Flashback 2009: Intrusion — or solemn reminder?

 

The dignified transfer of Army Spc. Lukasz D. Saczek of Lake in the Hills, Ill., at Dover Air Force Base.   (US Air Force photo/Roland Balik)

     Today is Memorial Day, a time to remember soldiers who have fallen in defense of our country. Now, as in 2010, we are a nation that hardly notices the war we're fighting, despite our president's repeated vows that it will end ... any moment now. This ran back when my column was a thousand words and filled a page. Daniel Hauser's parents eventually did agree to his chemotherapy.

OPENING SHOT . . .

      This is a photograph of Spec. Lukasz Saczek's arrival at Dover Air Force Base earlier in the month.
     Saczek, 23, was a soldier in the Illinois Army National Guard, Company D, 1st Battalion, 178th Infantry, based in Woodstock.
     He died May 10, in what the Army describes only as a noncombat-related incident.
      I wanted to publish the photograph in advance of Memorial Day, as a reminder that we are still a nation at war, that American soldiers are dying both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
     Such photos were banned by President George H.W. Bush during the first Iraqi war in 1991. The ban remained in effect for 18 years, until reversed last month by President Obama.
      The policy now is that the Pentagon asks families of deceased soldiers whether they wish to allow photographers at the homecoming, and the families decide.
      That is how it should be because such photos are not viewed neutrally. Some people consider them an intrusion, a political statement, a focus on personal loss and an implicit criticism of the war.
      Others see them as honoring the sacrifice by displaying it in real terms, reminding us at home that while we grill hot dogs and drink beer, young men and women are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever else they're ordered to go.
     You, of course, are free to interpret this photo however you like — the benefit of a free country. Myself, I see it as a solemn reminder to a nation that sorely needs reminding. It seems to me that of all the divides in this country, Democrat and Republican, North and South, black and white, there is also a chasm between the military, their families, friends and communities, which know all too well the cost of war, and the rest of the country, which can hardly be bothered to glance at it, even on Memorial Day.
     Spec. Saczek leaves behind a widow, Katie, 19, and a baby daughter who will be 2 months old on Monday.

IF THE ANGEL TARRIES

     The government shouldn't dictate to parents what medical treatment they must give their children.
      And yet, parents also should not be allowed to injure their kids just because their faith permits it.
      Between these two sensible viewpoints falls the case of Danny Hauser, the 13-year-old Minnesota boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma whose mother, Colleen, fled with him rather than allow the chemotherapy that doctors say will save his life.
      There are enough issues here to fill a textbook. Does it matter that she was inspired by an obscure holistic belief system and not a more mainstream form of medical denial, such as Christian Science? Would it be different if the treatment options were less clear-cut than the 90 percent cure rate with chemo, in this case, vs. almost certain death without?
      To me, the key fact in this situation is that a judge ordered the boy to have the treatment — that's why we have judges, to make tough calls. As a society, we tend to automatically respect faith and doubt jurisprudence, which seems backward.
      Courts get a bad rap, mainly from people who dislike their decisions. But somebody has to stay Abraham's hand so he doesn't slay his son Isaac, and if the angel tarries, a judge will do. For Danny Hauser, a court's ruling is the only thing between him and an early, unnecessary death.

RADIO NOTES

     WGN has always appealed to the housewife, the farmer, the night clerk and everybody else who wanted a rock of homey sanity to stand on for a minute or an hour or the time it takes to drive to Peoria to deliver a few bushels of peaches.
     Homey sanity hasn't always been in fashion, but that was sort of the point — you could go to Steve Dahl if you wanted sarcastic and funny commentary — once upon a time — or Howard Stern if you felt the need to feel superior to strippers.
     There are others — the urbane and intelligent Roe Conn, the freewheeling John Howell.
      But WGN was a mainstay, there at the base of the Tribune Tower, and at its heart was the "Kathy & Judy Show" — Kathy O'Malley and Judy Markey. I never actually set eyes on Kathy — she was always on vacation when I would stop by and spend an hour or two chatting with Judy, a smart, bighearted woman with a curious mind and a quick wit. It was shocking to see WGN show them the gate Friday, as the station tarts itself up to appeal to kids who won't listen anyway.
      There is no schadenfreude in this, no gleeful mocking of TribCo when it is down. We are all cooking in the same pot. But I couldn't let my former colleague, current friend and permanent Chicago icon slip out of town without saying how much she is liked and how much she will be missed, as we scan the constantly mutating local media landscape and try in vain to find a friendly, familiar face.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

