The generosity of the Target Corporation

     Don't get me wrong. I like Target. The stores are clean. They're big and bright. The red bull's eye design element really holds the place together. They have stuff I want. On weekends, when my wife goes to do an errand, to pick up enormous blocks of paper towels and slabs of toilet paper, weighty jugs of cat litter, I tend to go along, to lug the litter and look around. 
     There's always something interesting, a heretofore unimagined product, like a cleaner to clean the inside of your washing machine, which I always imagined was clean enough already. I wrote about that previously.
    Or this display, noticed last weekend. Before I say a word about it, I want you to take a look. I'm curious as to whether what popped out at me, immediately, also pops out at you. See the picture to the right? The little display next to the paper towels, pushing gift cards? Look at it closely.
     Anything leap out at you? Anything odd?   
    Yes, it could be that the "holiday" display is still up in March—I suppose the holiday could be Easter, but do you give Target gift cards at Easter? It's possible, though I just suspect somebody's falling down on the job at this particular Target. Anyway, that wasn't what I noticed.
    Anything else?
     How about "free sleeve with all holiday gift cards."    
     Free sleeve? These cards are a great money-maker for these stores, since you pay them for a plastic card that costs almost nothing, they have your money for a period of days and weeks until the recipient redeems the value of the card, which sometimes never happens because the cards are lost or forgotten. Sweet. Consumers spent $150 billion on gift cards in 2015 and $1 billion worth were never used. 
     So it is natural that Target would want to give you something in return, like this ultra-chic paper sleeve to put your gift card in. 
     A tremendously chintzy drop of generosity for a story to be ballyhooing, am I correct? That's like a hotel crowing that they give you clean sheets. 
    Is there a word for a gift so paltry it's worse than nothing at all? I can't think of it. Our language of gift-giving is surprisingly sparse. We have to borrow a Cajun term for "lagniappe,"  one of my favorite words, meaning a small present meant to seal the deal, that free cookie the baker gives you as you browse. The "free sleeve" is an anti-lagniappe, a present so expected—"We put a fresh paper examination table strip with every check-up"–that it makes you question the entire transaction. 
    "Free sleeve..." Is there a chance they were joking? A bit of whimsy cooked up by some harried copywriter, deep within the Target organization? Nah...

      

George Orwell's "1984" a best-seller, Snapchat worth billions—any relation? Discuss.

Workshop of Ralph H. Bauer, inventor of the first video game (Smithsonian Institution)

     Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, went public Thursday. By day’s end, its share price jumped 44 percent, making the company worth $34 billion, about equal to General Mills, makers of Cheerios.
     The offering interested me because I use Snapchat, by necessity. Since it is, I suspect, unfamiliar to many readers, I ought to explain it.
     Snapchat is a photo sharing and messaging app. Like life itself, Snapchat is fleeting. The recipient has a set number of seconds — say 10 — to look at the photo being sent. Then it vanishes, irretrievably.
     This has obvious utility if you are, say, sending naked pictures of yourself. Which let me rush to mention is not why I use it. Snapchat also allows messages to be written across the photo sent, and add a variety of comic trappings. If you want to send a photo of yourself as a dog, with floppy ears, snout and lolling tongue, Snapchat will do that.
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Liberals can wear jackboots too

 

Middlebury College

   Middlebury College is a lovely place, nestled in the mountains of Vermont. I visited with my older son in 2013 when we were looking at colleges. They were fiercely proud of their liberal arts heritage, and referred to Robert Frost so often I thought he went to school there. He didn't, but lived nearby.

     The place has less to be proud of after last Thursday, when a student mob disrupted an attempt by Middlebury political science professor Allison Stanger to host Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a highly controversial 1994 book that attempted to show a scientific link between race and intelligence. His attempts to speak were shouted down, and after he was removed to a remote location to conduct his talk via TV link, he and Stanger were attacked, sending the professor to the hospital.
     Here's the Washington Post coverage of the incident.
     I agree with those who find The Bell Curve disingenuous hogwash. Still. Violence is violence. It is unacceptable whether being used to terrorize a religious minority or bully a political scientist whose works you find hateful. There is no justification for it. If you believe in your ideas, if you believe they are true, you should also have confidence they will prevail against somebody whose ideas you find reprehensible. Not because you shouted him down and kept him from ever expressing those ideas. That isn't a free society.  

      College students should know this. But college is also an age of tremendous narcissism, personal drama and lack of perspective.  I was not taken with Middlebury, which has its own private ski slope. "It's a four-year summer camp for rich kids," I quipped. Perhaps their sense of privilege is such that the very idea of other opinions is intolerable. They need to work on that. 

     Totalitarianism is on the march in America. If tomorrow Donald Trump formed the Red Hats, squads of thugs who swagger around, roughing up illegal immigrants and Muslim refugees and liberals, they can now point to Middlebury College as justification. And who could say they don't have a point? Well, I could. It's the worst kind of hypocrisy, to use your erstwhile foes as your moral compass the moment they commit a transgression you would like to try yourself. The way Americans trembling at the thought of sharia law will suddenly point to Saudi Arabia's draconian practices and wish we could do the same. It's rank hypocrisy but then, there's a lot of that going around too. 

    Toleration is meaningless if you only extend it to those whom you agree with. Charles Murray's work might be of dubious scientific value, but it is an argument nevertheless, and those bullying him at Middlebury College did not him, but themselves, a grave disservice, elevating his reputation while undercutting their own. 

