Can we bring our divided continent back together?

     “What is the Continental Divide?” my wife said.
     A natural question. We were standing Tuesday at the “Continental Divide Overlook” at Eldorado Canyon State Park in Colorado. I wish language allowed me to convey the view — even a photograph would fall short. A sweeping, 50- mile wide panorama, starting, to the left, with the snow-capped Rockies, unfolding through pined mountainsides, distant valleys and rock gorges that set me pondering a possible connection between “gorge” and “gorgeous.”
     I puffed the dust off my high school geology. “It refers to drainage,” I said. “The Rocky Mountains form a ridge, north and south. A drop of rain falling on the west side will, eventually, make its way to the Pacific Ocean. On the east, to the Atlantic.”
     Hiking back down, the words “continental divide,” echoed in my head in a way that has nothing to do with hydrology. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that spans a continent. And we sure are divided, big time.
     What divides us? Race, class, religion. Politics form the most gaping division right now. The differences are sharper than ever, with the Republicans firmly anti-government, pro-business, anti-immigrant, pro-white, anti-gay, pro-religion, anti-women (though they would argue they support women by making their difficult moral choices for them). And the Democrats pretty much the opposite.
The Republicans offer up presidential candidate Donald Trump, an unstable amateur who has never run for public office. And the Democrats are assembling, in typical, shambolic, herding cats fashion, behind Hillary Clinton, the former senator, former secretary of state. Not to forget Bernie Sanders tagging along, a nagging reminder that even our divisions have divisions.
     You'd think a few miles on Rattlesnake Gulch Trail would be the perfect place to forget all this. But days into my supposed vacation, I had Trump on the brain. I found myself snapping photos of canyon walls and tweeting them with the caption, "It ain't Donald Trump that makes America great." The media was accused of focusing on Trump too much—I disagree, it's called "reporting the news"—but now that he has a scarily real chance of becoming the president of the United States, it's the responsibility of every patriotic American to point a quivering finger at his latest horror and scream, "Noooooo!!!"
     This might be naive. We are so polarized, no one switches loyalty, no matter what. I sincerely believe that Donald Trump could go on television and drown a litter of puppies—really cute, golden retriever puppies—one by one, serving their damp little bodies into the audience with a tennis racquet, and his fans would shrug and explain that's just Donald being Donald, sticking it to the old, drowning-puppies-is-bad establishment.
     Getting to nature is beneficial, the chief benefit being you realize how big, old, and indifferent the earth is to all our striving. Or to quote my favorite Park Service warning sign, "The mountains don't care."
     So we have to care. And the main question we need to care about is this: Do all these divisions matter more than the one thing that unites us? And that one thing, in case you don't know, and many seem not to, is that we are all living here, all Americans, together, on our respective slopes of our Great Divide.
     A year after 9/11, some grew nostalgic for the sense of shared purpose the attacks brought. We wondered when we might feel that again—maybe if space aliens attacked, we could band together again. But we don't need aliens for our way of life be threatened. We do that already. Nobody can hurt us like we can hurt ourselves. Even after Trump is—please God—defeated, the division will remain. We will realize that Trump wasn't a cause, but a symptom. We have proved ourselves very good at falling apart. It's getting back together, bridging this continental divide, that is the trick. We're the United States, remember. The founders put it in our name. So we wouldn't forget.

Friendly if you belonged

     Jackie Schaller died last Saturday at 90. The owner of Schaller's Pump, the legendary Bridgeport tavern, was given the proper affectionate send-off by our inimitable Maureen O'Donnell in the Sun-Times. But these old South Side guys, they weren't Teddy bears. They had a toughness that lingered right into old age, as I found out, a little, when the great Ed McElroy took me to Schaller's in 2009, leading to Jackie Schaller's memorable cameo in my 2012 memoir, You Were Never in Chicago:

    For lunch today, Ed takes me to Schaller's Pump. From the outside, the place seems unremarkable—a modest two-story brick building, a large welcome to White Sox fans painted across the wall. In the gravel parking lot, I mention that I was last here with Mary Mitchell, a black Sun-Times columnist who was hesitant to walk into Schaller's because of its reputation, unsure of how she would be received, though the regulars warmly welcomed her once she did muster the courage to go in. 
     "The only black you'll see here is the cook," says Ed.

Jackie Schaller

     On the inside, Schaller's Pump is also unremarkable — your standard small, dim neighborhood tavern, with an elbow-worn wooden bar and a dozen tables. Patrons are older, all white, and Ed knows most of them. We sit down and are joined by Jackie Schaller, a tiny man in a blue cardigan, not two years older than Ed but looking far more elderly, shrunken, pale — his face seems like soft stone worn away by a river. His grandfather started the bar in 1881, and it has operated continuously since then — all through Prohibition, which merely required installation of the peephole that's still in the side door. Schaller calls Ed "Eddie" and they reminisce. 
     "Who took you to your first World Series?" Ed says, and they both laugh. To St. Louis in 1946 to see the Cardinals beat the Red Sox. "I drove down in my car," says Ed. "The Chase Hotel. A guy I knew took care of us."
     Schaller is cooler toward me. Though in Ed's company, I'm still a stranger and a newspaperman at that.
     Did Schaller know his grandfather, I ask. Did he know the man who started the tavern?
     "Yes," Schaller replies.
     Silence.
     What was he like?
     A pause. "Five foot one," Schaller says, without a trace of warmth. Nothing more.
     An older black couple arrives and is shown to a table nearby, where they quietly eat. Times have changed, in some ways, and not in others. I ask Schaller how old he is.
     "My birthday is Jan. 15," says Schaller. "Do you know what day that is?"
    I shrug—nothing comes to mind.
    "Martin Luther King Day," Schaller says, with a quick flick of the thumb toward the black couple. There doesn't seem to be malice in the gesture—those days are gone—but maybe the memory of malice....
     Ed orders a hamburger and a glass of milk. I order a steak sandwich and a cup of coffee, with only the briefest glance of instinctive longing at the men having Budweisers at the bar. Jackie moves off, to see after a big group of tourists arriving at the back room. Ed tells me a little about him. "World War II guy. I think he got hit," Ed says, describing how Schaller went from an eighteen-year-old playing on the St. Leo Light Basketball Squad and mouthing off to the priests to a soldier fighting in the jungles of the Pacific. A common path for the boys of Ed's generation. They played ball, they went overseas, they fought, they got hit, they came home.
    "All those guys. Overseas. Bronze stars. You couldn't get a better bunch of people," says Ed. "All out of Visitation Parish. In Chicago, you know, we go by parish. Especially South Side. Visitation—it's like the pope lived there." Ed holds up his hands in amazement. "Unbelievable, Visitation. So many priests came out of there. So many policeman. Commanders. Firemen. It was so friendly."
    Friendly, of course, if you belonged.

