Something new along with the Gideon Bible.

      I've stayed in a lot of hotels, high and low.
      There was the Gritti Palace in Venice, the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec. 
      Those were highs.
      Then there was that motel on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, the one were you paid for your room by pushing your money into a stainless steel tray under a bulletproof window. The dump in Des Moines where we couldn't open the windows nor turn the heat off. And that place with the flies.
     Those were lows.
     But I've never, ever, been in a hotel anywhere in the world that set out earplugs on the night stand, along with a cheery business card, trying to put a bright spin on it. 
     Don't get me wrong. We loved our stay at the Starved Rock Lodge. A Civilian Conservation Corps classic, with an enormous lobby with a huge stone fireplace. Rustic rooms. An adequate pool.  We've already booked our room for next year.
      But the moment we checked in, well, it was in room 201, at the end of the hall. And I thought as we trooped toward it, Well, at least we'll be far away from the elevator. But just as we approached the room, we passed another, single elevator, right next to our room. We opened the door, as I was processing this, set down our bags, and my eyes fell on these ear plugs. "Just how loud could that elevator possibly be?" I wondered. My wife went outside and pushed the button. I sat on the bed, feeling unfortunate, and listened. You could hear the ping of the elevator loud and clear, like a ball peen hammer to the base of the skull.  You'd think hotels would turn those pings off. I would have passively cursed my lot, jammed the earplugs in and worn them for the next day.  But my wife is a woman of action—while I sat morosely on the bed, staring at my foot, she trooped down to the desk and got us moved, to room 208. 
     Which also had earplugs. I realized they were standard issue. Every room has 'em. Yes, the hotel is old, and poorly insulated. We would hear the whoops and muffled shouts of families parading down the hall. But you get that in most hotels, and none of them have earplugs.
     We never availed ourselves to the earplugs, despite the familial clatter, though we did take them home, for use at Union Station, where I'm an enormous fan of earplugs—people don't realize they're deafening themselves by standing for hours, cumulatively, next to roaring engines. 
     Earplugs are a bad bit of equipment to set out on the night table. Necessary or not, they set the wrong tone, and says, "This room is really loud." To be honest,  the Starved Rock Lodge didn't seem louder than any other hotel, once we got away from the elevator. So much about life is psychological. It's as if they had a can of air freshener, or a fly swatter. I am not a hotelier, but I do have a single word of advice:
     Mints.

But a Trump presidency would be so interesting...

     C’mon, are you certain that some tiny part of you doesn’t secretly want Donald Trump elected president?
     Aren’t you even a teensy bit curious? Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, Rex in Mundo, seated in majesty on his gold-plated throne, flanked by stuffed lions, killed by his son. What would that be like?
     I’m not talking about Trump supporters, those knee-jerk Republicans who vote GOP no matter how far their candidate strays from their alleged values, moral, religious and political. Nor the haters, emboldened to creep out of their basements at mid-day, blinking in the unfamiliar sun, salaaming at his feet. He’s still Their Guy; they’re following him into the abyss.
     No, I’m talking about Democrats, those responsible, thoughtful, patriotic citizens who consider government as a vital part of a decent society. We recognize a Trump victory as the bench-clearing brawl it would certainly be, his troglodyte haters running wild in the streets, his main lackeys Chris Christie, Rudolph Guiliani, and Newt Gingrich — a trio of henchmen straight out of “Dick Tracy,” characters only Chester Gould could have invented, perhaps as Pruneface’s gang — striding into the White House, staking out their prime offices. We don’t want that.
     And yet....

To continue reading, click here.

Sign of the times

     Upon reflection, I decided that this post was unfair, and removed it, and apologize to the people who were offended by it. I should have spoken to the parties involved before I supposed what their motivations might have been. Not doing so was lazy and timid, not to mention bad journalism.  I will try to do better in future. 

Joe & Lacey—or is it "Lacy"?—4ever

     "Why do people write graffiti?" my wife asked.
     We were sitting on a bench, eating our lunch at Starved Rock State Park, having decided to take in a few days of fall color. While the park was beautiful, the signage and fence rails were well-scribbled and gouged.

  "I suppose it's their stab at immortality," I replied. Although in a park such scrawls are doubly bothersome, first in that they disturb the beauty of nature, particularly when they are scrawled over trees and stumps, a common practice at Starved Rock. And second because they show a failure to grasp the essential message of nature: she endures, perfect by definition, while we pass through, momentary, evanescent, making our little dent in a field somewhere, and then returning, more or less immediately, to the utter oblivion from whence we came. Carving your name in a tree perpetuates your being, in the grand scheme of things, only a second longer than tossing a rock into a pool does. A few ripples and gone. 
     We were at "Beehive," a lookout point, enjoying our sandwiches, and I noticed a particular graffiti to my left, just because it was so  

bold and fresh. Last year's have already faded. Turning my attention ahead, I saw a second version. You'll notice that the girl's name is spelled differently in each. So one of them is wrong. You have to wonder about the story behind that. Did the swain really not know how to spell his girlfriend's name when he went to immortalize their love along with Romeo and Juliet? What was the moment of correction like? With anger or pity or a laugh? A reminder of another reason people do graffiti: because they're stupid. Never underestimate the importance of stupidity in the business of the world. Sometimes it seems the central operating principle. 


     

Why not add some moral support to that hotline number?

    I'm a fairly opinionated person. Which is good, in the main, because I'm in the business of presenting opinions, bolstered by a scaffolding of fact, of course, to give them form and structure.
     So if I don't have a view on something, I tend not to write about it. Thus, no columns on ... oh for instance ... golf. Never done it. Don't have strong feelings about those who do. If you like golf, well, go for it. It's a free country, at least for now.
     But on Sunday I wrote about the sign at right that Metra has put around its station in Northbrook in order to discourage suicides. I felt ... uncertain ... about them (they are two that I noticed). But I couldn't exactly say why. There was discussion here, but there was also a spirited conversation on my Facebook page, and reader Sarah E. Lauzen offered a key to my unease by posting this flier:

     This struck me as something of actual use to people considering suicide. Don't get me wrong -- a phone number for a suicide hotline no doubt helps certain people. But there is also a not-my-table aspect to it — the problem isn't being addressed, it's being delegated. The above could save a person immediately. Then I thought of Galway Kinnell's lovely poem "Wait," which I used to frame the Time chapter in my new book. Kinnell wrote it for a student who was considering killing herself after a failed love affair. It begins:

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.

