' Do you attend library board meetings?'

     

    Yesterday's column on wanting to keep my Chicago Public Library card was supposed to be a fun ode to libraries. I had not considered the depth of class resentment. Living in Northbrook — which apparently is a Shangri La of wealth and privilege — I have no right to read the Chicago Defender archives online. Not paying Chicago taxes, I deserve no more expectation of enjoying CPL access than a visitor from the suburbs could hope to blithely drive down Halsted Street, walk unhindered into Grant Park or assume a response from a Chicago police officer...
    Oh wait...
    In addition to my being Louis XIV for wanting to use the CPL online resources, there was the wrath of librarians.  This letter, sent to me and to the paper's top editors, was the far end of the bell curve.  Notice how she drags in literally every issue facing libraries and lays them at my feet. The boldface was added by me to a sentence I felt you should notice. The author wanted her full name used, but I made an executive decision, and shielded it. Good library jobs are hard to come by, and by the time we finished communicating — there was much more — I felt some progress had been made. Though it is a stark reminder that the Left eats its own. Beaten by librarians AND thrashed by a university press — I'll be happy to say goodbye to April. The subject line was "Publishing Steinberg's Unverified Lies." 

     I am writing because I am incredibly disappointed in the literal lies recently published in Neil Steinberg's article "Why should suburbanites have to bang on the Chicago library door, pleading to be let in?" The library's reciprocal borrowing policy has been and remains the following: "Reciprocal cardholders can check out books, DVDs and other materials, and use our online resources. Reciprocal cardholders cannot check out Digital Museum Passes or Internet to Go WiFi hotspots, or use OverDrive eBooks, audiobooks and magazines or hoopla videos, music and audiobooks."
     The library is discontinuing eCards, which were never available to suburban borrowers in the first place. Any suburban borrower who has an eCard has one because they falsified their address when filling out the eCard form. The form would not let you create a card without a Chicago address. And I know this because I work in the library where I had to deny renewal to thousands of eCards created with the addresses 1060 W Addison St (Wrigley Field).
     I also know that Neil contacted the library on April 22nd via email and a library staff member clarified that there would be no changes to reciprocal borrowing privileges, so I'm wondering he went ahead and wrote this strange attack piece on the library when he was already told that he can continue to use it access physical books and the online newspapers he falsely laments about losing access to.
     If Mr. Steinberg was truly a "library geek...who takes his libraries very seriously," then he would know that libraries are currently facing an unprecedented barrage of attacks from the far right and federal government. As of April 28th, 2025, there are 130 bills proposed in state legislatures throughout the US that threaten access to library materials. (Source: Legislation of Concern in 2025 - EveryLibrary). In Illinois, there are currently two proposed anti-library bills, IL SB1783 and IL HB2817. These bills claim to be about protecting minors for "pornography and obscene materials," which any librarian knows is dog whistle for any book that includes LGBTQ content or provides grade appropriate sexual education. Mr. Steinberg's own home library of Northbrook was part of a large controversy last year where pro-censorship advocates tried to prevent a screening of the film Israelism and successfully delayed it twice. On March 14th 2025, the Federal Government issued an Executive Order to severely cut IMLS funding, which will put the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled at risk. Unlike Mr. Steinberg, whose library privileges will remain exactly the same, the disabled citizens who rely on the Talking Books program may completely lose access to accessible materials. Those are the real tragedies and threats facing our libraries.
     While Mr Steinberg sits at his desk and writes false information he didn't bother verifying, as a librarian, I'm personally gearing up for the inevitable hate messages we will receive once the library releases its Pride Programming schedule in the next month. I'm hoping that none of them are threats of violence, though if they follow in the footsteps of years past, they will be. Later today, I'll be teaching a class on computer basics to patrons who are building the skills to complete tasks like sending an email or uploading a resume to a website - skills that a very large portion of our library users do not have. These classes are free and open to anyone — no need to have a library card or be a Chicago resident. On the seventh floor of Harold Washington Library, social workers are helping connect patrons to housing, food stamps, medical assistance, and free legal help. No card required. We offer study rooms and music practice rooms, public computers with internet access and basic programs like Microsoft Word, and 10 free printing pages a day. Once again, none of these services require a library card or Chicago residency. The Chicago Public Library system provides a plethora of resources to anyone who walks through our doors, no matter where they are from. We are simply asking that eBooks and eAudiobooks, which cost more than double the price of a physical book and can only be purchased for short term contracts (the library cannot outright purchase an eBook), are only circulated to tax paying residents. It would be nice if instead of attacking those of us on the front lines of the war on information and access, Mr. Steiberg took his energy to fight for the library. It seems like many people take for granted the fact that libraries still exist in a world where those in power are trying to gut every single service that can't be milked for profit.
     So my question to the Sun Times is, why did no one bother to research this policy change closely enough to realize that Neil made false statements about policy changes? And even if Neil's piece was accurate, why would you publish something so incredibly tone deaf while public librarians are facing some of the worst working conditions they ever have in this country? This piece is an entitled temper tantrum. While I would expect nonsense like this from the Tribune, I thought more highly of the Sun Times.
     And my question to Neil is, what are you doing to support libraries besides using our free services and then complaining that we're not doing enough for you when you're not even a resident of this city? Do you attend library board meetings? Do you use your position as a journalist to advocate for more library funding and social service funding (which directly affects the conditions inside the library)? Did you speak out against censorship at your own public library? Will you show up to defend CPL if protestors try to sabotage LGBTQ programming at the library? Every day, libraries get less funding while both the public and the city ask us to do more, but we cannot do more with less. And unless the public starts standing up for libraries, you might find that the information you treasure so much isn't accessible to anyone anymore because of censorship and funding cuts.
     Sincerely,
     GAR., disappointed public librarian

Banging on the library door

   

The Richelieu Reading Room of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or French National Library, in Paris.

