Flashback 2004: Part of Halloween is ruining the fun for others

     Friday I beavered away on the book, and then prepared a blog post which, late in the day, sparked an uncharacteristic thought: 'This kinda sucks."

     On to Plan B, Saturday being Oct. 31: mine the bottomless archive for Halloween columns such as this, back when the column filled a page. Did you remember that Christian fundamentalists lobbied to suspend trick-or-treating because Halloween fell on a Sunday? They did. Or that the Tribune wrote an ode to a mild British obscenity, referred to in rhyme in the second headline? It did. Or that it had a "Woman News" section and printed 600,000 copies of its paper back then. Apparently. That last item, well, I don't think I'd speak to that woman now, or write about it if I did. Times change. People too.

Opening shot

     Halloween is almost here. My 9-year-old is dressing as a ghoul with horns. His little brother is a bloody skeleton. When we went to Party City to buy the costumes, I of course was concerned; I had set myself a limit of $30 per boy, and their outfits, what with the bony-hand gloves and the death's head battle axe, nudged us slightly over that. But heck, Halloween comes just once a year. I wanted them to be satisfied.
     Oct. 31 this year falls on Sunday, a day that not so long ago was observed with commerce shutting down so people could focus on church. This coincidence was used by fundamentalists across the country, desperate to claw their way back to those lost days and drag us unwillingly along with them, to try to push municipalities to ban trick-or-treating, which they view not as a way for youngsters to fill plastic pumpkins with free sweets, but as the devil incarnate served by the degenerate secular culture they fear and hate.
      That is their right, of course. I wouldn't dream of stopping anyone from dimming their lights and holding prayer circles in the basement while disappointed Spider Men and fairy princesses mash their doorbells in vain and peer sadly into their darkened windows.
     That isn't enough, however. Christianity never seems happy unless it is on the march, and why be satisfied practicing your faith when you can also try to impose it upon others?
     In my view, it is a particularly perverse twist of mind to, on one hand, teach your children to believe in an actual Satan, a living Beelzebub, King of Darkness, hot for your soul, served by his attendant demons and presiding over a fiery Hell where all those who don't believe exactly as you do roast for eternity, while on the other grousing to your local officials that permitting children to wear fright masks and visit neighbors to plea for mini Butterfingers is a slide toward true evil.

On the blunt front, the Trib punts

     In the third act of Hamlet, the melancholy prince concocts a play to tweak the guilty conscience of his murderous uncle. The court assembles to see it. Ophelia is there and Hamlet approaches her.
     "Lady," he says, "shall I lie in your lap?"
     "No my lord," Ophelia answers, mistaking his intent.
     "I mean, my head in your lap," Hamlet says, clarifying.
     "Ay, my lord," she says.
     Hamlet settles himself comfortably against her, asking, "Did you think I meant country matters?"
     That's a pun, one certain to set the groundlings aroar 400 years ago. There's nothing like winking at a dirty word to draw a laugh (if you don't get the reference, read Hamlet's last sentence slowly).
     The Tribune, as you might have read in our business pages Thursday, pulled 600,000 "Woman News" inserts because higher ups objected to an article they learned about — too late! — examining the popular culture usage of the word Hamlet was referring to.
     Though I recognize that readers' sensibilities must be respected, no coarse Germanic vulgarism strikes me as half as offensive as the idea of creating a separate "Woman News" ghetto in your newspaper. Though I can't crow too much — a risque phrase was cut from my column Wednesday, with my approval — the words "mouth-watering Black Forest dessert," which would have been a lot more racy in context than here. The difference between how the two papers handled their brush with the naughty is this: At the Sun-Times, the low and the high all labor together, putting out a newspaper, and these issues are handled immediately. All interested parties became aware of the questionable material in my column within the span of 10 minutes, a decision was rendered, and life went on. At the Trib, the verboten article became lost within the layers of assistant editors and sub-managers and Grand Viziers and Keepers of the Royal Hounds, so that qualms did not get raised until 600,000 copies of the section were already printed. People here may not dab the perfumed hankie of sophistication to our lips the way they do at the Trib, but at least we know the time to make these judgment calls is before the newspaper gets printed, not after.

Neil the avenger

     Every day it becomes more difficult for me to ride Metra. The problem, I believe, is that I can't sink myself into the Zone. You know the Zone. You drop your head, you disappear into your thoughts, and tune out your surroundings, protected by a mental fog of privacy.
     I can't do it. I'm always looking up, at my fellow commuters, shuffling in lockstep up the stairs at Union Station like the workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I notice things, and give strangers names in my mind.
     Some are good guys — Hat Man, for instance, a young guy in a Dick van Dyke fedora. Brave of him. I shoot a supportive look in his direction as he strides, oblivious, by.
     Or villains, their leader being the infamous — to me — Pig Woman. The Pig Woman, so named for snout and her obvious selfishness, represents no less than a grave threat to the social order. When we get off the train at the station, we all line up to climb the ammonia-scented stairs out the Madison Street entrance. Orderly as sheep. Except for this one woman, in her 40s, a face like an Iowa sow. She pushes by everybody, shamelessly, working her way to the front of the line, where she cuts in. It offends me to my core. I keep waiting for somebody to notice, to call her on it. But the other commuters are in the Zone, docile as slaves, and squeeze to let her by.
     Usually I see her in the morning — she always seems to be in my range of vision, even outside the station, until she ducks into 20 N. Wacker.
     But the other night, I caught the 5:50. There she was, sleeping. I couldn't help myself. I woke her up.
     "You're the woman who always cuts in line," I said sternly. "Why is that? Explain yourself! Where are you going in such rush? Why can't you wait like everybody else?"
     She didn't say a word, and I turned and hurried away. You'd think I'd feel good, standing up for decency and social order like that. But I didn't feel good. I felt like I had become some kind of lunatic, hectoring strange women on the train. Perhaps I'm losing my mind.

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 29, 2004

So RFK Jr's dismissing Arab, Muslim contributions to society? If he’s in the Loop, he can just look around.

