Flashback 1998: TV's latest 'British invasion' is putting children in a trance

     My older son Ross graduates from college in a couple days. I haven't seen him in ... more than five months, as he used the past two school breaks to study in London and travel in Israel. There was a time when I worried about not seeing him for five minutes, as this column, almost exactly 20 years old, is a reminder. 
     The Teletubbies show began in England in 1997 and came here the next year. There doesn't seem much to be thankful for in our media world, but we can thank providence that the Teletubbies came and went—production ended in 2001— without leaving much of a lasting impact, though they did have their uses. As it is, having not seen a show in nearly 20 years, sometimes when I notice a couple rabbits on a green lawn I'll flinch, remembering.

     "Bye-bye Ross. Bye. Daddy's going to work now. Bye. See ya."
     Nothing. My 2-year-old son's head doesn't turn. His face doesn't deviate a degree from staring directly at the object of his affection: "Teletubbies."
     I walk over to his chair, lean down low, and whisper in his ear: "Bye-bye. See you. Have a good day!" Nothing. Eyelock. He doesn't even blink. The Teletubbies dance and sing.
     And here's the horrible part. I glance up from the slack, inert face of my mesmerized son to see what he is watching. Then I start watching the Teletubbies. Tinky Winky. Dipsy. Po. La-La. They bump their pear-shaped bodies together. They tumble. A baby face smiles down from the yellow sun. Periscope-like speakers rise up from the lawn and make ringing, Orwellian pronouncements.
     That was the week before last. Day One, their debut in Chicago, on Channel 11, Baby-sitter to the World. I linger for a minute or two, compelled by the bright colors, the endless repetition. It is all . . . so . . . weird. I almost sit down, my mouth hanging open, and take in the entire show.
     Instead, grabbing myself by the nose, I manage to jerk my head away. My gaze torn from the set. I flee the house, stumbling toward work, another concerned parent confronting the Teletubby menace, the most ominous development out of England since bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
     Yes, children aren't supposed to watch TV. Never watch TV. Never eat sugar. Never a minute unobserved. Instead they should spend their days capering creatively with their devoted caretakers: a full-time mother, two white-haired grandmothers, a few doting aunts, and a groom to look after the pony.
     But whose life is like that? I feel lucky that my wife is a stay-at-home mother. If occasionally (OK, habitually) Ross ends up parked in front of Channel 11 for an hour or three during the mad morning rush to care for him and his younger brother, to get me out of the house and do 1,000 other things, well, it's better than leaving the boys to scrabble for themselves in some Lord of the Flies day care center or subject them to the questionable mercies of an unemployed teenager plucked off the street.
     A little "Theodore the Tugboat," a little "Arthur" and the day is well under way. Why shouldn't Teletubbies join our pharmacopeia of TV Tot Narcotics?
     Yes, I find their blinking eyes and gaping mouths off-putting. But the show isn't designed for me, is it? If it were, there would be dancing girls. (Now there's an idea: a show for kids where the alphabet, counting and colors are taught by a cast of scantily clad models from Victoria's Secret and Chippendales. Something for everybody.)
     Like anything new, the Teletubbies offer the agonizing question of whether this is an unacceptable invasion that must be resisted, or just something new that we will eventually come to love.
     Perhaps I'm influenced by all the commotion that preceded Teletubbies. It was the biggest deal in Britain since Diana went for a drive in Paris. There were controversies -- one actor was fired for not being sufficiently Teletubby-like. There was the issue of whether the Teletubby with the purse is gay. (It was an echo of when a minister here demanded to know just what the heck is going on between Bert and Ernie on "Sesame Street." Stupidity knows no borders.)
     Day Two. Ross actually complains when "Barney" comes on— "Teletubbies! Teletubbies!" he says, demanding that I conjure them up "Right now!" I actually feel a sympathetic pang for the now-scorned purple dinosaur, whom I certainly hated as much as anybody when he first debuted.
     But enough viewings can adjust you to anything. I suppose I'm sympathizing with my captors, the TV version of the "Stockholm Syndrome." Having seen every single "Barney," by now I can actually sit through a show without having to entertain myself by imagining I am part of the gang of "Clockwork Orange" thugs who corner Michael in a gritty high school breezeway on his way home from the Barney set.
     Day Three. My worries that the Teletubbies are Video Heroin are replaced by a sort of Bad Parent Epiphany. With my wife having bolted for the supermarket—supposedly—an hour before, and the time of my departure for work drawing near, I prop Ross before the shrine of the Teletubbies, set a bowl of oatmeal in his lap, and tiptoe off to take a shower.
     I would never have done this before, but my confidence in the hypnotic power of the Teletubbies is that great. I trust them with his life.
     As quick as the shower is, I have plenty of time to imagine my beloved boy snapping out of his trance the moment the bathroom door shuts. I see him hopping to his feet and racing directly to the nearby, tragically available a) lye; b) sharp kitchen knives; c) dry-cleaning bag; d) open window.
     I return to find him in the same position I had left him. His hand is on the tablespoon, but he hasn't raised it to his lips. A Teletrance. I look at the set. Hmmm, what a pleasant little band of happy fellows!
     It is too late for me and my family. But you, who haven't yet seen the show, can still save yourselves. The Teletubbies are coming! They're here! On the air now! The toys will soon be in stores! Do something before it's too . . .
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 19, 1998

Today in Trumpland

     Notice how ineptly Donald Trump paints himself into a corner by assuming the success of his negotiations with North Korea. Putting himself—and the country he leads, unfortunately—in a position of weakness before talks, scheduled for mid-June, even begin.
     Trump says he'll walk away if it doesn't go well. But how can he do that when he is already taking a victory lap for something he hasn't yet done and might never do? As is his habit.
    One of the many problems with living in a fact-free world: you can pretend you've already done what you will never actually do.
    And people believe him. 
    A reminder that to focus on Trump and his flaws are wrong. There will always be another Trump in the wings, and if we continue susceptible to people like that, there will be no salvation of us.

    In the meantime, Trump has to make whatever concessions he will make, elevate the North Korean pariah to an international respect he doesn't deserve—Trump's already done that—and declare the whole thing part of his unbroken, if imaginary, chain of triumph.
     Freeing three American hostages is all well and good. But that shouldn't overshadow his alienating our closest allies while embracing the strongman dictators he yearns to become. Did you notice how Trump mentioned that the men he had just freed supported him? That's how hungry for any shred of validation. Look! These guys I just sprang from a North Korean prison approve of me!
     You can see by how Trump made a spectacle of the hostages' arrival—being personally on-hand at 3 a.m. and genuflecting before the dictator who finally released them.
     “We want to thank Kim Jong Un, who was really excellent," Trump gushed.

