Republican Fear Junkies

    Honestly? I'm not afraid of Donald Trump becoming president.
    First, because I do believe Hillary Clinton will win.
    Yes, that might be the dark star of hope, its unseen gravity distorting my judgment and pulling me toward an optimistic conclusion. But so far, as much as the electorate disdains Hillary, they hate Trump more, and with good reason.
    And second, should the United States suffer the ultimate infamy of Donald Trump being elected president, we'll survive it. We survived eight year of George W. Bush, we'd survive Trump too, for a number of reasons.
    A), He's erratic. The Republicans are embracing what he says, now, gingerly, the way you'd hug someone with dirty clothes. By an act of  intellectual gymnastics they forget his saying the opposite, whether years ago or yesterday, and ignore the inescapable reality that Trump could change again and will, as circumstances dictate. So no Wall, no barring Muslims, none of the truly crazy stuff, or not much of it.
    Though that could, again, be hope talking.
     B), what I've dubbed The Curse of the Outsider (op cit, Jane Byrne, Jimmy Carter). You sweep in from nowhere, knowing nothing—and knowing nothing is Trump's modus operandi—and you can't get anything done. Yes, the GOP hierarchy are lining up behind Trump, to their eternal shame.
    John McCain! I still can't get my head around that. McCain endorsed Trump. After Trump insulted him personally, and sneered at all American POWs. I never would have imaged it possible. McCain, and his quisling cast of defeated cowards amble, cringing, onto the Trump stage to join Chris Christie, in his dunce cap and chains. 
      But will they really work hard for his vague platform of ad hoc idiocy? 
      And the Democrats, freed of any lingering requirements of concern for governance by eight years of bitter Republican obscurantism, plus the genuinely vile and impossible programs Trump advocates, not to mention his bullying, my-way-or-the-highway demeanor, and they can sit on their hands and watch, grinning, as Trump tries to enforce his folly.
    C). Have you looked at his face? The strain. The white circles around the eyes. He just doesn't look like a well man. Yes, his keeling over dead sometime in the next six months would be a deus ex machina solution. But God looks kindly upon America. Or did.
     Not to get overly personal and mean, which smacks of Trumpism. I don't wish the man dead, just not living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The toughest challenge, facing him, is not to become like him. Because we lose that game, since he's better at being him than we are. 
     "When fighting monsters," as my favorite Nietszche quote goes, "take care not to become a monster."
     The whole thing does make me very sad, and not just for the Republicans. You have the Bernie Sanders crowd, buying lies as outrageous as Trump's, mirror image promises. Like two halves of a coin, like Raskalnikov and Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment. Sanders and Trump would look trite in fiction (not that Crime and Punishment is trite, but the symbolism would wilt in lesser hands, and whoever is authoring our current farce, it ain't Dostoevsky. Bulgakov maybe.)
     The Sanders supporters are already going all Ralph Nader on us, and daring suggest there is no different between Trump and Clinton.
    They must not have been listening Friday, when Trump said he would end no-gun zones (while standing at the NRA convention, a no-gun zone, which would be staggering hypocrisy if he, you know, cared).
     Clinton, Trump said, slipping into pure hallucination, is hot "to release the violent criminals from jail" while snatching away the guns of law abiding citizens, particularly our blushing, vulnerable daughters and mothers.
     "In trying to overturn the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton is telling everyone— and every woman living in a dangerous community — that she doesn't have the right to defend herself."
     His appeal to female voters, I guess.  
     Meanwhile Clinton sticking to her guns, so to speak, called for the sensible gun safety measures that 92 percent of the country endorse.
    Seems like a difference to me.  
     And it's so astounding -- I'm not scared, I'm amazed -- that even the most rabid gun fan could slurp that up, this wild, obvious pandering. But they do. They're fear junkies. Terror makes their hearts pump, makes them feel alive. They gotta have it to get through their days. It's like they're living in a horror film. They need to rationalize building an armory in their basement, stockpiling food. And with America safe and secure, the economy humming along, well, that's not in the script. So they manufacture this bogeyman. For seven years the quiet, reflective, almost timid Barack Obama, who did utterly nothing regarding guns, was the guy who woke them up at night in a cold sweat. His election and re-election caused a surge in gun sales. And now Hillary Clinton is forced onto that procrustean bed.
    On Saturday, I created the first hashtag I ever made on Twitter—hashtags are ways to organize tweets. It's #GOPFearAddicts. Please feel free, when you find examples of the Republican Party waving lies to terrorize their flock of bleating cowards, to contribute your own. Then I squinted at it, and made it #RepublicanFearJunkies, which is longer, but sounds better. We'll use them both and see which proves more popular. I imagine we'll have quite a collection by November, when Hillary wins. But not without every sane, patriotic American lashing himself or herself to the wheel and fighting to save our country from, if not ruin, then humiliation and insanity.
   

A hot dog and coffee on Touhy....

For those outside the Chicago area: yes, there's a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Niles.

