What is it about cars that makes us love them?

     This is my second piece from the special Chicago Car Show magazine that was included in Sunday's Sun-Times. 


     It was the sound.
     The growl of the 650 horsepower, supercharged V8 engine of the Corvette Z06 as I mashed the gas pedal, sinking into the red leather seat. All that power. From zero to 60 in under three seconds. The roar seemed to reach into my skin, grab my bones, and shake them.
     Of course, this being the 21st century, even that howl of raw power is actually under fine-tuned control. A few taps and the “Engine Sound Management” screen pops up, offering four modes, “Stealth,” “Tour,” “Sport” and “Track.”
     “Stealth is for when you are on long highway trips, and get tired of the noise,” said George Kiebala, owner of Curvy Road, an exotic sports car time share in Palatine. If you want the joy of driving that Corvette super car, without having to actually buy one, Curvy Road allows you access for a fraction of the cost.
     And why would anybody want to do that? Why spend $1,000 to drive a car that can go three times the legal limit for a few days?
     Maybe that is best answered by what Louis Armstrong supposedly said when somebody asked him to explain jazz: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
     That said, let’s try.

                                                              • • •

     What is it about cars that makes us love them?
     Being American, no doubt. Love of cars is in our blood, our birthright, with our wide open expanse of roads, the last remnant of the Western frontier. Our literature is filled with classic tales of setting out on the road in cars: Jack Keroac’s “On the Road” to Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Not to mention all those songs, “Little Deuce Coupe,” and “Thunder Road” and “Little Red Corvette.” Americans are born loving cars.
     Do you believe that? Don’t. Americans were taught to love cars.
     At the beginning of the 20th century, when automobiles were introduced, and were viewed with collective horror as too fast — pushing speeds of 15 miles an hour! — and too dangerous. At mid-century, as highways began to blast through neighborhoods and the public resisted. The phrase “America’s love affair with the automobile” was coined in a 1961 TV program, “Merrily We Roll Along,” on the DuPont Show of the Week (DuPont owned a quarter of General Motors) hosted by Groucho Marx, of all people. He woodenly walks out at the beginning, leading a horse in one hand, holding a cigar in the other, and starts talking about “that great American romance between a man and his car.”
     He’s got the “man” part right. Thinking over a lifetime of car commercials — all those sleek sedans smoothly gliding over glistening roads, sprays of autumnal leaves flying everywhere — and trying to pinpoint even one that stood out, the only ad that comes to mind is one from the 1970s for the Triumph Spitfire. Even then it might be more for the fighter plane than the car.
     “You not only get a car and a girl, but a piece of history,” the narrator promises.
     Which brings up the very real possibility that love of cars is a guy thing. Being a guy myself, and therefore biased, I consulted someone who wasn’t, putting the question to one of the cleverest women I know, Molly Jong-Fast, New York novelist and Twitter wit (as well as daughter of best-selling author Erica Jong).
     Love of cars, I asked, a guy thing, right?
     “Definitely,” she said. “Definitely a guy thing.”
     Why?
     “I can’t speak for the whole gender, but [loving cars] seems really dumb to me, and most women think it’s really dumb” she continued. “It doesn’t even make any sense. Men get something out of cars that is completely lost on me. I like driving just fine. … it seems , it doesn’t even make any sense, why you would you care?”
     Why do men care? As teenagers, cars represented freedom — freedom to sneak off somewhere with a girl. Besides cars offering logistical support for romance, men seem to believe that fancy cars impress women. Though looking at my own life, that hasn’t been the case.
     My wife was always maddeningly unimpressed with cars. In my mid-20s, Chevrolet let me use a brand new Corvette for a week. Midnight blue. I didn’t tell my then-girlfriend, merely showed up with it. She got in the car and started talking about her day. I looked at her, jaw hanging.
     “What?” she said, picking up on my expression.
     “THE CAR!!!!” I exclaimed. “Didn’t you notice THE CAR?!?!”
     “Oh this,” she said, looking around, as if noticing it for the first time. “You know I don’t care for this kind of thing.”
     I married her anyway.
     Jong-Fast said that men like expensive cars, not to impress women, but to impress other men.
     “You definitely see it in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s a status thing. It’s one of those things men do for other men. Funny, because women are accused of dressing for other women, for being thin for other women. Cars are proof that men are concerned with what other men think of them.”

Neil Steinberg with the 2015 BMW i8 

     There has to be more to it than that. Cars have personalities, like people, and exotic cars are loved for their quirks as much, if not more, than their speed. I drove a 2015 BMW i8 and was most taken, not with the obviously impressive stuff — its gull wing doors — but its little quirks.     

     Such as? The hood. It’s sealed. It doesn’t open. At least, it can’t be opened by civilians, who have no business poking around in the electric motor underneath. If you want the hood opened, take it to a BMW dealer, who knows what he’s doing. I love that.

                                                                            • • •

     I’ve been talking about other men’s cars. To me, car love is reflected in a man’s first car — heck, I’m sure some women love their first cars too. My first car was utterly impractical, purchased for entirely psychological reasons. I was 22, and living alone in Los Angeles, working a job I despised. I looked at exactly one car: a 1963 Volvo P1800, white. It was my dream car; I needed the boost.
     In some ways, the car was a disaster. It had a rebuilt engine from another car. Constant repairs. But it looked fantastic — it’s the car Simon Templar drives in “The Saint.” I once got a date at a four-way stop sign with a young woman in a convertible Mustang who shouted, “What is that?”

With the P1800. Barrington, 1984.

   I owned the car for about three years. Eventually, repairs started to get to me — the radiator started leaking, and with 1963 Volvo P1800 radiators hard to find outside of Sweden, the dealer built a new one, at the cost of a week’s salary. Eventually I had to sell it. When the new owner drove it away, I cried.
     Not to end on a downer note. Those who think that the advent of self-driving cars, not to forget Uber and the prospect of silently rolling cubes delivering riders from Point A to Point B will cool the passion that many have for automobiles are mistaken. It’ll just adapt, like all long-term relationships.
     “I love my Chevy Bolt and I’d almost rather drive it than any Ferrari,” said Curvy Road’s George Kiebala, insisting I take her for a spin. It was like driving a video game. “This whole amazing transition: electrification and how its working its way into he super car world.”
     So love of cars isn’t going away?
     “Oh no, oh my goodness no,” he said. “Definitely the opposite.”

