The U.S. Labor Department dreams of an Aryan America

     My profession has a saying, coined right here in Chicago: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Good advice, particularly now that building airy castles of fabrication is official U.S. government policy, and social media is awash in engaging untruths, making each of us a little paper boat buffeted by an endless typhoon of lies. Anything unusual enough to catch attention merits immediately asking: Is this true?
     A few days ago I noticed a grid of 15 images supposedly created by the U.S. Department of Labor, assembled by Geoff Bowser, a Brooklyn real estate attorney with fewer than a thousand followers on Bluesky. "I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day," he wrote.
     A dozen of the images were versions of the same broad-shouldered white hunk, with stern admonishments like "BUILD YOUR HOMELAND'S FUTURE" and "AMERICANS FIRST." The other three were a family straight out of "Fun with Dick and Jane," right down to the white-collared shirtwaist dress on the little girl.
     The standard 1950s dream images of a white-bread America that never existed — not without squinting away a whole bunch of folks who didn't count, then, and apparently still don't. An America that exists even less today, except in the fever dreams of those, now sadly in power, trying to stuff our country back into the confines of their narrow cookie-cutter molds.
     Why is this surprising? It perfectly meshes with everything else going on. Chicagoans are being snatched from the streets by masked thugs for the crime of being Brown in public. Black people are scrubbed from of our nation's history on official websites and driven out of positions of authority in the military. 

     Yes, I know that one reason totalitarianism succeeds, at first, is that decent people can't quite believe what they're seeing. You carefully pack your suitcase per instructions, not realizing it's going to be yanked away on the train platform. You show up for your job interview with a haircut and your best suit, not realizing they're never going to hire a person who looks like you.
     But could the Department of Labor really be representing America as a white man and only a white man, with no minorities in sight, and women, who make up half the work force, delegated to gazing with adoration at a daughter — in a pink bonnet! — at church?
     The United States is 19% Hispanic. Twelve percent Black. Six percent Asian. More than a third of the population. Is the Labor Department really giving them all the cold shoulder?
     I jumped on X to check — "if your mother tells you she loves you" etc.— and examined the Labor Department's X feed.
     The images are in support of Operation Firewall, the department's move to restrict visas.
     "The American Dream belongs to the American People," the department announces over one poster. And we know who those people are.
     "Initially, I just went to X out of curiosity to see whether the art that was posted was representative of the full extent of the art they used," Bowser told me. "When I saw that it was all white men as workers ... I felt compelled to share it as a composite to draw attention to the propaganda and racism."
     Why bother putting together that grid and disseminating it?
     "I'm angry and heartbroken about what Trump is doing to this country," said Bowser, who has two boys, 3 and 6. "On a more basic level, I'm doing it because it's something I can do. I don't want to have to tell my sons that I didn't try to stand against this."
     I reached out to the Labor Department for comment, forgetting that the government is shut down until further notice.

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Tricked by a bug

   

     Not to give women any ideas ... but praying mantises do not always need a male in order to reproduce.
      Sure, they can do it the standard birds-and-bees way, with male praying mantises famously being eaten by the female after serving their purpose. And usually, they do. But females can also reproduce through parthenogenesis, laying eggs that are clones of herself, without needing to  bother with the annoyance of involving a male, and all the drama that entails.
     And yes, the female occasionally eats their special friend after copulation. This happens mostly in captivity though, where males have been seen continuing to mate even with their heads gone, which is also par for the course. Though the nymphs — young mantises — also eat each other, and mantises are so generally voracious that they inspired a rare bit of wordplay in the no-nonsense Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ends its entry for mantids (a variant they prefer to "mantis"): "Since all mantids are ferocious carnivores, 'preying' rather than 'praying' may better describe them.") Touche!
     I spied this fine specimen on our doorpost Wednesday morning.
     "Hello gorgeous," I said. "Where have you been all summer?"
     She hadn't been there the evening before — at nearly four inches long, I could hardly have missed her at eye level — but then praying mantises are crepuscular (coming out at twilight) and nocturnal. She probably showed up in the night. I was surprised to see her — it's been getting a little cold for such an ectothermic (drawing heat from the outside rather than generating it from within; I know people like that) creature.
     I admired how still she stood as I snapped her portrait — I assumed it was a female, who had just laid her eggs, in a protective egg case called an ootheca, a lovely word that seems to have a pair of eggs right there in the beginning, coined by 19th century science, turning to the Greek, of course, ōon meaning egg, and thēkē meaning container. (Ootheke is ovary in Greek; mantis is straight Greek, for "prophet," which enhances the praying part).
     It was only later, when I passed by our doorpost a second time, did I remember the iron fist that nature hides within the velvet glove of all that beauty. My mantis wasn't holding still; she was dead. 

     Or so I thought. I returned later in the morning, thinking I would collect the corpse and perhaps deposit it on a shelf in my office, as a wintertime companion. But she was gone. I looked on the ground, figuring she had fallen off. No mantis. Maybe a bird got her.

      Then I noticed her, a few inches down, head facing earthward. Front arms definitely wiggling with life. And I remembered that mantises — and there are nearly 2,000 kinds, the praying mantis is only the most familiar — are mimics, imitating flowers, leaves, stems, blades of grass. There are orchid mantises and stick mantises, dead leaf mantises and mantises that mimic ants.  They blend in. 

     I'd been fooled. By an animal with a brain the size of a mustard seed, one that can carry on a meaningful romantic life with its head bitten off. I smiled, admiringly, and wished her well as she carried on with her Wednesday, and I continued with mine.

Donald Trump: Every brag a blot.

My father's carving of Don Quixote, bought in Spain in the 1950s.

     Donald Trump was praising himself on social media the other day. No news there. Now if a day passed when he didn't puff himself — that would be something special. Otherwise, to even report the fact of our president prattling on about his own superlative self is like sharing  the bulletin that molecules are flitting through the air, or that water is rushing across the landscape, seeking its own level — it happens everywhere all the time, and to notice it is to state the obvious.
     Yet this week, regarding some droplet flung from his firehosing self-puffery, spattering more salve at the festering open wound that is his ego, I thought again of a line from Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman as, "Self-praise is self-debasement" mentioned in my 2017 examination of our then-new president through the lens of Don Quixote.
     But for some reason, this time I paused. Something wasn't quite right. There is a problem with that quote, particularly "self-debasement." A clunky word, not one you'd ever use. You'd never say, "I'm not that good at bowling — this isn't self-debasement; it's true."
     We can do better. 

     I wondered what the original was, and found it in Chapter XVI. Don Quixote is ruefully singing his own praises, pointing out, in Miguel Garci-Gomez's translation: "though self-praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me."