    
     File this one under, "No wonder should go unremarked upon."
     Spent the morning in West Englewood, reporting on a story — we'll get to that next week — finishing up about 12:30 p.m. Time for lunch. I considered a couple Harold's Chicken Shacks; when in Rome... But there wasn't anywhere near by to park, and I just kept driving.
     Somehow, parking a few blocks away and ambling over to get in line and grab lunch in Englewood seemed a Bad Idea. Maybe I was being timid. 
     Hurtling down 95th Street — man it gets suburban fast — I passed countless Burger Kings and McDonalds and Wendys and Popeyes. Never considered those for a second. Not hungry enough for fast food, except of course for White Castle, which are special.  White Castle has a soul.
    But the pair I passed were on the other side of the street, and U turns for Sliders.... I kept going. 
     Onto 294 North. Love that road. Fast. I had an errand in Niles, so got off at Touhy going east. By now I was getting hungry. Papa Chris Place presented itself. It was well after 1 p.m. A hot dog would do the trick. I went in, ordered a char-dog, mustard, grilled onions, and ketchup. They didn't give me grief over the ketchup, not so much as a haughty glance. But that wasn't the wonder.
     Cup of black coffee.
     It was a decent dog, good pile of hot crinkly fries. Ate, checked the morning's email. When I finished, I took my tray to the garbage, fished out the green plastic basket I had thoughtlessly tossed in, after my eyes strayed over the "Don't throw your basket out" sign. Returned the ketchup bottle to the condiments, not far from where a Sun-Times sat ready for the next patron hungry for more than food. Went back to the table, retrieved my white styrofoam cup of coffee, and was leaving. The restaurant is set up so that, to exit the seating area, you have to pass by the counter, and as I did a woman behind the counter called to me, "Can I freshen up your coffee for you?" 
    I hadn't drunk much, maybe an inch worth. Good coffee, but hot, and I was eating. But I set down the cup, lifted off the cover, and she topped it off. 
    I can't remember that ever happening at a hot dog or burger joint, never, not once in my life. It certainly would never happen at a McDonalds. No minimum wage automaton would ever stop a patron going out the door to give him more coffee. That's probably a fireable offense at McDonald's. 
     "Thanks," I said. "This is my first time here. And thanks for subscribing to the Sun-Times." That last part probably sounded crazy and she ignored it, but I was glad they had the paper sitting out on the counter.
     "Come back again," she said.
    A nickel's worth of coffee. But it made me very happy, stepping into the parking lot, to see this sight, the Leaning Tower of Niles.  Not the bonus coffee, of course, but the gesture. A small kindness, a generosity of spirit, manifesting itself in subtle ways. I figured, whatever blurt of good publicity this blog could offer would be an apt way to return the kindness. It's the small things that make life rich. 

"Fourth City" just doesn't sound right

     "Third City." Chicago hasn't quite wrapped its head around that one yet, have we?
     "The Third Coast," yes. Particularly the fine Thomas Dyja history of Chicago of that name. Read it; you'll be glad you did.
     Otherwise, "Third Coast" is a bit shared, a bit greasy, like one of those loaner jackets at a fancy restaurant: too many other folks slip it on for anyone to be comfortable in it. Lots of cities on the Great Lakes use the "Third Coast" moniker. Cleveland has a number of "Third Coast" businesses. Milwaukee too.
     To be honest, Chicago is still leaving claw marks on "Second City." We were second in the United States in population for so long, starting in 1890 and for most of the 20th century, following New York, which was humiliation aplenty. We got used to it, with a little brother swagger. New York was so far ahead, almost triple the population, there was no hope of catching up. So we might as well turn the silver consolation prize into a point of pride.
    Then Los Angeles scooted past us in — wait for it — 1982, which shows you just how hard we cling to former glory. We ignored the shift out of ego and because Los Angeles really isn't a city at all, not a proper one but a vast agglomeration of contiguous places....

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Never ever gonna golf.

     No, as a matter of fact, I've never golfed, not once in my life.
     Not from any animus. I'm not anti-golf. I have no opinions or emotions about it.
     If you asked me why I have never golfed, I guess the honest answer is that I've never had the opportunity. Nobody ever asked me. My father, a nuclear physicist from the Bronx, never golfed, not once. Nor did I know anybody who golfed. 
     My in-laws did. It seemed a fun, quasi-athletic thing, and did tempt me. Since I've been in suburbia, for the past 15 years, when it got warm I'd promise myself to slide over to whatever that golf course is on Willow Road and take a few lessons. 

    But May would turn into June, and June into July, and I never did it, and this year the intention isn't there. 
     Not that I haven't been on a golf course: I have. A magazine once sent me down to Montego Bay, Jamaica, where I walked 18 holes at Round Hill with Arnold Palmer, interviewing him for a story, or trying to. He wasn't having a very good game; in fact, that might have helped me to never take up the sport, because Arnold Palmer wasn't having fun, and he's really good at it, generally.
     It was a beautiful place, though. Like being in heaven, but with golf.
     Rich people seem to always golf—it's the reward for their lives of success, fame and money. Michael Jordan and whoever's president, tycoons and stars and such. They all love golfing. Which made me a little tempted. Here's something people do hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and I've never done once.
   Well, I did go to miniature golf, which is fun, but also doesn't count. And I seem to remember going to a driving range, some time in the hazy historical past, but my guess is I was no good at all. Should I find myself on a course, I know I'd be horrible, and I can embarrass myself plenty here, in print, without seeking out further embarrassments in the physical world.
    I was prepared to go golfing with my younger son. But he didn't take to it either. Golf camp might have something to do with it. He was maybe seven years old, and we sent him to a five day "Golf Camp" at the Northbrook Park District. I imagine it was two hours of basic golf tips in the morning. 
    At the end of the first day, my wife called me at work. 
    "He's quitting golf camp," she said. "You'll have to call them and get our money back."
    I asked her to wait, let me talk to the lad first. I sat him down and gave him a speech that went something like this: "You can't quit golf camp. First, because it's golf camp. Everything else you do for the rest of your life will be harder than golf camp. If you can't get through golf camp, what will you be able to get through? Second, it's golf camp. It cost $200" (or whatever the figure was). "When you get older, you're going to want us to buy you guitars and automobiles and pay for college tuition, and we're going to say, why should we spend this money when we threw away money on golf camp and you didn't even go? Third, it's golf camp, it's five days long, and I'm making you go through with it."
     That speech worked. Actually, talking out what the problem was worked. It turned out, the instructor, in trying to impress upon the kids how dangerous a driver could be, slammed on forcefully on a fence post, splintering it, and that scared my boy, who was seven, remember. Once we got to that point, he was able to make it through the week.
    But golf never stuck with him, and I can't say I blame him. It must be genetic. 

