bill, sponsored by state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, was filed almost three years ago. Rauner, who ran in 2014 stating he would not delve into "social issues" either by pushing to restrict abortion, or to reduce the ability of state-employees or poor women to get the procedure, began waffling publicly like Hamlet.

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An agnostic goes to synagogue

Leonardo DaVinci, "St. John the Baptist"

     Yom Kippur is today. 
     This ran five years ago—five years ago today, in fact—in the Sun-Times. It is particularly relevant, alas, now that Alabama Republicans have chosen Judge Roy Moore to be their senatorial candidate, a religious fanatic who thinks his idea of God should trump our nation's law. It also mentions Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz who, double alas, passed away in 2014.

     Every columnist has a few hobbyhorse causes he likes to ride. One favorite of mine is the idea that government shouldn't promote any particular religion. I like it because, despite being so obvious—a diverse nation of many faiths, we can't exist in harmony if the law backs just one—many folks still can't seem to wrap their heads around it.
     Raised in their own insular worlds, they lurch upon the national stage with their great idea—prayer into public schools!—never pausing to consider whose prayer will be put in school (theirs, naturally; is there any other kind?) It is satisfying to inform them that, yes, there are other people who believe other things, a half dozen faiths per classroom, and adding prayer to schools would make them more chaotic than they are now.
     Such reasoning can't be merely accepted—that would involve changing their minds, and most are hardwired to prevent that—so instead they accuse me of hating religion. People to whom fairness is unfamiliar still perceive, in a foggy general way, that fairness-based arguments can work, so they want to grab at that advantage themselves. They say: You're disagreeing with me! You must hate me in a fashion similar to how I hate you! What about tolerance of my bigotries?
     For the record: I think religion is swell. Life is a long time, you need help to get by, and faith is perfect for that. Religions tend to be old and are embraced by many, so there's tradition and company, plus food and music.
     OK, not always food. Yom Kippur was earlier this week—the holiest day of the Jewish year, a fast day. Not that I'm the sort who believes that God Almighty is peering down from heaven, quill pen poised over the Book of Life, waiting to see whether Neil Steinberg toddles off to synagogue or not. But my wife announced she was going to services at the Lubavitch Chabad of Northbrook. That was different. The Lubavitch are a highly observant branch of Judaism—think beards, black hats, fringed garments. Typically not the corner of our faith that my wife and I would snuggle in. But unlike most synagogues, they don't charge a fee to worship on the high holidays—typically most synagogues see it as a chance to make hay.
     Our previous temple membership fell victim to the recession. So free helped. Though in my secret heart, I felt distant from the process, brooding as I put on my suit: Every year this stuff seems more ridiculous. I could be attending an animistic goat ritual performed by Ghanaians and couldn't feel less affected.
     I didn't say that aloud. I'm trying not to complain so much, and when I had shared similar thoughts in previous years, my wife just smiled and replied, "You always say that, but you end up getting something out of it."
     I had never been to a Lubavitch Yom Kippur service; I expected it to be all in Hebrew, expected a scene from Vilnius in 1754, the low drone of ancient syllables uttered by men in prayer shawls. I would slink in, as out-of-place as a peacock among penguins, perch awkwardly in a corner for a few hours, and then flee unchanged, grateful to be gone.
     That's not what happened. A surprising amount was in English. They not only weren't hostile but warmly welcomed us freeloaders. Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, director of Lubavitch Chabad in Illinois, gave a sermon that I didn't transcribe, but can be summarized thus: We're glad you're here. Because Orthodox or Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist, whatever, we're all Jews. We should be Jews together and do Jewish stuff. We should be good to people, give them m'vater - space, respect.
     "We're not judgmental," Moscowitz said, a concept that many faiths, still hoping to convert the entire world, by persuasion if possible, by law if not, might want to contemplate. Religion should be voluntary. Moscowitz said the Lubavitch are here, doing the things they believe in, and hope other Jews will come and join them and see that they're good. (And maybe kick in a little something. He did allude to having electric bills to pay, a soft-sell invite to those present to help, which of course we will; we're not utter schnorrers, as they say in Yiddish, not mooches).
     But that isn't why I'm writing this; that wasn't the surprising part. The surprising part was, when I was done, after ... geez ... five hours over Tuesday and Wednesday, I felt better. Not that I felt so bad going in, but I felt better. Life seemed more palatable. I will forever deny that grace or God or anything like that had any part. It was just nice to sit in a room among other people and hear familiar prayers and think about being a better man for a few hours, with no email or Facebook. I came out renewed, though not—and this is important— also feeling the laws of the United States should be changed to funnel people into Lubavitch services. In all candor, the place was packed, and if none of you ever go, that's fine with me.
     My wife merely smiled at my glowing report. "You say that every year," she replied.

               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 28, 2012

Hefner idealized women; women didn't reciprocate

    The naked women were supposed to be temporary.
     Just until Hugh Hefner's new magazine got off the ground and could afford to hire top writers.
     "Later, with some money in the bank, we'd begin increasing the quality and reducing the girlie features," remembered Hefner.
     That never happened. Instead Hefner, 91, who died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, kept the erotic photos and the literary quality. In the process he became an important figure in 20th century America—a cultural icon, a successful businessman whose business just happened to be built around pornography. A vigorous advocate for 1st Amendment, civil and gay rights who yet had difficulty including real women in his vision of dynamic equality, a champion celebrating unembarrassed consumerism and the female form, albeit idealized, airbrushed and safely naked or nearly.
     As Hefner once described it: "pretty girls, night life, food and drink, sports cars, travel, Hi-Fi music with emphasis on jazz."
     Like a boys' secret clubhouse, girls were not welcome, something Hefner was upfront about in the magazine's first issue.
     "If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you," Hefner wrote in the undated November, 1953 issue, assembled in his South Side kitchen. "If you're somebody's sister, wife or mother-in-law, and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion." 
     Such pats on the head did not go down well with increasingly-outspoken women.

