Wait a sec! This isn't the Donald Trump we know

 

     Words don’t often fail me. I wouldn’t last long in this job if they did. But Tuesday night, after sitting with a big bowl of popcorn, serenely watching the Democrats run the table in the midterm elections — a strong majority in the House, more than enough in the Senate, even the governorship of Texas — I snapped off the television, sucked my front teeth, tweeted out a clip of Anthony Quinn doing his ecstatic Zorba the Greek dance, then went to bed.
     But the clip, even without elaboration, was deceptive. I didn’t feel ecstatic, or celebratory, or even particularly glad. What I felt was calm, focused and more than a little wary. So ... after all that thundering for years about rigged elections, conjuring up will-o'-the-wisps of voter fraud and mobilizing the Justice Department to chase after them, the biggest crybaby in public life since Nero is going to just shrug and go, “Oh, right, I lost. Good for you.”
And we’re supposed to believe him? Does that sound probable to you?
     Maybe I bought a bully’s bluster. Didn’t realize that, like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” one solid bop on the nose would change him from a preening predator to a blubbering wreck, complaining that Fox News doesn’t love him anymore.
     Or maybe there’s a Plan B — they won’t certify the election. Another mob will be sicced on the Capitol. He tried it before.
     Did he really say he was “absolutely willing” to accept the election results? That he would “look forward to working with” the Democrats? That they did a “good job”? Does that sound like the Donald Trump you’ve gotten to know over the last 10 years? Can I be the only one in the country who is suspicious?
     Smarter political minds than my own seem to accept it. Wednesday I reached out to political whiz David Axelrod, the man who helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Why isn’t Trump fighting this tooth and nail? His reply might be the most succinct remark in the history of punditry since Dorothy Parker supposedly responded to the death of Calvin Coolidge with, “How can they tell?”
     “Too big to rig!” Axelrod said.
     Could that be it? Yes, the scope of the loss was enormous. Seven states flipped: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. With Mississippi — Mississippi! — incredibly, still too close to call. Governorships in Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Iowa. Why not enjoy it? Grab our skis and head for hell, because obviously it’s frozen over, every red state now a winter Democratic wonderland.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Mailbag

 

     I've really got to stop answering email. I'm reading off an old program — the notion that we're discussing issues, having conversations. When that isn't what's happening at all. We're cudgeling each other with words. Or making non-negotiable demands. Consider this email that arrived Tuesday. I've obscured the sender's email and company name, out of kindness, so they don't get abuse. It's a business, a wan YouTube channel with a couple videos on it, and a name that has the marginal feeling of "The Tiny Tots Fun Station." Take a read:

   Now my standard reply when people suggest column topics is that I'm not the piano player in a Holiday Inn lounge. I don't take requests. And now that I read it, and its presumptive tone sinks in, I should have replied, simply, "You didn't say 'please.'" But in the moment I noticed something else about the above, something missing. Give it a going over; I've reproduced the entire email except for the company name. What's missing?

    My reply:

    

.    The reply was a strange spin on "Don't you know who I am?" and another demand.

     And that was the end. Not worth the effort, right? I'm not quite ready to delete gmail, the way I've taken Facebook off my phone. But I'm tempted.

Courting death by hauling top-heavy wooden floats in Japan — just another risky guy thing

     The news is flushing out my siblings lately.
     Just as my sister Debbie showed up in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV went under the knife for lung cancer. Deb has been kicking cancer’s ass for years, so tapping her wisdom seemed a no-brainer.
     Several readers replied, “You have a sister?” Well, I’m supposed to be writing a column for a Chicago newspaper, not a chatty meet-the-family Christmas letter.
     And yet. News has a will of its own.
     Now it’s my younger brother’s turn. Sam is no stranger to readers, particularly of my books. It is he who bails me out of jail in “Drunkard.” He’s also a plot point in “You Were Never in Chicago,” as I trace the classic newcomer’s path of coming here, getting a job, then bringing family to Chicago and helping them get jobs. I rented an apartment with a spare bedroom on Logan Boulevard, and enticed him to move here from Tokyo, where his apartment was so small I could span its width with my arms spread and one foot planted on the floor. And I have short arms.
     Sam still has the Big Love for Japan, and goes back often. He and his wife Yuri were there when my sister showed up, which would have not been the stuff of a column, except for one reason he went — to participate in the Danjiri Matsuri — an annual fall festival where huge wooden floats are maneuvered through the streets by acolytes wearing cotton happi coats.
     I knew it was dangerous — the festival is sort of a Japanese running of the bulls at Pamplona: a chance to party in the street, risk being killed, and survive. I thought of telling him, “Don’t get crushed.” But that seemed a prissy, older brother concern.
     What I said instead was, “I want to see a picture.” Because he can fall down in that department. I would have left it at that. Then two participants were crushed to death in Osaka, and 16 injured. The New York Times found four others who died in 2022 and 2023. Suddenly, I was sitting on a big international news story, so designated Sam as a Sun-Times foreign correspondent and got to work.
      Weren’t you worried about being killed?

