"Pray for Kumamoto & Kumamon" — The birth of Cute Studies

      This was a challenge. I first started talking to Mosaic in October about writing something about cuteness as an academic field. We quickly decided the topic warranted a research trip to Japan. The visit required a lot of prep work, contacting government officials and academics, lining up hotels and a translator. Then when I was finished, in April, the narrative had to be recast after the area I visited was hit by an earthquake.
      So I was very happy when the story was finally posted, last Tuesday. 
      Mosaic encourages distribution of its features, and we were all pleased that The Guardian reprinted this, and it was carried by the BBC, and Digg, and many other popular sites. The story is republished here under a Creative Commons license, which means you are free to repost or reprint it as you like—my version here is slightly different than what Mosaic published, in that it includes my photos and a few favorite lines that were cut in the editing process. Their only requirement is that you credit Mosaic, which posts a new long form article on topics of health and science every week, and link back to the original article.
    It's quite long, so you might want to space your reading out. There is also a sidebar on cuteness and robots which I'm posting Thursday. 

     On April 14, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, toppling buildings and sending residents rushing into the streets. Hundreds of aftershocks—one an even stronger 7.0 quake—continued for days, killing 49 people, injuring 1,500, and forcing tens of thousands from their homes.
     News spread immediately around the globe on social media.
     “Earthquake just happened,” Margie Tam posted from Hong Kong. “R u ok kumamon?”
     “Are Kumamon and his friends safe?” wondered Eric Tang, a Chinese college student.
     “Pray for Kumamoto and Kumamon,” wrote Nut Nattsumi Silkoon, a violin teacher in Thailand, a phrase that would be repeated thousands of times.
     Kumamoto is a city of 700,000 in a largely agricultural province in southwestern Japan.
     But what, or more precisely who, is Kumamon? And why in the wake of an immense natural disaster did concern for earthquake victims focus on him, specifically?
     That’s a bit more complicated.


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      It is March 12, 2016, one month before the earthquake. Kumamon bounds onto an  outdoor stage at the opening event of his birthday party in Kumamoto. About 150 guests, mostly women, cheer, clap and whistle. 

     Kumamon waves and bows. He's a little less than two meters tall, with black glossy fur, circular red cheeks and wide, staring eyes. He’s dressed for the occasion in a white satin dinner jacket trimmed in silver and a red bow tie.
     One woman in the crowd holds a Kumamon doll swaddled in a baby blanket. Another dressed her doll in a grey vested outfit matching her own. She says it took her a month to sew. A number of fans pasted red paper circles on their cheeks to mimic his. Those in the first row arrived at 3 a.m. to snag their prime spots to greet the object of their intense though difficult-to-explain affection.   

      “Actually, I have no idea why I love him so much,” says Milkinikio Mew, who flew from Hong Kong with friends Lina Tong and Alsace Choi to attend the three-day long festival, even though Hong Kong is holding its own birthday party for Kumamon. She slept in, showing up at 6 a.m. for the 10 a.m. kick-off, so had to settle for a seat in the last row.
     Kumamon is ... well ... he’s not a exactly cartoon character, like Mickey Mouse, though he does appear in a daily newspaper comic strip. He’s not a brand icon either, like Hello Kitty, though like her, he does not speak, and like her, his image certainly moves merchandise.
     He’s sort of a ....
     But first, the big moment is here. A birthday cake is rolled out, and the crowd sings “Happy birthday.” Then birthday presents. A representative from Honda, which has a motorbike factory nearby, gives him its Kumamon-themed scooter. An Italian bicycle maker unveils a custom Kumamon racing cycle. Plus a new DVD, an exercise video, featuring Kumamon leading calisthenics.
     The Italian bicycle is not for sale, yet. But the other two items are, joining the more than 100,000 products that feature his image, from stickers and notebooks to cars to airplanes — a budget Japanese airline flies a Kumamon 737. When Steiff offered 1,500 special edition Kumamon dolls, the $300 figure sold out online in five seconds, according to the German toymaker. Last year Leica created a $3,300 Kumamon camera, a bargain compared to the solid gold statue of Kumamon crafted by a Tokyo jeweler which retails for $1 million.
     So what is he then? Kumamon is a yuru-kyara, or “loose character,” one of the cuddly creatures in Japan representing everything from towns and cities to airports and prisons. The word is sometimes translated as “mascot” but yuru-kyara are significantly different than mascots in the West, such as those associated with professional sports teams — Benny the Bull, Cyril the Swann — which tend to be benign, prankish one-dimensional court jesters that operate in the narrow realm of the sidelines during game time.
     Kumamon has a far wider field of operation as the yuru-kyara for Kumamoto Prefecture (a prefecture is like a state in the U.S. or a county in England) and has become more than a symbol for that region, a way to push its tourism and farm products. He is almost regarded as a living entity, a kind of funky ursine household god (it is perhaps significant that the very first licensed Kumamon product was a full-sized Buddhist shrine emblazoned with his face). Kumamon has personality. “Cute and naughty” Tam explains, later, asked what about Kumamon made her care about him enough to be concerned about him immediately after the earthquake.
     She wasn’t alone. After the April 14 quake, Kumamon’s Twitter feed, which has 473,000 followers, and typically updates at least three times a day, stopped issuing communications. With a thousand buildings damaged, water to the city cut, a hospital jarred off its foundations, and 44,000 people out of their homes, the prefectural government, which handles Kumamon’s business dealings and appearances, had more important things to do than stage manage its fictive bear.

      But Kumamon was missed.
     “People are asking why Kumamon’s Twitter account has gone silent when the prefecture needs its mascot bear more than ever,” the Japan Times noted on April 19.
    Into the vacuum came hundreds, then thousands of drawings, posted by everyone from children to professional manga artists, not only in Japan, but in Thailand, Hong Kong, China. They waged an impromptu campaign of drumming up support for earthquake relief, using the bear, which stood in for the city itself and its people. Kumamon was depicted leading the rescue efforts, his head bandaged like Apollinaire, lifting stones to rebuild the tumbled foundation of Kumamoto castle, propping up tottering walls, enfolding children in his arms.
     “Ganbatte Kumamon!” many wrote, using a term that means something between “don’t give up” and “do your best.” 

               
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     Kumamon is kawaii­­­—the word is translated as “cute,” but it has broad, multi-layered

Kumamon meets the Emperor and Empress

meanings, enfolding a range of sweetly-alluring images and behaviors. Not only does kawaii include the army of Japanese mascots, but a world a fashion that has adult women dressing as schoolgirls and schoolgirls dressing as Goth heroines or Lolita seductresses, giving rise to ero-kawaii, or erotic kawaii, a mash-up of cute and sexy.
      Kumamon is not sexy. Though when the Empress Michito met Kumamon, at her request, during the imperial couple’s visit to Kumamoto in 2013, she asked him, “Are you single?” He hovers in a realm of fantasy closer to a character from children’s literature, a cross between the Cat in the Hat and a teddy bear. Fans line up to hug him, often reaching back for a lingering last touch as they’re led off to make way for the next waiting fan. There is a tacit agreement to never allude to anything as crass as a man in a bear suit. 

Masataka Naruuo, left, helps his boss through a press conference.

     To, if not accept his reality, then to pretend that it exists. In 2014, Kumamon gave a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, where his title was given as “Director of PR.” The journalists posed respectful questions. “How many staff do you have, to help you out with your activities?” one asked. The answer, “We have about 20 staff members in our section,” was delivered by one of those subordinates, Masataka Naruo, who enjoys saying that Kumamon is his boss.
     What is happening here? Why are we drawn to cuteness? What about it causes us to open our pocketbooks and our hearts? Is appreciation for cuteness hardwired in human beings? Is it something embraced by individuals, or imposed upon them? Does it limit us? Or liberate us?
     These are questions being mulled by a potential new academic field, “Cute Studies.” We eagerly spend fortunes on cute avatars — Kumamon earned $1 billion in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that—without ever wondering: What is cute? What does it say about our society? Is what it says good or, possibly, could cuteness harbor darker facets as well?
     And where do our concepts of cuteness originate? That one is easy. The primal source of all things cute is found in every country, in every city and town, every neighborhood and close to every block in the world. You may have the template for all the cuteness in the world right in the next room and not even realize it.


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      Soma Fugaki has dark eyes that sparkle with intelligence as he scans the opening night crowd at “Blossom Blast,” a feminist art show at the UltraSuperNew gallery in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district.
     Drinks pour, music pulses. But Soma can’t dance, or walk, or even stand. His arms and legs are stubby, his muscle tone, poor. Nor can he speak. He has a condition the Japanese call akachan joutai, or “being a baby.”
     Soma is five months old, squirming in the arms of his father, Keigo, who gazes lovingly into his son’s face and describes what he sees. 

