Cops on bikes wall off chaos at Cleveland convention

 

  

     The flood-the-zone technique the police are using to control protest at the Republican National Convention is not without its hazards: I watched how a scuffle that broke out after an attempted flag burning turned into a densely-packed mob scene that might have been more dangerous than the incident that sent scores of cops—and members of the media—running to the same spot. (The would-be flag burner, for fans of divine justice, ended up setting fire to his pants, and 18 were arrested in the resultant scuffle. I did not see the incident itself, so can't judge whether 10 cops would have handled it more easily than 100; my hunch is that more isn't always necessarily better). 

    But in the main, it has been very effective for the first three days of the convention, and watching it in action, I thought I would try to describe what struck me as its most noteworthy feature, the use of bicycles as a crowd-control device.

     CLEVELAND — The Bible Believers are back, standing at the edge of Public Square, haranguing the crowd.
     “Your parents hated you,” screams one, through a megaphone. “They spared the rod! They sent you to public schools! Look at you now! You’re pathetic in the eyes of God!”
     The crowd shouts back, makes obscene gestures, pushes closer for a better look.
     Within minutes, Cleveland police start rolling their bicycles around the speaker and his cohort.
     “Make way, make way,” says one. Soon there are 80 officers with bicycles circling the platform, separating the incendiary group from the rest of the square.
     It’s called the “Barrier Technique” and was pioneered by the Seattle police department, which sent officers to Cleveland to train its 280 bicycle cops. The convention is the first time they’ve used the tactic, to direct marchers, to close off streets, and diffuse angry crowds. If the Republican National Convention’s last day ends as peacefully as the first three, credit will go first to the police — 4,500 from 40 departments across the country, though not Chicago (“They have their own problems to worry about,” quipped one high Cleveland police official).
     But the humble bicycle, skillfully deployed, also deserves praise.
     “Absolutely wonderful,” agrees a Cleveland police officer. “Saved the day.”

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"Father God, Bless Mark and his family...."

     Officer Mark Young and seven fellow officers from the equestrian unit of the Fort Worth Police Department drove with their mounts from Texas to Cleveland this week. As they lined up in front of the Terminal Tower, as part of 4,500 police officers providing security for the Republican National Convention, they were approached by Cathie Burson, of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, a member of Hope Is Here, an organization that brought 100 of the faithful to the convention to pray with people they encounter here. She thanked Off. Young for being here, protecting everybody, and asked if she could pray with him. He said yes.
    "Father God," she began, "bless Mark and his family and all your fellow officers." When she was done praying with him, she asked if there was anything I wanted to pray for. I thought about it, and told her that my mother is worried about me, being in the thick of the protests, and perhaps we could pray for my safety, with her in mind, and we did. It was a nice, quiet moment, and a few minutes later, when I found the Bible Believers in the square, again, spewing their Bible-based poisonous hatred, I was glad I had run into people who were trying to use their faith for good, to aid and comfort humanity instead of harassing it.  Isn't that what religion is supposed to be all about?

"Go back to Latinoland"

     
     I've been writing so much from Cleveland — two columns and a news story just yesterday — that I've fallen behind posting the stories on the blog. This is from the first day, and I wanted to get it up before time and subsequent events mooted it. While many protesters are kids lost in street theater or loons on a lark, I was impressed with this young lady's quiet fortitude and sincerity in the face of the indifference and hostility of those surging past her.

Patricia Eguino 

     CLEVELAND — Patricia Eguino stood near the gates of the Republican National Convention, holding a small white sign with green letters: “Latinos against Trump.”
     “I’m completely against Donald Trump,” said the 27-year-old who was born in New York City but lived in Bolivia and whose parents are Hispanic. “I don’t understand racism.”
     By Monday evening, she had been outside the Quicken Loans Arena, buffeted by passing delegates, for five hours.
     “I wish more Latinos were here, more protestors,” she said. “I feel lonely.”
     But the protesters in the Stop Trump march numbered fewer than 400, not the “nearly 1,000” that organizer Mick Kelly claimed, nor the thousands he predicted earlier. Beside the march, protests tended to be scattered, with the media crowding around the more flamboyant individuals, like performance artist Vermin Supreme, wearing his boot hat and rambling about his pony-based economic system, or a man in a polar bear suit drawing attention to global warming. Far more visible was the massive police presence. Squads of officers from around the country were stationed on every corner, or so it seemed.

     There were certainly protesters to be found at the convention. A “Coalition to Stop Trump” made up of students, Black Lives Matter activists, trade and anti-war protesters marched down East 9th Street to War Memorial Plaza on Monday afternoon, where they were confronted by Christian extremists, who displayed signs condemning gays and Muslims and hurled grotesque, sexually-explicit insults at the crowd. The police quickly moved in, using their bicycles to form a barrier between the groups.
     Eguino, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, wished more of her fellow students had come, but understood why they didn't.
     "They were scared," she said. "Of violence."
     Eguino heard "a lot of racist comments."
     "People told me, 'Go back to Mexico,' 'Go back to Latinoland,'" she said.
     Trump supporters also rallied, and at least one carried a semi-automatic rifle. But their fierce antagonism toward dissent was not in evidence, though in light of the "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" signs plastered on the street, perhaps take that with a grain of salt.
     Jim Gilmore, an author and motivational speaker from Chesterland, Ohio, walked down Euclid Avenue wearing a t-shirt proclaiming "DUMP TRUMP" in big bold letters, but was not harassed by the Trump faithful. He said he wore the shirt more as a lark than a protest against Trump, though he described himself as "a Republican who doesn't like him."
     "It feels like a ghost town," he said. "It's not a vibrant atmosphere."