 

     People ask me for directions. All the time. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I have a friendly face, maybe because I’m the most unmenacing man ever: 5-foot-9, almost, gray and balding, wearing glasses and an REI fleece that can’t go out of style because it never was in.
     I’m glad they do. Because I like giving directions. Makes me feel useful. My favorite moment came when standing at the corner of Michigan and Chestnut. A couple approached, clutching a guidebook, asking, in heavily French-accented English, if I would be so kind as to direct them to zee Hancock Building. I slowly lifted my finger to point at the brownish black, crisscrossed tower looming directly in front of us, smiled and said, “Voila.”
     Which, forgive me, I feel obligated to do now that the Trump administration is turning up its racism to 11 in the final sprint to Tuesday’s election. Particularly Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said:
     “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
     He’s wrong in all particulars, as usual. I count three Muslims who’ve won the Fields Medal — not “prize,” doofus — the top award in mathematics. Several have won a Wolf Prize.
     I understand I’m shifting populations here — Arabs and Muslims overlap, but are not the same group. “Arab” is an ethnic identity, which RFK Jr. is using as code for “Muslim,” a religious designation. There are Arab Christians, and while they don’t get much press, Arab Jews. (H.L. Mencken, in his epic “The American Language,” lists “arab” as a slur for Jews.)
     Before we get completely off track, pause to savor the head-spinning hypocrisy of RFK Jr. invoking the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, for excellence in science. From the mouth of a man who disgraced himself through vigorous anti-science, whose unwavering devotion to nutty folk belief has literally killed children.
     It’s such an uncharacteristic pivot, this sudden passion for achievement. You’ll never hear Trump lecture his torch-wielding nationalist buddies, “You know, you’re kinda hard on Jews, considering they’ve won Nobel Prizes up the wazoo.”
     Consistency isn’t their strong suit.

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Mailbag

 

     I've really got to stop answering email. I'm reading off an old program — the notion that we're discussing issues, having conversations. When that isn't what's happening at all. We're cudgeling each other with words. Or making non-negotiable demands. Consider this email that arrived Tuesday. I've obscured the sender's email and company name, out of kindness, so they don't get abuse. It's a business, a wan YouTube channel with a couple videos on it, and a name that has the marginal feeling of "The Tiny Tots Fun Station." Take a read:

   Now my standard reply when people suggest column topics is that I'm not the piano player in a Holiday Inn lounge. I don't take requests. And now that I read it, and its presumptive tone sinks in, I should have replied, simply, "You didn't say 'please.'" But in the moment I noticed something else about the above, something missing. Give it a going over; I've reproduced the entire email except for the company name. What's missing?

    My reply:

    

.    The reply was a strange spin on "Don't you know who I am?" and another demand.

     And that was the end. Not worth the effort, right? I'm not quite ready to delete gmail, the way I've taken Facebook off my phone. But I'm tempted.

Courting death by hauling top-heavy wooden floats in Japan — just another risky guy thing

     The news is flushing out my siblings lately.
     Just as my sister Debbie showed up in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV went under the knife for lung cancer. Deb has been kicking cancer’s ass for years, so tapping her wisdom seemed a no-brainer.
     Several readers replied, “You have a sister?” Well, I’m supposed to be writing a column for a Chicago newspaper, not a chatty meet-the-family Christmas letter.
     And yet. News has a will of its own.
     Now it’s my younger brother’s turn. Sam is no stranger to readers, particularly of my books. It is he who bails me out of jail in “Drunkard.” He’s also a plot point in “You Were Never in Chicago,” as I trace the classic newcomer’s path of coming here, getting a job, then bringing family to Chicago and helping them get jobs. I rented an apartment with a spare bedroom on Logan Boulevard, and enticed him to move here from Tokyo, where his apartment was so small I could span its width with my arms spread and one foot planted on the floor. And I have short arms.
     Sam still has the Big Love for Japan, and goes back often. He and his wife Yuri were there when my sister showed up, which would have not been the stuff of a column, except for one reason he went — to participate in the Danjiri Matsuri — an annual fall festival where huge wooden floats are maneuvered through the streets by acolytes wearing cotton happi coats.
     I knew it was dangerous — the festival is sort of a Japanese running of the bulls at Pamplona: a chance to party in the street, risk being killed, and survive. I thought of telling him, “Don’t get crushed.” But that seemed a prissy, older brother concern.
     What I said instead was, “I want to see a picture.” Because he can fall down in that department. I would have left it at that. Then two participants were crushed to death in Osaka, and 16 injured. The New York Times found four others who died in 2022 and 2023. Suddenly, I was sitting on a big international news story, so designated Sam as a Sun-Times foreign correspondent and got to work.
      Weren’t you worried about being killed?

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Not my circus: religion small and large

     Noticing this sign in the hallway of a Washington DC apartment building sent me tumbling down an interesting mental tangent. 
     I know a bit about Islam, and knew that shoes are removed during prayer in a mosque. But did not realize that also extended to quotidian life in the home. Makes sense — live a life of purity, keep the dirt outside. My daughter-in-law insists on the same thing, not out of religious scruple, but just trying to keep germs off the babies. I brought slippers and tried to remember, though old habits die hard.
     There are two tracks that religion occupies. Think of it as two levels. There is the individual, daily pathways each we blaze for ourselves, deciding how we pray, what to think, what we eat, whether our shoes stay on or off indoors
     And then there is, for want of a better term, the public track, faith as image, metaphor, communal consensus, political club to be wielded, for and against. Religion as concept, as it is talked about rather than lived. Not a distinction I see discussed much, which is unfortunate, because it strikes me as useful.
    They almost seem like two entirely different animals, do they not? Personal and public faith. I've said many times before that religion is a tool, like a hammer. You can build a house with it, or hit someone in the head. Same hammer. 
     But there is also religion as different tools, put to different purposes. A micrometer and a yardstick. Religion small and large. People rarely complain about religion small, religion as it actually manifests itself among regular folk. As much as people hate Jews, in often spectacular, creative fashion, you never hear bigots raging about the fuckin' Jews and their damn Sabbath candles and their yamulkes and their affinity for education. Not to give haters any ideas. I'd almost call it an unexpected charity, if I didn't know it's just an oversight. When you're damning people for being murderers drinking the blood of children and running the world, you don't think to add that they also eat gefilte fish.
     No, the faults of Jews bruited about by haters are either entirely imagined — run the banks, Hollywood, the world, whatever. Or attached by association — how do you expect me to be kind to you when all those kids are being killed in Gaza? Which is your fault. Because you're Jewish, and Jews also live in Israel. It makes as much sense as firebombing a Belgian waffle stand because of those historic atrocities in the Congo.
     I'm not sure why I shifted from Islam to Judaism. Maybe I was reluctant to reel off the generalized faults assigned to Islam — scary sharia law, responsibility for all terrorism everywhere, head scarves. (I can never quite get my head around that last one. Nuns sure got away with that, prior to the 1960s; what changed?) You can treat your own team more roughly. You get a pass.
      I did think about hammering on the door and asking about the sign. But that seemed, oh, intrusive. I'm sure guests appreciate the reminder. I sure would appreciate one in my son and daughter-in-law's apartment. Maybe I'd be less inclined to go blasting in, attending to some grandchild-related issue, only to be told, three paces in, to remove my shoes. It's an awkward moment. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Nobody ever removed their shoes with more alacrity. As if God Almighty was looking down going, "Tsk, tsk, shoes Neil." One key to successful grandparenting is to understand that this is not my circus, not my monkeys, not my rules. I'm just trying to follow them best I can. 

