I love wordplay as much as the next guy. However...

 

    And people think "every goddamn day" is edgy...
    Wednesday I was leaving the Department of Motor Vehicles—after a more than two hour wait for a simple driver's license renewal; get on the stick, Jesse White. 
     There it was, in the parking lot. I raced over, pulling out my iPhone.
    But clicking a few pictures was not enough.
    I had to know. 
    "Why are you asking?" said the voice that answered the number a few hours later. 
     I explained.
     "It happened in a bar," owner Ross Reed began. "Forty years ago."
    "Seandell's," he continued, a bar in Lincolnshire, at Milwaukee Avenue and 22, now long gone. "As red neck as red neck gets."
     He was in the tree business, understand. Sold a lot of firewood. Firewood goes in fireplaces. Creating smoke, that billows up chimneys and, eventually, over time, dirties them. 
     "So many people were asking who I knew in the cleaning business," said Reed. The tree business cools down the in fall, just when the chimney-cleaning business heats up. 
     "One night I was out with the boys in 1980, and I said, 'I kinda like sitting in a nice warm living room instead of being up a tree in a blizzard,'" Reed said.
    He started the business with a landscaper friend, Kevin Winkler. A business needs a name. Names were discussed. A certain sooty pun was unspooled. 
    "They said 'No way' and I said, 'watch me' and it's been Ash Wipe ever since."
     Officialdom didn't blink. 
    "Oh hell, I'm incorporated with the state, my own trademark," he said. "If the government can accept it...."
    So can the chimney-owning residents of the tony North Shore? So does the name attract customers? Or drive them away?
    "A little of both." 
    But between the two, business booms.
    "It's crazy," said Reed, 59. "Here it is, middle of July, I'm absolutely slammed. I don't advertise."
    With that truck you don't have to.
   Ever find any interesting stuff clogging up chimneys?
    "Lots of times you find animals," Reed said. "The coolest thing I found is a letter to Santa Claus written by a girl named Sarah. The family in the house had been there 25 years and didn't have a Sarah. They knew the people they bought the house from: no Sarah. I could tell from the dolls and toys she asked for, the letter was from 1910, 1915, discolored from time. It had gotten stuck up behind the damper. The lady from the house wanted it; I would have framed it, hung it up. I hope she kept it. That's one of the cooler things. I've been waiting to find the box of diamonds that grandpa hid up a chimney, but it hasn't happened yet."

    We talked for a long time. Sadly, some of the more interesting things he made me promise not to repeat here, and I'm a man of my word. These rich people and their fireplaces...

     While on the subject. How do you clean a chimney?
    "Brushes," Reed said. "You send 'em up. "You do it from the bottom up, because if you do it from the top up you got no control. You push the brush up, with a vacuum running, to catch it before it gets out of hand. In some of those mansions in Lake Forest: white carpet, white furniture, white dog, white wife... you get one speck of it in there and you're in trouble."
     No doubt. I did not envy the man his clientele. 
     A cleaning costs $150 to $200, "depending on how far I have to drive." A mansion can have five fireplaces. Or more. He's cleaned the fireplaces of homes about to be torn down. He's cleaned the chimneys for artificial fireplaces.
     "You really don't got to clean 'em with gas logs," he said. "I tell 'em that. They say, 'Well, I'll feel better if you do it.' My honesty only goes so far. 'You got seven fireplaces. You want me to pretend like I cleaned 'em? Okay...'"
    Then, out of the blue.
    "I don't wear my top hat anymore. It's in a drawer, but I don't wear them."
    But you did?
    I started in '79. I have hats as old as I am. The real McCoy. I bought it because that's what chimney sweeps wear. If you see someone up there in blue jeans ..." 
     He paused, to let the thought sink in. "But if they're up there in a top hat, you know immediately what they're doing."
      He said that chimney cleaning began in Germany 800 or 900 years ago, and the top hat tradition began with undertakers throwing away their top hats and tails and chimney sweeps taking them. 
     We talked a long time, and I hung up with reluctance, wishing I had a fireplace.


  




     

What's something that women in prison just can't get enough of? Books

Perimeter fence, Cook County Jail

     Among the hardships of prison — bars, noise, other prisoners — there is the trouble with books.

     Prison libraries tend to be small, their books old, dated and falling apart from use. And in a penal version of the old joke about the food at a Catskills resort being lousy and in such small portions, use of these small, out-of-date, battered prison libraries tends to be heavily restricted.
     “Sometimes a woman or man might have access for half an hour every two months,” said Vicki White, a volunteer at Chicago Books to Women in Prison, a group that does just what its name implies.
     White contacted me because she saw that “Out of the Wreck I Rise,” the literary recovery book I wrote with Sara Bader, had come out in paperback — the only person in the wide world who noticed, as far as I can tell. Would I consider, she wondered, donating 20 copies for female inmates, who often struggle with addiction.     

Vicki White

 

    “Right,” I thought. “Like that’s going to happen.”
     Still, I was curious about the group. The paperback publication is significant to them because they can’t send hardback books.
     “Many prisons require paperback only — security issues,” White said.
     When CBWP was founded in 2002 it originally shipped books to prisons in bulk, where the boxes would sit in mailrooms, unopened. So the founders assembled a library — about 8,000 volumes now — and began filling specific requests from prisoners.

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'No doubt'

Thomas Hobbes

     "Scientia potentia est," Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan. "Knowledge itself is power." 
     Which is why this particular era in our nation's checkered history can be thought of as The Great Abdication of American Power, since we are in full retreat from what we know to be true, racing willy-nilly to embrace what our leaders wish were true.