     They're taking my Chicago Public Library card away?!?
     Were you to evaluate the range of bad news in last Tuesday's Sun-Times, from the death of a courageous, liberal pope to the prospect of an impoverished city of Chicago laying off employees, you might not choose Shannon Tyler's story on page 15: "E-cards to be discontinued by library."
     Then again, you are not a library geek, like me, who takes his libraries very seriously.
     The CPL and I go waaay back — heck, I was involved in the decision-making process that selected the building for the Harold Washington Library Center. (OK, OK, the public was invited to vote on a variety of design options. I voted and my favorite won — I liked the elaborate frou-frou at the corners and didn't know they made patrons go through a maze to get into the place.)
     Then again, libraries tend to make you jump through hoops. But I'm always up to the task. From the British Library in London to the New York Public Library to the Library of Congress in Washington, I've gotten in, received library cards, roamed the subterranean stacks, consulted books and, in general, reveled in their bookish splendor.
     The British Library gave me a card good for five years. The Newberry Library not only gave me a card but a shelf to put my checked-out books on. And now the best Chicago can do for non-residents is issue a chit good for 90 days, non-renewable?
     Have you ever researched a topic? Ninety days is a start. Ninety days is clearing your throat. I've stepped over a book on the floor for 90 days before cracking the cover. These things take time.
     I use the CPL website continually, simply because it's the easiest way to search historic newspapers — the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Inter Ocean. Have you ever read the Inter Ocean? Its reporters were so sharp, I want to disinter their bodies and shake their clawed hands. Even the Tribune archive — in fact, I consult the Trib from decades past far more than I read today's Tribune.
     And you want to take that away? Just because I live in Northbrook? You monsters!
     I phoned the library. What, I wondered, have I ever done to you to deserve this? Being besieged by suburbanites trying to consult the Chicago Examiner online, are you?
     "We have such a demand," said Patrick Molloy, director of government and public affairs for the library. "Not so much from the suburban people, as we have people from all over the country and even internationally, creating online cards, checking out ebooks — they've got 15 things on hold — and people are waiting a really long time to get ebooks."

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A whole new meaning to "It's cheaper to keep her"

Ruth Snyder in the electric chair

    I complain about being surrounded by lawyers — two sons, a daughter-in-law and a wife — but there are advantages.
    Yes, conversation quickly devolves into .... well ... I couldn't tell you exactly what they're talking about, and I try to listen, hard. For a while. at least. Something about monopolistic practices, for the older boy. About motions to dismiss, for the younger. And landlord difficulties, for my daughter-in-law at Legal Aid (when can I drop the "-in-law" part? It seems unnecessarily specific. I love her like a daughter). 
    But one does pick up truths, as if by osmosis. 
    For instance, Saturday I received an email under the very promising slug "Good column yesterday re: Crimo..." that read:

      But too bad CP is not legal in Illinois. How much will the taxpayers spend housing and feeding this vermin, for what, 60 plus years possibly.
     Meanwhile millions of people in our country are homeless and/malnourished. Diverting funds from housing and feeding miscreants like Crimo should be diverted to help those less fortunate in our society, in my opinion.
     Consider me a pro capital punishment, far left liberal. Hopefully, one of Crimo’s fellow cell mates will ‘Off him.’ And the sooner the better. Happy weekend. - L. from Glenview

    "CP" being, I realized after a moment, "capital punishment" (As opposed to what's going on in Washington now, which we can consider "capitol punishment").
     I knew my response immediately. Checked it online at the U.S. Department of Justice's web site (which I hate to ID, lest they scrub that information too. I guess it's safe, because it doesn't deal directly with race. (Though you can't talk about capital punishment without getting quickly to race: a third of the Americans executed since 1976 are Black, double their representation in the population — though I should also observe they're responsible for half the murders). 
     I linked to the page in my reply:

     Ah L., you must not be surrounded by lawyers, like I am. Capital punishment is far, far more expensive than keeping someone in prison for the rest of his life, when you factor in the legal costs. It's cheaper to house 'em for 40 years than to fry 'em once and — if you ask me — a more terrible punishment. There's a former colleague who was sniffing around, begging for his old job back, and I mentioned, just the other day at the office, "I couldn't conceive of a worse fate than being him is." That would go double for Crimo. Thanks for writing.  NS

     Alas, the reader didn't bother clicking on the link, nor could he grasp that the legal appeals around capital punishment quickly dwarf food and housing and medical care for a prisoner. He seemed to think the choice was shooting Crimo the day after sentencing, or 40 years in prison. I observed that, had the death penalty been on the table, Crimo might never have pled guilty, and the trial would be grinding on right now. 

Independent Bookstore Day.

The Book Bin's new location, 1929 Cherry, Northbrook

     Happy Independent Bookstore Day! When I heard that the last Saturday in April has been designated a holiday to celebrate the tenacity of small bookstores, my first thought was, "Isn't every day independent bookstore day?" Not that I go every day — at this point, with the mesmeric lure of social media, I'm lucky to crack a book every day, never mind buy one. But I'm one of those people drawn into bookstores as if by gravitational pull. How can you pass one by?

     Holding a special day for small bookstores is sort of gilding the lily at this point. Once upon a time, independent bookstores were endangered by the peril of big box bookstores — Borders (remember them?) and Barnes & Noble and such.  Now the giants have largely gone the way of the dinosaurs, missed in their own right, while small bookstores, like the hardy voles, have survived the apocalypse and continue to thrive and evolve. Amazon might be handy in certain circumstances, but you seldom have a conversation there, and part of the money spent on Amazon ended up funding Donald Trump's inauguration.
     I'm lucky to live in Northbrook, whose Book Bin has been a social hub since 1971. The news is that  in February it moved into bigger quarters at 1929 Cherry Lane — and closer to me by a  hundred yards or so. They've always been busy — I'm always amazed to find four or five clerks working whenever I stop by — and supportive of my books. For the last one, we developed a fun symbiosis — anyone who wants a signed copy calls the Book Bin, which texts me. I stroll over and sign their copy, and the Book Bin ships it out. Do it now, if you like — 847-498-4999 — I'll be there in a few hours, can sign your book, and the Book Bin will speed it on its way. Gift-wrapping is free.
    Now that I think of it, walking over to the Book Bin to sign a book for them probably takes more time and effort than just packing it up myself. But it's a lot more fun — you see the latest titles, chat with owner Alli or her sister Amy, take the air on the way there and back. I feel like I'm a character in a Richard Scarry book.

    On Saturday, not only is the Book Bin celebrating Independent Bookstore Day, but it's also having a grand re-opening in the new location. There are snacks, music, fun.

