"Voting for empathy ... The future. We can do better than than this."

  

Government Bureau, by George Tooker (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Either you sympathize with other people.
     Or you don't.
     That's it.
     That's our entire political moment right now.
     The rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.
     So here's mine.
     The key word in the first sentence is "other." Other people, different from yourself. Because empathizing with yourself and those exactly like you is easy.
     And ineffective.
     Tribalism was fine when humans lived in tribes. Building the modern world required putting aside prejudices and working together. Those who found it within themselves to say, "You know. . . this guy might be black ... but he could actually be a soldier, a professor, a quarterback. Let's give him a try" did better. Societies that made the leap did better.
     Lose sympathy and you suffer. Britain fled the European Union because enough Brits were convinced that membership meant a Turk might move in next door and, oh I don't know, do Turkish things. Smoke a hookah. So they blew up their own economy.
     We're next. The Republicans are at war with The Other: immigrants, Muslims, gays, Jews, blacks. Anybody who doesn't meet their hidebound notion of what an American should look like.
     The truth isn't on their side, so they lie, rationalize and blame-shift, while drumming up bogeymen to distract voters. It's happening in every race. Pick one one:
     The 6th District, Republican Rep. Peter Roskam against Democratic newcomer Sean Casten. Once, Roskam would be merely a bland GOP non-entity, endorsed by the NRA, calling climate change "junk science." The usual.
     Now the stakes are higher... 

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Outside the box: A visit to Chicago Mailing Tube Co.

  

     I had to call Chicago Mailing Tube Monday, related to a project I'm writing for the paper. To my amazement, I realized that I never posted the column I wrote about my visit there, 11 year ago. That seems a tremendous oversight, considering how much affection I have for their product—sturdy, sharply-made cardboard mailing tubes.

     Perhaps the visit is a worthwhile distraction, too. I don't know about you, but there is only so much time I can fret about our country declining into a feral state, and there is a comfort in the poetry of tangible objects. Back then the column covered a full page, and ended with a joke, so I've left it in, though I seem to think my audience consisted for politically-savvy 6-year-olds.
     Ken Barmore, by the way, passed away early in 2015, just shy of his 98th birthday.

     If you glance north out of the window of a commuter train shortly after it leaves Union Station, you might notice a sign with sleek stainless steel letters spelling out "CHICAGO MAILING TUBE CO."
     And if you are of a certain frame of mind, after seeing that sign for a sufficient number of years, you might begin to idly wonder about the cardboard tube industry, in general, and about this low brick factory in particular.  

     After a few years of speculation, you might find yourself climbing the stairs to the spartan second-floor offices of Chicago Mailing Tube, where you will meet Ken Barmore, 90, who bought the company in 1949.
     "There wasn't much to buy," he recalls, "one machine and six or seven people—nobody knew anything about the company."
     Chicago Mailing Tube was founded by three partners in 1902. Back then it sold a lot of snuff boxes—squat cylindrical containers similar to what holds chewing tobacco today. The containers were delivered by horse and wagon, and the company still proudly holds several city licenses for delivery horses.
     No horses anymore, but it does have 40 or so human employees, and a number of spectacularly complex machines, producing cardboard tubes in near-Dr. Seussian splendor: ribbons of paper flying off enormous spinning spools, puffs of steam, rivers of glue pumped from 3,000-gallon vats, pneumatic hisses and roaring spindles.
     The process is called "spiral winding"—3-inch strips of brown paper are coated with glue and then wrapped tightly around a metal core, or "mandrel," then squeezed by thick rubber belts.
     "The pressure is terrific," says Barmore, pointing to belts compressing the tubes. "You get a finger under there, it's going to be flat."
     Cutting tubes precisely is one challenge of their manufacture—lengths sometimes need to be within a tiny fraction of an inch if they are to be used in manufacturing, say to hold industrial wire.
     "This is a competitor's tube," Barmore says, standing among a forest of tubes in the "sample room," appraising a cylinder as tall as himself. He eyes the end carefully. "It's got a bad cut on it. It isn't square. A lot of companies, they couldn't use that."
     We think of tubes holding paper towels and toilet tissue, but they also hide in plain sight -- as Parmesan cheese containers, charity cans, crescent dough packages and masking tape roll cores. Tiny tubes hold bundles of wires in cars, and huge tubes form concrete pillars in construction.  

