Dolton mom forced to give birth at the side of the road, symptom of broken health care system

Alena Ariel Wells

     Both my boys were born in Evanston. Which at the time seemed wrong, since we lived in the city.
     "Why Evanston?" I asked my wife. I worried it would dog them, a nagging footnote. They wouldn't be "born in Chicago" but "born in Evanston." Not quite the same ring to it, right?
     Plus: Evanston Hospital was half an hour away. Northwestern Memorial, less than 10 minutes down DuSable Lake Shore Drive from our place at Pine Grove and Oakdale.
     "My OB/GYN is at Evanston Hospital," she said, with finality.
     End of conversation. Go where the best care is. Evanston gave us the red carpet treatment — when we showed up at the emergency room, nurses came running. Then again, my wife made her entrance in an unusual fashion. Or as I explained afterward: "If you want to get immediate help at an emergency room, crawl in on your hands and knees. It focuses their attention wonderfully."
     Unless it doesn't. Such as with Mercedes Wells, the Dolton woman who was met with "blank stares" and turned away from Franciscan Health Crown Point even though she was in active labor.
     "I felt like they were treating me like an animal," Wells later said.
     She gave birth eight minutes after Franciscan put her on the curb. In the cab of a pickup truck. On the side of the road.
     As awful as that story is, it's only the tip of the iceberg of the racial disparity in health care in this country. It isn't a few bad apples in Crown Point, but, in the words of one study backed by two federal agencies: "Systematic discrimination is not the aberrant behavior of a few but is often supported by institutional policies and unconscious bias based on negative stereotype."
     This translates into years of life lost — WBEZ and the Sun-Times are running a series about it. The girl that Mercedes Wells gave birth to can expect to live, on average, three fewer years than had she been white. If the baby were a boy, the gap would be five years.
     There are numerous economic and social factors at work, but plain racism is a major aspect.
     The bottom-line truth — and this doesn't get said enough, so I'm going to just say it — cuts across medicine, law enforcement, employment, the whole of American society: Too many whites, encountering a Black person, see the "Black" part immediately, but the "person" part, poorly if at all.
     Everyone suffers. The only explanation that makes sense as to why the United States, alone among industrial countries, doesn't have a system of national health care, is because white citizens are in horror at the idea of Black people receiving benefits, even if it means they are also uninsured — a reminder that racism is self-destructive and blows back, the way that Southern towns, ordered to integrate their swimming pools in the 1960s, filled them in with dirt instead, so nobody could swim in the hot summer.
     Good manages to come out of the bad. There is a classic Chicago story also involving a woman being turned away from a hospital, one I hope you'll forgive me for relating.
     The woman was Nettie Dorsey, who had already paid for delivery services at Provident Hospital, the "Black medical mecca" near her home on the South Side. But the day in 1932 she arrived, in labor, there was no room for her. Provident had 75 beds for 200,000 Black Chicagoans. (That number seemed low, until I checked. Today, Provident has 45 staffed in-patient beds.)
     Dorsey went home to deliver her baby. Both died. Her husband, Thomas Dorsey, a noted composer of blues and gospel songs, was devastated and first thought he'd give up music. "God had been unfair; I felt that God had dealt me an injustice," he said. "I didn't want to serve Him anymore or write gospel songs."
     That bleak mood lasted a few days, until Dorsey sat down at a piano, put his hands on the keys and poured out his anguish in a new type of gospel blues song, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." The song was an instant classic —it was Martin Luther King's favorite song. Mahalia Jackson sang it at his funeral. Beyonce recorded it.
     Good has come out of Mercedes Wells' experience, too, and I don't mean the doctor and nurse who turned her away have been fired. Think hard — what is the wonderful thing that came from this whole episode? Many news stories didn't mention it at all. Any idea?
     The arrival of Alena Ariel Wells, weighing exactly 6 pounds, on Nov. 16 at 6:28 a.m., delivered without medical expertise but into the loving hands of her father, Leon. The baby is "doing well" according to her mother. The world she was born into, alas, not doing so good. But maybe Alena Wells will be one of the people who try to fix it.

Leon, Mercedes and Alena Wells.

Flashback 2010: Happiness is . . . an empty voicemailbox

     Nobody calls — well, scams, and automatic pharmacy reminders. That's about it. Rarely a real person. Emails too are mostly pellets from some ineffectual blunderbuss blast of scattershot PR pleas. Still, in the morning, as I scroll down in the vain effort to detect something significant, I define and delete them. Out of habit, I suppose, from the day when computer memory was limited and could fill up. A practice that was already out-of-date when this ran, 15 years ago. Back then, the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings.

OPENING SHOT 

    With swollen, foaming rivers of information roaring across the Internet, we flatter ourselves that the netting of relevant data is a recent skill — as if the primeval forest didn't also offer an overload of information to every prowling hunter, for whom reading the sky, culling facts from the flutter of leaves, from the sound of snapping twigs, were essential abilities, certainly more significant than our talent at finding good local restaurants online.
     We data dinosaurs remember a time when we periodically drained our lakes of information — we flushed away old files, squeegeed off accumulated e-mails. Now, electronic storage capacity is so cheap that few need bother deleting anything. So it grows.
     A shame, because having to dispose of something prompts you to look at it anew before consigning it to eternal oblivion — or, more accurately, before making it harder to retrieve since nowadays nothing ever really goes away.

BERRY PAINT TO BUNCHED ELECTRONS

     My mother phoned. "Do you know your voicemail at work is full?" she asked. "No ma," I said. I don't often phone myself at work, because when I do, I'm never there.
     So I phoned my office.
     "Welcome to Avaya messaging," began the mechanical lady's voice. "You have . . . two new voice messages . . . one hundred, twenty-three, saved messages. Your mailbox is full. You will be unable to send messages. You may wish to delete unwanted messages. Main menu . . ."
     I "may wish?" I do wish! Let's get at them!
     First the two new messages — the anonymous angry guy who has been phoning at night for years (for a taste, click the video at the end of the column). He marks his messages "urgent" — the only caller to do so. Sometimes I delete his message right away, upon hearing that it is "urgent," pausing to savor the irony. Nothing signals a communication is meaningless as clearly as it being labeled "IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ."