Protesters don't hate Trump enough to vote for Hillary

 

Tom Moore

      CLEVELAND — The Republican National Convention was about to nominate Donald J. Trump as its candidate for president. So naturally the protesters milling around Public Square had something to say about the party and its champion.
     “I’m here because Donald Trump and the GOP stand for racism misogyny, homophobia, violence,” said Tom Moore, 24, of Massachusetts, holding a handmade cardboard sign reading “GRAND OLD PARTY, SAME OLD KLAN.”
     “Not that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have her own track record with racist violence,” added Moore, who wore a green T-shirt, an orange batik skirt, and combat boots. “Hillary Clinton advocates racist hate, but there’s no one like the GOP.”
     So which one is he going to vote for?
     “I’m going to vote for Jill Stein.”
     The Green Party candidate. But isn’t that just a vote for Donald Trump by proxy?
     “It is a terrible gamble,” he admitted.
     At a colorful mosh pit of belief, where you can't swing a cat and not hit some kind of oddball performance artist, fringe constitutional theorist or foaming religious zealot, perhaps the rarest opinions are proud Hillary Clinton supporters. Those who admit voting for her, maybe, are not exactly gushing with praise.
     Erika Husby, 24, of Chicago, wore a rectangular smock painted with orange bricks and "WALL OFF TRUMP" painted in blue.
     Does this mean she's supporting Clinton?
    "Probably," she said, looking stricken. "I think that I will, sadly and bitterly."
     Oskar Mosco, 35, a rickshaw driver (if such a thing is possible) from Santa Barbara, Calif., held a sign that said, "JUST SAY NO! TO WHITE SUPREMACY."
     "I want to be able to say to my kids and grandkids that I took a stand," he said.
     Does that stand include voting for Clinton?
     "I haven't decided between Dr. Jill Stein and [Libertarian candidate] Gary Johnson," he said, rejecting the idea that it has to be either the Republican or the Democrat or a wasted vote.
     "I don't want to support dualistic thinking," he said. "The world is not black and white. There's gray."
     What's wrong with Hillary Clinton?
     "I think she's a wolf in sheep's clothing," he said. "She's the 1 percent."
     But persistence pays off, and finally I located Haley Corradi, 24, a high school math teacher from Minnesota who held a sign reading "LOVE TRUMPS HATE" across a background of rainbow stripes.
     Was she planning on voting for Hillary Clinton?
     "Definitely," she said, smiling broadly.

Protests, non-voters and a linty-fresh Donald Trump

Sandy Buffie and friend. 

Melissa Brown

     CLEVELAND — No one goes to the 2016 Republican National Convention expecting to encounter a life-size bust of Donald Trump constructed out of 30 gallons of dryer lint held together with two gallons of glue.
     But it makes perfect sense when you do.
     “At the end of the week, I’ll take the best offer,” said the artist who created it, Sandy Buffie, who said that the money will benefit the Center for Arts Inspired Learning, which organizes activities for kids including, aptly enough, an anti-bullying program.
    
     Welcome to Cleveland, where the streets are alive with acres of t-shirts praising the take-it-to-the-bank GOP nominee Donald Trump and castigating his certain opponent, Hillary Clinton, as a hellion who should be in prison: on some shirts, she already is. There are cross-wielding preachers, $1 iced water vendors, 100 Indiana State Troopers in their “Smokey Bear” hats, plus thousands of officers from around the country augmenting Cleveland’s lean force. Delegates in suits, media in shorts and a general funhouse effect, though the city is reacting with pride.
     “You know the convention’s there?” asked Melissa Brown, riding the No. 75 bus toward downtown Cleveland. Assured her new friend did, and asked what she thought of it, Brown, “old enough to know better and young enough to do something about it,” said: “It’s great. You got all political views and bring a little money to the city. Everybody’s happy. It’s a win-win.”
     Not that the hoopla is going to gull her into voting. Brown, who is African-American, isn't supporting either Trump or Hillary Clinton.
"The only way I'd vote is if Jesus Christ put his name on the ballot," she said, explaining that her church, the Church on the Rise in Westlake, is handing out "Elect Jesus" banners.
     Brown exits the bus, gets aboard a red line Rapid Transit train to Tower City, the hectic hub of the convention. She takes a seat behind Mike Tallentire, 27, who works the third shift restocking a Walmart Supercenter in North Olmsted, Ohio. He used his day off to handprint a lengthy statement on a white t-shirt, a quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the need for immigrants to assimilate in this country. Then he headed downtown to attend an America First sponsored by Citizens for Trump.
     "He just seems the lesser of two evils," Tallentire says, doing a balancing gesture with his hands. But as he speaks, he warms to Trump.
     "He's a businessman not a politician," said Tallentire. "So maybe he can do something about the deficit that never seems to go down."
     And the more extreme statements of Trump's, about immigration and such?
     "The media twists his words around."
     Take Ahmer Mohamed, a Cleveland cab driver for 17 years. He's black, and a Muslim, and voting for Trump. That bit about barring Muslims at the border?
     "He's changing his mind," said Mohamed. "He's not against Muslims. He's against enemies. He's said he's sorry. He's OK now. Lot of people have a bad idea, that he's a nasty racist. He's a strong guy."

The circus is in town, and that town is Cleveland

     "There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging," H.L. Mencken wrote in 1924. "It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell — and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."
     Take comfort, then, that the spectacle that will unfold this week in Cleveland is not an unprecedented descent into madness, not a radical departure from the stately decorum we like to imagine our forefathers exhibited when conducting political business. Just the same old craziness in a new box.
     That said, given Donald Trump's genius for attracting the carnival fringes of American life, the Republican National Convention, beginning in Cleveland on Monday, promises to be a circus on an epic scale.
     Ring One is the candidate himself, whose off-the-cuff pronouncements are — take your pick:
     A) a refreshing breeze of candor wafting into our sealed room of political correctness.
     B) terrifying blasts of hate and demagoguery that would tear our nation apart if anyone took them seriously. (Spoiler alert: It's "B.")

