On the nightstand: "The Remains of the Day"

    The state of the country being what it is, it seems increasingly essential to have a good book nearby to lose myself in as need be, or at least to look forward to losing myself in, a respite from the daily stirring of the pot that our president finds useful to keep the public distracted from what he has already done.
     A good friend recommended Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day, and I hurried to the library to pick it up.
     The story is a week in the life of Stevens, the aging veteran butler at Darlington Hall, as he drives to Cornwall to meet the manor's long-ago housekeeper, Miss Kenton, now married, though perhaps not happily. It's after World War II, and much has changed—his longtime employer, Lord Darlington, died three years earlier, and was recently replaced by an upstart American businessman, Mr. Farraday. He motors along in his boss's elegant Ford, musing on the past, various revered butlers he has known, his father's decline. 
     The central joy of the book is the tone, the voice, Mr. Stevens always restrained observations on the nature of "dignity," his failed attempts to engage in banter with his new boss.
   Passing a signpost for Murssden, the home of Giffen and Company, makers of "dark candles of polish," a technical innovation "which came to push the polishing of silver to the position of central importance it still by and large maintains today," Stevens sets off on several pages on the importance of well-buffed silver, the highlight being:
    "I recall also watching Mr George Bernard Shaw, the renowned playwright, at dinner one evening, examining closely the dessert spoon before him, holding it up to the light and comparing its surface to that of a nearby platter, quite oblivious to the company around him."
     Either you get that or you don't. The book is one slow reveal, and the less said, the better. The ending also offers up a steaming dollop of philosophy that I know I'll value as the darkness gathers. Or try to anyway.  
    Though the peril of escaping from the daily headlines in a book is that the news follows you there. I don't think I'm revealing too much to say as The Remains of the Day clicks along like a hall clock, Lord Darlington's politics don't hold up well. In the mid-1930s, Lord Darlington comes under the sway of British fascists, leading to this:

     "I've been doing a great deal of thinking, Stevens. A great deal of thinking. And I've reached my conclusion. We cannot have Jews on the staff here at Darlington Hall."
     "Sir?"
     "It's for the good of this house, Stevens. In the interests of the guests we have staying here. I've looked into this carefully, Stevens, and I'm letting you know my conclusion.
     "Very well, sir."
     "Tell me, Stevens, we have a few on the staff at the moment, don't we? Jews, I mean."
     "I believe two of the present staff members would fall into that category, sir."
     "Ah."
     His lordship paused for a moment, staring out of this window.
     "Of course, you'l have to let them go."
     "I beg your pardon, sir?"
     "It's regrettable, Stevens, but we have no choice. There's the safety and well-being of my guests to consider. Let me assure you, I've looked into this matter and thought it through thoroughly. It's in all our best interests."

     That word—"safety"—just glowed on the page. Sound familiar? Though now we'd say "security" and the parties that our best interests demand be kept at a distance are now Muslims. But the logic, or rather, the illogic, is exactly the same.

Mark Giangreco busted for groping at the Twitter orgy

     One of the great things about working at the Sun-Times: not many meetings.
     Well, I'm sure somebody has meetings. I glimpse them through doorways as I'm hurrying out of the building.
     Occasionally I get sucked into a meeting, like one a few weeks ago explaining the importance of doing what I've done for years -- use social media, post to Facebook, Tweet stuff. We were reminded once again that we are no longer newspaper reporters, but "digital storytellers." I gazed at the phrase mournfully. They've been repeating that for years. What does it even mean? Digital storytellers. It has a whiff of kindergarten, of a robotic Mr. Rogers with a lightbulb nose and an LED red cardigan tinnily reading The Little Engine That Could to an audience of mechanical puppets. Is that our job now?
     I was forming a comment along those lines, when I thought better. Shutting up is an art form.  But I felt the need to say something, for the reason most people speak at meetings -- to hear myself talk.
     "Do you think we could get some guidelines for Twitter?" I asked, reminding my boss that Twitter is a minefield we're expected to skip across several times a day.

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Charles Dickens, served by slaves in America

Charles Dickens delivering a lecture

     Sunday. If I have to write another word on Trump, my head will explode. Heck, if I have to write another word about ANYTHING my head will explode. So ... with that in mind ... well...ah hell. It's still February, right? Still Black History Month? Since the idea of Charles Dickens encountering slaves in America will be a surprise to many, I'm dredging up this column from nearly a decade ago. I almost trimmed the opening bit about Lincoln on, as well as the closing snapshot of the boys. But I figure, heck, maybe there are people out there who feel like absorbing the whole thing. This is from back when the column took a whole page, was broken into parts, and ended with a joke. 

OPENING SHOT 

     Tomorrow is Abraham Lincoln's birthday -- an official holiday in Illinois. His 199th birthday, in fact, which means we can begin dreading next year, when our greatest and most overexposed president receives a big dose of relentless kitsch and blind hero worship. Myself, I wish we could honor Lincoln with something even a little significant -- say, by dropping the bothersome and useless Lincoln penny -- but it won't happen, not while we can busy ourselves in empty praise.
     Remember that Lincoln is great because he remains relevant, as an inspiration and guide. While all of our presidential candidates were genuflecting, more or less, before the religious wings of their party, I couldn't help but think of how Lincoln handled a similar situation. Lincoln was never baptized and did not belong to any church, a personal choice that would bar him from the presidency today but was merely a stumbling block in the more enlightened world of the mid-1800s.
     When he first ran for Congress, in 1846, Lincoln was called an "infidel" and a "scoffer of Christianity." He did something unimaginable today -- he didn't run to join a church, didn't gather the press and get baptized. He admitted the situation. "That I am not a member of any Christian church is true," he wrote in a handbill.
     Back when Barack Obama was telling the world he is not, not, not a Muslim, I kept waiting for him to take a page from Lincoln and add, "And what if I were? Are Muslims barred from high office in America? And if we think that being Muslim is a slur that makes a person unelectable -- too many Americans obviously do -- aren't we surrendering to the very hatred that our nation supposedly stands solidly against?"
     If he said that, I missed it. A reminder that praise of Lincoln and exhortations to moral courage are easy. Following Lincoln's example is hard.

