Freedom from Fear

Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Fear."

     When the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, 15 years ago, my boys were 4 and 5 years old, and it was natural that I'd view the event through my feelings for them. The month wasn't out, and the country was debating what to do. If you've forgotten how we ended up in a land war in Afghanistan, this column from the end of September, 2001 will help remind you of  the thinking at the time—the World War II mentality is significant. We make mistakes because we're always fighting the last war instead of the next one. I can't say I'm proud of being swept up in the passions of the day. Still, despite the saber-rattling, I did manage to nail one truth: "This is  war against Fear."

     On the day the unimaginable became real, late in the evening, after hours of drop-jawed TV watching, keyboard pounding and simple shock, I ended up, as always, with my wife, standing in my boys' bedrooms, watching them sleep.
     I said, as always, "I'm going to check on the boys," though, in truth, they never need checking. They're always there, always sleeping, in a pile of toys, their breath slow and measured, their relaxed faces the faces of angels.
     The truth is, I'm not checking for their benefit, but for mine. To deliver a kiss that isn't squirmed against. To reassure myself, before I go to sleep, that they're still there, right where they belong. The same way that, if somebody gave you a chest of gold and you stashed it in your closet, next to your shoes, you'd probably stick your head in to take a peek at it from time to time, just to make sure.
     On the evening of the day the unimaginable became real, the contrast of those familiar, peaceful rooms--the reassuring night lights, the sock monkey, the guardian Pinocchio--with the mind-warping horror of the day, the heart-crushing thought of all those lost sons and lost daughters, lost mothers and lost fathers, conjured up, for me, a memory of a painting by Norman Rockwell called "Freedom from Fear."
     It was part of a series of paintings called "The Four Freedoms,'' inspired by a speech that Franklin Roosevelt gave trying to put steel in the spine of a nation quavering before a world gone mad with terror.
     It was January 1941. The Nazis had rolled over Europe and were battering at Britain. Japan was gobbling up its neighbors. In America, the isolationists were arguing that the fight wasn't our fight. Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters were practically flinging kisses across the Atlantic at Hitler, convinced that the world would be better under Fascist domination.
     Roosevelt set out to explain to Americans why they had a stake and why they needed to be ready. He said "It is immature—and, incidentally, untrue—for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world." He set out exactly what cherished rights we stood to lose: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear.

     Norman Rockwell responded with a series of paintings. You might recall the most famous of the four, "Freedom from Want," which shows the happiest family ever recorded in the history of art, abuzz as a gigantic, golden brown turkey is set before them.
     "Freedom from Fear" isn't quite as memorable. Just a simple scene--a mom and dad tucking in a pair of kids. You really need to read the headline on the newspaper in the dad's hand to grasp what is going on. The headline reads, "Bombing Kills/Horror Hits."

    I never realized what it felt like to be the bulwark between a terrifying world and your children. It made me realize what we have riding on this. Parents stand between their children and the grim reality of the world, or try to. But there is only so much we can do, and there comes a point--now--when you have to say a prayer and hope your leaders do the right thing, whatever that might be.
     This is a war against Fear. Those who are trying to portray the pending military action as a crusade against Islam, a racial war or a conquest of Afghanistan are missing the point. Race is not a factor, religion is not a factor. If Timothy McVeigh and his band of losers were holed up in Idaho, we'd go into Idaho and get them, and if the state government there tried to stop us, we'd get them too.
     When battle comes, it will have one goal—to reduce the certainty that more children, more parents, more friends will suffer the kind of anguish that people all across the world suffered last week and are suffering still.
     If you can't support that, then what can you support? If you are so doubtful of your right to exist that you can't imagine fighting for it, if you pause from rolling in unworthiness at the feet of chickens to take this grave moment and stand up and declare that America doesn't have the right to protect itself because we eat meat or support the ACLU or have not always acted nobly as a nation, then I say, "The hell with you." We'll win this victory without you, and you can go sit in the corner of history along with Lindbergh and Chamberlain and all the other quislings and appeasers.
     It astounds me that people could preach inaction at a time like this. That, like Lindbergh, they could put their faith in the ultimate goodness of those itching to murder us. To suggest that we should kneel before them and call upon their scant mercy.
      I am not a hater. I feel sympathy not just for my kids, but for all kids, all people, all those sitting placidly beside their yurts in Afghanistan, or wherever, all who will be caught up in the crossfire, and I wish they didn't have to die. I wish they'd abandon their murderous—and ultimately suicidal—hate for us. But I doubt they will.
      Inaction would only encourage more destruction in the future. And no encouragement is necessary. The terrorists are no doubt thrilled by their recent success and inspired to more. They can hardly wait, and it will take boldness and vigor on our part to stop them. We are, as in World War II, coming late to the game, late to a fight the world has already been battling, and will have to make up lost ground.
     Every evening since the day the unimaginable became real, I stand over my sleeping boys and fear they'll be caught up in the Great Anthrax Release of 2005 or take a mortar round in a trench in Central Asia in 2015. But I'll be honest. I don't fear that much. Because I know that we live in a great country, a powerful country. If we could be attacked by the Axis, unprepared, and turn around and whup 'em, then how can we not be up to this task? This country, as Roosevelt said in his Four Freedoms speech, is "soft-hearted but cannot afford to be soft-headed." We dropped our guard, yes, we drifted into a false sense of security—a peace-loving nation will do that. Becoming complacent was a mistake. But we are not complacent now.
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 2001

Yellow plastic flowers.