Books on the nightstand: "The Unwinding"

     "Books on the night stand" is a heading for a page at the side of this blog where I sometimes write about books I'm reading.
      But times change. And I had to pause whether I could include the book I've been -- well, not "reading," certainly.  And "enjoying" doesn't fit either, it's too sobering. I suppose "listening to," since it's a book on tape, well, except it's on CD ....
    The hell with it. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer is a haunting, timely epic look at how America got where it is today. To add an extra twist, I was about to drive down to Wayne County in January to talk to the residents there about their overwhelming support for Donald Trump in advance of his inauguration. 
       Packer is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and The Unwinding his 2013 panoramic portrait of what went wrong in the United States over the past 40 years, an crumbling of social, economic, governmental, moral and intellectual bedrock that has left us unmoored and stumbling toward whatever fate -- or doom -- awaits us.  The growing partisanship, cynicism and dysfunction of politicians, their increasing domination by big money interests, the missed opportunity of the banking and real estate collapse of 2009, when the government bailed out the banks and the mortgage lenders but failed to put in controls that might prevent the next crisis. Obama comes off as colluding with the very people he should have sent to jail.
    The book is a bravura act of reportage—a factual version of John Dos Passos' 1930s classic trilogy U.S.A —with a big cast of characters: Tammy Thomas, an African American factory worker in Youngstown, Ohio who becomes a social activist. Dean Price, a North Carolina truck stop owner who gets into bio-diesel. Jeff Connaughton, an ambitious aide to Joe Biden — the future vice president is portrayed as a shallow ambitious phony, one of many famous people salted throughout who, like Napoleon in War and Peace, add glitter and spice up the narrative. Names like Jay-Z and Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and Alice Waters pop up. I savored the damning portrait of Newt Gingrich, whose bare-fisted tactics hurried American decline, as well as that of new gilded age tycoon Sam Walton. I'm not sure why Raymond Carver is there, but I welcomed him too. Some I was barely familiar with, like Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire now supporting Trump.
    This is the first non-fiction book I've listened to on an audiobook, and one with so many characters poses some challenges, at least at the beginning. But I've found it also makes me eager to get into the car. The trip to Wayne County gave me a richer sense of the people supporting Trump -- not idiots, certainly, but people with limited range of interests focused on a particular set of local issues.  In one of those echoes that would look trite in fiction, the audiobook I grabbed almost randomly off the library shelf to listen on the way down also expanded and echoed what I'd find when I go there. If we learn one thing from the Right, contempt is easy. Understanding is hard, and anyone trying to figure out how we got in this mess would do themselves well to read it..
    Since audio book readers often get overlooked, I have to give props to award-winning veteran reader Bob Fass, who delivers these tales of suffering with an appealing dry evenness.
    As I was listening to the book, I also found myself thinking about how hearing a book is different than reading it. So it was more perfect timing that I happened upon The Untold Story of the Talking Book, by Matthew Rubery, (Harvard University Press: 2016) drawn by its clean and appealing cover. I've just read the introduction, but am intrigued both by the tidbits of information he assembles—Saint Augustine was dumbfounded to find his teacher, Saint Ambrose, reading silently to himself—and the larger questions Rubery raises:

     What exactly is the relationship between spoken and printed texts? How  does the experience of listening to books compare to that of reading them? What influence does a book's narrator have over its reception? What methods of close listening are appropriate to such narratives? What new formal possibilities are opened up by sound technology? 

     We think of the shifting sands of technology as being something new. But even before the public had heard Edison's phonograph, the press was speculating it might mean the death of books, or their radical transformation, as who would read the words themselves when skilled elocutionists could do it for you?
     I wrote a little about the history of audiobooks three years ago, when Audible brought out my memoir Drunkard in audio form. But I haven't gotten into The Untold Story of the Talking Book far enough to give it more of a full treatment than this. You'll have to wait for a couple weeks. In the meantime, this book actually will be resting on my nightstand.

Why would anyone WANT Trump to visit Chicago?

 

     What's wrong with people?
     I'm reading all this speculation about Oprah Winfrey being maybe interested in running for president. Conversation seems to revolve around her views. Is she sincere? Is it a joke? And the logic seems to be, heck, experience doesn't count for anything, obviously, since Donald Trump was elected president. So why not Oprah? She's a big rich star too!
     Those people are missing the point, entirely. Yes, Trump won. But based on the chaos of his first six weeks of his administration, and the unqualified clown/zealots he's stuffing his cabinet with, his election isn't a template for more of the same. It's a grim cautionary tale, a reminder that while the popular mania might turn on expertise in general and politicians in particular, that electing a president based on lack of government experience is like choosing a surgeon based on scant medical knowledge. Oh, he can put on green scrubs and a paper mask and look the part. And maybe fool some people who judge by appearances. But stick him in front of an open chest cavity and he just stands there, gawping.
     Which is sorta what Trump is doing now.
     The only actual accomplishment Trump can point to is giving himself an "A." The rest is bluster. Which is not the bad part. The bad part is that some people believe him. They assume, he's so smug, so certain, so rich, he must be succeeding, since he says he is. Except he's not. We just aren't used to somebody lying so consistently, so thoroughly. It throws us.
     Yes, there are similarities. Like Trump, Oprah is a giant airship of inflamed ego. The materialism run amok? The close-your-eyes-follow-me-and-your-dreams-will-come-true magical thinking?

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God's substitute for happiness

 Mariusz Kwiecien, as Eugene Onegin, and Ana Maria Martinez as Tatiana
 (Photo by Todd Rosenberg, Lyric Opera of Chicago)