     Accusations of the president colluding with Russia? A "witch hunt." Again and again, drilled into us. Before a charge is leveled or evidence shown. 
    Is the president a traitor? Half the country doesn't know and doesn't care and never will.
    The respected lawman conducting the investigation? Hopelessly compromised. The media? Fake. Except for news flattering Trump. That always seems on-the-level. 
    Does this contradiction bother millions of Americans? No.

    We act like what we don't know won't hurt us. When it can and does and will. Consider climate change. 
     The weather ratchets warmer, day by day, year by year, gradually, on average. It's hotter than it's ever been. That warm weather drives storms, fires. We see it all around us. 
     The nations of the world gathered, agreed to do something with the Paris climate agreement. It wasn't a lot, but it was a start.
    Then Trump was elected. And our country crawled before industry, in general, and the coal industry in particular, naming a paid lobbyist, Scott Pruitt, as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a government body he used to regularly sue.

     Being a shill of the coal industry—a paid lobbyist who continued to hoover up favors as EPA head—did not end Scott Pruitt's career with the federal government last Thursday, when the president accepted his resignation.
     Trump knew what they were getting. Pruitt was chosen because he was a shill. Pruitt was Oklahoma attorney general and a hireling for the coal industry. Since the complexity of that phrase might elude some readers, I should elaborate: the fossil fuel industry paid him hundred of thousands of dollars to encourage the use of coal.
     Of course Pruitt kept that gravy train rolling even after Trump made him administrator of the EPA, while he also vigorously began trying to dismantle the environmental regulations put in place to keep the country from being polluted and the world from burning up, and urged Trump to pull out of the Paris accords, where the nations of the world had banded together trying to reverse climate change—the process by which carbon dioxide, created by burning coal and oil, collects in the atmosphere and causes the climate to become warmer . 
     There is no question this is happening. Unless you sell the stuff causing it to happen, or are in the employ of people selling the stuff causing this to happen. Knowing the truth, we could have done something, were trying to do something. Almost did something.
     Now we're just blinding ourselves to the problem, in order to maximum our short term gain. It's like burning your home's floorboards in the furnace on a cold day.

     As scary as this is, even scarier to see how it is perceived.

     I used to think it was just Fox News. But looking at the reaction to Pruitt's resignation, I happened across a Wall Street Journal editorial that begins: 

   Chalk one up for the swamp. The permanent progressive state finally ran Scott Pruitt out of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, and the tragedy is that Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.
     President Trump announced on Twitter Thursday afternoon that he had accepted Mr. Pruitt’s resignation. Mr. Pruitt cited the “unrelenting attacks on me personally” and his family that have “taken a sizable toll on us all.” He’s right about unrelenting. Dozens of reporters have examined every furl of Mr. Pruitt’s forehead since he started the job.

     Dozens! Oh my! As if scrutiny is a bad thing. The editorial mentions a few of Pruitt's more minor abuses and then lets loose with this startling sentence: "Mr. Pruitt says most of this was false or exaggerated, and no doubt much of it was."
     "No doubt." Could you summarize the requirement to be admirer of the current administration better in two words? You cannot doubt what he says, no matter how obviously incorrect, or contradictory, or petty. Easier to imagine a Deep State bogeyman—I suppose we should be grateful it isn't the Jews, yet, because when you're imagining a shadowy presence to blame for your own faults, it usually falls to them. Maybe that's coming.
    So Pruitt had to go, not for corruption, not for tearing down regulations but—as the New York Times reported—because he was coveting Jeff Sessions' job and Trump got tired of reading about his daily excesses and petty grifts.
    The Journal faults Pruitt, not for viewing his office as a personal dole, but for appearing to do so. He isn't responsible for what he did—that's the Deep State, the "collaborationist press" and the "left's environmental agenda." Not because he was terrible, but because it looked terrible.
     These people have "no doubt" their pieties are true, because it is in the financial interest of a few, who put out a lie, that their supporters slavishly believe, contrary to their interests. I wish I had the knowledge why, but I don't. Talk about powerless. 

The first 100 questions about Rev. Pfleger's Dan Ryan protest

     Rev. Michael Pfleger's anti-gun violence march shutting down the Dan Ryan was the big Chicago story over the weekend. It raised a lot of questions. Here are the first 100:

1. Who were the protests for?
2. Does anybody not know about the problem at this point?
3. If so, will they learn about it from this?
4. Or were the protests supposed to jar those already aware into action?
5. What should those people do?
6. Aren't those inconvenienced by closing the Dan Ryan the ones whose attention the protest is trying to snag?
7. Are they now more sympathetic?
8. Or less?
9. Did the mayor really suggest the march might deter shooters?
10. What dream world is he living in?
11. Is this crisis even a matter of caring?
12. Can we care the problem away?
13. Don't officials care more about the Dan Ryan being shut down than Chicagoans being killed?
14. How screwed up is that?
15. Did you answer "totally?"
16. How does awareness help, anyway?
17. Aren't residents of violence-plagued neighborhoods plenty aware?
18. What should they do?
19. Start jobs programs?
20. Is the march mainly for their benefit?
21. Ever notice how personal responsibility is rarely mentioned?
22. Is that blaming the victims?
23. Why do protests insist affected communities don't control their own lives?
24. Do they?
25. Aren't protests appealing to some higher power to fix everything?
26. Isn't that what priests do every Sunday?
27. Is question No. 21 a sign of white privilege?
28. Should this column have been written by a black pundit?
29. Would it offer different questions?
30. What are those?
31. Would those questions have more validity?
32. Why?
33. Or why not?

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Why do buried lives become important?

