Flashback 1992: Dated books tell tale of schools' fiscal woes

From "The World is Round," by  Rose Wyler (Grosset & Dunlap: 1937)

 

    You need to keep your eyes open in this job. Because one story leads to another. When I reposted the 1988 investigation into the bad shape many students were in when they presented themselves to kindergarten at Chicago Public Schools, another memory stirred. Don Hayner and I had to go around to schools and collect — or drop off, I don't recall — questionnaires. Sometimes we had to wait, and we'd do our waiting in the school libraries. Naturally, I browsed the books, in those pre-Internet years. And perhaps unsurprisingly, was aghast at just how out-of-date and shabby they were. Four years later, I dropped this. This isn't a column — I wouldn't get one for almost another four years. What surprises me, reading it now, is how I downplayed the rather significant news — that schools were holding onto outdated books and loaning books to each other to fool federal regulators, and that companies were reluctant to deal with CPS because they were so slow to pay. To me, that wasn't as interesting as the musty information being forced on children. Say what you will about the Internet, at least the reading isn't generally 20 or 30 years out-of-date.

     Of course, this story could not be written today because there wouldn't be librarians to talk to. Over the past three decades, investment in libraries at CPS has cratered, and only about 15 percent of Chicago's public schools employ a librarian. Though now that I think of it, talking to the remnant might yield interesting results. One story leads to another.

"Meanwhile the savages — or Indians, as Columbus miscalled them — were gathering rapidly in the protective jungle; a thousand or more . . . the savages chattered like sea-fowl, offering to barter their cotton for any trinkets, however cheap; but the admiral would accept only gold."
      — From The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Armstrong Sperry (1950)

     You can actually see the high-water mark of Chicago education: the line where a surge of money and students pushed schools to their zenith, flushing them with resources and promise, before breaking and rolling back.
     Just step into any public school's library and look at the books.
     The collections are filled with volumes bought during those heady times: science books stockpiled in the post-Sputnik rush to embrace technology; sports books purchased with plentiful federal dollars in the 1960s.
     They are old now, worn and out-of-date. Those that deal with any sort of technical subject are woefully behind the times.
     "If you live in a large city, you have probably seen big buildings with computers in them," speculates a 1972 volume on the shelves of one elementary school.
     Those that deal with history, like the Columbus volume, often view it through an outmoded lens, blurry with bias: "The largest number of today's newcomers has been the blacks," muses Chicago and Its People, a 1972 volume that lumps together blacks, Appalachians and Latin American immigrants.
     Yet schools are forced to keep antiquated books on the shelves because there is no money to buy new ones.
     "If you start pulling all those (outdated) books off the shelf, you are not going to have anything," said Ann Tanner, a librarian at Lane Technical High School, 2501 W. Addison.
     "I'd love to get more books," said Caroline Whalen, librarian at Louisa May Alcott Elementary School, 2526 N. Orchard. She estimates she would need double her budget to replace books such as Baseball's Greatest Pitchers, whose "Heroes of Today" section lauds Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson and Denny McLain.
     "Kids love new books," said librarian Glenish W. Gillespie, of Michele Clark Middle School, 5101 W. Harrison. "Some of them won't look at an old book unless they are highly motivated."
     But at Michele Clark, the biography of Henry Aaron stops with the slugger hitting his 504th home run. A book titled Desert War refers not to the one in the Persian Gulf, but the one in North Africa against Rommel. The two copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm looked unused.
     It is no different at other schools. The volumes of the Best Plays series on the shelves at Amundsen High School, 5110 N. Damen, begin in 1899 and end, abruptly, in 1961.
     A look on the sports shelves at one school is a step into not only another era but another city: It's Good to be Alive, by Roy Campanella, Koufax, by Sandy Koufax, and a history of Walt Alston and his Dodgers crowd one shelf.
     Five different books about space can be pulled off the shelves at Lane Tech without finding one recent enough to include any of the Apollo moon landings.

   "But to go to the moon with a manned ship is something that cannot be done unless we have the space station first." 

     — From Rockets, Satellites and Space Flight, edited by Willy Ley (1958).

     Despite the problems they cause — librarians must routinely steer students toward newer reference books and caution them to always check copyright dates — outdated books are a valuable commodity.
     To keep certification, vital for its students applying to colleges, a school library needs a certain number of books per student.
     After Kelvyn Park High School "got rid of the junk" in its collection several years ago, the librarian had no new books to replace them. She found herself forced to put in a desperate call to nearby schools, begging them to quickly send over any obsolete books in storage to line Kelvyn's shelves before a certification inspection.
      Kelvyn got the books.
     The reason Kelvyn weeded out its surplus had less to do with keeping an up-to-date collection than with another common library problem.
     "Our library is totally inadequate in terms of space," said Patricia Hanlon, Kelvyn librarian. "It's so crowded that, every time we get a new book, we have to decide what we are going to throw out."
     At least one librarian keeps old books because they have a certain weight — literally. At one end of the Michele Clark library, scores of identical copies of beat-up textbooks are used to weigh down the freestanding metal shelves, which the librarian fears might otherwise topple over.

   "The company did not employ negroes in the factory. But they were hired to clean the streets, to work around the mill yard, and for other menial tasks." 

     — From The Way Our People Lived: An Intimate American History, by W. E. Woodward (1945)

     This isn't to say old books are necessarily bad. Librarians point out that most classic fiction does not go out of date, and some older biographies are superior to their newer counterparts.
     "Sometimes they're very good," said Frances Szymanski, librarian at Amundsen. "I have found many of the newer books are not well-written but are geared for a lower-level of reading. When you want an in-depth study of a person, what you want is an older book."
     Szymanski proudly points to recent additions — a beautiful 16-volume Spanish atlas, Gran Atlas Salvat; the Reference Library of Black America; the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. But they are not enough.
     "I would greatly increase the number of duplicates in fiction," she said, when asked how she would improve her library if given more funds.
     If anything, the problem will get worse before it gets better. The book budget is often the first thing to get axed — most high schools had their library budgets cut by a third this year.
     "Don't be taken in," said Tanner, gesturing around the three-story library at Lane Tech, with its wood carvings and murals of Native Americans. "Yes, it is a lovely room, very beautifully appointed. But for a school this size, the library is woefully small."
     Tanner said her library has so many pressing needs that new books aren't even the same priority as, for instance, improved security.
     "Maybe my focus isn't on new books because so many of our good books walk that it gets depressing," said Tanner.
     Even when schools have the appropriations to buy new books, they often are held up because of the school system's budgetary procedures, she said.
     "Companies do not want the business of the Chicago public schools because payment is so slow," said Tanner, adding that companies hold books back every year because of board debts. "I call them and they say, `Yes, Mrs. Tanner, we've got your order, but we're waiting for the board to pay its bills.' "
     Sometimes just finding time to order books is a challenge.
     "School librarians have virtually no time to prepare book orders," said Hanlon.
     And Szymanski added: "We would like to remove, perhaps, more old books, if we had the staff and if we had replacements. But we're just not getting the kinds of funds we need. So we just keep taping them."
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 1992

MY world is oh-so special....