     It is Kim Jong Un who should be thanking Trump, for all the favors and benefits bestowed. I suppose that's coming.

Autocrat of Time

     Few notions regarding history are more mistaken than the idea that we are on a descending spiral of laxity, where more and more is permitted, and standard after standard of taste and decency are abandoned. 
      I think this is because we assume that certain trends in some areas apply to all manifestations of expression. Yes, obscenity spreads and becomes more common. Moviemakers fretted over Rhett Butler saying "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," at the end of "Gone With the Wind," in 1939, while now all TV channels except the big three broadcast networks relish whatever dirty words they see fit. 
   But there are sub-currents. For instance, nudity was more acceptable in general media in eras gone by than it is now. I remember seeing microfilm of the Sun-Times original coverage of the 1955 Schuessler-Peterson killings, where the paper published photos of the naked bodies of the boys in a ditch, lightly airbrushed. Something we would never do today, out of consideration for the families of the victims and the knowledge that the paper would be torn down brick by brick by outraged readers if we did. 
    On the other hand, clothed corpses are another matter. I noticed that the CBS Evening News, once the platinum bar of excellence, didn't hesitate last month to flash a photograph of Prince's body, sprawled in his Paisley Park mansion, to illustrate a minor story about how no one was being charged for providing the drugs that lead to his death. I don't believe that would have happened a decade ago. I'm not pleased it happened now, but I am of an earlier age.

    Turn your attention to this watch advertisement, which I glimpsed on the back cover of the July, 1927 issue of American Magazine, a popular, mainstream general interest publication at the time similar to The Saturday Evening Post. Notice anything unusual? Try to imagine Timex or Hamilton running it now, and the outcry it would evoke, as much for the sexism as the nudity.
     Although I should point out a detail about this ad, if you can tear your eyes away from the windblown flapper: the watches are for both sexes, men and women. The ad is designed to appeal to both and, indeed, advertising studies show that women look longer on a photo of a naked woman than men do. Gloria Steinem said it's because the women are automatically comparing themselves to the picture.
     So are we better now, having shelved this kind of thing? I tend to disapprove of anything that reins in creativity. Rules are generally made to be broken. And standards change quickly. When this blog started, almost five years ago, I would encounter people who were troubled by its slightly risque title. Now I never do. Which means either tastes are changing; or my circle is narrowing. Or both. 

     
     

‘O nation miserable!’ — ‘Macbeth,’ prophecy and the Chicago mayor’s race

Ian Merrill Peakes as Macbeth

     You don't have to be Harold Bloom to analyze Shakespeare. Anyone can do it. For instance, I believe the entire character of Othello and the root of the play's tragedy can be comprehensively summed up in two words: he's stupid.
     His subordinate Iago, envious and bitter at being passed over for promotion, lays a crude trap and Othello falls in, eyes open.
     A critique which Bloom, famed literary critic and scholar, agrees with, in more ornate terms: "He so readily seems to become Iago's dupe...Othello is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect."
     In other words, he's stupid.
     The details can be parsed in any play, which is also part of the fun. With "Macbeth," for instance, now on stage to great effect at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, we can argue whether Macbeth is undone by the witches' prophecy; fresh from victory, noble Macbeth encounters the Weird Sisters, who tell him he'll be king of Scotland.
     Are the crones predicting Macbeth's certain future or merely goading him toward it?
     Bloom considers Macbeth a pig trussed for slaughter, forced along the chute that fate and his scheming wife have set for him. I'm not so sure. Maybe I just don't like predestination. But any resistance Macbeth might have felt is undercut by that fatal prediction, "All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king!"
     The prediction dooms Macbeth as much as his wife does. He's supposed to be king, so naturally goes about the bloody business. I flashed on that augury while reading the Sun-Times front page Tuesday: "LIGHTFOOT'S BIG STEP" it trumpeted, with Fran Spielman's careful analysis of why the former police board president seems to be joining the pack baying after Rahm Emanuel's job.
     First I felt the tickle of hope. Is Lightfoot the chosen one to deliver Chicago from the clutches of Rahm Emanuel, that charmless man, who can be easily imagined wandering the fifth floor of City Hall, trying to rub Laquan McDonald's blood from his hands. "Out, damned spot! ... What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" (Since vagueness allows anyone to interpret wildly and then criticize the product of their imaginings, let me be plain: Emanuel didn't kill McDonald, just sat on the evidence of his killing for a year, either through willful ignorance or desperate complicity).
     But we cannot wish Emanuel's opponents into having a chance against him. I'm not sure whether media attention doesn't magnify them to a stature they don't deserve and, like the witches' augury, drive lambs toward the cash buzzsaw slaughter that Rahm Emanuel has for them. If a high school squad challenged the Bulls to a game, would we treat them as serious contenders and put them on the front page? Are we not confusing intention with result?
     Fran's story is illustrated by seven tiny photos of dabblers already running, and a more apt graphic could not be imagined. Dorothy Brown? Really? She can't run the clerk's office, never mind the city. Garry McCarthy? (McCarthy, McDonald, it's like we have our own set of shabby minor characters cut from "Macbeth.") A true villain out of Shakespeare, slouching back to Chicago to avenge his lost manhood, Falstaff-like Mike Ditka, in fool's motley, jingling after him, goading him on to higher folly. Willie Wilson? The man needs an expensive hobby—he should buy a boat—so as to keep him from these expensive forays into politics. Paul Vallas? We've already got one rebarbative figure-spouting white insider murmuring in the mayor's office; why go through all this only to swap for another?
     The rest aren't worth the breath to ridicule. Let's exit today's stage with the bard, as we entered it. The paper ran a lukewarm review of Chicago Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Tuesday. I won't contradict expertise, but my wife has been raving about it for a week. The powerful performances of Macbeth and his lady, played by Ian Merrill Peakes and Chaon Cross, are reason enough to see the play, forget the special effects. I thought it magnificent.
     Than again, I viewed "Macbeth" as perfect for these Trumpian times, particularly when Macduff scoffs:

Fit to govern! No, not to live. O nation miserable,With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd, When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again?

