And by "meow," I mean, "You're handsome and a good owner..."

     Our dog Kitty can talk. Well, after a fashion. She certainly communicates with me, from morning — about 5:15 a.m., when she appears at my bedside and makes a plaintive growl, which means, unequivocally, "Get the fuck up and take me outside" — to midday, when she fixes me with a probing glare which means, "Where is my goddamn mid-day snack?" To evening, when she assumes what I consider a "significant look," meaning it's time to go outside, again. With various remarks in between. For instance, during a thunderstorm, she hurries to wherever I am, even in the bathroom, and stands very close, which I know means, "I blame you for this: Protect me!"

     At least I've decided it means those things. I would be reluctant to say so with 100 percent certainty. It's not as if I've done a study. And I can't ask her, yet.
     Though people do believe their pets can communicate with them in a variety of unexpected ways. As I learned over Memorial Day weekend, visiting the Naperville home of some longtime friends. In their kitchen, my attention was snagged by four brightly colored hexagons arranged on the floor by the refrigerator, each containing six buttons that, when pressed, utter a recorded phrase in the owner's voice, like "Play!" and "Cat box — stinky" and "Oops, I puked."   

    I demanded: Does your cat really communicate with you through these buttons? They assured me the cat did. Nor are they alone in this belief.

     "Social media is filled with videos showing dogs, cats and parrots learning the meaning of dozens of buttons and pressing them to 'talk' with their people," Robyn Schelenz writes in "Can our pets really say ‘I love you’? Science is finding out" on the University of California web page. "And a few of these chatty animals have become minor celebrities as they seemingly converse, not just about food and walks, but about more complex concepts like love, strangers and time, opening a window, potentially, into what our pets are thinking." 

     Schelenz turns out to be, not a researcher, but with the school's marketing department. Ah.

     Her story does bring up Clever Hans, the famous performing horse that was supposedly communicating, doing math problems and such by clomping its hoof, when it was really being subtly directed by its owner. The possibility exists that owners eager to be in  closer communication with their beloved pets are misinterpreting random presses. Cat boxes are generally stinky. 

     Schelenz cites a study being done by the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California's Animal Communication Project.

     "The use of soundboards has the potential to be a powerful tool through which dogs, cats, and other domestic animals might be able to communicate their needs, wants, and internal states to their owners," the project explains, in a post looking for volunteers for a broad national study. "The potential welfare impacts of this technology are powerful: if pets can tell their owners when they feel ill, for example, they might be taken to the vet sooner and treated before their condition becomes severe."

     So the jury is out, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure it's been brought up before. But do we really want to know what our pets are thinking? Most cats seem to be trying to tell their owners — and generally succeeding, if demeanor is any indication — "Hey, you suck!" 

     Maybe when Kitty delivers her morning whine, what she means to say is, "There is no God!" but I, misreading her intent, take her outside and, being there, she does her business.

Letter from Paris

 

     The summer of 1977 I turned 17 and spent a month in Geneva, Switzerland. A long time ago. But I remember the one movie playing at the one local theater that showed English films: "Car Wash." Not my favorite. And I remember the movie that was "COMING NEXT" — Led Zeppelin's concert film, "The Song Remains the Same." And recall, sharply, the growing disappointment, as the month ticked by, realizing that "Car Wash" was never going to close, at least not while I was there.

     Quite the different situation in Paris, as regular contributor Jack Clark tells us. You remember Jack. Former Chicago cabbie, current fiction and memoir writer.

     If you ask me, it's time to promote Jack Clark from regular contributor to EGD Paris bureau chief. Though that raises the risk I'll start giving him assignments — for instance, as diverting as these lists of movies are, I'd be more interested in seeing lists of French pastries, perhaps illustrated with a photo of a cup of a coffee and a representative example on a small round table on a street in Paris. Not an assignment, of course. A suggestion, from a faithful reader.

     "What do you do in Paris if you don’t go to museums?" someone asked me recently. Well, it’s a big city, but still a great walking town. You can walk from one side to the other in two hours or so. It would take you decades to visit every bakery. And many of them are truly great, so you don’t want to limit yourself to just one. You never know what specialty you might find inside. When you see a bakery along the way, go in and take a look. I don’t speak the language but I can say pain au chocolat and croissant and a few other standards, and I’ve gotten very good at pointing. If you don’t find something that looks enticing, no one will care if you turn and walk out. But be polite and say, Merci, au revoir and walk down the block or around the corner and try the next one.
     A French friend living in New York told me there were several good French bakeries in town. “Here’s the difference,” he said. “In New York everyone knows the good bakeries. In Paris everyone knows the bad ones.”
     Cafes and restaurants are great too. They really do know how to do food here. And if you stay away from the tourist traps and the ritzy places it’s generally much cheaper than in Chicago. If it’s not lunch or dinner time, you can order a single cup of coffee and sit for hours. It’s a great town for people watching.
     We like to go to a neighborhood market on Sunday morning. You can buy produce, prepared food, and other items. But the best part for me is after the shopping is done, when we’re sitting at the café in the middle of the market, drinking coffee and eating pastries from the bakery across the street, (this is not always permitted, but if they know you, they might let you get away with it) while watching the parade of people pass.

     And I’m working, of course. I’m about a third of the way through a novel tentatively titled, "Long-Lost Friends," and just released another book: "Eddie Miles Drives Again & Other Stories." It’s ten short stories, all set in Chicago. You can find it here and there online and also at www. jackclarkbooks.com.
     One of my favorite pastimes is to go to a movie. There are sixty-some movie theaters in town with 400 screening rooms. On the average day there are about 500 movies playing, which makes my hometown Chicago look like a movie desert, which vast stretches of the city truly are.
     On Wednesdays we usually pick up L’officiel des spectacles, which translates as "The official entertainment guide." This is a small magazine about the dimension of the Reader’s Digest, which lists live theater, comedy, music, art exhibits, and the movies playing in Paris for the week.
     In the current issue, the brief movie descriptions take up 27 small-print pages. This is followed by 22 pages of showtimes at the various theaters. The first two pages of descriptions list movies from France, Tunisia, USA, Slovakia, Jordan, Germany, Italy, Mexico, U.K., Senegal, Morocco, and Canada. If you’re like me and don’t understand French, most of those movies are off limits. French movies are shown in French, of course, most of the rest are shown in the original version with French subtitles. But this means you can go to just about every movie from the US, Canada (as long as it’s not from Quebec), or the UK. If there is a “(vo)” at the end of the listing that means it’s the original version. Here are your choices for the week of Wednesday, May 13th to Tuesday, May 19th, as listed in the magazine.

New releases:
Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, USA & UK 2026
Obsession, USA 2025
Reeditions: (rereleases, I guess)
Dune, USA & Mexico 1984
Top Gun, USA 1986
Films en exclusivite, which translates to Exclusive Films. I’m not sure what they mean by this but here’s the list:
An Evening Song for Three Voice, USA 2023
Dead Man’s Wire, USA 2025
The Criminals (Fuze), UK 2026
The Devil Wears Prada 2, USA 2026
Die My Love, Canada 2025
The Drama, USA 2026
Drunken Noodles, USA & Argentina, 2025
The Royal Opera, UK 2026
Hamnet, USA 2025
Marty Supreme, USA 2025
Michael, USA 2026
Mortal Kombat 2, USA 2026
The New West (East of Wall), USA 2025
I Swear, UK 2025
Project Hail Mary, USA 2026
Super Mario Galaxy, USA 2026
My Father’s Shadow, UK 2025

The next secrion list Autres films or Other Films.

