Is this too strong for you?

"Venus of the Rags," by Michelangelo Pistoletto

     My mother reads this blog, faithfully. Which has never caused me a moment's embarrassment. Until, well, maybe today. Let's just say, Mom, you might want to skip this one. Agreed? Can we both agree on that? Good. Thanks. It'll make our conversation this afternoon just that much easier.  Besides, it's all about Samuel Johnson. Dull, Georgian stuff. Nothing of interest for mothers here.
     Right ... so, waiting for Mom to push away from the computer ... there ... done. Excellent. Bye Mom. Love you.

     As a fan of Samuel Johnson, I was of course delighted that my favorite magazine, The Economist, named its newest column after the Great Cham of Literature. (The Economist, while sharp and of-the-moment in every other regard, embraces the quaint old- school notion of not using reporters' bylines. The idea being, I suppose, that the newspaper—they call themselves a "newspaper" because magazines are so, I don't know, tawdry—speaks with a unified voice. So its columnists have noms de guerre like "Lexington" and "Bagehot" and "Buttonwood.")
     This Johnson entry on cuss words (I thought it was recent when I read it, but it's from 2015, a hazard of encountering material online) touched upon a subject near to the hearts of all of us working here at everygoddamnday.com. Almost immediately, Johnson deems "God damn" as "too strong for American ears." That might explain the mass of readers who haven't been showing up here.
    Not really. To be honest, it probably isn't the blog name.  Very few readers have complained over the past three years—a handful, hard though that may be to believe.  Credit the portmanteau with a lower-case "g" — "goddamn" — as opposed to "God damn." Makes all the difference in the world. Plus the blog is protected by an iron-ribbed pre-emptive putdown of those who might dare to blush at its name.
    While excellently written, The Economist, like all journalism, is not infallible, nor do its columnists have space to explore every tangent. What the Johnson column left out was the idea of context. "Fuck" still shocks on network television, or what's left of it, but is a staple of cable and of course online. I ran into ... (umm Mom, I thought we agreed this isn't interesting for you. Besides, isn't that the doorbell? I believe it is. The neighbor ... with muffins. Hot blueberry muffins. Or maybe that's Dad calling you. Either way, perhaps you should leave off reading at this point, and go have some tea, and we'll both be more comfortable ... truly) ... Hera Lindsay Bird's delightfully dirty new poem, "Keats is Dead so Fuck me From Behind," in two very different places on Twitter within the span of an hour Monday: one, the feed of Gili Bar-Hillel, a translator of Hebrew children's books, who accused me of being sarcastic about a bookstore (I like to see who I'm sparing with) and the second on the feed of Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine (I'd say we're due for the issue on "Fresh Voices from New Zealand," where Bird is safely tucked, for the moment). The wheels come off the poem a bit toward the end, but credit her with the best use of "fuck" in the opening line of a poem since Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse," 
     Where was I? Bad words. "Nigger" is unacceptable in most polite society, but tossed about freely by African-Americans when among themselves, and by the occasional blogger, holding his breath and wondering how it'll fly. And "God damn," while perhaps not showing up in the State of the Union anytime soon, skates by in the general filth and irrelevance of the online world. 
    Or so it seems to me.
    And Mom, really. I'm surprised at you. We'll discuss it later.

How the story ends depends on how it begins

     A neighbor—older, meticulous, German—was explaining to me how he takes plastic bags of dog excrement and flings them over his well-tended hedge into the street.
     The street we both share. Our street.
     He was indignant, almost proud.
     Of course there was more to it. The conversation had been about dogs—mine was in tow—and he told me that some people hurl their poop bags into his yard. So he hurls it right back.
     I walked away thinking, "Framing." How you begin the story determines how it ends. You include the provocation, and the reaction seems justified. Leave it out, and he becomes the jerk, throwing dog shit into the street. Which is true? Maybe both.
     We see this constantly. In his mind, Micah Johnson wasn't firing blindly at innocent police officers, Instead—again in his own mind—he was reacting to the Black Lives Matter movement, which keeps its view tight on those jumpy videos of cops shooting innocent folks. The cops meanwhile widen the frame, to include the violent neighborhoods they patrol, and wonder why everyone else doesn't.
     "Why are we just focusing on the very very small percentage of all interactions with police officers that go bad?" a reader wrote Saturday. "Why don't we start a movement that focuses on all black lives that tragically end? Lets go to the Southside and Westside and protest the shooting of all those young blacks by mostly other blacks....Can a liberal Democrat answer this question please?"

To continue reading, click here.

Create your own reality

     The headlines Sunday morning were filled with tales of anxiety. "AMERICA GRIEVES, TENSE AND WARY," the New York Times announced across its front page. 
     Maybe so. It seemed a good time to escape to the Chicago Botanic Garden where nature is, as always, just nature. We must not have been alone in this impulse, because it was about as crowded as we've ever seen it: part the perfect summer day, part the dire news, perhaps, part both a lily exhibit and a pepper festival going on at the same time.
    As always the Garden was a slice of heaven, and not just for the plants. People of all ages, races, languages. "I'm not sure what that is—Romanian?" I whispered to my wife as we passed some murmuring Eastern European tongue. Lots of Russian, of Japanese. Babies in carriages, old folks in wheelchairs. A white, grandfatherly sort with white hair put a loving arm around an African-American boy, maybe 12, in a bright green soccer uniform and they ambled, talking. My fingers itched to whip out my iPhone and take a picture, but I decided not to intrude. Maybe taking an hour like this, to get away, is just another example of White Privilege. If it is, so be it, it was my privilege to take it and I am not ashamed to do so. This is how the world should be for everyone, how it could be, if we'd only let it

"Red Hot" variety lily. 

The Tea Party's man feints to the Left.