      Am I the only one seeing the ghost of Floyd Collins?
     He flickered into mind after those boys were trapped in a cave in Thailand, a dozen soccer players and their coach. 
    When the search was going on, as each day passed, hope dwindled. Then they were found but, in a cruel twist, getting them out was neither immediate nor perhaps even possible. It involved a six hour dive, in near total darkness, for children who could not swim. Found but not safe.
     Collins was the Kentucky cave explorer, on Jan. 30, 1925, he became trapped 55 feet underground, while trying to find a new entrance to the Crystal Cave. He too could be seen but not rescued.
     The next two weeks became an early American media circus, as primitive radio stations set up, barkers sold food and souvenirs. A reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, William Burke Miller, began wriggling into the cave to interview Collins, and sent out breathless dispatches: 

     CAVE CITY, Kentucky, Feb. 2—Floyd Collins is suffering torture almost beyond description, but he is still hopeful he will be taken out alive, he told me at 6:20 o`clock last night on my last visit to him.
     Until I went inside myself I could not understand exactly what the situation was. I wondered why someone couldn't do something quick, but I found out why.      "I was lowered by my heels into the entrance of Sand Cave. The passageway is about five feet in diameter. After reaching the end of an 80-foot drop I reached fairly level ground for a moment. From here on in I had to squirm like a snake. Water covers almost every inch of the ground, and after the first few feet I was wet through and through. Every moment it got colder. It seemed that I would crawl forever, but after going about 90 feet I reached a very small compartment, slightly larger than the remainder of the channel.
     This afforded a breathing spell before I started again on toward the prisoner. The dirty water splashed in my face and numbed my body, but I couldn't stop. Finally I slid down an eight-foot drop and, a moment later, saw Collins and called to him. He mumbled an answer.
     My flashlight revealed a face on which is written suffering of many long hours, because Collins has been in agony every conscious moment since he was trapped at 10 o`clock Friday morning.
     I saw the purple of his lips, the pallor on his face, and realized that something must be done before long if this man is to live.

     Miller won the Pulitzer Prize. Collins died of exposure after two weeks, days before a shaft sunk trying to reach it would have broken through. The fates of those boys are still in the balance.
      Why do such stories resonate? Collins would be followed by a number of others—Baby Jessica McClure, the 18-month old girl who fell into a well in Midland Texas in 1987 comes to mind. When children are involved, world attention is even more transfixed.
     Maybe it's the optimist in me, but these stories touch on something precious. They remind us of the value of every life. Experts from half a dozen countries, including the United States, which sent Navy divers, rushed to Thailand. It was breathless, front page news. The same children who would be turned away from our borders with a sneer of mocking derision were suddenly of enormous value—suddenly, I would suggest, be given the enormous value they deserve. 
      I hope that the boys are rescued, all safe, and reunited with the parents. And moreover, I hope that the world, relieved, sees the contours of a lesson in this. Why do people only become important when buried alive? Why are the lives of others precious only when they are put in peril? Something to think about. 

RIP Danny Malloy

Downtown Berea, Ohio, mid-1960s

     "Absolutely heartbroken 💔," the Facebook post begins. "I am a better person for knowing 'Dad Malloy'..."
     A glance at the photo. Heavier, half a century older. But that black curly hair. Those black eyes. That overbite smile. A keen little boy's face peered at me through the thick mask that time settles over us all.
     Danny Malloy was my best friend. We lived in a suburban development, brand new at the time. Ranch houses, oblong boxes, set in circles. I was on Carteret Court, he lived the next circle over, on Downing. Walk straight out my front door, hit the tree lawn as the screen door slams, cut across the circle, aim myself between Ricky Johnson's house and the Caffreys and there you were, in Danny Malloy's backyard.
     His dad was a janitor at Southwest General Hospital. Mine was a nuclear physicist at NASA. Ricky had us both beat: his dad was a fireman. That's how it was then, people mixed together. Well, they lived together, in the same neighborhood. Now that I think of it, there wasn't a lot of mixing among the adults. I doubt my father and Danny's father ever met. How could they? They went to work, came home, slept. On weekends they stayed in their own yards. 
    We kids, on the other hand, we mixed. We rode bikes, played kickball.

    Danny had 14 brothers and sisters. I read their names on the funeral notice with flashes of recognition: "Robert (Mary Ann), Sharon Mayer (Paul), Pam, Michele Batdorf (Dave, deceased), Celeste Deguzis (Jeff), Connie Schramek (deceased) (Jim), Gary (Simona), Ann Marie Weger (Rod), Mary Siskovic (Ken), Tim (Kelli), Brian (Hallie), Brenda Bednar (Steve), Laura (deceased) and Angela (deceased)."
     Bobby, the oldest—a shadow, a decade or more beyond us, that distant cool of an older sibling. Sharon and Pam too. Celeste babysat for us—she once brought her dinner over on a paper plate, covered in foil. I can still see her, cutting across the circle, holding that plate, staring at it with a child's shock at seeing the proprieties upended. You ate dinner at home. 

    Or was that Connie? No, Celeste.

    Gary was a little younger than us, and the rest were babies, their births faintly registering. Fourteen brothers and sisters.
    I had two. So naturally, Danny came over to play at my house. That's how it worked. I just assumed we represented some kind of sanctuary—my parents must have pointed that out to me. And we did what? Played. I couldn't spend 30 seconds describing those years. I was a solitary kid, given to making castles of wooden blocks—red rectangles, blue squares, yellow cylinders—and army men and Hot Wheels. I remember Danny and I ... playing with dinosaurs. Plastic dinosaurs. Creating elaborate scenarios, stories.

     I wish I had a picture. But you didn't take photographs of that kind of thing.  My parents took photos of us on vacation, as documentary proof. Tiny figures set against some historic site. Not of their kids playing kickball with their friends. Mine didn't anyway.
     I only went over Danny's house once, I'm certain of that. But the visit stayed vivid in mind. Triple bunkbeds in the bedrooms. In my memory, their dining room table was a picnic table with benches—can that be? His mother made our peanut butter sandwiches out of an enormous peanut butter jar. I had never seen one that big. His father worked at night, was tired, unshaven.
     That's really it. No dramatic moments, no break, just the gradual drifting off. He probably went to St. Mary's, the Catholic School, or we lost each other in the vastness of Berea High, heading toward our various fates. No doubt I fancied my path far, far better, heading off, seeing the world, being a writer. Though reading the heartfelt tributes from Danny's friends and co-workers, I see that wasn't the case at all. If you measure a man's life by the lives he's touched, the people he's helped, then Danny has me beat. Turns out, I was playing the wrong game all along... 

