If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

      I subscribe to the Washington Post. Because it is an excellent newspaper. So much so that, for years, when Amazon would come under fire for some lapse — employees collapsing in sweltering warehouses, or forced to wear adult diapers because they weren't permitted bathroom breaks — I'd dilute my contempt for the company by thinking, "Well, at least Jeff Bezos funds the Washington Post."
    Not complete forgiveness. But partial mitigation.
    Yes, when Bezos refused to endorse Kamala Harris, and showed up at Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump's ring, I was alarmed, and considered cancelling my subscription. But the Post is still an important news source. Once the snowball of rationalization starts rolling downhill, it grows and grows.

     Then at the end of February Bezos announced that the newspaper's editorials would now be exclusively "in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Which is akin to the paper announcing in 1938 that its editorials would emphasize two main values: the need for people in the Sudetenland to be reunited with their German brethren, and the importance of Japan having access to Southeast Asian oil. In essence, the paper would now climb on a chair, bang two garbage can lids together and shout "Hurrah for Trump!" on its editorial pages.

     Honestly, I was taken aback. But still kept my subscription. Out of habit at this point.

     Bezos was joined by others — Tim Cook, from Apple. And of course Elon Musk, who stepped away from running X, nee Twitter, and SpaceX, and being the richest man in the world, to become Trump's right hand man.  Wielding a chainsaw — literally and figuratively — carving apart the government that we who are not billionaires so often rely upon to keep our lives from going down the toilet. I know that I soon will be leaning heavily upon the Social Security system that I have paid my hard-earned money into since I was 16 years old and scooping ice cream at Barnhill's in Berea. How will I live after the cash I expect from Social Security is diverted into the already bulging pockets of billionaires?
    Nor am I alone. You don't need me to tell you what a confusing, frightening time this has been, with entire offices of government shorn away while Trump tries to trash one Constitutional right after another by executive order. Here birthright citizenship, there 20 million Americans cut from the voting rolls by ginning up artificial barriers for them to clear on their way to the ballot box. The First Amendment will be next.
    Friends ask me how to resist. What small, ridiculous symbolic act they can perform to ... what? Register their displeasure in the great cosmic record keeper in the sky? Utter a bleat of unease as we all are stampeded over a cliff by our mad shepherds? Raising our voices. If only the czar knew. "I've got the solution, Natasha — we will inform him of our displeasure, through the sincerity of our protest!"

    In your dreams.
    Then clarity came to me. Of course. If you can't beat Trump, join him. Everyone else has. Bezos. Cook, Musk. Better men than I. More successful men. They obviously know something I don't. I may never be privy to their secret, successful thoughts. But I can emulate their actions. Indeed, I must.  