Eyes Wide Shut, USA 1999
Rear Window, USA 1954
Seven Chances, USA 1925
Fight Club, USA 1999
The Rain People, USA 1969
Inland Empire, USA 2006
Lee, UK 2023
Lost Highway, USA 1997
Lost in Translation, USA 2003
Magnolia, USA 1999
Marie-Antoinette, USA 2005
Mission Impossible, USA 2000
Moonlight, USA 2016
Mulholland Drive, USA 2001
Space Cadet, Canada 2025
The Birds, USA 1963
Pride & Prejudice, UK 2004
Orwell: 2+2=5, USA 2025
The Godfather, USA 1972
Phantom Thread, USA 2017
Pillion, UK 2025
War for the Planet Apes, USA 2017
Psycho, USA 1960
The Metropolitan Opera: I Puritani, USA 2025
Ready Player One, USA 2016
Requiem for a Dream, USA 2000
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, USA 1975
Wild at Heart, USA 1989
Shaun of the Dead, UK 2004
Sherlock Junior, USA 1924
Stop Making Sense, USA 1984
Vertigo, USA 1958
Sweet Thing, USA 2020
Witness For the Prosecution, USA 1957
Thelma and Louise, USA 1991
The Mastermind, USA 2025
Top Gun: Maverick, USA 2022
The Ladykillers, UK 1955
Twin Peaks (Fire Walk with Me), USA 1992
The Virgin Suicides, USA 1999
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, USA 1975
Face/Off, USA 1997
The World is Full of Secrets, USA 2018

     If that’s not enough, check out what the magazine calls Festivals et cycles. There’s a Harold Lloyd retrospective at the Champo theater in the 5th arrondissement. It’s showing four of Lloyd’s silent movies made between 1923 and 1928.
      Then there is: Cycle Le Printemps Du Film Noir. It’s a thick block of type with at least 20 films, with directors and the year of the film listed. All are showing at the Filmotheque — also in the 5th. If the movie was released with a French title that’s the only one they show. But without bothering to translate those, I find plenty of English language movies including, A Most Violent Year, Bad Lieutenant, Body Double, Cutter’s Way, a Don Siegel movie, another by Brian DePalma, and one by Scorsese, all listed with French titles only, The King of New York, Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men, another Don Siegel and one by Jonathan Demme, listed with the French title, and also A Simple Plan. They are all marked vo.
     The Ecoles Cinema Club in the 5th and the Christine Cinema Club in the 6th are putting on something called Spring Break. They are showing Blade Runner, Into the Wild, M.A.S.H., a Clint Eastwood movie, one by Fritz Lang from 1953, Blood Simple, Bonnie and Clyde, Citizen Kane. . . Well, there’s more but my eyes have started to give out.
     When I turn the page I find Cycle Bon Voyage at the Ecoles Cinema Club in the 6th, where you can catch, Fargo, Manchester by the Sea, My Own Private Idaho, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Casablanca. The last is showing at Christine Cinema Club in the 6th.
     That’s somewhere around 80 movies. I was surprised to not find a single Western showing in Paris. Usually there are several and also maybe a John Wayne, John Ford, or Sam Peckinpah festival or retrospective going on. This might be the wrong time in history for watching Americans with big guns eliminating the bad guys. Many of the French have a somewhat curious viewpoint on America today.
     The magazine costs 2.40 euros. The issue I cited here is number 4071. At one issue a week, that adds up to more than 78 years, pretty much the entire postwar era.
     It’s Wednesday again so we picked up the latest issue, once again without a single Western listed. John Wayne is probably trying to shoot his way out of his grave to catch the next flight to Paris.
     I thought that was a pretty good final line. As far as I was concerned, the story was done. I was chuckling to myself over my John Wayne joke when my wife, the lovely Hélène, looked up. “You forgot the Cinematheque,” she said.
     “I couldn’t find it,” I said. “Maybe they’re taking the week off.”
     She grabbed the magazine, quickly paged past the Paris and suburban movie theater listings, past the listing for children’s films, and pointed at the Cinematheque heading.
     “Why did they put it way back there?” I said. She tossed the magazine my way and left the room.
     According to Google the Cinematheque Française is a French film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris, (12th arrondissement) the archive offers daily screenings of worldwide films. All are shown in their original version.
     Among the English language highlights: A Marilyn Monroe retrospective from April 8 to July 12, 23 films.
     A Greta Garbo retrospective from May 6 to 24, 21 films.
     25 Essential Serial Killer Movies, May 7 to 25. I didn’t look but most of them have to be American, right?
     A Robert Altman retrospective from April 22 to May 24, 37 films. This includes what the French insist on calling John McCabe. It’s one of my favorite movies and also one of Julie Christie’s sexiest roles. In the U.S. we gave Christie equal billing with Warren Beatty and called it McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It played in Paris on May 15th, so I missed my chance this time around. It’s also a Western so John Wayne can relax and put his gun away for now.

 

 

Puzzles are the anti-TikTok, the antidote to mind-numbing social media

     If you asked me to list the three greatest cartoonists from a century ago, the first two would be easy: No. 1, George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” created a surreal world around the love triangle of the titular, gender-fluid feline, her — or, sometimes, his — unrequited love for the brick-throwing Ignatz Mouse, both kept in line by Krazy’s secret admirer, Offissa Pupp, all capering across a stark Arizona scrubland conjured up by Herriman’s madly creative pen.
     Then Windsor McKay, whose “Little Nemo in Slumberland” plunged readers into Art Nouveau dreamscape where a little boy peers over pillows while his bed, its legs impossible long, strides down Fifth Avenue.
     As for the third, I’d be hard-pressed. But Rube Goldberg would certainly qualify. His wildly complicated machines entered the vocabulary, a “Rube Goldberg device” being any overly-engineered contraption which, though perhaps not involving a goat gnawing through a rope releasing a boot to kick a ball through a hoop, uses more steps than necessary.
     That said, I would not have noticed, never mind purchased, “The Rube Goldberg Puzzle Book,” if it weren’t created by my former NU classmate — and ace New Yorker cartoonist — Robert Leighton. Friends buy friends’ books — the sales pitch getting harder and harder, year by year. Everyone is so busy.
     Yeah, busy flipping through Instagram.
     Which I do too, for 30 minutes at a throw, watching snippets of “Peaky Blinders” and “The West Wing” and whatever other mind-decaying fluff some string of code decides is going to mesmerize me today.
     But having purchased a puzzle book ($16, not bad for a hardback) there was a complication I hadn’t foreseen. I then had to do puzzles, based on Goldberg’s drawings. Initially, they were quite simple — a four-panel comic strip is scrambled. “Can you figure out the proper order to tell each story?” Robert asks. Well, you can, but you have to read the panels first, then find the fractured narrative by thinking. And thinking is the one thing you don’t do flipping through TikTok.
     But I felt compelled to push on. Not only was the book written by a pal, but the introduction is by Jennifer George, Rube Goldberg’s granddaughter and chief creative officer of the Rube Goldberg Institute, “a not-for-profit organization that uses my grandfather’s work to inspire joy, curiosity, and creativity through inefficient machines.” That also scratched my particular itch — I’ve been gazing into my newly arrived second grandchild’s face a lot lately, musing on two things: first, what could his world possibly be like, say, in 2076? And second, what passing thought, if any, might he someday have for a certain old guy who huzzahed him into the world?

