Giorgio Armani and me

 

     I was never a Giorgio Armani kind of guy. First off, I wasn't rich. Second, I wasn't thin — a chunky endomorph in an Armani suit was a contradiction in terms.
     Third I had no taste. I liked corduroy. I wore beige khaki pants and baggy blue Oxford shirts with solid knit neckties loosened to sternum-level. On fancy occasions, I tightened the knot.
     Armani might have been my polar opposite. He defined the greed-is-good 1980s —  unstructured suit jackets of lush fabrics over elegant t-shirts. Money was almost meaningless to me — I cashed my paycheck and keep the currency in a fishbowl on my dresser, digging my hand in and taking some when I was low. Money bought stuff; it wasn't the barometer of my personal worth. That was what writing was for.
     That doesn't mean I didn't benefit from Armani. I did. He enriched my life in a way I hadn't thought about lately until the designer died in Milan Sept. 4, age 91.
     Once, in the late 1980s, I was grinding through my career as a night-shift nobody on the City Desk of the Chicago Sun-Times. I forget what got stuck in my craw — no doubt some passing spat with a long gone editor, stepping on my neck. They all were, in my estimation. "Not having a column," I used to say. "Is like being drowned."

      Not in hazy, abstract way, I'd continue, if anyone were listening. But like someone holding my head underwater and killing me.

   So I went to Marshall Field's — I did that a lot in those days, going to Field's State Street store to waste time, cool down, usually by walking through their furniture department, looking at the gorgeous Chippendale breakfronts and deep leather chairs. Going to Marshal Field's was free, and anonymous, and restorative. Somebody was buying this shit. Somebody was enjoying life. Maybe I would too, someday.
     I don't think I was alone — I recall my friend Cate being somehow involved, a memory she confirms, along its vague parameters.
     We went to the men's section, where I bought this Armani tie. Deep red. With this little yellow and black arrows. I think it cost $70, almost 40 years ago. A fabulous sum, no doubt smoothed by Cate's presence, goading me on: of course I must have that tie. I deserve it. She probably picked it out for me, or at least endorsed my selection.
     Need it I did, and every time I put it on, some of the cachet and power and mystery of Armani was transferred to me, by osmosis. I made its tiny little knot so many times that eventually the red silk wore away and the white lining showed through — not something that happens often with neckties, so either I wore it an awful lot, or it wasn't as high quality as it pretended to be.
     Even unwearable — even if it wasn't worn through, the knot was the size of a cherry, and as out-of-date as spats — I kept the tie. As a talisman. I liked seeing it, hanging there, deep red with that little arrow motif. I had class, to paraphrase Terry Malloy, I was a contender. I was somebody.
     That's a lot to get from a single necktie. Thanks for the assist, Cate. And thanks for the tie, Giorgio. Rest in peace.

Charlie Kirk assassination another tear in the unraveling fabric of American life

The San Martin Palace in Buenos Aires. Once private residences, now the ceremonial headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