     To be honest, I did not know former Congressman Joe Walsh had a radio show, and never would have thought of him again for the rest of my life had not he posted a particularly brainless tweet in the wake of the Dallas police shootings, seeming to threaten the president and declaring a state of "war." 
    I remembered vaguely meeting him in a coffee shop four years ago, and thought it would be diverting on a Sunday to dig that column out. My apologies if it's overkill — with the way the news is going, I'll have some new horror to react to by this afternoon.
    Until then, notice how he blames the abortion issue on liberals, as if the Right trying to strip away reproductive rights from women were a Democratic plot. The general sense of squishiness and blame-shifting should be reminiscent of another Republican flash-in-the-pan currently enjoying his moment on the stage. 

     Rep. Joe Walsh is a charming man. Big, handsome smile, generous (at least to me), Walsh (R-8th) insists on paying for our drinks at the Starbucks on Delaware.
     And he has moxie ­— after I wrote a column about breakfast with Sen. Dick Durbin, Walsh was the lone politician to suggest the same.
     I will admit, meeting the Tea Party's darling was not high on my agenda. What the Tea Party represents — tear down the government out of an exaggerated concern for the deficit, oppress immigrants under the fig leaf of illegality, and in general try to drag the country back to a past that wasn't all that great the first time — is anathema to me. But why not talk?
     "Awfully nice of you!" he exudes.
     The Tea Party movement . . .
     "Here's the deal. There's such a misunderstanding of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement is a good thing only in that it has gotten the country talking again."
     Walsh talks fast, and it takes a moment for the "only" in the above to register.
     "No," he corrects himself. "I mean it's a better thing than that. The country is going through a revolution. What I mean by that is we're having a grand debate and an argument and a fight about our core principles."
     Reagan's epiphany was: Starve the government so we can cut these programs we hate that serve people we hate. That's what's happening.
     "What you and I both know is we've got 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day. And they're not living until they're 63, they're living until they're 93. Politicians in both parties have been scared to frickin' death about how to pay for all that health care."
     What would be a fair amount to pay? What would be fair for Joe Walsh to pay in taxes?
     "I wanna say 'Yes, we should pay something.' I want a safety net, especially when it comes to health care."
     The question is, who pays for it?
     "If we don't figure that out, we're sunk financially. Come home from Afghanistan tomorrow. Get rid of the oil subsidies. Do all this stuff that I want to do and liberals want to do and it won't solve the debt problem. The biggest, fastest-growing piece of our budget is health-care costs for our aging population. Democrats don't want to touch it. They're scared to death. So here come Republicans."
     When it comes to women, suddenly you want an active government prying into citizens' lives.
     "The Tea Party movement, all we talk about, all we've focused on is the growth of government, all this spending, all this debt, and to a smaller degree our loss of perceived freedoms. I don't think we've been asked four times in the past two years about abortion."
     But it keeps coming up.
     "The other side's bringing it up. It's how they succeed, they think."
     Does that explain immigration, too? Because I seem to recall a lot of immigration talk at rallies.
     "I don't want to have a discussion what to do with 12 to 14 million living here until the government does the one thing it should do: Secure the border. You gotta stop the spigot. Right now, it's illegal to come over the border. I'm a limited-government guy, but use every resource we've got."
     Is it worth it? You're expending resources trying to stop something that's good for the U.S.
     He chewed on that. "You probably want the government to do a bit more than I do," he finally said. "One thing I want the government to do is enforce its laws. If it's not going to enforce its laws, it should change its laws."
     But wouldn't that be "amnesty"?
     "I hear what you're saying. I don't want my government to incentivize behavior."
     Such as by permitting of gay marriage?
     "I don't want my society recognizing any forms of marriage except for heterosexual marriage. End of story."
     Why?
     "I want my government acknowledging the best, most unique way for kids to grow up is through a two-person heterosexual marriage."
     What's that based on? Studies?
     "God yes!" he said, poking my arm — he does that a lot, driving his point home. "A man and woman! There are studies that show, when it comes to crime, education, drug use . . ."
     What studies? That just isn't true.
     "I will feed you studies. But the Tea Party doesn't talk about this. I've talked about this twice. Nobody talks about abortion. The Tea Party is 99 percent focused on the economic."
     It's been a week and I'm still waiting for those studies, which don't exist. Walsh is very dynamic. He believes — using facts if they're there, emotion and sleight of hand if they're not.
     "There's this notion that the Tea Party, we're these crazy cave men," he said. "All I'm trying to do is get us back to what I think this country was founded upon."
     I think it was founded upon life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet some people's happiness doesn't seem to count for much.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 12, 2012

Joe Walsh is an idiot

    Is there any situation that Joe Walsh can't make worse? As the nation reeled from the murders of five policemen in Dallas Thursday night, Walsh popped up on Twitter, blaming Obama and urging that he be ... what exactly? "This is now war." Here's the Tweet. 

     He does know that Obama has already served out his two terms, mostly, and won't be running again? Maybe he doesn't. Speculating on what Joe Walsh does or doesn't know is an endless task. Like plumbing the depth of a bottomless well.

     I remembered having coffee with Walsh when he last ran in 2012—I actually try to be open to the other side and listen to what they have to say, talk about thankless tasks. I'll post that chestnut tomorrow. 