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Thank you for not mentioning my betrayal of America today...

     My Wednesday column, an obituary of CSO violinist Samuel Magad, was written because a relative of his, a friend and former colleague, asked me to do so. 
     It drew this note. I receive nearly identical versions of this email every single time I write about a subject other than Donald Trump. I thought I'd share this one, representing 100 others:

     You wrote a great column today. You are a very talented writer, don’t waste your talent writing about Trump. There are plenty of other writers bashing Trump, we need you writing pieces like today’s column.  Thanks Mike R.

     My response:

     It's funny how relieved dupes are when I write about anything other than the fraud they blindly follow. I always wonder why. What should cross your mind — but won't — is that a guy who's a talented writer, in your view, on every other subject except your crazy obsession is also a talented writer when explaining how you betray every American value you pretend to hold. Thanks for writing.  NS

Samuel Magad, an 'impeccable' violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 48 years, dies

 

     When Samuel Magad auditioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a 26-year-old vet fresh from the U.S. Army Orchestra, he of course was accepted — the violinist had already debuted with the CSO as an 11-year-old prodigy during World War II.
     But there was one issue.
     "You're a good player, but could you get a better violin?" asked music director Fritz Reiner, who studied under Bartok.
     No, that wasn't possible, in the short term.
     "I had a junk violin, but I was broke," Magad recalled. "I had a wife, two babies and not a penny. He said, 'I'll take you anyway.'"
     In the long term, however, a better violin would come. By the time Magad's nearly half-century with the CSO ended, he was playing the 1710 Stradivari "Vieuxtemps Hauser."
     After a lifetime of playing music at the highest levels, including as the backbone of the CSO for 48 years, Magad died in Buffalo Grove on May 25 at age 94.
     "It’s mind-boggling to think of the changes Sam navigated during his years under four very different Chicago Symphony music directors," said Wynne Delacoma, the former longtime classical music critic at the Sun-Times. "He arrived in 1958 during the reign of the legendarily precise Fritz Reiner and rose to assistant concertmaster in 1966 during Jean Martinon’s relatively short tenure. Georg Solti named him concertmaster in 1972, and Sam held that front-row seat for two decades as the high-octane CSO-Solti chemistry turned the orchestra into an international powerhouse. He was a steady presence during the next 15 years when Daniel Barenboim’s approach to a piece of music could change from one performance to the next. Sam’s impeccable technical skills and open mindset were invaluable assets to whomever was on the podium."
     The concertmaster is the unsung backstop who not only cues the A note — usually played by the oboist — which the orchestra tunes their instruments to at the start of each piece, but he sees that the conductor's wishes are obeyed and facilitates logistics. If a star violin soloist breaks a string mid-performance, the concertmaster will swap instruments.
     Some concertmasters are mere mouthpieces of the conductor; not Magad.
     "Magad saw himself as a colleague of the orchestra's players, walking the players' side of the divide with management," Anne Mischakoff Heiles writes in "America's Concertmasters." "Giving voice to their concerns, he endeavored to use his voice to promote the welfare of his colleagues."

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Now if he can just pressure Berkeley into signing up...

 

Macbeth and the Witches (1770: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I try not to traffic in the obvious — always pausing to suppress the urge to add a final k to that word and make it "traffick," which to me would give it more of an archaic, Salem witchcraft deal with the devil vibe. But it's not a modern word, and I usually decide against it.
     So there was no point to draw attention to developments that are already clear, like the grotesque criminality and self-dealing of Donald Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund. More of the same, on a larger scale. Besides, everyone else already has decried this leap into large-scale naked corruption, and there is no need to join in chorus. 
     Yes, I was tempted to point out that while Republicans objecting to this enormous shit upon the rule of law, rather than emitting the usual "baa" and shuffling in whatever direction Trump points, might be considered a mildly hopeful sign, if you're feeling upbeat, the GOP has in the past occasionally put up feeble resistance to other departures from ethics, law, reason, sense,  tradition, decency, etc., only to eventually revert to form and get back on their knees. Don't have the we've-come-to-our-senses party quite yet.

    However, when I read Monday that the president, in his continual thrashing trying to extricate himself from the tar pit of a war with Iran that he swan dove our country into, alone, was now suggesting that Iran, and other Middle East nations — Saudi Arabia, Qatar — consider joining the Abraham Accords, and recognize the state of Israel, I did have a thought that might merit sharing:
     Maybe, while he's at it, he could also entice a few American universities to join in recognizing Israel as a legitimate nation, despite its doing bad things, like every other nation, and existing on land somebody else wants, like every other nation. Now that would be an accomplishment. 

Flashback 2009: Intrusion — or solemn reminder?

 

The dignified transfer of Army Spc. Lukasz D. Saczek of Lake in the Hills, Ill., at Dover Air Force Base.   (US Air Force photo/Roland Balik)

     Today is Memorial Day, a time to remember soldiers who have fallen in defense of our country. Now, as in 2009, we are a nation that hardly notices the war we're fighting, despite our president's repeated vows that it will end ... any moment now. This ran back when my column was a thousand words and filled a page. Daniel Hauser's parents eventually did agree to his chemotherapy.

OPENING SHOT . . .

      This is a photograph of Spec. Lukasz Saczek's arrival at Dover Air Force Base earlier in the month.
     Saczek, 23, was a soldier in the Illinois Army National Guard, Company D, 1st Battalion, 178th Infantry, based in Woodstock.
     He died May 10, in what the Army describes only as a noncombat-related incident.
      I wanted to publish the photograph in advance of Memorial Day, as a reminder that we are still a nation at war, that American soldiers are dying both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
     Such photos were banned by President George H.W. Bush during the first Iraqi war in 1991. The ban remained in effect for 18 years, until reversed last month by President Obama.
      The policy now is that the Pentagon asks families of deceased soldiers whether they wish to allow photographers at the homecoming, and the families decide.
      That is how it should be because such photos are not viewed neutrally. Some people consider them an intrusion, a political statement, a focus on personal loss and an implicit criticism of the war.
      Others see them as honoring the sacrifice by displaying it in real terms, reminding us at home that while we grill hot dogs and drink beer, young men and women are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever else they're ordered to go.
     You, of course, are free to interpret this photo however you like — the benefit of a free country. Myself, I see it as a solemn reminder to a nation that sorely needs reminding. It seems to me that of all the divides in this country, Democrat and Republican, North and South, black and white, there is also a chasm between the military, their families, friends and communities, which know all too well the cost of war, and the rest of the country, which can hardly be bothered to glance at it, even on Memorial Day.
     Spec. Saczek leaves behind a widow, Katie, 19, and a baby daughter who will be 2 months old on Monday.

