Trying to climb out of the Trump morass

     "Are we gonna be okay?" said the Metra conductor, punching my ticket.
    "We always have been," I replied, because what else are you going to say? "No?" I have no flippin' idea. I'm not the Delphic Oracle. 
    At least I was sincere; I might gaze into the abyss good and long, but then I lean toward optimism. I feel obligated to examine the negatives—and after this most astounding of presidential elections, you don't need much imagination to see things going into the weeds and fast. But why feel miserable about bad stuff that might never come?
    It's early yet. Yes, Trump promised a bunch of things that are some combination of a) immoral; b) harmful; c) evil; d) impossible.
    But Trump has a proven history of saying almost anything, of making promises then denying them. At this point, that is a strength. His saying that, after a year of promising to put Hillary Clinton in jail, nah, he isn't going to do that, well, it felt like springtime.
    There have been a lot of people buttonholing me, to talk. Even a pair of librarians at Northbrook Public Library,  when I stopped to return a book Tuesday night, gathered around to parse the situation. We were more or less flabbergasted, but holding up, and talking helped.
    "Their reward for enduring the awful experience,"  J.K. Rowling writes in The Casual Vacancy "was the right to tell people about it."
    A colleague stopped me at the paper.
    He asked, What about this video of neo-Nazis in Washington, D.C., exulting over Trump's election? Two hundred people! I thought he meant, "200, and that's a lot," but he meant just the opposite. Two hundred isn't very many neo-Nazis at all, he said. Why was the media even covering it?
    Well ... I said, maybe because a bunch of bigots and far right haters are goose-stepping into the White House. That creates a sensitivity. And two hundred may not be a lot, but it's not nothing. Maybe next week it'll be 500.
    He wasn't quite following me, so I tried a metaphor.
   "It's as if the doctor found a malignant lump on your arm," I said, "It being real small wouldn't be that important. You still wouldn't say, 'But the rest of me isn't cancer so I'm fine!' You'd watch that small lump very carefully. That's the situation here."
     No need to slide into panic or depression. That doesn't help. The immediate threat is from, not Trump or the government, but the sidewalk toughs and schoolyard bullies who are being emboldened, by the illusion that their worldview isn't horrendous, who feel free to abuse whoever is before them who seems a little different, blacks and Muslims and Hispanics. Not so much Jews and the handicapped, though I imagine that's coming. We need to see how these situations are treated--does the rung above the empowered deplorables, the local cops and school principals and such, stick with our view of American as a diverse nation, or do they get with the Trump program and wink at these offenses? My gut tells me the former. Though that could be hope talking.
     There is cause for alarm, but also cause for hope. On the phone with my older boy, Ross, over the weekend, whip smart and very political, I observed that he didn't seem at all anxious about the change in administration. Why?
    "We have strong institutions," he said. Not meaning, I should point out, mental institutions where these alt-right haters can be stuck after they are finished acting out in public. He meant the courts and the judiciary, the media and the police, the business community and what state, city and local governments haven't been too corrupted by the right wing mania against American rights. One mean-mouthed talking yam can't undo that overnight.
    That's an actual comfort. Trump can dog whistle haters all day long, and individuals will follow. But to turn the ship of state into the direction he's seems willing to have it go, well, that takes time and effort. Barack Obama, if you notice, never closed Guatanamo Bay, despite his promises. I have no doubt that Trump will try to do some awful things. But whether he succeeds is an open question, and while concern and alarm is natural, so is tentative optimism. We just don't know.
   

Unexpected benefits of the Trump era #3: A chance to get in shape.

    It was during Dave Edmund's "Get Out of Denver" that the endorphins kicked in. As if my brain said, "Ahhh" and smiled for the first time in two weeks.
    I was at the Northbrook Y Monday evening. Not a time I usually go -- it's better in the morning, before stuff starts happening.
    But I hadn't worked out that morning — talking on a New York radio show about the disastrous election. Hadn't since before Nov. 8 in fact--too busy, too tired, too dispirited. It was easy to sit for hours in front of the computer, absorbing the latest unimaginable development.
    But four years is a long time, and it hasn't even begun. We have to pace ourselves and settle in for the Long Haul Toward Trumpian Fascism. Since there is nothing you can do right now -- people are marching in the streets already, and that's fine, I suppose, but I'm holding off joining the protests until Trump begins implementing the folly he's promised. They'll need fresh reinforcements and it'll help to be in shape. When police turn the water cannons on the crowd, I might be a bit more nimble dodging behind a car for protection. And maybe I'll hit the ground just a little bit faster when the National Guard opens fire on the protesters.
     I'm not preaching tuning out, tempting as it is. You don't want to find out the trucks are coming for you by hearing their rumble down the street. That said, there is only so much bad news you can absorb, and fretting is not actually productive. Walk, run, swim, hike. The country won't go to hell any faster because you do 45 minutes on the elliptical, and you won't suffer as much. Exercise helps.
     As does music. I always blast music when I exercise. It also helps. In fact, I really can't enjoy exercise without it. Though in my regular workout mix tape I couldn't help notice odd echoes of the past election, from Anais Mitchell's "When the Chips Are Down" ("What you gonna do when the chips are down?/Nowwwww, that the chips are down") to Genesis' plodding "Squonk" ("If you don't stand up/You don't stand a chance.") Not to mention The Call's "I Still Believe."
     In 2010, I lost 30 pounds after a doctor told me that my sleep apnea would go away if I did. (It worked). Since then, a dozen pounds have crept back. My goal, by the end of 2017 to peel 20 more back. It won't keep the year from being The First Plague Year of Donald Trump. But I'll be a little more fleet of foot running from the New Brownshirts emboldened by Trump's embrace of white nationalism.
     So watch what you eat. There were lots of jokes about drinking your way through the Trump administration, and if I thought it would carve a second off his presidency, or diminish the odds of his utterly fucking up the country even by a percentage point or two, I'd be right there. But it wouldn't.
    Alas, it would be only me who'd get screwed up, and I have a sense we're going to need every single sound head and stout heart in the years to come. So eat that grapefruit. Snack on apples instead of candy. You never know when you'll have to run alongside a freight train as it picks up speed, trying to snag the outstretch hands of the other refugees, heading for Canada, who'll pull yourself into a boxcar.
    You've got time to prepare for that now;, don't spend it on the couch, bemoaning what is done and chain eating Mallomars. The news will unfold without you. I really felt the panic notch down during "Get Out of Denver" today. The good feeling lasted through the evening. It might ratchet back up tomorrow when Trump names Ted Nugent as Secretary of the Interior. But at least now I know where to go when it does.