     Lunch Saturday was at Dolce Arte, a bright and airy Italian restaurant at 3622 S. Morgan in Bridgeport, attached to an enormous art gallery space. My meatball sandwich was just so-so, but the pastries we shared were first rate. Afterward, we poked around, looking at the enormous photographs of David Yarrow — I liked his shots of animals; less so, the staged tableaus of Wild West models and wolves on LaSalle Street. The prints cost over $40,000 apiece, so somebody must covet them.
     Above one door was the sign at top. Not sure if it was an artwork or mere decoration. Moreover, I'm curious as to whether what stopped me, reading it, will also stop you. "My world is full of possibilities."
     What's your reaction to that? I instantly, well, not took offense, but found fault. It seemed needlessly reductive. I'd have gone with "The world is full of possibilities." There is a stench of ego to "My world is full of possibilities." My immediate reaction was along the lines of, "Fuck you, buddy, everybody's world is full of possibilities. Whether they act on them or not is another matter...."
     Am I wrong here? Maybe I was feeling unusually touchy. I'm still sleeping in a chair in the TV room. But it reminded me of the taint of ego, how it can poison an otherwise positive thought. Of course, there's a lot of that going around.

Maybe adults should follow students in setting down our phones

 

     My high school had a smoking lounge. But don't let the term "lounge" fool you. There were no comfy chairs, no billiard table, not even any walls. It was outside, behind the school, a weedy area where students would gather before, after, and I imagine, during class to get their nicotine fix.
     This was in the late ’70s. And if today it seems wildly inappropriate that a public school would facilitate smoking among teenagers, remember, back then smoking was considered nearly a human right, and there was a problem they were trying to address: smoke-filled restrooms. At least the lounge got smokers outside where they wouldn't impose their vice upon others.
     Memories of the smoking lounge wafted into mind while I was on medical leave, when Illinois joined 38 states allowing cellphones to be banned during school next year.
     When Illinois first contemplated the ban, I was against it. Phones are part of our lives now, like auxiliary limbs. Schools would do better teaching kids restraint regarding their phones since they will be constant companions after graduation. The focus should be on harm reduction.
     Then I thought about the situation some more, and through a superpower of mine called "changing my mind," decided that the ban is right. It helps that social media has degraded into an odious AI slop sink. Facebook imagines that my being Jewish means I want to view an endless loop of every antisemitic incident anywhere on earth, interspersed with agitprop about Israel, plus trite little tales about the Holocaust, which is being retrofitted into a feel-good story of heroism, resistance and survival.
     Spoiler alert: It wasn't.
     Meanwhile, Instagram served up so many snippets of "The West Wing" that I finally realized I could just watch "The West Wing" on Netflix and cut out the middleman. That's when I thought of smoking in school. We are biased toward the present, and it's hard to imagine things changing. But change they do, and today's necessity becomes tomorrow's puzzling affliction. Someday people gaping at their phones could be viewed with the same disapproval extended toward the miserable knot of co-workers puffing around the office entrance.
     Social media is so harmful to teens, so toxic, schools are right to teach youth there is life outside their screens. And the smoking lounge made me wonder whether high schools might not only be right regarding phones, but a vanguard, pointing society toward where we should all be going, as they were with cigarettes.
     In 1978, when I graduated from high school, the smoking rate among American adults was 36%. Today it is 10%, a triumph over damaging addiction, with countless years of life saved. (Though that might change now that the federal government is getting out of the "help people stay healthy" business.)
     Illinois banned smoking in high schools in 1990. Eighteen years passed before the state got around to banning smoking in restaurants. At the time, it was unimaginable — to not light up after a meal? Calamity. The restaurant industry would die. We journalists were dead set against it — what would a newsroom be if you couldn't grind out your cigarette on the tile floor? (The Sun-Times had its own smoking lounge, a truly repulsive little room that did have chairs, plus an enormous air purifier. I would go there sometimes to smoke a cigar and listen to Art Petacque reminisce about the mob.)

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Flashback 1988: How parents fail in preparing kids for kindergarten

 

     My three grandchildren marinate in adult attention. Love, books, toys. I've watch all four parents in action, up close and over time, and have nothing but admiration. They rock.

      The only problem, as I see it, is that all children aren't given such a leg up in life. 

      Not close. Most stories vanish, but this one has sat in mind for nearly 40 years, and I thought I would post it now, to mark the end of my surgical recovery period and prepare for my first column being published tomorrow. 

      This is a story was written as part of a team producing a series, "The Critical Years." We developed a questionnaire, working with the Board of Education, the Erikson Institute, and Chapin Hall Center for Children at U of C (we did things up right, back in the day) and sent hundreds to Chicago Public School kindergarten teachers, following up with focus group interviews with teachers and parents — I remember sitting in a room at the Robert Taylor Homes, conducting an interview with half a dozen parents, thinking, "We're not in Berea anymore...."  

     As shocking as this story is, in my memory, the reality was worse. Children would show up to kindergarten not knowing their names — they'd know a nickname, "I'm Little T!"  They wouldn't know the primary colors.

    Whenever critics of Chicago Public Schools are slamming CPS for their results, I remember this story and want to pipe up, "But consider where students start at. A lot of these kids are royally screwed from Day One — with the best conceivable education, many would never catch up."

      The news today is hardly better. One in four adults in Cook County is functionally illiterate. The ham-handed slashers of the Trump administration have gutted Headstart and other programs designed to throw a lifeline to such kids. I'd be a little reluctant to share such an old story with you, were I not completely confident we could write the same thing today. Maybe we should. That said, it's quite long — feel free to skim.

    This story ran on the front page, bylined, "By Don Hayner and Neil Steinberg."