IF THE ANGEL TARRIES

     The government shouldn't dictate to parents what medical treatment they must give their children.
      And yet, parents also should not be allowed to injure their kids just because their faith permits it.
      Between these two sensible viewpoints falls the case of Danny Hauser, the 13-year-old Minnesota boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma whose mother, Colleen, fled with him rather than allow the chemotherapy that doctors say will save his life.
      There are enough issues here to fill a textbook. Does it matter that she was inspired by an obscure holistic belief system and not a more mainstream form of medical denial, such as Christian Science? Would it be different if the treatment options were less clear-cut than the 90 percent cure rate with chemo, in this case, vs. almost certain death without?
      To me, the key fact in this situation is that a judge ordered the boy to have the treatment — that's why we have judges, to make tough calls. As a society, we tend to automatically respect faith and doubt jurisprudence, which seems backward.
      Courts get a bad rap, mainly from people who dislike their decisions. But somebody has to stay Abraham's hand so he doesn't slay his son Isaac, and if the angel tarries, a judge will do. For Danny Hauser, a court's ruling is the only thing between him and an early, unnecessary death.

RADIO NOTES

     WGN has always appealed to the housewife, the farmer, the night clerk and everybody else who wanted a rock of homey sanity to stand on for a minute or an hour or the time it takes to drive to Peoria to deliver a few bushels of peaches.
     Homey sanity hasn't always been in fashion, but that was sort of the point — you could go to Steve Dahl if you wanted sarcastic and funny commentary — once upon a time — or Howard Stern if you felt the need to feel superior to strippers.
     There are others — the urbane and intelligent Roe Conn, the freewheeling John Howell.
      But WGN was a mainstay, there at the base of the Tribune Tower, and at its heart was the "Kathy & Judy Show" — Kathy O'Malley and Judy Markey. I never actually set eyes on Kathy — she was always on vacation when I would stop by and spend an hour or two chatting with Judy, a smart, bighearted woman with a curious mind and a quick wit. It was shocking to see WGN show them the gate Friday, as the station tarts itself up to appeal to kids who won't listen anyway.
      There is no schadenfreude in this, no gleeful mocking of TribCo when it is down. We are all cooking in the same pot. But I couldn't let my former colleague, current friend and permanent Chicago icon slip out of town without saying how much she is liked and how much she will be missed, as we scan the constantly mutating local media landscape and try in vain to find a friendly, familiar face.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

      With Mother's Day two weeks in the past, we gardeners are in full frenzy. My tomatoes are in and caged, the flower box that had been causing flooding has been removed and a very promising burning bush put in its place.
      Sometimes I puzzle whether something should be pulled up or nurtured, and so appreciate this handy definition from Gallagher:
      If you water it and it dies, it's a plant. If you pull it out and it grows back, it's a weed.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 24, 2009

Flashback 1999: A club that's for all kids

     Facebook served up this column from 1999, which I posted a dozen years ago when the Boy Scouts were enduring one of their regular spates of controversy. Since then, the popularity of the Scouts has continued to crater — from 4 million members, back when I was part of the organization in the 1970s, to about 1 million now. Shaken by social changes, criticism over its tardy decision to stop excluding gay scouts followed by the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't exodus of Mormons plus, I imagine, the isolating effects of social media and an increased tendency of people not to join groups in the living world.  The Camp Fire organization, on the other hand, while significantly smaller, is going strong.

     Just as the Boy Scouts of America were twirling in bad publicity hell after the latest flap over its booting out gay scouts , I received a letter from the Camp Fire Boys and Girls, touting their corn maze down in Ottawa, Ill.
     The maze is immense; more than 10 acres of cornfield. Nothing quite so evocative of sweet late summer as a corn maze. But that wasn't what I was really interested in.
     What I was really interested in was sex. Or more specifically, how Camp Fire manages to sidestep the issue that has so thoroughly bollixed its big brother, the Boy Scouts?
     How do they manage to cook S'mores and pitch tents without getting hung up on the emerging sexualities of their little charges?
     The answer is surprising.
     "Kids are kids and our job is to give them an opportunity to have a really wonderful time growing up," said Jean Lachowicz, executive director of the Metro Chicago Council of the Camp Fire Boys and Girls. "We are very family-oriented. The other issues just don't come into play."
     Surely, I said, she can't be suggesting that Camp Fire Boys and Girls, whose members range from kindergarten to high school, allow gay youngsters to make lanyards and potholders alongside everybody else, as if they were normal people?
     "We don't even get into that," she said. "Who are we to say?"
     What a freakish anomaly. A group that doesn't try to dictate to the personal lives of its members. Practically revolutionary in sex-obsessed, eye-to-the-keyhole, who-do-we-hate-this-week America.
     Just as the Boy Scouts have a credo, filled with a bunch of Victorian hooey about duty and moral rightness, so Camp Fire has its own motto, which it calls an "Inclusiveness Statement." They post it on the wall.
     It reads: "Camp Fire Boys and Girls works to realize the dignity and worth of each individual and to eliminate human barriers based on all assumptions which prejudge individuals."
     Talk about radical. Morality in America is almost always used as an excuse to ostracize people. Very rarely is it offered up as a reason to include them (though, frankly, even if I believed the view of the Boy Scouts — that there is something so radically wrong with homosexuals they can't be taught how to use semaphore flags — I think that would motivate me to want to get them in Scouting all the more, in the hopes that our vigorous outdoor program and credo of moral certitude would win them over and draw them away from perversion. To shun them seems, well, to lack faith in heterosexuality).
     Before parting, I had one more question about Camp Fire. Where did the boys come from? When my sister, Debbie, was a Blue Bird, 30 years ago, it was an all-girl thing. Court order? Lawsuit?
     "In 1975 we switched to boys and girls," said Lachowicz. "We found the clubs were taking in more and more boys , so they decided to change the organization so it is co-ed."
     A huge, cathartic crisis?
     "Nah," she said. "Camp Fire has always been a very, very flexible organization."
And one that doesn't feel it needs to add to the problems of any youngster straying from society's norms.
      "Kids want to be involved in something that's positive and not painful," she said. "We just do what we have to do. Kids who join Camp Fire are really happy. We have a blast."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 17, 1999

Works in progress: Jack Clark in Paris, deux

The Louvre, Paris

     As a certified museum guy, I have to admit that frequent contributor Jack Clark's pride at never visiting the Louvre left me a little ... baffled. It's like not liking chocolate — possible, yes, but not exactly something to be proud of. I'll let you decide if he makes his case. As for the painting that he highlights, I deliberately tucked it into the body of the story, and not the top, so it wouldn't go up to illustrate the post on Facebook, causing the behemoth to perhaps flag and block it as a species of pornography, which is just sad.