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Not my circus: religion small and large

     Noticing this sign in the hallway of a Washington DC apartment building sent me tumbling down an interesting mental tangent. 
     I know a bit about Islam, and knew that shoes are removed during prayer in a mosque. But did not realize that also extended to quotidian life in the home. Makes sense — live a life of purity, keep the dirt outside. My daughter-in-law insists on the same thing, not out of religious scruple, but just trying to keep germs off the babies. I brought slippers and tried to remember, though old habits die hard.
     There are two tracks that religion occupies. Think of it as two levels. There is the individual, daily pathways each we blaze for ourselves, deciding how we pray, what to think, what we eat, whether our shoes stay on or off indoors
     And then there is, for want of a better term, the public track, faith as image, metaphor, communal consensus, political club to be wielded, for and against. Religion as concept, as it is talked about rather than lived. Not a distinction I see discussed much, which is unfortunate, because it strikes me as useful.
    They almost seem like two entirely different animals, do they not? Personal and public faith. I've said many times before that religion is a tool, like a hammer. You can build a house with it, or hit someone in the head. Same hammer. 
     But there is also religion as different tools, put to different purposes. A micrometer and a yardstick. Religion small and large. People rarely complain about religion small, religion as it actually manifests itself among regular folk. As much as people hate Jews, in often spectacular, creative fashion, you never hear bigots raging about the fuckin' Jews and their damn Sabbath candles and their yamulkes and their affinity for education. Not to give haters any ideas. I'd almost call it an unexpected charity, if I didn't know it's just an oversight. When you're damning people for being murderers drinking the blood of children and running the world, you don't think to add that they also eat gefilte fish.
     No, the faults of Jews bruited about by haters are either entirely imagined — run the banks, Hollywood, the world, whatever. Or attached by association — how do you expect me to be kind to you when all those kids are being killed in Gaza? Which is your fault. Because you're Jewish, and Jews also live in Israel. It makes as much sense as firebombing a Belgian waffle stand because of those historic atrocities in the Congo.
     I'm not sure why I shifted from Islam to Judaism. Maybe I was reluctant to reel off the generalized faults assigned to Islam — scary sharia law, responsibility for all terrorism everywhere, head scarves. (I can never quite get my head around that last one. Nuns sure got away with that, prior to the 1960s; what changed?) You can treat your own team more roughly. You get a pass.
      I did think about hammering on the door and asking about the sign. But that seemed, oh, intrusive. I'm sure guests appreciate the reminder. I sure would appreciate one in my son and daughter-in-law's apartment. Maybe I'd be less inclined to go blasting in, attending to some grandchild-related issue, only to be told, three paces in, to remove my shoes. It's an awkward moment. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Nobody ever removed their shoes with more alacrity. As if God Almighty was looking down going, "Tsk, tsk, shoes Neil." One key to successful grandparenting is to understand that this is not my circus, not my monkeys, not my rules. I'm just trying to follow them best I can. 