     You can read the entire poem here.
    Metra should post the "Everything is Awful" questions, or the Kinnell poem, AND the hotline number. To just have the number is minimal and reeks of the same societal indifference that nudges people toward suicide in the first place. Which is why the signs troubled me. It's as if, on the bridges downtown, they placed, not a life ring behind glass, but a number to call to request a life ring. Big difference.
    Oh. And while we're on the subject of Sunday. I used the word "Masonic" to describe the sign with the shaking hands. I was not implying something dark or indifferent about Masons, not suggesting they wouldn't leap to assist those in need. It's just that Masonic banners sometimes use the shaking hands iconography being discussed. As Sigmund Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Nancy Pelosi: "This is what they had; their white-man-ness."

 
     As the Trump presidential campaign drifts away from the iceberg of that recording of The Donald bragging how he uses his celebrity to grope women, alarm bells clanging, staffers rushing around the tilting decks, the vessel of his ambition settling into the water, beginning, at long last, it seems, the final plunge to the bottom, we are left with a question:
     Why isn't the prospect of the nation's first woman president a bigger deal?
     When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was a pervasive sense of history. A nation that spent its first 87 years with legal slavery was now choosing a black man as leader.
     This should be even more significant, because, if you look around the world and over the ages, prejudice against women is far more widespread and severe than bigotry against blacks ever was.
     But don't trust me on that.
     "When I ran for Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black," said Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress — in 1969 — and who also sought the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

To continue reading, click here.

Don't do it.

     A woman jumped in front of the train at the Northbrook station a few weeks ago. I wrote about the small memorial that sprouted on the spot for a couple days. Now a more permanent memorial, of sorts, has been established—this sign, an attempt to reach out to whatever tormented souls might be in the general vicinity and considering suicide. 
     I couldn't decide what I thought of it — rare for me. 
     On one hand, there was a desperate, we've-got-to-do-something quality to it. What are the odds that someone approaching the tracks intending to kill themselves will even notice it, never mind seize the aid offered? Given the general nature of the problem, isn't this an extraordinarily localized solution? Not much help to those wanting to end it all a block away. And what's with the handshake imagery? Is that really what a suicidal person wants? A good solid handshake? There seems something wrong, something oblivious and Masonic, something lacking about it. But I can't put my finger on it beyond that. 
     On the other hand, really, what else could be done? And it seems a problem that should be addressed somehow. Nearly three dozen people have been struck and killed by Metra trains this year, most of those suicides. Not a number to be shrugged off.  The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority put such signs in after a spike of suicides in 2012, and officials there consider them effective. 
     Maybe so. Still, it's such an small gesture at an enormous problem, it somehow feels inadequate, somehow both not enough and too much.  It's a very big sign. I wouldn't be surprised if it sparked more despair than hope, if it gives more people the idea of ending it all than people it gives aid to. An unintended consequence, the way certain anti-drinking campaigns encourage drinking. It made me sad to see it though, again, I'm not sure why. Maybe you have ideas.

Several readers mentioned my use of the word "Masonic" in the above. I wasn't implying something malign about Masons, merely thinking of imagery such as the above.

    

The Great Creepy Clown Panic of 2016

     Up until Thursday, when my boss asked me to look into the creepy clown phenomenon, I had studiously avoided the subject, just because it seemed one of those scraped-from-the-corners-of-the-Internet kind of things.  In mid-August someone dressed as a clown tried to lure children into the woods in South Carolina — maybe — the thing got on the Internet, where all sorts of scary clown videos and reports sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Maybe a prankish teenager or two or 10 jumped the gun on Halloween and wore masks to frighten younger children, and a squad of Barney Fife police chiefs in various Hickburgs dutifully issued press releases and threatened any Bozos who would use their face paint and rubber nose to cause alarm to steer clear of their particular Mayberry.
      It did not add up to anything significant, in my view, except for connoisseurs of mass delusions. I am neither frightened nor intrigued by clowns. They just seem another inexplicably popular and widespread phenomena, like stock car racing.
     But I am nothing if not a dutiful employee, and if my boss wants me to "find one of these scary clown guys," that's exactly what I would attempt to do. Looking online, I saw the outlines of what seemed a classic case of hysteria — children seeing things — given a 21st century twist as the sparks of immature fancy were been fanned into a brushfire by the Internet.
     "These are illusionary clowns," I told my boss. "They don't exist in the living world."
     Except. One college student detained by security at University of Illinois—Chicago. There was a photo of his apprehension, though he explained that he was a "performance artist" doing some innocent, non-threatening activity, and they let him go. That seemed a good inroad into this nonsense. I phoned U of I and invited them to reach out to this unnamed student and offer him a chance to tell his tale of miscommunication, perhaps plug his particular brand of art (which, to be honest, I also doubted the existence of, assuming that "performance artist" was the lame excuse this mope blurted out upon apprehension).
     But nothing was forthcoming from the school. I considered going to campus and poking around but, to be honest, that did not seem smart use of my time.
     My boss was disappointed.
     "I'd like to talk to one of these guys to understand why they thrill themselves by scaring people," he said.
     I almost said, "Who doesn't?" I'm the guy who told my boys there was a monster living in our basement (in my defense, it was a scary, perhaps dangerous basement, and I was trying to forestall their exploring it). I also seem to recall telling a tentful of sleepover boys the "Hook" story and then returning to rake my fingernails along the side of the tent. It's the sort of thing people are doing now with clown masks and finding themselves subject to arrest.
     I did observe that the Guardian had actually dispatched a reporter to South Carolina, as Ground Zero for the Clown Epidemic. No clowns were found, but a lengthy story nevertheless ensued, one of dozens if not hundreds. Perhaps I'd best set off Southward in search of scary clowns. Dedicate some resources. Work the story in the fine tradition of investigative journalism.
     My offer was not snapped up.
     As I like to say, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. As I was heading out the door on Friday, I noticed the mask above at our tech bar. Its owner, a colleague in her 40s who I should add is niceness incarnate, explained that they were yanking them from the stores so she snapped it up, for only $12. Her daughter was having a bonfire -- perhaps she would put it on and creep around the house. Or wake up another child with the mask.
     You could see her savoring the thought.
     But then the cold reality of our tremulous times sunk in.
     "I'm hesitant to do that in my own yard!" she said, indignant. "You'd think people would have better things to worry about."
     Which is the rub of it, in my opinion. They do. Which is why we have a clown scare, the same reason people worry about sharks but not heart attacks. These mass hysterias are caused, in part, by stressful time. Between the Scariest Clown of Them All, Donald Trump, still having a shot at the presidency, and Syria and ISIS and Zika and God knows what else, of course the kids would start seeing clowns in the woods, or thought they were seeing them. Mix that into a safety fetish that threatens to deform our proud culture beyond all recognition, a zero tolerance lack of discernment on the part of lower level authorities like school officials, then we have our current Clown Crisis based on next-to-nothing. And suddenly it is a terrorist act to wear a clown mask, just as joking was made into a crime by the TSA.
     Enough. The Web is our Great Aggregator, and it can magnify things which are very small. Every hamlet has a walking man, some poor soul with mental challenges wandering the margins, muttering to himself.  But if every small town paper began reporting on him, it would seem an invasion, and the larger outlets would investigate the Army of Muttering Men while pundits analyze What It All Means.
     It means, to me, that — stop the presses — people are frightened and imaginative. That pattern recognition lends disparate occurrences the illusion of cohesion, of significance. That despite falling away in big chunks, there is still an awful lot of media. Maybe too much. Put "scary clown" into the Nexis database and 501 articles show up over the past month. Now that's really frightening.