Rattling the cup

     The Chicago Sun-Times has no paywall, so depends on reader support. I've written several effective fundraising letters for the Sun-Times. But for some reason, when they came around recently, asking for another, I declined. Not in the mood. But the very next day, my attempt to expense a sandwich, tater tots, iced tea and a cake pop in Morton, Illinois, breaking open the pumpkin story, was kicked back. We don't pay for food (the confusion was my fault — I failed to mention that Morton is 150 miles away, and they assumed it was a suburb).
     Suddenly I had an idea for a new fundraising letter, and asked if I could do it after all. This is the result. Alas, they lost a few choice bits, such as Larry Green going through the photo department garbage, demanding to know why rolls of film are being processed with only a few shots exposed (Because if you pop in a fresh roll, and snap the Hindenburg blowing up at Lakehurst, New Jersey, you don't then carry the camera around for a few days while you fill the rest of the roll. You get that first shot in the paper). Nor would they permit mention of the challenge of getting compensated for tips to strippers, while investigating an embezzler who spent his ill-gotten gains at Thee Doll Hose on Kingsbury, since they tend not to give you a receipt when you stuff a dollar in their g-string. But it does convey the spirit of the thing. Please feel free to give generously.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dear Sun-Times reader,
     I like to say about the Sun-Times, “The paper won’t give you a new pencil until you hand in the stub of the old one.”     From the moment of our founding, the Sun-Times has always been the scrappy underdog, doing more with less, trying to scrape the last few morsels of journalistic quality from whatever resources we have to work with.
   Sometimes, we take that thriftiness to absurd lengths. Recently, when I tried to expense a CTA bus ride to Little Village, our accountant demanded my boss write a letter authorizing the expenditure.
      Or just last week, my attempt to expense lunch during a long day downstate talking with farmers was kicked back. I’d been talking with farmers about growing pumpkins - a skill honed over generations - and residents near a pumpkin processing plant about whether the facility made the air in their town smell like their grandmother’s kitchen, or “pumpkin vomit.”
      Food is not part of the story, I was told. It is, I replied, if you don’t want me swooning in a pumpkin field as the shadows lengthen. They paid.
      It’s important to get out into the world. That sometimes costs a little money. 

Metropolitan Museum

     What I’m trying to say is, the money you donate to the Chicago Sun-Times is not taken lightly.

     Every penny is scrutinized. Carefully. Sometimes too carefully. But that’s because we understand that you work hard for your money, and so do we.
     That’s what those dollars are for. Sending reporters out to ask questions, follow stories and bring back something worth knowing.
      Four years ago, the Sun-Times took down its paywall so everyone could read our journalism, whether they could afford to pay for it or not. Keeping that commitment takes resources, and readers willing to help provide them.
      We know that when you donate to the Chicago Sun-Times, you expect to see that money on the page. And you do.
      Please consider making a generous gift to help us keep that journalism available to everyone. And I promise you, from long experience, that it will not be wasted.

Neil Steinberg

How stupid are Ohioans? We're about to find out.

Vent Haven Museum, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

  

     "Willful ignorance" is a familiar term, almost a cliche.
     Yet you don't see it used much of late, which is too bad,  because it's a useful concept in understanding our current political landscape.

     Look at the scandal over the vile attack ad put online Monday by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Some MAGA operative tracked down the estranged mother of  the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton, and has her saying that Acton "lied her entire life."
      The GOP is putting millions of dollars behind the ad.
     You can see its appeal. "Even her mother thinks she's a liar," Strong stuff, if you stop there, will yourself to ignorance, learn nothing more, and do not permit yourself to actually examine the facts of the situation.
      Which are as follows: Acton was abused as a child. Raped between the ages of 1o and 12 by her step-father. The husband of the woman in the Ramaswamy ad, Donna Arthur, who remained married to her husband. A court took Acton and her brother away from their mother in 1978. They've had no contact since.

     The briefest survey of the facts casts the commercial in the light of a loathsome piece of bald deception, one that even some Republicans have decried.

      But not all. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor Donald Trump of course supports it. As does his morally void lapdog, JD Vance. In a decent world, the ad will ensure Acton's election and, looking at the polls, she seems on her way to that. It was an act of both desperation and folly, elevating Acton while reminding everyone just how bad a person Ramaswamy truly is.

     Nor is he alone, The episode is a reminder of an essential truth that is often lost in the fairness rituals of journalism: these are bad people, doing bad things. Trump is a bad person who ruins everything he touches. JD Vance is a bad person. Marco Rubio is a bad person.

     As for the excrescence, Ramaswamy, you might be unfamiliar with the hedge fund billionaire. His sole previous appearance on EGD was in 2023, when he participated in the Republican presidential debates, will give you a sense of the man:

     Thirty eight year old wackjob/businessman Vivek Ramaswamy promptly pronounced "climate change is a hoax,” and claimed, vis a vis nothing, that "more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” In general, Ramaswamy was an incandescent spotlight of batshittery, confidently airing a variety of specious theories and crazed policy proposals, and was probably the big winner of the night, if drawing attention to yourself, your destructive hopes and fierce, misplaced self-regard can be considered winning

    He's gotten worse since then. Bad people seldom get better. Just the opposite. They deteriorate, driven to more extreme acts trying to support the unsupportable. 
     You can't be a good person and support Trump. Oh, you can have once been a good person. And you might do some good things that you can use to argue otherwise. But by now, the situation is undeniable: MAGA is moral poison, a toxic delusion based on lies, used to hurt people, dependent on the aforementioned willful ignorance. There's no reason that shouldn't be said, loud and clear and often.

'Oh noooooooo!'

     Harry Weese was a great Chicago architect whose love of triangles has already been dissected here on EGD — his two most significant Chicago buildings are the SwissHotel, an equilateral triangle at 323 E. Wacker, and the Metropolitan Correction Center, an isosceles right triangle at 71 W. Van Buren. 
     His other downtown building, the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, 55 E. Wacker Drive, is certainly not a triangle. More of a, well, I'm tempted to take inspiration from my colleague Lee Bey calling the new entrance to the Museum of Science and Industry a "carbuncle" and label it a "boil." Round in a bad way. He should have stuck to triangles.
     Which is ironic, because Weese's true masterwork is also not a triangle. Nor is it in Chicago, In fact, it's not a building at all, but the Washington DC Metro, whose vast, vaulted poured concrete interiors were designed by Weese. I feel a burst of Chicago pride every time I travel through them, such as a recent visit to Washington to meet Grandbabe #3. 

