Flashback 2011: If only Rod read different Kipling

     There is fellowship among criminals. Each knows what they themselves are guilty of, and so harbors sympathy for those unfortunate enough to get caught. So of course Donald Trump, with God knows how many crimes and misdemeanors staining his soul, would look kindly upon former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich his brother-in-arms.    Thursday morning we awoke to reports that Trump is "very strongly" considering pardoning Blagojevich, seven years into his 14 year prison sentence for corruption. Expect it to happen, and soon. 
      That is actually good news, of a sort. By commuting his sentence, instead of pardoning him, that means Blagojevich probably won't be able to run for governor again. Heck, given the public's demonstrated taste for mendacious egomaniacs without the capacity for reflection, Blagojevich would probably win.
      The bad news is he will still be twirling in the limelight he adores, quoting Kipling, playing the martyr, Christ and Martin Luther King rolled into one. Don't expect him to merely fade away, like Mel Reynolds. Before he went into the big house, I mused on his cotton puff of a soul. If we are going to have to endure him again, a refresher course is in order.

     My God, the man quoted Kipling.
     If anybody doubted whether Rod Blagojevich, our disgraced former governor, could really come through his self-imposed ordeal unchanged, if they doubted that, despite the arrest, the two trials, the 18 convictions, the harsh 14-year sentence, Blago could really remain the same self-pitying egomaniac he was at the start, all they had to do was see him pause before the media, which has been forced to record his every pompous, blown-dried word, to invoke his favorite bard.
     "Rudyard Kipling, in his poem 'If,' among the things he wrote, was: 'If you can meet with triumph and disaster,' " Blagojevich intoned, as he left court Wednesday, " 'and treat those two imposters just the same.' "
     Again with the Kipling. Again with "If," which Blago has memorized and quoted at moments of difficulty throughout his tenure.
     "If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you," he recited, three years ago, when he was still proclaiming his innocence and beginning the oblivious twirl in the limelight that no doubt earned him many extra years in the clink.
     More Kipling. Thanks for the life lesson, governor. Kipling is not just the bard of British imperialism, but has become the poster boy for conceited self-delusion. Blago seems to think he's fighting off the Zulus at Rorke's Drift, one brave man facing hostile hordes.
     That's not the tone he took when begging Judge James Zagel for mercy. But I have no doubt that the Blagojevich we'll see during the appeals process, or later in frequent jailhouse interviews (where he is certain to invoke Thoreau and Nelson Mandela), will be filled with injured self-pity and Gunga Din. To cope with that, we must keep our gaze locked on what, specifically, Blagojevich did wrong. When Barack Obama resigned his Senate seat to become president, it was the job of the governor to select a new senator. It is a big responsibility; a senator is a state's key advocate in Washington, determining how much federal money comes back to fund programs that millions rely on. I believe that any random Illinoisan, any housewife, cabdriver or busboy would instantly recognize the gravity of the task, and 99.9 percent would have acted accordingly.
     Not Blago. He viewed this as an opportunity to profit, period. "I want to make money," he said. That was the beginning and end of the calculation. That isn't "horse-trading," that's barratry, the selling of an office. Not just a crime but a sin.
     Were I the judge, I'd have given him less time in prison, because he is a pathetic figure, a lost soul, cut off from self knowledge. Even the Kipling he professes to admire could have saved him. Let's go back to "If:"

      If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you 
      But make allowance for their doubting too.

     What allowance did Blagojevich make? What allowance has Blago's father-in-law Dick Mell made, for that matter, that he can dare contemplate "the appointment of a political protege, possibly his daughter, state Rep. Deb Mell," as the Sun-Times has said, to his aldermanic seat? Gee Dick, haven't you inflicted enough relatives on us for one career?
     Kipling wasn't just an imperialist taking up "the white man's burden." He had depth—he despised corruption, for instance, and would have loathed our governor. I'd like to quote some Kipling far more apt than "If" to this sad case. "General Summary" begins:

          We are very slightly changed

          From the semi-apes who ranged

          India's prehistoric clay.

     And ends:

          Who shall doubt the 'secret hid'

          Under Cheops' pyramid

          Was that the contractor did

          Cheops out of several millions?

          Or that Joseph's sudden rise
          To Comptroller of Supplies

          Was a fraud of monstrous size

          On King Pharaoh's swart Civilians?

          Thus, the artless songs I sing

          Do not deal with anything

          New or never said before.

          As it was in the beginning

          Is today official sinning,

          And shall be for evermore.