     So wear the red hat, if that will please him. And if you can, mouth the slogans too. Isn't that how Winston Smith ends up at the end of "1984." He loves Big Brother. Love Donald Trump. It's possible, right? It must be. Look how many people do it. Half the country, almost. Half the Congress, by a whisker.
     I mean, the man has done good things, right? Fast-tracking the COVID vaccine. You have to give him that. Saved millions of lives. And moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. That showed those Palestinians! His whole feint to cleanse them from Gaza and turn the territory into some kind of opulent resort. Is that really madness? Or genius? It'll be genius if it works, and as for the Palestinians, well, better off relocated to Jordan than slaughtered by the Israelis. 
    I could go on. Getting rid of the penny — that was a frustration of mine for years.  Trump axed it in a stroke.  Annex Greenland — why not? All the cool superpowers are doing it. China snarls like a junkyard dog, straining to sink its teeth into Taiwan, Russia gobbles up Ukraine. Greenland has all the earmarks of the ideal victim — nearby, defenseless, already cringing, waiting to be kicked.
    Yes, certain actions of Trump's are ... problematic. Shit-canning science by throttling the National Institutes of Health, for instance, and yanking back federal funding for universities that permitted overly-enthusiastic pro-Palestinian protests. But doesn't science typically thrive under some kind of oppression? I mean, look at Galileo. The Inquisition of the Catholic Church was in full swing in 1633, and still Galileo still used his telescope to gather evidence supporting the Copernican heresy of the earth revolving around the sun. What a great moment in the history of science, when the instruments of torture set out before the great astronomer. "E pur si muove," Galileo said. "And yet it moves."
     Okay, okay. That probably never really happened. But isn't that yet another gift that Donald Trump gives us? The gift of wonderment, of being able to embellish a world which, let's be honest, is often just too pedestrian and bland for our purposes? To be freed from the chains of fact, from the constant concern of did this happen or did that happen or does this word mean this or that, or is this action legal under the Constitution? Sweep all that bother away and just trust him to know what's best for us.
     It feels good, right? Freeing. After years of being in the losing opposition, that's a mighty appealing thought. To be on the winning side, for once. And don't Democrats seem to know it? Just by the way they sulk and scratch themselves, staring at their thumbs while the nation is terraforned into a dictatorship before their very, unblinking eyes? Who wants to be on their team anymore, mealy-mouthed little cowards without the courage of their own convictions. Story of their lives, losers who sat on their hands while their better qualified candidate lost an election — ooo, her laugh annoys us, we can't vote for her! — and are now sulking in a corner while the country is torn apart and rebuilt as a totalitarian state. 
     I for one am sick of it. So a change of course. There's no price of entry, no charges of hypocrisy. Half of Trump's cabinet are men who in 2016 were declaring him the greatest threat to the Republican Party since John Wilkes Booth. Nobody is so rude as to clap the Secretary of State on the shoulder and ask him what happened to all that "Little Marco" business. If anyone did, he would look them square in the eye and tell them that Donald Trump is a just and forgiving master, and once you bend the knee, the past is forgotten, at least until you cross him in any way or just aren't useful anymore.
     A decade's worth of columns, slandering Trump? I abjure them and apologize and — poof! — they are gone. Not really written by me. Mislabeled by balky software. Or if they were written by me — and who can be certain of anything anymore? — they are tissues of error created before I'd seen the light and fully understood the scope and majesty of the man. Now fluttered away on the wind, vanished. They never existed. We are living in the new world now. Times change, and we change. with them. 

    So all hail Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, gloria mundi in excelsis. I'm only sorry it took me this long. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I have seen the light. It's a beautiful thing. Come join me. Because those of us who dwell in truth — and truth is whatever Trump says it is, today — we hate to be alone. Or even questioned. Really. Our confidence is that great that any form of dissension burns like thermite. You see how easy it is to shed the past and face the future, boldly, to win through surrender. Join me. Right now, by clicking here. Or else.

Gay Chicago firefighters, on TV and in real life, focus on their jobs

   

Daniel Kyri

     Darren Ritter didn't know he was gay when he joined Firehouse 51 in 2018.
     "My character was only going to be around for a few episodes, so I don't think there was a lot of thought put into who guy was," said Daniel Kyri, the actor who plays Ritter on "Chicago Fire," now in its 13th season on NBC. "I just played the character as I saw him; I wasn't throwing out rainbows."
     Lt. Paul Clark certainly knew he was gay when he started as an actual Chicago firefighter at the Wells Street Station in 1997.
     "I was there about year and half, then I transferred to the West Side Douglass Park neighborhood and was there for nine years," said Clark. "That's where I cut my teeth on the job, a very busy firehouse, very poor neighborhood. I saw a little bit of everything."
     Like Ritter, Clark played it low-key.
     "I was never an in-your-face type of person," said Clark, 59. "I just, consciously or subconsciously, decided to let guys figure it out on their own and see how they react."
     When the producers of "Chicago Fire" invited me to interview Kyri, it seemed an opportunity to compare the experiences of a fictional gay Chicago firefighter with a real one.
     Firehouses are not known as monuments to tolerance; how did Clark's colleagues accept him?
     "As you can imagine, the fire department and firehouses are very gossipy," said Clark. "It doesn't take long for word to spread. I let it happen organically and almost made a game out of it. However they react is on them. Either way, I wasn't going to let it affect me."
     Kyri, 30, was born in Chicago and worked at the Goodman Theatre. As the show's writers got to know him, they decided to have his character come out. That intimidated Kyri.
     "Being a young actor, there is a hesitation with portraying a gay character," he said. "Am I only going to be known as portraying a gay character? I do not want to be limited in my career."
     This was no off-Loop black box theater, but a nationwide stage.
     "Knowing what this show is," Kyri said. "A Dick Wolf procedural about first responders. Middle America is watching. Not knowing how the reception is going to be. Coming out as a gay firefighter, the first one on the show. Is the audience going to accept that? Is this going to cost me my job?"