     So I blew off my responsibilities Wednesday afternoon and caught the matinee of "Eugene Onegin" at the Lyric, because seeing "Carmen" for the second time this season Tuesday night obviously didn't satisfying my opera jones for the week. 
    Well, actually, I was told that if I missed it, I would be sorry, and that was correct. Beautiful, strong voices, enigmatic sets. True, I'm more a Bizet man than a Tchaikovsky man—give me the big rolling punches of "Carmen" more than the dolorous loveliness of "Eugene Onegin." But it worked.
   Yes, "Eugene Onegin" is not heavy on plot. He's a scoundrel. One sister is in love with him, writes a letter and is rebuffed, he woos the other sister at a dance, cheezing off her suitor, his best friend. There's a duel -- which means, with all the dueling in "Hamilton," if I can find one more dueling production this season, that would constitute a trend.
    Trying to justify going, I told myself I wasn't just playing hooky, but working, building my base of knowledge regarding opera, always useful when covering Chicago's pressing urban problems. And I was pleased to recognize not one but two performers from previous work: Ana Maria Martinez, who was in "Don Giovani" (sort of carving out a singing-against-the-bad-boy niche for herself) and Iowa's pride, Katharine Goeldner, whom you might remember as stepping into the lead role the last time the Lyric did "Carmen," in 2010/2011 (or, more likely, not. But I sure remember it).
    At intermission the group behind me started debating what language the singers of "Eugene Onegin" might be using. I let them go on but, when resolution didn't seem at hand, Finally, I broke my rule against butting into other people's conversations. 
    "It's Russian," I said, half turning in my seat.
     "It doesn't sound like Russian," a man objected.
     "I studied Russian in college," I said, evenly. "They're speaking Russian words. 'Ya lubloo ti da,' 'Yes, I love you.'" 
    They were still skeptical—this person claiming knowledge on the subject they obviously lacked any experience in whatsoever didn't count. Then one located some corroboration in the the program. "It says 'Russian,'' one lady read, and they were satisfied. 
    Well, you don't go to the opera to socialize with other patrons. It never works out well. Although, heading up the aisle at the same intermission, an 85-year-old woman grabbed my arm and suddenly I was escorting her on my arm. She was apologetic, and I said No, this is exactly how my mother gets around. 
    "Though you really should use a cane," I said, delivering the same lecture I give to my mom at every opportunity. She said she has a man who lives with her and helps her, but he also had to tend to her husband, and couldn't make the four-hour investment going to the opera entailed. I was about to quote Blanche DuBois on the kindness of strangers, but we were in the lobby and she broke free and was gone.
     Not a lot of intellectual challenge going on with "Eugene Onegin." Although. Early on, when two rustically-dressed women are peeling potatoes against a vast orange background with five tall thin birch trees cutting up the stage, one snatch of song was translated as, "Routine brings comfort from distress. God's substitute for happiness."
    Well, that's something to chew on. Damning, yes. I guess to be happy you have to seduce your pal's beloved then kill him in a duel.  Frankly, I'd rather make coffee and walk the dog every single day. Without giving away the ending, I have to say I was one of the few patrons, if not the only patron in the history of music, to laugh out loud, big grin on my face, as poor Eugene was left, miserable and alone in the center of the empty stage, decrying his woe. I had that reaction because I was suddenly thinking of a particular die-hard bachelor friend and wishing he were sitting next to me so I could elbow him in the ribs and say, "Something to look forward to, eh?" And I have to say, as the lights came up, and I jumped to make the 5:25, I was pretty darn happy, even though I was catching the same train I always do.

The Riverwalk: Promenade, jogging path, ramp to a penal colony on Mars

     Oddly, the two things I most meant to say when I set out to write this — how Rahm Emanuel, when he first took office, said he wanted to revitalize the river front, and how the river forms an artificial coast, giving a sweeping vista of skyline — didn't make it through cutting this for size. 

     Sure, Rich Daley wrecked the finances of the city and left behind a ruined economic shell. But Millennium Park, man that's something. And the Bean! I just love the Bean.
     And yes, our current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, doesn't have a clue what to do about the violence convulsing our city. But he did build the Riverwalk, and it's nice.
     Last month, the Riverwalk opened its latest stretch from the Franklin Bridge to Lake Street and that, coupled with the February warm weather seemed to demand an in-depth journalistic investigation.
    One afternoon last week, I crossed the river on the Orleans Bridge, turned right, strode down the concrete ramp, took a hard left, walking to the base of the Lake Street Bridge. I paused, fired up a Rocky Patel, and started to stroll, err, probe.
   I would like to report that the new ramp is a cleverly designed modernistic fantasy of concrete and metalwork. But it's not. It looks like the entrance chute to a penal colony on Mars, a spew of naked concrete and chain link fence. That's the bad news; the good news is, it may not done yet, at least according to the an architect's rendition I noticed in city materials. I phoned the mayor's press office, several times, over a period of days, and emailed, trying to get clarification. They're working on it.

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       I paused to listen to musician Sean Black on the Riverwalk. This is his song, "The One." 

On the nightstand: "The Remains of the Day"

    The state of the country being what it is, it seems increasingly essential to have a good book nearby to lose myself in as need be, or at least to look forward to losing myself in, a respite from the daily stirring of the pot that our president finds useful to keep the public distracted from what he has already done.
     A good friend recommended Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day, and I hurried to the library to pick it up.
     The story is a week in the life of Stevens, the aging veteran butler at Darlington Hall, as he drives to Cornwall to meet the manor's long-ago housekeeper, Miss Kenton, now married, though perhaps not happily. It's after World War II, and much has changed—his longtime employer, Lord Darlington, died three years earlier, and was recently replaced by an upstart American businessman, Mr. Farraday. He motors along in his boss's elegant Ford, musing on the past, various revered butlers he has known, his father's decline. 
     The central joy of the book is the tone, the voice, Mr. Stevens always restrained observations on the nature of "dignity," his failed attempts to engage in banter with his new boss.
   Passing a signpost for Murssden, the home of Giffen and Company, makers of "dark candles of polish," a technical innovation "which came to push the polishing of silver to the position of central importance it still by and large maintains today," Stevens sets off on several pages on the importance of well-buffed silver, the highlight being:
    "I recall also watching Mr George Bernard Shaw, the renowned playwright, at dinner one evening, examining closely the dessert spoon before him, holding it up to the light and comparing its surface to that of a nearby platter, quite oblivious to the company around him."
     Either you get that or you don't. The book is one slow reveal, and the less said, the better. The ending also offers up a steaming dollop of philosophy that I know I'll value as the darkness gathers. Or try to anyway.  
    Though the peril of escaping from the daily headlines in a book is that the news follows you there. I don't think I'm revealing too much to say as The Remains of the Day clicks along like a hall clock, Lord Darlington's politics don't hold up well. In the mid-1930s, Lord Darlington comes under the sway of British fascists, leading to this:

     "I've been doing a great deal of thinking, Stevens. A great deal of thinking. And I've reached my conclusion. We cannot have Jews on the staff here at Darlington Hall."
     "Sir?"
     "It's for the good of this house, Stevens. In the interests of the guests we have staying here. I've looked into this carefully, Stevens, and I'm letting you know my conclusion.
     "Very well, sir."
     "Tell me, Stevens, we have a few on the staff at the moment, don't we? Jews, I mean."
     "I believe two of the present staff members would fall into that category, sir."
     "Ah."
     His lordship paused for a moment, staring out of this window.
     "Of course, you'l have to let them go."
     "I beg your pardon, sir?"
     "It's regrettable, Stevens, but we have no choice. There's the safety and well-being of my guests to consider. Let me assure you, I've looked into this matter and thought it through thoroughly. It's in all our best interests."

     That word—"safety"—just glowed on the page. Sound familiar? Though now we'd say "security" and the parties that our best interests demand be kept at a distance are now Muslims. But the logic, or rather, the illogic, is exactly the same.