   

Which are more dangerous, Muslims or gun owners?

     Radical Islamic Terror!
     An untraditional way to start. But these are untraditional times. And since Donald Trump fans obviously read this — trust me on that — and they seem to like hearing that phrase, why not keep them happy too?

   Again again, as the Teletubbies cry: Radical Islamic Terror!
     There, I said it twice. They must really like me now. President Obama, on the other hand, refuses to say it because he realizes that the whole purpose of the phrase is to weld these three concepts together. Republicans may be against gay marriage, but they’ll happily wed “Radical” to “Islamic” and “Islamic” to “Terror.”
     Yes, there is terror inspired by Islam. In their zeal to make those who disagree seem ridiculous, the GOP insists that not using the phrase means you are unaware there are terrorists who blame Islam for their actions.    

       Look at it this way: terrorists also have two legs, and mirrored left and right halves to their bodies — every single terrorist is like this, in fact — and yet we don’t scream “BIPED BILATERAL TERROR!” because that would draw white folk into the range of blame, which is what this exercise is really about: offloading responsibility for terror from those who commit it to innocent individuals who share their religion.

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Unexpected benefits of the Trump Era #2: A chance to be courageous.

    Growing up in the 1970s as I did, there was a sense that the great moments of history were behind us. In the 1960s, just disappearing over the horizon, there were Civil Rights to win, a Vietnam War to oppose, protests in the street, a chance to stand up and be counted. A chance to matter. The whole world was watching.
    And before that, World War II, when our parents' generation—"The Greatest Generation"—had Hitler to oppose, a world to free. Not a lot of soul-searching required when Nazis are taking over the world (actually, there was, one of those small details lost in popular history. A reminder that general public cowardice and folly are not ailments specific to our present day. Most of America would have shrugged and let the Axis have the rest of the globe, under the daft notion that we'd somehow be safe between our oceans. The Japanese did us a favor).
    With the advent of Donald Trump, and the wasp's nest of un-American, radical haters he is installing in Washington, each of us suddenly has a job to do, a chance to matter, to be a soldier in the army of American decency. Sure, our country suddenly is frightening as hell, but that means each one of us will have plenty of opportunities to oppose the mean, counter-productive measures Trump's henchmen will put in place, whether unleashing religious bigots to oppress gay people, dialing back women's reproductive rights, or forcing Muslims onto some fascist-tinged "registry." Every time you go to the Target could be a test. We will be called upon to push back against the haters who, liberated by Trump's example, will now feel free to oppress others.
    Not that it will be easy, or at least not always easy. The third time I was noting on Facebook that of course all decent folks, especially Jews, will sign up for any Muslim registry, a sort of "I'm Spartacus!" standing with our singled out brethren, I paused, and asked myself, "So ... what if this new registry carries a penalty for false reporting? Say up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine for representing yourself as a Muslim if you're not? Do you still sign up? Just how committed are you to this whole freedom thing?"
   A tougher question. Online bravado is easy— a good thing, in one sense, since that cuts both ways, and just as on-line support is easy, so is on-line hate, and that means the vast majority of the sewer-dwelling white nationalists on Twitter probably would not actually, oh, set fire to a black church in the real world. The way they used to. At least one hopes they wouldn't, though a string of atrocities is to be expected — acts of terror committed in the name of opposing terrorism. I certainly expect them.
     But don't be deceived. When the rubber hits the road this spring, standing up for American values will have consequences, more than just nudging yourself into the comforting crowd at a rally or tweeting a particularly cutting remark. There will come a point when you will have to put your neck on the line. What will you do then?
    That may be an opportunity that you have dreamed about. Had I lived back then, what would I have done? When the world is falling apart — and if our world won't fall apart, count on it to split a bit at the seams — what would I have done? 
    No reason to answer that now. We all imagine we'd be heroes. Sure, we'd see the child slip into the water, kick off our shoes and swan dive into the river to save her without a moment's hesitation. That's what we tell ourselves anyway. Even if, had the moment ever really came, we might have just stood there gawping, pointing one trembling finger, frozen.
     The moment is going to come. Count on it. As Donald Trump and all he represents sour the American dream, as the highest offices, then lower offices, are filled with hard-eyed bigots, they will begin to build their vision for this country. Some Americans will eagerly join in. People who will no doubt shock you, by their presence, grinning on the podium next to The Donald. People you know, joining in the general hilarity of running some loathed group down. No one dreams of being a quisling, but they will leap at the chance. If the government started to recruit members for the New Waffen SS tomorrow, the line to join would be a mile long. And some would oppose it so long as doing so was convenient and risk free. But as soon as that opposition has consequences, risks, danger, many, maybe most, will fold, and go grumbling back to the sidelines to watch the tragedy unfold.
     “If it weren’t for fear,” Hemingway wrote. “Every bootblack in Spain would be a bullfighter.”
     Not everyone will cave, of course. Some will stand their ground. How many do that — dig in, stand up for their beliefs, hold firm, even when it isn't easy, even when they are imperiling themselves — that will decide how this thing ends up, just how much of a tragedy our nation is in for. You always wondered what you'd do in a crisis. Soon you'll get to find out.

Women for Trump

   A lot of email from yesterday's column about a woman who says she's fleeing to Canada out of fear of  a new holocaust. Perhaps surprisingly, the most passionate came from women. My guess is, since Trump is so blatant and grotesque in his disregard for women, they have to be especially fervent in their love for him to avoid any risks of recognizing the dissonance between their actual interests and what they're supporting. A number of sneering emails from women Friday; this will stand in for them all.

Your article comparing the Trump presidency to the actions of the third reich is hateful garbage. To base an entire article about some bigoted nitwit leaving for Canada is insulting. Hatred is consuming you, please leave.

     The charge that one is acting out of a hate is an example of the fallacy of assuming everyone is motivated by the same thing driving you. Particularly when you can't understand the argument they're trying to make. She's also aping Trump's habit of merely echoing back whatever charge is being made against him. "I'm a racist and misogynist? Noooo. Hillary Clinton, SHE'S the racist and misogynist." This week I stopped answering negative emails, generally — it took 30 years, but it finally happened. But this one the temptation was too great. I replied:

What's the hateful part? I just see a rightly frightened woman -- millions of them actually -- terrified by the real actions, this week, of the utterly unfit president-elect you've chosen. You're just doing the I'm-rubber-you're-glue parroting that your leader does so well. Proud of yourself? Really? The sad thing is, I bet you are. Thanks for writing. I'm staying right here. To thwart people like him. And you.