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Let it go

     A woman called my office.  From Northbrook. She started by explaining that she had already contacted a local reporter, but the local reporter "wouldn't touch" her story. Now it was my turn. 
     The story involved a minor traffic accident, maybe six months ago. Or longer. Something she had witnessed, perhaps. She was driving, in line to make a left hand turn. A black van, in front of her, pulled back and veered to the right, across traffic. The car in front of that, was a Mercedes. A kid in the passenger seat turned around and looked at her.
     The story pelted me like a sudden rain. When she got home, she heard from the police. She had been reported for leaving the scene of an accident. The driver of the Mercedes thought it was her, and not the black van, that had hit them.  The caller said the police came to her home to see her car was undamaged, but she ended up signing a ticket saying she had failed to reduce speed to avoid an accident. It didn't quite stack up, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Detail piled upon detail. Complaints to the mayor. The chief of police. I was obviously the end of a very long chain of woe.  She wanted to make sure this never happened to anyone ever again. She said that several times.
     I tried to get a word in, but she wasn't having it. 
     This is a story that I call "a dog's breakfast"—a jumbled collection of glop. It would never go in the paper. To do so, I'd have to contact the police, find the other driver, and for what? A traffic ticket that may or may not have been issued fairly. 
     Obviously very important to her, though. I listened. She mentioned a husband—that's good, somebody helping her out, maybe. And a daughter, a cop somewhere else. Also good.
    Eventually I had to break in. 
    "You called me," I interrupted her in mid-sentence. "Don't you want to hear what I have to say?"
     She paused, startled. I told her I didn't think it would ever get into the newspaper, because, while important to her, it wasn't the kind of story that anyone else would be interested in. Even though she thought she was treated very badly by the police.
     "People think it only happens to black people, but it happens to white people too," she said, exaggerating the harm done to her.  In fact, no harm, other than having to hire a lawyer and months of worry, seemed to have happened.
    "How did it end?" I asked. "How did the court case end?"
    The woman she supposedly hit never showed up in court and the case was dismissed.
    Really not a story at all. But something that filled her world. I could see that. I tried to be sympathetic, to not shut her down. 
    I told the woman, she should have her daughter call me.
    "She doesn't want her name in the paper," she said.
    "I'm not putting anything in the paper," I said. "At least not right now. I just want to hear her perspective on this." 
     "She's in Denmark, on vacation," she snapped. 
     "I'm not in any rush," I replied.
     Asking for the daughter seemed to change her tone.
     "I feel like I'm wasting your time and you're wasting my time," she said.
     I agreed, and gave her a piece of parting advice.
    "I can see how this has been a stressful and difficult situation," I said. "But you should let it go now."
     I asked her how long she had lived in Northbrook. She said 30 years. If this is the bad thing that is going to happen in Northbrook, I'd say she's doing pretty well. But it wasn't the only bad thing. There was another misfortune, even greater than this one, and she started in on that.  I won't tell you anything about that, but it was a true tragedy. 
     I told her I was sorry for her troubles and got off the phone. 
    After hanging up, I chewed on what had happened. There was an injustice, in this woman's mind. And she wasn't letting go. Instead, she was living in this bad thing that supposedly happened to her, gnawing on the details, suffering anew each time. Maybe motivated by this actual tragedy that she hadn't let go of either, years ago.  
    Let it go. Easy advice to give. Hard advice to take.  I believe it takes practice, stiff-arming worries and complaints that you'd like to embrace hard and hold onto. Don't. Let it go. Bad things happen to everybody, minor annoyances and great tragedies and yes, sometimes you have to seek elusive justice, and pursue it over the years, and I'm not saying that isn't sometimes important. But the things people cling to are often complaints that will never find resolution. All you can do is put them away, eventually.  Life is precious, and short, and most of us have it pretty good, if you see how other people live, trapped in cages of their own making. Let it go.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I'm traveling today, so I didn't want a fun activity that would be solved too easily, since I can't supervise the contest this morning, and probably won't check in until mid-afternoon (so be nice). 
     Where is this man? Bonus points for who he is, and what he's doing. It isn't simple, but it shouldn't be that hard either. 
     Good luck, have fun, place your guesses below. And the winner gets ... heck, the posters are getting tiresome. How about a copy of "Complete & Utter Failure"? I think that will serve.

Trying to finish their work

     The fearful fascist thrills to terror attacks, such as Thursday night's horror in Nice, France, where nearly 100 Bastille Day revelers were mowed down by a truck. Newt Gingrich was on Fox News immediately, calling for Muslim American citizens to be deported (where?) if they believe in Sharia law. Before 6 a.m. Friday, stuff like this was showing up in my email.

     What do u think Neil now that there is more blood on your hands this morning? Do you get a bonus from President Axelrod or from Stooge Balack Hussein? Since ur on Balacks inside, no pun intended, describe to me Balacks day, would you? I bet he didn't sleep a wink, he was so exhilarated that his religion has killed more innocent people? I picture him having a cafe au lait, playing 2 rounds of golf, he is giddy, smoking 2 joints after, then maybe some French pastries, all while wearing a beret. We gotta get Loretta over there for some serious hugging. That's what the Islamic terrorists need, is big big hugs. As u promote live and understanding and If only Loretta had been around hugging Hitler, maybe you wouldn't be here today? Ever think of that, sellout? —Vince DiBenedetto

     I thought a moment -- there is so little of that nowadays -- and replied like this:

Dear Mr. DiBenedetto:Does it ever occur to you that you are reacting exactly as they intend? It's like you're giving money to ISIS. How does that feel? I can tell you how it looks. Horrible. And you signed your name to it.
Thanks for writing.

     Why is it, when the Western way of life is attacked, that some people respond by trying to abandon the Western way of life? Yes, they're terrifying. But isn't our duty as Americans NOT to be terrified? Not to react blindly in terror, lashing out at each other? Gingrich and his ilk, it's as if they're in league with the terrorists, trying to finish their work.