     A 5-year-old boy came to kindergarten at Drake Elementary School last year not knowing common words like "doll" and "cat."
     He didn't know how to look at a picture book, or how to do things most children learn "from just being alive," said Judith Bowden, his teacher at Drake, 2722 S. King.
     The boy's mother is illiterate and could not read to him, which Bowden said was a major cause of his school problems.
     More than six of 10 children in city public school kindergartens are not read to by parents, according to teachers responding to a Chicago Sun-Times survey.
     By comparison, nine of 10 kindergartners in Wilmette public schools are read to by their parents, as are 87 percent of middle-and upper-income children attending Chicago public schools. Yet experts say reading aloud to children is crucial to their educational development.
     "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. This is especially so during the preschool years," according to the landmark 1984 report Becoming a Nation of Readers by the Commission on Reading.
     One ongoing study by Linda Meyer, a senior scientist at the nationally recognized Center for the Study of Reading in Champaign, goes even further. Meyer's study suggests that parents reading to their children is not enough. There must be quality reading that involves an exchange of questions and insights between parents and children.
     Teachers surveyed said six of 10 children have parents who do not know how to prepare them educationally for kindergarten. Teachers in Wilmette said only one of 10 children has such parents and slightly more than two of 10 middle- and upper-income Chicago children have parents who don't know how to prepare them.
     Typical survey responses from kindergarten teachers:
     "The children are left to take care of themselves." "Parents don't talk to children or ask them questions." "Nobody worked with these children. Television is their baby-sitter."
     Many Chicago children are far behind when they start school. And while the study indicates parents want to help, it also shows they don't know how.
     Educators, who for a long time looked within the school system for the key to academic improvement, are increasingly looking to parents.
     "It is unlikely that we will be able to make a major difference for the child unless we place equal priority on education and academic remediation for the parent," warned a 1988 Ford Foundation study, Toward a More Perfect Union: Basic Skills, Poor Families and Our Economic Future.
     Once a young child falls behind, he may never catch up, said Burton L. White, director of the Center for Parent Education in Newton, Mass., and author of The First Three Years. He added:
     "The child who is delayed at age 3 when he enters Head Start invariably, with virtually no exceptions, is behind on language. And if he's nine months or more behind on language, the chances are very good he'll never be an average student. Ever. The probability that any Head Start program is going to make him even an average student is very, very low."
     Teachers said some parents don't even talk to their children.
     "Many young parents don't know, for example, that even though a child is not verbal, the mother or father being verbal helps language develop," said Laura Devon, spokeswoman for Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project assisting children at risk.
Besides lacking basic parenting skills or information, parents have some ideas that are just plain wrong.
     "When you think you've heard the worst, something the next day always tops it," said Cheryl Stampley, a nurse working with new parents at the Robert Taylor Homes.
     Often, mothers feel that showing attention to newborns will "spoil" them. Some fathers feel that, until they are 6 months old, babies cannot see. Or hear. Or feel pain.
     A surprising number of parents will not put their children in a crib. They're afraid of crib death, although the crib itself, of course, has nothing to do with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
     A parent does not have to be poor to be overwhelmed with the responsibility of child rearing. Middle-class parents also frequently don't know what children need.
     "As bright as they are, they are totally unprepared (to be parents)," said Pat DeMar, director of a Family Focus drop-in center in Lincoln Park.
While poor parents may lack knowledge, said DeMar, affluent parents, ironically, sometimes have too much.
     "They read numerous books, on child bearing, on child rearing, but they reach a point where they're so well-read they lack security in their own instincts," DeMar said. "I worked at Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor, and I saw better parenting because they felt their instincts were OK."
Without adequate parental involvement, children can be so far behind when they enter school they have great difficulty catching up, even if the school does its job.
      At Terrell Elementary School, 5410 S. State, next to the Robert Taylor Homes, fourth-graders made a year's worth of progress in reading during 1987. Yet they still remained about 1 1/2 years behind the national norm.
     "We have to work twice as hard to get the children half as far," said Terrell Principal Reva Hairston.
     Parents often instill in their children a distaste for school that never goes away.
     One young mother, Kathy Jackson, sees her lack of participation as the cause of her son Robert, 11, having trouble in school.
     "He's not interested in school," said Jackson, "I didn't read to him, I didn't do anything with him. I believe that had a lot to do with it." She said she has begun to read to her younger son, Rodney, who is enrolled in the Dewey Child Parent Center, 638 W. 54th Pl., and that he seems to like school.
     It's futile telling some parents to read to their kids. "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Laura Devon of Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project aiding children at risk.
     Many parents are illiterate. One of every three to four adults in Chicago is functionally illiterate. From 650,000 to 1 million Chicagoans above the age of 16 read below the sixth-grade level. Only one-half of 1 percent of these adults are enrolled in literacy programs, according to the Chicago Literacy Coordinating Center.
Illiteracy itself, though, needn't prevent a parent from enriching a child's early years and helping to foster a desire for learning.
     "Even if you can't read yourself, you can contribute by telling your child anything from fairy tales to stories of your childhood. You create a social event in which the child gets the idea of gaining meaning," said James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development.
     Many parents are themselves children. In 1986, 9,959 children were born to teenage parents in Chicago. If these children were entering Chicago public schools today, they would represent one-third of all kindergartners. Studies show teenage parents are more hostile and punitive to their children. They also don't talk or listen to them as much as older parents do.
      "I was 15 when I had my little girl," said Estasia, a mother in the Beethoven Project, which assists parents in caring for their children. "I had to give up cheerleading. I loved that uniform. She was my responsibility, from the moment I got home from school."
     "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Devon of Ounce of Prevention.
     "Often young parenting increases the incidence of child abuse and neglect. We've seen that in news accounts of the last couple months, where a mom left her baby in a cold garage. Many young moms might think it is OK to leave an infant in that situation for a couple hours."
     More than 10 percent of the babies born in Chicago are also dangerously underweight, according to the Public Health Department. Low birth weight - anything below 5 1/2 pounds - is caused by a range of prenatal factors, from drug abuse to poor nutrition to depression.
     Low birth weight is a factor in 70 percent of Chicago's infant mortalities, and surviving low-weight infants have a greater chance of suffering physical and mental handicaps.
     Most poor parents want the best for their children, according to the Sun-Times study. They just don't know how to get it.
     The survey shows that 65 percent of parents come to school to discuss their children's progress more often than the two times required to pick up report cards.
     "You don't discuss your child's progress unless there is interest," said Ted Sanders, Illinois education superintendent, commenting on that figure.
     And nearly six of 10 try to help their child with homework, according to the study.
     "I've never met a parent who didn't want her child to succeed, but some of them don't know what to do," said Reva Hairston, principal at Terrell for the last 12 years.
     "So much depends on the home life and how much parents do with their children as far as listening and talking to the child," one teacher wrote, echoing a sentiment of many of those surveyed.
     Although a distinct minority, some parents seem to have almost no involvement with their children's education after they start school.
     About 14 percent of children have parents who have never come to school, not even to pick up their children's report cards.
     "Many children raised themselves, and come to school when they feel it's time," said Pam Stevens, director of the Dewey Child Parent Center. "I went to a house on a home visit, and the door was open, the babies walking around, and the parents nowhere to be found."
     Almost one of 10 children is regularly more than 15 minutes late for school, and 15 percent of all children miss more than five days of school a month, according to the Sun-Times study.
     Bowden of the Drake school said she has one child who was absent 51 days and another who was absent 40 days this school year."I think some parents are so overwhelmed with their own problem they can't see, so their priority is self preservation," she said.
     Teachers say many parents don't like to visit schools because it reminds them of their own academic failure.
     "When they come to school, it's because their children are destructive," said Dr. Grace Dawson, principal of Beethoven School. "They come to school for negative, not for positive, reasons."
      While parental involvement will improve a child's chances of school success, increasing that involvement is not easy.
     "It would be nice if we said to parents that involvement is in your child's best interest, and they would do it," said Dewey director Pam Stevens. "But we have to use all kinds of bribes and incentives. We have to persuade. We have to be evangelical. There's a big gap between where we are and where we are supposed to be."
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 29, 1988