Corvette Z06

Maybe someday a special beef dish will also be named after Jeff Bezos

Bust of Wellington, by Sir Francis Chantrey
Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Arthur Wellesley is no longer famous. Though I imagine his title, “The Duke of Wellington” raises a glimmer of recognition in the public mind, not due to the man himself, alas, but for the beef-in-pastry dish apparently named after him. History can be cruel that way.
     Wellesley was the brilliant, Dublin-born British military leader who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Big in his day. “The last great Englishman,” Tennyson dubbed him.
    He also visited prostitutes. Women who, then as now, had a habit of cashing in twice on their famous customers; once for their services, again in print. Nor were their friends more scrupulous. When London pornographer John Stockdale wrote to the Duke, demanding money to excise passages involving him from London tart Harriette Wilson’s pending reminiscences, Wellington scrawled “Publish and be damned” across the letter and returned it.
       Supposedly. The actual letter does not exist. “The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson” were published in 1824, with the Duke of Wellington foremost among the parade of famous men marching through her bed.
     Only the fullness of time will determine whether Jeff Bezos’ performance last week rises to a Wellingtonian high standard for panache. Though Bezos did the Duke one better, disseminating himself the entire correspondence from American Media Inc., parent company of the National Enquirer, which Bezos claims was blackmailing him. The Enquirer, it has been established, serves as a protective shield around Donald Trump, buying up rights to salacious stories from women he seduced, for example, then burying instead of publishing them.

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Hot Cars in the Coldest Month

     The Sun-Times has been producing an occasional magazine to enhance our Sunday paper. In December, they asked me to write about manufacturing in Illinois, and today's edition includes an attractive publication about Chicago and cars, to mark the start of the Chicago Auto Show.
     I was happy to write this piece about 126 years of automobiles being shown off in Chicago, and another about our love for cars, which I'll post here Tuesday. But if you can, try to pick up Sunday's physical paper, because the special section has a lot more than just me in it: Richard Roeper on the Tucker Torpedo which, betcha didn't know, was manufactured in Chicago during its brief, memorable existence, as well as issue editor Ryan Smith on auto racing, driverless cars, local car collections, tons of photographs, and much more.


     In a jab at the “White City,” the faux Roman splendor of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition that disgusted modernists at Adler & Sullivan, the architects painted their Transportation Building orange, with a yellow arched entrance dubbed "The Golden Door."
     Through that door were 17 acres of 19th century America in motion: huge locomotives and street cars, handcars and sail cars, wagons and harnesses. Studebaker of Chicago showed off their latest buggies. Models of ocean steamers and famous bridges were on display, as well as historic modes of transportation from sleighs to sedan chairs.  

     And tucked in a corner, almost entirely ignored, a delicate Daimler quadricycle: the first four-wheeled, gasoline-powered automobile on public display in the United States. Along with it, a second car, an electric.
     The opening note in a century-and-a-quarter symphony that would, in the 20th century become as distinctly Chicago as deep dish pizza, the Blues or skyscrapers: the Chicago Auto Show.
     A constantly-changing car circus that almost defies description, a burst of summery sparkle and hot horsepower in the middle of dreary, frozen winter, the Chicago Auto Show draws millions downtown to ogle thousands of cars — from economy boxes like the first 2-cylinder Honda to a Packard with a V-16 engine. From steam-driven cars to a concept car to be powered by an nuclear reactor.
     Nor have cars been the only draw. Into the mix, a dizzying cast of leggy models, athletes, movie stars, TV actors and race car drivers. Knute Rockne and Ronald Reagan and Oprah. Revolving turntables, flashing lights, blaring music, surging crowds, and the occasional out-of-left-field non-automotive technological development, like television, which RCA Victor showed off at the 1939 show.
     Chicago's "First Annual National Automobile Exhibit" was held March 23-30 in 1901 at the Coliseum, a former Civil War prison at Michigan Avenue and 15th Street. Tickets were 50 cents. The cars on display were primitive; none had a steering wheel. They were steered with a tiller; steering wheels wouldn't become popular for a few more years. Many were electric, or steam-powered. A wooden, 1/10 mile track ringed the exhibition hall. Visitors taken for a spin were usually riding in a car for the first time, though the track was really intended to show potential dealers that the vehicles actually worked.
     By the second show, the track was gone, a victim of the show's success; an increasing numbers of vehicles meant there wasn't room for it.

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Housekeeping note

     Because the story I'm featuring Sunday, on the history of the Chicago Car Show, isn't going live on the Sun-Times' web site until 5 a.m., it can't be posted here until after 5 a.m., aka, when I wake up. So those night owls tapping sleeplessly at their computers between 12 a.m. and 5 a.m. and expecting to find comfort here will be disappointed, except of course for this little notice. My apologies for a situation beyond my control, but I can't link to a story that isn't online yet (and I have to link to them, because they pay for the things).
    Thank you for your understand, and for reading everygoddamnday.com. If you are looking for something to do in these wee hours, why not order a delicious Eli's Cheesecake for yourself or someone you profess to love, using the ever-wakeful link at left? The ad will only be up for another week, and I want the kind folks at Eli's to get, if not their money's worth, then at least a shimmer of value for their investment.

The Saturday Snapshot #26

     Vanity is a two-edged sword.
     One edge is the desire to manifest yourself, to project your ego, which is responsible for most of the art and literature in the world, is the reason people leave their homes and strike out into the world. A laudable thing, to take the thimbleful of you that is bubbling around in your head and contrive to somehow paint the world with it.
      The other edge is the desire to manifest yourself, all over a perfectly nice "L" car. To not care that your tag is just going to be a blocked window for someone inside, or, rather, that the Chicago Transit Authority will have to expensively remove it, taking up a lot of time, and jacking up the cost of transportation for all of us.
      Which is more significant? I wouldn't dare try to say. The self-absorbed person starts to tell a story, and maybe the listener is fascinated, or maybe the listener is bored. Or one is fascinated and another are bored. By the same story. It depends on the skill of the teller, the inclinations for the listener. It changes with time and place. How you feel about graffiti depends on how you feel about society, capitalism, art, color, cities, trains.  I deeply admire Banksy; the above, not so much, though I sympathize with the urge that sent some kid doing it. We want to leave our mark on the indifferent world.
    These were taken at the CTA rail yard at Harlem/Lake terminal, by regular reader Francis Mullen, a rail operations switchman. He suspects they might have been done at the 63rd and Ashland yard and then moved to Harlem/Lake.
     Asked for some thoughts on the photos, he replied:
     "I don’t understand why this medium appeals to them. It’s our policy not to send these cars in service so their exposure is mostly limited to their forums. There is a cost to society, however, in that when we are short cars for service the supervisor is forced to adjust his schedule to spread the gap. So a 15 minute headway becomes 20. A severe shortage will produce noticeable delays. There’s also a cost to the shop janitor that puts aside her normal duties to clean these enormous paintings with some nasty chemicals. It takes hours to finish. I think these guys are thoughtless and arrogant in pursuit of their impish thrills. Buy some canvases already."
     Then, a few minutes later, added,
     "Besides the Kilroy was here aspect, I wonder if the transitory nature of their efforts adds to the thrill."
     I hadn't thought of that. They value them because they are fleeting, the way that Buddhist monks spend hours creating these elaborate sand mandalas, sing a little song, then sweep them away. Could be.