    Though I immediately regretted sending it — a big drawback of email. That last sentence, I would insert "try" — "To try to thwart people like him." Because who can be confident of stopping this juggernaut of hate that's assembling in New York City? I'm not. The time to stop them was Nov. 8, and we blew it. Now, all we can do is try, and grieve over the consequences of our failure.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     The photos I think are difficult to the point of being impossible to solve are usually the ones that are guessed right away.
     But this picture, while genuinely hard—it's just a house—will yield fruit to those who think a little about it. Solving the puzzle almost demands cogitation – assuming someone isn't familiar with the place and IDs it just based on personal experience.  With so many readers—and the numbers keep going up, which I appreciate—sometimes someone gets lucky.
      I renewed the contest because I found a cache of these desktop flags, copies of Commander Oliver Hazard Perry's battle flag. I want to give them away, to provide inspiration and encouragement. In these challenging days, as Donald Trump assembles his rogues' gallery of nitwits and haters to run our government into the ground and afflict vulnerable American citizens with fear, we need to remain calm, strong and stoical. Do not give up, the ship or anything else. Our country has survived many hardships, the worst always self-inflicted. Remember: the Red Scare. Vietnam. The battle for Civil Rights. Watergate. The path is seldom smooth. While Donald Trump represents an unprecedented departure from anyone we have had before in the Oval Office, despair is premature. We will survive him too, though we might have years of calamity, suffering, failure and shame ahead of us. The bad guys won an election, but that's all they won. A free people remain free, and as Barack Obama's eight years remind us, the president can only do so much, good or harm. 
    Enough. So where is this lovely house? Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

"History warns us ... the best thing to do is leave"

Canada

     Your neighbors will gladly murder you, given the nod by authority, then blame you for bringing your own death upon yourself. They’ll then move into your empty house, live there guilt-free, and years later, should anybody be so impolite as to raise the subject of your death, deny it ever occurred.

     That, in brief, is the lesson of the Holocaust, and if you suspect it left a scar on world Jewry, you’re right. Nothing like seeing the culture that produced Goethe, Rilke and Beethoven herding children into gas chambers to make you realize that the solid bedrock of civilized life, well, ain’t so solid.
      The earthquake of Donald Trump's election began with his calling Mexican immigrants rapists, then radiated outward, as hatred will, jarring Muslims and blacks, rattling women, before deputizing Mike Pence to go after gays. Hate doesn’t discriminate — talk about irony — it settles for whoever is convenient.

     Jews not fixated on Israel were shaken by formerly fringe anti-Semitic organizations riding into the mainstream on the Trump bandwagon, their slurs retweeted, their coded rhetoric about shadowy global conspiracy pockmarking his speeches.
    It worked. He won. Since Trump’s seismic election, rather than distance himself from the focused cruelty he exploited, as many wanly hoped he might, Trump has kept going, naming alt-right Breitbart bigot Stephen Bannon as his special adviser one day, recommitting himself to forcing Muslims in America to register the next.

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Unexpected Benefits of the Trump Era #1: Less argument

   I usually reply to any reader who makes a halfway cogent statement. It takes time, but I find myself focusing my thoughts and using phrases that later prove valuable in columns.
    Last Friday, however, under the strain of readers replying to my column on a dozen things to do before killing oneself in despair over Trump's election, I would silently block people. Their anger was too high, their points too wild.
    To be honest, I felt relieved. No more contention. No more pointless bickering. No more getting in trouble when their ire infected me and I strayed over the line, then they complained to my bosses of being ill-used by having their vileness echoed back. Just block the stuff and be done with it.
    Reading the email below, however, the old habit of replying stirred. Such a slow pitch right down the pipe. How could I not swing? He was merely aping Trump's I'm-rubber-you're-glue reply to valid criticisms, with a spice of anti-media disdain. Words began forming in my head.
    But I didn't write that. Well, here, first read it.

I noticed you used the Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource. Considering it has little credibility (it's a partisan liberal hate group which is being paid---via donations from ignorant liberal bigots---to smear decent moral people), you damage what little credibility you currently have. You have to know that the public criticism of the media by influential people is going to get worse and worse, until the media get "fixed." Right now the credibility of the media, according to various polls, is at an all-time low. It's going to get even worse unless you people start playing fair and stop using ignorant liberal bigots as if they had any credibility. You really should be condemning the SPLC for its ignorant bigotry, instead of using it as a resource.

    I replied simply "Wow. Thanks for writing." Which was an honest summation of my feelings and drew no reply. Success! We've sailed into a realm beyond argument, where Right Wing hatred and fear are so extreme words are useless against them, mere noise, rain on a tin roof.
     Walking the dog a few minutes later, I heard, in my mind, some crashing chords from a Pink Floyd song, and its stark opening lines.
    "What shall we use... to fill ... the empty....spaces...where...we used... to talk?"
    What indeed.

Sand Castles at the Cultural Center

     I'm a big fan of the Divvy bike system, but it does have a flaw, and I'll tell you what it is. Since the Divvy bikes need to be left at Divvy stations, that discourages spontaneously stopping places en route. Oh, you could carry a light cable lock in your helmet bag, and I've considered that. But then you have the half hour limit, and you can't really pause and idle places with the meter running like that. They get you quickly from Point A to Point B, but if you suddenly want to pause at Point C, you're shit out of luck. 
    For instance. Tuesday I Divvied from the paper to Millennium Station, then strolled over to The Gage for lunch. After, I was about to hop on the bike back, when I thought, "What's your rush?" bypassed the Divvy station and began to walk back. There, right in front of me, is the Cultural Center. 

    The Cultural Center is the old main Chicago Public Library, which Richard J. Daley announced the city would pull down, on general principles of replacing gorgeous and intricate older buildings with plain, ugly brutalist new ones. But Sis Daley, his wife, in her only public intrusion into city affairs, said, in essence, "The hell you will." And so the Cultural Center was born.
    Despite its huge Tiffany dome and interesting exhibits, I never set out for the Cultural Center as a destination: I've never said to myself, "I think I'll head over to the Cultural Center and see what's cooking." Not once.
    Which is a shame, because they have neat things going on, like Spectacular Vernacular, a show of design elements put together by the duo behind the British Parsons & Charlesworth design studio. It was a typical Cultural Center show -- odd, not quite museum quality, but engaging for a few minutes nevertheless, particularly these sand ziggurats constructed using wooden blades designed by Tim Parson's great-grandfather, Henry Ingham, an engineer in a cotton mill. I spent 10, 15 minutes gazing about the show, which had a vast array of Japanese artifacts for reasons I couldn't fathom, then went on my way -- perhaps not infused with culture, as such, but certainly distracted. 

