Grasping at straws

     Am I wrong to take a slim measure of hope from Donald Trump going after paper drinking straws?
     "I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work," Trump wrote Feb. 7 on Truth Social. "BACK TO PLASTIC!"
     Kind of a self-own, isn't it? Have you ever had trouble using a paper straw? I haven't.

     We know just how vindictive and trivial Donald Trump can be. But could that be a good thing? Because if he's going after paper straws and the Kennedy Center, and everybody who ever crossed him — that has to be a distraction from his central task of tearing down our country and transforming it into a dictatorship, right? Maybe a little?
     Yes, a hallmark of fascism is total control of society. Mussolini told Italian men what kind of hats to wear. The devil really is in the details. But there is only so much effort that can be made and, if three weeks in, Trumpolini is raging against paper straws, well, that's at least a few seconds he isn't gutting American government. Maybe he'll just dive into the weeds and never come out.
     Wishful, I know. Is optimism premature? With three years and 49 weeks to go. Or is optimism essential?
     I find myself groping toward it. Otherwise, the reality, of privatizing our government under the lash of Elon Musk is too horrible to contemplate. Truly, we are in the hands of our enemies, and I don't think a conquering power would move with this rapidity. Even the Chinese Communists gave Hong Kong a couple years of breathing room before voiding their freedoms. Lawsuits are being filed, judges making rulings, but the old system is buckling already. 

     So where are we? As I've said before, hope is the last coin in your pocket when all your money is gone. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor can't win, ultimately. America will not be undone — not completely undone anyway — by a man who believes in nothing, who completes nothing, who mistakes intention with result, and needn't achieve anything when he can lie and say he has and his army of groveling dupes believes him. 

     Don't get me wrong — there will be much suffering and innocent people will be hurt. They're already being hurt. But as we go through this, remember Losey L. McLoser will, ultimately, lose. Of that I am convinced. Or trying to be convinced, anyway. If he succeeds, if he has a third term then bestows the presidency upon Donald Trump Jr. as a kingly token, then we were never the strong democracy we thought we were. Now that I say it, it sounds obvious. 

Is this column antisemitic? Gosh, I hope not

 

     I'm no semiotician — an expert in the study of symbols — but I am Jewish and know antisemitism when I see it. An octopus with a hook nose straddling the globe, its waving tentacles holding missiles and moneybags? Definitely. Particularly if it is marked with a Jewish star. That's a giveaway.
     Swastika spray-painted on a synagogue door? Absolutely. Elon Musk extending his arm straight out in a Nazi-like salute — well, he's an odd duck, given to weird jigs and twitches. And since he's gone on record supporting neo-Nazis in Germany, I'd say debating the meaning of a gesture is beside the point.
     Bottom line: Just as I cherish my right to speak freely, so I do not lunge toward offense, nor leap to stifle others. When I was passing through the Chicago Cultural Center last week, showing it off to a Chicagoan who had never been inside, we passed by the "U.S.-Israel War Machine" that this week is causing a fuss. I paused. My underwear remained unknotted. I took a photograph, thinking it could be used when addressing a certain kind of hysterical anti-Americanism. We moved on to look at the gorgeous Tiffany dome.
     A valuable skill, moving on. I was surprised, and disappointed, Thursday to open the Sun-Times and read a story about the puppet, and a nearby one of Benjamin Netanyahu, being labeled antisemitic by 50th Ward Ald. Debra Silverstein, the City Council's lone Jew (I was the only Jew in my elementary school. That's rough. I hope Silverstein isn't constantly being called on to stand up and explain what Hanukkah is about. Embarrassing).
     She asked the city to take the display down.
     Sigh.
     Debra, Debra, Debra. Did the creator of "U.S.-Israel War Machine" pay you for this bit of press agentry? Because you took a crude papier-mache caricature sitting unnoticed in a seldom-visited corner of the Cultural Center — remember my friend, who lives blocks away, had never set foot inside — and slapped it into the pages of the Sun-Times. Nice work. Maybe next you can organize a book launch for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
     I love Israel, I'm a Zionist, and I hope that a thousand years from now there is still a Jewish State of Israel. I also think Benjamin Netanyahu is the devil, that he left the door open for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and my big puppet of him would have longer fangs and more blood dripping off his fingers.
     Does that make me an antisemite? I suppose in some eyes. The same way my thinking that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be in prison instead of the White House makes me a traitor to many. I think it makes me patriotic.
     Sympathizing with yourself is common as dirt. If we look at the problems in our world, 99% of them are from people so enthralled with their own precious selves that they are unable to grasp the humanity of anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't understand why it's so difficult to accept that a lot of people with connections to the Palestinian territories, either through family or culture or inclination, are upset over the situation. I certainly am. And some of those people might want to express their outrage. With a pair of big puppets. At the Cultural Center.

To continue reading, click here.

Barack Obama is a skilled orator

"Chicago Taking a Beating" by Roger Brown (Union League Club) 

     This week I'm burning through vacation days that I'd otherwise lose, and in order to make it a true vacation thought I'd post a few essays written then never published. The following is from mid-October, a million years ago. I imagine I held it back because I came up with something better, and it seemed too much inside baseball, not to mention touching the third rail of race — in a way I find acceptable. Of course you never know whether that electrical rail is live and will kill you or not until you put your foot on it and find out.

     I wouldn't call Barack Obama articulate. Or well-spoken. Even though he is obviously both  — that's why the struggling Kamala Harris campaign trotted him out in Pennsylvania last week to try to convince voters not to let petty considerations prevent them from doing their part to avoid handing our country over to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.
     But I wouldn't use those specific words — "articulate" or "well-spoken" — because ... do you have any idea why? I think this is a media thing. Because a few readers might complain, since Barack Obama is Black, that saying he is articulate somehow suggests that Black people generally aren't articulate or well-spoken, and is thus racist.     
     A stretch, certainly, but one some still make. Maybe trying to improve the world, maybe for the pleasure of lashing out, though the fashion peaked a few years back and I believe is in decline as the general world disaster gathers in strength like the latest hurricane off the Gulf Coast. Maybe the whole thing is an irrational fear of editors and, by osmosis, writers too. Maybe I'm cringing at the sight of a stick.
     It's one of those invisible calculations going on behind the scenes of what's left of the old media. I find the situation unfortunate, as a writer, since it pulls arrows out of our quiver and requires contortions and codes. 
     It affects not just praise, but criticism. You can't apply a cliche criticism about ethnic groups to an individual, no matter how apt. I sometimes forget this. For instance, last week, I wrote a column about Mayor Brandon Johnson's almost psychopathic use of race as a general shield against his numerous flaws. It began. "Respect Mayor Angry!" I liked dubbing him "Mayor Angry" it seemed to fit — and imagined I could use it during what remains of his sure to be brief life in the public eye.
    What I forgot was, at some point in the 1960s Black Panther sorts who were raging about killing whitey were dubbed "angry" and it became some kind of generic slur, the way "cheap" was attached to Jews. Ta-Nehisi Coates raised a tempest last week when idly speculating when conditions in his own life would proceed to an extent where he would join Hamas fighters in raping and killing whatever random Jews he could get his hands on, as a way to make this a more equitable world. Had he called those Jews "cheap" it would have been worse.
     It seems odd, to me, that Ta-Nehisi Coates can say such vile things and I can't call the mayor angry, but then the playing field has tilted one way, the theory being that doing so somehow makes up for it in the past being tilted another. I don't see how that works. But then again, I wouldn't, and comply with the situation as it is to get my stuff in the paper and keep my job for another two years. I changed the lede to "Respect the mayor. No matter what he says or does." Which wasn't the same, but starts off the column well enough.