     Sometimes I listen to the first few syllables. "Mister Steinberg, you LIBERALS make me pu . . ."
     Delete. God bless voicemail.
     "Thank you brother Steinberg," a minister begins, citing a few minutes I took to speak to a young man under his care.
     Onward, to the 123 saved messages, wondering what that first message will be. Like an archeologist with a toothbrush, working my way backward in time.
     A retired cop; a Metra engineer; a man abused by a priest. The Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
     Delete delete delete. Most I saved for the phone numbers -- quicker than jotting them down.
     A few dozen messages and we're back to the fall, and the election. A campaign manager. A senator's aide. The National Confectioners Association; the BBC; the Chicago Bears; a newspaper in Norway; the American Embassy in London.
     The need to cull messages is a sign of our phone system's age. The e-mail pit, which once we were periodically hectored to dredge out, has apparently become bottomless, thanks to terabytes of storage. Or are we on to petabytes by now?
     There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind.
     Back to voicemail. Some I kept as a record of the caller's remarks.
     "The weapon was not registered, therefore it was illegal."
     One was me, a nasal voice — cripe, I do sound like Woody Allen — caught without a notebook, calling my voicemail to read words from a plaque. A clever trick — if I say so myself — to have in your bag.
     A surgeon. A public defender. Leon Varjian, the man who created the Pail & Shovel Party at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1970s, phoning from New Jersey.
     Once this stuff is kept forever, will anybody bother with it? Scarcity creates value, and electronic communications' overwhelming quantity, coupled with its hasty, artless construction, will probably keep anybody from ever caring. Nobody is going to write a thesis on "Tweets of the Early 21st Century."
     Or will they?
     We haven't even read the stuff we've got. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read yet.
     At least I think that's true. Better check.
     "There are massive amounts of demotic papyri," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ("Demotic" denotes the common form of ancient Egyptian writing; it relates to the familiar bird-and-eyeball hieroglyphics the same way shorthand relates to block printing).
     "It's the biggest single corpus of written records, because they used this stuff as packing for mummies."
     Stein did not want to guess how much is still untranslated, and passed me to professor Janet Johnson, editor of the massive Demotic Dictionary, which the institute has been assembling for the last 40 years.
     "Twenty years ago, I would have said that only 10 percent of all fragments have been read," she said. "But in the last generation, an inroad is being made on the backlog of unpublished things. Work on demotic is really moving forward."
     While I had her on the phone, I asked: How's the dictionary coming?
     "We're on the last three letters," she said. "We hope to be done in two years."
      We'll check back then. Meanwhile, the first voicemail was no forgotten complaint from Barack Obama, as I had hoped, but a Canadian lawyer offering a speaking engagement. Eventually the voicemail was scrubbed clean, and offered words I took unexpected pleasure in hearing:
     "You have no new messages and no . . . saved messages. Main menu."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

From Alicia Brandt:
     The technological advance I wish I could get is an addition for my answering machine: a Get-to-the-Point button.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2010

A cautionary tale

"Praying hands,"  by  Albrecht Dürer (Albertina Museum, Vienna).

      

     Readers write to me all the time, sometimes sharing various personal developments. Like this on received Friday afternoon:

      Newspaper readers do tend to be an older crowd. I was sympathetic, and immediately replied:

   And this is the part that makes me cringe. Figuring, "No time like the present," I clapped my palms together, turned my eyes upward in the general vicinity of heaven, supposedly, and said, out loud, in the presence of my wife: "Please God, deliver a swift and full recovery to Jim Murray."

     The shame is not from the invocation of a deity I don't believe in, but in something revealed the next email.

     "Do you often shop online?" OMFG. A scam! I had fallen for a fuckin' scam. True, my only loss was dignity. But I had prayed for this piece of shit, in his miserable overseas scamster boiler room. I decided to string him along.

    That brought an instant reply.

     People fall for this shit? I mean, talk about a muddy narrative. I tried to string him along.

     But he must have sensed he was nailed —they do this all day long —and moved on to bigger dupes than me. And while I did not lose anything material, there was still an odd, visceral sort of violation. I'd dropped my guard. I had prayed for this guy.   

     No shame there. Still, we human beings, who take things on face value, or try to, are at a disadvantage in this online world. And it's only going to get worse.

Atop blog: "A Dip in the Lake," by John Cage (Museum of Contemporary Art)

Landscapers hit hard by ICE blitz, '...accused of the crime of working'

Barbara Kruger, The Art Institute

     Rey was just doing his job — cleaning up a yard in Rogers Park one morning at the end of October — when a Black Jeep Wagoneer slowed down, a group of masked men jumped out, slapped on handcuffs and dragged him into the vehicle, then drove off, taunting him as they did.
     News spread quickly.
     "I was heading downtown with my husband," said his boss, Kristen Hulne, owner of Patch Landscaping, with her husband Patrick, a newly-retired Chicago firefighter. "We get a call from a guy in the office: 'ICE just picked up Rey.' My other employee ran away and hid. The customer called and said, 'I'm sorry this happened; I took all your equipment off your truck and locked it away in the yard, safe.'"
     It's hard enough to operate a small business. Never mind a landscaping business in a city as weather-scoured as Chicago. The federal government's war on immigrants these past few months made that task even harder for landscapers here, a "cat and mouse game" Hulne calls it, trying to both rake leaves and avoid capture.
     "It's such an incredible burden on this industry," said Marisa Gora, owner of Kemora Landscapes, adding that ICE withdrawing recently is of limited comfort. "We don't know if they're going to come back in the spring."
     "As landscaping contractors, we're a targeted community," said Lisa Willis, owner of MINDSpace, "Our industry associations really haven't spoken up about it. It was really disappointing."
     The executive director of Landscape Illinois declined comment beyond, "we need to keep a low profile to protect as many of our workers as possible from additional enforcement."
     A worry everyone I spoke with raised — if I exercise my right as an American citizen, will our increasingly-vindictive government come after me or my business? It's like living in Russia.
     When a worker was abducted, everything else stops —for Hulne, it took time to locate the terrified worker who fled. The abandoned truck and equipment had to be collected. An increasingly Kafkaesque police state confronted.
     "We got a lawyer that day," Hulne said. "Before I could turn around, Rey's wife was in my office crying. Fifteen minutes after that I had a call from our alderman —'Oh my God I just heard what happened....' There was this immediate mobilization of the neighborhood. It was incredible."

To continue reading, click here.