     Jack does sidestep the obvious question of what is happening in the painting. According to Wikipedia, the nipple tweak was seen as somehow symbolic of the lady on the right being pregnant with Henry IV's child. In more recent times, it was seen as a wink at lesbianism, though the two subjects are sisters. The sort of puzzle one misses by not frequenting museums.

     Three of my siblings visited us in Paris the other week. We took my brother Kevin and his wife Joanne to hear some music in a club housed in a boat docked on the left bank of the Seine. Kevin’s the real musician in the family. I wasn’t a bit surprised when he ended up on stage singing and playing a borrowed bass guitar.
     My sisters Kathleen and Ryan went to every museum they could find, without me. I didn’t have any problems in that boat on the river but just listening to them talk about the various museums they’d visited made me feel somewhat seasick.
     Being colorblind is a blessing that I’ve used to keep myself out of scores of museums. It’s about more than my abbreviated color perception. I like my art one piece at a time. Museums stuffed full make me dizzy. Once I almost saw blood.
     That was on a visit to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Museum in Cody, Wyoming, back in the late 1980s. I’d always heard it was a great place and I’m a big fan of the old West as portrayed in books and movies. But sad to say, the museum was just as boring as most of the others I’ve tried.
     They had a bunch of Indian mannequins dressed in authentic Indian wear standing around Teepees and looking very. . . Well, actually I forget how they looked. That’s how unimpressive it was. But the woman I was with was having a great time. She’d once worked at the Art Institute so this was right up her avenue. I followed along trying to pretend I was interested and then I wondered where the museum had gotten the clothes. “Probably off of dead Indians,” I answered myself.
      Once I had the thought, I found what looked like bullet holes everywhere, in the back, in the shoulder, in the side. And suddenly, in the midst of horror, I was having a great time. “Look at this one,” I said to my friend. “I mean, moths don’t eat through leather, do they?”
      “Look, right there in the lower back. Isn’t that where the kidneys are?”
     “Jack, would you please shut up?” my friend whispered. “Everybody’s listening.”
     Shut up? She had to be kidding. Here was some actual history. Those Indian villages were a fantasy: the Indians living in peace. When did that ever happen? Not after 1492.
     Some years later, I was driving a taxi and my passenger said he was a history professor at Yale. “What’s your specialty?” I asked. When he told me it was the American West, I asked if he’d ever been to the museum in Cody.
     “Oh sure. I go every other year or so.”
     I told him about those holes and he promised to take a look on his next visit. Who knows? Maybe my observation made it into a Yale class or paper.
     But where did they get the clothes? Who did they belong to? How did they die? Who was on the other end of those bullets? I wouldn’t mind hearing those answers.
     In any museum, I would probably find the answer to, How did they get all this stuff, more interesting than the stuff itself. And remember, most museums have even more stuff in storage.
     Speaking of museums and Paris, I did go to the Louvre once, but I only got as far as the gift shop. This was decades back, I was on my way to Paris to write with my friend Bob Meyer. He was a Chicago artist, writer, and all-around craftsman and artisan, who had moved to Paris to be with his young son. We were turning the 1931 Fritz Lang movie M into the play M the Murderer.

      Bob Horn, another Chicago artist, wanted me to ask Bob to go to the Louvre gift shop and pick up a postcard of the painting, Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters. In the 1594 work, two women in their early 20s are sitting in a bathtub. An older woman is in the background, looking down at her knitting. The girl on the left is reaching out, tweaking one of the other girl’s nipples. Horn was planning a painting based on the original. “Bob will know the painting,” he said.
     (You may notice a trend in those last few paragraphs: We’ve all run out of original ideas.)
     When I got to Paris, Bob Meyer said, “I’ve been here for eight years and I haven’t been in the Louvre yet. I’m not going for Bob Horn.” They were the best of friends, of course, and both were involved with the founding of the NAB Gallery in Chicago in 1974.
     But Bob gave me directions to the Louvre. And then on my legal pad he drew a rough sketch of the postcard Bob Horn wanted. “Just show ‘em that,” he said. “They’ll know the painting.”
     I wasn’t so sure. Bob could make the simplest drawing look sexy and on the border of obscene. But I didn’t see anything like that in the sketch. I folded it and headed for the Louvre.
     On the way, I passed rue Rivoli where there were several postcard stores. I went into one after the other and showed them the sketch. “The Louvre,” everyone said, and some were kind enough to point the way.
     So I went to the Louvre and down to the gift shop where there are thousands and thousands of postcards. How would I ever find the right one? There were two teenage girls behind the counter. I held up my drawing and they both immediately turned bright red. Bob had done it again. Here they were, working in a museum with thousands of nudes. They probably never gave any of them a second glance. But my old friend Bob, with a five-second drawing scribbled on a yellow legal pad, had somehow ignited a flash fire.
     After the girls recovered, they knew exactly in which aisle I would find the postcard. I bought a few extras.
     Aside from transposing the sisters, Bob had drawn the scene perfectly from memory. I guess that’s what you learn in art school. I don’t know where he’d learned to hint at pornography without ever crossing into it.
     I looked at Bob’s sketch for days, but I could never find what had made the two girls blush and Bob, who died in Paris in 2021, wasn’t giving away trade secrets. I’ve got several of his drawings at home. When I look, I rarely see those hidden elements. I think they come with the shock of first viewing. Almost every woman who’s set foot in my apartment has skipped past most of my other art to take long looks at Bob’s drawings. I wish I knew what they were seeing.
     Maybe if I’d spent more time in museums.

'I will get justice' — Chicago man vs. the government of Saudi Arabia

 

     Ahmed Abdul Majeed wants justice.
     Born in India, for more than 40 years he lived in Saudi Arabia, employed at a travel agency, booking trips for the royal family, building the company.
     “I used to work a lot,” he said. “Seven days a week.”
     For the past two years, Majeed, 67, has lived in the Devon Avenue Indian community with his son, Ahmed Abdulumer, a food delivery driver and American citizen. It was his son, 34, who brought Majeed to my attention.
     “My father,” Abdulumer wrote, “was a victim of forced labor and human trafficking.”
     The details are complicated. We should probably start by explaining the kafala system, the tradition of immigrants existing in rightless limbo in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations.
     “Unfortunately, migrant workers in Saudi Arabia have little to no control over their lives,” Abdulumer wrote. “The status quo in Saudi Arabia for decades has been the kafala system for migrant workers which had been exploiting, stealing wages, imprisoning, raping, falsifying charges and killing countless workers over many decades. This system strips workers of their freedom and dignity, silences complaints and grants employers near-total control over their lives.”
     Some workers are brought in under false pretenses. Others enter with eyes open — the money is good, relative to their homelands. Being on the bottom of the social ladder in Saudi Arabia is still better than being on the bottom of the social ladder in Bangladesh.