     A big Independent Bookstore Day event is something called the Book Crawl — like a pub crawl, only with books. They've printed passports, created special stamps, hired buses, and if you visit 10 participating bookstores, you get 10 percent off all year. 
    Some of my favorites are on the list: 57th Street Books, a sprawling subterranean (okay, a few steps down from the street) Hyde Park institution. New and used. Good Dante selection. Powell's too.
      Bookends and Beginnings, which took over Bookman's Alley in Evanston for many years and now has moved into a new space in participating. As is the Newberry Bookstore, which, in keeping with the library's mission, is heavy on design — I once spent $10 there for a little booklet designed for self-guided bike tours of Chicago's racial history, timed for the centennial of the 1919 race riots, not so much because I planned to ride it, though I should, but because it was such a neat little volume.
    Quimby's is taking part, a skateboard punk of Chicago bookstores (though its brother, Comix Revolution in Evanston, is not. I got my first Uglydoll at Comix Revolution, and they have the best curated new book table. I found Eddy Portnoy's essential "Bad Rabbi" there). 
    The Book Cellar, Lincoln Square's jammed shop, is on the list — the "cellar" part is for their wine bar.  And the Book Stall, in Winnetka... 
     You get the idea. Sorry I didn't give you more advance notice — I only found out about it Friday morning. I'm not hitting 10 bookstores. Saturday morning I'm conducting an interview — about a book, fittingly enough, the new Wrigley Building coffee table book — with one of the authors and the photographer. I'll write about that in a couple weeks. Afterward, I plan to stroll over to the Book Bin and see what I can find. So, figure about 11:30 a.m. Maybe I'll see you there.

Crimo isn't alone ignoring the pain of others

     When you stop caring about people, you can do anything.
     Ignore any suffering, endorse any wrong. Heck, you can, as Robert Crimo III did, cause suffering and inflict wrongs yourself. Show up at your own town's Fourth of July parade and fire 88 shots from an assault rifle into the crowd of your neighbors, killing 7, wounding 48 more.
     You're free to do that, then shrug it off afterward.
     We wonder how Crimo could do it, while at the same time imitating him, in our own small way.
     Part by necessity. The world is a terrible place. You can't mourn every bird nudged out of every nest, every child who dies anywhere. Life would be continuous agony. You have to be concerned about yourself, primarily, your family, next, if you're lucky enough to have one. Then a few neighbors, co-workers, friends. We make such a big deal out of the tiny fraction we care about, we completely ignore the majority who don't count.
     Some cause harm. For a lark. In Crimo's case, he pulled the trigger, he claimed, inspired by friends being shot by police — imaginary friends apparently. Lies are helpful that way, the grease on which our bad deeds slide. Crimo says he was a zombie, a sleepwalker.
     There's a lot of that going around. Those who aren't psychopaths prefer to let others do their harm for them. The reasons hardly matter. Our government hurts people based on their immigration status. Their paperwork. It's such a familiar excuse, we forget just how flimsy it is, how false. Just as baseless as other popular pretexts: the color of someone's skin, their religion, gender. Meaningless distinctions that become meaningful to those who want to oppress and hurt, or ignore oppression and pain.
     As if the 2022 Fourth of July massacre weren't close enough — a 13-minute drive from my house to Ross Cosmetics, the Highland Park store and social center Crimo chose as a sniper's nest — after the killing I noticed a photo I took at a Trump rally at the corner, within sight of my window.
     It was 2020, the COVID Plague Year. Northbrook activist Lee Goodman had taken to posting the COVID death tolls on a sign at the corner of Shermer and Walters — then under 200,000 dead. Trumpers began holding rallies at that corner to register their displeasure at anyone keeping track of something as trivial as Americans dying in a pandemic, the opening salvo of what, five years later, has become a general war on education, experts, data, information.
     Not only don't we care who gets hurt; we don't even want to see an official toll. Statistics are for losers.
     It might seem facile to draw a line from Crimo to the administration. Why not? Both are motivated by the same blithe unconcern for life. It's only a matter of degree. , and seven dead are a rounding error chump change compared to what's happening right now. Human Rights Watch just issued a paper: "100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days: The Trump Administration's Assault on Rights in the United States and Abroad."
     No. 1 is "Children, adults, and whole families may find it more difficult to feed themselves as the administration eliminated over $1 billion in food assistance for school lunches and food banks in food insecure school districts and communities across the US."
     Are those kids going to die of hunger tonight? No. But it's a hint at what's going on — if you don't care about hungry kids, what do you care about? Trans high school athletes, apparently.

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Coffee with the senator

     Sen. Dick Durbin announced Wednesday that he won't run for re-election. Of course he did. In an era when politicians leap to look out for themselves, first, last and always, clinging to power until it's pried away, Durbin is a man out-of-time, cleaving to the old standards of service to country before service to self. Who knows where we'd be today if Joe Biden had done the same in a timely fashion, although Durbin had the benefit of learning from Biden's bad example. I'll miss Sen. Durbin, for the good he did for our country, our state, and for how accessible he was — the kind of guy you could sit down with and share a cup of coffee.

OPENING SHOT

      Had a cup of java with my old pal Dick Durbin at a Madison Street coffee shop Thursday morning.
     "So you don't think Alito is so bad?" said Illinois' senior senator, alluding to a column I wrote suggesting that President Bush's current nominee to the Supreme Court wasn't the kind of towel-gnawing conservative crazy who would justify the Democrats kicking out the stops to block him. I assumed a filibuster was a flat-out political impossibility but Durbin — who is on the Judiciary Committee, and thus should know — disagrees.
     "I would have told you that last week," he said. "But after meeting with my colleagues, I'm not sure. We can't rule it out. I was surprised at the intensity of feeling."
     They are convinced that Alito will not only pitch Roe vs. Wade, but lead us into a world of excessive governmental power and reduced individual rights — a dark new Alito's America.
     Not that they got that across. A murderer's row of Democratic senatorial powerhouses, led by Ted Kennedy, had hours of choice TV time to tar Alito, and came off looking verbose and ineffective.
     "It wasn't an easy week, I'll tell you," Durbin said, with a laugh.
     To be fair, the Dems were in a bind -—anything resembling tough questioning would be seen as bullying a respected jurist, which doesn't poll well. So they were left speechifying and focusing on minutia.
     None of it added up to the impression that Alito was too conservative to serve.
     "We look back and say, 'What went wrong?' " said Durbin, who insists that the American people feel Bush won the election and therefore gets to pick his court nominee, but they didn't realize they would also be getting Alito's America.
     "Did he win the election saying he would appoint a justice to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade?" said Durbin. "This isn't what we bargained for."
     Durbin said Democratic senators will decide over the next several days whether they want to take the dramatic step of filibustering the nomination. It's still a long shot but, I'll tell you this: It would make great theater.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 20, 2006