     Not this year, not next. Maybe 2021. Maybe not.

Flashback 2007: Delightful and unexpected; Family vacation to Tennessee -- yes, Tennessee

     I was puzzling over what to write in the paper Wednesday and, through some random brain circuitry quirk, got to wondering what Eddie Montgomery is up to.
       Montgomery is the surviving half the Montgomery Gentry country music duo—his partner Troy Gentry died in a helicopter crash last September. I saw them on stage twice, and admired their powerful performance and honest, intelligent music. 

     Turns out that in February, Montgomery issued an album they had finished just before Gentry died, and not only has been touring, solo, but as chance would have it is coming to Bloomington, a mere 140 miles from Chicago, this Saturday night, playing at the Grossinger Motors Arena. Tickets are available.

     That seemed reason enough to dig deeper. So much of concert music is canned bologna  nowadays, I thought the Kentuckian's performances in the wake of Gentry's death might be more genuine and heartfelt than the standard fare.
    "I know I'm supposed to be a big badass outlaw or whatever," Montgomery told Rolling Stone in March. "But when we hit the stage a couple weeks ago without him, I was so nervous. I was like 'Oh my God' – I thought I was gonna get sick. But finally I felt him in there, and I started smiling."  
     Monday I contacted Montgomery's management and asked to talk to him for a few minutes about how he's holding up without the man he's been harmonizing with for so long—the duo officially formed in 1999, but they played together for decades before that. Maybe I'll hear from him Tuesday, most likely I won't on such short notice, but as I tell the boys, "It's called "trying.'"
     There aren't many groups that I like, but Montgomery Gentry songs are a few cuts above, and I quote them from time to time in the column. Now that I think of it, I would have included the recovery anthem "Some People Change" in my recent book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," but after going through the time and expense of tracking down Beth Nielsen Chapman and paying her a fortune for "Save Yourself," I didn't have the heart.
     No matter, in checking what I wrote when I first encountered the group, I came upon this travelogue to Tennessee, and thought it merits posting.

     The day before we left, I walked a cigar down Wacker Drive.
     Why go on vacation at all, I wondered, when it is so very pleasant right here? What sights could be possibly better than these? Especially in Tennessee, of all places?
     Ah, well, I concluded, with a melancholy puff. People do these things. The boys and the wife are looking forward to it -- she has her heart set on climbing some mountain and staying at a lodge there. Might as well go without complaint and see what happens.

                                                                  - - -

     Nashville has its own Parthenon. Who knew? A full-scale replica, not of marble like the one in Athens, but concrete-studded with pebbles, smack dab in the center of a city park. It's huge.  

     Inside, a 42-foot-tall statue of Athena, facing a pair of 24-foot-tall, 7.5-ton bronze doors so skillfully hung you can move one with your pinkie.
     Delightful and unexpected — here, in the Bible Belt, where people put Ten Commandments magnets on their SUVs, they erected an enormous pagan temple with a gilt Greek goddess in the center.
     And this was just the first morning of the first day. 

                                                      - - -

     My experience with country music began and ended 20 years ago with "Coal Miner's Daughter." But we were here, so why not go to the Grand Ole Opry?
     A great show. Impressive how they draw the audience into their 80-year tradition with a short film and a Minnie Pearl imitator revving up the crowd. They welcomed us to their 4,252nd consecutive performance, then got down to business with a blast of fiddle and a brace of blur-legged dancers.
     Acts came and went. White-haired pros with half a century at the Opry mixed with ingenues making their debuts.
     "This song is going to be on my new album, and I'd like to do it for you," said Jennifer Hanson, a leggy lass, touchingly sincere, introducing a tune called "73" that outlines the fracture of her family, its title referring, courageously, to the year she was born.
     Then a duet called Montgomery Gentry burst onstage. A driving beat, great lyrics — especially "Lucky Man" — sharp showmanship and twangy music. I had never heard of them before but instantly could tell that these guys were good. We bought their new CD and couldn't stop listening to it as we drove across the state.

                                                              - - -

     Homemade biscuits. Moon Pies. Sweet tea. Goo-Goo Clusters. Fried strawberry pie. Fried banana pudding. Turnip greens.
     Carthage. Alexandria. Tennessee's ancient world motif isn't limited to the Parthenon — 170-year-old wallpaper at Andrew Jackson's home shows scenes from mythology. No doubt an attempt back then to lend classical luster to a frontier nowhere.
     Fishing barefoot in a river. Riding horses through dense woods. We spent three days hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, whose beauty defies words — trees covered with delicate lichen and moss, banks of wildflowers, 10-mile-wide mountain vistas. The boys, whom I expected to drag their feet and pine for TV, instead surged ahead, particularly the older kid, as if he had been waiting his whole life for this. We went from worrying he'd refuse to climb to worrying he'd skip off a cliff.
     We stayed at the place my wife dreamed about — LeConte Lodge. No electricity, no roads, it's supplied by pack llamas. Toward evening, we watched the mist roll eerily up the mountainside, just like smoke.

                                                                   - - -

     After the park, Pigeon Forge, a godawful, endless strip of chain restaurants and go-kart tracks that makes Wisconsin Dells seem like the Garden of Eden. One could easily juxtapose it to the Smokies and make a compelling argument for the extinction of the human race.
     Too easily, and just as Tiger Woods doesn't practice two-inch putts, so I don't traffic in the obvious. I made the best of it and taught Kent how to shoot pool.
     Besides, that's where we saw the Dixieland Stampede, Dolly Parton's revival of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Any experience that includes live thundering bisons and a piglet race supposedly redeciding the outcome of the Civil War cannot be all bad.

                                                                       - - -

     "Martin Luther King stayed in a motel?!" marveled Ross, as I tucked him into bed in our room at the Peabody. Ironic — to him, King is a famous person, so of course he would stay somewhere fancy, like the Peabody, with its famous lobby-dwelling ducks and its duckmaster with his red jacket and gold-headed duck cane.
     I was explaining that tomorrow we'd visit the National Civil Rights Museum, cleverly carved out of the shell of the Lorraine Motel, where King was murdered in 1968.
     Like the whole state of Tennessee, the museum far exceeded expectations — a vivid, throat-clenching, eye-misting experience. We spent three hours there — the boys learning the saga for the first time, me picking up information I didn't know: For instance, King was stabbed by a deranged black woman in 1956. He later laughed off the incident, which seems the right approach to such situations.

