Picking wheat out of the chaff

     Sometimes I include the backstory. Sometimes I don't. Wednesday's column didn't come out of the blue — what happened was, two weeks ago, some Red State troll site posted my 2023 column, "Why Restrict Child Porn But Not Guns?" using the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the Constitution to argue that we could have some sane gun laws. My column basically said, "The 1st Amendment is important, but we carve out an exception for child porn, which is illegal to make, own and sell, in order to protect kids. So why not carve out a few exceptions to the 2nd Amendment — mandatory trigger locks come to mind — for the same goal?"
     Nothing earthshaking there, right? I don't know what about that reasoning, beyond that it suggested gun ownership should be subject to law, which it already is, drove gun nuts crazy. OR, rather, crazier. But they thrashed around when the column was first published. My theory is that the headline I wrote includes the words "child porn," drawing a Beavis and Butthead "Heh heh, you said 'child porn'!" reaction. Plus, maybe, since the idea of gun control is beyond their comprehension, their churning minds somehow mashed my reasoning into an argument for child porn. Hard to say. I'm not the Stupid Whisperer.
     Anyway, the kerfuffle died down, eventually, as kerfuffles do. But two weeks ago something happened to inject oxygen back into the embers — someone must have posted it on ArmedLunatics.com or some such thing. Suddenly the paper was inundated with calls — Why was the Sun-Times employing a pedophile? Three concerned colleagues mentioned it to me. I got my first real death threat.
     In thinking about the matter — my super power, thinking about stuff — I began to wonder how turning "pedophile" into a random slur to throw at people who support policy you don't like, affects people who actually work with the actual problem. I made one phone call — to the Chicago Children's Advocacy Center — and they surprised me by calling back. Not something many organizations would do in our curled-up-in-a-defensive-ball era.
     In writing the story, I wondered how much context I should give. Why address this now? I had said something similar in a column a month ago, when my name made a cameo in the latest dump of the Epstein files. At first it was a long paragraph but then, as I cut — I typically write long and then pare — I decided what Char Rivette was saying is too important, and there was no need to dilute her message by interjecting myself into the equation. It did skew the story more toward Epstein, and less toward Trump fans calling everybody pedophiles — everyone, that is, but the alleged pedophile in the Oval Office. But that was probably okay. My editor agreed.
     I thought of tucking a little introductory italics graph here, on the blog, the kind of insider nod that EGD readers like. But then decided, just as, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna, so, if you're going to stay out of it, then stay out of it.
      But Thursday rolled around, and I figured I could unspool the back story, which might have enough heft to hold your interest, illustrated by a photograph of the sky the other night using my new iPhone 17. A big improvement.

Fight against child abuse made more difficult by Epstein scandal

     The children arrive every day.
     "Monday we had 11 kids come in. Tuesday we had 10," said Char Rivette, chief executive officer of the Chicago Children's Advocacy Center. "Wednesday only six. Every day, brand new cases. I see them and think: How would this child feel if they thought they're being trivialized? Especially teenagers. How painful that is, to feel those feelings, being hurt so badly by multiple people throughout your life."
     Hurt by being sexually abused. The few cases that enter the system — most are never reported — begin at the advocacy center at 1240 S. Damen Ave., a colorful facility designed to be comforting to young victims.
     "We investigate all allegations of child sexual abuse in the City of Chicago, with the Chicago Police Department and DCFS," said Rivette. "We come together to make sure these kids are heard, and move forward with investigations. We interview kids, make sure they have everything they need. We also do education, outreach and prevention. We want to put ourselves out of business."
     We were talking because, with the Epstein files straddling the news, a salacious national scandal of the rich and powerful, and pedophilia now a casually flung political slur, I began to wonder how this affects people working in the trenches every day trying to help anonymous children who have been molested. I reached out to Rivette and asked how this affects her ability to do her job.
     "Two things," she said. First: "I sigh, because this is a problem that has been historically huge in the world, especially in the United States. Then it gets sensationalized. We've been hearing about Epstein for years and years, and it can be really distracting from what happens. The sensationalism it creates in the media makes victims even more reluctant to come forward, because it doesn't feel safe. They're afraid they're not going to be believed, and nothing is going to change. ... This Epstein thing makes it seem more scary."
     Second, she realizes: "OK, here's an opportunity to bring this to the forefront. I try to see it as an opportunity to educate."
     So let's educate. What do people need to know?
     Child sex abuse is common.
     "One in four women report being sexually abused as kids," she said. "It's just so underreported."
     The assailants are not jet-set real estate millionaires who sweet talk victims off playgrounds.
     "The stats are that 90, 95 percent of children know their abuser," said Rivette. "A lot of those folks are relatives or people close to the family. Mom's boyfriend. A neighbor. Older cousins. That's far more problematic than being trafficked by a stranger or being picked up on the street. ... We see up to 2,000 cases a year here. There are kids coming in because of dad, cousin, uncle, boyfriend. That is the primary perpetrator. That is where we need to focus our energies."