      With Mother's Day two weeks in the past, we gardeners are in full frenzy. My tomatoes are in and caged, the flower box that had been causing flooding has been removed and a very promising burning bush put in its place.
      Sometimes I puzzle whether something should be pulled up or nurtured, and so appreciate this handy definition from Gallagher:
      If you water it and it dies, it's a plant. If you pull it out and it grows back, it's a weed.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 24, 2009

Flashback 1999: A club that's for all kids

     Facebook served up this column from 1999, which I posted a dozen years ago when the Boy Scouts were enduring one of their regular spates of controversy. Since then, the popularity of the Scouts has continued to crater — from 4 million members, back when I was part of the organization in the 1970s, to about 1 million now. Shaken by social changes, criticism over its tardy decision to stop excluding gay scouts followed by the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't exodus of Mormons plus, I imagine, the isolating effects of social media and an increased tendency of people not to join groups in the living world.  The Camp Fire organization, on the other hand, while significantly smaller, is going strong.

     Just as the Boy Scouts of America were twirling in bad publicity hell after the latest flap over its booting out gay scouts , I received a letter from the Camp Fire Boys and Girls, touting their corn maze down in Ottawa, Ill.
     The maze is immense; more than 10 acres of cornfield. Nothing quite so evocative of sweet late summer as a corn maze. But that wasn't what I was really interested in.
     What I was really interested in was sex. Or more specifically, how Camp Fire manages to sidestep the issue that has so thoroughly bollixed its big brother, the Boy Scouts?
     How do they manage to cook S'mores and pitch tents without getting hung up on the emerging sexualities of their little charges?
     The answer is surprising.
     "Kids are kids and our job is to give them an opportunity to have a really wonderful time growing up," said Jean Lachowicz, executive director of the Metro Chicago Council of the Camp Fire Boys and Girls. "We are very family-oriented. The other issues just don't come into play."
     Surely, I said, she can't be suggesting that Camp Fire Boys and Girls, whose members range from kindergarten to high school, allow gay youngsters to make lanyards and potholders alongside everybody else, as if they were normal people?
     "We don't even get into that," she said. "Who are we to say?"
     What a freakish anomaly. A group that doesn't try to dictate to the personal lives of its members. Practically revolutionary in sex-obsessed, eye-to-the-keyhole, who-do-we-hate-this-week America.
     Just as the Boy Scouts have a credo, filled with a bunch of Victorian hooey about duty and moral rightness, so Camp Fire has its own motto, which it calls an "Inclusiveness Statement." They post it on the wall.
     It reads: "Camp Fire Boys and Girls works to realize the dignity and worth of each individual and to eliminate human barriers based on all assumptions which prejudge individuals."
     Talk about radical. Morality in America is almost always used as an excuse to ostracize people. Very rarely is it offered up as a reason to include them (though, frankly, even if I believed the view of the Boy Scouts — that there is something so radically wrong with homosexuals they can't be taught how to use semaphore flags — I think that would motivate me to want to get them in Scouting all the more, in the hopes that our vigorous outdoor program and credo of moral certitude would win them over and draw them away from perversion. To shun them seems, well, to lack faith in heterosexuality).
     Before parting, I had one more question about Camp Fire. Where did the boys come from? When my sister, Debbie, was a Blue Bird, 30 years ago, it was an all-girl thing. Court order? Lawsuit?
     "In 1975 we switched to boys and girls," said Lachowicz. "We found the clubs were taking in more and more boys , so they decided to change the organization so it is co-ed."
     A huge, cathartic crisis?
     "Nah," she said. "Camp Fire has always been a very, very flexible organization."
And one that doesn't feel it needs to add to the problems of any youngster straying from society's norms.
      "Kids want to be involved in something that's positive and not painful," she said. "We just do what we have to do. Kids who join Camp Fire are really happy. We have a blast."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 17, 1999