                                                                       - - -

     Much of the country is still woods, and driving across its vastness was supremely reassuring. During the trip, the London terror plot unfurled, and the standard crew of flag-waving cowards took to the airwaves to announce that the only way to combat terrorism is to preemptively renounce the freedoms that terrorists oppose.
     Fools. It's a great country, and while we certainly can be harmed, we'll win in the end, if we keep faith in ourselves.

                                                                     - - -

      Memphis has a pyramid. Who knew? And of course Graceland. I went; how can you not? And since the place has been picked clean, culturally, there didn't seem any point to criticize. So I just went and enjoyed. It actually was interesting, and I learned stuff. His life, despite all the buffing, seemed hollow. By the time Elvis was my age, he had been dead for five years, and I decided that, all things being equal, I would rather be me than be Elvis, a revelation worth driving 1,900 miles to receive.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 15, 2007

'Don't give advice' and other useless, unheeded commencement suggestions

     Welcome friends, family members, residents of Chicago and environs.
     This is the commencement season.
     They have already begun, these solemn ceremonies, grand processions and groaning brass overtures, at institutions great and small, and will continue for a month and a half, from Loyola University Chicago, all this week, until ... Northwestern University, bringing up the rear, Friday, June 22.
     I'll be at NU, seeing the younger boy off into the world. But first, I'll be at Pomona College in California. Two boys, two commencements, boom-boom, one after another. Because the younger lad flashed through college in three years, itself a lesson on the value of paternal advice, since, when he raised the idea, I urged him to linger and enjoy college. You'll have a lifetime to work.
     He shrugged and did what he wanted. That's what kids do.
     Leading to my first piece of advice for commencement goers: don't give advice. Really, don't. The grads don't want to hear it, probably won't hear it, and you're giving it anyway, not based on their lives, but yours. We pretend we're trying to spare them our mistakes, but what we're really doing is trying to pick the music for a party we're not invited to.
     No matter. Advice will be given. Speakers famous and obscure will don black robes and puffy velvet hats, and share wisdom. Dream dreams. Live life.
     But what about the audience? Who speaks of our hopes?
     Nobody. Maybe we don't need it; our hopes are right in front of us, a snaking line of black-robed almost-graduates, taking selfies.
     To be honest, the person needing advice is me: fashion advice, first. Pack a sport coat? I consulted the video of the 2017 Pomona commencement to assess what the audience was wearing. A few old coots in jackets, but mostly men in their shirtsleeves.
     "Wear what you're comfortable in," my wife suggested. "It's California."
     Everywhere is California now. So my next bit of advice is: wear clothing. For an audience member to even ponder fashion inflates yourself to a significance you don't enjoy. You're a speck of color in the crowd.
     Bring mints. They help the time go by.
     Try not to cheer your graduate. Because every single graduate has family, and a brief delay after each makes the ceremony even longer than it already is. However, for some families, this graduation represents not the latest step on a perpetual victory lap but a revolution, a stirring breakthrough. They have to cheer, to scream out the names of their babies.
     I always thought the stern warnings against cheering reflect white privilege. What do they expect? Everyone in the audience to pat fingertips against palms and whisper, "Oh look, Muffy, junior is reaching another summit ..." So don't cheer unless you have to. If you do, go crazy. You earned it. Well, technically, your kid earned it, but that kid would have been selling drugs on a street corner if you didn't ride herd over him 24/7, and you know it and I know it even if the kid doesn't know it. So you earned it, too.
     I already know what I'm going to do, and I didn't realize this until I started to watch the Pomona video. I'm going to cry, and I'm not even sure why.
     Relief? No. If I could close my eyes, call out "One more time!" and open them to find myself standing at Evanston Hospital, awkwardly clutching a red-faced bundle wrapped in a soft blankie, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant once more having to squeegee up all that vomit in the white-tiled restroom at Zephyr ice cream parlor. It was on the ceiling.
     Pride? Maybe that. The boys turned out far better than I ever imagined, so far ahead of what I was at their age I can't even take credit. I was present, said stuff that nobody listened to, paid for things, but in the end, I feel like a rooster crowing at the sunrise, marking an occasion that I did not actually bring about.
     Maybe confused amazement. That sounds right. Really, it's as baffling as if I stepped out of pre-school orientation and returned to find my sons magically grown, grinning adults in neat beards, patting me once on the shoulder as they hurry off. Huh? What? How did that happen?

"Furst things furst."

     The ability to tell if something is sincere or a joke is vital for a reporter. 
     So it was with some unease that, researching Friday's column about LimeBike, the company introducing self-locking, electric-assisted bikes to the South Side, I watched this safety video introducing the system. And found myself ... confused.
      It's some kind of arch parody of an in-flight safety film, correct? I mean, it has to be. With those silly uniforms, the lime green ties and neck scarves, not to mention buttons, badges, belts and shoes.  The unplaceable European accent.  "When biking with company" isn't even American English. The simpering smiles. The vogueing hand gestures. The confetti at the end.
     So definitely a joke, of some sort. But why? LimeBike is an American company that operates within the United States. No Dutch parent to have inherited the creators of this video from. What then? Some marketing company's idea of fun? I hate to be the person who takes stupid things seriously, but something about this left me puzzled, and it isn't the sort of question you could ask the company—what's with the video? They could barely muster a comprehensible response to my wondering why they never actually come out and tell riders to always wear helmets, but merely show helmets being handed to bikers, who then immediately discard the helmets, apparently, and go riding without them. They emphasize the need to comply with vague regulations, as if wearing a helmet were a legal nicety and not a vital stratagem to keep your brains from being smeared over the curb.
     Maybe I'm getting old.
     Back in the '80s, when David Letterman was king of late night TV, sincerity was considered toxic, and every young person went about life wrapped in a cocoon of protective irony. That got tiresome, eventually, and was seen as a kind of emotional cowardice. I hope this video is just an example of marketing gone horribly wrong, and not evidence that fey sniggering is back. I can be as ironic as the next guy, but in its place. 
      Looking for edification, I poked around the LimeBike site, and watched a second video, a Matrix homage browbeating riders to park their LimeBikes responsibly. That one is less distressing, and gives me hope that the safety video is simply singing in a key I can't quite comprehend. 

"Furniture zone"? 