     
     

     

The miracle of evolution

     I've been staying with my parents in Boulder for the past few days. And one of the joys of such visits is rambling through the library of my father, a retired NASA scientist. For some reason I pulled down Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, by P.B. Medawar and J.S. Medawar (Harvard: 1983) and have been browsing happily.
     The entry on barnacles includes the fact that "Aristotle understood the special reproductive problems of creatures which do not move." The essay for "Man's Place in Nature" touches upon humanity's gradual realization that the Lords of the Earth are actually animals ourselves, a cousin to the gorilla with delusions of grandeur.
    Leading us to the entry under "creationism," which contains an idea that, for all the debate over the subject, I had never heard expressed before, and it's potent enough that I thought it merits sharing:

     We are surprised at the obstinacy with which creationists cleave to literal creationism. So doing, they fail to realize that the evolutionary concept is a much grander and more awe-inspiring conception—in keeping with what C.S. Lewis referred to as rational piety, and for many people conducive to reverence.

     Of course. Not only is the "And then God made everything, end of story" of the Bible wrong, but like so many untruths, it's a gross impoverishment of the reality that it supposedly describes. The religious fairy tale pales in the sense of awe and wonder that one would expect the actual creation of everything that exists in the universe would evoke, and does, when you grasp the actuality of it. Any deity worthy of the name would prefer credit for the vast, interconnected, incremental clockwork progress of evolution, its patience, subtlety and beauty playing out over billions of years, to the tossed-off because-I-say-so of the Bible. Comparing Darwinian and Biblical notions of the origins of life is like comparing our DNA blueprint to a crayon stick figure.
    But no need for much elaboration. I'd rather you re-read the quote by the Medewars (a British couple; Peter, a biologist, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1960; Jean approached him over the meaning of "heuristic" and love ensued) than listen to me extemporize upon it. Just as faith so often serves up hatred when it's supposed to encourage love, so its view of creation as a dusty desert whim of theological fascism viewed through a keyhole crumbles next to the magnificent real miracle of evolution.

The beauty of bicycles

     Who doesn't love old bicycles? The people who built the Schwinn above, who designed the frame behind the handlebars to flare out, resembling ... what? The thorax of some emerald insect? The wing of a bird? What were they thinking? Doesn't matter. The end result is wonderful.
     The other day I wandering into University Bicycles, the sprawling cycle shop just off the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, and was first amazed by the jammed mass of bikes of all colors, sizes and descriptions. The vast repair department, the arrays of helmets, gloves and bicycling jerseys.
    I just had to explore. Even though I'm not in the market for a new bike—my black Schwinn Cruiser with its fat whitewall tires does just fine—and as much as I admired their custom "University Cycle" Italian-style racing shirts, I'd look like a fool in one. You need to earn clothing like that.
     My attention shifted to University Bicycles museum's worth of antique bicycles hanging from the ceiling.  Most were Schwinns, the dominant American bike company for most of the 20th century (and a company, I should point out, founded in Chicago in 1895). There were lesser brands as well, such as a 1888 Hickory with wooden spokes and rims.
    I'm sharing the pictures just to say, "Hey, look at this." But they do raise a question: why was design so important on these bikes? Nowadays bikes are all about performance, about simplicity, the lightness of the alloys, their toughness and ruggedness and speed. The streamlined chain guards and fenders are all a thing of the past. Why don't we value them anymore? My guess: because we live in a world where we jettison the superfluous, to save money. We can't afford style.
    Maybe because bicycles were newer, and companies felt they had to sell the product. If you don't know it, the bicycle was one of those technological innovations that changed society, like computers, television and the automobile. There was a Bicycle Craze in the 1890s. Women started shedding those layers of skirts because they were riding bicycles, which not incidentally put them beyond the reach of family and chaperones. Editorial writers wrung their hands, as editorial writers do, and Wondered What It All Meant.
     If you want to see more, there's a rambling video on YouTube that gives a jumpy tour of many more of the older bikes in the store. Or, better, stop by University Bicycles next time you are in Boulder. I asked if they minded if I photographed their bikes, and they said go right ahead. Nice people. I bet they're even nicer if you buy something.

Memorial Day, 2016

      We do lots of activities over Memorial Day weekend—picnics and barbecues, tent sales and, not to forget the big event itself, the Indianapolis 500.
     Don't blame the shrug of modern life. When Memorial Day began, right after the Civil War, as Decoration Day, it was a time for families to visit the graves of their knighted Union dead, outings immediately re-purposed by amorous young folk.
     "Decoration Day was also a day of courtship for the young people," notes holiday scholar Jack Santino, pointing out how 19th century couples would wander off to the more remote spots of woodsy cemeteries.
      Given these practical uses of the holiday, we can't be blamed for wondering, as we dip our heads and reflect on the sacrifice of soldiers who gave their lives for the country, for whose benefit do we do this?
      The noble dead? To please those gazing down at us from heaven?
     Pretty to think so. I would suggest, however, that we remember those who yielded their lives, not as a favor to them, but for ourselves. Dignity demands it. Our nation did not form spontaneously, like a mountain range, but was wrested by intention and force from Mother Britain. Nor did it survive for 240 years without the exercise of military power--often in folly, for certain but sometimes crucially, to make sure the Wehrmacht didn't come rolling down Michigan Avenue.... 

