Museum to the result ignores the cause

     John Kerry is in Hiroshima for Group of Seven talks, and on Monday toured the city's Peace Memorial Museum, becoming the first sitting secretary of state to visit the museum and take its grim journey through the dropping of the atomic bomb.
     Kerry said "everybody" should tour the museum, including President Obama, who visits Japan next month, and having toured it myself this past March, I agree with him.
     It's a somber place, by necessity, but as stark as the story it tells, of the atomic bomb exploding above Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, and the toll on the humans living below, it is also an incomplete story as well.
      You can't be a human being and not be saddened by the experience—Kerry called it "gut-wrenching." But I was also struck by the subtle dishonesty of the exhibits, which emphasize the deaths of school children over just about anything else. Again and again. Mannequins holding their tattered uniforms, photos of their injuries. It would be possible to visit the museum and miss the fact that there had been a war at all, one started by the Japanese invading Manchuria, a brutal global struggle for survival which the Americans, who were fiercely isolationist, unfortunately, were drawn into only when the Japanese attacked our base at Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning in December, 1941, killing 2,000 American servicemen.
    This is not a minor point. Though I suppose the Japanese can be forgiven for not emphasizing it, since we do such a poor job of teaching the story ourselves. Many Americans don't know we fought the Japanese in World War II, never worry about fine points like the atomic bomb. That was illustrated this week on my Facebook page, in a discussion of Germany, someone mentioned Japan's failure to come to terms with the horrors it inflicted on its neighbors in World War II. 
    "Japan is a pretty peaceful place," a woman replied, "what we did to them was horrible."
     In the discussion afterward, it turned out, she didn't know that Japan was responsible for some 10 million deaths prior to the dropping of the atomic bomb, most in China, which it invaded in 1937 and brutalized. Americans alive at the time were profoundly grateful for the bomb—85 percent approved its use, according to a Gallup Poll in September, 1945—which saved uncounted American lives — and Japanese — lives that would have been lost had we been forced to invade the island. Guilt over its use is based on anachronism: applying the values of today to the past, conveniently forgetting large swatches of history including the fact that, awful as the bombing of Hiroshima was, it did not prompt the Japanese to surrender. A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was required to do that.

   

There's a lot of that cult of personality thing going around

     Xi Jinping.
     Any idea what that means?
     Here, I’ll make it easier: A) Street slang for “Extreme Jumping,” the practice of leaping off tall buildings, cliffs, etc., in one of those flying squirrel suits while taking a video for YouTube
     B) Korean for “Sin Juniper,” a kind of gin made with radioactive juniper berries
     C) the president of the People’s Republic of China for the past three years
     Too easy, right? It’s “C,” though don’t feel bad if you guessed differently. We’re Americans, we can’t keep track with every detail in this big old globe of ours. I imagine a third of the country, if you asked them to name the leader of China, would say “Mao Zedong,” and he died in 1976.
     You’re certainly not alone.
     “I never heard of him,” Bill O’Reilly said on Fox News last September, after laboriously reading Xi’s name off a piece of paper. “I don’t know who he is.”

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Really important people show up for the bris

     Politics has become such a free fire zone, the tendency is to blast away at everything, big or small, without any sense of balance. Thus Hillary Clinton can be assailed for a policy statement, for something her husband did 20 years ago, for her relationship with Wall Street banks, and her smile, all in the same breath, all with the same vigor, as if those were all equivalent. 

     I try not to do that. Given Donald Trump's utter unfitness for president in thought, word and deed, between his preying upon the darkest impulses in the submerged American psyche and his tacit union with xenophobes of all stripes, who cares whether his wife posed for risque fashion shots or that his hands are tiny? Why traffic in trivialities?

    So it is not significant that the man skipped his own grandson's bris to campaign. If the three marriages don't show that Trump doesn't hold family life in high regard, nothing will. Though the delicious irony that Trump has the White Supremacist vote locked up; the existence of his Jewish grandkid must be one of the many things they don't know. Reading a story laying out the whole situation—Brisgate, we'll call it—it struck me that the average, non-Jewish reader might not get the significant of brises, something that I explained back in the 1990s, when I hosted a pair. 

     Elsewhere in the paper today, my colleague Jim Ritter has a calm, sober look at the current state of the art of medical thinking regarding the practice of circumcision.
     Poor guy.
     I wish I could have gotten to him beforehand and warned him: Jim, buddy, don't do this. Listen to me, the voice of experience. Write a story about podiatry.
     You see, I, too, wrote a story about circumcision, about 10 years ago. And have found myself, ever since then, placed on the mailing list of NO-CIRC, the California group that feels circumcision is the greatest atrocity visited upon mankind since the Romans crucified slave rebels along the Appian Way.
     So every quarter, for the past decade, the NO-CIRC newsletter lands in my mailbox. It's an arresting document, filled with tales of botched circumcisions, of doctors who now see the light, of men declaring their lives ruined by circumcision (they speak of not being "complete"). There are all sorts of heretofore unimagined practices, such as submitting to reconstructive surgery to have the little bit put back.
     I should be strong and just pitch the newsletter out, unread. But that would take a more solid will than my own. Curiosity always gets the better of me, and I need to flip through it, marveling that what is for me and everyone I've ever met a forgotten bit of surgical business buried deep in our unremembered pasts is, for these people, a defining wrong and peerless crime they set their lives to fighting.
     Hope you enjoy it, Jim, because they've got your number now.
     Of course, I'm biased. Circumcision is one of my people's rituals. Eight days after a boy is born, you get everybody over to the house. A mohel—or rabbi trained to do the deed—shows up, puts on a little show, does a few deft slices, and then everyone breaks out the Crown Royal.
     I've hosted two bris ceremonies in the past three years and would love to host another, if the opportunity arrives. They're fun. True, there is a certain anxiety among the male guests, who tend to whistle silently, their hands folded in front of them, protectively. They stare with sudden interest at the light fixtures while the act itself is being performed.
     But the newborn boys, snockered on Manischevitz sucked off a piece of gauze, took it like, well, men. A little crying, and then back to normal. Maybe they'll hate me someday for it and join NO-CIRC, but I sort of doubt it.
     And the ceremony had meaning to me. Not so much the ageless covenant going back to Abraham, an unbroken chain from Chicago leading to the sands of the Sinai Desert. No, what I found most amazing was that people showed up. A bris has to be done at a set time - eight days after the birth, during the day. Which means that it is rarely conveniently scheduled. People don't come out on a Tuesday morning because they want to watch a surgical procedure and grab a free bagel. They come out because, I assume, they care about you, they're proud you've had a boy and want to share in it.
     A good thought. I concluded, after the two bris rites, that as a general rule the people who took the time to attend were the people I was going to expend energy worrying about. Several times, when faced with a friend's less-than-friendlike behavior, I comforted myself with the thought, "Heck, they didn't come to the bris—what did I expect?"

