Why I seldom go on television

     So CNN tapped on my cage Friday morning.
     "I am reaching out on behalf of CNN's show, Newsroom with Kim Brunhuber, which will be simulcast across CNN International and CNN Domestic channels," a producer wrote. "Might you be willing and available to join Kim tomorrow morning (Saturday 30th August) during the 4am CDT (5am ET) hour?"
     Four a.m. is kinda early.  And I'd never heard of Kim Brunhuber. I think the last time I tuned into CNN was for the election, in November. Otherwise, life is too short. But with the troops on their way to Chicago, the eyes of the world are fixing on Chicago. Shouldn't I wave? Do I want to be part of the mix or not?
      "This would be to discuss the Trump administration's preparation to conduct a major immigration enforcement operation in Chicago as soon as next week," she continued, "according to multiple sources familiar with the planning, marking the latest escalation between the president and a Democratic-led city." 
     I decided to play for time.
     "At 4 a.m.?" I wrote back. "Can I be in my pajamas?"
     She took me seriously. 
     "We understand how unsocial an hour it is for your Saturday, but would be incredibly grateful for your analysis on this," she said. "Of course, you can get straight back into bed as soon as the hit is finished."
     Yeah, that is going to happen. Though the idea of my words going around the globe was appealing. Mr. International. I can't both scorn those cringing at the orange menace and then pass on a chance to speak out. I decided to send it up the chain of command.
     "I'm usually up anyway at that hour," I replied. "I've run it by my boss. After 38 years at the paper, I'm trying to last two more and not get myself fired. Sometimes they view TV as the locus of all meaning, sometimes as boosting a competitor. Let me get back to you as soon as I get the go-ahead."
      CNN reached for the honey.
     "A relief to know that we have some chance here!" she wrote. "If it is any help, we really enjoy your blog, particularly your assessment of pogo sticks... "
     That gave me pause. A thumb-twiddly bit of nothing I'd tossed on my blog to fill a day. They were flattering me. There's a Lucy-and-the-football quality to these TV shows. I always think they are going to "lead to something" but they never do. 

     I replied:
     "I talked to my editor, and we're good to go. The pogo stick post was filler (I write every single day, without fail). If I seem reluctant, it's because my experiences with TV are almost invariably bad. (Here's a post more illustrative of that, you might enjoy). So let's go ahead and do it.
     The link I sent was about going on the BBC last year to talk about "Hatless Jack," a book about how John F. Kennedy didn't kill off men's hats. She didn't appear to look at it. Now that I was on the hook, time to consider the segment.
     "Please send through any thoughts you might wish to share with the team on what the latest reaction is/ your own take," she wrote.
     "My take?" I replied, "The tyranny playbook tells would-be dictators to start at the margins — thus immigrants, like trans folks, who are viewed with fear and suspicion by their base, can have their rights curtailed. The rest of us come next. Chicago had 3 million residents in 1950. Now we have 2.7 million. We welcome immigrants because a) it's good for the economy; b) it's good for the culture; c) it's the morally right thing to do. Trump has long used Chicago as a racist dog whistle — it's America's great Black metropolis — and wants to break the city the way he's trying to break prestigious universities and medical science, so there will be no one to oppose him when he scuppers elections. Roughly that."
     This apparently did not give them a sense of what I had to say. Another producer chimed in with:
     "Would you be able to send some bullet points/thoughts at some point today? Can be short - just to help Kim form his questions. "
     By now it was 1:35 p.m. I answered this way:
     "It's a broad topic, but something like:
     "— Immigrants are and always have been vital to Chicago. Get out of downtown, and it's one ethnic enclave after another.
     "— The city was completely correct to try to mitigate the human suffering caused by busloads of immigrants that Texas started sending here.
     "— Chicago is completely within its rights to refuse to cooperate with masked ICE agents seizing residents from the streets without any kind of due process of law.
     "— There is no need for the National Guard or the Army here — we can pick up our own garbage, thank you. Crime is at a historical low, and the military doesn't offer an actual solution anyway. Gov. Pritzker insists that this is all part of a Trump plan to use the military to squelch voting, something any decent, patriotic American must oppose.