     And yet. Some of the safety tips seemed translated from another language. What the hell is a "furniture zone"? Is that intentional? A mistake? How did that happen? 
      The LimeBikes weren't bad—although that electric motor has a worrisome quality I didn't have room to elaborate upon in Friday's article. When a rider tries to move forward slowly, say edging into an intersection, it wants to project the rider forcibly forward, to get the bike going, and I can see it thrusting bicycles into harm's way when the rider is trying to approach a hazardous situation slowly. 
      Come to think of it, there isn't a word in the safety video about getting adjusted to the electric motor either.  I understand not all of their bikes have them, and the video has a one-size-fits-all, "we're happy to be in your city" generic quality. But still. It's irresponsible. You don't want to find out about the electric motor when it pushes your bike in front of a speeding truck.
      I hope I don't seem safety-obsessed. But it seems you should be able to avail yourself to a new bike system without first passing through a gantlet of smirking sardonicism. They're going to feel pretty stupid when under-informed and poorly-cautioned riders start suing them, and those goofy videos are shown to granite-faced jurors in courtrooms across the country.

Duck on the roof

     There's a first time for everything.
     After coming home to our old farmhouse on pretty much a daily basis for the past 18 years, I thought I had seen every possible permutation, every one of the old place's various moods and aspects. Pelted by rain, piled with snow. Lit up like a cruise ship at night. Dappled with shadow in the years it was dwarfed by a mighty sugar maple, far taller and older than the house itself. Flaws obvious in the bright sunlight after we lost the tree, a crying need for a new roof (done) and a new paint job (soon).
      But I'd never seen our house straddled by a duck. Pausing to chat with a neighbor across the street, glancing over to catch sight of a male mallard standing sentinel on the peak of the roof, next to the chimney.  I broke off our talk and wandered closer, as if mesmerized.
      Yes, we have ducks. A couple. For the past few years now. At least I assume it's the same pair. Hard to think they keep being replaced, one set flying off, a new pair arriving. 
      I'll look out the kitchen window and see them, rooting for seeds knocked off by the smaller birds at our bird feeder.  They lay their eggs somewhere on the property—one year in my compost heap, forcing me to refrain from tossing grass clippings in during their brood's gestation. One season they paraded around with a half dozen ducklings. It was like living in a children's book.
    Generally I see them during the regular appearance in our backyard after a heavy rain of what I once saw described in a real estate listing as "a seasonal pond," aka a yard that floods. 
     The male duck—the "drake"—has an emerald green head, a showy display intended to attract the drab, dun-colored female. 
      If you think I'm going to insert a joke here, you're out of your mind.
     Safer to swerve into etymology. "Duck" is a very old word—more than a thousand years, tracing back to the Old English "duce" meaning, unsurprisingly, "dive."  The 39 species of ducks in North America are divided between divers, which submerge entirely in water to feed, and dabblers, which go face down but leave their backsides on the surface. 
     The mallard, anas platyrhynchos, is the largest dabbling duck, and the most common, found in North America from the Bering Strait to Florida.  Ducks quack, of course, but the female mallard also is given to "deep, reedy laughing" according to my Sibley Guide to Birds. Which might not be unrelated to the fact that the male duck is one of the few birds with a penis.
      In this rare, but if I may be so bold, fortunate minority of penis-possessing birds, ducks are joined by geese and swans; otherwise, about 97 percent of birds don't have penises. To fertilize the females, males simply "mush their genital openings together," according to this National Geographic analysis of avian penises that will tell you more than you can ever care to know about the subject, assuming I haven't done that already. 

Mallards were on the first U.S. Duck Stamp in 1934

     If you feel comfortable around ducks—perhaps now more of a challenge than usual thanks to the above paragraph—it might be in part because ducks have been accompanying humanity for thousands of years. Wild ducks are depicted on the walls of Egyptian tombs; the Chinese had domesticated ducks 4,000 years ago, and ancient Romans raised them in incubators. 
      Few ducks are endangered, because they are so good at adapting to the world around them. And because duck hunters are so passionate about their sport. Duck hunters contribute far more to preserving wetlands and wildfowl refuges—hundreds of millions of dollars through the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service's Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps—than those whose interest in birds doesn't include killing them. Gun aficionados often pretend that they are not given their due, when appropriate, or that somebody is trying to restrict their rights. But duck hunters help the environment, adding to the nation's population of ducks rather than reducing it, and can hunt ducks with their duck hunting guns until the end of time, as far as I'm concerned. 

Ancient Chinese bronze of a duck

 While generally placid—they have a serenity, like Buddhist monks strolling around a monastery courtyard in contemplation— ducks nevertheless do not enjoy an comfortable place in human  psychology. Though less aggressive than geese, many duck words have negative connotations—"sitting duck," for instance, which originates from drakes molting after reproduction and being unable to fly. Ducks in popular culture invariably are angry and thwarted, whether perennial loser Daffy Duck, sputtering and irascible Donald Duck (who debuted in 1934, same as the duck stamp; one wonders what about that year was so conducive to ducks) or, even worse, his miser uncle Scrooge McDuck. I can't think of a positive duck character—Howard the Duck? Nope. The Ugly Duckling isn't a duck at all but, as he he discovers to his vast relief, a swan.

    At the beginning of "Pecked to Death by Ducks," global nature humorist Tim Cahill points out that, despite the title, "There are no ducks in this book."

     Then why the title? He tries to explain:  

     In Bali, I was examining ceremonies in which men and women, overcome with religious zeal, fell into trances and acted like various animals: horses, monkeys, pigs. These people were said to be "sanghyang." A man who becomes entranced and stomps like a horse is called "sanghyang djaran." 
     I had noticed there were domestic ducks all over Bali. Children brought them back from a day of feeding in the rice paddies. You'd see a lovely child with a white flag in her hand leading a row of waddling  self-important ducks over the levee just at sunset. 
     Why, I asked Nyoman, is it that I never see someone fall into a trance and become bebec, a duck? Nyoman said he really didn't know. It just wasn't done. Nobody knew how to act like a duck. 

     That is true. When we try to imitate ducks, we always fail. "Duck, duck goose," a seemingly innocent childhood game where youngsters become faux ducks and are chased by geese has been much maligned in recent decades. Neil F. Williams picked it second in his 1992 Physical Education Hall of Shame, right after dodge ball, for its potential for embarrassing  children, not to mention being a physical activity where the majority of participants sit around and do nothing for most of the game. 