     

 

"Island of garbage"

     Of course I watched Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday night. Well, part of it anyway. A bit. The thing lasted six hours. I didn't camp out in front of the television and tune in CNN or MSNBC. No need for that. Rather I lay on the sofa in the living room and scrolled X.
     It was easy. Trump's rally was highlighted on a hot pink bar at the top of the screen. Tapping that took me to Trump, live, doing what he has done since June 16, 2015, when he rode that escalator down the salmon-tinted excrescence of a lobby at Trump Tower: malign immigrants.

     "Take our country back," he said. The "...from brown people" is unvoiced. He isn't saying that Norwegian immigrants are ruining our country just by being here. Because of all the crimes they commit. 

     It isn't true — immigrants are actually more law-abiding than citizens, which makes perfect sense, when you think about it — someone should. If you could be deported for a speeding ticket, you'd keep your head down too. No matter. The lying is baked into the Trumpian worldview. I think that's the most repellent part, for me. Prejudice I understand — everybody harbors prejudice to some degree or another. But to create a counterfactual hothouse within your own soul in order for your biases to grow as lush and bountiful as they can. That's nuts.
     The rally got boring quickly — listening to the same old shit — and I skipped down through X to see what others were posting. I was struck by the number of pro-Trump clips, from Joe Rogan's show, from supporters. Suddenly the world was lovin' Trump. At least here. There were also clips of women flashing their breasts — you don't normally see that on the former Twitter. Must be bait to draw in the important young man vote. That was the only explanation I could think of.
     No doubt Elon Musk was putting his thumb on the scales for Trump. He was at the rally, leading chants of "USA! USA!" in his James Bond villain accent. His hat reading "Make America Great Again" in a font popular in Nazi Germany. The devil is in the details. Musk has lately gone all in for Trump, the two open-wound egos locked in a mutual admiration society. Musk bought Twitter — exactly two years ago, on Oct. 28, 2022 — for $44 billion. He decimated its value by turning it into a haven for haters and loons. So he's trying to claw some value back by turning it into a megaphone for Trump — the world's richest man ballyhooing America's greatest traitor. He's counting on a prime place at the trough when Trump is re-elected. Like all who sell their souls to Trump, he forgot to read the fine print. 

     For now, it's working, with nearly half the country. Trump and Musk, presenting themselves a champions of the little guy. Boy, people really are stupid. Maybe our politics is as simple as that.
     Other opinions still came through. Shocked shares of heretofore anonymous, now forever notorious, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe slurring Hispanics:
     "These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There's no pulling out. They don't do that. They cum inside. Just like they did to our country."
     I tried to think of another instance of the word "cum" appearing in presidential politics and came up empty. Some outlets spelled it "come" which is silly. Another day.
     Then the alleged comedian bored in on Puerto Rico. “I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now," he said. " I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
     Since laughter was sparse, he provided his own. "Ha ha ha ha." Four harsh syllables.
     There's more. He pretended to see a Black friend in the crowd. "We carved watermelons together, it was awesome." He mused on the war in Ukraine. "Who even cares?
     You get the idea. You can watch it yourself, if you're interested — the "love making babies" part is at 2:37. The "floating island of garbage" is at 3:38.
     I have a pretty broad sense of humor, but it doesn't seem remotely funny. Someone on X observed that satire is mocking the powerful; bullying is mocking the weak. Dismissing an island of 3.2 million people as garbage is bullying.     

     A week before the election, we are nothing if not numb. I can't say I was offended so much as puzzled. This is Donald Trump's message in the home stretch? Delivered at the home of the infamous 1939 Nazi Rally. In for a dime, in for a dollar, I suppose. But still...
     It had the effect of supercharging support for Kamala Harris. Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny tweeted Harris's supportive statement on Puerto Rico to his 45 million followers four times in the next hour. Not enough for anyone to feel optimistic about the outcome. But the guttering flame of hope flickered in its cave, trying to push back the darkness all around.
      I didn't tweet anything myself during the rally — what's the point? But just before bed a thought came to me, and I composed a message: "I watched the rally, but missed the part at the end where they open the Ark of the Covenant." The kind of sly remark that does well on X.

Flashback 2004: Disabled vet's battle with VA over benefits was news in '73 too

Folk art, Smithsonian Institution, Museum of American History

 

     We went to Wicker Park Friday night and saw Mitchell Bisschop's one-man show, "Royko: The Toughest Man in Chicago" at the Chopin Theater. I liked it, while at the same time felt my colleague Bob Chiarito nailed its shortcomings in his review. Both can be true because I'm the rare audience member who is also a working newspaper columnist.  I actually choked up when, as the Chicago Daily News folded, Royko cast his reaction in the voice of a kid on the last day of summer pleading to play just a little bit more. C'mon guys! Don't end this yet. Just one more hour. I feel that way every day.

     Royko's widow, Judy, was there — she said it was her fourth time seeing it — and when a friend introduced us, her frosty, "I know who you are," before turning on her heel and walking off reminded me how her late husband hated younger columnists and treated us like crap at every opportunity — apparently deputizing his family members to carry on the tradition for him, from beyond the grave. Nice to see you too, Mike, and thanks for the reminder — that's why I'm always elaborately kind to whatever ambitious young journalist comes my way. Not that many do.

     The play highlights a Royko column about Leroy Bailey, and I mentioned it to a friend who invited me to see the play that I dredged up Bailey 20 years ago when the VA was in the news for treating its veterans shabbily. She expressed interest in seeing it, and I said I would post it here. It's from when the column ran a thousand words and filled a page, and I kept the other items here , in case you're interested. The really cool part is that, after it ran, Tom McNamee tracked down Bailey and visited with him. Alas, that column isn't online.

Opening shot

     Of the several thousand columns written by Mike Royko, the absolute best is easy to pinpoint: It was published Dec. 10, 1973, in the Chicago Daily News and told the story of Leroy Bailey, the man without a face.
     Bailey had had a face when he went into the Army and was shipped to Vietnam. Then a rocket slammed into his tent and exploded. Eyes, nose, teeth, gone. He was living in his brother's basement in LaGrange, knitting wool hats, when Royko found him. The doctors at Hines Veterans Hospital had told him nothing more could be done for him. But an Oak Brook doctor thought he could reconstruct Bailey's face enough so that he could eat solid foods, instead of taking his nutrients by squirting them down his throat with a syringe. The doctor began the series of operations that would allow Bailey to eat normally. But the VA had refused to pay because they decided that the treatment was for something "other than that of your service-connected disability." Eating like a person, the VA decided, was a needless luxury.
     This will sound grimly familiar to readers who were aghast this past week as the Sun-Times detailed the delay and indifference of the VA here, how vets have to struggle for benefits they have already paid for with their blood, and how Illinois is among the most stingy states in the nation when it comes to helping vets. Not only is it a disgrace, but — as Royko's piece reminds us — it's nothing new.
     Americans fall over themselves to pay lip service to our military. We love a parade, and act like anybody who doesn't support our troops is a coward and a traitor. And then we turn our backs on the most deserving — the wounded vet — not by accident, not individually, but en masse, as a matter of policy.