The bagel lot

    Tuesday morning found me plunging backward, into the past, looking for the first use of the word "bagel" in the Chicago Record, a short-lived paper of the 1890s, and the Chicago Daily News. 
    The results were not what I expected.
    "Bagel" first shows up as a name, such as a certain Conrad Bagel, waylaid and robbed by five masked men in front of his State Street saloon in 1893. For 40 years it is only a name, plus misreadings of other names like Paget (the tendency of microfilm is for letters to puff up and degrade; optical scanners can have trouble reading them).
     The foodstuff shows up in the 1930s. In 1936, columnist Clark Rodenbach makes a colorful visit to Gold's, a restaurant at 810 W. Roosevelt since 1902. He notes that Sears executive Julius Rosenwald was a patron, Illinois' first Jewish governor, Henry Horner, "drops in when gubernatorial duties permit," as do Jewish celebrities such as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and Groucho Marx.
    Being a journalist, Rodenbach must count as a near-celebrity, because he can't leave without a gift.
    "Before you go," says Moe Rafison, the third generation to run the place, "let me give you a bagel or two."
   Rodenbach feels obligated to explain what he's talking about. "They are roughly of donut form; and, like the rye bread, crispy on the outside and tender within. A great breakfast favorite with show-people after the last show."
     It was interesting to follow the bagel into more general acceptance — though even in the late 1950s, bagels were still being explained (including humorously, such as "a donut made of concrete") not only in a daily newspaper, but apparently among Jews themselves. 
    "Are Lox and Bagel (salmon and rolls) essential to Jewish Survival?" is the topic of a humorous debate held at the K.A.M. synagogue in Hyde Park in 1956, though I hold out hope that the explanation was inserted into the topic for the benefit of the general public.
     What really intrigued me was the use of "bagel" in the classified ads in the 1960s and 1970s.  

       "AUTO sales mgr. 100 cars a mo. If you can run a Bagel Lot." reads one, in 1966. "Floor plan & financing available."
     "SALESMAN BAGEL LOT," reads another, in 1972. "MUST BE EXPERIENCED."
     It didn't seem a term used with the customers themselves, but part of the private lingo of the car lot. "AUTO SALESMAN" a 1976 ad explained, "Need 2 experienced salesmen for high volume 'Bagel Lot'"
     My Wentworth and Flexner "Dictionary of American Slang" had nothing, as did AI. I formed a theory that it would turn out to be the deepest discount cars, pivoting off the "Jews are cheap" calumny. 
     I wasn't far off. In Paul Dickson's "Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms" I found, "bagel: a poorly maintained car, to a person looking at it for trade-in."
     As to why a bagel was a poorly maintained car, for now we'll leave that to the imagination.
      If you are like me, you are wondering what happened to Gold's. At the crossroads of the Jewish ghetto in the 1930s, it was steamrolled along with much of the neighborhood by the University of Illinois campus in the early 1960s. Although as a reminder that being Jewish is to never be too far from calumny, I noticed a brief, laudatory 1931 Daily News description of Gold's uses the word "clean" four times. A moment's reflection and you'll realize why.
    

The crowded house

     There is an old Yiddish tale that goes like this:
     A village man comes to his rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I have a problem — my house is far too small for my growing family, but I can't afford a new one. What should I do?"
     The rabbi looks at the man.
     "Do you have a chicken?" he asks.
     The man is a little confused.
     "Yes," he slowly replies. "I have a chicken."
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Take the chicken into your house to live."
     The next day the man returns.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. Now I have the chicken flapping around, feathers flying, in addition to my children running, my wife scolding. It's even worse!"
     "I see," says the rabbi, stroking his beard. "Do you have a goat?"
     "Yes..." says the man, unhappy where this is going.
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Bring the goat into your house as well."
     The next day the man returns, eyes red.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. But this is even worse: madness — the goat braying all night, chasing the chicken, the children running, my wife complaining. It's a nightmare."
     "I see," says the rabbi. "Do you have a cow...?"
     You see where this is heading. The story can be continued with any number of livestock until the poor man is at his utter wit's end. Then the rabbi instructs him to remove all the animals from the house, and the man returns, grateful and amazed, at how his home situation has been improved.
    "Rabbi you are a true tzaddik, a sage!" he exudes. "There is so much room for everybody."
     The moral, I believe, is that we have it good, but we don't know it, until things go bad for a little while. I had it good, until I had my rotator cuff surgery when ... well, honestly, I still have it good. Yes, the thing hurt like the dickens for ... two days. But the drugs helped. ("So long as I'm in pain," I hissed to my wife, "it's not addiction.") As does physical therapy. And my wife has been a godsend, as always.
     Harder was wearing the sling for 24 hours a day. Not just any sling — with a pillow and its own red ball for me to squeeze — reminding me of the little shovel on my Ariens snowthrower. On my left hand — my dominant hand. For six weeks.
     I became quite good with my right hand. I wrote in my journal, slowly. And learned to dictate copy. Wednesday marked my third week in the sling. Three more to go. But it will come off, eventually, and I will be so happy for a time, joyously thinking of the tale above, along with the line from Psalms that came to mind when I first contemplated the vast amount of time to be spent in the sling: "A thousand years are but a day when it is past." (Checking, the actual quote draws God into the equation: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." I like my remembered version better.

Extra credit: I'm a huge Eugene O'Neill fan, and after I wrote the last paragraph above, I realized there is a slight echo of his greatest play. Any idea?

The final line of "Long Day's Journey into Night" — "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time."

Speaking of private ailments

       Lately, it seems the news has quieted down. The daily Trump disaster? Almost muted, a muffled din far away. The war in Iran, even more absentee than before. The economy, despite everything, chugging along uneventfully. The gathering global warming catastrophe? Routine now.

      Maybe because it is summer; the August slough.
      Then I began to suspect it wasn't the news, so much as me. I had this surgery and have been focused on recovery, sleeping, sort of, in a chair every night. Maybe I'm just not absorbing current events very well. The news is there, but since I'm not writing a column — back on Friday, in theory — I'm not processing it effectively.

Henry David Thoreau
(National Portrait Gallery)

    Which reminded me of my one of my favorite quotes, from Henry David Thoreau, one that I've posted here a couple times, but bears repeating, warning against all who "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere."
     Despite my frequent quoting — seven times, as recently as last year, quite a lot really — I don't recall the context. Had to be "Walden," right?
    Wrong. I plugged the quote into Google, and AI fell flat on its face, as AI will do:
   "AI Overview — Henry David Thoreau used this phrase in a letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, written on December 5, 1856." 
     Bold-face be damned, when I went to look at the citation itself, in his letters posted by Project Gutenberg, I got an Oct. 18, 1843 letter to his sister Helen. This is the germane passage, where he refers to his friend, Willam Ellery Channing — the poet who suggested he build a hut in the woods and go live in it:
     "You think that Channing's words would apply to me too, as living more in the natural than the moral world; but I think that you mean the world of men and women rather, and reformers generally. My objection to Channing and all that fraternity is that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. They want faith, and mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere; but let any one of them recover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that company."
     In essence, reformers themselves need the help they deign to lavish on others.
     True enough. But this is the interesting part. As useful as that phrase is, and as much as I used it, when I plug the quote into Google, up pops six EGD and one Sun-Times reference. Nothing else, It doesn't quote any other work than mine. Which I find hard to believe. Maybe Google is now so self-referential that it sends me back to my own stuff, like a dog returning to its mess. Or could it be that I'm the only person ever to quote that particular line? That idea defies belief.

