Viruses don’t care if you’re lying or not

The Angel of Death striking a door during the plague of Rome. (Wellcome Collection)

     Reality intrudes.
     You can crumple up the X-ray, cover your ears and hum.
     Yet if a tumor is there, it remains, growing.
     You can refuse to believe your house is on fire. Call the person who tells you a liar.
     Yet your house still burns.
     That’s why I don’t yet despair about Donald Trump, his funhouse of lies, and the Americans who choose to believe him.
     Because while anyone can ignore truth, truth doesn’t ignore anyone. Declaring yourself great and actually being great are very different things. Greatness isn’t a state achieved by declaring it on your hat. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
     Not to underestimate the danger of what Republicans are doing, trying to establish a new American system built on the whim of one powerful individual, supported by a web of lies, where loyalty is the ultimate value — not honor, not honesty, not law.
     Nothing new here. We see this in lots of other places. Xi Jinping, the supreme leader of China, stands atop a pyramid of state suppression and genuflecting loyalty. Everyone must obey. The free speech guaranteed in their constitution is just another lie. Propaganda and news are the same thing.
     Yet reality intrudes.
     In late December, a new coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China and began to spread. A Chinese ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang went on social media and tried to sound the alarm. The local medical authority warned him that “any organizations or individuals are not allowed to release treatment information to the public without authorization.” In early January he was called to a police station, accused of “spreading rumors online” and “severely disrupting social order” and forced to sign a statement confessing his crime and promising to refrain from “unlawful acts.”
     But the virus was still spreading. 

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Famous American

     Stamp collecting is considered a benign pastime, without the risks inherent in, say, whiskey connoisseurship or bungee jumping.
     The hobby is not, however, without its perils.
     For instance, I shudder to think how much of my brain is filled with useless philatelic information that I can easily recall without checking, from the first American postal stamp (1847) to the first commemorative stamps (issued in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893) to the first living person honored on a United States postage stamp, Charles Lindbergh.
     That 1927 stamp shows his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, but not his face, because of a Postal Service policy that forbids depicting living persons on postage stamps. The USPS considered doing away with that regulation in 2011, then cooler heads prevailed. Which is why we don't have any Donald Trump postage stamps. Yet.
     I could go on and on. The 1930 Graf Zeppelin set? In 65 cent, $1.30 and $2.60 denominations. Green, brown and blue. The green is not to be confused with the 1933 Century of Progress zeppelin stamp, which is far less valuable. When I first got a job, in 1987, I considered celebrating by blowing the $600 or so the three-stamp set cost back then. (Not a good investment; you can buy them today for a thousand bucks on eBay).
     You never know when this stuff will pop up. I was at the Northbrook Post Office last week, sending the boys their new driver's licenses, which they got over Christmas break, to get the all-important gold star that somehow makes air travel more secure.
    I looked down on the counter, and noticed a plug for the new Walt Whitman stamp. Must have missed it when it was issued last year, to mark the bicentennial of his birth.
    Did I think, "Oh good, they're honoring the greatest American poet!" or "About time!"
    No, I did not.
    I thought, "Again? He's already in the 'Famous Americans' series of 1940."
    At home, it took me all of 10 seconds to lay my hands on the cover. Yes, I still have my collection.
    There's nothing more to say, than to hang my head in shame. I wish I had spent those years—approximately between 9 and 15—studying French or literature or some more valuable pursuit.
     I suppose I could throw out for discussion the whole idea of "Famous Americans." It sounds so dated, doesn't it? The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is a neglected anachronism tucked in a corner of the Bronx. "I want to be famous" sounds almost crazy, like something mass killers say, or deluded teens who'll end up in sex trafficking. Maybe it's just the word, "fame." Too much baggage at this point, and Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have attritted to 15 seconds. To want to be famous is to aspire toward an illusion, to grasp at nothing. Then again, there's a lot of that going around.

Some covering fire in defense of the Tribune

News boy 1948, by Irving Penn
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      One does not often get beseeched, appealed to or entreated. I can’t remember seeing the word “rally” used, not as a noun referring to a gathering, but as a verb, demanding we come together and fight. But there it was, in a posting headlined, “NINA STATEMENT ON ALDEN GLOBAL PURCHASE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE.” Right in the opening sentence:

“The Northern Illinois Newspaper Association today calls for journalists, news organizations, units of government and the general public to rally around Tribune Company employee efforts to maintain the integrity of one of our nation’s great news organizations. This statement follows reports that Alden Global, a New York hedge fund, has bought a 32 percent stake in Tribune Publishing.”