     "How's that?"
     Two hours passed, then they had a concern:
     "Thanks Neil, one more question - just for clarification, are you saying illegal immigrants shouldn't face enforcement proceedings?"
     That gave me pause, and reminded me of right wing hosts playing gotcha. Putting words in my mouth. I had read somewhere that CNN was drifting to the right, trying to peel viewers off Fox News.
     "No, of course not," I replied. "I'm saying they shouldn't be snatched off the streets in extra-judicial kidnappings by masked thugs and shipped to prisons in Africa. Nor should they be demonized as violent criminals when most of them are not."

     Just the question got my back up.
    "Is this too far outside CNN's new business model?" I continued. "We don't have to do this. You asked me. I don't want to be yelled at and have my words twisted."
     At this point another producer called, and we had a long, lovely chat, which set my mind at ease. Though a few minutes later, I got this:
     "Unfortunately, due to the developing story on Missouri redistricting, our programming has been adjusted, and we are no longer doing the segment on Chicago immigration enforcement as earlier planned. Please stand down on this request for now."
     "Stand down"? Military jargon. As if they were my superior officers. With an echo of Trump's wink to the Proud Boys: "Stand back and stand by."      

     No matter. I have to admit, I was greatly relieved. Even happier when I woke up Saturday at the leisurely hour of 4:12 a.m. and realized I'd slept later than if I'd done the show.

     Note to self: next time TV asks, just say no, right off the bat. It saves time and effort.

Flashback 2012: The whole world is watching — even if we aren’t

Paris catacombs

      Last week Donald Trump referred to Chicago as a "killing field" and "a disaster." More lies designed to justify his sending in the National Guard and federal law enforcement. Part of his general program of corrupting the military and turning it into a private army so he can squelch opposition when he corrupts the 2026 elections. But also playing to the long-standing slander that Chicago is a blood-soaked city. It is not; its reputation is.

     Earlier this month, men wearing balaclavas and carrying assault rifles burst into a jewelry store in Grenoble, France. They fired into the glass cases, clubbed the jeweler with a rifle butt, grabbed the loot and fled with a hostage.
     “It’s worse than Chicago!” one bystander told the Le Parisien newspaper.
     One of the many ironies of Chicago’s deadly summer is that while many here expend scant concern about the problem — no worries, not my part of town — the world is gazing at it with horrified fascination.
     “Velkommen til dodens by” a recent headline in Norway reads. “Welcome to murder city.”
     “Chicago gang crime murder out of control,” announces a headline, in Chinese, on the SinoVision.Net website. The story begins: “This summer, Chicago is filled with blood, sweat and tears.”
     That’s a common mistake. To assume the city is in a general grief state — it must be, given the toll — and miss that Chicagoans who aren’t themselves in high crimes areas seem willing to shrug off the problem. Abroad, neighborhood distinctions that help Chicagoans feel secure fly by observers, who treat the city as if it were one unified place.
     “Nine dead, thirty-two wounded in an exchange of gunfire,” began a story in Le Monde, as if they also all occurred at once. “This is the heavy toll of last weekend.”
     Chicagoans know to remain mute at the racial aspect of the killing — it goes without saying. Not so in other countries
     “A total of 433 people died on these streets last year, most of them African Americans killed by African Americans,” explained a story on the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s website titled, “Murder City.”
     That story ran May 29, before the lethal summer even began, a reminder that one reason our murder epidemic so resonates abroad is because it meshes with the “rat-tat-tat” view the city is already saddled with.
      “ Ti aspetti la citta di Al Capone,” is the first sentence in an Italian journalist’s 2004 book about Chicago. “You expect the city of Al Capone.” Well some do, obviously.
      At times, the foreign press seems so shocked it has to stretch the facts.
     “Forget the Windy City or the City of Broad Shoulders,” the Australian story reports, fancifully. “The people who live here call it murder city, or Chi-raq.”
     Since when?
      While the local media focuses on detailing the drip-drip-drip of shootings, abroad they seem more given to general shock. We forget how rare murder is elsewhere. More murders have occurred this year in Chicago, with a population of 2.8 million, than were committed last year on the continent of Australia, population 22 million. Nearly twice as many, and it’s still August. Our murder rate is 10 times theirs. Yet there can be this strange disconnect. Just as soldiers and their families bear the brunt of our wars, so members of the blood-soaked communities grieve and suffer while the rest of the city turns a blind eye and goes blithely about its business.
     I drove the length of Chicago on Wednesday, to Hegwisch, which to a foreigner might seem directly on the bloody South Side. To a local, it’s a world away, a sleepy enclave as menacing as your grandmother’s sewing bag. The threat of crime never crossed my mind, until I got home and read an email from a concerned reader in Norway that ended, “hopefully u n ur family r safe.”
     In Northbrook? Safe as can be. Not everyone is so lucky. The media hasn’t been indifferent — the Sun-Times certainly splashes the story over the front page with sickening regularity. But if people aren’t actually being killed en masse the night before, the sense of urgency falls away. A 15-year-old kid shot a cop Wednesday night and the cop shot him back. And that was a mild night, relatively.
     Part of it has to be racial. If those were white people dying the media would be far more worked up. One 23-year-old athlete from Wheaton killed in St. Louis got more attention than a dozen 23-year-olds killed on the South Side receive. Part has to be the problem is so entrenched. What can be done? Putting cops on the street can thwart it for a while, but the underlying issues remain, ticking. Cops can’t be on every corner 24 hours a day. Crime is both the symptom and cause of every other social problem — no jobs, poor education, bad parenting, drugs. We’ve tried to address them before and failed, and now the poster boy for ignoring social issues, Mitt Romney, might just end up president.
     If blood on our streets doesn’t bother us, maybe blood on our reputation will.
     “Called the deadliest ‘alpha world city’ — with that title comparing it to global cities like New York, London, Los Angeles or Tokyo — Chicago has seen 19.4 murders per 100,000,” London’s Daily Mail reported.
     Why do I suspect that some people will read “deadliest world city” and come away thinking, “Hey, Chicago’s a world city! Cool.”