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My (not so) new car

     Timidity is not my way. Which is good, for a guy obligated to churn out as much material as I do — three columns a week in Chicago Sun-Times, the other four days on this blog, plus the occasional book. My spectrum of topics is by necessity wide. Otherwise, it would grow tiresome as I rang the same bell, again and again.
     Yes, certain subjects are taboo. The details of grandchildren beyond the fact of their existence (people are asking the gender of the newest, born last week. As I sometimes say: silence is an answer. I wasn't ordered to do so — I'm just being cautious, a valuable attribute in those caring for the very young). 
     Or ... and this was pure cowardice on my part ... the new car, bought three and a half years ago. A 2023 Mazda CX-9, Carbon Edition. Not so new anymore.
     Why avoid such a enticing subject? I mean, cars, right? Windows into the soul of American men. I've written at length on the topic, regarding cars that were not mine. 
     Honestly, picking the car was such a protracted ordeal, that at the time I didn't want to cap the experience by inviting whoever could flop their fingers onto a keyboard to tell me what a sap I'd been, what a dupe and sucker for buying such a laughable lemon. I already had the car. Any feedback would be doubts raised too late to do anything but torment, like when I told my mother, may she rest in peace, that I had bought four new tires at Costco.

     "Don't buy tires at Costco!" she urged, for reasons I can't recall. I considered this advice.

     "Mom..." I said measuredly. "The tires ... are already ... on the car."

     But at this point, any dire news about the CX-9 would be pointless, as we've owned it happily for three and a half years, almost. It actually was listed in Consumers Reports as to be one of the less dependable years, for flaws and repairs. But that was general, about the CX-9 as a class, and the individual we have has been spared the woes afflicting others. The CX-9 was also discontinued the year after we bought it, which did not strike me as a good sign.

     Nevertheless, 25,000 miles. Around the earth at the equator. Driven it all the way to upstate New York. In winter. Great for cruising — it's a bigger car. Honestly, my wife would have been happy with the CX-9's little brother, the CX-5. And in truth, it seemed fine if a little ... dinky. That's the word I used, dismissing it. "Dinky."

     "I'm old," I told her. "I want to tool around the suburbs in a bigger car. I want something Tony Soprano would drive." A larger vehicle gives a necessary boost to a fellow. That actually worked, winning her over along with, I suppose, the red leather seats. 
     Sure, a few glitches. The key fob is a little sensitive — I can be in the house, and if I squeeze it the wrong way in my pocket, the rear hatch lifts in the garage, 100 feet away. The information interface with the cell phone has hiccups, and there is this big knob to cycle through various digital shells that borders on stupid. 
     But merging onto the highway I mutter a little prayer of thanks, sometimes out loud, for the hefty turbocharged engine. It seats six, which came in handy ferrying guests when the boys got married. The backup camera is great, as are the little warning beeps it gives if you want to merge into a lane occupied already. You can puff warm or cool air at your backside, through holes in the seat.

    Most important, to me, is this: it's handsome. That sharp little nose and hooded headlight/eyes has more style than most cars on the road. It has a personality. Sometimes it seems enormous. "Look at that boat," I'll say, admiring it from a distance. From other angles, it's almost demure.

     Anyway, I needed something to write about today, and the photo of the car popped up, and to  paraphrase Molly Bloom, "I thought as well this as another." You are now free to tell me what a mistake we've made.
       

Being formed by Christians does not a Christian nation make

George Washington life mask, by Houdon (National Portrait Gallery)

      George Washington planted vineyards and also ran a distillery. Thomas Jefferson was a passionate wine collector, sometimes called “America’s first vintner,” who once confessed “wine from habit has become an indispensable for my health.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy,” observing that the elbow was perfectly designed, by the Almighty, to facilitate drinking: “Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom.”
      Given this, and other related historical facts, it would be easy to argue that the United States was founded by a bunch of tosspots for the express purpose of facilitating inebriation.
     It would take an honest, fair-minded person — they do exist — to survey, not the narrow range of grape-stained documents, but the whole of American history, to point out that subordination to Great Britain did not encumber consuming wine, and other factors inspired the quest for American independence, such as a desire for freedom.
      A similar candor demands that a similar evenhanded historical perspective be applied to last Sunday’s “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” the prayer orgy on the National Mall featuring top officials from the Trump administration celebrating the notion that ours is a Christian nation created by, and for, Christians.
      Pretty to think so. For them. For others, not so much. But before we dive in, first consider the source — something the media is terrible at doing. We wake up every morning, shocked to discover a fiery object in the sky, muster our wits to gradually ascertain that, yes, it is indeed the sun, again, and then prepare to receive that day’s load of lies and crimes as similar bolts from the blue, as if they hadn’t appeared yesterday and the day before that, and the day before.
      The proponents of the America-is-Christian canard are the same people who generally not only take pride in their woeful ignorance of the past but claim to feel bad if minor details like slavery or labor strife or mass immigration manage to nudge themselves into a textbook, who pass laws to make sure succeeding generations are hobbled in a similar fashion, a kind of intellectual foot-binding. Now, in their continuing quest to salve their inflamed egos, they claim America was founded especially for them as a Christian nation. It wasn’t. It was founded by Christians, true. But suggesting that their creation is therefore, by necessity, also Christian, is like arguing that Albert Einstein’s revolution in physics makes atomic energy Jewish (which the Nazis actually did claim, to their eventual sorrow).
      Where to begin? It’s common to start with the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, where our nation spelled it out so plainly that even MAGA could understand, if they were into understanding reality rather than trying to mold it to their whims.

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Misdirected wrenches

      About 65 million packages are delivered every day in the United States. We all know the drill. Today's load of brown cardboard is deposited on the front steps, if we have them, or the package room of a building. The UPS or Amazon guy snaps a picture. We look outside, think, "Goodies!" and go collect our new stuff and add it to the old stuff.
     But what if a package isn't yours? Some 2 or 3 percent of shipments — about a million packages a day — go astray. What do you do if one of them washes up on your front step? What is your responsibility for these goods you did not order and do not want? Call UPS? Open the box? Keep what's inside? It isn't a gift, precisely. Though someone gave it to you. If they're intended for a neighbor, the right and decent thing to do is walk the box over — just last week, a magazine for someone living two blocks away ended up in our mail, and next time I walked Kitty, I took the publication with me and saw it to its proper recipient, feeling a little conspicuous when I walked up to his house and shoved it through the mail slot. People have been shot for less. 
     But a few days ago something strange happened. We got a long UPS box — at first I thought it was flowers, which sometimes come that way. But inside was a wooden play set for the new grand babe and ... a separate UPS box, within the first, containing a 17 piece DeWalt combination wrench set. That box was addressed to a tool shop in Mokena. 
     For a moment, I wondered if it was part of the gift — a play set for the babe, wrenches for grandpa. But that was daft. Nobody would do that. So what should I do? Having my own tools, plus tools inherited from my father-in-law, plus some from a neighbor moving far away, I am rich in hand tools, particularly wrenches, from tiny wrenches to big spanners a foot and a half long that look like they're intended for tightening bolts on an aircraft carrier. 