   
   

A woman is marrying her dog on Valentine’s Day — but wait, there’s more to it

     We get two daily newspapers delivered at home, the Sun-Times and the New York Times. I always read my own paper first — loyalty — and then turn my attention the Grey Lady.
     On Sundays, I start with the news section, then on to what I still consider “The Week in Review,” then the book section, magazine and business, working my way down through the various substrata of descending significance until I end up at the lowest sub-chamber, Style, with its dubious celebrations of flyspeck fads, grotesque genuflection to tasteless wealth, and enormous full-color Ralph Lauren ads for glitzy sequined, epauletted get-ups that would make Michael Jackson cringe with embarrassment.
     At the back of Style, the marriage announcements — “Vows” — which I don’t read so much as scan, occasionally dipping into one to check the job statuses of the happy couples, tsk-tsking over their well-off parents and gold-plated, The-World-is-Mine careers. I glance at all the photos, skipping past the same-sex couples, pausing at the comfortably hetero duos to reassure myself that the brides-to-be are not as pretty as my wife — Ha! doing better than you, pal! — a vindictive little game rigged so I always win.
     The Times also does news stories spotlighting certain couples about to be married, and last Sunday one stood out: Lilly Smartelli, posed with her arms around her groom-to-be: Bernie, a 9-year-old mixed breed cocker spaniel poodle.
     She is marrying her dog, this Valentine’s Day.
     Let me pause here, to give you time to form your immediate reactions, which I will go out on a limb and predict are: 1) the world is going to hell; 2) people are crazy; 3) the Times has slid into tabloid sensationalism.
     Am I correct? Of course I am.

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2007 flashback: Maritime law vs. the love boat

      I don't want to spoil the opening joke of this column. Just to say, after you read it, and want to immediately act, there is the convenient Eli's Cheesecake link to the left. This ran back when the column was a full page, and I've left in the original section headings. Though I'll warn you, it runs a thousand words, and if it seems to go on forever, well, yeah, it seemed that way to me, too. Nobody says you have to finish the thing, but I'm including it all for anyone so inclined.

Opening shot

     There are three key issues relating to Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which, while perhaps striking the average reader as tedious in the extreme, are in fact so important to our global ocean habitat that I'm going to devote my entire column today to carefully analyzing them.
     Issue No. 1 relates to seabed mining provisions . . .
     Nah, not really. I just wanted to drive away the fair-weather reader. Why should the easily discouraged benefit by the secret knowledge that I'm about to impart?
     Today is Wednesday, Feb. 7. Which means—and I don't know why you need me to point this out, but apparently you do, because otherwise you'd wait until the last minute, as always —that a week from today is Valentine's Day.
     Time fleets. You've already blown your New Year's resolutions. Christmas was, as usual, a depressing disaster. Valentine's Day is your last chance before the Mother's Day/Father's Day nexus to get it right.
     Here is my central piece of advice: Whatever gift you're going to buy, get it by Friday. Don't wait.
     Because forethought is three-fourths of the present, particularly in longtime relationships, when surprise is most elusive.
     Those who procrastinate—who tell themselves, "Hey, I've got a whole week"—wake up and it's Feb. 14 and they're in a rugby scrum for the last gleanings at Fannie May's. They end up with sagging White Hen carnations.
     Sure, it's a challenge to grab the paddles and deliver a jolt to romance. I don't know what you should do for your sweetie; I have a tough enough time thinking up something to wow my wife, never mind wow yours. But whatever it is, do it by Friday. Time is fleeting.

Recherche du froid perdu

     Smell is the most nostalgic of the senses. A certain scent of boiled hot dog and baked bean, and I am cast back to the Fairwood Elementary School lunchroom, my pudgy hand hesitating above a plate of ice cream sandwich halves, bisected and sold for a nickel, trying to pick one where the lunch lady's slice faltered, making it a quarter-inch longer than the others.
     Or preparing for the weather Tuesday. The walk from the station to the office Monday had been like blowing bubbles in a bowl of cold acid. So I wrapped my Irish lambswool scarf around my face.
     One whiff of that breath-moisted wool and I was transported back to the white moonscape of my boyhood, to that frosty suburban noplace, kicking a chunk of snow down the sidewalk, wearing a brown corduroy Mighty Mac coat and a hat knitted by my grandmother, a hat whose pompon had been snipped off, at my insistence, as a show of maturity.
     Why do young people equate casting off their clothing with coolness? Figurative coolness, as opposed to literal. Shuffling up Wacker Drive, I noticed that the underdressed pedestrians were invariably in their 20s, youngsters braving the elements hatless, gloveless, wearing a thin spring jacket instead of the Eddie Bauer Gore-Tex Ridge Line Robert Falcon Scott Edition Arctic Coat System I wore.
     Bundle up, people. It's cold out there. There's nobody to impress. We wrap our children so thickly because we love them and don't want them to be cold. Dress yourself like somebody loves you, and the cold weather will bring only warm memories.

The more the merrier

     They don't invite me to the editorial board meetings anymore. I detract from the air of gravitas, apparently.
     Then again, you didn't have to actually be in the room with Todd Stroger Monday to see his problem at Cook County.
     Passing in the hallway was enough.
     It was like a lackey convention. Too many to actually cram into the board room. So they sat, thumbing their BlackBerrys, or talking into cell phones, or wandering about, examining the photos on the walls.
     I couldn't tell who was an underling and who was a coatholder, who was playing security and who was somebody's ne'er-do-well cousin. But they made quite an assemblage. One reporter counted eight—in my view, there might have been 80.
     All vanity, of course. When Sen. Dick Durbin, who has become one of the most powerful politicians in America, arrives for our periodic breakfasts, he is usually by himself, as befits a politician in a democratic society.
     Then again, Durbin is a savvy statesman, not a flailing, tone-deaf whelp like Stroger, padding the payroll with his relatives even while under close scrutiny, just like his father did. Who can't even grasp that just as charity begins at home, so does economy.