      Kipling was a 21-year-old reporter when he wrote that in 1886. Alas, it holds up well.

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 9, 2011

You can skip Rome; Bonci pizza is here

     The beauty of Chicago is that you never have to go anywhere else. Paris? We’ve got plenty of French Impressionists at The Art Institute. India? Stroll down Devon Avenue. Not precisely Mumbai; but close enough. Throw in Chinatown and the Taste of Peru and you might as well stay put. A week in Thailand, and I never ate a single mouthful tastier than anything off the menu at Star of Siam. I’ve been from Antigua to Zurich and everywhere in between. Trust me. Put your feet up. Relax. You’re not missing anything. 

Matt Warman, manager of the Bonci Pizzeria,
161 N. Sangamon, cuts a slice of mushroom.

     OK, Rome is nice. There is nothing here like Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That alone is worth the airfare. Huge, gorgeous, and — as if that isn’t enough— after you’ve spent a morning in stunned awe of the iconic masterpiece, you can stroll over to Bonci’s Pizzarium on Via della Meloria, just outside the walls of the Vatican.
     And the pizza there ... like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, words can’t convey the experience.
     We rubes tend to think of pizza as coming in two forms: deep dish and flat. Being Chicagoans, we endlessly argue over which is the true pizza, where stuffed pizza fits in (answer: it doesn’t) and should flat be cut into wedges or squares (answer: who cares?). We have no clue there is a third, entirely different type of pizza, represented by Bonci: light, airy crust, with all sorts of toppings — over 1,500 — you must try, served al taglio, as the Italians say, “by the cut.” You tell them exactly how much you want, sampling an inch of this, two inches of that.  
     It’s worth flying all the way to Rome just to ... oh wait. Never mind. Turns out Bonci opened a second location at 161 N. Sangamon St. two years ago next week. (Yes, yes, it escaped my notice; I’m not New Pizza Parlor Central). Even if you know it’s there, do you know why, with the entire world to choose from, Bonci picked a spot 10 minutes from the Sun-Times for its second location?
     How did that happen?
     “I worked with Gabriele,” said Rick Tasman, president of BonciUSA, referring to Gabriele Bonci, “the Michelangelo of pizza.” “He had been wanting to come to the United States.”

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One secret of Bonci pizza is flour flown in from Italy. 

Ivanka Trump gets facts wrong in tweets displaying coded message of bigotry

     One of the editors at the paper asked if I would cobble together a quick reaction to Ivanka Trump's stupid tweet today. At first I tried to say no—if I started responding to stupid Trump tweets it would quickly become all I'd ever do. But he seemed to want something so, obliging fellow that I am, I did my best to accommodate. 

     You know what I miss? Good old-fashioned, Southern-style 1950s-era bigots. Axe-handle wielding sheriffs and George Wallace; they were loathsome, they would inflict horrible harm, but give them points for candor. They snarled the hatred in their hearts. They didn’t try to dress it up, to be clever and speak in codes.
     At least not to the degree they do today.
     Now take Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, whom the president seems to be grooming for some undefined role on the international stage, maybe Queen of the World. Suddenly Chicago was in her gunsights on Tuesday.
     Maybe out of sympathy for her father, whose dog whistles and semaphore flags to bigots and white supremacists was partially stifled, certainly temporarily, by the pair of mass shootings, in El Paso and Dayton, apparently committed by hardened haters. The poor man was forced to condemn white nationalism, which musta hurt.

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Expensive but worth it

Battle of the Titans, attributed to Francesco Allegrini (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      Cornwall, in the southwest of England, has sandy beaches, complete with surfing and, I was surprised to discover when I visited, palm trees..
      And in that sand, titanium, first noticed by one Rev. William Gregor in 1791, though he wasn't able to identity the black sand he had found, leaving it to a more skilled German scientist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who discovered the metal independently in 1795 and named it titanium, after the Titans of Greek mythology because, to him, the name had no meaning and therefore "could give no rise to any erroneous idea."
     If you're wondering what sent me down this particular rabbit hole, blame Jack, a reader—among hundreds who wrote in with their thoughts, experiences and good wishes last week during my three-part series on spine surgery, thank you all very much—who wrote:
      "Who knew element 22 would be your blessing."
      Element 22 is titanium, which I mentioned because it is a cool-sounding, Space Age metal. Which was all I knew about the substance, though that "22" reminded me that titanium, as opposed to, say, steel, is an element, with its own atomic number (any guesses? C'mon. Think hard. You've had a hint. . . Sigh: 22). 
     An atomic number, is you remember your high school physics, is the number of protons at the nucleus of an atom. Hydrogen has one proton, thus its atomic number is 1. And titanium has .... anybody? ... 22, putting it between scandium, 21, and vanadium, 23, on the Periodic Table. 
     It is indeed a cool substance. Stronger than steel but almost 50 percent lighter, titanium is used mostly in airplane parts—a Boeing 747 engine has 9,000 pounds of titanium—both  engines and airframes—about 66 percent of titanium processed—with the rest going into chemical plant pipes and valves, expensive wristwatches and, let's not forget, medical devices. 
      So how come did it come about to be used to shore up balky spines?