"Beauty emergency"

      Tuesday morning, after our walk, I went up our driveway to toss Kitty's morning contribution into the trash can by the garage and spied half a rabbit. Our dog, who, truth be told, can be slow on the uptake, didn't notice the offal, thank God. 
      After I squired Kitty into the house, I went into the garage, got a shovel, and returned to what indeed turned out to be the hindquarters of a bunny, the upper portion cleanly snapped away mid-spine, as if cleaved in two with an axe. I considered taking a photo but, yuck, right? I buried the lower half in the strip of woods running along our property, covering the grave with a log, to deter it being dug up.
    It was clear to me what had happened: an alien spaceship had bisected the rabbit with a space laser, taking the upper half for study, or whatever nefarious purpose inspires extraterrestrials to flit about our planet in a way that manages to be both omnipresent and elusive.
     I considered reporting my confirmed alien sighting to the proper authorities, but realized that, without tangible evidence, my information would not be given the weight that it deserves ...
     Okay, okay, not being serious here. With so much rampant credulity — really, we live in the Golden Age of Gullibility —  I don't want you thinking, "Oh no, not Steinberg too." I've gone on record about what I think regarding the tendency to automatically view UFOs as visiting aliens, for all the good it does. (The wistful, who want so much to believe, try to skew the issue into, "You don't believe there could be life anywhere in the vast galaxy?" A red herring, and not the relevant question, which is: "Are they here, now?" The answer to that must be a resounding "No!"  The whole UFO phenomenon is based on people not grasping the hugeness of space, nor the expanse of time. "Star Wars" nailed it: if there is life in the galaxy, the overwhelming odds are it was both "long ago and far away.")  

      Still, there is something useful here. When we consider how smoothly people make the leap, from a flash in the sky to a mothership from Rigel 7, the whole Trump disaster should be no surprise. We knew long ago, or should have known, that too many people are eager to believe the most jaw-dropping nonsense based on nothing at all; why is it surprising that this tendency functions in realms beyond specks in the sky?

     Wednesday, standing in the kitchen, I though I saw something flash in the back yard. Looking harder, I saw nothing. "These microships are fast," I thought. Again, not really. Ten seconds later, my wife said, "Look!" and I saw I had left the grill open the night before, eager to convey our steaks to the table. 
     "I must have left the ..." I began.
     "The coyote!" she said. I redirected my gaze, and there was maybe 40 pounds worth of loping piebald manginess, heading around our house and west down Center Avenue. My wife alerted the neighbors across the street, who are watching a dog for friends and might conceivable let her in their fenced-in back yard. 
    They saw the coyote, parked in front of their house, and one let out a shout they've developed to alert the other that a momentary phenomenon demanding attention is something marvelous, not dire. A pretty bird, not a car accident. "Beauty emergency!" she said. I'm going to borrow that one. Her husband snapped the above picture but, being a more modest sort than I, waved off the idea of credit.
     Given this new information, I'd like to revise my theory about what happened to the rabbit. Space aliens didn't cut the rabbit in half: they left the rabbit carcass there, as bait, trying to attract the coyote. That must be it.

With 'Amadeus,' Robert Falls shocks by not shocking

 

Ian Barford

     We legacy media skew old. The grizzled goat in front of me, picking up press tickets at the Steppenwolf Theatre on Sunday night, asked, "Where's the bathroom?" That seemed a smart idea.
     We were about to see the Peter Shaffer play "Amadeus," directed by Robert Falls, and with Falls you never know what mayhem is going to be unleashed onstage. One certainly doesn't want to add to the pyrotechnics, unintentionally: "That old man who leapt up with a strangled cry during the quiet monologue and ran gibbering out of the theater — was that part of the show?"
     "Take a right," we were instructed. We confronted a blood red corridor and a single red door labeled, "ALL GENDER RESTROOM." The men in front of us tottered in. I began to follow, but my wife froze. She wasn't going in there after them.
     I diverted my path, as well. Solidarity. We found a "PRIVATE BATHROOM" tucked to the left, and once we established there were no ominous males lurking inside, I sent her on her way and returned to the brave new world awaiting me — well, not so new; Steppenwolf was remodeled in 2021. But I hadn't been there since then. COVID kneecapped my habit of going places and doing things, aided, I suppose, by gathering senescence.
     What do you expect in a bathroom? Urinals, correct, if you're a man? Stalls with toilets in them? Ah, ha-ha-ha. There was none of that. A blank white corridor that seemed like a set from "2001: A Space Odyssey." I walked the length, found myself among the sinks, figured — hoped — that I'd missed something, that these weren't the new sink/toilets I hadn't yet heard about. So turned and tried a metal door handle I'd missed. Success!
     Something new. But a change that can be adjusted to. I've never felt the overpowering bathroom shame that seems a major force in American politics. Then again, I've traveled internationally, which is fatal to such prejudices. I remember standing at a urinal in Tokyo, hat in hand, so to speak, when a grandmotherly cleaning lady with rubber gloves and a bucket came in, knelt and began to scrub the floor, almost at my feet. What can you do at that point but shrug and proceed? The sort of cultural enrichment one roams the globe to experience.
     Then again, I'm a connoisseur of unease. On the drive in, I'd mused over the shocks that Falls has presented in the — geez — 40 years I've been seeing his shows, since Aidan Quinn slowly spray-painted, "To be or not to be" on a brick wall onstage at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre in 1985, turned to the audience, jerked his thumb at the dripping red paint, and said, "That's the question!"
     Full-frontal nudity, as in the "The Tempest." Gloucester's gouged-out eyes sizzling on a grill, from "King Lear." And the zenith of Falls' theater-as-a-thumb-jammed-in-the-audience's-eye splintery-stick-to-jam-up-the-audience's-backside directorial style, the surprise stabbing of Isabella at the end of "Measure for Measure." I thought patrons were going to rush the stage. The Goodman had to hold formal "conversations" immediately after each show, which were really just therapy sessions designed to help the audience find the strength to leave the theater and go about their lives.
     "Amadeus" seemed fresh meat for Falls, with the pompous, plodding Vienna court composer, Antonio Salieri, passing judgment on the giggling, carnal man-boy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. What Grand Guignol thrills were in store?

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2006: Alanis hijacked my son's iPod

     Talk about eerie synchronicity. I dug this up last August and set it aside ... for reasons I can't recall. Looking for something to run tomorrow —working on a big project, no gas in the tank — it appealed to me because my wife and I were just talking, yesterday, about whether we had spoiled the boys. We decided, no, we did not. Loved them, yes. But didn't spoil them, and failing to get them exactly what they want for Hanukkah seems to reinforce that. 

    In addition: a couple weeks ago, a reader was trying to think of the name of a person I'd written about "once married to the futurist John Naisbitt." I dug around, and she turned out to be Noel Brusman, mentioned in the third item. 

     And finally, the real icing on the cake, wondering how I should illustrate this, I looked around my desk, and noticed the self-same blue 2006 iPod, sitting within arm's reach. I have no idea how it got there. Cleaning out a drawer, probably. Nor how long it has sat there. But it came in handy.

