From Katrina emerged a hero

     I'm afraid to even whisper this. But here goes: do you think the American public was, oh I don't know, let down by Hurricane Irma? Felt, in its secret heart, that they were promised this epic storm, this unparalleled disaster, and the severe weather that gripped Florida, damaging though it was, fell far short? As if the whole thing were an entertainment, a show, an extravaganza, that never quite pulled together.
     Not the people living it, of course. They were relieved, somewhat, although the power outages and flooding and such were no doubt trial enough for them.  

     No one would admit saying this—I'm certainly not. Saying it, I mean. But my gut tells me the feeling is there, just below the surface. 

     Without the promised once-in-a-millennia storm, cable news had to time-fill and tap-dance, sharing what tales it could find, spinning each person being evacuated from their home as a moment of high drama and heroism. 
     We will, perhaps, eventually learn of true tales of heroism, though they will be hard pressed to top "Zeitoun," the excellent book that Dave Eggers wrote after Hurricane Katrina.  

     I wrote this when the book came out, but before the Zeitouns divorced, after the hero was shown to be not so heroic after all.  It detracted from the story, quite a bit, an unhappy ending to an inspiring saga. I don't think it undermines the book, however. Every tale has to end somewhere, and Eggers could not predict the future.  

  
     Out of the fetid floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, where most public figures associated with the 2005 disaster drowned in their own incompetence and failure—a negligent president, an overwhelmed FEMA director, a bumbling mayor—paddles a true American hero, Abdulrahman Zeitoun.
     If "American hero" and "Abdulrahman Zeitoun" do not fit together easily in your mind, then you must read Zeitoun, the new book by Dave Eggers, a Chicago native and University of Illinois graduate. Eggers examines the hurricane that inundated New Orleans four years ago through the eyes of one man and his family. As the storm gathers, we meet Zeitoun, a Syrian-born immigrant who runs a successful remodeling business; his wife, Kathy, a convert to Islam, and their four children.
     Given that too many Americans either know nothing about their fellow citizens who follow Islam, or else clutch at crude stereotypes, this book would be fascinating even without Hurricane Katrina, just for the intimate portrait Eggers paints of the family's life, of the frequent unease of being Muslim in post-9/11 America, the challenges of raising kids and running a business.
     Zeitoun is a man who fits no cliche. The logo of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC is a paint roller ending in a rainbow. Zeitoun picked the rainbow because his painters offer many colors. After his signs and stationery are printed, however, he learns a rainbow also has another meaning. Some customers turn Zeitoun's vans away, assuming it is some kind of gay painting company. New workers see the vans and quit, afraid people will make assumptions about them. After some soul-searching, Zeitoun decides to keep the rainbow, realizing that those who reject one minority tend to reject them all: "Anyone who had trouble with rainbows," he says, "would surely have trouble with Islam."
     Kathy Zeitoun is an equally strong figure, deflecting the constant muttered tweaks of her family. If you've ever wondered why a Christian woman would abandon her faith, adopt Islam and wear a headscarf, after reading about the process that led to her conversion, you'll wonder that more don't.
     As the hurricane looms, Kathy and her children flee the city, to her family in Baton Rouge who can barely tolerate their presence. ("Take that thing off your head," her mother is still telling her, 15 years after she converted.)
     Zeitoun stays in New Orleans, to look after his house, to help, and because he is curious. Katrina hits, but the damage is not bad. Then the levees break, the city floods.
     Zeitoun has a used canoe, bought on a whim, and he takes to gliding through the abandoned, almost serene streets, the antennae from submerged cars scraping his canoe. He evacuates trapped senior citizens and feeds hungry dogs left by their fleeing masters, occasionally attempting to enlist the help of the growing military presence.
     Eggers' writing is pitch perfect, without flourish or excess.
     "He paddled up Claiborne, the wind and rain fighting him, to the Memorial Medical Center, where he knew there were police and National Guard soldiers stationed. As he approached, he saw soldiers in the alleyway, on the roof, on the ramps and balconies. It looked like a heavily fortified military base. When he got close enough to see the faces of the soldiers, two of them raised their guns."
     The official relief efforts are an invading force, blasting around in their helicopters and fan boats, too loud to hear the soft cries that send Zeitoun on another mission of mercy. They remain in the background until—not to give away the plot, which snaps forward like a novel—they suddenly aren't in the background anymore, and Zeitoun is sucked into a nightmare of George Bush's vision of an American security state.
     How he responds, the sustaining power of his faith, how his wife and his extended family around the world react, make Zeitoun required reading, a truly significant book, a guidepost to what America has gone through and where it might yet return unless we hold fast to the principles we claim to revere.
     Zeitoun idolizes his older brother, Mohammed, a famous champion long-distance swimmer in Syria who died in a traffic accident at 24. But judging by the effect that Abdulrahman Zeitoun could have on the world, if this book gets the audience it deserves—it is already a best-seller—his solitary heroism will prove vastly more important. As pious as a Pilgrim father, paddling his canoe with the silent watchfulness of a Cherokee chief, Zeitoun fills an inexcusable void in our culture—the Islamic-American hero: strong, resourceful, loving, patriotic, a man who puts himself in a difficult situation by deciding to stay and face indifferent nature, only to be plunged into a far worse ordeal by the government, as represented by a gang of equally indifferent official goons, stupid with authority, many of whom could have been saved from becoming police state cogs had they the benefit of having read this book.
     Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it, for the simple reasons that it is not heavy-handed propaganda, not eat-your-peas social analysis, but an adventure story, a tale of suffering and redemption, almost biblical in its simplicity, the trials of a good man who believes in God and happens to have a canoe. Anyone who cares about America, where it is going and where it almost went, before it caught itself, will want to read this thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful book.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 2, 2009