    In the meantime, as an appetizer, the last time Walsh appeared in my column, from November four years ago.  Note the helpful, ignored advice to the GOP in the second graph. They can't say they weren't warned about how to avoid their current disaster. Judging by the tone, the presidential ballots were still being counted, but it was clear that Walsh was toast. I was a little giddy, thinking we were rid of him. But like a bad penny, he keeps coming back:

     Maybe this is like one of those Christmas movies where everybody gets a second chance to relive their botched lives, doing it right this time. Maybe Barack Obama will pull it out, and get that shiny new second term he always wanted, a true holiday miracle, freed of the political fetters that hobbled him from doing all he said he dreamed to do for the country.
     Maybe the Republican Party will awake from its long night of obstruction and pandering to its radical fringe. Maybe they'll announce themselves changed men and give Bob Cratchit that big raise and realize the government is supposed to do more than provide grim workhouses to punish the poor.
     And Joe Walsh lost. That can't be stressed enough. Joe Walsh, Tea Party bigmouth, magically removed from the Illinois political scene, at least for now. Picture Walsh the size of a bundled baby, his howling face red, as Robbie Gould drop-kicks him into the oblivion he so richly deserves. Buh-bye Joe, say hello to Alan Keyes and Jim Oberweis for me when you get there.
     Cue the puffy snowflakes, up with jingling bells, cut to young Natalie Wood, home at last. Christmas came early this year.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 2012

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

        When I was in junior high school, I was a member of the Roehm Junior High School fossil club, that had wonderful golden yellow sweatshirts emblazoned with one of these friendly fellows and the slogan, "Friends of the Trilobite." We would go fossil hunting at the shale fields in Sylvania, Ohio. I never found one—I remember digging up a pathetic fragment, that's it. As an adult, I broke down and bought one, which seemed a kind of surrender.
    I'm not sure of the allure. I imagine I thought they looked cool. I certainly was very proud of my Estwing fossil hammer.
    Trilobites—the great, great, great-great-great (add a few hundred more "greats" here and you'll still fall short) grandfather of horseshoe crabs.  They scooted around the bottom of the sea starting about 500 million years ago, in the Pre-Cambrian era, and not petering out until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian. So humanity is going to have to do a lot better if we hope to touch their record. 
     What was their secret? Difficult to say. I'd guess at no religion or weapons, but can't be certain. There are without question 17,000 known species of trilobites, so they were working the diversity thing, big time. Something we might want to think about. Organisms with only a single variety tend not to endure, and I don't mean that as a slam at ginkgo biloba trees, which as you know is alone in its own division, class, genus, order and species, yes somehow managed to hang around for the past 270 million years (going back coincidentally, to the time of the trilobites).
     But enough paleontology. I'll draw your attention to the tableau below. 
     Where is this singular place? A bit off the beaten track, but maybe you've been there.  I'll give you a hint: it's not in a museum, meaning those of you who guess, "Field Museum" will out yourselves for not reading thoroughly (or out me for having bored you with all this trilobite crap).
     Place your guesses below. The winner, as always, gets one of my blog posters—I'll let you chose the year. Please don't guess if you're already been successful before, Tate. Good luck.

Dallas

Brent Thompson, one of the officers slain in Dallas.

     In the 1980s, when such things were still possible, I spent a Christmas Eve riding along with two Chicago cops in the 2nd District—the area around 51st and Wentworth. The central memory of that night is that I was scared—particularly charging up the darkened stairway of a six-flat—and I was with two cops.
     Police have hard jobs—that doesn't get said enough, because it's obvious, and because it's beside the point in the steady drip-drip-drip of abuse-of-authority cases we see in Chicago and across the country. When innocent black people are being murdered on camera by police, the fact that most officers are doing their duty somewhere else isn't particularly relevant.
     The difficulties police face is a fact we only only acknowledge when something like Dallas happens, when officers are killed in the line of duty and suddenly their perspective snaps into view—it's a job that can get you killed if you're not careful and sometimes even when you are careful.
     It is a truly shocking crime, because it cuts at a basic assumption in American life: respect for the police. The officers themselves decry criticisms that are leveled them, with increasing volume and frequency, thanks to the undeniable evidence of cell phone video technology. They consider themselves misunderstood, victims. What they don't realize is that these criticisms stem from disappointment: we expect the police to be heroes, we want them to be heroes, to do the right thing. And they usually are. But they are also human, and mistakes happen. Even those police who are caught on camera shooting people without justification are not, I believe, acting out of racism so much as out of fear. They're trying to get home at the end of their shift, and they know—unlike the public, they don't have the luxury of being able to forget—that not everyone does. Or they're hopped up from whatever chase or scuffle happened before the camera was trained in their direction, and they do the wrong thing.
     Or, sometimes, they're poorly trained or aggressive jerks. There's that too. This tragedy does not erase the dire situation we have with police and minorities in this country. It only adds a new chapter.
     The situation is still the same. Police have more power and authority than other people—they enforce the law. More so, they embody it, and if they feel they are being held to a higher standard, they are. That's what they signed up for. What we need to understand is that we are all, cops and civilians, facing the same problem here: how to combat crime without hurting either innocent people or police officers. Right now, decency requires we honor these fallen officers and their grieving families—look at Brent Thompson's face. A father and grandfather, he just looks like a good guy, and deserved to go home Thursday night, not to the morgue. Think of him, and his four other slain brothers in blue, and remember the debt that society owes to its heroes. They died trying to keep their city safe. Our thorny law and order problems will be right where we left them, waiting for us, when we're through.   Already, the various factions are trying to twist this horror to their benefit, with union officials claiming, incorrectly, that this is an outgrowth of disrespect for police, while critics observe that the shoe is on the other foot. That helps no one. What would help, if we could muster the strength to do it, is if we could only realize that, police and civilians, black and white, are all in this together, bound by a common humanity and citizenship in this great country of ours. We will all succeed or fail, live or die, together. When will we understand that? Not anytime soon.