     Had breakfast the other morning with Sen. Dick Durbin and Dan Seals, the young Democrat who just might unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District next week. We were discussing that age-old question of whether the current election really is the most mean-spirited in history or only feels that way. Conversation naturally moved to George Allen, the Virginia senator who, having pretty much dug his own political grave with his mouth, is desperately lashing out at his opponent, Jim Webb, by pointing shrilly to salty lines culled from Webb's war novels as if they were evidence of perversion. Durbin used a phrase I hadn't heard before.
     "George Allen is a spit tobacco senator," he said. "One of four in the Senate." Meaning that he dips and chews tobacco, a vile habit better left in the barn. But Allen doesn't leave it in the barn. Durbin entertainingly described a flight down to Guantanamo he and Allen shared on a military airplane, and the cringing revulsion the clean-cut, dignified and ramrod straight military hosts extended toward Allen, a drooling nicotine addict dribbling brown saliva into a plastic cup. That's a grosser image than anything in Webb's novels.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 1, 2006

     For many years, my column took up a page and ended with a joke, often sent in by readers. Sen. Durbin shared what had to be a real occurrence

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Normally, you couldn't pry me off the couch on a Sunday afternoon. But this Sunday, Jan. 20, the first-ever 10th District Democratic Convention ... The public is invited, and the keynote address is by my old pal and regular reader, Sen. Dick Durbin who — completely unrelated to Sunday's convention — sent in this joke:
     The senior senator from Illinois was visiting an elementary school in Caseyville. Always eager to impart the importance of understanding our democratic system, the senator asked the children in a third-grade class whether anyone could name the vice president of the United States.
     There was a silence. Finally, a small voice from the back of the room ventured: "Judge Judy?"

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 2008

'How can we help?' Go to 26th Street and chow down

 

Susana Mendoza

     Don't bite off more than you can chew.
     If something is overwhelming — whether today's news, or the $39.95 Carne a La Tampiqueña platter at Nuevo Leon Restaurant, 3657 W. 26th Street — just cut it down to manageable size. That works for both ceaseless national turmoil and dinner. I got the half order.
     I was there last week at the invitation of Susana Mendoza, the Illinois comptroller. Not a personal invitation, mind you — we don't know each other — but a general plea, delivered by one of her now trademark slick videos, complete with aerial drone shots and Illinois farmer Dick Bigger Jr.
     Seeing the fun Mendoza has with Bigger's name — which got her campaign video on Stephen Colbert — reminded me that there are two types of politicians: the stiff, robot from Mars sort — no names, please, you know who I mean — and easygoing, Judy Baar Topinka types. Proud possessors of quirks, like Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, twirling her baton at the Pride Parade. Public servants I bestow with the ultimate compliment: "actual human beings."
     Into that fold goes Mendoza, whose official portfolio includes neither dining with the press, nor plumping the neighborhood where she was born.
     But one of the countless negative results of the Trump administration's war on America has been ICE raids deadening business in ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Village.
     "It was tremendous," Mendoza said, noting traffic at Nuevo Leon fell by three-quarters. "They went from 280 tickets a day to 67."
     "Locals are not coming out," confirmed Nuevo Leon owner Laura Gutierrez. "We did have a couple incidents, people picked up, right down the block. When people from the neighborhood see that, they stay inside the house."
     I initially wondered whether Mendoza worries she is urging immigrants into harm's way. But I'd misunderstood the target audience: folks like me.
     "We're encouraging people who are not from the community to come to the community," she said. "That's why we did it in English."
     It works. I arrived an hour early and happily wandered 26th Street, an area I'd never visited before.

Ginger pigs

     I did have a goal: El Nopal Bakery, 3648 W. 26th St. Having lived on Logan Boulevard for several years, I developed a deep affection for treats I think of as "ginger pigs," actually called marranitos or cochinitos — "little pigs" — big, thick, soft gingerbread cookies, roughly porcine in shape.
     The idea, Mendoza said, is "to have people maybe venture out of their comfort zone. So many people are talking about this issue, [wondering], 'How can we help?' The best way is lifting up the businesses by coming into these communities, where people are afraid to come, and spend money."
     I did my best, buying two ginger pigs, and would have spent more, except many stores are geared toward princesses — well,15-year-old girls on their quinceañeras. Though some aimed at a younger crowd, and my eye was caught by an attractive green number in the window of Pink & Blue Kids Wear, 3437 W. 26th St., that seems perfect for a certain as-yet-unborn girl.
     I went inside. The dress seemed reasonably priced for such elegance, at $120, but as one unaccustomed to this kind of purchase, I snapped a photo and sent it to her due-in-June mother, who, while uncertain of what occasion would call for it, pronounced the garment "very adorable." I decided to put off the purchase, for now, but to return soon to collect it, and more ginger pigs.
    "All of us can help by coming here and patronizing these businesses," said Mendoza, who doesn't plan to stop her efforts at Little Village. Chinatown is next, and then other affected Chicago communities.

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Bird of prey

Photo by Dan Abraham

     Much reader reaction to Monday's column on birding.
     "You can't go wrong with birds," I told my wife. Not only for their beauty, their energy, the way they slip the bonds of earth and fly. But their independence —  they carry on quite well without us; better, in fact. They are not often domesticated. People do keep birds, but in cages. Not like dogs and cats and goldfish. They are free, which is more than we can say, particularly at the present moment. 
    Among the many sharing their thoughts was Dan Abraham, who writes:
    "I’ve never written to you before, but after reading the column on birding, I thought you might like this photo. I don’t intend to go birding, but this guy showed up in my backyard in Evanston the same day your column came out.  Google says it’s a Cooper’s hawk. "
    He is right, I do like it, and his photo prompted an investigation and a confession.
    First, for all the times I've referred to a Cooper's hawk, I never asked the obvious question which is ... anybody? ... that's right: who's Cooper?

William Cooper

     The bird was named — nearly two centuries ago, in 1828 — after naturalist William Cooper, one of the founders of the New York Lyceum of Natural History, now the New York Academy of Sciences, and what is extra nice is that it was not done so by Cooper puffing himself, as often happens, but by his friend, Charles Lucien Bonaparte. 

     Among his other interests, Cooper was a conchologist, a word I had not encountered before, which means exactly what it sounds like: a zoologist of shells.

     The confession is simple: I tend to call every hawk I see a "Cooper's hawk," even if they are a sharp-shinned hawk, which indeed look very similar, or a rough-legged hawk, or any of the eight species of hawks found in Illinois. 

     Now that I admit the sin, the practice of lumping all hawks under that one variety sounds pretty lame. I'm going to have to try to do better and improve my hawk-identification skills. Hawks deserve no less.

     

What can you do? Go birding.