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, March 2, 1999

Hugh Hefner, advocate for family values

     Today is Hugh Hefner's 90th birthday. The Playboy founder has long been in California, but was born and raised in Chicago, started Playboy on the kitchen table of his Harper Avenue apartment, and ran his empire here until the mid-1970s.
     Some people are captivated by Hef. I am not one of those people. I always shared the opinion of Mike Royko, who once wrote:

     He is the world's most over-rated playboy. In fact, I'm not sure that Hefner is a playboy. He seems to be as middle-class as the people he criticizes in his giggle-giggle philosophy.

      Bingo. Not that there's anything WRONG with being middle-class. I certainly am. Still, I don't pretend to be the avatar of sophistication, which Hefner certainly did. Nor do I suggest that crass commercialism and unexamined carnality amounts to the nine-fold path to enlightenment. 
     That said, he was a personage of significance, no doubt about that. In this 2000 column, I found myself at one of his parties, and thought I'd share the experience, such as it was, to mark his birthday.

     The principal of Queen of Peace High School phoned. Could I, she asked, come to their event on Monday?
      Gee, I said, I'd love to, but I'm going to Hugh Hefner's party. He's showing off his twin girlfriends, Sandy and Mandy.
     I could have just said, "Sorry, I'm busy." But I provided details, succumbing to the shameful braggadocio that sends people to such parties in the first place. Look at me! I was saying. I'm big and important!
     Within such pride are the seeds of its own punishment. Having bragged about going, when Monday night came, I had to actually go.
     That cuts across my core personality, which is to rush home each night and read Hop on Pop. First, I'm a tired guy, I like to rest. Second, when I go out, I avoid crowds. Why risk having your elbow jostled? Third, I have the most persuasive lobbyist in the world working on me not to linger downtown, in the form of a 2-year-old on the phone saying wistfully, "You come home fwum work now?"
     But Hugh Hefner? The man is an icon. What guy doesn't cast a long, envious look at the life Hefner has had? Rich. Famous. All the babes in the world.
     My wife thought I was going to ogle the centerfolds. But really I was going to ogle Hefner.
     That view is not shared by all. The principal, for instance, surprised me by expressing disdain. Why, she asked, her voice registering part wonder, part icy disgust, would you want to go there?
     I've met the principal, and like her, and was a little embarrassed to be caught bragging about something so clearly loathsome to her. Her displeasure hovered above me and kept me from joining in the easy dismissal of those protesting naming a street in honor of Hefner.
     At first, the protest seems like a time warp, just for the terms used: "pornography," "provincialism," even that hoary 1920s chestnut, "free love."
     It is easy to forget that the mainstream of America is a very conservative place. The fact is that sex and nudity send a big chunk of America screaming for the exits, and as fun as it is for hip urbanites such as ourselves to smirk at them, many people feel that the entire Playboy philosophy is grotesque and damaging to family life.
     They're wrong, of course. Hugh Hefner has done more to foster family values than anybody. His party, for instance, was one long infomercial for being married and spending your nights at home playing Scrabble.
     About 500 people packed into a dimly lit room. Unidentifiable techno disco wumping out of big speakers. Hef and three or four identical, improbably constructed women, the twins apparently among them, somehow transported through the crowd and placed on a raised podium surrounded by a nose-high wall. On tiptoe, you could just see them.
     "Watch Hef dance!" a media pal urged. I gazed over the wall. Hef danced like my Uncle Max, his hands in little fists, feet planted, shoulders waggling happily for about 10 seconds.
     Later, I tried to ascend to the empyrean to greet him, but was rebuffed. Having shown off to a high school principal, I was punished by being told to go stand with the other supernumeraries in the crowd scene.
     My wife—her mind addled by love—had actually worried that I would become lovestruck by some Playboy centerfold and hie away with her to California. But in reality, such women are more anatomical curiosities than lust objects; closer to giraffes than people.
     Frankly, the next morning, ears ringing, stomach uneasy, I realized, too late, that I would have had more fun at Queen of Peace High School, reminded yet again of the essential fact missed by both critics and defenders of Playboy: It's an illusion, harmful only to those who seek it out in reality.
            —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 13, 2000

Gay Talese takes us inside "The Voyeur's Motel"

Gay Talese

     My use of the word "incredible" to describe Gay Talese's book "The Voyeur's Motel" in this column turned out to be prescient. When it was published in late June, journalists more rigorous than myself poked holes in his accounts, and Talese renounced the whole thing.  It sucks to get old.

     When I’m 84, I just hope to be somewhere. Sitting on a comfortable chair in the sun, perhaps, plaid wool lap rug neatly tucked, flipping through Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and someone to bring a fresh cup of tea. Sign me up right now.
     The thought of being Gay Talese, 84 and at the very top of his game, roiling the media world two, maybe three, different ways in the span of a week, well, it’s unimaginable.
     And no, I don’t mean the Twitstorm over his telling a crowd at Boston University on April 1 that, as a young man, he wasn’t inspired by female reporters. That’s called candor, and the shriek rising up from the Internet is only news because we’re still accustoming ourselves to it. It’s too omnipresent and witless to have actual value, and someday will be seen not as news so much as similar to how we view the writing inside toilet stalls: a trivial element of modern life of interest only to those who find themselves directly before it.
     No, I mean his article, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” in the April 11 New Yorker.  An incredible story, leaving behind important questions, something they’ll discuss in journalism schools 50 years from now (assuming, of course, there are journalism schools 50 years from now) the way we’re still talking about Talese’s profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published 50 years ago this month in Esquire (the anniversary being Talese’s third source of notoriety this week)....