Picking the wallpaper in Hell

                       

     Mike Pence.
     Ah, hahahahahaha.
     Well, if there is anyone in America still wondering what the 2016 election is all about — and those people seem to exist, though I can't imagine how — Donald Trump's all-but-official choice for vice president, Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, ought to nudge them toward making up their minds.
     Pence is Trump's Christian Soldier, the man Trump hopes will march with him onward to the White House. Pence has called himself "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” The Indiana governor is the guy who last year vigorously defended a state law designed to allow Hoosier businessmen to express their contempt for gays and lesbians, provided they could gin up a religion-based justification. The law's immediate effect was to cost Indiana millions, as large corporations — which have learned the gays-are-employees-and-customers lesson so elusive to Republican leaders — scrambled for the exits.
     Pence also signed one of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the country, one that would force a woman who had an abortion to pick out a little Twinkie-sized mahogany coffin to bury her aborted fetus in or pay for cremation, her choice.
     Mike Pence! Not a lot of ambiguity there. Do I sound gleeful? Honestly, I'm disappointed. I was pulling for Newt Gingrich as the sentimental favorite.

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"Bags?! We don't have BAGS!"

     Authors are often portrayed as being intensely jealous of each other's success, and maybe some are. But I take genuine pleasure in the accomplishments of my writer friends. My former landlady is Carol Weston, the author of the "Ava and Pip" trio of young adult novels, delightfully blending together wordplay and the challenges of growing up. I was thrilled to hear that the three books will be sold bound into one volume at Costco as "The Diaries of Ava Wren."
    Not only is it good for Carol, but good for Costco, which has grown in stature in my eyes. The days when I go there grudgingly, cringing, and think of those space fatties on their scooters in "Wall-E" are long gone. Now I know they've got great salmon, and usually the best prices. 
     Still, Henri Bendel it is not. And when I heard the good news, I couldn't help think of this column from seven years ago, when I juxtaposed the two shopping experiences. 

     Once upon a time, there was a store on North Michigan Avenue called Henri Bendel. It was a fancy New York clothing shop exclusively for ladies, but occasionally I would venture inside to buy a present for my wife.

    A clerk — think Audrey Hepburn — would glide over and ask if I needed help. I certainly did need help, and enjoyed slipping into the role of the Befuddled Male in a Woman's World — think Cary Grant, except without the looks.
     Together we would peer into various display cases, and she would hold up various garments, and I would settle on a purchase. Sure it was expensive, but as I always said, "At Henri Bendel, you pay for the service — the fact they also give you something is just an added bonus."
     All too soon I would be walking out of the store with an elaborately tissue-papered and boxed and gift-wrapped silk scarf or smart little hat, in a little chocolate and white striped bag, delicate as a debutante's purse, which I would proudly parade through the springtime warmth of Michigan Avenue (her birthday is in May, so it was always spring).
     Oh sure, inevitably I had to take the present back — the hat was wrong, or the scarf was wrong, and the whole thing cost far, far too much anyway, in her eyes. But that was OK because I got to return the item, with apologies and smiles and mutual understanding, another little Noel Coward play in the returns department.
     All this remembrance drifted back last week under the high white lights of Costco in Glenview. My wife, also a generous soul, in her fashion, had purchased for me a stylish black Calvin Klein jacket, all wool, a steal at $55.95 But it was too large, and I volunteered to return it and get the size smaller.
     The transaction was handled by a slack-faced clerk who met my attempt at conversation with blank silence. I entered the vast warehouse to try on the jacket in a smaller size. Gazing around — there are no mirrors in a Costco — I waited until a fellow customer came by, a woman pushing one of those immense carts. Again playing the Befuddled Male, I asked her whether this jacket fit. She said yes, but in the mechanical way that hypnotized people speak in movies — "Yehhhhhhhs" -- and without actually looking at me or breaking stride.
     I figured I'll look in a mirror at home.          
     While I was there, I wandered the aisles. Costco might be as familiar to you as your living room, but it's still new to me — someplace I first went to, under protest, five years ago and have been back to maybe once a year since.           

     The land of Brobdingnag, no question — giant jars of mayonnaise, triple boxes of breakfast cereal, tubfuls of apple juice you could bathe in. The deal seems to be: You buy a month's worth of product, we shave 20 percent off the price.
     Fair enough, if you abandon the idea of shopping as a social act. I picked up four cans of shaving cream, shrink-wrapped into a slab, and a few other toiletries, plus a package of socks and the smaller jacket.
     I paid the clerk, who deposited the toiletries and the socks and the jacket into the cart, nudging it past the register. I looked at the items, jumbled in the cart.
     "Could I have a bag please?" I asked.
     "Bags?" the clerk exclaimed, in a tone of surprise and contempt. "Bags! We don't have bags." He looked at me for the first time, as if to see what manner of person was in front of him, this bag-asking man. "We have boxes. Over there."
     It was here that I remembered Henri Bendel — well, right after thinking of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." ("Badges! We don't need no stinkin' badges!")
     I selected a box, emblazoned with "THE FAT BURNING POWER OF CONCENTRATED GREEN TEA EXTRACT," put the stuff into it and, holding the box awkwardly in my arms, headed in shame to the car.
     The jacket fit, but the sleeves were too long, and the seamstress couldn't shorten them. Two days later, I returned to Costco.
     "I remember you from Monday!" I said brightly, to the slack-faced returns lady. She didn't react at all. I proceeded into the store. My wife wanted canola oil.
     I picked up a gallon, and noticed the brand name, "Kirkland Signature." That sounded familiar. Oh yes. But could it be? I hurried to the clothing area. "Kirkland signature" shirts. I looked up. Huge signs at the back: "Kirkland MEATS." "Kirkland BAKERY."
     This seemed so wrong. A feeling akin to horror — like the discovery that Soylent Green is people — crawled over my skin. Shirts produced by an oil company. Hot dogs turned out by a bakery.
     I tried to comfort myself — Trader Joe's brands everything with its name. But "Trader Joe's" is the name of the store. Who or what is "Kirkland"? (The town in Washington, it turns out, where Costco used to be headquartered). Is that supposed to be elegant?
     I bought the Kirkland oil. The snow was blowing horizontally outside, and I got a frozen handful of it slapped into my ear as I quickstepped to the car, wondering: How did that jaunty man in his mid-30s, happily squiring his brown and white striped bag down the Boul Mich in springtime, end up in this wintery parking lot?
     Henri Bendel closed its Michigan Avenue store in 1998.

