Wednesday, March 31, 2021

I didn’t expect ‘doom’ to be so exhausting


     “Impending doom.”
     I read the words aloud to my wife.
     “Now there’s a phrase that you just don’t see very much,” I continued. “I wonder if other things ‘impend.’ Or is it just doom?”
     She started to read something on her phone. The winds buffeted the old house, which groaned like a clipper ship rounding the Horn Monday night, as we fished the internet for news which, despite an upswing in positive developments — vaccines rolling out more and more, weather improving, that ship stuck in the Suez Canal finally freed — suddenly seems grim.
     “The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of ‘impending doom’ from a potential fourth surge of the pandemic,” I read. “CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, appeared to fight back tears as she pleaded with Americans to ‘hold on a little while longer’ and continue following public health advice, like wearing masks and social distancing, to curb the virus’s spread.”
     When government officials start to cry, that’s usually bad, right? Despite everything that’s gone on for the past ... ah ... year plus, the people in charge do not generally weep.
     Wasn’t it only last week we had turned the corner and were ready to skip into springtime? Robins twittering, tank cars of vaccines rumbling across the country, the buds on the saucer magnolia just beginning to emerge fat and pink? That is not necessarily good either — the weather is supposed to drop into the mid-20s Wednesday and Thursday. If the blooms come out too early, and the temperature plummets, those blossoms can get burned, and the blossoms are not luxurious and pink, adding a week of festivity to springtime, but brown, like burnt marshmallows stuck on the ends of twigs, an omen, a foretaste of autumn and death when spring has barely begun.

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Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Trumpspeak, translated

 

     One of the joys of the Joe Biden era—besides seeing our national problems addressed honestly and vigorously, which is happiness aplenty, or should be—is we aren't pinned to the wall by a firehose of lies and self-puffery geysering hourly out of the mouth of Donald Trump and his supporters.
     Oh sure, Trump's still off somewhere, haranguing wedding parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the condemnation of history is hardening around him already, and maybe the law too, and the latest Republican go-to move of restricting voting so the people disgusted with them have a harder time booting them out of office, well, that isn't really a tactic of the strong and confident, is it? 
     That doesn't mean the battle is over, however. Those who haven't figured Trump out by now never will, and they are on the move. Though the putsch of Jan. 6 was thwarted, and it was a come-to-Jesus moment for a few, the reset continue on as before. The trouble is, once you commit yourself fully to ignoring reality and crafting your own alternative world, then it doesn't matter the enormity of the particular reality you are ignoring. You can always slap a few rolls of pure fabrication over the rot, stand back, and admire the shimmering effect. 
      The forces of authoritarianism, denied the executive office, have gone local. It isn't just in southern statehouses. Here in my quaint little village of Northbrook, there is an election of town officials next week, and one faction is vigorously winking and gesturing at the MAGA crowd, in code of course. Let me draw your attention to the sign above, several of which are jammed into the ground along with the various candidate signs in front of our red brick village hall.
     Let's unpack the code in this sign—it bears no attribution, of course; nobody becomes a fear-peddling bigot out of surfeit of courage—shall we?
     "INSIST ON HONEST ELECTIONS" means undercutting the election process that you are losing. Which Trump was already doing back in 2016, assuming his own defeat, which through some malign fate did not happen. A strategy he returned to in full-throated fury in 2020, stirring up that rebellion against our government Jan. 6, and pushing the lie onward, as Republican legislatures try to restrict and limit the casting of ballots, to improve their sweaty grasp on power.
 Remember, the 2020 election was thoroughly vetted, in court, triple-counted, and found to be impeccable, for those of us in the reality-based world. Honest elections were already insisted upon; that's why he lost. But "CORRUPT THE VOTE" makes for an uncomfortable banner, even for them, so they are mobilizing around the concept of "honest elections" in the service of dishonest elections.
     "FREE SPEECH" means shrugging off consequences of their own speech Once you've established yourself as a racist, for instance, speaking exclusively to your similarly-bigoted friends, it can be uncomfortable when your frame of reference shifts and you must attempt to justify yourself to those not crouched in the same cramped corner of the mental spectrum you occupy. So in an attempt to distract attention from the fact that you are doing and saying racist things, you focus on the criticism that you honestly receive and pretend you are being repressed, and pretend that your right to spout idiocy is being somehow squelched. Go on Fox News and complain that your voice is being silenced, the way a person who has said something stupid and been called out on it in those terms will point in indignation at the insult of being labeled "stupid" while completely overlooking the stupidity that prompted it. I suppose they consider that clever. It certainly fools themselves, if no one else.
    And finally, "UNBIASED MEDIA" is, in classic Orwellian "WAR IS PEACE" form, a hurrah for biased media, the type that curled purring at Trump's feet, uncritically passes along and amplifies his lies, and demands that everyone else does the same. News outlets that reflect the drumbeat of craven cowardice and demi-treason emitting from the Republican Party must be themselves skewed, because the only other explanation is the reality they are reflecting, and that was abandoned long ago.
     Not to forget the final decorative dollop of the American flag, brandished by those betraying literally everything it represents. 
     I went to vote Monday, and chatted with one of the Democratic candidates for trustee in front of the village hall—no Republican candidates in sight, I guess they're satisfied letting their anonymous signs do the talking. She said the Trumpite faction is ominously strong in Northbrook, and I do see their MAGA red everywhere. Before the election, there were those big rallies at Shermer and Walters, young people insulting the passing traffic, venting the free-floating grievance that passes for political philosophy. As I've said for a long time, Trump wasn't a cause, but a symptom, and the fear and perpetual indignation that spawned him has not gone away, just trickled down below the foundations of our homes, to emerge below our feet with the crocuses, an ominous bloom. 
These red signs have to be worrisome to those of us working to ensure that the Trump offense is confined to our shameful past, and not merely a preview of worse to come. Make sure you get out and vote, while you still can. Because what happened in Georgia can happen here, too.