Flashback 1996: Immigrants turn up heat on the natives

     God, this is SO depressing...
     Are we doomed to chew over the same old bullshit FOREVER?
     I was up early Saturday — big day, had to head over to Bridgeport first thing in the morning. I figured, let's take care of EGD early. And I was in the Newsbank, and thought, "Wonder what I wrote this week 30 years ago?" My column began in 1996, and I can see what odd, antique, esoteric issues were captivating public attention then.
     Oh look. Immigration. Republicans fear-mongering over the prospect of swarthy people crossing the border. Everything old is new again.
     Sigh. I guess they keep doing it because it works. Donald Trump will serve eight democracy-shredding years as president of the United States because half of America is terrified they'll lose their job to a 22-year-old who just showed up in this country and barely speaks English. The hate runs deep. My column starts up again Friday, and I swear, I'm tempted to turn this in. It could be printed, word for word, as is and, except for the mass citizenship ceremony, be entirely accurate.

     I happened to be driving past Soldier Field Tuesday when the ceremony let out.
     Eleven thousand or so Chicagoans, beginning the day as immigrants, had roasted in the sun for hours waiting for the federal government to hand over a piece of paper. Now they were transformed, finding their way home as new Americans.
     Traffic, already snarled by construction, snarled more. I'd like to say that everybody in the cars were honking and smiling and waving and giving thumbs up at this freshest batch of fellow citizens outside of a maternity ward, dressed proudly in their Sunday best.
     But we weren't. We just sort of sat there and gawked at them. I thought about honking, but I was in the left lane, stopped, and I figured the guy in front of me would get out of his car and shoot me.
     I couldn't help but imagine that many motorists in the traffic jam had their usual simmering outrage over immigration jacked up a few notches.
     I pictured them drumming their fingers on their steering wheels, eyeing the mustachioed men and dark-skinned women and thinking: "This, this is the peril! The waves of traffic-blocking, job-grabbing, foreign-tongue-jabbering humanity polluting our beloved American lifestyle and sapping our vital national essence!"
     Were not such thoughts common, how else could the Illinois Republican Party dare run that horrible television ad, the one with the grainy black-and-white surveillance footage of illegals scampering across the border? The implication is that we're being invaded; foreign people are pouring across our porous borders, the gates left open by bleeding-heart liberal Democrats.
     And then what? That's the part I never quite understood. What bad thing are all these immigrants supposed to be doing?
     Taking jobs, I guess. Though the argument has a basic flaw. If your job is such that a guy raised in a small village, a guy who doesn't speak much English, can wade across the Rio Grande and take it away from you, well then mister, maybe you should be thinking about personal career development, immigrants or no.
     Not to imply that the world doesn't send us its share of doctors and engineers and physicists. But the fact is that many recent arrivals tend to take the lowest jobs, at least until they acclimate themselves, which can take years.
     Many immigrant Ph.Ds are sweeping up after hours. It must gall them, along with all their fellows cleaning the toilets and tending mewling babies, to be treated as some sort of unwanted menace.
     Let's not be coy, either. "Immigration" is a code word for "immigration from Latin America." Those Republican fear ads didn't show a group of Colleens in knee socks dancing the Siege of Ennis, or a bunch of Gdansk shipworkers arriving at Terminal Four clutching cardboard suitcases.
     (Though it would be funny to imagine such ads: "There are a million grandmothers in Kiev who would rather be feeding the birds in Grant Park, and will, if you let them!" Maybe the Republicans are saving those for October.)
     I have a sneaking suspicion as to why so many native-born Americans are so worried about Latin American immigrants. Not that they would admit it, but I think that, in their hearts, they're afraid the immigrants are better people than we are. Harder working. More dedicated to their families. Less given to bellyaching and self-pity.
     They worry about how they'll be able to park the truck behind the worksite and catch the traditional midmorning nap and still keep their customers if some clutch of short, swarthy men with cowboy boots and big belt buckles, some plantain-eating recien llegados are going to work their tails off 12 hours a day?
     Not to worry. We're just as good, but maybe a little less motivated. The new immigrants, by setting a good example, will help us. Because the vast majority settling here will buoy us. They always do.
     And anyway, we'll get used to them. The irony of immigration is that while Average Joe American is always worked up about foreigners, in general, the specific groups keep changing. A hundred years ago it was the Irish who were viewed as bestial interlopers whose base origins and strange habits would prevent them from ever assimilating into our precious Way of Life.
     Guess what? They did, and the same thing will happen with Hispanics. Bet on it. All the haters and nativists who flinch whenever they see a sign pointing out a telefono, or clench their jaws in passing a frozen fruit bar vendor, those people will die off, to be replaced by people who grew up in a country where Latin American immigrants were just another part of the multitude who came here and found a home and prospered. Here, to this great country, which doesn't persecute people because they can read Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the original.
     Welcome to it. Sorry about the botched, over-long ceremony in the hot sun Tuesday. But that's how it goes over here. You'll get used to it.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 11, 1996

Cold ... colder ...

     Cold sinks. Heat rises. But why? A bright boy such as myself should know. It's because ... ah ... guessing ... with warm air, the molecules are busier, bouncing around, while with cold air they are slower, bunching together. Thus denser. Heavier.
     Am I right? Let's ask AI: why does warm air rise while cold air sinks?
     "Warm air rises and cold air sinks due to differences in density and the force of gravity," the AI overview begins. "When air is heated, its molecules speed up and spread apart, making the warm air less dense than the surrounding air. Earth's gravity pulls harder on the nearby cold, dense air, causing it to sink to the ground. As this cold air drops, it slides under the lighter, warm air and forces it upward."
     Sounds right to me. Meaning I was close enough. I'm glad being the son of a nuclear physicist had some advantage.
     This is significant because for the past two weeks I've been sleeping in a blue recliner in our TV room, on the ground floor of our house. It's colder there, I realized, because the warm air rises to fill the three levels above.
     So cold that, the other night, I actually adjusted the thermostat, which is an earthquake for me. I never adjust the thermostat. Not in winter. Not in summer. I always feel just fine. It's a gift.
     I didn't think about this until Friday afternoon, when my wife announced that she was too was cold, working in the living room, and would adjust the thermostat. She did so, fiddling with a dial located under an African doll in our front room. That wasn't the one I used.
     "I actually adjusted the thermostat the other day," I informed her. "But the one in the TV room. I was cold."
     She laughed.
    "That one doesn't do anything,*" she said.
    "It doesn't?" I replied. genuinely surprised. "Did not know that."
    "And how many years have we lived here?" she laughed.
     "Twenty-six years," I said, in a small voice.