     Then there was the mystery of how the wrenches got in there. Or maybe not such a mystery. Having once toured an Amazon fulfillment center, a vast, sprawling, frenetic hive of Seussian commotion — roaring conveyers, chutes, slides, twirling robots, human pickers pushed to the limits of human capacity —  the potential for error was easy enough to see. There must be astounding tales of unimaginable screw-ups, waiting to be uncovered.
     I thought of gifting the wrenches — they were mine now, were they not? — perhaps bestowing them on the younger boy. But he has no need for wrenches, now or in the foreseeable future. They would just be a burden, more crap from dad. The thing to do was send them on their way. Return them to UPS.
     My wife was dubious — I think she viewed me as somehow now responsible for these wrenches. Possession is 9/10 of the law. She wondered whether UPS would just take them from me. But I pointed out the mailing label, with the all-important bar code. They were on a journey. The thing to do would be to speed them on their way. We were heading to Red's Garden Center anyway, to load up on herbs and flowers and such. The UPS store was on the way.
      When we pulled into the strip mall, I suggested she wait in the car. No, she said, she wanted to see how this goes down. Given my luck, she might have been worried that, without her cool head, some kind of Roger Thornhill chain of mistaken events would be set in motion, like in "North by Northwest." "He's here! The guy with the wrenches!" one of the UPS workers would cry, and I'd end up climbing down the face of Mount Rushmore with Eva Marie Saint.
     We walked in.
     "Can I help you?" the clerk said. 
     "You delivered these to me," I said, hefting the box onto the counter. "But I am not the Pennsylvania Tools of Mokena." He took the box without a word. We turned and walked out. She praised my honesty, but I was thinking of how the situation would have transpired had it been, not superfluous wrenches, but a DeWalt reciprocating saw. I could really use one of those.

'I still have a life' — amputees struggle to cope with loss

 

      Usually, they cry.
      Because losing a limb is not subtle, not a hidden loss, like losing a kidney. You see what is missing. Everybody does. A part of you is gone and never coming back. The absence affects your daily life — how you stand, walk, sit, if a lower limb. Or every time you reach for a cup of coffee or scratch your nose, if a hand.
     About 2 million Americans live with limb loss, with another 3 million born missing an extremity. About 500 people in this country lose a hand or foot, an arm or leg every day, most to vascular conditions, such as diabetes. The rest to trauma, particularly car and motorcycle accidents.   

     Last year Karl Fisher, a Zion medical van driver, lost both legs at the knee. He was 6 feet 7 inches before.
     "Now I'm 4 feet tall," he said.
     Fisher wept when he learned what would happen. He also cried when he met the man waiting outside his room one afternoon on the 20th floor of the sun-filled Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Downtown Chicago.
     L. Bradley Schwartz, a Glenview lawyer, has visited 50 or so new amputees, to share his experience. He knows, their concerns — am I still me? When can I get back to living my life?
     You can consider him a volunteer, though he doesn't see himself as having much choice.
     "I can't ignore people that have been through this," he explained.
     Schwartz is what Shirley Ryan AbilityLab calls a "peer mentor."
     "A peer mentor provides their support, their insight, their lived experience to someone who's going through what Brad has gone through, to provide that insight so they can live successfully out in the community," said Cristina M. Mix, peer mentor coordinator at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
     And what has Brad Schwartz gone through? A medical nightmare almost beyond description.

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Flashback 2010 — Notice: This is not a column about a dog

Kitty, August, 2010

   

     Billy Goat owner Sam Sianis died this week. While I certainly did my share of holding up the bar at the Goat, I never wrote about it, or him, much — someone else did that. My relationship with Sam was a distant one. I did check the archive to see what I had written about him, and he makes a cameo in this column which is too much fun not to share, and also explains why I avoided Sianis and his bar, as a topic if not as a watering hole.

     My younger kid nailed his bar mitzvah last week -- really nailed it; letter perfect, no muss, no fuss, no heavy lifting, out of the park on the first swing, chugging around the bases, doffing his cap.
     He did so well that I bypassed the several days of foot-dragging and delay that I would typically enjoy before doing something that I absolutely did not want to do, and instead took him directly, two hours after the luncheon ended, to pick up his bar mitzvah present: a new puppy.
     The first half dozen or so colleagues to whom I mentioned our new household addition — 2 months old, cute as hell — all said a version of the same thing: "You must write about this!"
     To which I answered, in ruffled indignation, that I certainly was not going to write about the dog, that I would never write about the dog, because my colleague Mark Brown has already laid claim to all matters canine, and that if I started doing so as well, not only would I be poaching on his preserve, but there would then be two columnists at the paper exploring the world of dogs, and that was one too many.
     (Writers can be odd that way. I am certain that, were I to find myself sitting on the white paper strip in a physician's office, and the doctor were to somberly inform me that, he's sorry, but I have a dire illness, my very first thought, before any personal woes sunk in, would be a frantic: And I can't even write about this, because Roger Ebert already has. Roger planted his flag on that frosty pole, and anything I might add on the subject would be merely derivative, like someone hanging out at the Billy Goat and writing about Sam Sianis as if Mike Royko never existed).
     So this column is not about the dog.
     I guess it's about me.
     See, I never wanted a dog, I see now, because I was completely unfamiliar with dogs. We never had any growing up, nor did my father, nor his, nor, as far as I can tell, any Steinberg going back to bondage in Egypt. I disliked dogs. They bark. They smell like dogs. They lick you. If you took every minute I've spent within a yard of a dog in my entire life and added them up, you wouldn't have been able to fill an hour.
     What happened? As much as I was dead-set against dogs, there are other people in my life beside myself and — surprise, surprise — they can be just as stubborn and mulish as I am, if not more. My younger son wanted a dog as much as I didn't want one, and wheedled and noodged me for a dog for about the past year, then saw his opportunity and pounced. He quite cannily seized upon the chance offered by his bar mitzvah — a big accomplishment, requiring mastery of ancient Hebrew — as a lever he could use.
     He was right. As much as I was set against dogs, I was even more reluctant to be the Dad Who Didn't Get His Son A Dog, Not Even For His Bar Mitzvah.
     He found this puppy online — I've had more than a few gimlet-eyed PETA sorts ask me where the dog is from, not in a friendly, curious way, but in a leering, gotcha mode, to see if the source of our dog passes the moral purity test. Let's put it this way — we've gotten five cats from shelters, so we did our share, and if you need to know exactly where this dog's from, OK: I run an animal-testing lab as a hobby, squirting oven cleaner into the eyes of puppies to see how they react, and this one was an extra. Satisfied now?
     Anyway, this puppy belongs to the boy, but she really, really likes me, for some unfathomable reason, and when I come home she goes crazy, doing backflips, spinning around, her tongue lolling out. She runs up to me, and I lean down to pet her, and next thing you know I'm rolling on the floor, giggling as she licks my face.
     My family, of course, is horrified.
     "Stop it!" my older son, who has become quite the fussbudget at 14, commanded. "You hate all creatures, big and small."
     Not anymore. I am born again in dog heaven. Having sworn I'd never take care of the dog, I now stand happily at 3 a.m. outside in the rain as she does her thing.
     But what amazes me — what allows me, just this once, to poach on Brown's turf — is recognizing what has happened here.
      I was against a certain class of individuals — in this case dogs — of whom I was completely ignorant, based on my preconceived notions of what they might be like and my fear of being inconvenienced.
     And then I met a specific member of this class, this bichon/shih tzu pup which my boy has named, delightfully, "Kitty."
     Now I'm a different man. A dog person.
     Is there not a moral here? People are not dogs, but the mechanism is the same. Much of our national discourse in this shameful historic moment has to do with groups of people dismissing other groups, based on fear, based on nothing, keeping them at a distance and missing out.
     If only they could set aside their fear and get to know a few individuals in the class that so disconcerts them. They might be in for a big surprise. I was.
     — Originally published Sept. 5, 2010