    Which makes Trump's constant upchuck of auto-flattery all the more puzzling, because it is so unnecessary. There is always someone at hand to do it for him; many someones. He's surrounded by a hallelujah chorus of lackeys, lickspittles and lapdogs — and those are just the L's — scrambling over each other to pay tribute like piglets fighting for position around a sow. He needn't bother. But bother he does. Because that echoing void where a soul might go demands to be fed, 24-7, and as an addiction expert once said, "It's hard to get enough of something that doesn't work in the first place." I am often accused of hating the man but the bedrock truth is, I pity him. I can't imagine a worse punishment than just being who he is.
     "Self-praise is degrading" is an improvement on "self-praise is self-debasement." But we could still do better. Let's look at the original Spanish for clues: "Las propias alabanzas envilecen."
     "Propia" is own, as in your own self. "Alabanza" means praise, often in religious sense, as in worship. There is Alabanza Christian music, singing of the glories of God. So "Las propias alabanzas" means, literally, "The self-praise." We could flip it to "praising yourself," which sounds better.
     "Envilecen" is a verb, meaning to debase, or degrade.
     We could try, "praising yourself is shaming yourself." An improvement on the translation I used in 2017, "self-praise is self-debasement," though the doubled "yourself" grates as much as the doubled "self" did. Or spice it up even more with a bit of the vernacular: "singing your own praises is cutting your own throat"? Even better. 

     But we live in a time when language is sandblasted into an endless series of smooth bloops and bleeps, thoughts polished smooth like pebbles so we can continually slingshot them at one another through social media. It's often said of our president that every accusation is a confession, so why not build on that and observe that every brag is also a blot? "Every brag a blot." Now, that's a keeper.

Nothing to see

 

    
      My granddaughter lives within walking distance of the White House, and Monday we all took a break from cooing over her to stroll our little lozenge of concentrated cuteness over to eyeball the place for the first time since the East Wing was torn off.

      You can't see anything. Which itself is odd, because typically this administration is too arrogant and dumb to be ashamed of the bad it's doing. In truth, the careful concealment was more worrisome than any glimpse of ripped up architecture. Because it is a reminder that, as awful as what we know of the current administration certainly is, imagine what is going on out of sight. Not just the self-dealing, the corrupt practices — those are also pretty plain, though there must be more and worse that will someday be revealed. 

     Beyond that, think about those windowless ICE detention facilities. We see how ICE behaves in public, with upstanding members of the public whose only crime is exercising their Constitutional rights. What is going on in darkness, with zero oversight nor accountability? When the facts come out — and they always do — it'll make the recent tempest over abrupt removal of part of the people's house seem silly. It isn't a matter of speculation, but a certainty. Anyone wondering whether the faceless thugs operating outside the law are behaving themselves in private is an idiot.
    It was very sad to see the White House. Usually I thrill to consider the greatness that once resided here. Now it's hard to think beyond the evil therein, the excrescence occupying it, tearing it apart, and our country too. 
   At least we can still speak out. Free speech hasn't been cast as obstruction of justice, yet, though ICE is halfway there, hassling Americans for taking videos in a Sam's Club parking lot. There were protestors in LaFayette Park. They seemed to be having fun, and I thought I'd amplify their messages in my own small way. 

Frosty mug

   
     You know what made car alarms so annoying? They never stopped. They went on and on and on and on and on. And on. And on and on and on and...
     You get it. Plus, inevitably there wasn't anyone actually breaking into the car that was shrieking in front of your apartment in the middle of the night.
     Which makes the annoyance of car alarms different from the present situation in our country, where indeed a criminal is right now trying to steal our country, abusing peaceful residents one day, defacing public monuments the next, all the while planning to corrupt our election system so he and his cronies can never be removed from power no matter how unpopular they become. The danger is very immediate and real.
     So no false alarms here. Constant warning, as loud as possible, is justified, maybe even essential.
     But also deadening. Soul-sucking. So the strategy at EGD is to occasionally turn our gaze away from the horrific shit show in Washington — and increasingly around the country — and regard something that doesn't suck.
     Such as this frosty mug of A & W root beer I was served earlier this month in Weston, Michigan. I hadn't eaten at an A & W in 20 years, if not more, if ever. But we were driving my brother's hot new Audi Q6 — an all-electric SUV, it seemed a challenge to get it to Ontonagon without ending up on the side of the road. And was. Planning was required.
     So we were making one of three pitstops required to make the seven hour drive, timed for an early lunch, and walked over to this A & W. Where I ordered a double cheeseburger and a diet — thank you Mr. Diabetes! — root beer.
     "Do you want that in a frosty mug?" the clerk asked.
     I was taken aback — a frosty glass mug? In a fast food joint? it's as if I spied a worker seated next to the deep fryer, churning butter.
     "Hell yes!" I said, or words to that effect, and she produces from a cold case a big, heavy, indeed frosty glass mug.
     The sugarless root beer was quite good, as was the cheeseburger — I had a hunch that A & W fare wouldn't be the queasy, why-did-I-put-that-in-my-mouth? offal found at McDonald's. After we ate, when I went to deposit my garbage at the can by the door, I placed my mug on a tray, along with all the other used mugs, and marveled at this nod to tradition, which required an expenditure of time, effort, much mug washing, and no doubt considerable breakage. I thought maybe A & W Restaurants were family-owned; they're not. But they are the only major restaurant chain that is franchisee-owned, meaning someone closer to the customers decided to go to the effort to keep the frosty mug tradition alive.
     It's worth it. As was the typically glorious weekend at Ontonagon, complete with cigars, sauna, tomahawk steak, conversation, lake swimming, and the largest beach bonfire ever constructed by mankind, in my estimation. On the way back, we stopped in Weston again, topped up the battery, and hit the A & W, where I ordered exactly the same thing: double cheeseburger, frosty mug of diet root beer. It was still good.
     Does the persistence of the A & W frosty glass mug in the annus horribilis of 2025 counterbalance the destruction of democracy, the erosion of freedom, the encouragement of the cruel and the dampening of hopes of any of this ending anytime soon, if at all? No. Not in the slightest. But it's not nothing, and at this point I'll take any glimmer I can get. America may not be great, anymore, but it is still good, at certain times and in certain places.

Erie Canal, the ditch that made Chicago great, marks its 200th birthday

 

     The Erie Canal is one of those historical topics that traditionally make eyes roll up. It's so pre-industrial, and mule-centric. But as a student of the origins of Chicago, I knew that there is a fascinating tale there, one not only key to the development of the city, but also important today in this time of rapid technological change. I was so certain that last November, when we drove to Cooperstown for Thanksgiving, I detoured 45 minutes to Lockport, New York, to eyeball the thing, and take the above photograph. I'm glad that the paper recognized that I'd found something worthwhile, and splashed the story across the front page, and hope you agree.