    Honestly, for years I doubted we had really been friends at all. Assumed he came over because my house was quiet and full of toys. The fact that I was also there must have been secondary. I tend to think the worst of people, which is usually a safe bet, but also how you move through life leaving the fewest ripples, a solitary boat on a vast and empty sea.
    I had a coda with Danny that made a lot of difference. I came back to Berea, maybe 15 years ago, to participate in a ceremony at the high school, and dropped my latest book off at Danny Malloy's house, and inside the cover jotted a note, the phone number of where I was staying. It would be great to see you.
     Danny showed up, met my wife. 

     "We were like brothers," he told her. 

     That shocked me. We were?
     "I still remember things you would say," he said.
     You do? I said, amazed. What sort of things?
      "You would turn to your mom and command, 'Sing for us, mother!"
     I did? My mother was a singer in the USO. Went to Europe to entertain the troops. I was very proud of that. It sounded like something I would say. And my oldest boy calls my wife "mother." I sounded like him.
     "What would she sing?"
     "Get Me to The Church on Time."
     Of course. From "My Fair Lady." My mother saw it on Broadway on her honeymoon in 1956. Played the soundtrack over and over. As a child I loved that song.
      That's all I have to say. I should leave the last word to those who knew him better, such as Kathy Stein, whose post began up top.

    "This man has touched the lives of so many for the better, including mine. He was one of the most selfless people I’ve ever known, always encouraging, and he never failed to see the best in everyone. I hope my life from this point emulates that level of love and service to others. He loved his family and the Lord and I’m so glad that we will get to see him on the other side of eternity. Thanks for always being there, the motorcycle rides, and trips for ice cream. Love you and miss you Dan-the-man ❤️." 

  

Sure, I hung with Nelson Mandela....

     Zulu dancers. A line of them, far away and below. And music. Drums.
     Or some kind of dancers. African. 
     That's it. That's all I remember.
     And I didn't even recall that until I noticed a beaded chain holding press credentials hanging from a door knob in my office. 
     Seven Chicago Police Department news media identification cards, from 1991 to 1998, a big red and blue PRESS tag from the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
     And a greenish yellow OFFICIAL PRESS CREDENTIALS with the seal of the City of Chicago and the words: "NELSON MANDELA, Chicago VISIT, July 6 & 7, 1993. City of Chicago. Richard M. Daley, Mayor.
     Leading to two thoughts.
     Nelson Mandela visited Chicago? And I was there?
     Exactly 25 years ago.
     Dancers. Music. Nothing else.
     You'd think that kind of thing would lodge in a guy's memory.
     Could I have gotten the tag and never gone? Then kept it? That doesn't sound like me. 
     Although ... I had the Democratic National Convention credentials and I know for a fact I never went inside the hall, not once. But I was outside, talking to ... anarchists. 
     Those dancers....
     I scribble notes at the end of each day for just such a situation, so pulled the maroon 1993 Waterstone's Literary Diary down from the shelf.
    Tuesday, July 6—the diary observes that in 1674 the second edition of Paradise Lost was published, and Milton received 5 pounds from the printer. In the little section for the day, I wrote:

      Started to get cracking on old people story, but sent over to cover Mandela at City Hall. Couldn't get to fifth floor because of security sweep so I worked the crowd waiting downstairs. About 150 fans & curious passerby. Young man who shook hands with Mandela held his hand aloft as if broken and beamed at the hand. Wouldn't let friend touch it. Strolled over to Palmer House—pleasant, smoking a Cuban, stuck in upper balcony, waiting without a newspaper. Fought urge to go get something to read—made myself just sit there—zen. Mandela was ushered in w/dancers and drummers. Endless speeches by religious leaders, including a cartoon Sikh who, as best I could tell, lectured us on the benefits of Sikhism. No lunch, caught a frozen yogurt from Carson's on the walk home (Since when do I refer to the newspaper as 'home'? A bad sign). Mandela didn't say a lot—basically begging for money. But his speech was delayed so much that he blew the market edition deadline and I had to scrape together whatever scraps I could to fill a story.

     A reminder that, for all our complaining about cell phones, at least now you always have something to read. Wasn't always the case...
    Looking over the stories that ran—the main story by Lynn Sweet—I don't seem to have missed anything vital. Mandela was here to raise money, was sorry he couldn't meet Michael Jordan, who had a previous commitment. An unsigned quote box gives a sense of the speech I heard:

     A sampling of Nelson Mandela's comments here:
     On how black South Africans will benefit economically from a new regime:
     "The government that will be installed will be able to address the major socio-economic problems facing our country, raising questions of employment, raising the living standard, working out illiteracy."
     On violence:
     "We must not lose our sense of proportion to think that because of the violence that there will be no progress as far as the quest to bring about a democracy in our country."
     On his rival, Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi:
     "He must not allow himself to be used as a cover by sinister forces and to curry to the impression that there is a clash between two black organizations, which is what the ruling class is trying to create. I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of our people are for peace and in due course all organizations and individuals who are playing the role of spoilers will be sidelined." 

     I'm not saying Mandela isn't worthy of reverence; he is. But sometimes we also magnify our heroes to a height they don't quite deserve. As amazing as it is to think I don't remember a speech by Mandela, it's even more amazing to realize that, just maybe, I don't remember it because it wasn't very memorable.