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A luxury they will never enjoy

     Hmm.
     Now Tuesday was a really good day. Got to work with a pocket full of nothing, true, but came up with a column about the minimum wage that I wasn't embarrassed to pass on to the editor. Jumped on the Blue Line to Wicker Park. Popped into Myopic Books, one of the great used book stores left in Chicago. Had lunch at my new favorite place, Dove's on Damen, bumped into my pal, Tony Fitzpatrick, the artist, sitting right next to me. Talked about Rahm Emanuel circling the drain. A good time.
     Just as I got home news broke about the governor of Mississippi announcing that, envious of the scorn being heaped on North Carolina, his state too had passed its own ridiculous law making it easy for the state's wasp's nest of haters to use their religion as a pretext to snub and harass gay people who try to patronize their stores, to buy flowers or cakes for their weddings, as if those stores were places of public accommodation in a capitalist society called the United States of America and not religious relic stalls at some market in a medieval village in Upper Slovakia.
     "Is this the hill to die on?" my kids' elementary school principal would ask, when some particularly nugatory bit of nonsense was being fluffed into A Big Honkin' Issue. Apparently yes, since it seems the whole wheel of Christianity turns upon scorn for gay marriage. Who knew?

   Why should bowl-haircut state legislators South of the Mason-Dixon line be allowed to make a fuss about regular American citizens going peacefully about their business, and get no flack back in return? It's deeply satisfying that a company like PayPal fled North Carolina in revulsion. Such courage must be emulated.  I pursed my lips, pulled a picture of some black-clad ISIS group off the Internet, and Tweeted it with this line: "Someone should tell Mississippi that 'sincerely held religious beliefs' really isn't much of an excuse any more."
      I thought it clever, and others agreed — it was retweeted nearly 200 times, with 300 "likes." I went to watch the Bulls game, satisfied that my small role in flying the flag for liberty and justice for all in the United States had been fulfilled.
     By Wednesday, however, well, not such a good day. The motley bund of haters and white supremacists—whoops, excuse me, "race realists"— sulking down in Mississippi began to stir, sniff the air, and mobilize themselves. They cannily deduced, by my name, that I'm a Jew — no slipping anything past these folks — a parasite on my "host" country. 
     Twitter lit up.
     "omg a jew doing jew stuff I'm so surprised omg" wrote something calling itself Ferric Jaggar. Jew stuff? Really? Maybe that's why they call it Twitter; all these twits. How to respond to that? Start by considering the source. Silence would be ideal—what purpose is served by responding?— but it's so tempting to try. I tweeted back: "I assume by 'jew stuff' you mean 'thinking.' Yeah, it's fun, you ought to try it sometime. It's how we stay ahead." For all the good it did. Immediately others were waving it around --see, see? I was claiming that Jews are better than Christians? (Well, umm, this particular one is, at the moment here, compared to morons like you, yeah, I'll stand by that.) 
    Soon it was coming fast and furious. I lost count. Dozens. Scores.
    "What about Israel?" others chimed in. What about the Orthodox view on intermarriage? You could see their logic shining through, like the spine of a tadpole. Of course the Jew stands with Israel. It was the strangest thing. At first I tried to respond. "Don't you have Jews in Mississippi?" Not all Jews are knee jerk supporters of Israel. I'm certainly not. But somehow explaining J-Street ambivalence toward the direction Israel is going at the moment to faceless Aryan Nation bullies who just assume they're hitting me where I live, well, extra stupid.  In fact, we tend to look more askance at some of that country's glaring missteps than Christians do, who adore the nation because it fits into whatever insane End of Time philosophy they've got locked up in their secret hearts.
     It didn't waste the day. But it wasted an hour of the day. Maybe two. I'd focus on my work, manage 20 or 30 minutes, and then jump back on, read a few, wince, block five or 10 replies—I trained myself not to even read them—and then flee back to my job. 
     Still, it managed to cast the afternoon in a mournful, sour pall, to think that such creatures exist, they populate our country, the South especially, it seems, muscles twitching in their jaws, bereft that they can't openly loathe blacks anymore and still keep their jobs at the Piggly Wiggly, determined to keep the one group they can hate, gays (and, I guess, Jews) under their boot.  It must supply them with the self-esteem they lack.
     I don't have energy to pluck out any more specific examples of ugliness. A number seemed to think Israel is responsible for ISIS, or felt outraged that I had pointed out that, like ISIS, the people behind the Southland's pro-bigotry laws are using their faith as an excuse to hurt people. That made them victims, which is how all bullies view themselves, the better to justify their hostility for the world. You haven't lived until someone with "fuhrer" as part of their Twitter handle accuses you of insensitivity.
     I had to keep reminding myself that bigotry is, at its core, a form of ignorance: the uninformed ramping up their fright at something that a non-terrified person would instead learn something about and thus no longer fear. A failure of empathy. A crime against empathy, really. And that for all their attempts to hurt others — like Mississippi's new law — their true victims are themselves, crouched at the keyhole of their worldview, missing life's pageant. A number of my new Twitter pals referred to "white genocide"—their term for a world including minorities and people different from themselves. "White suicide" is more like it, as a culture is defined by its worst elements (another link with ISIS: they slur the thing they would promote by associating it with themselves).
     Enough. I'm not the Idiot Police. That's a mantra of mine. I can't fix them and shouldn't try—there are too many, for starters, and their logic twists in such a way that they always end up right, in their own minds if nowhere else. It's the rule of their existence. The world will step over them, like a pedestrian avoiding dog shit, and keep moving forward. Let time do its work. It seems like the hate is the only constant in some places, such as Mississippi, and various flesh vessels are born, live and spend their lives allowing the hate to inhabit them before they pass it onto their children like a hereditary disease, like syphilis. They not only lost the Civil War, but they're still losing it, still losing, every day, thrashing at the modern world with their limp little noodle of a creed as it rushes past them, cringing at their touch. 
      Not to indict them all. I've been South—the photo above is Durham, North Carolina. They don't all seem to be sputtering haters. Or maybe that's just the polite public face, until they can run to Twitter and reveal their true, hideous selves.