     A woman was hit by a train and killed a block from my house Thursday evening. The idea that something had happened presented itself in the form of police lights, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, to the left, as I sat in the van at Walters and First Street, waiting to turn left about 4:25 p.m.. So I turned right instead, to get away from the commotion.
     "Probably a broken crossing gate," I explained to my passenger, as we proceeded on our way. But there was that helicopter, which suggested something more dire. Later my wife, who heard the news from neighbors, who find out these things instantly, told me a few details: a woman had been hit by the train and killed.
     The first question I had was not whether she was old or young, whether she was somebody I knew or not—odds are she wasn't, as I don't know many people. The first question I had was whether it was an accident or suicide.
    Why that question? What doest it matter, to me, a stranger? I suppose as somebody who rides the train regularly, who almost daily crosses the tracks, walking the dog, doing errands, and watches how careless people are around the trains, surging around the lowered gates, blundering along with their eyes locked on their cell phones, I was looking for a data point to use to bolster my conviction that people don't understand the peril that the trains represent. A cold reaction.
     I never -- I realize only now, writing this -- thought, "Oh the poor woman!" Someone being killed horribly, pulverized by a train, a couple hundred feet or so from my front door. Is that a lack of sympathy on my part? A hundred and seventy-five thousand people die every day in the world; you can't ache for them all, and why does a death localized to my neighborhood elevate it to realm of something to be cared about?
     On Friday, getting off the train after arriving back mid-day from the city, I noticed this little bouquet of plastic flowers, to the right, and walked over. A cross of votive candles, a small ceramic cross. This must be the spot. Not where people usually wait. Evidence of suicide; a person would come here, a little away from where people wait on the platform, to do the awful deed. 
    An old, Biblical notion, of spots being cursed or blessed. I stood there, and tried to feel whether grim death clung around this spot. It didn't. I wondered whether the loss of life—the night before—somehow changed or sanctified it. It really didn't, in my eyes. The shrine might grow, but knowing Metra they would sweep it away in good time, and that would be that. Walking the block home, I speculated on the details of the woman. How old? Forties? No. Thirty-seven, I decided, based on the Marianne Faithful song, "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," about a woman who kills herself. "At the age of 37, she realized she'd never ride through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair."
     Is that a reason to kill yourself? Is anything? What the world would be like if every spot where someone had died? Permanently marked, a landscape dotted with pots of plastic yellow flowers, sitting on curbs and night tables. We would get used to it, I suppose. Death is after all a part of life, the end that awaits us all.  A thought that weighs lightly when the latest to join the rolls of the vanished is someone you do not know. This time. 

    Postscript
    The Tribune reported that a 39-year-old Northbrook resident had stepped in front of the train deliberately, according to witnesses, about 4 p.m.  Thursday.

Thanks Ganesh.

     Yes, I'm an agnostic who never believed in God for a second.
     But I'm still human.
     So for some reason — some kink in the neural network — this thousand-year-old Indonesian statue of the Hindu god Ganesh cuts through my wall of spiritual cynicism. 
    Actually, I know the reason. It is because Ganesh is described as, "Remover of Obstacles."
    Who doesn't want to embrace that? Particularly when the entity ballyhooed with this obstacle-removing ability is so placid, so centered, so elephantine. 
     So when I pass, hurrying through the ground floor of the Art Institute, to the modern art wing perhaps, I usually pause, stand before the innocent millennium-old lump of sandstone and say, "Please Ganesh..." and usually some plea involved with the writing, publication, sale or promotion of books, an endeavor just chocked with obstacles. 
     I figure, it couldn't hurt. And Ganesh, to his — her? its? — credit, never explains to me why whatever it is I'm hoping for won't come true. 
     Thursday night, my new book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise" was launched at the Poetry Foundation. My wife was there, and my brother Sam. My co-author, Sara Bader, and my agent, Susan Raihofer, of the mighty David Black Literary Agency, both flew in from New York.   Kind friends agreed to read with me — Rick Kogan, Carol Marin and Bill Savage. Plus many old friends took the time to come, such as Cate Plys and her husband Ron Garzoto, and Kier Strejcek, from Northwestern, and Magda Krance, from the Lyric Opera, and the great Ed McElroy, and the good folks from the University of Chicago Press, and many more, all joining a standing room only crowd of enthusiastic readers. 
     I can't say for certain if it was those passing prayers to Ganesh that made it all happen — actually that was Steve Young and the fine folk at the Poetry Foundation. But I can't say that the great stone god didn't help in some abstract way beyond reasoning.  Thanks Ganesh.

Did I really see this sign?

     There's always a way out. You can question the science: science has historically been wrong; maybe it's wrong now. Happens.