We're all guardians of American values now

Morgan Library, New York City

     When the Sun-Times eliminated its library, years ago, as one of the many cost-cutting measures that allowed the paper to survive to this day, I learned about it when our last librarian stuck her head into my office.
     “Well, I’ve been fired and they’re shutting down the library,” she said. “Since you’re the only person who uses it, come take what you want.”
     I liberated a hand truck, muscled a couple 7-foot bookcases into my office, then started transferring the most useful volumes. As I did this, the librarian took a yellow legal pad and began writing down which titles I was removing. She didn’t get far before an awful realization clouded her face: it didn’t matter anymore. There would be no library for these books to be missing from, and no librarian to care where they were. She left me to my task; a few days later she was gone, and I never saw her again. 
      That haunting moment came to me again this week, as protesters took to the street to decry the presidential election. To whom are they complaining? Donald Trump? The American people who just elected him? The czar? If only he knew! Like my departing librarian, they were showing fidelity to a structure of official values that had simply evaporated.
     At least she was talking to a sympathetic audience, me. What the protesters accomplished was to comfort the very person they were protesting against, serving up a chance for the false equivalence that got him elected in the first place. See? Violence! These incidents counterbalance our candidate winning office by maligning vulnerable minorities for 18 months, his campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," itself a coded credo for nationalism.

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Ink

     The night the Cubs won the World Series — less than two weeks ago, as difficult as that might be to believe — I slid by the Field Museum for the Founders' Council party for their new tattoo exhibit. 
     It was the sort of thing that sounded like a good idea beforehand — I'm not a big sports fan, why not take in something cultural when everybody else is holing up at a sports bar? Although I admit, a half hour before the opening pitch, sitting in a theater at the Field, listening to two ethnographers discuss tattooing in the Philippines, well, I wondered just what was wrong with me.
    But the Field people set up a big flat screen in the lobby. And the show was interesting, surveying a practice that has been part of nearly every society, throughout time. They created silicon torsos and commissioned some of the best living tattoo artists to decorate them; it seemed a clever solution to how to display the designs without offending our Midwestern standards of prudery.
      Tattooing is not my thing—I remember three years ago, when I wrote an article examining the practice in Chicago, I considered getting one — nothing elaborate, just a simple orange dot, say, the size of a pinhead, on my inner forearm, to see what it was like. But I knew, as soon as I imagined doing it, that I couldn't. I'd hate having it there, probably end up gouging it out of my arm, just to be rid of the thing.  I have a hard enough time buying glasses.

    Which is silly, because our lives tattoo us whether we like it or not, every line, every spot, time's artwork upon our faces. Whether we are happy or sad, sour or easy-going. We tattoo ourselves silently, inexpertly. I admire people who can do it cavalierly. But I'm not them. 
    Even though I wouldn't want one, I did appreciate the designs, particularly this modern America eagle by London artist Alex Binnie, who melds traditions of Africa, the North Pacific and New Guinea into what he calls "urban primitivism." I couldn't get a tattoo, as I said, but if I did get one, I'd hope it was something like this. 
    In a clever move, the Field Museum has set up a working tattoo parlor, where top Chicago artists will put designs on customers, of which there was no shortage. In the first three hours, the president of the Field told us, they received 2,900 calls from people who wanted tattoos applied at the Field. The waiting list has 1,000 people on it. The tattoos cost $250 each, and the artwork must be selected from among 42 designs. The first public sessions are Nov. 19.
      I always thought that tattooing had become so popular in the United States in the past decades because we had lost the tribalism that glued people together for millennia, and this was a way to ape it. But as the recent election shows, the tribalism never really went away. Society was just focused on the new globalism, which we thought was the future, and now seems as if it might have been a phase, a veneer that can be puffed away by a small percentage of the country falling this way instead of that on a particular day. Tribalism reared up, like a bushman on the savannah, and drove a spear deep into our notions of America. 
     Enough. The tattoos have a cartoonish beauty, such as these designs from Sailor Jerry, a famous Hawaiian artist of the 1940s and 1950s. They have an innocence, a joy. 
     If it seems a stretch for the Field, that might be because the show was developed by Musee du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac, Paris' newest major museum, which opened in 2006 on the Left Bank of the Seine. It runs through April 30.


    

Farmall Calendar: "It isn't just about tractors"

      Richard Schmitt remembers the first tractor he ever drove.
     “My dad started farming in the mid-40s — he had a Farmall F20,” said Schmitt, 82. “I was about 7 years old, and he taught me how to drive it. My dad still had horses, yet I couldn’t drive a horse; the horses he had were kinda wild-like.”
     Mechanized farming is such a given now, it might be hard to imagine that once farmers had to be persuaded to use tractors, which were both expensive and dangerous — a new one easily cost a year’s profits, and a quarter of the fatal farm accidents when Schmitt was a young man were caused by farmers being crushed by tractors. That had to be balanced against the ability to pull a bigger plow.
     “The horses couldn’t pull the 7-foot plow,” said Schmitt, who lives in Sterling, 100 miles due west of Chicago. “The tractor could pull a 7-foot disc, and the horses could only pull a 4-foot disc.” A bigger plow allowed for a bigger farm, more crops and — in theory — more money. “We were really farming big.”
     Now Schmitt owns 750 acres and 58 Farmall tractors, including five featured on the new 2017 Farmall calendar, which arrived on my desk last week, a welcome break from post-election turmoil. It was sent by Dan Herrick, an Oregon photographer with local roots, who works for a variety of websites selling farm equipment, including farmallparts.com.
     This is the second year he’s done the calendar.
     “My boss told me, ‘I’d love to see a Farmall calendar,'” Herrick remembered. “I said, ‘I know where a whole bunch of them are and can shoot them in their natural environment, all in north central Illinois.'”

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"Please give him the respect that comes with that office."

     My older son said something once I liked to quote as an aphorism, because it's so true: "People are the worst!" 
     I'm not even sure exactly what it means. Just that emphasis on worst — I really like to get my back into it.  A general summation of how humans fail their lofty potential.
     I could write for hours on the subject. But today I will just focus on one aspect. Raw hypocrisy. How you can say and do one thing, applying a standard to someone else, for years, and then flip around 180 degrees when convenient and embrace something exactly opposite for yourself. How does a person do that?
   Consider this email from Sunday: 

     I got very upset when I read your column on Friday. Again, you were so critical and disrespectful to President Elect Trump.
     Stirring up more hate against him divides our country when we should be healing it and working together to solve our problems.
     Donald Trump was elected by the people and will be the President of the United States.
     Please give him the respect that comes with that office and support him when he does something praiseworthy.
     Thank you.