The readers speak

     I don't normally print fan mail—it violates my air of Christ-like humility. But this e-mail, sent under the heading, "Sometimes you're ok" is too splendid not to share:

Mr. Steinberg,I read your column most days depending on my mood, and I am glad to see that you are less of a jerk than you used to be. I always like when you write about your sons. I do want to commend you for the very nice piece you wrote on MLK day. I was a little surprised to be honest.Paula Taylor

Today's chuckle

     Vol. VIII of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud is titled Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, and it struck me as a stroke of brilliance—or a sign of desperation—to pull down the light blue book and see what it might have to offer.
     I only wish space permitted me to do more than suggest how spectacularly unfunny most of Freud's jokes are, undone by a near complete shift in cultural references—nobody eats salmon mayonnaise anymore, there are few marriage brokers, we don't know where Galicia is, never mind the reputations of Jews there. Then of course there are nearly insurmountable problems because of translation, which the editor struggles in vain to overcome.
     "In the German the first syllables of 'spas' [Bader] and "brooms" [Besen] sound alike," he explains, unhelpfully. "And in the German proverb the last word is 'well' [gut]."
     Oh I see! Ah-hah-hah.
     But there are enough funny Freud jokes—or at least funnyish jokes—to warrant launching Freud Joke Week, if only to justify my plowing through the damn thing.
     Much of what he presents as jokes are actually pithy phrases, such as the following, which might not be humorous, but certainly is true:

Human life falls into two halves. In the first half, we wish the second half would come. In the second half, we wish the first one were back.

              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 7, 2007

"Nice country you've got here, shame to have anything BAD happen to it..."

   

     I wrote this before I realized I had gotten an old pre-Valentine's column ready to go, months ago. Well, no rules against filing MORE than once every goddamn day. Just don't get used to it. 

    Yeah, I listened to Tuesday's State of the Union address, the whole 80 minutes, though they seemed like 800. I couldn't understand fellow Dems who "boycotted" it or stayed away with a flourish of self-importance, as if Trump would miss them. That's why we lose. We don't stare the thing we're fighting in the face. I sent out a few aghast tweets, lost in the vast ocean of Twitter snark, for all the good that did.
    A few aspects stood out. The way Trump, representing his entire generation of American exceptionalists, returned again and again to the theme of World War II—he brought in three D-Day vets to sit in the chamber. Highly ironic for an isolationist president who adopted "America First," the slogan of Lindbergh and all the crypto-Nazis who didn't want to enter the war at all. You'd think the man wasn't withdrawing American power and influence from the world stage with both hands. 
    Then there was his prattling on about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, which I'm sure his adviser, the Jewish fascist Stephen Miller, thought a delicious piece of gaslighting, and no doubt drew chortles from the gang at Stormfront and 4Chan. Make no mistake: Jews fall for this shit as readily as anybody else. I'll never forget running into them, yamulke proudly in place, at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Of course they had their reasons.
    To me, the only part of the State of the Union that seems significant the next morning was his thinly disguised pleading to be let off the hook for whatever crimes the Mueller investigation has been laboriously cataloguing.
    "The decision is ours to make," Trump said, early on. "We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction. Tonight, I ask you to choose greatness. "

     That would be resistance to him, remember, and his bigoted, ignorant, vindictive policies. Vengeance against him, for selling out his country to the Russians. 
     As bad as that was—the rhetorical equivalent of "Don't struggle, honey, and it won't hurt," the worst was coming. This:

     "Our country is vibrant and our economy is thriving like never before. Friday it was announced we added another 304,000 jobs last month alone, almost double the number expected. An economic miracle is taking place in the United States, and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous, partisan investigations. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just does not work that way."

     As naked a threat as any thug ever delivered to a corner grocery store: "Nice place you've got here, Pops, I'd hate to see anything happen to it." Drop the investigation or I'll shoot the economy. 
     The poll numbers were astounding. Yes, not scientific. Yes, those who watched were a self-selective group, perhaps skewed toward Trump supporters, who can watch him speak without tasting a little vomit in their mouths. But still. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Trump is going to win in 2020. He is going to roll the disorganized, bickering Democrats, rushing first to Bernie, then to Beto, some drawn by Howard Schultz, others to Joe Biden, the whole anthill going in a hundred directions, unifying only to utter a quavering Charlie Brown shriek of "How can we lose when we're so sincere?" after it's all over.

Gutenberg to BuzzFeed, ‘theatre of information’ changes, and so do we

 Gutenberg Bible, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

     Gutenberg went bankrupt.
     Forgive me for leaping to today’s point so abruptly. But I want to get that on the table right away, for those readers who shrug after a few lines and rush off to “Pearls Before Swine.”
     That fact is important, yet overlooked. The average reader is vaguely aware that Johannes Gutenberg was a 15th-century German who printed the first book using moveable type, a Bible, now rare — 49 copies, to be exact. (So rare, there are none in Illinois: two pages at the Newberry Library; one at The Art Institute. Otherwise, the nearest copy is at Indiana University.)
     They do not know that Gutenberg started printing Bibles in March 1455 and by November had gone bankrupt and lost his printing press.
     I mention this now, in this moment, as digital media is being rattled by failure and mass firings: 1,000 employees sacked in recent weeks at BuzzFeed, AOL, HuffPost and Vice Media. Newspapers are shedding staff, as technology relentlessly undercuts the established order, and nobody can figure out how to stop the process. Flash: We can’t. The old way is over. A few living fossils might survive; I’m hoping to become the horseshoe crab of Chicago media. But generally, we’re sailing off into a new world and never going back.
     BuzzFeed, et al., are in the same business Gutenberg was in — selling words for money — and grasping his struggles might give us insight into our own.
     Gutenberg’s Bibles were expensive — 20 gulden, when a stone house in Mainz went for 80 gulden. Think $100,000 in today’s money. Printing these books took time, and getting the monasteries who bought copies to pony up took even longer. The new product worked — people wanted printed books — but money was slow in coming.
     Sound familiar? Early printers struggled to figure out how to keep their heads above water.

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The best grapefruit EVER!