Whoops! Hey, sorry . . .

     I know you're not supposed to think about the stuff on television. That, for the most part, it's moronic mush designed to roll unchallenged over viewers too tired and numb to extend critical thought. But my God. Perhaps the Orwellian name "The Learning Channel" implies some kind of higher, educational standard, but the lurid fare it serves up as entertainment gets under my skin. I was flipping the channels last week, and I settled on a TLC program. In my memory it was "Medical Miracles," but it could have been "Surgical Surprises" or even "Hospital Hootenanny."
     The story was of a 6-year-old girl, severely burned after her father thought it would be a good idea to use gasoline to jump-start a fire in the fireplace. The story focused on the medical challenges, on the skin grafts and surgeries, introducing the heart-tugging aspect of the twin sister, who at age 6 consented to have some of her own skin stripped away so that her sister could live, complete with poignantly plinking pianos over photos of the pre-burn sisters hugging each other. While dad did address his judgment error that sent a fireball rolling out of the fireplace, burning his daughter over 80 percent of her body, the term he used, I believe, is that he felt "bad" (though he might have said he felt "very bad" or even "terrible." But that was it).
     Call me a cynic. (And the choice nowadays seems limited to "cynic" or "idiot.") But if I had the members of this star-crossed family in front of a camera, happily re-creating their nightmare for a moment of TLC fame, I would have given another 30 seconds to the issue of dad setting little Mandy, or whatever, ablaze, and not just dismiss it with a two second kiss-off. And if I were that dad, I don't think I could bring myself to blandly sit in front of the camera and rehash my moment of bottomless stupidity that had so wrenched my child's life.
     Funny. We relentlessly censor the bloody images of real carnage streaming in daily from Iraq because the public squeals if forced to see the handiwork of our policies. Then we fill the void with the wildest Grand Guignol TV can get away with. If there isn't an Autopsy Channel, it's not because somebody hasn't tried to start one. Maybe next year.

Yeah, that's us

     Last week, I wrote about the unique Canadian ability to fixate and complain about the United States. Canadian sympathizers sent in a lot of flak (including a charmingly succinct if unpersuasive "You're wrong!"). But after the column was reprinted in the Nagging Neighbor to the North, a number of its denizens recognized truth when they saw it, such as Montreal radio host Ted Bird, who writes:
     "Saw your Canada piece this week, reprinted in the Montreal Gazette. I'm no self-loathing Canadian, but man, have you got us pegged. It's actually quite embarrassing. Please be advised that the self-styled intellectual left doesn't speak for all of us, and there is a silent majority of Canadians who still consider America to be their closest friend and ally, and a force for good in the world. Most of the rest are system-sucking crackpots like welfare recipients, erstwhile flower children whose grandkids wish they would get a haircut, and students with heavily subsidized tuition practicing their right to free speech that was bought with blood in epic battles detailed in history books that they've never bothered to read. I wish they would find the energy to mobilize mass protest every time our outrageous income taxes take another jump, but then, they'd actually have to have jobs [to] be affected by taxes."

Was the sponsor Guinness?

     Americans would rather be bored than offended; most places, it's the other way around. Thus, 500 art world types in Britain, surveyed by Gordon's Gin, sponsor of that country's prestigious Turner Prize, just voted Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain" — an ordinary porcelain urinal the artist signed — as the most influential work in modern art. They're right, sadly. The idea that an artwork should be finely wrought or — God forbid — beautiful went out along with sock garters. What I want to know is this: If the idea of art as whatever shocking item you can pluck out of the junkyard, is 87 years old and counting, and is aped in every museum and gallery in the world, doesn't that mean we can move on to something else? Something new? Or — dare I say it — old?

Neil Steinberg will discuss his new book, Hatless Jack, from 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday with Milt Rosenberg on WGN-AM (720).

—Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 2004

The $46.95 pizza.

     I write a lot. Every goddamn day, in fact. Okay, some days on EGD I don't write more than a brief intro to go atop something I've hauled out of the vault because my brain is just too spent to do anything else. Though usually that's because I've been working on some massive project that drained away all my energies. For instance, Tuesday's post — I thought of writing something new, but had just polished off a 3,000-word history project for the paper. I was fried.
     Trying to fill that void, I pretty much touch on anything. Yet there are things I don't say. For instance, our older son was with us for a few days last week, and that required pizza from Lou Malnati's — "the Prodigal Pie" as I call it. My wife and I always get the same thing — deep dish, buttercrust, spinach and mushroom. Though his wishes had to be considered, and he voted for sausage and onions. So half one, half the other.
     Do you see what's coming? I didn't.
     Place the order. Wait 25 minutes. Get in the car and drive the minute to Lou Malnati's — I can walk, and have. But something about the five-minute quickstep with a hot pizza in your hands. I figure, speed is my friend.
     I go into the empty store. Give the youth at the counter my name. He consults the register and says, "That'll be $46.95."
     Forty-six dollars. And ninety-five cents. For a large pizza. I don't understand how that's possible. The pizza wasn't quite ready — I like to come a few minutes early, to maximize hotness when it hits the table. So I pulled out my phone and consulted the menu. A large pizza is $28.89.  Realization dawned. The toppings. The toppings were the culprit. Four toppings — spinach, mushroom, onion, sausage — at $3.70 per, and no break for just covering half the pizza. "Full price charged for 1/2 portions." it says, right there. So 4 x 3.70, or $14.80. Plus the 99 cents for butter crust. That comes to $44.68. Plus tax.
     I've heard of this inflation business, but never had it struck home in quite this way before. Yowza. This pricy pie seemed worth sharing. A near 50 buck pizza seems a milestone (though not, I hasten to add, one that makes me even a tiny bit inclined toward electing a liar, bully, fraud and traitor as president. As bad as people who support Trump because he echoes their biases and fears, even worse are the guys who claim to be ready to shred their country's core values because gas costs $4).
    I took the pizza home, shared the news, put in a plug for two toppings next time, and we dug in. I never wrote any of this because ... well, a person as blessed as I am should not complain about trivialities. I'd have forgotten all about it. 

     But the same day, David Brooks, the conservative troll living under the bridge of the New York Times, tweeted a photo of a cheeseburger and a double whiskey, complaining of their price. I thought my pizza was expensive....
     “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport,” Brooks wrote  on the social media site some still call Twitter. “This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”
     The tweet blew up the Internet — as of Wednesday it had 38.5 million views, as readers piled on. Why? Somebody was ignoring the booze aspect. The restaurant itself pointed out that $17 was for the burger and the rest was Brooks' bar bill (I often wonder how he can live with himself; now I have a clue).

     Suddenly my expensive pizza conclusion (order fewer toppings) seemed like solid Midwestern good sense compared to Brooks' East Coast faux economic insight,  "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." (No, they think the economy is terrible because publications like the New York Times keep telling them it is). 

     And perhaps because a pizza can push fifty bucks if it has a few extra toppings. Though at least with Lou Malnati's, it's worth it.