Memo to Jeff Bezos: We're not all like Rahm Emanuel

City Hall bas relief

Dear Jeff Bezos:
     Before we begin, I have to thank you for two things. First, for all the books. Volumes I could comb 100 used book shops — back when there were used book shops — and never find.
     And second, thanks for the Washington Post. I subscribe online, visit several times a day. With Donald Trump president, I would go insane if not for the Post letting loose a fact-based broadside in his direction every day.
     Enough dilly-dallying — I know you billionaires hate to dilly-dally. The country is abuzz about Amazon's competition for your new second headquarters — dubbed mellifluously "HQ2," a reminder of just how wrong "Tronc" really is. Some 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment go with it. Quite the prize.
     My inclination would be to not interfere. But this paper reported Friday that our mayor has been courting you, directly, and I thought I had better step up quickly and say something before he completely wrecks our chances. Let me assure you; Chicagoans are not all like Rahm Emanuel — in fact, it's just him. I've seen our mayor turn on what he considers charm: a high-pressure, in-your-face rattling off of statistics that prove, prove, by scientific method that the only rational decision you could make is to cave in to whatever he wants. I can just see you pressed back in your chair, eyes widening, brushing Rahm's spittle from your cheek with one hand while the other reaches for the buzzer under your desk, thinking, "We gotta pick whichever city in the continental United States is furthest away from this guy."
     Don't do that. Most Chicagoans are much more, ah, human. Rahm notwithstanding, Chicago certainly meets all your criteria regarding size and public transportation and universities and such.

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Preparing for the storm

John Rogers Cox "Grey and Gold" (Cleveland Museum of Art)

    

     There seemed little to do Saturday but wait and watch Hurricane Irma as it neared the Florida coast. Hundreds of thousands fled, while the rest stayed glued to reports. I found myself sifting through the many, many stories I've written about hurricanes and tornados over the years, and paused at this one, worth sharing for its look into the mechanics of how wind damage, expected to be widespread, occurs.

     Tornadoes get into a home through the garage.  
     I did not know that. I always assumed that . . . well, frankly, I never really thought about how tornadoes blow houses over. I thought they just knocked them down like a kid kicking over a block castle.
     It doesn't work like that, according to Kim Fuller of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which called again recently to push its Project Impact, an effort to get communities to protect themselves against tornadoes before the twisters strike.
     I got the impression that the federal government is tired of always going in to clean up the mess afterward and finally figured out that if they got everybody to dig into their pockets to shore up their homes ahead of the fact, the damage next time might not be so great or expensive.
     "Prevention' is a new word for us," said Fuller.
     The idea makes a certain rough sense. The flimsier the home, the easier it blows away (that's why trailer parks always get pulverized). FEMA is trying to get owners of today's spit-and-bailing-wire houses to anchor their roofs down and, particularly, bulk up that garage door.
     I always think of garage doors as heavy, particularly those big two-car models. But when you compare it with the construction of a house, a garage door is a relatively fragile construct: a thin, flexible wall of wood that slides, attached to the house itself by a flimsy track or connected by a pair of pivots (assuming your garage is attached to the house; if not, hey, let the tornadoes come!). If high winds blow out the door, what do you have left, particularly with a two-car garage?
     Right. A big, gaping hole in the house, 20 feet wide, a delicious handhold for a tornado to grab the structure and tear it open.
     "That wind's going through there will take the door right off," said Fuller. "Then it just pushes the roof off."
     Ouch. Can't have that. FEMA suggests that homeowners spend a grand or two to shore up their garage doors and other vulnerable areas.
     "We're trying to tell people that preventative measures do work," Fuller said.  
     That strikes me as a hard sell. How many people don't wear their seat belts, which come with the car? Now imagine you had to pay a dollar to buckle up. Nobody would do it.
     Still, FEMA is hopeful.
     "I'm seeing a change in mind-set," said Fuller. "Last year, since Hurricane Floyd, people are saying, 'Enough is enough.' After the tornadoes in Texas, for the first time, we have community officials saying, 'We didn't know there was something we could do.' It's our responsibility to the public to get the information out. There are very simple things people can do to increase their chance of surviving."
     Tornados are not unknown in this area -- the 10th anniversary of the Plainfield twister is coming up this August. But I just can't imagine there are people cautious enough, or with time and money enough on their hands, to shore up their garage doors against the possible advent of tornadoes. But maybe I'm wrong. You can call the FEMA Hotline at (800) 480-2520 and get more information (and it is an interesting call: "If you are calling in response to a disaster, press 1 now. . . .").
     If you end up reinforcing your garage, call me, too. I think the readers would love to meet somebody who's trying to cover all their bases so completely. Stay safe.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 2, 2000

Going (Russian) postal

     Ohhh, I'm a bad person. I am going to hell.  
     Not really. I'm not saying that in a sincere, "my soul is consigned to flames!" sense. I not only never believed in such rococo nonsense, but have trouble believing anyone in the world can believe such a thing, though obviously they do.
    If you read the "ohhh" as more of a groan, you'll get a sense of my sincere, sinking feeling when I realized what I had done, entirely by accident.
     Readers of this blog know that I have a fidelity for truth, for directness, for candor.
     And now I have gone and contributed to the smokescreen of deceit and obfuscation that is the web.
     Quite unintentionally, I hasten to say. Hell, if there were one, is paved with good intentions. 
     And the timing is awkward; just as the truth about Russians posing as Americans and creating anti-Hillary lies during the election is dribbling out ...  well, maybe I had better just tell the story.
     So I'm clicking over the Washington Post, and for some reason I'm told that the cookies on my computer are keeping me from seeing a certain story, and I might want to clean my cookies off my computer. So I figure out how to do that, and wipe out all cookies—bits of information that web sites place on your computer to recognize you and smooth surfing— from the computer. Boxes and boxes of cookies are trashed.
    Of course then I have to sign back in, into Blogger, into Facebook.    
     Into Twitter. Twitter asks me to log onto, not my standard @NeilSteinberg but @RussianPostal, the fake site I set up in March to create an air of reality around the non-launch of my parody Russian postage stamp honoring Donald Trump, created by a New York illustrator and actual postage stamp designer who agreed to help me with the ruse.
    I would never do such a thing in the newspaper, where satire is too often taken seriously accustomed to believing what they're told. But on the freewheeling web, it seemed a good idea. During the last week in March, I started tweeting anodyne announcements about new Russian postal stamps. I figured that would enhance the effect when my Trump stamp was announced.
    Reaction to the Twitter feed was tepid, but it perhaps helped, a little, I think, though the prank was quite successful—my most popular post ever, in fact. April 2 came around. I went about my business, forgetting about Russian Postal.
    Until, prodding by my cookie cleanse, I signed back on. And found that dozens of people had been sending tweets to Russian Postal. Russian people. Sharing their various real-life gripes with the actual Russian post office.
    They complained about lost packages:
   

    They complained about long lines, and send documentary photos:

 

   And bad conditions:

   My site became included in the loop from what looked like actual Russian Post Office trying to help people.

