Words have meaning even if they aren't true

     People just say stuff.
     Such as “How are you?” when they couldn’t care less how you are. And “I’m fine” when they’re not. It’s expected, the grease that society slides forward on. Hardly worth noting.
     When it comes to politics, however, this just-say-stuff habit is more worrisome. Then the grease can send our nation skidding off of a cliff of toxic nonsense and paranoid fantasy. Politicians make promises that they can’t possibly deliver. They air claims that can’t possibly be true, that directly conflict what they just said a day or two ago. And their followers, well, follow, saying things they neither mean nor think about.
     Such as? Abortion. “Abortion is murder,” the anti-abortion crowd claims. You hear it all the time. First, that’s incorrect. Since murder is a legal term, and abortion is legal and thus it is by definition not murder. What they mean is “Abortion should be murder.” Except they don’t mean that either, as you can demonstrate by replying, “Oh really? If it’s murder, then for how long should the murderers go to jail?” And the answer is “umm.” We can translate that grunt as “OK ‘abortion is murder,’ is just something we say because it sounds powerful and more compact than, ‘I want to force my religion on you while dragging gender roles back to the 1950s.'” Admittedly quite a mouthful.
     Donald Trump is a master of saying stuff. A mighty river of words flows out of his waggling lips, vague promises and idle threats and broad accusations. They sound dynamic, and his fans lap it up. Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Bar Muslims from entering the country. Deport 11 million illegal residents. The election is rigged. The media are corrupt.

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What do you get for a friend in rehab? This.

    There are no "Hooray You're in Rehab!" cards, that I know of. There should be. Swapping a life that's gone off the rails for one that's functional, fulfilling and disciplined should be a cause for celebration, not shame. 

    Which is why I was delighted when my friend Lise Schleicher, who owns BasketWorks in Northbrook, suggested creating a One Day At a Time Recovery gift basket around my new book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, written with Sara Bader.     She's been doing land-office business with her Chicago Reads basket featuring my Chicago memoir, You Were Never in Chicago, and was looking to do some brand extension.  And yes, I sign the books for those who want me to.

    Lise consulted with me designing her basket, and I suggested the sweets—sugar touches the part of the brain that booze wallops, and you tend to go through a lot of candy in the early days of rehab. Coffee of course. And the "One Day at a Time" sign because you need that one-foot-in-front-of-the-other determination to get through those arduous first months of recovery.  

    And the book, which has been out now for about two months.. It's still getting notice—just last week Newcity ran a perceptive review  by lit editor Toni Nealie. I also taped a podcast that I thought went very well for the Poetry Foundation which should be up any day. And in a few weeks Sara and I will go into the studio to cut a segment with Scott Simon for "All Things Considered" on NPR.

    With gift-giving season approaching, I wanted to spotlight Lise's new basket. I've used her company before, and can attest that she's prompt and the baskets are wildly appreciated. Particularly under these circumstances, when a person tends to feel alone, facing a life radically different from the life they've become accustomed to. They could use some support, and nothing says, "I'm with you" like a basket of goodies. I believe this sort of thing could catch on. It's a great idea.

"A little disappointing"

     Today's initial post is just a re-jiggering of yesterday's—kind of a rip-off, really, for regular readers—so I thought I would offer something fresh. Since today is the 75th anniversary of the opening of Mount Rushmore, it seems appropriate to share this chapter from "The Quest for Pie," the unpublished memoir of my trip with the boys out west in 2014.

     Gutzon Borglum is not famous. Though he should be, if only for embodying the truth that you can do something great, something truly great, that you can create a masterwork through tremendous personal effort, a masterwork that is known around the globe, leaving behind a shrine to yourself and your genius in the bargain and still be completely, utterly obscure.
     And if you are the one person in a thousand who knows who Gutzon Borglum is, well, you should feel good about yourself, because you are extraordinary too, in your own way.
     Borglum sculpted Mount Rushmore. He worked on it for more than 14 years, aided by some 400 workers. The job was finished after his death in 1941 by his son Lincoln.