     Buenos Aires is a beautiful city. At least along the tree-lined boulevards of the Retiro. Domed buildings, charming streetlights, couples dancing the tango in pocket parks. "It's like the love child of New York and Paris," I told friends, after visiting.
     So it was unexpected and jarring, on a walking tour, to suddenly have the guide start talking about thousands of Argentinians dropped to their deaths from helicopters during the 1970s "dirty war," after the takeover of a military junta — about secret torture sites and desaparecidos, "the disappeared," people who vanished without a trace into the machinery of state oppression.
     You realize, once again, how fragile society can be. How quickly it can decay under a pretty surface. How easily, despite the Beaux Arts buildings and comfortable cafes, it all can go horribly wrong. How what should be the central, cherished values of any decent culture — respect for life and individual dignity, our ability to work out differences through debate and the ballot box — can quickly dissolve into horror.
     The murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk is both a horror and another warning sign that our vaunted American civil society is hurtling into a ditch whose depth none can predict.
     Not just a human tragedy — Kirk, 31, was married, the father of two young children — but a gear in a larger, grinding global disaster where the clanking mechanism of democracy is seen as no longer acceptable. This assassination happened against a background of norms and laws being shredded, of American soldiers sent into cities, supposedly to combat crime. But it doesn't take a very active imagination to suspect the troops are, as Gov. JB Pritzker has said, there to acclimate Americans to the idea of armed military in our streets. Because though the Trump administration has not shown any special interest in the hard work of fighting crime, it does display a keen desire to paint its adversaries as criminals.
     Before a suspect was even in custody, the usual MAGA screamers were at it. President Donald Trump blamed those calling out his excesses for the killing.
     “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals," Trump said. "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
     The comparison to the Nazis is used because Trump and his supporters say things reminiscent of the Nazis. The Reichstag fire was the pretext for turning Germany into a police state. Kirk's death was immediately put to similar use.
     “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization," close Trump ally Laura Loomer wrote. "We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
     If not Kirk, it would be someone else. For days before Wednesday's murder, that awful video of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a train in North Carolina, was shown in heavy rotation on right-wing media. Not because of a sudden sympathy for immigrants, but for their eagerness to spotlight certain groups of victims and criminals, part of an endless shriek of grievance, to demonize those who disagree with them and justify their repression.
     This is a very old playbook. In the 1870s, it was called "waving the bloody shirt" — using the losses of the Civil War for an emotional appeal to gain political advantage.

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Flashback 2011: Now we turn away from Sept. 11

Milky Way Behind Three Merlons (NASA photo by Donato Lioce)

T anto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle
Che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

     So ends The Inferno, as Dante, having climbed through all nine rings of hell and witnessed unbearable horrors, from faceless souls scoured by flame to Satan himself, gnashing Judas in his mouth, makes a break for it. He rushes upward through a tunnel, and at long last, "Through a round opening, I saw/Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears/Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars."
     It’s the happy ending of all happy endings, and today, Sept. 12, after an extraordinary weekend of national mourning and remembrance to mark the 10th anniversary of the fiery perdition of Sept. 11, 2001, I recommend that today be a celebration, a non-public holiday, a private return to life, wrenching our view from the past and its irrevocable tragedy and re-directing our gaze to the present and its small joys, and the future, with all its promise and peril.
     I hate Sept. 11, hate that it happened, hate that people are capable of it, hate reliving it — I didn’t realize how much until this weekend, maybe because while 9/11 was marked in past years, it wasn’t the national day of mourning we saw now. No disrespect for the victims, nor their families, and the loss they suffered. I’m not saying that observance wasn’t appropriate. It was. I’m saying I didn’t like it — particularly the patriotic overtures. There was tremendous courage, yes, heroes aplenty.
     But 9/11 shouldn’t become a patriotic holiday. Being caught unaware by 19 fanatics with box cutters and having a tremendous gaping wound kicked into the heart of our nation is not exactly an endorsement of the greatness of America. I flew the flag, and said the pledge, and talked to my children about what happened. But 9/11 isn’t the 4th of July, and the narrative we are building for it — that Sept. 11 is a story of heroism — gilds the horror behind it, like the growing tendency to recast the Holocaust as a tale of personal resistance, all Schindler’s List and Anne Frank, when the Holocaust is really about the negation of individuals, about inhuman slaughter completely out-of-scale with any mitigating flashes of bravery. Sept. 11 was an enormous atrocity committed by evil madmen against unsuspecting innocents, and while it’s comforting to focus on the sacrifice that came in its wake, and though comfort is necessary, we don’t want the solace to grow so large it overwhelms the monstrosity we’re being consoled over. As welcome as the stars are at the end of The Inferno , nobody is going to think it’s a book about stars. They show up in the last line.
     So we’ve done our mourning, at least for this year, and probably for a while. The 11th anniversary won’t be the production the 10th was. What now? Obviously: look up, turn from the past, see the future and notice the good stuff.
     Good stuff? What good stuff? The economy sucks, the wars . . . they don’t quite rage, but they simmer. China looms. What’s good?
     Well, we’re alive, aren’t we? Wherever the economy is heading, it’ll still be better than being dead, and having acknowledged the fallen, it is now time to recognize us, the living. Maybe in future years we’ll have an official Mardi Gras Sept. 12th — the day after the funeral 9/11. We’ll bake special cakes and play music, dance and sing. Me, I plan to kiss the first pretty girl I see Monday morning — my wife — drink some black Cafe du Monde coffee, crank up the Mozart on the iPod on the Metra, rejoice that there’s still a newspaper office with my name on it, and go there and work. The stars will be harder — light pollution — but I’ve already checked them off. Several weeks ago, a friend invited me to hang out with his pals at the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had a long dinner, and then afterward I walked out onto the beach and looked up at the sky and just gasped. "Oh my God!" The stars, so bright I could barely make out the constellations, the full expanse of the Milky Way. More stars than I had ever seen; I felt like I was seeing the stars for the first time.
     We all go through long stretches in our lives when we don’t see the stars, both figuratively and in the real world. They are drowned out by the glare of lesser lights. Yet the stars are always there, waiting for us, and if we try a little — Dante spends The Inferno climbing, weeping and struggling — we get to see them again. I’m not saying you have to haul yourself to Lake Superior. But you do need to expend effort, if only mental effort. There is wonder aplenty in our wounded world, if you look for it. Sky and color and sweet life. Poetry, friends, music, beauty. Time to find it. Enough of Hell for a while. "Riveder le stelle" — See the stars.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, September 12, 2011