Some defied belief, like the driver who used a package to brace his truck:

     To be honest, if it weren't for the existence of that actual Russian postal service assistance feed, I might leave this up, to give these disappointed Slavic postal customers somewhere to complain, to let them vent off steam, and create the illusion of concern. But such a place actually exists, and might even do some good, and so I've merely created a place where feedback is misdirected. So, not wanting to gum up the system more than it already is, I'll leave Russian Postal up on Twitter for the weekend, in case you can take a look, then pull the thing off-line.  There's enough falsity on the web without my adding to it. Because people are credulous and will believe what they read, as our country is discovering, to our continuing misfortune. 


 

Can Samoas-flavored pina colada mix be far behind?

     Boys Scouts have an oath. Girl Scouts have a promise. As both organizations were forged more than a century ago—Boy Scouts in 1910, Girl Scouts, two years later—it is not surprising that a fine mist of Victorian notions about youth clings to both groups, despite their sometimes frantic efforts to stay current. 
     The Boy Scouts, for instance, vow to stay "morally straight" and obey a law demanding they remain "clean."  The girls' morality, meanwhile, is assumed, as is their cleanliness. No vows necessary. The boys are, in a subtle way, being warned away from traps that boys are expected to be tempted by, if not fall into.  The girls, well, not so much an issue. Rude to even mention, really. They're girls. The "good" is implied.
     That's why the Boy Scouts' gradual transformation into a hate group was so jarring. They were supposed to be moral, while being blinded to what morality now meant, thanks to the shrinking in significance of what you do with other people and an increase in what you do to them. 
     Girl Scouts, well, they sold cookies. Who doesn't love cookies?
    Yet, despite this chasm in pretensions to morality, one still has high moral expectations for Girl Scouts, perhaps even more than the Boy Scouts, since they didn't have to struggle for decades deciding which kind of kid to bar at the door. Girls who liked girls, well ... let's just say, years before the military initiated "Don't Ask/ Don't Tell" the Girl Scouts were already there. You're a girl? Great, start making potholders.
     So I was a little disappointed to see this box of Girl Scouts Thin Mints breakfast cereal at the Evanston Jewel Thursday night. Really? Everyone has a bottom line, and brand extension is all the thing, but cookies for breakfast?  The Girl Scouts of America is not only endorsing cookies for breakfast, but making a buck in the process? Does that "make the world a better place," to quote one of the imperatives from the Girl Scout Law. Does that help the girls who snarf it back be "strong"? Is the girl who breakfasts on Thin Mints really, truly, "Doing her best?" 
     I imagine General Mills didn't steal the Thin Mints brand, but are sharing their cut with the Girl Scouts. So the organization gets paid something. But what are the Girl Scouts giving up in return? I have to wonder whether they thought this through. I'm all for marijuana legalization, but somehow, when the Girl Scouts offer a merit badge in cannabis cultivation, it will still be a sad day. If the Girl Scouts don't take their own program seriously, who will? 

Saving birds from the wilds of the city

  

   Facebook has this feature where it tosses up what you were doing on this date in the past, and I noticed this story from five years ago today. I love birds though, like opera, birds are a subject I have more enthusiasm for than knowledge about. My fondness for them  manifests itself mostly in going through 20-pound bag after 20-pound bag of birdseed at my backyard bird feeder, usually thick with half a dozen birds at a time, or more. 

   For this story, I found myself on the 6:01 a.m. Metra downtown, to rendezvous with folks whose love is even stronger, who get up even earlier, and who manifest their passion for birds in a surprising and selfless way.