Filipino president-elect a glimpse of Trump administration

Rodrigo Duterte

     If you're curious what it'll be like to live in a nation led by an erratic demagogue prone to uttering horrible things about women, there is no need to wait until Donald J. Trump is sworn in as president of the United States in January. All we have to do is turn our gaze to the Philippines right now.
     For those not paying attention — and really, we're Americans, we can't keep track of every tinpot territory — 10 days ago the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte, the tough-talking mayor of Davao City, over a field of far more qualified but tainted by association politicians. Think Hillary Clinton's lightweight cousins.
     I hasten to point out that "tinpot" was sarcastic: the Philippines has 103 million people and is the 12th largest nation on earth, its population equal to the United Kingdom and Canada combined.
     Out of sight, out of mind. But believe me, we'll be hearing more of them. Duterte started his campaign by saying how he'd abolish the Filipino Congress and kept voters buzzing with his jaw-dropping remarks, the capstone being how he, as mayor, should have had dibs when Jacqueline Hamill, a 36-year-old Australian missionary, was gang-raped and murdered during a prison riot in 1989.
     "She was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first," he joked, to the laughter of supporters.... "

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"The Ewww Factor"

        The email from yesterday's piece on transgender individuals and bathrooms can be imagined: frightened, ignorant people, prattling on about "God's law," as if any self-respecting deity from any defendable theology would not strike them dead on general principles. just for the offense of uttering His name as a hallelujah chorus for whatever uninformed nonsense they seem determined to uphold. They don't merit reading.
     But I did get one email from a transgender lawyer that included the email she sent me in November, when last I addressed this issue. I re-read it, and thought, offering as it does something too little heard in all this— direct testimony from the people most affected—it would be of interest to you.

Hi Neil,

    I read your column on the transgender controversy at District 211. I found it thought-provoking, as most of your columns are. I did want to share a few thoughts of my own with you.
     One of the difficult things about growing up transgender is what I call the "ewww" factor. Growing up as a boy who acted like a girl caused people in my life, including classmates, to act towards me as though I were "ewwwy". Trans kids are often shunned as "different". Because human beings are social animals, this shunning is very painful and difficult. When the government, itself, however, takes the position that certain kids have to be treated differently from everybody else, the results for those kids are devastating. While I understand that discrimination against black people is different from discrimination against transgender people, I am sure that I do not need to remind you that one of the bases of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a cultural/social study about how black children felt about race, a study that involved children picking out dolls of different races in response to certain questions. It is simply not good or right for the government to tell certain children that they are different from other children and cannot be allowed to join with them as equals.
     Your column quotes Cates ["Inside the Girls' Locker Room," Nov. 5, 2015], the Superintendent of the district as saying, "Measures of privacy allow developing teenagers to choose for themselves whether or not to use privacy areas . . . safeguarding matters for transgender teens we believe will be helpful to students in our locker room." But, of course, Cates is not allowing transgender teens to choose for themselves whether or not to use privacy areas--he is requiring them to use privacy areas and allowing cis-gender kids to "choose for themselves".
     Some girls are born with penises. Some boys are born with vaginas. It is high time we as a society learn to accept that fact. Allowing trans girls into the girls locker room on the same basis as other girls, and allowing trans boys into the boys locker room on the same basis as other boys, does not pose a threat to anybody. And if, as Cates says, the district will allow students to choose for themselves whether to use privacy areas, cis-gender kids who have some (I think irrational) issues with trans kids can themselves use the privacy areas.
     You say that the "fervent desire [of trans girls] to stride easily into the girls' locker room and be welcomed as one of the gang is still, at this cultural moment, constrained if they also possess a penis." I understand that locker room use is different from bathroom use. But for over a year I used women's bathrooms in courthouses all over the Chicago metropolitan area while I still had a penis. No one was embarrassed, inconvenienced, bothered, or hurt. Transgender people are required to live 24/7 as the gender to which they are transitioning for certain periods of time before they can access certain types of transition health care
     I think you could have taken a bolder stand with your column.
     Yours very truly,
     Joanie Rae Wimmer
     Attorney at Law
     Downers Grove, Illinois 

Gut feeling steers you wrong on potty wars

    One evening last summer. Dinner over, darkness settling upon suburbia, the citronella candles flickering. We're sitting around the iron table on our deck with old friends from the city, a couple and their 19-year-old son.

     The lad hunches over his phone, arranging to meet up with a buddy later, and refers to this friend as "them." His mother explains that the friend exists in some zone between the genders and so rejects the prosaic "he" or "she," instead going by the plural, "they."

     Just as I was smirking, thinking how strange this is, no doubt some practice bred in the superrich petri dish of The Latin School — the city kid's alma mater — my older son pipes up that he, too, knows someone from Glenbrook North who goes by "they." Now there's two. Nearly a trend.

      "What's wrong with 'it'?" I ask. "A perfectly good word."

     Harsh, yes, but I was viewing it from a grammarian's point of view. I didn't realize that the American Dialect Society picked "they" as a singular pronoun for the 2015 "Word of the Year"....

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A cold spring

     A Facebook friend posts a video about how the Rothschilds control every central bank in the world. I watch as much as I can stand, a few seconds.
    Not only anti-Semitic crap, but old anti-Semitic crap. That's like floating conspiracy theories about fluoridated water.
    I start to type a reply, get a few letters, then stop.
   Sigh. Erase what I've begun, unfriend the person and move on.
   A few posts down, my attention is caught by a video of an Asian woman dancing vigorously. Harmless stuff, until I eye the comments.

   "This is why The American Empire works so hard to control us, which includes going so far as to install an *african-American*into the white house," Eric Hudson opines. "Because they know that without such controls, Black people will take over the world, just by being ourselves."
     Sigh.

     I almost type, "Take over the world ... by dancing vigorously?"
     But why bother? Why even be part of it? You reach into the cage, more often than not, you draw back a bloody stump. And who's fault is that? Theirs? They obviously have no control over thoughts that border on random hallucination. You do. You have discernment. So discern, goddamn it.
     I'm not the Idiot Police. Can't be the Idiot Police.