     What was the most significant event in the history of Chicago?
     The Great Chicago Fire? Wrong. The 1893 World's Fair? Wrong. The Cubs winning the World Series in 2016? Tempting ... but no.
     Those don't count. Because Chicago was already a dynamic city when they occurred. What happened to create a major metropolis here in the first place?
     Time's up! The most important thing to ever happen in the history of Chicago — for starters, it's the reason Chicago is not a city in Wisconsin — isn't well known here because it didn't happen here, but 500 miles east, exactly 200 years ago Sunday: the opening of the Erie Canal, a 363-mile waterway, 40 feet across and four feet deep, from Albany, on the Hudson River, west to Buffalo on the northeast tip of Lake Erie.  

     The opening was announced by a cannon firing in Buffalo at 9 a.m. Oct. 26, 1825, with the news echoed across the state, all the way to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, by guns placed within earshot of each other.
     As that cannonade reverberated, kicking off eight days of celebration, Chicago was a swampy nowhere, a log stockade fort and, maybe, 100 residents. St. Louis, "the Rome of the West," had 100 times the population. There were more enslaved miners digging for lead in Galena than there were residents of Chicago.
     So how did the Erie Canal push Chicago to the forefront?
     The canal meant a ship could sail across the Atlantic Ocean, pass New York City, travel 150 miles up the Hudson and transfer cargo to flatboats at Albany. Those boats would transverse the state via canal, load goods and passengers back onto schooners at Buffalo to range across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River, across Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River, up Lake Huron following the contours of Michigan, through the Straits of Mackinac down choppy Lake Michigan, to be deposited on its southernmost point, at Chicago, which on an 1825 French map in the Newberry Library was the name of the portage where Native-Americans carried their canoes from the Chicago to the Des Plaines rivers.
     If that sounds arduous, it was easy compared to the previous system — ox cart — unchanged since ancient Greece. Considered an engineering marvel on par with the pyramids, the Erie Canal cut shipping costs by 90%.
     Not everyone got it. President Thomas Jefferson, in a rare moment of short-sightedness, withheld federal funds, calling the canal idea "a little short of madness." New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton made it his personal project. Work on the canal began July 4, 1817, three days after Clinton took office.
     Some called it "Clinton's folly." Others immediately saw the canal's implications, including Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois territory's delegate to the House of Representatives.
     The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the northern border of Illinois as a continuation of Indiana's northern border, cutting Illinois off from access to Lake Michigan.
     Pope pressed Congress, already rattled by storms that would lead to the Civil War, arguing that being connected to the Great Lakes and the East, via the nascent Erie Canal, would tie Illinois to the Union.
     Without lake access, Illinois's proximity to the Mississippi might draw it into the camp of the restive South. Congress agreed and pushed the state's border 60 miles north.
     That's why Chicago is in Illinois rather than Wisconsin. What got it going as a city was the prospect of the goods of the world landing at the sand bar blocking the mouth of the Chicago River. Where would they go from there? What would be loaded for the return trip? The soldiers at Fort Dearborn got busy excavating the mouth of the river, while the federal government began developing the port of Chicago.
     Meanwhile, a dream that began when Joliet and Marquette visited Native Americans here in 1673 — a canal leading to the Mississippi — was put into motion: The Des Plaines River wasn't good for much beyond canoe traffic. But If a canal could be dug from the Chicago River, 96 miles south to the Illinois River at LaSalle. Then boats could continue into the Mississippi and down to New Orleans. The Erie Canal dropped Europe on Chicago's doorstep; the I & M Canal would invite South America, too.
     Such A canal cost money. had to be paid for. There was one readily available resource here: land. Chicago was surveyed and platted up so lots could be sold to finance a canal, plus land along the canal route.
      If you look at the original James Thompson Chicago map of August 1830, you'll recognize Loop streets — Wells, La Salle, Clark. And west of the river are two street names that hint why this is being done: Clinton, for the Erie-building governor of New York, and Canal, which kind of gives the game away.

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Guest voice — Little Village "America is the promised land"

     Longtime reader Ephrain Silva has been keeping me posted about developments in his Little Village neighborhood. I asked him if he wanted to write something for the blog, and he submitted this:

      It was nice to get out and about today...cool and crisp and the leaves and all of that stuff. I did manage to walk a stretch of 26th between Kedzie and Pulaski. In a normal place and time, it would have been jam-packed with all types of people. But this is no longer a normal time nor place. I kept expecting to see the Trump storm troopers coming through like bats out of hell...Bovino riding high with his Kevlar helmet. But not today. They are probably busy terrorizing some other neighborhood. And in America under Trump terror sells...and it sells well.

     I expected to hear a lot of anger out there and yes it there alright...there is more than enough hate, anger and fear out here. It shouts out mostly under bated breath is the feeling I get. I think most of the folks who are under the scope out here though have different sort of feeling. I think they feel betrayed and sad. They aren't stupid or ignorant as the Administration portrays them. They knew when they came here by whatever means that they were risking it all for one shot at the dream. They knew they would be marked and possibly hunted someday. Sadly that day has come. But they also put down roots and worked their asses off. They raised their families, paid their taxes, bought homes and through it all kept believing in the promise of America. America may have turned its back on them.... But I do not feel that they have turned their backs on it. They agree that criminals should be expelled and they too want safer neighborhoods and to not feel like prisoners in their own communities because of crime. No different than anyone else.
      The larger issue I believe is the terror. The terror emanating from far away....in DC and in the halls Congress and everywhere else in this land that feels it okay to eat away at communities they feel are less than themselves. They were fed a steady meal of bullshit, and they ate it all up. Then they gave the keys to the kingdom to these folks with the badges and the masks and the guns and said make America great again. We have always been and maybe we are destined to always be a great experiment. A place where everyone has a chance to be what they can make of themselves and to dare to believe that they can make a better life here than where fate set their feet the day they were born.
      I do not know if we will survive this presidency as one nation. I do not know if the terror on these streets and in many other communities is making America great again. But I do know that in the hearts of those to whom this terror is directed, no amount of pressure is going to stop them from believing that America is the promised land for them and they will continue to resist, to work, to live as best they can.

Flashback 2007: Humor campaign — Politician banking on funny-sounding last name

Clown, by Charles DeForest Fredricks (Met)

    No column in the paper today — my big Erie Canal celebration was moved to Sunday (and yes, I know, your eyes roll up at just the thought of the Erie Canal. Mine did too. But read it; you'll be surprised).

    Cruising around old White House columns — I've visited a few times — I found this, and couldn't help be drawn in by my uproarious, boy-filled house.  I'm slightly amazed I got that wife's name in the newspaper — we were a more freewheelin' place at the time. As was I. Given the gravity of today, and my own fade into senescence, I doubt I could reproduce the spark of this piece. 

     Jay Footlik didn't win, needless to say, and had a surprising second act. Lately he is a lobbyist for Qatar. As such — geez — he is alleged to be a bagman in Qatargate, one of the countless scandals to plague Benjamin Netanyahu's regime, where his advisors are accused of being in the employ of the desert monarchy. A warrant is out for Footlik's arrest in Israel.