     The early bird catches the worm, but how early must you wake to catch the early bird? In Annette Prince's case, it's 4:30 a.m. Thursday to head downtown to collect birds, both living and dead, whose journey from the wilds of Canada to the rainforests of South America have been interrupted by the brightly lit trap of Chicago.
     "We have about 10 people out today," says Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a group of volunteers who fan out over downtown every day during migration season—mid-August to early November, and again in the spring—to gather birds that collide with buildings during the night.
     Small birds generally fly at night to avoid predators. "They're going all night down the lakefront, they're looking for a place to stop, they unfortunately stop here," says Prince. "They're looking for green areas, or are confused, and come down to these buildings. They don't see there's glass."
     The birds stun themselves against windows, trying to get to trees and fountains inside lobbies, or are fooled by reflections of nearby trees and fall to the sidewalk, where the birds are either rescued or trod upon.
     Down an alley, Prince finds a Swaison's thrush, stunned, eyes squeezed shut, wings drooping, and transfers it to a paper bag.
     She's found everything from owls to hawks in the eight years she's been doing this; the group has collected 150 species, mostly songbirds, warblers, hummingbirds, tanagers. As with people, it is usually out-of-towners unfamiliar with the territory who get into trouble. "City birds like sparrows, pigeons and starlings never hit windows," Prince says.
     Prince, 54, moves fast, eyes scanning the sidewalk along the building, a jittery alertness that itself is almost birdlike. She cuts a singular figure, in bright green Chicago Bird Collision Monitors T-shirt and gym shoes, carrying a green net on a pole and a black bag. She stops to scrutinize an alley with her binoculars and a FedEx delivery man notices her and breaks into a benevolent smile.
     Prince picks up a small piece of wood and puts it in a nearby trash can. More out of regard for her fellow monitors than environmentalism. "Every time you see a piece of debris, you think, 'Is that a bird?'" she says. "I'm not trying to be Streets and San."
     When she sees an actual bird, such as the one in front of a revolving door on North LaSalle, she breaks into a run to get to it.
     She has a job, as a speech therapist. Why bother doing this in her spare time?
     "These birds have been migrating for thousands and thousands of years," she says. "It's just in the past hundred that these barriers, these skyscrapers, have been in the way. . . . Birds incur a huge amount of death in migration, it's the leading cause of death; storms, running out of food, dying of exhaustion, they're pushed to their physical limits. All those things are natural things. This is something added on top of it. An added hazard. A billion birds a year are killed by collisions in North America alone."
     Prince rendezvouses with two other volunteers, John Kaiser and his wife, Suzanne Checchia, who has a Whole Foods shopping bag holding two dozen dead birds. "A lot of ovenbirds," she says, handing over a baggie containing a colorful Magnolia Warbler.
     "Oh man," says Prince, examining the half-ounce bird. "Look at this guy, just gorgeous."
     By days' end they'll find 75 birds, 35 alive. There's a forensic birding quality to the effort; they always try to identify dead ones.
     Checchia opens the door to her red Jetta and there, in a box, are 14 living birds, each in its own brown lunch bag, some bags rattling slightly. They'll be rushed to the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn where 80 percent will survive to be banded and released into the wild. The dead birds go to the Field Museum, which keeps them for study.
     The group started in 2003. In addition to collecting birds, they work with building owners to encourage them to dim lighting at night and treat windows to reduce their allure to birds. They have 100 volunteers, but are always looking for more, who must take a two-hour training session to learn how to spot and handle birds. The next one is Sept. 10 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. There's more info at birdmonitors.net.
     "It can be hard getting up in the morning," Prince says. "But it's very rewarding. Our volunteers are not only there to save the individual birds, but to raise awareness."
     Prince is on the way back to her car when she spies a warbler on the ground by the small park at Franklin Street. In a flash she's beside it, on her knees, carefully placing her net over it. "I want to call this a Northern Parula," she says, delicately holding the bird. "He's tangled," she says. "His wings are bound to his body by spider webbing, which is really very strong." With tremendous care, she unwraps the bird, then gently sets it in a paper bag for a brief detour to Glen Ellyn on its way to South America for the winter.

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

Trump does the wrong thing, again, but cleverly

     When Donald Trump does something stupid, it’s usually spontaneous, some from-the-hip salvo, an ill-considered suggestion, like his tweet Sunday musing that unless North Korea starts behaving we might have to suspend trade with China, which would gut the American economy more thoroughly than a Korean nuke to Sacramento.
     But the six-month fuse Trump lit Tuesday spiking the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival act is a sort of calculated genius. I’m not saying his executive order is the right thing to do; it isn’t. Tugging away the legal status of hundreds of thousands of young people who are trying to carry on with their daily lives is bad policy, bad economics and morally wrong.
     The president is doing the wrong thing in a clever fashion, for a change, or at least more clever than Trump usually does things, which is setting the bar low.
     Let’s unpack Trump’s latest jaw-dropper. First, by issuing an executive order nullifying Barack Obama’s 2012 edict providing immigrants who were brought to this country as children, dubbed “Dreamers,” relief from deportation, he blows a big kiss to his alt-right base. The “Make America Great Again” crowd, who, if not all haters, do their own dreaming about a return to a legendary time when white Protestants ran everything.
     Plus they love reversing anything that Obama ever did in office, even if it means losing their own health insurance.

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Port of Chicago: woebegone but still a role to play

     Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed House Bill 1797 on Aug. 25. Unlike most bills the governor has been flinging away, this bill received no public notice whatsoever beyond an obligatory line on the Illinois General Assembly website.

     This is because the bill involves financial relief for a place little known despite its enormous size: the Port of Chicago.
     The Port of Chicago is actually two places: the Lake Calumet Terminal, a 1,600-acre shipping facility, with wharves and silos, transit sheds and warehouses. And Iroquois Landing, a 190-acre parcel at the mouth of Calumet River acquired in 1978. The Port contains the Confined Disposal Facility, a lakeside area where the Army Corps of Engineers dumped contaminated muck dredged from the bottom of rivers and, not unrelatedly, a 36-hole golf course, Harborside International, on a former waste dump.
     Consumers tend to think of shipping as something done quickly. Order a flannel shirt from Land’s End and within days it arrives on your doorstep. The rare time we give shipping a thought, we are often entertaining images of drone delivery, of sushi winging its way to diners in Iceland. That’s our future.

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Some laborers have jobs machines just can't do

    
    Happy Labor Day! Typically I'd post my Monday column from the Sun-Times here. But scheduling interceded. Wanting to have a columnist in the paper every blessed day—see, it's not just me—my boss asked if they could nudge me to Tuesday this week, and, accommodating chap that I am, I heartily agreed.
    So what to run today? I could write something, but Tuesday's story is rather complicated—it involves shipping—and as this is a holiday, I hope you don't mind something out of the vault. Deep from the vault; almost a quarter century. This leapt to mind, for the range of workers it shows—and no, the photographs don't go with it, but rather illustrate various working folks I've encountered over the years.
     But only one guy like the man deboning whitefish in this story. He made a deep impression on me, because he was happy, grateful for his job. At least he said he was. Many times, I've told myself, if that guy deboning whitefish in a cold room can do it for 13 years, you can do this.
     The Fish House, by the way, is long gone — there's a Lexus dealer there now. So is Alfred Dunhill. And Brach's, which took a thousand jobs with it to Mexico, victim of our daft sugar tariffs. Something to keep in mind now that we've got an unfit, unhinged president with his erratic hand on our trade policy tiller.

     One hundred pounds an hour, the whitefish fillets are set before Christ Kostakis. One hundred pounds an hour, Kostakis runs his naked left hand gently over the chilly fish, caressing it, feeling it, probing for tiny pin bones as thick as a blade of grass.
     One hundred pounds an hour, he takes a needle nose pliers and removes the 32 or so bones in an average fish fillet.   