     Here she signed her name, which I will withhold, so as not to subject her to abuse. Nobody should experience that.
    To be honest, I've stopped answering most people. I think I added more readers to the filter Friday than I've added all year. I'm just so tired of reading their diatribes, their lengthy manifestos, their point-by-point bullshit refutations that are only persuasive if you already believe everything they're saying. I'm tired of answering, of trying to be polite, of doing that thinky-feelly thing I do. 
   But this one, I couldn't resist. This is what I wrote back:

     Question: did you give Barack Obama "the respect that comes with that office"?
     Really?
     Thanks for writing.

     No answer of course. You never get an answer.* They're shocked you wrote them back at all. And they certainly aren't going to jump through this intellectual hoop just because I hold it in front of their nose. They just shrug, I assume, and move on. It's not as if anybody does any self-assessment.  Not that anyone slaps their forehead and thinks, "Ohhhh! He means the way I slagged Barack Obama, a dignified, thoughtful man, as a secret Muslim terrorist, and castigated his elegant, sophisticated wife as Chewbacca, fooling myself that my dimwit racist code somehow went undetected, then spun around and salaamed at the feet of this foul-mouthed yam and his mail order bride wife and demanded they immediately be extended the full pomp and respect of the presidency despite their jaw-dropping 18 months spent appealing to the toilet of American political life. Yeah, I guess there is a double standard at work there."
    Nobody does that. It's naive to expect anyone would. My bad. What I've finally figured out is that honesty and reason can be as deceptive as deceit and folly, if you assume other people are using them, that truth forms some kind of hard bottom to the world. Reason can be the mat of woven rushes over the pit. Rather than assume sense, it is better to assume people are idiotic, mean, tribal, hypocritical.
    People are the worst. 
    There was no mystery here. The great tragedy is, it was all apparent. Anyone deceived has only himself to blame. The Democrats kept pointing out the inconsistencies, the lies, the fraudulence, and the hypocrisy. As if that mattered. It's like going to McDonald's and hectoring people in line about the calories. "Yeah, yeah, shut up, I'm getting a Big Mac and Biggie Fries anyway..."
     In the end, it didn't matter. None of it mattered. This election—maybe every election—was about what voters chose to focus on, what they felt was important. Not experience. Not judgment. Not temperament. Not fairness. Not character. 
       Trump supporters wanted change, and voted for him, end of story. It's like jumping off a cliff to feel the breeze. It's like going to a bar and ordering the strychnine because you like the bottle it comes in. 
   "You know that's poison," the bartender might even say. "It'll kill you."
    "That's okay," you say. "I'm looking for a change, and I really like the bottle and am really thirsty."
    "Okay..." he says, pouring a big slug. "It's your funeral."


* In this case I did, later Sunday:

Dear Mr. Steinberg,In response to your question, "Did you show respect to President Barack Obama?"The answer is Yes! REALLY
Thank you for considering my opinion.

To which I replied:

That's encouraging. Of course I will judge Trump by what he does. He already seems to be backing away from his most extreme beliefs, which is encouraging.

Tightly-wound flag

Watching evacuation of French army and flags

     Even before Donald Trump was elected president, I wondered what symbolic act would be justified should the infamy occur. I remembered an old photo from Life magazine, showing a weeping Frenchman in Marseilles in 1940, watching as the flags of France were evacuated to North Africa after the Nazi onslaught. Maybe it was time to put away my American flag, I thought. Store it in plastic until the occupation ends four years from now. Why let it fly over a country that has brought itself so low, delivered such an intentional blow to the freedoms we cherish?
    But that seemed defeated, timid. Better to let the banner fly over the country in good times and bad. I think that was the right decision.
    Though yesterday morning, I noticed it very tightly wrapped -- the wind. That happens. I usually go twist the flagpole so it hangs free and full. Typically, I do that several times a day.
    Not this time. Somehow, the tightly-wrapped flag feels right for this tightly-wound national moment. The election is one of those ringing disasters that drops from consciousness for a minute or an hour then comes back with the morning headlines or the phone call from a friend. And we are wound up in it again. Times are tight, in the sense of narrow, bound, difficult.
    This is something that is going to have to unwind itself—with all of our help, of course, in due course, and we are going to have to be vigilant if the rights of our fellow citizens are plucked away. But if you believe that Trump is a liar and a fraud — and I do — then that cuts both ways, and given that much of what he advocates is either unconstitutional, impossible or both, it makes sense that he will back away from the worst of what he was elected promising. He has already begun doing it, without much prompting from without.
     November is not half over. With December and most of January to come before he becomes president, with four long years after that. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we need to adjust ourselves accordingly. I can't go running to fix the flag every time some chance breeze sets it all awry. That's not my job, not any one person's job. Sometimes you have to be a little patient let things unfold and work themselves out. I'm not advocating indifference, but forbearance. Head up, shoulders back, gazing steadily at events as they unfold. Leave weeping to the French. You can't leap every time the wind blows. We will know when time for action will come, and it'll come soon enough. Now the thing is done, and we have to see what unfolds.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, I'm a sucker for a good curved building. I've been goggling Bertrand Goldberg's Marina Towers for nearly 40 years and still marvel at their funky 1960s corncob vibe. And don't get me started on the convex green loveliness of 333 W. Wacker, reflecting the passing river, the clouds. 
     Business took me to this one at lunchtime on Thursday, and I paused in front, to enjoy its decorative — yet useful in shading sunlight — metal vanes, extending beyond the top of the building, forming a ridge that is part palisade, part row of candles on a birthday cake.
    Where is this cool blue edifice? The winner gets this really handy "Don't Give Up the Ship" flag, the battle flag for — I don't need to tell you –  Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, who fought and won the Battle of Lake Erie against the British, both a reminder that our country has been through narrow straits before, and reflecting a steely resolve which we all could use at this moment. Or half of us anyway. Those with long memories might remember "Don't Give Up the Ship" is also the name of the 2002 book I wrote about my father, which is why I have a box of these things. I thought they would make good promotional giveaways. Oh well, it was worth a try. 
    Place your guesses below. Good luck. Have fun. 

Check back at 7 a.m.