Welcome to suburbia, team still calling itself the Chicago Bears! Let the razzing begin!

     This doesn't happen often. Before I wrote Tuesday's blog post, I suspected the subject could be a column in the newspaper. Then I shrugged and wrote it for EGD — I don't like to save all the good ideas for the paper. The next day, talking with my editor, we decided the approach merited adapting it for the paper.

     This isn't the same as Tuesday's post. But there are similarities. Students of my work — as if such a thing exists — might enjoy seeing how repeated reworking refines a piece. Or if you don't want to read a polished version of something you just read yesterday, you can read this, from over a dozen years ago. 

     Well, well, well, if it isn't the Chicago Bears, rushing past me on their way to the suburbs, for real this time.
     Let me just slide my ample suburban backside over to make room on the Bench of Shame. Welcome to the club, boys. "One of us! One of us!"
     It's truly happening.
     “Moving outside of the city of Chicago is not a decision we reached easily,” Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren wrote in a letter to season ticket holders. “This project does not represent us leaving, it represents us expanding.”

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     Sure it does, Kevin. Expanding ... into Arlington Heights. Yet not leaving Chicago. Good luck with that. Quite a stretch, one foot on the city dock, one on the suburban pier ... 26 miles away.
     Sure looks like "leaving" in the traditional "go away from" sense.
     The Bears won't play Downtown anymore, right? Fans who hope to see them play within Chicago city limits will need a television, or a very active imagination. Yet, through some alchemy of branding, they won't become the Arlington Heights Bears. The name "Chicago," they intend to keep. Too good to actually play in the city, but gripping the city's name hard, stiff-arming anyone who would take it away.
     Allow me to savor this moment.
     Ahhhhhh ...
     Honestly, as someone who has had his chops busted continually for 25 years for the moral crime of writing about Chicago while not living in the city, I'm not sure how to feel about this development.
     Gleeful? Sure. Nothing we flailing-around-in-the-status-ditch like more than to see our betters knocked off their high horse. This move might even be helpful to my situation. Now I've got the Chicago Bears football team standing foursquare behind me, arms folded across their brawny chests, hands tucked in sweaty armpits, nodding. Now I can reply: "It's good enough for the Chicago Bears, it's good enough for me."
     Or is it just harmful to them without necessarily benefiting us scorned suburbanites? Trust me here: Chicagoans love lording their residency over those whose pillows rest beyond the city limits. If the Bears go on some White Sox-like swoon — and they've certainly stumbled out of the gate — will the general weakness and inauthenticity of the suburbs be blamed? Or will they bluster, "No, no! We sucked before!"
     Maybe "Chicago Bears" is just another brand. Americans respect branding. Philadelphia Cream Cheese was not created in Philadelphia, nor is it made there. "Chicago" is hog butchers and Bronko Nagurski. The Bears are like Home Run Inn Pizza — a taste of Chicago you can enjoy anywhere. The Chicago Bears can go back to playing in Decatur, where they started, and still keep the name.
     Or can they? My experience says that Kevin Warren can spin the move however he likes. It won't help. The suburban stain doesn't wash off. Believe me, I tried reminding folks: Mike Royko lived in Winnetka. Nelson Algren fled to New Jersey. Saul Bellow wrote "The Adventures of Augie March" in Paris, Rome, Salzburg — everywhere but Chicago. "Not a single word of the book was composed in Chicago," Bellow later confessed.