'Museum Hack' tour reveals Art Institute many miss

Ali Kemp, Museum Hack guide

     "Make no mistake, this is pornography," said Ali Kemp, pausing Monday in front of Titian's painting "Danae and the Shower of Gold" at The Art Institute of Chicago. "If you were a rich dude in renaissance Italy, and you wanted porn, you just commissioned someone to paint your own. But if you wanted people not to know what it was, you'd come up with some vaguely mythological story that could somehow involve a naked lady and that's what you'd portray."
     She was — the woman in the painting, not Kemp — one of thousands of naked ladies sprawled on chaises I've tramped past in a lifetime of vigorous museum going. But I can't remember ever pausing to look closely and think about what I was seeing, such as the dog in the corner of the painting.
     "Now there's this little dog, which seems innocent enough," she said. "But in renaissance Italy, nothing is as it seems, and that dog symbolizes that she is ... loose, basically."
     I knew there is an Art Institute — I've been a member for years. And I knew there are tours — groups of foreigners trekking after someone holding a small flag. But it never occurred to me that there are also organized gonzo tours, not until Museum Hack invited me to tag along and I thought, "Why not?"
     "We lead sassy and subversive tours at The Art Institute," explained Cody Nailor, a publicist for the tours. "These aren’t your grandma’s tours."
     Indeed not. Museum Hack offers "Drag Tours"— art tours led by cross-dressing men —"Badass Bitches" tours, focusing on feminism and the one I was on, the "Un-Highlights Tour." In addition to Chicago, it operates in New York, San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles.
     The Art Institute allows this?
     "We do allow Museum Hack and other various groups to conduct their programs at the museum so long as they follow our security and visitor protocols," said Anna E.. Miller, a museum public affairs coordinator.
     The group gathered in the lobby.
     "We're going to see a sampling of the things I find in this museum the weirdest, the sexiest, the most disgusting. and just have a really good time," said Kemp, a mother of three who lives in Downers Grove. "It's just going to be the cool stuff that you wouldn't get to see if you came here yourself."
     Our first stop was a two-foot tall Aztec figurine, labeled: "Ritual Impersonator of the Deity Xipe Totec.".
     "Do you guys have an outfit in your closet, you know you could put on if you got a call from your boss, or a Tinder date, something that made you feel sexy and powerful?" Kemp asked. "The Aztecs had an outfit like that too."
     She explained that during a certain festival, Aztecs wore the flayed skins of ritual victims. She pointed to the corset lacing at the back of the ceramic figure, where the skin was held in place.
     "You might feel best in a little black dress, and they would feel best wearing you," she said. "They're wearing people."
     Speaking of people, our tour had five: Kemp, myself, Larry Snider, a new retiree to Melbourne Florida, plus Vivian Lee and Faith Magtulis, an engaged couple from Toronto, here on business.
     We pulled up in front of Giovanni Baglione's "The Ecstacy of St. Francis." .
     "Do any of you guys have a favorite celebrity feud?" said Kemp. "First is Baglione; he's the Taylor Swift of this scenario. He sweet, nice , easy to work with, easy to like his artwork. He probably has cats. The second is Caravaggio. He's a real jerk, but he makes great art."
     Two hours passed quickly. Yes, sometimes we descended into parlor games—pick a place we'd hide in a miniature Thorne Room. Part of the pleasure of tours is finding the guide's mistakes, and I noticed just one: Kemp presented Louis XIV and Honore Daumier as contemporaries, even though the Sun King died nearly a century before the great caricaturist was born.
     A visitor to Chicago could find worse ways to spend $59. A reminder that merely checking out the latest show—the John Singer Sargent exhibit opened this week—and pausing before old favorites doesn't come close to taking full advantage of The Art Institute. There's a lot there, if you take the time to seek it out.