OPENING SHOT

     Like every youth in the U.S. not yet old enough to drive, my boys asked for a Nintendo Wii.
     They didn't get one. Oh, I dutifully went to Best Buy a week after the frenzy of the game system's release, assuming that, as per plan, there would now be plenty on hand. The clerk gave me a strange look, as if I had asked him to snip off his pinkie finger with a cigar cutter.
     No Wii, no way.
     "I'm not lining up at midnight," said my wife, a sentiment I shared. So we — and this will seem like child abuse to some — didn't get the boys what they wanted most. We gave them other things.     

     The older boy got an iPod Nano, of which we'll hear more later. And a set of Dante/Beatrice bookends. And other cool stuff — there are eight nights of Hanukkah, remember. The younger one got an electric keyboard and a tennis racket and more.
     I mention this just in case you are planning to spend the weekend in frantic search of whatever your child's heart desires for Christmas. Because children are mercurial. Yes, it is disappointing not to get what you want. But getting what you want sometimes only defers disappointment for the 10 minutes it takes for the kid to realize what a pile of junk he has been pining away for. An adult can exert judgment — we are allowed, though we forget that sometimes, in our quest to give our loved ones the perfect childhood that we didn't have either.

YOU WANT IT TO WHAT?

     Imagine the spoon was invented recently — say a few years back. What a marvel. No more complex and cumbersome mechanical devices conveying soup to your lips with a linked series of little buckets. No more sputtering suction pumps.
     A "spoon'' — what a great name for a product. So sleek. So well-designed. We'd all go spoon crazy. You buy your spoon, take it out of the box, admire its pure lines, then hurry to your steaming bowl of soup and — splat — it doesn't work. Hey, this isn't right! You try it again. Sploosh! Maybe you're using it wrong — maybe it isn't the narrow end, but the convex side. So you try that, the gentle dome of the spoon facing up, of course. More Campbell's Cream of Tomato in your lap.
     That was me with my son's iPod Nano. No sooner did we give it to him, then he wanted to open the plastic box it came in. Kids are funny that way.
     The job was quickly delegated to me. At first the box seemed seamless, as if the device was imbedded in a lucite brick. Then I studied it under a bright light, found a discreet little tab— designed by Swedes, surely. I pulled it, and the brick opened. Magic!
     Flush with success, I linked the gizmo — the size of two matchbooks laid end to end — to my kids' computer downstairs. That computer told me that I would have to download iTunes 7.0. But the program wouldn't download for reasons mysterious — the computer gave me one of those useless messages, telling me to go into my system's administrator. Huh? What? Like go into his office?
     Instead I went upstairs, where my computer downloaded iTunes fine. It also took the liberty of starting to load the songs from my own iPod file onto my son's new Nano, starting with A, as in Alanis Morissette.
     "Not age appropriate?" my wife said, all sweet naivete, when I ran to her frantically.
     "'And are you thinking of me when you . . . ' " I sang, and here I put a little oomph into the obscene verb, just like she does, "f - - -  her?"
     "Oh," she said.
     Of course the songs wouldn't come off. There's a "RESTORE" button that's supposed to wipe the slate clean. In theory. In reality it didn't. My older son kept popping in from time to time.
     "Got it going yet, Dad?" he'd say, brightly, his face shining with love and trust, while I fussed and sweated.
     That was three days ago. The good news is it didn't become the Hanukkah when Dad went gibbering down into the basement, grabbed a 4-pound drilling hammer, and pounded a brand new $149 iPod Nano to flinders.
     The bad news: It still won't play music. Except Alanis Morissette.

DEPT. OF CORRECTION

     In my item Wednesday about "Noel Brusman's son Dave," a photo caption mistakenly identified the Chicago airman serving overseas.
     He's actually Dave Naisbitt, brother of John Naisbitt, a social studies teacher at Hinsdale Central, himself a noteworthy personage.
     "He is a wonderful guy, a terrific guy," said Dr. James Ferguson, principal of the school, when I called to make sure John Naisbitt is really there, so as to reduce the risk of having to correct a correction.
     Not only is he there, he's busy. Naisbitt helped form the school's "Citizens Club," which this year collected 300 boxes of medical and school supplies, blankets, Beanie Babies and assorted items and shipped them to Afghanistan. (And yes, both are the sons of the bestselling author of Megatrends, also named John Naisbitt -- John Harling Naisbitt, while his son is John Senior Naisbitt, which is why I didn't refer to him as John Naisbitt Jr.)
     Whew! Now you see how these errors get in the paper . . .

TODAY'S CHUCKLE:

     This one -- sent by Larry Brody -- is too funny not to print.

     A lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw a man along the roadside on his hands and knees, eating grass. He ordered his driver to stop and got out to investigate.
     "Why are you eating grass?" he asked.
     "I don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass."
     "Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the lawyer said.
     "But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there, grazing under that tree."
     "Bring them along," the lawyer replied.
     They all climbed into the car, and the lawyer instructed the driver to proceed to his house.
     "Sir, you are too kind," said the man. "Thank you for taking us with you."
     "Glad to do it," the lawyer replied. "You'll really love my place. The grass is almost a foot high." 

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times,  Dec. 22, 2006

People still exist even if the Trump administration refuses to see them

     If the phrase "object permanence" doesn't mean anything to you, then you probably haven't spent much time lately sprawled on the floor next to an infant.
     My granddaughter has, among the phalanx of educational toys vying for her attention, an object permanence box, which is basically a wooden cube, a little smaller than a square Kleenex box, with a hole in the side. Colorful cloths are tucked into the hole and disappear. Then they're pulled out of the box, and reappear. Voila!
     Why is this important? Let me pull a few lines from a recent academic paper:
     "Knowing that objects continue to exist when they cannot be directly observed or sensed is called 'object permanence.' This fundamental cognitive skill is important for working memory and allows us to form and retain mental representations of objects.
     "For example, when a ball rolls under a couch and out of sight, infants who have object permanence understand that the ball exists. They may persist in attaining the ball by moving their body in various ways to look for and reach it even though it is hidden from view."
     Wobbly object permanence skills is why peek-a-boo is so entertaining for very young children. The beloved grandma mysteriously vanishes behind a wall of hands and then — peek-a-boo! — she magically appears, out of nowhere! It's great fun.
     Once mastered, object permanence stays with a person. Your keys fall into the couch, you retain an idea of where they might be — between the cushions — and look for them. You don't shrug and forget the keys exist.
     But object permanence is failing at the highest levels of government, where the current administration seems convinced that if certain narratives, or group of persons, are hidden from view, then they — and the challenges they present to whatever homogeneous white straight society they obviously hope to build — magically vanish.
    Does violent racism constitute a significant thread throughout American history? Delete a few web sites, scrap a few plaques and — presto chango! — never happened. Our kids are back to learning about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
     Do trans people trouble you? So vexing, what shall we do about high school girls swim meets? The Trump administration is vigorously trying to scrub trans people from public life — from passports, from the military. Medical care they need to live their lives is being criminalized.
     In July, the Trump administration ordered the LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline shut down, an astoundingly callous act.