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You be the journalist

     While the best columns are often those written the quickest — I think Friday's well-received Maureen Dowd snarkfest took an hour to write — others can be pawed over for days, weeks, or even months.
     It was in December that I interviewed Daniel Kyri, a star in the "Chicago Fire" procedural drama (I keep wanting to call it a "soap opera" but that could have negative connotations). I'd never seen the show before, but he plays an openly gay firefighter, and I thought it might be worthwhile to compare and contrast what he had to say with the thoughts of an actual gay firefighter, if I could find one.
     That got the thing pushed into the slow lane. But — mirabile dictu — my old friend, Larry Langford, at the Chicago Fire Department did actually put me in touch with a real live 28 year veteran of the CFD, Lt. Paul Clark, who is indeed gay. I interviewed him in January.
     I knew that incorporating the two interviews would take some effort, and slow-walked that challenge until I finally decided that putting it off forever was not a success strategy. It was time to shit or cut bait, as we professionals say.
     So I began pulling the column together last week, and tried to get a draft Saturday, to lessen the Sunday morning strain. The column will run Monday.
     In doing so, I had to consider something Clark quotes one of his fellow firefighters saying about the gay pride pylons on Halsted Street: "'Can you believe the city put these up for these fucking fags?'"
     The question being, how much of that goes in the paper?
     Left to my down devices, as a believer in poet Robert Lowell's dictum, "Yet why not say what happened?" I would print the whole quote verbatim and let the complainers complain (the way some readers, already in my spam filter, took exception to the three interjections of "Jesus!" in Friday's column, never considering that the Galilee carpenter isn't my lord and I have no obligation to honor their theological view of the cosmos any more than they respect mine, aka, not much).
     But as I sometimes tell readers, I just work for the newspaper; I don't run the place. Nor do I set style. I follow it. So I knew what I called "the obscene gerund" in my apology regarding Dylan Thomas; a locution I borrowed from a Doonesbury cartoon about Frank Sinatra (from 40 years ago — Jesus!) wouldn't fly. It would end up as "f—-ing." (I found "obscene gerund" so funny in that context I used it in the blog version of the column, even though here, it isn't necessary, as swears are permitted by the boss, aka me).
     But what about "fags"? Such curse words have been dashed even more lately, the result of mission creep stemming from "the n-word," general societal cowardice, and a desire to thwart social media algorithms that will increasingly tag you as a hater and shutter your account if you use derogatory words under any context.