Now covering knitting and yarn crafts

     So the year is half over, and like me, you're wondering how the knitting vogues that were ballyhooed at the start of 2016 are faring. You remember when Skeinoblog laid out its "Knitting Trends 2016: What's Hot This Year"? Just how popular were these new "super-bulky yarns" anyway?
      "Hand-knitting follows the fashion industry," said Cindy Cooper, owner of Elemental Yarns in Plainfield. "Yeah, we have some super-bulkies. But a lot of the influence comes from television shows, like 'Game of Thrones.'"
     Then there's the issue of sustainability, which...
     Okay, so I can't really devote my entire column to knitting. Believe me, I was tempted. At least I had the thought: I could be the knitting reporter, covering the yarn arts beat. As the presidential campaign veers deeper into farce, a bone deep revulsion sets in at the prospect of reaching my hands into the mess and trying to arrange its gloppy, putrid contents into some kind of order. Knitting seems so pleasant by comparison.
     On Saturday, Donald Trump retweeted a white supremacist graphic that shows Hillary Clinton against a sea of money and a Jewish Star. He does that a lot—tweets neo-Nazi tropes to his 9.5 million followers. That's why they love him. Well that, and his slurs against racial and religious groups.

     To continue reading, click here.

Storm coming

Storm approaching O'Fallon, Illinois, by Evie Levine

   
     Years ago, when my column took up a full page and I ran a jokes at the end, sent in by readers, I received a chuckle from someone who identified himself as a "nephrologist." 
     I quickly checked the dictionary, and was charmed to discover, I thought, that this meant he makes his living studying clouds. I was compelled to ask him about it, and he set me straight. A nephrologist is a kidney specialist.  
     Oh. Not "nephologist"—one who studies clouds.
     That's life. You think you've got someone dreamily gazing at the heavens but, on second glance, it's another wage slave poking into somebody's lower back.
     Yet there are a few of us who make our living thanks to clouds. In May, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a charming article on the wonderfully-named Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the equally-delightful Cloud Appreciation Society.  I haven't joined yet only because I can't decide if membership is quaint or strange.
     What is it with clouds? In the photograph above, snapped Wednesday morning by my cousin, Evie Levine, there are the appealingly weathered farm buildings. And the windblown, bright green mid-summer corn, with its yellow tops. But it's the cumulonimbus clouds, low, grey, louring, that make the picture sing, that adds the drama. 
     Maybe the allure is that clouds can alternate between being so placid and puffy, white, motionless, floating above us, then suddenly turn turbulent and roiling, dark, threatening. Maybe that's why they're so fascinating. Or maybe because while they look like they're floating, they're actually falling, at a rate of about eight feet a minute, according to my 1926 copy of "Fogs and Clouds" by W.J. Humphreys, which has been sitting on the shelf for years, just waiting for this moment.
    Maybe that's it—placid and turbulent, both aloft and descending. They're just like people. 
   

Does this beard make me look like Steven Spielberg?

     If you are curious as to how the process works—and no one has asked, so maybe you're not, but I'm telling you anyway—I wake up, and write something, either for the paper or here or both. It goes online, and in print, and people react to it. 
    My subject is basically what's on my mind. Tuesday it was the you-look-like-Steven-Spielberg trope. I started writing something, then Abner Mikva died, so I wrote his obit—he seemed so hale when I had lunch with him in January, I thought there was no rush. Then I returned to this column. 
     Which seemed fine .... until an editor had the idea of taking my picture, and running it next to Spielberg's. I looked at the two, and had this thought, for the very first time: "Shit. They're RIGHT. I DO look like Steven Spielberg. Fuck. I look WORSE!" 
     Which sort of put me in a quandary. I thought of yanking the column back. But that seemed panicky. If I did that every time I had second thoughts, nothing would ever get printed. The higher road seemed to be, heck, show some spine, leave it out there. Probably be ignored, like most everything online, but if it provokes a geyser of derision, well, so what else is new? 

     My wife sleeps later than I do — beauty’s privilege. At home, I use the time to write stuff. On vacation, I go to the hotel gym.
     But the oil light went on during our drive East, so I figured an early-morning trip to the Jiffy Lube was in order.
     In the waiting room with coffee and the Post, a Jiffy Lube employee, Louis, called my name and began a canned pitch: we should also rotate your tires and change your transmission fluid and . . . .
     No, no, no. Just the oil.
     That bit of robotic business out of the way, Louis blinked, and seemed to notice me for the first time.
     “Did anyone ever tell you you look like Steven Spielberg?” he said.
     People tell me that all the time, so much that I have a canned reply.
     “I don’t look like Steven Spielberg,” I said. “I’m just a Jewish guy in a baseball cap and a beard....”

To continue reading, click here.

Clinton lead shrinks, widens

     In general, I tend to defend the media—a vibrant part of democracy, it's part of what keeps us from being Russia. 
     
     But sometimes I do feel a flash of the loathing that such a big hunk of the public seems to feel.

     Such as Tuesday, when I read this headline, from The Hill:

     Clinton lead shrinks to five points in national poll. 

    And then, a few hours later, this one, on Twitter: 

    Clinton expands lead over Trump to 13 points: Reuters poll.

    So a lead that shrinks and widens, to either 5 percent or more than twice that, depending on who's being polled and who's doing the poll and who's doing the reporting, apparently. 

    Leaving us totally unenlightened. 
   
    All together now, repeat after me, the classic words of Christopher Marlowe:

    "Why this is hell; nor am I out of it."
    

Abner Mikva: 1926-2016

     The Mikva Challenge people tell me I had one of the last interviews the revered jurist and legal mind gave. When I took him to lunch for his 90th birthday in January, he was so full of pep that I never thought of writing his obituary, a melancholy duty that I performed this morning. What popped out, to me, from his long and extraordinary life is how he faced the same fanatical opposition we are facing now, with success and grace—the NRA spent six months and $1 million trying to block his federal bench Senate confirmation. And failed. Something we liberals need to bear in mind. Our cause is right, and we should not weaken just because are opponents are brutal and relentless. If those who would undermine and destroy the country are strong, we just need to be stronger.