Soma and Keigo Fugaki

     “Everything about him is a reflection of myself,” Keigo says. “It’s like a cartoon version of myself. That has to do with how much I think he’s cute. I stare at him all the time. He looks like me. It’s my features, but exaggerated: bigger cheeks; bigger eyes.”
     Babies are our model for cuteness. Those last two details—big cheeks, big eyes—are straight out of Konrad Lorenz’s kindchenschema, or “baby schema,” as defined in the Nobel-Prize-winning scientist’s 1943 paper on the “innate releasing mechanisms” that prompt affection and nurture in human beings: fat cheeks, large eyes set low on the face, high forehead, small nose and mouth, stubby arms and legs that move in a clumsy fashion. Not just humans: puppies, baby ducks and other young animals are enfolded in Lorenz’s theory.
     Lorenz’s paper is the Ur-document of Cute Studies, but did not produce an immediate reaction among the scientific community — he was a Nazi psychologist writing during wartime, exploring their loathsome eugenic theories, a reminder that the shiny face of cuteness invariably conceals a thornier side.
     For decades, scientists focused on what babies perceive, what they think. But in the 21st century, attention turned toward how babies themselves are perceived, as cuteness started taking its first wobbly steps toward becoming a cohesive realm of research.
     Part behavioral science, part cultural studies, part biology, the field is so new it hasn’t had a conference yet. Experiments have demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills — useful modifications for handling an infant. A pair of Yale studies suggest that when people say they want to “eat up” babies, it’s prompted by overwhelming emotions — caused, one researcher speculated, by frustration at not being able to care for the cute thing, channeled into aggressiveness.
     These emotions are triggered chemically, deep within the brain. Experiments hooking up volunteers to MRIs have shown how seeing cute creatures stimulates the brain’s pleasure center, the nucleus accumbens, releasing dopamine, in a way similar to what happens when eating chocolate or having sex.
     Women feel this reaction more strongly than men. While biologically this is explained by the need to care for infants, society’s larger embrace of cuteness leads academics in gender studies to wonder whether cute culture is the sugar pill that sexism comes in — training women to be childlike — or could it instead be a form of empowerment, “that publicly signaled these young women taking control of their own sexuality,” in the words a paper by Hiroshi Aoyagi and Shu Min Yuen, recently printed in a journal edited by a little-known American instructor living in Tokyo who has become something of the father of Cute Studies.


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     “Feel free to wear these slippers,” says Joshua Paul Dale, pausing to remove his shoes at the entrance to his large — well, large for Tokyo — light-filled apartment in the Sendagaya section of the city.
   

Joshua Paul Dale

 Dale, 50, a cultural studies scholar on the faculty of Tokyo Gakugei University, is the driving force for creation of Cute Studies. He was the first to assemble academic papers into an online “Cute Studies Bibliography,” a list now at nearly 100 publications, from T.R. Alley’s “Head shape and the perception of cuteness,” in Developmental Psychology to Leslie Zebrowitz et al’s “Baby Talk to the Babyfaced” in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
     Dale’s latest step in creating his field is editing the The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture’s special cuteness issue, published in April 2016.
     “The articles collected in this issue demonstrate the flexibility of cuteness as an analytical category, and the wide scope of the insights it generates,” he writes in the introduction.
     Despite such progress, it is too early to declare cuteness an independent scientific field, like geology.
     “It hasn’t yet happened,” says Dale, who estimates that only a few dozen academics worldwide focus on cuteness. “We hope that it’s in the process of happening. I started independently and then other scholars are interested. We have conference panels to try to get the word out. I suppose the next step is to get the funding and do a small conference or symposium.”
     Dale says one inspiration is “porn studies,” now with its own quarterly, created after academics united to focus on a topic they felt cultural researchers were neglecting out of misplaced squeamishness. A distinct field encourages exploration.
     “If we just limit it to people in biology, or people in one area, then certain work will get done and certain work won’t get done,” Dale says.  
     Hiroshi Nittono, director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka  

Dr. Hiroshi Nittono

University, contributed to the East Asian Journal’s special issue. Nittono, wrote the first peer-reviewed scientific paper with “kawaii” in its title, and postulates a “two-layer model” of cuteness: not only does it encourage parental care of newborns, first, but once a baby grows to toddlerhood and begins interacting with the world, cuteness then promotes socialization, a pattern Dale sees reflected in the aborning field.  
     “It’s interesting because it’s inherent in the concept itself,” Dale says. “Cute things relate easily to other things. It kind of breaks down the barriers a little bit between self and other, or subject and object. That means it invites work from various fields. It’s interesting to get people together from different fields talking about the same subject.”
     Not that you need an academic conference to do that. Japan has uniquely embraced cuteness as reflecting its national character, the way tea ceremonies or cherry blossoms were once held up as symbolic of Japanese nationhood. In 2009, the government appointed a trio of “Cute Ambassadors,” three women in ribbons and baby doll dresses whose task was to represent the country abroad. But the preferred national image doesn’t necessarily correlate to the found reality.


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Tokyo subway station

     Cuteness is so associated with Japan that encountering the actual country — mile after mile of unadorned concrete suburban buildings alternating with rolling green fields and periodic densely-packed cities — can come as something of a surprise. The Tokyo subway is jammed with hurrying businessmen in dark suits, rushing women in paper masks, racing kids in plain school uniforms. Cute characters such as Kumamon can be hard to spot, and to expect otherwise is like going to America and expecting everyone to be a cowboy.
     Still, there are pockets of cuteness to be found — tiny yuru-kyara charms dangling off backpacks, peeking from posters, or construction barriers in the form of baby ducks.
     But not everywhere, not even in most places.
     Even in Kumamoto during Kumamon’s birthday weekend. Exit from the Shinkanesen bullet train at Kumamoto station, and there is nothing special on the platform. Not so much as a banner. Not until you take the escalator down and catch glimpse of the enormous head of Kumamon set up downstairs, plus a mock stationmaster’s office built for Kumamon. The train station shop is filled with Kumamon items, from bottles of sake to stuffed animals including, somewhat disturbingly, a plush set that pairs him with Hello Kitty, the wide-eyed bear directly behind Kitty in such a way as to suggest ... well, you wonder if it’s deliberate.
     In the city, his face is spread across the sides of buildings, with birthday banners hanging from the semi-enclosed shopping arcades that are a feature of every Japanese city.
     Six years ago, Kumamoto wasn’t known for much. There is an active volcano, Mt. Aso, nearby, and the 1960s reproduction of a dramatic 1600s-era castle that burned hundreds of years ago. In 2010, Kumamoto residents told officials there is nothing in their city that anyone would want to visit. The region is largely agricultural, growing melons and strawberries.   

     They were being asked about local attractions because in 2010 Japan Railways was planning to extend its Shinkansen bullet train to Kumamoto, and the city fathers were eager for tourists to use it. So they commissioned a logo to promote the area, hiring a designer who offered a stylized exclamation point (their official slogan, “Kumamoto Surprise,” was a bright spin on the fact that many Japanese would be surprised to find anything in Kumamoto worth seeing). The exclamation point logo was a red blotch, resembling the sole of a shoe. The designer, seeking to embellish it, and knowing the popularity of yuru-kyara, added a surprised black bear. “Kuma” is Japanese for bear. “Mon” is local slang for “man.”  
     Paired with a mischievous personality — Mew calls him “very naughty” — Kumamon made headlines after Kumamoto held a press conference to report that he was missing from his post, having run off to Osaka to urge residents there to take the train. The stunt worked. Kumamon was voted the most popular yuru-kyara in 2011. (Japan has a national contest, the Grand Prix, held in November. The most recent one was attended by 1,727 different mascots and 80,000 spectators. Millions of votes were cast).
     A few Kumamoto officials resisted Kumamon — their concern was he would scare off potential tourists, who’d worry about encountering wild bears, of which there are none in the prefecture. But the Kumamoto governor was a fan, and cannily waived licensing fees for Kumamon, encouraging manufacturers to use him royalty-free. 
     Rather than pay up front, in order to get approval to use the bear’s image, companies are required to promote Kumamoto, either by using locally manufactured parts or ingredients, or boosting the area on their packaging.  The side of the box the Tamiya radio-controlled “Kumamon Version Buggy,” for instance, has photos of the region’s top tourist destinations. In one of the songs on the exercise DVD released on his birthday, as Kumamon leads his fans through their exertions, they grunt, “Toh-MAY-toes ... Straw-BEAR-ies” ... Wah-TER-melons.” All agricultural products that are specialties of Kumamoto. Go into a grocery store and Kumamon smiles from every pint of strawberries and honeydew wrapper.
     It’s as if Mickey Mouse were continually hawking California oranges.     
     The bullet train began service to Kumamoto on March 12, so the date now used as Kumamon’s official birthday. He was there to greet the first scheduled train, a moment recreated during his birthday fest.
     Shopping in Kumamoto the day before the start of the celebration, Mew and her friends wear Kumamon t-shirts and carry Kumamon backpacks. They stand in the entrance of the Otani Musical Instruments, a store in the Kamitori Arcade. Otani sells sheet music and guitars, but has put a sale banner featuring Kumamon in its window and a table of small items carrying his image: keychains and change purses and handkerchiefs, some with musical motifs, directly at the store’s entrance.
     The three women show their discoveries to each other. They own a lot of Kumamon products already. Why buy more? What makes Kumamon so special?
     “Because he’s very cute,” says Tong, in English.