Mark Giangreco busted for groping at the Twitter orgy

     One of the great things about working at the Sun-Times: not many meetings.
     Well, I'm sure somebody has meetings. I glimpse them through doorways as I'm hurrying out of the building.
     Occasionally I get sucked into a meeting, like one a few weeks ago explaining the importance of doing what I've done for years -- use social media, post to Facebook, Tweet stuff. We were reminded once again that we are no longer newspaper reporters, but "digital storytellers." I gazed at the phrase mournfully. They've been repeating that for years. What does it even mean? Digital storytellers. It has a whiff of kindergarten, of a robotic Mr. Rogers with a lightbulb nose and an LED red cardigan tinnily reading The Little Engine That Could to an audience of mechanical puppets. Is that our job now?
     I was forming a comment along those lines, when I thought better. Shutting up is an art form.  But I felt the need to say something, for the reason most people speak at meetings -- to hear myself talk.
     "Do you think we could get some guidelines for Twitter?" I asked, reminding my boss that Twitter is a minefield we're expected to skip across several times a day.

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Charles Dickens, served by slaves in America

Charles Dickens delivering a lecture

     Sunday. If I have to write another word on Trump, my head will explode. Heck, if I have to write another word about ANYTHING my head will explode. So ... with that in mind ... well...ah hell. It's still February, right? Still Black History Month? Since the idea of Charles Dickens encountering slaves in America will be a surprise to many, I'm dredging up this column from nearly a decade ago. I almost trimmed the opening bit about Lincoln on, as well as the closing snapshot of the boys. But I figure, heck, maybe there are people out there who feel like absorbing the whole thing. This is from back when the column took a whole page, was broken into parts, and ended with a joke. 

OPENING SHOT 

     Tomorrow is Abraham Lincoln's birthday -- an official holiday in Illinois. His 199th birthday, in fact, which means we can begin dreading next year, when our greatest and most overexposed president receives a big dose of relentless kitsch and blind hero worship. Myself, I wish we could honor Lincoln with something even a little significant -- say, by dropping the bothersome and useless Lincoln penny -- but it won't happen, not while we can busy ourselves in empty praise.
     Remember that Lincoln is great because he remains relevant, as an inspiration and guide. While all of our presidential candidates were genuflecting, more or less, before the religious wings of their party, I couldn't help but think of how Lincoln handled a similar situation. Lincoln was never baptized and did not belong to any church, a personal choice that would bar him from the presidency today but was merely a stumbling block in the more enlightened world of the mid-1800s.
     When he first ran for Congress, in 1846, Lincoln was called an "infidel" and a "scoffer of Christianity." He did something unimaginable today -- he didn't run to join a church, didn't gather the press and get baptized. He admitted the situation. "That I am not a member of any Christian church is true," he wrote in a handbill.
     Back when Barack Obama was telling the world he is not, not, not a Muslim, I kept waiting for him to take a page from Lincoln and add, "And what if I were? Are Muslims barred from high office in America? And if we think that being Muslim is a slur that makes a person unelectable -- too many Americans obviously do -- aren't we surrendering to the very hatred that our nation supposedly stands solidly against?"
     If he said that, I missed it. A reminder that praise of Lincoln and exhortations to moral courage are easy. Following Lincoln's example is hard.

INTERESTING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

     My beef with Black History Month is it implies that somehow black history is outside and separate from American history. It isn't. Black history is American history, and vice versa. That said, people of all races are so generally ignorant of everything that has gone before them, any artifice that helps fill the gaping void is to be welcomed.
     The problem is that most Black History Month efforts are directed at children -- as if they're the only ones who require a vague idea of the past -- and thus we get the same tales every year: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Martin Luther King and his dream.
     What about something for those who've mastered the basics? There is, for instance, the question of how outsiders viewed our system of slavery. Charles Dickens, at 30 the most famous author in Britain, came to America in 1842 to tour the new republic, visiting prisons and insane asylums and textile mills. He never made it to nine-year-old Chicago, settling for St. Louis instead. Dickens was a keen observer, repulsed by the ubiquitous American habit of chewing tobacco and experiencing a wave of guilt when, on his way to Washington to meet President Tyler, he found himself in a slave state. Dickens writes:
     "We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for at the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach."

WATCH WHEN YOU CROSS THE STREET!

     So my wife is taking a class downtown, which puts her on the 7:12 into the city a few mornings a week, which means I get to make the boys their lunches.
     No big deal -- heat up the Beefaroni, spoon it into a Thermos, slather the peanut butter on bread. The surprise came when I went to put the younger boy's lunch into his backpack. There was a mass of jammed papers -- balled up, crumpled, like a small animal had made a nest out of them.
     "Ummm, are your papers supposed to be like this?" I asked.
     He beamed with pride, and said that he is famed as the messiest boy in the fifth grade. "It's my legend," he explained. "It used to be Philip, but now it's me."
     "And this was decided," I asked weakly, "by general acclamation?"
     But he was gone, wheeling his backpack down the sidewalk. I watched him go, wondering if this was yet another crisis that demanded Immediate Parental Action. Well, perhaps these are returned papers -- I assume if he handed in crumpled-up balls there would be repercussions. We never had backpacks when I was a lad -- we carried our books and jammed our papers into our desks, which, now that I think of it, were not exactly pristine zones of order.
     So maybe it's OK. As far as parenting goes, my general rule is, if something seems unimportant, ignore it. I can't very well make a speech about the need for neatness. Not until I clean up my own office first.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Lincoln of course was famous for his folksy wit. He loved to tell stories and jokes, and certain lines went down in history, such as his supposed retort -- he later denied it -- when told that his most-successful general, Ulysses S. Grant, was a drunkard: "Tell me what brand of whiskey he drinks. I want to send a barrel of it to my other generals."
     Lincoln once said of a general far more timid than Grant:
     "It is called the Army of the Potomac, but it is only McClellan's bodyguard . . . . If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 11, 2008

Flashback, 2005: On the frontiers of science.

   

     While the boogeyman media that exists in the mind of our president and his supporters is slammed for its supposed lies—a "lie" being any truth that Donald Trump doesn't want to hear—the actual media that I know is not only obsessed with accuracy, but, unlike our president, has concern for both the readers and the people being written about, on a human level. 

