Earthquake

     Construction on the Carmo Convent began in 1389, and the structure loomed over central Lisbon until Nov. 1, 1755, when the Great Lisbon Earthquake brought the roof down.
     Rebuilding the city was such a massive task that neither replacing the Carmo roof nor clearing the ruins was a priority. Time passed, the skeleton became something of a tribute to the tragedy, which took up to 40,000 Portuguese lives. Today it holds an archeological museum and is one of the most diverting ways to spend an hour in the city. Who doesn't love a good ruin?
     There was a lot of fallout from the Great Lisbon Earthquake, wiping out much of Portugal's wealth and sealing that once prosperous nation's decline, plus providing a stark horror that tamped down Enlightenment optimism — with a helping hand from Voltaire, who was inspired by the earthquake to pen his novel "Candide," poking fun at those who decide that this vale of woe is nevertheless the "best of all possible worlds."
     Tuesday's mid-term election was an earthquake, though not a tragedy. I hope it is an event that will restore America's fortunes, rather than doom them. We'll see. Either way, it was a seismic shift, and the truth is, I'm still chewing on what it means. The outcome seems a clear occasion for optimism though, like Candide's Cunegonde, I nevertheless find "my heart is almost closed to hope." The results were too late to opine on for Wednesday morning — I went with a column about motherhood — and while I've begun trying to gather my thoughts, which, startled at the thunderous election results, bolted in every direction of the compass, it's going to take another day to coax them back into their pen and give them a good brushing before I can consider putting them on display.

     So forgive me for buying some time with these cool photos that I took last March when my wife and I were in Lisbon.
     The news is good. I think. As Candide says, ""You see that crime is sometimes punished." But the question remains: what else is it? Because good can be fleeting; here today, gone tomorrow.

Millions of American women don't want kids — one stands up to explain why

 

Bailey Swilley

     The American birthrate has fallen to historic lows, and Bailey Swilley isn’t helping any. Which is ironic.
     “I love babies,” said the Brooklyn-based comedian/storyteller. “That’s the thing. I love babies. I like kids.”
     Fair enough. I love bread, yet don’t want to be a baker.
     “I don’t see myself as a parent,” she said. “I don’t see myself in that role.”
     She has a lot of company. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced a fertility rate of 1.6 children per American woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1. I’d been brooding on this for a while when the email from a publicist hit my inbox, slugged, “NOV 21: Hit NYC Fringe Show in Chicago — Bailey Swilley’s “A Baby For Me? No Thank You, Please!”
     Approaching random women and asking why they don’t want to have children seems a recipe for a quick trip to human resources. But here was an opportunity. About a third of young women don’t want kids. What soured Swilley on the prospect?
     “I am an older sister, my brother is five years younger,” said Swilley, who grew up in Memphis. “Older enough to remember watching my parents parent him and me, and being like, ‘I don’t think that’s for me. I just don’t see myself in this. Not what I aspire to.’”
     Inherent revulsion with parenthood doesn’t usually make the traditional list of reasons people don’t want children — jittery economy, lack of suitable partners, the generally fraught future. Swilley mentioned the term “body horror” — she has a routine about a doctor hunting for part of a broken IUD — as well as the “ring of fire,” which I thought had to do with volcanic activity in the Pacific, but is also a phrase associated with the pain of childbirth.
     Swilley is married — I assumed her husband is on board with her determined childlessness.
     “We’re on the same page,” she said. “I bring it up a lot. I ask him. All of his friends have kids, more his friends than mine. We spend a lot of time with his friends’ kids. Afterwards, I’ll check in, ‘Did you feel anything? Feel that should be something we do?’ We have those check-ins a lot, and always land at, No.”
     Other folks’ kids will do that. I distinctly remember the shock of being childless and visiting friends who had just had children, to find them sitting sunken-eyed in the middle of their shattered apartments, their padded coffee tables and plastic safety gates and gadgets, spattered with spit up and splotches of green and orange baby food, smiling these serene, exhausted, souls-among-the-damned-in-hell grins and urging us to follow them over the cliff into their zombie cult.

To continue reading, click here.

There's something not COMPLETELY on the up-and-up with that fellow...