Justice Ginsburg snaps at the bait

    

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

     I once had an editor who I once described this way: "He's not only timid, but inspires timidity in others."
     That's how leadership works. You act a certain way, and people see it, and follow your example, either because they like your style, or to curry favor, or because your actions, performed by a person in a position of authority, lend them a certain unspoken permission.
     That is what we are seeing with Donald Trump, who has made bullying and personal attack an even more common part of American politics than they already were, which is saying a lot. 

      Not only does every knuckle-dragging hater now feel free to stand up and walk the streets of our social discourse, but you get respected people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, denouncing Trump as a "faker" and worse, an action legal experts consider at best unwise, since it calls her impartiality into question should, say, the 2016 election end up before the high court the way the 2000 election did.
     You can see why it happened. Trump candidacy poses an existential crisis to any patriotic American, and credit must be given to the Bushes, Mitt Romney, Dan Webb, and other rock-ribbed Republicans who also denounced him, and went on record that they just could not support Trump, no matter what the GOP did. Ginsburg also felt she had to denounce Trump as the looming disaster he without question is.
     Of course, once you do that, you're playing Trump's game. He immediately attacked Ginsburg as a "a disgrace to the Court" and demanded that she resign.
     "It's so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that," Trump continued, and we know we have strayed into a particularly surreal realm when Trump is delivering lectures on dignity. Does anyone doubt how he'd react had Ginsburg instead praised him? Support for Trump is the measure of all things: those in his corner are winners, those opposed, losers. That is his value system. Whether it becomes our nation's too, well, that is what this struggle is all about. 

It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup

Barbara Kruger installation, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

     Being mathematically inclined is considered a good thing. But I'm not so sure. Spend time on Facebook and a ready grasp of numbers can be the bell clanging dully at train crossings. An annoying warning of limited practical use.
     I was scanning the posts of my Facebook friends, just seeing what is on people's minds for want of a better word. There was a photo of that $100 million Noah's Ark Ken Ham has built near his Creation Museum in Kentucky, along with the observation that the money could have been used to "buy a house and a car for every homeless person in Kentucky."
     The dull clang started up. I sighed and slid over to Google. There are an estimated 30,000 homeless people in Kentucky, a state of 4.4 million. About one in 150 persons. Sounds right.
Divide $100 million by 30,000 and you get $3,333. Not bad, but not enough to buy a house and a car — even in Kentucky.
     I shared that thought on Facebook and turned off the post's notifications, not wanting to be drawn into conversation about how many cars/houses one Ark replica could buy. Even to make the suggestion shows, not only innumeracy but a category error, a fundamental misunderstanding about why the Ark was built. It isn't as if Ham was rooting around for some way to help the people of Kentucky and thought, "Not low-income housing . . . an Ark! That's it! For when the Flood comes!" It's a profit-making tourist attraction — $40 a pop for adults, $28 for the kiddies. To suggest Ham should have done otherwise is like saying Walt Disney could have used the cash spent on "Dumbo" to support actual elephants instead. Yeah, sure, had his goal been helping elephants. But it wasn't. He was making a cartoon.

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Is this too strong for you?

"Venus of the Rags," by Michelangelo Pistoletto

     My mother reads this blog, faithfully. Which has never caused me a moment's embarrassment. Until, well, maybe today. Let's just say, Mom, you might want to skip this one. Agreed? Can we both agree on that? Good. Thanks. It'll make our conversation this afternoon just that much easier.  Besides, it's all about Samuel Johnson. Dull, Georgian stuff. Nothing of interest for mothers here.
     Right ... so, waiting for Mom to push away from the computer ... there ... done. Excellent. Bye Mom. Love you.

     As a fan of Samuel Johnson, I was of course delighted that my favorite magazine, The Economist, named its newest column after the Great Cham of Literature. (The Economist, while sharp and of-the-moment in every other regard, embraces the quaint old- school notion of not using reporters' bylines. The idea being, I suppose, that the newspaper—they call themselves a "newspaper" because magazines are so, I don't know, tawdry—speaks with a unified voice. So its columnists have noms de guerre like "Lexington" and "Bagehot" and "Buttonwood.")
     This Johnson entry on cuss words (I thought it was recent when I read it, but it's from 2015, a hazard of encountering material online) touched upon a subject near to the hearts of all of us working here at everygoddamnday.com. Almost immediately, Johnson deems "God damn" as "too strong for American ears." That might explain the mass of readers who haven't been showing up here.
    Not really. To be honest, it probably isn't the blog name.  Very few readers have complained over the past three years—a handful, hard though that may be to believe.  Credit the portmanteau with a lower-case "g" — "goddamn" — as opposed to "God damn." Makes all the difference in the world. Plus the blog is protected by an iron-ribbed pre-emptive putdown of those who might dare to blush at its name.
    While excellently written, The Economist, like all journalism, is not infallible, nor do its columnists have space to explore every tangent. What the Johnson column left out was the idea of context. "Fuck" still shocks on network television, or what's left of it, but is a staple of cable and of course online. I ran into ... (umm Mom, I thought we agreed this isn't interesting for you. Besides, isn't that the doorbell? I believe it is. The neighbor ... with muffins. Hot blueberry muffins. Or maybe that's Dad calling you. Either way, perhaps you should leave off reading at this point, and go have some tea, and we'll both be more comfortable ... truly) ... Hera Lindsay Bird's delightfully dirty new poem, "Keats is Dead so Fuck me From Behind," in two very different places on Twitter within the span of an hour Monday: one, the feed of Gili Bar-Hillel, a translator of Hebrew children's books, who accused me of being sarcastic about a bookstore (I like to see who I'm sparing with) and the second on the feed of Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine (I'd say we're due for the issue on "Fresh Voices from New Zealand," where Bird is safely tucked, for the moment). The wheels come off the poem a bit toward the end, but credit her with the best use of "fuck" in the opening line of a poem since Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse," 
     Where was I? Bad words. "Nigger" is unacceptable in most polite society, but tossed about freely by African-Americans when among themselves, and by the occasional blogger, holding his breath and wondering how it'll fly. And "God damn," while perhaps not showing up in the State of the Union anytime soon, skates by in the general filth and irrelevance of the online world. 
    Or so it seems to me.
    And Mom, really. I'm surprised at you. We'll discuss it later.