Technology is always changing, except for the Shure Model 55

     There was a lot more I wanted to fit into here, such as the fact that the first time electric loudspeakers were used in public was in Chicago -- at the Olympic Theatre in September, 1912, when Bell Telephone and Western Electric rigged 10 speakers to transmit sound effects from backstage. Or that "microphone" is like "cursor," one of those words that started with one kind of technology and ended with another. Two hundred years ago "microphones" were ear trumpets—something the hard-of-hearing used to make small noises larger, hence the name. Still, I really enjoyed my visit to Shure, and hope some of that enthusiasm came across. 

     Of course it stands out.
     In an era when hi-tech design means some version of the Apple lozenge, all brushed steel and rounded corners, how could you fail to admire an example of 2016 technology that owes its look to the chrome grille of a 1937 Oldsmobile.
     The Shure Unidyne Model 55 Dynamic Microphone debuted in 1939 and has been in production ever since, more or less unchanged. A few tweaks: the quarter-sized diaphragm inside, glued to a coil of wire that turns sound vibrations into electrical impulses, went from aluminum to Mylar. The inner windscreen, once cloth, is now foam.
     The company that sells them, Shure Incorporated, started in Chicago in 1925 and has staked out an enviable position both revering its past and working at future innovation, or so it seemed to me when I toured its Niles headquarters.
     I assumed the Helmut Jahn building was designed for Shure, since its decorative screening so boldly evokes a microphone. Actually, it was built for Ha-Lo Industries.
     “They went bankrupt building the building,” said Michael Pettersen, director of corporate history, overlooking a few other factors, like Ha-Lo’s disastrous purchase of Starbelly.

To continue reading, click here. 

Musings of 18th century giant still relevant today

   

     Sometimes I surprise myself with what I can get away with putting in a newspaper column, which tend to be about, you know, news.  Samuel Johnson isn't close to news — has been dead for 232 years, and his life isn't exactly crackling across our social consciousness. It should be. I called up this column to share it with an acquaintance and realized, while I was at it, I should share it with you here.