Rattling the cup

     The Chicago Sun-Times has no paywall, so depends on reader support. I've written several effective fundraising letters for the Sun-Times. But for some reason, when they came around recently, asking for another, I declined. Not in the mood. But the very next day, my attempt to expense a sandwich, tater tots, iced tea and a cake pop in Morton, Illinois, breaking open the pumpkin story, was kicked back. We don't pay for food (the confusion was my fault — I failed to mention that Morton is 150 miles away, and they assumed it was a suburb).
     Suddenly I had an idea for a new fundraising letter, and asked if I could do it after all. This is the result. Alas, they lost a few choice bits, such as Larry Green going through the photo department garbage, demanding to know why rolls of film are being processed with only a few shots exposed (Because if you pop in a fresh roll, and snap the Hindenburg blowing up at Lakehurst, New Jersey, you don't then carry the camera around for a few days while you fill the rest of the roll. You get that first shot in the paper). Nor would they permit mention of the challenge of getting compensated for tips to strippers, while investigating an embezzler who spent his ill-gotten gains at Thee Doll Hose on Kingsbury, since they tend not to give you a receipt when you stuff a dollar in their g-string. But it does convey the spirit of the thing. Please feel free to give generously.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dear Sun-Times reader,
     I like to say about the Sun-Times, “The paper won’t give you a new pencil until you hand in the stub of the old one.”     From the moment of our founding, the Sun-Times has always been the scrappy underdog, doing more with less, trying to scrape the last few morsels of journalistic quality from whatever resources we have to work with.
   Sometimes, we take that thriftiness to absurd lengths. Recently, when I tried to expense a CTA bus ride to Little Village, our accountant demanded my boss write a letter authorizing the expenditure.
      Or just last week, my attempt to expense lunch during a long day downstate talking with farmers was kicked back. I’d been talking with farmers about growing pumpkins - a skill honed over generations - and residents near a pumpkin processing plant about whether the facility made the air in their town smell like their grandmother’s kitchen, or “pumpkin vomit.”
      Food is not part of the story, I was told. It is, I replied, if you don’t want me swooning in a pumpkin field as the shadows lengthen. They paid.
      It’s important to get out into the world. That sometimes costs a little money. 

Metropolitan Museum

     What I’m trying to say is, the money you donate to the Chicago Sun-Times is not taken lightly.

     Every penny is scrutinized. Carefully. Sometimes too carefully. But that’s because we understand that you work hard for your money, and so do we.
     That’s what those dollars are for. Sending reporters out to ask questions, follow stories and bring back something worth knowing.
      Four years ago, the Sun-Times took down its paywall so everyone could read our journalism, whether they could afford to pay for it or not. Keeping that commitment takes resources, and readers willing to help provide them.
      We know that when you donate to the Chicago Sun-Times, you expect to see that money on the page. And you do.
      Please consider making a generous gift to help us keep that journalism available to everyone. And I promise you, from long experience, that it will not be wasted.

Neil Steinberg

How stupid are Ohioans? We're about to find out.

Vent Haven Museum, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

  

     "Willful ignorance" is a familiar term, almost a cliche.
     Yet you don't see it used much of late, which is too bad,  because it's a useful concept in understanding our current political landscape.

     Look at the scandal over the vile attack ad put online Monday by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Some MAGA operative tracked down the estranged mother of  the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton, and has her saying that Acton "lied her entire life."
      The GOP is putting millions of dollars behind the ad.
     You can see its appeal. "Even her mother thinks she's a liar," Strong stuff, if you stop there, will yourself to ignorance, learn nothing more, and do not permit yourself to actually examine the facts of the situation.
      Which are as follows: Acton was abused as a child. Raped between the ages of 1o and 12 by her step-father. The husband of the woman in the Ramaswamy ad, Donna Arthur, who remained married to her husband. A court took Acton and her brother away from their mother in 1978. They've had no contact since.

     The briefest survey of the facts casts the commercial in the light of a loathsome piece of bald deception, one that even some Republicans have decried.

      But not all. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor Donald Trump of course supports it. As does his morally void lapdog, JD Vance. In a decent world, the ad will ensure Acton's election and, looking at the polls, she seems on her way to that. It was an act of both desperation and folly, elevating Acton while reminding everyone just how bad a person Ramaswamy truly is.

     Nor is he alone, The episode is a reminder of an essential truth that is often lost in the fairness rituals of journalism: these are bad people, doing bad things. Trump is a bad person who ruins everything he touches. JD Vance is a bad person. Marco Rubio is a bad person.

     As for the excrescence, Ramaswamy, you might be unfamiliar with the hedge fund billionaire. His sole previous appearance on EGD was in 2023, when he participated in the Republican presidential debates, will give you a sense of the man:

     Thirty eight year old wackjob/businessman Vivek Ramaswamy promptly pronounced "climate change is a hoax,” and claimed, vis a vis nothing, that "more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” In general, Ramaswamy was an incandescent spotlight of batshittery, confidently airing a variety of specious theories and crazed policy proposals, and was probably the big winner of the night, if drawing attention to yourself, your destructive hopes and fierce, misplaced self-regard can be considered winning

    He's gotten worse since then. Bad people seldom get better. Just the opposite. They deteriorate, driven to more extreme acts trying to support the unsupportable. 
     You can't be a good person and support Trump. Oh, you can have once been a good person. And you might do some good things that you can use to argue otherwise. But by now, the situation is undeniable: MAGA is moral poison, a toxic delusion based on lies, used to hurt people, dependent on the aforementioned willful ignorance. There's no reason that shouldn't be said, loud and clear and often.