How the story ends depends on how it begins

     A neighbor—older, meticulous, German—was explaining to me how he takes plastic bags of dog excrement and flings them over his well-tended hedge into the street.
     The street we both share. Our street.
     He was indignant, almost proud.
     Of course there was more to it. The conversation had been about dogs—mine was in tow—and he told me that some people hurl their poop bags into his yard. So he hurls it right back.
     I walked away thinking, "Framing." How you begin the story determines how it ends. You include the provocation, and the reaction seems justified. Leave it out, and he becomes the jerk, throwing dog shit into the street. Which is true? Maybe both.
     We see this constantly. In his mind, Micah Johnson wasn't firing blindly at innocent police officers, Instead—again in his own mind—he was reacting to the Black Lives Matter movement, which keeps its view tight on those jumpy videos of cops shooting innocent folks. The cops meanwhile widen the frame, to include the violent neighborhoods they patrol, and wonder why everyone else doesn't.
     "Why are we just focusing on the very very small percentage of all interactions with police officers that go bad?" a reader wrote Saturday. "Why don't we start a movement that focuses on all black lives that tragically end? Lets go to the Southside and Westside and protest the shooting of all those young blacks by mostly other blacks....Can a liberal Democrat answer this question please?"

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Create your own reality

     The headlines Sunday morning were filled with tales of anxiety. "AMERICA GRIEVES, TENSE AND WARY," the New York Times announced across its front page. 
     Maybe so. It seemed a good time to escape to the Chicago Botanic Garden where nature is, as always, just nature. We must not have been alone in this impulse, because it was about as crowded as we've ever seen it: part the perfect summer day, part the dire news, perhaps, part both a lily exhibit and a pepper festival going on at the same time.
    As always the Garden was a slice of heaven, and not just for the plants. People of all ages, races, languages. "I'm not sure what that is—Romanian?" I whispered to my wife as we passed some murmuring Eastern European tongue. Lots of Russian, of Japanese. Babies in carriages, old folks in wheelchairs. A white, grandfatherly sort with white hair put a loving arm around an African-American boy, maybe 12, in a bright green soccer uniform and they ambled, talking. My fingers itched to whip out my iPhone and take a picture, but I decided not to intrude. Maybe taking an hour like this, to get away, is just another example of White Privilege. If it is, so be it, it was my privilege to take it and I am not ashamed to do so. This is how the world should be for everyone, how it could be, if we'd only let it

"Red Hot" variety lily. 

The Tea Party's man feints to the Left.

     To be honest, I did not know former Congressman Joe Walsh had a radio show, and never would have thought of him again for the rest of my life had not he posted a particularly brainless tweet in the wake of the Dallas police shootings, seeming to threaten the president and declaring a state of "war." 
    I remembered vaguely meeting him in a coffee shop four years ago, and thought it would be diverting on a Sunday to dig that column out. My apologies if it's overkill — with the way the news is going, I'll have some new horror to react to by this afternoon.
    Until then, notice how he blames the abortion issue on liberals, as if the Right trying to strip away reproductive rights from women were a Democratic plot. The general sense of squishiness and blame-shifting should be reminiscent of another Republican flash-in-the-pan currently enjoying his moment on the stage. 