Works in progress: Jack Clark in Paris, deux

The Louvre, Paris

     As a certified museum guy, I have to admit that frequent contributor Jack Clark's pride at never visiting the Louvre left me a little ... baffled. It's like not liking chocolate — possible, yes, but not exactly something to be proud of. I'll let you decide if he makes his case. As for the painting that he highlights, I deliberately tucked it into the body of the story, and not the top, so it wouldn't go up to illustrate the post on Facebook, causing the behemoth to perhaps flag and block it as a species of pornography, which is just sad.

     Jack does sidestep the obvious question of what is happening in the painting. According to Wikipedia, the nipple tweak was seen as somehow symbolic of the lady on the right being pregnant with Henry IV's child. In more recent times, it was seen as a wink at lesbianism, though the two subjects are sisters. The sort of puzzle one misses by not frequenting museums.

     Three of my siblings visited us in Paris the other week. We took my brother Kevin and his wife Joanne to hear some music in a club housed in a boat docked on the left bank of the Seine. Kevin’s the real musician in the family. I wasn’t a bit surprised when he ended up on stage singing and playing a borrowed bass guitar.
     My sisters Kathleen and Ryan went to every museum they could find, without me. I didn’t have any problems in that boat on the river but just listening to them talk about the various museums they’d visited made me feel somewhat seasick.
     Being colorblind is a blessing that I’ve used to keep myself out of scores of museums. It’s about more than my abbreviated color perception. I like my art one piece at a time. Museums stuffed full make me dizzy. Once I almost saw blood.
     That was on a visit to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Museum in Cody, Wyoming, back in the late 1980s. I’d always heard it was a great place and I’m a big fan of the old West as portrayed in books and movies. But sad to say, the museum was just as boring as most of the others I’ve tried.
     They had a bunch of Indian mannequins dressed in authentic Indian wear standing around Teepees and looking very. . . Well, actually I forget how they looked. That’s how unimpressive it was. But the woman I was with was having a great time. She’d once worked at the Art Institute so this was right up her avenue. I followed along trying to pretend I was interested and then I wondered where the museum had gotten the clothes. “Probably off of dead Indians,” I answered myself.
      Once I had the thought, I found what looked like bullet holes everywhere, in the back, in the shoulder, in the side. And suddenly, in the midst of horror, I was having a great time. “Look at this one,” I said to my friend. “I mean, moths don’t eat through leather, do they?”
      “Look, right there in the lower back. Isn’t that where the kidneys are?”
     “Jack, would you please shut up?” my friend whispered. “Everybody’s listening.”
     Shut up? She had to be kidding. Here was some actual history. Those Indian villages were a fantasy: the Indians living in peace. When did that ever happen? Not after 1492.
     Some years later, I was driving a taxi and my passenger said he was a history professor at Yale. “What’s your specialty?” I asked. When he told me it was the American West, I asked if he’d ever been to the museum in Cody.
     “Oh sure. I go every other year or so.”
     I told him about those holes and he promised to take a look on his next visit. Who knows? Maybe my observation made it into a Yale class or paper.
     But where did they get the clothes? Who did they belong to? How did they die? Who was on the other end of those bullets? I wouldn’t mind hearing those answers.
     In any museum, I would probably find the answer to, How did they get all this stuff, more interesting than the stuff itself. And remember, most museums have even more stuff in storage.
     Speaking of museums and Paris, I did go to the Louvre once, but I only got as far as the gift shop. This was decades back, I was on my way to Paris to write with my friend Bob Meyer. He was a Chicago artist, writer, and all-around craftsman and artisan, who had moved to Paris to be with his young son. We were turning the 1931 Fritz Lang movie M into the play M the Murderer.