      And the question I concocted to pose to Control's "Ask the Experts" column is the same question I posed to myself, in different terms, this morning and just about every morning, until I settle down to the work of the day. So points for consistency.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     My family lives in a house of laughter — raucous, loud, echoing laughter, often at the expense of others. I could put on a pouty face, and solemnly pretend I'm sorry about that, but nobody else seems to be apologizing for themselves nowadays, so I'll just present being mean as a handicap and dare anybody to cast aspersions upon my disability.
     I do, however, feel a slight twinge at how my world view has infected my loved ones. Just this morning, my wife, a sweet young woman when I met her, walked into my office.
     "Look at this," she said with a guffaw, shoving a large blue brochure into my hands. " 'Jay Footlik for Congress.' Couldn't he have taken his wife's name?"
     "You mean Jill Asswype?" I said smirking. "I can try to find out."
     The good news is that his campaign acknowledges the oddness of his name -- among the several possible campaign slogans posted on his Web site is: "Jay Footlik: Funny name, serious experience."
     The Buffalo Grove resident was special assistant to President Bill Clinton and now is a security consultant trying to unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District.
     "This is probably the best chance to get him," said Footlik, 42, who feels Kirk is vulnerable for his abrupt personality and his fawning support of the folly in Iraq.
     "He's a rubber stamp for this president," Footlik said.
     Being the sort of guy I am, I had to ask Footlik about his name.
     "It makes you tough as a kid," he said. "My father left when I was 4, so I never had any real connection on the Footlik side of the family until I got in the White House and, lo and behold, a lot of Footliks came out of the woodwork . . ."
     "As they tend to do when you get into the White House," I said, unable to stop myself.
     His Brazilian-born wife had the more euphonic maiden name of Grace Mozes -- why not just take her name, as my wife suggested. People do that.
     "She would have preferred it," he said, tactfully.
     Of course, Footlik's odd name also highlights a quality that Kirk lacks: humor.
     "The more people make fun of Jay's name, the more name recognition we get," said campaign manager Simon Behrmann, pointing out that others with funny names enter the political fray, such as John Manlove in Texas.
     "Or look at Barack Obama," he said. "It didn't hurt him."

HOT, DIRTY, FROTHY NIGHTMARE

     I can be like one of those creepy guys you meet at a party who shakes your hand then doesn't let go.
     Nancy J. Bartels of Itasca wrote a perfectly pleasant note, mentioning in passing that she is managing editor of Control, "a small B2B publication for process control engineers."
     Say no more! Would you, I asked, mind sending a few copies? As the former editor of the newsletter for Castle Metals in Franklin Park, I have a lingering affection for industrial publications. There's nothing like a good trade magazine to put dirt under your fingernails -- figurative dirt, I mean.
     Soon the September and October issues of Control were in my hands.
     The magazine is a tad too well-designed for my taste, with a sleek nameplate and nice layouts — I prefer my technology a little retro — but there were the requisite articles on "Distillation Control and Optimization" and "Measuring Flow of Gas-Entrained Liquids."
     The advertisements — remember, this industry measures stuff inside factories — are also a delight. Phoenix Contact boasts both "flexible expandability" and "hot-swappability" (and really, isn't that what guys in their 40s are looking for?). Magnetrol tosses a chummy arm around our shoulders and asks, "Torque Tube Displacer Problems?" (Is it that obvious? My torque tube displacer just isn't its old self anymore . . .)
     Then there is "Ask the Experts," a column "moderated by noted process control authority Bela Liptak."
     Anyone who claims that sharp writing can't be found in business publications didn't read the question from William Love of Kredit Automation in Liptak's October column headlined "Difficult Level Measurements."
     "We have a large tank in which sodium hydroxide is mixed into water and the high pH (>13.5) caustic mixture is heated to 200 degrees F. and continuously agitated and recirculated . . ." Love writes. "The fluid in the tank is a hot, dirty, frothy, corrosive nightmare. It is hard to measure level in there, and we have destroyed several types of sensors."
     Liptak's answer boils down to using a diaphragm to keep the liquid off the sensors, using its mass to gauge its level.
     I've been trying to think of what kind of tough calibration question I could pose to Bela Liptak:
     "I'm trying to measure a 47-year-old container under severe pressure, a roiling mixture of acid thoughts and base instincts, sometimes agitated and sometimes calm. My problem is that I'm not sure whether to calibrate it against smaller containers — in that case, it seems pretty full — or contrast my measurements to fuller, more placid containers, by whose measure it seems almost empty."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     I'm going to get in trouble for printing this joke — even worse, because I came up with it — but it's a little late to start getting squeamish.
     Blame Elie Wiesel. He was in town a few weeks ago, speaking at a luncheon for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he mentioned that the present political situation worries him. "I'm a frightened Jew," he said, which, considering he lived through Auschwitz, is saying a lot.
     They give you a ton of materials at these things and, preparing to pitch them a few days later, I
noticed a card with the slogan "NEVER AGAIN!" And hence the joke, which I apologize for in advance.
     Times are always perilous for Jews, and it can be difficult to judge whether a particular moment is unusually worrisome, or merely offers the standard danger. Though I did notice that the Anti-Defamation League has quietly dropped its "Never Again" slogan and is now using, "Not Anytime Soon."

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 31, 2007

Not secure

     Sometimes, the small things get to you in a way the big things don't.
     It isn't that tearing off the East Wing of the White House to install a grotesquely huge ballroom that 44 presidents managed to live without is worse than, oh, a crusade against immigrants sending masked thugs into cities to kidnap workers off the street, or squashing the free press, or murdering people at sea, or demonizing LBGTQ Americans, or corrupting the justice department, or extorting money from the government, or accepting bribes from foreign governments, or undermining of women's rights, voting rights, science, health care, higher education and the general destruction of the federal government as a tool for helping people.
     To name a few.
     That latter part is worse. Far worse. And yet. Seeing the rendition of the huge honking Versailles of a ballroom he is erecting hurt in a new way. The surprise, the suddenness of it — an airy plan one day bruited by a chronic liar who sometimes follows through, usually doesn't. Then backhoes ripping out the walls. It's so symbolic of what is happening all around us. A hundred novelists couldn't dream it up. Ripping apart the White House. It would be too obvious, too crude. Too wrong. It would look trite in fiction. 

     But it's not fiction. It's real. Another impossible to imagine development that, in retrospect, we should have seen coming. What made us think he would limit himself to figurative destruction of the edifices of democracy. Of course this lurch into the literal. 

      Outrage was both on point and pointless.
     "It's not his house," Hillary Clinton said on X, summing the situation up perfectly. "It's your house. And he's destroying it."
     Got that right. Maybe the creeping terror is because the White House is still exactly that. A house. A residence where people live. Like all homes, it's supposed to be secure. Safe from vandalism and the whim of tyrants who temporarily — or not so temporarily — dwell there. 

     But it isn't safe. None of us are. Not anymore. We're supposed to be secure. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be secure in our houses. If the People's House is not secure — if Trump can destroy it at will, right before our eyes — then whose home can't he destroy?

