Housekeeping note

     A reader requested that I return the Saturday Fun Activity and, being a full service columnist, I shrugged and thought, "Why not?" And if you recall, since people got frustrated with Night Owls solving the activity at 12:01 a.m., the Fun Activity posts at 7 a.m., to give folks who sleep in, sort of, a fighting chance. Please go to bed, and check back after 7.

    Thank you.

    Your amiable host.

    Neil Steinberg

Hillary Clinton's candidacy is a big deal

     In September 1952, Elizabeth Michalicka, 23, left her job as a secretary for Commonwealth Edison. She had been there for six years and liked her work, but she was getting married to John Mocek, and married women were not welcome.
     "You couldn't work there," she recalled. ComEd didn't fire her; they didn't have to. She was just expected to leave — and did.
   Times change. On Tuesday, Mocek, now 87, watched television late into the night, holding hands with her daughter BettyAnn Mocek as Hillary Clinton announced that she is the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States, the first woman to run for the White House representing a major political party.
     "I think it's wonderful," said the elder Mocek. "Finally this country has come to their senses a little and seen that maybe a woman could run this country."
     I met the pair because the younger Mocek phoned the newspaper the next day, aghast that Sen. Mark Kirk retracting his endorsement of Donald Trump was splashed across the front page Wednesday while Clinton's triumph was relegated to the inside pages....

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Postscript

And in case the opening vignette is not chilling enough, reader Nancy Perkovich shared this: 

     I worked as a stenographer in the Stock Transfer Dept. of Commonwealth Edison Co. from 1959 to 1962. I was impacted by 2 of their rules as follows: When I got married in 1961, I had to change my name from Nancy L. Parr to Nancy P. Perkovich. When I entered my 5th month of pregnancy in 1962, I had to bring a note from my doctor attesting to that fact, which was submitted to the Dean of Women's Affairs, at which time my employment was terminated.

Sweet victory turned sour

     History is not an actual place. You can't go there. Instead it is a maze of supposed facts ("a set of lies that people have agreed upon," to quote Napoleon) that can be highlighted, ignored or twisted. History is, in essence, an argument. When the Six-Day War occurred, 49 years ago this week, it was a miracle. The scrappy underdog Israelis fending off armies of much larger, much more powerful countries. Almost a Biblical wonder of the one-day's-worth-of-oil-lasting-eight-days variety.
     Since then, Israel's victory has curdled, as the four million Palestinian refugees whose lands was seized in the war have grown in numbers, resentment and international savvy. Sympathy for Israel can be harder to find -- almost impossible on college campuses, except among Jews, and even they, as liberals, can't help but feel conflicted, sensing that something has gone awry in their liberation saga. 
    I'm of two minds. On one hand, the Arabs hated the Israelis before. That's where the war occupation came from. As much as Palestinian apologists want to paint anti-Jewish fervor as a symptom of the occupation, it was rather a cause. Inability to live with Jews created it, and foster it now. Putting pressure on the Israelis to fix the situation treats the Palestinians as pawns and puppets, and they're not. They're actors in this drama, too. 
     On the other hand, something has to be done, and the right wing Netanyahu government seems to have no interest in solutions -- joining the Palestinians in a blindered denial of the situation as it stands. And the years go by. 
    I try not to think about it—what's the point?— but do hold out hope that if the situation becomes grim enough, the Palestinians might decide they want a country of their own, something they've never advocated, because they want all of Israel back, and that's never going to happen. Anyway, on the 40th anniversary of the war, I wrote this. Not much has changed since then. The very definition of tragedy: there is a problem demanding change, but nothing changes.

SIX DAYS + 40 YEARS

     The year 1967 is not vivid in my memory. I don't recall the Beatles releasing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band." Nor the first Super Bowl. The Summer of Love was, in my neck of the woods, the Summer of Kickball. While I remember thinking that hippies looked like pirates in their headbands and fringed jackets, I'm not sure when.
      But I do remember the Six-Day War, 40 years ago this week, when Israel crushed the assembled armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, seizing Jerusalem, too. My father had a Hammarlund Super-Pro shortwave radio, and in that time before 24-hour TV news, we'd find out what was going on in the world through the BBC. My grandparents were over at our house for my 7th birthday, and we clustered around the crackling shortwave to hear the war news -- a scene out of a vanished era.
     The Israeli victory is painted in somber hues today, colored by the intractable conflict with the Palestinians that followed. "Israel's wasted victory" is the headline on this week's Economist.
    I believe this dim view is an anachronism -- contemplating the past through the distorted lens of the present. Before the Six-Day War, Israel faced complete annihilation. And while the Arab states took another crack in 1973, Israel's stunning 1967 victory was its announcement to the world that, as convenient as it would be for them to be swept into the sea, the Jews did not intend to die quietly this time just to please their critics.
     Yes, problems ensued. The occupation brought misery and death to Palestinians, who returned the favor to their occupiers. Israel's international reputation is tarred as an occupying force, and people who don't care about repression in any other country on Earth care deeply about the Palestinians, who resist peace today in favor of the fantasy of military victory tomorrow.
     The irony is, in 1967, Israel seized land it thought would be needed as a buffer against onrushing Arab armies.
     But the victory meant the land would not be needed, and instead brought a restive population and a whole new brace of problems.
     This makes the victory complex, but not regrettable -- at least from the Israeli point of view. The Palestinians, I understand, view it differently.
     The current problems are thorny, but preferable to the problems posed by larger and stronger nations bent on invasion and conquest.
       Had the Israelis not destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and swept to victory, they might not be around today to debate whether the victory was ultimately a good or bad thing.
                           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 4, 2007