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      Nobody is cute in Shakespeare. The word did not exist until the early 1700s, when the “a” in “acute” was replaced by an apostrophe — ‘cute — and then dropped altogether, the sort of truncation for which frenetic Americans in their restive colonies were already notorious.
     “Acute” came from “acus,” Latin for needle, and later denoting pointed things. So “cute” at first meant “acute, clever, keen-witted, sharp, shrewd” according to the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which doesn’t suggest the term could describe visual appearance. This older, “clever” meaning lingers in expressions like “don’t be cute.”
     The newer usage was still being resisted in Britain in the mid-1930s, when a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph included “cute” on his list of “bastard American expressions,” along with “O.K.” and “radio.”
      Not only is “cute” unknown before 1700, but Lorentz’s kindchenschema is largely absent from visual arts before the 20th century. Even babies in medieval artworks are depicted as wizened miniature adults.

Kewpie

      Cute images of the kind we’ve become accustomed to begin showing up around 1900. While purists fussed, popular culture was discovering the bottomless marketability of cute things. Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip in 1912 about “Kewpies” — taken from “cupid” — preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads who soon were being handed out as carnival prizes and capering around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
      Cuteness and modern commercialization are linked.
      “In terms of Western culture, world culture in general, it’s definitely the rise of consumption and the nascent middle class able to afford trivial objects,” says Joshua Paul Dale.
      Still, kewpies followed the lines of actual human anatomy, more or less, the way that Mickey Mouse resembled an actual mouse when he first appeared on film in 1928. A half a century of fine-tuning made him much more infantile, a process naturalist Stephen Jay Gould famously described in his “biological homage” to Mickey. Gould observed that the mischievous and sometimes violent mouse of the late 1920s morphed into the benign, bland overseer of a vast corporate empire.  

Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie

     
     “He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty character of Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom,” Gould writes.
     In Japan, the national fascination with cuteness is traced to girls’ handwriting. Around 1970 schoolgirls in Japan began to imitate the caption text in manga comics, what was called koneko-ji, or “kitten writing.” By 1985, half of the girls in Japan had adopted the style, and companies marketing pencils, notebooks and other inexpensive gift items, like Sanrio, learned that these items sold better festooned with a variety of characters, the queen of whom is Hello Kitty.
     Her full name is Kitty White, named for Alice in Wonderland’s cat, Kitty. She has a family and lives in London (a fad for all things British hit Japan in the mid-1970s).
      That first Hello Kitty product — a vinyl coin purse — went on sale in 1975. Today, about $5 billion worth of Hello Kitty merchandise is sold annually. In Asia, there are Hello Kitty amusement parks, restaurants and hotel suites. EVA, the Taiwanese airline, flies half a dozen Hello Kitty-themed jets, that carry images of Hello Kitty and her friends not only on their hulls, but throughout the plane, from the pillows and antimacassars to, in the bathroom, toilet paper emblazoned with Hello Kitty’s face, a detail which an observer does not need to hold a doctorate in psychology to wonder about.
     Just as Barbie’s measurements drew critique from feminists and scholars, so Hello Kitty caught the interest of academics, especially in Japan, where the progress of women has lagged far behind that of other industrial nations. With girlishness a national obsession —  Japan did not ban possession of child pornography until 2014 — and its most popular female icon lacking a mouth, if cuteness does become a separate field, then, like porn studies, much credit has to be given to feminist pushback against what Hiroto Mursawa of Osaka Shoin Women’s University calls “a mentality that breeds non-assertion.”


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     “If your target is young women, it’s saturated,” says Hiroshi Nittono, of the market for cute products in Japan. That is certainly true. In an effort to stand out, some yuru-kyara are now made intentionally crude, or semi-frightening. There is a whole realm of kimo-kawaii, or “gross cute,” epitomized by Gloomy, a cuddly bear whose claws are red with the blood of his owner, whom he habitually mauls. Even Kumamon, beloved as he is, is still subject to a popular Internet meme where he is revealed as Satan in disguise.
     Because the practice of putting characters on products is so prevalent, and subject to resistance, Nittono, a placid, smiling man who wears an ascot, has been working with the government on developing products that are intrinsically cute. He asks to meet, not at his apartment or an academic office, but at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Hiroshima, where he is finishing up an academic tenure.
     For the past few years, Nittono and the government have been collaborating to develop cute items, a few of which are laid out on a table: a squat makeup brush, a bowl, a brazier, a few medallions and tiles. Given the mind-boggling array of cute merchandise available at shops in every mall around the world, it is not an overwhelming display of the ingenious synthesis of academe and government.
      Nittono’s group is exploring how cuteness can be used as a device to draw people toward products without blatant branding.
     “We use kawaii for such sentiment, feeling, kawaii things are not threatening, that is the most important part, small and not harmful,” says Nittono. “A high quality product is somewhat distant from the customers; it looks expensive. But if you put kawaii nuance on such product, maybe such items can be more approachable.”
     “If you have something cute, then you want to touch it, and then you see the quality of it,” adds Youji Yamashita, a ministry official.


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Date Tomito

 

     Objects can be unintentionally kawaii. With her husband Makoto, Date Tomito owns “Bar Pretty,” a tiny side street tavern in Hiroshima. Six people would be crowded sitting at the bar. Makoto comes in from the market bearing a small plant in a yellow pot, a present for his wife.
      “This is kawaii,’ Date says, holding the plant up, elaborating. “There are lots of different meanings for kawaii: ’cute,’ ‘small,’ ‘clumsy.’ Some things just have a cute shape.”
     She stresses something about kawaii.
     “It’s never bad,” she says. “I never use kawaii in an ironic way. Kawaii is kind of the best compliment. Around Japanese people, especially girls and women. They really like kawaii stuff and things.”
     Not that Japanese necessarily consider themselves kawaii. In a German study of 270,000 people in 22 countries, the Japanese came in dead last in being pleased with how they look. More than a third of the country, 38 percent, said they are “not at all satisfied” or “not very satisfied” with their personal appearance.
     Those surgical masks worn in public? Yes, to avoid colds, pollution and allergies. But ask Japanese women, and many will say that they wear them date masuku — “just for show.” Because they didn’t have time to put on their make-up, or because they don’t consider themselves cute enough, and they want a shield against the intrusive eyes of their crowded world.


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Harajuku Mikkoro

     One question that Joshua Dale agrees could be worth exploring in his new field is how cuteness is affected by duplication, by overload. One baby draws you in, a dozen send you fleeing. Cuteness doesn’t seem to work as well multiplied. In abundance, it can be overwhelming.
     Go to Harajuku, the fashion district not far from Dale’s apartment—which, perhaps significantly, is sparsely decorated, with nothing stereotypically “cute” on display. The stores are so crammed with kawaii merchandise, vast arrays of character faces and kitsch and glittering fashion accessories, it’s almost blinding.
     And for every Kumamon, for every popular yuru-kyara, there are a hundred Harajuku Mikkoros. A five foot tall yellow and brown bee, Harajuku Mikkoro stands on a sidewalk, celebrating Honey Bee Day by finishing up three hours of loitering in front of the Colombin Bakery and Café, greeting passersby, or trying to. Most barely glance in his direction and do not break stride, though some do come over and happily pose for the inevitable picture. There is no line.
     Harajuku Mikkoro is cute yet obscure, the common fate for most yuru-kyara. The city of Osaka has 45 different characters promoting its various aspects, and must fend off periodic calls for them to be culled, in the name of efficiency; one administrator piteously argued that the government officials who created these characters work hard on them and so would feel bad if they were discontinued.
     Harajuku Mikkoro is trying to avoid that fate.
     “He is not a success yet,” admits one of his handlers, distributing cubes of the café’s trademark honey cake. “Many are not as successful....”
     “...as Kumamon?”
     “We’re trying to be.”