    "Society is held together by communication and information" — a sentiment perfectly true in 2010, though James Boswell wrote it in a book published in 1791.
     Friday I finished reading Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, and while its 1,433 pages cannot be summarized in a newspaper column, I hope you won't mind my trying to anyway. Every 1-0 Cubs/Phillies snooze fest gets reported; why not this?
     Johnson is an epic figure, both for his literary output and his physical person — a huge, unkempt man, his face scarred, blind in one eye, he twitched and muttered, and was both a figure of ridicule and the greatest English man of letters between Shakespeare and Dickens.
     His 1755 dictionary — a massive effort he compiled alone with half a dozen clerks — endeared him to his countrymen, particularly since the French assigned 40 Frenchmen to their dictionary, and they took 40 years to finish. Johnson took seven.
     His would-be biographer Boswell went to London as a 22-year-old Scottish lawyer with a cheerful "desire of being acquainted with celebrated men of every description."
     Boswell succeeded, hanging out not only with Johnson, but economist Adam Smith, artist Joshua Reynolds, statesman Edmund Burke, actor David Garrick, the cream of Georgian London. Unsatisfied, Boswell slips over to France to meet Voltaire.
     Such a man can't help dropping names, and in the same all-caps fashion that zealots use today. Here Boswell's about to dine with Johnson for the first time.
     "I had gratified my curiosity much in dining with JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, while he lived in the wilds of Neufchatel," Boswell writes. "I had as great a curiosity to dine with DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON."
     Johnson is so fearsome that Boswell is surprised to find good food — veal pie! — on a decently set table.
     "I supposed we should scarcely have knives and forks, and only some strange uncouth, ill-drest dish,"Boswell confesses. "But I found everything in very good order."
     Not cuisine, but Johnson's genius for wit makes the book enjoyable.
     "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," Johnson says.
     "Sir," Johnson says, ending a discussion of the worth of pious resolution. "Hell is paved with good intentions."
     Marrying a second time is "the triumph of hope over experience."
     No one is better at taking down mediocrity.
     "He is not only dull, but the cause of dullness in others," Johnson says.
     The American Revolution is going on. Johnson, a royalist, puts his finger on the hypocrisy that would haunt the new republic.
     "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" he asks.
     Boswell can't resist jumping in. He dutifully records Johnson's objections to slavery — "No man is by nature the property of another" — and then must register his own objections to such "wild and dangerous" attempts "to abolish so very important and necessary a branch of commercial interest." An institution that — opponents of gay marriage please note — Boswell argues, "in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued."
     I enjoyed Boswell's hidebound thickheadedness almost as much as Johnson's brilliance. He recoils at someone who shook David Hume's hand.
     "I took the liberty to object to treating an Infidel writer with smooth civility," he says, suggesting instead the philosopher should be kicked down the stairs.
     "An Infidel then shall not be treated handsomely by a Christian," he writes, voicing a sentiment troubling us now that we hear it from other quarters.
     They talk of sexual equality. Boswell is shocked that his father is considering leaving any inheritance to his sisters.
     "You ask by what right your father admits daughters to inheritance," Johnson writes. "Ask yourself, first, by what right you require them to be excluded?"
     They are vexed by the same media problems that vex writers today.
     Booksellers protest to Parliament over threatening new technology, "cheap editions of the most popular English books," causing publishers to "suffer from an invasion of what they had ever considered to be secure."
     Johnson's work is borrowed without payment or credit.
     "It was seized on with avidity by various publishers of newspapers and magazines, to enrich their publications," Boswell writes.
     Johnson is forced to take out an advertisement complaining "those essays are inserted in the newspaper and magazines with so little regard to justice or decency, that the Universal Chronicle, in which they first appear, is not always mentioned."
     Instead, his work is stolen "with the most shameless rapacity."
     In another current touch, there is a comments section in the edition I read. The margins are filled with notes by Johnson's friend, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, who considered Boswell a parasite and a liar and eagerly contradicted him.
     "Not I — never had," she writes, when Boswell quotes Johnson saying she had high regard for the Scot. "I thought him a clever & a comical Fellow." So feedback is nothing new.
     I'm not expecting you to run out and read it — it took me months, and I think you have to be a certain sort to finish. But it was comforting, somehow, to see that the shifting media landscape of today, with its whir of websites, resonates so neatly with a distant time of broadsheets and pamphlets.
     "We must read what the world reads at the moment," says Johnson, waving off suggestions that the "teeming of the press in modern times is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much."
     The spread of information is always good.
    "It must be considered," he says, "that we have now more knowledge generally diffused."

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 9, 2010

Hazelden battles opioids by dispensing them

     “Do you have any questions about your prescription?” asked the gal behind the pharmacy counter at CVS.
     “Yeah, how do you keep from becoming addicted?” I replied. She was taken aback, smiled uncomfortably and muttered something like “Oh you’ll be fine” before pushing the bag at me.
     I wasn’t worried about myself. I was picking up opioid painkillers for my son, suffering from an inflamed throat that felt like “swallowing broken glass.”
     In one of those coincidences that would look trite in fiction but happens in real life, I had just been on the phone with William Moyers, vice president of public affairs for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. He was in Chicago for a speech and called me, well, because that’s what vice presidents of public affairs do.
     “Opioids are the Trojan horse of addiction,” said Moyers. “They sneak up on us and our families and communities like no other substance of misuse. That’s what makes it so scary. They’re clean, easy, legitimate and omnipotent.”
     That’s what worried me. Fifty percent more people died of opioid overdoses in 2014 than died in car wrecks. Some 75 people die every day in the United States from opioid overdose, an “epidemic” which suddenly is being compared with the HIV-AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
To continue reading, click here. 

"Das Rheingold," ripped from the headlines

     If you are going to stiff your contractors, make sure they aren't giants. 
     That isn't the typical spin on "Das Rheingold," the opening salvo of Richard Wagner's epic Ring Cycle.
     But these are not typical times.
     I was fortunate enough to join the full house Saturday night welcoming the opening of the 2016/2017 Lyric Opera season, and now that our incomparable critic Hedy Weiss has weighed in with her typically spot-on review, I feel safe to poke my nose out and sniff the start of what is certain to be a whiz-bang season, complete with beloved barn burners "Carmen" and "The Magic Flute." 
    "Rheingold" starts with one of the most famous passages in music, Wagner's 136 bars of E flat tonic chord. Given the composer's eventual supporting role in his nation's slide into homicidal madness in the 20th century, that groan always struck me as the modern world waking up and fluttering one red eye, all the more significant when you consider that Wagner composed it in the early 1850s.  
      Put it another way. At the exact moment Wagner was blending Norse myth and aural thunder to create"Rheingold," our own national composer, Stephen Foster, was penning "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair."  
     This is a new production of the Ring, and I admired director David Pountney's spare, almost Becketian way it begins, the Rhine River emerging wondrously from a satchel, and the dwarf Alberich with his tramp's bowler hat. He lusts after the Rhinemaidens, capering about on their rolling industrial platforms, steals their gold (memo to guardian nymphs—don't tell strangers how to steal your treasure)  then forges that gold into the all powerful Ring in his subterranean hellscape (yet another homage to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis.") 
    The plot, as with many operas, is too convoluted to bear recounting. But Wotan, king of the gods, has hired a pair of giants, Fasolt and Fafner, to build his fortress and now is reluctant to pay their agreed-upon-price, his sister-in-law Freia. He dangles the gold he doesn't actually have, another Trumpian ploy.
    "Rheingold" is more of an hors d'oeuvre compared to the table-groaning feast of the next three operas in the cycle, "Walkure," "Siegfried," and "Gotterdammerung," and just hearing a snippet of stormy themes to come while Donner blows the mists away from Valhalla was enough for me to want to leap to the rest of the action. But in due time. The Lyric is doling them out, one a year, and then hitting the entire cycle in 2020 for those with the will and the backside stamina to surmount it. 
    My wife, no Wagner fan, pronounced it "magic" and says she now intends to see the entire Ring, a completely unexpected come-to-Jesus moment. 