The beginning of Trump's end

     Whew.
     That was fast.
     Let history show that the wheels started to come off the Donald Trump bandwagon over the first week of June 2016.
     On Friday he was cruising along, while sentient patriotic Americans of both parties squirmed with pit-of-the-stomach dread that this erratic, unqualified bigot might somehow become president of the United States, leading our country to ruin with his misguided, mean-spirited, almost-insane policies.
     By Monday, Trump was in the ditch, insisting that his denunciation of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel for being of Mexican heritage was not a gaffe but a legitimate, defendable position. Democrats who have had the this-can't-be-happening vice tightening on their heads for weeks felt it loosen a few turns as even Republican allies began shying away in disgust. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called Trump's words "the textbook definition of racist comments." On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Kirk withdrew his support, with more sure to follow, as Republican politicians weigh winning the presidency against preserving their own chances at re-election. On cue, Trump tried to backpedal and tap dance away from his own unambiguous remarks.
     Self preservation isn't the only factor at work here. Part of it is simple defense of our nation and its way of life. What Trump is too stupid to understand is this: if we begin to denounce our fellow citizens as being incapable of doing their jobs because their parents were Mexican immigrants, or because they're Muslim, or Catholic, or whatever lineage or credo is disagreeing with Donald Trump at the moment, then the country unravels and we become just another balkanized ....

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"What a man, my hero, my brother."

     The hypocrisy of some people can really be breath-taking. Perhaps "suffocating" is a better word. Here conservatives fulminate for seven years against Barack Obama, inveighing against him as illegitimate in every regard: not an American, not a Christian, not commander-in-chief, not someone whose word carries any weight or meaning. No Supreme Court justices for this joker.
    And then Muhammad Ali dies. And these same conservatives cavil against him for ... ready? ... being a draft dodger. For failing to comply with government orders regarding Lyndon Johnson's undeclared war in Southeast Asia.
    One of many examples from my mailbag Sunday:
    "What in the HELL is wrong with everyone?" Fran Borowski cries. "M. Ali was nothing more than a FREAKEN DRAFTDOGER !!!!!! END OF DISCUSSION."
     For her, perhaps. And I guess for me, too. Either you see Muhammad Ali as the American hero he is. Or you're lost in past ideology.

     There's a lot of that going around. I tried pointing out, for all the good it did, that Ali did not "dodge" the draft. He stood up, refused induction, and took the consequences for his actions, which we were very steep—loss of millions of dollars in boxing purses, sentenced to five years in prison, excoriated by the armchair chicken hawks of the day.
     The passing decades did allow most to see Ali as the hero he was. But many seem stuck in 1967. Dick Esgar begins:

     I am not going to read your article today.  I read Morrissey's and thought it was very good, I would expect yours is also. I enjoyed Ali a lot, he was the greatest fighter that has lived. But he is not 'KING OF THE WORLD', or he would have went into the military like he was suppose to. I was never drafted, but if I would have been, I would have gone.

    And fought bravely, no doubt, and won medals, if not the war itself, single-handed. We always rise heroically to the challenges we never face, in our own minds.

Esgar continues:

My brother in law, was drafted, and died at Fort Polk, La., in basic training, 26 years old, from blood poisoning, he got from a cut on his hand that did not heal, and crawling around in the dirt. There is no place for anyone that does not answer the call or respect our Flag. And as I have told you before, it has got worse since Obama took office

     Sounds like an argument for avoiding the draft, not obeying it.  A military that valued its soldiers would have cleaned that cut. I wrote to him:

     Muhammad Ali served his country better than 100 men who went sheeplike to their deaths. Sad that, after all this time, you don't see it.  

    Let's not end on that note. I believe the Muhammad Ali story ultimately says something good about America, and so let's give the final word to John W. Wilson.

     It was June 1965 when I received a letter from the President of the United States of America. It was an impressive letter in bold italics and gold embroidering around the border and quite intimidating. It said "greetings from the President of the United States of America, you will report for induction no later than 08:00 hours on 06/15/1965. Failure to report as instructed may result in a $10,000.00 fine or imprisoned for 5 years and or both". I knew when I registered for the draft at 18 years of age that this could happen, but the army had not entered my mind. I did not want go because of the civil rights struggle and the disrespect and abuse by Chicago Policemen and the not allowing Black men and women the right to register to vote. I was not protected by the constitution why should I have to serve. But I went and turned out that I was told by my company commanders that everything I did was outstanding. Fired expert with the M-14 rifle hitting 75 targets in 75 attempts, running 10 seconds off the world record in the mile in army combat boots and fatigue pants, missing expert with one of the most difficult weapons the army .45 caliber pistol by one shot. Unheard of at that point in time. I was offered on 5 different occasions during my two years of active duty to go to officer''s candidate school which I refused each time. Years later after serving in Viet Nam and back home my cousin who served was berating Ali as a coward for refusing induction into the service, I replied no he is not a coward, I am the coward because I did not want to go into the service, but I was too afraid of prison and the fine I would have to pay for not reporting. I loved Ali for being a man that took on the powers of the US Government. I met Ali many times in Hyde Park and he would always greet me and others with genuine concern and a warm embrace.What a Man, my hero, my brother I am so glad that I was blessed with the good fortune to have known this great leader, great warrior and wonderful human being. 

Photo exhibit drums up hope inside Cook County Jail

     Imagine you’ve organized inmates at the Cook County Jail into a photography class. Hard to do, since most of us can’t imagine volunteering anywhere, doing anything, not even for an hour stuffing envelopes at a local church. Never mind approaching Sheriff Tom Dart, persuading him to let you into the jail, then digging into your own pocket to buy cameras to place into the hands of hardened men more accustomed to using their hands to throw gang signs.

Christopher Jacobs

   Still, imagine you’ve done all that and held your first photography exhibit in the jail.
     What’s your next thought? If you were Chicago music photographer Christopher Jacobs, it is “Now I’ll organize the prisoners in my second photography class into a drum circle.”
     “After our first show, I was out in Venice Beach for the Grammys and I saw a drum circle and I thought, ‘Bingo, that’s my next thing,’ ” explains Jacobs, a professional photographer, standing in the gym of the jail’s Mental Health Transition Unit on the grounds of the old boot camp just east of the jail.
     The photos on the gym’s yellow cinderblock walls reflect a narrow range of subject matter by necessity. “Our canvas was super-limited,” says Jacobs. Bars, fellow prisoners, plants from the garden, the therapy dogs Jacobs brought in one day....