So now being the GOAT is all caps and a good thing...

     Summer's over?! And I never got the chance to lie under a cherry tree, a la Sydney J. Harris, and just muse. About the small mysteries of life. About writing and language. That's so unfair. 

     I blame the 24/7 news cycle. You just can't get in the proper musing fashion with your ex-president vigorously manifesting himself as a traitor, continually ramping up to tear the country apart violently to return himself to undeserved high office.     

     But you can try.
     I watched Serena Williams play in the U.S. Open — my wife is a tennis fan. And while it was thrilling and dramatic, one small aspects of her monumental success kept tripping me up. 

     Just look at it. 
     She's the goat. And not because Williams lost her bid for a 24th major title. Everyone was intensely gratified by how well she played, at 40, against opponents who sometimes weren't yet born when she began her professional career.
     No, Williams is the GOAT because that stands for "Greatest of All Time."
     You know that. I know that.
     And yet. It just doesn't feel right.

     To me. 
     Decades of habit cannot be abandoned in a moment. Up until fairly recently, a goat, in sports, was someone who failed in spectacular fashion. Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner was perhaps the archetypical goat for letting Mookie Wilson's grounder go between his legs in the sixth game of the World Series. Charlie Brown was a goat. 

     (Note that, in this strip, Charlie despairs at being "the goat," which strikes me as unusual, since the definite article seems more used in the greatest sense. Blow a play and you risk becoming a goat, part of a braying herd. Rise to the summit and you achieve the rare distinction of becoming the GOAT.)

     Yes, I'm always the one, when some other old coots complain about changes in the language, who points out that language is supposed to be plastic. That's something of an in-joke, as plastic today refers to the artificial substance, while previously it evoked the ability to be formed, taken from the Greek word plastikos, to mold or sculpt (hence "plastic surgery.")

     Goat as a metaphorical term, and not just a barnyard animal, is traced all the way back to 1530, when William Tyndale translated the Bible from Hebrew and offered up "And Aaron cast lottes outer the gootes; one lotte for the Lorde, and another or a scape-goote."

      Hence "scapegoat," or animal upon which the people of Israel's sins were imposed upon, came into the language. "Scape" was coined in the 1300s as a shortened term to describe the act of escaping. Thus a "scapegoat" is literally an escaped goat, as opposed to the one that gets its throat cut. 

Metropolitan Museum

     The new meaning, "Greatest Of All Time," starts with Muhammad Ali, who used the term to refer to himself. It was abbreviated by LL Cool J, who put out an album, "G.O.A.T.," in 2000.

     This was all sorted out a couple years back by Sports Illustrated and others. I'm late to the party, I know.

      I wonder. Will the Charlie Brown sense be effaced by the Serena sense? I could say I hope not, because the Bill Buckner goat is such a useful term. What would its replacement be? A ... what? Loser? Clod? Blunderer? Nothing comes close. While GOAT, as in Greatest Of All Time, still has a whiff of the barnyard. At least to me, though that has to be my age, since few seem hesitant. "The most fierce GOAT = Serena Williams," former presidential press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted this week. The language changes, and time reminds us of the fact. When the Hindenburg zeppelin blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, Herb Morrison, broadcasting its arrival on WLS, described the disaster as "terrific," meaning "full of terror." It isn't terrific anymore.

The problems of 2021 are still here

     Why do they call this a “new” year? There’s nothing new about it. We’re still the same old people, dragging the same old problems after us.
     A flash of fresh energy and hope, as if the clockwork arrival of a new digit — a 2 instead of a 1 — is going to make it all somehow work, and the world become better, kinder, thinner.
     Yes, that’s what the problem was: 2021, the numeral. Changing to “2022” will fix everything!
     Then a few hours pass, maybe a day or two. We get hungry, and our old selves come loping back, like extras in a low-rent zombie movie. “Hi! Didja miss us?”
     The COVID we grappled with all through 2021 is right where we left it, in its supercharged Omicron form. Filling the hospitals with those who won’t take the free vaccine, for the same reason a toddler won’t eat his pureed peas. “I don’t want to! You can’t make me!”
     Yet they still show up at the hospital when they can’t breathe. So the same doctors whose advice they mocked a week earlier can stick a tube down their throats.
     And the same old Jan. 6 insurrection, whose first anniversary is Thursday, sits there and ticks. I guess it’s my job to Explain What It All Means, though, honestly, my heart isn’t in it.
     Really, for whom is explanation necessary? Either you understood all too well long ago or you never will. Among the many myths that liberals embrace — we can delude ourselves, too — a key delusion is that reason will prevail, truth reign triumphant, and at some point Trumpsters will slap their foreheads and go, “Ohhh, wait. We’re dupes swallowing lies spewed by a traitor! That’s so embarrassing!”
     It’ll never happen. Seventy percent of Russians today think Stalin was good for their country (Sigh, historians consider him responsible for the deaths of 20 million Russians, between his forced collectivization and gulags. Not to forget his non-aggression pact with Hitler).

To continue reading, click here. 

"Plague? We don't need no stinkin' plague!" The State of the Blog, 2021

Clown with Drum, by Walter Kuhn
Art Institute of Chicago

     Credit where due: 2021 wasn't worse than 2020. We could be almost a year into Donald Trump's second term. Think about that.
     An infamy that might still be coming. Which is the tone that pretty much continued through the year. Bad, but not worse, unless that's on deck. Yes, the plague, surging with omicron yet not quite as lethal (unless that's coming). The orange traitor separated from his Twitter bullhorn. For now. Still, hundreds of thousands more dying of COVID. And the former Liar in Chief's followers baying for his return, while inveighing our current president, Joe Biden, who at times seems maddeningly inert.
     Honestly, I won't blame Republicans if they corrupt and subvert our electoral system and place Trump on the throne, I mean in the White House, in 2024. Because they certainly telegraphed their intentions. Clear. As. Day. And the Democrats are doing that Three Stooges thing they do, dragging their hands over their faces and hee-bee-bee-beeing and bumping into each other in a roiling ball of confusion.

      In some ways 2021 was worse, beginning as it did with the Jan. 6 insurrection, a rock nadir in American history (unless it's just the warm-up). One I came close to predicting in my column that day, "The South shall fall again. And again. And again." At least I set the stage:

The Lost Cause marches on, as we will see Wednesday, when Congress faces another ego-stoked rebellion: Donald Trump’s insistence that his clearly losing the 2020 presidential election in the chill world of fact can be set aside, since he won the race in the steamy delta swampland between his ears.

     Of course, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to see that coming. Then and now. January also saw my most well-read post, "In Defense of John Kass," which got nearly 10,000 hits. Again, not setting the internet on fire. But not bad, though I think it's more a reflection of just how many people fuckin' hate John Kass. The blog overall got almost a million hits in 2020, though I estimate that between a quarter and a third of that are robots. Bad? Good? Who knows? As the poet said, work is its own reward.
     In February, we bade farewell to Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis. March began by joining the Night Ministry as they treated homeless 'L' riders. In April, we glimpsed one of the earliest movies in existence, police on parade in 1896, and saw how a newsreel caught them attacking protesters then lying about it in 1937.