     You can question the source: she lied once about A, years ago; maybe she's lying now about B. Possible.

     You can question the medium, the publication or web site or network that the source and the science are conveyed in. That darn liberal media. They skew and spin and dance to the music wafting out of hell. They have an "agenda" — everyone has an agenda, including PTA meetings. But somehow, just calling it an "agenda" makes it somehow suspect.
     Fox News — the top cable station — and the Wall Street Journal, the top circulation paper, and the Drudge Report and Breitbart and the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller and on and on? The rebel alliance. A small band of heroes, facing off against the massive might of The Atlantic.

     The bottom line is nobody believes anything they don't want to believe. No matter the facts. No matter the sources. No matter the media. We all vanish in the comforting soft fog of our own convictions, our familiar opinions. I happen to think mine are right. But then who doesn't? 

    The mists of certainty, of self-regard, of outrage, gather around us, so thick, we don't see each other anymore. We can barely see our own hands in front of our faces, so we go with the hand and discard the rest. It seems a recipe for destruction, does it not? A great nation, blind, paralyzed, sinking in the tar pit of history. Not a cheery outlook, true, but then you are free to ignore it, and probably will.  

You have to figure the rules out for yourself

     Whenever I go to Target with my wife, I’m like a bored 6-year-old. She’s busily checking items off her list, muscling slabs of paper towels into the huge red cart while I wander off, not quite humming “la la la,” but gazing dreamily around finding . . . what?
     Sometimes products. “Affresh Washer Cleaner”? Really? People clean the inside of their washing machines? Whatever for? What’s next? “New Soap Soap! Makes your yucky soap bars springtime clean!”
     Sometimes people. School is starting, so mom/child duos were stocking up on necessities for that first flap away from the nest.
    “Do you want it?” a mother said, holding up a dish rack — a dish rack is a plastic coated wire assemblage for holding dishes while they dry, I should mention, in case any freshmen still read the paper.
     “I don’t even know what that is!” the daughter huffed, in a tone of exasperated annoyance that compressed a decade of mother/daughter conflict into one phrase, spoken in the tone of "I hate you mom and can't wait to get away from you and your constant dish rack pushing."
     "For doing dishes," the mother explained, flatly, one of the 100,000 little nudges a parent must give a child during the excruciatingly slow slog toward adulthood. Washing dishes, I should point out, again for those theoretical freshmen, is a process performed after your parents collect your dirty bowls and plates off the sofa and before those plates appear, as if by magic, back on the shelves ready to be used by you.
     We don't have much drama in the Steinberg household. Then again, the boys are 19 and 20 — not boys anymore — and besides, both were gone most of the summer. The rising junior was in Washington, D.C., at a right-wing think tank ("Just don't become heartless" was my sole piece of advice); my sophomore was wrangling 13-year-olds at a summer program at Northwestern ("I'm never having children," he informed me, several times, and I smiled that turnabout-is-fair-play smile).
     We drove out to see the older boy in June. It happened to be at the height of the right-wing fuss over my attempt to buy an assault rifle, with Rush Limbaugh hooting in ridicule and Fox News running little morality lessons that were almost entirely false. We met the boy at his office.
     "Well, you've had a relevant week!" he said, smiling. I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, feeling that 20 years of parenting effort had been rewarded.
     The younger one offered us reward as well, pulling out a deck of cards and announcing he would teach us a new game, "Mao."
     "It isn't like '52 Card Pickup'?" asked my wife, on guard after years of whoopee cushions, snapping gum packs and powder that turns milk solid.
     Mao is like Crazy Eights. You try to get rid of the cards in your hand, only in Mao you learn the rules by playing. The dealer establishes the rules in his own mind, but does not reveal what they are. Instead he assigns penalties as you violate the rules you haven't been told. "Penalty for not saying, 'Have a nice day,'" he might say, sliding a card off the deck into your hand, while you puzzle over what happened.
     At first it all seemed arbitrary and frustrating. My wife was almost standing to quit when I shot her a look, practically guiding her back into her chair with my eyebrows.
     "Kent is teaching us a game," I said and, to her credit, she got my point.
     It turned out to be fun. Most card games are stupid and almost automatic — the only time I truly regretted being a parent was years ago, grinding through endless rounds of "War." But Mao demands rigor; you are placed in a situation where you don't know the rules and the only way you can find out what to do is to play, pay attention and learn from your mistakes. Rather like life.

Literature and Recovery

Walt Whitman

     One way to publicize your work is to write for websites. I wrote this for Sober Nation, a popular recovery website, explaining what "Out of the Wreck I Rise,"  my new book, written with Sara Bader and published Monday, is trying to do.