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Boulder, SUVs and goats

      I've spent a lot of time in Colorado: a full year, in bits and pieces, since I was a teenager. I don't love it the way many do. I mean, it's nice. Mountains. Forests. More mountains. Fine if you like that kind of thing.  I'm there now, visiting my parents. So I thought I'd share an observation from a dozen years ago, when SUVs were newer and more something to be remarked upon, as opposed to something accepted with a shrug.

     BOULDER, Colo.--There are fewer sport-utility vehicles on the roads here than in Chicago. That was a surprise. I assumed, with all the mountains, it would be the other way around, and worried I was somehow misperceiving things, perhaps due to the less congested traffic zipping along new, clean highways, plus the wide open spaces. But I quizzed my wife, cleverly not tipping my hand, and she viewed it the same. And we definitely did not spot a single Hummer in a week of driving the kids hither and yon, through the Rockies and back and forth across town.
     I have a theory as to why this is: People in Chicago drive all those Behemoths and Whales and Mountainsides--complete with headlight grills to brush away nonexistent branches and fog lights to cut through the mist of fjords 5,000 miles away--as part of some elaborate interior fantasy, a parody of the life they'd lead if only they weren't working like dray horses in windowless brokerage houses on LaSalle Street.
    But in Colorado, where people actually routinely shun their work and responsibilities and race off to the mountains and climb them, sometimes with their bare hands, they don't need to fantasize. They're busy hiking, riding, paddling, skydiving. They don't need a 3-ton, 11 mpg, $60,000 hunk of junk to prop up their outdoor delusions. They've got the real thing. We pulled over to the side of the road in Rocky Mountain National Park and watched a herd of elk basking in the sun, if not eyeball to eyeball, then as close to a group of elk as I want to be without bars between us.
     And I was driving a sedan.
     Not that Boulderites are without their own fantasies. Living next to smoggy Denver, which is a kind of Cleveland with mountains, and with every acre of farmland rapidly turning into tracts of pre-fab homes, there is a certain frenzy to environmentalism here.
     For instance. We were zipping along Foothills Parkway when we passed a couple hundred goats at the side of the road. We were in residential Boulder, and a glance beyond the goats confirmed that this wasn't some sliver of farm. There were houses around the goats. My wife was puzzled, but my long acquaintance with the People's Republic of Boulder--I've been coming here since the mid-1970s--gave me a hunch what was happening. The goats were mowing the grass, a diligent step on the road to ecological Nirvana. I had to know more.


     Recession, not eco-friendliness       
      "I came up with the idea," said Patrick Tarver, median maintenance flood supervisor for the City of Boulder. "We've only had it going about three weeks; it started out as a pilot program."
     To my disappointment, the goat mowers were not inspired directly by some chai-swigging, patchouli-scented macro-organic aversion to internal combustion engine lawn mowing, but because of lawn care services folding in the recession.
     "We couldn't get a mowing contractor," Tarver said. "The budget hit them really hard. They had let people go, sold equipment, and couldn't handle the job."
     Enter the goats.
     "We had a noxious weed problem, and used the goats in the past, and it just kind of came to me to try goats out," he said. "We have real steep berms, and it would take a lot of time to weed wack the whole area."
     A company in a nearby town, "Nip It in the Bud," provides hungry goats at $1 a day each--there are 232 in Boulder's herd, and Tarver said the goats' work compares favorably to human mowers at $10 to $15 an hour. Temporary fencing keeps the goats from wandering away.
     Tarver said that while the primary motive was "an economic thing," there is no question that goat mowing scratches a particular Boulder eco-green itch.
     "It is a Boulder mentality item as well," he said. "We're always looking for alternatives, and the goats don't put out ozone, don't put out noise pollution, don't use any fossil fuels."
     One man's ceiling is another man's floor, however. While I was appreciating Boulder for its wide-open spaces, grass-gobbling goats and zoning that doesn't permit any building that doesn't look like it was made out of mud by Pueblos, I ran into a resident who was thinking of packing it up.

     A few people can be too many
     "I've lived here since 1966," said a deeply-tanned, squinty kind of guy I met on the trail, while his dog and my boys played in what I hoped was a creek but could have also been an open sewer. He didn't have to finish the thought.
     "I suppose it's gotten pretty built up for you," I said.
     "It has," he agreed.
    "There's always North Dakota," I said, nodding sagely and forcing down a smile.
     We flew back into Midway, and saw our first Hummer of the week on the treacherous terrain of Cicero Avenue. I was calm though. I'm trying to get beyond the fist-shaking scorn for SUVs that I've felt over the past five years. I'm trying to replace it with more of a bland, avuncular tolerance just shy of contempt. If kids can play cowboys and Indians (well, just cowboys nowadays) then why shouldn't adults buy big rolling playpens and pretend they're being chased by rhinos in the veldt?
     I just wish they wouldn't feel the need to drive while doing it.

                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 8, 2003

"Not in jest, but in earnest"

      There is a quote from antiquity that explains half the suffering in the world. It's one of my favorites, all the better because odds are you've never heard it before.
     Ready? 
     Here goes.
     "Little boys throw stones at frogs in jest," the poet Bion wrote in 100 BC, "though the frogs die, not in jest, but in earnest."
     In other words, the powerful do things lightly that have heavy consequences. 
     Great, huh? 
     So why is this quote illustrated by a grainy photo of a mother duck and her seven ducklings in my backyard?
     Our backyard is so wet it attracted ducks. I thought I would get their photo, and since I don't have a camera with a long lens—I don't have a camera at all—I stealthily crept out the back door to get a closer shot with my iPhone. I didn't want to scare the ducks by slamming the door, so I left it open.
     What I forgot, padding across the wooden deck on tiptoe, was the dog, who saw the ducks, and bolted out the open kitchen door, shot across the deck and after the ducks, scattering them in a quacking cloud of confusion and duckling and feathers.
    "Kitty!" I shouted giving pursuit.
     I don't think she hurt any of the ducklings —I once saw her trying to get the better of an overturned cicada and, well, let's put it this way: the cicada won.
      The inter-species scrum disappeared into the pine trees. I eventually tracked the dog down. The momma duck quacked mightily and assembled her charges, and stalked off, highly offended, to find a more hospitable yard. I felt very bad about driving them away. It wasn't my intent. But that's how it goes.
      Little boys throw stones at frogs in jest, though the frogs die, not in jest, but in earnest.  It also works for ducks, and lots of other things too. 