'Oh noooooooo!'

     Harry Weese was a great Chicago architect whose love of triangles has already been dissected here on EGD — his two most significant Chicago buildings are the SwissHotel, an equilateral triangle at 323 E. Wacker, and the Metropolitan Correction Center, an isosceles right triangle at 71 W. Van Buren. 
     His other downtown building, the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, 55 E. Wacker Drive, is certainly not a triangle. More of a, well, I'm tempted to take inspiration from my colleague Lee Bey calling the new entrance to the Museum of Science and Industry a "carbuncle" and label it a "boil." Round in a bad way. He should have stuck to triangles.
     Which is ironic, because Weese's true masterwork is also not a triangle. Nor is it in Chicago, In fact, it's not a building at all, but the Washington DC Metro, whose vast, vaulted poured concrete interiors were designed by Weese. I feel a burst of Chicago pride every time I travel through them, such as a recent visit to Washington to meet Grandbabe #3. 

    I figure, at least a few readers don't know about this, and might appreciate being informed.
    The visit, I'm pleased to report, went very well. Grandbabe #1, now 16 months, seemed to remember me, or at least took to an older gent who did nothing but to read to her and tell her stories and dance and sing and whatever else she cared to do. 

      We spent a good amount of time stacking colorful boxes and then knocking them over, which I pretended was a shocking event — I put my hands on my ears, elbows out, stared wildly, and uttered a boggled, "Oh nooooooooo!" — a good-natured mix of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and Macaulay Culkin's hands-to-cheeks dismay gesture in "Home Alone." She would mimic the expression, to my delight, pressing her hands to her ears.  It soon became the payoff of the stacking process, and we would press our hands on our ears and beam at each other in mutual admiration, truly happy to be sharing this secret, this incredible witty spin we had invented. 
    The other noteworthy moment came when, suddenly at a loss for a story or song, I noticed her toes and went for the traditional. "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef..."
    At that point, for the fourth little piggy, some long-dormant neuron fired and I said, "this little piggy had LESS roast beef than the previous piggy, but still enough roast beef to meet his nutritional needs."
   Where did THAT comes from? All I can think is that my wife, who is nothing if not kind hearted, felt bad for the hungry little piggy, denied roast beef, even though it only existed in myth, and decided to give the poor notional swine some cold cuts. Or it could have been me, making fun of her kind-heartedness. 
     Anyway, part of effective parenting (or, I suppose, grand-parenting) is keeping the process interesting for both yourself and your charges, and this door opening for the fourth toe, formally called the digitus quartus pedis (Latin for "fourth toe") or the "ring toe," to correspond with ring finger, has kept me creatively engaged. 
     "This little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy COULD have had roast beef but, being a vegetarian, opted for a chive cake instead...")
      A chive cake being an actual foodstuff that I watched this girl knock back at a Laotian restaurant. You learn a lot in this grandparent business, if you do it right.  

Two thumbs down

Rendering of proposed Siskel and Ebert statue 

    

     My first thought: there already IS a bad statue of Roger Ebert, down in Champaign. Do we really need another? As for Gene Siskel, well, best to draw the veil.  

     To be located on private property, so they're of course free to do whatever they like. And this is in the fine tradition of godawful tourist trap TV tributes, bronzes monstrosities of the Fonz and Bob Newhart and whomever. Just as postage stamps never again are the honors they once were before Thin and Fat Elvis, so bronze statues long ago sank from equestrian honors bestowed upon heroes to metallic essays in fatuousness. This is not to take anything away from Roger Ebert, whom I knew and admired deeply. But he already has his deathless tribute: his words.
     The thing is unveiled in 2028, and I'll probably never see it — most people won't, there being no compelling reason to step foot in Prudential Plaza. I guess this is supposed to draw them there.
      Will it? Have you ever gone anywhere in Chicago to look at a statue? I mean, I'll pause passing the Kup statue on Wacker Drive — quite a good, stylized work that has some of the panache the man himself possessed — maybe clap a comforting hand on his foot and say, "Oh Kup, you wouldn't recognize the place." But I wouldn't cross the street to do it.