     Abner Mikva brought his sharp legal advice and principled worldview to all three branches of government — he was a congressman, federal judge and presidential adviser. He stood up to Richard J. Daley, for years, and managed to survive hizzoner's efforts to destroy him.
     And if that weren't enough, if giving legal advice to Bill Clinton and encouraging Barack Obama to try for the White House weren't enough, Mr. Mikva, who died of cancer at age 90 on Monday, was also the young man who tried to volunteer to help the Democrats in 1948 and was told by a ward heeler: "We don't want nobody nobody sent," coining the immortal distillation of political cronyism.
     "That's Chicago for you," said Obama, remembering the phrase when he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mr. Mikva in 2014. The president called Mr. Mikva “one of the greatest jurists of his time,” someone who “helped shape the national debate on some of the most challenging issues of the day.”
     Obama on Tuesday issued a statement saying Mr. Mikva "believed in empowering the next generation of young people to shape our country. Ab’s life was a testament to that truth. ... Like so many admirers, I’ve lost a mentor and a friend."

To continue reading, click here.

Riding the Washington Metro

 

     When I learned that my older son would be spending the summer interning in Washington, D.C., my immediate concern was for his safety, though not because of the threat of terrorism or predatory senators. I worried about the train. The Washington Metro marked its 40th anniversary with a spate of bad publicity about how decrepit, run down and dangerous it is—nine people died after two Metro trains collided in 2009. 
    Or, short of disaster, I worried if it would be able to get him to where he needs to go. Stretches of the system are going to have to be shut down, sometimes for weeks or months at at time.
     We went to visit the lad recently, and stayed in North Bethesda, taking the Red Line back and forth into DC, giving me a chance to thoroughly inspect it. I was interested in how bad it is, and how the system differs from Chicago's "L" and Metra.  

    The stations are vast, dim, with indirect lighting on barrel vaulted, honeycombed ceilings. 
     The DC system was the handiwork of Chicago's underappreciated, tormented architect Harry Weese. In designing the Metro, he created "some of the most powerful public spaces of our time," New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in Weese's obituary in 1998, calling the Metro, “among the greatest public works projects of this century." The sections where two stations intersect “induce an almost religious sense of awe”
     The trains? Not so much. The first car we got into was one of the 40-year-old relics from when the system was unveiled as Washington's Bicentennial Birthday gift to itself. It was, I noted with amazement, carpeted, whatever the original color was now a salmon brown. I hard to marvel at the hubris of that. Maybe the original wallpaper peeled away.
      Every time a train pulls into the station and stops, there is a full five-second delay before the doors open. I'm sure you get used to it, but it was just long enough for me to wonder whether they'd open at all, or perhaps, the whole car would just burst into flame instead. My wife, trying to put a bright spin on it, pointed out that the delay allowed riders to not have to stand up until the train was stopped, a bonus, of sorts.
     The Metro is one of the deepest subway systems in the world, which required the enormous escalators leading down into and out the system, entrances that seemed so Jetsons in the late 1970s. Now the escalators are often broken, forcing passengers into that mincing Geisha quickstep people fall into when trying to get up and down broken escalators. 
    And because the stations are under the water table, there is evidence of seepage everywhere: streak doors, corroded metal. It turns out they didn't fully waterproof the thing when building it, as a false economy, and now part of the $1 billion repairs it needs it to be retroactively sealed.
    In its defense, the Metro got us where we were going. The system also tells you how much is left on your transit card when you enter and exit a station, a trick that Chicago's Ventra card devices cannot manage to do. While Chicago has the efficient one-fare-takes-you-anywhere system, in Washington, you pay when you leave, the charge depending on how long of a trip was taken, which makes sense, and is what they use in Tokyo, but adds another layer of complexity.
     Back in Chicago, taking the "L" to the Cubs game Monday, I had a renewed sense of appreciation for our system's clean, new cars and lack of water damage. The Metro was a triumph 40 years ago; now it is a rebuke, and a reminder that we not only expect a government that makes the trains run on time, now, but demand one that remembers to maintain them so they keep running into the future. To do otherwise is to betray both our past and our future.

Take my 4th of July presidential mediocrities quiz!

     Oh cheer up. It’s the Fourth of July. Yes, anyone who loves this country has to be worried that by next July 4 Donald Trump will be president and the red, white and blue, star-spangled banner we all love will suddenly seem a soiled pennant of shame.
     Put it in perspective. Should the ultimate infamy occur this November, and America’s fearful and ignorant elect a bigoted fraud as president, be reassured: he won’t be the most flawed individual ever to hold the highest office in the land. Well, OK, he will be the most flawed individual ever to hold the highest office in the land. But he’ll have plenty of second-place company.
     In celebration of Independence Day, a quiz on some near-Trumpian mediocrities the American miracle has somehow survived.

1. Trump won’t be the first president whose arrival in office was greeted with sorrow. Who was deemed “probably the man of smallest caliber who has ever been made president of the United States”?

a) Thomas Jefferson
b) Calvin Coolidge
c) Harry Truman

To continue reading, click here.