      Bob Horn, another Chicago artist, wanted me to ask Bob to go to the Louvre gift shop and pick up a postcard of the painting, Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters. In the 1594 work, two women in their early 20s are sitting in a bathtub. An older woman is in the background, looking down at her knitting. The girl on the left is reaching out, tweaking one of the other girl’s nipples. Horn was planning a painting based on the original. “Bob will know the painting,” he said.
     (You may notice a trend in those last few paragraphs: We’ve all run out of original ideas.)
     When I got to Paris, Bob Meyer said, “I’ve been here for eight years and I haven’t been in the Louvre yet. I’m not going for Bob Horn.” They were the best of friends, of course, and both were involved with the founding of the NAB Gallery in Chicago in 1974.
     But Bob gave me directions to the Louvre. And then on my legal pad he drew a rough sketch of the postcard Bob Horn wanted. “Just show ‘em that,” he said. “They’ll know the painting.”
     I wasn’t so sure. Bob could make the simplest drawing look sexy and on the border of obscene. But I didn’t see anything like that in the sketch. I folded it and headed for the Louvre.
     On the way, I passed rue Rivoli where there were several postcard stores. I went into one after the other and showed them the sketch. “The Louvre,” everyone said, and some were kind enough to point the way.
     So I went to the Louvre and down to the gift shop where there are thousands and thousands of postcards. How would I ever find the right one? There were two teenage girls behind the counter. I held up my drawing and they both immediately turned bright red. Bob had done it again. Here they were, working in a museum with thousands of nudes. They probably never gave any of them a second glance. But my old friend Bob, with a five-second drawing scribbled on a yellow legal pad, had somehow ignited a flash fire.
     After the girls recovered, they knew exactly in which aisle I would find the postcard. I bought a few extras.
     Aside from transposing the sisters, Bob had drawn the scene perfectly from memory. I guess that’s what you learn in art school. I don’t know where he’d learned to hint at pornography without ever crossing into it.
     I looked at Bob’s sketch for days, but I could never find what had made the two girls blush and Bob, who died in Paris in 2021, wasn’t giving away trade secrets. I’ve got several of his drawings at home. When I look, I rarely see those hidden elements. I think they come with the shock of first viewing. Almost every woman who’s set foot in my apartment has skipped past most of my other art to take long looks at Bob’s drawings. I wish I knew what they were seeing.
     Maybe if I’d spent more time in museums.

'I will get justice' — Chicago man vs. the government of Saudi Arabia

 

     Ahmed Abdul Majeed wants justice.
     Born in India, for more than 40 years he lived in Saudi Arabia, employed at a travel agency, booking trips for the royal family, building the company.
     “I used to work a lot,” he said. “Seven days a week.”
     For the past two years, Majeed, 67, has lived in the Devon Avenue Indian community with his son, Ahmed Abdulumer, a food delivery driver and American citizen. It was his son, 34, who brought Majeed to my attention.
     “My father,” Abdulumer wrote, “was a victim of forced labor and human trafficking.”
     The details are complicated. We should probably start by explaining the kafala system, the tradition of immigrants existing in rightless limbo in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations.
     “Unfortunately, migrant workers in Saudi Arabia have little to no control over their lives,” Abdulumer wrote. “The status quo in Saudi Arabia for decades has been the kafala system for migrant workers which had been exploiting, stealing wages, imprisoning, raping, falsifying charges and killing countless workers over many decades. This system strips workers of their freedom and dignity, silences complaints and grants employers near-total control over their lives.”
     Some workers are brought in under false pretenses. Others enter with eyes open — the money is good, relative to their homelands. Being on the bottom of the social ladder in Saudi Arabia is still better than being on the bottom of the social ladder in Bangladesh.

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My (not so) new car

     Timidity is not my way. Which is good, for a guy obligated to churn out as much material as I do — three columns a week in Chicago Sun-Times, the other four days on this blog, plus the occasional book. My spectrum of topics is by necessity wide. Otherwise, it would grow tiresome as I rang the same bell, again and again.
     Yes, certain subjects are taboo. The details of grandchildren beyond the fact of their existence (people are asking the gender of the newest, born last week. As I sometimes say: silence is an answer. I wasn't ordered to do so — I'm just being cautious, a valuable attribute in those caring for the very young). 
     Or ... and this was pure cowardice on my part ... the new car, bought three and a half years ago. A 2023 Mazda CX-9, Carbon Edition. Not so new anymore.
     Why avoid such a enticing subject? I mean, cars, right? Windows into the soul of American men. I've written at length on the topic, regarding cars that were not mine. 
     Honestly, picking the car was such a protracted ordeal, that at the time I didn't want to cap the experience by inviting whoever could flop their fingers onto a keyboard to tell me what a sap I'd been, what a dupe and sucker for buying such a laughable lemon. I already had the car. Any feedback would be doubts raised too late to do anything but torment, like when I told my mother, may she rest in peace, that I had bought four new tires at Costco.