INTERESTING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

     My beef with Black History Month is it implies that somehow black history is outside and separate from American history. It isn't. Black history is American history, and vice versa. That said, people of all races are so generally ignorant of everything that has gone before them, any artifice that helps fill the gaping void is to be welcomed.
     The problem is that most Black History Month efforts are directed at children -- as if they're the only ones who require a vague idea of the past -- and thus we get the same tales every year: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Martin Luther King and his dream.
     What about something for those who've mastered the basics? There is, for instance, the question of how outsiders viewed our system of slavery. Charles Dickens, at 30 the most famous author in Britain, came to America in 1842 to tour the new republic, visiting prisons and insane asylums and textile mills. He never made it to nine-year-old Chicago, settling for St. Louis instead. Dickens was a keen observer, repulsed by the ubiquitous American habit of chewing tobacco and experiencing a wave of guilt when, on his way to Washington to meet President Tyler, he found himself in a slave state. Dickens writes:
     "We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for at the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach."

WATCH WHEN YOU CROSS THE STREET!

     So my wife is taking a class downtown, which puts her on the 7:12 into the city a few mornings a week, which means I get to make the boys their lunches.
     No big deal -- heat up the Beefaroni, spoon it into a Thermos, slather the peanut butter on bread. The surprise came when I went to put the younger boy's lunch into his backpack. There was a mass of jammed papers -- balled up, crumpled, like a small animal had made a nest out of them.
     "Ummm, are your papers supposed to be like this?" I asked.
     He beamed with pride, and said that he is famed as the messiest boy in the fifth grade. "It's my legend," he explained. "It used to be Philip, but now it's me."
     "And this was decided," I asked weakly, "by general acclamation?"
     But he was gone, wheeling his backpack down the sidewalk. I watched him go, wondering if this was yet another crisis that demanded Immediate Parental Action. Well, perhaps these are returned papers -- I assume if he handed in crumpled-up balls there would be repercussions. We never had backpacks when I was a lad -- we carried our books and jammed our papers into our desks, which, now that I think of it, were not exactly pristine zones of order.
     So maybe it's OK. As far as parenting goes, my general rule is, if something seems unimportant, ignore it. I can't very well make a speech about the need for neatness. Not until I clean up my own office first.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Lincoln of course was famous for his folksy wit. He loved to tell stories and jokes, and certain lines went down in history, such as his supposed retort -- he later denied it -- when told that his most-successful general, Ulysses S. Grant, was a drunkard: "Tell me what brand of whiskey he drinks. I want to send a barrel of it to my other generals."
     Lincoln once said of a general far more timid than Grant:
     "It is called the Army of the Potomac, but it is only McClellan's bodyguard . . . . If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 11, 2008

Flashback, 2005: On the frontiers of science.

   

     While the boogeyman media that exists in the mind of our president and his supporters is slammed for its supposed lies—a "lie" being any truth that Donald Trump doesn't want to hear—the actual media that I know is not only obsessed with accuracy, but, unlike our president, has concern for both the readers and the people being written about, on a human level. 

     When I was on the night desk, I would take phone calls, and I took one from a man who said he had invented a flying saucer engine. He left his phone number, and I kept it, and would call him every few months, to check on his progress. I was curious, which is the heart of journalism. I encouraged him to bring his invention into the paper. Eventually, he agreed, which was surprising, almost a little scary. I remember laying this out in front of the photo editor. This guy who believes he has invented a flying saucer motor is coming in for a portrait, posing with his invention. He's in earnest, and we have to treat him with respect. 

     Below is the story that resulted. I was proud of how I communicated the situation before me in a way that handled the inventor gently yet was clear to everyone else. It came to mind last week because I was approached by a Chicago composer whose music is used to score low-budget horror films. We went back and forth on email. I asked him a few polite questions, and viewed a few trailers of the films he is involved in—Cannibal Santa can represent them all.  While I felt I could have written something, what kept me from doing so is this: he was proud of them. I kept thinking of Royko's line about not taking a bazooka to a flea. This was his dream—a lot of people's dreams, actually.  I had to let it go, telling him a version of the story below, in abbreviated form, as explanation. To my relief he replied, "You have me cracking up laughing! Ha ha. Yes, I get it." 

    This piece is brief because it's from a time when my column was a number of items on a full page. It ran under the headline, "On the frontiers of science." Roger later called to thank me for sharing his story. I was genuinely happy about that.

     Chicago is home to big inventions. The first nuclear reactor, as many know, was built on a University of Chicago squash court. Less known is Elisha Gray, the Highland Park electrical whiz who invented the telephone, only to have it swiped by Alexander Graham Bell.
     In that light, I welcomed Roger Rhenium to the office. Mr. Rhenium is building a flying saucer engine in his North Side basement. He's kept me informed of his progress over the years, but I never dared hope to actually meet him, never mind hold his Rhenium Reactor in my hands.
     The device involves a pair of D-shaped tubes through which ball bearings flow. Turning the tubes as the balls race through them builds up torque — I'm not able to explain exactly how, but Mr. Rhenium assures me it could be not only used to power flying saucers, but also cars and boats.
     Mr. Rhenium, 59, is a professional house painter and amateur scientist. He has been working on his reactor, sporadically, for 40 years. He has also said he created "a very important energy device," too revolutionary to reveal to the media at this time.
     Skeptic that I am, I wondered if he was not concerned that something so simple and mechanical — stainless steel balls in a tube — would have been thought of by somebody already, had it worked.
     "It is simple. Extremely simple," he said, in his soft-spoken manner. "But I'm quite confident no one's thought of it yet."
     Like me, the U.S. Patent Office failed to grasp the exact way the reactor will function, based on Mr. Rhenium's application drawings. They have asked for a working model. Mr. Rhenium seemed slightly taken aback — he feels his drawings are clear — but he has contacted a model builder in Wheeling, and they are proceeding.
     Everybody needs a dream — I myself cling stubbornly to the notion of someday being thin, successful and surrounded by friends, a goal that lately seems more fantastic than Mr. Rhenium's. I admire his calm certainty. When I asked if he was offended that the Patent Office sent him a list of Newton's laws of motion, he said he didn't mind, and brushed aside the implication that these laws might even prevent his Rhenium Reactor from ever working.
    "It will work," he said. "I promise you that. I've got complete confidence in it."