    Because there are so many of them
    And only one of me.
    So don't try.
    Not that I'm alone. Lots of sensible people, crossing swords with the army of madmen, like some monster horde in one of those "Lord of the Rings" movies I can't watch because they're just so exquisitely boring. I've fought this fight enough, in the past and, I suppose, again in the future. Retire from the field, for now anyway.
     To tell you the truth, I'm getting tired of Facebook too, tired of the shit that people believe or, worse, don't even believe but are too thick to wonder about, and just pass along because, either way, it's interesting.
     And then there's email.
    "Why should Trump bother releasing his tax returns if media is complicit in the cover up of crimes evident in Obama’s tax returns," something called Orly Taitz—some kind of pun, no doubt—writes. Into the filter with Orly. In doing so, I'm told I have 12 previous emails from him—a patient man, I am. Filter them all. Talk to the hand, Orly.
    It must be Donald Trump. Just watching the Republican Party collapse in front of him last week, a little voice has been whispering, "He's going to win you know."
     The Voice of Doom perhaps.
     Though honestly, even if he doesn't win, the damage is done. Republicans will elbow each other to take the Trump Highway in 2020. And the shame of a major American political party embracing this fraud, this unqualified clown, after hectoring and catcalling Barack Obama for seven years, to roll at the feet of Donald Trump like puppies. You want to vomit. Having watch them be venal hypocrites for decades, I thought I had their measure. But they still have the capacity to astound.
     "6 Corporations Own the Media."
     Jets chasing a UFO.

     Every patriotic fiber in my body says Hillary Clinton is going to win. And then the haters and howlers who have been writhing under Barack Obama can go back to hating and howling. They may even be secretly relieved, to be spared the burden of actually having to try to get something done. I'll sure be relieved when she wins, and not secretly either.

     Until then, well, it's in the 30s today. A cold spring, in more ways than one. 

A bit of doggy heaven within O'Hare

     If I still ran my "Saturday Fun Activity" feature, I'd toss up this animal-friendly spot, with its verdant grass, bushes and trees in the background, perhaps first snipping out that tell-tale Yellow Cab to the far right. Not that it would fool anybody: savvy travelers would instantly ID it as O'Hare International Airport, perhaps even pin-pointing it as Terminal One.
     I had never noticed this oasis before, because I never brought our dog to the airport before. And while my older boy often asked if the dog might show up to greet him at the airport when he returned home, it seemed one of those bothers that could be waved off — enough that I was going to the airport to collect him, wrangling his filled-with-bricks-of-unwashed-clothing luggage back to the car. Asking me to bring the dog as well was a bridge too far.
      But he was arriving at 6:24 a.m. Thursday. My wife realized she could come along and still make it to her office on-time. And suddenly the dog got scooped up into our little welcome party.
     Of course I walked the dog before we left. So it wasn't a matter of necessity. But the flight was delayed a little, as flights will be. And while we camped by baggage claim, waiting, my wife noticed a sign pointing toward an "Animal Relief Area." Curious, I figured a walk was in order.
     The little white metal container for bags was empty. Otherwise a rather well-tended little rectangle of wood chips, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, dotted with round stones for dogs to sniff. Kitty, who seemed put off by the lack of smells in the airport, joyously nosed around, blotting out the evidence of previous dogs with her own splash of tribute.
    There are similar areas at Terminals 2 and 5, plus an indoor zone, with artificial grass and miniature red fire hydrants—basically a bathroom for dogs—within the security zone in the Rotunda at Terminal 3.
     The boy was elated to see Kitty waiting for him, and while he effusively hugged and praised her, it did cross my mind that, after a few months apart, I wouldn't mind some of that. But it wasn't as if, without her, the joyous welcome would be transferred to me. Don't be jealous of a dog, I told myself. Eventually, while the dog was being greeted and re-greeted, I cleared my throat and dipped my head into his line of vision and generally made my presence known, and was rewarded with a nod and a light, momentary hug, as if my clothes were dirty and he didn't want to get any on himself.  Burdened with the two heaviest pieces of luggage, I staggered after the boy, his dog and mother and they happily made their way toward the car.

"For a piece of bread you can hear God sing"

Tony Fitzpatrick at the DePaul Art Museum

     Birds do not loiter. They dart and dive, swoop and soar. Occasionally, they'll pause at a spot, and if you're lucky, you can steal a glance, close-up.

     I was lucky Wednesday, crossing a bridge in Northbrook; a flash of red caught my eye. I looked up and got a good three second's study of a scarlet tanager lingering on a branch, right in front of my nose.

     Wow.  

     Is it me, or are there more birds around Chicago this spring?

     "We've had a solid month of rainy weather, and that's not ideal for birds," said James Steffen, ecologist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

     "Some springs are better than others, but it's been pretty typical," said Josh Engel, a research assistant at the Field Museum. "I wouldn't say it's different."

     Okay, it's me....

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Design just has to work

     Certain things are so iconic, so ubiquitous that it's odd to think that someone designed them, and they have an official name, like this classic of industrial seating, the GF 40/4 Chair, designed by David Rowland, who spent eight years, from 1956 to 1964, perfecting it.
    I noticed the chair last week at the Art Institute of Chicago in, appropriately enough, an exhibit on the influence of architects on chairs (and some people think the Van Gogh bedrooms are the most exciting thing going on there now!)  The "GF" in its name is for "General Fireproofing," the Youngstown, Ohio company that made a variety of iconic office furniture: swivel desk chairs, metal bookshelves, generic office desks. The "40/4" part of its name is because 40 chairs can be stacked four feet high. It was shunned by "skeptical manufacturers," according to the exhibit, who didn't believe the wiry chair could support human weight and stand up to hard use. Until Skidmore, Owings and Merrill ordered 17,000 for the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus in 1964, and General Fireproofing happily took the job. Millions more of the chairs have been made since then, though I would bet many of those original  U of I chairs are still in service. A reminder that design doesn't have to be beautiful; it just has to work, in order to endure.

When did Saudi Arabia become more progressive than the U.S.?

 

Giant Coal Lump, Jim Thorpe, PA.