      Quite the sorry spectacle. And no harm in feeling pity for them, an echo of the empathy they obviously lack. I think it's important not to hate them back, because if you do, then they've won, a little. To be honest, I felt like Dante, pausing at some trench in the netherworld, holding a handkerchief to my nose, half-swooning as I gaze as long as possible upon the horrible sight, the upturned faces of the damned, before hurrying on with a shudder and a sigh. Some people are their own punishment. It's best to linger among them only long enough to remind yourself how good it is to not be one of them, to have the pleasure of getting away from them. It's a luxury they will never enjoy.

Give Wayne a raise already!

     Everyone should have a lousy job in the food industry. At least once: good for the soul. I had two. My very first job — well, not counting the seven years delivering newspapers, starting at age 9 — was the summer I turned 16. At Barnhill's, an 1890s-themed ice cream parlor in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Pay was $2.30 an hour and I was a soda jerk/janitor since I worked a split shift. I showed up at 5:30 p.m., scooped ice cream for a few hours, shut down the restaurant and returned at 5:30 a.m. to open it back up.
     Grueling. I still remember solitary frustration of mopping the floor, hearing a "pop" above me, being showered by broken glass, and realizing that I had jammed the mop handle into one of the large glass globes around a light fixture.
     That was one summer.
     A few bad jobs later — junior counselor at a summer camp, moving cardboard boxes in a warehouse for J.C. Penney — I became a baker at Bob Evans, a restaurant that prided itself in its biscuits. I would stand at a table in the middle of the kitchen and whip up biscuits. One busy Sunday I baked 250 pounds worth.
     The guy at the dish tank was named Wayne. I can still see him — the back of his head anyway. Crew cut, black plastic glasses held on by an elastic band. He'd stand at the long stainless steel sink, throw the dirty dishes into a big square rack, hose them down with a sprayer dangling on a metal hose. Pull up the metal door, steam billowing out, push the dirty rack in, the glistening clean rack sliding out the other side

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"What wounds are these?"

     It looks like my 20-year-old is going to spend the summer interning in Washington, D.C.. Concerned parent that I am, on Sunday night, learning the address of the apartment he'll likely share with a pal, I plugged it into Google map and ascertained that, yes, there is a Washington Metro station a convenient five minute walk away. 
     On Monday morning, the New York Times ran a front page story thoroughly describing what a godawful mess the Washington Metro has become, after years of managerial bungling and deferred maintenance. Original cars from when the system opened in 1976 are still in use. The only recourse might be to shut down stretches of the system for months at a time, paralyzing the city. 
    The article recounted fatal crashes and shirked safety standards. My first thought was, "We'll have to get him a car." Though cars have accidents too, far more than transit systems do, and, thinking of Washington traffic, decided it is probably better to take our chances with the Metro. 
     Toward the end, the story, written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, there is a description of a 2009 collision that woke up dozing legislators, noting that "eight riders and a train operator were killed and dozens were wounded." Later, of another collision: "No one was wounded, but the track defect that caused the derailment had been detected a month earlier."
     Does anything pop out at you from those two sentences? For me, it was the word "wounded." I always thought of wounds as something that happen to soldiers in battle. Riders hurt by mishaps on crumbling transit system are "injured."
    I wanted to shake it off—everybody hates a fusspot—but being a writer is nothing if not about sweating the details. Though I realize that the Times can commit howling errors, like any other newspaper—I once saw a front page where they dropped the dateline--it still seemed something worth pointing out.
     Trudging upstairs, coffee in hand, I started to compose my polite note. Not to the public editor, that would seem like ratting out the reporters for a minor lapse. We're all cooking in the same pot. Write to the reporters themselves. First, praise for the interesting story. Then, a reluctant mention of the topic at hand...
    But first, I plugged "wound" into my online dictionary. I have a personal rule that most people who point out errors are themselves wrong, leaping to draw attention to the perceived flaw without ever checking to determine that they are correct. The nameless iMac dictionary defined the verb "wound" as: "inflict an injury on." Period. And while their examples are both military, "the sergeant was seriously wounded," for the verb, and the adjective, "a wounded soldier," there is nothing to exclude the word from being used to describe victims of a wheezing train system soon to be ferrying my beloved child.
    Language changes. Perhaps we're seeing a word in transition. Daniel Webster's 1828 dictionary endorses my meaning, "To hurt by violence." 
    But the full 1933 Oxford English Dictionary definition begins, "A hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury." and traces it back more than a thousand years, to Beowulf, "da sio wund ongon,"
    That could in theory mean flying glass in a train accident caused by bungling bureaucrats. Seeking something more current than the 1930s, I went on-line and found confirmation from an impressive grammar blog called Daily Writing Tips: 

     "In modern usage, the noun wound [WOOND] refers to any injury that tears the flesh.
     The verb to wound [WOOND], however, retains its earliest meaning: “to inflict a deliberate injury that tears the flesh.”

     Underline "deliberate." So the Times story is indeed on shaky ground, at least using this authority. People have a tendency to stop collecting evidence once they've validated what they already believe, and I'm no different, particularly since I have my own work to get to this morning. 
     I wasn't going to bother writing to the reporters—who'd welcome that email? I tried to proceed with my day, but felt like I was being timid. "The secret wound lives on within the breast," as Virgil writes. So I dashed off notes to the reporters and, to my surprise, heard back almost immediately from Stolberg, who said that the mistake wasn't theirs—they did use "injure"—but the harm to the article was inflicted by some spinning gear elsewhere in the vast New York Times mechanism. She had already made inquiries, and it was quickly fixed in the on-line version. So I'm not the only person sensitive to these nuances. Now if we could only get The New Yorker to stop saying "insure" when they should say "ensure."
     Enough. Having made my share of blunders in print, I hope I haven't belabored this small point too tediously. As Shakespeare writes: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

The Left can be as looney as the Right

Untitled, silkscreen by Barbara Kruger (1989, The Broad collection).