     "In the 1950s, surgeons noted that titanium metal was ideal for pinning together broken bones," notes my go-to reference on these matters, John Emsley's excellent, dare I say, invaluable book "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements" (Oxford: 2001). "It resists corrosion, bonds well to bone and is not rejected by the body. Hip and knee replacements, pace-makers, bone-plates and screws, and cranial plates for skull fractures, can be made of titanium and remain in place for up to 20 years."

     "Up to 20 years?" Sheesh, now they tel me. Nobody mentioned that before. You mean I have to go through this again, and in my late 70s at that? Oh well, I guess I'll worry about it in 2039.

      What else? That black sand that Rev. Gregor discovered wasn't pure titanium, of course, but titanium oxide—TiO2, or one atom of titanium bonded with two of oxygen, which are very useful in covering things up, thus is found in paint (where it replaced lead, fallen from favor after it was discovered to poison people) to lipstick to sunscreen. 
     Not to take anything away from Gregor, an amateur chemist, but someone was bound to find it: titanium is the 9th most common element on earth, making up .44 percent of the crust, and is found in most rocks, sand, clay not to mention most plants, animals and stars in the night sky. 

      Titanium shows up in some odd places: titanium tetrachloride is used in smokescreens and skywriting because it puts out dense smoke when mixed with water. The star in a blue star sapphire is due to titanium. 
    I should wind this up before I go completely into the weeds, but can't before I point out that Frank Gehry's masterwork, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is covered with 33,000 square meters of pure titanium. Local yokel that I am, my immediate thought was to wonder whether that means our own Pritzker Bandshell, also designed by Gehry, is also titanium. No such luck: stainless steel, no doubt as an economy move. And maybe a smart one. While prices vary according to grade, titanium, is very expensive to produce, roughly 100 times the cost of stainless steel. 
     "It's use has been thwarted by its cost," diplomatically noted Michigan's Titanium Processing Center. But not in my case: nothing but the best for my spine. 

Burn me!

A man kneeling and placing a laurel branch upon a pile of burning books, by Marco Dente (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    My columns and blog posts are not exactly setting the world on fire. Not raging across the dry tinder of social media. More like sending out a quiet ripple in a puddle of regular readers. On good days. 
    I'm okay with that—I kinda have to be; not a whole lot of choice in the matter. The few occasions when I did manage to strike a spark—getting mocked by Rush Limbaugh, for instance, or finding myself ridiculed on Fox News—I quickly felt scorched, and was only too happy to return to normal, and for my cool cloak of anonymity to be wrapped around my smoldering shoulders again.
     The Washington pundits and East coast TV babblers—it seems lucrative, but nothing to be proud of. An enormous electronic Punch & Judy Show full of confused shrieking, brickbats flying, babies wailing. Don't get me wrong, I'd jump at the chance. But I'm not too broken up that the chance never came. This is enough. 
     And yet. There is a joy in being held in contempt by the contemptible—the pride that writers in the 1970s felt at making Richard Nixon's "Enemies List." 
     So there is one regret I've been harboring in secret: that I never drew the ire of our president, Donald Trump. Hasn't happened yet and probably never will. That isn't surprising. He's pretty much reacting to Fox News, and I'm never there.  Still, I think Trump's scorn would be something I could look upon with pride though, as with all badges of honor, there is something embarrassing about even admitting to wanting it. A hunger I would never confess to. But a friend sent me a Bertolt Brecht poem on Saturday—I am blessed with friends who pass along poems, which is better than notoriety—that so perfectly captured the feeling I harbor regarding Trump, I just have to share it, even though doing so requires copping to this shameful desire.
     The poem is titled "The Burning of the Books," translated from the German by Michael Burch: 

     In a thoughtful analysis of the poem, Dutch poet Kamiel Choi points out:

     Observe that Brecht writes “burn me” (verbrennt mich) rather than “burn my books.” The famed bon mot by Heine, ‘Where they burn books, they will too in the end burn people’ has been fully internalized here.