Monday, March 29, 2021

Office sings its siren song as vaccine spreads

 


     On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, workers pouring out of the Sears Tower looked up as they cleared the building. The World Trade Center had come down about an hour before, and nobody knew what might happen next. Hurrying away, carrying laptops, they scanned the skies.
     I know that because I saw it. As employees streamed out of their offices, I was heading toward mine, the Sun-Times newsroom at 401 N. Wabash. I was going into work because that’s what people did in the morning. You went to work.
     Not for the past year, of course. COVID-19, a far more deadly disaster — in the United States, closing in on 200 times the toll of 9/11 — creating a chasm between those who could work at home and those who had to risk their lives to draw a paycheck.
     I’ve gone into the office three times over the past year, always because I was downtown anyway, going to the library or conducting an interview. Each time, the newsroom was silent and empty. It was grim, unnatural.
     When will that change? With millions of doses of vaccine being pumped into millions of arms every day, society is pondering a return to work.
     On March 29, Microsoft and Uber are welcoming employees back into their West Coast headquarters.
     Not everyone will be going back. A big British paper, the Daily Mirror, is closing its London office. Reporters can work out of their cars or homes.
     I can provide some insight of what that’s like. For most of my career, going in to the office was a choice. As a columnist I could work at home and usually did. But I routinely prodded myself to go in, for a variety of reasons. Usually because something specific was happening downtown, an event, interview, meeting, lunch, opera rehearsal. I was hoofing into the paper in 2001 because I joined the editorial board, a five-year detour into being a serious person.

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Sunday, March 28, 2021

Flashback 2003: Go straight to the top to fulfill an elevator dream

     On Wednesday, I began a column on workplace fatalities by talking about four men burned to death installing the elevators at the Sears Tower in 1973—a story that appears in the new book that I'm turning in next week.
     I heard from a lot of grateful workers, including someone from IUEC Local 2, speaking for the 1300 of his "brothers and sisters who build, repair and maintain this equipment."
     Which reminded me that, intrigued by the certificates that used to be framed in elevators, I had spent a day with an elevator inspector from Local 2.
     There is a coda to this story: after it appears, someone asked me why I didn't include anything about the man I wrote about being nearly crushed by a malfunctioning elevator? Because when he said, "People get hurt" I didn't have the presence of mind to ask "Did YOU ever get hurt?" And he didn't volunteer the information, which is understandable. 