   Saudi Arabia, despite great wealth, is one of the most socially backward countries in the world. Women can't drive, or open a bank account without permission of a male relative. They only got the right to vote, in municipal elections, in 2015, a year that saw Saudi Arabia conduct 151 beheadings.
     Despite being mired in the 12th century, Saudi Arabia still manages to be forward looking when it comes to important business matters.
     Such as oil. Oil is what brought Saudi Arabia from being a sandy nowhere of nomadic tribes to a wealthy global power. So it might be surprising, to those paying attention, to see a dramatic shift this week. I will spare you which ministers are ousted and which are in, and give you the first three paragraphs a May 10 story on Gulf News Saudi Arabia headlined, "Shake Up Moves Saudi Arabia Down New Path":

     RIYADH: In a series of sweeping royal decrees on Saturday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia replaced a number of top ministers and restructured government bodies in the first moves of an ambitious plan to chart a new direction for the kingdom.      The decrees were among the first concrete steps in the plan, which was announced late last month to great domestic fanfare by the king’s son and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is about 30, oversees economic policy and runs the Defence Ministry....

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Just another gravel barge....

    Expectations mold perception.
    What you think you're going to see colors what you think you saw.
    This can't be emphasized enough, since most people never get beyond using their current beliefs, not only as a screen to mask out information that doesn't agree with those beliefs, but as a filter to distort what they're seeing. You can't convince them otherwise because they don't allow themselves to process contradictory information. They can't even perceive it's there.
     I'm no different, as illustrated by this momentary exchange on the Madison Street Bridge a couple weeks ago.
    A long gravel barge was moving up the river. I've often seen these barges, loaded with gravel, heading to points elsewhere. Something about it — the lookout on the bow maybe — made me whip out my phone to take a picture of the gravel barge going by.  My wife observed that it was probably destined for Oak Street Beach.
    "The gravel?"I said, as we started to walk.
    "No, the sand," my wife said. "It's a barge full of sand."
    "No, it's...." I began, then stopped, and actually looked at the barge disappearing under the bridge. Wouldn't you know it? She was right. It was sand.  I would have sworn it was gravel. In my defense, I never really focused on what the barge was carrying, just that it was a barge full of something. Usually, it's gravel. This time it wasn't. 
     I'd be an idiot to insist that, appearances notwithstanding, it's still a barge of gravel because that's what I thought it was, initially. So sad that those surveying our political or cultural landscape can't adjust their perceptions with similar ease. They're expecting gravel because it all looks like gravel to them, and by God, it must be.

How are we going to make it through six months of this?

     Trump v. Hillary.
     Coming soon to a theater near you.
     Well, not really coming to a theater.
     That might be the one place it's not coming.
     And certainly not coming soon.
     A full six months.
     Quite a lot, really.
     So tell me. How much would you pay to cut to the chase? To have the election over, the results known?
     A dollar? A hundred dollars? A thousand? I suppose it depends on the state of your pocketbook.
     I would pay a lot. Because the next six months will be what the New York Times described Saturday as "the ugliest, most cringeworthy presidential contest of the modern era ... a half-year slog through the marital troubles, personal peccadilloes, financial ambitions, social-media habits and physical appearances of 'Dangerous Donald' and 'Crooked Hillary.'"
     A grim prospect. And pointless too. What can we possibly learn about either that we don't already know?
     I keep flashing on the O.J. Simpson trial. Day after day of Johnnie Cochran and Marcia Clark, the lost eyeglasses, the glove. I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears, squeeze my eyes closed and scream, "Make it stop!"
     Not the most laudable sentiment for a newsman, I know. But sincere nevertheless.
     The cold truth is, life must be lived, one day at a time. And we must get ourselves to Nov. 8.
     "To bear," as the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell writes, "is to conquer our fate."
     So how do we bear this? How to endure a campaign guaranteed to be agony, at least for those of us who aren't whooping for Trump? His supporters are having fun, energized, like kids excited to be allowed to stay up late, thrilled to find they suddenly have permission to let their fears and bigotries strut about unashamed at mid-day, the bedrock of the Trump appeal. To be honest, I don't really blame Trump. People were already like this: he's just the mirror, the blowhard wind stoking their flames.
     What about the rest of us? Those for whom Hillary is like the firefighter who bursts through the door of our burning house—not necessarily the best person in the department, but who cares? She's the one we're counting on to escort us down the ladder to safety.
     We could try to view it through the long lens of history. A thrilling, knock-down, drag-out fight harkening back to the bare knuckled era of the early Republic. When Ted Cruz, already a fading memory, just one week ago accused Trump of being a serial philanderer struggling with venereal disease, the historian in me wanted to dig up when charges like that were being flung around in a presidential election. My guess: Jefferson v. Adams in 1800 (Bingo. Jefferson's followers even presaged our current bathroom fixation, detecting in Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman" while Adams' camp referred to Jefferson as "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.")
     So this is history. Or will be, when we get through it.
     Something to look forward to.
     Plus, Clinton's going to win, right? I mean, between Trump proposing catastrophic schemes, and his offending Hispanics, women and Muslims, then continually re-offending them over the next six months with his leering, ham-handed, Taco Bowl attempts to regain their good favor, she has to win.
     Though if Trump is evidence of anything, it is that certainty has left the building.
     I have a quote I've been repeating—I'm not sure why it helps, but it does.
     "Why, this is hell," Christopher Marlowe writes, "nor am I out of it."
     I guess it helps because it implies that one day, eventually, we will be out of it.
     And we will. On Nov. 9.
     Although, whether that marks the end of one hell or the beginning of another, worse one, well, we'll find out.

"The world has changed, you perfidious bigot you."

      Happy Mother's Day, first of all. 
      If you are a mother, I hope you take this moment to bask in the outpourings of affection being showered upon you, from those for whom you sacrificed the best years of your life, trying to raise them into some semblance of maturity. 
     And if you are a child—and who among us is not?—I hope you remember to thank your mother or, if that is not possible, to remember her, as fondly as you can.
      And since it's springtime, and May, and Mother's Day to boot, a cheery thought, as my own little Mother's Day gift to you. 