     "You don't see the bones, you feel them," says Kostakis, who has done this at the Chicago Fish House, 1250 W. Division, for 13 years, explaining why he cannot wear a glove to protect himself from the 40 degree temperature.
     "The whitefish has soft meat," adds Carl Mitsakopoulos, treasurer of the Fish House. "A machine would tear up the meat. If you do it by hand, the meat comes out whole instead of ragged - better eye appeal and better quality."
     In this technical age, with the robots of mass production clicking away, it is useful to remember that in reality this is not always the case.
     Just as a machine hasn't been made that can pick pin bones without destroying a whitefish fillet, so there are a surprising range of jobs that are still filled by humans because no machine can do them properly.
     The best cigars, for instance, are still hand-rolled, because machines just cannot handle the variation of natural tobacco leaves.
     "The handmade cigar has to be all tobacco leaf, typically top quality leaf," says Hal Ross, humidor manager at Alfred Dunhill, which sells tobacco at Water Tower Place. "And it makes a huge difference."
     Likewise, the Brach's candy complex on Kinzie Avenue, the largest candy factory in the world, at first seems a wonder of automation. Computers control the big vats that feed into automated ovens, and dozens of varieties are made at the same time in one hygienic maze of production and automation, the armies of cherry cordials and chocolate stars untouched by human hands.
     Except for one thing: those hard peppermints, with the pictures in the center. Sometimes a Christmas tree, sometimes a flag, sometimes a heart. It seems that no machine can make those little mint pictures without making them look all messy.
     So the images are created by hand: each of the myriad mints that leave the factory each year, bearing a tiny original image.
     When the corn syrup candy used to make the mints comes out of huge pressure cookers, it's the color and consistency of petroleum jelly. Workers refer to the substance as "glass."
     Strong men then take the warm blobs and carry them over to stone tables, where they are worked by hand, pressed with metal bars, kneaded and folded while colorings are added, turning them electric greens and hot pinks, deep roses and searing blues.
     The colored "glass" is tugged into long shapes, which a candy artist then works into a picture. Using his hands, powdered in sugar, each man forms what is basically a giant mint - a disc that's more than two feet in diameter, weighing about 100 pounds, with an image surrounded by white peppermint. Each one is slightly different.
     Then the big aromatic blob is hefted into an extruder, a machine that begins slowly turning the disc until it is transformed into a long rope of candy. The rope, when sliced into segments, reveals hundreds and hundreds of quarter-sized mints, each containing a perfect, tiny, handmade rose.
     Food manufacturing is often so labor intensive because machines frequently just can't make the kind of subtle distinctions that a human can.
    "You have to detect sours, ferments, medicinal tastes and off-aromas from a quick sampling," says Wayne Thomas who, along with a staff of three, spends his days "continuously" tasting coffee brewed from the semitrailers of beans arriving at Richheimer Coffee on North Halsted—150 cups a day, by his estimate.
     Asked whether a machine could do what he does, Thomas seemed to savor the challenge of constructing an imaginary one.
     "They could run a sample of coffee through high-pressure, liquid chromotography and determine what compounds are present," he says. "Then go through a statistical analysis of how many people say this is a good cup of coffee versus the spectral analysis of the product. Then they might be able to correlate the information and submit the sample to the instrument, which might then identify an ideal coffee taste profile because of the presence of certain components in coffee . . . "
     But is there any chance of anybody going to that trouble and expense anytime soon?
     "Nah," says Thomas, who, amazingly, sometimes drinks coffee on his off hours. "Coffee is really a strange animal. It is somewhat subtle. It's an individual thing."

                  —Originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 27, 1992

Life is moving on

John Ashbery

   I was sorry to hear that John Ashbery died today. Though not terribly sorry: 90 is an age we can all hope for and, anyway, a poet of worth never really dies, not in the way that you or I will.

   Sara Bader and I included excerpts of three of Ashbery's distinctive, enigmatic poems in Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery—"The Skaters," "The Ecclesiast," and, my favorite, "The Bunaglows," whose lines bear repeating on this day:

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way.
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planted and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterward, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back.
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on toward death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

     
   

How I got that bowling ball

    This is the column that explains how I got the bowling ball I gave away—or, rather, tried to give away—in the Saturday Fun Activity. What stands out for me upon re-reading is how different the media landscape is today compared to 20 years ago.  I can't imagine a publicist calling up and trying to get me to go to a party with a Hollywood actress—it sounds like something out of "The Sweet Smell of Success." The Goat is more of a tourist trap than journalist hang-out, or so I'm told. 