     Walt Whitman volunteered as a nurse in the Civil War. Most people don’t know that. Yet you can see his passion for nurturing in his work. There are moments in Leaves of Grass when he practically pulls up a chair and tends to the reader as if comforting a patient.
     “O despairer, here is my neck,” Whitman writes. “By God! You shall not go down. Hang your whole weight upon me. I dilate you with tremendous breath...I buoy you up.”
     As a writer, words have always buoyed me up. So when I entered rehab 10 years ago, I grabbed at them like a drowning man. Certain lines were talismans I kept in my pocket and referred to constantly. Not just literature, but from movies and songs. As much as I sometimes regretted see my problem laid out so starkly, for example, I couldn’t regret it too much, not when remembering “better I should know,” a simple lyric from Sara McLachlan’s essential recovery anthem, “Fallen.”
     As the years passed, I began pulling useful thoughts about recovery out of whatever I was reading. Samuel Johnson is famous for compiling his epic dictionary of the English language. But an alcoholic wading through James Boswell’s Life of Johnson can’t help but find within it a primer in keeping on the path of recovery, such as when Johnson tries to explain to his disbelieving friends how he can possibly not drink. What do you do, Boswell asks him, when a “good worthy man takes you to taste his wine, which he has had twenty years in his cellar?” Johnson scoffs in reply: 

No good and worthy man will insist upon another man’s drinking wine . . . it is something to please one’s company; and people are always pleased with those who partake pleasure with them. But after a man has brought himself to relinquish the great personal pleasure which arises from drinking wine, any other consideration is a trifle.

     “Any other consideration is a trifle.” Exactly. Sobriety first.
     So much of recovery is focused on the early stages — giving up the substance that has enslaved you, changing your way of life—that some overlook the need to fill the rest of your life with something substantial. You can’t live a life based on what you don’t do. Literature helps embellish and strengthen recovery, making it seem, not something dreary, not the folding chairs and cinder block in the church basement, but something thrilling, even heroic. “The gates of hell are open night and day,” Virgil writes in The Aeneid. “Smooth the descent, and easy is the way. 
But to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—There the struggle, there the labor lies.”
     Don’t we all know it? There are many elements that make up a successful sober life, whether attending 12-step programs, going to group or individual therapy, forging a relationship with God, focusing on exercise, nutrition, work, hobbies, family.
     To that list I think it’s important to add literature. Not only excellent recovery memoirs like Mary Karr’s Lit or David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, but novels such as David Foster Wallace’s massive Infinite Jest, which might be the best treatment of Alcoholics Anonymous ever written. I took the quotations culled from a lifetime of reading, thoughts and words that helped me along the way, and, together with co-author Sara Bader, put them together into Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, which the University of Chicago Press is publishing in September. The quotes are not only grouped thematically, dealing with early recovery, for instance, or family, or relapse, but mortised together so they form a narrative, a kind of mosaic one leading to the next. My favorite pairing is in the chapter on time — an essential element in recovery, mastering the hours, days and years of your life.
     The first is from John Cheever’s diary:

     When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger...To try and restore some purpose and beauty to it you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody’s wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning that you were dead. But when you try to trace back the way you came into this abyss all you find is a grain of sand.

     Followed by Emily Dickinson observing, in a letter:

     It is the speck that makes the cloud that wrecks the vessel, children, yet no one fears a speck.

     Part of staying sober is learning to recognize and fear that speck, being on guard for that first grain of trouble that could, unnoticed, bring about a storm. Part is creating a full rich life that rewards you. Great writing has always done that for me, and might for you as well.


Neil Steinberg, a columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times, is an author of Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, published by the University of Chicago Press.


                                                                                                                           

"The technology has changed quite a bit"

 
   
     Thousands of Chicagoans pass this nondescript building near the Loop every day and never give it a second glance. That is intentional. Made of beige grooved concrete, it is identified only by a single small plaque: “AT&T.” But don’t let its modest exterior fool you.
     “This building touches every single resident of the city,” said Jim Wilson, AT&T’s Area Manager Network Services.
     Those who do pause might notice something peculiar: no windows on most floors. Why build a 538-foot-tall building where only the second and the top seven floors have windows? The short answer is, because what’s inside isn’t able to look out and nobody outside is supposed to look in. Those at AT&T refer to the place only by its address, which is . . . well, they’d rather I not say. Security.

   A bit of online sleuthing will turn up the Holabird & Root-designed building easily enough, but you can understand their caution. Not only does this center handle much of the city’s phone and internet traffic, but all the 911 calls come through here. Pressed for something to call the place, AT&T officials say they refer to it as an “Office” or a “Mega-Office,” one of three in the city.
     “This is one of the key switching stations for AT&T,” said Warren Salek, assistant vice president of the company’s Radio Access Engineering division, guiding a tour of the facility never seen by the public. “Some of the first electronic switching systems were installed right here in this building.”
     Built in 1970, the building actually has just 27 stories, though it is tall as a 50-story building because each floor is double height, built to accommodate enormous banks of telephone....