                          —Originally published Feb. 11, 2005

Who do bullies bully? Whoever bullies can.

     Like a toddler casting aside a toy he has tired of playing with, the Trump administration has tossed xenophobia out of its crib, for the moment. That’s good. But it then picked up sexual panic as its guide while casting government policy. That’s bad.
     The issue of students using bathrooms they are comfortable with exists only in the minds of hysterical parents worried about crimes that never actually occur. And, of course, religious fanatics looking for someone to oppress. But that’s enough for our new alt-right federal government, meticulously working its way down the list of cheap symbolic victories, to turn its attention to a new enemy: transgender students.
     After the Justice Department on Wednesday revoked federal guidelines that schools must allow transgender kids to use bathrooms according to their sexual identity, it’s a good idea to pause, step back and play connect the dots. President Donald Trump’s first month was roiled by his bigoted, unnecessary and illegal order restricting travel from seven Muslim countries. His second month now starts out by addressing another non-problem: the tiny percentage of children using bathrooms assigned to a gender they consider their own instead of ones belonging to the gender they were born into. In between, he announced that undocumented immigrants will be rounded up and deported by the millions.
What do these actions have in common?
     Well, the administration would say that Trump is addressing the nation’s most pressing problems, which apparently involve the risk of Syrian families finding refuge here, migrant workers picking strawberries unmolested, and fifth-graders struggling with gender issues using the bathrooms they would like to use.

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

      One of the first things I do every morning is check the Washington Post to see what new assault against American values the Trump administration has cooked up overnight. It's a great newspaper—I subscribe and you should too. 
    When I looked this morning, even before the news registered, I noted the change in the masthead above, featuring the paper's new slogan.
     Journalistic sorts are debating its aptness. Some find it "awesome," others, melodramatic. A Huffington Post political editor jokingly tweeted the new HuffPo slogan, "The night is dark and full of terrors." 
     Hmm. It is dramatic.  But if the online world teaches us anything, it's that understatement and nuance end up working at Panera Bread. It's arresting, but perhaps rightly so. "Don't tread on me" worked wonders for the Tea Party. I would argue that despite reporting on the gathering tragedy in this country and world, journalists still don't emotionally grasp what it means. The president is out to kill the media and impale its corpse on the White House fence—how's that for a slogan?—because he's driven bonkers by even the slightest rumble of digression as he vomits forth his lies. We are, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, like a wild beast thrown into a sawdust pit to fight for its life (another contender).
     The media reports the iceberg, the gash, the listing ship, but doesn't quite understand the implications of the freezing water all around. They are, for instance, still going ahead with this year's Correspondents Dinner, a creaky Washington insider tradition that was ethically squishy before the president, who might not even show, labeled them "the enemy of the American people." That's like insisting on holding afternoon tea in the lifeboats, because it's on the ship's schedule. I can't imagine going. Then again, I can't imagine accepting the Congressional Medal of Honor from Donald Trump, not if I threw myself on a grenade to save my buddies.
     Maybe it's "darkness," which does have a whiff of the poetic. Not to play editor, but you could cut it in half, "Democracy dies,"  and sum up our moment just as succinctly and perhaps with more power. Because that's what we're seeing. It isn't dead but, at Monty Python would say, "it isn't at all well."
     Then again, the whole concept of slogans is fusty. "All the news that's fit to print," sounds as old-fashioned as a butter churn, in an era when a guy can brag about grabbin' 'em by the pussy and get elected anyway. 
    The "Democracy dies..." line has been bandied about by Bob Woodward, the Post's legendary Watergate reporter and editor, and that alone should cast suspicion on it, as his reputation is kinda checkered. Post spokesperson Kris Coratti told CNN it will be used online, and perhaps in print too. "We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year. We started with our newest readers on Snapchat, and plan to roll it out on our other platforms in the coming weeks."
     How corporate. I too have a concise values statement about the business—"You've got to put the slop where the pigs can get at it"—but I'm not sure I'd want to see it under the Sun-Times masthead.  (The Sun-Times does have a slogan, "An Independent Newspaper," which is soft-spoken and I suppose could use freshening, though, in this day of media behemoths, that's actually quite an important distinction and something to crow about). 
   If we do change it, I'd put my bid in for "Death to Tyrants," but the Secret Service might pay me a visit, and I'd have to explain I mean only political death. I hope Trump lives to be 90 and sees his name a codeword for betrayal, like "Quisling."
    I do like the spirit behind "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Though, if forced to choose, I'd have to agree with those who find it a misstep.  When the dry facts are that the president of the United States is a cruel fraud and pathological liar who, along with his neo-Nazi buddies, are tearing at the heart of America, pithy slogans just sound trivial.  Arby's can say, "We've got the Meat," but the Mayo Clinic shouldn't dub itself, "The Illness Blasters."
     Plus, there's that alliteration—almost always annoying. "Trump Teaches Totalitarianism" is true too, but kinda kindergarten. Second, it's sort of a downer, isn't it? Why not "Freedom Grows in the Sunlight"? Darkness is certainly falling and Democracy shudders every time it gets an injection of poison from nice old Dr. Trump. I'm just not sure I want to be reminded of that every single time I look at the Washington Post. The news stories do that already.

What's a dog owner to do?

