Mailbag

   

     Not a ton of reader reaction to Monday's column on the war in Iran. Not surprising. Protracted historical metaphors might be useful, but do not set the blood aflame. Probably a good thing. How many self-appointed patriots leaping to defend newly-launched carnage, scraping together indignation from the freshly-spilt blood of those put into harm's way, do you want to indulge?

Hi Neil-
     With all our brave military heros [sic] now serving in Iran and all over the world for our freedom; I was disappointed to read your page 2 Top News Article. It appears to divide the country; and/or, support the division of our country for political reasons. 

     Greg V.
     Downers Grove, Illinois

     There's no point in answering something like that. But the day was young, and sometimes I can't help myself:

Greg:
     Our soldiers aren't in Iran, yet — in case facts still matter. Though I imagine that's coming. As for dividing the country, it's already divided — actually, not even. Only a quarter of Americans support Trump's war. What disappoints you is to see the division reported. Don't worry, if your tyrant has his way, with the help of people such as yourself, that won't happen anymore. Thanks for writing.

     NS

     Another reader complimented Monday's column and ended his email, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," which I recognized as the title of the Wilfred Owen poem about a gas attack in World War I, and dimly remembered writing a blog post about it.
     I called up the 2013 post, after a far different president, Barack Obama, was considering approaching Congress to ask for permission to attack Syria after Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people — the red line Obama said they mustn't cross. Our president ended up dithering; he didn't order those air strikes, at least not in 2013. He did, a year later,  for all the good it did. Not much — over half a million Syrians died between 2011 and 2021. I wonder how many Iranians will die in this adventure.

     It troubled me, a little, to see some of the same thoughts in Monday's column as were expressed in 2013 — apparently, when America charges into war, I automatically think of World War I, that monument to pointless slaughter.
     There are worse go-to moves, and 13 years is a long time. Few readers, I imagine, rattle their newspapers and think, "Heyyy, I read this metaphor in 2013!" Actually, few readers have physical newspapers to rattle. But still. You don't want to be a one-trick pony. "That Steinberg, he's really good at comparing whatever's happening now to World War I. That's his speciality of the house."

    Oh well, there will be plenty of opportunities to develop fresh approaches to this war. It doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. World War I lasted four years.

War is much easier to enter than to exit

 

     America has fought many wars. And built many war memorials.
     Wandering around Washington, D.C., I made a point to stop by the biggies — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, No. 1 in my book, for breaking war's symbolic stranglehold on imagined glory. A black granite gash in the earth featuring not eagles but the names of the 58,318 American dead.
     The Korean War Veterans Memorial, a night patrol of 19 stainless steel figures, in ponchos against the cold rain, faces etched with stress and fatigue, frozen in mid-stride. Even the sprawling, soulless World War II Memorial.
     The World War I Memorial wasn't on my radar. Until I found myself next to it, at the corner of 15th and Pennsylvania Avenue. A few extra steps, and there was Sabin Howard's epic sculpture "A Soldier's Journey." Starting with a doughboy taking leave of his wife and daughter, charging into combat, men around him killed, wounded, with a homecoming at the end.
     World War I is a stark reminder of the greasy slope of war — what started with an assassinated Austrian archduke exploded into fighting across the globe, ending 31 years later — historians consider World War II an extension of World War I, after a 21-year intermission to raise a new generation of cannon fodder.
     War between the United States and Iran commenced Saturday. It'll end... nobody knows, of course. We assume it'll be a few tightly contained airstrikes, like last summer.
     But then war always seems quick, at the outset, with the boys hurrahing down to the recruiting office to sign up, worried the action will be over before Christmas. The Russians, don't forget, rolled into Ukraine four years ago, expecting to be in Kyiv in a few days. They're still fighting, having lost an estimated 200,000 men.
     When World War I broke out in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, promised not to get involved. "He kept us out of war" was his re-election slogan in 1916. "No new wars," Donald Trump echoed in 2024.
     Both promises worked. Both were broken. Both with reason. Iran is the worst sponsor of international terrorism — Hamas could have never pulled off the Oct. 7 attacks without Iran's enthusiastic backing — making it impossible not to welcome the elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "It's been mass terror, and we're not going to put up with it any longer," Trump said.
     You go, Mr. President. Add it to the list of Trump successes, along with elimination of the penny. Whether that counterbalances scuttling voting rights, well, you decide.
     We're attacking Iran now... why exactly? To destroy its capacity to produce nuclear weapons? Sounds laudable. But also very... familiar. Didn't we just do that?
     “A spectacular military success” Trump said after the strikes last July. “Iran’s key enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
     "Totally, again, obliterated," Trump said Saturday. Maybe it'll stick this time. We're also calling for regime change. That seems naive — how well did that work in Afghanistan? Or to return to World War I: remember the regime Germany ended up with after Versailles. We liked the Nazis even less.