     In May, EGD chowed down with a hockey billet family. June we said goodbye to our cat, Gizmo. July saw three columns, out of four, about picking up after dogs, including one on how blind people do it, which might be the archetypical Steinberg theme. I was proud of that.

     In August, we visited the S. Rosen hot dog bun factory. In September, it was two visits with top sound engineer Steve Albini. October marked the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.  In November, we marked autumn by pedaling around Elmwood Park, looking at trees. And December, heck, I don't know, the continuing time-suck that is the Jussie Smollett case stole a few more minutes from my life, and yours.

     What does it add up to? Hell if I know. 

     Thanks as always to our Saturday star, Caren Jeskey, who stuck 52 landings, every single week, without fail, without ever being late or making me sweat, even while moving to Chicago and enduring all sorts of adventures here. Deep gratitude to Marc Schulman, of Eli's cheesecake, who blessed me with cheesecake, with advertising, and the pleasure of his insights. Thank you for everyone who read, and who wrote in, particularly those with corrections. 

     On Wednesday, I turned in the final edited manuscript of the book I was asked to write, based on this blog, by the University of Chicago Press. It was enormously fun to write, and I can't wait for he book to come out in the fall. So something to look forward to. Which is about all anybody can ask nowadays. Stay safe. Thanks for reading. See you all every goddamn day in 2022. 

When "batshit" just won't suffice.

  

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     

     Molly Jong-Fast first registered on my radar about a decade ago, when collecting quotes for "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the literary companion to recovery I was writing with Sara Bader. Jong-Fast had told the New York Times something typically concise and piquant about secrecy and recovery that fit right into our chapter about Alcoholics Anonymous.
     "It seems crazy that we can't just be out with it, in this day and age,"she said. "I don't want to have to hide my sobriety; it's the best thing about me."
     After the book came out, we started to occasionally communicate through Twitter. I saw her as a Manhattan wit ("loud, arch and snappishly funny" as the Guardian recently described her), heir to Dorothy Parker. I called her a couple times, when I needed a particularly incisive quote. She never let me down.
     Then Jong-Fast upped her game by joining forces with The Lincoln Project folks, a band of Republicans who never got the memo about the entire party groveling before the great orange godling, and decided to resist the liar, bully, fraud and traitor, no matter how completely their confreres submitted. After COVID locked everyone down, Jong-Fast started a Tuesday and Friday podcast with Rick Wilson, "The New Abnormal," which I recommend highly. It allows me to generally ignore the endless jaw-dropping mouse shriek of the post-Jan. 6, 2021 Republican Party, and instead keep tabs indirectly on important developments via the podcast, at a remove, second hand, filtered through smart, humane people who condense the ocean of bile and deliver it to me in significant drops. The New Abnormal is like the special smoked goggles used to view a solar eclipse: a way to contemplate a fiery phenomenon without burning your retinae or going blind.
     One challenge facing Jong-Fast as she boldly considers the current political hellscape is that it beggars language. If "crazy" seems apt to her when describing a culture where people are embarrassed to admit they're in recovery, what word could she use to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene? "Crazy" still fits, but it also seems a little inadequate without some kind of intensifier, and one of Jong-Fast's favorites is "batshit." "Batshit crazy"—she used the phrase three or four times in a single program last week.
     Which got me pondering about how Chiroptera guano got associated with madness. Etymology, like the GOP, is a nexus for mistaken amateurism, and online there is a common theory that "batshit" somehow devolved from the "bats in the belfry," an early 20th century trope to jocularly refer to lunacy.
     That strikes me as fanciful. Even "batty" only refers to batlike qualities in my Oxford English Dictionary. I would sooner lump "batshit" in with other "-shit" terms: apeshit, bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit. "Batshit," like much evocative slang, is thought to stem from the military. There's a wink at it in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 with the character "Col. 'Bat' Guano."
     As with "apeshit," (or the current GOP, for that matter) in its original usage, the "crazy" is implied. "Most of America's males were in Korea or World War II or I. They killed, and they aren't all going batshit," Lt. William Calley is quoted saying in the 1971 "Lieutenant Calley."
     I found the term as far back as the Fall, 1953 Carolina Quarterly, of all places, in Gabriel Boney's "Epiphany in E Flat." "A coarse voice answered sharply, 'Batshit!'"
     So "batshit crazy" is really a pleonasm—using more words than necessary, for effect. Like "cash money" or "tuna fish." So when did the redundancy, "batshit crazy," begin to be used? It seems to be a creature of the mid-1980s. I found it in the 1985 novel "Night Moves," by Walter Jon Williams:

     "I thought Harvey, the guy who was helping me, was batshit crazy."

      For an even older usage, all I have to do is look at the wall in my office closet, at a cartoon that I've long admired by P.S. Mueller that ran in The Chicago Reader in 1983. 

     "Full blown batshit crazy and still holding down a productive job." It spoke to me (and thanks to Jim Mueller, Pete Mueller's brother, a long ago regular reader who got me a signed print). 

     Allow me to offer Mueller's "full blown batshit crazy" as my thank-you gift to Molly Jong-Fast, to tuck away for when things in our country go from bad to worse, as they very well might. In a few years, when Matt Gaetz becomes the 2024 Republican nominee for president and Evangelicals guiltlessly dance around golden idols of Donald Trump, beating timbrels and buffing it with their long hair, when "batshit crazy" begins to seem, well, tepid, she'll be able to remember this and deploy the more powerful "full blown batshit crazy." What a sad day that will be.

     