Bob Dolgan looks for woodcocks at the Glenview Park District's Kent Fuller Air Station Prairie. 

     Usually, birds come to me. To my backyard feeder: robins, sparrows, wrens — little brown birds, mostly, with the occasional red cardinal, gray dove or blue warbler offering variety.
     I'm generally content with that setup, though chasing off squirrels is a constant challenge. They adapt.
     Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, however. So when Bob Dolgan, publicist for the Newberry Library, said he is a regular birder and invited me along, I could not refuse the opportunity to seek out birds. Anything is better than sitting in the kitchen, staring gape-mouthed at the newspaper.
     We met in the parking lot of the Sheraton Northbrook and, to my amazement, took just a few steps and might as well have been on Egdon Heath. We were on a grassy bluff above a body of water carrying the lyrical name Techny 32B inline reservoir. A strong, steady wind ruffled our clothes. He carried with him a tripod and a 60x Bushnell spotter scope.
     A few dozen European starlings vectored past.
     "Europeans starlings — we kinda hate them, right?" I said, tucking myself into the fold of birders. An invasive species, introduced in Central Park by some fool who wanted every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to be found in America, crowding out native birds. A reminder of how much lasting damage one idiot can cause.
     "Today, I'm feeling very generous, so I'm not going to say that," Dolgan replied. "They were introduced more than a century ago. They just take up a lot of habitat from other species. They're not a great bird."
     Great birds came fast and furious. Three mallards on the water. A killdeer — a large plover on long legs.
     "You have a life list, right?" I asked.
     "I have been a little bit less focused on my list and more focused on the experience," he said, not offering the number of distinct species he's seen in the wild in his birding career. I deliberately didn't ask for the figure. Guys have a way of turning every pursuit into baseball, every activity into a batting average, a numbers game.
     "If you look at birds just to check a name off a list, a lot gets lost," Dolgan said. "There is less a connection to nature and joy of discovery. At the same time, I am keeping up with it. Looking at how many I've seen in Illinois, how many in Cook County. I report it on ebird.org."
     Ebird.org is an engaging, well-crafted website. There Dolgan listed the 22 birds we saw over the next hour — well, birds he saw. I sorta squinted in the direction he pointed, though the geese were my contribution; hard to miss geese.
     For those keeping score at home, in addition to my Canada geese, we noted examples of: blue-winged teal, northern shoveler, mallard, green-winged teal, killdeer, Wilson's snipe, lesser yellowlegs, greater yellowlegs, pectoral sandpiper, ring-billed gull, American herring gull, great egret, great blue heron, barn swallow, European starling, American robin, house finch, song sparrow, eastern meadowlark, red-winged blackbird and common grackle.

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Bob Dolgan spying a noteworthy bird on a watery mud flat in Northbrook.

Flashback 2013: Egg salad (eww) delicious for many

     Passover ends Sunday, and with it my annual stiff-arm refusal of hard-boiled eggs and all their manifestations.

     I don’t like egg salad.
     That’s it, end of column. Thank you very much for reading, please exit to your left and enjoy your visit with the other fine features in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.
     Still, here?
     Oh all right then. We are bound by the limits of the form, aren’t we? Ann Landers once left the last quarter of her column blank, when writing about her divorce, as a tribute to a marriage that ended prematurely. Very dramatic, though it was an extraordinary circumstance. Someone who made her living telling others how to manage their lives couldn’t just shrug when something so vital in her own life went off the rails. Smart.
     My marriage is fine, as far as I know. The egg salad though . . . I don’t like eggs hard-boiled, either. Which makes for an awkward moment at Passover, when my wife passes me the bowl of hard-boiled eggs, taking one for herself with a flourish of anticipatory joy. She really loves hard-boiled eggs.
     I shudder with visceral revulsion and quickly pass the bowl, averting my gaze as if it held kitty entrails. I do not, however, say, “I avoid these eggs because hard-boiled eggs are gross — bland white goo surrounding a yellow sphere of chalky disgust.”
     I don’t, in fact, say anything at all. Because I have learned a vital truth that, judging from my email, many adults have not mastered. One I would like to pass it on to you. Ready?
     You are not the final arbitrator of all things. No one is. I’m certainly not. While an educated person, proud holder of a degree from Northwestern University, my tastes are nevertheless not the template quality can be measured against. What I like, and what is good on some objective scale, assuming such a scale exists, are two separate things.
     This shouldn’t be a revelation. Yet so many just assume that what they like, and what is indeed good, bear more than an accidental relationship. So leap they do, aided by God, whom I’m beginning to define as: “the imaginary cosmic force that people conjure up to add weight to their own personal biases.”
     I wish more people understood this. On Sunday, I wrote about the utter greatness of “The Book of Mormon” musical, laying out, necessarily in abbreviated, canyon-floor-rushing-up-at me form, why I think it’s a superior work of art. This prompted a number of readers to write back along the lines of, “I saw ‘Book of Mormon’ the other day and it was the worst thing I have seen in years.”
     Period. Well, stop the presses. I’ll go tell the producers and they’ll close the show. Some writers, perhaps aware that something more is required, offer up rationale — it was “sophomoric,” which I take as the five-dollar word meaning it has swears in it. Or “racist,” which, thanks in part to the vigorous efforts of the Rev. Jesse Jacksons of the world, has gone from meaning “an unacceptable, even illegal act of racial hatred” to “anything that involves race that I don’t like.”
     Now, a solid case could be made for either complaint — that obscenity ruins a work by jarring tender sensibilities. Or that stating frank truths about any particular people — such as suggesting that Uganda is a poor and violent place where many people suffer from AIDS — is unacceptable racism in a world gone mad to flatter everyone at all times.
     But my correspondents didn’t say that — they just said categorically they didn’t like it, often that they didn’t like it because it wasn’t good. And I’m not embarrassing them by name, because to do so seems mean, since they are guilty of such a common lapse.
     As the years grind on, I’m starting to see we are all ego junkies, so busy shooting up our own opinions that, as junkies will do, we ignore the rest of the big blue world. I’m as guilty as anyone. I can’t tell you how many times, talking about opera, I’ll be whining about seeing Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1994, and what a soul-shattering experience of badness it was, only to be truly surprised when the person I’m talking to juts out his lower lip and says, in a small voice,“But I love Berg.”
     You lose friends that way. And boldly thundering your opinion, without any sort of explanation, assumes people care, and they do not, particularly if they don’t know you. That’s important enough to write a column about, I think, because if society is a continuum, where on one side is a hive of selfless bees all laboring mightily to make the communal honey, and on the other is Robinson Crusoe, padding along his island alone, we have swung about as far toward Crusoe as you can get and still occasionally catch sight of another person. Our politics are a disaster, our schools in crisis, faith a shambles, in large part — I believe . . . in my opinion — because each of us has become so enamored with ourselves, our tastes, our sensibilities, our lives, that we forget there are other people on this trip too. So enjoy your egg salad. I’m sure it’s wonderful stuff.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2013

