Flashback 2010: Why were bombs sent to synagogues in Chicago?

Synagogue in Buenos Aires

      Anti-Semitism waxes and wanes, and if I seem nonchalant about it surging lately, that's because, in my view, it never goes away. If it seems fresh, it's because people forget, and anything short of the Holocaust tends to get shrugged off. Life goes on. This column from 15 years ago, written after two Yemeni bombs containing powerful explosives were sent to synagogues in Chicago, but intercepted due to Saudi intelligence.  Pause when the column gets to "the political philosophy now ascendant." Saw that one coming a mile away. And now it's here.

     "O despairer, here is my neck. By God! You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me."
     Good old Walt Whitman. Always there in a time of crisis. I worried about tomorrow's election, I truly did. A year of angry ugliness, from 2009's summer of botched health care town halls to tomorrow, when the resurgent corporate interests and their Tea Party tools will have their victory dance.
     Then I dug out Leaves of Grass, and am not so worried anymore.
     "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."
      The deficit is indeed a problem — you don't fix it by cutting taxes, but at least they got people talking, if not yet actually thinking, about it. Which is a start. As is participation. The first words out of the mouths of Tea Party supporters are that they've never been involved in politics before. Well, bravo, welcome to the party. You always wondered who those people who didn't vote were, and now we know. They'll discover that political movements wax and wane. What's up today is down tomorrow. We'll find out whether spite has a future in politics.
     "All has been gentle with me . . ."
     It's natural to assume other people have things easier. It's also usually wrong. Don't mistakenly assume Whitman's boundless enthusiasm reflects an easy life. All was not gentle with him. His family was broke; he left school at age 11 to go to work. But that isn't what he wrote -- he saw America for all its brawny, sweaty, hay-stacking, lumber-cutting glory. It was not a stumbling slave-owning nation to him, even as the Civil War was about to tear it apart. He saw the "solid and beautiful forms of the future."
     I think that is my biggest problem with the political philosophy that is now ascendant — it assumes an American in decline, whose government cannot afford to govern, whose people cannot afford taxes, cannot tolerate the influx of a single new immigrant.
     "Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations."
     How could that be true in 1855 and not true today?
     "Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes."
     Lack of malice is a blessing — liberals forget that, enviously eyeing just how far compressed scorn can take a movement. But all biases are a kind of blindness — you aren't seeing things as they are, but seeing them through the filter of your own passions and dislikes. Sure, it makes action easier — you aren't reacting to unfolding events, but acting off an old script. Yet where does that action take you?
     "The fury of roused mobs."
     Since we have such a difficult time seeing flaws in ourselves, and such an easy time seeing them in others, I'll ask a simple question: Why do you suppose someone in Yemen would send bombs to synagogues in Chicago?
      The answers are obvious, but let's review them: 1) Because they hate Jews. 2) Because they hate Americans.
      Does that sound about right- Now ask yourself: What are the odds that the people putting those bombs in the mail ever met a Jew, or even an American- In Yemen, pretty slim. Yet they made those bombs and put them in the mail on general principles.
     Now ask yourself: Is abstract generalized hate confined to Yemen? Or do we see it in the United States?
     One of the Chicago synagogues a bomb was mailed to is the gay and lesbian Congregation Or Chadash. They're in Edgewater now, but they used to meet in a church in East Lake View, two blocks away from where we lived. For Yom Kippur 1996, my wife and I and our newborn went to Or Chadash for services because they were close and didn't charge much. The gay aspect didn't bother me at all, not until we were actually there, and I worried how we would be received, this pair of breeders with our spawn.
     Not that the congregants did anything to make us feel unwelcome. Just the opposite. We sat in the back, and every time Ross cried, we would rush him out of the room, so as not to bother people.
     About the fourth time this happened, I sprang to my feet. The rabbi stopped in mid-prayer.
     "You know," he told the congregation, "when I was growing up, I loved to hear the sound of the babies at the back of the synagogue. It's nice to hear it again."
     I stopped, fussing baby in my arms, and looked around. Congregants were not annoyed at this interruption. They were smiling.
     These are the people that some Yemenis acting under al-Qaida's murderous madness would have killed, sight unseen.
     If the lesson we take from this is the easy one — the world is filled with crazy people — then we're letting ourselves off the hook. Generalized malice at whole swaths of humanity is not confined to Yemen. The election tomorrow, alas, will not change that.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 2010

You can't have our freedom; we're using it.

Danish crown, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen

 
     I grew up in an era of protest. People taking to the streets. First for civil rights, then decrying the Vietnam War. Outrage peaked, and it could be hard to tell if the results were a rally or a riot.
     Actually, not so hard to tell — the looted stores were a giveaway.
     You could argue it worked — civil rights inched forward, the Vietnam War ended.
     You could argue it didn't, really — Nixon resigned in disgrace with the war still going on. It took a new president, and a new era, to finally bring the war in Southeast Asia to a close, nearly seven years after the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention. Civil rights remained elusive.
     As a rule, I don't do protests. I wonder: to what end? There is an essential optimism to protests that I sense is misplaced, a faith that someone is listening, someone cares about your appeal to a higher power, What I call "If only the czar knew." 

     We aren't alerting concerned leaders to troubling situations. We are begging the unhearing. We are wildly gesticulating before the blind. If anything, the social turmoil feeds Trump's plans to break American society — if somebody at a protest steps in a flower bed, he'll justify sending in the Marines.
     Then again, living in a fact-free hellscape between his ears, Trump doesn't even need that. There doesn't have to be a Reichstag fire this time; he can just make it up. "They're eating the dogs; they're eating the cats." American elected the guy who said that; what hope has she now? Facing a human virus custom built to defeat democracy, who can conjure up anything at all, present it as truth and have it accepted. A dishwasher in a Denny's can be branded the head of MS-13 and dragged away to a black op site.
     At best, participating in a protest is like voting — at best, expending considerable effort for tiny effect, to be an ant in a colony. At worst, street theater, a little play you perform in public for yourself.
     "Never confuse movement with action," as Hemingway said.     

     What's so bad about a little movement? A symbolic act of futility? Think how much effort gets wasted on everything else. I seem to have planted tomatoes this year, again, and what good ever comes from that? Sometimes you have to act, and if significant action is not possible, you still do what you can.

