The Louvre is closed.

     Workers at the Louvre went on strike Monday. Which caused me to send out supportive thoughts of solidarity to any teenagers being dragged through Europe by their parents, sullen and silent, figuring, "At least I'll be able to tell the gang back home that I saw that famous woman, Mona Whatever."
     I was that kid. Summer of 1977. My father spent a couple months at the Palais de Nations, taking his family along to cool their heels in Geneva.  Not what I would call a hopping town. I spent a lot of time in the American Library, reading "Dune." I pined for Cleveland or, more specifically, my girlfriend in Cleveland. That's what you do at 17.

     Though I did stretch my wings, taking the train to Zurich, and the boat two Chillon, twice, to visit Byron's Castle. I had a great fondness for Byron at the time. "I have not loved the world/Nor the world me/Have not flattered its rank breath/Nor bowed a patient knee,"    
     For the last two weeks of the trip we hit Paris and London. The highlight was to be the Louvre. But the Louvre .. was closed ...for renovations.

     I didn't believe my mother when she told me — can there be a more 17-year-old reaction than that? I thought she was lying to me, that she just didn't want to go to the Louvre. To spite me. In my defense, that sort of thing was certainly within her capacity. 
     I insisted on striding up to the museum doors and pulling. Locked. Turns out ... the Louvre ... was closed. For renovations. The week we were in Paris.

     I ended up ditching my family and wandering the book stalls along the Seine. In one, there was a pile of art reproductions on canvas, mounted on wood. A life-size copy of Petrus Christus's "Portait of a Young Lady" caught my eye and I bought it. 

     She's been staring from my bedroom wall for ... ngggg, doing the math ... 48 years now. I eventually put a big ass gilt frame around it. And when the actual picture, housed in Berlin, came to the Met, I made a point to go see it, sitting gazing at it for maybe half an hour. The original is much finer — art reproduction wasn't at its height in the mid-1970s.

      The funny thing is, the Louvre being closed turned out to be one of the more memorable aspects of the Paris trip. I didn't get back for 15 years, until I returned with my wife. The Louvre was open that time. Closed makes for a better story. I'm sure that will be cold comfort for all those tourists milling around in front of the locked Louvre doors in stunned incomprehension.

WBEZ, longtime Chicago voice for 'respect and joy,' needs help

     WBEZ and I go way back. In the mid-1980s, when I was freshly fired from the Wheaton Daily Journal and looking for any kind of work, Ken Davis gave a whistle and I started filing live reports on his Studio A program.

     I didn't get paid, of course — taking advantage of the ambitious young is a venerable media tradition. But it was reporting on the radio.
     I broadcast from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, watching attendants slide big numbers into place. From a live poultry store, watching a chicken, its throat cut, upside down in a metal funnel, blood running out the bottoms, talons scratching uselessly against the galvanized metal.
     Awkward situations made good radio. I broadcast naked from a sensory deprivation tank — quite the thing in the mid-1980s — on Lincoln Avenue.
     After floating peacefully on heavily salted water in total darkness for nearly an hour, imagining myself an amoeba on an ancient sea, the door was ripped open and phone receiver receiver into my hands. Ken asked what I was thinking about at the moment he called. "How much I have to pee," I replied, blinking.
     As the years passed, I'd circle back to WBEZ, first in the creepy old Bankers Building at Clark and Adams, with the radio tower on the roof, and then at their new digs at Navy Pier. For several years, the Tribune's ace columnist Eric Zorn and I would meet on Michigan Avenue every Friday and walk over to the pier to do a run-down of the week's news.
     Or I'd be a guest on particular programs — Scott Simon's "Weekend Edition" or "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" or Jim Nayder's "Magnificent Obsession" — a quirky early morning show on addiction and recovery. It was periodically rebroadcast, and now and then I'd hear from someone who caught my segment and was braced in their struggle.
     And that's just being on the station. I haven't even touched upon my experience as a listener. WBEZ reflected life in Chicago. Jazz at night in the city that practically invented jazz. Live feeds of important historical events — hearings, trials.
     Plus lots of fun — Garrison Keillor's folksy "A Prairie Home Companion," a mix of humor and music. "Car Talk" with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers — and if listeners today have a hard time imagining WBEZ running a show dedicated to car repair, well, let's say that station didn't take itself quite so seriously.
     Then again, these are more serious times.
     Last week, the U.S. House chainsawed $1.1 billion intended for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR's parent. The good news is WBEZ only gets 6% of its budget from the feds.
     It's much worse nationwide. In swaths of the rural countryside, the NPR station is the only game in town, a key source of important local and emergency news. More than 120 stations get more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government.

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

Synagogue in Buenos Aires

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

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

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

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

Danish crown, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"No king he"

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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