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     Humanity has always embraced household gods — not the world-creating universal deity, but minor, more personal allies to soften what can be a harsh and lonely life. Not everyone has the friends he deserves, or the baby she’d cherish. Often people of both sexes are alone in the world.

     On Shimtori Street, in Kumamoto, is a second floor walk-up tavern, the KumaBar, so called because its décor consists entirely of Kumamon images: dozens of them, all sizes: figurines, dolls, signs, posters. He beams from bottles — Kumamoto-made beer and sake are featured here — and smiles from menus. Sitting at the bar is a full-size fiberglass Kumamon statue, with changeable eyes that, at the request of customers, the bartender will adjust to reflect advancing inebriation.
    KumaBar opens its doors at 7 p.m. the night before the birthday festival begins, and Rika Usui is waiting. She hurries in and grabs the stool at Kumamon’s right, orders a drink and pats his paw.
     She is, she says, a home economics teacher in Tokyo.
      Does she like Kumamon?
     “A lot,” she says.
     Why?
     “The way he moves,” she says, in Japanese. “He moves jerkily. He’s round and cute.”
      She does not like any of the other yuru-kyara.
      And her students? Do they like Kumamon too? They do, universally.
      “It doesn’t make a difference,” she says. “Girl or boy.”
     Usui has her picture taken with Kumamon, and spends a long time puzzling over the various Kumamon products for sale, glassware mostly, including one glass showing him sprawled on the ground, perhaps asleep. She eventually purchases a Kumamon kitchen apron.
     The bar begins to fill up. She does not talk to the arriving patrons, or even seem to notice them. Just before she leaves, she quietly turns and raises her glass to Kumamon’s lips to give her friend a quick little sip, and then is gone.

                                                                       *

Tamami Yazawa, performing as "LivePainter Gerutama."

                                                          

     Back at the UltraSuperNew gallery opening attended by Soma and his father, guests watch artist Tamami Yazawa in a frilly white miniskirt, draped in white feathers, with fuzzy leggings, an enormous yarn bow atop her head, her face painted white with a red flower on each cheek and blue dots running down her nose. She kneels in the gallery window and dabs at a teal and yellow painting that closely resembles finger-painting writ large.
     Her professional name is Gerutama, and she insists that, despite appearances, she is definitely not kawaii. She is a “LivePainter.” Some Japanese of both sexes reject kawaii—“fake” is a word often used. But they are in the minority. Japanese women still live in a culture where single women in their 30s are sometimes referred to as “leftover Christmas cake,” meaning that after the 25th — of December for cake, the 25th year for the women — they are past their expiration date, and hard to get rid of. Nobody wants either.
     “Kawaii is sickening,” says gallery-goer Stefhen Bryan, a Jamaican writer who lived for a decade in Japan and married a Japanese woman. “Kawaii is especially baby-like. If a woman acts like an adult in Japan, it’s an offense. Their self-esteem is nothing in this country. It’s all under the aegis of culture. It’s low self-esteem en masse.”
     Without question. But there is also more going on with cuteness than just the training wheels that help keep a sexist culture from toppling over, more than just conditioning girls to survive in a world dominated by men, or a tactic to hotwire biology in order to sell change purses and motor scooters. A very human need is also being filled. Teddy bears exist because the night is dark and long and at some point mom and dad have to go to bed and leave you. There is real comfort in cuteness.
     “Filling in an emotional need is exactly where kawaii plays a significant role,” writes Christine R. Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific. “Even in America, journalist Nicholas Kristof has written of an ‘empathy gap’ in today's society. He points to the place of objects that may be considered promoters of ‘happiness,’ ‘solace,’ ‘comfort.’ When a society needs to heal, it seeks comfort in the familiar. And often the familiar may reside in ‘cute.’ Witness the use of teddy bears as sources of comfort for firefighters in the wake of NYC's 9-11. So I see kawaii things as holding the potential as empathy generators.”
     Kumamon is a power station of empathy generation. In the weeks after the Kumamoto earthquake, Kumamon was so necessary that in his absence his fans simply conjured him up themselves, independently, as an object of sympathy, a tireless savior, an obvious hero.
     And then the bear himself returned. Three weeks after the April 14 earthquake, Kumamon visited the convention hall of the hard-hit town of Mashiki, where residents were still sleeping in their cars for protection as one of the 1,200 tremors continued to rumble across the area. The visit was reported on TV in the papers, as news, as if a long sought survivor had stumbled out of the wreckage, alive.
     The children, many who lost their homes in the earthquake, flocked around him, squealing, hugging, shaking hands, taking pictures.
     “It’s so fluffy and cute,” said Suzuha Araki, 5, smiling.


                                                        # # #

     

The duped believe the scam with all their hearts

     At New Year’s 1993, outgoing President George H.W. Bush, on his way to Russia, visited the American troops he had sent to Somalia three weeks earlier. He toured a hospital and spent a total of 10 hours in the country.
     If you’re wondering what that historical blip has to do with anything, especially our chaotic presidential race, remember last week when I introduced you to my Cleveland

I had to ask, "Are you sincere?" He was.

cabbie. I mentioned he is voting for Donald Trump but didn’t get the chance to share his reply when I asked why a black Muslim would do such a thing.
     He said that Bush visited Somalia and thus most Somalis vote Republican. The cabbie waved off other considerations that Trump would ban Muslims like himself from the country or that Bush himself isn’t supporting Trump. The cabbie offered up the fiction that Trump had recanted and apologized, which he certainly hasn’t.
     His answer set the tone for Cleveland. Everyone I spoke with seemed motivated by an equally nonsensical rationale: Black Lives Matter protesters who aren’t voting because our country isn’t equal yet. Jews supporting Trump despite his cracking open the Pandora’s Box of bigotry because they prefer his stand on Israel to Hillary Clinton’s. Those who are voting for neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton because the most important things in this election is for them to preserve their own moral purity.

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Review #2

 
  I'll admit, I was not familiar with ForeWord Reviews—a magazine that focuses on independent bookstores. But I was pleased and impressed with their review of the new book, which comes out in about six weeks. I thought the reviewer really captured the tone and spirit of the book. This will be in the fall issue. 
   

The bridges of Cleveland

     As a child, I was terrified of the bridges in Cleveland. I have a hunch why. They must have loomed into my subconscious during our family's regular drives from the suburban flatlands of the West Side to the industrial East Side to visit my grandmother. As we drove across them, they vectored out in all directions, the city a vista of factories and steelwork and smokestacks, with no comforting ground in sight. I would have nightmares about these bridges: me, lying sprawled face down on the deck of a bridge, without guardrails, as it quickly lowered like the elevator of an aircraft carrier. They were so scary I remembered them for the rest of my life.

     Maybe it was because there are so many Cleveland bridges: more than 100 within Cleveland proper. And Cleveland bridges are enormous. The city sits on a series of bluffs that rise steeply from the lakeshore, requiring bridges that can span a half mile, a mile, or longer.

View from the Veterans Memorial Bridge

     Chicago bridges are puny by comparison, as dictated by the easy hop from one sandy bank, over the trickle of a Chicago River, to the marshland on the other side, barely above the water itself.  The Wabash Avenue Bridge is 345 feet across. 

     Compare that to Cleveland's Main Avenue Bridge, running a mile and a half—8,000 feet across.  Chicago bridges are mainly bascule bridges—bisected stubs that open and close—while Cleveland's are high fixed spans, huge multi-deck concrete viaducts, steel edifices, along with lift bridges with their massive superstructures.

     I was covering the convention last week, not studying bridges. Though of course I saw them, and thought about my unease about them. Then suddenly, at one point, Wednesday night, before dinner, I found myself standing at the foot of the Veterans Memorial Bridge at sunset and, sensing my opportunity, impulsively decided to walk to the other side, a journey of some 3/4 of a mile. 

     It was not stressful. A lovely summer evening stroll. There was little traffic—you'd have to be insane to drive into downtown at that point—and I easily scampered across the four lanes to see the view from the other side. It wasn't isolated though—other pedestrians and bicyclists were there as well. I was rewarded with beautiful views of the city on both sides. 

      The Veterans Memorial Bridge's steel span is 591 feet long, and contains 4250 tons of steel, the work all fabricated by the King Bridge Co. of Cleveland, founded in 1858, which built three of Chicago's earliest bridges, which no longer exist.

Hope Memorial Bridge

     There was nothing scary about the walk across the bridge, no sense of vertigo, no fear of the railings. I felt I was finally making my peace with Cleveland bridges, and that they'd trouble me no more. 