    I figure, at least a few readers don't know about this, and might appreciate being informed.
    The visit, I'm pleased to report, went very well. Grandbabe #1, now 16 months, seemed to remember me, or at least took to an older gent who did nothing but to read to her and tell her stories and dance and sing and whatever else she cared to do. 

      We spent a good amount of time stacking colorful boxes and then knocking them over, which I pretended was a shocking event — I put my hands on my ears, elbows out, stared wildly, and uttered a boggled, "Oh nooooooooo!" — a good-natured mix of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and Macaulay Culkin's hands-to-cheeks dismay gesture in "Home Alone." She would mimic the expression, to my delight, pressing her hands to her ears.  It soon became the payoff of the stacking process, and we would press our hands on our ears and beam at each other in mutual admiration, truly happy to be sharing this secret, this incredible witty spin we had invented. 
    The other noteworthy moment came when, suddenly at a loss for a story or song, I noticed her toes and went for the traditional. "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef..."
    At that point, for the fourth little piggy, some long-dormant neuron fired and I said, "this little piggy had LESS roast beef than the previous piggy, but still enough roast beef to meet his nutritional needs."
   Where did THAT comes from? All I can think is that my wife, who is nothing if not kind hearted, felt bad for the hungry little piggy, denied roast beef, even though it only existed in myth, and decided to give the poor notional swine some cold cuts. Or it could have been me, making fun of her kind-heartedness. 
     Anyway, part of effective parenting (or, I suppose, grand-parenting) is keeping the process interesting for both yourself and your charges, and this door opening for the fourth toe, formally called the digitus quartus pedis (Latin for "fourth toe") or the "ring toe," to correspond with ring finger, has kept me creatively engaged. 
     "This little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy COULD have had roast beef but, being a vegetarian, opted for a chive cake instead...")
      A chive cake being an actual foodstuff that I watched this girl knock back at a Laotian restaurant. You learn a lot in this grandparent business, if you do it right.  

Two thumbs down

Rendering of proposed Siskel and Ebert statue 

    

     My first thought: there already IS a bad statue of Roger Ebert, down in Champaign. Do we really need another? As for Gene Siskel, well, best to draw the veil.  

     To be located on private property, so they're of course free to do whatever they like. And this is in the fine tradition of godawful tourist trap TV tributes, bronzes monstrosities of the Fonz and Bob Newhart and whomever. Just as postage stamps never again are the honors they once were before Thin and Fat Elvis, so bronze statues long ago sank from equestrian honors bestowed upon heroes to metallic essays in fatuousness. This is not to take anything away from Roger Ebert, whom I knew and admired deeply. But he already has his deathless tribute: his words.
     The thing is unveiled in 2028, and I'll probably never see it — most people won't, there being no compelling reason to step foot in Prudential Plaza. I guess this is supposed to draw them there.
      Will it? Have you ever gone anywhere in Chicago to look at a statue? I mean, I'll pause passing the Kup statue on Wacker Drive — quite a good, stylized work that has some of the panache the man himself possessed — maybe clap a comforting hand on his foot and say, "Oh Kup, you wouldn't recognize the place." But I wouldn't cross the street to do it.

 

A-line dress

     I went to the Obama Presidential Center Museum on Monday, for an interview and to accompany my sister, visiting from Texas — it was the one place in Chicago she asked to see. I just was there in June, so didn't give the place the most careful once over. 

   However, we did pause in front of the display of the First Lady's couture — I thought Debbie might like it — and noticed something I'd missed before. This sleeveless A-line dress that Michelle Obama wore on vacation a few times while her husband was president. What makes it noteworthy is not the designer, but where it was purchased: Target. The dress cost less than $40, and she wore it between 20o9 and 2013.
     It seemed to symbolize a lot more than a piece of discount clothing. I probably don't need to point out the yawning gap between that sensibility — a celebration of the dignity and worth of ordinary Americans — and the current plutocratic crew in the White House. We are so far from that, with the Oval Office festooned with gilt loving cups and faux gold crap and half the White House being ripped up, it seems, to satisfy whatever shrieking midget dictator-manque is crouched at the back of what's left of Donald Trump's decaying mind, I figured, it might be worth remembering that not so long ago we had a First Lady who wasn't a contemptuous Eastern European courtesan and a president who wasn't an odious liar, bully, fraud and traitor servicing Vladimir Putin and betraying democratic Ukraine along with most closely held American ideals and interests. If you're paying even the scantest attention, you don't need me to explain why this is horrendous. The New York Times editorial page did a good job of that Wednesday. Here's the gist:
     "He is aiding an autocratic leader and dangerous adversary of the United States who is waging a brutal war against a democratic neighbor. Mr. Trump is doing so partly in the faint hope that gas prices, which have jumped because of his reckless war in Iran, will fall over the next two weeks and help Republicans avoid big losses in the midterm elections. He is damaging America’s national interest, and likely sacrificing Ukrainian lives, for his own political interests."

     Not much else worth saying beyond that. I have no idea if the elections are going to help, or if Donald Trump will merely declare himself king while the military seizes control and a third of the country applauds like seals. Whatever happens, we must remember that we weren't always like this — that isn't an opinion, but a fact. And I believe we won't be like this forever. That is an opinion, a hope really, but one that I'm sticking with and sharing because the alternative is just too horrible to contemplate. We will not be like this forever, but oh boy, it sure fucking feels like forever right about now.

Polish poet turns words of Holocaust victims, perpetrators into shards of 'memory activism'

 

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski 

during the war we laid out bodies like wood
but after the war we laid out wood in the forest
like bodies freshly felled.

     Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is not Jewish, but reads his poetry like an Orthodox Jew praying, bending at the waist, rocking forward and back.

I went with my child to the forest and cried helplessly with him
tears dripped from my eyes and the child wiped them away with his hand
and I so regretted I had brought him into the world

     He’s in a third floor conference room at the University of Chicago, reading to about two dozen people, gathered on Monday morning to hear him.

they didn’t know where to run since it was an open field and they ran in circles
how we laughed
and before we killed them
we even whistled some tunes

     Kwiatkowski is reading — loudly, with little inflection — from his book “Crops,” translated from Polish by Peter Constantine. More a pamphlet than a book: 19 small, hard, stone-like poems over 32 pages.

my father
a decent office worker in the railways
never took part in any of the shootings
he was just doing his job
organizing transports
eastward and westward
north and south
back and forth

     The poems are his, but the words aren’t — he gathered them from taped testimonies, combining victims, perpetrators and bystanders.
     “I didn’t change any of the words,” he says. “But still I’m framing it. I’m choosing the fragments. I’m responsible.”
     I’m here because he sent me “Crops.” I read it in less than 10 minutes, but the book rearranged my brain, providing necessary starkness, a counterpoint that I’ve been missing. Over the years, we’ve seen the Holocaust transformed into entertainment, especially on social media. Once there was one Anne Frank. Now there are 6 million. The Holocaust has been retrofitted into a bracing tale of courage, resistance, and redemption. The Holocaust is not a tale of courage, resistance and redemption. It is an epic of cruelty, obedience and horror.
     Kwiatkowski agrees.
    “Most art about the Holocaust is kitsch,” he says.
     Kwiatkowski gathers words, but doesn’t mince them, which makes him a controversial figure in Poland, where depictions of the Holocaust that don’t relentlessly depict the Poles as either victims or heroes are highly unwelcome. The Polish government once demanded that the Sun-Times take down a column of mine suggesting otherwise and, when the paper refused, we were sued. We won, because this is America. Whether it stays America...