     “Journalists?” Hey, that’s me!
     My first thought — God, this is embarrassing — was, “Is the Sun-Times even a member of NINA?” We tend not to join that sort of thing. Save the $250. I checked NINA’s membership. The Hinsdalean. The Woodstock Independent. The Rock Island Argus. Thirteen publications and three individuals. The heart breaks. 
    Whew! I thought. Off the hook.
     Such a petty reaction made me reconsider. What did it even mean to “rally” around the Tribune? Send thoughts and prayers? Lash out at Alden? That loathsome vivisectionist of newspapers, buying them up, selling off assets, hacking away expenses, leaving behind a stripped corpse. Tribune writers are lining up to do that already, ignoring that Alden exists in a gold-plated empyrean of wealth far above the influence of public image. “What matters infamy if the cash be kept?” Juvenal writes.
     What hasn’t been said? There’s the Michael Ferro angle. Ferro sold out to Alden, a petty act of vindictiveness that hasn’t gotten enough scorn. I knew him, slightly, had lunch with him. He had his own wacky notions of where the paper should go — reporters would wear Google glasses and livestream news events that algorithms would automatically chop into videos. Maybe that’s still coming.

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Vindictive, never vindicated.

The Funeral of Chrystom and Marcella Vindicating Herself, by William Hogarth
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "I was thinking about you and your OED yesterday," writes faithful reader John Powers. "With The Cowardly Liar claiming vindication, then having Lt. Col. Vindman escorted from the White House vindictively, I wondered if the two words have similar roots, despite their seeming opposition. Sure enough, both derived from Latin roots that describe vengeance."

     He stopped there, noticing the common root.  But his observation demanded further digging.  What's the connection? Vindicta is indeed Latin for "vengeance," so "vindictive" is, in my Oxford, "given to revenge, having a revengeful disposition," a perfect description of our president. "Vendetta" comes from the same word
     A negative trait. So how does another of vindicta's children, "vindicate" end up meaning something positive? "To clear from censure, criticism, suspicion, or doubt by means of demonstration."  

    I have a theory. In our era, we think of proof of innocence as offering vindication. Due to evidence, argument. But in more rigidly religious times, a person could also be exonerated through punishment or vengeance, as seen in the first two definitions in the OED, 16th century usages that have to do with "to revenge" or "to punish." You did wrong, received punishment, and were thus redeemed in the eyes of God. Vindicated.
     Samuel Johnson, oddly, has no entry for either word in his 1755 dictionary. Daniel Webster cites the modern usages of "vindicate," but also presents it as a synonym for punish, quoting John Pearson's 1659 "Exposition of the Creed"—"God is more powerful to exact subjection, and to vindicate rebellion," noting such usage is "entirely obscure" in 1828, when the dictionary was published.
     I am an amateur etymologist, if that, and to avoid the risk of inflicting upon you some ghastly ignorant fancy, I ran the theory by an actual professional, British linguist Paul Anthony Jones, whom we met last week thanks to his observation that the word "hobby" derives from "hobbyhorse." (I'm currently reading his excellent book "The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities.")  He kindly replied:

Wholly possible that this development was late in both English and Ecclesiastical Latin of course—and oppositely, even if this change of meaning was already established in Latin before English caught on, all that does is shift this change of meaning further back in time, not alter the reason for it. (I hope that makes sense!!) Either way it’s a neat idea and seems perfectly plausible to me—it’d be interesting to see if any other words have followed a similar track of punishment->reward, and whether there’s a religious element to their development or not.

     So "plausible." While "plausible"—I feel obligated to point out in this age of smeared realities— is far from "correct," it seems a good point to end our examination, with only one thing left to add. Whether punishment eradicates crime is a valid philosophical and social question. What certainly does not erase a crime, now or in the past, is lying about it. Our mercurial president is incapable of knowing that. His vengeful supporters should know that but don't, or pretend they don't. Yet it is clear. Trump is eternally vindictive. And he will never be vindicated.