     When I was on the night desk, I would take phone calls, and I took one from a man who said he had invented a flying saucer engine. He left his phone number, and I kept it, and would call him every few months, to check on his progress. I was curious, which is the heart of journalism. I encouraged him to bring his invention into the paper. Eventually, he agreed, which was surprising, almost a little scary. I remember laying this out in front of the photo editor. This guy who believes he has invented a flying saucer motor is coming in for a portrait, posing with his invention. He's in earnest, and we have to treat him with respect. 

     Below is the story that resulted. I was proud of how I communicated the situation before me in a way that handled the inventor gently yet was clear to everyone else. It came to mind last week because I was approached by a Chicago composer whose music is used to score low-budget horror films. We went back and forth on email. I asked him a few polite questions, and viewed a few trailers of the films he is involved in—Cannibal Santa can represent them all.  While I felt I could have written something, what kept me from doing so is this: he was proud of them. I kept thinking of Royko's line about not taking a bazooka to a flea. This was his dream—a lot of people's dreams, actually.  I had to let it go, telling him a version of the story below, in abbreviated form, as explanation. To my relief he replied, "You have me cracking up laughing! Ha ha. Yes, I get it." 

    This piece is brief because it's from a time when my column was a number of items on a full page. It ran under the headline, "On the frontiers of science." Roger later called to thank me for sharing his story. I was genuinely happy about that.

     Chicago is home to big inventions. The first nuclear reactor, as many know, was built on a University of Chicago squash court. Less known is Elisha Gray, the Highland Park electrical whiz who invented the telephone, only to have it swiped by Alexander Graham Bell.
     In that light, I welcomed Roger Rhenium to the office. Mr. Rhenium is building a flying saucer engine in his North Side basement. He's kept me informed of his progress over the years, but I never dared hope to actually meet him, never mind hold his Rhenium Reactor in my hands.
     The device involves a pair of D-shaped tubes through which ball bearings flow. Turning the tubes as the balls race through them builds up torque — I'm not able to explain exactly how, but Mr. Rhenium assures me it could be not only used to power flying saucers, but also cars and boats.
     Mr. Rhenium, 59, is a professional house painter and amateur scientist. He has been working on his reactor, sporadically, for 40 years. He has also said he created "a very important energy device," too revolutionary to reveal to the media at this time.
     Skeptic that I am, I wondered if he was not concerned that something so simple and mechanical — stainless steel balls in a tube — would have been thought of by somebody already, had it worked.
     "It is simple. Extremely simple," he said, in his soft-spoken manner. "But I'm quite confident no one's thought of it yet."
     Like me, the U.S. Patent Office failed to grasp the exact way the reactor will function, based on Mr. Rhenium's application drawings. They have asked for a working model. Mr. Rhenium seemed slightly taken aback — he feels his drawings are clear — but he has contacted a model builder in Wheeling, and they are proceeding.
     Everybody needs a dream — I myself cling stubbornly to the notion of someday being thin, successful and surrounded by friends, a goal that lately seems more fantastic than Mr. Rhenium's. I admire his calm certainty. When I asked if he was offended that the Patent Office sent him a list of Newton's laws of motion, he said he didn't mind, and brushed aside the implication that these laws might even prevent his Rhenium Reactor from ever working.
    "It will work," he said. "I promise you that. I've got complete confidence in it."

                          —Originally published Feb. 11, 2005

Who do bullies bully? Whoever bullies can.

     Like a toddler casting aside a toy he has tired of playing with, the Trump administration has tossed xenophobia out of its crib, for the moment. That’s good. But it then picked up sexual panic as its guide while casting government policy. That’s bad.
     The issue of students using bathrooms they are comfortable with exists only in the minds of hysterical parents worried about crimes that never actually occur. And, of course, religious fanatics looking for someone to oppress. But that’s enough for our new alt-right federal government, meticulously working its way down the list of cheap symbolic victories, to turn its attention to a new enemy: transgender students.
     After the Justice Department on Wednesday revoked federal guidelines that schools must allow transgender kids to use bathrooms according to their sexual identity, it’s a good idea to pause, step back and play connect the dots. President Donald Trump’s first month was roiled by his bigoted, unnecessary and illegal order restricting travel from seven Muslim countries. His second month now starts out by addressing another non-problem: the tiny percentage of children using bathrooms assigned to a gender they consider their own instead of ones belonging to the gender they were born into. In between, he announced that undocumented immigrants will be rounded up and deported by the millions.
What do these actions have in common?
     Well, the administration would say that Trump is addressing the nation’s most pressing problems, which apparently involve the risk of Syrian families finding refuge here, migrant workers picking strawberries unmolested, and fifth-graders struggling with gender issues using the bathrooms they would like to use.