    "It gets better," I said, thinking of the music. 
    Only one moment in the two-and-a-half hour opera clunked for me, conceptually--Wotan's fortress is spied in the distance as a tiny wooden mock-up of the gears and pulleys arch of the stage set. I get where they're going, but it's such a tiny framework of brown sticks, evoking, for me, the wee witch's house in "Hansel and Gretel," and seems more a false economy than a defendable dramatic decision. No wonder Wotan didn't want to pay the giants their fee. 
    But that is a quibble in a night of splendor. Given the critical guffaws that some new "Rings" have received, and the technical problems that have plagued other productions, the Lyric can't help but sit back, satisfied that they have launched their massive vessel well upon its stormy sea. 
    The swapping of love for power and gold. The crushing down of workers under your power. The indifference of our leaders—Eric Owen's Wotan was an oddly absent figure, overshadowed by half a dozen other characters. Great art is always timely, but this production might be a little too timely. Then again, it has only just begun.
     
     

Don't throw away your vote on Gary Johnson

     I was well on my way to writing for today's paper about a completely different subject, when I realized I thought my Sunday blog post was on a sharper topic — Libertarian Gary Johnson — and I decided to go with that instead. So while this is on the same topic as yesterday, and has a few shared elements, it's been pretty much refurbished top-to-bottom.

     Just as many other Americans are contemplating doing this year, I threw away my first presidential ballot by registering a protest vote.
     It was 1980. I was 20 and worldly as a tadpole. Voting for Ronald Reagan wasn’t a possibility for me — I considered him evil, the guy who, as governor of California, sent cops armed with shotguns into People’s Park, then shrugged off when a student protester was killed with, “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed you must expect things will happen.”
And Jimmy Carter had gone insane during his first term in office. I truly believed that, then and now.
     So who was left? An independent named John B. Anderson, notable for his shock of white hair and 50-cent gas tax.
     What’s the difference between then, and those who now plan to register their unease with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton by voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party’s Jill Stein?
     A lot.

     Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter, mired in the hostage crisis and the energy crisis and a few more crises that don’t leap to mind. He received 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Anderson took 6.6 percent of the popular vote, meaning that if myself and every single person who voted for Anderson instead voted for Carter, Reagan would still have beaten him handily. Our votes didn’t matter.

To continue reading, click here.

Flap your arms and vote for Gary Johnson

     Traffic can be terrible on Chicago expressways. There are these massive jams, and what do you do if you need to get somewhere quickly and the expressway is at a standstill? This column suggests you simply turn off your engine, step out of the car, flap your arms and fly. Not only will you get to your destination much quicker, but flying instead of driving will be an unambiguous message to those in authority at the highway department that they better get their act together and fix the congestion problem before motorists vanish into the air like so many winged birds....
     What? That's impossible you say? You can't simply flap your arms and fly? Oh right, that's true. So I guess that my suggesting you do so, well, it doesn't help much. At all in fact. Indeed, it's kinda stupid, isn't it? I'm recommending an impossible course of action that, if attempted, would accomplish nothing.
     There's a lot of that going around. For instance, the Chicago Tribune endorsing Gary Johnson. Which is actually worse, because I'm joking and they're not, apparently. Yes, the chances of the Libertarian former governor of New Mexico winning the presidency are marginally better than your becoming airborne by vigorous arm agitation. But not by much, and for all practical purposes it's the same.
     Gary Johnson not only can't win, he shouldn't win. His sole appeal is that he's neither Hillary Clinton, who people can't stand for a variety of hollow reasons, or Donald Trump, who people can't stand because he goes out and works hard to deserve their contempt every single minute of every single day.
     Despite being practically unknown, Johnson still fails miserably—the moment he gawped at the word "Aleppo," drawing a blank at mention of the epicenter of the Syrian war, is really all you need to know. Being aware of the most important international crisis of the past three years isn't just a requirement for a potential world leader, it's a requirement for a responsible resident of the world, and being that unplugged means Johnson deserves nobody's vote.  There's more, but that's enough. The only thing you need to know—and some people don't—is that George W. Bush won in 2000 because independent vanity candidate Ralph Nader drew enough of the thinking vote—the alleged thinking vote— away from Al Gore. If enough people vote for Johnson, it'll happen again and Donald Trump will win.
     That isn't how the Tribune sees it.
     "We reject the cliche that a citizen who chooses a principled third-party candidate is squandering his or her vote," the newspaper wrote Friday, joining the throng this election season rejecting obvious fact. "Look at the number of fed-up Americans telling pollsters they clamor for alternatives to Trump and Clinton. What we're recommending will appeal less to people who think tactically than to conscientious Americans so infuriated that they want to send a message about the failings of the major parties and their candidates."
     Send a message to whom? President Trump? And what would that message be: "you won but it isn't our fault because we voted for a person who isn't you?"
     A message that says, "We sat on our hands and watched people crazier than ourselves elect a bigoted, sexist, impulsive, ignorant, bellicose, tax-shirking fraud whose undeniable bad qualities are so numerous that it becomes tiring just to list them."
     Or should that message be: "We voted for a Libertarian loons who wants to privatize government rather than a former senator and secretary of state who adheres to the admittedly-unpopular notion that the role of the government is to get stuff done"?
     Gary Johnson is the Pontius Pilate, I-wash-my-hands vote. Doing something to make yourself feel good under the illusion that you are making some kind of statement, when what you are doing is holding your own sense of moral purity above that of the country, protecting yourself from consequences by voting for somebody who can't win. Flapping those arms and soaring away, in taking your own fantasy flight, leaving your earthbound fellow Americans to figure out the mess they're in. It's better to stay home.
     How did this happen? How did the Chicago Tribune join the handful of papers in the country—the Detroit News is another— to endorse Gary Johnson? I could offer theories. But I have friends at the Tribune, so won't insult them by speculating what went wrong. I don't know, for certain. But I do know that I used to have to dig into the distant past to illustrate how out-of-touch the paper can be, remembering Col. Robert McCormick wrapping himself in the flag, urging the country to be nice to Hitler under the charmed notion that if we do then maybe he'll leave North America alone. Now I have a much more recent folly to hold against them.