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Muhammad Ali was at home in Chicago

  

    There are certain famous people who lived in Chicago for a stretch of time whose presence never quite attached itself to the psyche of the city, either because they were very young, like Bobby Fischer and Golda Meir, or because they were here very briefly, like Ronald Reagan, or kept a low profile. 

     Muhammad Ali was neither young, nor low profile, nor was his stay here brief: he lived in Chicago for a dozen years, at the height of his fame. Yet for some reason he isn't particularly associated with the city. My guess is that, like Oprah Winfrey, his fame was so vast, it transcended place. 

    Ali passed away Friday, and his relationship with the city seemed to merit a separate story, and this ran in the Sunday paper alongside his obituary. 

     Cassius Clay was born in Kentucky, but Muhammad Ali was born on the South Side of Chicago.

     Ali lived in Chicago, where he found his faith, for about a dozen years. He would cruise in his Rolls-Royce down Lake Shore Drive or stop in for a steak at Gene & Georgetti.

     Ali, who died Friday at 74, got married and started his family here and would have fought one of his bouts for the heavyweight championship of the world here, too, but politics prevented it.

     The young boxer first came to Chicago in the late 1950s to compete in Golden Gloves tournaments, held at the old Chicago Stadium. Heavyweight Ernie Terrell, who was to have boxed Ali in Chicago, said the future champ made a big impression even then....

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Muhammad Ali: "The king of the world" dies at 74

    When the bell rang to begin the seventh round of the heavyweight championship of the world that long-ago February day in 1964 in Miami and a battered Sonny Liston, slumped on a stool in his corner, spat out his mouth guard instead of standing up, it was the ridiculed long shot, Cassius Clay, on his feet, ready, who realized first, a moment before anyone else, what had just happened. Shooting his arms into the air in triumph, his mouth a wide ‘‘O’’ of joy, he managed a brief victory dance alone in the center of the ring before pandemonium erupted and the world came over the ropes to embrace him.
    ‘‘I am the greatest!’’ Clay shouted into the microphone that would be stuck into his face for the next half-century. ‘‘I am the greatest! I am the greatest! I’m the king of the world!’’
     And so he was, for one more day as Cassius Clay, then for decades as Muhammad Ali, the only man to win the title of heavyweight boxing champion three times, a reign interrupted in 1967 by his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. Army, a moral stand that stalled his boxing career and deprived him of the fortune he could have earned during three years in his prime, but cemented his fame as a revered cultural icon.
     Ali was a brash, bragging, rhyming champion who, despite riches, still cared deeply about social issues, ‘‘a new kind of black man,’’ to use his phrase, fearless, proud, independent, who expanded what it means to be a hero and introduced many in this country to the Muslim faith. Ali settled into decades as a sort of roving ambassador, controversy fading into universal affection, ending up among the most beloved, most recognizable, most important stars of the 20th century, without question the most significant athlete who ever lived....

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Bashing the demonizers

Detail of "Eyes to the Front or The Inevitable Outcome of Class Struggle" by Jerry Truong

   
    Sometimes, when I answer an email, the recipient seems amazed to hear from me. 
    They seem to expect silence. Or some kind of staff reply. 
    No, no staff. And not responding, even to rude people, seems itself rude.
    So I read lots of email, and try to muster some kind of reply. 
    And in reading so much email, patterns emerge. 
    Today, I'd like to draw attention to two common words.
    "Bash" and "demonize."
    They are used only in one circumstance, as far as I can tell: when conservatives are fairly criticized about something which, being conservatives, they just can't face directly.

    So rather than address the nature of the criticism, they categorize the criticism itself as unfair, crude.  

    If I point out, for instance, as I did in April, that Indiana has just passed a truly medieval law requiring aborted fetuses to be buried in coffins or cremated (because they're  babies, you see?) then ... well, let William Duffy explain it. 

    "You've got the balls to bash Indiana as a racist place with your civil rights garbage statement," he wrote.

     "Bash." Like with a sledge hammer. (I won't even start on "civil rights garbage." I'd bet that those three words have never been strung together, but of course I'd lose). 

     Or when I pointed out that John McCain had replaced his record of heroism with one of craven cowardice by endorsing Trump after Trump insults all POWs in general and him in particular, A.L. Jones of Park Ridge wrote:

    "For sure your use of Memorial Day to bash McCain and the continuation of your personal dislike against Trump were really in bad taste." 

    "Bash" implies a certain whack-a-mole crudeness. One is not touching a point with the finger of satire and truth, but blindly clubbing away. (Though I have to savor Jones' "personal dislike," as if there is no other reason to hate Trump than petty grievance. Trump isn't a madman who would destroy the country; I'm just holding a grudge).
    Moving on to the second word, If I point out that Donald Trump, the likely presidential candidate of the Republican party, has said a variety of bigoted, idiotic, and anti-American things, and that all Republicans are implicit in these positions if they support Trump, no matter how grudgingly, then I am "demonizing" them. 

     "My problem with you is that you deminize folks like me who disagree" wrote a reader calling himself "Mysterious Johnson," who was writing to inform me that he was returning after boycotting me for my various sins, and was perhaps surprised when I was less than warm in my welcome (and no, I did not point out his spelling error. When someone is utterly mistaken, as Johnson is—he feels his sincere religious convictions should allow him to revoke the civil rights of gay people, aided by the law—there is no need to snipe about spelling). 

    Or, to drive home just how popular "demonize" is, savor this, from the endless wheedle for money that comes from Ron Paul.
    "But our national media would rather demonize our Second Amendment rights than the misguided “gun-free zone” policies that only embolden bloodthirsty thugs and madmen!"
     What does that even mean? "Demonize our Second Amendment"?
     At this point, I don't think I could in good conscience use either "bash" or "demonize." And anyone who does is halfway to being dismissed. The words are just so moist with the tears of self-pity, the bully pouting because he has been put on the red chair in the corner, completely forgetting what he did that got him there. 