      

St. Jane decorates the thronged and common road

     "Do you mind if I take a photograph of your monkey lamps?" I asked the woman behind the front desk at the St. Jane Hotel, 230 N. Michigan. "It's for my blog."
    Lauren Kaczperski, the hotel's executive meetings manager, said she did not, and added the lamps were custom-made for the St. Jane in Europe.
     "They're certainly special lamps," I said, stepping over to a corner of the lobby and snapping a few shots. I was on my way to Northwestern's downtown Medill graduate school to talk to a friend's class. But had a few minutes to spare. The Carbide and Carbon Building is one of my favorite Chicago buildings, for its brawny industrial name, Art Deco trim and hard-to-pin-down black/green color, so give it extra scrutiny in passing. Which is how I noticed the monkey lamps through the window.
     The St. Jane opened in 2018 in what used to be the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago. Kaczperski said they spent $30 million fixing up the place, which is now cooly elegant with a slightly funky, artistic vibe. The hotel is also named, delightfully, for Jane Addams, the tireless social reformer. Though one does wonder what the Nobel Peace Prize winner would think of a fancy hotel being named for her; she was concerned about the conditions faced by girls working in Chicago hotels, so I suppose she might not mind, provided the staff is treated well. She did once write, "We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by traveling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road," which could very well include introducing distracted travelers to the existence of the author of "Twenty Years at Hull House" by naming hotels in her honor.
     Nor were the lamps the only artistic touch. The wallpaper in the entrance is marbleized like the endpapers of a 19th century book. Hanging there is "Hustle Coat," where Chicago artist Nick Cave had lined a street vendor's black raincoat with the kind of glitzy baubles being sold. The St. Jane says "Hustle Coat" is one of only two Nick Cave public art installations in Chicago. 
     Maybe not quite “Domplatz, Mailand," the enormous square Gerhardt Richter painting that the Pritzker family bought for $3.8 million in 1998 to decorate the lobby of their new Park Hyatt up the street. Fifteen years later, perhaps realizing how the work had appreciated, they sold it off, fetching $37.1 million at Sotheby's, a record for a living artist. Think what a modern Jane Addams could do with that kind of money. 
     We talked a bit about the hotel, someplace to bear in mind if you are trying to place out-of-town guests: funkily designed, well located and courteously run. And they accept dogs at no additional charge.  She offered me a tour, but I begged off—couldn't be late for that class.

"Hustle Coat," by Nick Cave

   
   

Iowa caucus mess offers lessons to Dems

     Monday’s Iowa Democratic caucus disaster already feels like ancient history, with Tuesday’s teary Queen-for-a-Day State of the Union and Wednesday’s shameful Senate impeachment acquittal in the meantime.
     But before the smoldering wreckage disappears in our rearview mirror, it’s worth a second look. Self-criticism is a liberal superpower. We can consider ourselves, assess candidly, recognize what is wrong and, in theory, fix it.
     So let’s take a look. Shadow Inc., an obscure tech company founded by former Hillary Clinton campaign staffers, was supposed to be the secret weapon to bring the Democrats up to speed against well-oiled Republican technology efforts. Instead, it thoroughly botched what should have been a dramatic Democratic milepost to the 2020 presidential election. What happened?
     I spoke with Shlomo Engelson Argamon, interim chair of the computer science department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He began by cautioning that neither he nor anybody knows exactly what went wrong yet and won’t for a couple weeks.
     That said, there are obvious take-aways that can considered right now.
     “In software development, a Silicon Valley attitude is: ‘Move fast and break things,’” Argamon said. “Build things quickly, throw them out there, see what happens. Get feedback from users. If they break, fix them and improve them. Learn by deploying.”

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Playing with your food

Cathedral

     I've played board games all my life. Starting as a young boy with Mousetrap and Candyland—how I admired that thick slice of Neapolitan ice cream depicted on the board—then Clue and Stratego, moving up to Risk and Othello, playing a game was a way to carve up the endless expanse of time that is childhood, give it boundaries, limits, rules, a purpose, maybe even fun. 
     Certain games came and went— 3M Bookshelf games like Twixt and Feudal were a big deal in the 1970s—and certain games were given a joyous second life with the arrival of my own children. Stratego came roaring back, and how I loved to play it with the boys. Even before the game started, just setting up your side, arraying your forces, planting your bombs, getting ready to play, was challenging and fun.  
     Ebay shepherded home lost games: another 3M Bookshelf game, Breakthru, a great game with each side has a different set of pieces and a different goal, somehow vanished along the way, and it was a joy to play it again. The pieces were polished steel cylinders, marvelous to behold.
     Some games weren't really that fun—the Game of Life, with their insurance policies and college tuition and little cars filled with pink pegs. Maybe the point was to acclimate children to the tedium and responsibility of the adult world. Some games were little more than coin tosses, barely more than luck: Trouble, which we played more than we ever would if it just used dice, just for the joy of their clear plastic hemisphere containing the dice, the "Pop-o-Matic." Battleship was basically the board version of blind man's bluff. You felt around in the dark for ships. The cool little plastic ships made the effort worthwhile, sort of.