     If you've never seen an elevator silently whoosh down 28 floors and stop a few inches above your nose, it's quite a sight. Actually, most everything in the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building at 300 E. Randolph is quite a sight. Only five years old, cool gray, with an immense, open lobby dominated by a hovering circle of stainless steel, and glass elevators that rise like bubbles heavenward, it reminded me of those international corporate headquarters Bruce Willis is always stumbling into shortly before a squad of heavily armed Euro-terrorists seal the doors.
     I was there to fulfill a long-held dream. You see, some functions of the city are obvious. I can't walk a block without noticing a city worker milking parking meters — you know, the guy who rolls around a little, wheeled safe and marries it to the meters in a kind of machine mating, then funnels the quarters out? They're everywhere.
     Other functions are mysterious. What do bridge tenders do in the winter? Why do you never see people out on their condo balconies?
     And, most tantalizing of all, to me: elevator inspectors. I had never seen an elevator inspector, for all my years of riding elevators. Never. But they must exist. Their handiwork is right there, often at nose level, in a little frame. "This Certifies That," it begins, in the Gothic lettering we still associate with officialdom, "I HAVE THIS DAY" — and here it gives the date —INSPECTED" — and here it lists the address and particular elevator — "AND FIND THIS ELEVATOR AND MACHINERY IN SAFE OPERATING CONDITION."
     Inspected how? I have never seen an elevator inspector, but I've imagined every detail. A small man, 5' foot 6, in a derby hat and bow tie. A small, waxed mustache. Neat herringbone suit and vest — green — and thick, owlish glasses. He would carry a complex wooden case that opened like a Chinese box to all sorts of drawers and compartments, filled with an array of tools — brass calipers and dentist's mirrors on thin, extending wands. He would remove his green suit jacket, place it on a hook that folded out of a secret place in every elevator in the city, roll back his sleeves, sand his fingertips, then begin.
     Curiosity for the truth overwhelmed me. So I called the Buildings Department, and they hooked me up with Mike Lundin, elevator inspector and proud member of the International Union of Elevator Constructors, Local 2. The only thing Lundin had in common with the inspector of my imagination was a mustache, and, even then, it wasn't waxed, but a regular, Chicago-guy mustache. No bow tie, no suit. He wore black jeans and a golf shirt, his primary tool a flashlight.
     "This morning, I had a dumbwaiter," he said, explaining that Chicago's 13 full-time elevator inspectors are responsible not only for certifying the city's thousands of elevators, but also escalators, dumbwaiters, moving sidewalks, platform lifts and carnival rides.
     Our task for the moment was elevator No. 16 — an elegant, glassed-in job. We were met by the building's full-time elevator technician, Joe Goodwin, wearing a blue jumpsuit emblazoned with "Mitsubishi." The automaker's electrical division made the building's elevators.
     "First, we ride the car," said Lundin, a graduate of Gordon Tech, who has been on the job for nearly five years.
     We went up to the 28th floor, then up a flight of stairs to a room filled with gray electrical lockers and big motors driving wheels that spun quietly as the elevators zipped up and down. Each motor is paired with a generator — a "regenerative system" so that the extra oomph the motor expends running the elevator can be caught by the generator and turned into electricity, the power fed back into the building's system.
     "We'll look at the hoist cables," said Lundin. "We look for different telltale signs of wear."
     Each elevator is held by five 5/8-inch steel cables, any one of which could hold the elevator by itself. The cables are made of steel strands wound around, oddly enough, a rope. There is hemp at the center of all that steel because it is soaked in lubricant that oozes out as the cables run back and forth, helping to reduce friction that leads to wear.
     Lundin took out a round brass gauge to see how thick the cables were. "It's shut down right now, Joe?" he asked a little hesitantly before sticking his hands close to the cables.
     "Elevators are extremely dangerous," he said, checking to make sure the cables had not stretched out too far, a sign of wear. "There are a lot of moving parts. People get hurt. Our union preaches safety."
     He checked the brake system, the doors on each floor, the area on top of the car, the safety switches, the 15,000 pounds of counterweight.
     A few myths to dispel: You can't escape through the hatch in the elevator car roof, like in the movies. Most are locked and can only be opened from the outside. Pushing the call button again after it's already lit doesn't bring the elevator faster, nor does pushing the "Close door" button close the doors more quickly.
     After about 45 minutes, Lundin was done. The only thing left was the paperwork, the filling out of a new, enigmatic little inspection certificate to frame inside elevator No. 16. And, yes, he does point out the elevators he has inspected to his three children, Rachel, Sean and Annie.
     "See, I'm famous," he told his oldest, Rachel who, being 14, answered with the inevitable: "Dad, will you stop it?"
     —Originally appeared in the Sun-Times, February 7, 2003

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Texas notes: Cockerel

     Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey has previously written on the theme, "Hail chickens." Today's could be considered a variation, "Chickens, hail."