    So I try not to use "bash" and "demonize." And if you use them, you might want to pause and reflect whether you are in the wrong and don't know it. A lot of people are in the wrong and don't know it, but feel if they can just grab the right label to slap on their dilemma, they will magically be in the right. They won't.

Can we bring our divided continent back together?

     “What is the Continental Divide?” my wife said.
     A natural question. We were standing Tuesday at the “Continental Divide Overlook” at Eldorado Canyon State Park in Colorado. I wish language allowed me to convey the view — even a photograph would fall short. A sweeping, 50- mile wide panorama, starting, to the left, with the snow-capped Rockies, unfolding through pined mountainsides, distant valleys and rock gorges that set me pondering a possible connection between “gorge” and “gorgeous.”
     I puffed the dust off my high school geology. “It refers to drainage,” I said. “The Rocky Mountains form a ridge, north and south. A drop of rain falling on the west side will, eventually, make its way to the Pacific Ocean. On the east, to the Atlantic.”
     Hiking back down, the words “continental divide,” echoed in my head in a way that has nothing to do with hydrology. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that spans a continent. And we sure are divided, big time.
     What divides us? Race, class, religion. Politics form the most gaping division right now. The differences are sharper than ever, with the Republicans firmly anti-government, pro-business, anti-immigrant, pro-white, anti-gay, pro-religion, anti-women (though they would argue they support women by making their difficult moral choices for them). And the Democrats pretty much the opposite.
The Republicans offer up presidential candidate Donald Trump, an unstable amateur who has never run for public office. And the Democrats are assembling, in typical, shambolic, herding cats fashion, behind Hillary Clinton, the former senator, former secretary of state. Not to forget Bernie Sanders tagging along, a nagging reminder that even our divisions have divisions.
     You'd think a few miles on Rattlesnake Gulch Trail would be the perfect place to forget all this. But days into my supposed vacation, I had Trump on the brain. I found myself snapping photos of canyon walls and tweeting them with the caption, "It ain't Donald Trump that makes America great." The media was accused of focusing on Trump too much—I disagree, it's called "reporting the news"—but now that he has a scarily real chance of becoming the president of the United States, it's the responsibility of every patriotic American to point a quivering finger at his latest horror and scream, "Noooooo!!!"
     This might be naive. We are so polarized, no one switches loyalty, no matter what. I sincerely believe that Donald Trump could go on television and drown a litter of puppies—really cute, golden retriever puppies—one by one, serving their damp little bodies into the audience with a tennis racquet, and his fans would shrug and explain that's just Donald being Donald, sticking it to the old, drowning-puppies-is-bad establishment.
     Getting to nature is beneficial, the chief benefit being you realize how big, old, and indifferent the earth is to all our striving. Or to quote my favorite Park Service warning sign, "The mountains don't care."
     So we have to care. And the main question we need to care about is this: Do all these divisions matter more than the one thing that unites us? And that one thing, in case you don't know, and many seem not to, is that we are all living here, all Americans, together, on our respective slopes of our Great Divide.
     A year after 9/11, some grew nostalgic for the sense of shared purpose the attacks brought. We wondered when we might feel that again—maybe if space aliens attacked, we could band together again. But we don't need aliens for our way of life be threatened. We do that already. Nobody can hurt us like we can hurt ourselves. Even after Trump is—please God—defeated, the division will remain. We will realize that Trump wasn't a cause, but a symptom. We have proved ourselves very good at falling apart. It's getting back together, bridging this continental divide, that is the trick. We're the United States, remember. The founders put it in our name. So we wouldn't forget.

Friendly if you belonged

     Jackie Schaller died last Saturday at 90. The owner of Schaller's Pump, the legendary Bridgeport tavern, was given the proper affectionate send-off by our inimitable Maureen O'Donnell in the Sun-Times. But these old South Side guys, they weren't Teddy bears. They had a toughness that lingered right into old age, as I found out, a little, when the great Ed McElroy took me to Schaller's in 2009, leading to Jackie Schaller's memorable cameo in my 2012 memoir, You Were Never in Chicago:

    For lunch today, Ed takes me to Schaller's Pump. From the outside, the place seems unremarkable—a modest two-story brick building, a large welcome to White Sox fans painted across the wall. In the gravel parking lot, I mention that I was last here with Mary Mitchell, a black Sun-Times columnist who was hesitant to walk into Schaller's because of its reputation, unsure of how she would be received, though the regulars warmly welcomed her once she did muster the courage to go in. 
     "The only black you'll see here is the cook," says Ed.