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Dibs

     "Dibs" is an odd phenomenon, usually remarked upon during the long Chicago winters. Those parking spaces on residential streets dug out after snowstorms by neighborhood residents, then reserved for their exclusive use by setting out kitchen chairs and sawhorses and other handy objects to mark their claim.
     The logic, as much as there is logic, is they "earned" those spaces by digging out their own cars, through sweat equity. With a hint of threat—anyone who moves the boundary markers and parks in the cleared space does so at their own risk.
     Every heavy snow, TV stations like to show the various hodgepodge dibs markers, and take up the debate anew. A bit of Chicago color.
     Yet dibs are not confined to cold weather. In summer, there are parade route dibs, such as the ephemera set out on Cherry Street in advance of the July 4 parade in Northbrook. Here the claim is more tenuous. There is no work involved, no snow to shovel. This property is often not on a residential block, but, the case of these photos, the public parkway in front of Greenbriar School. Yet if I showed up a half hour before the parade, kicked these chairs aside and set up my own, those who had set them out, sometimes days in advance, would show up and obviously feel ill-used.
    Why?
   Because their claim was first, I suppose. They got there and mapped out the spot, sort of like getting in a line. You get in line, you can leave and return, provided a friend remains to back up your claim. These lawn chairs and caution tape are place holders. Their reward, not for street cleaning work, but for planning ahead and undergoing a minimum of effort.
     More importantly, society seems to recognize this claim. Dibs could just as easily be seen as selfish and futile—it's certainly the former—and youths would rush to see who could scatter the markers first. 
    But we don't. It is a claim of little consequence, so is respected, this temporary seizure of public space. I live a block from the route, show up as the parade is approaching, my folding chair slung over my arm, and never have trouble finding a clear spot to park myself. 
     But that is not the end of it. 
     For some reason, walking the dog past these markers earlier this week, I thought of the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off.   
     That too, is a matter of claim. The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and across the globe, insist they have a right to occupy Israel because they were once there or, rather, their ancestors were, a few generations back. 
     Because of that pre-1948 presence, they believe they have a right to return to land that many have never seen—even "return" is a misnomer, since you can't go back to a place you've never been. 
     That's the half of the puzzle that gets bruited about periodically usually when the Palestinians contrive a protest, or action of some sort that gets a sufficient number of them killed to draw fickle international attention. They fling themselves against the Israeli state, are killed, then the survivors wave the bloody shirt, insist they have been wronged. The world notices, clucks, then moves on with nothing changed.
     This has been going on for half a century.
     As with dibs, society somehow respects the Palestinian claim, to some degree, and the obvious question is "Why?" It can't be they were there "first"—Jews were certainly in the Holy Land too, thousands of years ago. The Palestinian claim isn't enjoyed by other groups. Native Americans controlled the entire continent of North America, 500 years ago, though neither they nor anybody else suggests that, because they were first, they have a right to get the whole thing back. They lost, history moved on. That is usually the case.
     But not with the Palestinians. Part of it has to be that, like parade dibs, it is a claim of little consequence to those giving it support. The far left liberals and college students who turn out passionately for the Palestinian cause have the benefit of something easily-understood to be indignant about, and are required to give up nothing. It isn't their land.
     If you grab those U.S. supporters and ask them what other displaced peoples they support—say, the Kurds—they will just look blankly at you. The Palestinian situation is the only injustice in the world. If you asked what about all the Jews who, for instance, were kicked out of Egypt, Iraq, Iran, etc., in the 1950s, as revenge after the formation of Israel, where Jews had lived for millennia, again the blank stare. When do they get to return to their homes? Who cares? Never. Those situations don't matter. 
    Again, "Why?"
    I think this is where anti-Semitism comes in.  Germany did not believe the Jews who had lived there for centuries belonged there either. Ditto for many other countries. The Jews' homes are always in doubt. The simple solution to any society's problems always seems for the Jews to go somewhere else. We see that today in the United States, with a small but real and growing anti-Semitic presence at the highest levels of government. It would look exaggerated in fiction, but there it is. The hidden solution that's discovered again and again by a certain type—anti-Semitism is philosophy for stupid people. Oh! Look! The answer!
    That's what made the founding of Israel in 1948 so important, such a miracle, a miracle that resonated around the world for a couple decades until, after 1967, the Israelis moved from being the underdog to being the top dog in the area, with the strongest military and the most vibrant country. The Palestinians began to look like victims, and there is a certain sort of squishy heart that automatically goes out to a victim without too much thought of extenuating circumstances. Who never worry that the Palestinians never seem to have a plan, either for thriving in what territory they have or interacting peaceably with the permanent reality of Israel. What they have are dibs on the land of Israel, because someone they knew lived there once. It's a stretch, and yet the Israelis are damned for not respecting it.
     This isn't to say that the 4 million Palestinians in the occupied territories aren't in an awful situation, nor that a solution can't be found, nor that Israel has not mismanaged its control of the territories and shrugged off its responsibility in recent years. All that is true. While most people approach this situation as a 0 or 1, this side or that, Palestinian or Israel, there is plenty of blame to go around. I see no reason to be hard-hearted toward Palestinian suffering. Jews, of all people, should recognize the wrongness of that. The question, "What happens now?" is met with equal silence by both sides (or, more accurately, each offers up its own brand of nonsense, the Palestinians saying "Now we march on Jerusalem," the Israelis saying, "Now we do nothing while nibbling away at Palestinian land.")
     The irony is, the best way for outsiders to help the Palestinians resolve their situation is to withhold the false sympathy they periodically show toward them after their ritual self-immolations make the news. The Palestinian plan—Israelis vanish offstage and the country falls open to them—would be a catastrophe if it actually happened, though that is moot, since it's never going to happen. What is happening is the Israelis are hardening into the same right wing nationalist disease that is afflicting half the world, our country included.
     I should wind this up—weighty musings for some plastic chairs on the side of the road. But claims to the property of others are social constructs, as rule bound and time specific as a minuet or Virginia Reel.  The 70-year claim that the Israeli people and government have on their own nation is only questioned by many because it is a Jewish nation, and denying Jews a place in the world is one of the oldest fall-back positions in history.

Spirit of '76, Pt. II: If you're lost, check the map

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

     This is the second of two parts of a July 4 look at the Declaration of Independence. Part I, "Despair is not a success strategy," can be found here.  

    It is essentially a memo drafted by a committee, albeit one that had the good sense to delegate the work to the best writer in the group, Thomas Jefferson.
     The 33-year-old Virginian required —anyone sweating a deadline please take note — 18 days to turn around his assignment, writing the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in quill and ink in his rented two-room suite at the home of Philadelphia bricklayer Jacob Gaff.
     I would imagine the average supposedly patriotic American ready to expound on how the intentions of the founders should guide our daily lives today has little idea of what the Declaration of Independence actually says.
     Such as our president, currently picking a new Supreme Court justice to serve for 20 or 30 years, eagerly embracing the supposed original intentions of the founders, when useful. But what were the intentions of our founders, originally? As outlined at the start, in our founding document, the first roadmap, a declaration so important we honor its final adoption on July 4, 1776 to this very day.
     The Declaration of Independence formally announces our break with Great Britain. But why? Does it give a hint of a reason, beyond the famous but vague phrases about self-evident truths and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
     Yes, it does. The bulk of 1337 words are a protracted list of grievances against one man, King George III, the “Author of our Miseries,” to use the words of Richard Henry Lee.

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A visit with Ann Landers

     The centennial of advice columnist Ann Landers' birth is Wednesday. I figured, if I'm ever going to share this story, now is the time to do it.