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Quite radiant

     Any Sunday worth the name should include time spent sprawled on the sofa with the Sunday papers. 

     But this Sunday saw a house full of family, here to see my sister. My brother and his wife stopped by bearing a shopping bag filled with peppers from their garden. My son and daughter-in-law brought their dog Virginia and my grandson. My wife grilled up an excellent flank steak, the baby was passed around and admired, and a good time was had by all. 

     So the papers didn't get read. Nothing is perfect. When Monday morning I found myself going to Hyde Park again — second time this week, to the University of Chicago, something you'll read about tomorrow — I grabbed the Times Book Review to read on the train. I figured, the news could wait. 
     The section included A.O. Scott's review of "The Radiance," by Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Scott calls the book "autofiction," a term I hadn't heard before — not stories about cars, but a fiction/nonfiction blend about "a man named Ayad, who shares many traits with the real-world Akhtar."       

     While Scott couldn't quite tell what he was reading — "Is this a campus comedy? A novel of ideas" A medical mystery? A spiritual quest narrative?" — the bottom line is, he liked it. "Whatever this book is, it's alive."
     But that's not why I'm sharing this with you. The campus section draws this description. "Ayad's class is stocked with the kind of overmedicated, trauma-curious, identity-obsessed youngsters who have figured in countless op-eds and magazines stories over the past couple of decades. The fluctuating power dynamic between them and their instructors, and the overall climate of hypersensitivity, ideological conformity and bureaucratic surveillance that hovers over the college, are by now commonplaces of fiction and creative nonfiction alike."

     Scott might read a lot more than I do, so he seems to think these are stock descriptions. To me, they don't seem very commonplace at all — certainly not nearly commonplace enough — and I wanted to share them. Identity-obsessed. Hypersensitivity. Ideological conformity. It is really refreshing to see someone just come out and say it. 

'I look forward to reviewing your proposal and learning more about The Quest for Pie.'

     Scams suck. You don't even have to be taken in by them. Just the fact of their existence. They're so depressing.
     It was such a beautiful fall afternoon Sunday. We took my sister to the Chicago Botanic Garden and just wandered around. The air was fragrant, the light, golden, the colors varied, the crowd, happy.
     Yet I was grimacing, mulling over an email I had gotten the day before. It began:

In Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life, what stands out is the refusal to treat recovery as a simple turning point between a troubled past and a better future. Your account of loving your work and family while remaining attached to alcohol captures the contradictions that make addiction so difficult to confront...

     Do you see the markers of AI in that? The lack of a salutation. Using the full title, including sub-title, of the book. The generic summation of the book's reception — in 2012. I should have just deleted it and kept going. I've received a number of similar book marketing scams before.
     But this wasn't a shill for book marketing. It was, supposedly, from the executive publisher of a London imprint. Another sign. Why would someone that high up be trolling around for mid-list authors? Over the weekend. They wouldn't. I should have just deleted it.
    But hope is a funny thing. I checked online, on the publisher's web site. She was a real person. Only this email wasn't from that person. I was fairly sure of that. The email ended in ".gmail." Another giveaway. I wrote back: 

Thank you for your kind note. There are so many AI scams related to book publishing, I hope you don't mind my asking you a question: how did "Drunkard" come to your attention? Thanks.

       She replied, beginning:

I came across Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life on Amazon, and I was drawn to the candour and perceptiveness with which you examine addiction, recovery, and their effects on personal and family life.

     The "u" in candour was good. English spelling. But again, the subtitle. Still — and here I did the part I'm embarrassed about — I took 10 or 15 minutes and composed an email about where my career is right now, and what project I'd like to see published: the unpublished memoir I wrote about going out West with my boys, "The Quest for Pie." That means a lot to me. I sent the email Sunday morning. She wrote back immediately.
     Another tip-off. What publisher is writing to anybody Sunday morning? Or Sunday evening, assuming she's in England? Which she — if it's a "she" — is not. Things move slow in publishing.
     I'll spare you the rest. We went back and forth a bit. I made it clear I'm not paying for anything. "There are two things a man should never pay for," I wrote. "One of them is editorial direction." She said that is fine. 
     But as I walked around the garden, I realized. "This isn't real. This is someone in Ghana using AI to mimic an editor." I should have known that. I did know that. Yet proceeded anyway, on the slimmest, most pathetic hope. What really bothered me, I think, is that I couldn't figure out what the scam is. Maybe this is like a romance scam, only targeting authors. We'd go over the book for six months and then she'd spring the trap. 

     That might have been what really saddened me. The knowledge that this is our future, being forced to decide, again and again, if something is real, is human, or just another attempted rip-off, a little better disguised than previous attempts. Email has become a street jammed with pick-pockets and muggers, with fewer and fewer actual pedestrians in between. The ability to see through this, to decide who's who, to determine if something is the work of humans, or not, is going to be increasingly important. And exhausting. My gut told me: this isn't right. Listen to your gut. And to experience. 

     The lesson of experience is clear. In 34 years since my first book came out from St. Martin's, no publisher has ever reached out to me with this kind of query. Never. When something has never happened before, the odds that it is happening now go way, way down. Truth might be a hard road, but allow yourself to stray from it and you quickly go into the bog. I wrote back, and said what we need to do is set up a Zoom call to discuss this further. I assumed that will be the end of it.

   Not quite. When I got that first email on Saturday, I did, immediately write to the publishing house itself, an interesting group called Bookouture, to see if their executive had indeed written to me. I'm not a complete fool. They wrote back early Monday:

Good afternoon Neil,
Thanks for getting in touch. We are aware of emails currently circulating that are impersonating our editorial staff, and our cyber team is investigating this issue. Please be advised that the email you received was not sent from Ruth, or anyone at Bookouture – we would suggest reporting the message and blocking the sender.
Thanks so much again for alerting us.

Best regards,
The Admin Team

    Well, there you have it.  

    

 

Illinois is the Land of Lincoln, the Prairie State and… America’s Pumpkin Capital. Here's why.

John Ackerman, in a pumpkin field in Morton, Illinois.