     Maybe because we first stopped by the small museum to Borglum in town, on our way in, before visiting Mount Rushmore itself, and viewed up close Borglum’s competent but soulless bronze of Lincoln, sitting on a bench by the curb, as if waiting for a bus, in addition to Borglum’s other artless, static metal creations. But by the time we got done passing all the tributes to Borglum, not just the museum in town and the studio shrine at the Mount Rushmore site, plus various busts and plaques peppered all around, I began to suspect that the whole endeavor was a deliberate ploy on Borglum’s part, an artist’s trick to drape honor upon himself, using America’s presidential greats as a pretext. It seemed almost post-modern.
      Not that Mt. Rushmore wasn’t impressive — it is. Big and impressive and patriotic. Sometimes a hugely famous artwork is a let-down when you finally see the genuine article. Michelangelo’s David, for instance. By the time I got myself to Florence, on that vexing trip to Italy with my father, and we laid eyes upon David, it struck me as a well-wrought garden sculpture. I had seen it too many times already.     
     Not Mount Rushmore, whose scale allows it to survive the hype. It really is enormous, and enormous is one quality that is hard to sap away with trinkets. I was particularly intrigued, as we hiked the “Presidential Trail” around the mountain, to catch the four faces from different angles, peeking through the trees. For some reason, we always get Mount Rushmore reproduced from a single, head-on perspective, as if it’s the only view possible, and it felt marvelous, almost subversive, to see Washington in profile. It was surreal, like glancing at your change and noticing a penny with Lincoln gazing directly at you.   

      Yes, Mt. Rushmore memorializes four men who need no memorializing. Nobody says, "Oh, right, George Washington, I forgot about him. High time somebody did something in his honor.” And Jefferson, well, he doesn’t really resemble Jefferson here — his nose is wrong. (That is, he doesn’t look like Jefferson as commonly depicted in portraits and statues — it isn’t as if anybody has a photo).
     But Mount Rushmore is patriotic, and there’s a joy in patriotism, a sentiment you ruin if you think about it too intensely — here it probably helped to skip Wounded Knee. I felt very God-Bless-America-y, so long as I diligently ignored the various aesthetic disappointments. Mount Rushmore is also a reminder of how generally polite the world can be — had France at some point decided to erect the massive heads of, oh, Louis XIV, Charles De Gaulle, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne, carved into a peak in the Pyrenees, we’d never stop laughing at them. The world is very kind to Americans when it comes to Mount Rushmore, or maybe they just mock us out of earshot in languages we don’t bother to learn.
     The boys and I had lunch — another let down, since Ross, an avid film buff and Alfred Hitchcock fan, discovered, by reading the signs, that Hitchcock didn’t actually film “North by Northwest” here, except for some outside establishing shots. The scene where Eva Marie Saint guns down Cary Grant was not filmed in the room where we were having our $27 worth of tepid foil-wrapped cafeteria cheeseburgers, but in a studio in London.
     Having just seen the Badlands and the Corn Palace in Mitchell, I couldn't help but place Mt. Rushmore in league with the latter. The Corn Palace is a brick building, not made of corn, but decorated anew each year with corncob designs, honoring the local crop and, not incidentally, drawing the dupes off the highway to buy popcorn and postcards, which also was Mt. Rushmore's original purpose — that’s why the local boosters contacted Borglum, to create a magnet to draw visitors to the Black Hills of South Dakota. As is its purpose to this day, once you blow away the mist of unfocused patriotic zeal that the park service sprays over the place. Give them credit: it works.   