 

A-line dress

     I went to the Obama Presidential Center Museum on Monday, for an interview and to accompany my sister, visiting from Texas — it was the one place in Chicago she asked to see. I just was there in June, so didn't give the place the most careful once over. 

   However, we did pause in front of the display of the First Lady's couture — I thought Debbie might like it — and noticed something I'd missed before. This sleeveless A-line dress that Michelle Obama wore on vacation a few times while her husband was president. What makes it noteworthy is not the designer, but where it was purchased: Target. The dress cost less than $40, and she wore it between 20o9 and 2013.
     It seemed to symbolize a lot more than a piece of discount clothing. I probably don't need to point out the yawning gap between that sensibility — a celebration of the dignity and worth of ordinary Americans — and the current plutocratic crew in the White House. We are so far from that, with the Oval Office festooned with gilt loving cups and faux gold crap and half the White House being ripped up, it seems, to satisfy whatever shrieking midget dictator-manque is crouched at the back of what's left of Donald Trump's decaying mind, I figured, it might be worth remembering that not so long ago we had a First Lady who wasn't a contemptuous Eastern European courtesan and a president who wasn't an odious liar, bully, fraud and traitor servicing Vladimir Putin and betraying democratic Ukraine along with most closely held American ideals and interests. If you're paying even the scantest attention, you don't need me to explain why this is horrendous. The New York Times editorial page did a good job of that Wednesday. Here's the gist:
     "He is aiding an autocratic leader and dangerous adversary of the United States who is waging a brutal war against a democratic neighbor. Mr. Trump is doing so partly in the faint hope that gas prices, which have jumped because of his reckless war in Iran, will fall over the next two weeks and help Republicans avoid big losses in the midterm elections. He is damaging America’s national interest, and likely sacrificing Ukrainian lives, for his own political interests."

     Not much else worth saying beyond that. I have no idea if the elections are going to help, or if Donald Trump will merely declare himself king while the military seizes control and a third of the country applauds like seals. Whatever happens, we must remember that we weren't always like this — that isn't an opinion, but a fact. And I believe we won't be like this forever. That is an opinion, a hope really, but one that I'm sticking with and sharing because the alternative is just too horrible to contemplate. We will not be like this forever, but oh boy, it sure fucking feels like forever right about now.

Polish poet turns words of Holocaust victims, perpetrators into shards of 'memory activism'

 

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski 

during the war we laid out bodies like wood
but after the war we laid out wood in the forest
like bodies freshly felled.

     Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is not Jewish, but reads his poetry like an Orthodox Jew praying, bending at the waist, rocking forward and back.

I went with my child to the forest and cried helplessly with him
tears dripped from my eyes and the child wiped them away with his hand
and I so regretted I had brought him into the world

     He’s in a third floor conference room at the University of Chicago, reading to about two dozen people, gathered on Monday morning to hear him.

they didn’t know where to run since it was an open field and they ran in circles
how we laughed
and before we killed them
we even whistled some tunes

     Kwiatkowski is reading — loudly, with little inflection — from his book “Crops,” translated from Polish by Peter Constantine. More a pamphlet than a book: 19 small, hard, stone-like poems over 32 pages.

my father
a decent office worker in the railways
never took part in any of the shootings
he was just doing his job
organizing transports
eastward and westward
north and south
back and forth

     The poems are his, but the words aren’t — he gathered them from taped testimonies, combining victims, perpetrators and bystanders.
     “I didn’t change any of the words,” he says. “But still I’m framing it. I’m choosing the fragments. I’m responsible.”
     I’m here because he sent me “Crops.” I read it in less than 10 minutes, but the book rearranged my brain, providing necessary starkness, a counterpoint that I’ve been missing. Over the years, we’ve seen the Holocaust transformed into entertainment, especially on social media. Once there was one Anne Frank. Now there are 6 million. The Holocaust has been retrofitted into a bracing tale of courage, resistance, and redemption. The Holocaust is not a tale of courage, resistance and redemption. It is an epic of cruelty, obedience and horror.
     Kwiatkowski agrees.
    “Most art about the Holocaust is kitsch,” he says.
     Kwiatkowski gathers words, but doesn’t mince them, which makes him a controversial figure in Poland, where depictions of the Holocaust that don’t relentlessly depict the Poles as either victims or heroes are highly unwelcome. The Polish government once demanded that the Sun-Times take down a column of mine suggesting otherwise and, when the paper refused, we were sued. We won, because this is America. Whether it stays America...