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Maggie the cat

     Maggie was a cat, I suppose, based on a jury-rigged shrine I noticed at the corner of Ashland and Pratt a week ago today. My wife and I had visited the Glenwood Avenue Arts Fair, had fun, as we always do, and were walking back to our car, waiting for the light, when I saw these sad decorations festooned around the bottom of a light pole.
     The cat vanished from this vicinity more than a month earlier, I gathered, from a sign on the pole. The burnt out votive candles and general decay of the thing led me to believe that a lonely vigil had taken place here, that time had passed, as time does, as hope gave way to disappointment and despair.
    You see these tributes to people, mostly, white crosses beside the highway where people died in accidents, garlanded with those horrible plastic flowers which, far from being an approximation of actual flowers, are more the opposite, a kind of mockery of the whole idea of flowers. The authorities tolerate these shrines, for a respectable period of time, then sweep them away, lest our landscape become too studded with poignant tributes to the dead. There is something so pitiful about them.
    Still, you can't criticize these memorials either, whether for humans or for animals. The grief is so much, the loss so big, that something has to be done, though there is little to do beyond this. 
     Why is it done? Not to seek permanence, obviously. The memorial to Maggie was already starting to fall apart. Maybe to extend their presence just a little longer, to manifest the beloved on earth in some small way, for some small time, beyond the tragically shortened lifespan. 
      So let us lend our shoulder to the task, and raise a little electronic cairn here to Maggie, a lost cat, a beloved comrade, we am told, who disappeared July 17 from the corner of Pratt and Ashland, under circumstances I cannot speculate upon.
    There is a lesson here. Each of us in turn will disappear and sad as that is, if we are lucky, we will leave someone heartbroken over their beloved comrade. Sad as it is to imagine, that person who misses us will clutch at the space where we had recently been, and maybe decorate the void with a few meager trappings of our former presence. As sorrowful as that tribute might be, it is also a reminder that much happiness was had, for years and years, each day a loan, a withdrawal from the immensity of life, a promissory note that death calls due the debt we can never repay. What they are remembering, and what we must try to remember is that though we will be gone, one and all, in the time that we were here, when we forestalled the ache of loneliness for others, whether human or animal.  They will miss us, and none of us would have it any other way. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     We focus so much on intolerance—and rightly so, particularly during this memorably awful presidential campaign of 2016—that we forget just how compassionate people can be. Despite the goal line stance that certain Southern states are making regarding toilet use — they just can't move from one room into the next without leaving claw marks on the doorway, can they?—in general the mainstream seems to be not making quite the huge honking deal over transgender people as it did over other minorities.
     Maybe it isn't compassion, but Repression Fatigue. 
     Anyway, I don't know that this prominently displayed and charmingly amateur portrait is a transgender woman. It could just be a blonde gal with broad shoulders and a five o'clock shadow. But I've always considered it such, displayed prominently in a place where I go as often as I can.
    Where is it? Shouldn't be too difficult, I imagine. Notice, if you can—I didn't focus on including them when I took the shot—what the light fixtures are made of. Creative. But there you go.
     Winner receives one of my endless store of blog posters. Place your answers below. Good luck. 

Review #4

     Online etiquette demands that you do not steal the copy of other publications, even your own. So I post the first four paragraphs of my Sun-Times column here and link back to the paper, so as not to drain away their all-important readership. 
     But this review, in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, is just four paragraphs long, so I'm posting only the first paragraph and linking to the rest, and using their lovely graphic. I hope that's okay. 
    It isn't a review so much as a notice, but given that the Sunday Book Review is the epicenter of literary America, just being on the field is a great boon. The shout-out not only speaks well of the book, but of the team behind it—this was no accident, but the result of in-the-trenches effort— and I am grateful to everyone at the University of Chicago Press, who worked hard to make this happen. 

     “Alcoholics Anonymous,” commonly referred to as the Big Book, helped to establish the 12-step program. It’s been an indispensable guide for millions since it was published in 1939. A new, very different kind of book, “Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery,” by Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader, aims to be a complementary comfort.

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"Alt-right" — because "mean crazy neo-Nazi online bully trolls" is such a mouthful

     Blinking red light on the phone. A message.
     “Neil, this is Arlene K—, I live in Oswego. I really enjoy your columns. Would you please do a column on alt-right and explain it? I don’t know what that’s about, and I’m starting to get worried about it.”
     This column is not a lounge band; I don’t take requests.
     However, in this case: an excellent question, Arlene, one much in the news.
     “Alt-right” is the new, sanitized term that includes a rogue’s gallery of haters, loons, tinfoil-hats, bullies and misfits, united by unmerited self-regard and a contempt for modern American life and most of the people who comprise it. They are a far right fringe, have always been with us, and surged into the public eye lately thanks to the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump, who used the rock they live under as the cornerstone of his campaign.
     When Trump says “America is a hellhole and we’re going down fast” or when he says political correctness is “killing” America, he is speaking alt-right, or a more formal version, like “vous” versus “tu” in French, the plural, polite form more suited to a national political election.

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Another milestone in the newspaper death march

It's in the middle, to the immediate left of the square dark brown building.

     How much do I hate the Tribune Tower? When I went to post this assignment, I realized, to my amazement and chagrin, that I have never taken a photograph of the building, not one, in all the years I've been wandering around, downtown, snapping. I can see the logic: "Eeeyew, yuck. Why take a picture of THAT?!" But that is overstating the case. To be honest, I never considered the possibility. But I did finally find it peeking out of this group shot.