* To the air conditioner, she later elaborated. It controls our boiler; the house has radiator heat.

Books on the TV tray next to the reclining chair. And on the phone...

     An EGD reader asked me what books I've been reading during my convalescence. Good question. I'm working on my own book, about the benefits of Judaism, so for the past year have been trying to make a dent in modern Jewish literature, pressing forward on three fronts: audiobooks, physical books and, the first time and at my wife's urging, reading on my iPhone, since I can hold it easily in one hand.
     The first book I read on my phone was "The Chosen," by Chaim Potok. I read it 50 years ago, but only vaguely remembered something about a baseball game. It's an excellent novel, a crisply-written character study of the friendship between the protagonist, Reuven Malter and his friend Danny — slated at birth to become the next tzaddik, or leader of his particular sect  of orthodoxy. Plus their relationships with their demanding faith and strong-willed fathers. A reminder that, like all religions, Judaism is not a block of uniformity, but a spectrum; the various factions sometimes hate each other. The opening game is played between the Hasidim and a less rigorous sect. We might see them as both orthodox Jews, but the Hasids really despise their opponents, warning them that they're going to hell for being apostates.
      Right before the surgery, I read Harry Golden's surprisingly-useful
"Only in America." I googled "10 best contemporary Jewish novels" and one of them was Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" which I picked because it won the prestigious Man Booker award. The funny, thoughtful book was published in 2010 and is surprisingly current, with much of the plot pivoting on the Palestinian situation. One character joins a group he calls "Ashamed Jews" and they go around apologizing for the continued existence of the state founded in their name.

     The physical book I'm reading is James Loeffler's "Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America," published this month by Metropolitan Books. It's set in Chicago, beginning in 1949 with what is essentially an anti-Jewish pogrom in Englewood. One of the book's many shocks is realizing how American antisemitism cruised right through World War II, largely unaffected by the Holocaust, a term rarely used until 30 years later, after a TV series of the same name. Much real estate is given to Terminiello v. Chicago, a Supreme Court case that grew out of a anti-Semitic priest holding a hate rally on the West Side, and the question of whether groups can be protected from libel in the same way individuals are.
     The center section is about the legal ramifications of the 1977 attempt of Nazis to march in Skokie, while the last third brings us up-to-date to the present day I'm going to write a column about it so I don't wanna get too far into it, but it makes her gripping read with a caveat that the center section explores every legalistic posture, maneuver, and nuance in microscopic detail. 
     I'm also finishing Andre Aciman's sweet and melancholy "Out of Egypt" on Audible, which I read years ago and was really just fact checking one passage but ended up listening to the whole thing. It's a sentimental look at his family before they were kicked out in 1965 part of the Arab world's purge of Jews into Israel, where it turns out they don't belong either.  The book is billed as a memoir, though Aciman, who went on to write "Call Me by Your Name," recreates conversations and scenes from decades earlier that he couldn't possibly remember, and as a writer of memoirs myself, I wondered how much art embroiders the reality he is describing.

     What's next? Beyond the obvious Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. I think I'm going to polish off Elie Wiesel's "Night," which I managed to miss in high school, when everybody else read it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Flashback 2012: The semi-precious joy of a campus tour

Charles Martin Hall statue at Oberlin College
(Photo by Gary Cohen, '11, used with permission of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine)

     August is college tour season. Sometimes I suggest to parents embarking on the process that they check out my odyssey with my older son, "Nice work if you can get it."
     I didn't remember that I'd also written anything in the paper. But Facebook disinterred this 2012 column on Wednesday, and I couldn't resist sharing it, if only so I can show my son that his path to the law wasn't quite as straight as he may now believe it was.

     Charles Martin Hall is not famous in the way that, oh, Monty Hall is famous. Which illustrates the deadening effect of TV, since the place in our brains where the shrieks of strangely costumed audience members on “Let’s Make a Deal” still reside could instead be dedicated to the young Ohioan who discovered an easier way to extract aluminum from ore.
     Though the most common metal on earth — present in almost every plant, animal and rock — up to Hall’s discovery in 1886, aluminum was vastly expensive to refine, and what little was made was seen as a novelty of the wealthy, a semi-precious metal used in jewelry. The crown jewels of France included bars of aluminum. That changed after Hall went on to found Alcoa. The price of the metal dropped to 1/1000th of what it had been previously, which is why we use aluminum in soda cans instead of wedding rings.
     The only reason I know this is because — gosh — 20 years ago I wrote a book on college pranks, and Hall was a 21-year-old graduate of Oberlin College working on the college campus when he made his discovery. At his death, he gave a ton of money to the school, which expressed its gratitude by naming a variety of buildings after Hall. Alcoa continued the praise by commissioning a life-size sculpture of the lad out of aluminum and donating it to Oberlin, which for the next 50 years had to contend with students — who like nothing better than to mock the pieties of their elders — stealing the easily transportable, hollow-aluminum statue and dragging it to various spots around campus.
     Mildly interesting, perhaps, but not the kind of knowledge that has much practical daily value, and it sank deep into my subconscious until early last week when, snooping around Oberlin’s campus with my family on our first official college visit for my older boy, nearly 17, we strolled past Hall Auditorium.
     “Who Hauled Hall on Top of Hall?” I exclaimed, to puzzled stares. “It was the name of a song.” I described the Hall saga to my boys who, truth be told, couldn’t have cared less.
     No matter. As much as parenthood involves sacrifice, there are eventual benefits, such as the chance to hie yourself to various college campuses around the country and kick the tires of academic institutions. This is a new joy for me. People didn’t do it back in the 1970s — at least not people in Berea, Ohio. I signed up for Northwestern having never seen the campus, and still recall my relief, pushing beyond Norris Center and glimpsing the little curling promenade along the lake and thinking, “Hey, this is nice...”
     Nowadays we hedge our bets, and parents of college-bound kids are convinced that if we’re going into hock for decades, we better go see what our sprouts are getting. Though I almost missed out a second time. My older son is nothing if not headstrong and at first dismissed with a wave of the hand our suggestion that he visit schools. A waste of time. He would attend Johns Hopkins, become a doctor of neurology, end of story. My wife and I exchanged worried glances. You need to go take a look first, we insisted. “What,” my wife ventured, “if you don’t like the campus?”
     “Mother,” he said, in a tone of frozen contempt that I’ll be chuckling at for the rest of my life. “I’m not going there for the campus.”
     I’d like to say that our reason prevailed but suspect we had nothing to do with it. Rather a book he is reading — The Thinking Student’s Guide to College, I believe — encourages visits, adding that students hot to do research should consider small liberal arts colleges, because while at a big university you’ll end up in an auditorium with 150 other freshmen listening to some grad student mumble about the research a professor you’ll never meet is conducting in a lab you’ll never see, at a small school you might work with the professor yourself. Hence Oberlin.
     I went along for the information session — a good thing, because I could counter my lad’s revulsion at the idea of co-ops, a bewilderment that some students would voluntarily choose to manage their dorms and cafeterias when they could be studying the folds of the brain, and I could explain that it takes all kinds to make a world, and some kids are interested in business management.
     But I skipped the walking tour and hot-footed over to the college’s art museum, a lovely building resembling an Italian villa, which reminded my younger boy of the Gardner in Boston. Later, I walked the dog on the quad, marveling at my good fortune: Now I get to visit colleges. With time growing short, I realized what I had to do — hurry over to the science building to pay my respects to Charles Martin Hall, tucked away on the second floor, his statue bolted to a one-ton block of granite, to discourage future wanderings, but decorated in sunglasses and a lei by some creative student carrying on the fine tradition of undergraduate derision.