    I was at the Hallmark Store in Northbrook this week, looking over the Mother's Day cards, of which there are a profusion, and I noticed that they represent, even more than I can recall them doing in previous years, the full spectrum of the maternal experience. Not just in English and Spanish and Polish and Italian, not just for the religious and the secular, the casual and the formal, the funny and the emphatic. 
     But also cards for people you might not think would get cards today. Cards for "Ex-Mother-in-Law" and "Ex-Daughter-in-Law" (reassuring her, "Some things never change," such as the feelings of their former in-laws) . Cards from one mother to her co-mother, and for mothers whose child has died, and for individuals who were "like a mother" without, apparently, enjoying official motherhood status.
      Which is all wonderful and in keeping with complicated, messy reality as it is lived by real, flesh-and-blood people, and so different from the icy, theoretical, my-way-or-the-highway, white, Protestant, a mommy-and-a-daddy-and-tw0-and-a-half-kids wilted former ideal that so many of our legislators, particularly in the Southland, seem to still be paddling toward, even as it recedes over the horizon.
      Hallmark Cards, based in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 1910, and is not known for being on the forefront of social change. They can't afford to be. Printing greeting cards costs money, and if they create a style of card that nobody wants, then they lose money on that card. Lose enough money on enough cards, you don't say in business for 106 years. They also lose money if their brand strays into the odd or the unacceptable. To be included among the realm of individuals to whom Hallmark sells cards is to be normal, by definition, to be acceptable, and on Mother's Day, 2016, acceptability is a very wide net.  
    See? I told you, good news.  Yes, not everyone has gotten the memo yet. It might go down better in a card. "The world has changed, you perfidious bigot you" and you open it up, "Get with the program, bub." Not something Hallmark would sell. Yet. Maybe by the fall

Is your sign straight?

     The sign didn't skew a lot, but it skewed enough—maybe half a brick dip to the left or, if you prefer, half a brick rise to the right. 
      It was crooked. 
      Plus, of course, the old brackets that held the "My Pi" sign from the restaurant before, the pizzeria that came and went, and quickly too. That's what happens. You get one chance.
      Nobody took those brackets down. A man on a ladder could have removed them with a screwdriver in 10 minutes. 
      But no one did.
      Last year, months before the restaurant opened, I was walking down Shermer in the old leafy suburban paradise and saw that sign announcing the new place, "Agave Anejo Mexican Grill," and immediately had this thought:
      They'll never make it.
      Because to survive, a business needs to pay attention to detail. Especially a restaurant. Because you can eat at home. You need to master the details, to not scrimp  and cut corners and do a slapdash job. To thrive, a restaurant has to sweat the small stuff. That's what customers expect, and are paying for.
      This vaguely Star Trek "A" was obviously designed on the cheap, the name itself hard to read, and skewed to boot. Amateur hour. The restaurant was doomed.
      I thought of writing that, a year ago, when I saw the sign. But why torment a small business owner, right out of the gate, some poor guy pursuing his dream? A Mexican restaurant of his own.
     Maybe the food would be great. A culinary genius, oblivious to such non-food matters as signs and skewing.
     Better to err on the side of kindness, if staying quiet was kindness.
     Maybe I should have written my thoughts. Maybe it would have helped him. Maybe not doing so wasn't doing him any favors.
     Nah, he wouldn't have taken the criticism and learned. People so seldom do.
     So the restaurant opened, last August. The grand opening banner stayed up for a month after the grand opening. That, too, was a bad sign, literally. It advertised the grand opening that had come and gone, and didn't come down until one corner fell down, and even then it flapped around in front of the door. For a day or two.
      Of course we ate there, my wife and younger son, we tried the food. And it wasn't bad. A little expensive. Basic Mexican food. I remember a serviceable ceviche. We almost went back for a second try—support the local business, a block from our house.
     But inside, there was no art on the wall. Who starts a Mexican restaurant and has no art on the walls? Not a colorful paper-mache lizard. Not a sombrero. Not a metal cactus. Nothing.
      So we didn't go back. The lack of art gave me almost a contempt. Really? And we were supposed to eat there why? The place never seemed that crowded. A few people in the bar. And then not even that. A week or so ago the restaurant went dark and the "FOR LEASE" sign went up. Too little capital, I would guess, and too little effort. A small dream poorly executed.
      Still, someone's dream, not deferred, but vanished, so nothing to laugh about. Instead, a grim nod, a recognition of the risk that all who strive face, and should be aware of. That tilted sign was the tip-off, before the the first basket of tortilla chips hit the table. Don't be half-assed. If you're going to do something, do it well. Make sure your sign is straight.

     

Let's go back to the coroner

"Still" by Damien Hirst, Art Institute of Chicago

     Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Cina announced his retirement Wednesday, claiming a desire to seek a "more peaceful lifestyle."
     Which immediately raises the question: What about his four-year tenure wasn't peaceful?
     Perhaps he was referring to the dramatic press conference where he revealed that teenager Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times, 14 while lying in the street, dying.
     Oh right. There was no such press conference. Cina's term was distinguished by a big hike in funding, allowing him to hire more staff and modernize the medical examiner's office, and though we played connect-the-dots last week, I would be so bold to suggest that those two elements — his keeping mum and his being served a big heaping slice of county pie — are not unrelated. Just a theory.
      I'd love to ask him about it, but no interviews, at least not with me. Then again, I'm the one who pointed out when he showed up that he planned to keep his $5,000-a-day forensic consultancy sideline. That kind of thing tends to sour relations.
     Not so for his predecessor, Dr. Nancy Jones, who had a habit of articulating medical findings, even ones that her bosses found unwelcome. Such as in 2009 when she said that Chicago Board of Education President Michael Scott committed suicide, even though Scott's pal, Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Scott's family preferred to dwell in an alternate universe of flimsy conjecture. Daley threw Jones under the bus, and her staff passed around photographs of the messes they were supposed to be cleaning up.....

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"It's hard to take the fingerprints of the dead"

Anti-NATO protest, Chicago, 2012. 

      The Cook County Medical Examiner, Dr. Stephen Cina, quit on Wednesday, saying he wanted "a more peaceful lifestyle"—whatever that means, perhaps a reference to his $5,000 a day forensic consultancy sideline. 

     One that got away. I heaved a weary sigh—having known every Cook County Medical Examiner since the first, Dr. Robert Stein, and watching most of them work, I know that the morgue produces interesting stories. Not Dr. Cina, too modest, or too circumspect, to allow that. 