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Mailbag

   

     Not a ton of reader reaction to Monday's column on the war in Iran. Not surprising. Protracted historical metaphors might be useful, but do not set the blood aflame. Probably a good thing. How many self-appointed patriots leaping to defend newly-launched carnage, scraping together indignation from the freshly-spilt blood of those put into harm's way, do you want to indulge?

Hi Neil-
     With all our brave military heros [sic] now serving in Iran and all over the world for our freedom; I was disappointed to read your page 2 Top News Article. It appears to divide the country; and/or, support the division of our country for political reasons. 

     Greg V.
     Downers Grove, Illinois

     There's no point in answering something like that. But the day was young, and sometimes I can't help myself:

Greg:
     Our soldiers aren't in Iran, yet — in case facts still matter. Though I imagine that's coming. As for dividing the country, it's already divided — actually, not even. Only a quarter of Americans support Trump's war. What disappoints you is to see the division reported. Don't worry, if your tyrant has his way, with the help of people such as yourself, that won't happen anymore. Thanks for writing.

     NS

     Another reader complimented Monday's column and ended his email, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," which I recognized as the title of the Wilfred Owen poem about a gas attack in World War I, and dimly remembered writing a blog post about it.
     I called up the 2013 post, after a far different president, Barack Obama, was considering approaching Congress to ask for permission to attack Syria after Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people — the red line Obama said they mustn't cross. Our president ended up dithering; he didn't order those air strikes, at least not in 2013. He did, a year later,  for all the good it did. Not much — over half a million Syrians died between 2011 and 2021. I wonder how many Iranians will die in this adventure.

     It troubled me, a little, to see some of the same thoughts in Monday's column as were expressed in 2013 — apparently, when America charges into war, I automatically think of World War I, that monument to pointless slaughter.
     There are worse go-to moves, and 13 years is a long time. Few readers, I imagine, rattle their newspapers and think, "Heyyy, I read this metaphor in 2013!" Actually, few readers have physical newspapers to rattle. But still. You don't want to be a one-trick pony. "That Steinberg, he's really good at comparing whatever's happening now to World War I. That's his speciality of the house."

    Oh well, there will be plenty of opportunities to develop fresh approaches to this war. It doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. World War I lasted four years.

War is much easier to enter than to exit

 

     America has fought many wars. And built many war memorials.
     Wandering around Washington, D.C., I made a point to stop by the biggies — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, No. 1 in my book, for breaking war's symbolic stranglehold on imagined glory. A black granite gash in the earth featuring not eagles but the names of the 58,318 American dead.
     The Korean War Veterans Memorial, a night patrol of 19 stainless steel figures, in ponchos against the cold rain, faces etched with stress and fatigue, frozen in mid-stride. Even the sprawling, soulless World War II Memorial.
     The World War I Memorial wasn't on my radar. Until I found myself next to it, at the corner of 15th and Pennsylvania Avenue. A few extra steps, and there was Sabin Howard's epic sculpture "A Soldier's Journey." Starting with a doughboy taking leave of his wife and daughter, charging into combat, men around him killed, wounded, with a homecoming at the end.
     World War I is a stark reminder of the greasy slope of war — what started with an assassinated Austrian archduke exploded into fighting across the globe, ending 31 years later — historians consider World War II an extension of World War I, after a 21-year intermission to raise a new generation of cannon fodder.
     War between the United States and Iran commenced Saturday. It'll end... nobody knows, of course. We assume it'll be a few tightly contained airstrikes, like last summer.
     But then war always seems quick, at the outset, with the boys hurrahing down to the recruiting office to sign up, worried the action will be over before Christmas. The Russians, don't forget, rolled into Ukraine four years ago, expecting to be in Kyiv in a few days. They're still fighting, having lost an estimated 200,000 men.
     When World War I broke out in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, promised not to get involved. "He kept us out of war" was his re-election slogan in 1916. "No new wars," Donald Trump echoed in 2024.
     Both promises worked. Both were broken. Both with reason. Iran is the worst sponsor of international terrorism — Hamas could have never pulled off the Oct. 7 attacks without Iran's enthusiastic backing — making it impossible not to welcome the elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "It's been mass terror, and we're not going to put up with it any longer," Trump said.
     You go, Mr. President. Add it to the list of Trump successes, along with elimination of the penny. Whether that counterbalances scuttling voting rights, well, you decide.
     We're attacking Iran now... why exactly? To destroy its capacity to produce nuclear weapons? Sounds laudable. But also very... familiar. Didn't we just do that?
     “A spectacular military success” Trump said after the strikes last July. “Iran’s key enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
     "Totally, again, obliterated," Trump said Saturday. Maybe it'll stick this time. We're also calling for regime change. That seems naive — how well did that work in Afghanistan? Or to return to World War I: remember the regime Germany ended up with after Versailles. We liked the Nazis even less.