Tattooing inks rich Chicago history

 

     Large portraits of tattoo icons Tatts Thomas and Ralph Johnstone watch over Nick Colella as he works.
     "Both of those guys tattooed on the 400 block of South State Street where the Harold Washington Library is," said Colella, owner of Great Lakes Tattoo on Grand Avenue.
     Tattoos go way back. The oldest known tattoos are on Ötzi the Iceman, a body preserved in the Alps for over 5,000 years. Tattooing was common in ancient Egypt and is found on mummies, mostly women, who often etched fertility signs onto their bodies.
     Chicago is part of that history.
     "Chicago plays a vital role in tattooing in the country," Colella said. "That area of State Street, you had all the sailors come from Great Lakes Naval Base. That's why this place is called Great Lakes Tattoo. You had this naval training base here where all these sailors in wartime came to train, then went down to State Street to see girls and get tattoos. All the arcades had tattooers. All the burlesque shows had tattooers. This stuff on the walls is all from those arcades."
     The walls of Great Lakes Tattoo are jammed with framed selections of classic art: swooping eagles and beribboned daggers, grinning skulls and flaming hearts. Like any fashion, tattooing goes through phases. Polynesian tribal tattoos were popular in the 1990s, then strands of barbed wire on the upper arm.
     But the snarling panthers and cheesecake ladies are always in style.
     "That's pretty much what I do: traditional American tattooing," Colella said. "That's what Danni's doing: repainting in the same tradition they repainted 80 years ago."
     Danni Nievera, at the next stall — 10 artists work at Great Lakes — carefully dabbed red onto a dragon on a sheet of paper.
     "I'm just using gouache, adding color," she said.
     I was not there to get tattooed — I have a hard enough time picking out a new pair of glasses — but to visit World Tattoo Gallery, a small exhibit space downstairs, and see a show of Tony Fitzpatrick's colorful paintings. Tony was heavily tattooed himself, and his art was influenced by tattoo art. Popping in, eyeballing his pictures, then leaving seemed a lost opportunity. So I asked to talk about tattooing while there.
     Besides aesthetics, the old designs carry the spirit of their originators.
     "I like tattooing off these old designs because that's what keeps those guys alive," Colella said. "That's what the history of it is. That's the tradition of it. I'm doing their designs in the current manner with better tools and nicer inks."
     What does Nievera, 30, like about tattooing?

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Danni Nievera

Flashback 2003: Lumbering fears not all that bad

     For a guy who likes to loaf, I hate being sick. I suppose most people do. That drained, feverish feeling. Gobbling Tums to settle the stomach. Hours sprawled in bed, flipping through a book — P.G. Wodehouse, not as funny as I recall — or the random hodgepodge of Facebook videos. I looked at a table saw on the Home Depot yesterday, and today half the videos are woodworking porn. I can't figure out how to make it stop,
     At 4 p.m. I ventured into my office to figure out something for tomorrow. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson, the bard of being sick at home. "When I was sick and lay abed, I had two pillows at my head..."
     Nah, too much effort. Into the archive, looking for columns that take place in bed. I found this, too fun not to share. This was part of the "Hammered and Nailed" series of columns I wrote about repair in our home section. You might recall, I outlined the Fort last November.  Too soon for another installment, but I really feel as if someone hit me behind the ear with a sock of nickels, so this will have to do. If you decide to read it, strap in: it's twice as along as my usual column. Back in the day when we had time on our hands and newsprint to fill.

     Night. Bed. Sleep. A crash and then the tumble of lumber. Unmistakably. I was on my feet in an instant, moving fast toward the door, thinking, "The Fort has fallen over." I stopped, went back, got my pants, started to leave, then checked the clock: 3:19 a.m.
     Hurrying through the darkened house, I braced myself for the sight. Timbers lying in a shattered heap. All that work and money for nothing. My wife would laugh at me about it for the rest of my life. The Fort has fallen over.
     Still, somewhere deep down I was relieved. Cart the ruins away, I told myself. Be done with it. My own fault. My folly. I had haughtily rejected the premade forts as beneath my fever dreams of fatherhood, instead designing my own Taj Mahal Fort, 15 feet high with a 90-square-foot floor plan. The lumber alone cost $1,700.
     When I began work, on Father's Day, at 5:30 a.m., I was energetic, excited. I had marked with four little red flags on metal rods where the concrete supports would go. Concrete a yard deep. I would do it right. I had carefully dug around the 10-inch cardboard concrete form, removed the circle of sod, and then dug down. And down.
     If you've never dug a hole, it's hard work. Not so much the first foot, or even the second foot. But that third foot. Each hole took about 90 minutes to dig. Still, the process was very satisfying. It's hard to mess up a hole. Sometime that morning my wife and boys came out with a glass of lemonade and sang "Happy Father's Day," and that was nice.
     After digging the first two holes, I poured the concrete. Also a backbreaking-yet-satisfying experience. I mixed the concrete with a shovel in a big plastic trough, then spooned it into the holes. Before it set, I positioned the big metal brackets for the 6-by-6 beams. I carefully checked them with a level, ensuring a solid foundation.
     At the end of the day, I cleaned up, hosed out the trough, looked at these two little 10-inch circles of concrete, with their metal brackets sticking out. It seemed a lot of work for two holes.
     The second day I did it again, for the other two holes. The work seemed to go easier. There was one truly frightening moment — I thought I had put the brackets in too soon for the first holes, so I waited until I had filled the fourth hole with concrete before I tried to sink the bracket in the third. Big mistake. I went to shove the metal into the wet cement. It went down halfway and then stopped. Sick with fear, I contemplated having to dig up the entire mess of drying concrete and repour it.
     At that moment my wife wandered over. She can smell panic, and has a genius for happening by at the pinnacle of crisis. She stood smiling at me, her Mister Handy.
     Sweating like a pig, I fixed a false grin on my face and gave the metal bracket a mighty push. It went in, barely, but was skewed hard to the left.
     "You know honey," I grunted, through gritted teeth, trying to muscle the bracket upright, "this is not ... the best moment."
     That was a weekend's work. The next weekend, I bolted in the legs of the Fort — huge honking 6-by-6ers. I was a little concerned that the cut was not exactly flush, but went halfway across the broad end of the beam and then jumped up 1/16th of an inch. The lumber place must not have had a saw big enough to do it in a single cut. A few of the beams also had cracks in them.
     Not terrible cracks, I decided. Normal, probably. I couldn't imagine dragging those beams back to Craftwood. So I pressed on. Across the top of the upright 6-by-6 beams, two 4-by-4 horizontals then a series of 2-by-6 joists, to hold up the floor, nearly 6 feet in the air (this was before the deadly porch collapse; I'd use 2-by-12 joists now. Instead, I will just have to hope that genetic Steinberg unpopularity prevents my boys from having too many friends over).
     As I began contemplating putting the floor down atop the joists, I ran into a problem. The Fort is basically a little house sitting on a 9-by-10-foot platform, with a little railed porch in front. The little house is framed by 4-by-4 beams, and I knew that if I merely screwed the beams to the floor, they wouldn't be as sturdy as if I put them through the floor and bolted them to the joists. But doing that meant making complicated cuts in the flooring, cuts my fancy new DeWalt chop saw couldn't do.
     I pondered: easy and unstable or difficult and locked in? The thing was wiggly as it was. The beams seemed to sway on the concrete footings. I was standing there, trying to figure out how to proceed, my stomach in a knot, when wife happened by — "Howzit going?" she said breezily. I started trying to explain the dilemma.
     "Do I bolt the post to the floor or have it go through the floor and bolt it to the beam?" She just looked at me. I said it several more times, in several ways, and she still didn't understand, and then I did something that scared both of us: I slammed my head against the joist, deliberately, out of frustration, a quick dip to the side and then a thud. I've never done something like that before in my life. She remembered something she had to do in the house.
     Things actually got worse from there. Taking the tough road — always the tough road — I fished a jig saw out of the basement and made the cuts in the first floorboard to accommodate the Fort beams, a laborious process, but mismeasured, and put one cut in the wrong place, so that the beam couldn't pass through. I thought of taking the jigsaw to my throat but, collecting myself, grabbed a new $14 cedar board and measured again, more carefully this time, measured twice in fact. The new board was an even better job — the cuts neat and precise — and I joyfully went to put the board in place. I was on the ladder, moving it into position when my wife came by, smiling.
     "I don't believe it!" I said, aghast. "I've done it again."
     "Done what?" my wife asked.
     "Cut the board wrong. I screwed up the measurement again!" She had a bright idea, but I just didn't want to hear it.
     "Can I suggest ..." she began.
     "No!" I shouted. "No you can't suggest! Leave me alone. I can't believe it. I did it again."
     "Can I share an idea with you ..." she said quickly.
     "No!" I snapped angrily. "No ideas. This is a disaster. I can't understand it." I raved on in this vein for a bit, until my wife said,
     "Flip the board over."
     Flip. The. Board. Over. Hope dawned. I wasn't as stupid as I thought, not at least in this instance. I flipped the board over. It fit. I had measured correctly, but then turned the board around.
     At that point I had decided to call it a day. Now 12 hours had passed. It was 3:19 a.m. and I was at the back door, hurrying to see my collapsed Fort. I flipped on the floodlights. The Fort was there, intact. I couldn't understand it. I had heard a crash then a tumble of lumber. It was not a dream. I walked out into the cool night, walked all around the Fort in the darkness, looking for a shattered timber, something, touching it lightly with my hand as if I couldn't believe it was still there. But it seemed fine. Eventually I went to bed, mystified.
     Later that morning, when the sun was out, I went back to look at the Fort. I walked around the Fort once, twice, then I noticed something in the driveway. The garbage can, where I had piled some wood scraps, was knocked over, probably by hungry raccoons. The lumber scraps had tumbled out — that was the crash and tumble I had heard. Not the Fort. At that exact moment my wife walked over and I unwisely told her what had happened. It took her five minutes to stop laughing.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2003