     So kudos to everyone showing up at a No Kings rally today. My wife and I are planning to go to one ourselves.  Not because I imagine it will do any good, short term. Or even long term. Or that things will get better anytime soon. They will not. 
     What I want is, when this is all over, to be able to look my granddaughter in the eye and tell her I did what I could. We tried to keep America the decent place which, if always falling short of its promises, at least made those promises. At least pretended to be fair and democratic and open. Not this nest of calculated cruelty, of indifference and fear and tearing down of the regulations, agencies and rules that keep people's lives decent. At least having the hope of decency.
     I see it as an almost physical tug of war. Trump and MAGA world are pulling at our rights, like a mugger trying to yank away a woman's purse. And we're pulling back, crying, "You can't have our freedom — we're using it!"

    I know I said that last concept in the column Friday. It seems worth saying again. And again. And again. Until we don't have to say it anymore.

A parade for Trump, but the true patriots will be in the streets

      I love a parade. Give me a crisply uniformed high school marching band, tall hats smartly strapped under chins, horns held high, playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." A line of fire trucks, lights flaring, sirens whirring. I'm lucky enough to live around the corner from where parades — Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day — pass by in Northbrook.
     My wife and I don't bother with folding chairs. Just stroll over and park our butts on the curb. Though that means we'll have to groan to our feet when the knot of veterans pass, so we can stand and applaud. We're spry. We're still up to it.
     Saturday's parade in Washington, D.C. is different. The stated purpose is to honor the 250th anniversary of the Army. But it has — like so much in this country — been seized, retrofitted, and put to work serving the greater glory of one Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, honoring his 79th birthday.
     Given how Trump has festooned the Oval Office in gold bling, I can see how the humility of that title, "president," might begin to gnaw at him, and he'll declare himself to be, oh, Emperor of Everything, Supreme King and Gloria Mundi.
     Assuming he hasn't already. There's so much to keep track of. You miss important stuff. Trump could have ordered the original Bill of Rights sent over from the National Archives to use as kindling in his fireplace and, I swear, the news would blip for 6 minutes until pushed aside by the next jaw-dropping violation of national norms.
     A president, remember, is a governmental official. Elected by the people. Subject to the laws of the nation, running the country as co-equal in power with Congress and the judiciary. Instead the bare Republican majority in Congress is sprawled prostrate, twitching to every whim of Trump, and the judiciary, increasingly packed with handpicked Heritage Foundation nestlings, either sings hallelujah or, when a dissenting voice is heard, can be ignored.
     Who dares to enforce a court decision that crosses Trump? To echo a line credited to Stalin: "How many divisions does the U.S. Court of Appeals have?"
     Trump has an army, which he's forcing to parade down Constitution Avenue, mimicking his idol, Vladimir Putin — honestly, if they blare, "To Serve Russia," that nation's military anthem, from loudspeakers in Washington Saturday, you might be shocked. But would you really be surprised?
     He also has Marines, 700 of whom he sent, along with the California National Guard to Los Angeles this week, over the objections of LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
     An academic perfectly summed up what's happening.
     "He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power to undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties," Ilya Somin, a law school professor, told the New York Times.
     Mayor Brandon Johnson, striking a tone I cannot recall a Chicago mayor ever taking in the face of looming unrest, called upon the city to "rise up" and "push back" against the federal government undermining our rights.
     "This is a necessary fight," he said at his press conference. "I am counting on all of Chicago to resist in this moment because, whatever particular vulnerable group is being targeted today, another group will be next."

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"No king he"

     

     

     The Washington Post did a poll this week, asking 1,000 Americans whether it is a good idea for the president to send the California National Guard and the United States Marines into Los Angeles to quell violent protests that broke out over the increasingly common practice of masked immigration police snatching people off the street, dispatching them to unknown dooms in foreign hellholes.        
     Forty-one percent think it is a good idea and support the policy; 44 percent oppose the suspension due process and the rule of law, and 15 percent just aren't sure.
     I read that, and thought: I've got to dig that yarn out of my closet and begin focusing on knitting. Because really, if that's where we are, in 2025, then why bother addressing issues at all? The same 40 percent of the country that have been huzzahing Trump since he went down that escalator in the peach-toned hell of Trump Tower almost exactly 10 years ago are with him still, the same bare half majority puts up an increasingly exhausted, dispirited and failing opposition, while a staggering 15 percent strokes its chin and thinks, "Golly, I just don't know what to think...."

     If you're looking for a bright side — and at this point any kind of optimism might be part of the problem — 52 percent of the respondents to the poll said they disapprove of Trump's immigration policies. With 37 percent — a solid third plus change — saying they're all for kneecapping our economy and nation by enacting a cruel policy of isolation and xenophobia. So long as that bare majority doesn't go into the street and raise their voices...

    We're allowed to give up, right? Maybe because I turned 65 on Tuesday, but it struck me that this swine of a man, this jabbering dupe of a president, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson's sharp description of Nixon, will be the sun in my sky for years to come. Maybe forever. Because even after the corporal human being, to stretch the term, is no longer with us, the concept of a president as dictator, as king, as unopposed figurehead, will continue. I have a hard time believing J.D. Vance can just pick up where he left off. 

    But then again, I have a hard time believing any of this. Always have. Which might be why he wins. The American media, slow on the uptake, raising a finger and offering a weak, "hey!" as MAGA world rushes by to ravish and destroy our country.

     Knitting. He hadn't been campaigning a month when, dispirited, already, I suggested it might be time to divert myself from the parade of bad news and focus on yarn craft.

     "I could be the knitting reporter, covering the yarn arts beat," I wrote on July 6, 2016. "As the presidential campaign veers deeper into farce, a bone deep revulsion sets in at the prospect of reaching my hands into the mess and trying to arrange its gloppy, putrid contents into some kind of order. Knitting seems so pleasant by comparison."

    I'm tempted to apologize for that — preemptive surrender. Or maybe I should be proud. Nothing was working. This entirely unfit buffoon was striding toward the presidency, and I was groping for a new way to register dismay and desperation. It wasn't true surrender, but desperation disguised surrender. Didn't matter. 