     Men are idiots. I almost said "Women make men idiots." But why blame them? They're merely being women, doing womanly things: lounging on red velvet chaises, brushing their long, golden hair, striding smartly about their business in those sharp suits. It's not their fault.
     It is men, weak in the presence of beauty, who do it to themselves. Who, in their infinite capacity to believe in their own imagined splendor, stride into light posts while straightening their ties in store windows.
     Particularly married men. I almost said "Even married men," but that also understates the case. To be married is, among other things, to be out of practice. Out-of-circulation, pickled in the brine of domestic bliss. The rare moments you are dragged out into the light of unfamiliar feminine society, well, you make mistakes. You head down into the basement to get your old bowling ball. . . .
     But I am getting ahead of the tale. It begins like this: I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when the phone rang. A publicist calling with—surprise, surprise—an opportunity. Usually I dispose of such calls in about five seconds. But this opportunity was a little different: a pretty young actress, Jennifer McShane, is in town, shooting a movie with Keanu Reeves. Would I like to meet her? They were having a party for her at a swell downtown spot Saturday night.
     "That sounds like fun . . ." I said, Jiminy Cricket pulling on my sleeve. "But I had better not." I had never heard of Jennifer McShane. I had no burning desire to write about the difficulties of filming a big-budget Hollywood movie. And yet . . .
     "Maybe we could set up something else up, then," the publicist suggested, and I felt myself weakening. I tried to think of some ridiculous, unromantic, neutered activity to invite the budding thespian to and came up with a doozy: "How about bowling?" I blurted out.
     The publicist said yes—publicists invariably say yes—and hanging up the phone I heard the reverberating gong of doom sounding in the distance. This was a bad idea. Embarrassment was afoot. I hadn't gone bowling in about 15 years. My last game, if I recall, I managed an 80. True, this young woman, judging from the 8-by-10 the publicist sent over, was a slight thing, willowy and undernourished. But there was a certain athleticism about her. Maybe she could bowl.
     I considered rolling a few practice games to sharpen my form. I swung by the AMF lanes at Marina Towers to get the lay of the land. I knew the lanes were there, in theory, but wanted to visually confirm it beforehand. It was like we were going on a date or something (you might want to take this moment to reread the first sentence of this column).
     I had forgotten that one of the many advantages of being married is you never have to meet unknown women at bowling alleys. I had forgotten how nerve-racking that could be and now was being reminded.
     Of course I told my wife about the rendezvous. God bless her, she was jealous. While the tabloids are not filled with tales of young actresses falling head over heels for the bowling flair displayed by endomorphic newspaper reporters who bear a passing resemblance to the Bob's Big Boy character at the age of 40, my wife—perhaps infected by my delusional view of the world—was worried about me being plucked away and ending up poolside in Hollywood, some actress's plaything.
     I planned to use my own bowling ball, purchased when I was a teenager. That'll impress her! I was heading down to the basement to retrieve my "Golden Knight" ball, a relic of my misspent teenhood, when my wife offered up a vital bit of helpful advice.
     "Why not just rent a ball?" she said. "Why lug it?" I paused, thinking, perhaps for the first time, and took her advice.
     Later that day, the publicist called. Bowling might be a problem, she said, schedulewise for Jenny. I leapt at the opportunity to reverse my folly: "Fine, fine," I said. "Bowling is a mistake. Let's meet at the Billy Goat instead. We can have a beer and talk about acting."
     At 5:15 I got up from my desk, announced that I was going to the Goat to meet a starlet and left the office. I don't write about the Billy Goat much—a very good columnist who is no longer with us already staked out that territory—but it is a nice place to sit and have a beverage. Like the basement of a crazy Greek uncle with a lot of friends.
     I took a table by myself, facing the door. The clock ticked. Every time someone came in, I looked up, expectantly. A few friends happened by, and we got to talking. I told them I was being stood up by the star of "Cyborg Cops 3." Finally, about 6:30, I abandoned hope.
     "OK, guys," I said. "I'm leaving. If any starlets come by, tell them they missed me." I walked out, thankful to be going home, and even more thankful not to be dragging around that bowling ball.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 1999

Saturday fun activity: What is it?

     Why didn't I think of this before?
     For years, I've posted enigmatic places, and only once stumped the Great Hive Intelligence.
     Because people get around. And anyplace I've been to and snapped a photograph of, odds are, one of the thousands reading has been to as well.
     But this ... this, thing, I have a good feeling about.
     A musical instrument, obviously. But what sort of musical instrument? 
     I'll give you two hints.
     First, it is a common term, not something exotic and unknown. It is something whose name people will have heard, at least people—second hint alert—of a certain age, of an age nearing my own. Younger people might not have heard of it, for reasons that will become obvious when I tell you what it is.

Obscure starlet Jennifer McShane

     So what is this thing? The winner will receive ... an undrilled, unused though not new bowling ball with an interesting back story. That is, you'll receive it provided you come to the paper and pick it up. I'm not shipping the thing. A bowling ball signed by the obscure starlet Jennifer McShane. And if you're wondering why I'm giving away an unused, though not new, bowling ball signed by obscure starlet Jennifer McShane, it is because I'll be moving to the new building in a few months, and it won't do to have all this stuff I've accumulated. 
    And if you're wondering why I own a bowling ball signed by obscure starlet Jennifer McShane, well, I tell the story in a column, on that I can't believe I haven't shared with you yet. But I will. Tomorrow. Do consider stopping by. 

\

Plato's 'Republic,' ripped from the headlines

     Computers prevailed, remember, because they are far better than what came before.
     When writing, you can edit easily. No Wite-Out necessary.
     When reading, the endless resources of the internet are a few keystrokes away.
     But books are not entirely mooted. They retain advantages, which is why, unlike typewriters, they’re still here. Books do one thing technology is still terrible at: they stick around for a long, long time. Any given technology has a way of blooming dramatically then wilting fast. Everything I wrote on my Kaypro is lost unless I printed it out. The Zip drive I bought with my Dells? Useless. With the Cloud, thumb drives are as convenient as thumbscrews.
     But the copy of Plato’s “Republic,” translated by G.M.A. Grube, that I bought in 1981 for a college class is still here, booted up, ready to go when, on a whim, I plucked it off the shelf to pass an idle hour.

     Wow.

     The “Republic” vibrates with relevance, from the very first page, when Socrates and his pal Glaucon head down to check out a festival and, wobbling homeward, are overtaken by friends, who deliver an ominous invitation to stick around in town.
     “Do you see how many we are?” Polemarchus asks.

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World hounds queen like Diana was hunted

Shrine to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, Harrod's, 2009

     When the subject turns to the death of Princess Diana, 20 years ago today, Aug. 31, 1997, two memories stand out.

     The first is the manner I learned of the accident: from the Sunday New York Times, which was delivered in our breezeway on Pine Grove Avenue. Old school, even back then. We had a newborn, two months old, our younger son, and didn't watch TV or listen to the radio that evening. We weren't as plugged in, could go hours if not days without dipping a toe in the sloshing oceans of news. 
     Nowadays, you can't have a moment downtime, waiting for the elevator doors to open, without whipping out your phone and dipping into the constantly running river of information.

     Back then, I clomped out the back door, scooped up the fat paper log of a newspaper, stripped off the plastic, and saw a short, early bulletin, squeezed into a column on the front page, that told only of the auto accident in Paris. I  went inside, clicked on the TV; the grim music and somber tones immediately told me she was dead, even before I heard words confirming it.