Elie Wiesel's last warning

     Elie Wiesel died yesterday. The internet was instantly flush with his warnings about complacency in the face of evil, arriving within hours of the Donald Trump campaign re-tweeting an image of Hillary Clinton juxtaposed against piles of cash and a Jewish star, an image taken from a white supremacist web site in an act of either utter stunning ignorance or sneering anti-Semitism, and which is worse?
    That seemed apt, as Wiesel's life after being liberated from Buchenwald was one of warning — his most famous book, "Night," begins with a villager returning to his home with tales of death camps that nobody believes.
     The warnings always seem overblown. Evil strikes people as unbelievable—it can't be serious. That's why evil thrives. You don't believe what's happening until it's too late.
     Today, it isn't that nobody believes Trump is a racist and a bigot—it really can't be argued, with his blanket condemnations of Mexicans and Hispanics, his mockery of women and the disabled. But rather that a swath of America doesn't care. Worse, it's the reason they like him. Trump gives permission for bigots—who are bullies and thus cowards at heart—to strut about in mid-day, suddenly halfway decent. 
      And in this they are in keeping with the rest of the world, where globalism and diversity are under attack by those who feel the world has changed too much, and who want to go back to some imagined earlier life when they were isolated and in charge, at least in their own perceptions. 
    In that sense, it must always be remembered that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. First we had to have a despised serf class of 11 million undocumented immigrants allowed to fester, blocked the road to citizenship that our parents and grandparents enjoyed. We needed 20 years of Republican assault on the media, on the idea of facts, of knowledge, of experience, of science, where a man who has never been elected to public office can flog that as a qualification for the presidency, out of one corner of his mouth, while the other corner interviews vice presidential candidates who know their way around government.
     The Jewish Star pinned to Hillary had just enough deniability—a graphic error. Unlike Muslims, Jews can't be reviled directly, unless it is through the ploy of anti-Zionism, where Israel is held up as some kind of unique transgressor nation that shouldn't exist. If you're wondering why the horrors of Syria unfold with muted outrage on college campus, while every sophomore is ready to man the ramparts damning Israel, it's because the killing fields of Syria are done by Syrians, and who knows a Syrian? While Israel's unfortunate and unwise occupation of the Palestinians are done by Jews. The easiest way to clarity there—not that many are searching to clarity—is to remember that in 1966, when Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan, nobody knew or cared about either and Israel still had to be destroyed, and its neighbors were poised to try. That is where the territories came from. They too, like Trump, are more a symptom than a cause and, like Trump, should they go away, the larger problem will remain. 
     "I'm a frightened Jew," Wiesel said, at a luncheon for the United States Holocaust Museum in Chicago in 2007. I remember thinking, sitting in the audience, that that was over-stating the case—are Jews not now enmeshed in the fabric of American society? Of Western democracy? Maybe not so much, based on the not-subtle dog whistles that Trump is sending out to his white nationalist friends. Not so much, based on the rise of Le Pen and the other pro-Fascists in Europe. Not so much, seeing how England would scuttle its economy and international standing for a decade if not forever in order to disentangle itself from the framework Europe set up after World War II in a vastly successful bid to grow economically and not fall to killing each other again.
     If the Brits will leap out the window, a self-inflicted defenestration to avoid having to comply with lumber standards, imagine what they'll do to others. 
     That's the problem with warnings — you never know which ones are important.  The genie of nationalism and identity, once let out of the bottle, is very hard to put back in. In keeping with his campaign of fraudulence and fear, Donald Trump is playing upon the worst instincts of America, and a much wider swath—not quite half, not yet, but that could change—is responding. Maybe that means he goes down in epic defeat in November. Maybe that means he wins. Nobody knows, but we're going to find out, and if you're optimistic, you shouldn't be.
    I keep thinking of another classic, almost as important as Wiesel's  Night—Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. A speculative historical novel where anti-Semite aviator Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the United States begins to lope after Germany in repression of Jews. It's a chilling book, because it is so real. People have a wide range of capacity for good and ill, and it comes down to who is leading them and what they are being told. 
     America is being told lies by a demagogue who would divide and ruin the country. Elie Wiesel warned of such people in life and, in death, he warns us still.  Anyone who doesn't view the election of 2016 as a looming disaster that must be avoided just isn't paying attention, to the present or the past. 

Trump circa 2000: "The glib assurance of the idiotic"

    Donald Trump is coming to Chicago to squeeze cash out of local tycoons who find it easier to give money than to think. Ron Gidwitz, whose family has been wealthy for a century, is heading up his local cup rattling effort, forgetting that while Trump will flash across the heavens and be gone in November, please God, the shame of supporting him will linger.
    I, on the other hand, am in the rather comfortable position of having warned of Trump's unfitness to be president for ... gee ... 16 years now. I was wondering what the first column I wrote about Trump was, and dug up this, as true today as it was then, alas.

     What would you take to a desert island?
     I don't know why that question is supposed to be profound.
     But each generation of journalists seem to find that this simplistic bit of fancy somehow probes the depths of a person's character, particularly a politician's character, assuming politicians have character. It shows what they value.
     The first time it was asked, maybe it did. Now it's just another tiresome ritual in an election process that seems to become more tiresome and more ritualistic with every passing year.
     The true idiocy of the question was driven home to me recently when I caught a snippet of the "Today" show on NBC.
     There was Donald Trump, living out his current personal phantasm as political candidate.
     Matt Lauer was trying to lob a few of Trump's inconsistencies back at him. First he addressed Trump's having lumped the presidential candidates into what Trump had called the "Lucky Sperm Club."
     That's shorthand for children of pampered privilege who would be nowhere if not for the accomplishments of their parents (on the money for Bush and Gore, somewhat accurate for McCain, and not at all accurate for Bradley).
     But isn't it true, Lauer asked Trump, zeroing in for what he thought was the kill, that your father was himself a rich real estate developer, just like you? Doesn't that put you in the same club of acorns falling not far from their paternal oaks?
     Nah, said Trump, with the glib assurance of the idiotic. You see, he said, my father was a rich developer in Brooklyn. He never made it to Manhattan, like I did. Big difference. Lauer let him off the hook and moved on to the famous desert island quandary. Someone among this year's crop of ace political journalists had posed the matter to everyone running, and they had served up the requisite pious posturings: books, a Bible, the candidate's family.
     Trump had answered: "a supermodel." That was certainly a change of pace, and the type of flip statement that passes as free thinking in our current sad political clime.
     Lauer brought this up to imply that by claiming to want to pass the days before rescue cavorting with a supermodel rather than reading the Bible with his family somehow made Trump unworthy to hold the highest office in the land, and Trump backed away, claiming the whole thing was in jest.
     In my mind, I find the supermodel answer on par with the Bible/books/family answer. Neither would do much good when it came to surviving on a desert island. The supermodel would just curl up in a fetal ball and whine about wanting Evian water and Benzedrine.* The Bible and books would be ruined in the first hard rain. And what kind of sick monster would wish his own family to be marooned with him on a desert island, to share his doom as provisions ran out and the elements overwhelmed them?
     Why doesn't anybody ever answer the question with: a 55-gallon drum of water? Don't you want the leader of the free world to be the type of guy who would rather bring a desalination system or a short-wave radio to his desert exile, as opposed to literature? I know I do. Find the guy who says he would bring a 65-foot cabin cruiser with a full tank of gas to the hypothetical desert island. He's the guy we need.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 2000