     "We used to make cores for machine-gun bullets for the Joliet arsenal," Barmore said.
     The brown paper in the tubes is 100 percent recycled and always has been -- Chicago Mailing Tube was green before green was cool.
     "We've always used recycled paper," Barmore says. "Fifty-seven years. It's a lot cheaper." How much cheaper? Between half and a quarter the cost of new paper.
     All the rejects, the poorly cut tubes, pieces of scrap, are fed up a conveyer into a grinder— it sounds like frozen turkeys raining down on a tin roof—then baled into enormous six-foot cubes to be returned to the mill to be pulped.
     How does a man get into the cardboard tube trade?
     "I wanted to get into the farm machinery business, but I couldn't make any kind of a deal," Barmore remembers. "I'm a farm boy, from Monroe, Wis. A dairy farm. I know cows."
     Why not stay down on the farm?
     "I hated it," he says. "I hated milking cows."
     This was during the Great Depression—Barmore is Monroe High School Class of '34—when collapsing milk prices had farmers dumping milk at the side of the road because it wasn't worth selling.
     "Things were very bad," he says. "Believe me, it was hell."
     He got a job candling eggs for $12 a week, repaired farm machinery, drove a bus in Rockford, found himself in charge of ordering coal for Central Illinois Electric and Gas.
     "How many pounds of coal to make a pound of steam, how many pounds of steam to make a kilowatt," he says. "I was figuring that out." Too many other jobs to list.
     Businesses are handed down, but his son, Tom, didn't want to make cardboard tubes.
     "He's a CPA—he didn't want to go into it," Barmore says. "He was not interested in tubes."
     Did that bother him?
     "I didn't want to be a farmer, so I figured, if he didn't want to make tubes, that's his business."
     But he has a grandson, Keith Shimon, who runs the business now.

   "I thought it would be fun, and it has been fun," says Shimon, 33. "It's been a lot of work, but it's been fun."
     Cardboard tubes are a $2 billion to $3 billion industry, according to Kris Garland of the Composite Can and Tube Institute based in Alexandria, Va.
     Competition from Asia is slight because of high shipping costs. A cardboard tube is expensive to ship.
     "It's kind of like we're shipping air, and the 10-inch tubes really fill up a truck," Shimon says.
     Thus, factories tend to be regional suppliers, much in the same way that local potato chip companies have stayed in business because nobody wants to ship potato chips very far.
     Technological progress has helped—better machines—and hurt the industry. Architects who once sent their plans in sturdy tubes now hit the send button instead. The American textile trade moving to China also hurt, because there is no need to make centers for bolts of cloth.
     Chicago Mailing Tube tries to stay ahead of a changing world by being nimble.
     "We pride ourselves in how fast we can react," Shimon says.
     "Customers call up today and the trailers go out tomorrow," Barmore says.
     Really? I ask.
     "Really," he says.
     

TODAY'S CHUCKLE
     I confess, I cooked this one up myself, in tribute to today's special topic. Apologies in advance:
     Q. What do you call toothpaste that is dozing at a briefing by former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card?
     A. A Card-bored tube.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 18, 2007

Jews may not like life more than you do, but they talk about it more

Babylonian lion (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   
     You know what's a primary Jewish value?
     Being alive.
     I hope I'm not spilling the beans here. Revealing some deep rabbinic secret. 
     But it's true.
     We like being alive. It's important to us. I can't say whether Jews like living more than gentiles, since I'm not gentile. I would assume everybody likes life equally. So maybe it's just that Jews make a bigger deal of it—"To life! To life! L'Chaim!" We talk about it more, perhaps because there's always somebody trying to kill us.
     Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon. Razed Jerusalem and took the Jews into captivity, more than 2,500 years ago. Various caesars. About 1500 years worth of Christian leaders. Assorted Russian czars. Don't forget Hitler, and his pal Stalin. After the formation of Israel, the Arab states. When they failed, the PLO and periodic freelance Muslim terrorists, cheered on by half the sophomores around the world.
     Let's not forget home-grown American haters, like the guy who murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday.
     That didn't happen in a vacuum, but two years into the administration of Donald Trump, our own miniature Mussolini who uses prejudice of all kinds to stir up and distract his base.
     "I am a nationalist," Trump said. Actually, what he said was "I am a white nationalist" but the "white" is unvoiced, like the "p" in "psalm." And if you didn't hear it, his far right supporters certainly did.
     Still. Mass shootings happen so frequently in the United States now—at churches, schools, music concerts, workplaces—that I don't feel inclined to join the chorus connecting this one to the anti-Semitism that Trump winks at. (Jews are the "globalists" that Trump refers to. Hitler called them "internationalists." And people claim there is no progress)

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S

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

     I wrote this in mid-September, when I heard that Elton John would be playing the United Center at the end of October. I intended to put it in the paper Friday—heck, he might even see it. But October sped by, and I forgot. Maybe just as well...