   
    A million years ago, last week, I was cleaning out some file drawers in my office, looking for an editorial I wrote 13 years ago about the Cubs, and I found a few of these flags which, a century ago, on Tuesday, suddenly became relevant. 
    At the same time, I also visited a place I looked at and thought, "That would make an intriguing Saturday Fun Activity, if, you know, I still did that."
    Which I totally can, since I run the ship. So, inspired by the happy union of prize and photo, I'm returning the contest, at least for today. And if you remember the Fun Activity, it posts at 7 am., to give people who aren't insomniacs a chance to win.
    So check back at 7 a.m., and I'll have the photo up. It's probably really guessable, and my hunch is, you could use the flag.  
    Though to be honest, Trump is already backpedaling on ObamaCare. And so it begins. Still, a flag like this could come in handy.

Twelve things to do before you kill yourself

     The volume of calls to suicide prevention hotlines doubled Wednesday, as blue Americans tried to wrap their heads around the fact that the United States of America had elected an ignorant, cruel bigot as president. And I admit, just the words “Rudolph Giuliani, attorney general” are enough to make a guy want to jump off a tall building.
     Not to joke about something so serious — unless joking helps, then go for it. The bottom line is, if you’re plunged into despair by the election results, then you’re also the kind of person our country needs most. Stick around, now it gets really interesting. Toward that end, I offer a dozen activities for those who might be thinking about ending it, or for anyone gaping in horror at this week’s alarming turn of events.
     1. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, if you’re genuinely suicidal. They have a special line for veterans, and also take calls in Spanish.
     2. Call your friends. You may not be contemplating ending it all, yet still need bucking up. Nothing loosens a knot of dread like talking with others. When I heard of those reacting to the results by weeping, vomiting or rushing to the hospital with chest pains, my own reaction — a kind of grim numbness — didn’t seem so extreme.

     3. Weep. Nothing like a good cry cleanses your soul. Here's a line from Harriet Beecher Stowe to prime the pump: "This horror, this nightmare abomination! Can it be in my country! It lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow."
     4. Expand your horizons. The above written in 1853 about slavery. This isn't the first time the United States chose evil. The idea that brutality arrives with Donald Trump is quaint. From eradicating Native Americans and enslaving black people, from Vietnam and Guantanamo Bay, we've been there, done that. Read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."
     5. Wait. Time is an essential healing quality. Remember that two key elements of Trump's success are disloyalty and mendacity: he won't necessarily follow the whims of those who elected him. Nor will he do what he promised. He might be the best liberal Democratic president ever. Today is Nov. 11. Circle the 18th - one week from today. A lot can happen in a week. One week ago the city was celebrating the Cubs' victory. Who knows what next week could bring?
     6. Go to Margie's Candies, 1960 N. Western Ave. Order the Jumbo Hot Fudge Atomic Sundae. Only $7.95 plus tax. Also order two jars of their home-made hot fudge sauce—$6.55 plus tax. Keep one in the fridge and take two tablespoons at the onset of election-related misery. Give the other to someone who needs is. Acts of kindness always help.
     7. Get healthy. Nothing like a good workout/run/yoga session to get the endorphins flowing.
     8. Help Planned Parenthood. Either by giving money or, ideally, volunteering. Trump has vowed to cut their funding. Regular citizens will have to take up the slack.
     9. Subscribe to a newspaper. Trump is all about undermining what's left of American journalism. Don't let him. Get the paper at home—each copy is a universe, containing worlds. Three months of the Sun-Times is $56.94. A lot cheaper than therapy.
     10. Learn Spanish. The country will be 28 percent Hispanic in 2060 no matter what Trump does. It'll come in handy. Here's your first sentence: "¡Rápido! ¡Aquí! ¡Te esconderé!" (RRRRAH-pee-doh! Ah-KEY! Tay ess-KON-deRAY!) Translation: "Quick! In here! I'll hide you!"
     11. Fly the flag. I thought about furling mine and putting it away for the next four years. But that would cede patriotism to those who abuse it. The pride of this country isn't in that it never made a mistake. The pride of this country is that it acknowledges errors and fights to correct them. This is one big ass error that America is going to need every right-minded citizen to correct.
     12. If all else fails, ignore it for a while. Polls show that 30 percent of Americans at any given time can't name the vice president. Join them. Focus on music, flower arranging, Scrabble, whatever floats your boat. Take a break. The whole nightmare will still be waiting when you get back. And you will get back, because our country needs you, now more than ever.