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Is there an unsullied spot for new filth to spatter?

      There is a chance — slight, but delicious to consider — that at this point, one can err too far in caution. Resignation even. The belief that nothing can touch Donald Trump, while valid, based on hard experience, might be old hat. 

      Yes, the default has to be: his cult doesn't care, hasn't cared for years, that he's a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.  Nothing, most likely, can change that. A century after death, they'll be worshipping him like Christ, sitting cross-legged on the ground outside their temples, chanting, scanning the skies for his return.
      Nothing upends that. What are the Epstein revelations compared to, oh, sending a mob to trash the Capitol? Or unleashing masked federal thugs on innocent immigrants? Or failing to do what he can to stop Putin from crushing Ukraine? 
      Not much. Certainly not much new.
      So yes, social media blows up for a few days with the latest accounts of Epstein's emails. The juicy tidbits. Do they tell us something new about the man who bragged about groping women against their will? Who ogled teen pageant contestants undressed and speculated on the sexual appeal of his own young daughter? Who slept with a porn star, cheated repeated on each of three wives?
     Not really.
     But there is the straw that broke the camel's back. The possibility, anyway. Is this it? I doubt it, mainly because history commands otherwise, and hope is a luxury we can't afford. Or as a wit —okay, me —put it years ago: once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     Until it does. 

Flashback 2008: Like the first nick in a new car

     Yesterday being Nov. 14 led to the column on World Diabetes Day, so why not take that lead, and also pivot today's post off today's date? This ran in the paper exactly 17 years ago. It's notable for several reasons. The opening observation holds true for people who are NOT being dragged off the street and muscled into a van. Yet.

    The number of papers sold announcing Obama's election is worth the price of admission — I won't give it away here. But DAMN! 

     Though my primary takeaway from this is: the wheel turns. It sure turned from the first week of eight years of Barack Obama to the current nadir — O were it so! —of the Trump enormity, with Megyn Kelly actually trying to defend Jeffrey Epstein by pointing out that "he wasn't into, like, 8-year-old girls." Those MAGA sorts, always managing to limbo below the moral bar, no matter how low it is set.

     The problem with grasping a crisis is that while it's going on all over, it can still seem contradicted by localized events — thus, on every cool day in July, those ideologically opposed to the idea of global warming get to shout, "See? Fifty-nine degrees in July — some warming, huh?"
     Or last week. We went to Abt, the electronics and appliance giant in Glenview.
     A mass of humanity that defies description. Police cruisers parked on Milwaukee Avenue, cops using flares to control traffic. I think we got the last open parking space, a quarter mile from the entrance.
     "What is this, 'Free Day'?" I asked my wife as we struggled like salmon to get in. "Isn't there supposed to be a recession going on?"
     There is. Looking at Abt as evidence of financial hardiness is like pointing to the freezer compartment in the kitchen of a house ablaze and saying, "Fire? What fire? Look at all this ice." It's something they should teach in school, along with the alphabet, but don't: One example isn't proof.
     Newspapers are too self-referential. The guy who delivers your milk doesn't pause to expound about the magnificence of the dairy profession, the gorgeous red sunrises, the solemn dignity of cows.
     So I held back on the following, tucking it into columns and then plucking it back into the electronic limbo where bits and pieces wait for their chance at life in print.
     But a marvel should not go unremarked upon. And now that the phenomenon is waning, I have to add it to the record.

     Every day for a week after the election of Barack Obama, employees coming to work at the Sun-Times' building at 350 N. Orleans were greeted by an incredible sight: people lining up outside our store to buy back issues of the newspaper, particularly the one announcing Obama's election. Sometimes, the line has been 50 deep, and, yes, I counted, and asked, "Why wait in line?"
     "It's a piece of history," explained Haroon Rajaee. "He represents the true American spirit. This is what America is about."
     "So few [black men] on the cover they aren't looking for," added Gregg Parker, tamping down the protests around him with an indignant, "I'm just keeping it real!"
     The Nov. 5 issue of the Sun-Times shattered our circulation records — 900,000 copies, last time I checked. Nor is the phenomenon limited to Chicago -- across the nation, people are saving mementoes.
     A reminder of newsprint's role as official imprimatur of fact -- if it's in the newspaper, it's true, in theory. People who can scarcely believe Obama won want to hold the confirmation in their hands.
     "Give me the ocular proof!" Othello demanded, and a newspaper is just that.
     They also want something to pass along to generations unborn, as Michelle Holmes, editor of the SouthtownStar, said, "Nobody bookmarks a Web page to save for their grandchildren."
     Not yet anyway. There is an eagerness among some to embrace anything that squirts into their in-box as fact, however improbable. They'll get a text message, "SPACE BEES DOOM WORLD TUES." and start eating all the cookies.
     For the rest of us, we like verification in print. Which raises the troubling question: If there were no newspapers, how could we be sure that anything really happened?
     The stock market has been fluctuating wildly for weeks. Yet the Wall Street Journal on Thursday felt confident dubbing the latest dive a result of the market cringing away from Obama's "anti-growth" policies. Which raises the humorous possibilities of wondering what other quotidian woes can be set at the feet of the president-elect?
     I stamped inside Friday, brushing the rain off my hat.
     "This rain. ..," I thought. "It isn't natural, not for November in Chicago. It must be the heavens spitting cold disapproval down upon the Obama administration forming in Kenwood."
     OK, so maybe you can do better. But it's hard to top what people are offering up sincerely.
     "So what do you think will be his 'Bay of Pigs'?" asked the wise old city editor, and I nodded and pondered.
     The Bay of Pigs, for those just joining us, was the first big stumble John F. Kennedy made after he took office. The Eisenhower administration had cooked up a harebrained scheme to try to overthrow Fidel Castro by training Cuban nationals into a ragtag army.
      The invasion was set to go, and Kennedy, worried that he'd seem weak if he spiked Ike's Cuban D-Day, gave it the green light. The whole thing was an embarrassing fiasco, evidence that our bright young president had flaws.
     But somehow, the morning after Barack Obama's election didn't seem the time to speculate on future failings.
     They will come, of course. The Obama presidency will have highs and lows, like any other. But trying to anticipate them is futile — the weeks after Kennedy was elected, few knew about this lunatic CIA plot moving forward in the swamps of south Florida.
     Futile, and a little overly cynical, even for me, who has a tendency to stand in the back of weddings as the bride and groom kiss, feel that one moment of sappy sentiment, then bat it away by reminding myself the truth — that they'll both live their lives and grow old, and the man will die at 64 and the woman will go on another 25 years playing bingo and end up in an ammonia-scented day room somewhere, and the wedding dress she so carefully folded and preserved and stored on a shelf for 70 years will go into the trash.
     That's the truth — or, rather, it's a truth. The thrill of anticipation people are feeling now is also true, and one can embrace that, too, and probably should, because it was a long time coming, to quote the song, and it'll be a long time gone.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2008