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

      One of the first things I do every morning is check the Washington Post to see what new assault against American values the Trump administration has cooked up overnight. It's a great newspaper—I subscribe and you should too. 
    When I looked this morning, even before the news registered, I noted the change in the masthead above, featuring the paper's new slogan.
     Journalistic sorts are debating its aptness. Some find it "awesome," others, melodramatic. A Huffington Post political editor jokingly tweeted the new HuffPo slogan, "The night is dark and full of terrors." 
     Hmm. It is dramatic.  But if the online world teaches us anything, it's that understatement and nuance end up working at Panera Bread. It's arresting, but perhaps rightly so. "Don't tread on me" worked wonders for the Tea Party. I would argue that despite reporting on the gathering tragedy in this country and world, journalists still don't emotionally grasp what it means. The president is out to kill the media and impale its corpse on the White House fence—how's that for a slogan?—because he's driven bonkers by even the slightest rumble of digression as he vomits forth his lies. We are, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, like a wild beast thrown into a sawdust pit to fight for its life (another contender).
     The media reports the iceberg, the gash, the listing ship, but doesn't quite understand the implications of the freezing water all around. They are, for instance, still going ahead with this year's Correspondents Dinner, a creaky Washington insider tradition that was ethically squishy before the president, who might not even show, labeled them "the enemy of the American people." That's like insisting on holding afternoon tea in the lifeboats, because it's on the ship's schedule. I can't imagine going. Then again, I can't imagine accepting the Congressional Medal of Honor from Donald Trump, not if I threw myself on a grenade to save my buddies.
     Maybe it's "darkness," which does have a whiff of the poetic. Not to play editor, but you could cut it in half, "Democracy dies,"  and sum up our moment just as succinctly and perhaps with more power. Because that's what we're seeing. It isn't dead but, at Monty Python would say, "it isn't at all well."
     Then again, the whole concept of slogans is fusty. "All the news that's fit to print," sounds as old-fashioned as a butter churn, in an era when a guy can brag about grabbin' 'em by the pussy and get elected anyway. 
    The "Democracy dies..." line has been bandied about by Bob Woodward, the Post's legendary Watergate reporter and editor, and that alone should cast suspicion on it, as his reputation is kinda checkered. Post spokesperson Kris Coratti told CNN it will be used online, and perhaps in print too. "We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year. We started with our newest readers on Snapchat, and plan to roll it out on our other platforms in the coming weeks."
     How corporate. I too have a concise values statement about the business—"You've got to put the slop where the pigs can get at it"—but I'm not sure I'd want to see it under the Sun-Times masthead.  (The Sun-Times does have a slogan, "An Independent Newspaper," which is soft-spoken and I suppose could use freshening, though, in this day of media behemoths, that's actually quite an important distinction and something to crow about). 
   If we do change it, I'd put my bid in for "Death to Tyrants," but the Secret Service might pay me a visit, and I'd have to explain I mean only political death. I hope Trump lives to be 90 and sees his name a codeword for betrayal, like "Quisling."
    I do like the spirit behind "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Though, if forced to choose, I'd have to agree with those who find it a misstep.  When the dry facts are that the president of the United States is a cruel fraud and pathological liar who, along with his neo-Nazi buddies, are tearing at the heart of America, pithy slogans just sound trivial.  Arby's can say, "We've got the Meat," but the Mayo Clinic shouldn't dub itself, "The Illness Blasters."
     Plus, there's that alliteration—almost always annoying. "Trump Teaches Totalitarianism" is true too, but kinda kindergarten. Second, it's sort of a downer, isn't it? Why not "Freedom Grows in the Sunlight"? Darkness is certainly falling and Democracy shudders every time it gets an injection of poison from nice old Dr. Trump. I'm just not sure I want to be reminded of that every single time I look at the Washington Post. The news stories do that already.

What's a dog owner to do?

     You know what's really hard to locate on February grass? Dog shit. It blends right in, among the muddy splotches and wet clumps of leaves, and once you take your eye off it, well, it's gone. 
    I was walking Kitty Wednesday morning down Walters Street when, having done her business a few blocks earlier, she stopped a second time. She sometimes stops a second time, which is why I always bring two bags, just in case.
    Well, not always. As Kitty assumed the position, I dug my hand into my blazer pocket. But no bag. Maybe it fell out when I grabbed the first bag, which I had already disposed in a convenient trash receptacle. Maybe I only grabbed one leaving the house.
    As you might have guessed from reading my column, I am a pathologically responsible person. I pay my taxes, vote, recycle, hold doors for ladies and men, do everything I think is required of a member of society. I would no sooner leave my dog's waste on somebody's lawn than I would burn a cross on it. 
     So what to do? I was miffed but not panicked. I looked up, noted the address and the approximate location of the deposit, and hurried west on Walters, scanning the gutter for some kind of useful debris. There's usually a scrap of plastic blowing somewhere.
    What I found was a copy of the Wall Street Journal, snugly doubled-bagged, in front of a house. I stripped off one of the bags, and walked the paper up to the front door, where I propped it up on the porch.
     I did ponder the ethics of this. I was taking a bag, but newspaper bags are usually trash for non-dog owners. I had second thoughts about moving the paper—yes, making access to it more convenient as penance for skimming the bag. But what if the owner gazed out the door, saw no paper out front, thought it wasn't delivered and ever went to retrieve it, not noticing it right next to the door? I almost turned around and put the paper back on the curb. But fortune favors the bold, and too much responsibility can be suffocating. I decided to live with my minor misdeed, particularly since it was committed in the name of neighborhood cleanliness. 
    I marched briskly back to the address, a pleasant yellow house, to set matters right. Only the poop wasn't there. I scanned the ground closely. It all looked like dog shit, more or less. I made a few passes back and forth, leaning over, gazing hard. Kitty giving me a few impatient looks. Or maybe they were judgmental. Or quizzical. Hard to say. She's a dog.
    A minute passed. I was loathe to leave. I hate people who don't pick up after their dogs. They're like people who don't signal when driving. Making the world a worse place through indifference. And we already have a world that's a worse place, thank you very much all you folks who don't realize how we have to all care about other people and consider the effects of our actions on them and think and participate in order to live in a decent society.
    I must have been walking like Groucho Marx at this point, bent over, examining the ground when ... well, you know what happened, right? No, I didn't step in it, though that's a good guess. I did consider, on the spot, that the best way to find it would be by closing my eyes and blindly walking over the area, confident that would certainly locate the waste underfoot. But I was not willing to go that far. Besides, how would I pick it up after stepping in it?
    No, the obvious next event was the home owner came out—a friendly-looking lady, hefting a 20-pound bag of dog food to her car, so at least she was on the team. She said something like, "Cute puppy, see you too having a stroll there," or words to that effect, conveying curiosity about what I was doing, and I explained that the dog had left a mess, I didn't have a bag, I had run home—a shorthand I like to think, more than a lie; somehow "so I stole a plastic bag off a neighbor's newspaper" seemed like it would make matters worse—and she waved it off. "Don't worry about it," she said. I could have said, "I worry about everything," but what I actually said was, "Just so you know it was inattention, not indifference."
     Even after she got into the car I lingered, really wanting to leave this campsite the way I found it —I was in Scouting as a lad, that could be part of the problem. Then I had a thought, the doggie-doo version of Peter Singer's controversial view of infanticide *—I would rationalize not picking up Kitty's poop, here, due to carelessness on my part, by cleaning up after someone else at first opportunity.  Thus the universe's quantity of neglected dog messes—a bane on pedestrian life —would not be increased because of me.  The problem was rationalized. And so, with a clear conscience, I headed home.
 
* In 1993, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer sparked a firestorm of controversy by suggesting that babies not be considered alive until they were 30 days old, since they lacked self-awareness, and suggested that it would be morally-defensible for their parents to kill them, if deformed, provided they had another baby to replace it, thus the world would not be short one baby.