     Humor often doesn't translate well, and sometimes the funnier the moment, the more delicate and difficult to dig up and transplant.
    So from the start, I want to acknowledge that it will take a bit of careful spadework to move this from memory and make it blossom here. Perhaps the humor will be lost. But we will try.
    First, context. I eat a grapefruit, almost every day, at breakfast. Several reasons: I like grapefruit. They're low in calories and filling: 120 calories for a big honking softball-sized fruit. And then there is Vitamin C, and that wonderful tart smell. I've lauded grapefruit here in the past.
    To feed this habit, we are constantly toting five-pound bags of grapefruit home from the supermarket. Grapefruit aren't always good: they can be dry, or too sour. Sometimes I buy one, test the batch, then later return for more. It takes effort.
    My wife doesn't eat grapefruit as much, but she will snack on oranges. Which is a novel practice to me. I would never, ever reach into the refrigerator, pull out an orange, and eat is as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. Just not something I do.
     A few days ago, my wife cut up an orange and sat down at the kitchen table where I sat, reading the newspaper. She offered me an orange section. It was a perfect-looking orange, the perfect color, the surface glistening with juice, all without flaw.
     I accepted her offer, held the section to my mouth—as kids we'd tuck the skin behind our lips to make orange smiles, but I didn't do that. I bite it. The orange was very sweet, ripe, rich, wonderful.
     I wasn't about to take more sections. That would be poor thanks for her having offered me one. But now I was hungry, hungry for oranges, so I did something unusual. I went into the fridge, removed my own orange, and cut it into sections, of course offering her one to replace the one she had offered me. Nearly 30 years of marriage; manners are important.
      My wife observed that it was unusual to see me eating an orange. Usually I'm a grapefruit man.
      "I like it..." I mused. "It's sweet. It's like the best grapefruit ever." 
     My wife collapsed into laughter, declaring this the funniest thing I had ever said. I'm not sure why. I think it's the grapefruit-o-centric view of oranges, seeing them as a smaller, sweeter version of grapefruits. A naive, a sweetness itself perhaps. But anyway, she was laughing about it a day later, and I thought I would try to pass it along, knowing that I would almost inevitably fall short.

Trans folks are lucrative Night of the Living Dead threat to frightened faithful

     There are not a lot of transgender citizens of the United States — figures I see hover at around half a percent. Still a significant number of people: about 1.5 million. But not like they’re crowding me.
     Looking over my 58 years on earth, I can’t think of any interaction whatsoever outside of my duties as a professional journalist. None that I noticed. No doubt I have run into trans folks and been unaware.
     What I’m trying to say is, the existence of transgender Americans has not been rattling my windows, certainly not the way it does certain individuals who profess to be religious. To hear them describe it, the transgender community is a kind of Night of the Living Dead assault, an inexorable force on the march. That people exist who do not identify with their birth gender is an earthquake, a revolution, one they will not tolerate, this pickaxe aimed at their own wobbly sense of self. It is something terrifying. Something to be stopped.
     Last week I received an email from Brian S. Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. His effort to stop gay marriage was a flop, so, like the March of Dimes shifting from polio to birth defects, he re-deployed his forces in the fight to keep the world exactly as he imagines it should be.
     Brown’s letter begins:

Dear Friend — I have been saying for a while that the push by LGBT extremists to impose gender ideology on society has reached insane proportions. Take what is happening in California, for instance.

The Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee of the California Legislature, a Democrat, has declared that people who testify before the committee will be prohibited from referring to another individual using male or female pronouns such as ‘he’ or ‘she,’ ‘him’ or ‘her.’ Instead, the rules now require the use of the pronouns, ‘they.’ The rule change was made to endorse gender neutrality so that “transgendered” and “non-binary” people are not offended with the use of a pronoun that doesn’t fit their gender identity.

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Sometimes less cold is plenty warm

 

     It was 7 degrees out Friday morning when I went to walk the dog.
     "It's still cold outside!" my wife cautioned me, from the warmth of our bed.
    Yes, yes, dear, I said, nevertheless refraining from putting on the ski pants I had worn for the past half dozen dog walks. Or the glove liners. Or the scarf wrapped around my face. Or the shop goggles.
     Seven degrees. Not much. But 29 more than the day before.
     I clipped the dog to her leash and we left the house. Outside and it was ... nice. It felt pleasant. Walking down the street, smiling, I thought of an old tale, that goes like this:

     A young husband living in a small studio in Wicker Park goes to see his rabbi with a problem...
     (Yes, traditionally these stories take place in a nameless village in Poland. But times change, and I try to keep up).
     "Rabbi," the young man says. "My apartment is so small. And now with the baby, it is even smaller. Life is unbearable. What should I do?"
     "Do you have a chicken?" the rabbi says.  Of course, the young man says, I have a chicken, out in its chicken coop in the alley.
     (Okay, these traditional Jewish folktales do not translate that well to modern American life, but bear with me).
     "Bring the chicken in the house with you," the rabbi says.
     The young man does so. The next day he returns.
     "Rabbi, I did what you told me to do, and brought the chicken in. But now it's even worse. The chicken is flapping, feathers flying, the baby howling, my wife complaining. With all due respect, this was not a solution to my problem."
     "Wait," the rabbi said. "Do you have a goat?"
     The man admits that he has a goat.
    "Bring the goat into the apartment."
    You see where this is going. It makes a good camp story. You can add as many animals as you like: a donkey, a cow, a horse, though those last two wouldn't really belong to a poor man. You can be descriptive, with the flapping chicken and the braying mule and the chomping goat. The poor young man, desperate now, returns to the rabbi. "Please, rabbi, this is madness!" the man says, at his wit's end.
     "Fine," smiles the rabbi. "Now take them all out of the house."
     The story ends the next day as the man returns, grateful, and thanks the rabbi for the miracle he has rendered. Without the animals, the apartment no longer seems small.

     The story is about relativity. Twenty below was really cold. Dangerously, painfully cold. Seven, on any other day, would be bleepin' cold. But after 20 below, it felt balmy. Here's the interesting thing. Later in the day it was 20 degrees above zero. And that felt fine, but not as nice as it had Friday morning. And Saturday it was 40. And while that was certainly an improvement, it didn't have the joyous release that 7 degrees had. The closest I can figure is that people adjust after changes. Twenty below seemed miserable for two days, and 7 was a release from misery. Once you have been released from misery — 7, 20, 40 — you're free, and the rest is just details.
   
 

The Saturday Snapshot #25

     I don't think I took any photographs during the astoundingly cold pair of days we had midweek. It was just ... too ... cold. I'd have to take my gloves off. Madness. In fact, Wednesday and Thursday, I left the house six times: to walk the dog. Otherwise, the cold seemed in my bones, and I sprawled around the house, too tired to even read.
     But reader Nikki D. stepped into the gap, snapping this Wednesday, noting:

     I took this today during the polar vortex cold, and it's an unaltered photo. This is the view of my side yard, our neighbors are there in the background. It seemed as though it was too cold for colors, almost like I stepped into a film noir.  

     "Too cold for colors"—I like that. Poetic. That could be the title of a children's book, something starting in the black and white winter, with perhaps a trace of bluish snow, then bursting into floral yellows and reds and purples come spring—Friday morning certainly felt springlike, a balmy 7 degrees...
      Scale is hard to tell in this photo, at least for me. Is the tree small, a crab-apple perhaps? It looks that way, at first glance. Or is it large? It seems to grow if you compare it to what seems like a brick outdoor stove nearby.
      Anyway, I don't want to overthink this one today. Thanks to Nikki for sending it in, and I encourage other readers to get off their cans and share a shot or two of their own. It's a game anyone can play. 