     Anyway, it's 3 a.m. No wonder I'm tired. Saturday is "No Kings Day." Welcome to the club. Here's something I wrote on the subject, reflecting on the "TRUMP" sign going up at Trump Tower by remembering Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias."

     Shelley notes the stone pharaoh’s face: Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.
     “Sneer of cold command” sort of evokes Trump, the man, does it not? I only met him once, when he was in town drumming his Atlantic City casino. No king he; Trump needed a shoe shine and a haircut.

     I wrote that 11 years ago, in 2014. Before the man was even running. Then, in the giddy optimism of youth, I predicted the sign would be down in 12 years. Now, it seems more likely that, by next year, all the buildings in downtown Chicago will have Trump signs. He's never going away.

     So yes, last night was one of the rare days I went to bed without a blog post for the next day. Not sure why I didn't write anything. Following the news from Los Angeles, I didn't see what there was to say. That this is bad? That it's a dry run, and if the president can send the Marines into a city, over the objection of the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California, then he can send them into Chicago to arrest J.B. Pritzker for saying something mean. You don't need to be paranoid to see that coming, just look a little ways down the road.     

Park district shuns an anti-hate ad — and ketchup on hot dogs

     Regular readers know that I belong to a widely reviled minority; contempt is increasingly heaped upon us without letup or shame.
     I'm referring, of course, to people who put ketchup on hot dogs.
     Not that I do it all the time — Friday I biked over to Little Louie's, the beloved Northbrook frankfurter joint, and ordered two chardogs, one with mustard, grilled onions and relish, for my wife, and one with mustard, grilled onions and a pickle spear for me. I don't relish relish.
     So not habitual with the ketchup. But I do reserve the right. And I push back against those riding the you-can't-be-a-Chicagoan-and-put-ketchup-on-your-hot-dog hobby horse. It's an old joke — Bugs Bunny goes to the steakhouse, slathers his steak with ketchup, and an incensed French chef in a tall toque chases him out of the restaurant with a cleaver.
     It isn't that Chicagoans don't put ketchup on hot dogs — some obviously do. It's that certain Chicagoans pretend to care about it, deeply.
     Why? A stab at sophistication — afraid of being considered rubes, Chicagoans insist upon their gustatory refinement. And a kind of parody of prejudice — we might not be able to mock the folks we once loved to mock, but we sure can still mock you, you loathsome ketchup lover you.
     This is a popular gambit among New York advertising agencies trying to spray a whiff of authentic Chicago on their puffery like someone dosing an outhouse with a blast of Febreze.
     Which is why I was surprised to see the Jewish United Fund, a venerable Chicago organization — founded in 1900 — launch an ad showing a frank with a single zigzag of ketchup.
     "Hey Chicago," it taunts. 'Antisemitism is up 400%. Don't just hold the ketchup. Hold the hate."
     Et tu, JUF? We ketchup lovers don't get enough grief? Is JUF now lumping us with antisemites?
     "No, no, no," said Elizabeth Abrams, a spokesperson for the JUF. "It's not saying if you put ketchup on your hot dog you are an antisemite. We want to remind and inform the greater Chicago community that antisemitism is a pervasive problem."
     They've got that right.
     To imagine that the Trump administration is fighting antisemitism by going after universities for their anti-Israel protests is like pretending Donald Trump is against insurrection because he sent the Marines into Los Angeles. (Trump actually called the protesters "insurrectionists," which is world-class gaslighting).

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The plan is working, so far...

 

"Bust of the Collector," by Damien Hirst

      Not to try to find any kind of silver lining in our nation's collective stagger toward totalitarian dictatorship.
      But it does make the always relevant Juvenal even more spot-on.
     Looking around the chaos, decadence and folly of Rome 2,000 years ago, he observed, "it is difficult not to write satire." 
     I feel you, brother.
     Though sometimes the acid-witted Juvenal — born Decimus Iunius Juvenalis — can cut too close to home. Such as today, my 65th birthday. Over the weekend I was poking around his 10th Satire (there are only 16 that survive),  checking its famous "bread and circuses" line. (In my edition, it's "bread and games.")
     I happened upon this:
     "'Give me length of days, give me many years, O Jupiter!' Such is your one and only prayer, in days of strength or of sickness; yet how great, how unceasing are the miseries of long old age!"
      I don't know. My dad is 92. He might not know his children anymore; but he doesn't strike me as miserable. When I ask him if he's happy, he says he is. True, he has no volition, and lacks any interest in anything. Not the usual requisite for happiness. But he doesn't seem to suffer by it. Or even notice. If you ask him how he spent his day, he won't say the sad truth, "Watching television." What he will reply, every time, is, "That's a good question." A good question he can't answer and doesn't try. He lets the matter drop.
    Juvenal continues:
     "Look first at the misshapen and ungainly face, so unlike its former self; see the unsightly hide that serves for skin; see the pendulous cheeks and the wrinkles like those which a matron baboon carves upon her aged jaws ..."
    Big on appearances, the Roman were. And people are. Me, well ... here never having been especially gainly is an asset. Not that far to fall. 
   "The young men differ in various ways: this man is handsomer than that, and he than another; one is far stronger than another: but old men all look alike. Their voices are as shaky as their limbs, their heads without hair their noses driveling as in childhood. Their bread, poor wretches, has to be munched by toothless gums; so offensive do they become to their wives, their children and themselves..."
     Here Juvenal is perhaps led astray by the aged as seen in the crowded streets of Rome circa 95 A.D. No fluoride in their water pitchers. No C3-7 laminosplasties and hip replacements to straighten their posture and steady their gait. Juvenal himself died about age 40.
    "Their sluggish palate takes joy in wine or food no longer and all pleasures of the flesh have been long ago forgotten..."
     Not true. Well, yeah, the wine part is true, though Fre NA winelike liquid is a passable approximation.  And food is holding its own. True, a challah roll will spike my blood sugar. But I had one Sunday. As for that last part, well, umm, not yet forgotten.
     There's more. The old are deaf, unable to enjoy music or the theater — I did have my first audiologist appointment at Costco last week. No hearing aid ... yet. Noise damage in the left ear. All those NU frat parties, standing with a red cup of beer, my head three feet from a throbbing speaker. And I don't go to theater or concerts the way I used to, because that involves conveying myself somewhere, and why bother?
     "The little blood in his now chilly frame is never warm except with fever; diseases of every kind dance around him in a troop."
      Juvenal does seem to have been listening in on recent conversations with friends and family.
     "One suffers in the shoulder, another in the loins, a. third in the hip; another has lost both eyes, and envies those who have one; another takes food into his pallid lips from someone else's fingers."
      Brevity is not Juvenal's strong suit. He goes on, spiraling toward the heart of the matter.
     "But worse than any loss in body is the failing mind which forgets the names of slaves and cannot recognize the face of the old friend who dined with him last night, nor those of the children whom he has begotten and brought up."
     Worse ... for those unafflicted, so far. Though at 65 torturer time has certainly laid out his grim devices and I am paraded past them, like Galileo forced to view the Inquisition's flails and pincers and spikes. Sadly, I don't think renouncing my heresies will get me off the hook.
     Being Juvenal, he dives deeper, and finds worse — he has his tottering old fool disinherit those forgotten children to bequeath his estate to a streetwalker. Don't see that happening in my case; then again, you never do. 