Skylark

     Some games were just beautiful. The boys had one called "Skylark" that wasn't very challenging to play. It just looked great, with these sweet cardboard birds. I grew to view Monopoly more as a game of chance than anything else, played right. But I cherished its graphics—the question mark of "Chance," that cop blowing his whistle. Monopoly sets that departed from the classic set, using cities other than Atlantic City, where the streets were borrowed, were incomprehensible to me. Then the family played a game of Monopoly where the older boy bought one property of each color and perversely refused to trade. "It's a trading game," we argued. "It says so on the box!" The game went on for hours, nobody could win, until we quit in disgust and never played again. "You killed Monopoly," I told him.
     Games were location specific: my grandmother had a Cootie Set. We would assemble the odd primary bugs out of their primary-color parts sprawled in her living room and nowhere else. Our family buying Cootie was an unimaginable as our covering our sofa in clear plastic or or subscribing to Reader's Digest or any other practice that was the exclusive provenance of Cleveland Heights.

Cool

Idiotic

     Cootie was an example of the tendency of games to deteriorate. The original, 1950s Cootie was cool. Subsequent versions were idiotic. I took great pride that the armies in my Risk set were little painted wooden cubes. None of the crap plastic armies that came later.  
     Some games I loved as a child then stopped playing at some point—Dogfight, with little plastic biplanes to maneuver over the European countryside. And a few games showed up late, just before we pretty much stopped playing: a wooden Quarto set, bought on vacation in Canada. A shifting Labyrinth game. I was the one urging, "C'mon, play!" as the boys wandered off, into their own lives (where, I'm happy to report, games are still played on game nights at the New York University School of Law. So it isn't just us). 
     A few games never left, continuing into adulthood. Chess and checkers, of course. Scrabble, the godhead of modern games, that can be played throughout the day on my iPhone. A favorite new game, The Settlers of Catan, that our dear friends from Ohio gave us (the same couple that gave us a beautiful wooden game, Cathedral, as a wedding present. It involves walling off a larger part of the board, and has been on our coffee table for 30 years).
     So I was interested to see Cards Against Humanity is opening their Chicago Board Game Cafe in the Margie's Candy Building next week. Block Club Chicago posted a news story about the opening. 
    I would seem to be their intended audience. But I greet the news with more skepticism than excitement. What I'm wondering about is the idea of eating dinner and playing board games, at the same time. How does that work? Yes, in college, drinking and certain board games—particularly backgammon—were a thing. And back in the day I liked to pour myself a dram and play chess with anybody who'd sit across the board from me. 
    But dinner and Monopoly? At a restaurant? Or Risk, which takes forever—I remember waking up, face down on the board, at a sleepover. Or some other game selected by the cafe's "team of professional board game teachers [who] will help you pick the right game for your group and teach you how to play." That sounds kinda strange, right? A board game sommelier. "Might I recommend a 1965 Milton Bradley Mystery Date Game to go with the paella?" (The cuisine will be Spanish and Vietnamese,  a combination I had not heretofore imagined and can hardly imagine now).
      And won't the games quickly get dirty? Greasy? Spotted? Part of the appeal of board games is their clean perfection, these square folding cardboard worlds. Or their gentle wear, the result of your parents' play Not something manhandled by 100 strangers. The games tokens, armies, die, piles of cash, action cards. Sure, games get old, as do we all, and accommodations must be made. But a game of chess with a wooden spool standing in for a missing a rook just isn't the same. It loses a certain dignity.
     Maybe it'll work. Max Temkin, the guy behind Cards Against Humanity, a fun, wildly obscene game my family played exactly once (a dinner guest brought the cards) is a good businessman and obviously thinks this is a good idea. 
     This isn't the first time it has been done. The web site mentions a few other game cafes around town. And I remember places like the Blue Frog, a River North bar that had stacks of games. No one ever seemed to be playing them.  Now that I think of it, games in public establishments are like apartment balconies: you never see anybody using them. Still, best of luck to the Chicago Board Game Cafe. They're shaking the dice, beginning a game where 90 percent of the players lose. Let's see if they can win.