They dare return us to the old slavery

    The dog still needed to be walked Wednesday morning, as always. She didn't know it had been a late night, or who was just elected president. Snapping her collar on, and plunging out into the chilly morning about 6:30 a.m. felt normal. The leaves were colorful, the air crisp, the sun rising. The world was still here.
     Okay, I thought. We'll manage this. He can't really build the wall—unnecessary, vastly expensive and logistically insane. Start deporting those 11 million undocumented immigrants and the crops rot in the field. Dial back gay marriage? Can you really unring that bell? Umm yes. His vice president kicked a hole in the Indiana economy trying to do just that. Has that kind of right ever in the history of the United States been extended, and then a few years alter snatched back? "Sorry ladies, guess you won't be voting after all!!!" 
     Bargaining. That's what, Stage 3 on the Kubler-Ross grief scale? I seem to have skipped over No 1, denial—can't very easily deny this Hieronymus Bosch painting, transpiring in glorious red and blue before my eyes, with the New York Times real time win-prediction meter starting deep in Hillary territory then pinning itself for Trump. Denying the outcome would be like denying the sky because  it's stormy. It's right there, big as life, every time you look at it. A mighty nation brought low. Mass folly.
     At home, coffee was still here. Cafe du Monde. The papers arrived, freezing the midnight moment when the balance had not yet completely swung Donald Trump's way.
     I wonder if there'll be papers at all in 2020?
     Of course the world wasn't really, there, not the world as it had been the day before. By the time I got back, the emails were showing up.
    "I guess it's time to head back to Israel and get drunk..."
     And the phone calls.
     "You fucking kike Democrat boot-licker phony fucking journalist. I'm laughing at you, you faggot!"
     Trump fans reaching out to bind up our divided country. Adding their undervalued perspective to the national conversation.
     Phone numbers come up now when people call -- they don't realize that -- and in my pre-coffee fog, I phone one back, under the quaint notion that he would regret the bile so easily spilled into my voicemail. "Wrong," as the president-elect likes to say. Which did give the chance to leap back to Kubler-Ross Stage No. 2, anger, because it's infectious, and when somebody starts screaming at you, you tend to give back in kind. Mental note to self: don't call people back. Don't answer emails. Let them have their moment, ululating over the fraud whose lies they bought. They'll have time to regret what they've done.
     Or not. He'll just lie some more and tell them how wonderfully he's done, like they do in Russia.
     Though to be honest, the reader response was not really worse than could be gotten on any given day pre-Trump. We can't blame him for the vileness in the American soul. He didn't create it, it was already there. He just weaponized it, monetized it, for himself. Turning anger into political capital he could spend to buy the White House.
     The White House. Suddenly I saw those elementary school placemats with the presidents. Postage stamps. Those future kids, yet unborn, proudly memorizing the presidents, starting with, "Washington, Jefferson, Adams..." ending "Bush, Obama, Trump" and then whatever godawful specimen comes next. Because as bad as this is, it'll only get worse. Or not. We'll all get used to it, and it'll just be the Way Things Are. The pit-of-the-stomach dread of today—like somebody died—will just be a historical artifact, half trivial, half amusing, grandpa putting on a black armband when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected. Thought he was a tyrant.
     They say in American anyone can grow up to become president. Now we know what that really means.
    I called my parents.
    "How could people vote for someone like that?" said my father, 84. "He made fun of people with disabilities. And people could vote for him. It says something about our country, that's for sure."
     Yes it does dad.
    My mother, 80, got on the phone, all defiance, explaining that this simply means the first woman president will be Elizabeth Warren.
    "Dad and I will still be here in 2020," she said, "and we'll live to see that day."
    I sure hope so mom, I said.
     "How could this person be the president of our land?" she said.
Can't answer that one, mom.
    "I'm wearing all black today and reading 'Confederacy of Dunces,'" she continued.
     That's a plan. Mourn and amuse ourselves. The last Kubler-Ross stage is acceptance. This is what happened. The pieces of the vase cannot be glued back together. Is that acceptance? Or complacency, normalization? He'll be president, yes, but that doesn't mean we have to accept anything he tries to do: Barack Obama never got that courtesy. Acceptance is a luxury we can't really afford right now, a sort of privilege. Being Jewish, my rights won't be plucked away as fast as others' rights will--women, Hispanics, Muslims. But tying yourself into a knot of anguish won't help anybody.
     Which is one way of viewing it. Another is that we may have lost the battle, but not the war.
    The keening was endless on Facebook. I added David Remnick's mournful analysis, An American Tragedy, and Eric Zorn's excellent, grim, assessment, Can America Survive President Donald Trump? Spoiler alert: no.
    I posted my column, of course, the fourth written Tuesday, as events unfolded. And then, prompted by some essential rebellious gene, the La Marseillaises scene from "Casablanca," where the German occupiers singing "Watch on the Rhine" in Rick's Cafe are drown out by the French National Anthem. Something uplifting, defiant and apt, particularly the lines from the second verse, which they never get to, "C'est nous qu'on ose méditer/De rendre à l'antique esclavage!" 
   Or in English:  "It is us they dare plan/To return to the old slavery!"
   Mike Pence might lull himself to sleep thinking about cramming gays back in the closet. Donald Trump might have based his campaign on making every Hispanic citizen a suspected illegal alien, on defunding health care for poor women, or stuffing the Supreme Court with justices who'll dial back women's rights 50 years. He might have been carried to the presidency on the shoulders of the most motley band of alt-right haters to ever dart blinking into the sunlight, their ranks augmented by the grumbling dispossessed who'll swallow any flattering lies and don't sweat the details. But this isn't done yet, and they can't just start shredding modern life, not while free American citizens have a say about it. He'll be president, not king, and though he has Congress at his bidding, the struggle has not ended. It has only begun.  Allons enfants de la Patrie!

Abandon all audacity of hope, ye who enter here

     Donald Trump won.
     An incredible turn of events which, when you pull back and look at the globe this past year, makes a grim sense. We should have seen this coming. Maybe we did see it, but it was so incredible we couldn’t believe the evidence of our eyes.
     Across the world, globalism is in retreat. Great Britain dropped out of the European Union in June. The Philippines elected a murderous madman as president, in the form of Rodrigo Duterte, who promptly began to fulfill his promise to kill drug dealers and drug users.
     Like it or not, the United States is part of that world.
     Seven years since the end of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Americans lost patience with the old politics. With regular politicians. And elected a man who violated all the usual norms, gleefully, without consequence. Howard Dean yelped and his candidacy was dead. Trump famously declared that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose one vote. He did about everything else but fire that shot, insulting, in no particular order, Mexicans, POWs, women, Muslims…it might be easier to list the people he didn’t malign.
     Now he’s our president-elect.
     On Monday, Trump said in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “You have one day to make every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country and your family come true.”

     And the country believed him.
      A stunning repudiation of Barack Obama and everything his administration stood for — his cerebral approach, his inclusiveness, his care for immigrants, for health care. “The Audacity of Hope.” All out the window now.    
     Any minority, particularly Hispanics, Muslims and Jews, who have been feeling increasingly frightened by Trump's embrace of the "alt-right"—a motley of heretofore obscure haters and far right reactionaries—can't help but be even more afraid now. What will our future be like?
     The presidency of the United States of America is the first elective office that Donald Trump has ever held. While that was true for a number of U.S. presidents, they were either military men, like Andrew Jackson or Dwight Eisenhower, or held appointed public offices, like William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover. Donald Trump is sui generis, a figure unprecedented in American history.
     For now, the markets will plunge—500 points in Dow futures last time I looked—the world will gape in shock. And we will get to see just what Donald Trump will actually do. Will he build that wall? He promised to. Will he start deporting 11 million undocumented Hispanic immigrants? He vowed he would. Temporarily bar Muslims from entering the country? He suggested that, too.
     Nations have stood at the crossroads before. In 1932, the United States elected Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany elected Adolf Hitler. The results don't need to be elaborated upon here.
     The polls were wrong. Hillary Clinton led most of them, for months. She won every poll of the American people except the one that counted.
     Trump is a man who has never run a city, never mind a state, never mind a country. Who deals in crude generalities, who makes promises that not only can't he keep, but also that can't be kept.
     Trump promised to "Make America Great Again." The slogan implied, directly, that we were no longer great. That our greatness had been stolen by invading Mexicans, by—get used to hearing the phrase, because he promised to say it a lot—radical Islamic terrorism. By job-snatching Chinese and untrustworthy Europeans. And that global conspiracy of bankers.
     Hillary Clinton argued that our greatness was in our diversity, that we were "Stronger Together." But Clinton lost, and Trump won. What that means we will begin to understand in the weeks and months and years to come. It would be overly dramatic and premature to say that the light that America held to the world has gone out, dowsed by electing an unashamed bigot and demagogue. But it sure is flickering, for a lot of people, the ones who aren't rejoicing tonight.
     I predicted this at the end of September. Just as I wish I had been wrong about his winning, I hope I'm wrong about the dire results. He was a Democrat once. Maybe he'll go back to being a Democrat. In his second term. I suppose I should leave you with some words of comfort. We are still the United States of America. We survived the British burning our capital and a Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II, the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. We'll survive this too, somehow. Buckle your seat belts, it's going to get bumpy.
     And Donald. Guess the system wasn't rigged after all, eh?