     "Don't buy tires at Costco!" she urged, for reasons I can't recall. I considered this advice.

     "Mom..." I said measuredly. "The tires ... are already ... on the car."

     But at this point, any dire news about the CX-9 would be pointless, as we've owned it happily for three and a half years, almost. It actually was listed in Consumers Reports as to be one of the less dependable years, for flaws and repairs. But that was general, about the CX-9 as a class, and the individual we have has been spared the woes afflicting others. The CX-9 was also discontinued the year after we bought it, which did not strike me as a good sign.

     Nevertheless, 25,000 miles. Around the earth at the equator. Driven it all the way to upstate New York. In winter. Great for cruising — it's a bigger car. Honestly, my wife would have been happy with the CX-9's little brother, the CX-5. And in truth, it seemed fine if a little ... dinky. That's the word I used, dismissing it. "Dinky."

     "I'm old," I told her. "I want to tool around the suburbs in a bigger car. I want something Tony Soprano would drive." A larger vehicle gives a necessary boost to a fellow. That actually worked, winning her over along with, I suppose, the red leather seats. 
     Sure, a few glitches. The key fob is a little sensitive — I can be in the house, and if I squeeze it the wrong way in my pocket, the rear hatch lifts in the garage, 100 feet away. The information interface with the cell phone has hiccups, and there is this big knob to cycle through various digital shells that borders on stupid. 
     But merging onto the highway I mutter a little prayer of thanks, sometimes out loud, for the hefty turbocharged engine. It seats six, which came in handy ferrying guests when the boys got married. The backup camera is great, as are the little warning beeps it gives if you want to merge into a lane occupied already. You can puff warm or cool air at your backside, through holes in the seat.

    Most important, to me, is this: it's handsome. That sharp little nose and hooded headlight/eyes has more style than most cars on the road. It has a personality. Sometimes it seems enormous. "Look at that boat," I'll say, admiring it from a distance. From other angles, it's almost demure.

     Anyway, I needed something to write about today, and the photo of the car popped up, and to  paraphrase Molly Bloom, "I thought as well this as another." You are now free to tell me what a mistake we've made.
       

Being formed by Christians does not a Christian nation make

George Washington life mask, by Houdon (National Portrait Gallery)

      George Washington planted vineyards and also ran a distillery. Thomas Jefferson was a passionate wine collector, sometimes called “America’s first vintner,” who once confessed “wine from habit has become an indispensable for my health.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy,” observing that the elbow was perfectly designed, by the Almighty, to facilitate drinking: “Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom.”
      Given this, and other related historical facts, it would be easy to argue that the United States was founded by a bunch of tosspots for the express purpose of facilitating inebriation.
     It would take an honest, fair-minded person — they do exist — to survey, not the narrow range of grape-stained documents, but the whole of American history, to point out that subordination to Great Britain did not encumber consuming wine, and other factors inspired the quest for American independence, such as a desire for freedom.
      A similar candor demands that a similar evenhanded historical perspective be applied to last Sunday’s “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” the prayer orgy on the National Mall featuring top officials from the Trump administration celebrating the notion that ours is a Christian nation created by, and for, Christians.
      Pretty to think so. For them. For others, not so much. But before we dive in, first consider the source — something the media is terrible at doing. We wake up every morning, shocked to discover a fiery object in the sky, muster our wits to gradually ascertain that, yes, it is indeed the sun, again, and then prepare to receive that day’s load of lies and crimes as similar bolts from the blue, as if they hadn’t appeared yesterday and the day before that, and the day before.
      The proponents of the America-is-Christian canard are the same people who generally not only take pride in their woeful ignorance of the past but claim to feel bad if minor details like slavery or labor strife or mass immigration manage to nudge themselves into a textbook, who pass laws to make sure succeeding generations are hobbled in a similar fashion, a kind of intellectual foot-binding. Now, in their continuing quest to salve their inflamed egos, they claim America was founded especially for them as a Christian nation. It wasn’t. It was founded by Christians, true. But suggesting that their creation is therefore, by necessity, also Christian, is like arguing that Albert Einstein’s revolution in physics makes atomic energy Jewish (which the Nazis actually did claim, to their eventual sorrow).
      Where to begin? It’s common to start with the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, where our nation spelled it out so plainly that even MAGA could understand, if they were into understanding reality rather than trying to mold it to their whims.