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Flashback 2012: Israel vs. Iran war off, for the moment, maybe

    

           Double bull stone capital from Persepolis (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)

     Not to make you guys feel like second class citizens or anything. But I flopped my fingers on the keyboard Satuday, to address this war we find ourselves in, and quickly thought, "You know ... this belongs in the paper."

     When my next column runs. Monday. Leaving you on Sunday high and dry. Though this Iranian mess did not come from nowhere, and glancing into the vault, I see many columns that lay out the situation we're in, more or less precisely. This one has the added bonus of neatly explaining what I — if no one else — has felt forever about the Palestinian situation.

     Everybody says the press never reports any good news. But maybe the press does report good news, but when it does, the public simply ignores it.
     For instance. This week, the New York Times reported some very good news: that the war Israel and Iran — and, maybe, the U.S. and the rest of the world — seemed hurtling inexorably toward for the past year may not be so inevitable after all.
     “A series of factors,” the paper says, “for now, argue against a conflict.” Whew.
     You already know the particulars — Iran is building a nuclear weapons program while pretending it’s a nuclear energy program, yet still rattling its saber and ranting about the eradication of Israel. A nation which, given its history of other countries trying to destroy it with deeds not words, has a habit of not just sitting around waiting for doom to arrive — very un-Jewish of them in that regard — so has been making noise that it will strike Iran first, if need be.
      Now, the Times says, tough economic sanctions have caught Iran’s attention so that they appear to be negotiating in quasi-good faith, as opposed to the playing-for-time-until-we-make-our-bomb talks of the past.
     That’s good news. If true.
     Meanwhile, former and current members of the Israeli military have gone public saying, in essence, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are nuts pushing for an unnecessary war.
     We should be overjoyed that a war is being averted ( if it is being averted). It shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, that people barely notice when a war is avoided since, heck, we barely notice the wars we’re still fighting ( Sigh. Really? OK, Afghanistan, remember?)
     A preemptive strike based on Iranian bluster and threats never struck me as a good idea. Then again, those missiles aren’t pointed at me. A reminder that there are two distinct camps among Jewish Americans when it comes to evaluating Israel. To the Trust Israel Always camp — older Jews, fervent Zionists, Standard Club members, those not prone to critical thinking — the idea is, these are the guys who raided Entebbe and whupped the behinds of their Arab foes for decades. They know what they’re doing.
      And having been raised in the afterglow of 1967 triumph, that’s a comfortable spot, and I can understand wanting to nestle there.
      I can even argue the case, a little. It goes like this: The world didn’t like Jews before — we were a menacing, unacceptable force of evil back when we were a bunch of bearded old guys studying Talmud and selling rags in rural shtetls across Poland. So naturally, now that the Jews have a nation with an army, stop the presses: They still don’t like us, even more, with new reasons added to the old.
      And yet. Some of those reasons just don’t brush easily off the table, no matter how you try to wipe them away. There is the growing tendency of the leadership to stray further and further right, coddling ultra Orthodox zealots, divine right settlers and militants.
     I have a habit I call “looking at the current facts.” Which, now that war with Iran doesn’t seem to be happening this week, click back to Israel’s perennial Problem No. 1: controlling the lives of four million stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Yes, the Palestinians’ leaders screwed them in the past. Yes, they seem to use any freedom given them to lob rockets blindly into Israel. But they’re still there, and the question remains: What’s to be done now?
      The popular Palestinian solution — the Jews shrug and wander off stage and we get the country back — is not helpful, a pipe dream, the same the-Jews-disappear-and-then-life-is-swell solution that Jews have been offered for a thousand years. Hope you don’t mind if we don’t snap at that one.
     But the current Israeli answer — the status quo goes on forever while Israel slowly absorbs more occupied land, condensing the Palestinians into a smaller and smaller ball until, poof, they magically disappear — seems equally unrealistic, because “forever” doesn’t seem an option, though at 45 years, we’re on our way. The Iranian crisis is cooling, maybe, for now, but there will certainly be another.
     Whenever this issue comes up, all sides grab at the past and start waving the parts that flatter them. That’s an endless sinkhole, one I try to avoid by asking, “What next?”
     Israel is there. It isn’t going away, particularly if Iran’s fingers are truly pried off the bomb, for the moment. The Palestinians are also still there, 4 million and growing. What happens next? Nobody has a clue.
     I keep returning to the long journey of the Jews. They didn’t sit down by the waters of Babylon and weep, remembering Zion, hoping that someday they’d get to enslave somebody too. That can’t be how the story ends.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 2, 2012

