Trump brand now shining like a lead balloon

     There are many ways to vote against Donald Trump.
     Vote early now or at the ballot box Nov. 8.
     Either way works. But that still isn’t enough for some to register their disdain for the talking yam who would shrug off our cherished democracy.
     Walking through a Barnes & Noble this week, Michele Kurlander turned books by Donald Trump around, so their covers faced the wall.
     “Childish,” she said. “But it made me feel better.”
     In May, when the Los Angeles Dodgers were at Chicago and staying at the Trump International Hotel and Towers, first baseman Adrian Gonzalez refused to join his teammates at the hotel.
     “I didn’t stay there,” Gonzalez said. “I had my reasons.”
     And Elonide Semmes, president of Right Hat, a boutique branding agency headquartered in Chicago, instructed her staff not to stay in Trump hotels as they crisscross the country helping companies forge corporate identities. The epiphany came on the Chicago River during an architectural boat tour.

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A sort of genius really

    Donald Trump exists in that surreal zone of stupidity that is so extreme, you'd almost feel sorry for him, that is, if he weren't trying to lead the country over a cliff. 
    The day after his third scowling, shrugging, blathering performance at a presidential debate, he raised what has become one of his trademark baseless charges: that Hillary Clinton was "inappropriately given the debate questions."
     Which leads us to the subjects raised at the debate: the Supreme Court. Immigration. The economy. Couldn't of seen these coming, eh? These were surprises to Trump? No wonder he was so badly beaten by Clinton and her secret information. No wonder, even as the debate was transpiring, Trump was aware enough that he was blowing it, again, badly enough that only cheating on Clinton's part would explain it. He lashed out at her, poised despite his constant interruptions, insults, one of which, "nasty woman," instantly became a badge of honor, the way that the ((())) denotation used by Trump's anti-Semitic supporters to tag Jewish names was seized and used by Jewish writers on Twitter.
      While I have been slow in surrendering my pessimism, my nagging fear that he will win, the polls are such that I'm beginning to yield that up to actual hope that he won't. 
    Still, it's grim that he's even running, that he's in contention, that anyone supports him. He'd be embarrassing as a fringe candidate that got a whopping 10 percent of the vote. 
    Let's touch upon the undeniable qualities: a bigot and a bully, a fraud and a liar. Rolling like a puppy at the feet not only of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, but too dumb to be ashamed of it. Lauding Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad, calling him smarter than both President Obama and Hillary Clinton in Wednesday's debate, when he hobbyhorsed on his dozen or so familiar concepts, ignoring the substance of the questions he was asked. 
    Hillary Clinton didn't get the questions ahead of time.* Any idiot would have known what policy questions Chris Wallace would raise. But Donald Trump is not just any idiot.  He's special. Idiocy is the one area where he truly excels. 


* Events later showed that, actually, she had, the rare instance of one of Trump's wild charges actually being true. That said, I think the point still stands.

"Soul clap its hands and sing'

                                   That is no country for old men. The young 

                                    In one another's arms, birds in the trees

     Ever since Google maps started listing 'L' stations, I take the train everywhere. Why bother with a cab? Trains are convenient, usually faster, and cost a lot less.  
     Plus the 'L' pulses with life, energy. The middle aged suburbanites on the Metra gaze at their phones in dull silence, like cows in a pen. The city kids tumble on and off the trains, shouting, laughing, practically dancing in place.
      Or such is my romantic view of it.
     So I took the Brown line from the Merchandise Mart to Sedgwick Tuesday to meet a friend for lunch at Kanela's Breakfast Club on Wells Street. Try the barbecue chicken salad. Mmm.
     While I was in the neighborhood, I stopped at the Up Down Cigar Shop to pick up a couple Rocky Patels as a treat. And now I'm taking the train back to the paper. 
    Most people stand by the door, but that gets crowded, makes it hard for others to get in and out. So I step into the center of the train. Considerate. The train is full, there isn't a seat, but that's okay. I can stand for two stops, or 20. I'm a man in motion, moving through the city, on the 'L,' healthy, happy, or as close to happy as I come. 
    A young woman is sitting next to me. I don't notice her until she speaks.
    "Would you like my seat?" she says. I look around, to see who she's talking to. She's talking to me. I look down at her face. About 20. I'd almost guess Navajo, by her cheekbones and her gleaming black hair, but that can't be. Probably Hispanic. A college student maybe.