In Chicago and across a polarized America, old and young join 'No Kings' protest

Victoria Eason, left, and her mother Jennifer.

     "The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches ... but always most in the common people," Walt Whitman wrote in his preface to "Leave of Grass," lauding "... their deathless attachment to freedom."
     As satisfying as it is to offer such quotes at face value, as eternal truths — Walt Whitman said it, he's famous, so it must be true — this one might merit a little picking apart.
     First, the line was written in 1855. Meaning the American public's attachment to freedom wasn't so deathless that the country wouldn't soon be ripped apart in civil war over whether fellow human beings should be kept as slaves.
     Who were these common people, anyway? Who are they now? The millions who turned out Saturday for massive "No Kings" rallies across the country? Or the millions more who voted for the president three times? Who support him now, and who will continue to do so no matter what. Even if he runs for a third term in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution?
     We were divided then. We are divided now. In 2024, 49.8% of voters cast a ballot for Donald Trump. And 48.3% voted for Kamala Harris. Almost an even split.
     Once, a tight election might have led to efforts toward bridge building, reconciliation. Now Trump is implementing radical change by executive fiat, without congressional approval or concern for public reaction, which was in full cry Saturday.
     I slid over to the "No Kings" protest in Highland Park and was immediately struck by just how old everybody seemed. Gray hair, walkers, wheelchairs.
     Why is that?
     "It's an older crowd because we remember the way America was, and we want to get it back," said Betty Kleinberg, 83, of Deerfield. "It wasn't perfect, but it was better than it is now. We're doing this for our grandchildren."
     "I'm a very active member of our community and am so appalled by everything going on," said Joanne Hoffman, 92. "As long as I still have my wits about me, I'm going to keep doing this."
     You must really want to be here, I told Phil Reinstein, 87, tapping his rollator.
     "I do," he said. "To try to save this country."

Grace Goodrich

     But as I looked around, I realized something — the impression of an elderly crowd was premature, formed by noticing other cautious seniors such as myself who showed up half an hour early. A self-selected group. As the event unfolded, I realized there were plenty of families and children, too.
     "We need more young people," said Grace Goodrich, 25, of Northbrook, there with her father, Paul. "It's going to eventually affect us more. We need to stand up for what makes this country great."
      Jennifer Eason came with her 9-year-old daughter, Victoria.
     "I'm here because Donald Trump is doing bad things," the 4th grader said.
     Betsy and Curtis Porter of Glencoe brought their 6-year-old son, Ethan, already at his second protest — he also went to the first "No Kings" protest in June. I asked him why he was there.
     "America is free," said the 2nd grader.
     And what does being free mean?
     "We make our own choices," Ethan said.
     Sometimes those choices conflict. Several came to protest but didn't want their own voices cited. A woman holding a sign reading "I'M A 77 YEAR OLD GRANNY FOR FREEDOM" quailed at the prospect of having her photo in the newspaper.
     "I want to live," she explained, fleeing.

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Betty Kleinberg, 83, right, and Paulette Vainstock, 81

Censorship is stupid

"Mexican News," by Alfred Jones, after Richard Caton Woodville (National Gallery of Art)

   
 

     Face the music. Accept the news, good or bad. Move on.
     That seems so simple. Though it requires a spine, which so many folk just don't have. And brains. Also often in short supply. 
     I'm thinking about the mess at Indiana University. Last week the administration abruptly fired the student media director and cancelled all future editions of the Indiana Daily Student, pretending it was a regular business decision to "align with industry trends."