Metal man

     While in Champaign for the Pygmalion Festival last weekend, my attentive host, Seth Fein, asked if I wanted to see the statue of my late colleague Roger Ebert. Of course I said that I did. We went directly from dinner and found him, sitting in his movie theater seats in front of the Virginia Theatre, his thumb up in perpetual approval. 
      I've written before of the oddness of seeing men you know or knew in life rendered into bronze—and only men; the women of my acquaintance tend to be spared. As much as I admire Roger, I can't say I was pleased to see him forever—or for the next century anyway— exiled to the streets of his home town. Perhaps because his words form such a permanent and aesthetic tribute, one that will, in my opinion, far outlast any statue. Perhaps because the likeness is at best an approximation, reminding me of those static depictions of kids at play that Northbrook has scattered around its downtown park, images that are closer to metallic corpses than reflections of living children. Perhaps because it lacks the humor and warmth and uniqueness of the man himself, or because of those empty seats on either side of him, inviting tourists to plop down and wrap a chummy arm around Roger, something he would have despised in life.
    And yes, I did sit down, and pat his cold, hollow back, and a picture was taken, but it felt wrong, even as I was doing it, and I will spare us both the embarrassment of the result. 
    Best not to dwell on it. I understand that such projects are reflections of grief, and longing, highly valued by those closest, and thus beyond criticism. Such statues are closer to gravestones than art, and the decent individual doffs his cap and passes silently by. 
     Still, I can't help but wonder what Roger would have made of it — I'm sure he'd capture its dubiousness with greater audacity and skill than I dare muster.

Saying the Pledge of Allegiance to a faded flag

I pledge allegiance …

The sky was yellow Wednesday evening, so I took the flag down before the rain came. Thursday morning before work I put it back out, sliding the aluminum pole into the unsteady brass holder on our front porch, immediately placing my right hand against my heart and saying the pledge because, well, that’s what I do.

… to the flag …

The old flag is faded. The field of royal blue is now more of a bluish white. I probably should replace it. But it was a quality flag. I got it when we bought the house 16 years ago. The stars are embroidered; none of those cheap printed flags.

… of the United States of America …

But I like the faded flag. It seems apt. Not that we are a country fading, in decline — though we certainly seem to be, especially of late, divided, bickering, hating each other, unable to function while our problems deepen and our rivals thrive. We are into the second quarter of our third century. Not a young country anymore. Could we possibly go from the recklessness of youth straight to the folly of age without ever being wise?

... and to the Republic ...

A word that doesn't get considered much. We are not a confederation of independent states, each jealously guarding our local traditions and prejudices, though that's how many of us behave. We are a republic, a union where "supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives." Note the absence of "some" in that definition. Not held by "some people" Not "rich people." Not "white people." Just people. All people.

... for which is stands ...

I never understand those whose who equate patriotism with knee jerk celebration. Love sometimes means clear sight and hard truths plainly told. We slaughtered our native people and drove them off their land—not a practice we invented, but one we excelled at. We enslaved. A shameful history, but taken in full, one with flashes of glory. The good and the bad, not always in balance, but always in competition. We failed our ideals but we had those ideals. Not everyplace on earth did, or does.

... 0ne nation ...

Not because we're all white, or all Christian, or all men, or all straight. We never were that nation; only pretended to be. For a long time. We never were and are less so now. The most repugnant thing about this most repugnant presidential campaign of 2016 is that one candidate—no need to say his name, it gets said enough—pretends he will turn the ship of state around, flip the bird to everyone treading water, and head toward his mirage without them. Not that it's his fault—he is a symptom, not a cause. Too many Americans happily hoist his sails, swab his decks, declare this obvious sham their captain, so eager are they to sail off the edge of the world with him, fleeing their fear, unaware it will dog them to the ends of the earth.

Hmmty-hmmm

Sometimes I say it, sometimes I hum. "Under God" was jammed into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 by a skittish Congress seeking to score a symbolic victory against the Godless communists. They didn't realize that forced faith, like forced patriotism, is hollow. Just like those castigating that backup quarterback for protesting the National Anthem, oblivious to the fact that he isn't undermining the liberty we all enjoy. He's demonstrating it. Freedom to mouth accepted platitudes isn't freedom, it's gilded oppression.

... with liberty ...

Always balanced by responsibility. My freedom to paint my lawn blue ends at your property line, your freedom to make a fist ends at the tip of my nose. So many across the spectrum don't get that.

... and justice ...

Fairness. Reasonableness. The hope that you will be judged, not by what other people of your faith do, not by what I'm afraid you might do, but by what you actually do, who you actually are, "the content of your character," to quote Dr. King.

... for all.

Postscript: a reader pointed out that I forgot a word in the pledge: "indivisible." My immediate impulse was to hurry to put it in. Then I paused, deciding to leave it out, as a reminder, since a lot of people seem to forget that word.

There is a coda to this post. If you want to find out what happened to this flag, read A liberal burns a flag for Flag Day.

Pack your lunch!

     Pack your lunch, and slide by my last book signing of Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, published by the University of Chicago Press and written with Sara Bader. It's from 12 to 2 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29 at Chicago's iconic office supply store, Atlas Stationers, 227 W. Lake.  A 75-year-old family-run business, owned by Don and Therese Schmidt, Atlas is the closest thing Chicago has to the ancient stationery shops of London. I'll be there signing books, and since Don—against my advice, I should add—wants to show that Amazon has nothing on him, thank you very much—the books are priced at $15.95, 30 percent below list and a penny under the behemoth Amazon. Hope to see you there! 