Prank

 

     I went downstairs to walk the dog, turned right on Greenwood, and meandered. The night was warm, soft, lovely.
     I should say I was in Hyde Park — it wasn't my dog, but my son's. Not my home, but his, and his wife's. They were, ah, busy elsewhere and, in my full service dad mode, I'd volunteered to go walk the dog.
     No hardship. A perfect night. Gorgeous stone mansions lined the street. Why doesn't anyone even try to build these anymore? Mature trees — do I call Northbrook "the leafy suburban paradise"? Hyde Park makes Northbrook look like Nebraska.
     At 50th Street I passed the above sign. Obama's block. Odd, I thought, walking on, that they'd cut off traffic for him — he's hardly ever there. I wonder if the residents resent it. They must. Past 50th, a second sign. I took a closer look. Oh. The "P" was taped on. A college prank, probably. And I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. You'd think, having written a book on college pranks myself, I wouldn't be taken in so easily. No shame there. We are all duped now and then. This at least is clever, and harmless. Without effect, except to draw a smile. And when was the last time something presidential did that?

Has Facebook begun the long slide toward ruin?

Breuget's electrical telegraph machine (Cabinet of Physics, University of Coimbra)

    Here's an odd coincidence. On Friday, I grabbed the post from 10 years ago and it, too, decried the crappification of Facebook. So maybe the habit won't be so easy to break after all. 

    So another grandchild, born this week — maybe to me, maybe to somebody else. Who can say? I really shouldn’t be more specific than that.
     Certainly no word of the news, if there is any news, breathed on Facebook. I ... or, um, another person very much like myself ... would sooner sell a child to the circus than post its photos, or any identifying details, on any sort of social media. As for what the potential harm of that could be, beyond strong and immediate rebuke, I’m afraid to ask. Maybe X snatches their images and does unspeakable things with them.
     As it is my ... well, somebody’s ... adult children view Facebook the way I, when young, would look at my grandfather’s dentures falling into the soup: as an embarrassing lapse of age. Worse. It’s like yanking the dentures out of your own mouth and flinging them into the soup, with pride. Not an accident, an intention.
     Facebook is no longer hip, or the bomb, or dope, or fire, or whatever the current term for coolness might be. “Slow death” is the phrase encountered online. The young might have an account, allowing Facebook to pretend it’s reaching the sweet spot demographic. But the 20-somethings I know never use it and mock those who do. The cracks are starting to show. On May 20, Meta, the parent of Facebook, is laying off 8,000 workers — 10% of its workforce. Last week, The New York Times, in an opinion piece, declared Meta “at the start of a long, slow decline.”
     The plan is that artificial intelligence will do the jobs of the freshly fired, even though AI is part of what’s wrecking Facebook, all those blocks of regurgitated history lite and random pop culture factoids. And that rash of ads. God forbid you buy shoes, as I have. Facebook will dangle the shoes you just bought under your nose for a month, hoping you’ll buy a second pair. And this is the super-intelligence that would rule us.
     I have to admit, I’m kind of savoring the Facebook riffs, being myself lashed to an oar in the old world, pulp-based, legacy media. It’s like when Borders went bankrupt in 2011. I winked at the Book Bin and other independent bookstores which survived the era when giant bookstores roamed the earth, hardy voles, gazing out from their safe nooks, watching the dinosaurs bellow and die.

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"How does it feel to be a minority?"

     "You're not gay, right?" said my neighbor at a table in the Hilton ballroom, packed for the annual American Civil Liberties Union Illinois luncheon in late April.

     Busted. Is it really that noticeable? Do I radiate a certain straightness? At the moment, perhaps, in my way butch blue Lauren blazer with gold buttons. But he should see me fussing over my little dog; I'm like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." And I do love Judy Garland, live at Carnegie Hall.
     Still, I admitted he had me dead to rights. 
     "Guilty as charged," I said, or words to that effect.
     "You're the only person at the table who isn't gay ..." he continued. I had been invited by a gay lawyer's association, which, apparently, you have to be a gay lawyer to join. Funny. I've been to the local Council on American Islamic Relations office — not everyone there is Muslim.

     "...how does it feel to be in a minority?" he asked.

     "I'm Jewish," I replied, immediately and perhaps with more asperity than I intended. The I'm in a minority everywhere I go that isn't a synagogue or Israel was unvoiced. He let this comment pass unanswered — perhaps I had just admitted something disreputable. Jews had their minority status card revoked long ago. We're white, though all the privileges pursuant to whiteness — the right to run a country, for instance, or worship without people showing up suddenly to kill us — doesn't seem to go with it. Honorary whites, for the purpose of criticism only. 

     Jews don't bask in the highest esteem in a good year, and this isn't a good year for Judaism. Lately we've been suffering a bad time, between Israel deciding to push the brute force approach to its limits, prompting college sophomores to embrace what strikes them as simple truth: The Jews don't belong wherever they happen to be! An insight the Germans hit upon long ago, to their eventual sorrow. Five hundred years didn't plant us in Nuremberg, why should 2,500, 0r 25,000 for that matter, give us claim to Jerusalem? Not when people who have never set foot there have their heart set on it.

     Had I been thinking, I'd have leaned forward, made intense eye contact, smiled my toothiest, and confided in a Peter Lorre voice, "It's the killing of children and drinking their blood part that I like best..."

     "Well," he continued, circling back to his original conversational gambit. "Nobody can really say they aren't gay, just that they aren't gay yet."

     Ah. I chewed on this a moment. It's almost as if he were  ... nah, that doesn't happen. To me. Anymore.

     "Well, I'm 65," I said, arranging my thoughts into audible order. "I'm certainly taking my sweet time about it."

     He said that he himself had had a few kids before he saw the light, and ... well, I should probably not be too specific. Don't want to embarrass anyone. And in truth, I wasn't embarrassed, or offended, or even miffed. Just ... sort of ... puzzled. That's it. Puzzled. It was an odd conversation to take a train ride for 45 minutes, then walk for half an hour, in order to hold. But I had been invited, an invitation turned down the past few years, but this year thought, heck, let's get out there in the public. But now I was, in public, enjoying the company of people other than myself, well, let's say it was an endorsement of solitude if ever there were. 

     The program began and we fell silent. The speaker, NYU Law's Melissa Murray, was very good, and I'll try to type up her remarks and run them when the Supreme Court lurches back into the news, which happens every other day, it seems.

     Fun had, chicken consumed, remarks recorded, I was the first person at the table to stand up and leave, even while the program was still going on, thanking my seat mate for his conversation and my host for inviting me, pumping his hand, the first words we'd exchanged. I threaded my way around the tables, walked briskly out of the Hilton, up Michigan Avenue, and to Union Station making the 1:33 Metra Milwaukee North with five minutes to spare.