Police plant seeds of trust

 

   
     A piece of turf in Englewood. Young black men and women hanging out. And cops with dirty hands, planting something, then covering it up.
     Familiar words. You think you know where this story is going. But you don't.
     "My name is Officer Davis. I work at the 7th District police station," says David Davis, standing beside his partner, Ja'Lance Hunt. "Our mission is to protect and preserve life. We would be glad to answer any questions you have. We're here today to help you plant, to put the flowers in the garden today. We go to all the schools in Englewood and we plant flowers, but we also act as the police too. OK? So who's going to show me how to plant?"
     It was a sunny morning in West Englewood last week at the Southside Occupational Academy High School, 7342 S. Hoyne, a school for students with disabilities. Southside Occupational is a rare Chicago public high school that has its own dog, Louie, a mini-Goldendoodle.   
    "Everybody knows Louie," says Joshua Long, the principal.
     It was the school's Earth Day celebration, with outside activities: food grills, art projects and planting their school garden. Officers Hunt and Davis greeted one group after another with enthusiasm, placing tiny seeds into their hands, helping plant them into the rich earth and cover them up with dirt.
    “You ready to do some gardening?” enthuses Davis.

     God knows the Chicago Police Department would never invite press to such an event. It was The Kitchen Community, the foundation that runs 115 of these “learning gardens” at schools in Chicago. I might have declined the opportunity to drive to Englewood to watch kids plant chicory. But when Kitchen Community regional director Tovah McCord mentioned that police officers would be there helping, I decided to slide by. Though I confidently assured McCord that the police would never talk to me because, well, not talking to the press is what cops do. That’s what makes the whole “Code of Silence” flap so laughable. It isn’t just that police don’t talk about wrongdoing. They don’t talk about anything. It’s safer that way.
     But Davis and Hunt didn’t seem to get the memo. They not chat easily with the students, laughing and hugging, but they even talk with me.
     “It’s about building relationships,” says Hunt. “At the end of the day, it allows us to interact. For the kids, learning about growing healthy foods and the police coming out supporting that. It gives us an opportunity to plant, be interactive and do some positive things with the kids. It’s a win-win. It allows them to see us in a different light.”
     Hunt and Davis are Army veterans and have been partners for 11 years. They worked with ATF, the FBI, and with gang crimes. Now they’re with CAPS.
     “We did all the secret squirrel stuff,” says Hunt. “But nothing, nothing beats working with kids.” They also take students on college trips and visit schools to mediate tense situations before they become violent.
     I tell Hunt I’m surprised to find officers who talk to the press.
     “When you’re trying to do positive things . . .,” he says. “It’s bigger than us. These are future leaders.”
     As a gardener myself, I know that not everything planted bears fruit. The trick is to keep trying.
     “How do you effect change?” says Hunt. “You can complain. But what are you doing about it? You do it by your interaction. It starts with what we’re doing now: talking. It starts with your interaction with me. Now I don’t know what your past experience has been with the police. If nothing else, this is something different. Unfortunately, everything has always been negative. So it’s almost like there’s no good things happening, no good kids. You’ve got a lot of kids doing the right things as well as officers.
     “We’ve been able to change opinions. How do we build relationships? What’s the best place to start? Schools. You get that many young ladies and young men in one place, it gives them the opportunity — their first time to ask questions and to understand the other side of it. We’re honest with them. We encourage questions. We go to the grammar schools, the little kids will ask, ‘Why you all shoot people?’ They have no filters. We always address the elephant in the room. You have to address it but not let it be the focus of what we’re talking about. It allows them to expand their minds.”

Out of balance

Wells Fargo History Museum, Los Angeles

     So Hillary Clinton might have violated State Department rules regarding email servers.
     And Donald Trump might have paid no taxes—he won't tell us, even though he promised he would.
    And Hillary, well, she was married to Bill Clinton, who wasn't faithful.
    While Donald Trump would bar Muslims from the country, insulting Islam abroad and at home, violating a core tenet of America.
    Clinton can be robotic.
    Trump can be cruel.
    Clinton lied about coming under fire in Bosnia.
    And Trump lied about giving a million dollars to veterans.
    Do you see a lack of balance here? The media tends to ying-yang politics. We think that's fairness. But some things don't balance. Hillary Clinton's cozy relationship with investment companies increases the chances that big money will get the deference in her administration that it gets under every administration, left right or center. Donald Trump's nationalism and protectionism increases the chances of war with China. 
    I don't see how those balance each other at all. Whenever I catch the attention of someone foaming about Benghazi, for instance, I say that first, there's nothing there, but second, even if there were, I would rather elect a Hillary Clinton who lied about secretly traveling to Libya and killed those Americans, herself, personally, than a Donald Trump who would honestly implement half the policies that he promised he would do. They aren't comparable. They're not two sides of a coin; they're one side of a penny and another side of a silver dollar. Trump's fans waving about Hillary's supposed lapses is like John Wayne Gacy telling a neighbor complaining about all those bodies being dug out of his basement, "Well, yeah, but you didn't mow your lawn...." 
     There are countless non-scandals that Republicans have tried to pin on the Clintons—Trump has already brought up Whitewater, Vince Foster. Meanwhile, Trump has no qualifications to be president, in experience, intellect, temperament, outlook, values, goals or morals. 
     It's a no-brainer. Which usually settles the case. Unless you're dealing with people who have no brains. Then it gets complicated. And scary. 