                                Those dying generations—at their song,
                                The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
                                Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
                                Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

    "No thank you," I say, automatically then, unable to resist, jut out my lower lip and add petulantly, "Nobody has ever offered me a seat before." But she has already looked away, and I do the same. 
     Fifty-six. A bit grey in the beard, yes, but I thought in a dashing, Richard Branson sort of way. Not in a geriatric, young-people-offering-me-a-seat way. I keep my gaze level, watching the apartments roll past. 
     "A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time," Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in 1858, when he was ...ulp... 49. 
     Then again, Holmes lived to be 85, old enough to see his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court Justice, rise to the high court of Massachusetts. Still plenty of time to get used to my role in the universe. 
    Besides, the offer is a good thing, to see the young offering their elders a seat. And kids, really, they aren't able to judge how old people are. Everybody over 30 is ancient. You can't feel bad about that. Though of course I do, a little. No one wants to grow old, though we all do. Most of us, that is. Nothing to do but accept it. Growing old, remember, beats the alternative.  Yeats, as always, points the way out in his "Sailing to Bzyantium."
                                          
                                          An aged man is but a paltry thing,
                                          A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 

                                          Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
                                      For every tatter in its mortal dress

     That's a plan. The doors slid open at the Mart stop and, not looking again at my would-be benefactress, I put on my bravest face, not quite clapping and singing, but striding out of the train with all the purpose and dignity and vigor I can muster.

Now is the time to salaam before Steve Bartman

 
     Life is not fair.
     I hope I’m not the guy spilling the beans to you. But the best competitor and the one who wins are not always the same person.
     Baseball teaches us that. It isn’t just any player who whiffs to sink the Mudville Nine. It is the Mighty Casey.
     The team whose pitcher racked up the most number of perfect innings in a game — 12, by Pirate Harvey Haddix — also lost that game, in the 13th.
     And the Cubs … well, they’re in the playoffs now, still, in the second half of October. Acclaimed the best team in baseball, for all the good that does. Fans strode into the post-season confident in our champions who just needed to execute a few preliminaries, to sign some paperwork, the bill of lading for our long-delayed and much re-routed delivery of glory.
     Then we felt a chill.
     An apt moment to give reverence to Steve Bartman, to salaam before him, like a minor household deity. You remember Bartman. He was just another fan at Wrigley Field on Oct. 14, 2003, at Game 6 of another National League Championship Series, this one against the Florida Marlins. One out, eighth inning. Luis Castillo drives one down the left field line. Moises Alou goes after it....

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"Such a storm of vulgar force"— Books on the nightstand

  



   It's been a long time since I updated my Books on the Nightstand section. 

      We beat up ourselves for whipping out phones and text messaging each other, posting Facebook updates and sending Snapchats. But in truth, the desire to keep in touch with our friends and loved ones, as much as possible, is neither regrettable or new.  
    On Thursday, Oct. 7, 1773, Scottish lawyer James Boswell  watched a dreadful storm lash rain against the windows of the house he was staying at on a remote island in Western Scotland and felt cut off.
     "We were in a strange state of abstraction from the world," he wrote.  "We could neither hear from our friends, nor write to them. It gave me much uneasiness to think of the anxiety my dear wife must suffer."
     And Boswell was with the man he most admired in life, Samuel Johnson, the great English author and dictionary compiler, taking a long-anticipated trip to Boswell's home nation, visiting its western islands, the Hebrides.
    While they were warmly received wherever they went—Johnson at the time was among the most famous men of letters in the English-speaking world—the Hebrides felt like both the outer rung of the civilization, and at times its lowest rung as well. At one point they peer into a poor hut, smoky and filthy, where the simple family sleeps all in one bed.
    "Et hoc secundum sententiam philosopherum est esse beatus,"  Johnson murmurs to Boswell. "And that, according to the opinion of philosophers, is happiness," no doubt a dig at Boswell's idol, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his lauding of simple country virtues.
     Boswell would meet Rousseau. And Voltaire. And David Hume. And King George III. He thrilled to be in the presence of greatness, so much his adoration is almost charming. And Johnson, who once said "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," is the avatar of pithiness and reason. They're great guys to hang around with.
      Johnson remarks on the value of being attacked in print, as opposed to being ignored.
     "A man who tells me my play is very bad, is less my enemy than he who lets it die in silence," he tells Boswell. "A man whose business it is to be talked of, is much helped by being attacked."
     Words to remember.     
     Having devoured Boswell's Life of Johnson and found it perhaps the best biography I've ever read, I long anticipated Hebrides as a kind of looser encore, and it is exactly that, although Johnson does sometimes fade away, nearly lost amidst the lairds and lochs and crumbling castles reported upon by Boswell. It nearly shocked me when Boswell pauses to address this, as if he had read my mind.
     "He asked me today how we were so little together," Boswell notes, on Sept. 19, 1773. "I told him my Journal took up so much time. But at the same time, it is curious that although I will run from one end of London to another to have an hour with him, I should omit to seize any spare time to be in his company when I am in the house with him. But my Journal is really a task of much time and labor, and Mr. Johnson forbids me to contract it."
     The book is still a box of candy for any Johnson fan, and I've been reading it with much joy and happiness.  I happened upon a 1936 Viking Press imprint (in Evanston's delightful Amaranth Books on Davis Street) that reproduces the original manuscript, whole, and includes much tart personal observations that are cut out of the book as published at the time, his arguments with Johnson, his nightmares about his child's face, eaten by worms, and his tendency to start each morning with a dram of Scottish whiskey, until Johnson, a teetotaler, berates him. "For shame!" 
     They have an exchange that would be current this week, with the conservative Boswell taking up the popular Republican cry, and Johnson providing the draft of common sense.
     "But is there not reason to fear the common people may be oppressed?" Boswell asks. 
     "No sir," Johnson answers. "Our great fear is from want of power in government. Such a storm of vulgar force has broken in."
    "It has only roared," parries Boswell.
    "Sir, it has roared till the judges in Westminster Hall have been afraid to pronounce sentence in opposition to the popular cry.  You are frightened by what is no longer dangerous, like Presbyterians by Popery." There are many people nowadays, Johnson observes, quoting a popular work, who "would cry "Fire! Fire!' in Noah's Flood." 
     Such people are still with us, unfortunately, though the likes of Boswell and Johnson are not. But they can still be found alive and well and talking lustily in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Plus a lot about Scotland. They even observe a game of golf, circa 1773.