     The limousine she sent to collect me had custom license license plates: "AL 1955."
     The "AL" was for Ann Landers, obviously, the owner of the limo. What writer owned a private limo? She did.
    And "1955" was the year she stepped out of obscurity and started her column at the Chicago Sun-Times and, shortly thereafter, 1200 other papers. I knew that too, because I had written her obit. I knew everything about her. Or so I felt.
      In 1955, she had been a 37-year-old well-to-do housewife and mother who had never held a job or published a word when, new to the city, she walked into editor Larry Fanning's office, looking for work. Her timing was good. Nurse Ruth Crowley, who originated the "Your Problems'' advice column under the pseudonym Ann Landers in the Chicago Times in the 1940s, had just died. The paper was looking for a replacement.
     Fanning gave her a series of questions to answer.  One of the questions she answered involved walnuts dropping onto a lawn from a neighbor's tree, and in her reply she quoted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, commenting on the walnut issue. 
     See here, Fanning said, you can't just make a thing like that up. She told him she hadn't. She knew Douglas, a personal friend, and phoned him. She got the job, and had to go out and apply for a Social Security number, because she had never received a paycheck before.
    I don't remember why I wrote her obit. It seemed something worth doing. She was, after all, among the most significant journalists of the 20th century, whose compassion and humanity helped nudge America toward being a more tolerant place. She left the paper just after I arrived. Her office was still painted the same Pepto Bismol pink she must have preferred.
     But after you gather that much information about a person, it's hard to keep it contained. Bits of information kept leaking out into my own column.
     In 1998, the newspaper asked me to write the story marking the Sun-Times' 50th anniversary, and I tucked in a few sentences about Ann. How she won the job by doing research, consulting experts and writing well. How she didn't always run columns of Q and A, advising husbands whose wives can't cook and wives whose husbands can't be faithful. When Robert Kennedy was shot, she began her column, "Bobby Kennedy is dead. I still can't believe it'' and called for gun control and reduced violence in TV and movies. She marked her 1975 divorce by leaving half the column blank.
     So I occasionally let loose a fact or two about her, where appropriate, and she noticed. Which is kinda incredible, because she was famous, her column syndicated to around the country, the world. She started sending me little notes. I remember looking at one, her head floating on the stationery, disembodied like the Wizard of Oz, and thinking, "This is an opportunity."
    I didn't realize she wrote those little notes to everybody.
    So I wrote her back, thanking her for her kind words, suggesting we have dinner.
    A few days later the phone rang. Her secretary.
    "Ann doesn't go on dates with strange men," the woman said—she really got her back into that word, "dates," the way a pitcher puts a spin on a ball. "But you may come over for tea."
     The Sun-Times was still in the grey trapezoidal barge at 401 N. Wabash. The limo ride to her apartment, immediately east of the Drake Hotel, was a brief one. The doorman waved me in, and I took an elevator to her apartment. I was shown in by a maid, and found myself alone.
      The decor was high fashion circa 1964. There was a bronze Dali bust of John F. Kennedy on a plinth. A grand piano in the French Revival style—I had never seen one before, nor have since. A framed front page of the Sioux City Journal from July 4, 1918, the day Esther Paula Friedman—her birth name—was born and, 17 1/2 minutes later, her twin sister. Pauline, who would follow her sisters footsteps and start her own hugely successful advice column under the pen name "Dear Abby."
     Eventually Ann showed up, a tiny woman with the best plastic surgery I have ever seen in my life. She was in her 80s, and her cheeks looked like a baby's ass.
     We sat on the sofa. I said something, and she replied, in a slightly dentured lisp, "Speak more slowly and come sit by me." She wanted every shred of newspaper gossip I could offer. The tea arrived, with a slice of chocolate cake so fantastic it seared in my memory. It was so moist, it was if it had pudding in it. "This," I thought, "is the cake rich people eat." I asked her about it, and she praised her private chef.
     At one point she looked at me closely.
     "Why are you here?" she said. Candor seemed the best option.
     "I wrote your obit, Ann," I said, explaining that I was interested in the truth of her rocky relationship with her sister, which some portrayed as close, some distant. She told me.
     Before I left, she gave me a tour of the place. There were photos of her and Father Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of Notre Dame and her particular friend. And lots of owls—she was a fan of owls. That week, I would buy a copy of the marvelous children's book, "Owl Babies," and send it to her by way of thanks for her time, and for the cake.
    After a couple hours it was time for me to leave, and she walked me to the door, and we had an exchange I always treasured.
     "Are you friends with Richard Roeper?" she asked.
     I admitted that I was.
     "We're drinking buddies," I said.
     "Why isn't he married?" she asked, then adding, in a rushed semi-whisper. "Is he gay?"
     "I don't think so, Ann," I said, grinning.
     "You tell him this," she said. "You tell him Ann Landers has this advice for him..."
    I stood up a little straighter. It felt like I was getting wisdom straight from the Delphic Oracle.
     "...you tell him to figure out his life before it's over." 
    Very good advice, for him, me and just about anyone.
     I promised her I would. And did, rushing to his office, closing the door, and passing along Ann Lander's remarks with the maximum of emphasis and drama. I never saw her again. She passed away in 2003, and the obit I had written was manhandled so much by a colleague that I took no pride in it, which is why it isn't being reprinted here.
     But once was enough to make me very glad to have met her.