Ron Magers: The Last Man Standing

Ron Magers

     They were the generation after the black-and-white TV pioneers, the Floyd Kalbers and Len O'Connors, and before broadcast news shattered into tiny pieces against the Internet.
     Big personalities with big hair and fat 1970s neckties, easy to caricature: Walter Jacobson, feathers flying, squawking indignation. Carol Marin, our avenging angel, wielding her fiery sword of justice. And the king of the roost, Bill Kurtis, orotund and oracular, saved from Ted Baxter pomposity by the glint of self-knowledge.
      All have cut their anchor chains, slowly slipping out of the camera's gaze: Carol bursting into academia. Bill riding off into ranching. Walter, well, slithering someplace even more obscure than CBS.
     And now Ron Magers, the last man standing, takes his bow Wednesday night on WLS Channel 7 after 50 years in broadcasting, 35 of them in Chicago.
     "It's hard for me to take this all in," he said. "People are so nice."
     Since when? What Magers is seeing is his own niceness reflected back at him. If I had to pinpoint what kept Chicago watching Magers, night after night, rather than giving him the bum's rush to Pittsburgh, I would say it was not his niceness — that would get cloying — but his wit, that suppressed grin. Ron Magers was a funny man doing a serious job....

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How much snot can a snot-sucker suck?

     This might be the best idea.
     Or not.
     I really can't tell.
     We don't have a newborn, anymore. Haven't had one for, geez, almost two decades.
    And when we did, I seem to remember a blue bulb, with a nozzle at one end, used—by my wife God bless her—to extract snot from their noses.
    So maybe the "NoseFrida—The SnotSucker" is a huge improvement over the blue bulb system.
   I'll let you judge.
   It certainly caught my eye, as I was trucking through Bed, Bath & Beyond last week. Or its clear, bright Swedish graphics did. No question what's going on here. Though I did, skidding to a stop, think, "What the hell?!?"
     I would recommend a visit to the fridababy web site for all those who find themselves tasked with what they call "sticky situations." The yuck factor is balanced by friendly graphics and unflinching copy help gild over what they're talking about with a shiny veneer of art. The text points out that a filter is involved which keeps the sucked snot from being drawn into the mouth of the parent, which is almost reassuring.
    A NoseFrida, including four all-important filters, is $15.99. They sell them everywhere. Nordstom carries it.
    Notice their other products. NoseFrida is only the flagship device. There is also Windi, "The GasPasser," a valve designed to be inserted in your baby's posterior, to ease its farts out and reduce gas pain. Another product that might be vastly helpful. 
     Or Fridet, "the ButtWasher" designed to replace moist towelettes.
     There's more, but you get the picture.  
     They seem to be trying to corner the gross bodily substances market.
     As a fan of products, and marketing, generally, if not these in specific, I had to pass them along, and seek your thoughts. They're sold all over the world, so someone must buy them.
     My errand at Bed, Bath & Beyond, by the way, was to buy special pants hangers for my 20-year-old, who is spending his summer in Washington, D.C. His mom is under the illusion that only the proper hanger stands between him and hanging up the dress pants he needs to wear every day at his internship.  I assured my wife that, considering how his pants end up with the rest of his clothes, in bunched knots piled on the floor of his bedroom, the type of hanger they aren't being hung upon is really not all that significant. Wire hangers will do the job nicely. But she was adamant, insisting that hangers have powers to draw a man to order, to paraphrase Homer.
    The quote, from Book XIX of the The Odyssey, as translated by Robert Fagles, is: "Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin." I've seen it quoted more poetically as "The blade itself incites to deeds of violence," but I'll be damned if I can find which edition that's from. 
     What they mean, in essence, is: the tool encourages the action. So a SnotSucker draws — quite literally — a baby to better breathing. Or so is the theory. Anybody ever use these things? 

"Do you want to die? ... Or do you want to be OK?"

     When this study came out last winter, I began looking for an actual Chicago lawyer who would talk about alcoholism. The fact it's nearly June shows how difficult that was to find. Then again, when I was writing about neckties, it was hard to find a lawyer who'd go on record saying, "I need to wear a necktie in court." I wanted to drive that home in this column but, space being what it is, decided to just let her talk, and not hang in the background, commenting.

     Princeton undergrad. Harvard Law. Partner at a big law firm in Chicago.
     "Theoretically, I'm smart and should know better," Harris said. "It just wasn't the case. It's a disease, unfortunately. My father's side of the family. I just happened to get it."
     The disease is alcoholism, which not only runs in families but in certain professions. Journalism is one, let me assure you. And law is another. A study published earlier this year of 12,825 attorneys by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the American Bar Association found that 20 percent of attorneys engage in "hazardous, harmful and potentially alcohol-dependent drinking." That's one in five, twice the average for people in general.
     "Lawyers are more likely to be problem drinkers," said Patrick Krill, director of the Legal Professionals Program at Hazelden and one of the study authors. "It's a very stressful environment with an abundance of alcohol."
     For Harris, the problem began slowly.
     "I drank moderately at college," she said. "I started as the only African-American woman attorney at the firm, and felt a lot of pressure to succeed. I wanted to fit in. Every Wednesday and Thursday we'd go out for cocktails. It was the culture...."