     When I find myself in front of a piano keyboard—something that seems to happen less and less as time goes by—I will sometimes, if the mood strikes me, lay my hands on the keys, standing there, or maybe even pull the bench out and sit down, then begin to play the opening chords of "Your Song," by Elton John. Surprising—I imagine, if they noticed or cared, which of course they don't—anyone who happens to be around, because I do not know how to play the piano.
     But I can play "Your Song," or now, after the corroding years, the first few seconds, because when I was 17 I laboriously taught myself to play it, note by note, chord by chord, first the right hand, then the left, then together, as a present for my girlfriend on her 16th birthday.
     She loved Elton John. Loved him, with that singular intensity and passion that teenage girls direct toward certain singers, certain fashions and certain boys. I can't say that her attraction to Elton John and to me were unrelated: we both were guys in glasses, prone to heaviness, adept with words, though of course Elton got his, famously, from lyricist, Bernie Taupin, while I was on my own.
     At 17, I was more into Bob Dylan—"Blood on the Tracks"—had just come out, and viewed her extraordinary fondness for Elton with amusement, at first. But then, in the gravity that our loves hold for us, was pulled in too, and her interest became mine.
     What Elton John is now—big glam stadium rocker, dressed as Donald Duck, churning out the hits—wasn't how he was then. He had done a pensive, Western-themed album, "Tumbleweed Connection." (ahead of its time; issued three years before the Eagles decided to be desperados). Quiet, trickling love songs, that I didn't realize it, would come in handy when our romance fizzled out, five years later. "Lately, I've been thinking, how much I miss my lady..."
     Elton John was performing in Chicago this weekend. I was tempted to go, even though the last concert I attended was years and years ago: Tom Waits at the Chicago Theater, really, because I couldn't not go.
     But Elton John, bidding goodbye to his performing career? That's tempting.
     "I thought maybe we should go to the United Center and see Elton John," I said to the wife, in mid-September.
     "Have you seen him before?" she asked.
     "Yes," I replied. "1979. At the Auditorium Theater."
     "That would be the time to have seen him, then," she replied, with finality.
     Yes, yes it was.
     I was in college then, beginning of sophomore year. You had to enter a lottery and the lucky few would have the privilege of coming downtown to buy tickets. I won, and remember the trip to the box office for the newness of going downtown, as well because Steve McQueen was jumping a car off the parking garage at Marina Towers for his movie "The Hunter," and I joined the throng cordoned across Wacker Drive, waiting for the great moment.
     But watching a movie being made is like watching paint dry. I had tickets waiting at the Auditorium box office, and eventually gave up waiting and moved on. I can still see the pair of tickets—good seats—in their little envelope. I photocopied them and sent them to her, without any explanation, a tacit invite. The letter, I'm sure, is in the big bag, tied with thick blue piece of yarn, sitting in the basement, the letters she handed back to me when she dumped me in 1982. I could dig into the bag and find it, but I'm not touching the thing. I opened the bag exactly once, read a sentence or two, then closed it and never opened it again. It is not a place I want to go.
     The ploy worked. She came to Chicago, my college roommates were banished, and we camped out in the back bedroom of Northwestern Apartments 210, except the night of the concert, a Chicago nightlife whirlwind. Dinner at Jimmy Wong's—the exotic pu-pu-for-two platter, and a big fishbowl of a drink that had, in my memory, a little flame in the center of the glass. Or was that was the night before. Because the night of the concert, staying at what was then the Pick-Congress Hotel, a dark, sub-par refuge, then and now, we ordered a room service cheeseburger and a Heineken. I can still see the tray in the dark room....
     The show was Elton solo—that was a big deal, I recall—though, halfway through, a giant clamshell opened behind him, and there was Ray Cooper, his drummer, looking maniacal, hunched over his kit, playing timpani. It was a dramatic effect.
     The part of the show I remember was during "Rocket Man," Elton John improvised, "I'm burned out, I'm faded away, I'm a fucking Rocket Man," he sang, and we all cried "No! No!"
     He was 32 years old then, though I suppose a decade on the road made him feel that way. I can't imagine how he feels now, after nearly a half century of mega-stardom and enormous fame and wealth. My guess is it can all seem pointless—the drawback of doing what you love every day, day after day, month after month, year after year.
     So I thought I would remind him, that beyond the sea of people, there must be an army of duffers, of lower grade Rocket Men, slightly singed, smelling of cordite, looking wearily at the nearly-drawn parabola of our lives, "that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return," as Thomas Pynchon put it.
     Countless people, like me, like maybe her—I couldn't say and wouldn't dream of trying to find out—who didn't go to the show. Who asked themselves what they were trying to find that was worth $500 for a pair of tickets, and decided, no matter how good the performance, what we were looking for wouldn't be there. But who still carry all that music around, and know all the words to "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." For all his glitter, nobody celebrated the ordinary like Elton John, "just someone his mother might know." It is probably meaningless to a star like him but, for what it's worth, the ordinary salute him, and say, "Thanks." It meant something.