     But his predecessor, Dr. Nancy Jones did, after sufficient pleading directed at her boss, Todd Stroger, a process that ended up in my book, "You Were Never in Chicago." I am proud of this story on a number of points,  particularly noticing the tools she was using. Anyway, I thought it worth reposting.

     'It is difficult to take fingerprints of the dead," says Dr. Nancy Jones, the Cook County medical examiner. "They really are not that cooperative."
     She immediately reconsiders this.
     "These are the best patients in the world," she corrects herself, as if reluctant to criticize broadly people she sees by the thousands, though they don't see her. "If you come to me as a clinician, and I tell you to quit smoking, you don't. I tell you to take your medicine, you don't. It's the living patients who don't do what you tell them to."

Dr. Nancy Jones

    Here, in an autopsy room at the county morgue, however, the patients stay put, quietly waiting their turn on rolling steel tables, their lightless eyes half open. Technician Tiffany Gregoire helps arrange the body of a large, muscular young man, then gently washes him with a sponge. He was found face-down in a roadway, a bullet hole in his back, the latest victim this year of heightened violence, one of a dozen corpses to arrive in the previous 24 hours.
     "A little lighter load," says Dr. Jones. The average is about 16 cases a day. She reads off today's list: "A drug death, a gunshot, an unknown bone that may or may not be human, a couple of elderly people without families, a pedestrian . . . Actually, it's not a bad day."

UNCONVENTIONAL TOOLS

     Dr. Jones examines a 24-year-old who hanged himself with a shoelace—one of two suicides on today's schedule. Suicides are up. "We always know when the economy goes sour," says Dr. Jones, who suspects hard times might also explain the spike in child murders they saw in April and May.
     At the next table, Dr. Larry Cogan examines the gunshot victim. With a potential murder trial in mind, he inserts a steel rod into the wound and Sherry Davis photographs it, so a jury can see the bullet's trajectory.
     After the victim is rolled over, Gregoire takes a scalpel and cuts across the big man's chest, just below his collarbone, and down his sternum, making a rough "T." Below the brown skin is a beige layer of fat, then deep red tissue that looks disconcertingly like steak. In short order, his heart is on an electronic scale. It weighs 374 grams.
     Dr. Jones has short, coiffed red hair and frameless glasses. She was born in Aliquippa, Pa., a small steel town; her father worked in the mill there for 40 years. Though she has lived in Chicago since 1970, she is, she admits, a small-town girl at heart, and she brings a certain practicality to her job. Her medical kit includes carpet needles and a regular pair of pliers instead of a medical dura stripper costing four times as much. The cutting instrument she uses for autopsies is not a scalpel, but a fancy kitchen knife—a Henckels with a 10-inch blade, the kind found in upscale kitchens.
     "The reason I have this is because they hold their edge, and they're a lot less expensive," she says.
     Gregoire struggles to reach up into the murdered man's throat and pull out his tongue. It is hard, physical work, and while she utters an occasional expletive, her face is placid, expressionless. This is routine. When is it difficult?
     "I would have to say when the bodies come in with roaches," she says. "I don't like that. I'd rather see maggots than roaches."
     After weighing the man's heart, liver, lungs and other organs, then dumping them into a red plastic biohazard bag that will later be inserted into his chest, Gregoire turns her attention to opening his skull. Pulling away the dura inside the skullcap sounds like fabric ripping.
     "This is the part of work that gets a little tiresome," Gregoire says.
     The weight of each organ is recorded on a chalkboard. The photographs are shot on film, leading to "racks and racks and racks" of slides.
     Dr. Jones uses carbon paper to fill out multiple death certificates. The modernization that led hospitals to bar-code every last pair of Tylenol hasn't reached here yet. Dr. Jones -- who joined in 1986 but only became medical examiner last year—is planning to bring the office into the modern age as fast as possible, assuming the money can be found.

'IT'S A LOT OF STRESS'

     She also hopes—someday—to have enough staff to give them breaks from the routine, because "it gets to everybody." Some time away from the autopsy room, maybe an occasional month doing paperwork, filing slides, perhaps educating hospitals and funeral homes, which sometimes forget that certain deaths—suicides, infants, industrial accidents, murders—are required by law to be sent to the medical examiner.
     "It will make a huge improvement, to have relief, and not do the same thing day after day after day, month after month after month," she says. "It's a lot of stress."
     Despite the county budget crisis, she is hopeful.
     "I've been getting a lot of help from downtown," she says. "They really do understand my issues here."
     Beneath Dr. Jones' no-nonsense demeanor beats a warm heart. She likes riding horses, owns two, and adopts rabbits from a rescue group. When a friend, a police officer, died, the officer's wife asked Dr. Jones to perform his autopsy. She did so with her usual professionalism, crying only later, as she dictated her notes. Dr. Jones is 55 and proud of it.
     "Getting old is a privilege that many people don't have," she says. "Every time you get up in the morning and feel those aches and pains, you should thank the Lord."
     Her job has strengthened her faith.
     "I believe in God, very, very much," she says. "Doing autopsies on human beings, you see how intricate we are. The wonder of the human body. How well it meshes together, and how little it takes to stop a person's existence. One little thing."
     A few feet away, Dr. Cogan has removed the bullet that killed the man. A mangled lump of whitish metal, no bigger than a fingertip.

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 2, 2008

Hey George, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

     Chicago! Yo! Over here! I have a question.
     So the 2016 Summer Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 5 — three months from Thursday — assuming the city doesn't first dissolve into unrest or the region become overwhelmed by Zika-carrying mosquitoes or Brazil collapse into political anarchy.
     That said, how many of you have had this thought: "Darn, if only we had gotten the 2016 Olympics. I sure wish it were taking place right here instead."
     A show of hands. Anybody?
     Thought so. While I'm sure there must be someone who wishes that, among Chicago's complex raft of woes, the city were also throwing a weird mega block party for shot-putters and pole-vaulters and all those other sports we studiously ignore the 47 consecutive months between Olympics. But I'm not expecting many.
     The general reaction has to be a collective, Whew!
     Dodged that bullet.
     One disaster that Richard M. Daley didn't foist upon Chicago despite trying with all his might....