21 things that are true no matter who is elected president

     The presidential race was still too close to call at our first deadline Tuesday night. But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions from this most dramatic, historic and vexing race.

1. Why is it surprising that this ordeal just won’t end? The election was very close, revealing not only a divided country, but an evenly divided country. No wonder we have such difficulty getting anything done. Half the country wants to move this way, half that. Of course we’re being torn apart. The once-great United States is like a two-headed horse in some shabby vaudeville review.

2 Global warming, health care and immigration are still huge problems. We just held an 18-month presidential campaign and barely discussed what to do, except float a few diametrically opposed bullet points: build a wall, create a path to citizenship.

3. If Trump wins, his foes can take comfort in the fact that he is erratic — he calls it “unpredictable.” He proposes and abandons policies, makes promises and then denies he ever made them, with blinding speed. We really don’t know what he’d do.

4. If Clinton wins, well, her foes can take comfort in the fact that she’ll have to reach out to them to get anything done. The question is how vigorously she’ll be spurned by disappointed Republicans. If history is any judge, really vigorously.

To continue reading, click here. 

Election day, 2016

     This is the 13th presidential election in my memory, not counting being irked that the 1964 Republican convention pre-empted "Mr. Magoo." So starting with the 1968 battle between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the first contest I really noticed in detail, one where, at age 8, I insisted my parents take me to the Berea, Ohio Humphrey headquarters so I could snag a campaign button, which I still have.

Candidate cookies, Bennison's Bakery, Evanston

     And true to its unlucky #13 status, this election has been, by far, the most jinxed, sordid, troubling , jaw-dropping affair of the baker's dozen, if not in the wide sweep of American history, for reasons that hardly need to be articulated at this point. I read one pundit who, trying to argue that it wasn't the ugliest campaign ever, reached back to the 1800 battle between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, which isn't exactly a compelling case for this election's ordinariness.  
    But now, at the end, or the end of this part anyway, a bit of summation is in order. Where to begin? From Trump descending the escalator at his namesake Manhattan tower to call Mexican immigrants rapists — the hook set deep in the mouth of the media that left them flailing on the line from that point on — to the motley crew of 16 GOP debaters, to the passionate Bernie Sanders insurgency, to the chill figure of Hillary Clinton who, alone among them all, seemed to understand what this was about: choosing someone to run the government of the United States of America, not break further it apart.
     The Republicans have been locked in a 30-year trench war to tear down that government, brick-by-brick, ever since Ronald Reagan taught them that if society changes so much that you can't directly oppress the people you hate, you can kneecap the government that helps those people and and lower your taxes in the bargain. They've been sliding down this chute for decades, only to plop at the feet of Donald Trump and sedition.
    Trump was the last man standing at the Republican pygmy wrestle-off, and the GOP, to its deathless shame, more or less lined up behind him, the Bushes notwithstanding—and really, names like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and the word  "valor" don't usually belong in the same sentence, but now they do. 
    Donald Trump. So much has been said about him it seems overkill even to type his name at this point. Bigot. Fraud. Liar. Misogynist. Bully. I will go to my grave marveling that a man like John McCain can be directly slurred, and see all American servicemen in general and POWs in particular mocked and dismissed, and support the guy anyway. It defies understanding.  
   Bigot. Fraud. Liar. It's a shame the GOP has already worn out slurs by hurling them willy-nilly at their opponents, because they ring hollow now when justly applied. Trump had a way of echoing back any charge directed at him, an "I'm rubber, you're glue" stunt that, alas, was only one of the many juvenile aspects of this Schoolyard Election. 
     It's like the Hitler analogy -- it's been overused to much, that when you finally get a guy who talks like Hitler, passing around Nazi -- whoops, "alt-right"—paranoid fantasies as fact, raving about international conspiracies and grasping bankers, it's only good for an eye roll. Oh that again?  You become the Boy Who Cried Wolf. And there was some debate whether he was more of a fascist buffoon, like Mussolini, than an actual menace, like Hitler, though that would depend if the man achieves power or not. Still, it is an apt comparison; Trump allowed the lowest rung of anti-Semites to hoist him upon their shoulders, merely grinning at the attention. He even has his own Goering/Goebbels, fat/thin duo of fawning underlings in the shrill, gaunt, fist-pounding Rudolph Guiliani and the ever-sniveling lardbag Chris Christie. 
     Though to be honest, nothing Trump said sparked quite the visceral disgust as on Monday, when he said, "You have one day to make every dream you ever dreamed for your country and your family come true." 
    By voting for him of course. Trust drop into daddy's arms and he'll take care of everything 
    No programs. No plans. He never explained how he was going to do any of this, because of course he won't. It's all snake oil and bullshit. And Americans lapped it up. As awful as Trump is, you can't blame him — he didn't create these people, he just goaded them on, drew them out. The blame is ours. A freedom loving people. Howling to be enslaved.
     Clinton seems to be winning -- she preserved her narrow lead in all the polls-- but Nate Silver still gives Trump a  35 percent chance of winning, which is better odds than the chance of tossing a coin and getting heads twice.
    Not that a Clinton victory will end the dark forces that Trump has so skillfully summoned. They were there all along, and now in blinking the light and normalized, they'll batter even more relentlessly at the foundations of our government and society. Maybe if Trump's defeat is massive enough, they'll go slink back under their rocks. But I doubt it. Assuming he isn't elected president—and I'll exhale only after he isn't—how could we have come this close? Any joy at Hillary's election will have to be mitigated by the grotesque sight of what's under the rock Trump kicked over. The only comfort: they were already there. Trump didn't create them, he only exploited them. Not a cause, as I've been saying for a year, but a symptom. Being the folks who believe in facts and science, we can't decry the fact that we are now aware of this noxious reality. As Sarah McLachlan sings, "Better I should know."
   And if Trump wins? Well, then bar the door, Katie. We sail off the edge of the world, outdoing Britain which dropped out of the European Union with a thud last June, throwing away economic prosperity in terror at the prospect of Turkish immigrants.. I don't know what the country will look like then, but it will be dark for four years, if not forever. It's hard to imagine, and I'd prefer not to. We don't have to worry at this point, all we have to do is wait for a few more hours and we'll find out.