     The word also falls victim to an alarming tendency to whitewash the past. And here the left and the right have drifted so far from center, away from faith in the value of frank confrontation with reality — in my view — that they've begun to converge. Both the MAGA crowd and Blue State lefties posit the existence of timorous souls who will be crushed if exposed to the weight of the nation's true hateful past, and feel obligated to bowdlerize the historical record on their behalf. To lighten the load, as it were. Children and the profoundly sensitive are preemptively given the final say in vetting acceptability for supposed adults. I hate that.
     I tried out "f—-ing f-gs" but that reads to me as cursing out dried fruit. See, that's why I avoid euphemism. Very quickly readers have no idea what you're talking about. Then I considered "Can you believe the city put these up?" without the final clause at all. But that softens the insult so much you wonder why Clark remembers it a quarter century later.
     At this point I wanted to consult my editor, John O'Neill — oh right, he was let go last week.
     Seeking clarity, I went into the Sun-Times NewBank archive and found the word last appeared in a 2014 column about the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting protest buffer zones around abortion clinics:
     "A law aimed to prevent the Westboro Baptist Church from showing up at military funerals with their neon “GOD HATES FAGS” signs would end up stopping people from showing up at Bruce Rauner rallies with “RAUNER’S A FRAUD” signs, and we need more, not less, of those," the author wrote.
     If that writing sounds familiar, well, it was written by me. Seeing myself as the Welcome Wagon for obscenity — not a single colleague writing over the past 11 years felt the need to use the word — took the wind out of my sails. Or maybe someone wanted to use it and wasn't allowed.
     So take it out? Self-editing is the path not only to confusion, but tedium, and I decided to offload responsibility and let whoever draws the short straw Sunday morning and has to edit my column be the one to figure it out. (My editors opted for the nearly-indecipherable: "f—— f—-s.")

     And yes, I did pause, and worry, whether by using "obscene gerund" I was plagiarizing Garry Trudeau. And decided that credit was impossible — it would ruin the passage — and you can't really plagiarize a two-word phrase, any more than if I refer to "household words" I'm stealing from Shakespeare, who uses the term in "Henry V." 

     Of course you can get in trouble with this thinking. Years ago I ended a column "Isn't it pretty to think so?" and a reader sincerely accused me of plagiarizing the last line of "The Sun Also Rises." I had a reply, along the lines of, "I just assume everyone knows it — if I ended the column 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' would you accuse me of plagiarizing the Bible?" But it also reminded me to be careful about that kind of thing.  So if anyone is under the illusion that the life of a writer is carefree, let me assure you it is not. There is a lot to worry about.

The perfect baby gift

     People don't listen. And if they do, they tend to dismiss whatever doesn't jibe with what they already believe. 

     When dealing with my boys — and now their spouses — I try to break that pattern by actually attending to what they say, consider it, and weigh whether it might be true, even when I'm dubious.

     For instance. Almost as soon as our daughter-in-law informed us we'd be grandparents — in my memory, it was the next words out of her mouth — she instructed us that under no circumstances were we to kiss the baby, at least not on the head, at least not for the first six months. Because: germs. And bacteria. And disease. From us.

     Before these words had echoed away, I was online, checking the veracity of her claim. Because: really? Since when? Turns out to be true. I mentioned this last month. 

     It wasn't true when our boys were born in the mid-1990s.  Then, we were doing our parental duty if we didn't leave their carriers on top of the car and drive off. And I imagine it won't be true 30 years from now, when other concerns crowd to the forefront. Whether to implant the chip in their heads like everybody else, I imagine.

     Okay, fine, no worries. We'll withhold our kisses. Don't want to infect the baby. I didn't object beyond a crushed little, "But we can kiss a little socked foot, yes?"

     I tucked the information away, and forgot about it. We'll worry about it in June.

     But a few weeks back, I was looking for art to accompany something I'd written on the Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium District. Not many photos online. So I was glancing at old tuberculosis posters, and noticed a poster warning parents not to kiss their children.

    An idea bloomed. Perfect. I snapped into action.

    So I was ready when I attended my first baby shower last weekend, for the pending granddaughter. I'd never been to a baby shower before — they tend to be all-female affairs. 

     But my older son felt like being there — he's going to be a very hands on dad — and that opened the door to invite all the men in the family. We had a good time, nibbling beef tenderloin sandwiches and drinking mimosas.

     We didn't need to worry about a present — there's an online registry to choose from and, besides, we were going to the trouble and expense of the party, which is present aplenty.

     But I had still gotten a gift — one of those old TB posters I'd looked at, transferred to a onesie. There are businesses online that do that, and quickly too. 