     I've seen some strange weather in Chicago — a day when it was 105 degrees, another, 26 below zero, green skies, monsoon rains and massive snows. But I've never seen a day like Saturday, beginning at dawn with flurries in April, then alternating from blue-skied sunshine to white-out blizzard, and back. Sun, then snowstorm. Clear skies. London fog. All. Day. Long.
     "BI-POLAR VORTEX" a Facebook friends labeled a video of the maelstrom, resurrecting a twitter tag from two years back.
     My poor saucer magnolia blossoms. Open for one day and then, boom, snow and freeze.
     "Where's your global warming now?!" I snarled at the sky.
     "That's not what it means," my wife informed me, perhaps forgetting whom she married.
     Yes dear, I know. A feeble attempt at humor, based on conservatives who, trumpeting their ignorance of all things scientific, declare that really cold days are a refutation of climate change: "How could the world be warmer if it's cold now?" That's like standing in a house engulfed in flame, pulling open the freezer and announcing, "Look! How can there be a fire? The popsicles are fine!"
     But I don't want to rag on the Right. It's too easy. I've started to notice that while the Right's irrationalities get frequent denunciation in the press, the Left has its own irrationalities that receive gentler handling....

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Hoosierland women! Send you little visitor to Gov. Pence.

     It’s a shame that so much attention is going to North Carolina’s new law cruelly scrapping all of their state’s local local anti-discrimination ordinances and raising the specter of police bursting into bathrooms to check on the birth genders of the people using them.
     The latest development there is that not only are major businesses like the NBA, PayPal and IBM lining up to condemn the law and question whether they want to do business with the state, but now the Obama administration is saying that the Tar Heels bigotry-empowerment act could endanger billions of dollars in federal aid, which can be withheld from backwaters that choose to indulge in un-American discrimination.
     As satisfying as all that is, it shouldn’t distract us from the aftershocks rolling across our own little bit of the Southland in the Midwest, Indiana.

       There Governor Mike Pence signed a truly medieval law demanding, among other things, that aborted fetuses be given formal funerals or cremations, and if you think Indiana woman just shrugged and sighed and went back to their washboards and their sad irons, well, think again. 
     Rebellious Indiana women, waking up to this attempt to shove them back into the early 20th century, have created a “Periods for Pence” Facebook page, sharing the governor’s public comment phone number and urging women to keep the Pence informed about their menstrual cycle, since he seems so concerned, including some (apparently) real life exchanges such as...

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My name is Neil Steinberg and I'll be your teacher

     Yesterday was April 1, and so, before we begin, apologies to those loyal readers who were fooled, even upset by my post announcing the end of the blog. I tried to drop enough giveaway clues in it, and succeeded too well, for those who thought the gag was obvious, and not well enough for those who were genuinely deceived. But in general it seemed to be enjoyed by most, and certainly caused some discussion, which is the point of these.
     I almost forgot that I also had a column in the paper Friday, also tied to a certain day — April 1 was the day the Chicago Teachers Union went on their one-day, ill-advised strike. This column also caused a bit of fuss, of a more serious nature, and I thought today being Saturday, I'd slip it in for those who missed it in the paper (and you know who you are!)


     Good morning class.
     Settle down, please. There's room for a few hundred of you in the front: the little kids, please.
     I know there's a lot of us here — 330,000 Chicago Public Schools students, shut out of school Friday due to the one-day teachers union strike.
     Which means the teachers will be walking picket lines, and you'll be, well, somewhere. Hundreds of schools and churches will open their doors, and you might go there to get out of harm's way. Though I'd imagine a good number of you are parked on the sofa at home, killing time as only kids can.
     So forgive me for intruding. I thought I'd try to shoehorn a little education into your day. You can play Call of Duty: Black Ops III all afternoon.
     So, hello, I'm Mr. Steinberg.
     I did pause to ask myself whether this makes me a scab — “scab” is a historic labor term for someone who undermines a strike. The Chicago Teachers Union announced it is monitoring school entrances, threatening to fine any teacher who goes to work today. This was necessary, as opposed to the choir of solidarity that greeted the 2012 strike because, well, times have changed. In four years the economies of Illinois and Chicago have gone from menacing to calamitous, and the union pushing to the front of the line, well, it sparks mixed feelings.
     So flexibility being a survival skill in unions nowadays, I can be a proud member of the Communications Workers of America and still instruct what few students actually drop their eyes upon this today. I’m not on strike.

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The end

     Well, we all saw this day coming, didn't we? 
     At least in recent months.
     Last summer, true, when the blog was clicking along at up to 5,000 hits a day, with some months nearing 100,000 hits, I told myself it would just go up and up, on and on, forever.
     But then, well, it seems people got tired of reading this every goddamn day. To be honest, I got tired of writing it. And while it was amusing to write for thousands of readers, a growing swarm, with praiseful write-ups in Robert Feder's column and the Beachwood Reporter, not to mention the good $10,000 a month or more I was pulling in on blog advertisements, it is something else entirely to write for a couple hundred people a day, with the only income a couple bucks from those pesky pop-up erectile dysfunction ads.
     Frankly, it's just pathetic.  So I'm done.
     Not that it hasn't been a good run. I was proud when Ubilabs named this blog one of "100 Things to Watch in 2011." And excited to have commentators who ranged from John Kass's cousin to Carol Mosley-Braun. Not to mention to create a written legacy of first rate, or at least very good second rate, literary journalism that will glow online like a beautiful radioactive flower until the end of time, or until Google shuts down its servers, whichever comes first. 
    I want to go out on top. Or near the top. Or at least when the top is still a memory, sort of.
    This is goodbye, but not farewell.  You can still read me five days a week in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Me (far right) playing with Eric Zorn's Good Time
  Bluegrass Ramblers.

   In closing, I want to thank you all, you readers, or what readers remain anyway, for sticking with me through the thick and the thin. Thank you for the comments, and for the baked goods. To be honest, I'm looking forward to putting the time that was devoted to writing this blog to more productive pursuits. As you may know, I've taken up the four-string folk mountain harmonium—it's like a banjo—and have been rehearsing with Eric Zorn's Good Time Bluegrass Ramblers, exploring the rich heritage of 1930s Appalachian music. We'll be performing regularly at the Thursday clog dance recitals at the Old Town School of Folk Music—you can check out the schedule here.
     Such farewells should be short. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope to see all of you at our Old Town gigs. Bring your dancing clogs! 