What’s next? ‘Hi, this is a scam! Grab your wallet so we can cheat you!’

"First Scene of Thieves," by Gror (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  

     My iPhone rings. An 800 number, calling me. Which might as well flash a red “SCAM!”
     But I am a curious sort.
     “Dear citizen …” an ominous robotic voice begins. “Due to a certain suspicious activity, we are forced to suspend your Social Security number to immediate effect. Due to this your benefits will be cancelled …”
     I’ve received this call 14 times over the last two weeks of January.
     “In order to connect with a Social Security administration officer, press '1' now,” it continues. “In case we do not hear from you, your Social will be blocked permanently. Press '1' now, and you will automatically be connected with a concerned department official.”
     I admire that “concerned” — a nice touch. Who doesn’t want to believe there is a soul in the government who cares? Once I broke down and pressed “1,” though the person I then connected with sounded, to me, not so much concerned as confused. A harried drone in a Third World basement boiler room. They immediately asked for my Social Security number. “You’re the one who called me,” I said, hanging up.
     “Social Security numbers do not get suspended,” the Federal Trade Commission points out on its web page devoted to this scam. “Ever.”
     Are there people who don’t know this? Apparently so. Which raises the question: Why base your scam on something a halfway savvy person knows to be false?  

"Second Scene of Thieves," by Gror (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   
     For exactly that reason. Because scammers want to weed out those with discernment. Fraud isn’t about duping everybody. It’s about identifying the most credulous, the choicest marks, and going after them. It’s a manpower issue. What scamster wants to laboriously lead a would-be mark along, only to have him balk at buying $3,000 in Apple gift cards to pay off a delinquent tax bill? Falling for the obvious initial gambit means you are more likely to keep giving, information and even cash.
     Scams fall into two categories: fear and greed. The Social Security number is a fear scam. The terrifying and mysterious government is about to drop kick you into oblivion. There are similar scams involving the IRS, which will never call you demanding payment. Or Com-Ed, calling to say your power is about to be cut.

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It isn't the cows

Metropolitan Museum of Art

    It's amazing how long you can know something without ever thinking about it.
    For instance.
    Chicago, "hog butcher for the world," yadda yadda. Union Stockyards. We all know it. Cows to slaughter. "The Jungle." Familiar to us all.
     So what was the revolutionary part? The big breakthrough that allowed Chicago to kill all those cattle?
     The chutes? The pens? The hooks? The railroads?
     No.
     Don't feel bad if you don't get it. I'd never get it; I never even thought to ask before Tuesday, and I was reading about ...
     No, before I give away the game, lets do a thought experiment. You run a Chicago slaughterhouse. It's 1877. The cows show up, I don't know, from Kansas, and Iowa, and wherever cows come from. They're led, snorting and foaming, into your slaughterhouse. Where you have all these big Lithuanians with cleavers, Stav and Jurgis and whatever. They kill the cows, and the pigs.
     Then what? Think. It's August. You have all these dead cows and pigs in a bloody heap in your slaughterhouse. What do you do with them?
      Sell them, right? Where do you sell them? To whom? Chicagoans? It's a big city, but we can eat enough to make you a titan.
      Hint: "hog butcher for the world."
      Right. You sell your beef and pork to the world.
     How do you get it there?
     On trains, right?
     So it's August, you kill all these cows and pigs, cut them up, load the meat on trains and ship it to points East.
     Do you see a problem? What happens to the meat? It spoils, right, in about six hours. Which is why the meat slaughtering industry was seasonal. You didn't slaughter in summer. The meat went bad too fast.
     Okay, enough mystery. You need to cool the meat. Which is why, in 1877, Gustavus Swift sent an open railcar filled with sides of beef in the dead of winter back to his former home in Boston. To show it could be done. And how he shipped meat for the next five years, until contracting with the Michigan Rail Car Company to design special insulated rail cars to hold ice, yet keep it from touching the beef and turning it black. He had to set up ice depots along the way to replenish the ice, and overcome resistance from the railroads, which preferred bulkier (and more profitable) live animals, as well as public revulsion with "mummified" meat (butcher shops would display signs, "No Chicago dressed meat sold here") which he did by selling it for far less, since it cost less to ship. Swift was the Uber of his day: a big chain driving out the locals with a vast system.
     It was an enormous organizational effort. Swift "had to buy ice-harvesting rights in lakes all over northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin so that he might have the ice for chilling his beef and loading the ice boxes of his cars at Chicago," his son recalled. "He had to develop icing stations all the way across the country to his markets in the East—the railroads would not build them. Then he had to get the ice-harvesting facilities to supply these stations. he had to build ice houses of huge capacity."
     The railroads wouldn't build them because they preferred shipping live cattle—more profit. But Swift wanted to maximize the value he was shipping. Swift also pushed other innovations: butchers did not typically display the meat they sold. Swift wanted customers to see it, which meant they came to value particular cuts and pay more. He almost didn't care what people paid for his beef, as long as they bought it and became customers. As I said, the Uber of his day.
     "Dressed beef profoundly disrupted the traditional American beef trade," William Cronon observed in"Nature's Metropolis." "Dressed beef brought the entire nation—and Great Britain as well—into Chicago's hinterland."
    But not without resistance. In 1887, the Butchers' National Protective Association was formed with the central purpose of deflecting Chicago beef.
    Not to get lost in the details. What's important to remember is, it was the ice that changed things particularly the car designed by Andrew Chase, at Swift's request: Chase used ice to chill air that chilled the beef. Suddenly slaughtering cattle was a year-round business, a round-the-clock business, since any refrigerated rail car that left Chicago with an empty cubic foot of space was wasting money. Which also led to the huge, consolidated system, because it was expensive to create and maintain this cold supply chain, first with ice, then with mechanically refrigerated cars and warehouses. Driving the small fry out of business.
     Swift's competitors leapt in. Philip Armour created the Armour Refrigerated Line in 1883, and by 1900 it owned 11,000 refrigerated railcars.
     This was supposed to go into yesterday's column. But I had that opening sentence about freezing to death, and sailed off from there, and this was all so complicated, that I never got to what I thought was the most interesting part. Just as well, because I get to tell you now. History, like life, is not fair, and it does not always emphasize the most interesting part. We think it's the cows. But it's not; it's the ice.