   
     "The Odyssey" had a moment over the summer, as the Christopher Nolan movie made waves around the world. I didn't see it, having been reading Homer's epic tale for decades, along with its predecessor, "The Iliad." Judging from the reviews, I figured the film wouldn't compare.
     You can't immerse yourself in masterpieces like these without getting a lot back. The violence of war. The capriciousness of fate. Then there are the stylistic flourishes. Since both works are designed to be memorized and recited out loud — I read both to my boys — in a pre-literary age, there are certain tropes intended to trip off the tongue. "The wine dark sea." "The long black ships." I imagine many people know this.
     Facing Donald Trump's bottomless venality, criminality, and general unfitness and loathsomeness, I realized, quite quickly, that it wouldn't do to disgorge a big copy block of faults every time his name was mentioned.
     So I coined what I considered a Homeric trope, "liar, bully and fraud," at first, later amended to "liar, bully, fraud and traitor." The essentials. Short and to the point. I hasten to add that those terms are not insults, or empty slurs, but dry journalistic descriptions. He's a liar because he lies continuously, on matters big and small, and has done so since his first day in office and before. He is a bully because he picks on the weak and vulnerable, both in his policies, directed against immigrants, children, the poor. And in his social interactions, browbeating reporters whose jobs depend on them never responding, "Will you shut the fuck up you orange shitstain of a human being?"
     "Fraud" is well-documented, in various courts of law. And a "traitor" is someone who betrays his country, usually for money, which would ID Trump easily as a question on Jeopardy: "This president accepted gifts from foreign powers and allowed his family and himself to be enriched by embracing policies contrary to the interests of the United States." Only one name fits.
     Over the past few years, I haven't put the Trump trope in the paper because ... well, I hesitate to speculate. My hunch is they don't want to attract the attention of the administration, which has already been hacking away at public radio funds. Which I suppose is defendable, the way you can't really blame a soldier for throwing down his gun and running away when the bullets fly. But that doesn't make it a laudable practice.
     Besides, newspapers with far more solidity than the Sun-Times have long been cowering before Trump. The New York Times, while in some ways doing yeoman's work reporting on the torrent of news, has this maddening tendency to try to frame his actions in the patterns of the past. "Sanewashing" is the term I've seen. Pretending this is all normal. I subscribe to the Times, read it best I can, and generally ignore when they do this.
      But Sunday ... well, they finally snapped to the idea that Trump is out of his fuckin' mind, and ran a story, quite prominently, in the upper right hand corner, with the headline, "Trump's Speech Becomes More Vulgar and Muddled."
     Hard to argue that.
     The fourth graph is the nut graph, and let me see if the word that stopped me dead stops you:

     "He is more long-winded, more profane and more absolutist than when he ran for president a decade ago. His rambling speeches seem even more garbled at times. He makes comments that leave people wondering what he is talking about or that sound like he is saying something he is not. And even for a president who has never fully observed the norms of the office, he seems more willing to say things no other president would say."

     "Fully," right? "Never fully observed the norms of office." Ya think? Missed a few, did he? That has to be a joke, right? From day one, Jan. 20, 2017, when he got in a pissing match with the National Park Service because its crowd estimate didn't jibe with his delusions of grandeur, to Jan. 6, 2021, when he sicc'd a mob to storm the Capitol, then gazed at his thumb, ignoring pleas to do something to stem the violence, Donald Trump has been a grotesque violation against any kind of dignity, decorum, rationality, kindness, forethought, patriotism, selflessness, not to mention the gravitas and responsibility that, prior to him, were wrapped up in the word "presidential."
     Saying that Donald Trump "never fully observed the norms of office" is like saying that Stormy Daniels did not reflect the values of modesty and diligence often associated with Quaker women.
     Today is Election Day. The received wisdom is that the Democrats will do well, and I hope that wisdom is correct. And yet. I feel obligated to point out, again, that no Blue Wave is going to wash away years of corruption and norm-wrecking. Won't happen. The Democrats, quick to fall to bickering among themselves, will have to take full advantage of whatever institutional edge they get. And they've failed to do that in the past, big time. Trump should have been in a cell next to Lex Luthor on the moon by the time the Biden administration ended. That he wasn't, that he was allowed to run again and be elected is a massive failure we need to all acknowledge. And how can we do that if we can't even describe the scope of Trump's failing? He trashed the norms that made this country work, sent an engraved invitation for every grifter, hater, fanatic, con man, power-thirsty blonde enabler, plutocrat, kleptomaniac and proto fascist to come help him. That's what he did fully. This demon crew he has assembled, they will not go quietly.