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"Then I realized it was true"—Lillian Ross and Jake LaMotta

     There's so much to read in a newspaper, and our attention span is so diffused nowadays, by tweets and posts and the constant pressure of where we might be other than here and what we might be reading other than this, that I sometimes flip through the paper hurriedly, first noting what's there, before I set down to read this or that article that catches my attention.

Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Ross

   So it probably says something about me that I initially skipped over the obituary of Jake LaMotta, the Raging Bull of boxing fame, in last Thursday's New York Times, but settled in on the 2/3 page headlined, "Lillian Ross Dies at 99; A New Yorker Reporter Whose Memoir Rankled."
     The memoir, Here But Not Here: A Love Story was about her half-century-long affair with William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and though it was published after his death, Ross's book drew "furious" response. Charles McGrath, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it a "cruel betrayal" since Shawn's widow was still alive. "a tactless example of the current avidity for tell-all confessions."
     A similar chorus of outrage had met her most famous work, a profile of Ernest Hemingway, "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" which chronicled the author's stopover in New York in 1950, capturing his staccato pidgin speech ("He read book all way up on plane," Hemingway said, of a fellow passenger. "He like book.") and near constant inebriation.
     "Nothing more cruel has happened to an American writer," Irving Howe wrote in the New Republic, ignoring the fact that Hemingway both approved the piece before publication and afterward praised it, as well as Lillian Ross.
     Then again, I find the greatest indignation is not from people directly affected by a piece of writing, but from third parties, aghast by proxy, on the behalf of people they assume must be done wrong by the way they were handled in a story. The Ross obituary does not mention, and history may not record, what Cecille Shawn felt about Ross's relationship with her husband—which, after 50 years, you imagine she knew about—or the book.
     It's almost as if many people—but not all—have an allergy to candor, so much that they have to express it when given the opportunity.

Jake LaMotta

     Even though that impulse—to condemn unpleasant truths, to endorse heavily-shellacked versions of reality—is antithetical to good writing, and part of the leap a writer makes is deciding, if not to suspend care about what subjects think about a particular work or passage, to push that priority far down the list.
     As I always say, the reason most people can't write is not because they can't string words together, though that's a factor, but because they draw away from expressing the frank truths that make for good writing. They are more worried about some acquaintance than about the most important person, the reader.
     Though not everyone shies away hard realities.
     When I finished Ross's obituary, I turned to LaMotta's, and in it, he summarized perfectly what I had been thinking reading the strong, in my view unfair, reactions to Lillian Ross. The Martin Scorcesse movie that made LaMotta famous to a new generation, "Raging Bull," was a masterpiece, but certainly did not paint the violent, abusive fighter in a positive light. Nor did LaMotta expect it to.
     "I kind of look bad in it," LaMotta told the New York Times. "Then I realized it was true. That's the way it was. I was a no-good bastard. It's not the way I am now, but the way I was then."
     LaMotta was not a writer nor sophisticated thinker like Charles McGrath or Irving Howe. But he had a realization that escaped both of them: that truth is itself a kindness, more flattering than a bucket of honeyed lies. A fiction writer crafts how things could have been, maybe how they should be, creating characters who seem real, and has a free hand because there are no people to be flattered or insulted.
     A non-fiction writer has only reality, and the degree that writer is faithful to reality, and not what the subject might like, or the publication might prefer, determines whether, like Lillian Ross, a particular writer is remembered and cherished or, like the dozen of other profile writers who no doubt tackled Hemingway in 1950, instead are justly forgotten. What her contemporaries condemned her for then was the very thing most valuable about her now.

Trying to see the future through clouds of drones

     The clouds in the east were pink early Tuesday, painted by the rising sun.
     It was about 6:30 a.m. I was taking our dog Kitty on her morning stroll and did what people nowadays do upon seeing anything unusual: whipped out my iPhone and took a picture.
     Why? Who knows? Possible Facebook cover shot. Potential blog illustration. The truth is, it's a habit. Almost a reflex. I worry I'll step in front of a truck someday and lunge to snap its picture as it bears down on me when what I really should be doing is leaping out of the way.
     Clouds documented, I continued on. A buzzing sound. I looked up: high in the sky, a drone, lights winking. I looked down: standing directly in the center of the intersection, a young man bent intently over a control box.
     The young man never looked up as Kitty and I approached. I stopped and — what else? — took a picture of him. Intrusive? One's expectation of privacy standing in the middle of an intersection is quite small or should be. We rounded the corner of Briarwood and headed down Center Avenue.
     Are the skies soon going to be thick with these things? Delivering books for Amazon, sushi for GrubHub. Each house with its droneport, a 4-by-4-foot platform, raised off the ground so the squirrels don't get at the fruitcake your Aunt Agatha sends.
     The future is hard to perceive. Maybe impossible. So many ways to misread what's coming. There is what I call the Arthur C. Clarke Syndrome. Clarke, the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," extrapolated a few moon landings to expect colonies on Mars. Are drones this year's Space Food Sticks? Or the Model T in 1910?

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