Travels with Kitty

     We took Kitty with us down to Champaign last weekend. My idea. We were about to leave her with the neighbors—they love having her, of course. And no doubt she would be happy to be left behind, playing on the block with her dog pal Izzy. But then we would be dogless, and I decided it would be just more fun to have her along, and it was.
     She is a well-travelled dog--she has been out to Colorado, and sniffed at Rocky Mountain National Park, had tea in the Empire Room at the Palmer House, or the dog equivalent of tea anyway, padded through the Smokey Mountains, and turned up her nose at the Atlantic Ocean.
     At times wrangling both Kitty and a vacation has required a bit of ingenuity. In Durango, Colorado, we knew we would be gone most of the day taking the narrow gauge train to Silverton and back. So I slipped a $20 bill to the bellboy to walk the dog at lunch. He was happy for the easy double sawbuck, and I felt like King Farouk arranging it. Kitty didn't seem to mind.
     Hotels tend to be more accommodating to dogs than they used to be. The Palmer House provided a special dog bed. The Chateau Frontenac in Quebec has a dog in the lobby, to comfort dogless visitors. There was a line to pet her. Before our trip downstate, I phoned ahead, and the Hyatt Place was happy to have her, though they should be, considering their $75 fee for dogs, which is good whether you stay one day or six. A lot of money, and would have been a deal breaker, but I was there with a festival, which had secured a block of rooms, and special accommodations were made.  
    As soon as we arrived, we took her to lunch across the street at the Big Grove Tavern, which was also happy to have her dine with us, on the patio. We weren't even the only party with a dog waiting for a table. I looped her leash under the leg of my chair, and left her to sniff around, and snuck her bits of omelet.
     I could go on, but there really isn't more of a point today than, "Don't be afraid to take your dog places." Yes, I know, earth-shaking it's not. No matter. Take the dog. Sure, you might feel like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage," particularly if you are a man of a certain age escorting a tiny dog. Go with it. You'd be surprised what a well-behaved small dog can get away with, if you're polite and quick about it. I walked her into the Northbrook Post Office one day last week to transact some quick business.
    "Are dogs allowed?" I asked innocently, as we conducted our transaction.
    "Not usually," the clerk said, tossing Kitty a glance. 
    "Oh, I 'm very sorry," I said, collecting my stamps and my change. "I didn't realize." And we were gone. 
    

The Only Part of Last Night's Debate You Need to See

     I don't usually share the works of other writers here. But since today's post is an expansion of yesterday's, and since I have a paternal interest in this young writer out of California, I thought, for those who had enough of Nixon, I'd post this analysis of Monday's debate taken from the Claremont Independent, written by Ross Steinberg, junior at Pomona College.

     Yesterday’s debate featured exactly the Trumpian performance we’ve come to expect: the Donald’s signature one-two punch of incoherence and lies, paired with enough bizarre non sequiturs—“I have a son who’s 10, he’s so good with computers,” anyone?—so as to border on the surreal.
     With such a ‘bigly’ amount of sheer ineptitude, however, genuinely important debate moments are being forgotten. It’s easy to miss the insanity buried amidst the absurd, the moments such as when Trump accused Clinton of fighting for her entire 68 years of life against an organization started in 2004. But one of Trump’s less provocative monologues contains the most substantive policy revelation of the debate. It is a microcosm of the debate as a whole; if you don’t have the time to watch the full debate, all you need to do to understand Round One of Trump v. Clinton is to read this three-paragraph transcript of the Republican nominee’s response to the following question from moderator Lester Holt: “On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing the nation’s longstanding policy on first use. Do you support the current policy?”

To continue reading, click here.

Trump is going to win (redux).

Illinois GOP chairman Tim Schneider at the City Club Tuesday. 

     No, this isn't deja vu. Today's column is a reworking of Tuesday's post. It seemed something worth sharing in the paper, and so I fleshed it out by sliding over to the City Club to hear what the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party had to say about Monday's debate. So apologies for the overlap, though you fans of nuance—and I know you're out there—might enjoy spotting the various differences between the two pieces. The headline in the paper is "Donald Trump is going to be elected president." 

     Donald Trump is going to be elected president of the United States on Nov. 8.
     At least I believe he will. I’m not the Delphic oracle. But that seems the direction we’re heading, and Monday night’s debate only reinforced my suspicion.
     What? You think Hillary Clinton won? Since I have my seer cap on, let me peer into your mind, read your thoughts and make a bold guess:
     You liked Hillary Clinton before, right?
     Amazing. But that cuts both ways. Trump fans were equally buoyed. Eighty percent of Drudge Report readers picked Trump the winner in a post-debate poll, as did viewers of Fox News. They’ve supported him so far; what could possibly happen to shake them?     The Democrats and the pundits were ululating Clinton’s victory Tuesday. I watched every minute and agree that, under the usual rules of what I think of as SaneWorld, Clinton won, looking poised and presidential while Trump babbled and flailed. But his supporters recounted something very different the morning after.
     “Honestly, and the truth is . . . a draw,” Tim Schneider, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, told the City Club of Chicago on Tuesday. “I don’t think anything that happened last night in the debate changed anybody’s mind. If you were going to vote for her before the debate, you’re going to vote for her after the debate. Donald Trump the same way.”
     Despite this split decision, Schneider sees Illinois suddenly up for grabs.
     "They've written off Illinois," he said. "All the pundits said Illinois is going to be blue. But I tell you, this is a different election. You go down to southern Illinois and they're 'Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump.' They're really, really rooting for this guy. There are many, many states that have never been in play before that are in play this time, and who knows?"
     Who knows? I do. Trump wins. Not because I'm one of those Trump Trump Trump chanters.
     To be honest, I wasn't convinced the man will win until I read something about Richard Nixon.
     I pulled down Elizabeth Drew's book "Richard M. Nixon" and happened upon this sentence: "Nixon had transformed the party of Abraham Lincoln into the party that welcomed racists and despisers of big government, setting in motion a Republican conservative ascendancy."
     Sound familiar?
     Yes, the past is not prologue, necessarily.
     But it is a hint, a map indicating that events can fall a certain way. 