      That really is the only way: address what frightens you, overcome it. Had I just stood there and stared, trembling, at the bridge and not crossed it, had I fled in fear, were this were a screed, railing ignorantly against the scariness of bridges, cataloguing their proven dangers, that would be, well, in a word, stupid.

      The next day, I found myself on a march across the even more beautiful Hope Memorial Bridge—named for Bob Hope's father, a stone mason in Cleveland., I considered my trek across Hope Memorial as a kind of reward for conquering my fears. Then again, there is usually a reward in overcoming your baseless anxieties toward unobjectionable entities like bridges. I only wish the people at the Quicken Loans Arena could figure that one out.  

     

     

It's always smart to pop into the library

     At the risk of suggesting that I wasn't Johnny-on-the-spot in Cleveland, I did, to quote the Tammany Hall hacks, see my opportunities and took 'em. Killing time between the 1:30 p.m. protest fizzle and the 6 p.m. protest squib (all the hard core protesters stayed home, I realized belatedly, saving themselves to flock to Philadelphia to howl at Hillary for not being Bernie Sanders) I saw that the Cleveland Public Library had Shakespeare's First Folio on display, so popped in to take a look, 20 minutes before the place closed.

     It was just a book, open to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and I couldn't photograph it anyway. But the special collections department had a number of interesting displays, such as the spread of campaign literature above, or gems from its John G. White Collection of Chess Memorabilia. I particularly liked the "Sultan Peppah: Gourmet Chess Set," not an artwork, but a mass market gift item sold 20 years ago. The collection has over 30,000 books and bound periodicals, with everything from Bobby Fischer's score sheets to Emanuel Lasker's medals.
    I mentioned the Lewis chessmen — a personal favorite, and they pointed with pride to their British Museum reproduction which is, I was pleased to note, exactly the same reproduction as my father brought back for me from London in the mid-1970s, a few pieces at a time, since he took so many trips there.
     The Cleveland Public Library is looking good, in part thanks to Cracking Art, an Italian art cooperative that has installed enormous, brightly-colored creatures around downtown, including a pair of bright sky blue birds in front of the library — I probably wouldn't have noticed that the First Folio, the least interesting part, was inside, had I not stopped to admire the big birds.
    They also have a card catalogue, and we talked about that. The librarian said though they've stopped adding to it about 2004, they still use it, as many of the notions are in a variety of foreign language and they have not had the resources to digitize it, a blessing, as we fans of Nicholson Baker know, because the cards carry all sort of information — scrawled on the backs, for instance — that tend to get lost in the rush to get them online. (Baker wrote a piece in the New Yorker, "Discards," in...ulp ... 1994, as a call to arms to stop disposing of these records, an argument he extended to bound newspapers in general and the British Library in particular in his cri de coeur, Double Fold). 
     Besides, the cabinets are really beautiful, are they not? 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

   It's been a busy week. Not only in Cleveland for the convention, but last weekend, Dallas, which made for four flights in seven days. Whew. Then again, the whole year has been like that, jetting around from Japan to Joshua Tree. Not complaining—it's fun to go new places, and keeps life interesting, as well as providing fodder for the Saturday challenge.
     With that in mind, who is this guy, waving with such stolid affability? And where is he? While I can't hope to stump you, as I did last week for the first time, he's obscure enough, at least now, that I can hope you won't just see his face, snap your fingers and go, "Of course! It's good old..."  I had enough hope to airbrush out the name of the building, which was generic, but still gave a way the game on Google. So maybe I won't have to go to the trouble of putting a prize in the post, which this week is ... well, let's go with the 2015 poster. I really have to get rid of those things, and don't want to just burn them. 
     Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

If a protest falls on a bridge and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a noise?

The largest protest march at the Republican National  Convention Thursday, in context.

     Good to be home, and have a chance to catch up with a few postings that didn't make it here. Such as this, which is in today's Sun-Times. I'm pleased that though the New York Times had two reporters working the march and the day's protests, their article missed what I believe is a salient point: there were no observers whatsoever, beyond press and media. 
     I also just enjoyed walking across the bridge, right down the yellow line—how often to you get the chance?—and seeing the "Guardians of Traffic" protectively clutching their various modes of conveyance. 

     CLEVELAND—The protesters were there, about 200 meeting at the historic Hope Memorial Bridge, just west of downtown Thursday, the last day of the Republican National Convention.
     The signs were there, “Don’t Trump America” and “Stop Trump” and “Our Political System is Sick”— the protest was organized by Stand Together Against Trump, or “STAT,” formed by medical personnel.

      There were medics and Amnesty International observers and volunteers from Seeds for Peace handing out water and chunks of homemade banana bread.
     There were megaphones, used to shout chants, such as the classic, oddly syncopated, “The people, united, will never be defeated! The people, united, will never be defeated.”
Many media, even more police, everything you’d expect at a protest. Except for one thing:
     There were no bystanders; nobody there to see it.
     The march proceeded across the mile-long bridge, past a pair of art deco stone pylons with their "Guardians of Traffic" scowling indifferently, across the uninterested Cuyahoga River, and beyond apathetic mills and industrial wasteland, past the east guardians, also blasé, and then through the ubiquitous eight-foot tall metal fencing found anywhere near the Quicken Loans Arena, where the convention itself is taking place.

"Without reading, you don't have access to freedom"

     There were actually some very positive things going on at the Republican National Convention, so long as you kept your attention away from what was happening inside Quicken Loans Arena.           

     CLEVELAND—Even in a Public Square jammed with colorful advocates of every cause, both marginal and mainstream, Jonathan Harris stood out. 
     "I'm spreading the love of reading," said the branch manager of the Aurora Memorial Public Library in Portage County, whose jerry-rigged bookmobile—a milk crate filled with paperbacks strapped to the back of his bike—was simple yet effective.
     No sooner had Harris paused before the Terminal Tower when M'Ryah Holmes, 11, and her sister Rameerah, 10, were upon him, eagerly looking through his selection, being given away to anyone who would take them.
     Why do they like to read?

Mavis Holmes with daughters M'Ryah, (left) and Rameerah.

     "They don't have no choice," said their mother, Mavis Holmes, with a steely inflection that suggested much get-your-butt-in-that-chair-and-read guidance on her part.
    Why is reading important?
     "The reason it's very important is for them to understand their civil rights," said Holmes, an assistant instructor at a high school. "To get an education and understand the process. You can't have access to freedom without being literate. Without reading, you don't have access to freedom."
     An hour later I ran into Harris in the park next to Public Square, when he stopped his bike for Muireall Brown, 19, of Florida.
     "Do you have anything?" she asked.
     "What do you like to read?" asked Harris. His white baseball cap declared "Make America Read Again" and Babar the elephant peeked out from the tattoo on his right bicep. Harris has been working in libraries since he was 16—his father Mike was also a librarian. 
     "I like a lot of historical-fiction," Brown said.
     This is kind of a busman's holiday for him—taking off work as a librarian to peddle a bike around, working as a librarian. Why?
     "It gives me a chance to talk about reading, about libraries, about funding.
     Brown didn't find a book she liked. But a fellow medic—she was at the convention with Rust Belt Medics, tending to cases of sunburn and dehydration among the protesters—did find a book to his liking.
    "The Time Machine by H.G. Wells," said Taylor Morris, 26, of Atlanta. "I almost took the prequel to Dune that Frank Herbert's son wrote. But I didn't want to take too many books."
       
    
     

Cops on bikes wall off chaos at Cleveland convention

 

  

     The flood-the-zone technique the police are using to control protest at the Republican National Convention is not without its hazards: I watched how a scuffle that broke out after an attempted flag burning turned into a densely-packed mob scene that might have been more dangerous than the incident that sent scores of cops—and members of the media—running to the same spot. (The would-be flag burner, for fans of divine justice, ended up setting fire to his pants, and 18 were arrested in the resultant scuffle. I did not see the incident itself, so can't judge whether 10 cops would have handled it more easily than 100; my hunch is that more isn't always necessarily better). 

    But in the main, it has been very effective for the first three days of the convention, and watching it in action, I thought I would try to describe what struck me as its most noteworthy feature, the use of bicycles as a crowd-control device.