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 31, 2012

"Stop! This is the empire of death."

Still a few bugs in the system

Digital display technology check at Watchfire Signs, Danville, Illinois

     Sometime it takes a while for the media to catch up. I see the Independent suggesting "The AI bubble may be about to burst." 

     God, I hope so. Because right now the hype is tedious and endless. I'm still doing the dishes and the laundry. Let me know when the next Boston Dynamics unit is ready to do either; then I'll share the enthusiasm. But right their robots seem only fit to dance. 

    Okay, and vacuum. I was skeptical about those little round robot vacuums. But we have one; it's great.

     But not intelligent. It does find its way around a room. And back to its little charging port. Which is impressive. But it can't do our taxes. Yet.

     Until then, I'm just waiting. I'm always reluctant to declare The Next Hot Thing to be a dud, ever since, more than 40 years ago, I announced that cell phones were a fad. They weren't.      

     So I acknowledge that artificial intelligence is both important and here to stay. I see that, just as telephone operators and gas station attendants were replaced by chips, so customer service reps and, I suppose, journalists, will give way to algorithms. Someday you won't have to decide what's for lunch; your kitchen will do that for you.  

      But look at me, adding to the annoying, pie-in-the-sky AI hype. Big on ballyhoo, short on helpfulness. Every day I write this little essay on blogger, a useful, intuitive platform that Google offers for free, just 'cause, and every time a little prompt pops up offering to insert a dozen or two links into my copy. My choices are "Dismiss" and "Apply." Not wanting a bunch of random links in my copy, I dismiss it. Every time. If you want to learn more about a noun, you can search it yourself.
     So rather than making my job easier, it's making my job harder. Adding an extra step. Every time I write something.
     Finally I took dynamic action to get rid of it — or tried to. By asking AI, ironically enough. I dove into the settings and flipped a few things. Only I couldn't shut it off. Whatever AI suggested didn't work. It still offers to toss links into this. Maybe that's the true future of AI —a system that spares you from the annoyance it will cause if you don't stop it.

     I'm sure AI is going to get better. Any minute now. Though we may come to miss the days when it didn't work that well. 

Flashback 1987: Stress Test — One man's fitness odyssey

     Whenever I look back on my old Sun-Times stories, I'm amazed at how consistent my voice is. I wrote this almost 40 years ago, when I was 26. It sounds like something I could write today. This wasn't a column, but a feature story. A lot of reporters have trouble placing themselves into a story. That obviously wasn't an issue for me.