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Flashback 2012: Israel vs. Iran war off, for the moment, maybe

    

           Double bull stone capital from Persepolis (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)

     Not to make you guys feel like second class citizens or anything. But I flopped my fingers on the keyboard Satuday, to address this war we find ourselves in, and quickly thought, "You know ... this belongs in the paper."

     When my next column runs. Monday. Leaving you on Sunday high and dry. Though this Iranian mess did not come from nowhere, and glancing into the vault, I see many columns that lay out the situation we're in, more or less precisely. This one has the added bonus of neatly explaining what I — if no one else — has felt forever about the Palestinian situation.

     Everybody says the press never reports any good news. But maybe the press does report good news, but when it does, the public simply ignores it.
     For instance. This week, the New York Times reported some very good news: that the war Israel and Iran — and, maybe, the U.S. and the rest of the world — seemed hurtling inexorably toward for the past year may not be so inevitable after all.
     “A series of factors,” the paper says, “for now, argue against a conflict.” Whew.
     You already know the particulars — Iran is building a nuclear weapons program while pretending it’s a nuclear energy program, yet still rattling its saber and ranting about the eradication of Israel. A nation which, given its history of other countries trying to destroy it with deeds not words, has a habit of not just sitting around waiting for doom to arrive — very un-Jewish of them in that regard — so has been making noise that it will strike Iran first, if need be.
      Now, the Times says, tough economic sanctions have caught Iran’s attention so that they appear to be negotiating in quasi-good faith, as opposed to the playing-for-time-until-we-make-our-bomb talks of the past.
     That’s good news. If true.
     Meanwhile, former and current members of the Israeli military have gone public saying, in essence, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are nuts pushing for an unnecessary war.
     We should be overjoyed that a war is being averted ( if it is being averted). It shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, that people barely notice when a war is avoided since, heck, we barely notice the wars we’re still fighting ( Sigh. Really? OK, Afghanistan, remember?)
     A preemptive strike based on Iranian bluster and threats never struck me as a good idea. Then again, those missiles aren’t pointed at me. A reminder that there are two distinct camps among Jewish Americans when it comes to evaluating Israel. To the Trust Israel Always camp — older Jews, fervent Zionists, Standard Club members, those not prone to critical thinking — the idea is, these are the guys who raided Entebbe and whupped the behinds of their Arab foes for decades. They know what they’re doing.
      And having been raised in the afterglow of 1967 triumph, that’s a comfortable spot, and I can understand wanting to nestle there.
      I can even argue the case, a little. It goes like this: The world didn’t like Jews before — we were a menacing, unacceptable force of evil back when we were a bunch of bearded old guys studying Talmud and selling rags in rural shtetls across Poland. So naturally, now that the Jews have a nation with an army, stop the presses: They still don’t like us, even more, with new reasons added to the old.
      And yet. Some of those reasons just don’t brush easily off the table, no matter how you try to wipe them away. There is the growing tendency of the leadership to stray further and further right, coddling ultra Orthodox zealots, divine right settlers and militants.
     I have a habit I call “looking at the current facts.” Which, now that war with Iran doesn’t seem to be happening this week, click back to Israel’s perennial Problem No. 1: controlling the lives of four million stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Yes, the Palestinians’ leaders screwed them in the past. Yes, they seem to use any freedom given them to lob rockets blindly into Israel. But they’re still there, and the question remains: What’s to be done now?
      The popular Palestinian solution — the Jews shrug and wander off stage and we get the country back — is not helpful, a pipe dream, the same the-Jews-disappear-and-then-life-is-swell solution that Jews have been offered for a thousand years. Hope you don’t mind if we don’t snap at that one.
     But the current Israeli answer — the status quo goes on forever while Israel slowly absorbs more occupied land, condensing the Palestinians into a smaller and smaller ball until, poof, they magically disappear — seems equally unrealistic, because “forever” doesn’t seem an option, though at 45 years, we’re on our way. The Iranian crisis is cooling, maybe, for now, but there will certainly be another.
     Whenever this issue comes up, all sides grab at the past and start waving the parts that flatter them. That’s an endless sinkhole, one I try to avoid by asking, “What next?”
     Israel is there. It isn’t going away, particularly if Iran’s fingers are truly pried off the bomb, for the moment. The Palestinians are also still there, 4 million and growing. What happens next? Nobody has a clue.
     I keep returning to the long journey of the Jews. They didn’t sit down by the waters of Babylon and weep, remembering Zion, hoping that someday they’d get to enslave somebody too. That can’t be how the story ends.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 2, 2012