Jackie Schaller

     On the inside, Schaller's Pump is also unremarkable — your standard small, dim neighborhood tavern, with an elbow-worn wooden bar and a dozen tables. Patrons are older, all white, and Ed knows most of them. We sit down and are joined by Jackie Schaller, a tiny man in a blue cardigan, not two years older than Ed but looking far more elderly, shrunken, pale — his face seems like soft stone worn away by a river. His grandfather started the bar in 1881, and it has operated continuously since then — all through Prohibition, which merely required installation of the peephole that's still in the side door. Schaller calls Ed "Eddie" and they reminisce. 
     "Who took you to your first World Series?" Ed says, and they both laugh. To St. Louis in 1946 to see the Cardinals beat the Red Sox. "I drove down in my car," says Ed. "The Chase Hotel. A guy I knew took care of us."
     Schaller is cooler toward me. Though in Ed's company, I'm still a stranger and a newspaperman at that.
     Did Schaller know his grandfather, I ask. Did he know the man who started the tavern?
     "Yes," Schaller replies.
     Silence.
     What was he like?
     A pause. "Five foot one," Schaller says, without a trace of warmth. Nothing more.
     An older black couple arrives and is shown to a table nearby, where they quietly eat. Times have changed, in some ways, and not in others. I ask Schaller how old he is.
     "My birthday is Jan. 15," says Schaller. "Do you know what day that is?"
    I shrug—nothing comes to mind.
    "Martin Luther King Day," Schaller says, with a quick flick of the thumb toward the black couple. There doesn't seem to be malice in the gesture—those days are gone—but maybe the memory of malice....
     Ed orders a hamburger and a glass of milk. I order a steak sandwich and a cup of coffee, with only the briefest glance of instinctive longing at the men having Budweisers at the bar. Jackie moves off, to see after a big group of tourists arriving at the back room. Ed tells me a little about him. "World War II guy. I think he got hit," Ed says, describing how Schaller went from an eighteen-year-old playing on the St. Leo Light Basketball Squad and mouthing off to the priests to a soldier fighting in the jungles of the Pacific. A common path for the boys of Ed's generation. They played ball, they went overseas, they fought, they got hit, they came home.
    "All those guys. Overseas. Bronze stars. You couldn't get a better bunch of people," says Ed. "All out of Visitation Parish. In Chicago, you know, we go by parish. Especially South Side. Visitation—it's like the pope lived there." Ed holds up his hands in amazement. "Unbelievable, Visitation. So many priests came out of there. So many policeman. Commanders. Firemen. It was so friendly."
    Friendly, of course, if you belonged.

     
     

     

The miracle of evolution

     I've been staying with my parents in Boulder for the past few days. And one of the joys of such visits is rambling through the library of my father, a retired NASA scientist. For some reason I pulled down Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, by P.B. Medawar and J.S. Medawar (Harvard: 1983) and have been browsing happily.
     The entry on barnacles includes the fact that "Aristotle understood the special reproductive problems of creatures which do not move." The essay for "Man's Place in Nature" touches upon humanity's gradual realization that the Lords of the Earth are actually animals ourselves, a cousin to the gorilla with delusions of grandeur.
    Leading us to the entry under "creationism," which contains an idea that, for all the debate over the subject, I had never heard expressed before, and it's potent enough that I thought it merits sharing:

     We are surprised at the obstinacy with which creationists cleave to literal creationism. So doing, they fail to realize that the evolutionary concept is a much grander and more awe-inspiring conception—in keeping with what C.S. Lewis referred to as rational piety, and for many people conducive to reverence.

     Of course. Not only is the "And then God made everything, end of story" of the Bible wrong, but like so many untruths, it's a gross impoverishment of the reality that it supposedly describes. The religious fairy tale pales in the sense of awe and wonder that one would expect the actual creation of everything that exists in the universe would evoke, and does, when you grasp the actuality of it. Any deity worthy of the name would prefer credit for the vast, interconnected, incremental clockwork progress of evolution, its patience, subtlety and beauty playing out over billions of years, to the tossed-off because-I-say-so of the Bible. Comparing Darwinian and Biblical notions of the origins of life is like comparing our DNA blueprint to a crayon stick figure.
    But no need for much elaboration. I'd rather you re-read the quote by the Medewars (a British couple; Peter, a biologist, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1960; Jean approached him over the meaning of "heuristic" and love ensued) than listen to me extemporize upon it. Just as faith so often serves up hatred when it's supposed to encourage love, so its view of creation as a dusty desert whim of theological fascism viewed through a keyhole crumbles next to the magnificent real miracle of evolution.

The beauty of bicycles

     Who doesn't love old bicycles? The people who built the Schwinn above, who designed the frame behind the handlebars to flare out, resembling ... what? The thorax of some emerald insect? The wing of a bird? What were they thinking? Doesn't matter. The end result is wonderful.
     The other day I wandering into University Bicycles, the sprawling cycle shop just off the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, and was first amazed by the jammed mass of bikes of all colors, sizes and descriptions. The vast repair department, the arrays of helmets, gloves and bicycling jerseys.
    I just had to explore. Even though I'm not in the market for a new bike—my black Schwinn Cruiser with its fat whitewall tires does just fine—and as much as I admired their custom "University Cycle" Italian-style racing shirts, I'd look like a fool in one. You need to earn clothing like that.
     My attention shifted to University Bicycles museum's worth of antique bicycles hanging from the ceiling.  Most were Schwinns, the dominant American bike company for most of the 20th century (and a company, I should point out, founded in Chicago in 1895). There were lesser brands as well, such as a 1888 Hickory with wooden spokes and rims.
    I'm sharing the pictures just to say, "Hey, look at this." But they do raise a question: why was design so important on these bikes? Nowadays bikes are all about performance, about simplicity, the lightness of the alloys, their toughness and ruggedness and speed. The streamlined chain guards and fenders are all a thing of the past. Why don't we value them anymore? My guess: because we live in a world where we jettison the superfluous, to save money. We can't afford style.
    Maybe because bicycles were newer, and companies felt they had to sell the product. If you don't know it, the bicycle was one of those technological innovations that changed society, like computers, television and the automobile. There was a Bicycle Craze in the 1890s. Women started shedding those layers of skirts because they were riding bicycles, which not incidentally put them beyond the reach of family and chaperones. Editorial writers wrung their hands, as editorial writers do, and Wondered What It All Meant.
     If you want to see more, there's a rambling video on YouTube that gives a jumpy tour of many more of the older bikes in the store. Or, better, stop by University Bicycles next time you are in Boulder. I asked if they minded if I photographed their bikes, and they said go right ahead. Nice people. I bet they're even nicer if you buy something.