     I would never be so bold as to claim that my gift was the hit of the shower, nor cast shade upon all the lovely little baby ensembles and complex bottle warmers and such the couple were given by others. But I will say that my present earned the biggest laugh of the afternoon. Score one for zayde. 

Noteworthy Chicagoans fete famous East Coast author

     So the wife and I went out to a party downtown Wednesday night. Which is unusual for me, because I normally don't go to parties, through an effective combination of a) not being invited and b) not wanting to go, as parties typically involve conveying myself somewhere and encountering unfamiliar people. I'd rather be home.
     But my close personal friend Christie Hefner invited me to a book signing at Carnivale, the big, fun Latin American restaurant on Fulton, and while that still wasn't enough to make me want to go (by "close personal friend" I mean I like Christie and we had lunch once at the Cliff Dwellers Club), it prompted me to ask my wife if she was interested (I recognize the burden of being married to me for — Jesus! — 34 years and try to enliven the torpor, when I can). To my surprise, she said, yes, in fact, she would like to go to the party.
     Which still might not have been enough to get us there. But Christie (now that I think of it, we've also had dinner, at the gorgeous, if narrow, Venetian palazzo on Michigan Avenue belonging to auctioneer Leslie Hindman) is nothing if not efficient, and her assistant prodded me until I finally RSVP'd that we were going.
     At Carnivale, we were met at the door by owner Billy Marovitz, who I've known since he was a sprite, having been a close personal friend of his uncle, Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (and by close personal friend I mean we had lunch together at the old Standard Club, and he came to my apartment on Logan Boulevard to marry my brother, Sam Steinberg, to his wife of — Jesus! — 35 years, Yuri).
     The room was packed, and I noticed several well-known personages, including former Gov. Pat Quinn and former TV political reporter Mike Flannery, who I considered speaking to. But he didn't look in my direction, and the moment passed.
     I can't hope to read the books piled on the floor by my night table, not if I took three months off from work and did nothing else. So getting another book was not high on my list. But having had — Jesus! — nine book parties myself, albeit more sparsely attended than this, I have a moral code that can be described as "Buy the book!" I hurried up to beat the crowd to acquire the book being feted, "Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech," getting in line right next to beloved icon of Chicago journalism Carol Marin.
     Due to some quirk of personality, I introduced Carol to the author, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who, perhaps being in the middle of a long, exhausting book tour, looked up without exhibiting signs of interest or comprehension. She read my name off a Post-it note, wrote it with a Sharpie, then "Star power!" and signed her own name, "Maureen." No last name. Which, in many years of attending such events, I can't recall any author ever doing. Maybe she considers herself in the ranks of Cher and Madonna and similar mono-named cynosures. Or maybe she has arthritis or something. I probably shouldn't speculate.
     The talk involved Marovitz asking questions, and I would discover later when I began reading, Dowd repeating whole paragraphs from her book's introduction, almost word for word. While I wasn't in my reporter mode, I like to show that I'm sometimes out and about. She said, "Hollywood and Washington are twin capitals of illusion.” So I snapped a photo and sent that line to my 2,860 followers on Bluesky.

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A furry pink nest to incubate the fabulous dreams of youth

 

    Bean bag chairs. Remember those? Great vinyl sacks of styrofoam pellets, in banana yellow and candy apple green. The style originated in 1968 by a trio of Italian designers and called the Sacco chair and considered "one of the icons of the Italian anti-design movement." That original chair was more pear shaped, and considered haut decor enough to find itself into several museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art.

    By the early 1970s, it was shaped more like a squashed tomato, and available from Sears. I remember wanting one, vaguely, without ever going so far as to express that desire to my parents, whose tastes ran to Scandinavian design, for themselves, and ranch oak, for us children. They must have loved ranch oak — a dark style of wood. I had a ranch oak bed, dresser, desk. I hated it.