     The fired adviser told The New York Times that the move was taken because the college wants the newspaper to stop printing news, and only feature be-true-to-your-school boostry fluff. 
     Student journalists suspect they were angry that the newspaper wasn't chirping loudly enough about Homecoming weekend, and if they had to spike the 158-year old newspaper to amp up school spirit, so be it. It's only the students. It's not like something important. Like donors.
     So what happens? The issue, that would have burned for a few hours on campus in Bloomington, is fanned into a national wildfire that goes on, day after day, in stories such as this one in the Washington Post.
     And in one of those moments of selflessness that seal a story forever in the public mind, the  Exponent, the paper at rival Purdue, two hours north and living in a different century, apparently, printed a special edition outlining the Indiana dust-up, then "crossed enemy lines" from West Lafayette and filled Indiana Daily Student boxes around the Bloomington campus with a special edition outlining the situation.
     "WE STUDENT JOURNALISTS MUST STAND TOGETHER," the front page headline reads, according to a story in the Herald-Times.

    You have to love that, right? Another ham-handed college administration ballyhooing their own inadequacy. Yes, it's all taking place in Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, and so can be lumped together as matters beneath notice. But with truth under attack on a daily basis across our country, even a victory in a minor skirmish in an overlooked place is worthy of notice. 

The threat of an American king

Reception of the Grand Condé at Versailles by Jean-Léon Gérôme (Musée d'Orsay)

     A regular reader in Norway writes:
     "I’m trying to understand the phrase 'no kings' in modern discourse. Given that constitutional monarchs in Europe today hold no real political power and function largely as symbolic figures within democratic systems, it’s unclear to me why monarchy is still viewed as a threat. Could you clarify this perspective?"

     It is not monarchy itself that is a threat — nobody is worried that Donald Trump will start wearing a crown and an ermine robe; though, at this point, I wouldn't put anything past him. Nor are we talking about quaint modern European royalty. We aren't worried about Queen Beatrix on a bicycle. Rather it is the absolute power, unquestioned obedience, mandatory worship and grotesque abuses once associated with kings that are a growing concern for many Americans.

     Better late than never.

     We are used to a government that tries to address the needs of its citizens. Or at least pretends to. Remember why our nation was created. If we read the Declaration of Independence, the very first thing it declares — with considerable hypocrisy, given that slavery would be legal for most of the next century — that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
     Respecting those rights is the purpose of having a government in the first place.

     "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men," it continues, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." 

     Kings don't derive their power from the consent of the governed — it is given by God. It cannot be taken away, in their own estimation. 

     Sound familiar?
     Look at the actions of the second Trump administration. Immediately stripping away the government, diverting money that once went to help citizens to his rich pals. Elon Musk basically bought unfettered access to the United State government for a $278 million bribe to the Trump campaign, and his minions raged through the government, firing workers and mining our data.
     Trump's central values seem to be revenge — the Justice Department, purged of its ethical employees, now pursues sham cases among all who opposed Trump. Who tried and — alas — failed to bring him to account for his continual crimes. Democratic states get budget cuts and masked thugs plucking brown people off the street. Red states get factories spurred by Trump's random and autocratic tariffs.
     This is where the "No Kings" phrase comes from. There is no government anymore, just Trump. He makes the decisions, or his handpicked lackeys and lick-splittles. We were a nation founded on division of power — Congress had an important role, passing laws, approving budgets, a role it has abandoned. It took an extended summer recess and, with the government shut down, barely functions and when it did was busy salaaming before Trump, treating the bare Republican majority as a mandate from God.
     The courts, meanwhile, are a funnel up to the Supreme Court, which Trump managed to pack with three partisan toadies during his first term, and now has a solid MAGA majority whose primary function is to clap like seals at whatever he does.
      Thus we find ourselves with a king, in all practical terms, if not in name. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded horror, reflecting his own tin-plated superficiality and lack of substance. He has unveiled plans to deform the White House with an enormous ballroom, and to construct an enormous imperial triumphal Roman arch worthy of Hadrian to mark the 250th birthday of the United States and its transition into an oligarchy. 

     But it feels trivial to focus on aesthetic lapses when the structural, fundamental damage he does is so great. The hornet's nest of conspiracy theories, lies and calumnies buzzing in his brain has become national policy. Truly, had the Russians conquered us militarily, and set out to dismantle and cripple the country, they could hardly have struck upon a campaign as destructive as the one we've seen over the past nine months.

     The public who aren't dancing around the Golden Calf of Trump have few options at this point. We can pine for the 2026 election to restore a Democratic majority in Congress, but Republican gerrymandering has decreased the odds of that, and the election might not happen anyway or, if it does, the government might not respect the results. Kings don't have to, and Trump has been very clear that the only elections he recognizes are those that go his way.
     Thus the "No Kings" protests, the desperate act of desperate people who see the country they love slipping away or, more accurately, being handed on a platter to a would-be tyrant who encompasses literally every negative quality that can be found in a person. It's a very sad, dangerous state of affairs.

     Does that answer your question?

Do 'No Kings' protesters hate America? Or love it?

No Kings rally, Des Plaines, June 14, 2025

     Protest is as American as apple pie and baseball. Our nation began with colonists decrying an oppressive tyranny from across the sea. As soon as our Founding Fathers broke away and formed a government, they protected protest in the First Amendment. A nod to freedom of religion, speech and the press, then boom: Congress will make no law prohibiting "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
     That doesn't mean our current leaders aren't blasting contempt at this most enshrined of American traditions.
     Saturday, Oct. 18 is the second "No Kings" protest, which has been receiving volleys of condemnation. House Speaker Mike Johnson, doing his special mind-reading trick, looked into the hearts of millions of people, many who haven't yet decided whether to go or not, and called it a "hate America rally" sponsored by the hidden hand of terrorists.
     "They have a 'hate America' rally that's scheduled for Oct. 18," Johnson told Fox News. "It's all the pro-Hamas wing and the Antifa people."
     And he knows that ... how?
     Oh right. He doesn't. He's just making stuff up. There's a lot of that going around.
     "This will be a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protesters show up," said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
     George Soros is a 95-year-old Hungarian-American philanthropist whose name has become a dog whistle for "Jewish money."
     The "No Kings" organizers deny they are in the grip of the flailing tentacles of octopoid globalists.
     "I am a volunteer," said Kathy Tholin, on the board of Indivisible Chicago and an organizer of the local protest. "We are all volunteers. Every single individual; none of us are paid by anybody."
     Why would people venture out for a "No Kings" protest?
     "One of the clear goals of the Trump regime is to isolate and depress us," said Tholin [begin italicsMission accomplished!end italics I thought], "and make us think there is nothing we can do to make a difference. It is incredibly energizing to spend time with the many, many people who refuse to submit quietly and are willing to speak out. That kind of solidarity, that kind of working together with friends and neighbors, is what is going to save us from this authoritarian suppression."
     While I haven't attended a protest, as a protester, since the Northwestern University anti-draft registration protest in the spring of 1979, I can vouch for the accuracy of that statement. Rather like Mike Johnson, I also tend to take a dim view of demonstrations. Maybe because, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were so many of them. For civil rights. Against the war. Some of them were stupid — yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon.
     And what did they accomplish? Really?
     Sixty-two years after Dr. King's March on Washington, civil rights have been rebranded "wokeness" and are in full retreat.
     But I blundered onto the first "No Kings" last June 14. We were driving through Des Plaines, saw hundreds of people gathered on street corners, and pulled over. I donned my figurative reporter's hat, grabbed a pen and notebook and went to investigate.
     Maybe because it was in Des Plaines. Regular, open, salt-of-the-earth people. No pretense, no showing off. Des Plaines is home to the Choo Choo Restaurant. They bring your basket of a cheeseburger and fries aboard a little model train. How can you not love the community supporting that?