     You know what's really hard to locate on February grass? Dog shit. It blends right in, among the muddy splotches and wet clumps of leaves, and once you take your eye off it, well, it's gone. 
    I was walking Kitty Wednesday morning down Walters Street when, having done her business a few blocks earlier, she stopped a second time. She sometimes stops a second time, which is why I always bring two bags, just in case.
    Well, not always. As Kitty assumed the position, I dug my hand into my blazer pocket. But no bag. Maybe it fell out when I grabbed the first bag, which I had already disposed in a convenient trash receptacle. Maybe I only grabbed one leaving the house.
    As you might have guessed from reading my column, I am a pathologically responsible person. I pay my taxes, vote, recycle, hold doors for ladies and men, do everything I think is required of a member of society. I would no sooner leave my dog's waste on somebody's lawn than I would burn a cross on it. 
     So what to do? I was miffed but not panicked. I looked up, noted the address and the approximate location of the deposit, and hurried west on Walters, scanning the gutter for some kind of useful debris. There's usually a scrap of plastic blowing somewhere.
    What I found was a copy of the Wall Street Journal, snugly doubled-bagged, in front of a house. I stripped off one of the bags, and walked the paper up to the front door, where I propped it up on the porch.
     I did ponder the ethics of this. I was taking a bag, but newspaper bags are usually trash for non-dog owners. I had second thoughts about moving the paper—yes, making access to it more convenient as penance for skimming the bag. But what if the owner gazed out the door, saw no paper out front, thought it wasn't delivered and ever went to retrieve it, not noticing it right next to the door? I almost turned around and put the paper back on the curb. But fortune favors the bold, and too much responsibility can be suffocating. I decided to live with my minor misdeed, particularly since it was committed in the name of neighborhood cleanliness. 
    I marched briskly back to the address, a pleasant yellow house, to set matters right. Only the poop wasn't there. I scanned the ground closely. It all looked like dog shit, more or less. I made a few passes back and forth, leaning over, gazing hard. Kitty giving me a few impatient looks. Or maybe they were judgmental. Or quizzical. Hard to say. She's a dog.
    A minute passed. I was loathe to leave. I hate people who don't pick up after their dogs. They're like people who don't signal when driving. Making the world a worse place through indifference. And we already have a world that's a worse place, thank you very much all you folks who don't realize how we have to all care about other people and consider the effects of our actions on them and think and participate in order to live in a decent society.
    I must have been walking like Groucho Marx at this point, bent over, examining the ground when ... well, you know what happened, right? No, I didn't step in it, though that's a good guess. I did consider, on the spot, that the best way to find it would be by closing my eyes and blindly walking over the area, confident that would certainly locate the waste underfoot. But I was not willing to go that far. Besides, how would I pick it up after stepping in it?
    No, the obvious next event was the home owner came out—a friendly-looking lady, hefting a 20-pound bag of dog food to her car, so at least she was on the team. She said something like, "Cute puppy, see you too having a stroll there," or words to that effect, conveying curiosity about what I was doing, and I explained that the dog had left a mess, I didn't have a bag, I had run home—a shorthand I like to think, more than a lie; somehow "so I stole a plastic bag off a neighbor's newspaper" seemed like it would make matters worse—and she waved it off. "Don't worry about it," she said. I could have said, "I worry about everything," but what I actually said was, "Just so you know it was inattention, not indifference."
     Even after she got into the car I lingered, really wanting to leave this campsite the way I found it —I was in Scouting as a lad, that could be part of the problem. Then I had a thought, the doggie-doo version of Peter Singer's controversial view of infanticide *—I would rationalize not picking up Kitty's poop, here, due to carelessness on my part, by cleaning up after someone else at first opportunity.  Thus the universe's quantity of neglected dog messes—a bane on pedestrian life —would not be increased because of me.  The problem was rationalized. And so, with a clear conscience, I headed home.
 
* In 1993, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer sparked a firestorm of controversy by suggesting that babies not be considered alive until they were 30 days old, since they lacked self-awareness, and suggested that it would be morally-defensible for their parents to kill them, if deformed, provided they had another baby to replace it, thus the world would not be short one baby.

Postscript: On Thursday morning, as promised, I scooped up the first carelessly neglected dog waste I came across. And here's the interesting part. It was not without a shudder of revulsion. Because this was not Kitty's dainty doggie doo, but a mountainous mound from some big dog. Which really made me smile after I bagged it up and headed toward a nearby Dumpster. We are comfortable with crap that's familiar, while revolted at the unfamiliar. When really, it's all the same shit.
  

It's freakishly warm in Chicago, it's all my fault, now eat your noodles.

"Uncle Vanya," is at the Goodman Theater until March 19.
Marton Csokas as Astrov and Kristen Bush as Yelena. (Photo by Liz Lauren).

     And if you're wondering if it occurred to me that I was writing a column combining a Wisconsin snowblower and a Russian play, well yeah, it did. How did that happen? Well, it was warm, and I saw the play, and at first I thought of writing about just the play, and what it said about life. But the weather is such a big deal, or should be, and somehow the two fused in my mind. I think it's stronger than if I just stayed with the weather, or the play, particularly in these distracted times. Or maybe the weather is a lure. Everybody reads the weather stories; not everybody would start reading a column about "Uncle Vanya."

     You know what's not causing this freakishly warm February?
     Global warming.
     Whoops, I mean "climate change." The term "global warming" fell from favor because every time it snowed some congressman would gleefully sneer, "Twelve degrees outside! Some warming, huh?"
     So while it's possible that this heat wave is a symptom of our steadily warming planet, it isn't part of the mountain of science proving mankind's complicity. One piece of evidence isn't proof. Which doesn't keep those hoping to justify themselves from pretending otherwise.
     The explanation for this mid-winter week of springtime — 71 degrees predicted for Wednesday — that I've been offering to friends is: It's my fault.    

The might Ariens Sno-Thro 24

     This is how I did it. On Dec. 10, after years of resisting, I finally buckled to my wife's pleas and bought a snowblower. A massive, orange, steel, assembled-in-Wisconsin Ariens snowblower, with a halogen light and its own little shovel for clearing the chute. I think the little shovel sealed the deal for me.
     If I were Fox News I'd finesse the story so that as I muscled the thing into the garage, the sun came out and it never snowed again. In truth, which always puts bumps in your tale, I used it four times the first week, for minor snowfalls. But never again.
     In the years I didn't have a snowblower, I assumed that once I had one, it would make me an advocate for blizzards. That the machine sitting idle in the garage before a dry driveway would be a rebuke. But that isn't how it turned out. The machine is, as my wife points out, "insurance" and it's working fabulously.