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Republican Fear Junkies

    Honestly? I'm not afraid of Donald Trump becoming president.
    First, because I do believe Hillary Clinton will win.
    Yes, that might be the dark star of hope, its unseen gravity distorting my judgment and pulling me toward an optimistic conclusion. But so far, as much as the electorate disdains Hillary, they hate Trump more, and with good reason.
    And second, should the United States suffer the ultimate infamy of Donald Trump being elected president, we'll survive it. We survived eight year of George W. Bush, we'd survive Trump too, for a number of reasons.
    A), He's erratic. The Republicans are embracing what he says, now, gingerly, the way you'd hug someone with dirty clothes. By an act of  intellectual gymnastics they forget his saying the opposite, whether years ago or yesterday, and ignore the inescapable reality that Trump could change again and will, as circumstances dictate. So no Wall, no barring Muslims, none of the truly crazy stuff, or not much of it.
    Though that could, again, be hope talking.
     B), what I've dubbed The Curse of the Outsider (op cit, Jane Byrne, Jimmy Carter). You sweep in from nowhere, knowing nothing—and knowing nothing is Trump's modus operandi—and you can't get anything done. Yes, the GOP hierarchy are lining up behind Trump, to their eternal shame.
    John McCain! I still can't get my head around that. McCain endorsed Trump. After Trump insulted him personally, and sneered at all American POWs. I never would have imaged it possible. McCain, and his quisling cast of defeated cowards amble, cringing, onto the Trump stage to join Chris Christie, in his dunce cap and chains. 
      But will they really work hard for his vague platform of ad hoc idiocy? 
      And the Democrats, freed of any lingering requirements of concern for governance by eight years of bitter Republican obscurantism, plus the genuinely vile and impossible programs Trump advocates, not to mention his bullying, my-way-or-the-highway demeanor, and they can sit on their hands and watch, grinning, as Trump tries to enforce his folly.
    C). Have you looked at his face? The strain. The white circles around the eyes. He just doesn't look like a well man. Yes, his keeling over dead sometime in the next six months would be a deus ex machina solution. But God looks kindly upon America. Or did.
     Not to get overly personal and mean, which smacks of Trumpism. I don't wish the man dead, just not living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The toughest challenge, facing him, is not to become like him. Because we lose that game, since he's better at being him than we are. 
     "When fighting monsters," as my favorite Nietszche quote goes, "take care not to become a monster."
     The whole thing does make me very sad, and not just for the Republicans. You have the Bernie Sanders crowd, buying lies as outrageous as Trump's, mirror image promises. Like two halves of a coin, like Raskalnikov and Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment. Sanders and Trump would look trite in fiction (not that Crime and Punishment is trite, but the symbolism would wilt in lesser hands, and whoever is authoring our current farce, it ain't Dostoevsky. Bulgakov maybe.)
     The Sanders supporters are already going all Ralph Nader on us, and daring suggest there is no different between Trump and Clinton.
    They must not have been listening Friday, when Trump said he would end no-gun zones (while standing at the NRA convention, a no-gun zone, which would be staggering hypocrisy if he, you know, cared).
     Clinton, Trump said, slipping into pure hallucination, is hot "to release the violent criminals from jail" while snatching away the guns of law abiding citizens, particularly our blushing, vulnerable daughters and mothers.
     "In trying to overturn the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton is telling everyone— and every woman living in a dangerous community — that she doesn't have the right to defend herself."
     His appeal to female voters, I guess.  
     Meanwhile Clinton sticking to her guns, so to speak, called for the sensible gun safety measures that 92 percent of the country endorse.
    Seems like a difference to me.  
     And it's so astounding -- I'm not scared, I'm amazed -- that even the most rabid gun fan could slurp that up, this wild, obvious pandering. But they do. They're fear junkies. Terror makes their hearts pump, makes them feel alive. They gotta have it to get through their days. It's like they're living in a horror film. They need to rationalize building an armory in their basement, stockpiling food. And with America safe and secure, the economy humming along, well, that's not in the script. So they manufacture this bogeyman. For seven years the quiet, reflective, almost timid Barack Obama, who did utterly nothing regarding guns, was the guy who woke them up at night in a cold sweat. His election and re-election caused a surge in gun sales. And now Hillary Clinton is forced onto that procrustean bed.
    On Saturday, I created the first hashtag I ever made on Twitter—hashtags are ways to organize tweets. It's #GOPFearAddicts. Please feel free, when you find examples of the Republican Party waving lies to terrorize their flock of bleating cowards, to contribute your own. Then I squinted at it, and made it #RepublicanFearJunkies, which is longer, but sounds better. We'll use them both and see which proves more popular. I imagine we'll have quite a collection by November, when Hillary wins. But not without every sane, patriotic American lashing himself or herself to the wheel and fighting to save our country from, if not ruin, then humiliation and insanity.
   

A hot dog and coffee on Touhy....

For those outside the Chicago area: yes, there's a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Niles.

    
     File this one under, "No wonder should go unremarked upon."
     Spent the morning in West Englewood, reporting on a story — we'll get to that next week — finishing up about 12:30 p.m. Time for lunch. I considered a couple Harold's Chicken Shacks; when in Rome... But there wasn't anywhere near by to park, and I just kept driving.
     Somehow, parking a few blocks away and ambling over to get in line and grab lunch in Englewood seemed a Bad Idea. Maybe I was being timid. 
     Hurtling down 95th Street — man it gets suburban fast — I passed countless Burger Kings and McDonalds and Wendys and Popeyes. Never considered those for a second. Not hungry enough for fast food, except of course for White Castle, which are special.  White Castle has a soul.
    But the pair I passed were on the other side of the street, and U turns for Sliders.... I kept going. 
     Onto 294 North. Love that road. Fast. I had an errand in Niles, so got off at Touhy going east. By now I was getting hungry. Papa Chris Place presented itself. It was well after 1 p.m. A hot dog would do the trick. I went in, ordered a char-dog, mustard, grilled onions, and ketchup. They didn't give me grief over the ketchup, not so much as a haughty glance. But that wasn't the wonder.
     Cup of black coffee.
     It was a decent dog, good pile of hot crinkly fries. Ate, checked the morning's email. When I finished, I took my tray to the garbage, fished out the green plastic basket I had thoughtlessly tossed in, after my eyes strayed over the "Don't throw your basket out" sign. Returned the ketchup bottle to the condiments, not far from where a Sun-Times sat ready for the next patron hungry for more than food. Went back to the table, retrieved my white styrofoam cup of coffee, and was leaving. The restaurant is set up so that, to exit the seating area, you have to pass by the counter, and as I did a woman behind the counter called to me, "Can I freshen up your coffee for you?" 
    I hadn't drunk much, maybe an inch worth. Good coffee, but hot, and I was eating. But I set down the cup, lifted off the cover, and she topped it off. 
    I can't remember that ever happening at a hot dog or burger joint, never, not once in my life. It certainly would never happen at a McDonalds. No minimum wage automaton would ever stop a patron going out the door to give him more coffee. That's probably a fireable offense at McDonald's. 
     "Thanks," I said. "This is my first time here. And thanks for subscribing to the Sun-Times." That last part probably sounded crazy and she ignored it, but I was glad they had the paper sitting out on the counter.
     "Come back again," she said.
    A nickel's worth of coffee. But it made me very happy, stepping into the parking lot, to see this sight, the Leaning Tower of Niles.  Not the bonus coffee, of course, but the gesture. A small kindness, a generosity of spirit, manifesting itself in subtle ways. I figured, whatever blurt of good publicity this blog could offer would be an apt way to return the kindness. It's the small things that make life rich. 