    Best,

    Neil Steinberg

Donald Trump does backflips on abortion

     So Donald Trump, the, ah, front-running Republican presidential candidate, er, now, in the year 2016, said Wednesday ... that would be March 30, again of 2016, that ... ah ... women, who have abortions, after he is elected president of course, illegal abortions, since he, Donald Trump, once elected president, will make abortions illegal through some alchemy that somehow eluded the lesser talents of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,  Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. 
     That those women, who still have an abortion, despite their no longer being legal, under the presidency of Donald Trump, will certainly be punished, in some way, for having that illegal procedure, though whether that punishment is through a fine, or prison or, heck, this is Donald Trump we're talking about here, whether by stripping the woman naked and drawing and quartering her in DuPont Circle, well, he didn't quite say. 
     "There has to be some form of punishment," Trump told Chris Matthews on MSNBC. 
     Moot now anyway. It took him only hours to backpedal away from his call for punishment — being Donald Trump means that nothing that comes out of your mouth carries such weight that it can't be retracted, contradicted or amended as need be. No, it is the doctors who should be punished. The women, being women, are not responsible for their actions, are the victims of abortion, along with their murdered babies....
    Don't trust me on this. His campaign statement said:
     "The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb."
     A reminder of two key points. First, that pro-lifers, or anti-abortionists, or whatever they call themselves, are really about controlling women. They say abortion is "murder"—that's the the word they use over and over and over—but hesitate at the well-then-put-the-murderer-in-jail-then part of their argument, because they really don't mean it. It's just words they say trying to get you to bend to their religion.
     And two, Donald Trump is so never going to be president. Not in a world where people are paying attention. At least I hope not. You do have to wonder, with states from Indiana to Texas hacking away big chunks of reproductive rights, whether women actually are paying attention. They should be, because they sure as hell have been warned. We all have been.

IMAN Green ReEntry rebuilds homes, lives

Rashid Grant, 38, who spent 20 years in prison for murder, rehabbing a home in Chicago Lawn as part of Green ReEntry, a program of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.

     Last September, Jack Appleton, 62, was living in a shelter, looking for work. The search wasn’t going well, thanks to one aspect of his career that sticks out on a resume: 13 years in prison for bank robbery.
     “Most people don’t even want to talk to you,” Appleton said. “I just was looking for a chance.”
     Jack Appleton’s chance finally came.
     “I had just got out of Pekin, and was looking for a job and a place to stay,” he continued, pausing Monday morning from work rehabbing a brick bungalow on Fairfield just off West 63rd Street in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. “I heard from word of mouth about IMAN.”
     IMAN is the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a nonprofit organization designed to strengthen bonds between black and Muslim Chicagoans. IMAN’s programs include a medical clinic, outreach to store owners, and Green ReEntry, which helps the recently incarcerated get work experience and housing. We expect felons who have served their time not to return to jail, yet few employers are willing to risk hiring them. Green ReEntry not only helps them, but their community too.

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This is why the Republicans lose

     This is why the Republicans lose. Because you cannot stop time. It moves, forward, relentlessly, whether you like it or not.
     Oh, you can try. You can block nomination of a new Supreme Court justice to replace the deceased Antonin Scalia, out of the patently-offensive notion that Barack Obama no longer represents the will of the people in the last year of his term. You can announce that the court will just have to wait for that 9th justice. You can do that.
     But the Supreme Court still hears cases. And the 4-4 deadlock announced Tuesday means that the lower appeals court ruling in Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association stands, denying the lawsuit by a group of California teachers who argued that forcing them to pay union dues was a violation of their 1st Amendment rights.
     The irony is, had Congress done its duty and approved Obama's choice, Merrick Garland, he very well might have sided with the conservatives. We'll never know, will we?
    Thanks Mitch McConnell. You can't hold back time. It squeezes around you and moves forward with or without your approval. 

At least he didn't say 'Work will make you free."

     "My policy is America first," Donald Trump told Fox News Monday, "and will always be, America first."
     "America first."
     Really?
     Though anyone in the least bit historically-minded is already cowering in a paroxysm of disbelief, watching this presidential campaign in open-mouthed, Edvard Munch-strength horror, Trump's words have to send a new shiver across our blown-out sensibilities. 
    The America First Committee, the bund of isolationists and Hitler boot lickers that thrived for a year before Pearl Harbor, funded by xenophobes like Robert McCormick, starring sieg-heiling erstwhile hero Charles Lindbergh. It fought to make sure America was as unprepared for war as it could be, under the charmed notion that Herr Hitler and his allies would leave us alone as long as we didn't antagonize them.  Trumpeting safety, it endangered the country, leaving us vulnerable.  
     FDR, whom they loathed, warned them.
     "Let no one imagine that America will escape," he told Chicagoans during a visit in 1937, "that American may expect mercy, that this Western hemisphere won't be attacked."
      This is exactly what Trump et al believe. If we bar immigrants and refugees, we can somehow keep terrorists at bay. It is a theory that imagines all bad things hovering outside our borders. All we have to do is not let them in. When the truth is far more complicated. 
     I can't even insinuate that Trump intended the reference as a dog whistle to his terrified rabble of followers. Even if he weren't ignorant of the past, his supporters certainly are—a chunk of America doesn't even know there was a World War II, never mind sweating the home-front details—and only resent when the obvious parallels between Trump and Hitler are pointed out: the stoking of support based on demonizing already-scorned minorities, the barely suppressed—so far—calls to violence.  
     You really should watch the Fox News clip where Trump says it. They play a snippet of Barack Obama suggesting we should let more refugees in. Then they cut to Trump, who reflexively wildly-exaggerates what Obama has said into talk about "open borders" as if Obama had invited the world in. As if they really don't know that America's current refugee policy is a profile in cowardice. Our country has let a couple thousand Syrian refugees in the past year, while Europe has welcomed millions.  Even if terrorists were among them, pointing to terrorist acts as an argument against immigration is like pointing toward a car wreck as an argument for a 10 mph speed limit.
      Haters see risk in the things they already hate. They can't grasp the risk of America turning its back on its values, on the thing that made us a great nation to begin with, not to mention providing the grease our economy needs to work. They don't see the harm of being a ghetto of white ignorance that feeds the phenomenon in the first place. 
    Perhaps the most galling thing about Trump is that he is not alone. His success is due to his shouting things the GOP has been whispering for years. While Trump is acting as the Harold Hill of haters, high-stepping toward the White House with trombones at full blare, the House of Representatives passed HR 4731 out of committee Monday. The "Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act,"  would reduce and cap our already minuscule refugee admissions, allowing timid state and local governments to opt out of letting any refugees in at all. 
      This isn't "America First." This is "Fear First."