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'Solace in time of woes'

 

     The interview at the Pittsfield Building on Wednesday ran a little over 90 minutes, from 9:30 a.m to just after 11. I didn't have to be at Siena Tavern for lunch until noon. That gave me almost an hour. 
       I walked a couple blocks south to Iwan Ries at 19 S. Wabash, on the second floor of the Adler & Sullivan-designed Jeweler's Building. Run by the fifth generation to own the company since its founding in 1857, Ries is the second oldest family-owned business in Chicago (the first being, surprisingly, Baird & Warner, founded in 1855).
      Iwan Ries has a fancy BYOB cigar lounge, but that costs money to use. As it was, the stogie put me back $16 and change. It also has a little side room with a few chairs and ashtrays. That was good enough for me to sit and relax and read the newspaper for 20 minutes. They didn't have my go-to smoke, a Rocky Patel 1990 Vintage toro, so I took the recommendation of the clerk, Harry, and tried the Rocky Patel Number Six, which was delightfully smooth, so much so I bought a second for another day. I'm a creature of habit, so it's good to have an occasional reminder that being forced out of your rut sometimes has advantages.
     The place is exactly as it always was. I tried to remember when I first came here, and couldn't. Over 30 years ago. As I left, I told Harry that it was nice to come across something that hasn't been ruined, yet. 
     "We never change," he said.    

The title is line from the Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Betrothed." 

What part of 'autism is genetic' doesn't RFK Jr. understand?

     My father has blue eyes, but I do not. Mine are a lovely green. My older son nevertheless has blue eyes, as does his daughter, my granddaughter.
     The reason is obvious. The winter and spring of 1932, when my grandmother was pregnant with my father, were particularly chilly in New York City. While 1960 was exceptionally warm in Ohio. Cool weather, as you know, breeds eyes that are blue, a color associated with cold. While warmth sprouts green. This year was quite balmy, but my son keeps the air conditioning cranked up — his apartment is like a meat locker — and so we can assume that had a significant role in their daughter's ice blue eyes.
     If you're nodding in agreement, here's bad news. The above paragraph is nonsense, cooked up for illustrative purposes. Eye color has nothing to do with environment. It's genetically determined. Nothing that occurs after the moment of conception has any influence on eye color at birth (afterward, it can shift. Most white newborns have blue or gray eyes — Black newborns generally have brown eyes — but that often changes as the melanin pigment in the iris manifests itself).
     How then can someone with captivating green eyes, such as myself, and a classic Van Morrison brown-eyed girl, such as my wife, have a child with blue eyes? Genes are paired, one from each parent. The gene for blue is recessive, meaning it gets overshadowed by a dominant brown gene. If your mom gives you a brown gene, and your dad provides a blue, your eyes will be brown. But you can still turn around and pass that thwarted blue gene along to your child, which, matched with your mate's recessive blue gene, is why a baby born of two non-blue-eyed parents like my wife and myself can still have blue eyes.
     Are you following this? Accepting it? Good, because it is true. It's not controversial. So why run this little genetics lesson in a busy metropolitan newspaper? Here, take my hand, and let's take the leap together. One, two, three, go!
     Autism is genetically determined. Like eye color. I could have mentioned this when U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump held their press conference three weeks back to blame Tylenol for causing autism. But honestly, I was so gobsmacked by their dangerous suggestion that babies not be vaccinated against hepatitis B, I focused on that.
     Last Thursday — it seems a century ago — the secretary of HHS and the president drove this particular crazy bus into the spotlight at a Cabinet meeting, claiming that boys who receive circumcisions at birth get autism at twice the rate as the noncircumcised, citing a 2015 Danish study (doubling it into two studies, perhaps out of habit) that suggests the pain of circumcision could be related to autism. RFK Jr. made the leap to conclude that wee snipped bairns are often given Tylenol, aka acetaminophen, aka autism juice. QED, more proof!

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'The annual wreckage'

 

     "What's that?" my wife asked, pointing to a plant poking out of my sage, a scarlet-stemmed intruder with oval light green leaves and deep blue, almost black, berries.
     Heck if I know. We had gone over to the late-October garden to admire an unexpected tomato. Spherical, bright red, rare enough that I'm surprised I recognized it on sight.
     I took a photo — the phone, I discovered, will tell you what a plant is if you press your finger on a photo of its leaves, the "LOOK UP" function. Only it didn't work. Sometimes it doesn't work.
     Google Image Search did the trick. "Common pokeweed," a web site called Gardening Know How sniffed. Native Americans used them in medicine and Southerners sometimes bake the fruit into pies, but you have to handle it gingerly: "A native plant that grows in disturbed soils, such as fields and pastures. It's a tenacious grower that can grow up to ten feet (3 m). The plant is hazardous to livestock and all parts of the plant are considered toxic."
     "Disturbed soils." I'll have to tuck that one away for when the National Guard hits downstate. Oh, right, they're never going there. 
     The web site encouraged people who find them to dig them out, getting all the roots, as they come raging back, and produce 48,000 seeds, distributing more pokeweeds.
     Have to do that ASAP. Until then, I did some poking myself, and came up with Amy Clampitt's poem, "Vacant Lot with Pokeweed."
     "Tufts, follicles, grubstake biennial rosettes," she begins, none too promisingly, "a low- life beach-blond scruff of couch grass."
     The poem picks up in the second stanza, observing "weeds do not hesitate," another useful phrase to slip into the literary toolbox.
     The third stanza has "magenta-girded bower," also good. In the fourth and last, she compares the fruit to a garnet — not perfect, but not bad — and ends strong, with: "salvage from the season's frittering, the annual wreckage."
     It's going to be difficult, from now on, not to refer to my garden as "the annual wreckage." Amy Clampitt, by the way, was born in Iowa, attended Grinnell College, and did not publish her first collection of Poetry until she was 63. She received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1992, and used the money for her first major purchase: a neat little gray clapboard house in Lennox, Massachusetts, chosen for its proximity to Edith Wharton's "first real home."
     Clampitt died of ovarian cancer two years later, and preserved the home through a writer's residency program — you get to live in the Berkshires with your spouse and children, if you have them, but no pets, for six months, and the Amy Clampitt Fund pays you $4,000, which is not bad for a poet. You have until June 15 ,2026 to apply here. Good luck.