     I asked my girlfriend if she thought I was fat.
     "No, I don't think you're fat," she said. "A little extra, but you're not fat. You're not skinny, but I don't like skinny men."
     I asked my mother if she thought I was fat.
     "No, I don't think you look fat," she said. "You are very well shaped."
     I asked Dr. George Lesmes of Northeastern Illinois University's Human Performance Laboratory if he thought I was fat.
     He said nothing, but arranged for me to take a series of fitness evaluation tests that would answer the question, not with opinions, but with cold, unlying numbers.
     "The thing that is important for people who are looking to change their lifestyles is feedback," Lesmes said. "There's no better feedback than numbers. If I can say to you in May your oxygen capacity is 3, and show in July it's up to 3 1/2, that shows progress and is good for motivation."
     The American College of Sports Medicine recommends that individuals over 35 take a fitness evaluation test, not only to gauge any improvement that might come from an exercise and diet regimen, but to make sure they don't have any cardiac problems that might be aggravated by strenuous exercise.
     Before the test, a lab assistant went over a lengthy form that stated, in essence, that I realized I might drop dead at any time during testing and, should that happen, there would be no hard feelings between us. I signed, changed into sweats, and soon found myself sitting on an examination table.
     The first test, a stretching test, was simple. Sitting with my legs on the table, I stretched forward and, arms straining, reached as far as I could past my toes. Piece of cake. I scored a 12 and, not knowing that meant I had the flexibility of uncooked spaghetti, felt quite good about it.
     Next, electrodes — plastic discs with small metal nubs in the middle — were attached to my chest. Hairy men, such as myself, might be a bit surprised to realize that the spots where the electrodes are to be attached must first be shaved. I certainly was surprised, if not horrified. I picked forlornly at the clumps of hair as they fell over the table.
     "Do you want me to save it?" the lab assistant asked. She told me that Evanston firemen, who take the test each year, say it grows back and, at worst, itches for a while. I comforted myself with the thought that if burly firemen allow themselves to go through this, so could I.
     She handed me what looked like a sock made out of netting and told me to slip it on to hold the wires in place. I took the sock and examined it dubiously.
     "This fit people much, much larger than you," she said and, after a bit of struggle, I slipped the netting over my torso.
     Electrodes now held in place by the netting sock, I shuffled over to a treadmill, dragging an electrocardiogram machine behind me.
     Running on the treadmill is the part where, if you're going to have a heart attack, you do. I don't know why, but I had pictured a leisurely jog, trotting along to the bips and bleeps of heart machines.
     What I got was a mad, exhausting dash. Every three minutes they increased the speed and the angle of the treadmill. After seven minutes or so my personality shrank away and I was reduced to an unthinking bundle of flailing muscles and gasping lungs, staggering instinctively forward as the white coat on my right took my pulse, the white coat on my left jacked up the treadmill, the third white coat watched the monitor and the fourth coat, a man — the same man who told me not to lean so heavily on the railings - added insult to injury by jamming a nose clip over my nose and having me breathe through what looked like a hairdryer hose.
     The purpose of the test is to put as much strain as possible on the heart, to see how it reacts. Later, I learned my heart redlined at 188 beats per minute. My first question, after I had given up, been helped off the treadmill and lay in a panting, sweating heap on an examination table, was: If people are in bad shape, why put them through this? Isn't having a heart attack on the treadmill under close scrutiny just as bad as having a heart attack running around a track somewhere?
     "Sure, but running real hard on the treadmill, we'll be able to monitor you with the best equipment possible," Lesmes said. "We'll also be able to identify at what point in your exercise problems occur. Then we can sit down with you and make sure we design an exercise program that will benefit you without putting you at risk, or getting to that point where problems occur."
     Lesmes went on to explain that, for instance, if the EKG showed that my heart started to do the tango at 160 beats per minute, they would design an exercise program where I would be able to approach my limit without overstraining my heart.
     The body fat analysis started simply enough. I sat next to a machine called a spirometer and expelled as much air as I could into a tube. My efforts were displayed by a large, Plexiglas cylinder and recorded on a cylindrical graph. Urged on by the cheerleading of the lab assistant, it was rather fun, like a game one might find at a state fair.
     The purpose of this test was to find out how much air was in my lungs so that in the next test, the hydrostatic weighing, the reading would not be thrown off by excess air.
     Hydrostatic weighing was not so much physically taxing as it is psychologically icky. I had to climb into a square metal tank filled with warm water, and sit on a harnesslike thing attached to a scale. Once on the harness I had to dip my head below the water, blow all the air out of my lungs, and wait until the assistant took a reading.
     While I was showering and getting back into my street clothes, the data was compiled into a small booklet, which we then reviewed. The good news was that my heart was "strong," which meant that it was quick to recover its "resting" rate after exercise and did not change rates in rapid jumps, but gradually.
     The news quickly got worse. My oxygen consumption was average, flexibility fair, lung flexibility good. The real knife-twister was body fat: 23 percent. According to their table titled "Normal Values of Percentage Body Fat for the Average American Population," I had the body fat of a 47-year-old man, which I suppose would be fine if I were 47, and not 26.
     They calculated my ideal weight (170 pounds) and — perhaps on the assumption that I was stupid as well as fat and couldn't do the math myself, perhaps just to grind my face in it — they calculated how many pounds I would need to lose to get to that ideal weight.
     Then we then went over the mysteries of calorie intake, types of exercise and importance of warm-ups.
     "We don't want to just tell you you're fat," said Diane Reynolds, a graduate assistant. "We want to work with you to reach a goal."
     My goal at that point was lunch, and, after going on a tour of the gym that people who pay $65 for the test are free to use, I conducted a test of my own, which involved measuring my response to a big bowl of teriyaki chicken. I passed.