     * And yes, the sexism of this line jumped up and poked me in the eye when I read it too. For the record, I renounce the sin, and apologize. I'm sure there are many resourceful, dynamic supermodels who would rise to the task of surviving on a desert island, in a far more capable fashion than I would. In my defense, I was a callow lad, still in my late 30s, when I wrote this. 

Feeling that Olympic-sized regret yet?

     

     
     Well, THIS was an oversight. 
     After the state of Rio de Janeiro declared a "state of public calamity," its governor warning of the risk of "a total collapse in public security, health, education, mobility and environmental management,” I couldn't resist re-tweeting a 2013 column on the mayor, Eduardo Paes, chiding me for lampooning the International Olympic Committee selection of his city for the 2016 Olympics. I thought I'd toss in a link to the original column but, to my surprise, in the first flush of doing this blog, I didn't post it here in July, 2013. Time to correct that. This is the piece that got Brazilians in a knot. Turned out, they should have spent less energy being indignant, more getting ready to host the world.


Dear International Olympic Committee:

Howdy! Long time no talk to. Four years. Where does the time go?

I know you've probably forgotten about Chicago, ever since you gave us the backhand in fall 2009, and in the first round no less.

But we remember. Yes, we do. What Chicagoan who stood in those crowds—dressed in our civic best, as it were, holding a hand-picked bouquet, gussied up to the tune of $50 million in city-buffing money, waiting, eager for the good news—can remember the deflating letdown, the shocking dismissal, the confetti trickling out of our slack fingers into the street, watching benumbed as Madrid, Rio and Tokyo skipped onward without us.

Ouch.

And in case you are tempted to ascribe this to bitterness, we'll happily note that the Olympic games are three years away, so everything could still work well. Hard to imagine, but it's possible. The protests rocking Brazil—hundreds of thousands of people, in 100 cities last month, the streets of Rio in flames this week—could ebb, and everything could somehow be fine in 2016. We add our sincere hopes and prayers that it will be so to those of the world.

Although one little question keeps waving its hand over its head, going "oh oh oh!" and begging to be asked. So I'm just going to call upon that question and be done with it. Ready? 

Here's our question:

Sorry yet?

Because you could have had Chicago. Which isn't a city without problems. Lots of problems. Streets in certain neighborhoods raked with deadly gunfire every weekend. Pension giveaways one straw away from cracking the government's back. School teachers laid off by the thousands. And I'm sure, had we gotten the 2016 Olympics, as we should have, there would have been grumbling aplenty about hosting a big quadrennial party for the world's athletic elites in the midst of all our concerns.

But I bet we could have done it without firebombs. Without the military breaking out the tear gas and the rubber bullets. I bet our population wouldn't rise up against the Olympics, the way they're doing in Brazil, which is also upset about hosting the World Cup in 2014.

Chicago hosted the World Cup, along with eight other cities, in 1994, which was such a non-crisis to us that I bet a lot of people who were around then don't even remember it. I do—it was hot. That's it. A city like ours knows how to do this kind of thing. We planned a victory party for several million Blackhawks fans in, what, three days? Tear gas proved unnecessary.

No hard feelings, IOC. Maybe next time, assuming we feel like going through all the bother to try to win your silly Olympics. But I don't expect that. Most Chicagoans, rather than yearn toward our lost Olympics, are glad. We got off light, and now can get to sit back and watch Brazil try to manage the task, which might be more fun than hosting would have been. You can't say you didn't have your chance. And you blew it. You could have had gold, but settled for bronze.

Best,

Neil Steinberg

                              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 24, 2013

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I don't know if today's fun activity is easy or hard and, honestly, I don't care.
     I just wanted to post a photo of this large, sulking, naked gentleman. 
     If you've seen him before, you might recognize him right away.
     If you haven't, well, good luck.
     He is really, really big — that's a clue. 
     In fact, I'll provide a second photograph at bottom to give you a hint just how big. 
     Pretty cool, huh? I thought so.
     The winner gets — should he or she want it which they probably don't — one of my 2015 blog posters, which I need to get rid of because, goddamnit, I'm making a 2017 poster, whether anybody wants it or not. I want it. 
     Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Shhh, it's late. Go to bed.

     Just a reminder. It's Saturday. If you're wondering where my blog post is, that posts at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, so people who aren't insomniacs can have a chance to solve it. The above photo is NOT the puzzle. It's Coe Lake, in my lovely hometown of Berea, Ohio, photographed on a post dinner stroll. Go to bed. 