     We tramped around, probably longer than we should have, and it struck me that on our way here we had passed a thousand more dramatic mountaintops, carved by the wind and the rain, and we make a big deal out of this one and flatter our own abilities because of the crude likenesses of ourselves we managed to blast upon it. Omnia vanitas.
     My boys were even cooler than I to Mt. Rushmore.
     “A little disappointing,” Ross concluded. “Nature is more wonderful than anything we can build.”
     “The Badlands were better,” Kent agreed. “Man-made creations don't compare to nature.”
     I was surprised, pleased, proud and a little unsettled to hear the line from Bernard Pomerance's “The Elephant Man” that I had delivered in the Badlands echoed back to me, in slightly altered form, a day later. Here I thought I was a Polonius-like blabbermouth whose constant stream of platitudes are completely ignored by his sons. But kids are listening even when they don’t seem to be listening. Keep in mind that whatever you tell your children they'll eventually tell you.

                                                                                      

A rough beast is born and slouches toward 2020

     The column I originally wrote for Monday just assumed the Cubs would boot Sunday night's game against the Indians. But as the day progressed, it dawned on me that Chicago might actually win, and thus the column would seem out-of-place. I toyed with adapting it, but that didn't work, and in the end I decided to hold it and run this instead, which sharp-eyed readers will notice is a version of Sunday's blog post.

     Eight days to the election. One week from Tuesday. Just under 200 hours.
     You’d think we’d be home free.
     Yet we’re not. The thing keeps getting weirder.
     Where to start?
     There’s the Washington Post/ABC poll last week that finds the candidates 1 percentage point apart, with 46 percent of voters backing Hillary Clinton and 45 percent backing Donald Trump.
     A dead heat.
     And at week’s end the whole email server nightmare came roaring back. How could it not? As with any good horror movie, just when the monster has been blown up and shot and stabbed and the building has collapsed atop him, just when the heroes are finally grinning and ruffling each other’s hair and making their movie’s-over jokes, suddenly the yammering yam comes bursting out of the rubble, red eyes glowing, his election hopes inexplicably alive.
     Wasn’t it a week or two ago that Trump’s campaign chances were dead and shriven and buried under the weight of squalid allegations of him groping women? Now he comes rearing out of the grave, a la “Carrie,” supercharged by the electric zap of news that FBI Director James Comey sent an inexplicable letter to Congress saying, in essence, we’ve got some emails that may involve Clinton on Anthony Weiner’s computer.

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Enter Anthony Weiner, with a seltzer bottle

     Nine days to the election. One week from Tuesday. Two hundred hours and change. 
     You'd think we'd be home free.
     Yet we're not. The thing keeps getting weirder. 
     As with any good horror movie, just when the monster has been blown up and shot and stabbed and the building has collapsed atop him, just when the heroes are finally exhaling and ruffling each other's hair and clapping one another on the shoulder and making their movie's-over jokes, suddenly the yammering yam comes bursting out of the rubble, inexplicably alive.
     So Donald Trump, whose campaign chances were dead and shriven and buried, comes rearing out of the grave, a la "Carrie," with news that the FBI director James Comey sent an inexplicable letter to Congress saying, in essence, we've got some emails that may involve Hillary Clinton on Anthony Weiner's computer. 
   The thing was almost instantly debunked, but it doesn't matter. I hesitate to declare that facts have mattered less in this election than any in our history — there have been some doozies— so I will just say, "Why should the truth start mattering now?" Just the word "emails," like the word "Benghazi," is enough to erode Clinton's narrow lead. 
    Anthony Weiner. The former Congressman whose career was destroyed, not once but twice, by naughty cell phone photos he felt compelled to send to strangers. First as Congressman, then as mayoral candidate. He happened to be married -- in one of those coincidences that would look trite in fiction -- to one of Clinton's top aides, Huma Abedin. 
     That the emails don't seem to reveal anything or even necessarily involve Clinton is just the icing on the cake of horror. Of course. When one of the major candidates lives in a fact-free echo chamber  —"This changes everything!" Trump exulted—it makes sense that this non-story would rock the campaign. 
    Actually, it doesn't change anything. Clinton has been thoroughly demonized for offenses, —the tragedy in Libya to her high-paid speeches to the endless server scandal — that wink out into insignificance when held up against the bone-deep bigotry, ignorance and anti-Americanism of Donald Trump and everything he unambiguously and proudly represents. 
    I was tempted to conclude that, in generations to come, saner heads will recall the 2016 election with wonder, as the nadir, the hard bottom we bounced up from. Pretty to think so. Because that doesn't sound right. My gut tells me that this is just the opening bell of our dystopian future, with charismatic non-politicians whipping up grass roots mobs, tweet wars and battling TV comedians giving us our news. As terrible as the election of 2016 is, it is only the beginning. Hillary might win — I hold out hope she will win, unless of course she loses. But somewhere, a better, more palatable version of Donald Trump — Donald 2.0 — is being assembled. Some Marco Rubio-calibre fraud is staring hard at himself in the mirror, liking what he sees, and cooing, "Next year, it's your turn baby!" The rough beast awakes and, in anticipation of its hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be born.  