To continue reading, click here.

Quite radiant

     Any Sunday worth the name should include time spent sprawled on the sofa with the Sunday papers. 

     But this Sunday saw a house full of family, here to see my sister. My brother and his wife stopped by bearing a shopping bag filled with peppers from their garden. My son and daughter-in-law brought their dog Virginia and my grandson. My wife grilled up an excellent flank steak, the baby was passed around and admired, and a good time was had by all. 

     So the papers didn't get read. Nothing is perfect. When Monday morning I found myself going to Hyde Park again — second time this week, to the University of Chicago, something you'll read about tomorrow — I grabbed the Times Book Review to read on the train. I figured, the news could wait. 
     The section included A.O. Scott's review of "The Radiance," by Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Scott calls the book "autofiction," a term I hadn't heard before — not stories about cars, but a fiction/nonfiction blend about "a man named Ayad, who shares many traits with the real-world Akhtar."       

     While Scott couldn't quite tell what he was reading — "Is this a campus comedy? A novel of ideas" A medical mystery? A spiritual quest narrative?" — the bottom line is, he liked it. "Whatever this book is, it's alive."
     But that's not why I'm sharing this with you. The campus section draws this description. "Ayad's class is stocked with the kind of overmedicated, trauma-curious, identity-obsessed youngsters who have figured in countless op-eds and magazines stories over the past couple of decades. The fluctuating power dynamic between them and their instructors, and the overall climate of hypersensitivity, ideological conformity and bureaucratic surveillance that hovers over the college, are by now commonplaces of fiction and creative nonfiction alike."

     Scott might read a lot more than I do, so he seems to think these are stock descriptions. To me, they don't seem very commonplace at all — certainly not nearly commonplace enough — and I wanted to share them. Identity-obsessed. Hypersensitivity. Ideological conformity. It is really refreshing to see someone just come out and say it. 

'I look forward to reviewing your proposal and learning more about The Quest for Pie.'

     Scams suck. You don't even have to be taken in by them. Just the fact of their existence. They're so depressing.
     It was such a beautiful fall afternoon Sunday. We took my sister to the Chicago Botanic Garden and just wandered around. The air was fragrant, the light, golden, the colors varied, the crowd, happy.
     Yet I was grimacing, mulling over an email I had gotten the day before. It began:

In Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life, what stands out is the refusal to treat recovery as a simple turning point between a troubled past and a better future. Your account of loving your work and family while remaining attached to alcohol captures the contradictions that make addiction so difficult to confront...

     Do you see the markers of AI in that? The lack of a salutation. Using the full title, including sub-title, of the book. The generic summation of the book's reception — in 2012. I should have just deleted it and kept going. I've received a number of similar book marketing scams before.
     But this wasn't a shill for book marketing. It was, supposedly, from the executive publisher of a London imprint. Another sign. Why would someone that high up be trolling around for mid-list authors? Over the weekend. They wouldn't. I should have just deleted it.
    But hope is a funny thing. I checked online, on the publisher's web site. She was a real person. Only this email wasn't from that person. I was fairly sure of that. The email ended in ".gmail." Another giveaway. I wrote back: 

Thank you for your kind note. There are so many AI scams related to book publishing, I hope you don't mind my asking you a question: how did "Drunkard" come to your attention? Thanks.

       She replied, beginning:

I came across Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life on Amazon, and I was drawn to the candour and perceptiveness with which you examine addiction, recovery, and their effects on personal and family life.

     The "u" in candour was good. English spelling. But again, the subtitle. Still — and here I did the part I'm embarrassed about — I took 10 or 15 minutes and composed an email about where my career is right now, and what project I'd like to see published: the unpublished memoir I wrote about going out West with my boys, "The Quest for Pie." That means a lot to me. I sent the email Sunday morning. She wrote back immediately.
     Another tip-off. What publisher is writing to anybody Sunday morning? Or Sunday evening, assuming she's in England? Which she — if it's a "she" — is not. Things move slow in publishing.
     I'll spare you the rest. We went back and forth a bit. I made it clear I'm not paying for anything. "There are two things a man should never pay for," I wrote. "One of them is editorial direction." She said that is fine. 
     But as I walked around the garden, I realized. "This isn't real. This is someone in Ghana using AI to mimic an editor." I should have known that. I did know that. Yet proceeded anyway, on the slimmest, most pathetic hope. What really bothered me, I think, is that I couldn't figure out what the scam is. Maybe this is like a romance scam, only targeting authors. We'd go over the book for six months and then she'd spring the trap. 