In defense of John Kass

     Back in my Medill days, professors would sometimes pose a trick question: What is the main purpose of a newspaper?
     Apple polishers and future do-gooders would wave their arms, eager to rhapsodize about reporting the news and speaking truth to power, penning the first draft of history, blah blah blah. We worldlier sorts would let them embarrass themselves for a while, then float our hands up.
    "To make money and stay in business," one of us would drawl, with a half smirk, knowing even before we were told that this is the only correct answer. Because a paper that has gone out of business can't do anything good, bad or indifferent. The Chicago Daily News was a fantastic newspaper, the best in the city, right up until March 4, 1978. Then it was nothing but a painful memory.
     One way newspapers try to avoid this fate is by casting a very wide net. A newspaper is a universe, or should be. Like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. There isn't a section titled, "Airy nonsense for dupes"—we call it the horoscope, and the Sun-Times ran two last time I checked because apparently one just isn't enough. We run three pages of mostly undistinguished comics. Why? When I once asked why we didn't dial the comics back to make room for actual journalism, the features editor shot me a withering look that said, "Because readers would show up here carrying gas cans and solemnly set themselves on fire in front of the paper, that's why." Half of the people who tell me they read the Sun-Times only for my column then add, "...and Sudoku." Which is fine. You can read the Sun-Times for me and the tide tables. Or just for the legal notices. All good, so long as you read.
     That is why John Greenfield's Jan. 11 piece in the Chicago Reader, "John Kass washing his hands of responsibility for last week's riot was a bridge too far" demanding that the Tribune columnist be fired for his supposed role fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks evoked an unfamiliar emotion, one that I have never felt nor could have imagined it possible to feel: a need to defend John Kass.
    Not the material, God knows. I concede that Kass's writing is that of a monotonic right-wing troll, with all the hysterical self-pitying whine that has pervaded our nation like stink in a bus station bathroom for the past four years. At least to my recollection. It's been a while since I've actually read him. So maybe he got better. I try to extend the benefit of the doubt, even to those of whom I disapprove, which is one of the many differences between us. (For instance, I've had colleagues tell me that he is a nice guy, in person, and I have no reason to doubt them. Though, if true, that only deepens the mystery of how avuncular right wingers can smile and nod at passersby while neck deep in a sewer of hateful ideology). But when I did read him, or try to, he was reliably repetitive, dull, tone deaf, mean-spirited and shrill. And that most fatal flaw, incurious. Remember that John Kass column where he eagerly explores some unusual topic just because it is fascinating? Yeah, me neither. For a while, I would test myself by reading the first three paragraphs of his column and then stopping, just to see if I had any problem bailing out at that point. I never did. Then I gave up doing even that. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there was no there there.
     Which is okay, because he isn't for me. Part of the trick of not being John Kass or writers like him is to realize that not everything is supposed to be for you. There are other people in the world who believe other things. They have a right to exist and passionately believe all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. They get to read stuff they like too.  
     From time to time readers would challenge me, since I had written "BobWatch" in the Reader for two years in the mid-1990s, to reprise the column with Kass as my material. I'd patiently explain that doing so would be physically impossible. Bob Greene was deeply weird in a captivating way—you almost had to read his column, excuse me, skein of related columns, celebrating scab baseball players or mourning the passing of soda fountains or keening over Baby Richard, whatever fragile hobbyhorse he had firmly mounted between his monstrous thighs and was now riding into splinters. Bob Greene was like a patient in an Oliver Sacks book, damaged in a creepy, fascinating way. Sure, you might read through latticed fingers, pausing to choke back a half ounce of hot vomit, or turn to an imaginary audience to say "can you believe this shit?" which is actually how BobWatch started.
     But Kass? I'd have great difficulty reading an entire column. Not if you paid me $1 a word. Not if you put a gun to my head and cocked the hammer back and told me I had to get to the end and summarize it or you'd pull the trigger and splatter my brains against a white wall. I mean, I would try, particularly for that buck a word. And maybe, probably, I could do it, but it would take intense concentration, fingers raking my cheeks, eyes whirling to track the pale little moths of thought as they slide off the page and flap silently away, casting strange shadows, circling around me like butterflies around Alice's head. 

     Like Greene, Kass could write at one point. To read his sharp 1996 profile of Richard Daley, with its priceless opening vignette of Daley running home to his mommy with a fever, is to mourn the ruin that can come bundled with a column. I distinctly remember his first one, a riveting. two-parter about a Chicago public school teacher being beaten with a metal bar. Then, as often happens, success and ego and laziness got to him, and soon he was doing a bad parody of Mike Royko, haunting the Billy Goat, sharing recipes for beer can chicken, coining fake insidery lingo and adopting a bully's swagger he passes off as a style. A colleague summed him up far more succinctly than I'm doing here with: "He sees people who aren't there," adding a few lines about how Kass can drive down an empty block and see wise guys in loud plaid jackets picking their teeth under street lamps while grannies in babushkas kneel in front of their bungalows, scrubbing the front stoops with Comet.

     I suppose that's imagination of a sort.
     But after enough years of that passed Kass, like Greene, became a mere parody of himself, as the sentient wandered off, fanning the air. By now he has to be the least consequential columnist on the Tribune's roster, in all of Chicago, if not the world, if not in the history of the world. Nobody I know has ever said, "Did you read John Kass today?" Though, again to be fair, this must be due to my being in a self-selective group. I don't hang out with people who read John Kass. They certainly exist. I'm sure when his column is published on, er, whenever it runs, a cheer goes up in Mount Greenwood. 
     Here's where John Greenfield goes astray. I don't know Greenfield, but I imagine he's not down at Dugans holding up the bar with the guys from Second City Cop, shaking his head about how fuckin' Obama was given every break in the world by the pansy liberal press while poor old Donald Trump never was given a chance. Hated because he was so good and decent and American. Those who see the world as a vast conspiracy of the semitic and the pigmented arrayed against them, and Kass as a brave cry in the wilderness giving voice to their deep existential pain at hearing Spanish spoken by a kid running the fryer at McDonald's.
     In our world, Kass, like Louis Farrakhan, never comes on the radar unless there are hoots of outrage over his occasional lurches into anti-Semitism. But that doesn't make him responsible, just one tiny piping voice in the great Right Wing chorus harmonizing fear of globalism and religions not their own. He's in the back, warbling, he isn't conducting the choir. It's not his fault. Heck, I wouldn't blame Kass for a fist-fight between neighbors over chairs set out in dibs in Gage Park, never mind large-scale mob action in Washington. There isn't a justification for Greenfield's claim that "it's time for Tribune leadership to get rid of Kass's column for good." 
     First, the request is naive. I don't have many rules for myself as a columnist, but one is: never advocate the impossible. One thing Bob Greene taught us is the Tribune never gets rid of anybody over issues of quality. Once in the club, always in the club, no matter how stunted or sporadic their work has become. I can't tell you how many Tribune writers I've met over the years where I had to swallow the reply, "Good to see you; I thought you were dead." Bruce Dold wasn't in the business of cashiering mediocrities; he would have had to start with himself. Granted, that will change under Alden Capital, and this whole conversation might be like debating whether a man who is condemned to hang next week should be shot today instead. I used to feel competitive with the Tribune. Now I just feel sorry for them. They used to have office aeries with semi-circular windows looking out of the Gothic horror show of Tribune Tower at Michigan Avenue, far below. Now they're going to be tucked behind the presses at the giant windowless bulk of Freedom Center. I assume they got rid of the chap in livery handing out warm towels in the executive washroom long ago.
     Second, until Alden pulls the plug and runs the whole place off an algorithm and four workers in Kashmir, Kass will have a valid function. To be the blithering nincompoop that Greenfield decries. That's his job. Half of the Tribune readership laps up that kind of garbage. Why not keep them happy? The Sun-Times used to run Dennis Byrne, who though not quite as sphincterific as Kass, still wrote a column that was similarly a head-shaking mystery to those of us not locked in the grip of right-wing batshittery, I never thought the man should be drummed out because of it. Just the opposite. I was glad he was there. He gave me cover. Whenever someone would accuse the paper of being merely a liberal rag, I could murmur, "But we run Dennis Byrne. Read him instead of me."
     Remember, nobody forces you to read any particular columnist. That's what the photos are for. As a subtle hint of what you'll be getting below. Which, to be honest, still flies past many readers, who will write in to inform me, "A-HA, I'm onto you, Steinberg. You are in the LIBERAL camp!!!" Figured that out, huh? All by yourself! Thank you for writing.
     So maybe that's just me, with the superpower to nimbly jeté over the John Kasses of the world, and hoo-boy, there are a lot of them. I have never watched a moment of Sean Hannity. Why would I do that? You have to keep the poison out, and if I seem irked, it's because the Reader made me think more about John Kass over the past hour than I have in the previous decade. I hope none of this is seen as an indictment of John Greenfield, who has been around the block himself, often on a bicycle, and is editor of Streetsblog. He seems a solid guy, this an understandable lapse and I am not criticizing him for it, personally. Think of it more brotherly advice. I'm only telling him what I would tell a friend who left the dead mouse of a John Kass column on my pillow, as sometimes happens: don't be a vector, don't be the dim cat sharing your limp prize. If you didn't bring Kass up, I'd never think of him at all, and isn't that a happy place to be? Even as a Tribune subscriber. I can look at a page he is on and his column doesn't even register. My eyes dance over him without perceiving one word, the way you step over a turd on the sidewalk without needing to study its topography. I don't even realize he's there. Originally, I grabbed his headshot to illustrate this page, but I had to remove it, because otherwise my eyes couldn't focus on the words underneath. 
      Yes, it galls that the Tribune would keep Kass while showing the gate to such luminaries as architecture critic Blair Kamin, arts maven Howard Reich, and restaurant reviewer Phil Vettel. It is what I used to call, in the years that David Radler ran the Sun-Times, the Bean Soup Theory of Journalism, where occasionally you look into the bowls of soup you're selling and think, "You know ... I could pluck out a few beans, and it would still be bean soup." Until you find yourself with a bowl of broth and three beans.
     I'm glad that the Sun-Times seems on the way to becoming the preeminent newspaper in Chicago, but sad it had to happen this way. This is like winning a 100-yard dash then, as you cross the finish line, turning to see your opponent 30 yards back, writhing in the cinders, clutching his calf. It's good to win. But not like that.
     So if keeping Kass means that Eric Zorn will have a job a little longer, I am all for that. Remember, Fox News didn't turn rural America into gobsmacked haters who will buy any lie provided it's idiotic enough. Rather, Fox found them that way, and printed money by parroting their stunted biases back at them. The right wing media is like those vibrating mattresses once found at seedy motels. The Magic Fingers don't give you a bad back, and they don't make it better. They just provide the illusion of soothing your damage while charging you a quarter a minute. John Kass didn't lead that mob, he followed it. They're all followers, sheep beseechingly bleating for a shepherd, cattle in a chute. That's the problem.    
      Okay, you get the point. No mas. I do prattle on, and I apologize for that. One of the central if unspoken tenets in journalism is, "You have to put the slop where the pigs can get at it." You have to empty the bucket within reach of the readers.  So if the swine snuffling around the Trib are hungering for a big trough full of John Kass's musings then, soo-EEE, come and get it. If Fox News can keep Sean Hannity on the payroll, a truly evil man, a traitor and genuine abetter of terrorists who should probably be on trial in the Hague, then the Tribune should have no worry about its moaning Hannity homunculus, its wan Tucker Carlson wannabe, who does no harm to anybody but himself, and probably fattens the Tribune's thinning bottom line while he's at it.
     So I throw my full and enthusiastic support behind John Kass, for all it's worth. Besides, when I have doubts about myself as a columnist, as often happens, all I need do is think of Kass, his brow uncreased by doubt of any kind, and suddenly I find serenity and pride, confidence and satisfaction. I might not be much, but I sure ain't that. So for selfish reasons alone, I hope that the Tribune ignores calls for his firing, and keeps the man for as long as Chicago can stomach him.