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Bear down, Arlington Heights Bears!

     In my post about going back-and-forth with CNN, I quote myself saying this, as a preface to explaining why the city needs every warm body it can get:
     "Chicago had 3 million residents in 1950. Now we have 2.7 million residents."
     I wasn't thinking, or, rather, thought I was writing to somebody in Atlanta. But my writing about it expanded the audience. Slapdown came quickly, from a reader named Nate.
     "'Chicago had 3 million* residents in 1950. Now we have 2.7 million,'" he wrote, quoting me. "And you're one of the ones that left. Taking the 'we' out of it."
     Ouch. True enough. I try to admit when I'm caught in a deception.
     "I generally try not to include myself among Chicagoans — stolen valor — but sometimes I mess up," I replied. "I'll correct."
     And I did, changing it to "Now Chicago has 2.7 million residents."
     Only then I realized I hadn't written that for the post, but was quoting something that I had already written to CNN. So I changed it back — as a value, quoting accurately, even quoting myself, surpasses not being caught putting on airs.

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    Which came to mind Monday when the Bears announced they're really, truly moving to Arlington Heights. No foolin' around this time. 
     “Moving outside of the city of Chicago is not a decision we reached easily,” Bears president and CEO Kevin Warren wrote in a letter to season ticket holders. “This project does not represent us leaving, it represents us expanding.”
     Expanding ... into Arlington Heights. While indeed leaving Chicago, in the sense they won't play there anymore. But they still won't be the Arlington Heights Bears, correct? The name "Chicago" they intend to keep, apparently.
    Allow me to savor this moment.
    As someone who has had my chops busted for 25 years for not living in the city, I'm not sure how to feel about this apparent development. Is this helpful to my cause? With this move, I've got the Chicago Bears behind me, arms folded across their chests, hands tucked in armpits, nodding in agreement. I can reply: "It's good enough for the Chicago Bears, it's good enough for me, so shut the fuck up!"
     Or is it just harmful to them without necessarily benefiting us scorned suburbanites? Chicagoans love lording their residency over those whose pillows rest over the city limits. If the Bears go on some White Sox-like swoon, will the general weakness and inauthenticity of the suburbs be blamed? 

     Bank on it.
     Unless it doesn't. The New York Giants play in East Rutherford, New Jersey. I almost said, "And nobody holds that against them." Honestly, I'm not that well versed in New York Giants fandom. Maybe their fans howl location-based derision from the stands. Maybe they wave signs, "You made me schlep to East Rutherford for THIS?!?!?!"

    Or maybe, because the Giants went to the Super Bowl five times and won four, they could play at the American Girl store in Montclair and that would be okay with fans.

     I shouldn't dip my toe too far into sports — I couldn't name a current Bears player if you put a gun to my head. But next time someone gives me grief about living in Northbrook, I can say, "Hey, at least I sometimes work in Chicago. That's more than" — whoever the quarterback of the Bears might be — "can say." 

     Which means I'll have to learn a player's name. Someday. 

* Actually, as my sharp-eyed readers pointed out, the population was 3.6 million in 1950. Which really distances me from a city known, not for its understatement, but its ballyhoo.

At least the Washington Monument is safe.

Patrick Ahern, left, talks with National Guardsmen about the Washington DC situation.