     Rep. Joe Walsh is a charming man. Big, handsome smile, generous (at least to me), Walsh (R-8th) insists on paying for our drinks at the Starbucks on Delaware.
     And he has moxie ­— after I wrote a column about breakfast with Sen. Dick Durbin, Walsh was the lone politician to suggest the same.
     I will admit, meeting the Tea Party's darling was not high on my agenda. What the Tea Party represents — tear down the government out of an exaggerated concern for the deficit, oppress immigrants under the fig leaf of illegality, and in general try to drag the country back to a past that wasn't all that great the first time — is anathema to me. But why not talk?
     "Awfully nice of you!" he exudes.
     The Tea Party movement . . .
     "Here's the deal. There's such a misunderstanding of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement is a good thing only in that it has gotten the country talking again."
     Walsh talks fast, and it takes a moment for the "only" in the above to register.
     "No," he corrects himself. "I mean it's a better thing than that. The country is going through a revolution. What I mean by that is we're having a grand debate and an argument and a fight about our core principles."
     Reagan's epiphany was: Starve the government so we can cut these programs we hate that serve people we hate. That's what's happening.
     "What you and I both know is we've got 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day. And they're not living until they're 63, they're living until they're 93. Politicians in both parties have been scared to frickin' death about how to pay for all that health care."
     What would be a fair amount to pay? What would be fair for Joe Walsh to pay in taxes?
     "I wanna say 'Yes, we should pay something.' I want a safety net, especially when it comes to health care."
     The question is, who pays for it?
     "If we don't figure that out, we're sunk financially. Come home from Afghanistan tomorrow. Get rid of the oil subsidies. Do all this stuff that I want to do and liberals want to do and it won't solve the debt problem. The biggest, fastest-growing piece of our budget is health-care costs for our aging population. Democrats don't want to touch it. They're scared to death. So here come Republicans."
     When it comes to women, suddenly you want an active government prying into citizens' lives.
     "The Tea Party movement, all we talk about, all we've focused on is the growth of government, all this spending, all this debt, and to a smaller degree our loss of perceived freedoms. I don't think we've been asked four times in the past two years about abortion."
     But it keeps coming up.
     "The other side's bringing it up. It's how they succeed, they think."
     Does that explain immigration, too? Because I seem to recall a lot of immigration talk at rallies.
     "I don't want to have a discussion what to do with 12 to 14 million living here until the government does the one thing it should do: Secure the border. You gotta stop the spigot. Right now, it's illegal to come over the border. I'm a limited-government guy, but use every resource we've got."
     Is it worth it? You're expending resources trying to stop something that's good for the U.S.
     He chewed on that. "You probably want the government to do a bit more than I do," he finally said. "One thing I want the government to do is enforce its laws. If it's not going to enforce its laws, it should change its laws."
     But wouldn't that be "amnesty"?
     "I hear what you're saying. I don't want my government to incentivize behavior."
     Such as by permitting of gay marriage?
     "I don't want my society recognizing any forms of marriage except for heterosexual marriage. End of story."
     Why?
     "I want my government acknowledging the best, most unique way for kids to grow up is through a two-person heterosexual marriage."
     What's that based on? Studies?
     "God yes!" he said, poking my arm — he does that a lot, driving his point home. "A man and woman! There are studies that show, when it comes to crime, education, drug use . . ."
     What studies? That just isn't true.
     "I will feed you studies. But the Tea Party doesn't talk about this. I've talked about this twice. Nobody talks about abortion. The Tea Party is 99 percent focused on the economic."
     It's been a week and I'm still waiting for those studies, which don't exist. Walsh is very dynamic. He believes — using facts if they're there, emotion and sleight of hand if they're not.
     "There's this notion that the Tea Party, we're these crazy cave men," he said. "All I'm trying to do is get us back to what I think this country was founded upon."
     I think it was founded upon life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet some people's happiness doesn't seem to count for much.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 12, 2012

Joe Walsh is an idiot

    Is there any situation that Joe Walsh can't make worse? As the nation reeled from the murders of five policemen in Dallas Thursday night, Walsh popped up on Twitter, blaming Obama and urging that he be ... what exactly? "This is now war." Here's the Tweet. 

     He does know that Obama has already served out his two terms, mostly, and won't be running again? Maybe he doesn't. Speculating on what Joe Walsh does or doesn't know is an endless task. Like plumbing the depth of a bottomless well.

     I remembered having coffee with Walsh when he last ran in 2012—I actually try to be open to the other side and listen to what they have to say, talk about thankless tasks. I'll post that chestnut tomorrow. 

    In the meantime, as an appetizer, the last time Walsh appeared in my column, from November four years ago.  Note the helpful, ignored advice to the GOP in the second graph. They can't say they weren't warned about how to avoid their current disaster. Judging by the tone, the presidential ballots were still being counted, but it was clear that Walsh was toast. I was a little giddy, thinking we were rid of him. But like a bad penny, he keeps coming back:

     Maybe this is like one of those Christmas movies where everybody gets a second chance to relive their botched lives, doing it right this time. Maybe Barack Obama will pull it out, and get that shiny new second term he always wanted, a true holiday miracle, freed of the political fetters that hobbled him from doing all he said he dreamed to do for the country.
     Maybe the Republican Party will awake from its long night of obstruction and pandering to its radical fringe. Maybe they'll announce themselves changed men and give Bob Cratchit that big raise and realize the government is supposed to do more than provide grim workhouses to punish the poor.
     And Joe Walsh lost. That can't be stressed enough. Joe Walsh, Tea Party bigmouth, magically removed from the Illinois political scene, at least for now. Picture Walsh the size of a bundled baby, his howling face red, as Robbie Gould drop-kicks him into the oblivion he so richly deserves. Buh-bye Joe, say hello to Alan Keyes and Jim Oberweis for me when you get there.
     Cue the puffy snowflakes, up with jingling bells, cut to young Natalie Wood, home at last. Christmas came early this year.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 2012

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

        When I was in junior high school, I was a member of the Roehm Junior High School fossil club, that had wonderful golden yellow sweatshirts emblazoned with one of these friendly fellows and the slogan, "Friends of the Trilobite." We would go fossil hunting at the shale fields in Sylvania, Ohio. I never found one—I remember digging up a pathetic fragment, that's it. As an adult, I broke down and bought one, which seemed a kind of surrender.
    I'm not sure of the allure. I imagine I thought they looked cool. I certainly was very proud of my Estwing fossil hammer.
    Trilobites—the great, great, great-great-great (add a few hundred more "greats" here and you'll still fall short) grandfather of horseshoe crabs.  They scooted around the bottom of the sea starting about 500 million years ago, in the Pre-Cambrian era, and not petering out until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian. So humanity is going to have to do a lot better if we hope to touch their record. 
     What was their secret? Difficult to say. I'd guess at no religion or weapons, but can't be certain. There are without question 17,000 known species of trilobites, so they were working the diversity thing, big time. Something we might want to think about. Organisms with only a single variety tend not to endure, and I don't mean that as a slam at ginkgo biloba trees, which as you know is alone in its own division, class, genus, order and species, yes somehow managed to hang around for the past 270 million years (going back coincidentally, to the time of the trilobites).
     But enough paleontology. I'll draw your attention to the tableau below. 
     Where is this singular place? A bit off the beaten track, but maybe you've been there.  I'll give you a hint: it's not in a museum, meaning those of you who guess, "Field Museum" will out yourselves for not reading thoroughly (or out me for having bored you with all this trilobite crap).
     Place your guesses below. The winner, as always, gets one of my blog posters—I'll let you chose the year. Please don't guess if you're already been successful before, Tate. Good luck.