         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 7, 1987

Dousing flag burning is a step toward drowning freedom of speech

     

     Almost exactly 60 years ago, on Aug. 2, 1965, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory led protesters on a five-mile march from Chicago City Hall toward 3536 S. Lowe, the home of mayor Richard J. Daley.
     They chanted "Ben Willis must go, snake Daley also" — Willis was the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, notorious for jamming Black students into "Willis wagons," classrooms held in trailers, a solution to overcrowding not found in white schools.
     They were met by a mob of several hundred Bridgeport residents, who poured out of their homes, shouting racist slurs, hurling rocks and eggs. The police ordered the marchers to disperse and, when they didn't obey, arrested 65 peaceful marchers, charging them with disorderly conduct.
     If I had arrested the crowd, I would have had a riot on my hands," explained Capt. Howard Pierson, commander of the Deering police station.
     The Illinois Supreme Court upheld their disorderly conduct convictions. But the U.S. Supreme Court overturned them, ruling, in Gregory v. City of Chicago, that our constitutional rights cannot be shouted down in what a University of Chicago law professor had called "a heckler's veto."
     If our First Amendment rights were voided whenever someone else violently objected — or could be constrained by the spot decision of a cop on the beat — then none of us would have free speech.
     The heckler's veto is back, as a loophole in an executive order, "Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag," signed Monday by President Donald Trump. It acknowledges that the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning is protected speech, then tries to skip around it this way:
     "Burning this representation of America may incite violence and riot," the order notes. Perhaps that's only acceptable when mobs are being let loose on the Capitol.
     Burning a flag is clearly free speech. Perhaps this is best illustrated by citing another legal passage: the United States Flag Code, adopted by the National Flag Conference in Washington DC in 1923, and amended by Congress.
     Specifically Section 8, "Respect for the Flag." Line K: "The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning."
     Not only is burning the flag permitted, it's preferred, as the most desirable, respectful way to dispose of old flags.
     Underline respectful. It isn't the burning that's the problem. The FBI isn't going to burst into American Legion halls — the group collects old flags for disposal — and arrest vets in their watch caps.

To continue reading, click here.

Pogo no go

      Random thoughts bubble out of nowhere.

      Such as:

     Are pogo-sticks fun?

     Is there anybody out there who has pleasant memories of an hour — or a minute — spent entertaining yourself with a pogo stick? 

     Because I remember encountering them as a child, and giving them a try. Maybe I was too heavy. But they didn't spring up the way they were supposed to. The pogo stick rider tended to fall over. And abandon the effort very quickly, if one were smart. 