     This story began in mid-August, when the Chicago Teachers Union sued the Illinois Policy Institute for being critical of them. In looking at the IPI web site, I noticed a story on how Illinois is head-and-shoulders the top pumpkin producing state in the nation. My column on the lawsuit mentioned pumpkins, but didn't answer the question: why Illinois? Why not Iowa or Indiana? The answer is easy — because Libby's is here. But my hunch was there was more here, that if I dug a little, my efforts would be rewarded, and I believe I was right. 

     A pumpkin seed weighs about 1/100th of an ounce, when planted in April. By late September, through an unappreciated conspiracy of miracles: the balm of time, the embrace of Midwest weather, the kiss of rich soil and the careful application of husbandry — fertilizer spread, pests thwarted — managed by Illinois farmers, some who have been at this for generations, that little oval the size of a fingernail can increase in size 18,000 times, into a 12-pound pumpkin, ready for picking.

     “There are days, when the conditions are right, I’m pretty sure I can hear them grow,” says John H. Ackerman, a fourth-generation farmer in downstate Morton, which, about two hours southwest of Chicago, is the self-proclaimed pumpkin capital of the world.
   Morton seized the title, though Illinois could easily dub itself “Pumpkin Heaven.” It must be because the state grows so many of the distinctive orange fruit, the icon of the fall season. (Botanically, a pumpkin is a fruit because it contains seeds and grows from a pollinated flower, though cooks treat it as a vegetable, for its savory qualities.)
     Fruit or vegetable, or both, in 2025, our state grew 535 million pounds of pumpkin, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than the next four top pumpkin-growing states — California, Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — combined.
     Why? What makes Illinois so pumpkin-friendly?
     “The region offers the optimal combination of soil composition, climate and geography, with about 120 days of summer heat, warm nights and moderate rainfall that create great growing conditions,” says Jacqueline Jimenez, senior director, brand marketing, culinary and confectionery for Nestle, the owner of Libby’s, which has an enormous pureed-pumpkin processing plant in Morton.
      “However, what sets the region apart is our deep roots here, including not only our factory but our multi-generational partnerships with the local farmers who grow our Libby’s pumpkins. Some of these farming families have grown Libby’s pumpkins for 60 years. We know them by name, and they understand this land and climate in a way that’s irreplaceable.”
     More than soil or climate, the presence of the Libby’s canning operation in Morton is responsible for Illinois’ pumpkin preeminence. About 90% of the canned pumpkin produced in the United States is grown within a 60-mile radius of Morton. And most of that goes to Libby’s, though there also is another cannery, Seneca Foods, in Princeville, about 33 miles away.

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And those XXS are going fast...

 

   

     I settled into bed with the this week's New Yorker, admired the front cover, glanced at the back and paused, puzzled, then looked closer for a more careful examination. There was something odd about the photo. Not your standard fashion shot — a smiling woman, maybe a bit more crinkled around the eyes, with deeper crow's feet, than is usual. Is that it? Her hair, a sort of ginger pink, with a few loose strands flying off. Normal, rather than high-style. Wearing a white t-shirt that took up a third of the page. No text, except a faint pair of scribbled words, "The Row," written in the upper right hand corner.

     "I don't even know what this is an ad for," I told my wife, listing my first three guesses: 1) the shirt; 2) her teeth ("The Row") 3) some TV show.
     Choice #1.
     The Row is a $1 billion luxury fashion house, founded in 2005 by former tween movie stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (long-time readers might remember my April 1, 2019 post confessing to producing their first three movies).
     I found The Row web site, and see the all-cotton white t-shirt that I think is depicted costs $550. It comes in XXS, XS, S, M, L and XL.
     I'd never heard the term XXS and, wondering who it is intended for, checked out the "Size Guide" and see it corresponds to a 22 inch waist, which is the average waist size of an 8-year-old child. Golly.
     Funny. I'd actually purchased a t-shirt for myself this week. My wife was putting in an order at Land's End, and asked if I wanted anything. I do wear their t-shirts, so looked at the colors and, throwing caution to the wind, bought one in a sky blue, thinking I could pair it with a light blue L.L. Bean summer shirt that is a particular favorite. On sale, it was $17.
     Later in the evening, I had second thoughts — I really have enough t-shirts to last me the rest of my life — and asked my wife if she could perhaps cancel her order, or somehow strike my shirt from it. Why load up on t-shirts? My wife, used to this, said no, she couldn't, and if I didn't want the shirt, she would give it to Goodwill. I said I would make room for it, somehow.
     $550 for a white cotton t-shirt. And the kicker is, five of the six sizes are already sold out, with XXS no doubt going fast.

An open letter to Pope Leo XIV on cancer and how to survive it

Debbie Dana

Dear Pope Leo:

     Whenever a friend gets cancer, I usually buy them a copy of “Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors,” by Evan Handler. The actor’s 1996 memoir is an excellent guide to navigating cancer, full of practical tips, such as making sure your nurses wash their hands.
     It’s funny, honest, and best of all — spoiler alert! — Handler survives, to this day.
     While I did consider shipping a copy to Rome, I immediately envisioned the package being tossed into one of dozens of huge canvas-sided rolling postal carts jammed with goodwill offerings: prayer cards and inspirational books and charms from the spectrum of faiths. You’re a popular guy, as I’m sure you already know.
     So I figured, better to drop my advice into this newspaper bottle and toss it into the electronic sea. Perhaps a favorable breeze will nudge it your direction. If not — the sure bet — it might help someone else in a similar position.
     My apologies about giving advice. I have a few rules regarding friends plunged into sickness or misfortune, and Rule No. 1 is: “Don’t try to fix things,” a rule frequently broken. It’s hard to resist trying to help, and handwashing is so important. People forget, and nice guys such as ourselves, we have a hard time greeting a nurse striding into our room with: “Did you wash your hands?”
     I imagine the pope gets first-class treatment, something to be thankful for. Gratitude is key in overcoming travails. My major health troubles have all been mostly mechanical rather than metastatic — spine, hip and now shoulder — which strikes me as far less severe than the Big C. I try to focus on how lucky I am to have access to advanced medical treatment, as opposed to most people in the world, who don’t. Attitude is important.
     “A cheerful heart is good medicine,” says Proverbs. But look who I’m quoting Scripture to. I’m not someone who believes in divine providence. But coincidences happen. Within hours of your lung cancer surgery Tuesday, my older sister, Debbie, arrived from Dallas. I don’t write about Debbie much, because she’s usually deep in the heart of Texas, arm wrestling the Angel of Death. But she’s here now, visiting, and as a true cancer warrior — she’s had three kinds over the last 14 years — I asked her for any wisdom she might share with a newbie such as yourself.