Memorial Day, 2016

      We do lots of activities over Memorial Day weekend—picnics and barbecues, tent sales and, not to forget the big event itself, the Indianapolis 500.
     Don't blame the shrug of modern life. When Memorial Day began, right after the Civil War, as Decoration Day, it was a time for families to visit the graves of their knighted Union dead, outings immediately re-purposed by amorous young folk.
     "Decoration Day was also a day of courtship for the young people," notes holiday scholar Jack Santino, pointing out how 19th century couples would wander off to the more remote spots of woodsy cemeteries.
      Given these practical uses of the holiday, we can't be blamed for wondering, as we dip our heads and reflect on the sacrifice of soldiers who gave their lives for the country, for whose benefit do we do this?
      The noble dead? To please those gazing down at us from heaven?
     Pretty to think so. I would suggest, however, that we remember those who yielded their lives, not as a favor to them, but for ourselves. Dignity demands it. Our nation did not form spontaneously, like a mountain range, but was wrested by intention and force from Mother Britain. Nor did it survive for 240 years without the exercise of military power--often in folly, for certain but sometimes crucially, to make sure the Wehrmacht didn't come rolling down Michigan Avenue.... 

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Boulder, SUVs and goats

      I've spent a lot of time in Colorado: a full year, in bits and pieces, since I was a teenager. I don't love it the way many do. I mean, it's nice. Mountains. Forests. More mountains. Fine if you like that kind of thing.  I'm there now, visiting my parents. So I thought I'd share an observation from a dozen years ago, when SUVs were newer and more something to be remarked upon, as opposed to something accepted with a shrug.

     BOULDER, Colo.--There are fewer sport-utility vehicles on the roads here than in Chicago. That was a surprise. I assumed, with all the mountains, it would be the other way around, and worried I was somehow misperceiving things, perhaps due to the less congested traffic zipping along new, clean highways, plus the wide open spaces. But I quizzed my wife, cleverly not tipping my hand, and she viewed it the same. And we definitely did not spot a single Hummer in a week of driving the kids hither and yon, through the Rockies and back and forth across town.
     I have a theory as to why this is: People in Chicago drive all those Behemoths and Whales and Mountainsides--complete with headlight grills to brush away nonexistent branches and fog lights to cut through the mist of fjords 5,000 miles away--as part of some elaborate interior fantasy, a parody of the life they'd lead if only they weren't working like dray horses in windowless brokerage houses on LaSalle Street.
    But in Colorado, where people actually routinely shun their work and responsibilities and race off to the mountains and climb them, sometimes with their bare hands, they don't need to fantasize. They're busy hiking, riding, paddling, skydiving. They don't need a 3-ton, 11 mpg, $60,000 hunk of junk to prop up their outdoor delusions. They've got the real thing. We pulled over to the side of the road in Rocky Mountain National Park and watched a herd of elk basking in the sun, if not eyeball to eyeball, then as close to a group of elk as I want to be without bars between us.
     And I was driving a sedan.
     Not that Boulderites are without their own fantasies. Living next to smoggy Denver, which is a kind of Cleveland with mountains, and with every acre of farmland rapidly turning into tracts of pre-fab homes, there is a certain frenzy to environmentalism here.
     For instance. We were zipping along Foothills Parkway when we passed a couple hundred goats at the side of the road. We were in residential Boulder, and a glance beyond the goats confirmed that this wasn't some sliver of farm. There were houses around the goats. My wife was puzzled, but my long acquaintance with the People's Republic of Boulder--I've been coming here since the mid-1970s--gave me a hunch what was happening. The goats were mowing the grass, a diligent step on the road to ecological Nirvana. I had to know more.


     Recession, not eco-friendliness       
      "I came up with the idea," said Patrick Tarver, median maintenance flood supervisor for the City of Boulder. "We've only had it going about three weeks; it started out as a pilot program."
     To my disappointment, the goat mowers were not inspired directly by some chai-swigging, patchouli-scented macro-organic aversion to internal combustion engine lawn mowing, but because of lawn care services folding in the recession.
     "We couldn't get a mowing contractor," Tarver said. "The budget hit them really hard. They had let people go, sold equipment, and couldn't handle the job."
     Enter the goats.
     "We had a noxious weed problem, and used the goats in the past, and it just kind of came to me to try goats out," he said. "We have real steep berms, and it would take a lot of time to weed wack the whole area."
     A company in a nearby town, "Nip It in the Bud," provides hungry goats at $1 a day each--there are 232 in Boulder's herd, and Tarver said the goats' work compares favorably to human mowers at $10 to $15 an hour. Temporary fencing keeps the goats from wandering away.
     Tarver said that while the primary motive was "an economic thing," there is no question that goat mowing scratches a particular Boulder eco-green itch.
     "It is a Boulder mentality item as well," he said. "We're always looking for alternatives, and the goats don't put out ozone, don't put out noise pollution, don't use any fossil fuels."
     One man's ceiling is another man's floor, however. While I was appreciating Boulder for its wide-open spaces, grass-gobbling goats and zoning that doesn't permit any building that doesn't look like it was made out of mud by Pueblos, I ran into a resident who was thinking of packing it up.

     A few people can be too many
     "I've lived here since 1966," said a deeply-tanned, squinty kind of guy I met on the trail, while his dog and my boys played in what I hoped was a creek but could have also been an open sewer. He didn't have to finish the thought.
     "I suppose it's gotten pretty built up for you," I said.
     "It has," he agreed.
    "There's always North Dakota," I said, nodding sagely and forcing down a smile.
     We flew back into Midway, and saw our first Hummer of the week on the treacherous terrain of Cicero Avenue. I was calm though. I'm trying to get beyond the fist-shaking scorn for SUVs that I've felt over the past five years. I'm trying to replace it with more of a bland, avuncular tolerance just shy of contempt. If kids can play cowboys and Indians (well, just cowboys nowadays) then why shouldn't adults buy big rolling playpens and pretend they're being chased by rhinos in the veldt?
     I just wish they wouldn't feel the need to drive while doing it.