         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 5, 2012

'To write is to err'

    

     With time on my hands, I thought I would catch up on my movie viewing. I don't remember ever actually watching any of the Marx Brothers, movies or, if I did,0 it was so long ago, in the distant mist of the 1970s, that I've forgotten. 

     So I started in on "Animal Crackers," but barely got a minute into the film when I had to stop and go back (I originally said, "rewind"). The spelling of the first name of the Groucho character, Captain Spaulding, in the credits was different than the spelling in the movie itself, "Jeffrey" versus "Geoffrey." The kind of continuity flaw you don't see in modern Hollywood movies very much. I wonder how many viewers notice.

     Errors are both trivial and important. Trivial in the sense that we all make them. When a loyal Sun-Times reader with basic math skills pointed out to me that the Chicago Tribune had botched some simple math trying to figure out what 10.5% of $10 might be — "Not that the Sun-Times would ever gloat..." he began — my impulse was not to rush it into print. 

     He then followed up with the Trib:

"Please check your arithmetic. Your editorial last Friday stated that "beginning Saturday, Chicagoans will pay $1.50
on every $10 in retail purchases. On August 1 the sales tax is going from 10.25% to 10.50%. 10.5% of $10.00 is $1.05 not $1.50. Whether this error is AI related, the work of a summer intern or just a simple mistake, the prominence of the Tribune's erroneous statement entitles the readers to an explanation."

    Of course the Trib neither ran the letter nor corrected the error.

    Still, my thinking was mostly: "There but for the grace of God ..." Particularly after I noticed that the $22 million Alex Giannoulias has in his campaign fund was inflated into $22 billion in Tuesday's Sun-Times. We all do it.

     But the growing world of AI slop and constant social media bilge raises the questions of how we approach the slurry of mistakes sprayed at us along with it. Obviously finding the creator and demanding some kind of fix isn't possible. Nor is the problem limited to anonymous content creators I've noticed that the more august source, the more reluctant they are to fix mistakes. I've given up notifying the New York Times of their occasional gaffes. They never respond.

     Can we become so comfortable with mistakes that we start to accept them? That the margin between fact and fiction, ever broadening in the Trump era, can grow so wide that nobody cares what's real and what's not, and we all live in our own dream worlds of delusion and fantasy. Maybe we already do. For instance, I'm convinced this thinking and veracity stuff is important.

     For writers, our duty is clear. We have to be fierce proponents for accuracy in our own work. An easy task for me as every mistake that's ever found its way into print still stings. Thirty years ago, on the opening page of "Complete and Utter Failure" I refer to a cornet, the instrument, but spelled it "coronet," like the crown. Thank God, the chapter was excerpted in Doubleday's company magazine, and a New England English professor pointed out to me in time for the typo to be corrected in the book itself.

      That's the weird dichotomy a writer must straddle: vigorously trying to eradicate mistakes while acknowledging that they're bound to happen no matter what. Or as I sometimes say: too right is two air.

     Whoops, what I meant was, "to write is to err."

Flashback 2010: Lots of innovation goes into housing inmates

     Two days on "Paradise Lost" worked surprisingly well. So when Facebook served up the memory of this column, built around "Prometheus Unbound," I couldn't help sharing it. What I remember most about it is I was doing weekly commentary with Bob Sirott on Channel 32 and I tried to get the station to send a film crew to Navy Pier. They sort of looked at me strangely and said "We don't do that kind of thing." Most of the studio cameras were automatic, and they were very few people around. A harbinger of things to come.

     Need a straitjacket? Humane Restraint of Waunakee, Wis., sells a handsome model in heavy-duty canvas with leather straps. List price $163.50.
     But don't call it a "straitjacket."
     "It's the 'humane jacket,' " corrected company rep Stacy Schultz.
     We were at Navy Pier, at the 140th annual Congress of Correction, the American Correctional Association's convention.
     Yes, 140th -- the group began in 1870 as the National Prison Association, the trade organization for the ever-burgeoning American incarceration industry.
     As I wandered the booths promoting one-piece steel toilets, digital imaging, heavy-duty locks and concertina wire, I had to adjust my vocabulary to meet industry trends. What I considered an electric fence, for instance, is now a "non-lethal electrified system."
     We don't think about jails much, and some products defy imagination, though once you see them, they make perfect sense.
     For instance, the Swintec Clear Cabinet Typewriter, which is just as it sounds: an electric typewriter made of clear plastic -- even the ribbon cartridge is transparent -- so prisoners can prepare their legal briefs without having a place to stash their shivs and drugs.
     Prisons are a $40 billion industry in the U.S. because we are addicted to punishment -- about one out of 100 adults in this country is currently in jail.
     "No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free," the Economist noted in a scolding cover story last week. "The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America's level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan."
     None of this is ACA's fault -- their job isn't to decide how many prisoners should use Humane Restraint's No-Shank Toothbrush -- think of a plastic thimble with bristles. They just have to figure out how to safely and economically warehouse the millions upon millions of people we insist on sending them.
     The corrections conference offered five days of workshops, most on practical topics like "Upgrading Suicide Risk Assessment Practice" and "The North Dakota Department of Corrections' Better Results for Therapy of Hepatitis C."
     But one session Tuesday afternoon seemed out of place: "Prometheus Bound -- A Reading of the Greek Tragedy and Its Relation to Corrections."
     The workshop is the creation of Bryan Doerries, a New York writer and translator who founded Theater of War, a group that puts on readings of ancient Greek plays for soldiers, to get them talking about the war.
     He realized that prison guards are another group under constant pressure with little opportunity to discuss it, and that "Prometheus," the tale of a god chained to a rock, punished for stealing fire and giving it to humans, might provide such an opportunity.
     He brought the idea to George Lombardi, director of the state of Missouri's Department of Corrections, where last year "Prometheus" was performed four times for staff.
     "They got it," Lombardi said. "We do lots of stuff for offenders, all kinds of programs, but we don't have a whole lot for staff.
     "Prometheus has great relevance for those of us working in correctional institutions, particularly with very recalcitrant offenders."
     A quartet of Chicago actors from the Steppenwolf Theater read four scenes, with James Meredith particularly fine as Prometheus. A discussion followed, and participants -- most weren't turnkeys fresh from the cell block, but longtime administrators -- immediately offered ways the play relates to them.
     "He was resolute," said S. Elwood York Jr., director of pretrial services for Key West, Florida's 16th District, who heard in "Prometheus" the echo of boastful gang members. "His attitude was, 'I'm taking my lumps. I'm tough. I'm proud of what I did.' "
     Beforehand, I had thought Prometheus' pride would make the play less relevant -- he did something noble, in bringing fire to man. But the corrections workers said many criminals feel exactly the same way.
     "Sometimes we forget that the person who committed the offense is committed to the cause," said York, mentioning gang loyalty. "It's a different set of priorities."
     John Gannon, a forensic psychologist, called it "a kind of heroic disorder" -- a pride in their ability to absorb punishment, a failure to see the goal of correction.
     Bringing prisoners around to a different view is more important than ever.
     "With overcrowding, you get double bunks, triple bunks, 3,200 people in a space for 1,600," said Adrienne Poteat, a federal corrections official from Washington, D.C. "That's a lot of people, and what do you do with them?"
     What indeed? Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who oversees nearly 10,000 prisoners at any given time at the County Jail, is concerned with this issue, and I asked him about it.
      "Other than a very small segment of the jail population, they're all getting out," he said. "The question is: How would you want them to be when they get out? Better or worse than when they went in?"
     He said that except for a minority who are "damn close to evil," this "other, much, much, much larger group should be handled with far more flexibility" than we currently muster, focusing more on treating their problems with programs far less costly than prison.
     "You don't even have to get into the debate whether you're liberal, conservative, tough-on-crime -- let's talk about being fiscally smart, for once," Dart said. "We cannot continue to do it this way. Our grandchildren -- heck, our children -- will have nothing left."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 4, 2010 