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Flashback 2004: Our vanishing toy stores

     The American International Toy Fair winds up in New York City today, reminding me that in the go-go '90s I actually convinced my bosses to send me there to report on the action. How, I can't imagine—probably offering to stay on a friend's couch to cut expenses. 
     I remember the fair so clearly. Particularly entering into the Marx Toys area, which made a Ft. Apache cowboys and Indians set that had been the coveted joy of my 7th birthday. They had one set up, exactly at it was on that sun-drenched June day.
   "It's the SAME!" I marveled.
    "We use the same molds," the president of Marx told me.
    But here's the odd part. When I went back to look at the column I wrote from my expensive trip to New York, it's not worth re-reading, Dry, ordinary and not-up-to-standards. Maybe the travel had thrown me, or I was off my feed. 
     So I found this toy-related column from 2004, which I'm running in honor of the Toy Fair—and, to be honest, since I'm coming off the novo-virus, and can't imagine writing anything.  If the story about the bear sounds familiar, it's because I told it in this September 2014 post about old stuff I love.
    Though look at that first sentence, with its awkward exclamation mark, maybe the subject to toys sparks such enthusiasm that it overcomes my professional discernment.
    Can't let that be true. I'll have to ask my boss to send me next year, to see if I can't write something worthwhile about toys.

     Chicago is losing her toy stores! I keep waiting for the story to break out of the business section ghetto and be seized by television and the chattering classes, but it never does. So I'll have to put my shoulder to the stone and roll. First that enormous Toys R Us flagship on State Street shut down, then FAO Schwarz on Michigan went bye-bye, and now Zany Brainy and Noodle Kidoodle -- toy stores, though they tried to present themselves as some kind of High-Toned Science and Learning Centers -- all have gone belly up. What's going on here?
     First, a sop to the few that remain, so they don't send out pained hoots of existence. Yes, there's Galt Toys at 900 N. Michigan and a few KB Toys and others I'm not thinking about.
     But downtown is becoming slim pickings. The loss of FAO, Toys R Us and the others should not occur without somebody, if not mourning, at least pontificating.
     Not that I'll particularly miss FAO Schwarz. First, they constantly blared that dreadful parody of Disney's dirge "It's a Small World" at anybody who walked in the door. If you haven't heard the song ("It's a world ...") then count yourself blessed ("... of ...") because it carves itself into your mind and haunts you to the grave ("...toys!").

     GI Joe doesn't count as a soldier
     Second, I once asked a clerk for lead soldiers. I had bought some for the boys at Hamleys, the immense toy store in London. It seemed more a gift for myself than for them, but they surprised me by liking them. I thought -- silly me -- FAO might sell them.
     "Oh no," a clerk fretted, fluttering his hands. "We wouldn't carry those." War toys! You'd think I'd asked for napalm. As if the world will become a more violent place if my boys get a few more troops of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
     Third: I had purchased a Steiff teddy bear from FAO for my younger son's birthday. Steiff makes these gorgeous, durable and hugely expensive mohair toys. I had some as a kid, and so underwriting their vast cost for my own boys struck me as a stab at tradition. I remember what I paid for the teddy bear -- $160 -- due to my wife's shocked, rage-suppressing "why-do-you-always-do-this-to-me?" reaction, and the way I, with rare matador smoothness, deflected her ire into sentimental tears with one apt sentence.
     "When you see the bear in your grandchild's crib," I said, "it'll seem like a bargain."
     My older son surprised me by saying he wanted a teddy bear like his little brother's. Sensing trouble, I asked him if he meant a bear similar to his little brother's -- a Steiff bear, perhaps looking a little different, since they make about a hundred styles. No, he said, with the certainty of youth, he wanted That Exact Same Bear.
     Filled with hope, I ran to FAO Schwarz. They were cleaned out, and a clerk gave the not-my-table shrug that passed for service.
     With time dwindling, I had a desperation-stoked flash of brilliance. I plugged into Google "Steiff teddy bear" and the serial number off the button in the bear's ear (Steiff toys have a little brass button in their ears; don't ask, it's another tradition), and up popped a toy store in -- I kid you not -- Coon Rapids, Minn. Selling the exact bear I wanted, for $30 less than I had paid for my FAO bear a year earlier. Two days later, it arrived in the mail.
     That's why toy stores are dying. Why buy a $200 Xbox (if that's what they cost; I've struggled to keep my boys away from it with the same fervor that parents of teens use to keep them off drugs) when, with a little planning, you can skip the trip, skip the store, save money and have the toy in hand a few days later?
     Not to be simplistic. They have the Internet in London, too, and Hamleys is still there. I'm sure our addiction to soup-to-nuts emporiums such as Target is part of it.
     And the aforementioned Xbox has to be a factor. It's the last toy you ever have to buy. My impression is that once a kid has one of those, they take it into a room, close the door, and don't come out until puberty hits.

Plug in the kids and forget 'em
     That can be a good thing; parents can talk, read, fly to Paris while the kids remain mesmerized. Still, my wife and I have been resisting. Once, when the foyer was a clutter of shattered block castles and scattered lead soldiers (sure, I let the boys play with them, and sure, the occasional arm gets twisted off. But how many kids in the world are doing that? I take a certain anachronistic pride).
     We looked over the mess, and she said, "Once they get an Xbox, they won't play with toy soldiers."
     Ouch. "Never," I vowed. Let every other kid go on Ritalin and Xboxes. I managed to straight-arm the every-kid-in-school-has-one argument, and deflected the unvarnished, constant begging.
     But one night last week, I discovered the boys on their knees carefully arranging piles of change and crumpled dollars — literally counting their pennies, pooling their resources to attain their beloved computer game god.
    Even stone hearts break. "They'll be freaks enough just based on parentage," I told my wife. "Let them have their Xbox. I spent years playing Risk -- that wasn't exactly learning French, was it?" And anything that gets two brothers, 6 and 8, to cooperate with each other can't be all bad.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times Jan. 9, 2004

Hard to honor a man who never stops honoring himself

    