     I probably didn't want the chair so much as the lifestyle that went with it. My pals and I would recline on my bean bag chairs, listening to Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer and be cool.  I think I was too cool to even want the bongs that went along with that.
    That thought came back to me as I was walking Kitty one morning last week, and came across this hot pink monstrosity set out for the trash. A quick Google image search identified it as a Himalayan Pink Faux-Fur Hang-A-Round Chair, available in the Teen section of Pottery Barn, which goes without saying. A 12-year-old girl's idea of what adult female elegance might be. My heart broke a little, seeing it, while admiring the damn-what-the-neighbors-think panache of whoever set it out. I'd be embarrassed.

    Because such novelties grow old. I never did own that beanbag chair, but those who did soon came to regret doing so. "The beanbag chair became a summary cliche of the 1960s. It was freedom in a brand-new bag — but it offered so much freedom it quickly led to stiff limbs and deadened buttocks," wrote Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov in their 2005 Blobjects and Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design. "In the end, the beanbag chair was a miniature parable on the limits of freedom."

     I hope somebody picked it up, and that it's embellishing the bedroom of some scrap dealer's 10-year-old daughter, like a promissory note from the adult world — someday, my dear, you will manifest your own style, and be fabulous and colorful and take your ease in wacky, furry chairs. 
     If you see it and just have to have one, well, bless your heart. Pottery Barn doesn't carry them anymore. But Walmart has a chair very much like it, the Mainstays Blair Plush Faux-Fur Kids Saucer Chair, for $32.98, which is a perfect price for furniture for that short period between the time kids are too energetic to arrange themselves into such a sling, to when they slink off to college and put away their childish things. It also comes in gray, peach and white.

     Those machines aren't ruling the world quite yet. The downside of using company web site for blog research is that achingly stupid store algorithms can't differentiate between momentary professional interest and actually being a potential customer.

     

Geese are smarter than people

 

     What do geese know that we don't?
     The value of organization, for one. While the structure of the United States government, built over centuries, is being torn apart in a matter of months, we can still look up and see those tight Vs in the spring sky as flocks of  Canada geese return north.
     Though many geese never leave the Chicago area. A pair showed up at my feeder last week. Most of the birds we get are "LBBs" — little brown birds, sparrows, wrens, finches — shamed by the occasional red cardinal. My feeder has also been visited by everything from ducks to hawks, which, of course, are not interested in the birdseed, per se, but the wildlife below — bunnies and squirrels — scavenging what falls from various beaks.
     The geese were nibbling at those paltry leavings when, big-hearted fool that I am, I went outside. The geese removed themselves to a safe distance and I grabbed a heaping scoopful of seed and tossed it on the ground. There. Bon appetit.
     Have you ever watched geese eat? I hadn't. One goose would plunge its face into the seeds, happily gobbling. The other wouldn't. It stood guard, head on a swivel, looking left, then right. This went on for several minutes. Then they'd switch.
     "Sentinel behavior," said Michael P. Ward, an expert in conservation and bird behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Trying to detect predators. A lot of things want to eat birds, and they're better working together, taking turns."
     Cooperation. Looking out for each other. Another practice that has fallen on hard times in the human world.
     One doesn't get a goose expert on the phone every day. I seized the opportunity.
     That flying V formation? I assume it's to keep the flock from getting separated.
     "No, it's actually aerodynamics," Ward said. "The wind goes around the lead bird. The bird in the very front of the V pays a cost."
     There is no designated head goose. They take turns at the point of the V. Again, sharing the burden.
     I suggested more geese are sticking around Chicago due to global warming.
     "That is definitely correct," Ward said. "Winters in Chicago have become more mild. Geese learned to take advantage of human food. Geese are hanging out on people's roofs. In Chicagoland, the majority of them are staying. Then you have birds that come down from farther north."
     The geese seem to weigh the chance of starving to death in Illinois — where snow can cover the fields they like to forage — against being shot by hunters in Kentucky.

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"People see geese as this dumb bird that gets in my way, but if you actually start studying them, they make decisions and have strategies," Ward said.