World Diabetes Day points to often-ignored ailment

     The first reference to insulin in a Chicago newspaper was both late and maddeningly provincial.
     The Chicago Daily News debuted the name of the lifesaving hormone that regulates blood sugar on the Feb. 13, 1923, editorial pages, in this embarrassing piece of whimsy mentioning the city's king of electricity and rapid transit:
     "To quiet a tormenting doubt whether insulin, the new diabetes cure, was or was not named in honor of Samuel Insull, we asked a doctor about it. He tells us that insulin was named from the so-called island of the pancreas. What a delightfully-romantic ring there is to the islands of the pancreas! One might almost do a ballad about them: 'Twas off the pancreatic isles/I smoked my last cigar."
     The Daily News, perhaps significantly, was studded with advertising for quack diabetes remedies like Warner's Diabetes Cure, mineral baths in Texas promising relief, and Sulferlick Mineral Water for those who couldn't make the trip.

     Kellogg's Bran continually ran ads mimicking news articles, promoting itself as a "constipation corrective," pointing out that "90 percent of all illness can be traced to constipation! It is responsible for most cases of diabetes ..."
     The Chicago Tribune at least shared the reason that the Daily News was waxing poetic on the subject: Drs. Frederick Banting and John McLeod were in town to talk to the City Club about their 1921 discovery, which, in May 1923, the Daily News finally got around to explaining in detail.
     I mention all this because quackery is on the rise again and because Friday — Nov. 14 — is World Diabetes Day, the date chosen to coincide with Banting's birthday. In 1923, an estimated 1% of the American population had diabetes. Now, about 10% of adults do, with one-third prediabetic.
     Diabetes is divided in Type I and Type II. The latter — 90% of cases — is where a body can't use insulin produced by the pancreas to process sugar in the blood. It's caused mainly by obesity, with help from genetics, and can be controlled by lifestyle changes and drugs like Metformin. Type I, also known as juvenile diabetes since it often presents itself in children, is when the pancreas no longer makes insulin, and it must be injected.
      Regular readers know I contracted Type I a year ago — through some undetermined autoimmune disease. Diabetes is not bad, as far as chronic conditions go — no surgery, no radiation, you don't have to die early, necessarily, if you do what you're supposed to do. In my case, that means swallow four pills a day, inject long-acting insulin every night and short-acting insulin as needed, should I decide to, say, eat pizza or sushi or some other high-carbohydrate food.

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Happy Feast of St. Cabrini

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini's arm bone, on display at her Lincoln Park shrine.

    There are a lot of Catholic feast days — 25 in November alone, by my count. Starting with All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day, at the beginning of the month, all the way to St. Catherine Labouré and St. Andrew, at the end.  Most months have about two dozen such holidays. You can't celebrate them all.
    Well, not being Catholic, I don't celebrate any of them. Except for St. Valentine's Day, I suppose, though the Catholic Church removed that from the official calendar in 1969 due to lack of historical documentation —they weren't even sure which of several Valentines were being honored (I feel safe speculating that the Vatican was perhaps prodded by the gross chocolate-and-flowers commercialization of the day).

      But sometimes a feast day pops up to be noticed, and since today —assuming you are reading this on Thursday, Nov. 13 —is the feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, I think we can pause to notice her for several practical reasons.
     The tireless social activist —think Jane Addams in a habit —was the first American saint (Nov. 13 was the day she was beatified in 1938) and a resident of Chicago. There is a shrine to her in Lincoln Park, incongruously nestled within a luxury high rise, that EGD visited in 2018, and you can dive into that experience here. 
     St. Cabrini is the patron saint of immigrants, which of course makes her relevant as heck. Gov. JB Pritzker has taken to repeating himself when he talks to national media, and it might be a change of pace if he looked into a camera and intoned: "The upper right arm bone of Mother Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants, is on display in a reliquary on the North Side of Chicago, and it guides us as a beacon of shining moral clarity to do the right thing," Sure, he'd get laughed at, but it might give pause to a few of the Catholic revanchists who are cheering on the current administration.
    Mother Cabrini herself was something of a mess. Pathologically terrified of water after nearly drowning, she chose a vocation that prompted her to cross the ocean 27 times. She also had, in the carefully chosen words of one account, a "frail health and nervous temperament" and was frightened of failure. 
    You can get insight into her situation by considering the "peace prayer" credited to her which, if you want to mark her day, is supposed to be said in her honor, perhaps along with lighting a candle:
     "Fortify me with the grace of Your Holy Spirit and give Your peace to my soul that I may be free from all needless anxiety, solicitude and worry. Help me to desire always that which is pleasing and acceptable to You so that Your will may be my will."

     The word that leaps out of that, for me, is "needless." A lot of worry is protective — am I being scammed? Is it safe to cross the street? Has this milk gone bad? Should I go see a doctor about this? Is there something else I could be doing to help my country?

     The key is not to let anxiety become a default position, the low level hum that sours your waking moments without really helping at all. But we are getting into the realm of St. Dymphna, a 7th century Irish teenager who is the patron saint of mental illness. Her feast day is May 15. Until then.