"Fourth City" just doesn't sound right

     "Third City." Chicago hasn't quite wrapped its head around that one yet, have we?
     "The Third Coast," yes. Particularly the fine Thomas Dyja history of Chicago of that name. Read it; you'll be glad you did.
     Otherwise, "Third Coast" is a bit shared, a bit greasy, like one of those loaner jackets at a fancy restaurant: too many other folks slip it on for anyone to be comfortable in it. Lots of cities on the Great Lakes use the "Third Coast" moniker. Cleveland has a number of "Third Coast" businesses. Milwaukee too.
     To be honest, Chicago is still leaving claw marks on "Second City." We were second in the United States in population for so long, starting in 1890 and for most of the 20th century, following New York, which was humiliation aplenty. We got used to it, with a little brother swagger. New York was so far ahead, almost triple the population, there was no hope of catching up. So we might as well turn the silver consolation prize into a point of pride.
    Then Los Angeles scooted past us in — wait for it — 1982, which shows you just how hard we cling to former glory. We ignored the shift out of ego and because Los Angeles really isn't a city at all, not a proper one but a vast agglomeration of contiguous places....

To continue reading, click here. 

Never ever gonna golf.

     No, as a matter of fact, I've never golfed, not once in my life.
     Not from any animus. I'm not anti-golf. I have no opinions or emotions about it.
     If you asked me why I have never golfed, I guess the honest answer is that I've never had the opportunity. Nobody ever asked me. My father, a nuclear physicist from the Bronx, never golfed, not once. Nor did I know anybody who golfed. 
     My in-laws did. It seemed a fun, quasi-athletic thing, and did tempt me. Since I've been in suburbia, for the past 15 years, when it got warm I'd promise myself to slide over to whatever that golf course is on Willow Road and take a few lessons. 

    But May would turn into June, and June into July, and I never did it, and this year the intention isn't there. 
     Not that I haven't been on a golf course: I have. A magazine once sent me down to Montego Bay, Jamaica, where I walked 18 holes at Round Hill with Arnold Palmer, interviewing him for a story, or trying to. He wasn't having a very good game; in fact, that might have helped me to never take up the sport, because Arnold Palmer wasn't having fun, and he's really good at it, generally.
     It was a beautiful place, though. Like being in heaven, but with golf.
     Rich people seem to always golf—it's the reward for their lives of success, fame and money. Michael Jordan and whoever's president, tycoons and stars and such. They all love golfing. Which made me a little tempted. Here's something people do hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and I've never done once.
   Well, I did go to miniature golf, which is fun, but also doesn't count. And I seem to remember going to a driving range, some time in the hazy historical past, but my guess is I was no good at all. Should I find myself on a course, I know I'd be horrible, and I can embarrass myself plenty here, in print, without seeking out further embarrassments in the physical world.
    I was prepared to go golfing with my younger son. But he didn't take to it either. Golf camp might have something to do with it. He was maybe seven years old, and we sent him to a five day "Golf Camp" at the Northbrook Park District. I imagine it was two hours of basic golf tips in the morning. 
    At the end of the first day, my wife called me at work. 
    "He's quitting golf camp," she said. "You'll have to call them and get our money back."
    I asked her to wait, let me talk to the lad first. I sat him down and gave him a speech that went something like this: "You can't quit golf camp. First, because it's golf camp. Everything else you do for the rest of your life will be harder than golf camp. If you can't get through golf camp, what will you be able to get through? Second, it's golf camp. It cost $200" (or whatever the figure was). "When you get older, you're going to want us to buy you guitars and automobiles and pay for college tuition, and we're going to say, why should we spend this money when we threw away money on golf camp and you didn't even go? Third, it's golf camp, it's five days long, and I'm making you go through with it."
     That speech worked. Actually, talking out what the problem was worked. It turned out, the instructor, in trying to impress upon the kids how dangerous a driver could be, slammed on forcefully on a fence post, splintering it, and that scared my boy, who was seven, remember. Once we got to that point, he was able to make it through the week.
    But golf never stuck with him, and I can't say I blame him. It must be genetic. 

Filipino president-elect a glimpse of Trump administration

Rodrigo Duterte

     If you're curious what it'll be like to live in a nation led by an erratic demagogue prone to uttering horrible things about women, there is no need to wait until Donald J. Trump is sworn in as president of the United States in January. All we have to do is turn our gaze to the Philippines right now.
     For those not paying attention — and really, we're Americans, we can't keep track of every tinpot territory — 10 days ago the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte, the tough-talking mayor of Davao City, over a field of far more qualified but tainted by association politicians. Think Hillary Clinton's lightweight cousins.
     I hasten to point out that "tinpot" was sarcastic: the Philippines has 103 million people and is the 12th largest nation on earth, its population equal to the United Kingdom and Canada combined.
     Out of sight, out of mind. But believe me, we'll be hearing more of them. Duterte started his campaign by saying how he'd abolish the Filipino Congress and kept voters buzzing with his jaw-dropping remarks, the capstone being how he, as mayor, should have had dibs when Jacqueline Hamill, a 36-year-old Australian missionary, was gang-raped and murdered during a prison riot in 1989.
     "She was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first," he joked, to the laughter of supporters.... "

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"The Ewww Factor"

        The email from yesterday's piece on transgender individuals and bathrooms can be imagined: frightened, ignorant people, prattling on about "God's law," as if any self-respecting deity from any defendable theology would not strike them dead on general principles. just for the offense of uttering His name as a hallelujah chorus for whatever uninformed nonsense they seem determined to uphold. They don't merit reading.
     But I did get one email from a transgender lawyer that included the email she sent me in November, when last I addressed this issue. I re-read it, and thought, offering as it does something too little heard in all this— direct testimony from the people most affected—it would be of interest to you.