                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 8, 2003

"Not in jest, but in earnest"

      There is a quote from antiquity that explains half the suffering in the world. It's one of my favorites, all the better because odds are you've never heard it before.
     Ready? 
     Here goes.
     "Little boys throw stones at frogs in jest," the poet Bion wrote in 100 BC, "though the frogs die, not in jest, but in earnest."
     In other words, the powerful do things lightly that have heavy consequences. 
     Great, huh? 
     So why is this quote illustrated by a grainy photo of a mother duck and her seven ducklings in my backyard?
     Our backyard is so wet it attracted ducks. I thought I would get their photo, and since I don't have a camera with a long lens—I don't have a camera at all—I stealthily crept out the back door to get a closer shot with my iPhone. I didn't want to scare the ducks by slamming the door, so I left it open.
     What I forgot, padding across the wooden deck on tiptoe, was the dog, who saw the ducks, and bolted out the open kitchen door, shot across the deck and after the ducks, scattering them in a quacking cloud of confusion and duckling and feathers.
    "Kitty!" I shouted giving pursuit.
     I don't think she hurt any of the ducklings —I once saw her trying to get the better of an overturned cicada and, well, let's put it this way: the cicada won.
      The inter-species scrum disappeared into the pine trees. I eventually tracked the dog down. The momma duck quacked mightily and assembled her charges, and stalked off, highly offended, to find a more hospitable yard. I felt very bad about driving them away. It wasn't my intent. But that's how it goes.
      Little boys throw stones at frogs in jest, though the frogs die, not in jest, but in earnest.  It also works for ducks, and lots of other things too. 

Police plant seeds of trust

 

   
     A piece of turf in Englewood. Young black men and women hanging out. And cops with dirty hands, planting something, then covering it up.
     Familiar words. You think you know where this story is going. But you don't.
     "My name is Officer Davis. I work at the 7th District police station," says David Davis, standing beside his partner, Ja'Lance Hunt. "Our mission is to protect and preserve life. We would be glad to answer any questions you have. We're here today to help you plant, to put the flowers in the garden today. We go to all the schools in Englewood and we plant flowers, but we also act as the police too. OK? So who's going to show me how to plant?"
     It was a sunny morning in West Englewood last week at the Southside Occupational Academy High School, 7342 S. Hoyne, a school for students with disabilities. Southside Occupational is a rare Chicago public high school that has its own dog, Louie, a mini-Goldendoodle.   
    "Everybody knows Louie," says Joshua Long, the principal.
     It was the school's Earth Day celebration, with outside activities: food grills, art projects and planting their school garden. Officers Hunt and Davis greeted one group after another with enthusiasm, placing tiny seeds into their hands, helping plant them into the rich earth and cover them up with dirt.
    “You ready to do some gardening?” enthuses Davis.

     God knows the Chicago Police Department would never invite press to such an event. It was The Kitchen Community, the foundation that runs 115 of these “learning gardens” at schools in Chicago. I might have declined the opportunity to drive to Englewood to watch kids plant chicory. But when Kitchen Community regional director Tovah McCord mentioned that police officers would be there helping, I decided to slide by. Though I confidently assured McCord that the police would never talk to me because, well, not talking to the press is what cops do. That’s what makes the whole “Code of Silence” flap so laughable. It isn’t just that police don’t talk about wrongdoing. They don’t talk about anything. It’s safer that way.
     But Davis and Hunt didn’t seem to get the memo. They not chat easily with the students, laughing and hugging, but they even talk with me.
     “It’s about building relationships,” says Hunt. “At the end of the day, it allows us to interact. For the kids, learning about growing healthy foods and the police coming out supporting that. It gives us an opportunity to plant, be interactive and do some positive things with the kids. It’s a win-win. It allows them to see us in a different light.”
     Hunt and Davis are Army veterans and have been partners for 11 years. They worked with ATF, the FBI, and with gang crimes. Now they’re with CAPS.
     “We did all the secret squirrel stuff,” says Hunt. “But nothing, nothing beats working with kids.” They also take students on college trips and visit schools to mediate tense situations before they become violent.
     I tell Hunt I’m surprised to find officers who talk to the press.
     “When you’re trying to do positive things . . .,” he says. “It’s bigger than us. These are future leaders.”
     As a gardener myself, I know that not everything planted bears fruit. The trick is to keep trying.
     “How do you effect change?” says Hunt. “You can complain. But what are you doing about it? You do it by your interaction. It starts with what we’re doing now: talking. It starts with your interaction with me. Now I don’t know what your past experience has been with the police. If nothing else, this is something different. Unfortunately, everything has always been negative. So it’s almost like there’s no good things happening, no good kids. You’ve got a lot of kids doing the right things as well as officers.
     “We’ve been able to change opinions. How do we build relationships? What’s the best place to start? Schools. You get that many young ladies and young men in one place, it gives them the opportunity — their first time to ask questions and to understand the other side of it. We’re honest with them. We encourage questions. We go to the grammar schools, the little kids will ask, ‘Why you all shoot people?’ They have no filters. We always address the elephant in the room. You have to address it but not let it be the focus of what we’re talking about. It allows them to expand their minds.”

Out of balance

Wells Fargo History Museum, Los Angeles

     So Hillary Clinton might have violated State Department rules regarding email servers.
     And Donald Trump might have paid no taxes—he won't tell us, even though he promised he would.
    And Hillary, well, she was married to Bill Clinton, who wasn't faithful.
    While Donald Trump would bar Muslims from the country, insulting Islam abroad and at home, violating a core tenet of America.
    Clinton can be robotic.
    Trump can be cruel.
    Clinton lied about coming under fire in Bosnia.
    And Trump lied about giving a million dollars to veterans.
    Do you see a lack of balance here? The media tends to ying-yang politics. We think that's fairness. But some things don't balance. Hillary Clinton's cozy relationship with investment companies increases the chances that big money will get the deference in her administration that it gets under every administration, left right or center. Donald Trump's nationalism and protectionism increases the chances of war with China. 
    I don't see how those balance each other at all. Whenever I catch the attention of someone foaming about Benghazi, for instance, I say that first, there's nothing there, but second, even if there were, I would rather elect a Hillary Clinton who lied about secretly traveling to Libya and killed those Americans, herself, personally, than a Donald Trump who would honestly implement half the policies that he promised he would do. They aren't comparable. They're not two sides of a coin; they're one side of a penny and another side of a silver dollar. Trump's fans waving about Hillary's supposed lapses is like John Wayne Gacy telling a neighbor complaining about all those bodies being dug out of his basement, "Well, yeah, but you didn't mow your lawn...." 
     There are countless non-scandals that Republicans have tried to pin on the Clintons—Trump has already brought up Whitewater, Vince Foster. Meanwhile, Trump has no qualifications to be president, in experience, intellect, temperament, outlook, values, goals or morals. 
     It's a no-brainer. Which usually settles the case. Unless you're dealing with people who have no brains. Then it gets complicated. And scary. 