Saying goodbye to Ed McElroy

Sept. 8, 2016, Poetry Foundation

     The third to the last time I saw Ed McElroy alive was in early September, when he showed up at the Poetry Foundation for my book launch. That's what Ed did: he showed up. Old-school, no excuses. While typical friends are always there when they need you, Ed was always there, in a suit and tie, driving a black Cadillac. Though he wasn't always happy about it. "I thought there would be food at this," he said after the reading, his subtle hint that maybe I should invite him to the foundation's private dinner, so I did. He parked in a crosswalk on Clark Street, which puzzled my New York publishing pals — why was the car still there 90 minutes later? I pointed out the ceremonial police baton with its red tassel placed conspicuously on the dashboard. Welcome to Chicago.
     Ed was famous, once, in the 1950s and 1960s, on WJJD. He announced wrestling, boxing, bicycle races. He hung out with Ted Williams. When he married Rita in 1955, Richard J. Daley attended the wedding. Daley once sent Ed to the airport to pick up a young senator from Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy and Ed had dinner on Rush Street.
     "Ed knew Martin Luther King," I told our table mates. "King was very good to me," agreed Ed.

     The second to the last time I saw Ed alive was at the end of September. He invited me to dinner at Gene & Georgetti with Marc Schulman, owner of Eli's Cheesecake. The occasion was pure Ed, in that I had no idea why we were there -- for Marc's benefit, or my benefit, or his. After radio, Ed became a publicist, for the Water Reclamation District and the Fraternal Order of Police and countless judges. He worked so smoothly you forgot he was working. We talked about Marc's dad, Eli, and the last time Ed and I ate at his namesake steakhouse on Chicago Avenue. Colleague Ray Coffey had grown weary in retirement, and we were cheering him up. That was also the sort of thing Ed did. He kept tabs. If you were Catholic and homebound, he'd slide by and give you communion, removing the wafer from a gold box he kept in his pocket. If you needed cheering, he'd take you to a steak house.
     In that light, maybe dinner was for me.

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Rita and Ed McElroy ins his home office. 

Oddness and telephone service

     The phone stopped working.
     So my wife called AT&T, to see what the problem was. 
     During the 45 minutes she was on hold, she asked, "Should I just cancel our line?" Lots of people are doing that now. No need for land lines. Cell phones are sufficient. 
     "Go for it," I said. The only people who call are surveys and charity come-ons, inevitably while I'm trying to nap. And my mother, though she can call my cell. 
      But when my wife finally got a representative, she found it would cost $10 a month more to not have a phone, under our plan. It seemed odd to pay for a service we'd no longer be getting. Might as well keep it. 
     She continued on hold.  A thought came to me. 
     "Why get the line fixed?" I asked. We didn't want a phone. We could pay the extra ten bucks a month to have the line discontinued. Or we could just leave it dysfunctional and get the same result: no phone. Heck, we could throw our phones away — except of course for the rotary dial classic that I bought for $5 on eBay just because I wanted one. 
    My wife's face fell.
     "We're paying for it," she said. "We might as well get the service."
     A service, I hasten to add, we no longer want.
     That's psychology for you. 
     So we'll have to wait until our contract is up, in January, when we can discontinue home phone service without paying the penalty. It'll seem odd, without it. Then again, lots of stuff feels odd lately. Oddness seems a condition of 21st century existence. 

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....

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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.

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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.

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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.
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"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.

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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.