Spirit of '76, Pt. I: Despair is not a success strategy

Inscription outside the National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

     Two-hundred and forty-two years ago this Wednesday, American revolutionaries formally broke away from their mother country, England. They issued a Declaration of Independence, boldly stating: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
     By "all Men" they really meant "white men" — not women, naturally, certainly not black men, who would later in the Constitution be established as 3/5 of a person, when enslaved, to increase the power of their drivers in Congress.
     In a sense, the founders were unintentionally signing a check they had no intention of cashing. They were like a man at a bar offering to buy everybody a drink, not realizing just how many people were crowded into the shadows.
     But they were there, and then began to come out of the shadows and claim their due — our nation's domestic history over the past 242 years in a nutshell: bloody Civil War followed by 150 years of struggle nudging up the personhood of blacks in the eyes of the state to somewhere above 60 percent but still somehow lagging beneath the full 1.0 status that whites automatically enjoy. Meanwhile, women rose up, first battling slavery, as leading abolitionists, as if practicing to win their own freedom. Then, a half century after Emancipation, casting off their own chains, earning the right to vote.
     At no point in the past was this struggle not being fought, by one group or another, but always returning to the central question: who is this Declaration of Independence for? Who belongs in this country?
     Those who believe that the United States of America was, is, and should always be a white Christian native-born clique, saw where our country is going, uttered a cry of alarm, and in 2016 elected the most unfit, dishonest, petty, vindictive, vain, ignorant man ever to call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home. After 18 months of spinning his wheels, more or less, issuing hourly Twitter rants, last week his tires caught and we were all projected forward toward the nation he wishes to see. A nation that bars immigrants because of their religion. That abuses children. That starves unions. And with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, that lurches jurisprudence rightward for the next generation.
     On Facebook, my Democratic brethren are liquid with terror. This is the worst thing ever! They repeat their empty promises to flee abroad, the same bleat of preemptive surrender heard two years ago.

     Please. Fifth-seven thousand Americans died in the Vietnam War. That was worse. As for threats to leave: how can we miss you if you don’t go away?
     If you stay, stop whining and get serious.
     In their defense, we are leaderless. What is needed is a Democratic Winston Churchill, to eloquently muster courage, to light these dark hours. Yes, there is a steady flow of defiance and reason from some, like our own Sen. Dick Durbin. But these are times that call for supreme eloquence. In The New Yorker, George Packer suggested the cool reserve that ushered Barack Obama into office failed him as he left. “Obama was always better at explaining the meaning of democracy than at fighting its opponents.”
     That difficult task falls to us. A fight for democracy. Will voting rights and the concept of truth be further eroded? Both must continue for a right-wing minority to exert its will over our more liberal nation, over a reality that exists whether they recognize it or not. Will the media holding a mirror to the administration’s ugliness and lies continue being denounced as “fake,” the precursor, make no mistake, to suppressing it, the way other totalitarian states do?
     The Fourth of July is Wednesday. With that in mind, I’ve been reading the Declaration of Independence adopted that day. Useful stuff. Reminders that this is not a time to feel bad about the United States of America, nor to abandon her, nor reject patriotism, nor forget hope. This is a time to gather up all those precious things that made this country great, to protect them so they can continue to protect us. Just because millions of Americans have lost sight of what this nation is about doesn’t mean everybody else must follow suit. Despair is not a success strategy.

You need a little poetic license to beat the heat

   

Center Avenue, Northbrook, June 29, 2018

  
   
     Ninety-six degrees? Two days in a row? Pshaw! I remember when it got HOT in Chicago. Such as on July 13, 1995, when the temperature reached 106 degrees, and I wrote the following, no doubt assigned to come up with something diverting about the heat wave.
     That day I walked a block outside, to our dry cleaners in East Lake View. I can still remember trudging back, toting a plastic bag of clothing, feeling as if the weight of the sun were pressing down upon my head. I returned to the apartment and had to lie down, for all the good it did: no air conditioning. The heat was deadly.
    Literally. I was wiped out and I was 35 and in good health. (Poor Edie was five months pregnant). For many older people, it proved fatal, and the hot spell that I had such fun with below was, even as I was flipping through quote books, was killing Chicagoans one-by-one, elderly and alone barricaded in their overheated apartments; 739 heat-related deaths by the time it was over. 
     And yes, I was part of the media, along with the city government and everyone else, who were slow to realize what was happening. Hindsight is 20-20. Even after the scope of the disaster started to come out. I remember wondering if it could simply be the medical examiner's office grandstanding—calling every death in the city a heat-related death, since it was so hot.  A blunder, or a bid for attention made sense. The truth just seemed incredible.

    Anyway, my purpose isn't to replay that disaster. Eric Klinenberg wrote an essential book, "Heat Wave" if you are interested. I was groping for ornate ways to describe the heat, and realized I had already found them. 

     The bad thing about "Hot, isn't it?" and "Hot enough for you?" and all the other variants people feel compelled to say is that everybody already knows it's hot, doesn't need to be told and is sick of hearing it over and over.
     Since poets and wits have been commenting on this for centuries, the following is provided, as a public service, as a guide to more dramatic phrases that can be used in this "fantastic summer's heat."
     A stranger observes that it is really very hot, and waits for your reply. Quote Coleridge: "Summer has set in with its usual severity."
     The person next to you on the bus comments that, as far as warm weather goes, this is unusual. Quote Lowell: "I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine."
     A guy on the elevator expresses displeasure at the heat. Quote Shakespeare: "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun / And wish the estate o' the world were now undone."
     Your hair stylist points out that it's hard to know what to wear in this weather. Quote Jane Austen: "What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance."
     A woman asks "How's about this heat, huh?" Quote Sydney Smith: "Heat, madam! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones."
     Your officemate expresses optimism that the heat won't last long. Quote Skelton: "After a hete oft cometh a stormy colde."
     The grocer observes that it is "hot as hell" outside. Point out that the phrase actually is from Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord's 18th century poem, "Recipe for Coffee" -- "Black as the devil / Hot as hell / Pure as an angel / Sweet as love." Or toss back the phrase in its original French, "Chaud comme l'enfer."
     You're walking along, perspiring heavily, and you catch the eye of someone else, also perspiring heavily. Back to Shakespeare: "Falstaff sweats to death / And lards the lean earth as he walks along."
     Someone bad-mouths the city for being so hot in the summer. Quote Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."
            —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 1995