     CLEVELAND — The Bible Believers are back, standing at the edge of Public Square, haranguing the crowd.
     “Your parents hated you,” screams one, through a megaphone. “They spared the rod! They sent you to public schools! Look at you now! You’re pathetic in the eyes of God!”
     The crowd shouts back, makes obscene gestures, pushes closer for a better look.
     Within minutes, Cleveland police start rolling their bicycles around the speaker and his cohort.
     “Make way, make way,” says one. Soon there are 80 officers with bicycles circling the platform, separating the incendiary group from the rest of the square.
     It’s called the “Barrier Technique” and was pioneered by the Seattle police department, which sent officers to Cleveland to train its 280 bicycle cops. The convention is the first time they’ve used the tactic, to direct marchers, to close off streets, and diffuse angry crowds. If the Republican National Convention’s last day ends as peacefully as the first three, credit will go first to the police — 4,500 from 40 departments across the country, though not Chicago (“They have their own problems to worry about,” quipped one high Cleveland police official).
     But the humble bicycle, skillfully deployed, also deserves praise.
     “Absolutely wonderful,” agrees a Cleveland police officer. “Saved the day.”

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"Father God, Bless Mark and his family...."

     Officer Mark Young and seven fellow officers from the equestrian unit of the Fort Worth Police Department drove with their mounts from Texas to Cleveland this week. As they lined up in front of the Terminal Tower, as part of 4,500 police officers providing security for the Republican National Convention, they were approached by Cathie Burson, of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, a member of Hope Is Here, an organization that brought 100 of the faithful to the convention to pray with people they encounter here. She thanked Off. Young for being here, protecting everybody, and asked if she could pray with him. He said yes.
    "Father God," she began, "bless Mark and his family and all your fellow officers." When she was done praying with him, she asked if there was anything I wanted to pray for. I thought about it, and told her that my mother is worried about me, being in the thick of the protests, and perhaps we could pray for my safety, with her in mind, and we did. It was a nice, quiet moment, and a few minutes later, when I found the Bible Believers in the square, again, spewing their Bible-based poisonous hatred, I was glad I had run into people who were trying to use their faith for good, to aid and comfort humanity instead of harassing it.  Isn't that what religion is supposed to be all about?

"Go back to Latinoland"

     
     I've been writing so much from Cleveland — two columns and a news story just yesterday — that I've fallen behind posting the stories on the blog. This is from the first day, and I wanted to get it up before time and subsequent events mooted it. While many protesters are kids lost in street theater or loons on a lark, I was impressed with this young lady's quiet fortitude and sincerity in the face of the indifference and hostility of those surging past her.

Patricia Eguino 

     CLEVELAND — Patricia Eguino stood near the gates of the Republican National Convention, holding a small white sign with green letters: “Latinos against Trump.”
     “I’m completely against Donald Trump,” said the 27-year-old who was born in New York City but lived in Bolivia and whose parents are Hispanic. “I don’t understand racism.”
     By Monday evening, she had been outside the Quicken Loans Arena, buffeted by passing delegates, for five hours.
     “I wish more Latinos were here, more protestors,” she said. “I feel lonely.”
     But the protesters in the Stop Trump march numbered fewer than 400, not the “nearly 1,000” that organizer Mick Kelly claimed, nor the thousands he predicted earlier. Beside the march, protests tended to be scattered, with the media crowding around the more flamboyant individuals, like performance artist Vermin Supreme, wearing his boot hat and rambling about his pony-based economic system, or a man in a polar bear suit drawing attention to global warming. Far more visible was the massive police presence. Squads of officers from around the country were stationed on every corner, or so it seemed.

     There were certainly protesters to be found at the convention. A “Coalition to Stop Trump” made up of students, Black Lives Matter activists, trade and anti-war protesters marched down East 9th Street to War Memorial Plaza on Monday afternoon, where they were confronted by Christian extremists, who displayed signs condemning gays and Muslims and hurled grotesque, sexually-explicit insults at the crowd. The police quickly moved in, using their bicycles to form a barrier between the groups.
     Eguino, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, wished more of her fellow students had come, but understood why they didn't.
     "They were scared," she said. "Of violence."
     Eguino heard "a lot of racist comments."
     "People told me, 'Go back to Mexico,' 'Go back to Latinoland,'" she said.
     Trump supporters also rallied, and at least one carried a semi-automatic rifle. But their fierce antagonism toward dissent was not in evidence, though in light of the "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" signs plastered on the street, perhaps take that with a grain of salt.
     Jim Gilmore, an author and motivational speaker from Chesterland, Ohio, walked down Euclid Avenue wearing a t-shirt proclaiming "DUMP TRUMP" in big bold letters, but was not harassed by the Trump faithful. He said he wore the shirt more as a lark than a protest against Trump, though he described himself as "a Republican who doesn't like him."
     "It feels like a ghost town," he said. "It's not a vibrant atmosphere."

Protesters don't hate Trump enough to vote for Hillary

 

Tom Moore

      CLEVELAND — The Republican National Convention was about to nominate Donald J. Trump as its candidate for president. So naturally the protesters milling around Public Square had something to say about the party and its champion.
     “I’m here because Donald Trump and the GOP stand for racism misogyny, homophobia, violence,” said Tom Moore, 24, of Massachusetts, holding a handmade cardboard sign reading “GRAND OLD PARTY, SAME OLD KLAN.”
     “Not that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have her own track record with racist violence,” added Moore, who wore a green T-shirt, an orange batik skirt, and combat boots. “Hillary Clinton advocates racist hate, but there’s no one like the GOP.”
     So which one is he going to vote for?
     “I’m going to vote for Jill Stein.”
     The Green Party candidate. But isn’t that just a vote for Donald Trump by proxy?
     “It is a terrible gamble,” he admitted.
     At a colorful mosh pit of belief, where you can't swing a cat and not hit some kind of oddball performance artist, fringe constitutional theorist or foaming religious zealot, perhaps the rarest opinions are proud Hillary Clinton supporters. Those who admit voting for her, maybe, are not exactly gushing with praise.
     Erika Husby, 24, of Chicago, wore a rectangular smock painted with orange bricks and "WALL OFF TRUMP" painted in blue.
     Does this mean she's supporting Clinton?
    "Probably," she said, looking stricken. "I think that I will, sadly and bitterly."
     Oskar Mosco, 35, a rickshaw driver (if such a thing is possible) from Santa Barbara, Calif., held a sign that said, "JUST SAY NO! TO WHITE SUPREMACY."
     "I want to be able to say to my kids and grandkids that I took a stand," he said.
     Does that stand include voting for Clinton?
     "I haven't decided between Dr. Jill Stein and [Libertarian candidate] Gary Johnson," he said, rejecting the idea that it has to be either the Republican or the Democrat or a wasted vote.
     "I don't want to support dualistic thinking," he said. "The world is not black and white. There's gray."
     What's wrong with Hillary Clinton?
     "I think she's a wolf in sheep's clothing," he said. "She's the 1 percent."
     But persistence pays off, and finally I located Haley Corradi, 24, a high school math teacher from Minnesota who held a sign reading "LOVE TRUMPS HATE" across a background of rainbow stripes.
     Was she planning on voting for Hillary Clinton?
     "Definitely," she said, smiling broadly.

Protests, non-voters and a linty-fresh Donald Trump

Sandy Buffie and friend. 

Melissa Brown

     CLEVELAND — No one goes to the 2016 Republican National Convention expecting to encounter a life-size bust of Donald Trump constructed out of 30 gallons of dryer lint held together with two gallons of glue.
     But it makes perfect sense when you do.
     “At the end of the week, I’ll take the best offer,” said the artist who created it, Sandy Buffie, who said that the money will benefit the Center for Arts Inspired Learning, which organizes activities for kids including, aptly enough, an anti-bullying program.
    
     Welcome to Cleveland, where the streets are alive with acres of t-shirts praising the take-it-to-the-bank GOP nominee Donald Trump and castigating his certain opponent, Hillary Clinton, as a hellion who should be in prison: on some shirts, she already is. There are cross-wielding preachers, $1 iced water vendors, 100 Indiana State Troopers in their “Smokey Bear” hats, plus thousands of officers from around the country augmenting Cleveland’s lean force. Delegates in suits, media in shorts and a general funhouse effect, though the city is reacting with pride.
     “You know the convention’s there?” asked Melissa Brown, riding the No. 75 bus toward downtown Cleveland. Assured her new friend did, and asked what she thought of it, Brown, “old enough to know better and young enough to do something about it,” said: “It’s great. You got all political views and bring a little money to the city. Everybody’s happy. It’s a win-win.”
     Not that the hoopla is going to gull her into voting. Brown, who is African-American, isn't supporting either Trump or Hillary Clinton.
"The only way I'd vote is if Jesus Christ put his name on the ballot," she said, explaining that her church, the Church on the Rise in Westlake, is handing out "Elect Jesus" banners.
     Brown exits the bus, gets aboard a red line Rapid Transit train to Tower City, the hectic hub of the convention. She takes a seat behind Mike Tallentire, 27, who works the third shift restocking a Walmart Supercenter in North Olmsted, Ohio. He used his day off to handprint a lengthy statement on a white t-shirt, a quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the need for immigrants to assimilate in this country. Then he headed downtown to attend an America First sponsored by Citizens for Trump.
     "He just seems the lesser of two evils," Tallentire says, doing a balancing gesture with his hands. But as he speaks, he warms to Trump.
     "He's a businessman not a politician," said Tallentire. "So maybe he can do something about the deficit that never seems to go down."
     And the more extreme statements of Trump's, about immigration and such?
     "The media twists his words around."
     Take Ahmer Mohamed, a Cleveland cab driver for 17 years. He's black, and a Muslim, and voting for Trump. That bit about barring Muslims at the border?
     "He's changing his mind," said Mohamed. "He's not against Muslims. He's against enemies. He's said he's sorry. He's OK now. Lot of people have a bad idea, that he's a nasty racist. He's a strong guy."