    "The task for the goose is nearly impossible," Williams wrote in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. "But usually the goose is encouraged by the incessant, high-decibel screaming of the other students, who have little else to do." 
     Why this general contempt for ducks? There is little scorn for the generic robin or the murderous hawk. I went into the backyard and studied my old married duck couple, slowly rising from their seasonal pond and walking off, together, like a pair of professors lost in conversation, arms behind their backs. Maybe because so many birds we see both in flight and on the ground—geese, crows and sparrows come to mind. Or almost exclusively in flight, like hawks. Ducks seem to be always earthbound, waddling or swimming. I never seem to notice ducks on the wing, and begin to suspect they are birds who can fly but choose not to.
     That doesn't sound right either. But it's the best I've got. I'd ask the ducks but they're, you know, ducks. They keep their own counsel.

South Side gets tired of waiting for Divvy, brings in its own bike systems

One of many pretty homes on Bell Avenue.

      Go online and look at a map of Chicago's Divvy bike system. You'll see a mass of blue tags densely packed on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, each tag marking a dock where ride share bicycles are located.
     Zoom in, and the docks separate out, and you can see they start, at the north, at Central Street in Evanston, spread as far west as Austin Avenue at the Oak Park border, and are concentrated in the Loop, sometimes with two on the same block. Scanning down the map, they thin out until the southernmost Divvy station, at 87th Street and Wabash in Chatham.
     Eyeing the 580 or so blue inverted raindrop markers, you might not even notice a vast chunk of the city has no Divvy stations at all: Nothing south of 26th Street between Western and Harlem avenues, all the way to the city's southern border at the Little Calumet River and 138th Street. An area of about 20 square miles.
     Quite a lot, really.
     Since the system debuted in 2013, residents of the Southwest Side have been pestering Divvy to come to their communities. And for years Divvy, which is owned by the City of Chicago, has said: patience. We're on our way. The system has to expand contiguously: otherwise, you'll have bikes but nowhere to go.
     Finally, the South Side lost patience, gave up on Divvy, and, on Tuesday, welcomed not one but two new bike systems: LimeBike of California and Pace of Massachusetts.
     In my capacity the Sun-Times unofficial bike share chronicler, I grabbed my helmet and headed to Beverly to see how the new bikes work.

To continue reading, click here. 

A Jay Bushinsky memory

Jay Bushinksy

     Robert Feder reports that Jay Bushinsky died Wednesday at his home in Israel at age 85 (sixth item). That brought a smile to my face—not because of his passing, I'm not that much of a bastard. 
     But at my single Jay Bushinsky memory, which I will attempt to reconstruct.   
     For many years he was the Sun-Times Jerusalem bureau, which itself evokes a whistle of wonder. But he would get back to Chicago from time to time, and one of those visits he was speaking to a local Arab group's dinner, briefing them on the Situation in the Middle East.
     I can't remember which group or when this occurred.  But I must have been working one of those awkward evening shifts—say 4 p.m. to 12 midnight. Most reporters would bring a sack lunch but, grandiose fellow that I am, given to comforting myself with pleasures, I would take myself to dinner. And this particularly night, facing another empty evening, I had slid over to a sushi emporium and loaded up. Back in the late 1980s there were more sushi places downtown than there are today. 
     Upon my return to the paper, an editor told me to hustle my ass over to some location and cover the remarks our own Jay Bushinsky was giving, before this Arab group.
     That too was a dinner, and my memory is rolling up, bloated with raw fish and vinegar rice, and having these very solicitous Arab folks around a big table gently urging foodstuffs on me while Bushinsky spoke.
     "You must try this," they would say, "we call it hummus. It is delicious." "Please sample some of this fallafel. You will like it." 
     I tried, in my most polite fashion, to explain that I had just eaten dinner, and this fare, rather than being unfamiliar, was my own people's food as well. I wish I could but I can't. That didn't work, and I ended up having to eat a bit, just to satisfy them.
     That's it. There is a second, shadow memory, a faint echo: that the attendees at the dinner were not pleased with Jay and whatever he had to say. Maybe I wasn't either, because I remember kind of cringing. Maybe because he was telling them the truth and I was too uninformed to recognize it. Maybe because he was off-base. I can no longer recall. 

   

Aunt Jemima welcomes us into an 1893 World’s Fair that’s not so fun to recall

     Sometimes the obvious sit in plain sight, unnoticed, until someone points it out.
     Despite a lifetime of eating hot dogs, a connection eluded me until I attended Northwestern literature professor Bill Savage’s lecture about ketchup during the Chicago History Museum’s Hot Dog Fest three years ago and he casually dropped the bomb.
     “Two immigrant brothers came here and in 1893, at the World’s Fair, had the brilliant idea to put a viener, a Viennese sausage, in a bun, and voila, the hot dog is born, or at least the Vienna Beef hot dog is born.”
     Ohhh, Vienna led to wiener just as Frankfurt led to frankfurter. Makes sense.
     With the 125th anniversary of the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition May 1, expect fond visits to Chicago’s debut in the global spotlight. The fair’s impact stays with us, in the many products debuted: from Vienna Beef to Aunt Jemima pancakes, from the Ferris wheel to the zipper. The blue ribbon that Pabst beer boasts of on every can was awarded at the 1893 fair. 
     Wait a sec. Aunt Jemima Pancakes … hmm … maybe we better skip that one. Awkward. Uncomfortable.
     Besides, the product had really debuted a few years earlier. The creators of Aunt Jemima went bankrupt in 1890, and a second company relaunched the brand at the fair, hiring a South side cook and former slave named Nancy Green to wear an apron and kerchief and dole out pancakes.
     Too late to turn back now. Anyway, speaking of impact that lingers, Aunt Jemima, and the uncomfortable racial stereotypes clustered around her can do more than ballyhoo pancakes. She also welcomes us to consider an aspect of the fair that, while not as eagerly appreciated as hot dogs or beer, is just as current and far more important.
     In 1890, when the Chicago fair was first being planned, black Americans tried be included in the great exposition—to see their achievements highlighted and celebrated. The Civil War had been over for 25 years. They were citizens now. They had legal rights, supposedly.
     Their effort failed, entirely. No members of the fair committee formed by President Benjamin Harrison were black. There was a representative from Alaska, but when African-American groups officially complained, the president responded that there was just no room.
     "The embarrassment of being ignored by the White House was almost matched by the embarrassment of begging for what Negroes regarded as their right of representation," one historian noted.
     Blacks couldn't even get jobs as guards at the fair. They would try, and be turned away. Of the 65,000 displays and exhibits at the fair, none highlighted the achievements of an African-American.
     Not that they were excluded entirely. White organizers brought in villagers from Western Africa and set them up in a thatched enclosure.
     "As if to shame the Negro," Frederick Douglass wrote, "the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."
     Douglass contributed to a cri di coeur issued by Ida B. Wells. Fresh from a speaking tour of England, she wasn't about to yield the fair to Nancy Green and her pancakes and happy tales of plantation life. Wells printed 20,000 copies of an 80-page booklet titled, "THE REASON WHY the Colored American is not Included in the World's Columbian Exposition" and had them distributed to fairgoers.
     The preface states:
     "At Jackson Park are displayed exhibits of [America's] natural resources, and her progress in the arts and sciences, but that which would best illustrate her moral grandeur has been ignored. The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years for freedom as against 250 years of slavery, would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions which could have been shown the world."
     Casting a wide net, the preface was also written in French and German.
     Much of the pamphlet was taken up with lynching, which would peak in 1894. Douglass' introduction, if you substitute execution by skittish cops for lynching, could have been written yesterday.
     "No proof of guilt is required," he wrote. "It is enough to accuse, to condemn and punish the accused with death."
     The pamphlet laid out heartbreaking documentation of black achievement in the arts and sciences, including lists of patents, who could have had a place at the fair, if only society allowed such a thing.
     It would be a double irony if today we looked back warmly at this fair as a high water mark and ignored, once again, the lives of those who were excluded.
     Sometimes the obvious sit in plain sight unnoticed until someone points it out.