     We eventually get to the crux.

   "He lives in a world of sorrow, he grows old amid continual lamentation and in the garb of woe," and "asks of every friend around him why he has lived so long, what crime he has committed to deserve such length of days."
     Is that coming? I don't know. Sometimes I think I can avoid it, because I am the king of the ordinary. Nobody enjoys walking a dog more than I do, or sipping that first cup of coffee, or savoring a tablespoon of Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter. 
     Yes, the dog, at 15, an old lady herself, is not a permanent fixture, much as I fervently wish her to be. The coffee can stay though, like most things, it doesn't seem to give me the kick it once did.
    I am not yet into deep age — check back at 75 — because I still consider myself very lucky. Healthy, with continual injections, not in pain, generally, blessed with a wonderful wife of nearly 35 years whom I love and sons and daughters-in-law who thrive, for now, whose company I enjoy and fancy maybe they do too. A grand-daughter arriving any minute — maybe this afternoon, a present beyond measure. A job I find satisfying — though yes, in a footrace with the dog to see who goes first — and some people appreciate. A big old rambling home, and an office with hundreds and hundreds of books — it isn't as if "Juvenal and Persius", translated by G.G. Ramsay and first published by the venerable Loeb Classical Library in 1918 is the only work of a Roman handy. 
    There are still good days ahead, and in honor of those, be they many or few, we find is meat more tender in "The Odes of Horace" translated by David Ferry. It contains a poem I feel entitled to end with — it my birthday after all. It's called "A Prayer."
     "What shall I ask for from the god Apollo," it begins. "As on his day I pour the new wine out."
     It isn't gold or ivory, not lavish harvests or grazing cattle.
    Horace — born Quintus Horatius Flaccus — dismisses the wealth of rich traders who ply "the dangerous Atlantic," then ends.

         But as for me, my simple meal consists

         Of chicory and mallow from the garden
         and olives from the little olive tree.

         Apollo granted that I be satisfied
         With what I have as what I ought to have

         And that I live my old age out with honor,
         In health of mind and body, doing my work.

     Yeah, that sounds like a plan. 

     Though as the great contemporary philosopher Mike Tyson points out, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Until then...
     

Joe's Folly? Ted Lasso has some insight into proposed South Loop soccer stadium

 

     Old habits die hard.
     When I read in the Sun-Times that Joe Mansueto has agreed to personally finance construction of a 22,000-seat soccer stadium in the South Loop, my immediate response was to smile at another rich man's folly. Soccer? Really? Who wants to watch a soccer game?
     But then a certain mustachioed coach wandered into mind.
     "Be curious," Ted Lasso said, in that folksy Kansas twang. "Not judgmental."
     Yes, Ted claimed to be quoting Walt Whitman, which is ridiculous. "Judgmental" is a 20th century word.
     It wasn't even coined until 1873, which happens to be the year Whitman had a stroke — I'm assuming the two events are unrelated — and he spent the rest of his life molesting his 1855 "Leaves of Grass."
     "Judgmental" isn't even an entry in my 1978 Oxford English Dictionary. Suggesting Whitman used the word "judgmental" is like claiming Lincoln said, "Transgender rights are human rights."
     But I digress, a folk illness among those with a fondness for words.
     "Be curious; not judgmental" is still good advice, even if coined by Jason Sudeikis, who along with Brendan Hunt — cast as the dark, deep-watered Coach Beard — are the masterminds behind Apple TV hit "Ted Lasso." The pair developed the show to reflect their own growing soccer interest as improv comedians at Boom Chicago, a Second City clone in Amsterdam.
      I became curious, learning that Mansueto is sinking one-tenth of his personal fortune into this project. Mansueto is worth $6.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. Building this stadium — taking the $650 million price tag at face value and ignoring the inevitable cost overruns — means he'll only have $6.2 billion left. Bold.
     My curiosity centered around this question: Did "Ted Lasso," which lent much-needed humanity to the first, awful COVID year, also boost the popularity of soccer?
     In ancient times, when I was growing up, American kids played soccer, informally, but it wasn't a sport we followed professionally. Nobody traded soccer cards. Soccer, like the metric system, was something happening far away, in Europe and South America.
     As recently as 2014, only 4% of American adults answered the question, "How closely do you follow Major League Soccer?" with "very" or "somewhat closely" while 80% said "Not at all."
     When "Ted Lasso" — a show about a small-time American college football coach improbably brought over to England to lead a fictional, hapless soccer team, AFC Richmond. — debuted in August 2020, the proportion of American soccer fans had soared to 5% while only 70%, like me, completely ignored the sport. I'd heard of Pelé, but wouldn't recognize him if he kicked me in the shin.
     As "Ted Lasso's" popularity grew, so did soccer's. Today, 12% of Americans — triple the number 10 years ago — follow soccer, while only two-thirds ignore it.
     But to credit "Ted Lasso" for the change is an post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) error. Twelve percent of Americans is 40 million U.S. soccer fans.
     The Season 3 opening episode of "Ted Lasso" drew 870,000 households. If an average household has about two viewers, that means the United States has over 20 times the number of soccer fans as it does "Ted Lasso" viewers. If anything, soccer boosted "Lasso," not the other way around.