Windblown.

 

     Vista Tower is coming along. I was strolling south on Michigan Avenue last week, and paused just north of the bridge to admire its progress. The 101-story building is the third tallest in Chicago, after the Willis Tower (sigh ... no, seriously, people have given up the Sears thing, right? Because it's been over a decade. Get with the program, folks) and Trump Tower (still going by its original name, alas). 
     Designed by Studio Gang—the same folks behind the way-cool Aqua building—Vista Tower has a very neat feature. If you look at the photo to the right, you'll notice a dark band near the top. That is the "blow-through" floor. Without it, the Chicago winds would rock the building so much people on the highest floor would get seasick. Many buildings try to counterbalance this effect with stabilizing weights, tanks of water and such. The blow-through floor allows wind to cut through the building, rather than push against it. The floor is a little taller than the regular floor, and doesn't seem as if it'll have any use for tenants. I get the impression it won't be a patio or pool or anything, but just an empty space. Which is a shame. I suppose if they clutter it with plants and deck chairs and bocce ball courts then the wind won't blow through right. 

     Maybe there will be a sly wink value to it. I can't help wondering if wisenheimers who get in trouble will say they live on the 83rd floor of Vista Tower, the way Elwood Blues tells the Department of Motor Vehicles that he lives at 1060 W. Addison (sigh, the address of Wrigley Field).

    Probably not. 

     Yes, today is a light entry. If you want, I'll give you your money back. The politics of late have been cascading over me, water off a duck's ass. Numb, maybe. Tired, disgusted, afraid; I'm not Sigmund Freud, I can't easily access the bottom of it, and don't really want to.

    Maybe I'm just waiting. The bus doesn't come any faster if you tap your foot. At some point sweating the details of this calamity is stupid. The woods are burning; do we really need to say "Oh look, that tree is on fire and that tree is on fire and this tree, and the one over there"? A big fucking forest fire. We all get it.  Now let's get on with this. 

      There came a point in the eternal O.J. Simpson trial where I just shut off, covering my ears and screeching, "Just tell me how it ends!" I don't think I'm going to watch either dueling town hall tonight, with Joe Biden on ABC, and Donald Trump on NBC. What would be the point? Anyone who didn't figure out a long time ago that Trump is a despicable con man, liar, criminal and traitor who will ruin the country, further, given the chance, is not going to grasp that now. And Biden, well, he could spend tonight's TV time teeing up newborn puppies and and perfecting his golf swing by driving them into the ocean and I'd still vote for him.

Damn you, J.B., for trying to save our lives!

      When pausing to photograph this distinctive sign in generally pleasant, rustic Channahon Monday. I did not consider the juxtaposition with the nostalgic tableau next to it: the classic Schwinn bicycle, its basket full of flowers, the sweet little girl statue.
    And then "J.B. PRITZKER SUCKS." In case you can't read the fine print, it continues, "THE LIFE OUT OF ILLINOIS SMALL BUSINESS."
     It was only later, looking at the picture, that the disconnect between folksy and hateful jumped out. Which is rather like what often happens when you meet people downstate—lovely folks, on the surface, but with a few odious beliefs jingling around their pockets like loose ammunition. 
     The sign doesn't go on to explain exactly how the governor is hoovering vitality from mom and pop establishments. No room and, besides, it's a given. It's assumed you know the problem is his closing down the state, more or less, trying to keep residents from dying of COVID-19.
     Can't the guy who posted the sign see what happens when you don't? 52,000 new cases. Tuesday. Isn't trying to tamp down that curve—surging up again—the kind of effort that even residents of this small community, 60 miles southwest of Chicago, can wrap their heads around. It's not like you need a Ph.D. to figure it out.
      Then again, I have a job, and my wife has a job. Maybe if we were sitting on our hands, day after day, watching our livelihoods shrivel and die and our life savings dwindle away, we might have a very different take on the matter. I don't want to be one of those guys sitting warm and dry in the boat, raising my hot tea and lemon to my lips, tut-tutting at how unseemly are all those thrashing about in the water, splashing in such an unseemly fashion. And those awful cries! Really. Can't they sink wordlessly? That's what I'd do in their position. Blow a few kisses at the governor as I expire.
     Or am I succumbing to that Democratic folk disease, empathy? Wear your fuckin' mask, Jethro.
     If I had presence of mind, I'd have pulled over and knock on the door (and no doubt been shot through it by someone in fear for his life; it isn't only the Right who can traffic in stereotypes). But I was already 20 minutes late—construction traffic on the Stevenson—heading down, and after I had been biking for three hours and just wanted to get home and eat dinner.
    Then again, I don't need to quiz the sign owner. This week the Sun-Times ran a story on the dozen or so death threats against the governor. The Illinoisans making the threats seem to be mostly the mentally ill, or the incarcerated, and not beleaguered small businessmen whose cupcake shops are languishing due to social distancing. The true nature of people come out in a crisis, for good and ill, and it is to be expected that along with the selfless acts of nurses and social service types there are bitter red staters just itchin' to shoot sumptin'.  Not to tell the governor his business, or make my colleague's work any more difficult, but myself, I'd squelch reports of death threats, just so as not to give anybody any ideas. 
     Think about how much you have to hate somebody to condemn him on a sign in your front yard. I like to think, no matter how extreme a situation I'd find myself in, I wouldn't do that. In fact, I don't have to assume. I know. For three years I've watched a liar, bully, fraud and traitor ripping at the foundations of my beloved country, which is worse than driving your bar into receivership. And yet not once found myself condemning him to passing cars. 
    Although, now that I think of it, I have put up a sign.  A neighbor had them printed up, and I eagerly bought one and placed it at the strip of forest along the edge of our yard. Here it is.