     Which leads to an observation of my own. Unlike Hitler in Nazi Germany, Donald Trump was inflicted upon a fairly free and open society. Even so, notice the speed and rigor with which a solid 40 percent of the population lined up behind his lies and cruelty. Willingly, happily, gleefully, without any threat necessary, nor any intimidation stronger than the nasty tweet I covet. Imagine how much greater that exodus from American values would be if there were the whisper of force behind it.  
       Maybe we won't have to imagine it.  Maybe in his second term, he'll move from caging refugee children to caging others. Unimaginable? It always is. As Milan Kundera wrote, the border where all convictions, faith, love, human life lose meaning is not, as we imagine it, "miles away, but a fraction of an inch."
       Now it costs nothing to oppose Trump—some trolls on Twitter. But what if you could lose your job? Your life?  Who would oppose him then? You? Me? We can only hope we never have to find out.
       Brecht fled Germany in 1933, shortly after Hitler took power. The poem above is from a 1939 collection, Svendborg Poems, named for the town in Denmark where he lived early in his exile. I probably should say a few words about him. Known best as a playwright: "The Threepenny Opera" and "Mother Courage and Her Children" Brecht also was a librettist, writing the words for songs such as "Mack the Knife" and "Alabama Song," which I'm sure you've heard, at least the version by the Doors, never knowing the words were written by a German poet. He died in 1956, but as with the best writers, his words live on. 

So much part of America we hardly notice

     This is an unusual circumstance. I wrote today's blog post last night, when I came home from Northbrook Days, updating it first thing Sunday morning to incorporate the Ohio slaughter. Upon reflection, it seemed a more fitting column to run in the newspaper than the one I had prepared—a trifle about a Twitter phenomenon called #ManholeCover Monday. My bosses agreed. So this links to Monday's column, posted early.  We'll boot Manhole Cover Monday to a week from tomorrow, assuming there aren't even worse mass shootings next weekend which, sadly, is not exactly a safe bet. 

    Northbrook Days, a mid-summer carnival, is usually held at the little park in the village's downtown, the funnel cake stands and Tilt-a-Whirl set up among the giant oak trees and on the ball field.
      There's live music, games, a beer tent. It's fun.
      But this year the festival was abruptly moved from its usual location for the past 95 years to the parking lot at Northbrook Court, on the edge of town. All our neighbors were abuzz about it. The park district said something about soil being impacted, but that seemed dubious; the scuttlebutt was, there were personal conflicts among various officials. Dark Forces were at work. 
       My initial inclination was to simply not go. The boys are grown and gone, and while my wife and I like to stroll over—we live a couple blocks away—for a look and a corn dog, hopping in the car was something else entirely. And when we got there, what fun would it be to wander a concrete parking lot next to the shuttered Macy's? I assumed no one would go.
    But curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to see the new locale for myself, and I suggested going to my wife, who readily agreed.
     We arrived at twilight, had our traditional Boy Scout lemonade, explored a bit, ate some pretty good Indian chow from a Wheeling place called Siri, ran into some parents of our boys' friends we hadn't seen since previous carnivals. Hands were shaken, hugs and information exchanged.  
     There was a pretty decent turn-out. And a good amount of police officers, which was natural and comforting, given the 20 people slaughtered at a Walmart's in El Paso, Texas, earlier in the day. My wife had been worried enough to tell me that she loves me just before we left for the fair, in case we were killed at mass-shooting. I thought that was overdoing it a bit. Our nation had already had its gun massacre for the day, and so we'd probably be safe until tomorrow. 
    That was true, but just barely. Another shooting, nine dead in Dayton, Ohio, took place at 1 a.m., while we slept. 

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Flashback 1998: Hometown is just a distant memory