    The second was a few weeks later, during the paroxysm of scorn for the media that follows. A photographer pal of mine, Bob Davis, and I were returning from a story when we happened upon a bad car accident in the Loop, on Wabash Avenue. A woman pulling out of a parking lot had run down a group of pedestrians. As Bob raised his camera to record the carnage, one of the on-lookers, rubbernecking for a view, some businessman, held up his yellow legal pad, blocking the lens, snarling something critical of the jackal pack media. 

    The irony of that moment stung and lingered. Here was a guy trying to do what? See what had happened. And while in the very act of trying to do that, he instinctively lunged to stop everyone else from seeing what happened. 
     Donald Trump might skate along on hypocrisy but he sure didn't invent it. 

    My column was still weekly, so naturally, writing a week after the event, I sidestepped the death itself and focused on what was most recent, the queen's speech. I was genuinely revolted by the public reaction to Diana's death: the  wallowing in sentiment, the hyperventilating exaggeration, the overwhelming bathos, the bottomless hunger to pry into the inner lives of those we feel we own.

     With all the sympathy and tears—much of it, no doubt, genuine—expended over the tragic death of Princess Diana, I hope you'll forgive me if I whisper a kind word about the villains du jour, Prince Charles and his mother.
     Perhaps I am stone-hearted. But I was far more interested in what Queen Elizabeth, pushed by public pressure in front of the TV cameras months before her usual day, had to say Friday than I was in witnessing Diana's funeral, the four-hankie culmination of this week's extraordinary worldwide keening.
     Would the queen, bending to the public craving for self-exposure, stoked to a white hot flame by the cheerleading British media ("SHOW US YOU CARE!" a headline demanded) drop 50 years of carefully manicured public decorum and break down, cry, give us a show, sing the old Bill Clinton standard, "I-feel-your-pain; you-feel-my-pain; we-all-feel-each-other's pain"?
     That was what the mob seemed to be howling for.
     Or would she—as I so fervently prayed—be true to herself, maintain the reserve that was once the very definition of royalty, perhaps slipping in a bit of pique? Stare boldly into the camera and say, in a properly icy tone: "How can you bloody pack of bloody jackals condemn the paparazzi out of one corner of your mouths while yapping for my son to go on the BBC and read a love poem to his dead ex-wife out of the other? How dare you?"
     Well, one could hope.
     Or would she, unaccustomed except at Christmastide to talking to an audience larger than a brace of corgi dogs, sleepwalk through a pained yet Buckingham-Palace-polished chin-up attempt at damage control ("I believe there are lessons to be drawn . . ." she said), lobbing a few shovelfuls of beach against the rising tide of ever-cheapened sentiment?
      That was easy. Door No. 3. And of course CNN immediately cut to the throng outside the palace, to pull a few average citizens aside to give the thumbs down on the performance.
     "Not enough," one said.
     "Not enough?" Isn't Rule No. 1 of etiquette that the parties most affected get to act however they like? That it's cruel to judge Mr. Widower for not crying at his wife's funeral and rude to express that judgment?
     And the really galling thing is that we're using the same cudgel that killed Diana to pummel her survivors. The public has no more right to know how Queen Elizabeth felt about the death of her former daughter-in-law than it did to see how Diana looked working out in her leotards. Those two interests spring from the same desire. The same demand that public figures—movie stars, political leaders, royalty—not only perform their jobs, but act as a sort of surrogate pal and fetish object to the body politic.
     Why should Charles—a reticent, solemn man who can't state an opinion without being mocked as a twit— suddenly be expected to spout his deepest pains on command, like a trained seal? Why should the queen suddenly be requested to emote like a diva? It's bad enough that people started lining up along the funeral route three days early, as if they were camping out in front of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before the Academy Awards.
     "Not enough"? It's already too much. Diana, in declining to act royal, in refusing to adopt the remoteness that the queen and Charles are unable to shed, might have built up a cult for herself, but she succeeded in pulling the royalty down to a state of low regard unequaled since the Roundheads were chasing the first Charles across the countryside.
     Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe royalty is bad, and the sooner it is retired, the sooner we can march off to whatever brave new world awaits us.
     We lie to ourselves that we loved Diana because she was so good, for her causes. But people didn't love Diana for her causes—we ignore causes. We scorn charity. Bor-ing. Except in the case of people like her, when causes are an excuse. How else to have parties? Unless it benefits AIDS or cancer or something, a masked ball is just decadence.
     People follow royalty for the same reason they play the lottery: wish fulfillment. Aren't we so interested in the royals for the very reason that the closest most of us will ever come to wearing a $ 200,000 ring or having tea and crumpets with the queen is to read about it, or to gape at it on TV?
     To suggest that people follow royalty for the good works they do is like saying that people play the lottery, not to spin dreams of wealth, but as a convenient way to contribute to the state's educational fund on an anonymous, weekly basis.
     So pity poor Charles and pity the queen. The reserve and decorum that seemed merely stiff before Diana will now appear inhuman.
     The only thing worse than remaining how they've always been would be to change—for Charles to start hanging out in nightclubs, joining conga lines with supermodels. For the queen to be photographed painting her toenails. Maybe that's next. God save the queen; God save us all.

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 7, 1997

   

Can't we pretend Hurricane Harvey didn't happen?

  
    What storm? You mean Hurricane Harvey? Or rather, so-called Hurricane Harvey?
     Never happened. An obvious fraud cooked up by Democrats trying to push their “climate change” agenda. The images on TV of waterlogged Houston residents being led to safety through flooded streets? Actors on Hollywood sound stages. More fake news by CNN trying to goose ratings with inspiring tales of rescue and . . ..
     Nah, it’s no good. Can’t do it. See, that’s why we liberals are at such a disadvantage. We have one hand tied behind our backs in the street brawl for America’s soul, denied the full range of fabrication easily employed by the Right, from simple bald lies (Ted Cruz first claiming he supported relief for Hurricane Sandy, then, fibbing again, insisting the bill was laden with pork. Which it wasn’t.) to the most elaborate fantasies (Alex Jones suggesting that Nazi protesters at Charlottesville were Jewish actors).
     Meanwhile, we’re mired in the troublesome realm of the real. Democrats just can’t contort our minds the way they can. We’re like rheumatic middle-aged men trying to compete on the pommel horse against Olympic gymnasts.
     I can’t even in good conscience hold up Hurricane Harvey — the worst rainstorm in United States history — as an example of climate change. While it is certainly the sort of meteorological disaster we are going to see more and more of as the Earth heats up, you can’t point to any one particular storm and lay it at the feet of our warming world. That’s why even though the evidence of climate change is as clear and undeniable as evidence that something wet and windy hit Houston this past week, that doesn’t stop Republicans from denying the former as they shed crocodile tears over the latter.
     Honestly, I’m not even comfortable using Hurricane Harvey as column fodder, because there are people involved. People suffering. Their homes destroyed, their lives upended. You don’t turn that into a joke.
    Either you sympathize with people or you do not. That is the essential gulf we see in America today.