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Circuses and more circuses

 

     Do adults really claw at each other the way man-babies Donald Trump and Elon Musk were carrying on this past week?
     Trump claims to value loyalty, yet hits his straying best bro with both barrels at the first criticism ("What are you saying, Neil, that Donald Trump is a hypocrite?!?! Bwa, hahahaha.")     

     No restraint, God knows no kindness or humor. It's all zero or one, friend or foe, kiss or kill. 

     How petty. I've trained myself to meet scorn with silence. What's the point? Why would you, for instance, call someone "an idiot?" Because if you truly felt that way, you'd be trying to score a point against, well, an idiot. Where's the honor in that?

    Then again, thinking things through is not a value in TrumpWorld.

    Occasionally I will reply to a particularly venomous remark with "The scorn of traitors is praise to a patriot." But even as I do it, I'm aware I'm wasting my time. The eagle does not chase flies.

   And those are strangers. Fallen friends ... well, first, I tend to like everyone I've ever liked, and when a friend does me wrong, I might upbraid them, privately. But then I try to make amends. Pour oil on the waters. There is a joy in that — another reason Trump and his camp, while continually jubilant, in the manner of bullies, are never joyful.

     Or as I sometimes put it:

     "Save feuds for 7th grade."

     If that doesn't work, let them go. Put them on the train to Siberia, emotionally. And even then I always leave the door open. I remember cutting through Grand Central Station in New York City and bumping into a former editor I was once close to. We had parted on bad terms — he messed up something in one of my books through carelessness and neglect. I'd chastised him about it, and he, rather than being sorry, merely harrumphed off. That was it. Over. Done.     

     In the train station, I was instantly excited to see him — My old friend! Had we not gone to baseball games together, at Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field? Had he not stayed at my apartment, and we shot pool and drank bourbon? Exchanging confidences about how he'd conquer publishing while I pursued the will-o-wisp of literature. 

     His cool reaction surprised me. Oh, right, we aren't friends anymore. Just people who used to be friends. I didn't call him names — though I cherished people who did. "He's just an asshole," a mutual colleague explained, meaning: He can't be fixed. I try to accept that.

     Sniping would be useless. As arresting a spectacle as the richest man in the world and the most mendacious locked in a catfight. A shitshow, two apes flinging feces at each other. 

      I couldn't take much joy in it. Musk has too much money to truly fail. And Trump, a serial fraud, will simply sell the United States to someone else, maybe even at a greater bargain than Musk got — access to the length and. breadth of our government for $288 million, less than $1 per citizen whose lives and information were placed into his greedy little hands.

     Or more likely, a series of someones. We are seeing, boldly, in broad daylight and without shame, the largest explosion of corruption ever seen in this country. So enormous a shift that even the concepts of graft, bribery, simony, and self-dealing have been suspended, for Republicans anyway. The concepts no longer exist, except as more meaningless slurs to hurl at enemies, and of course the justification for their own crimes. Trump could sell the Statue of Liberty to Qatar and half the country would sing the sheikdom's praise for letting us keep it.    

     Sure, a popular vote in November, 2026 could sweep this away. But by then the machinery of fascism will be well in place, assuming it isn't already firmly situated now. Not just in law enforcement, the military the media, Congress and the courts,, but in the public mind. They believe what they are told.    

     Here is an unedited email I received Friday from reader Tony Z. It wasn't a mass mailing, but sent to me individually. Try to read it to the end:

     Democrats Sacrifice American Citizens Lives for Criminal Illegal Aliens! Democrats Sacrifice Homeless American Veterans to give Free Five Star Hotel Rooms to Criminal Illegal Aliens! While Homeless Veterans who Fought for this Country live on the streets! Democrats Sacrifice Girls and Women by Allowing Men to compete in Girls and Women’s Sports! Democrats Sacrifice Children by Not only Allowing but Promoting Child Mutilation! Democrats Sacrifice Innocent Babies by Not only Allowing but Promoting the Slaughtering of Innocent Babies Any Reason Any Time! Democrats Sacrifice American Lives by Hiring DEI Pilots, Doctors,etc. Democrats are on the Wrong Side of Every Issue!

      That's the altar on which American democracy will be sacrificed. Ignorant sheep, their walnut brains jammed with rote Fox News talking points. As easy, and roughly accurate as it is to blame Trump, never forget he is a symptom, not a cause. Trump triumphs because he gives the people what they want: a circus. Remember my hero Juvenal's line about the secret to winning the hearts of the masses: panem et circenses — bread and circuses." 
     Perhaps we should read that famous phrase in context, in Juvenal's 10th Satire:

... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man. The People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

    Now that I read that again, I realize we are in some ways worse than ancient Romans. They had a reasonable expectation that their government would give them bread. Here, we settle for circenses et circenses. — circuses and circuses.

 

Mailbag

     Friday's column struck a nerve, and I was treated to a steady stream of emails. They were unusual in that they came from across the spectrum, even sectors that don't usually write in. I began to notice how they seemed to bunch together in pairs, with readers providing a kind of counterpoint to the email before. I thought I'd present two sets today as an illustration:

Jim M.  6:52 a.m.

Good Morning Neil,

I want to thank you for your thoughtful column today. Even though I am a Christian conservative, who voted three times for Donald Trump, I, too, am troubled by the general direction he is taking our country.

One of my great comforts these days is knowing our ultimate future is not controlled by men and women.

Thank you for your wisdom and passion.

In His Grip,
Jim M.
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Romans 1:16 (ESV)

John E. 6:50 AM

Amen. One of your best ever! I cannot believe we elected an amoral, unethical, egotistical, pathologically lying, admitted and convicted sexual felon TWICE!! THe great businessman declared bankruptcy 5 times!

John E.
Palos Park, IL 60464

     Then there was this pair.

Pete K. 5:14 PM

Fuck you you fucking fuck. 

June 6 and December 7 and September 11 are nothing like Jan 6, and you know it. But your political piece of shit ass likes to think it matters to us, when you like to throw out that date, and it doesn’t, until you cross this line.

Fuck you you fucking fuck, and fuck your simile

I just couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than that.