Gotcha

       
     So I bought a new phone a week ago Monday. I almost wrote "cell phone" but realized I come off as old enough without rubbing anybody's face in it. I had to buy it — the old phone, an Apple iPhone 12, wouldn't load software updates, no matter how many large attachments and apps I tossed over the side, like a balloonist flinging away ballast. 

     An iPhone 17, if you must know, through a process of extraordinary length and tedium. Not the 6.8 inch pro, but the smaller, 6.3 inch version. That was my central priority — I wanted the same size. Consistency is a big value to me at this point. I might not be able to keep the country from sliding into autocracy. But I can keep my phone from morphing into something huge and heavy. Same size, more or less, same color, black. I worried over the .2 inch increase, but decided it was acceptable. 

    This is a wild abbreviation of hours of study and consideration, over months. How much capacity? I opted for the 512 GB. Do I need the service plan? Generally no. But my wife says ... I started to summarize and quickly realized I was boring myself.

     Credit to Apple — buying it was easy and intuitive, leaving aside the stress and indecision I brought to the process myself. The thing arrived the next day via Fedex. I placed my phones together, migrated my data — easy as pie —  and then had to prepare my old phone to trade in. It was complicated — I had to watch a video or two — but eventually returned wiped it clean, both of information and fingerprints — wiping the screen, using Windex, actually thinking, "Clean the old gal up to meet her parents back at Apple." I thanked the black oblong for its service, packed it up in the little cardboard folder they'd sent and shipped it off, itself a complicated, three part process that involved a) going to the Fedex store or, rather, where the Fedex store had been last time I needed it. Being redirected by a sign at the shuttered store to the new location, b) being told, there, that the label on the parcel in my hand was intended by folks more observant than myself for UPS, not FedEx, and, c) finally, heading to the UPS store (you see why I'm trying to abbreviate this process? Every step has four substeps and three corrections).
     A few days after that Apple wrote me a stern note under the heading, "Action needed to continue your trade in." Despite my best efforts, I had not, apparently, turned off Find My Phone, a system to locating stray devices. Before I got my $120 trade in, I must do that, another dive into a rabbit hole that involved, I kid you not, a 24 hour security waiting period, as if it were some dramatic step, a gun purchase or a divorce.
     I finally did it, or at least thought I did it. No big "Success!" screen comes up. The thing to do once that was accomplished was to wait — waiting, like shutting up, an art form I struggle to master — until Apple realized the Find My ... feature had been shut off and alerted me that my 120 bucks was en route. But patience is the first victim of technology. And I wanted it done. So I jumped into the Apple chat support and, after a 20 minute conversation that I should have preserved. for donation to some future museum of head-on-a-board frustration, I was reassured by some AI chatbot that the check was indeed in the mail, so to speak, and I'd be notified in three to five business days.     

     Satisfied, I went about my business, or tried to. Then this appeared.

     There was something in that tone. The "need" part of the message, like bad news from your spouse. "Honey, we need to talk..." I almost overlooked that nothing was being delivered, or nothing I knew of. I phoned, as instructed, went through a variety of shells and messages without actually getting anywhere, realized I was wasting yet more time, and gave up and went about my business, or tried to. 
    The next day, I got this.

    Oh, for Pete's sake, I thought. What now? Had I inadvertently changed my birth date trying to shut off the Find My feature? I clicked on the Apple Support link. Ba-boom:

    It was a trap, set by my own office, that I had blundered into, softened up by the gantlet Apple had already put me through, buying a new phone and trading in an old one. You know, they used to give us phones. Call us to a room and hand out a box, like Christmas. I didn't care anything about the phones, then. They were free, to me anyway, a benediction that forgave all sins. Now, not only am I required to buy my own phone but if, loggy from the ordeal, I can find it's not a link, but the office in disguise, ready to bite my straying finger.