'Complicit in our own seduction'

    While I am the sole writer, editor, and proprietor of this blog, I'm not the only person who helps make it a success. Sometimes I forget that. Not only are there occasional contributors, such as my pals who helped tide me over after surgery, but there are readers whose comments point out errors and add valuable perspective. 

     Being a little abashed Sunday at not having read "Paradise Lost," I invited any readers who have read the book to share their thoughts. 

     I was impressed by the quality of the replies, particularly this email, which I found both interesting and beautiful, and will share with you in full. 

     Linda Clarke-Borre writes:

     Best wishes for a swift recovery. At least you are in a leafy suburban paradise. You mentioned Paradise Lost. It’s epic, and I thought you might appreciate a couple lessons I derived from reading it before life happened- and I began to understand…
     It’s a Puritan Epic for our times. Milton gives the Devil the best lines. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Milton, the failed revolutionary, writes his own fury into the fallen angel. (In Christian writings the Devil’s name is Lucifer — which means angel of light. Milton seduces readers into admiring his elaborate lies, making us complicit in our own seduction). 

     Then there’s heartfelt humanity of Adam and Eve. Their fall isn’t about an apple. It’s encoded in the conversation between them. Eve isn’t seduced by fruit, but by the flattery of her own reflection. Adam cannot bear to lose her. He looks at her and says, “She is my other self,” and chooses her over God. It’s the writing that is so moving; Milton makes you feel the bones of their relationship. When they hold hands and walk into a world of thorns, they are us.

     The third “thread” running through the epic story is the blind poet’s prayer. At the very beginning, Milton invokes a muse, calling on the Holy Spirit to illumine him, because he is blind. He can’t see the page, and dictates this entire epic to his daughters at night, as he asks God to be his inward eye. So when he describes the light of Heaven or murky Hell, he isn’t painting pictures; he is remembering light. Here, the poem becomes an act of radical faith, not in certainty, but in the very act of seeking. He dares to “justify the ways of God to men,” but in the end, he doesn’t justify them logically. He justifies them aesthetically, through the exquisite beauty of his verse. The poem is a glorious paradox: a Puritan epic about disobedience, a political tract that transcends politics, a tragedy that ends with hope. Every time I read the final lines—“They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way”—I am still much moved, not because they are punished. But because they are together.

     I don't know about you, but that makes me want to read the book.

William Blake

'The mind is its own place'

Satan, Sin and Death, by Thomas Rowlandson. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     "F… F… F… J… J… J…"

     I don't remember much about seventh grade. But for some reason, I remember sitting in touch typing class, listening to a monotonous voice on a record slowly enunciate the letters to type, starting with the above, first with our left index finger then with our right. Maybe because it was so god-awful dull. We drilled and drilled, practiced and practiced, until it became hardwired into our limbic systems. I couldn't tell you where any of the letters are on a keyboard; my body just knows.

      Why did I take typing? My wife-to-be studiously avoided it, because she didn't want to end up a secretary. But I wanted to be a writer, and a writer needs to know how to type. About the same time I also used all my paper route money to buy a walnut roll top desk, because a writer also needs one of those. It wasn't quite as useful, but it's sitting right behind me now as I talk, and it does hold a lot of stuff.

     Frankly, it's not something I think much about. Flop my fingers onto the keyboard, start to write and what I want to say appears on the computer screen in front of me. Like magic. Until a few days ago when, already looking ahead to returning to work, and with my left arm and a sling for the next four weeks, I figured I better learn how to dictate.

     You would think, being a newspaper man, I would have dictated before. When I started, there were reporters, out in the field, collecting information, jotting down notes, and what were called "rewrite men." They would sit in the paper and take dictation. They never left. Heck, I used to joke that I never saw one particular rewrite man, Phillip J. O'Connor, stand up. Though I must have, because he was very tall. I might've dictated once or twice; I remember being at some event, clutching a payphone, composing lines into the receiver. But that seldom happened.

     I'll tell you what my first thought was after I decided I had to learn to dictate these columns. It's a little embarrassing, but I thought of John Milton, the author of "Paradise Lost." Any idea why? That's right. Milton was blind and dictated the masterpiece to his daughters, composing it in his head, 40 lines at a time. 

     I've never read "Paradise Lost" – an astounding lapse, I know, for all the times I read "The Inferno." Let's say the opportunity never arose. Plus, I heard it was dull – maybe you guys can help here: has anybody read it? Liked it? 

     Sorry to toss the ball in your court. I wanted to read it now, while recovering from shoulder surgery – it seemed the ideal time. But I was deep into other books and I just couldn't muster the gumption to do it. Its reputation is not one of deep fascination. Though I shouldn't criticize because, as I said, I haven't read it. Yet.

     I do recall a quote from it that I use from time to time, one very apt in my present condition: in a sling, sleeping in a chair under a wool blanket, trying to heal, day by day: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Hell of heaven, a heaven of Hell."

     That has to be true, as anyone knows who has been in a good situation, only to see it sour due to some unforeseen circumstance, or managed to redeem a bad situation by approaching it with the right attitude.