Ray T. 4:47 PM

Afternoon Mr. Steinberg,

I have been reading your articles since you first started writing for the Sun-Times. Enjoy your point of view immensely. About 95% of the time I agree with you and the other 50% we can agree to disagree.

Todays article on D-Day was one of the best you have done.

Keep up the good work.

 

Ray T.

Commander 

American Legion Portage Park Post #183

D-Day is a reminder — we have to fight for freedom

     Friday is June 6. Those of a certain vintage will mentally add, "D-Day."
     It's not an official holiday; rather a solemn anniversary, like Dec. 7 or Sept. 11 or Jan. 6. One of the momentous events that shaped our world. If you're unfamiliar — and some are — June 6, 1944, was when the Allied Expeditionary Force hit the beaches in Normandy, France, beginning to push the Nazis out of Europe.
      Normally I'd put out the flag. But it's been displayed in front of my house since Memorial Day. Some shrink from patriotism, given the hard right turn into darkness our country is taking. Me, I lean into it with the fervor of a fight trainer urging his boxer, flat on his back on the canvas: "C'mon, get up, you mug! Get up!"
     So I keep the flag flying. I'll say the pledge and conduct my other little June 6 tradition — posting the opening clip of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." The surging ocean and steel tank traps. The little landing craft, motoring up to the beach, bristling with German machine-gun emplacements. The Americans, led by Tom Hanks, chewing tobacco, praying, joking, puking. The raw courage of the moment.
     You have to wonder if Americans would hit the beaches today. Why not leave the Nazis controlling Europe? We certainly seem willing to let the Russians have Ukraine.
     Were we different people back then? Not really. After the Germans invaded Poland and war broke out — Sept. 1, 1939, to throw another date you — a Gallup Poll showed 88% of Americans were against fighting to free Europe. Two-thirds didn't want to even provide arms to Great Britain, since doing so risked antagonizing Mr. Hitler.
     That changed, after the Wehrmacht rolled over France. Belgium. Norway, the Netherlands, Greece — 11 nations in all. We could see where this was headed. Totalitarianism always grasps for more. It never stops until it's stopped.
      America is slow to rouse. Two years after World War II broke out, we were happy to sit on our hands. Until Imperial Japan did us, and the world, an enormous favor by bombing Pearl Harbor. Even then, while prodded to declare war on Japan, we didn't include their allies, the Germans. Rather, the Nazis declared war on us. We didn't jump; we were pushed.
      Would we wade ashore into a blood red tide at Normandy Beach again? During COVID, millions of Americans rebelled from doing anything for the common good, no matter how small. Sacrifice infringed upon their personal liberties. How could anyone imagined we'd climb ropes up the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, into the teeth of the German machine guns, when we won't wear a cotton mask?
      We grew to hate the Nazis — vicious sheep following a murderous madman, who made these rambling speeches, raging against his enemies — Jews and just about any nationality that wasn't German. They had no freedom of speech, no redress in the courts. The Gestapo showed up and took you away, and you were never heard from again. We didn't want to live in a country where secret police pluck people off the street in broad daylight and drag them off to nightmarish prisons.

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'Better I should know'

 

     You know what I value? A really good salad. Such as this festival of food served Wednesday at Taco Diablo in Evanston. I've written about Taco Diablo before, when I first visited in 2017, focusing on its first-rate, welcome-to-hell interior design. And I used to really enjoy their bespoke tacos. But then I settled in on this grilled shrimp salad, with orange vinaigrette dressing, and now never order anything else.
     It's the rare salad that I can't even finish, though that may be a function of my talking too much when I'm with the buddy I always meet at Taco Diablo.
     But that isn't why I'm writing this.
     I'm writing this because when the salad arrived, I apologized to my tablemate — saying, "I hope this isn't a bush league move" or words to that effect — as I snapped a photo of my meal.
     I know. Photographing your food is very 2010. And I like to think of myself as a sophisticated person, someone who knows which little fork goes with which amuse-bouche. So documenting lunch ... is it de trop? Bad form? I like to think there is a certain gee whiz innocence about it. I hate to imagine there are people thinking, "Gosh, I'd love to have lunch with Neil Steinberg, but I know that when the food arrives he's going to whip out his damn phone and take a picture and I just want to SINK INTO THE FLOOR AND DIE!!!"
     Which is not the sort of thing people will tell you to your face. But they will think it.
     So I'm asking you, the great reading public. Should I cease doing it? Is having this blog enough mitigation to justify the practice? If I hadn't taken the picture, I couldn't be writing this now. Is that an argument for taking it? Or against? Obviously, I'm rooting for you to say, "No Neil, it's fine, you've slipped far enough into your decrepitude that this is one of your more forgivable habits." But if it isn't really acceptable then I'll at least try to stop. Nobody else seems to do it anymore. As Sarah McLachlan sings, "Better I should know."

Why should Illinois medical laws be expected to fall in line with Catholic doctrine?

    What? The Illinois Legislature is out of session? Already? And here I want them to consider my Respect the Dead Act, requiring all male residents whose parent has died within the past 30 days to show up at a synagogue and recite the Mourner's Kaddish.
     Not familiar? You'll have to be, if my law passes. "Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra..." Or for those who don't understand Aramaic, which is everybody: "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world..." followed by similar sentiments.
     What's that? Jews forcing their end-of-life practices upon a gentile world just won't fly? One of the many downsides of being an extreme minority. Along with people feeling less inhibited about setting you on fire based on their own festering moral confusion.