     Monday is Presidents Day: Happy Presidents Day! If the holiday has a certain redundant, dubious air about it, that might be because it comes one week after Lincoln's Birthday, and is a fairly recent development: far newer than, say, Sweetest Day, which goes back to 1921.
     Only in 1968 did Congress pass the "Uniform Monday Holiday Act" to "benefit the nation's spiritual and economic life" by creating three-day weekends out of Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays. The House Judiciary Committee noted that observance could be detached from actual birthdays "without doing violence to either history or tradition." Officially, it's still "Washington's Birthday," but it somehow morphed into common use as "Presidents Day," so ad hoc a holiday that nobody can seem to agree whether "Presidents" deserves a possessive or not.
     A day of honor, though, starting with our current chief executive, Donald J. Trump, whose inspiring rags-to-riches story hardly needs repeating. At 70 the oldest man to ever be elected president, and also the first immigrant. He was born in Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1947. His father, a Russian solder, Ivan Trumpovich; was not married to his mother, a 17-year-old Bavarian bar maid, Helga Schneider, who brought him to this country as a teenager in 1962. Trump worked in a series of used car lots, perfecting his English, saving his money to purchase an abandoned gas station, beginning his career in real estate....
     Oh, none of that is true—except Trump being the oldest man ever elected president. That's a fact. Though reading the above, I bet you did not think, "This is untrue. More fake news that we have become accustomed to constantly seeing in the lying press." Because despite what our new president says about the media, the sneering contempt he ladles on the institution whose job and duty is to catalogue his missteps, deceits and blunders, people still expect not only truth but perfection from the press. If I make a grammatical mistake, if I say "we journalists" when I should say "us journalists" readers will gleefully wave it over their heads, sneering and hooting in sincere outrage, speaking of fish wrap and carelessness. It's the most curious duality: to insist that something is routinely dishonest and unreliable, then fall shrieking to the floor at its most trivial slip from the highest standards of excellence.

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Their glory days

"The Country Election" by John Sartain, 1854 (The National Gallery of Art)
The blue banner reads, "The Will of the People the Supreme Law."

     This is the interesting thing about Donald Trump's view of the media...
     I take that back. There are enough interesting things about Donald Trump's view of the media to keep an army of historians and psychiatrists busy, and no doubt they are already hard at work, the poor devils...
     This is one of the interesting things about Donald Trump's view of the media, the interesting thing that I want to talk about today: he doesn't believe what he's saying. Obviously, and I'll tell you why. If he sincerely thought that "the media is the enemy of the American people" who told "lies" and "FAKE NEWS," then why is he spending 77 minutes talking to them in a press conference Friday? Why let them in the White House at all? If he really wants to talk directly to the American people, banish the lot and let your Twitter finger do the talking. 
     The truth of course, is that Trump's condemnation of the media is really a condemnation of the facts that the media is reporting, on the chaos and incompetence of the Trump administration, how badly it has stumbled out of the blocks and is just lying there in the dust. 
     In a world where consistency mattered, Trump would be painting himself in a corner with the whole "FAKE NEWS" bit. Because what happens should he ever do anything right, and the media swoons over his skilled handling of a situation? What would he do then?
    What he would do is break out in that smirky grin of his, shrug his shoulders, turn his palms to the sky and say, "Hey, they got one right for once!" 
    And his fans will guffaw and nod along with him and eat it up, as they always do.  Which is why Trump says what he does about the media. It gives his supporters, always hot to pour scorn on somebody, a big pinata they can hit to their hearts' content. The media represents everything they dislike, they are told, and now they are given permission to dutifully kick it, not noticing that they are being trained to cover their ears and hum so as not to even hear, never mind perceive, the truth about their president.
    We are entering a cruel, frightened era. Trump is a mean man who delights in making others seem small so he can tell himself he's big. The currency he offers is contempt, and his followers welcome the chance to accept it, ape his ways and spend freely. Seldom do I hear anything from a Trump supporter this isn't dripping with spite, with anger, with eyes-narrowed disdain. In that—and I've said this before—we shouldn't focus on Trump. We should focus on the people who have placed their bets on him and who will follow him, no matter what he says or does, who will ignore his misses as hits and his idiocy as sense. Those people were here when Trump showed up, and they''ll be here when he's gone. They viewed the eight years of Barack Obama as an unmitigated disaster, and they will view the eight years of Trump as the pinnacle of success. These are their glory days, whatever happens. They will not be denied the enjoyment of them, and if reality does not conform to their desires, they'll imagine a new reality that does, Trump will tell them it is so, and they will believe him. Nothing can change that.

Maybe we deserve it, maybe we deserve better

     As a journalist, I have access to all sorts of cool Secret Squirrel stuff unavailable to the average person. A healthy skepticism, for one...
     Sorry, cheap shot. I was actually thinking of Nexis. Nexis is a database of world media. The kid brother of Lexis, the case file database for lawyers. When you search Nexis, all the crappy aggregator web sites and fake news spoodle and insane partisan deformations never even get their foot in the door. You're looking at real articles that paid journalists produced using professional standards for publication. It makes a difference.
     As the wheels and gears started spinning wildly on the "well-oiled machine" of the Trump administration this week, like a cheap tin toy about to fly apart, I noticed I was looking away, distracting myself. No, no need to watch his farce press conferences—supposedly, I didn't see them—with Benjamin Netanyahu and then his 77 minute meltdown Thursday. When you know someone is a brittle, bullying liar, you really don't need to keep logging more instances of fragility, bullying and deceit. I get it. 
    Although the reaction to the second press conference was such jaw-dropped shock that I found myself circling back to watch snippets, just to confirm. 
    Yowza. 
    The word that kept coming back to me was "unfit." I logged into Nexis, set the time parameters for one year before the election—Nov. 8, 2015 to Nov. 8, 2016—then plugged in the words "Donald Trump" and "unfit."
     Because if one word of the mountains of apt criticism Trump has justly received, "unfit" seems to say it all. It kept echoing in my mind. The man shouldn't be president. He should never been allowed to be president. He should never have been allowed to run.   

    A big red notice that my request turned in more than 3,000 documents--the computer in essence saying, "That's a tall order...it's going to take me time."
   Of course. No worries. I'm just fishing. I added "president." Still more than 3,000 hits. So I added "bully" and culled the herd down to 326--about one story every day.
     The top hit, since it ran Election Day, Nov. 8, 2016, was a column by a man I'd never heard of. Philip Martin, at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Titled "Fat, Drunk and Stupid" it began, "I have a bad feeling about this," and was a last minute plea against voting for Donald Trump.
     He summarizes the deficiencies of Hillary Clinton—not fabulous, just never connected with people—explains why Trump will probably win Arkansas and come "perilously close" to the presidency. 
     Then this:

   For the last time, I want to say it plain: Trump is unfit to be president. He lies. He cheats. He's a bad businessman and a bad American. He's a bully who keeps score and you shouldn't trust him around your teenage daughter, much less the nuclear football.