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Fight night

     How big was the Mayweather-McGregor fight Saturday night?
     Even I watched it, and I had never seen a professional boxing match before in my entire life. The closest I came previously was a smoker at the Union League Club, and then we didn't pay as much attention to whatever was going on in the ring as much as we did our scotches and cigars.
     It was an accident of course. Friday was, well, one of those days, and when I saw my younger kid in his work-out gear heading for the Y, I said, "Wait five minutes and I'll go with you," and he graciously paused while I got dressed, grabbed a bottle of water and we went to work out.
    Exercise helps.
    While I was in the weight room, doing sit-ups, I heard an insistent, leathery, flapping noise, and realized it was the boy hitting the speed bag. I drifted over to watch, a blur of hands, the bag snapping back and forth faster than I thought possible. He invited me to try, and I did, getting up what I thought was a respectable rhythm.
    "You're doing it wrong," he said, and showed me his technique: hit with the knuckles of the fist then the heel of the hand, a double-tap with each hand that worked the bag much faster, so that even I could manage halfway respectable results.
    "How did you learn that?" I asked.
    "YouTube," he replied.
    Of course.
    I thanked him and, as we departed, we talked about how much fun the speed bag was—I usually end my work-outs with it, as a kind of reward. I mentioned the fight the next day, perhaps we could head somewhere and see it. He'd said he'd like that. A bit of online sleuthing told us: go to Buffalo Wild Wings.
    But they wanted $20 a head cover charge. And my other son wanted to join in. And my wife, who wouldn't actually watch a fight, but would go along with her men. Suddenly we were looking at $80 just to get in the door, never mind what we'd spend on wings, wild or otherwise. A hundred bucks to stream the thing at home suddenly seemed a bargain.
     It seemed a wasted opportunity, almost selfish, to just watch it by ourselves. Texts were sent, doors down the street knocked on, pizza ordered, and a party sprang up around the slugfest.
     The event started at 6 p.m. Having never watched a fight before, I ignorantly assumed that meant there would be an hour or two or preliminaries, then the Main Event. I stupidly began watching at 6 p.m., what turned out to be an hour lionizing the UFC fighter Conor McGregor, an Irish martial arts expert who despairing of worlds to conquer, like Alexander the Great, had challenged undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather to come out of retirement to face him. Then we got an hour of hosannas to Mayweather, including visits to his boxing center and strip club.
     Two hours of proof that, black or white, American or Irish, flaunted wealth ends up ridiculous and puerile.
     It wasn't boring exactly, with plenty of shots of exotic cars and a kind of pumped up self-assigned significance—not only would boxing be changed forever, but all sport, if not the universe nudged off its axis by this match. I smiling, remembering that a few days earlier I had never heard of either man. Their general tone of unashamed, counter-factual exaggeration made me think, more than once, of the current occupant of the Oval Office. The fact that he too isn't trailed by goons holding enormous championship belts above their heads seems almost a kind of restraint. Maybe that's coming.
     The truly boring part happened in the three undercards, as non-entity boxers poked at each other. The sport is condemned as violent, but these matches weren't violent. The contestants poked at each other in near-stupor. I knew I was in trouble about 8 p.m. when the talking heads introducing the matches did so from a largely empty arena in Las Vegas. The crowd wasn't even there yet.
     Fortunately I had the good sense to light the Tiki torches—will we ever look at them and not think of Nazis?—and build a fire out back in the fire pit, so we could repair there and take a break from the action, or lack of which.
     The main event began at about 11 p.m. Common wisdom was that McGregor, who had never fought a professional boxing match before, would have to overcome Mayweather, 49 and 0, early on in order to win. Mayweather, for his part, was content to keep his hands in front of his face, elbows close together and ward off blows for about the first eight rounds. As fit as McGregor is, he couldn't do that forever, and when he tired, in round 9, Mayweather began to pummel him and by the 10th round he was hitting him at will and the referee stopped the right to keep McGregor from being maimed.
    It was more complicated than that, but that was the essence.
    We all agreed that McGregor had not embarrassed himself, marveled at the sums taken in by the fighters—Mayweather earned a reported $300 million, McGregor a third or so—and declared the whole thing a success.
     Final thoughts? McGregor was undone by his personality, not his skill—as the bold newcomer, he couldn't have adopted the conservative strategy that won for Mayweather, even though that would have been his only hope, though not that doing so would have worked; then they'd both be hanging back, neither would win, and the audience would feel robbed. So everyone was forced to behave the way he did; McGregor's loss was almost foreordained by Fate. Hubris.
    What else? I was surprised at how poorly produced the opening segments were.  At one point they spent several minutes showing a poster of the fight, certainly a lost opportunity, considering that millions were watching. They were advising something we had all already bought.
    Given that the evening was bringing in the take of a Hollywood blockbuster, and that many people new to the sport were viewing, I would have imagined they'd have explained the terrain a bit more than reprise a few of McGregor's fights and show Mayweather getting on and off jets and talking about how much money he makes in a tone that, again, struck me as sadly presidential.
     On Facebook, friends wrung their hands over the violence of boxing. They should save it for the victims of actual violence. These guys are laughing all the way to the bank, and while I'm sorry it had to be done on this pretext, the fight led to a house full of my kids, their pals and our friends, so I can't complain either.