     That might have been what really saddened me. The knowledge that this is our future, being forced to decide, again and again, if something is real, is human, or just another attempted rip-off, a little better disguised than previous attempts. Email has become a street jammed with pick-pockets and muggers, with fewer and fewer actual pedestrians in between. The ability to see through this, to decide who's who, to determine if something is the work of humans, or not, is going to be increasingly important. And exhausting. My gut told me: this isn't right. Listen to your gut. And to experience. 

     The lesson of experience is clear. In 34 years since my first book came out from St. Martin's, no publisher has ever reached out to me with this kind of query. Never. When something has never happened before, the odds that it is happening now go way, way down. Truth might be a hard road, but allow yourself to stray from it and you quickly go into the bog. I wrote back, and said what we need to do is set up a Zoom call to discuss this further. I assumed that will be the end of it.

   Not quite. When I got that first email on Saturday, I did, immediately write to the publishing house itself, an interesting group called Bookouture, to see if their executive had indeed written to me. I'm not a complete fool. They wrote back early Monday:

Good afternoon Neil,
Thanks for getting in touch. We are aware of emails currently circulating that are impersonating our editorial staff, and our cyber team is investigating this issue. Please be advised that the email you received was not sent from Ruth, or anyone at Bookouture – we would suggest reporting the message and blocking the sender.
Thanks so much again for alerting us.

Best regards,
The Admin Team

    Well, there you have it.  

    

 

Illinois is the Land of Lincoln, the Prairie State and… America’s Pumpkin Capital. Here's why.

John Ackerman, in a pumpkin field in Morton, Illinois.

     This story began in mid-August, when the Chicago Teachers Union sued the Illinois Policy Institute for being critical of them. In looking at the IPI web site, I noticed a story on how Illinois is head-and-shoulders the top pumpkin producing state in the nation. My column on the lawsuit mentioned pumpkins, but didn't answer the question: why Illinois? Why not Iowa or Indiana? The answer is easy — because Libby's is here. But my hunch was there was more here, that if I dug a little, my efforts would be rewarded, and I believe I was right. 

     A pumpkin seed weighs about 1/100th of an ounce, when planted in April. By late September, through an unappreciated conspiracy of miracles: the balm of time, the embrace of Midwest weather, the kiss of rich soil and the careful application of husbandry — fertilizer spread, pests thwarted — managed by Illinois farmers, some who have been at this for generations, that little oval the size of a fingernail can increase in size 18,000 times, into a 12-pound pumpkin, ready for picking.

     “There are days, when the conditions are right, I’m pretty sure I can hear them grow,” says John H. Ackerman, a fourth-generation farmer in downstate Morton, which, about two hours southwest of Chicago, is the self-proclaimed pumpkin capital of the world.
   Morton seized the title, though Illinois could easily dub itself “Pumpkin Heaven.” It must be because the state grows so many of the distinctive orange fruit, the icon of the fall season. (Botanically, a pumpkin is a fruit because it contains seeds and grows from a pollinated flower, though cooks treat it as a vegetable, for its savory qualities.)
     Fruit or vegetable, or both, in 2025, our state grew 535 million pounds of pumpkin, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than the next four top pumpkin-growing states — California, Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — combined.
     Why? What makes Illinois so pumpkin-friendly?
     “The region offers the optimal combination of soil composition, climate and geography, with about 120 days of summer heat, warm nights and moderate rainfall that create great growing conditions,” says Jacqueline Jimenez, senior director, brand marketing, culinary and confectionery for Nestle, the owner of Libby’s, which has an enormous pureed-pumpkin processing plant in Morton.
      “However, what sets the region apart is our deep roots here, including not only our factory but our multi-generational partnerships with the local farmers who grow our Libby’s pumpkins. Some of these farming families have grown Libby’s pumpkins for 60 years. We know them by name, and they understand this land and climate in a way that’s irreplaceable.”
     More than soil or climate, the presence of the Libby’s canning operation in Morton is responsible for Illinois’ pumpkin preeminence. About 90% of the canned pumpkin produced in the United States is grown within a 60-mile radius of Morton. And most of that goes to Libby’s, though there also is another cannery, Seneca Foods, in Princeville, about 33 miles away.

To continue reading, click here.