Gotcha

       
     So I bought a new phone a week ago Monday. I almost wrote "cell phone" but realized I come off as old enough without rubbing anybody's face in it. I had to buy it — the old phone, an Apple iPhone 12, wouldn't load software updates, no matter how many large attachments and apps I tossed over the side, like a balloonist flinging away ballast. 

     An iPhone 17, if you must know, through a process of extraordinary length and tedium. Not the 6.8 inch pro, but the smaller, 6.3 inch version. That was my central priority — I wanted the same size. Consistency is a big value to me at this point. I might not be able to keep the country from sliding into autocracy. But I can keep my phone from morphing into something huge and heavy. Same size, more or less, same color, black. I worried over the .2 inch increase, but decided it was acceptable. 

    This is a wild abbreviation of hours of study and consideration, over months. How much capacity? I opted for the 512 GB. Do I need the service plan? Generally no. But my wife says ... I started to summarize and quickly realized I was boring myself.

     Credit to Apple — buying it was easy and intuitive, leaving aside the stress and indecision I brought to the process myself. The thing arrived the next day via Fedex. I placed my phones together, migrated my data — easy as pie —  and then had to prepare my old phone to trade in. It was complicated — I had to watch a video or two — but eventually returned wiped it clean, both of information and fingerprints — wiping the screen, using Windex, actually thinking, "Clean the old gal up to meet her parents back at Apple." I thanked the black oblong for its service, packed it up in the little cardboard folder they'd sent and shipped it off, itself a complicated, three part process that involved a) going to the Fedex store or, rather, where the Fedex store had been last time I needed it. Being redirected by a sign at the shuttered store to the new location, b) being told, there, that the label on the parcel in my hand was intended by folks more observant than myself for UPS, not FedEx, and, c) finally, heading to the UPS store (you see why I'm trying to abbreviate this process? Every step has four substeps and three corrections).
     A few days after that Apple wrote me a stern note under the heading, "Action needed to continue your trade in." Despite my best efforts, I had not, apparently, turned off Find My Phone, a system to locating stray devices. Before I got my $120 trade in, I must do that, another dive into a rabbit hole that involved, I kid you not, a 24 hour security waiting period, as if it were some dramatic step, a gun purchase or a divorce.
     I finally did it, or at least thought I did it. No big "Success!" screen comes up. The thing to do once that was accomplished was to wait — waiting, like shutting up, an art form I struggle to master — until Apple realized the Find My ... feature had been shut off and alerted me that my 120 bucks was en route. But patience is the first victim of technology. And I wanted it done. So I jumped into the Apple chat support and, after a 20 minute conversation that I should have preserved. for donation to some future museum of head-on-a-board frustration, I was reassured by some AI chatbot that the check was indeed in the mail, so to speak, and I'd be notified in three to five business days.     

     Satisfied, I went about my business, or tried to. Then this appeared.