      The Tribune Tower is a gothic horror show of a building, a retro throwback that bucked every trend in 20th century architecture when it was designed in the mid-1920s. While the Bauhaus was conjuring up streamlined structures in Germany, the Midwestern burgermeisters in Chicago held a widely ballyhooed architecture contest for the new headquarters of their self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper. Batting aside progressive blueprints from the likes of Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos, they chose a New York firm’s vision of what is in essence a 36-story medieval cathedral skyscraper, complete with flying buttresses, gargoyles and fleurs de lis. All it lacks is a crypt and a nave.
     Despite being all wrong, it was the perfect choice. The Tribune Tower somehow seemed to fit the newspaper within—mighty, unsubtle, backward-looking, with chunks of ancient buildings seized around the world by the newspaper’s far-flung foreign correspondents brought home as prisoners, in tribute to American exceptionalism.
     Walk into Tribune Tower, and along with the bromides to freedom and the supremacy of the press was an enormous map of North America, as if the rest of the world didn’t matter, which it largely didn’t. With WGN—“World’s Greatest Newspaper” don’t you forget—adding first radio, then television to the mix, the Tribune Tower was meant to exude permanence, power, authority, control, with a bomb shelter in the basement, just in case.
     As the building fit the fat, Republican avatar of the status quo for decades, so its sale, announced Tuesday, to a Los Angeles developer for $240 million, also seems apt for the current journalistic moment: Gut shot by the Internet a decade ago, tumbling for years in free fall and retreat, finally hitting the hard bottom with a splat, shaking itself back to life like a cartoon character, and crawling off to some obscure place a lot less public than the corner of Michigan and Wacker Drive, if not to die, then to morph into whatever decimated, enervated, shadow of its former self that daily journalism is well on the way to becoming. The amazing thing is it lasted this long.
     Tribune Media CEO Peter Liguori, a former entertainment exec for Fox, explained the move with characteristic lack of sentiment: "Monetizing the significant assets of Tribune Media's real estate portfolio is a strategic priority for the company," he was quoted saying in the Tribune press release, "and we are extremely pleased with the outcome of this sales process."
     I bet they are. Grandeur is not a significant asset anymore, at least not in the communications biz. As long as three bulleted headlines squirt into your phone on command, you don't care where they come from. Downtown Chicago, downtown Mumbai, it's all the same. Heck, half the country doesn't even care if they're true.
     No gloating here. No working journalist can take pleasure in this sale. "The end of an era," television reporters will say, unaware of the threadbareness of the cliche.
     A better metaphor would be a milestone on the newspaper Death March. We are having our fingers pried off the tangible world, the world of buildings and offices and desks and paychecks. All cooking in the same pot. The Sun-Times sold its less iconic, but equally hideous building to developers a dozen years ago, and Trump Tower went up on the spot where we once stood. Future home of the Midwestern White House, perhaps.
     Newspapering has moved to the margins of our cultural conversation, and whether the Tribune is produced in a tall thin version of Reims Cathedral, or out of the giant windowless box of the Freedom Center printing plant on West Chicago Avenue, or in Naperville, or not at all, hardly seems to matter much at this point.

Is Anthony Weiner an addict or just a jerk?

     “Addiction,” Philip Seymour Hoffman once said, “is when you do the thing you really, really most don’t want to be doing.”
     For Hoffman, the thing he really, really most didn’t want to be doing was take heroin. He had gotten clean, become one of the most respected actors in America. Then Hoffman decided it would be a good idea to go back to using heroin. The decision cost him his life.
     Or was it a decision? Addiction is a complicated issue, where brain chemistry and free will collide. A lot of people think addiction is just a scam — the Get Out of Jail Free Card that jerks desperately wave after being caught, trying to be excused their misdeeds. Hoffman had been clean for more than 20 years. He was free. Or was he? Did he decide? Or did the addiction slumber within him, like a cancer, biding its time?
      I can’t answer that one. If it was a bad choice, it was a bad choice that many make. Fifty percent more Americans died of drug overdoses in 2014 than died in car crashes: 47,000 people, a staggering toll. That in the face of such stats anyone would pick up a drug speaks to the human genius for both feeling special — bad things happen to other people — and for seeking that elusive zing across the frontal lobes that gives life savor.

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Cookie the Cockatoo, Brookfield Zoo's oldest resident, dead at 83

     I was going to simply post my visit to Brookfield Zoo's elderly bird from three years ago and be done with it. But I kinda liked the idea of jumping in for a rare Tuesday column on a big breaking story like the passing of Cookie the cockatoo. 

     He was crusty, a curmudgeon, as only the elderly can be. Sometimes he would shriek. While he did tolerate certain people, others he just wanted to bite.
     "If he didn't like you, he let you know it," said Tim Snyder, a business associate. "He was like a cranky old geezer."
      Then again, he had reason. He had his infirmities — osteoarthritis and osteoporosis, cataracts. And perhaps the lingering effects of a broken heart.
     "Back in the 1950s, we tried to introduce him to a female," said Snyder. "She was not nice to him. He didn't want anything to do with her."
     But Cookie the cockatoo, 83, who died Saturday, was seldom alone. He was the coddled patriarch of the Brookfield Zoo. His years of putting on shows, and being on TV and on public display, were behind him, and he was cared for, outside of the public gaze, in an office at the Reptiles and Birds House. Cookie was the oldest Major Mitchell's cockatoo known, a fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was one of the zoo's "biggest stars," and the last of 270 animals present at what was then called the Chicago Zoological Park when it opened June 30, 1934, in Brookfield, on land donated by Edith Rockefeller McCormick. He had come from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia and was estimated to be a year old.