Hi Neil,

    I read your column on the transgender controversy at District 211. I found it thought-provoking, as most of your columns are. I did want to share a few thoughts of my own with you.
     One of the difficult things about growing up transgender is what I call the "ewww" factor. Growing up as a boy who acted like a girl caused people in my life, including classmates, to act towards me as though I were "ewwwy". Trans kids are often shunned as "different". Because human beings are social animals, this shunning is very painful and difficult. When the government, itself, however, takes the position that certain kids have to be treated differently from everybody else, the results for those kids are devastating. While I understand that discrimination against black people is different from discrimination against transgender people, I am sure that I do not need to remind you that one of the bases of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a cultural/social study about how black children felt about race, a study that involved children picking out dolls of different races in response to certain questions. It is simply not good or right for the government to tell certain children that they are different from other children and cannot be allowed to join with them as equals.
     Your column quotes Cates ["Inside the Girls' Locker Room," Nov. 5, 2015], the Superintendent of the district as saying, "Measures of privacy allow developing teenagers to choose for themselves whether or not to use privacy areas . . . safeguarding matters for transgender teens we believe will be helpful to students in our locker room." But, of course, Cates is not allowing transgender teens to choose for themselves whether or not to use privacy areas--he is requiring them to use privacy areas and allowing cis-gender kids to "choose for themselves".
     Some girls are born with penises. Some boys are born with vaginas. It is high time we as a society learn to accept that fact. Allowing trans girls into the girls locker room on the same basis as other girls, and allowing trans boys into the boys locker room on the same basis as other boys, does not pose a threat to anybody. And if, as Cates says, the district will allow students to choose for themselves whether to use privacy areas, cis-gender kids who have some (I think irrational) issues with trans kids can themselves use the privacy areas.
     You say that the "fervent desire [of trans girls] to stride easily into the girls' locker room and be welcomed as one of the gang is still, at this cultural moment, constrained if they also possess a penis." I understand that locker room use is different from bathroom use. But for over a year I used women's bathrooms in courthouses all over the Chicago metropolitan area while I still had a penis. No one was embarrassed, inconvenienced, bothered, or hurt. Transgender people are required to live 24/7 as the gender to which they are transitioning for certain periods of time before they can access certain types of transition health care
     I think you could have taken a bolder stand with your column.
     Yours very truly,
     Joanie Rae Wimmer
     Attorney at Law
     Downers Grove, Illinois 

Gut feeling steers you wrong on potty wars

    One evening last summer. Dinner over, darkness settling upon suburbia, the citronella candles flickering. We're sitting around the iron table on our deck with old friends from the city, a couple and their 19-year-old son.

     The lad hunches over his phone, arranging to meet up with a buddy later, and refers to this friend as "them." His mother explains that the friend exists in some zone between the genders and so rejects the prosaic "he" or "she," instead going by the plural, "they."

     Just as I was smirking, thinking how strange this is, no doubt some practice bred in the superrich petri dish of The Latin School — the city kid's alma mater — my older son pipes up that he, too, knows someone from Glenbrook North who goes by "they." Now there's two. Nearly a trend.

      "What's wrong with 'it'?" I ask. "A perfectly good word."

     Harsh, yes, but I was viewing it from a grammarian's point of view. I didn't realize that the American Dialect Society picked "they" as a singular pronoun for the 2015 "Word of the Year"....

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A cold spring

     A Facebook friend posts a video about how the Rothschilds control every central bank in the world. I watch as much as I can stand, a few seconds.
    Not only anti-Semitic crap, but old anti-Semitic crap. That's like floating conspiracy theories about fluoridated water.
    I start to type a reply, get a few letters, then stop.
   Sigh. Erase what I've begun, unfriend the person and move on.
   A few posts down, my attention is caught by a video of an Asian woman dancing vigorously. Harmless stuff, until I eye the comments.

   "This is why The American Empire works so hard to control us, which includes going so far as to install an *african-American*into the white house," Eric Hudson opines. "Because they know that without such controls, Black people will take over the world, just by being ourselves."
     Sigh.

     I almost type, "Take over the world ... by dancing vigorously?"
     But why bother? Why even be part of it? You reach into the cage, more often than not, you draw back a bloody stump. And who's fault is that? Theirs? They obviously have no control over thoughts that border on random hallucination. You do. You have discernment. So discern, goddamn it.
     I'm not the Idiot Police. Can't be the Idiot Police.

    Because there are so many of them
    And only one of me.
    So don't try.
    Not that I'm alone. Lots of sensible people, crossing swords with the army of madmen, like some monster horde in one of those "Lord of the Rings" movies I can't watch because they're just so exquisitely boring. I've fought this fight enough, in the past and, I suppose, again in the future. Retire from the field, for now anyway.
     To tell you the truth, I'm getting tired of Facebook too, tired of the shit that people believe or, worse, don't even believe but are too thick to wonder about, and just pass along because, either way, it's interesting.
     And then there's email.
    "Why should Trump bother releasing his tax returns if media is complicit in the cover up of crimes evident in Obama’s tax returns," something called Orly Taitz—some kind of pun, no doubt—writes. Into the filter with Orly. In doing so, I'm told I have 12 previous emails from him—a patient man, I am. Filter them all. Talk to the hand, Orly.
    It must be Donald Trump. Just watching the Republican Party collapse in front of him last week, a little voice has been whispering, "He's going to win you know."
     The Voice of Doom perhaps.
     Though honestly, even if he doesn't win, the damage is done. Republicans will elbow each other to take the Trump Highway in 2020. And the shame of a major American political party embracing this fraud, this unqualified clown, after hectoring and catcalling Barack Obama for seven years, to roll at the feet of Donald Trump like puppies. You want to vomit. Having watch them be venal hypocrites for decades, I thought I had their measure. But they still have the capacity to astound.
     "6 Corporations Own the Media."
     Jets chasing a UFO.

     Every patriotic fiber in my body says Hillary Clinton is going to win. And then the haters and howlers who have been writhing under Barack Obama can go back to hating and howling. They may even be secretly relieved, to be spared the burden of actually having to try to get something done. I'll sure be relieved when she wins, and not secretly either.

     Until then, well, it's in the 30s today. A cold spring, in more ways than one.