Review No. 1

    "Out of the Wreck I Rise" is being published in a little more than two months, and while I'll try not to let the book completely hijack the blog, it is a big deal, at least to me, and I couldn't resist sharing our first review, from the Library Journal. 
     If it seems rather low-key to be excited about, that's their way. I've had them bend me over their knee before—being underwhelmed at what I write is kind of what they do—so this is close to a rave, particularly because it is starred: many libraries automatically buy books that are starred. Anyway, if this is like sharing my kid's report card, apologies. But I had to crow.

Library Journal

★ 07/01/2016Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steinberg and book editor Bader have compiled this collection of prose and poetry on the subject of addiction to help those who are still struggling or who are in recovery to find solace in the lives of great people who have also battled the disease. The writings are organized along the lines of an addict's journey—when the good times sour, the importance of time, and the power of embracing a new life. The experiences of well-known figures such as Etta James, Sid Caesar, and John Cheever are relayed in their own words, with feeling and lack of pretense. VERDICT Anyone affected by addiction will surely identify with the accounts included here, and thus, not feel alone in times of difficulty. 

Who are those people on the placemat?

     This column suffered for space. I normally get 650 words; I asked for more and got 900, so I shouldn't complain. Still, I lost Earl Sensenig talking about coming to Bedford from Lancaster to help build the new Mennonite community, and Charles Crumb talking about starting Bits of Time because of his love of antiques, and Rev. Reed quoting Chronicles. And I wasn't able to quite explain why I was doing it, how this country seems so divided, and the problem seems to be that it's easy to demonize each other and hard to try to understand. But I set out to withhold my own opinion and just listen to everyone on the placemat, and to their credit, everyone who picked up the phone spoke with me, candidly and at length. Despite being the dreaded mainstream media, they trusted me. And despite having a very different view of the world than they do, I liked them, and felt like we respected each other. It's a start.
   

    Paper place mats are not a celebrated form of communication, with neither the romance of messages in bottles nor the eager audience for fortune cookies.
     In fact, I didn’t glance at the place mat in front of me as we settled in at the Bedford Diner in Bedford, Pennsylvania, on our way home from vacation Monday. But my sharp-eyed wife drew attention to it, pointing out the services offered: Excavation. Well drilling. Hydraulic cylinder repair.
     “A lot of industrial,” she said, knowing I like industrial.
     A dozen ads, plus one for the diner and a word search. Here, I thought, are people who want to get a message out, who paid RAK Advertising, trying to be heard. I should listen. So I phoned them all.
     “Business is tough right now,” said Joe Ryan, 50, who runs Ryan Services, a general contractor. “It is somewhat slow. The natural gas business affected the area. We had the Marcellus (shale formation) right beside us in the Allegheny Mountains. A lot of drilling for natural gas. In ’07, ’08, companies out of Texas moved up, started drilling. They drilled so much, there was such an abundant supply, prices fell and a lot of people lost their jobs. We have work but not as much as we should.”

     To continue reading, click here. 

State of the Blog: Year Three

    "Sooner or later, it just becomes your life," sings Bruce Springsteen.
    Not to compare this blog to prison, which is what the song "Hard Time" is about.
    Though both do have certain daily routines. Jail has head counts and mealtimes and cell inspections; the blog has click counts and post times and reader comments.
    With the end of the blog's third full year today—1095 consecutive days—it's now a bona fide ingrained daily part of my life, and maybe yours too. But just a part, a small part for you, and a larger-yet-still-not-all-that-big part for me. More of a regular duty, like flossing, only I don't floss with equal diligence.
     Enough throat-clearing. To the all-important stats. Year One brought 385,679 hits. Year Two, 499,423. This year ... drumroll please ... 577,617, as of Wednesday morning, or 48,134 a month, for an increase over the previous year of about 13.5 percent.
    Thirteen point five percent.
    Not the sort of skyrocketing leap the internet is famous for.
    Roughly half the increase of Year Two.
    I'm not going to smear ash on my head and squat at the virtual city gates in mourning over my rate of readership increase slowing. I shouldn't care at all, and I suppose I really don't, not much, since I'm soldiering onward anyway. It gets more readers a month than "Moby-Dick" got in its first 30 years of publication, not to compare the two.
    The news is generally goodish. June, and seven of the past 12 months, scored above 50,000 hits, which I decided is some kind of threshold of significance. Last August topped out at a record, 59,998. Nobody seemed to miss the 2016 poster, so not doing one was a good call. Though I do have an idea for a swell 2017 poster, so I might create one anyway, just for the fun of it. There was a flash of real media recognition: every goddamn day was the only news organization to cover the arrival speech of the Sun-Times new publisher, Bruce Sagan, and Crain's Chicago Business used a photograph of mine, crediting the blog, so that was fun. 
     Still, the value of the blog seems greatest to myself. When I reached into the buzz saw of gun nuttery earlier this month, I could carefully explain what happened right here, without worrying about getting the thing into the newspaper. The process was medicinal, and helped me squeegee the right wing spittle off my body.
     The blog made a little money, thank you Marc Schulman and Eli's Cheesecake, which for the third years ran advertisements at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The ads led to at least one order, I am certain, because I ordered a cheesecake and sent it to Tate—or, more accurately, his kid, at his request—as thanks for his scrupulous volunteer copyediting of the blog. Which reminds me, I should write a post on the idea of Gratitude Sweets...
      Another day. At moments when there is not a lot to say I've been trying not to say a lot. So in closing out Year Three, thank you for reading, and for commenting, and for caring about this almost as much as I do. This blog strikes me as significant, and while that must be an error on my part, driven by the vanity and myopia that inspires so much error, it is my error, and I am sticking with it. Everyone else clings to their folly, why should I be any different?