       I was immediately enrolled in one of those generic security seminars that pelt us like rain and I would avoid if I only could. Hoisted with my own petard. Perhaps also as a result, perhaps coincidentally — who can tell anymore? — perhaps because now my tech judgment was suspect, I was also logged out of the paper's email system, and could not log in, because my new phone isn't set up with its One Login Connect security feature. I felt like I was being made to sit on the red stool, for being careless, and ended up calling our tech support, which allowed me to at least talk to an actual person, and apologize for clicking on the poisoned link. He didn't seem to take it personally. My OneLogin bona fides were quickly established.
     I planned to illustrate this item with a photo of a bird, taken with what I assume is the vastly-improved Zoom feature on my new iPhone17. Only I haven't been outside enough to see a bird. Because I've been inside. Futzing around with this tech shit. I decided to describe the tiresome process yesterday, without realizing just how tiresome it would be to relate. But it's 4:46 a.m. Saturday — I didn't get this written yesterday because we had a big pizza party so family could ogle the new granddaughter, radiating cuteness like a new sun. So some life is still happening, around the tech hassles.  We did go for a long walk out in the beautiful weather yesterday afternoon. Sad that I would choose to describe this phony inside process instead of that lovely outdoor stroll . Another wrong decision. Carpe diem. 

The president, the lies and the cannulated cow

 

     The beauty of getting out into the world, meeting new people and seeing new stuff, is two-fold. First, you learn new information, from the new people you talk to and the new stuff you see. Learning new things is fun.
     And second, you then can apply this new knowledge, making all sorts of interesting connections.
     For instance, struggling to articulate the general numbness of watching President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday, I remembered a cannulated cow seen at Chicago's High School for Agriculture Sciences in Mount Greenwood (What? You didn't know about either cannulated cows or the ag high school? Well, I'm happy to be the one to tell you.)
     MAGA types, who don't seem at all keen on either new people or new ideas, imagine liberals in some kind of pearl-clutching agony, or door-jamb-gnawing fury. But truly, nearly two hours of the State of the Union speech left me mostly bored. We've heard all this before, many times, from the moment candidate Trump descended that escalator in his monstrous brass and orange stone lobby.
     "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
     Tuesday was more of the same. When he wasn't lying about the economy or gaslighting — for example, the shameless fraud declaring war on fraud — Trump was grinding over the threat of immigrants. Both criminals and bad drivers. That's where I thought of the cannulated cow. How cows digest their food is important to the dairy industry, and one way to keep tabs is to surgically implant a round window into the side of a cow. Students and scientists look through the window, into the cow's stomach, and watch the half-digested mash sloshing around.
     That was the State of the Union speech. The same well-chewed slop of fear, hatred, lies, prejudice, nationalism and enormous self-regard that Trump has been spewing for years.
      One of the many dangers of this moment is exhaustion. The liars lie nonstop, while those familiar with the truth get tired of repeating ourselves, bloodying our fingers scratching at that brick wall.
     Yet scratch we must. So forgive me for belaboring the obvious for the benefit of — well, I'm not sure who at this point. Either you understood long ago or you never will. Yet truth will out.
     The current war on immigrants is not only morally and economically wrong, but entirely based on lies — haters are cowards, and rather than just admit they're surrendering to fear (of new people and new things) they slur the object of their fixation. They don't hate immigrants because immigrants are criminals; they tar them as criminals because they hate them.

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Out on the stoop

 

     Words are funny things. As you well know. I began re-reading Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" Wednesday and was struck by the magnificent economy of a certain phrase. The hero, Neil Klugman, is driving from his home in Newark, New Jersey to visit a young woman living in its leafy suburbs, noting as he did the "houses where no one sat on stoops." A lot of social history packed into seven words.
     He doesn't say whether that is good or bad. I suppose the answer depends where you happen to be living. Suburbanites might envy the cohesion of those nosy neighbors, gossiping on the steps, while city dwellers were keen to escape the crowded city, with its prying stoop perchers monitoring your movements, another hassle to be escaped, along with smells in the hallways and crashing garbage cans. 
     In the chapter on noise in my "Alphabet of Modern Annoyances," I studied New York's 1929 survey of city noise complaints, finding much to be nostalgic about:

     Despite the familiarity of most noise annoyances listed in the survey ("roistering whoopee parties" was my favorite) other irritants have ceased to be considered problems, from "the noises from milk wagons and pie trucks to "newsboys' cries" to "youths and maidens group on front stoops sing[ing] in close harmony at unreasonable hours of the night," an image that makes one positively pine for the past.

     A "stoop," of course, is the stairs leading from a front door to the street. I wondered about its etymology — the word sounds Dutch, though that might be because of eating too many stroopwafels on airplanes. I imagine some core meaning about downward motion, as the verbal form, such as "She Stoops to Conquer." 