     As someone who has hung out on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, site of Sunday's attack, at regular intervals since he was 13, the specter of Jews participating in a peaceful protest, drawing attention to the plight of the hostages in Gaza, being doused with fire, has rattled me more than my usual shiver at the horrors daily assaulting our senses. That could have been me, pausing by the protest to chat up the participants, on my way to the Ku Cha House of Tea, where I bought a pair of cute little tea pigs — round porcine objects intended to keep you company so you don't drink your tea alone...
     Then again, odds of my being there are slight lately. My parents don't live in Boulder anymore. We moved them here nearby three years ago, so we could take a more direct hand in their care.
     It's a job. My brother handles the endless paperwork. I do my share. There are continual decisions, and not easy ones. For instance, after my father's last check-up, the doctor said he should really see a cardiologist. He's 40 pounds overweight, and should be exercising regularly. This sedentary lifestyle is bad for his heart.
     My father is 92 years old and lost in a fog of dementia. I'm not going to force him to do hot yoga. Getting from the bed to the sofa is an excruciating process requiring a walker and close supervision. He's fallen in the past. He's not doing Pilates. Besides, we've tried to make him exercise and it doesn't work. He won't do it.
     So nix on diet, exercise, heart procedures. Right decision? Wrong decision? You can discuss — I consulted my brother, my mother and would have consulted my father, too, but he thinks he's still living in Boulder. As it is, he doesn't remember that he just ate lunch and wants to eat it again 10 minutes after he finished.
      You know who we didn't consult? Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich. Because we're not Catholic, and thus are not bound to Catholic religious doctrines— at least not those that the Supreme Court hasn't already converted into U.S. law.
      Nevertheless, there was the cardinal, lobbying the Illinois legislature to stall a bill that would allow the terminally ill to end their own lives. It's a complex issue, with the possibility of abuse. It's not personal to me, because it could never apply to my father: he has no rational discernment, no volition, and would agree to anything for a cookie. So he could never make a life-ending choice, beyond his refusal to exercise.
      Another Jewish superpower, however, is knowing that it's not all about me. You might have a fully-lucid parent dying in agony. And they, and you, and all that is moral and decent, might cry out for a way to shorten this pointless suffering.

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Check out Back When Books

     Monday I finally finished marching through Irwing Howe's "World of Our Fathers: The Journey of Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made." A long title but then, at 784 pages, it's a hefty book. Reading it took a while. But I was inspired to persevere, drawn through the volume, about the immigrant Jewish experience in the United States over the past century and a half, because of the wealth of detail, Howe's deft writing and relevancy, to me. It was filled with interest and poignancy, then again, it told the story of my family, more or less. And nothing spices up a work than when it reflects your own precious self.

     No sooner did I get to the end when the mail brought a new volume, "Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America 1890-1940," by Ewa Morawska. Okay, not just for general reading, but research for a project I'm working on.

    Not your cup of tea? That's okay, and the beauty of reading. You get to curate it for your own passions and taste.  You have a different personal story, and different interests, which is why I would direct your attention to the new advertisement running along the left side of everygoddamnday.com's home page that appeared Sunday and will run for the foreseeable future.

     It is from Back When Books, an online bookstore that specializes in laser-focused titles about everything from Chicago communities — Park Ridge, Maywood, Lake Bluff, and more — to specific celebrities: Dinah Shore, Robert Young, Jack Benny. There is much old time radio, much that I would call nostalgia. And nowadays who isn't looking back to the past with fondness, if not desperate yearning? Even if that past is the Great Depression and World War II. At least then, the enemy was across the ocean. Not in the house. Not in the seat of power, destroying us from within.

     In welcoming their patronage, I'd invite you to click on their ad and take a look around. I don't charge a subscription fee, or rattle the Go Fund Me cup. But just as, at the holidays, I encourage you to patronize Eli's Cheesecake as a way to make their advertising a viable business decision as opposed to mere charity, if you are looking for some diverting reading, I'd ask that you at least give the Back When Books web site two minutes of your time and attention, and see if you can't find a volume that catches your interest. Thank you.

Fight fiercely Harvard

      The president is venting his fury — a sentence I could embroider on a pillow and use to begin every column from now until 2029, since off-gassing his bottomless magisterial displeasure is the spoon stirring our national existence, now and for the foreseeable future.
     His vendetta against Harvard University, our nation's preeminent institution of higher learning, has raged for weeks: barring it from accepting foreign students, yanking back its tax exempt status, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support. I'm expecting the Army Corps of Engineers to fill Harvard Yard with coils of concertina wire next.

John Harvard

     My first thought was sympathy for Harvard's international students. Thousands of young people, a full quarter of the student body. Sure, many are no doubt scions of wealth, pampered and privileged and shipped off to lay the foundations for a life of same. Somebody has to pay full tuition.
     But some must have scrabbled their way there. Imagine studying in a wretched Third World slum. Hard work and smiling fate contrive to get you into Harvard, and then, while you're proudly wearing your new maroon sweatshirt around your shantytown, the president this buffoon blocks your way because ... because ... remind me, what does Trump have against Harvard?
     Oh right, they didn't bend their knee fast enough, didn't provide enough dirt on foreign-born students so he could choreograph their removal to Salvadoran El Salvadorian prisons.
     Not that I have a particular fondness for Harvard — though the boys at the Lampoon were indulgent to me when I was writing my college pranks book, allowing me the run of their library and archives. We shouldn't focus too long on one harm, because there are so many.
     The president is a whirling dervish of destruction, undermining our National Park Service here, our public health system there. It's hard to keep up.
     On Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for the crime of hanging pictures of Black folk. That hurt, because under her tenure, the gallery became perhaps the most vibrant wing of the Smithsonian. I love visiting it.
     This is a war on history — a literal white-washing — and all of us have a part to play, by being diligent stewards of the past.
     For instance, discussing the current assault, I told my wife: "Harvard was occupied by the British."
     What I meant was the place is very old, has been through a lot and will get through this, too.
     The very old part is true — founded in 1636, our nation's first university.
     But as often happens when you fire history from the hip, I missed. Plug "Did the British occupy Harvard?" into Google, and its AI chatbot pipes up with, "Yes, Harvard buildings were occupied by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War. In 1775, the Provincial Congress commandeered Harvard's buildings, and they were used to house 1,600 British soldiers, according to the Harvard Gazette."
     Being a trained professional, I then read the Harvard Gazette article Google AI linked to. Which did not say that. Sixteen hundred British troops weren't housed at Harvard; it was 1,600 American troops. An important distinction.
     How can everyone keep going on about how AI will eat our lunch, take our jobs and become our overlords? It can't even read a lucid article and differentiate between the British, who occupied nearby Boston, and the colonials, who settled in Cambridge, waiting for George Washington to assemble his Continental Army.

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Google AI learns fast. On Sunday it was this.

On Monday it was this.