Postscript: On Thursday morning, as promised, I scooped up the first carelessly neglected dog waste I came across. And here's the interesting part. It was not without a shudder of revulsion. Because this was not Kitty's dainty doggie doo, but a mountainous mound from some big dog. Which really made me smile after I bagged it up and headed toward a nearby Dumpster. We are comfortable with crap that's familiar, while revolted at the unfamiliar. When really, it's all the same shit.
  

It's freakishly warm in Chicago, it's all my fault, now eat your noodles.

"Uncle Vanya," is at the Goodman Theater until March 19.
Marton Csokas as Astrov and Kristen Bush as Yelena. (Photo by Liz Lauren).

     And if you're wondering if it occurred to me that I was writing a column combining a Wisconsin snowblower and a Russian play, well yeah, it did. How did that happen? Well, it was warm, and I saw the play, and at first I thought of writing about just the play, and what it said about life. But the weather is such a big deal, or should be, and somehow the two fused in my mind. I think it's stronger than if I just stayed with the weather, or the play, particularly in these distracted times. Or maybe the weather is a lure. Everybody reads the weather stories; not everybody would start reading a column about "Uncle Vanya."

     You know what's not causing this freakishly warm February?
     Global warming.
     Whoops, I mean "climate change." The term "global warming" fell from favor because every time it snowed some congressman would gleefully sneer, "Twelve degrees outside! Some warming, huh?"
     So while it's possible that this heat wave is a symptom of our steadily warming planet, it isn't part of the mountain of science proving mankind's complicity. One piece of evidence isn't proof. Which doesn't keep those hoping to justify themselves from pretending otherwise.
     The explanation for this mid-winter week of springtime — 71 degrees predicted for Wednesday — that I've been offering to friends is: It's my fault.    

The might Ariens Sno-Thro 24

     This is how I did it. On Dec. 10, after years of resisting, I finally buckled to my wife's pleas and bought a snowblower. A massive, orange, steel, assembled-in-Wisconsin Ariens snowblower, with a halogen light and its own little shovel for clearing the chute. I think the little shovel sealed the deal for me.
     If I were Fox News I'd finesse the story so that as I muscled the thing into the garage, the sun came out and it never snowed again. In truth, which always puts bumps in your tale, I used it four times the first week, for minor snowfalls. But never again.
     In the years I didn't have a snowblower, I assumed that once I had one, it would make me an advocate for blizzards. That the machine sitting idle in the garage before a dry driveway would be a rebuke. But that isn't how it turned out. The machine is, as my wife points out, "insurance" and it's working fabulously.

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Flashback 2004: Our vanishing toy stores

     The American International Toy Fair winds up in New York City today, reminding me that in the go-go '90s I actually convinced my bosses to send me there to report on the action. How, I can't imagine—probably offering to stay on a friend's couch to cut expenses. 
     I remember the fair so clearly. Particularly entering into the Marx Toys area, which made a Ft. Apache cowboys and Indians set that had been the coveted joy of my 7th birthday. They had one set up, exactly at it was on that sun-drenched June day.
   "It's the SAME!" I marveled.
    "We use the same molds," the president of Marx told me.
    But here's the odd part. When I went back to look at the column I wrote from my expensive trip to New York, it's not worth re-reading, Dry, ordinary and not-up-to-standards. Maybe the travel had thrown me, or I was off my feed. 
     So I found this toy-related column from 2004, which I'm running in honor of the Toy Fair—and, to be honest, since I'm coming off the novo-virus, and can't imagine writing anything.  If the story about the bear sounds familiar, it's because I told it in this September 2014 post about old stuff I love.
    Though look at that first sentence, with its awkward exclamation mark, maybe the subject to toys sparks such enthusiasm that it overcomes my professional discernment.
    Can't let that be true. I'll have to ask my boss to send me next year, to see if I can't write something worthwhile about toys.

     Chicago is losing her toy stores! I keep waiting for the story to break out of the business section ghetto and be seized by television and the chattering classes, but it never does. So I'll have to put my shoulder to the stone and roll. First that enormous Toys R Us flagship on State Street shut down, then FAO Schwarz on Michigan went bye-bye, and now Zany Brainy and Noodle Kidoodle -- toy stores, though they tried to present themselves as some kind of High-Toned Science and Learning Centers -- all have gone belly up. What's going on here?
     First, a sop to the few that remain, so they don't send out pained hoots of existence. Yes, there's Galt Toys at 900 N. Michigan and a few KB Toys and others I'm not thinking about.
     But downtown is becoming slim pickings. The loss of FAO, Toys R Us and the others should not occur without somebody, if not mourning, at least pontificating.
     Not that I'll particularly miss FAO Schwarz. First, they constantly blared that dreadful parody of Disney's dirge "It's a Small World" at anybody who walked in the door. If you haven't heard the song ("It's a world ...") then count yourself blessed ("... of ...") because it carves itself into your mind and haunts you to the grave ("...toys!").

     GI Joe doesn't count as a soldier
     Second, I once asked a clerk for lead soldiers. I had bought some for the boys at Hamleys, the immense toy store in London. It seemed more a gift for myself than for them, but they surprised me by liking them. I thought -- silly me -- FAO might sell them.
     "Oh no," a clerk fretted, fluttering his hands. "We wouldn't carry those." War toys! You'd think I'd asked for napalm. As if the world will become a more violent place if my boys get a few more troops of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
     Third: I had purchased a Steiff teddy bear from FAO for my younger son's birthday. Steiff makes these gorgeous, durable and hugely expensive mohair toys. I had some as a kid, and so underwriting their vast cost for my own boys struck me as a stab at tradition. I remember what I paid for the teddy bear -- $160 -- due to my wife's shocked, rage-suppressing "why-do-you-always-do-this-to-me?" reaction, and the way I, with rare matador smoothness, deflected her ire into sentimental tears with one apt sentence.
     "When you see the bear in your grandchild's crib," I said, "it'll seem like a bargain."
     My older son surprised me by saying he wanted a teddy bear like his little brother's. Sensing trouble, I asked him if he meant a bear similar to his little brother's -- a Steiff bear, perhaps looking a little different, since they make about a hundred styles. No, he said, with the certainty of youth, he wanted That Exact Same Bear.
     Filled with hope, I ran to FAO Schwarz. They were cleaned out, and a clerk gave the not-my-table shrug that passed for service.
     With time dwindling, I had a desperation-stoked flash of brilliance. I plugged into Google "Steiff teddy bear" and the serial number off the button in the bear's ear (Steiff toys have a little brass button in their ears; don't ask, it's another tradition), and up popped a toy store in -- I kid you not -- Coon Rapids, Minn. Selling the exact bear I wanted, for $30 less than I had paid for my FAO bear a year earlier. Two days later, it arrived in the mail.
     That's why toy stores are dying. Why buy a $200 Xbox (if that's what they cost; I've struggled to keep my boys away from it with the same fervor that parents of teens use to keep them off drugs) when, with a little planning, you can skip the trip, skip the store, save money and have the toy in hand a few days later?
     Not to be simplistic. They have the Internet in London, too, and Hamleys is still there. I'm sure our addiction to soup-to-nuts emporiums such as Target is part of it.
     And the aforementioned Xbox has to be a factor. It's the last toy you ever have to buy. My impression is that once a kid has one of those, they take it into a room, close the door, and don't come out until puberty hits.