Dallas

Brent Thompson, one of the officers slain in Dallas.

     In the 1980s, when such things were still possible, I spent a Christmas Eve riding along with two Chicago cops in the 2nd District—the area around 51st and Wentworth. The central memory of that night is that I was scared—particularly charging up the darkened stairway of a six-flat—and I was with two cops.
     Police have hard jobs—that doesn't get said enough, because it's obvious, and because it's beside the point in the steady drip-drip-drip of abuse-of-authority cases we see in Chicago and across the country. When innocent black people are being murdered on camera by police, the fact that most officers are doing their duty somewhere else isn't particularly relevant.
     The difficulties police face is a fact we only only acknowledge when something like Dallas happens, when officers are killed in the line of duty and suddenly their perspective snaps into view—it's a job that can get you killed if you're not careful and sometimes even when you are careful.
     It is a truly shocking crime, because it cuts at a basic assumption in American life: respect for the police. The officers themselves decry criticisms that are leveled them, with increasing volume and frequency, thanks to the undeniable evidence of cell phone video technology. They consider themselves misunderstood, victims. What they don't realize is that these criticisms stem from disappointment: we expect the police to be heroes, we want them to be heroes, to do the right thing. And they usually are. But they are also human, and mistakes happen. Even those police who are caught on camera shooting people without justification are not, I believe, acting out of racism so much as out of fear. They're trying to get home at the end of their shift, and they know—unlike the public, they don't have the luxury of being able to forget—that not everyone does. Or they're hopped up from whatever chase or scuffle happened before the camera was trained in their direction, and they do the wrong thing.
     Or, sometimes, they're poorly trained or aggressive jerks. There's that too. This tragedy does not erase the dire situation we have with police and minorities in this country. It only adds a new chapter.
     The situation is still the same. Police have more power and authority than other people—they enforce the law. More so, they embody it, and if they feel they are being held to a higher standard, they are. That's what they signed up for. What we need to understand is that we are all, cops and civilians, facing the same problem here: how to combat crime without hurting either innocent people or police officers. Right now, decency requires we honor these fallen officers and their grieving families—look at Brent Thompson's face. A father and grandfather, he just looks like a good guy, and deserved to go home Thursday night, not to the morgue. Think of him, and his four other slain brothers in blue, and remember the debt that society owes to its heroes. They died trying to keep their city safe. Our thorny law and order problems will be right where we left them, waiting for us, when we're through.   Already, the various factions are trying to twist this horror to their benefit, with union officials claiming, incorrectly, that this is an outgrowth of disrespect for police, while critics observe that the shoe is on the other foot. That helps no one. What would help, if we could muster the strength to do it, is if we could only realize that, police and civilians, black and white, are all in this together, bound by a common humanity and citizenship in this great country of ours. We will all succeed or fail, live or die, together. When will we understand that? Not anytime soon.

Now covering knitting and yarn crafts

     So the year is half over, and like me, you're wondering how the knitting vogues that were ballyhooed at the start of 2016 are faring. You remember when Skeinoblog laid out its "Knitting Trends 2016: What's Hot This Year"? Just how popular were these new "super-bulky yarns" anyway?
      "Hand-knitting follows the fashion industry," said Cindy Cooper, owner of Elemental Yarns in Plainfield. "Yeah, we have some super-bulkies. But a lot of the influence comes from television shows, like 'Game of Thrones.'"
     Then there's the issue of sustainability, which...
     Okay, so I can't really devote my entire column to knitting. Believe me, I was tempted. At least I had the thought: I could be the knitting reporter, covering the yarn arts beat. As the presidential campaign veers deeper into farce, a bone deep revulsion sets in at the prospect of reaching my hands into the mess and trying to arrange its gloppy, putrid contents into some kind of order. Knitting seems so pleasant by comparison.
     On Saturday, Donald Trump retweeted a white supremacist graphic that shows Hillary Clinton against a sea of money and a Jewish Star. He does that a lot—tweets neo-Nazi tropes to his 9.5 million followers. That's why they love him. Well that, and his slurs against racial and religious groups.

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Storm coming

Storm approaching O'Fallon, Illinois, by Evie Levine

   
     Years ago, when my column took up a full page and I ran a jokes at the end, sent in by readers, I received a chuckle from someone who identified himself as a "nephrologist." 
     I quickly checked the dictionary, and was charmed to discover, I thought, that this meant he makes his living studying clouds. I was compelled to ask him about it, and he set me straight. A nephrologist is a kidney specialist.  
     Oh. Not "nephologist"—one who studies clouds.
     That's life. You think you've got someone dreamily gazing at the heavens but, on second glance, it's another wage slave poking into somebody's lower back.
     Yet there are a few of us who make our living thanks to clouds. In May, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a charming article on the wonderfully-named Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the equally-delightful Cloud Appreciation Society.  I haven't joined yet only because I can't decide if membership is quaint or strange.
     What is it with clouds? In the photograph above, snapped Wednesday morning by my cousin, Evie Levine, there are the appealingly weathered farm buildings. And the windblown, bright green mid-summer corn, with its yellow tops. But it's the cumulonimbus clouds, low, grey, louring, that make the picture sing, that adds the drama. 
     Maybe the allure is that clouds can alternate between being so placid and puffy, white, motionless, floating above us, then suddenly turn turbulent and roiling, dark, threatening. Maybe that's why they're so fascinating. Or maybe because while they look like they're floating, they're actually falling, at a rate of about eight feet a minute, according to my 1926 copy of "Fogs and Clouds" by W.J. Humphreys, which has been sitting on the shelf for years, just waiting for this moment.
    Maybe that's it—placid and turbulent, both aloft and descending. They're just like people.