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Me and Debbie, circa 1963

   
 

'Look at Miss Ohio'

 

Berea, Ohio

 

    At the start of my morning stretches — have to push this rotator cuff repair back to normalacy — I called up Apple music on my iPhone where I'd left off last night, at Gillian Welch singing "Look at Miss Ohio." Usually I'd progress to the next song; instead I backtracked to the beginning:

Oh me oh my oh

Look at Miss Ohio
She’s a-running around with her ragtop down
She says "I wanna do right, but not right now"

     Not sure what the song is about, exactly, but the terminology evokes the Ohio I remember, with beauty queens and tiaras, fun times and convertibles. I actually went out, once, with a high school classmate who had a red 1965 Mustang convertible — her father's, I assume. I remember the car well; the date, not so much.
     I'm a sucker for Ohio songs, which are distinct from Cleveland songs, like Ian Hunter's "Cleveland Rocks," — pressed into service as the theme song for the Drew Carey show, with its joyful burst into downtown, though they, sadly, cheaped out when it came to paying rights for the vastly superior original and hired an imitator.

     Ohio songs, like the state itself, are good but idiosyncratic, both stuck in certain eras and timeless, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's classic protest ,"Ohio," 
      Lately, like "Look at Miss Ohio," Ohio tunes are vaguer, less defined. The National's "Blood Buzz Ohio" has a weird, somber quality to it over driving drums.

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I never married, but Ohio don't remember me

     I like bees, and Ohio certainly doesn't remember me. As for marriage, well, you can't relate to everything. Though looking at the video, the song seems to be about the miserable trudge of active alcoholism, which might explain its appeal to me. 
     Chrissie Hynde feels like she deserves a category of her own, with many references to her hometown of Akron, and "My City Was Gone," her classic spin on Thomas Wolfe's edict about the impossibility of going home.

 I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone
 There was no train station
 There was no downtown

     As with Chicago, "Cuyahoga" is a Native-American word that started out describing a body of water — it means "crooked river" in a language thought to be Mohawk — and then gets attached to the place around it, now the name of both the county containing Cleveland, and the river that runs through it. I never listened hard to R.E.M.'s "Cuyahoga" beyond its nostalgic tone. 

This is where we walked
This is where we swam
Take a picture here
Take a souvenir

       The line that touches me now, seeing that my home state has slid into MAGAland, is "Let's put our heads together/And start a new country up." Someone has to.
     Just being about Ohio isn't enough to save a song. Patty Griffin's "Ohio" is a droning dirge. Not even the talents of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant are able to save it.
     There's only one way to end this. I wouldn't be here without Ohio State University, where my parents met in 1954. "The Buckeye Battle Cry" might not touch on the University of Michigan fight song, "The Victors," but it's the best we've got, and it'll have to do. "Our honor defend/We fight to the end." That sounds like a plan.

Downtown, Berea

Trump weighs a public execution, which once elicited delight — and revulsion

     A reader writes, aghast at government plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army major who murdered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009.
     “I am so upset, so disgusted and in disbelief,” she says. “What has happened to this country?”
     I want to sympathize, but can’
     “Disbelief?” I reply. “Really? You are paying attention, right? This is very on brand for them.”
     Between condemning children in Africa to death by denying food — and now vaccines — to shooting Americans in the street for failing to comply promptly to the orders of masked men, to the certain atrocities going on out of sight in windowless ICE prisons nationwide, the idea of the government beginning to ballyhoo their horrors has a certain appeal. At least we’ll be able to witness this one. And unlike most victims of official violence, Hasan bears undeniable guilt.
     I’m generally against the death penalty, because it is so misapplied, racially and economically. But I’m willing to make exceptions — I’m glad Timothy McVeigh is not still around, writing manifestos, enjoying cheeseburgers and watching Netflix in his cell. Hasan falls into that category.
     Which doesn’t mean his death should be served up as public entertainment? Or should it?
     We’ve fallen out of practice watching public executions. To get myself in the spirit, I pulled down a collection of William Makepeace Thackeray’s journalism and reread “Going to See a Man Hanged.”
     Writing in 1840, the future author of “Vanity Fair” spends pages setting the scene — his sleepless night before friends arrive in a carriage at 3 a.m., imagining the final hours of “the poor wretch” awaiting execution. The gallows set up in the street before Newgate Prison; the sight sends “a kind of dumb electric shock” through Thackeray. The “gentle and good humored” crowd of 40,000 — Charles Dickens is also there. The cursing ragamuffins and teenage prostitutes, “giggling, drinking, and romping.” The jokes, the rumors, the catcalls.
     The condemned man, François Courvoisier, a Swiss valet who slit the throat of his employer, regards the crowd with “a wild, imploring look. His mouth, contracted into a sort of pitiful smile.”

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Cornell: 'Where Men of Muscle Win Their Way'

Grove Street Cemetery Gatehouse, New Haven, Connecticut

 

     When I was a freshman at Northwestern, I kept a wooden paddle in my dorm room window with the image of a knight in armor holding his thumb to his nose and waggling his fingers along with the letters, "GDI," a parody of fraternity names, standing for "God Damn Independent." 
     I was mystified by frats, found their members, by and large, bullies and boors, and resented that they occupied the apex of social life at NU, enjoying the best housing, a series of ivied, lead-glasses structures along Sheridan Road, while I lived in the NU Apartments, a retrofitted apartment building, gigantic and grim, turned into a 600 person dorm that wasn't even on the college campus, but in downtown Evanston.
     So my reaction to events like the alleged Cornell gang rape that have been pinballing around the media for weeks would be a "What did you expect?" — except that might be seen as insufficient ire in the freefire zone of moral outrage that broke out over this event. Better to stay quiet than to put my hand into that thresher.
     All I can add is there must be something about Cornell. While having a generally positive effect on American culture — the design of Campbell's soup cans are based on Cornell's colors — when they are bad, they are very very bad.
     While my 1992 pranks book, "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow" limited itself to thoughtful, clever pranks, there was one so historically significant and awful I felt obligated to include it, in a box:

     The Chlorine Banquet.

     The most notorious prank of the 19th century was the infamous "Chlorine Banquet" of Cornell University. It was the height of interclass warfare, and though the class of '98 had tried to keep their February 20, 1894 banquet a secret, word leaked out, and the location was discovered ahead of time. By the time, the freshmen, protected by a vanguard of 30 juniors, arrived at the Masonic Hall where the banquet was to be held, the street was filled with sophomores "ready to pounce upon them and use every endeavor… to spoil the freshmen's evening," according to the next day's New York Times. Though the entire Ithaca police force was at hand, a riot ensued as the freshmen tried to enter the building, "faces were punched, hats smashed, and there was a general melee, in which the officers were tossed about like chaff." The freshmen eventually gained entrance to the Hall, and the banquet went ahead, graced by such talks as "Our Noble Selves" and "Where Men of Muscle Win their Way."