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Chicago's own circus, City Council, once put on an elephant show

     Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had their last show using elephants in Rhode Island on Sunday. I can't claim to be particularly saddened to see the 120-year tradition end. Society changes. I used to enjoy taking the boys to the circus, and the shows were dramatic, especially the elephants forming a massive living tableau of animal bulk. But I understand that elephants are sensitive beings, and abusing them into public performance is not a particularly laudable human achievement. I'm sure feeding slaves to the lions in the Colosseum was a thrilling spectacle too, but that isn't a convincing argument against doing away with it.
    This view represents—I won't say "progress"—how about "evolution" on my part, to borrow Barack Obama's term. Ten years ago, in the wake of three elephants dying at the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Chicago City Council was holding hearings whether to effectively ban elephants in the city. I swallowed hard and attended a meeting. 
    It's a shame the aldermen couldn't have applied this zeal to shortfalls in pension funding; could have saved everybody a lot of grief. Elephants aren't the only ones who suffer. 

     Old people shouldn't live in nursing homes, where they are crammed in small, overlit rooms, often with cantankerous roommates. A few are neglected, suffering terrible bedsores, or abuse at the hands of churlish, undertrained "attendants."
     Instead, they should live out their days with their families, relaxing in wicker rockers, sipping lemonade on the wide front porches of splendid Victorian homes, their grandchildren capering around their knees.
     To help facilitate this, the City of Chicago should ban nursing homes within its borders.
     This, as best I can figure, is the kind of logic underlying arguments against allowing elephants -- either at the Lincoln Park Zoo or in passing circuses -- to reside in Chicago. Since elephants sometimes in some places are treated poorly, they shouldn't be kept in captivity at all.
     This was laid out in the City Council chambers Thursday, during a Rules Committee hearing for Ald. Mary Ann Smith's (48th) proposed ordinance to require so much free space for elephants that it would effectively ban them.
     We saw slides of elephants with abscesses on their feet. A brief, soundless, green-tinged video of a man with a hooked staff, instructing another man how to use it to discipline elephants.
     "Hurt 'em, make 'em scream," read the closed captioning, helpfully provided by PETA.
     Somehow, these incidents were supposed to jell into a general indictment. Testimony in support of the bill began -- for some inexplicable reason -- with a 16-year-old Lincoln Park High School sophomore named Francie Flannigan.
     "The elephants didn't ask to be here,'' she said. (They didn't ask to be in Africa, either, but no matter). "They are our guests. We should treat them like guests and not prisoners."
     The theater major ended by reciting from that elephant classic, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg.
     " 'I said what I meant and I meant what I said, an elephant is faithful, 100 percent.' "
     Ald. William Beavers (7th) responded to this curious display with a pertinent question:
     "Have you ever seen an elephant?"
     "Yes,'' said the girl. "At the Lincoln Park Zoo."
     "Anywhere else?
     "Also at the circus."
     Some three dozen other youngsters, all in identical neon green T-shirts memorializing the last three elephant inmates of the Lincoln Park Zoo, were in the public gallery, which is probably 1 percent of the kids who go through the zoo on a rainy afternoon.
     In general, Beavers provided a steady, thoughtful counterpoint, as we sailed to the realm of the absurd, acting as the Council's voice of reason (as opposed to Ald. Arenda Troutman [20th], whose rambling, incoherent speech left people scratching their heads).
     After the video, Beavers summarized the situation:
     "It's a video of one idiot, and you want to punish the whole city because you saw one person doing something."
     Patti Miles, a former employee of the Detroit Zoo, described how that zoo's elephants were shipped to a sanctuary in California -- she didn't explain why, if the elephants were so terribly abused, they nevertheless lived into their 50s, nor did she point out that the Detroit Zoo managed to make the decision without the intercession of government.
     She seemed to be speaking, not only against zoos, but against human experience of the living world in general.
     "Why is it so important to see something with your own eyes?" she asked.
     The assumption of all the pro-ban people was that there was some idealized state of nature, over in Africa, where all these elephants would be joyfully roaming if they weren't kidnapped and taken here, some Eden with no poachers, no droughts, no hyenas, no illness.
     There are 2 million Americans in prison in this country, some kept in horrendous, overcrowded conditions -- such as at the Cook County Jail. There are 600 elephants in the United States. I just don't think our priorities are straight.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 24, 2006

     Postscript: Stung by ridicule over its banning foie gras in 2005, the City Council ended up not banning elephants. In 2008, the City Council did pass a weak tea anti-elephant abuse ordinance, making it illegal "to use on an elephant any device or instrument with the intent to cause pain and injury" without mustering the courage to specifically mention "bull hooks" etc. and thus missing the heart of the matter.  The Lincoln Park Zoo got rid of its elephants, no law necessary, in 2012. 

U.S. Supreme Court leans toward legalizing corruption

Bob and Maureen McDonnell

     Things are a mess.
     They sure feel like a mess, don’t they?
     Chicago teeters on insolvency. Illinois hurtles toward its first anniversary of utter fiscal gridlock.
     Nationally, the view is even more surreal, like some semi-obscene Dali painting come to life. This crude New York punchline has shanghaied the Republican Party. While the Democrats who aren’t still skipping happily toward Shangri-La behind Pied Piper Bernie Sanders, banging tambourines wrapped in ribbons, grimly assemble around scarred old campaigner Hillary Clinton, like yeomen clutching pointed staffs in a muddy field around Henry V, psyching themselves up to fight off the legions of bowl-haircut Middle American sexist idiocy for the next six solid months.
     So I hate to point out another looming problem, one not on your radar yet. It won’t show up until June, maybe. But it bobbed to the surface of our national discourse last week before being flushed away by the next jaw-dropping set of bad news. Since you may have missed it, I feel compelled to pluck it out and hold it up, gingerly, between thumb and forefinger.
     Bob McDonnell.
     Name mean anything? Of course not. Don’t feel bad, it drew a blank with me too....

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Postscript: Wondering what happened? Read it and weep.