Someone is going to freeze to death Wednesday: don't let it be you

     "Freezing to death" is actually a misnomer, since humans begin to die of cold if their core temperature drops below a summery 85, long before ice crystals form.
     But it's too common an error to hope to correct now, and with the Chicago area expected to be plunged into a hellish 20 below zero—the high for Wednesday is predicted to be a record 14 below—this seems an apt moment, among the warnings to stay indoors (my plan) or bundle up in layers if necessity or foolishness lures you outside, to give careful consideration to the long tradition of fatal cold, and the rich literature it has inspired.
     "Hellish" for instance, was not a casually chosen adjective. Despite its famous flames, Hell is often frozen in Dante's travelogue. In the 9th circle, he comes upon figures encased in ice, describing a scene that will no doubt be reproduced on CTA platforms citywide today: "I saw a thousand faces after that/All purple as a dog's lips from the frost/I still shiver, and always will, at the sight."
     And in the lowest pit of Hell, Satan himself is buried to his chest in ice.
     But those people are mostly fictional. Browsing over a century plus of Chicago deep freeze death reports, those real souls most apt to die from cold tend to fall into broad categories: the old, the poor, the old and poor The impaired, typically drunk. The mentally impaired are also vulnerable—in January, 1979, two 8-year-old boys boys, clad only in their pajamas, slipped out of the Joseph P. Kennedy School for Exceptional Children in Palos Township, were locked outside and froze to death on the stoop. It was 5 degrees below zero. Nor where they the only state charges to die that year.
     Hypothermia as a form of suicide is not unknown. In 1898, Maud Alexander, 30, "concealed herself in the dark entrance of the vacant Horse and Harness Exchange building, 1633 Wabash avenue, last evening, and sought to freeze to death," according to a report in the Tribune. "I want to die," she told the policeman who discovered her and saved her life, explaining that she was "friendless and had no money."
     About 25 people die in Cook County every year from exposure to cold. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Illinois is in the top five states for number of cold deaths, though ranks 15th per 100,000 people. About 1,300 people die a year of hypothermia in the United States, 2/3 of those being men, since men are more prone to impairment from substances and what is considered an adventurous spirit.

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Au revoir L'Affaire Covington

Medusa, by Damien Hirst

 
     Last week, I asked the paper for Monday off, because I would be in Raleigh researching a story, and didn't want to be distracted. But I had time in the airport Thursday, and so wrote the following about L'Affaire Covington, thinking I might run it Monday. But the government shut down ended, I came back a day early, Covington suddenly seemed Old News, and a profane, Trump-loving cabbie gave me a column I felt more topical than this. It's a little rough, but will have to do on a Tuesday. And if not, well, there's always tomorrow. 

    One of the glories of my job is that I don't have to swing at every pitch. If I feel I'm going to dribble it into the dirt, or a topic is coming in a little tight and inside, I'll let it sail by and wait for another more my liking.
     The Jason Van Dyke verdict? Pass. With the entire city in full cry, I didn't feel anything to add, or, rather, my perspective seemed too minor league. To me the triumph was that he was tried at all. Six years and change isn't much of a sentence, but it's an improvement over nothing, which is what Van Dyke certainly would have gotten had that video not been released. Also, at the back of my mind, it's a policeman on duty trying to do his job. Whatever else you can say about firing 16 shots, it isn't something someone does after carefully weighing the options. The shame is the man was too afraid, or too hyped up, or too something, to simply pause. 
     Never underestimate the power of waiting. Those boys from Covington High School in Kentucky, caught on video in some kind of exchange with a Native-American man? The first critics who leapt out of the blocks, attacking and defending, what was the point? Initially, the incident was cast as mockery, and the internet exploded in condemnation. The main kid in the video, was to be hounded to his grave for that smirk.
     With Twitter lighting up like a pinball machine, I thought I would join the fun. My initial thought did not pass the smell test—let's say it was an unkind observation about the level of Jesus-like love that one can expect from the inmates at Catholic boys schools. That's the thing about unkindness—it's impatient, it wants to leap, it feeds on itself, and encourages others to join in without really thinking either.
     But I did think, and what I thought was: "Don't say that." So I didn't. Upon reflection, I decided to tack the other way, and find someone to sympathize with.
    "Call me a softie," I wrote, but I can't help feel a little sorry for the administrators and teachers at Covington school, who did not expect to see their national reputation turned to shit in a day.
    Or words to that effect. I had to quickly deleted it as a blunderbuss of contempt was fired in my direction. "Apologist!" cried someone I don't know, while someone I do know crafted a mocking parody. Usually deleting ill-advised tweets is pointless—it's already been copied and passed around derisively. But I figured, I don't need this, and returned to the living world: assuming that hasn't become online, and the flesh and pancakes world just a squishy necessity until we become brains-in-jars wired into the Internet.
     Before I weigh in on my actual opinions on Covington, let me explain a theory that I have, based on lots of interactions with bigots. I believe the central harm they do is to themselves. Sure, they sometimes find a victim and inflict damage, such as was directed supposedly at Nathan Phillips, that Native-American drummer—if being elevated from complete obscurity to nationwide lionization can be considered a kind of harm; it strikes me as ample compensation for an awkward five minute encounter.
    But day in and day out, the people the bigots are hurting are themselves. They're the ones always around, forced to squint through their tiny keyhole of a perspective at the wide green world. As the Covington Affair unfolded endlessly—the boys may yet show up at the White House to meet with their spiritual leader—a profound sadness settled in. I couldn't muster any anger toward them and was disappointed that so many of my fellow libs could. My main thought was: how poorly prepared they were to encounter the world, one filled with all races and backgrounds. Some are hostile, such as the Black Hebrews who supposedly catcalled them, priming them for this interlude (though how being insulted by group A allows you to then mock Person B is something of a mystery). Some are enigmatic, like a chanting Native-American beating a drum in front of you. The impulse to mock what you don't understand, on full display here, will not serve those boys well.
    Unless it does. Unless it carries them to the presidency. It certainly didn't hurt Donald Trump. I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm working off an old playbook. When raising my boys, nothing earned stronger paternal disappointment than when I thought they were being cruel or deceptive. I hope I didn't hobble them for the nation we are becoming.
     I focus on Right Wing lapses plenty, though the Left has nothing to feel good about here. The Left reflected what I call Slasher Movie morality. You know how slasher movies work (or did, I understand there are also variation on the classic theme)— establish a bad guy, who does these horrible things, and then the hero finally gets the upper hand, and inflicts all the sadism and brutality on the bad guy that we supposedly condemn him for doing. Only it's alright, because he deserves it.
    The Trump era is an open invitation to be vindictive. The question isn't, "Does the person you are heaping your scorn upon deserve it?" The question is, why are you doing it? Toward what end? And does the act say more about you than the person you are supposedly condemning? Because everyone deserves contempt, more or less, at one moment or another.
   