Tiny planes flying underground in Cleveland

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     As far as the World Series goes, you didn't think it was going to be easy did you?
     Otherwise, about all I have to say is that I was hurrying to the airport in Cleveland on Monday, having popped into town to write a quick scene-setter for the paper, when I noticed a small model of this very familiar red and white plane mounted on the wall over the tracks. The Granville Gee Bee R-1, my favorite plane, winner of the Thompson Trophy at the National Air Races in Cleveland in 1932.
     The RTA stop at Hopkins Airport sort of had a mixed aeronautical metaphor going on — antique racing planes on the walls, jetliners on the floor.  It didn't quite mesh, but give them credit for trying. 
     I should dig out the story I wrote about the plane —another day, it's late. But I had the honor of talking to the pilot of the Gee Bee, Jimmy Doolittle, the same Jimmy Doolittle who later led the raid on Tokyo in 1942. If I remember correctly, he was in the phone book in Arizona, and was more than happy to chat about his brief time in the cockpit of the Gee Bee. Flying it, he said, was like "trying to balance a pencil by its point on your fingertip." Or words to that effect. It had stubby wings, an oversized engine and a little sump of a tail, and killed several of the men who flew it, but not Doolittle, who won the race, stepped out of the plane, declared the era of racing planes over, and never raced again. 
      Decorating train stops is one of those small details that brings joy to city life, though Cleveland certainly has nothing on Chicago, which has been installing gorgeous mosaics and artworks at certain 'L' stops. Though I liked something I saw in the subway in Paris -- they had glass cases displaying wares from nearby stores, as advertising and display. That seemed a good idea, though security is no doubt a concern. 
    Anyway, I spent the entire evening watching Game 3 of the World Series, am feeling — tired and subdued — so this post will have to be brief and slight. I have to admit, the game was not a font of fascination, which could have been forgiven had we won. But we didn't win. 


     

Be president of the United States! Earn big bucks!

Old Post Office, now the Trump International Hotel, summer 2016

     Jimmy Carter is perhaps the most disdained president of recent history. Thinking about the late 1970s, the American public generally remembers the energy crisis, the hostages in Iran whom Carter couldn’t free, his “national malaise” and that’s about it.
 

National Portrait Gallery

   Which is unfair. At first he was very popular, for common man moves like walking with his family during the inaugural parade. Carter offered welcome relief from the Greek tragedy of Richard Nixon and the Roman farce of Gerald Ford.
     His being a peanut farmer was celebrated, and companies offered products trying to capitalize on Carter’s grinning likeness. The government quickly moved to make it stop.
     On May 3, 1977, Assistant Attorney General John M. Harmon prepared a memo suggesting the Federal Trade Commission might prevent the president’s likeness from being used commercially.
     “The commission could probably prohibit the use of advertisements, labels, or trade names which implied that the president endorsed, profited from, or was connected with the sale of a particular product,” he wrote. “The prestige of the presidency and President Carter’s well-known background would probably allow the commission to eliminate most of the attempts to attach the president’s name to peanuts and peanut products.”

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