     It’s been an odd week. That’s saying a lot considering the past few months, nearly all of 2020, and every single day after the horrible night of November 9, 2016.
     This is the most stressful time many of us have ever known. We’ve all been brought to our knees, vulnerable and faced with the fragility of life. Aware of the fact that we might lose everything at the drop of a hat— our businesses, our homes, the neighborhood stalwarts we’ve relied on, even our loved ones. We suffered through and pretty much survived our first oligarch. It’s been a bizarre ride, hasn’t it? 
    At least there are certain things we can still count on, if we are lucky. A hot cup of coffee in the morning. Snow storms in the north. The sounds of crickets lulling us to sleep in early spring in the south. The PBS News Hour, and Teri Gross on NPR. The Sun Times. SNL. The Austin Music scene coming back to life.
    Each morning I sit in front of my laptop with a cuppa joe near a floor to ceiling open window. I enjoy the sounds of the wind, blue jays and doves, the crunch of feet on the gravel path a few yards behind my tiny house, and children playing in the park. The chickens bellow out an insistent opera back and forth to each other as they vie for scraps and seeds. The little ones cower and skulk, and sneak bites when they can.
     Earlier this week I started noticing a rooster crowing nearby. Cock a doodle doooo! I figured a neighbor down the street must have acquired one of these dapper fellows. I heard the gent on and off for a few days and didn’t think much of it except “oh, Austin. You’re pretty cool.” Today he was a little louder, and much to my surprise I realized the calls were coming from our coop. How could that be? We don’t have roosters, only hens. A rooster would mess up the delicate balance of the egg laying ladies.
     It hit me like a ton of bricks. Blanche. Lately I’d found myself marveling at her dinosaur talons and noticing how quickly she was growing. She was gigantic, towering over the others. She was twice as large as her sidekick Thelma, yet they had come to us as a pair of teeny chicks.
     Blanche was no hen. She was a young rooster, a cockerel.
     I texted Wilson, my landlord, and filled him in. He responded “yes, I realized it too. We’ll have to get rid of her soon.” We are still calling her “her.” I decided to hang out with her a bit today, to get used to the fact that she is, in fact, a he. I could tell right away that she was different. Thelma seemed scared of her. When Blanche tried to straddle her, she shape-shifted before my eyes from the cute little hen I’d watched grow up into a domineering cock. When I let Wilson know what I’d seen he said “oh, no. We’ll have to get rid of her sooner than I’d thought.” Poor Blanche. This gang is all she’s ever known.
   A few nights ago I was awoken by a storm. Heavy wind, lightening, and a furious rain pounding against the roof and making percussive sounds on the air conditioner perched outside the window. All of a sudden huge balls of ice started falling from the sky. It sounded like the house was being pelted with little missiles. I was unnerved, thought about my car, and wondered if the chunks might fly through a window. I worried about chickens and even more so about the thousands of unhoused Austinites. Would everyone be ok?
     The hail lasted several minutes and I told myself “this will pass. Everything is OK.” When it was over I stepped outside to a lawn peppered with little white balls. I collected a few, the largest were green-grape sized, and popped them into the freezer. I’m not sure why, but it seemed fun, and the right thing to do. Something my Dad would have done when we were kids.
     It’s been hard for me to sleep this week after I had the unfortunate side effect of “COVID Arm” after my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. 11 days after the shot I developed huge red welts that look like burns and itch like the dickens, first around the vaccine site and then in random spots all over my upper body. Today is day 19 after the dose, and I noticed some new welts pop up. I saw the doctor, and as I expected, they are a known reaction and will go away. (Or so they say). The angry welts kept me up for days, and now the hail prevented yet another good night’s sleep. As I drifted back to sleep with the help of Benadryl, the chickens and I stayed safe. At about that same moment, straight line winds knocked down brick buildings in Bertram Texas, less than 50 miles north of here.
   And how was your week?
I WON’T HATCH
Oh I am a chicken who lives in an egg,
But I will not hatch, I will not hatch.
The hens they all cackle, the roosters all beg,
But I will not hatch, I will not hatch.
For I hear all the talk of pollution and war
As the people all shout and the airplanes roar,
So I’m staying in here where it’s safe and it’s warm,
And I WILL NOT HATCH!
                         —Shel Silverstein

Friday, March 26, 2021

Moral failure the go-to move for Chicago City Council

Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae: Council of Trent (Metropolitan Museum)

     I try not to contradict colleagues in print. However, something stuck out of Rummana Hussain’s otherwise flawless column about her experience with anti-Muslim bigotry in India, and I must speak.
     She expresses disappointment at the Chicago City Council for gutting its non-binding resolution decrying Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fanning the flames of Islamophobia and scapegoating minorities to distract the country from its actual problems.
     No argument there. But one sentence caught my eye like a fishhook:
     “The City Council is expected next week to vote on the dramatically watered-down resolution, which will represent a failure of character.”
     A failure of character for her, or me, or your average person with a functioning moral sense. But for the Chicago City Council, it isn’t a failure of their character, but an expression of it. That’s who they are.
     Craven collapse when the moment calls for courage is a council specialty, their go-to move. They’ll take the teeth out of an ethics ordinance, if it applies to themselves, faster than a Skid Row dentist.
     There are so many examples, space is limited and I hope you’ll forgive me for quickstepping through a few.
     This is the same body that in 1971 refused to support a resolution against firebombing homes. A Black family had been burned out of its house on the Southwest Side, and Ald. William Cousins introduced a resolution disapproving of the practice. It lost, 34-13. The outcry was so great, Mayor Richard J. Daley later said, in a stage whisper, “You ARE against firebombing,” and the same resolution they had just reject passed unanimously.
     This is the body that couldn’t denounce police beating people in the street, where the Rules Committee buried a resolution condemning “brutal repression” of protesters during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Heck, in the 1930s, the council couldn’t condemn Nazi Germany, while the city banned films drawing attention to the suffering of Jews there as anti-German propaganda.