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Misdirected wrenches

      About 65 million packages are delivered every day in the United States. We all know the drill. Today's load of brown cardboard is deposited on the front steps, if we have them, or the package room of a building. The UPS or Amazon guy snaps a picture. We look outside, think, "Goodies!" and go collect our new stuff and add it to the old stuff.
     But what if a package isn't yours? Some 2 or 3 percent of shipments — about a million packages a day — go astray. What do you do if one of them washes up on your front step? What is your responsibility for these goods you did not order and do not want? Call UPS? Open the box? Keep what's inside? It isn't a gift, precisely. Though someone gave it to you. If they're intended for a neighbor, the right and decent thing to do is walk the box over — just last week, a magazine for someone living two blocks away ended up in our mail, and next time I walked Kitty, I took the publication with me and saw it to its proper recipient, feeling a little conspicuous when I walked up to his house and shoved it through the mail slot. People have been shot for less. 
     But a few days ago something strange happened. We got a long UPS box — at first I thought it was flowers, which sometimes come that way. But inside was a wooden play set for the new grand babe and ... a separate UPS box, within the first, containing a 17 piece DeWalt combination wrench set. That box was addressed to a tool shop in Mokena. 
     For a moment, I wondered if it was part of the gift — a play set for the babe, wrenches for grandpa. But that was daft. Nobody would do that. So what should I do? Having my own tools, plus tools inherited from my father-in-law, plus some from a neighbor moving far away, I am rich in hand tools, particularly wrenches, from tiny wrenches to big spanners a foot and a half long that look like they're intended for tightening bolts on an aircraft carrier. 

     Then there was the mystery of how the wrenches got in there. Or maybe not such a mystery. Having once toured an Amazon fulfillment center, a vast, sprawling, frenetic hive of Seussian commotion — roaring conveyers, chutes, slides, twirling robots, human pickers pushed to the limits of human capacity —  the potential for error was easy enough to see. There must be astounding tales of unimaginable screw-ups, waiting to be uncovered.
     I thought of gifting the wrenches — they were mine now, were they not? — perhaps bestowing them on the younger boy. But he has no need for wrenches, now or in the foreseeable future. They would just be a burden, more crap from dad. The thing to do was send them on their way. Return them to UPS.
     My wife was dubious — I think she viewed me as somehow now responsible for these wrenches. Possession is 9/10 of the law. She wondered whether UPS would just take them from me. But I pointed out the mailing label, with the all-important bar code. They were on a journey. The thing to do would be to speed them on their way. We were heading to Red's Garden Center anyway, to load up on herbs and flowers and such. The UPS store was on the way.
      When we pulled into the strip mall, I suggested she wait in the car. No, she said, she wanted to see how this goes down. Given my luck, she might have been worried that, without her cool head, some kind of Roger Thornhill chain of mistaken events would be set in motion, like in "North by Northwest." "He's here! The guy with the wrenches!" one of the UPS workers would cry, and I'd end up climbing down the face of Mount Rushmore with Eva Marie Saint.
     We walked in.
     "Can I help you?" the clerk said. 
     "You delivered these to me," I said, hefting the box onto the counter. "But I am not the Pennsylvania Tools of Mokena." He took the box without a word. We turned and walked out. She praised my honesty, but I was thinking of how the situation would have transpired had it been, not superfluous wrenches, but a DeWalt reciprocating saw. I could really use one of those.