Blooming blossoms

 

April 6
 

     Long week. Lots of running around, reporting stories that will be in the paper next week. Trying to keep myself distracted. As the national shame reaches the end of its third month — Sunday — the weight of what our country is going through, with worse sure to come, has begun to press upon those with the strength to keep tabs on what's happening. 
     I won't outline it for you here — either you already know, or never will. Best to keep busy.
     The good news is the blossoms on the saucer magnolia in front of my house have been unusually splendid and long lasting. Friday they were going strong, a dozen days after I first snapped them. This despite one day where the temperature dipped into the 20s for a few hours — usually that's enough to change them to the color and shape of scorched marshmallows.
     Yet they survived.

     "Notice the magnolia blossoms as you go out the door," I'll tell my wife, seeing her off to work.

     I wondered why the blossoms would be so hearty and full this year, whether it might be that we had the tree trimmed last fall. Cutting back the deadwood — the tree is 50 years old if not older — might have encouraged new growth. Which was enough to make me think that the tragedy — well, one of the many tragedies — about our current situation is that pruning the government, had it been done with deliberation, humanity and care, and not with wild abandon, targeting the most vulnerable, might not have been a bad thing. But the reckless, wholesale, sloppy way that the richest-man-in-the-world-and-palpable-force-for-evil did it was not a good thing. Just the opposite. A bad, terrible thing. 

     All the news is not bad. Opposition builds, let by Harvard of all places...
     Sorry, saucer magnolia blooms, some six inches wide, on naked branches awaiting their leaves. The moment I had the thought, "They're really lingering this year," at that very second, I looked down and saw the first fat petal on the front steps, a vanguard for the general surrender liable to arrive any day. Nothing lasts forever. Not the good. Or the bad.

April 18

Blowing up the government, again

 

     Timothy McVeigh was so upset that the government used tear gas on children during the Waco siege that he killed 19 kids in a day care center. Agitated by the deaths of 76 Americans at the hands of federal law enforcement in 1993, he killed 168 more, lighting a two-minute fuse on a rental truck and walking away. The bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exploded at 9:02 a.m., April 19, 1995, 30 years ago Saturday.
     Toxic hate against American government did not die when McVeigh was put to death by lethal injection in 2001. Instead it grew and spread, so that our national infrastructure can be blown apart before our eyes — a sort of slow-motion, nationwide, institutional destruction — and reaction ranges from numbness to joy.
     Just as Britons in areas that most relied on trade with the European Union pushed hardest for Brexit, so red state Americans who lean most heavily on the government cheer its wholesale destruction since Jan. 20.
     People seem only dimly aware that services they depend on are being scrapped so that money once used for their benefit can be given in tax breaks to billionaires.
     The government isn't even keeping track of who's being fired. News organizations estimate that about 12% of the 2.4 million strong federal workforce have lost their jobs in the last three months, with more layoffs every day, and no end in sight.
     To add insult to injury, the fired workers are being told it's their fault. Even though, clearly, no assessments were done by the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's youthful wrecking crew created by executive order and given free rein.
     Again and again, offices are eliminated, only to be reinstated when an adult realizes that, oh, hey, they've let go people they need to keep nuclear reactors safe, or to check food for contamination.
     Not to forget the billions of dollars in research grants being eliminated, wholesale. Not in any connection to the merit of the work being done, but as retribution for institutions that do not adjust their programs to the government's liking. Harvard resisted, and not only are $2 billion in federal grants being withheld, but its tax- exempt status is immediately challenged, a clear violation of the First Amendment. Americans are not taxed more because of what they teach. Well they weren't, up to now.

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Flashback 2012: Classical stars surprise Thompson lunch crowd

     Wednesday's column on the Department of Motor Vehicles made me wonder what other DMV columns I've run. And while this only mentions the DMV in passing, I'm sharing it anyway, as a reminder that while working at home is convenient as heck, we do miss out by not going downtown.

    Mike Koetting, a deputy director at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, had just gotten off the L at the Thompson Center on Monday and was heading toward the elevators to go to a meeting when the haunting strains of "Vocalise" by Rachmaninoff snapped his head hard to the side.

      He moved toward the center of the lower level food court like a man in a trance, his battered leather briefcase held limply at his side.
     "I’m a music fan," he said.
     A few feet away from Koetting were two of the great musicians of our era, soprano Renee Fleming and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, performing a brief unannounced recital for the lunch crowd, passersby, jurors on their break and a select group who had been tipped off ahead of time, including Gov. Pat Quinn.
     Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra backed the pair, making their debut performance together.
     Some came without exactly knowing what to expect. Judy Kaufman had heard from a friend who volunteers at the CSO that something musical and noteworthy would be happening, and so brought her daughter, Vered, and grandson Jonah, 3, who just started studying the violin.
     "She told us to make sure we didn’t miss this," said Judy Kaufman, who lives downtown. They were delighted to learn who they had come to hear. "We had no idea. We are tremendous music lovers, and are so impressed with Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma, the giants of opera and classical music."
     A few minutes before the performance began, people going down the escalators were handed programs explaining that the event was a joint production of the CSO and the Lyric Opera, and is part of programs at both institutions designed to encourage music in community settings and foster a greater public appreciation for the arts.
     "Awesome," said Fanny Clonch, a French teacher from Curie High School, taking a program. She was giving a tour to 17 students from France, and steered them over to listen.
     Three students from the Tribeca Flashpoint digital vocational school happened by to patronize the Panda Express when they noticed the commotion.
     "Who is it?" asked Jack Whelan, 18, sipping a Mountain Dew. Told Yo-Yo Ma was playing, Whelan, a musical recording arts student, replied, "he’s sick," a slang term of approval meaning "cool" or "awesome."
     Choruses from Lake View High School, the Chicago High School for the Arts and Merit School of Music began the three-song program about 12:40 p.m. with a traditional South African folk song, and it was ended with a rendition of "America the Beautiful." It was to have been a sing-along, but few in the crowd of several hundred tried to compete with one of America’s premiere vocalists.
     While some patrons stood on chairs or crowded for a closer look, others blithely talked on their cell phones or continued their full-throated conversations or listened to their own music on earbuds. The door to the Department of Motor Vehicles office was open, but the music heard inside was very soft, nearly drowned out by booming announcements such as "Now serving B291 at counter No. 6."
     Fleming, the creative consultant for the Lyric, said that she and Ma, creative consultant to the CSO, had spent the morning talking with students, and that, coupled with their performance, had buoyed the artists.
     "It’s inspiring to us and gives us a lot," she said.
     The entire performance lasted less than 15 minutes and Mike Koetting headed to his meeting. What did he think of the music?
     "It was great," he said, and then laughed. "They’re good."