"Let them know Africans do love Trump"

    "Everyone here loves Trump," said the friend I was staying with while working on a story in North Carolina. "Even black people."
     How do you know? I thought, but did not say—guestly manners, and I suppose the restraint that puts Democrats at a permanent disadvantage in our current national tug-o-war. 
     I had barely seen a person, never mind a person of color, during my stay in this lovely suburb of Raleigh. Lots of tall, straight southern pine trees—growing telephone poles is big business here. Many old tobacco smoking sheds, little rough cabins preserved as a hint of the rustic charm being pushed out by suburban sprawl. But most people were obscured behind the tinted windows of wide-hipped Ford F-150 pick-ups.
     The government shut-down finally ended while I was away, and the victory for Nancy Pelosi and the Dems was being ululated on the pages of the liberal media.
     But the permanent opposition is having none of it. My friend roundly damned Pelosi while I pursed my lips, and is convinced this re-opening is but a three-week pause before Trump, master tactician, presses his struggle anew. Meanwhile, United Airlines sent an email pointedly suggesting I slip home early, ahead of Monday's polar vortex snowstorm. So I gratefully changed my flight, to find O'Hare oddly congested for Saturday night at 9 p.m.
     No matter. I confidently dialed American Taxi, with the relief felt when you spy your mother's face at the window. I was practically home.
     American Taxi let me down. Rather than briskly dispatch a taxi, an automated voice informed me they were short of cabs. It took my order, yes, and said they'd send a text. But no text came as I stood shivering outside. Only one or two American Taxis slipped by. Not promising. I called American Taxi back, busted through the electronic shells and found a real person, who told me there is a shortage of cabs. Several times, while I tried to pry out the information I needed: would there be, not only cabs available some time in the foreseeable future, but a specific cab available for me? And when might that be? He wouldn't say, and eventually I realized I was on my own. The government is being run by a egomaniacal fraud. Congress is seized up. And now, betrayed by American Taxi. It was as if they had snarled, “walk!”

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The Oriental Institute is no doubt next

"Western Gentleman in Oriental Costume" by unknown British painter
Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Workmen changed the letters on the sign of the Oriental Theater Wednesday night—a Facebook friend sent me a video of himself and a pal, having just seen "Kinky Boots," heckling the workers.

    "Blasphemy! Sacrilege!" one cried, while the other chimed in, "Boooo! Boooo!"
    Yes, change, how we hate it, sometimes.

     The official renaming, to the James M. Nederlander Theatre, is Feb. 8—my pal Chris Jones has a comprehensive story in the Tribune. He explains that there is no reason to get all weepy over the loss of the "Oriental" name; that wasn't even the original name of the  original theater in the site: The Iroquois Theater, the one that notoriously burned in 1903, with a loss of 600 lives, which puts disputes over names in context.
      "Oriental" has to go because the term is now considered offensive. I don't have a dog in this race, but my opinion on the subject was well-expressed by Jayne Tsuchiyama in the Los Angles Times in a 2016 piece headlined "The Term 'Oriental' is outdated, but is it racist?"
     She quotes Erika Lee, , director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota and author of "The Making of Asian America: A History:" 

"In the U.S., the term 'Oriental' has been used to reinforce the idea that Asians were/are forever foreign and could never become American. These ideas helped to justify immigration exclusion, racial discrimination and violence, political disfranchisement and segregation." Lee also claimed that continued use of the term "perpetuates inequality, disrespect, discrimination and stereotypes towards Asian Americans."

     Tsuchiyama doesn't buy it.
     "I don't see it that way," she writes. "I see self-righteous, fragile egos eager to find offense where none is intended."
     Racial analysis has a strict set of rules, manners and conventions. Tsuchiyama, being Asian herself, has standing to take strong stands that I couldn't prudently adopt.  Though even unfettered, I wouldn't put it that strongly, not only because it would be unwise, but because I have a vague sympathy for those who indulge in such semantic hurtmongering. We're all scrabbling around in society, and there is an immediate power and dignity that comes from objecting to something, from insisting you are being wronged somehow. That's why the Fox crowd, no matter the topic, always veers into their own victimization, whether notional, as is usually the case, or in certain instances real.  It's easy, rewarding, and many people itch to plug into it. Who knows, it might even be sincere. This is not to deny actual oppression. Asian-Americans of course have suffered their share of discrimination, from the abuses against Chinese railroad workers to World War II Japanese interment camps. But there are people who leap to object. The word "oriental" is dying out on its own, as Tsuchiyama notes, and trying to back form it into something offensive is of marginal utility.

     The Federal government banned the word from official documents and now it is being scrubbed from a marque in Chicago. I'd like to say that human tolerance is thereby improved. But I don't see the connection. Maybe the reason we agonize over the frills and trappings is because we can't get close to the heart of the problem.

The Saturday Snapshot #24

Todd

     You never get a second chance.
     Unless you do. 
     I was sitting in the The Pit in Raleigh, North Carolina, with my old friend Bob Ringham, when I saw this dramatic hairstyle slide past the window, atop a young man riding a scooter. Scooters are the thing in Raleigh, apparently.
    I drew Bob's attention to the stiff ridge of pointy hair as its owner disappeared.
    "Odd," I said. "Mohawks were a way to broadcast punk rebellion in 1977 and, 40 years later, they still are."
     I wanted to elaborate how they never aged, like other rebellious cuts, the DA, which went from genuine tough guy Rebel-Without-a-Cause talisman to toothless coiffure sunk in nostalgia and the mock heroic. A mohawk is still strange; like a tantrum in hair, a way each generation expresses anew its displeasure with the world.
     A few minutes later, he was back. I couldn't let a second chance slip by. I quickly stood up excused myself, hurrying outside and introducing myself, mentioning Chicago and this blog as if they were charms. He said his name is Todd and apologetically said his girlfriend had just been in a traffic accident and he had to go. Though nicely, nicely enough that I implored, "Two seconds," and he posed, briefly, in profile as instructed. In the first two photos, his magnificent crest was lost in the background but, for this final frame, I dipped my knees and silhouetted it against the sky. And then he was gone, off down the street.
    "I hope she's okay!" I called after him, and returned to the restaurant, where I was met by an inquisitive waitstaff.
    "Do you know that guy?" one waiter said. 
    "No," I replied, "we just met."

Where's Neil?

     I'm not the man in motion I sometimes pretend to be. In fact, fairly homebound and glad of it, partially because I can be bad about doing all the planning necessary for a trip. I'm out-of-town today, working on a story. But before I left, my wife and I had an exchange that made me smile: 

     She: Could you send me the address where you're staying?
     Me: I don't know where I'm staying.
     She: Well then, could you tell me what state you'll be in?
     Me: North Carolina.