     Shortly after 11 p.m., an overpowering odor began to permeate a room that was being used as a kitchen by the caterer. Several waiters and two juniors who went to investigate, were overcome by fumes and had to be taken outside. The cook, Henrietta Jackson, died. Contrary to early lurid times reports, which  fantabulized two dozen freshmen were rushed outside at the point of death, the banquet proceeded normally, and the freshmen were not informed of what was going on in the kitchen. An investigation showed that someone – presumably a group of sophomores – had intended to pump gas into the banquet hall, but misjudged, and bored holes through the floor of the kitchen instead, piping in chlorine gas they created a large glass jug. There was a huge outcry, and a grand jury met to consider charges against several suspects, who fled the campus. But guilt was never determined, and no one was indicted. The negative publicity surrounding the Chlorine Banquet did not prevent foolish students at other universities from replicating Cornell's mistakes. At Montreal's McGill University, in March 1907, sophomores doused the lights at a freshman concert and poured ammonia down the ventilation shafts. Several freshmen were burned, and some nearly blinded.

   This might seem irrelevant trivia, unrelated to the current situation at Cornell, so I will highlight two key similarities — first, a legal investigation went nowhere and, second, it happened again at other schools. 

 

Flashback 1998: A Rush campaign for mayor would have familiar, hollow ring

     Occasionally I will meet someone who expressses surprise — so I'm still working? As a columnist? At the Sun-Times? A fact they might know if they read newspapers, or got information that wasn't delivered by some earnest talking head on TikTok speaking urgently into a camera, spin they're expected to believe because, well, just because.

      Sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. Reading Frank Main's Sunday piece about Wallace "Gator" Bradley's latest hustle, my first thought was, "He's still around?" This guy has been coming in and out of my orbit for over 30 years, using his long ago gang affiliation to make a buck. 

     Looking back over his various appearances in the column, I noticed this, perhaps of interest now that Chicago is facing yet another mayor's race that is still a gathering of the hopeful and the eccentric and the deeply unqualified. Twas ever so.

    William Beavers, the famously self-described "hog with the big nuts," died in 2024. Bobby Rush retired in 2023 and turns 80 next month. There is one word I use that I would never use today — considered racist by those keen to find racism. After the piece, I'll tell you what it was.

     While I don't want to embarrass Ald. William Beavers by suggesting that he and I think alike, news of U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush's possible run for the mayor's office apparently sent our minds skipping down the same path.

Bobby Rush

    "It'll be Joe Gardner all over again," said Beavers, using a two-word code phrase meaning: doomed from the start.
     I, too, couldn't help but reflect on the late commissioner of the Water Reclamation District. He set the mold for quixotic, stillborn mayoral campaigns, a pattern that I can't help but imagine Rush will fall into; another fanciful quest designed to play to a select constituency rather than the kind of broad-based consensus-building that might have a chance of success against the popular and powerful Mayor Daley.
     Perhaps you don't recall the thud with which Gardner debuted his campaign. I happened to be at the big send-off picnic, four years ago, when he tossed his hat into the ring.
     It was not the sort of gathering one forgets easily.
     My first instinct was happiness. Daley struck me at the time as a desperate, entrenched underachiever with a dangerous itch to tie the city's hopes to casino gambling. Here was this Gardner fellow — pleasant, articulate, a comforting visage in round eyeglasses. Perhaps he would be just the right man to send Daley packing. Shake things up. Harold redux.
     And even if he wasn't, he seemed primed to put up a good fight. Nobody wants to have a ruler-for-life. It makes for careless, sloppy leaders. A strong opposition keeps the pols on their toes. At least the garbage gets picked up regularly.
     That warm and fuzzy feeling of hope lasted about a minute. And then I started to notice something strange about the crowd. They seemed a lot more hostile than you would expect from a campaign kick-off crowd, which is normally a pretty cheery bunch. A lot of young, angry guys milling around. I commented to a savvy photographer that I didn't realize so many young men in baseball caps and oversized pants took such a passionate interest in politics.
     "They're Gangster Disciples," the photographer said. While I didn't check for membership cards, it certainly seemed to me that Gardner was padding his crowd with gang members.
     And sure enough, there on stage, right next to Gardner, was the mother hen himself, Wallace "Gator" Bradley.
     Oh dear, I thought. This won't play well at all in Beverly.
     Afterward, at the news conference, I asked Gardner if he would be making a policy of actively seeking the support of Chicago's street gangs.
     He said: "I don't separate people on the basis of gang membership or non-gang membership as long as members and leadership are engaged in positive things."
     He went on to rhapsodize the high-minded civic goodness generated by the much-maligned street gangs, but it was drowned out by the sound of voters turning their backs on Gardner and embracing the mayor. Gardner got creamed.
     I can't say I expect Bobby Rush to do much better. Like Gardner, he pretends to be reaching out to the entire city, when in fact he is mugging for the folks back in the district. Rush has a track record of saying literally anything he thinks will cause a stir, and his recent claim to that he is a "coalition builder extraordinaire" shows that his grasp on reality has not particularly tightened.
     I have yet to see any individual come out strongly supporting Rush, never mind a "coalition" of individuals. Jesse Jackson Jr. spun a victory scenario for Rush that was so tentative and qualified that it might well have included an election-eve revelation that Daley was sneaking out at night to fan dance at the Baton nightclub.
     I'll share my favorite Bobby Rush memory. It was a cold Sunday, and he was holding a news conference outside City Hall. I can't recall what election it was, but Rush was accusing the mayor of forcing city workers to go around in his district and threaten voters to cast their ballots a certain way.
     It was such a wild claim that I couldn't quite believe he was making it. I kept running it by him in different wordings, to see if he still maintained it. "Let me get this straight," I'd say. "Mayor Daley is blackmailing city workers to go door-to-door, on city time, and threaten your constituents, in their own homes, that they'll lose their public services if they don't vote the way he wants?"
     It was a ludicrous charge, but he stuck by it. I kept pressing him; would he go to the state's attorney? Would he protect those constituents brave enough to come forward and testify? There had to be at least four crimes going on here.
     Only slowly did it dawn on me. Bobby Rush wasn't going to the state's attorney. He didn't even believe his own rhetoric. It was just some election-year spoodle he was spinning for, well, for reasons known only to himself. To please the fringe he is out to impress.
     He's still at it.

          — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 19, 1998

    I called Gardner "articulate" which is read by some as the racism of low expectations. "You mean Black people aren't articulate?" It's a stretch, in my book, though I wouldn't use it today, just to avoid possible hassle, leading to the unfortunate outcome that whites can safely be described as articulate while Black folks can't. Which doesn't sound right to me.