     

'Days of Rage' evokes protests of 1960s and resonates today in a big way

 

Dontaye Albert (left) confronts Olivia Tennison in Steven Levenson’s “Days of Rage.” 
Photo by Sam Bessler

     "Standing up and saying 'no' is the least I can do," says Jenny, part of a three-member, cash-strapped Ithaca commune trying to get themselves — and anyone else they can enlist — to Chicago to protest the Vietnam War in "Days of Rage," the Steven Levenson play on stage last weekend, and next, at the Greenhouse Theater Center on Lincoln Avenue.
     After weeks of effort, they've signed up two people — five if they count themselves.
     Current events have a way of resonating with history. America's undeniable current slide into authoritarianism evokes the 1930s: all-powerful, venerated leader with his thumb jammed in every aspect of public life? Check. News media condemned while ridiculous lies are promoted and believed? Double check. Powerless groups blamed unfairly for social ills and persecuted in public displays of random cruelty? Yup, got those too.
     Meanwhile the reaction, of some, to that slide harkens back to the 1960s, when youth took to the streets to raise their voices and tell themselves they were accomplishing something.
     It's an awkward fit, as the whole-world-is-watching grandiosity of the 1960s is generally missing from the inflatable-frogs-will-lead-us "No Kings" rallies, where the whole point seems to be registering massive opposition while demonstrating that sending in the military is unwarranted. They're trying to shore up the American system, not smash it.
     "Days of Rage" opens with the show's focal point, Jenny, played with understated mastery by Olivia Tennison, leafleting outside a Sears store on a cold day. She's confronted by employee Hal (Dontayecq Albert, in a fine post-college stage debut) whose younger brother is in Vietnam. Her face is a symphony of disgust as Hal at first tries to get her to move on, then trots out his own paltry revolutionary bona fides: "I broke a toaster oven."
     Hal is stirred into their distinctive mix of political agitation and sexual drama, as what starts as a love triangle turns into a love pentagram. He becomes the voice of the outside observer with a foot planted in the real world while his new radical friends quote Engels and spin their schemes.
     "This is how the process happens. Revolution," says Quinn (Amanda Hoople backstopping the cast with unshowy precision).
     "By yelling stuff at people?" Hal wonders.
     Though set in October 1969, "Days of Rage" makes scant attempt to capture the era — from pre-show punk rock a decade in the future, to language mostly devoid of 1960s lingo while including a few anachronistic touches —"Totally!" — to Spence's Warby Parker-ish eyeglasses (Matt Tenny brings energy to the role, but not authenticity: he's a buff 21st century man cosplaying his grandfather).
     The anachronistic aspect annoyed my wife, while it merely puzzled me. It's not like 1960s-era dress of threadbare radicals would be expensive to replicate, prompting me to check when the playwright was born: 1984.
     It starts slow, but Levenson picks up the pace in the second half, and "Days of Rage" builds in force and well-deployed surprise. Throughout is much oblivious ridiculousness.
     "I hate white people," says Peggy, the manipulative new convert, oddly eager to join their ranks, and herself white (played with scheming glee by Aliza Broder). "I can't help it. I always have."
     But Jenny grounds us back in why this tumult is happening — napalm burning children alive in Vietnam. While Spence wonders how the towns around concentrations camps could go about their lives pretending nothing was going on.

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Retirement doesn't mean veterans stop helping their comrades or their country

 

Brig. Gen. Thomas Kittler, U.S. Air Force (retired).

     Soldiers. Sailors. Marines. Each Nov. 11, when Veterans Day rolls around, crews of GIs, leathernecks and swabbies get trotted out and rightfully honored.
     Somehow the Air Force often gets overlooked, though Air Force vets are not the sort to complain.
     "I never feel slighted," said Tom Kittler, a retired Air Force brigadier general from Northbrook, allowing that, "I think it's a valid argument."
     Kittler immediately speculated why that might be.
     "The Army, the Navy, have been around for quite a long time. The Air Force is relatively new to the show."
     Relatively new, it became a separate branch of the Armed Forces in 1947. Before that, you had the U.S. Army Air Corps.
     The Army and Navy cast a wide net. The Air Force is more focused, looking for recruits like Kittler, who joined the Air Force ROTC in 1984 as a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Why? He was already flying, having earned his wings at 16.
     "It was my dream to fly airplanes," he said. "My dad was an avionics engineer. He'd take my Cub Scout troop out to the hangar, we'd climb over the old airplanes. That's how I got the bug."
     Americans give to the military; the military gives back. Kittler not only got a career out of the Air Force — he went on to become a commercial pilot — but a wife and family: He met his future wife Jennifer because she was an Air Force nurse.
     Which put her in a position to understand the demands of the job, like at Christmas 1989.
     "My folks were visiting," he said. Duty called. "We took off Christmas Eve. My parents were aghast — 'Where is he going? When is he coming back?' My wife said, 'He's going to work; he'll be back.'"
     The mission? Operation Just Cause, the effort to unseat Manuel Noriega and restore  Panamanian democracy.
     At least that was over quickly. He was in the reserve during the Second Gulf War, called up for a two-year activation.
     "That was hard," said Kittler. "I was away from my girls — I have two daughters," then 6 and 8. "But you get called, you have to go."
     Does service encourage patriotism?
     "Absolutely it does," he said. "I think the individuals you train to fight with, to go to war with, to spend Christmas Eve on an airplane with, these are your lifetime heroes. You do it for your buddies. You don't want to let them down. That's why I'm so involved with the Northbrook Veterans Center."
     Kittler, 64, a Northbrook resident, would prefer today's piece focus on all vets and their needs.
     "We want to spread the word. It's veterans helping veterans," he said. "Veterans don't know about service and benefits. We want to make sure everybody who is entitled to them is knowledgeable."
     Among The good that Kittler has had been able to do includes was mentoring Cameron Jones, an Air Force major and member of NASA's latest class of young astronauts.
     "My best friend's son came to me, when he was 12, and said, 'Hey Uncle Tom, I want to do what you do,'" recalled Kittler. "This past year, he just got tapped to be the latest of 10 astronauts. He's very bright, did extremely well at test pilot school. It's my understanding he will be selected for our effort to get back to the moon. He's very excited, and I'm very proud of him."

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"Always happy to save a reporter's ass"

A Vanitas Still Life, by Pieter Claesz (Franz Hals Museum)

     Sixty-five is not 57. That's for sure. While living through my 50s I felt I was bustling around the anteroom of age, now I feel I've entered in, found a comfortable chair, and am contemplating the effort of getting up while watching the clock tick.
     COVID must have had something to do with it. Society shut down. More than a million Americans died —a fact our nation just shrugged off. We all stopped going to work and despite continual corporate vows to the contrary, never really went back.

     It's not just perception. The world is definitely more menacing. In his second term, Donald Trump has gotten better at destroying America, and has an army of lapdogs and sycophants eager to help him. But life also just seems more disordered, chaotic, confusing, objectionable.