     But which sense came first? The stairs or the descent?

     The Oxford English Dictionary gives "Stoop" a full page, plus, starting by tying the word to Late Middle English and batting away my cookie-stoked theory. "It is doubtful whether the word has any connection with MLG. and early mod. Du. stolpe." "MLG" being middle low German, and you can figure out the rest.

     The bending usage is the oldest, back to 1571, while the architectural meaning shows up two centuries later, to describe "An uncovered platform before the entrance of a house, raised, and approached by means of steps. Sometimes incorrectly used for porch or veranda." The OED considers the word an American and Canadian coinage.

     The OED bringing up such synonyms as porch and veranda sent me scurrying to one of my least-used dictionaries, Webster's 1942 Dictionary of Synonyms, which goes into the weeds regarding the fine distinctions between similar words. It disputes the OED's doubts about the word origin, suggesting it comes, not from Holland, but from Dutch New Amsterdam: "Stoop, which is of Dutch origin, was originally used in and around New York City and is now used elsewhere to designate a small porch, flanked by seats of benches at the entrance to a house; it is now also applied to any platform at the entrance to a house, which one ascends by a step or two."

     While writing the above, a line from Shakespeare floated into mind. "Fetch me a stoup of wine," Sir Tony Belch commands in "Twelfth Night." (Actually, he says, "Marian, I say! A stoup of wine!" I had it mixed up with Richard III's "Give me a bowl of wine. I have not that alacrity of spirit Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have." Who does nowadays?)

     Where does "stoup," with a U, fit in? Back to the OED...

     Ah, here is the Dutch — specifically, Middle Dutch — I detected, older than them all, back to the 14th century to describe "a pail or bucket" now limited to the Scots and, of course, Shakespeare, quoting that and John Galt's 1822 satiric novel, "The Provost" — "Even lasses were fleeing to and fro, like water nymphs with urns, having stoups and pails in their hands."

    That seemed a lovely image to leave you with — it makes sense that a guy like Sir Belch would ask for a pail of wine — but thoroughness demanded I press on, finding a second OED definition, narrowing our pail into "a drinking-vessel, of varying dimensions; a cup, flagon, tankard."

     That's what Belch wanted: a cup of wine. No wonder people spurn the fact-based world. It does have a way of spilling the wind from the billowing sails of our fancy.

Pet surrenders surge in hard times — the right way and the wrong way

Kaye Larsen Olloway at Fat Cat Rescue, 2023.

 

     The black Kia rolled up shortly before midnight to Fat Cat Rescue, a 7-acre haven for feral cats in Wadsworth that readers might remember me visiting in the summer of 2023.
     It certainly was not summer now, but late January and bitterly cold.
     A couple got out of the car. You see them on security camera footage, jiggling locked door handles. They notice the doggie door, remove a cat from the car, push it through the door, then speed off.
     Being a cat, however, the animal didn't stay where it was put. She ran back outside, into the freezing weather, joined by two more cats dropped off by the same couple.
     The volunteers who keep Fat Cat humming eventually corralled the three cats, one badly hurt by frostbite. Then they appealed to me.
     "We need your help please," Michelle Andrich, a volunteer, wrote. "Two-part help."
     The first part was to share photos of the couple dropping off the cats and their car in the hope that "someone will recognize them and turn them in. ... There should be consequences for their actions."
     Pass. In the annals of unpunished crime, dropping off cats at a shelter doesn't cry out for justice. The couple didn't know any better, which leads to Fat Cat's second request.
     "There are proper ways for a pet owner to surrender their pets," Andrich said. Would I help "educate or enlighten people on proper ways to surrender your pet"?
     Well, I can try. Whether they actually get enlightened is on them.
     People give up their animals for a variety of reasons — they move, lose jobs, can no longer afford their upkeep. Pets get sick, or their owners do.
     What should you do if you can no longer care for an animal?
     Start by planning ahead, if possible.
     "Don't wait until the last minute," said Kaye Larsen Olloway, who runs Fat Cat and suggests allowing at least a month to find your pet a home. "If you know you're moving out, don't wait until the night before to make arrangements for the pet. Give us a chance to make arrangements. We have a list of 20 other rescues we can contact."
     Or reach out to Chicago Animal Care and Control.
     "Our staff will help you," said Armando Tejeda, public information officer at the city department. "You don't have to do this alone. Resources exist."

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