        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2012

Farcical Real ID regulations swamp Illinois DMV centers

 

     While much of the country reels from the federal government being torn apart — jobs slashed, agencies gutted, funding withdrawn — Alexi Giannoulias is facing the opposite problem: a mass of new federal requirements crushing his agency.
     "I haven't been this frustrated, professionally, maybe ever," the Illinois secretary of state said Monday. "Because we've done so much work to create efficiencies, and they're all being unraveled by this unprecedented demand."
     Real ID is a ticking time bomb of security theater, signed into law by President George W. Bush on May 11, 2005. A law designed, basically, to keep the Sept. 11 hijackers off those planes, ex post facto, by ensuring that people given special driver's licenses really, truly are who they say they are, making them jump through documentation hoops.
     "We have zero control," said Giannoulias. "We're required to scan and send this information, this crazy paperwork and documentation requirements. It's not something we put in. We have to take it. We have to put it in a scanner. It's brutal."
     Years of prepping the public, begging them not to wait until the last minute, proved insufficient, and now collective lifetimes evaporate in blocklong lines as frustrated Illinoisans battle to DMV windows only to find their paperwork not in order.
     "I had carefully reviewed the Real ID checklist on the website and believed I had the required documentation," wrote my neighbor, an insurance executive who often travels by air. Normally the most placid person, I bumped into her, irate, coming back from another failed attempt to get her Real ID, thwarted because she changed her name when she got married.
     "The need for a marriage certificate to verify a name change should be called out more explicitly — especially as it often applies to women," she wrote in a complaint I nudged in Giannoulias' direction, prompting our conversation. "It’s an easy detail to miss, and not something people carry daily. Yet it can derail the entire process."

     Nor is this a local problem. From coast to coast, DMV offices are swamped.
     "This is national. It's literally chaos and mayhem around the country," said Giannoulias. "In Florida, they're sleeping in their cars, in tents, in front of the DMV. Other states are shutting down their systems."
     And for what? To create reams of data that former staffers who are no longer at decimated federal bureaus won't ever look at.

     "I'm not a national security expert," said Giannoulias. "But to me, it seems an enormous waste of time and resources for this little star on your license."

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And they got rid of all those historic "Whites only" signs!

Columbus monument, Madrid.

       Sometimes I despair at answering readers — what's the point? If they haven't figured it out by now, they never will. But often I can't help myself. And there is a value, for me if not for my correspondent, as I sometimes discover arguments and hone language by preaching to deaf ears.

        Every single reader who wrote in disagreeing with Monday's column about censoring history did so with what they considered the same a-ha-gotcha! argument: what about those statues of Robert E. Lee, those Confederate flags, cancelled by anti-historical liberals?  

     This, from Brian M., will stand in for all:

     I hope that your Passover was a fulfilling one for you and your family. I enjoy your articles
     Even when we don’t align in our thoughts.
     Todays article on history I find interesting. You mention several times that basically history with all of its warts needs to be ‘out there’.
     Why then is the Columbus statuaries still missing from our local landscape? Only the history that the liberal position must be saved?

    I'd ignored others. But he was polite enough. And like Anne Frank, I like to think people are good at heart, so tried to help his reader by explaining the situation as clearly as I could. I replied:

     Good question. Because statues aren't history — they're honor. Let me try to explain the difference. I would demand that Nazism be fully addressed in any 20th century high school history textbook. That does not mean I want a Nazi flag flying in front of the school. Do you see the difference?
     That's a sincere question: do you?
     Thanks for writing.

     I did not expect an answer, but he surprised me.

Good point! Keep writing. Have to keep newspapers viable!

   

     See? That alone is reason to keep communicating. "Good point" is not "Let's move boldly into the future together." But it's a start.

Americans face history in all its messy complexity

     Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War. His brother George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The poet rushed from Brooklyn to a Washington, D.C., hospital and found a "new world" of horror and hope.
     He wrote a very readable diary about it, "Memoranda During the War," that includes gut-turning descriptions of piles of amputated limbs and loving portraits of wounded soldiers.
     He'd give them chaws of tobacco and pocket money, write their letters home. And, being Walt, check them out in the process. "He looks so handsome as he sleeps."
     That last detail might be creepy. But it's also interesting and worth noting of the man who once wrote, "What is more beautiful than candor?"
     In his travels around Washington, D.C., Whitman sometimes saw Abraham Lincoln — they'd nod to each other in passing.
     I admit to noticing Lincoln in my own wanderings around the city — not in the flesh, thank goodness, not yet. But in places associated with him, particularly at Lake and Wacker, the original site of the Wigwam, where Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860.
     Though Lincoln wasn't there; his handlers kept him safely in Springfield so as not to screw up their crude deal-making. Another messy detail.

     And of course the building wouldn't have been there, at street level today, but about 30 feet straight down, the streetscape having risen considerably since 1860.
     Lincoln is always here, always relevant, because we're still fighting the Civil War. There's no other way to put it. Thousands of books have been written about the 16th president, but my favorite is "Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President," edited by Harold Holzer.
     Like online comments today, many of the letters are sharp, telegraphic bursts.
     "Equal rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever," urges John McMahon of Hambrook, Pennsylvania on Aug. 5, 1864. "White men is in class number one & black men in class number two & must be governed by white men forever."
     That sounds like something found on X today. At least McMahon expresses his hateful thoughts directly, as opposed to our current passion for insinuation and cant, such as President Donald Trump's recent executive order to tamp down government portrayal of the struggle for equal rights in this country under the Orwellian title, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."
     Official websites are scrubbed, museum displays censored, books banned.
     All of it is done under the flawed notion that including the difficult, unpleasant aspects of history is dispiriting and must be suppressed. I suppose most of the Civil War could fall into that category, as does Lincoln being assassinated, April 14, 1865, 160 years ago Monday, by a fanatical Southerner — and this is the sort of detail cut out —incensed at the idea that Black people would gain the right to vote. Now their vote is being suppressed more cannily, though the motive is the same. "White men is in class number one."