The circus is in town, and that town is Cleveland

     "There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging," H.L. Mencken wrote in 1924. "It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell — and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."
     Take comfort, then, that the spectacle that will unfold this week in Cleveland is not an unprecedented descent into madness, not a radical departure from the stately decorum we like to imagine our forefathers exhibited when conducting political business. Just the same old craziness in a new box.
     That said, given Donald Trump's genius for attracting the carnival fringes of American life, the Republican National Convention, beginning in Cleveland on Monday, promises to be a circus on an epic scale.
     Ring One is the candidate himself, whose off-the-cuff pronouncements are — take your pick:
     A) a refreshing breeze of candor wafting into our sealed room of political correctness.
     B) terrifying blasts of hate and demagoguery that would tear our nation apart if anyone took them seriously. (Spoiler alert: It's "B.")

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Let it go

     A woman called my office.  From Northbrook. She started by explaining that she had already contacted a local reporter, but the local reporter "wouldn't touch" her story. Now it was my turn. 
     The story involved a minor traffic accident, maybe six months ago. Or longer. Something she had witnessed, perhaps. She was driving, in line to make a left hand turn. A black van, in front of her, pulled back and veered to the right, across traffic. The car in front of that, was a Mercedes. A kid in the passenger seat turned around and looked at her.
     The story pelted me like a sudden rain. When she got home, she heard from the police. She had been reported for leaving the scene of an accident. The driver of the Mercedes thought it was her, and not the black van, that had hit them.  The caller said the police came to her home to see her car was undamaged, but she ended up signing a ticket saying she had failed to reduce speed to avoid an accident. It didn't quite stack up, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Detail piled upon detail. Complaints to the mayor. The chief of police. I was obviously the end of a very long chain of woe.  She wanted to make sure this never happened to anyone ever again. She said that several times.
     I tried to get a word in, but she wasn't having it. 
     This is a story that I call "a dog's breakfast"—a jumbled collection of glop. It would never go in the paper. To do so, I'd have to contact the police, find the other driver, and for what? A traffic ticket that may or may not have been issued fairly. 
     Obviously very important to her, though. I listened. She mentioned a husband—that's good, somebody helping her out, maybe. And a daughter, a cop somewhere else. Also good.
    Eventually I had to break in. 
    "You called me," I interrupted her in mid-sentence. "Don't you want to hear what I have to say?"
     She paused, startled. I told her I didn't think it would ever get into the newspaper, because, while important to her, it wasn't the kind of story that anyone else would be interested in. Even though she thought she was treated very badly by the police.
     "People think it only happens to black people, but it happens to white people too," she said, exaggerating the harm done to her.  In fact, no harm, other than having to hire a lawyer and months of worry, seemed to have happened.
    "How did it end?" I asked. "How did the court case end?"
    The woman she supposedly hit never showed up in court and the case was dismissed.
    Really not a story at all. But something that filled her world. I could see that. I tried to be sympathetic, to not shut her down. 
    I told the woman, she should have her daughter call me.
    "She doesn't want her name in the paper," she said.
    "I'm not putting anything in the paper," I said. "At least not right now. I just want to hear her perspective on this." 
     "She's in Denmark, on vacation," she snapped. 
     "I'm not in any rush," I replied.
     Asking for the daughter seemed to change her tone.
     "I feel like I'm wasting your time and you're wasting my time," she said.
     I agreed, and gave her a piece of parting advice.
    "I can see how this has been a stressful and difficult situation," I said. "But you should let it go now."
     I asked her how long she had lived in Northbrook. She said 30 years. If this is the bad thing that is going to happen in Northbrook, I'd say she's doing pretty well. But it wasn't the only bad thing. There was another misfortune, even greater than this one, and she started in on that.  I won't tell you anything about that, but it was a true tragedy. 
     I told her I was sorry for her troubles and got off the phone. 
    After hanging up, I chewed on what had happened. There was an injustice, in this woman's mind. And she wasn't letting go. Instead, she was living in this bad thing that supposedly happened to her, gnawing on the details, suffering anew each time. Maybe motivated by this actual tragedy that she hadn't let go of either, years ago.  
    Let it go. Easy advice to give. Hard advice to take.  I believe it takes practice, stiff-arming worries and complaints that you'd like to embrace hard and hold onto. Don't. Let it go. Bad things happen to everybody, minor annoyances and great tragedies and yes, sometimes you have to seek elusive justice, and pursue it over the years, and I'm not saying that isn't sometimes important. But the things people cling to are often complaints that will never find resolution. All you can do is put them away, eventually.  Life is precious, and short, and most of us have it pretty good, if you see how other people live, trapped in cages of their own making. Let it go.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I'm traveling today, so I didn't want a fun activity that would be solved too easily, since I can't supervise the contest this morning, and probably won't check in until mid-afternoon (so be nice). 
     Where is this man? Bonus points for who he is, and what he's doing. It isn't simple, but it shouldn't be that hard either. 
     Good luck, have fun, place your guesses below. And the winner gets ... heck, the posters are getting tiresome. How about a copy of "Complete & Utter Failure"? I think that will serve.

Trying to finish their work

     The fearful fascist thrills to terror attacks, such as Thursday night's horror in Nice, France, where nearly 100 Bastille Day revelers were mowed down by a truck. Newt Gingrich was on Fox News immediately, calling for Muslim American citizens to be deported (where?) if they believe in Sharia law. Before 6 a.m. Friday, stuff like this was showing up in my email.

     What do u think Neil now that there is more blood on your hands this morning? Do you get a bonus from President Axelrod or from Stooge Balack Hussein? Since ur on Balacks inside, no pun intended, describe to me Balacks day, would you? I bet he didn't sleep a wink, he was so exhilarated that his religion has killed more innocent people? I picture him having a cafe au lait, playing 2 rounds of golf, he is giddy, smoking 2 joints after, then maybe some French pastries, all while wearing a beret. We gotta get Loretta over there for some serious hugging. That's what the Islamic terrorists need, is big big hugs. As u promote live and understanding and If only Loretta had been around hugging Hitler, maybe you wouldn't be here today? Ever think of that, sellout? —Vince DiBenedetto

     I thought a moment -- there is so little of that nowadays -- and replied like this:

Dear Mr. DiBenedetto:Does it ever occur to you that you are reacting exactly as they intend? It's like you're giving money to ISIS. How does that feel? I can tell you how it looks. Horrible. And you signed your name to it.
Thanks for writing.

     Why is it, when the Western way of life is attacked, that some people respond by trying to abandon the Western way of life? Yes, they're terrifying. But isn't our duty as Americans NOT to be terrified? Not to react blindly in terror, lashing out at each other? Gingrich and his ilk, it's as if they're in league with the terrorists, trying to finish their work.

Picking the wallpaper in Hell

                       

     Mike Pence.
     Ah, hahahahahaha.
     Well, if there is anyone in America still wondering what the 2016 election is all about — and those people seem to exist, though I can't imagine how — Donald Trump's all-but-official choice for vice president, Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, ought to nudge them toward making up their minds.
     Pence is Trump's Christian Soldier, the man Trump hopes will march with him onward to the White House. Pence has called himself "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” The Indiana governor is the guy who last year vigorously defended a state law designed to allow Hoosier businessmen to express their contempt for gays and lesbians, provided they could gin up a religion-based justification. The law's immediate effect was to cost Indiana millions, as large corporations — which have learned the gays-are-employees-and-customers lesson so elusive to Republican leaders — scrambled for the exits.
     Pence also signed one of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the country, one that would force a woman who had an abortion to pick out a little Twinkie-sized mahogany coffin to bury her aborted fetus in or pay for cremation, her choice.
     Mike Pence! Not a lot of ambiguity there. Do I sound gleeful? Honestly, I'm disappointed. I was pulling for Newt Gingrich as the sentimental favorite.