The Crime and Punishment of Jean Gump, Pt. II

Peace Museum, Hiroshima

     This is the second part of a two-part story on Jean Gump, the anti-nuclear activist who died March 16. You can read the first part here. 

     Yet, during the half hour she was at the missile site, she was not afraid.
     "It was really interesting," she said. "I expected I would be paralyzed with fear. But it didn't happen that way. I felt kind of good. I felt like singing. It was an easy thing to do, because it was so right."
     Along with their news release the group had prepared a six-page document headlined, "Today we sound the alarm!" It outlined the group's beliefs—that nuclear weapons are an unconscionable peril that must be resisted by all good people—and presented a legally phrased indictment of the government of the United States for "development, deployment and willingness to use nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction" and against the institutional Christian church for "its complicity in preparing for mass murder of the earth's people."
     After her arrest, Gump was taken to the Federal lock-up in Kansas City, Mo, interviewed by F.B.I. agents, and then, to her vast surprise, released on a signature bond. On Easter Sunday she had dinner at the home she thought she would never see again.
     The trial took place in June 1986 on the sixth floor of the Kansas City Federal Courthouse, in courtroom 666. Gump, with her finely tuned sense of the symbolic, points out that the number 666 is the biblical sign of apocalyptic evil in the Book of Revelation.