Pivoting from the Day of the Dead to the Day of the Election

     Happy Day of the Dead!
     OK, first off, you’re not supposed to say “happy,” despite all the colorful calaveras de azúcar, or sugar skulls, and boisterous street parties. Because the Day of the Dead, unlike Halloween, is not a peripatetic candy festival for kids that has been retrofitted into a costumed beer bash for adults. It’s a solemn, reflective time of honoring lost loved ones.
     And second, as mentioned above, it is “Day of the Dead,” singular, Día de los Muertos. Even though there are at least two days, Nov. 1 and 2, the first to remember lost children, Día de los Angelitos, which is an agony almost too great to consider — heck, it’s hard enough when your children survive, grow up on schedule, excel, get married and go off to live in Washington, D.C., where you hardly ever see them.
     And the second, Monday, Día de los Difuntos, or “All Souls Day,” dedicated to adults. For starters. Some mark four, or even eight days, referring to the “Week of the Dead.”
     Complicated, right? You can see why a lot of folks ignore cultures other than their own. Once you start to unpack the actual details, there’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s easier to neglect something than to be wrong about it.
     Nor is the holiday limited to solemnizing your own family. There is, for instance, a strong political element, usually completely overlooked, lost amid the sugary bread.
     We might, for instance, pause to remember all the children who are gone but not dead, those in ICE custody. They are alive, though children, separated from their parents and plunged alone into a nightmarish, unending confinement in a sprawling police state who might easily wish they were dead. They’re not your children; but they’re somebody’s children, and while this might be hard for you to wrap your head around, those children are loved and missed as much as you love and would miss yours, if some performatively cruel government separated you from them to score points with its howling base. Maybe more.
      We might also consider the departed who aren’t blood relatives. Especially with Tuesday being what we could call the Día de la Elección — the Day of the Election — most likely, although at this point, we really can’t be certain, can we?

To continue reading, click here.

Fancy chocolates

 

     I'm tempted to just leave you with this array of gorgeous chocolates from Richart. Really, what else is there to say? Life is good, enjoy it when you can. 
     But that might leave you wondering where you can pick up such a box, and the bottom line is, you can't, unless you find yourself in Paris (or, checking the web site, two locations in Lyon, and one in Saint-Andre de Corcy, just north of the city). And no, the rioting didn't affect the flagship store. I checked.

     Richart showed up on our radar in 1993, when my wife and I visited Paris together. Blundering out of the Musee d'Orsay, there it was, on Rue Bonaparte. At first I thought it was a jewelry store, then realized the small gemlike objects were candies. We bought a big white box, with drawers, that indeed looked like a jewelry box, only it was filled with chocolate. We were flush, back then, before kids, and did things like that.

     We returned in 2016, when we went to visit our oldest, who was going to school there for a semester. Feeling far less monetarily-endowed, with two boys in college, I think we picked up a couple big bars.

     Cut to last month. Our youngest son, daughter-in-law and older grandson headed over to Paris. because ... well, you'd have to ask them, but my belief is, to show that a newborn was not going to cramp their considerable style. We didn't say, "While you're there, go to Richart and buy us some chocolate." We did point out the existence of the place and suggest they might enjoy swinging by, if they were in the 6th arrondissement and looking for something to do. Though we did watch their two cats. For about a month. So credit to them for showing a gratitude unusual in the young.

     If the above were the extent, I would shelve it under "shameful boasting." But the thing with these chocolates is, they come in 34 flavors, as explained in a little booklet, "Guide de Degustation," with helpful English translation, matching each glyph with the flavor within,  which chocolate is "Madagascar vanilla Bourbon ganache and which "Black Current coulis and raspberry." My favorites: "Thyme praline" and "Grapefruit light ganache."

     So for over a month, most nights a week after dinner, my wife and I would make tea and haul out the way-attractive square white box, slide out the array and make our selections, with much discussion. I don't want to say the analysis process was more fun than the actual consumption, but it was definitely part of the fun.

     Doing the checking thing that journalists were once known for, I see that my opening paragraph is dead wrong. You CAN indeed order Richart in the United States. The box above will set you back $216, which, yes, is a lot for chocolate, but less than the price of professional cat sitters, and less than a single dinner at some of the trendier restaurants around town. The good news is shipping for this particular item is free. If you limit yourselves to three chocolates a night apiece — harder than it looks — that gives you and your beloved about at least a fortnight of joyfully sharing exotic French chocolates after dinner. A bargain really.

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

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

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

Opening shot

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

On the blunt front, the Trib punts

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

Neil the avenger

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

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

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

 

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

To continue reading, click here.