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"Bags?! We don't have BAGS!"

     Authors are often portrayed as being intensely jealous of each other's success, and maybe some are. But I take genuine pleasure in the accomplishments of my writer friends. My former landlady is Carol Weston, the author of the "Ava and Pip" trio of young adult novels, delightfully blending together wordplay and the challenges of growing up. I was thrilled to hear that the three books will be sold bound into one volume at Costco as "The Diaries of Ava Wren."
    Not only is it good for Carol, but good for Costco, which has grown in stature in my eyes. The days when I go there grudgingly, cringing, and think of those space fatties on their scooters in "Wall-E" are long gone. Now I know they've got great salmon, and usually the best prices. 
     Still, Henri Bendel it is not. And when I heard the good news, I couldn't help think of this column from seven years ago, when I juxtaposed the two shopping experiences. 

     Once upon a time, there was a store on North Michigan Avenue called Henri Bendel. It was a fancy New York clothing shop exclusively for ladies, but occasionally I would venture inside to buy a present for my wife.

    A clerk — think Audrey Hepburn — would glide over and ask if I needed help. I certainly did need help, and enjoyed slipping into the role of the Befuddled Male in a Woman's World — think Cary Grant, except without the looks.
     Together we would peer into various display cases, and she would hold up various garments, and I would settle on a purchase. Sure it was expensive, but as I always said, "At Henri Bendel, you pay for the service — the fact they also give you something is just an added bonus."
     All too soon I would be walking out of the store with an elaborately tissue-papered and boxed and gift-wrapped silk scarf or smart little hat, in a little chocolate and white striped bag, delicate as a debutante's purse, which I would proudly parade through the springtime warmth of Michigan Avenue (her birthday is in May, so it was always spring).
     Oh sure, inevitably I had to take the present back — the hat was wrong, or the scarf was wrong, and the whole thing cost far, far too much anyway, in her eyes. But that was OK because I got to return the item, with apologies and smiles and mutual understanding, another little Noel Coward play in the returns department.
     All this remembrance drifted back last week under the high white lights of Costco in Glenview. My wife, also a generous soul, in her fashion, had purchased for me a stylish black Calvin Klein jacket, all wool, a steal at $55.95 But it was too large, and I volunteered to return it and get the size smaller.
     The transaction was handled by a slack-faced clerk who met my attempt at conversation with blank silence. I entered the vast warehouse to try on the jacket in a smaller size. Gazing around — there are no mirrors in a Costco — I waited until a fellow customer came by, a woman pushing one of those immense carts. Again playing the Befuddled Male, I asked her whether this jacket fit. She said yes, but in the mechanical way that hypnotized people speak in movies — "Yehhhhhhhs" -- and without actually looking at me or breaking stride.
     I figured I'll look in a mirror at home.          
     While I was there, I wandered the aisles. Costco might be as familiar to you as your living room, but it's still new to me — someplace I first went to, under protest, five years ago and have been back to maybe once a year since.           

     The land of Brobdingnag, no question — giant jars of mayonnaise, triple boxes of breakfast cereal, tubfuls of apple juice you could bathe in. The deal seems to be: You buy a month's worth of product, we shave 20 percent off the price.
     Fair enough, if you abandon the idea of shopping as a social act. I picked up four cans of shaving cream, shrink-wrapped into a slab, and a few other toiletries, plus a package of socks and the smaller jacket.
     I paid the clerk, who deposited the toiletries and the socks and the jacket into the cart, nudging it past the register. I looked at the items, jumbled in the cart.
     "Could I have a bag please?" I asked.
     "Bags?" the clerk exclaimed, in a tone of surprise and contempt. "Bags! We don't have bags." He looked at me for the first time, as if to see what manner of person was in front of him, this bag-asking man. "We have boxes. Over there."
     It was here that I remembered Henri Bendel — well, right after thinking of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." ("Badges! We don't need no stinkin' badges!")
     I selected a box, emblazoned with "THE FAT BURNING POWER OF CONCENTRATED GREEN TEA EXTRACT," put the stuff into it and, holding the box awkwardly in my arms, headed in shame to the car.
     The jacket fit, but the sleeves were too long, and the seamstress couldn't shorten them. Two days later, I returned to Costco.
     "I remember you from Monday!" I said brightly, to the slack-faced returns lady. She didn't react at all. I proceeded into the store. My wife wanted canola oil.
     I picked up a gallon, and noticed the brand name, "Kirkland Signature." That sounded familiar. Oh yes. But could it be? I hurried to the clothing area. "Kirkland signature" shirts. I looked up. Huge signs at the back: "Kirkland MEATS." "Kirkland BAKERY."
     This seemed so wrong. A feeling akin to horror — like the discovery that Soylent Green is people — crawled over my skin. Shirts produced by an oil company. Hot dogs turned out by a bakery.
     I tried to comfort myself — Trader Joe's brands everything with its name. But "Trader Joe's" is the name of the store. Who or what is "Kirkland"? (The town in Washington, it turns out, where Costco used to be headquartered). Is that supposed to be elegant?
     I bought the Kirkland oil. The snow was blowing horizontally outside, and I got a frozen handful of it slapped into my ear as I quickstepped to the car, wondering: How did that jaunty man in his mid-30s, happily squiring his brown and white striped bag down the Boul Mich in springtime, end up in this wintery parking lot?
     Henri Bendel closed its Michigan Avenue store in 1998.

Justice Ginsburg snaps at the bait

    

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

     I once had an editor who I once described this way: "He's not only timid, but inspires timidity in others."
     That's how leadership works. You act a certain way, and people see it, and follow your example, either because they like your style, or to curry favor, or because your actions, performed by a person in a position of authority, lend them a certain unspoken permission.
     That is what we are seeing with Donald Trump, who has made bullying and personal attack an even more common part of American politics than they already were, which is saying a lot. 

      Not only does every knuckle-dragging hater now feel free to stand up and walk the streets of our social discourse, but you get respected people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, denouncing Trump as a "faker" and worse, an action legal experts consider at best unwise, since it calls her impartiality into question should, say, the 2016 election end up before the high court the way the 2000 election did.
     You can see why it happened. Trump candidacy poses an existential crisis to any patriotic American, and credit must be given to the Bushes, Mitt Romney, Dan Webb, and other rock-ribbed Republicans who also denounced him, and went on record that they just could not support Trump, no matter what the GOP did. Ginsburg also felt she had to denounce Trump as the looming disaster he without question is.
     Of course, once you do that, you're playing Trump's game. He immediately attacked Ginsburg as a "a disgrace to the Court" and demanded that she resign.
     "It's so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that," Trump continued, and we know we have strayed into a particularly surreal realm when Trump is delivering lectures on dignity. Does anyone doubt how he'd react had Ginsburg instead praised him? Support for Trump is the measure of all things: those in his corner are winners, those opposed, losers. That is his value system. Whether it becomes our nation's too, well, that is what this struggle is all about. 

It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup

Barbara Kruger installation, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

     Being mathematically inclined is considered a good thing. But I'm not so sure. Spend time on Facebook and a ready grasp of numbers can be the bell clanging dully at train crossings. An annoying warning of limited practical use.
     I was scanning the posts of my Facebook friends, just seeing what is on people's minds for want of a better word. There was a photo of that $100 million Noah's Ark Ken Ham has built near his Creation Museum in Kentucky, along with the observation that the money could have been used to "buy a house and a car for every homeless person in Kentucky."
     The dull clang started up. I sighed and slid over to Google. There are an estimated 30,000 homeless people in Kentucky, a state of 4.4 million. About one in 150 persons. Sounds right.
Divide $100 million by 30,000 and you get $3,333. Not bad, but not enough to buy a house and a car — even in Kentucky.
     I shared that thought on Facebook and turned off the post's notifications, not wanting to be drawn into conversation about how many cars/houses one Ark replica could buy. Even to make the suggestion shows, not only innumeracy but a category error, a fundamental misunderstanding about why the Ark was built. It isn't as if Ham was rooting around for some way to help the people of Kentucky and thought, "Not low-income housing . . . an Ark! That's it! For when the Flood comes!" It's a profit-making tourist attraction — $40 a pop for adults, $28 for the kiddies. To suggest Ham should have done otherwise is like saying Walt Disney could have used the cash spent on "Dumbo" to support actual elephants instead. Yeah, sure, had his goal been helping elephants. But it wasn't. He was making a cartoon.

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