Jean Gump

     The accused decided to serve as their own counsel, seeking legal advice from several sympathetic lawyers and from Gump's son Joseph, who is a third-year law student at DePaul.
     Kansas City attorney Henry Stover reviewed transcripts of earlier trials with the five, trying to give them an idea of what kind of witnesses the government would call and the sort of testimony they could expect. Stover says that, while self-representation was not the smartest legal tactic, it was an extension of the group's protest.
    "I think, from their perspective, it was a way to meet the jury more often," Stover says. "So often at a criminal trial the defendant just sits there, and in many cases does not take the witness stand. This way, each took turns, asking witnesses questions. At conferences at the bench with the judge, they actually got to express themselves fully. They had more opportunity for a conversion, personal conversion, to take place."
     The government's case was simply. these five people—Gump, Morlan and Rippetoe were tried along with Darla Bradley, 22, and John Volpe, 39, who committed a similar "action" at a nearby missile silo the same morning, and were also part of the Silo Plowshares group) had conspired to break into a national defense facility and destroy property vital to the defense of the country. There was no question of guilt—a national television network had filed it, after all—and motive was irrelevant.
     The Plowshares employed a version of the "necessity defense." The necessity defense acknowledges that, in certain dire situations, a person can act illegally because of overwhelming circumstances. For instance, if upon seeing a house on fire and a person yelling from the upper window, you broke into the house to rescue that person, and the owner of the house for some reason decided to press breaking-and-entering charges, you would use the necessity defense to excuse what would otherwise be an illegal act.
     In this case, the Plowshares argued the overwhelming danger of nuclear weaponry was, in effect, the moral equivalent of a house on fire, calling for their illegal actions.
     Judge Elmo B. Hunter would not permit the defense.
     "That type of argument," he said later, "if it were recognized [in court] would lead to a near anarchy situation. Every person has an ideal in which they believe, and the total result would approximate anarchy. You might have a kick on abortion. I might have a kick on the Sanctuary movement, and another might have a kick on the gold standards. If we are to pick and choose what laws are to obey, there is no law.
     With their basic defense ruled impermissible in court, the Plowshares had little chance for anything other than a guilty verdict, which the jury reached after deliberating for one hour and 47 minutes. Gump says that before reading their verdict, the jury asked Judge Hunter for permission to deliver, along with it, some sort of apology, but Judge Hunter denied permission. Judge Hunter says that no such request was ever made. "I don't know where she dreamed that up," he says.
     According to Stover, who has been involved with several Plowshare defenses, more than 700 pieces of mail were delivered to the courthouse, asking for leniency. The actual count of mail, kept on file at the courthouse, is closer to 35 letters.
     Judge Hunter sentenced Ripetoe, Bradley, Morlan and Gump to eight years in prison, followed by five years of probation. Volpe, in consideration of his three young children, aged 4, 8 and 9, was given a reduced sentence—seven years in prison. At sentencing, he offered to cut the sentences in half if the five would pay the several thousand dollars damages claimed by the government (Gump's share was $424.48). All five refused.
      The length of the prison terms surprised some people, but Judge hunter denies that the sentences were unnecessarily severe. "I wouldn't use 'severe' because of the circumstances," he says. "Very substantial, yes, but they're not severe because part of the reason for sentencing people is to get a deterrent effect—trying to deter that person and others in the public who might be tempted to do the same thing."
     After sentencing, the plowshares sent a series of personal, impassioned letters to Judge Hunter, trying to prick his conscience over his decision. ("Sometimes I wish we had said more at our sentencing, for I really had the feeling of being a lamb led silently to the slaughter," wrote Ken Rippetoe in the middle of a 2,000-word document cheerily titled "Greetings Judge Hunter!")
      "I wondered to myself, 'Are they abusing him because they're so forcefully approaching him on this issue?" says Stover.
     In retrospect, Judge Hunter feels his beliefs—in respect for law and a just society—permitted him no other choice than to give Gump the sentence he did.
     "I take no pleasure out of her situation," he says. "It's simply that she has made it impossible for me or any other judge to do anything appreciably different from what I did ... I don't care if they advocate their cause to the whole world as long as they do it using legal means and don't break the criminal law. They don't have a corner on fearing atomic warfare; we all fear it. They don't have a corner on wanting peace; we all want peace. They know they can advocate their cause in dozens and dozens of legal ways, most of them more effective than the one they've chosen, the illegal way."
     The government views Gump as a criminal. And, for some, the story ends there. but the temptation, given the circumstances, is to ask whether or not she is a fool, a Cassandra or a martyr.
    After all, while it was her crime that put her in Judge Hunter's courtroom, it was her refusal to recant that put her in prison. A few mea culpas, a check for $428.48, and Gump could very well be home now in Morton Grove. Whether this is foolishness or personal courage depends solely on how you view the delicate interaction between the individual and the state. Many people probably won't understand why she didn't pay the money and avoid the sentence. Others might never even think to ask the question.
     In Gump's eyes the illegality of the act is meaningless. She uses the example of Nazi Germany. Those who opposed the Nazis, though "lawbreakers" to the ruling order, were honored by later generations. Whether Gump, and people like her, will be similarly revered in the future probably depends on what that future brings. if, someday, the disarmament movement grips this country the way the civil rights movement once did, Gump might be viewed as a sort of Rosa Parks, whose insistence on riding in the front of the bus, while landing her in jail, sparked a movement.
     On the other hand, if another 40 years go by without the use of nuclear weapons, if the weapons turn out to be in fact "peace-keepers," then Gump's actions might, ironically, be viewed as having been contrary to the interests of peace.
     if the missiles are used, and anyone remains to sort through the past and care about it, perhaps Gump and the Plowshares will be seen as a small cadre of people who looked ahead and saw the true future, something like John Brown and his raiders, who seized the arsenal at Harpers' Ferry in 1859, hoping to set off a slave uprising, and were condemned as traitors and hung by the federal government, the same government that would be fighting for Brown's cause less than two years later.
     Gump has become bitter. "Americans—they've lived the soft life," she says. "They're a marshmallow country. Everybody wants peace and nobody wants to pay for it. I wouldn't want to go back to Morton Grove—they're living in a utopia. It's really an illusion. People shop at Field's."
     From prison, Gump looks out and sees a government that works, "hand in glove," with the media. She sees a prison system set up, primarily, to get cheap labor from prisoners. She compares Judge Hunter to Adolf Hitler, and sees his refusal to permit the mention of international law in his courtroom as being predictable, since "Hitler wouldn't have permitted Nuremberg trials."Defense, she believes, has nothing to do with the existence of nuclear weapons—they are created purely for the profit for the big defense contractors.
     But to examine Gump's politics too closely is to miss her central driving force, the impetus that put her, and the other Plowshares, atop that silo on Good Friday: Catholicism. Bible quotations and religious imagery are found throughout her writings, and while she denies her going to jail is an act of martyrdom, her explanation of her actions is, at the core, a religious one.
     "I don't know how a person could come at it other than from a religious perspective," she says.
     Gump is not advocating general social action—not encouraging people to read, write, think, march or care about nuclear weapons. She wants people to go to the missile sites and "disarm" the missiles. Period. All other antinuclear actions are a sop to the government.
     "Disarmament occurs when we disarm a weapon and in the 20 years I worked, not one missile was ever disarmed," she says. "As a matter of fact, three to five a day were manufactured. So all the work in the political area was wasted. Our government allows us to march in the street with signs because it is ineffectual."
     An explanation of Jean gump's actions is offered by her husband, Joe. "I liken it to the crucifixion syndrome," he says, "where individuals take upon themselves the suffering of the world in order to redeam the world."
     Joe Gump has put the house on Linder up for sale. They had planned to do so before last March, he says, because it seemed so empty with all the children grown and gone. With Jean gone, it seems even emptier. Joe, like Jean, would prefer to talk about the issues and not about "personalities," but he will, sitting in their immaculate Early American living room, with knickknack cabinets and embroidery on the wall, talk about the changes in his life.
     "It's something you try to find a way of adjusting yourself to," he says. "I always have had complete confidence in what she's done. We've been married 37 years, and we met four years before that. I can't say I was enthused at the prospect of being separated from your wife. It's difficult to live with."
     Gump's friends get together, now and then, to exchange copies of her letters and discuss the situation. The impact of Gump's action affects them differently. 
     "We all realize that we're cowards," says Carmen Pappas. "We're enjoying the goodies and don't want to join Jean in Jail." Isabell Condit doesn't feel like a coward.
     "I don't agree with her on a lot of things. I think she's a little extreme when she talks about the government. I think she's a little extreme when she talks about disarmament in the face of a perceived enemy. I believe in what Lincoln said when asked what you do with an enemy. He said you make him a friend."
     At the Federal Correctional Institution at Alderson, Jean Gump lives in a room with nine other convicts. There is little privacy. and Gump likes to wake up early and spend time alone in the day room, writing letters. She has a job. From 7:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., with a half hour for lunch, she works in the prison greenhouse, raising plants for the prison. She earns 11 cents an hour.
     According to the terms of her sentence, she is eligible for parole in January of 1991, but she feels her chances of parole are slight, because she will neither pay restitution nor agree to cooperate with the terms of the parole. In fact, if released she might very well grab the bolt cutter and head for the nearest silo. "I will die in prison," she says.
     If she goes in search of a silo, she won't have trouble finding some. There are more than 1,000 in the U.S., equally divided between Minuteman II and Minuteman III missiles. The Minuteman II (The type of missile at the silo Jean Gump broke into) is 57 feet tall, weighs about 36 tons, and if fired, could deliver a thermonuclear warhead with the explosive power of a million tons of TNT to a target 7,000 miles away within 20 minutes. But none has ever been fired. Yet.
     —Originally published in North Shore magazine, February 1987

     Note: The United States now maintains 399 missile silos, less than half the amount it did when this story was written.