     Either you see that, or you don't.  Late Friday he called the press "the enemy of the American People." And you know what happens to the Enemy of the People, don't you? He heads Saturday to a campaign rally—he needs public adulation to survive, apparently, the way a vampire needs human blood. It'll be in an airplane hangar, and I imagine the hangar will be filled with people. I imagine they'll have no trouble filling it with people. 
     The Martin observation was repeated in every paper in America all through 2016. But people had tuned the media out. The lying mainstream media. When the history of this sordid and humiliating period of American history is written, I hope historians note that journalists were standing on a chair, banging garbage cans over our head, shouting to the rooftops, trying to avoid this. America, to its shame, voted for Donald Trump anyway, with its eyes wide open, staring at his hideous personhood, believing what he told us and not what we saw so clearly. Some of us, anyway.
    Why? They wanted a change. They were tired of the old ways, the business-as-usual politics. It wasn't that they didn't have a valid complaint, they did. It's just that their solution will make the problem, make all of our problems, so much worse. America is like a man who burns his house down to get rid of the mice. Like a person who has a genuine ailment—say cancer—and then hires a shaman to spray fragrant oils on the soles of his feet. You're sorry they're sick. You understand the fear in that. But they're embracing a quack and don't know it. I'd add "yet," but that would be wistful. If we know one thing about error is that it tends to compound. The majority of people would much rather dwell in wrongness than admit being mistaken.

    Martin ends this way:

     Anyway, tomorrow is coming. And no matter what happens, no one is coming to take our guns. No one is going to make us any greater than our spirits will allow. Make no mistake, we are getting what we deserve. We need to start taking this stuff seriously, we need to stop listening to those who tell us we're the best and the brightest and that nothing is our fault.
     To paraphrase Dean Wormer, fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through history, America.

     From "Animal House." Perhaps an unfair reference, as Trump is a teetotaler -- kind of gives us teetotalers a bad name, huh? People often talk about drinking as an escape from the Trump monstrosity, and I'd join them if I thought it would shorten his administration by an hour, but I don't see how it would. So as bad as the Trump years will be for you, remember, I have to endure this sober.
     "Unfit." It echoes. I noticed E.J. Dionne's column in the Washington Post a few days back: "Admit it: Trump is unfit to serve."  Well duh. Though odd that people are just noticing. He's no different than when he ran. Only now he's president. 
     Though I might take exception with the idea that we deserve it. Even though I recall writing the exact same thing. Maybe we allowed it to happen. Not just last November. For years, decades, allowed money to overtake government, allowed the powerful too free a hand. Mocked the idea of experts, of competence. 
     Do we deserve this corrosive clown show of a government? A flailing, incompetent president, his Dick Tracy hall of villains staff?  This groveling Congress? Maybe we got what we deserved in November. But maybe it changed us. Galvanized us. Maybe seeing what we ended up with, we are now, trying to be a people who deserve better. A little late. But better late than never.

"An Enemy of the People"

     Donald Trump called the media the "enemy of the American people" on Friday. The temptation would be to shrug that off with all the toxic, self-serving, mendacious things that pour out of the president's mouth in a septic stream. 
     Is he going to spend four years doing this? And will it work? 
     Me, I took instant comfort, thinking of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," his response to the public scandal raised by his play "Ghosts." In "An Enemy of the People," a small town doctor, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, learns that the town's mineral bath is contaminated. He's pressured by the mayor, Peter Stockmann, his older brother, and assorted town folk not to reveal what he knows, but he does anyway, and is condemned for doing so. 
     "Sheer imagination, or even worse!" Peter Stockmann tells his brother, in language that sounds positively Trumpian. "The man who can make such vile suggestions about his own town is nothing but an enemy of the people."
    The point of the play is that sometimes the majority—or in our case, about 46 percent of the population—embrace a poisonous lie, and it is the moral duty of the minority, be it those working for the press, or even a single individual, to stand up for what is true and right. 
    Once again, Trump, in lashing out at those who would hold him to the standards of truth and American democracy, pins a badge of honor on those he wishes to undermine. 

Day of Facts — Scientists and researchers speak truth to power

Robert Martin, emeritus curator of the Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum, from a video created for Day of Facts.

     Facts can delight: A car dashboard is so named because buggies and wagons had a tilted board in that position to block mud kicked up by horses’ hooves.
     Facts can warn: Smoking cigarettes will, on average, shorten your life by 10 years.
     Facts can inspire: If you quit smoking by age 35, you can claw those lost years back.
     A relevant fact is a powerful thing. In that spirit, Friday, Feb. 17, has been dubbed the “Day of Facts” and 270 cultural institutions in the United States and 13 other countries have signed up to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media to share important facts.  

Turkish manuscript from 1600, showing a map of the Americas
with the south at the top, illustrating the long history of cultural
exchange between Islam and the West (Newberry Library)

 
    “The idea is for libraries and museums and archives across the country and around the world to post mission-related content as a way of reassuring the public that, as institutions, we remain trusted sources of knowledge,” said Alex Teller, director of communications at the Newberry Library. “It reflects recognition among a number of different institutions that while our missions haven’t changed, they’ve taken on a new significance in an era of alternative facts.”
     Those words sound carefully weighed. And for good reason. In this atmosphere of official vindictiveness, there is a real risk of payback. So I asked directly: Is this a reaction to Donald Trump?
     Teller sighed....

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The big wind at the center of the storm

     This week's Time magazine cover, even more apt in light of Thursday's detached-from-reality Trump press conference. It's by Tim O'Brien, who readers of the blog might remember as the artist behind this Little Golden Book parody. 
     Afterward, colleagues, their jaws hanging open, came by my office to ask if I had seen it. I hadn't—I was prepping my column for tomorrow. And given that I know that Trump is a pathological liar and bully, egomaniac and incompetent, somehow forcing myself to view each new example of these qualities, live and in real time well, it can seem like self-flagellation. I just want whatever damning evidence there is of his utter corruption to the Russians to come out, so he can be swept from office, the sooner, the better. Until then, comfort in the arts. 

It isn't April 1st yet, is it?