 

The Saturday Snapshot #12

     When a photograph is being taken, the person in the picture usually poses, smiling.
     Not in this case.
     Last week I was visiting Plochman's Mustard factory in Manteno, for a future story, when the tour came to the assembly line. This worker checking newly capped mustard bottles and plucking off the jars whose caps were skewed seemed to be a process worth photographing. I took out my phone and snapped ... this.
     The moment I took it, I felt bad for her. Normally, I'd ask permission, but with a worker in a factory, permission is assumed. I already had permission, from her bosses. 
   Bad, but not too bad. I also knew this was an arresting shot, far more than had she just acquiesced to the photo. That blue glove, like an exclamation point. The photo seemed to speak to the intrusiveness of modern life. All these cameras, the immediate worldwide attention found 24 hours a day online. Who among us doesn't shrink from that? 
    Is that why she's hiding her face? I didn't ask—my interest was in the production line, not her, specifically. I shouldn't speculate as to her motives, but it reminded me of about 15 years ago when I visited Lithuania. There used to be, oh, 50 synagogues in Vilnius, before World War II, but now there is just one left. The moment I arrived, with a photographer, and walked into the sanctuary, there was  a single Jew there. We went to take his picture, the last Jew in the last synagogue, against the large Hebrew prayer boards they have, or had, in Eastern Europe.
    "No," the man said, twisting away from the camera and shielding his face. "I don't like myself."
    There seemed a bitter irony in that. We absorb the poison around us.
    As I said, I don't know what her motive was and shouldn't guess: hiding from the law, not wanting a malicious ex-boyfriend to see her, concern an image would steal her soul, a variety of possible explanations. Who knows? But I have to lean toward the one offered by that lone Lithuanian Jew as explaining the motive of most people in these situations: they don't like themselves, don't like how they look, don't want pictures taken of this unattractive person who they happen to be. 
    She seemed to relent, after this first protest, and in other pictures of the line, her face does appear. But I didn't use those, didn't pass them along to the newspaper—trying to respect her obvious wish not to be seen. But I decided it was okay to post this one, in the smaller sphere of my blog, since you can't recognize her. I see it as a dramatic statement from those who feel this way. 

Got 40 seconds? Good, then do I have part of a column for you!

  

     Forty seconds.
     Not a lot of time. I'll have to work fast. Stick with me.
     Standing in the newsroom Wednesday I did something I don't often do: study one of the big monitors hanging from the ceiling, showing how our stories are doing.  Checking on my Mega Millions column. Top 10; good, good—people love the lottery. Nodding in contentment, I let my eye wander rightward to "engagement time," how long the average reader spends absorbing this finely wrought argument.
     Forty seconds.
     Ouch. You can't read a column a 40 seconds. Most people must bail out. Looking at the other stories, I saw 40 seconds is actually a long time. One had a time of seven seconds.
     You see why. People are on their phones, flicking here and there. They're like my dog, three steps forward—SQUIRREL!—another three steps—SMELLY SPOT ON THE GROUND!
     It can take her a while to get anywhere.


     The above can be read in 40 seconds—I just did, auctioneer-style, with a stopwatch. So you distracted folks, you've put in your time. I unclip your leash. For the rest, let's continue. Ripping through the above made me think of a Woody Allen joke: "I took a speed-reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
     Doesn't everything nowadays?
     And no, I don't take the 40 second average as an indictment of this little 719-word parcel left on your doorstep three times a week. Don't bother writing to sneeringly claim that if only I'd respect our president more, well then, readers would just sprawl before the column, sipping sweet tea, lingering indolently over what I have to say as shadows lengthen on the veranda.
     Thank you for your valuable input.
     Not that I am decrying the speed of modern life, something every writer since Seneca has done. What's the point? Technology wins. Always. It proceeds forward at its own imperative, and we lope after, changing as we go. We are not the same people who flustered in indignation at installing a telephone in our homes where complete strangers might interrupt us during the dinner hour. Those people were not smarter or kinder or better than we are—certainly not when you consider the hideous wrongs they accepted.
     The past is a terrible place. All its jaw-dropping folly was committed at a snail's past, relative to ours. Blundered into after years of careful debate. After endless speeches written in longhand, our country broke in half and started killing each other in the Civil War. Maybe it's better to be distracted: heck, half the people are reading on their phones, and if they don't look up regularly they'll blunder in front of a bus. Distraction is protective.
     I certainly distract myself. Walking somewhere without listening to an audio book seems so 20th century. Also on Wednesday I finished "Oliver Twist" on Audible—17 hours, 12 minutes. Time well spent? I'd say yes. Not because of the story. Oliver is perhaps the most inert hero in literature, buffeted through the tale like a cork in a stream, falling into the clutches of Fagin the Jew here, being rescued by good Christian folk there. He barely acts or speaks, beyond his famous request for "More."
     But Dickens' depiction of grinding London poverty is moving, a reminder that before Western society had minorities to hate, it scorned their own kind, based on wealth and social position.
     One scene resonates. Teen heroine Rose Maylie is visiting Oliver's benefactor, Mr. Brownlow, and his pal Mr. Grimwig. Learning Oliver is downstairs, Brownlow races from the room:

When the room-door closed behind him, Mr. Grimwig ... rose and limped as fast as he could up and down the room at least a dozen times, and then stopping suddenly before Rose, kissed her without the slightest preface.

     "Hush!" he said, as the young lady rose in some alarm at this unusual proceeding. "Don't be afraid. I'm old enough to be your grandfather. You're a sweet girl. I like you. Here they are!"
     That moment is never referred to again, nor does it affect Mr. Grimwig's status as a colorful crank. It was written by Dickens in the late 1830s and could have just as easily been written in the 1930s. But in 2018 it jars. That's progress.
     Thank you for your time and attention. You may go now.

Or if you have to play the lottery, don't play Mega Millions

The Lottery, Sèvres Manufactory, circ. 1757 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      When I finished yesterday's column on the Mega Millions lottery, it was 1408 words—twice as long as could fit into the newspaper. A few things I thought worth saying ended up on the cutting room floor (and a good thing too; I'd hate to think it was all superfluous tap-dancing and thumb-twidding).
     The part I want to take an extra day to pass along regards the Mega Millions game, and its 302-million-to-one chance of success. There are other lotteries, lots of them, most with far, far, far better odds. If you really just have to throw your money away so you can hope for things, and the idea is you want to win, you should throw your money away on those. You still won't win, but at least you'll have a better chance.
     Since mere argument is ineffective, I tried backing it up with this:

     Think of it this way: If I offered you one of two games, a chance to pick a number between 1 and 1000 with a prize of $1,000, or to roll a die and win $10 if a six comes up, it would be foolish to pick the former game, based on the bigger prize you won't be getting, and not the latter, with its far, far better 1 in 6 odds. You're still probably going to lose either game, so go for the one you have the best chance of winning.
     But people don't think that way, in part because the media doesn't challenge them to. We ignore that not only does the vast, vast, vast vast vast majority lose, but that winning is also overrated. We see the lucky souls clutching the giant check, and then they disappear into the blasted lives.

     Lots of conversation about this—people love the lottery, and I don't want them to think I'm some anti-lottery fanatic. I just think the lottery is stupid and, though as a rule I don't like to meddle in another person's fantasy, with the vast engine of the media banging garbage cans over its head and huzzahing for the lottery, I feel morally obligated to cough the truth into my fist a few times, just for appearance's sake.
     A common argument is that the lottery offers hope that money worries would be at an end. That's a particularly pernicious fantasy, and I replied to a person on Facebook with this metaphor: it's as if you have one cow, and are insisting that if only you had another thousand cows, well then your concerns over cattle would be at an end. Just the opposite. They would only be beginning.
     To this line of thinking, I was accused of being an elitist. Blessed with a good job (though not a particularly secure one) I can't relate to those who struggle to pay rent and buy food. Though those are the very people least in a position to spend money on the lottery. If your plans for dinner involves hitting the Mega Millions on your way to the supermarket well, buddy, plan on being hungry.
     The truth of the matter, I think, the the final word, was offered up by this reader, who observed the following, which I will leave with you. Thanks to everybody for the interesting conversations:

     Neil, you are not a gambler are you? Any degenerate gambler will tell you that the end game is not the win or loss, it’s the action and anticipation. The most exciting moment to any gambler is the moment before the card turns over, the dice stop, the ball falls on a number or the wheels stop spinning. That is the thrill and the reason people keep coming back and the reason some get addicted. Same with the lottery, that $2 or $20 is not about actually winning, but the action of the winning numbers coming up and the fantasy about what you could do if by some miracle you did win. It’s a much needed distraction from every day life and is harmless as long as you don’t start betting the rent or grocery money.