     WASHINGTON — The Washington Monument is secure. All 555 feet of it, 91,000 tons of stone with a cap of cast aluminum, a precious metal at the time the memorial was completed in 1884.
     It's safe from enemies foreign and domestic, due to its imperviousness and, for nearly a month, the diligence of National Guard members from seven states, including the trio from the Louisiana National Guard I came upon getting an earful from an older gent.
     "You are not authorized to make arrests," D.C. resident Patrick Ahern was telling them as I walked up.
     I identified myself — a Chicago newspaper columnist here studying the high cuteness levels of 3-month-old granddaughters, taking a quick busman's holiday to check out the troop situation on the National Mall.
     "These guys are not needed, and I doubt they would help Chicago much," Ahern said.
     No doubt. Though, I observed, most people I spoke with said they feel safer with soldiers around.
     "They're obviously tourists scared s---less of Washington because they read a lot of false narratives, including that which comes out of the White House," Ahern said.
     Also true. For instance, Margaret and Leonard Haight of Nebraska hadn't seen any soldiers during their visit — only 2,000 or so are spread over 68 square miles of the district.
     "I thought that we might," Margaret Haight said, seeming disappointed. I observed that some visitors find it comforting just knowing they are there, somewhere.
     "I do, too," she said.
     When Ahern walked off, one soldier said of the military presence, "Everybody has their opinion. They're free to voice. I just let them vent and say whatever they have to say."
     Smart policy. The nine guardsmen I spoke with were polite young men, not bristling with observations about their mission. Though they did clear up something I'd wondered about — why always groups of three?
     I assumed it must offer some kind of tactical advantage, and it does — called a "fire team," trios allow one soldier to focus on what's ahead, one to cover the rear and one to keep an eye on their flank.
     Soldiers have yet to arrive in Chicago, and there is hope President Donald Trump has shifted from empty threats into the braggadocio portion of the program, without actually acting. Bullies are cowards, so maybe Gov. JB Pritzker standing up to him worked.
     Trump did send out that crazed "Chipocalypse Now" meme Saturday, showing himself cosplaying Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, the Robert Duvall character in "Apocalypse Now," with the line, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR."

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Flashback 2006: Tokyo Rose, all over again

     My cousin Harry Roberts died of complications from kidney failure last week. You might remember me writing about his struggles. I will certainly be remembering him in the future — it's too soon now — but his loss got me thinking of what I've written about the illness over the years, and I found this. It ran back when the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings, and the closing joke. Vasilios Gaitanos received a kidney transplant from his wife in 2007 and lived to 2021.

     The opening section refers to arrests that were being made of Muslim immigrants somehow implicated in the 9/11 plot and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, tortured, and kept there for years, often without any formal criminal charges, a dynamic we're repeating today.

OPENING SHOT

     Mastering the details is what makes you feel at home in a new place. When I moved to East Lake View, it was a sign I was settling in to learn that those distant pops heard Sunday mornings were the Lincoln Park Gun Club blasting away at clay pigeons. Or that the guy walking the black lab was William Kennedy Smith.

     Or that the little old lady running the Japanese general store on Belmont Avenue was Iva Toguri D'Aquino, the notorious Tokyo Rose, whose broadcasts from Japan during World War II were intended to undermine U.S. troop morale.
     A slight thrill to know that the woman selling you rice crackers was convicted as a traitor and served time in prison.
     That she was really innocent was a deeper secret — I didn't know; I bet most Chicagoans didn't know, not until they read her obituary last week. She was swept up in circumstances, trapped in Japan when the war broke out — an American citizen, born on the Fourth of July, surviving the war by working at a radio station. There was no one "Tokyo Rose," but a string of female broadcasters, and nobody proved that D'Aquino was one of them. But she was convicted anyway during the security hysteria of the late 1940s and sent to prison for six years.
     Six years.
     Her story would be trivia if it did not echo today. If there were not thousands of new Iva Toguri D'Aquinos rotting in prisons because they, too, were swept up by circumstances at a time, like the postwar period, when fear overwhelms our devotion to our most cherished ideals. If we were not willing to do vile things to protect ourselves, willing to throw innocent people into prison for years until they are eventually released, accused of nothing, convicted of nothing.
      It is a legacy that will plague our children. They will wonder how we could have allowed this. We'll claim that we didn't know. But we do know. D'Aquino, once convicted a traitor, in death performs a great service to our country by reminding us. If only we will listen.