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Thursday, March 25, 2021

At least it wasn't S-M-U-K.

     You expect to see weird fashion in the New York Times Style section. Laughably odd, futuristic haloes and shiny rubber pants that blob out at the cuff instead of tapering in, the fertile, the uninhibited imaginings of an army of ambitious young designers intended only to catch attention, shock, perhaps hint at the future, certainly never be worn by a human being in the living world. Hardly worth the puff of a sigh, since they'll vanish in a moment anyway and be replaced by something even stranger.
    Other places you expect nothing but staid tradition, your L.L. Bean, your Eddie Bauer, perhaps offering up a new kind of plaid in this year's crop of flannel shirts. A duck boot that isn't green, maybe.
   
    So it was with surprise that I flipped open my Lands' End Men catalogue this week and saw, well, just look at it. The grey sweat pants/aqua poplin diver-and- beach-umbrella motif Hawaiian shirt over a white striped blue tee would be terrible on any normal human being, and looks pretty bad on their model. 
     But turns out that was only prelude. 
     Before we get to the matter-at-hand, I suppose I should admit that I do wear one of those black Lands' End puffy jackets simply because my wife bought it for me, it's warm, and everybody else has one. 
    Otherwise, the company already pretty much lost me. First, because I discovered the far better made, far more stylish and classic L.L. Bean. There's just no comparison.
    Second, Lands' End divided their t-shirts into regular t-shirts and "Super Ts," the former being of such poor quality I'm not sure what they're for. Straight to rags, perhaps, just cut up directly out of the package and start dusting.
     Anyway, I'm thumbing through the catalogue, basically just trying to shake off the shock of the guy at the right, and they do manage a spread of seersuckers—I've got a few, very comfortable on hot days—and linen and madras shirts.    
    Then this: "We spell comfort S-L-U-B." Again, you really have to see it, as disbelief is a definite risk, and documentary evidence important. Here you go.
     Slub? Really? A misspelling of Yiddish schlub perhaps, which I think of as an inept, pitiful, weak, put-upon man. ("A person regarded as clumsy, stupid, or unattractive" is how the Free Dictionary defines it). Is that really their target market?
    How can this happen? I mean, I know Lands' End is going for the WASPy, Connecticut boathouse ethos, but it's still clothing, still the rag trade. I have to imagine there are Jews somewhere, working, perched on stools, needle and threads in hand, mouthful of pins, somewhere in the background. They could have consulted them.
    "Slub?" They present it as a kind of concrete poem acronym for    

     SERIOUSLY COMFY.
     LAYER FRIENDLY.
     UNDERSTATED TEXTURE.
     BREATHABLE KNIT.
     It looks like an Onion parody, doesn't it? I knew almost half the country was cracked when Donald Trump nearly was re-elected after four years of stomach-churning failure and shameful idiocy. But somehow I never expected the nation's bottomless dimness to bleed into clothing catalogues. Companies lately have been bastions against the most extreme government missteps, drawing away from the staggeringly wrong, at least a little.
     I've given this too much thought already, and ought to wrap this up with a conclusion. I blame ... COVID. Think about it. Their catalogue staff, scattered at a dozen separate apartments and laundry rooms, trying to put together something based on the CEO's cracked notion, "let's get comfy," lowercase, natch. They actually copyrighted the phrase, "let's get comfy," which sounds to me like something a hardened heiress would purr trying to seduce Sam Spade as he looks for clues on the San Fransisco wharf front in a Dashiell Hammett novel. 
     Expanding on comfiness, someone floats the shlub idea. In person, the I-just-ate-a-bad-clam expressions of their colleagues would have killed that in the cradle. But you can't make out expressions on Zoom so well, and once it survives birth the Shlub Idea, now official, takes on a weight and momentum of its own, until I'm holding the catalogue in my hand, shaking my head and filing away the story so I can repeat it by way of explanation when Lands' End goes out of business in a couple years.