Playboy: not many sexy pictures, but lots of Don Cheadle

     When I heard that Playboy is for sale — its supposed worth, about $500 million — my first, unvarnished thought was: "Who's going to buy the magazine? I wouldn't buy a copy of the magazine."
     Last fall, when Playboy announced that they would no longer publish nudity, I wasn't even curious. Who cares? The world has hurtled past them.
     Now I realized that journalistic rigor demands I get my hands on an issue. Look at the thing. They used to send them free to the newspaper, where the fat brown envelopes, with discreet "PEI" — Playboy Enterprises Inc. — return addresses, would stack up, unopened. Life is just too short to browse $10,000 stereos and endless variations on the same pneumatic airbrushed babe.
     No more. I felt a trickle of dread at the thought of buying Playboy. There's still a whiff of shame associated with buying pornography.
     Tried the 7-Eleven at Franklin and Lake. The magazine rack had Maxim—the bawdy lad mag that kneecapped Playboy. The store also had the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, eating Playboy's lunch.
     No Playboy. Hidden behind the counter? No.
     Ditto for the CVS on Madison. Scientific American but no Playboy.
     The newsstand at Union Station carries it. At the register, I babbled to the clerk that this copy is for research.
     "There are many varieties online," she replied, enigmatically. "Do you want a bag?"
     "God yes," I exclaimed.
     Safely at home, I looked at it.
     Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
     The cover is matte, not glossy. A model wearing a pale blue bra, her hands braced behind her hips, pelvis thrust forward, hair in her face, a flash photograph that has the feel of a snapshot of your older sister taken at Wisconsin Dells in 1974.
     One hundred and six pages, total. Five pages of Playboy product ads—bunny logo baseball caps, Playboy cologne. Marketing is what keeps Playboy afloat, supposedly.
     Two photo spreads. The first, shot by Molly Steele "celebrated for her serene images of nature." Half a dozen of perhaps the most un-erotic photos ever to appear in a magazine not dedicated to dentistry. The third particularly sticks out: a woman in a lake, her head resting on her hand as if supremely bored, her face blocked by a brown clump of weeds. In the last, she clutches a sheet, tongue lolling out, no doubt intending to invoke Miley Cyrus, but more an expression of nausea. I can't imagine a horny 15-year-old boy would find interest in any of them.
     The second set, of Miss April, Camille Row, are a little better. Playboy centerfolds used to be shot in swank Victorian mansions; now, framed against beige shag carpets and goldenrod curtains, which I'm sure struck the Playboy editors as raw and real, but just looked tired. I showed the centerfold to my wife and she said, "That's not a flattering picture."
     There are articles—an interview with actor Don Cheadle, a short story, candidly titled "Insipidities," I soldiered through the tale, and could criticize it, but am too grateful to see fiction in a magazine in 2016. It brought to mind Samuel Johnson's quip, "the remarkable thing is not that it's done well, but that it's done at all."
     Which might be an epithet for Playboy. Nobody who works for a publication can take pleasure at its decline—we're all cooking in the same pot—and Playboy is as Chicago as the stockyards. Hugh Hefner, a proud graduate of Steinmetz High School, created it right here.
     But the first obligation of anyone intruding upon the public's attention is to be interesting, and, while acknowledging that I am not the target audience, I just couldn't see anything in the April Playboy—not one thing—that justifies tracking it down and paying $8. Maybe if you are really, really interested in Don Cheadle. But even then. Plug "Interview with Don Cheadle" into Google and nearly half a million hits come up.

Happy Easter!

     A number of readers wrote to wish me Happy Easter, which is nice of them. I appreciate the sentiment even though, truth be told, I'm Jewish, and don't celebrate the holiday in any fashion. Not even with the consumption of a single jelly bean — not on principle, mind you. I'd eat the jelly bean if one were to come my way. 
     But none did.
     Indeed, I didn't realize today was Easter until a few days ago. It sort of snuck up. I hope that isn't insulting — some people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that other people believe other things. It seemed like a callous neglect.
     It might be hard to believe, but growing up, I had no idea what the Easter story was until I saw the movie "Jesus Christ Superstar." Why would I? The subject never arose. It's a moving  story, and I can see why people recount it year after year.
     One reader, knowing my inclinations, wished me Happy Passover instead. But Passover doesn't come for nearly another month, at the end of April. The two might be twinned in the public mind, like Christmas and Hanukkah, but their occupying the same section of the calendar, roughly, is purely coincidental. I accepted his wishes in the spirit intended.

     I wouldn't have marked the holiday, but my pal, Michael Cooke, formerly of the Sun-Times, now editor of the Toronto Star, read my piece today on cemeteries, and sent some lovely photographs I wanted to share. They are of the burial ground and environs outside of St. Mary's Church, in the town of Kirby Lonsdale in Northern England, where he attended services last week.     
    The church is near the town where he grew up—he has relatives buried here—and parts of it date back to Norman times, making them nearly a thousand years old. 
     A reminder that this religion stuff has been with us a very long time, and if we approach it with a spirit of respect and appreciation for our fellows, there's plenty of good in every faith. Religion is a tool, one that can be used to ennoble or to tear down—you can use your faith to love others, or blow them up. The Christian faith inspired Easter, and its promise of rebirth, built and tended this gorgeous Anglican church for a millennia. Yet it is the same faith that inspired numerous  readers to write in this past week, and not pleasantly, explaining why their religion demands that they care about the birth gender of people using public restrooms, which is just daft. 
     But let's save that for another day. Happy Easter. I hope it was restful, fulfilling and happy for you. My wife and I spent an hour walking through the Chicago Botanic Garden, and while our lilies and crocuses are not quite as far as they obviously are in Cumbria, we enjoyed observing the Easter finery of the men and women, boys and girls who had come to stroll after church. 