Ron Magers: The Last Man Standing

Ron Magers

     They were the generation after the black-and-white TV pioneers, the Floyd Kalbers and Len O'Connors, and before broadcast news shattered into tiny pieces against the Internet.
     Big personalities with big hair and fat 1970s neckties, easy to caricature: Walter Jacobson, feathers flying, squawking indignation. Carol Marin, our avenging angel, wielding her fiery sword of justice. And the king of the roost, Bill Kurtis, orotund and oracular, saved from Ted Baxter pomposity by the glint of self-knowledge.
      All have cut their anchor chains, slowly slipping out of the camera's gaze: Carol bursting into academia. Bill riding off into ranching. Walter, well, slithering someplace even more obscure than CBS.
     And now Ron Magers, the last man standing, takes his bow Wednesday night on WLS Channel 7 after 50 years in broadcasting, 35 of them in Chicago.
     "It's hard for me to take this all in," he said. "People are so nice."
     Since when? What Magers is seeing is his own niceness reflected back at him. If I had to pinpoint what kept Chicago watching Magers, night after night, rather than giving him the bum's rush to Pittsburgh, I would say it was not his niceness — that would get cloying — but his wit, that suppressed grin. Ron Magers was a funny man doing a serious job....

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How much snot can a snot-sucker suck?

     This might be the best idea.
     Or not.
     I really can't tell.
     We don't have a newborn, anymore. Haven't had one for, geez, almost two decades.
    And when we did, I seem to remember a blue bulb, with a nozzle at one end, used—by my wife God bless her—to extract snot from their noses.
    So maybe the "NoseFrida—The SnotSucker" is a huge improvement over the blue bulb system.
   I'll let you judge.
   It certainly caught my eye, as I was trucking through Bed, Bath & Beyond last week. Or its clear, bright Swedish graphics did. No question what's going on here. Though I did, skidding to a stop, think, "What the hell?!?"
     I would recommend a visit to the fridababy web site for all those who find themselves tasked with what they call "sticky situations." The yuck factor is balanced by friendly graphics and unflinching copy help gild over what they're talking about with a shiny veneer of art. The text points out that a filter is involved which keeps the sucked snot from being drawn into the mouth of the parent, which is almost reassuring.
    A NoseFrida, including four all-important filters, is $15.99. They sell them everywhere. Nordstom carries it.
    Notice their other products. NoseFrida is only the flagship device. There is also Windi, "The GasPasser," a valve designed to be inserted in your baby's posterior, to ease its farts out and reduce gas pain. Another product that might be vastly helpful. 
     Or Fridet, "the ButtWasher" designed to replace moist towelettes.
     There's more, but you get the picture.  
     They seem to be trying to corner the gross bodily substances market.
     As a fan of products, and marketing, generally, if not these in specific, I had to pass them along, and seek your thoughts. They're sold all over the world, so someone must buy them.
     My errand at Bed, Bath & Beyond, by the way, was to buy special pants hangers for my 20-year-old, who is spending his summer in Washington, D.C. His mom is under the illusion that only the proper hanger stands between him and hanging up the dress pants he needs to wear every day at his internship.  I assured my wife that, considering how his pants end up with the rest of his clothes, in bunched knots piled on the floor of his bedroom, the type of hanger they aren't being hung upon is really not all that significant. Wire hangers will do the job nicely. But she was adamant, insisting that hangers have powers to draw a man to order, to paraphrase Homer.
    The quote, from Book XIX of the The Odyssey, as translated by Robert Fagles, is: "Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin." I've seen it quoted more poetically as "The blade itself incites to deeds of violence," but I'll be damned if I can find which edition that's from. 
     What they mean, in essence, is: the tool encourages the action. So a SnotSucker draws — quite literally — a baby to better breathing. Or so is the theory. Anybody ever use these things? 

"Do you want to die? ... Or do you want to be OK?"

     When this study came out last winter, I began looking for an actual Chicago lawyer who would talk about alcoholism. The fact it's nearly June shows how difficult that was to find. Then again, when I was writing about neckties, it was hard to find a lawyer who'd go on record saying, "I need to wear a necktie in court." I wanted to drive that home in this column but, space being what it is, decided to just let her talk, and not hang in the background, commenting.

     Princeton undergrad. Harvard Law. Partner at a big law firm in Chicago.
     "Theoretically, I'm smart and should know better," Harris said. "It just wasn't the case. It's a disease, unfortunately. My father's side of the family. I just happened to get it."
     The disease is alcoholism, which not only runs in families but in certain professions. Journalism is one, let me assure you. And law is another. A study published earlier this year of 12,825 attorneys by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the American Bar Association found that 20 percent of attorneys engage in "hazardous, harmful and potentially alcohol-dependent drinking." That's one in five, twice the average for people in general.
     "Lawyers are more likely to be problem drinkers," said Patrick Krill, director of the Legal Professionals Program at Hazelden and one of the study authors. "It's a very stressful environment with an abundance of alcohol."
     For Harris, the problem began slowly.
     "I drank moderately at college," she said. "I started as the only African-American woman attorney at the firm, and felt a lot of pressure to succeed. I wanted to fit in. Every Wednesday and Thursday we'd go out for cocktails. It was the culture...."

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