     There was something in that tone. The "need" part of the message, like bad news from your spouse. "Honey, we need to talk..." I almost overlooked that nothing was being delivered, or nothing I knew of. I phoned, as instructed, went through a variety of shells and messages without actually getting anywhere, realized I was wasting yet more time, and gave up and went about my business, or tried to. 
    The next day, I got this.

    Oh, for Pete's sake, I thought. What now? Had I inadvertently changed my birth date trying to shut off the Find My feature? I clicked on the Apple Support link. Ba-boom:

    It was a trap, set by my own office, that I had blundered into, softened up by the gantlet Apple had already put me through, buying a new phone and trading in an old one. You know, they used to give us phones. Call us to a room and hand out a box, like Christmas. I didn't care anything about the phones, then. They were free, to me anyway, a benediction that forgave all sins. Now, not only am I required to buy my own phone but if, loggy from the ordeal, I can find it's not a link, but the office in disguise, ready to bite my straying finger.

       I was immediately enrolled in one of those generic security seminars that pelt us like rain and I would avoid if I only could. Hoisted with my own petard. Perhaps also as a result, perhaps coincidentally — who can tell anymore? — perhaps because now my tech judgment was suspect, I was also logged out of the paper's email system, and could not log in, because my new phone isn't set up with its One Login Connect security feature. I felt like I was being made to sit on the red stool, for being careless, and ended up calling our tech support, which allowed me to at least talk to an actual person, and apologize for clicking on the poisoned link. He didn't seem to take it personally. My OneLogin bona fides were quickly established.
     I planned to illustrate this item with a photo of a bird, taken with what I assume is the vastly-improved Zoom feature on my new iPhone17. Only I haven't been outside enough to see a bird. Because I've been inside. Futzing around with this tech shit. I decided to describe the tiresome process yesterday, without realizing just how tiresome it would be to relate. But it's 4:46 a.m. Saturday — I didn't get this written yesterday because we had a big pizza party so family could ogle the new granddaughter, radiating cuteness like a new sun. So some life is still happening, around the tech hassles.  We did go for a long walk out in the beautiful weather yesterday afternoon. Sad that I would choose to describe this phony inside process instead of that lovely outdoor stroll . Another wrong decision. Carpe diem. 

The president, the lies and the cannulated cow

 

     The beauty of getting out into the world, meeting new people and seeing new stuff, is two-fold. First, you learn new information, from the new people you talk to and the new stuff you see. Learning new things is fun.
     And second, you then can apply this new knowledge, making all sorts of interesting connections.
     For instance, struggling to articulate the general numbness of watching President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday, I remembered a cannulated cow seen at Chicago's High School for Agriculture Sciences in Mount Greenwood (What? You didn't know about either cannulated cows or the ag high school? Well, I'm happy to be the one to tell you.)
     MAGA types, who don't seem at all keen on either new people or new ideas, imagine liberals in some kind of pearl-clutching agony, or door-jamb-gnawing fury. But truly, nearly two hours of the State of the Union speech left me mostly bored. We've heard all this before, many times, from the moment candidate Trump descended that escalator in his monstrous brass and orange stone lobby.
     "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
     Tuesday was more of the same. When he wasn't lying about the economy or gaslighting — for example, the shameless fraud declaring war on fraud — Trump was grinding over the threat of immigrants. Both criminals and bad drivers. That's where I thought of the cannulated cow. How cows digest their food is important to the dairy industry, and one way to keep tabs is to surgically implant a round window into the side of a cow. Students and scientists look through the window, into the cow's stomach, and watch the half-digested mash sloshing around.
     That was the State of the Union speech. The same well-chewed slop of fear, hatred, lies, prejudice, nationalism and enormous self-regard that Trump has been spewing for years.
      One of the many dangers of this moment is exhaustion. The liars lie nonstop, while those familiar with the truth get tired of repeating ourselves, bloodying our fingers scratching at that brick wall.
     Yet scratch we must. So forgive me for belaboring the obvious for the benefit of — well, I'm not sure who at this point. Either you understood long ago or you never will. Yet truth will out.
     The current war on immigrants is not only morally and economically wrong, but entirely based on lies — haters are cowards, and rather than just admit they're surrendering to fear (of new people and new things) they slur the object of their fixation. They don't hate immigrants because immigrants are criminals; they tar them as criminals because they hate them.

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