Pause at cemeteries

     I pause at cemeteries, then go in. 
     Don't you? It seems the thing to do.
     Though I'm not sure why. It feels like dull curiosity, at the moment, a mild historic interest. Almost something embarrassment, prying in the affairs of others, treading on their graves.
    But it's something of an obligation too. These people lived, they loved, they died, as shall we all, and left these traces, claimed their little space, a private country, eighteen square feet of territory made sovereign by their headstone forever.
    The least we can do is glance at them as we pass by, at this little garden of eternity.  
    Well, maybe not eternity. Not, in fact, forever. Nature is forever. Humanity is the frost on a pumpkin, the charge on a battery. Headstones melt in the rain it turns out, at least marble and limestone do. Granite lasts a bit longer, but those will crack or be carted off in their turn. It's only the illusion of permanence, to comfort the bereaved among us.

     Me, I find comfort in their ephemerality. Because it reminds us that for all the effort we put into our works, our careers and houses and such, great or small, it adds up to nothing, long term. A bigger monument, a plinth, a pylon, a crypt, which only makes the passerby shake their head at the irony, the futility. "Benjamin F. Barge" and his cap and gown and steepled glory is just as dead as the guy under an unreadable mound of softening stone. Reputation helps him no more than anonymity hurts the other. 
    How many people waste how many years piling up those stones? Stones that most people, truth be told, never contemplate at all.
    Though there is good in doing so. I hiked up a steep hill in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania last October to look over the cemetery. I did it the morning I left, as if it were some duty that had to be performed before I was free to leave the town. Because it was there.
    I pause at cemeteries, then go in, Because, coming out, I'm gladder to be alive. 

Roll on, Big O....

     The mind's a funny thing.
     When I was in Japan, I saw Lawson stores everywhere; they're the second most popular convenience store in Japan, after 7-Eleven, with some 11,000 outlets all over the country.
     And I immediately knew I was familiar with them.  That before 7-Eleven, before White Hen, there had been Lawson's in Ohio, where I grew up.
     Lawson's began as a dairy in Akron, Ohio, in 1938. As the stores spread, they threatened the milk man monopoly -- you didn't buy milk in stores, y0u had it delivered. Lawson's began the practice of selling milk in gallon jugs, and battled milk inspection laws as they spread their stores —as many as 700 in Ohio and three neighboring states, 200 in the Cleveland area alone.  They also fought the Ohio blue laws that kept stores closed on Sunday.
     But I really didn't think about their sudden appearance all around me. I hadn't seen one in decades. Lawson's sold out to Dairy Mart in 1985 and the stores were renamed. I hadn't seen the familiar, comforting, familiar, fat white milk bottle on the blue shield in 30 years. But I instantly accepted its presence, a survivor in the Far East.
     All I thought was "What a great logo."
     It wasn't until I got back home that the full memory returned. We were having breakfast Sunday morning. Edie had set out some orange juice, a new brand, and I was reading the ballyhoo on the label. "Squeezed daily" it said.
     Rollllllll on, Big-O,....
     Suddenly, I was hearing music in my head.
     Get that juice up to Lawson's in 40 hours. 
     A TV commercial, making heroic "The Big-O Orange Run," rushing fresh orange juice up to vitamin C deprived Ohioans.
     Now one man sleeps while the other man drives, on the non-stop Lawson run.
      Of course the commercial is on-line.
      And the cold, cold juice in the tank car caboose, stays as fresh as the Florida sun.
     Now we're used to living in a small world. If our roses come from South America, our bricks from China, well, that's how it works. But once upon a time racing that OJ up from Florida was a big deal. It was something to sing about.

"Let's make the bastard deny it"

     If Ted Cruz weren't such a loathsome piece of venality, I might have sympathy toward him for having his private life — his alleged private life — splashed all over the National Enquirer. 
    It has to be a nauseous feeling for a monster of personal ambition such as Cruz to spend years struggling with salmon-to-spawn intensity toward a cherished goal of personal aggrandizement, and have it, if not within his grasp, please God no, then at least within the realm of possibility, Donald Trump notwithstanding.
     Then to see it hit this road bump. More like a tree: the National Enquirer, which has bird-dogged some of the biggest scandals of recent years, has implied that five, count 'em, five women have had affairs with Cruz. The mind reels...
    Excuse me a moment....
    Ewww, yuck!!!! Ptooey!
    I'm sorry, where were we? Ah yes, Cruz, who spent Friday busily denying the story.  Blaming Donald Trump "and his henchmen." I haven't heard the word "henchmen" used seriously outside of North Korean propaganda and Lemony Snickett novels.
    Cruz went on, at great length, denying these allegation. Stepping into the trap set for him. News outlets had ignored these whispers for months, and might have ignored the "thinly-sourced" Enquirer piece, had not Cruz so ham-handedly drawn lingering attention to them, violating the first edict of Crisis PR: Don't Spread the Negative Press Yourself.
     Which reminds me of the famous story about Lyndon Johnson. Usually the story hinges around the phrase "pig fucking," but the late, lamented Hunter S. Thompson, of all people, tells a fairly clean version:

     Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go. He was sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.
     His campaign manager was shocked. 'We can't say that, Lyndon,' he supposedly said. 'You know it's not true.'
     "'Of course it's not true!' Johnson barked at him. 'But let's make the bastard deny it!' "

     To be honest, I have a hard time believing the National Enquirer allegations—that would imply that somebody, man or woman, found Cruz attractive, and that is unimaginable to me. Not that he's so bad-looking, really, so much as he's living proof that a person's personality colors their features. Satan is handsome, too, until you get to know him.