     All those commentators decrying, correctly, how Trump is the worst candidate in modern history are missing the point. Yes, Trump is terrible. But Nixon was pretty bad too. He had more experience, sure, been a congressman and a senator and Eisenhower's neglected vice president (is there any other kind?) for eight years.
     He was also loathed, also seen as uniquely unqualified, a House Un-American Activities Committee's henchman. During his 1954 cross-country anti-communism tour, the Washington Post's Herbert Block famously drew Nixon emerging from a sewer to be greeted rapturously.
     Ring a bell?
     Nixon's opponent, Hubert Humphrey, was enormously qualified. Also vice-president, but with none of the drawbacks and personal deficiencies of Nixon. Humphrey was the mainstream politician from Central Casting.
     Sound familiar?
     Just. Like. Hillary. Clinton.
     Enthusiasm for Clinton was overshadowed by the big love for Bernie Sanders. Just as in 1968, Democratic passion was drained by tantalizing might-have-beens Eugene McCarthy, whose candidacy fizzled, and Robert F. Kennedy, who would have taken the nomination had he not been assassinated.
     Nixon was law and order. Humphrey was violence in the streets. There was a third party candidate attractive to those disgusted with both.
     Nixon won, barely: 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 42.7 percent, with George Wallace getting 13.5 percent of the vote.
     So if—when—Trump wins, we can't be surprised. It has happened before.
     

Donald Trump wins

     Donald Trump is going to be elected president on Nov. 8.
     At least I think he will. I'm not the flippin' Delphic oracle. But that seems to be the direction we're heading, and Monday night's debate only reinforced that belief. Hillary Clinton was vastly superior, yet it was a draw, I am certain, in the minds of Americans. Each candidate spoke to his or her audience, which had only scorn for the other. 
   And then there's Richard Nixon. 
     I pulled down Elizabeth Drew's book on Nixon, part of Times Books'' series of brief biographies, The American Presidents.
     And I happened upon this sentence: "Nixon had transformed the party of Abraham Lincoln into the party that welcomed racists and despisers of big government, setting in motion a Republican conservative ascendancy."
    Sound familiar? 
    Yes, the past is not prologue, necessarily. 
    But it is a hint.
    All those commentators decrying — correctly — how Trump is the worst candidate in modern history are missing the point. Yes, Trump is terrible. But Nixon was pretty bad too. He had been a congressman and a senator and Eisenhower's neglected vice president (is there any other kind?) for eight years.
     But he was also seen as uniquely unqualified, a House Un-American Activities Committee's henchman, there for the jobs too unpleasant for Joe McCarthy to handle himself. During the 1960 campaign a Herblock cartoon had shown Nixon emerging from a sewer while someone in a gleeful welcoming committee shouted, "Here He Comes Now!" 
     His opponent, Hubert Humphrey was enormously qualified. Also vice-president, but with none of the drawbacks and personal deficiencies of Nixon. Humphrey was the mainstream politician from Central Casting.
    Sound familiar?
    Just. Like. Hillary. Clinton.
    As with Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party passion had been drained by more dynamic opponents: Eugene McCarthy, whose candidacy fizzled, and Robert F. Kennedy, who would have probably taken the nomination had he not been assassinated.  
    Nixon was law and order. Humphrey was violence in the streets. There was a third party candidate attractive to those disgusted with both. 
    When the smoke cleared, Nixon just barely won: 43.4 percent of the vote, to Humphrey's 42.7 percent, with George Wallace earning 13.5 percent of the vote.
     So if — when — Trump wins, we can't be surprised. It has happened before. 
     And the truth is, Nixon wasn't so bad, as presidents go. Which leaves hope for Trump. As a man who constantly shifts position, who makes vows today and abandons them tomorrow, denying he ever made them in the first place, he could be among the great Democratic president ever. We just don't know, and to be honest, I doubt it. More like one of the great disasters. Either way, I have a feeling we're going to find out.

Those good-guy-with-a-gun fantasies have a real world price

Tyehimba Jess recites at the Literary Death Match in Champaign Saturday.

     You can’t drive down to Champaign without loving America just a little bit more. All that open space. The miles of brown September corn. The decaying red barns. The communications towers against big blue skies. The fact that the crazy 55 mph speed limit finally went back up to 70, a sign that our nation still retains the ability to repair our errors, at least the minor ones.
     There are, of course, ominous signs as well—literal signs, like the “TRUMP-PENCE” billboard in one farmer’s field. Or another announcing “GunsSaveLife.com,” an Illinois pro-guns-everywhere group formed, apparently, because the NRA just isn’t busy enough. The website’s top story is headlined “ARE NO GUNS MALLS SAFE?” and begins “Are America’s malls with ‘NO GUNS’ polices safe for you and your kids and grandkids to visit? That’s a great question given a pair of Muslim terror attacks a week apart at malls that shared policies and/or signage that prohibits law-abiding good guys from carrying guns on their premises . . .”
     I somehow screw up the courage to go to Northbrook Court without an AR-15 (which, I suppose I must point out, Maxon Shooter Supply notwithstanding, I could easily and legally buy if I choose to, which I don’t). But I understand others find this prospect terrifying.
     Give GunsSaveLife.com credit for moxie. Guns actually kill people, and when you look at the stats—hard to do, with Congress obstructing research into gun violence—you see that states with looser gun laws suffer more random gun violence. Because terror attacks—even two a week—though scary, are exceedingly rare compared with the daily slaughter that having handguns everywhere encourages.

To continue reading, click here.