     The past has to be prettied up because the intention is to drag our nation back there. They pretend to be applying intellectual rigor or healthy skepticism, when what they are actually doing is whitewashing anything that gives away the game they are playing. Holocaust deniers do the same thing: pluck at inconsistencies in the enormous mass of German record-keeping and pretend to raise legitimate doubts.

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Are we having fun yet?

     

The Apple store in Northbrook, which recently closed.

     So last week the president announces these insane tariffs. Which he immediately rescinds — no, puts on a 90-day hold. Before announcing other, equally insane, economy-killing tariffs on China, the source of most of our electronics, particularly iPhones. Which he also immediately scraps — well, makes exceptions for the phones and electronics.

     Which I guess is a relief. Reversing folly is good. The tanking stock market clawed back some of its losses. Though we're still in a situation of total uncertainty, and nobody wants to build a factory or invest when the market can be — will be, judging from the recent past — whipsawed again and again by the whims of an idiot. 

     This almost prompts me to wonder why anybody cares at all what he says or does, given how little weight those pronouncements and decisions carry? The man is a chronic, habitual liar. We can't we accept it, assume it? Should we not have reached that point a long time ago?

     But that too is an illusion, the belief that nothing is significant, nothing true. Mistakes are not being reversed. Real damage is being inflicted — lasting damage, to decades-old relationships, to the American reputation as a world leader. We're becoming a pariah nation, half-feared, half ridiculed. And even "becoming" is optimistic. We're there, right now, our closest allies talking among themselves about how to best carry on without us.
     Every 20th of the month is another anniversary of his administration. A week from today it will be three months. A quarter of a year. One-sixteenth of his second administration, assuming he doesn't maneuver himself into a third, which, like most suppositions that a particular tradition will somehow endure, is no longer a safe assumption. Fifteen-sixteenths left to go. A very long time. As a certain program says: one day at a time.

"The drama of that plastic act"

Home + Housewares Show, 2015

 
     Friday's column on Passover contained this sentence: "We pretend that religion is changeless and eternal, but the truth is it's plastic and mutable."
     Which prompted regular commentator Double B to object:

     "Upon first read, I was insulted at the idea that religion is plastic and malleable. Why not like wet clay? ... Surely its a better representation than plastic. Plastic is so... terrible. It is so modern and terrible for the environment. It takes big machines to heat and form it."

     I sighed, and told Double B — gently, I hope — that he was falling into a trap I call "The Two Definitions Problem." A word has a primary definition, and many assume that it is the only definition. When our language is so — I almost said "plastic" — variable, the same term can have one, two, or a dozen very different meanings and shades of meaning. If I throw down my hand and walk away, leaving it there, and a reader objects that this is impossible — it is possible, if that hand is a quintet of playing cards and not the fleshy appendage attached to the. end of  my wrist. One word, "hand" two definitions. 
     I immediately pulled down Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755:

 plastick adj. [πλαστική] Having the power to give form. Benign creator! let thy plastick hand/Dispose its own effect. Prior.

     In fact, "plastic" is especially appropriate when applied to religion, as the molding power of the Lord is inevitably cited in early definitions. Three quarters of a century later, Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary loses the final "k" but keeps the divinity:   

PLASTIC ... Having the power to give form or fashion to a mass of matter; as the plastic hand of the Creator; the plastic virtue of nature.   

     The word is the opposite of modern; it's ancient. From the Greek, πλαστική — plastiki —"that may be molded." There is a common variant, itself 700 years, that builds upon that base — "plaster" — though my Oxford English Dictionary traces "plaster" to a related Greek term meaning, "to be daubed on or over."
     Even a seemingly modern term such as "plastic surgery" far precedes the artificial substance — The Lancet first used it in 1837. "Plastic explosive" goes back to 1905, to a kind of putty.
      My 1978 Oxford English Dictionary spends two-thirds of a page on "plastic" and never gets to what the current online Oxford grudgingly calls, in definition 3b: "Any of a large and varied class of materials used widely in manufacturing, which are organic polymers of high molecular weight, now usually based on synthetic materials, and may be moulded, extruded, or cast when they are soft or liquid, and then set into a rigid or slightly elastic form."

     That's the trouble with online — with no space limitations, people do rattle on.
     The first usage suggesting "plastics" are a certain group of malleable materials was coined by Leo Baekeland himself, the inventor of what he called Bakelite in 1907. In 1909 he wrote: "As an insulator..it [sc. Bakelite] is far superior to hard rubber, casein, celluloid, shellac and in fact all plastics...It can be used for similar purposes, like knobs, buttons, knife handles, for which plastics are generally used."
     This was when plastics were a miracle whose arrival may have saved the elephant — billiard balls could be made of Bakelite and not from ivory. During World War II, such compounds tended to be known by brand names — Nylon, Lucite, Plexiglas. 

     "Plastic money," aka credit cards, was coined in 1974 and "referred to the material of which such cards are made, but also alluded to plastic's connotations of artificiality and meretriciousness," notes John Ayto in 20th Century Words. 

     The same year, "plastic" as a stand alone term for a credit card was used. "She had a whole purse full of plastic," Dan Jenkins writes in Dead Solid Perfect.

     "Plastic" held onto its link to creativity. "For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other consideration," Pablo Picasso is quoted saying in Gilot and Lake's  1964 Life with Picasso. "The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic act."

     By then, the low cost of plastics led to their seizing the lead role among consumer goods. The default meaning became what the online OED calls, "Artificial, unnatural; superficial, insincere."  In the 1967 classic movie, "The Graduate," the crass materialistic world has just one word of advice for Benjamin Braddock: "Plastics."

    Plastic as pejorative was already a few years old, such as this, from the Daily Telegraph in 1963: "The plan's promoters must not take it amiss if, winking an eye, some of our elder oysters inquire whether plastic houses might not connote plastic people." 

     "Our elder oysters"? What's that? British slang uses "oyster," logically enough, as a tight-lipped person, one who is perhaps silent to hide his ignorance.
     "I never knew anybody so close, you old oyster you!"J.B. Priestley writes in Angel Pavement in 1930. 
     And off we go on a tangent (and not a straight line or plane touching a curved line or surface, but a completely different line of thought or action). That's the joy — and drawback — of etymology. There is no end, until we roughly tear our attention away to more pressing, if less fascinating, matters.