    I was supposed to be back in my hometown this weekend for the wedding of my friend's daughter, a girl I've known since birth. I felt bad missing it—originally, I tried to schedule the surgery for AFTER the wedding, but my wife put an end to that, and I saw her point: if I damaged my spine waiting a month to go to a wedding, not to mention the travel, and the dancing, and whatever, I would never forgive myself. Nor be forgiven. 
    As it was, I had this column about my hometown already cued up and ready to go. Last month I was friended on Facebook by the prettiest girl in Berea High School in 1978, the homecoming queen. We messaged a bit, in a convivial fashion, and I reminded her of when I asked her to prom—not seriously, I knew she already had a boyfriend; more as a piece of personal performance art, something a newly-confident 17-year-old would do as a lark, because he could, maybe to show he could face the rejection that any ambitious person is going to face every single day. She was very kind about turning me down.
     I mentioned that I had written a column about our home town, 20 years ago. I've considered reprinting it in the past, but it never seemed to quite pass muster. A little flat, maybe. 
     But the beast must be fed, and I think this rises to the standard for a quiet Saturday in August. Besides, there is an interesting tidbit about how this column was received. The Sun-Times editor-in-chief at the time, a flamboyant, pink-cheeked, white-haired slab of a New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, phoned me the evening this ran, perhaps a bit squiffy, and accused me of slipping a parody of the Tribune's treacly sentiment-junkie and fellow Ohioan, Bob Greene, into the newspaper—somebody must have suggested that to him. 
      That kind of call didn't happen often—it might never have happened, before or after— and I remember taking a breath, and evenly explaining that I would NEVER do that. I was indeed born in Ohio, in Berea, and that every word in the column is true. Furthermore, just because Bob Greene has wrapped his thick fingers around Nostalgia and is squeezing with all his might doesn't mean he has murdered the emotion for others, and I'm entitled to feel maudlin about my dying home town. I distinctly recall saying, "If he can do it a thousand times, I can do it once." 

The Army-Navy surplus store in my hometown. Growing up
in Berea, I never noticed anything unusual about the name. 

     BEREA, Ohio—The Fashion Shop is shuttered. The movie theater, too, its green and yellow marquee blank. The bank is now an antiques store. You can step behind the counter, right up to the gleaming stainless steel vault door and admire the pristine gears and massive pins inside. Within the vault itself, lacework is on sale.
     For the last two decades, whenever I returned to my hometown of Berea—every year or so—I marveled at how time had passed it by, this little town of 35,000, just west of Cleveland.      
    And pondered a haunting question. 

    How could a business such as the Fashion Shop survive, with its window filled with the same ancient, chipped mannequins modeling what always seemed to be the same pale blue or green checked house dresses? How could the movie house, where "The Sting" played for a solid year in 1973, hope to keep going, with huge multiplexes opening in towns all around?
     The answer is they couldn't.
     I missed the foreshadowing. All the new discount stores on the road between the highway and downtown. They should have been a tip-off. Who'd settle for the Fashion Shop when there is a big outlet mall? Who would go to Milton's Shoes—also gone—when there is a giant discount shoe store?
     Nobody, that's who.
     I tried to tell myself that this is good. That the only constant is change; the sole reason I care is that this is my hometown. I reminded myself what a grim place Milton's Shoes had been, with its scary middle-age clerks, scurrying under the hawk eye of Mr. Milton to retrieve boxes of Buster Browns and Red Ball Jets from the mysterious back room. The stock of shoes, so limited, that in order to fit my EEE feet my mother eventually had to give up and drive all the way into Cleveland, to the palatial Scientific Shoes (yes, that was the name; do you think I could make that up?)
     Hard not to look at the town and feel a little sad. Not only is the place losing its charm, but it's doing so because of bad choices.
     In the 1970s, Berea demolished a big hunk of the downtown to build an open-air mall of charming brick storefronts. It seemed a dynamic step, but it turned out to be a blunder. The downtown stores were just hanging on in their turn-of-the-century buildings. Nobody could afford the high rents in the new mall; the entire thing went under. Every store. Now the mall's an old-age home.
     Don't get me wrong; God bless the elderly. But it does something to a town to put a nursing home at its center. Two, now that I think of it. The old hospital is a nursing home, also.
     The downtown in Berea faces a green triangle—The Triangle, they call it, home to a Civil War memorial, the same stone soldier who stands watch over many small towns. During my visit I saw a panoramic photo of the Triangle from 1928. Then, it was a broad expanse of green trees, with a gazebo and a lot of park benches.
     Now, the Triangle is much smaller, whittled away by street widening and parking space, a last attempt to lure people to the shops, shops that aren't there anymore.
     No more benches. No people downtown to sit in them anyway. Who has the time?
     I tried to tell myself that this is only what is happening in small towns all across America. In comes Wal-Mart, out goes the general store. Up in Evanston, Chandler's, the stationery store, and Hoos Drug are both closed now. A decade ago you couldn't go to Northwestern and not have a funny story about trying to get some Hoos family member to cash your personal check. And seeing Chandler's close was like having the post office go out of business.
     This is the way of the world, I told myself. Someday kids will wax nostalgic about DigiLand and SaveMax, when they are being replaced by whatever comes next. Onward and upward. Excelsior!
     I told myself this. But I didn't believe it.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 30, 1998