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Cookie the Cockatoo remembered

Cookie in 2013

     Sad news from the Brookfield Zoo that Cookie the Cockatoo passed away Saturday at the ripe old age of 83. I had the privilege of spending time with Cookie in 2013 and wrote this report, which I share now in honor of the famed bird.

     He was a star.
     One of Brookfield Zoo's "biggest stars," in fact, though a critic 25 years ago dismissed him as "a bit of a ham" after seeing a performance, suggesting that he talks too much.
     Yes, like other stars, he liked to say his trademark lines: "Peek-a-boo," "Quit your screaming," and "Hi, Cookie."
     That is his name, Cookie the Cockatoo — a Major Mitchell's cockatoo, to be precise — and while his onetime co-stars such as Mora the Capuchin monkey and Maya the Yucatan miniature pig are long gone, Cookie endures.
     He no longer performs in the Animals-in-Action show at the Children's Zoo, or appears on television, as he once did. In fact, Cookie is no longer seen in public at all, but enjoys his retirement in seclusion, ruminatively gnawing on a piece of wood in his cage in the office of the Reptiles and Birds House.
     His feathers, only a little threadbare, retain their brilliant pink hue, shifting to salmon toward the head. His crest ruffles majestically when angry - and this bird is definitely a curmudgeon.
     "He really wants to bite someone," said Kathryn Pingry, lead keeper in the Bird Department.
     Occasionally a zoo visitor will knock on the office door to ask about the 80-year-old bird, the oldest of his breed on record, older than the zoo itself.
     The Chicago Zoological Park opened on June 30, 1934, on land that Edith Rockefeller McCormick donated for that purpose. She thought it should be like the modern zoos she had seen in Europe. Thus it was built as the first "barless" zoo in the United States.
     On opening day, the zoo had 270 animals including Cookie, who came from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, and was estimated to be a year old. His hatching birthday was set as June 30, same as the zoo's.
     Over the years, other famed bird stars have come and gone. A quintet of penguins Admiral Richard E. Byrd's second expedition brought back from Antarctica in 1935. Or Sally, another cockatoo, whose deft use of a pie plate reminded keepers of stripper Sally Rand and her bubble, then seen at the Century of Progress fair.
     Cookie was most recently on display in a round window of his own at the Perching Bird House. But five years ago keepers noticed his mood had begun to sour. In the winter, when there aren't many visitors, Cookie would get lonely.
     "He would just sit in his window and had nothing to do," said Pingry. "We noticed he just didn't want to go out there anymore, wanted to stay in his office, where there is always a keeper nearby."
     In 2009 he was permanently taken off display.
     "He was just so much more engaged, and happy to have company," she said.
     Well, certain company. Like other old folk, Cookie prefers the familiar.
     Approach his cage and you might be greeted by an earsplitting shriek.
     "The patience wanes," explained veterinarian Jennifer Langan. "He's not quite as tolerant."
     But if Cookie can be hostile toward humans, they nevertheless still love him.
     "We get calls," said Pingry. "He also gets cards, especially around his birthday."
      So how is Cookie doing? Well, to be honest, he's old. Birds, like humans, suffer from a variety of indignities as they age. Osteoporosis. Cataracts. His left eye is cloudy, his left claw mangled from a long-ago bite. Cookie has to take daily anti-inflammatories, for his joints, plus a "parrot pellet" containing vitamins. He uses a rope perch instead of wood: easier on the feet. He takes frequent naps, and keepers opening his cage to say hello worry about him pitching forward beak-first onto the floor.
     Like many an old bird, there is no more soaring: He doesn't fly anymore, and hasn't for a long time.
     "I worked with him the past 16 years, and he hasn't really flown," said Pingry. "He used to flap a lot in his picture window, but he never actually took off flying."
     Cookie doesn't speak his trademark lines, either, though he'll make "cute happy noises" and the occasional wolf whistle. He can see well enough to have favorites - he likes people in glasses - and dismiss those he has taken a dislike to, people he greets with a sort of annoyed scream of disapproval, characteristic of his breed.
     Up to now, Cookie would be briefly taken out on his birthday, to be greeted by well-wishers. But this year, that's canceled.
     "I think Cookie would like his birthday, but it could be a little too much for him," said Sondra Katzen,Brookfield's media relations manager. "Our top priority is his well-being, and we know he's most comfortable off exhibit."
     So don't worry about Cookie - you may not see him, but he's there. Nor is he without his pleasures. His cage is filled with toys and distractions. He's fed chopped-up apples, oranges, carrots, sweet potatoes and - the day's highlight - two peanuts, unsalted, in the shell, a forbidden treat, like a coveted daily 5 p.m. martini.
     "He really likes that peanut, twice a day," said Pingry.
                                               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 26, 2013