     Not sure what prompted the pogo stick thought. Some chaotic firing of neurons. The question certainly would have never seen the light of day. But shortly after I had it, I was walking down the block, and saw this pair of pogo sticks set out for the trash. No, I didn't try them. Or take them. Or knock on the door and pose my question to their former owner. 

      Coincidence, surely. What else could it be? I didn't summon the sticks up. It wasn't foreshadowing. Not augury. The linear universe glancing ahead, warning me through telepathy of the approach of discarded pogo sticks.

     But it seemed one of those odd coincidences that some consider fate. You contemplate pogo sticks. And here they are in the living world. I should ponder a bag of money next.

     Pogo sticks are a reminder that all the hand-wringing over phones and video games and such. Do you remember how kids passed the time? We twiddled our thumbs — boy, I bet more than one minor pundit has stretched that observation into an entire column. We bounced a tennis ball against the garage. We folded newspapers into boats. And I suppose some bounced on pogo sticks, or tried to. 

     The history of the toy is complicated, and while on another day I might dive in with a whoop, I think I'll shield you from the minutia on this one, the competing claims as to who first invented it and where "pogo" comes from. We don't have to plunge down every rathole, right? All you need to know is that it was a craze in the 1920s, with Ziegfeld Follies presenting chorus girls on pogo sticks, and came back in the 21st century as a kind of extreme sport.

     I don't want to let my own experience blind me. But I just can't imagine the things being fun. Correct me if I'm wrong. 

New novel reopens cold case death of Kup's daughter

     Celebrity is the cheapest coin, the shakiest currency. Debased to begin with, it loses value quickly. Today’s Taylor Swift becomes tomorrow’s Taylor Dayne. Sound impossible? It’s not; it’s inevitable.
     The stars themselves are burdened by fame’s presence, then tormented by its absence.
     “You used to be big,” Norma Desmond is told in "Sunset Boulevard." It is not a compliment.
     The rest of us ordinary folk hoard the briefest encounter with celebrity, our personal cache of fool’s gold. I catch myself tossing a few chips on the table, bragging how Barack Obama once called me on the phone to complain about a column, how I chatted on TV with Oprah Winfrey and sat in the Bulls locker room, talking with Michael Jordan. I used to be big.
     But it fools no one, not even myself. "Self-praise is self-debasement,” as Cervantes writes. These flashes mean close to nothing, three pebbles to suck on in the long forced march through the desert of non-entity.
     Now Irv Kupcinet, he was truly big, a star in his own right. The columnist shared tidbits of the famous we all hunger to read, sparkling in their reflected glow. He didn’t vanish, but left behind a quite-good statue on Wacker Drive, a sign on the Wabash Avenue bridge, and fading memories of those like myself who knew him.
     The Kup story I like to tell is that he once parked his Cadillac on Wacker Drive in front of the Lyric Opera before a performance. Lincoln Towing promptly hauled it away. Back at their yard, they ran the plates, realized whose car they had taken, and brought it back before the final curtain. That’s power.
     Just as the past isn’t past, the dead don’t stay dead. There is Kup, his wife, Essee, their daughter, Karyn, the whole Sun-Times circa 1962, the rock upon which Peter Orner builds his new novel, “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter.”
     Orner takes a footnote in Chicago history — on Nov. 30, 1963, a week after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Karyn Kupcinet, who everyone called “Cookie,” was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment. Foul play was suspected but never proved.
     The subplot involves an English professor who may or may not resemble Orner, a native of Highland Park who now chairs the English and creative writing programs at Dartmouth. Orner is an elegant writer who has his character's low-rent milieu down cold:
     “I hunker in my windowless cube at Loyola ... maybe at this point an English department is lucky to be housed at all. Our enrollments are in the toilet. This office has a Soviet Brezhnev-era feel. A solid kind of nowhere. It’s very quiet. Aside from the medievalist across the hall, who turns up every once in a while, nobody comes in to work anymore. Coming into work is a relic, an abandoned social practice.”
     “A Solid Kind of Nowhere” — I might have to swipe that as my autobiography title.

To continue reading, click here.