WE'VE ALL GOT A SPARE

     Vasilios Gaitanos and his wife, Dimitra, show up on the 10th floor for their appointment, as instructed, to check in with the guard. Usually I'd have them sent down to the ninth floor, but Vasily is older, and ill, and hurrying up to greet them seems the thing to do.
      I'm rewarded by watching Vasily guide his wife downstairs, to my office. A gentle touch. A whispered "ena, thio, tria" -- "one two three," in Greek — as they reach the bottom of the escalator.
      She is blind — blinded in a car crash 11 years ago. But they are not here about her. They are here about him. Vasilios Gaitanos' kidneys are failing. He has been on dialysis for three years.
     He used to play piano in the old Denny's Den, if you remember the sprawling Greek restaurant and club on Broadway. He doesn't play much anymore.
      "Now I'm looking out for only health," he says.
      Vasily, 61, has beaten cancer three times. He has just passed the two-year cancer-free period required before he can be put on the waiting list for donor kidneys.
     Dialysis is a stopgap — I didn't realize that before meeting him. It only approximates the miracle of the kidneys, only imperfectly filters the poisons that build up in your blood. So while on dialysis, your systems breaks down — particularly your heart, and Vasily already has had heart valve trouble.
      The average wait for a new kidney in Illinois is five years. Without a kidney, Vasily will probably die before then.
      The couple are in my office because their friends think — hope, pray — that maybe, if I write about him, then somebody would step forward and give Vasily a kidney.
     This is not in keeping with my understanding of how people operate though, I admit, that if you were going to donate a kidney to a stranger, then Vasily is the sort of man you want to donate your kidney to.
      "He's a very likeable man," says cardiologist and long-time friend, Dr. Maria Balkoura. "Everybody in the Greek community knows him and loves him."
      How likeable? I held my breath when I asked him his blood type, and was relieved to hear it is O+, because I'm A+, and I was worried, watching him dote on his wife, that I'd end up giving him my own kidney.
     I can see how it would be tempting. A person only needs one kidney to get by, and giving one to Vasily might give him another 20 or 30 years instead of two or three.
      Watching him tenderly squire his wife out of my office — did I mention that he is also losing vision from the dialysis? — I realized that such an act would not save just one life, but two.

MIRACLES DO HAPPEN

     Kidney ailments are complex, and rather than rely on Vasilios' understanding of the subject, I thought it prudent to also speak with Dr. Susan Hou, chief of the renal transplant program at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood.
      She said that Loyola's waiting list has 594 people on it, that 12,000 kidneys become available each year, nationwide, while 65,000 people need them. Dying while waiting for a kidney is all too common.
     We spoke for a long time, about the dynamics of the waiting list — children under 11 get preference. We spoke about the logistics of kidney transplants — the hardy little organs are good for up to 24 hours outside of the body.
     I was almost off the phone when I thought to ask her: level with me — does Vasily have a chance? Do people ever donate their kidneys to strangers?
     "There are some amazing stories," she said. "One woman mentioned it to a neighbor at a block party, and that neighbor gave her a kidney. Sometimes a stranger will call and want to give a kidney to anyone who needs it."
     Really? I asked, incredulous. People are really that generous?
      "I've given my kidney to somebody I didn't know," she said, as matter-of-fact as can be.
      It was three years ago. A patient of hers needed a kidney. Dr. Hou thought she might be a match, and she was. So miracles of kindness do occur. Maybe one will occur for Vasilios Gaitanos and his wife Dimitra. I sure hope so.

Today's chuckle

     This sharp line, from Kathleen Norris, is quoted in Only Joking by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves:
     In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 1, 2006