   

Things That Christianity Was Okay With

The Orator, by Magnus Zeller (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

     Like you, I am shocked, shocked at Evangelical Christianity's continued support of Donald Trump, in apparent contravention of almost every bedrock belief they otherwise claim to hold dear and demand other, non-Trump individuals rigorously adhere to. A puzzling departure from their supposed values, which the sharply-worded condemnation of Trump by Christianity Today last week is more the exception that proves the rule. A yelp of dissent interrupts the steady ululating of praise for the beloved leader, himself Christlike in their eyes. "The chosen one," as Rick Perry called Trump, half Peter, half Obi-Wan Kenobi.
     Although. I can't help but wonder: how much of a surprise should this really be? Is Christian support of our craven, cruel corrupt, criminal—and those are just the Cs—president really such a departure? Not when we think of American history, which does serve as a reality check to those who pause to consult it. Look at history, and suddenly this becomes, not an exception, but par for the course.
     The liar, bully, fraud and newly-impeached traitor who leads our country is not the first shameful enormity that official Christendom has given its enthusiastic approval. 
     A partial, utterly deniable list of Things that Christianity Was Okay With, culled from American history:

      The slaughter of Native-Americans.
      The enslavement of black people. 
      The subjugation of women.
      Irrational hatred toward immigrants.
      Anti-Semitism in all forms.
      Colonialist conquest of weaker nations.
      Indifference in the face of suffering of non-white groups.
      Denial of science.
      Ridicule of religions other than Christianity. 
      Censorship of literature.
      Suppression of the arts.
      Sexual ignorance.
      Thwarting efforts of black people to achieve civil rights.
      Fighting their attempts to live in white communities.
      Denying them the chance to work at good jobs.
      Squelching of advances in medicine.
      Control of women's reproductive rights.
      A grim, joyless view of sex, often for themselves but especially for others. 
      Aversion to dancing, and many kinds of music.
      Hostility toward gays.
      And toward lesbians, transgender folks, and anyone straying from rigid gender norms.
      Hostility toward any non-Christian religion, particularly Islam.
      Rejection of anything that smacks of magic, spiritualism, or any myth other than Christian myth. 
       America as an inclusive society. 

     I'm sure I've left a few out. Since I can hear the howl before it goes up, I should point out that a) there always was, like Christianity Today, a small element of dissent, like the abolitionist movement, that shouldn't be forgotten, and b) my own team, Judaism, certainly has its share of stunning moral lapses, lack of sympathy toward the plight of the Palestinians leaping to mind. 
     Neither of which, however, alters my main point one iota, so don't pretend they do. 
    
    

What if Trump won't go?

The Archangel Michael Defeating Satan by Lucas Kilian (Metropolitan Museum)

     It is still too early to even dream about defeating Donald Trump in 2020. Yes, flipping the Virginia state House and Senate from red to blue and winning the governor's office is a good sign. Yes, it is encouraging that Trump came out swinging for Matt Bevin, the Republican governor of Kentucky, and then he lost. Yes, there could be signs that the GOP might discover, to their shock, that welding their party to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor runs the risk of alienating voters. Even Southern voters.
     So yes, the news this week is good. But relief is premature. Any president has a built-in advantage, even one as toxic and unfit as Donald Trump. 
     Good signs, but only that. And if they lull loyal Americans into a false sense of security that the fight for the soul of this country might be won quickly, easily, or at all, then it does more harm than good. Trump could win, and history flow in his direction for years and years and years. And the winners write history.
     Still, there is one worry that can be put to rest now. I've heard several friends speculate about what happens if "Trump refuses to go" after his, please God, defeat in 2020. I don't know if they mean clings to the desk, weeping and wetting himself, or tries to lead some kind of coup d'etat after his electoral defeat.
     I reply that we are still a nation of laws and that, at 12 noon, EST on Jan. 20, 2021, if Trump loses he will stop being president and White House security will find some way to flush him out.
     Maybe my faith in America is blinding me. But I can't see Trump leading a military overthrow. He lacks the guile. Which might sound odd about such an inveterate liar, but Trump's falsehoods are ad hoc, spur of the moment, say-any-words-that-sound-good type of lies. Plotting an overthrow of the government is, I think, beyond him. He would tweet about it and give away the game. ("Big coop tomorrow! Very hush-hush. Which sounds better? Dictator or caesar?")

    Yes, he has fans in the Armed Forces. But look at the faces of those generals during the staged photo-op in the situation room last month. Are they going to violate their oaths, turn their backs on everything they believe in, and commit undeniable treason, all out of loyalty for a man who has no loyalty to anyone?  It's one thing for Bevin to refuse to concede defeat after the Kentucky secretary of state called the race for Democrat Andy Behsear. That's just being a poor loser. It's another thing entirely to try to negate the outcome.
    There is another way to spin the possibility of Trump clinging to power. Let's say it happens. Trump loses the election, but somehow remains—denying its legitimacy, military overthrow, whatever. Fox News declares him king. His base bows down. 

     Can that work? And if it does, we deserve it. Really. Because if that is how the United States of American ends, if that is how our nation derails, crumpling at a few taps from an erratic, ignorant buffoon like Donald Trump, then how real, how solid, how precious a structure could we have had in the first place? If that can happen, if there is even a chance of that succeeding, then it all was an illusion anyway, and we might as well join all the other nightmare totalitarian dictatorships that so clot the world, because our freedom was never real, and our vaunted laws were a sham. It was all a dream. I don't believe it possible. But that doesn't mean I won't be on the watch for it, and ready to fight against it with all my might. We all have to. The man is capable of anything. Anything. There is no bottom, no low beyond which he will not sink, if we let him. Never forget that.