     Last Wednesday I wrote a column analyzing the word "fuck," since Gov. JB Pritzker told our loathsome leader to "fuck all the way off." It was dashed in the paper, f - - -, but I was amazed they ran it at all. These are desperate times, and I think the general timidity that can affect newspaper editors is being sandblasted away by children being snatched off the street and sent to detention centers in Texas. Now is not the time to debate fine points.
     Regarding "fuck," a number of readers felt Pritzker shouldn't have said it. "I was taught casual swearing is laziness at best and a corrupted heart at worst," one sniffed. Which did not strike me as odd until I noticed this post, from 2018, "Is Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt." It had ... just a more buoyant spirit to it. No one in the comments dabbed a perfumed hankie to their lips and recoiled in horror from the term. 

     Sure, maybe it was because I wrote it exclusively for the blog, with none of the toning down that a newspaper requires. That could be it.

     Still, I thought to myself: "We're growing old, all of us, me and the readers combined, a bunch of seniors in a barrel going over the falls of life, heading to the rocks."
     Too stark? Maybe because a certain reader weighs in, in a footnote, brushing off my concerns, "Honey, I'm your mother. C'mon," and I realized again how much I miss her. Maybe because another colleague died the other day, Mo Cotter. Almost a quarter century on the copy desk. I remember her only vaguely: no-nonsense, in a good way, with just a crinkle of humor at the corner of an eagle eye. I plugged her name into gmail, and years of interactions came up, mostly her telling me I'd made some goof and she was fixing it, half courtesy, half reprimand. In 2012 I'd quoted a St. Josephinum English teacher Haley Coller. "I find a Hayley Keller on the school's faculty list," Cotter wrote. "OK if I change it?"

     Shit yes. I felt like a man, about to step off a cliff, who felt a sudden tug on his shirt. Mistakes are bad and screwing up names is particular bad. The scar of the Medill F stung. I thanked her profusely.
     "That's my job," Cotter replied, with customary terseness. 

      "Nevertheless, not everyone would look that up — I should have and didn't," I continued, "— so I appreciate you sparing me a lousy day tomorrow."
     "If I don't know a name or if it just looks funny, I look it up," she wrote back, subtly reminding me: do better. "I'm always happy to save a reporter's ass."

     Mo was 64. A year younger than me. 

     I made that last quote into the headline of today's post, as a kind of tribute, looked at it, and realized there was no possessive in "reporters." Had Cotter made a mistake herself? I thought, with a flash of something like excitement — we reporters secretly loved the rare-to-almost nonexistent times it is the copy desk in error. I glanced at her email. No, the fault was mine, of course. She used it. I dropped the possessive, typing the line in. Should have cut and pasted. We have to be so careful not to drop things, in the shortening period before, one fine day, everything simply drops.

Works in progress: Donald Colley — 'Honesty should guide the pen'

     Usually I run "Works in progress" on Saturdays, such as Lane Lubell's well-received post yesterday. But this week I got two submissions, and — my blog, my rules — decided to extend the practice to Sundays, when necessary.  Readers met Donald Colley in 2022, during the R. Kelly trial. He's been attending the court hearings of ICE Sturmbannführer Gregory Bovino, and files this report:

     In court today. So too one Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, Chief of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, present to appear before Judge Sara Ellis.
     Whether I go to court for myself or as the eyes of the public, the moment I pass thru the metal detector and retrieve my satchel with sketchbook and drawing gear, I look to be disinterested, as though I haven’t got a dog in the fight. Not so easy today. Today, I will draw and listen as the chief Federal law officer will address the questions posed by a judge concerned about tactics and practices of the Federal agents charged with apprehending undocumented immigrants and alleged criminals. Sent by the current POTUS and directed to ferret out those we’ve been told are here illegally, these Federal agents' stated targets are a criminal element that took advantage of a porous border, many of whom are described by current U.S. Secretary of homeland security as the worst of the worst.
     In the weeks since September, when Cmdr. Bovino and the CBP and ICE agents under his command initiated “Operation Midway Blitz”, daily coverage by media, thousands of videos documenting citizens and residents caught up in incidents related to these maneuvers, and criticism of this Federal directive by, among others, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, have caught the attention of the courts. It will be thru today’s inquiry that Judge Ellis will determine if, in the execution of “Operation Midway Blitz”, the Constitution that both she and Cmdr. Bovino are sworn to uphold, is being followed. This in a city I’ve called home for 26 ½ years.
     I find it imperative, should I feel the tug of personal interest, that I fall in line with what most of us want in a judicial system: impartiality, fairness, a high standard of practice, and an effort in earnest for veritas. So when I open my sketchbook and set pen to paper, I avoid caricature, refrain from giving added pugnaciousness or ghoulish cast. (However, if the lead lawyer has a Nixonian, bluish cast 5 o’clock shadow, so be it. Honesty should guide the pen). If I take license to hang a lantern jaw on someone, turn a slightly furrowed brow into a freshly plowed field, or grow a lawyer’s loose jacket into Emmett Kelly’s overcoat, then I come off as a clown in a forum where much is at stake for plaintiffs, defendants, and the people who care for and may depend upon them, not to mention my making light of the integrity of the institution. My brother spent some extended time incarcerated and the family pain and concern for the duration of his sentence was real. Yet another reason for veracity.
     Courtroom artists are present when Rule 53 is in effect, which forbids the presence of cameras, and sometimes all electronic media. One district attorney told me that some of the cases are enough of a circus that the inclusion of teams of photojournalists and AV equipment would only add to that. Note taken. Therefore, I work smaller than most, leaving large sketchpads and drawing boards at home. I prefer fountain pens and nonvolatile markers of various brush widths for detail and broader coverage in lieu of dusty pastels or pencils that need sharpening. At times I have been seated in the jury box, which affords a closer view of witnesses, questioning lawyer and judge. Mostly, I find myself seated among journalists, family members of plaintiffs and defendants, and interested members of the public. I call that perspective embedded, and it may have its own benefits.
     I first entered a courtroom as a 21-year-old art student whose brothers had found themselves in a fracas with music venue security guards. My sketchbook went along. The concert security guards took issue with me drawing them. I was summoned to the bench to hand the judge my sketchbook. A wide grin broke out over his court officer’s face as he recognized himself in my sketches. The book was handed back to me with the judge’s verdict, ”You’re fine. He may continue.” In the years since, my sketchbook and I have been the occasional visitors to a courtroom and it has always been engaging. I highly recommend it. We also like to go to city council meetings, and political rallies. I think of it as my continuing adult education and merger of Art, Politics and Civics lessons.