The nation won't go to hell any faster if you pause to admire butterflies

 

     Let's see. On Saturday we looked at a certain president who's name long ago began to taste like vomit in our mouths, and his vigorous efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history because ... well, I really have no idea why, exactly. Perhaps a legal way to kick people he hates without committing actual atrocities. Or maybe he feels it'll make haters like himself look better, generally, and perhaps instill a habit of casting a soft glow of nostalgic faux patriotism over the harshness of reality, an obscuring pink fog that might linger to when history finally, please God, has a chance to finally look back on our current epoch of national shame.

     So that means today we can shift to some beautiful butterflies I saw Saturday at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Because I think it's smart to alternate. Because we've got ... 44 months left in his second term, assuming the Constitution isn't entirely scrapped by then.

    Butterflies. How could I spot so many? Easy, a highly trained naturalist such as myself can induce a kind of spiritual self-hypnosis where I can look out over an expense of field and flower and just see a single butterfly, resting on a leaf 50 yards away, and sense its presence through deep spiritual bond with the natural universe ...  
     Kidding. Though I see the value of these lies — they're easy and fun too!. No, we went to "Butterflies & Blooms," the enclosed butterfly space at the Garden (writing the self-aggrandizing fabrication above, my first thought was, "Geez, how come libs don't get to just make shit up." My second was, "If the self-inflating brag you're tossing out isn't true, how stupid do you have to be to feel enhanced by saying it?")
     Sorry, butterflies. My wife's idea to go. Can't very well object to that. "No way, dear, I'm not wasting my time ... well, fuck butterflies!" 

     Not my brand. To enter the Butterflies & Blooms pavilion, you go through what is in essence an airlock, a set of double doors, with the interior door having an extra barrier of plastic strips, like in a warehouse freezer, to thwart a butterfly jailbreak. On the way out, you're checked twice, once by a staffer, then by looking in a mirror yourself, to make sure no butterflies are piggybacking on you, escaping into the greater world. It's like visiting Stateville.

Common morpho

     Having a sympathetic heart, my wife noticed a number of butterflies clinging to the mesh, as if gazing wistfully at the unfettered blue, yearning to breath free, and expressed words to that effect. I pointed out that there are plenty of hungry birds out there and, for all we know, we were projecting our love of freedom onto the butterflies. Perhaps they're thinking, "Thank God I'm safe in here!" 

    Our "love of freedom." Ah, hahahahaha. I crack myself up sometime. For a supposedly freedom loving people, we sure grabbed the boot of totalitarianism and pulled it down firmly upon our own necks. The hideous thing is ...

    Butterflies! See how hard this can be? Have we done the etymological (as opposed to the entymological) dissection of "butterfly" yet? Whence the "butter"? That's a stumper. I'm going to guess the color — those little pale yellow butterflies you see, when not in exhibits like "Butterflies & Blooms," but flitting about fields in the greater world.

     Pretty to think so. Especially compared to the theory floated by the Oxford English Dictionary, which tosses up its hands: "The reason of the name is unknown; Wedgwood points out a Du. synonym botershchijte..., which suggests that the inset was so called from the appearance of its excrement."

    Of course it does. Botershchijte. My Dutch isn't so hot, but that word looks like "butter shit" and ... indeed it is. That's perfect. Hopeful me, thinking the insect is named for its modest butter yellow denizens, when in reality the insect was named after its own shit. How au courant. Can you think of another animal named after its excrement?

     Actually, circling back to politics, which return tomorrow: "Trump's America." It does fit, and if that logic works for butterflies, then, well, why not?

White peacock

Out with the experts, in with the flunkies

 

LL Cool J, by Kehinde Wiley (National Portait Gallery)

     As a child, my favorite part of the Smithsonian was the Air & Space Museum. How could you not love all those planes? The delicate wood and fabric 1903 Wright Flyer. The indefatigable gray Ryan monoplane The Spirit of St. Louis. The orange Grumman Gulfhawk, which I had a personal fondness for because I had constructed a model of it — twirl the propeller and wheels retracted.
     But I grew up, and began to really appreciate the National Portrait Gallery. For the hall of presidents, the gorgeous August St. Gaudens bronzes. But also the way its collection strained to embrace all America. It wasn't mired in the dusty past, but alive with the vibrancy of today.
     You learned stuff at the National Portrait Gallery. The museum didn't just hang rapper LL Cool J, but juxtaposed it with John Singer Sargent's portrait of John D. Rockefeller, inviting visitors to notice how artist Kehinde Wiley, asked by VHI to paint the singer, used the oil titan's pose to convey power and authority.

William "Kyle" Carpenter by Mike McGregor

  

     The sort of "divisive narrative," apparently, that inspired our president, as part of his war on history, at least history that includes Black folk, to fire National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet on Friday, even though Sajet does not work for him and the president doesn't have the authority to do so. What cares a dictator for such niceties?
     What Donald Trump does care about — not that he ever visited the gallery nor saw the art — is the vexing display of works like Mike McGregor's photo of Lance Corporal William Carpenter, who used his body as a shield to protect his fellow Marines from an exploding grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. 
    Such a photo makes a viewer think, about many things really, including the way government policies have real effects on real people. We have no idea how the damage to the government, even of the Trump administration's first four months, will affect the people of the United States.

    And if the administration has its way, we never will.
    A thinking population, alive to he possibility of personal courage, the meaning of sacrifice for a higher ideal, would never tolerate a liar, bully, fraud and traitor like Donald Trump. So sweep away the dynamic director, whom Trump called "a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position."

    In with another fawning toady, though I imagine Fox News is running out of second string hosts by now.  No matter. There is no shortage of groveling cowards ready to betray their nation and everything it represents for a steady salary. When the concentration camps move from El Salvador to downstate Illinois, there will be no trouble hiring guards.

     Next we'll see a purge of the artworks. I'm already planning to be in Washington in July, to rendezvous with a certain young lady I'll be eager to meet. I was looking forward, should a spare moment present itself, to hurry over to the National Portrait Gallery to enjoy its riches. That visit will be tinged with melancholy, knowing that the edgier material will be heading to storage, replaced by 19th century patriotic tableaus and Rogers Groups of Lincoln consulting his generals and boys fishing.

     I assume the portrait of Trump can stay. Heck, they'll probably add more. A National Portrait Gallery filled with portraits of Donald Trump — that would be a moving musem-going experience.