     On the first April Fool's Day this blog was in existence, I pretended to be in the midst of Kittens in Yarn Week. A comment, I suppose, about the dumbing down of the media.  So it was with a flash of recognition that I got this in my in-box late Wednesday. The heart breaks. And just as newspapers are boldly stepping up in the epic battle to bring down the unfit bully and Russian catspaw, Donald Trump, our own local media conglomerate, tronc (for readers elsewhere: the once respected Tribune Publishing renamed itself "tronc," well, I suppose, because that sounds more like something that would be the source of what regular reader Jakash immediately dubbed a "kitty newslitter.")
     Yes, I know. We're all cooking in the same pot. And newspapers always have had the trivial. The comics weren't exactly The Pentagon Papers either. The Sun-Times prints big posters of sports stars, though I might argue that top athletes are still news figures as opposed to, say, a Pekinese with a bowl of spaghetti dumped over its head. Papers do what they must to survive. Still. Must the Tribune's parent do this? The email went on to inform potential subscribers:

    Which leads me to this question: Do we need the editors of the three of the top newspapers in the country to scour the web for cute animal stories? Isn't that what Facebook is for? And what aren't these editors doing while they're culling "inspiring animal news"? (And inspiring in what way? Just the idea inspires me to want to bite a towel and scream). 
     Sigh. Power to them. I'm sure it'll be very successful. In fact, the question isn't "Do we need newspaper editors to pick our cute kitty stories?" The question is, "Once we're being force-fed our steady stream of 'endearing pet stories and inspiring animal news,' will we need anything else?" Consume too much fluff and you're not hungry for dinner.

U.S. sells more corn than anybody; guess who buys it?

     It's time to play The Fact Game!
     How do we play? First, throw out a fact:
     Corn is a kind of grass.
     Just like rice, wheat, oats, or other cereal grains. Don't let the large seed head — the corn cob — fool you.
     Is that true? Untrue? Well, I read it in a book, Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland by Cynthia Clampitt.
     "Corn is big grass," writes Clampitt, early in her charming, engrossing book. "It grows faster than other grasses. Its large leaves make it better at capturing sunlight than other grasses. . . . So it's really impressive grass, but it's still grass."
     It sounds right, is written by a noted food historian and printed in a book published by University of Illinois Press, confirmed by a second source (". . . of the grass family" says the Enyclopaedia Britannica).
     I'd say: Fact!
     Again, again! Let's have another "fact":
     The United States is the No. 1 producer of corn in the world.
     Do we accept that as fact? It's good to be No. 1. So yes, we do!

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Unhappy Valentine's Day, for those who lost loved ones

     I have been fortunate, in that I've seldom had to resort to the shadier practices of the journalistic profession. No sneaking photos of the deceased off the mantle during a wake, no pretending to be an assistant coroner to get information.
      The sketchiest thing I ever did, in my opinion was for this story: lurk in a cemetery and accost mourners communing with their dead loved ones. I had heard that cemeteries were busy on Valentine's  Day, and that seemed the best way to go about researching it. To be honest, the bereaved didn't seem to mind the intrusion. It didn't bother them nearly as much as it bothered me.

     "I love you," Ed Caldario said, out loud, in front of the stone marking his wife's grave. Weeping, he set down red tulips.
     "I always brought her flowers on Valentine's Day. She loved flowers. I used to send them to her at work."
     For the fortunate ones to whom Feb. 14 meant only kisses, romantic dinners and funny valentines, it might be good to pause and remember that for other Chicagoans Valentine's Day was a bittersweet time of fierce love tempered by loss and sorrow.
     By noon Sunday, Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside was dotted with big heart-shaped arrangements of flowers, plastic valentine decorations and poignant valentine's cards.
     "For the one I love," read the cheery preprinted valentine affixed to a stick before the grave of a woman who died in her 70s. To the generic message of affection, her husband added: "We love & miss you very much."
     Pasquale D'Andrea took his hat off and crossed himself as he joined his wife Angela in front of the grave of her parents.
     "Valentine's Day is a day to remember loved ones," said D'Andrea, of Berkeley.
     Isabel Riveria and her sister, Mary Mendez, brought along a gardener's trowel to tidy up the grave of their nephew, Efrain Perez, who died nearly five years ago at age 18. They also brought some liquid laundry detergent, to clean off the reddish marble marker.
     Riveria said the Valentine's Day visit to Perez's grave is a yearly tradition, as is the visit to the grave of her brother. She said it doesn't detract from their other Valentine's Day festivities because they don't have Valentine's Day festivities anymore.
     "We don't party since they passed away," she said. "We don't celebrate the occasions like we used to."
     "Special days like this, it makes my mother real sad," said Mendez, who brought a red plastic heart reading "Happy Valentine's Day" to plant by the grave. "We try to keep it real quiet."
     Not too far away was the grave of a baby who lived for three days in 1986. Someone thought to bring a heart-shaped helium balloon, with metallic silver on one side, "I Love You!" on the other.
     The balloon was tied to the grave by a ribbon, and it twisted and struggled against its mooring in Sunday's strong breeze, as if trying to break free from earth and fly away.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 15, 1993

Love, soldiers, gypsies and free tickets to 'Carmen'

  

Associate choreographer Sarah O'Gleby at rehearsal for "Carmen" (photo by Andrew Cioffi) 

     "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle . . ."
     "Love is a rebellious bird," Carmen sings, during her famous entrance in the beloved opera, "Carmen," which opened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Saturday.
     Just in time for Valentine's Day.
     What does "love is a rebellious bird" even mean? Later she explains: Love; you wait for it, it never comes. But stop waiting, there it is. Think you've caught it? It's gone.
     Sounds about right.
     This is the ninth year the Sun-Times and the Lyric have joined forces to bring 100 lucky readers to "A Night at the Opera," and this is perhaps the most exciting yet because, well, it's "Carmen." Spain. Handsome soldiers. Saucy gypsies. Men fighting with knives. Women fighting with knives.
     And the music. The soul of Spain distilled as only a Frenchman, Georges Bizet, could do it.
    We're going Feb. 28, and there's a party beforehand. Details about how to enter to win one of 50 pairs of free tickets are online. You can enter every day, and if I were you, I would.

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