The South Side is the best, doughnut-wise

     “We’re taking a detour,” I said, turning south onto Cicero Avenue from 55th Street. “Five minutes.”
     7 a.m. Sunday. We had just dropped off our oldest at Midway for the flight back to college. A half-hour beyond O’Hare, as I pointed out hurtling past its runways on the Tri-State Tollway. “If your flight were from O’Hare, we’d be there.”
     But he pays for his own tickets now, and the $50 saved is worth it, to him and, I suppose, me. Fifty dollars for driving an hour on a Sunday morning seems smart. Besides, I had a plan to offset the melancholy of his departure.
     My wife came along to say good-bye at the airport. It wasn’t exactly the same teary farewell had he been, say 3, with his name on a big tag pinned to his coat. But close.
     She had no idea where we were going, but she’s sharp and solved the mystery before 67th Street.
     “Doughnuts!” she cried....

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If you can sing to strangers you can do anything

    I was walking the dog Friday and something happened that has not happened in a decade. 

     "Are you associated with CleanSlate?" a passing neighbor, walking with her young son, asked.

     CleanSlate is an organization that connects reformed drug addicts with janitorial work.  I was wearing a CleanSlate baseball cap, acquired when I wrote the story below. I like it because it's comfortable, it looks cool, and has a kind of anti-status: I assume no one knows what "CleanSlate" means.

     We talked for a while — she has just moved to my neighborhood from the city. I started to tell her the story, but it was too involved for conversation. Later, I looked it up, and thought it merits a second visit. Written back in the day when my column filled a full page and had several parts, I'm leaving in the "Opening Shot," a brief observation, as a reminder that sometimes I'm in the right. More than two years before the FBI handcuffed Rod Blagojevich on his condo floor, he might not have seen it coming, but others sure did.

     

OPENING SHOT

     So when do we start viewing the gubernatorial race as being not so much between Judy Baar Topinka and Gov. Blagojevich as between Topinka and Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who would take over the job should his boss find it necessary to, ah, spend time elsewhere?
     Quinn strikes me as an affable goof, a view formed during his grass-roots consumer and environmental activist days. The sort of do-gooder who usually never gets within spitting distance of public office. He might surprise us. I have a good feeling about Quinn. Wouldn't it be ironic if both Judy and Rod end up in history's Dumpster, digging for chicken bones with meat still on them, while Quinn is putting his feet up in the governor's mansion? Stranger things have happened.

'MO-TI-VATE ME!'

     Every morning at exactly 8:30, several dozen people gather in a square room in a nondescript brick building at the corner of Desplaines and Monroe.
     The men are dressed in suit coats and ties, the women in skirts and jackets or turtleneck sweaters and slacks. They sit in a circle. One man stands in the center.
     "Good morning!" he enthuses. "My name's Duane!"
     "Hey Duane!" the people shout, so loud that for a moment I think they're miked, "mo-ti-vate me, he's my friiiiiieeeeeend!" and at "friend," they do a sort of slow lariat twirl with one hand.
     "You know what brings me great joy?" he begins. "Cara brings me great joy. . . ."
     The Cara Program is an innovative center designed to jump-start lives that have fallen apart. The people in the suits and dresses have slid into that bog of unemployment, addiction and personal collapse lumped together under the unfortunate heading of "the homeless."
     Agencies handling such people tend to be grim places. Not Cara. The morning program is half gospel revival, half Mary Kay Cosmetics convention. The idea is to pump participants — who must be referred to get a spot inCara — to hurl their energies into the hard business of rebuilding their broken lives.
     ''You give me strength to do the things I couldn't do before," one lady tells the group. "I am recovered. I am healed. You have given me the keys to the kingdom."
     Those keys include access to a room filled with 35 new Dell computers upstairs. Plus rack after rack of donated clothes.
     "Before you can get a job, you need to look like you can work a job, and more important, feel in your heart you can do it," said Cara CEO Eric Weinheimer.
     Later in the day comes job training and job interviews and help setting up bank accounts. Cara has its own company — CleanSlate — and works with banks and insurance companies to place Cara graduates, who do better than employees hired over the transom.
     After saying what brings them great joy, the participants must sing a song — the idea is, if you can sing in front of several dozen strangers, you can do just about anything.
     Visitors, too, are pressed into the center of the circle. The chief of staff of the Illinois Medical District won't sing — too inhibited. Cara members jump up to help him out.
     Inhibition is not a problem with me. I stand in the center and tell them I take great joy from my family, from my work, and from being a recovering alcoholic — not something I toss out at every speaking opportunity, but I figure it might help these people.
     "I only know one song," I say. "I started singing it as a good-night song when my oldest son was born. If I knew I was going to sing it every night for the next 10 years, I might have picked something more, um, Jewish. But I'm stuck with it now, and it goes like this."
     I begin:
     "Ahhhha-mayyyyy-ziiing grace, how sweeeeet the soooooound. . . ."
     The rest join in -- real loud. Turns out they know it, too.

              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 15, 2006