Plug in the kids and forget 'em
     That can be a good thing; parents can talk, read, fly to Paris while the kids remain mesmerized. Still, my wife and I have been resisting. Once, when the foyer was a clutter of shattered block castles and scattered lead soldiers (sure, I let the boys play with them, and sure, the occasional arm gets twisted off. But how many kids in the world are doing that? I take a certain anachronistic pride).
     We looked over the mess, and she said, "Once they get an Xbox, they won't play with toy soldiers."
     Ouch. "Never," I vowed. Let every other kid go on Ritalin and Xboxes. I managed to straight-arm the every-kid-in-school-has-one argument, and deflected the unvarnished, constant begging.
     But one night last week, I discovered the boys on their knees carefully arranging piles of change and crumpled dollars — literally counting their pennies, pooling their resources to attain their beloved computer game god.
    Even stone hearts break. "They'll be freaks enough just based on parentage," I told my wife. "Let them have their Xbox. I spent years playing Risk -- that wasn't exactly learning French, was it?" And anything that gets two brothers, 6 and 8, to cooperate with each other can't be all bad.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times Jan. 9, 2004

Hard to honor a man who never stops honoring himself

    

     Monday is Presidents Day: Happy Presidents Day! If the holiday has a certain redundant, dubious air about it, that might be because it comes one week after Lincoln's Birthday, and is a fairly recent development: far newer than, say, Sweetest Day, which goes back to 1921.
     Only in 1968 did Congress pass the "Uniform Monday Holiday Act" to "benefit the nation's spiritual and economic life" by creating three-day weekends out of Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays. The House Judiciary Committee noted that observance could be detached from actual birthdays "without doing violence to either history or tradition." Officially, it's still "Washington's Birthday," but it somehow morphed into common use as "Presidents Day," so ad hoc a holiday that nobody can seem to agree whether "Presidents" deserves a possessive or not.
     A day of honor, though, starting with our current chief executive, Donald J. Trump, whose inspiring rags-to-riches story hardly needs repeating. At 70 the oldest man to ever be elected president, and also the first immigrant. He was born in Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1947. His father, a Russian solder, Ivan Trumpovich; was not married to his mother, a 17-year-old Bavarian bar maid, Helga Schneider, who brought him to this country as a teenager in 1962. Trump worked in a series of used car lots, perfecting his English, saving his money to purchase an abandoned gas station, beginning his career in real estate....
     Oh, none of that is true—except Trump being the oldest man ever elected president. That's a fact. Though reading the above, I bet you did not think, "This is untrue. More fake news that we have become accustomed to constantly seeing in the lying press." Because despite what our new president says about the media, the sneering contempt he ladles on the institution whose job and duty is to catalogue his missteps, deceits and blunders, people still expect not only truth but perfection from the press. If I make a grammatical mistake, if I say "we journalists" when I should say "us journalists" readers will gleefully wave it over their heads, sneering and hooting in sincere outrage, speaking of fish wrap and carelessness. It's the most curious duality: to insist that something is routinely dishonest and unreliable, then fall shrieking to the floor at its most trivial slip from the highest standards of excellence.

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Their glory days

"The Country Election" by John Sartain, 1854 (The National Gallery of Art)
The blue banner reads, "The Will of the People the Supreme Law."

     This is the interesting thing about Donald Trump's view of the media...
     I take that back. There are enough interesting things about Donald Trump's view of the media to keep an army of historians and psychiatrists busy, and no doubt they are already hard at work, the poor devils...
     This is one of the interesting things about Donald Trump's view of the media, the interesting thing that I want to talk about today: he doesn't believe what he's saying. Obviously, and I'll tell you why. If he sincerely thought that "the media is the enemy of the American people" who told "lies" and "FAKE NEWS," then why is he spending 77 minutes talking to them in a press conference Friday? Why let them in the White House at all? If he really wants to talk directly to the American people, banish the lot and let your Twitter finger do the talking. 
     The truth of course, is that Trump's condemnation of the media is really a condemnation of the facts that the media is reporting, on the chaos and incompetence of the Trump administration, how badly it has stumbled out of the blocks and is just lying there in the dust. 
     In a world where consistency mattered, Trump would be painting himself in a corner with the whole "FAKE NEWS" bit. Because what happens should he ever do anything right, and the media swoons over his skilled handling of a situation? What would he do then?
    What he would do is break out in that smirky grin of his, shrug his shoulders, turn his palms to the sky and say, "Hey, they got one right for once!" 
    And his fans will guffaw and nod along with him and eat it up, as they always do.  Which is why Trump says what he does about the media. It gives his supporters, always hot to pour scorn on somebody, a big pinata they can hit to their hearts' content. The media represents everything they dislike, they are told, and now they are given permission to dutifully kick it, not noticing that they are being trained to cover their ears and hum so as not to even hear, never mind perceive, the truth about their president.
    We are entering a cruel, frightened era. Trump is a mean man who delights in making others seem small so he can tell himself he's big. The currency he offers is contempt, and his followers welcome the chance to accept it, ape his ways and spend freely. Seldom do I hear anything from a Trump supporter this isn't dripping with spite, with anger, with eyes-narrowed disdain. In that—and I've said this before—we shouldn't focus on Trump. We should focus on the people who have placed their bets on him and who will follow him, no matter what he says or does, who will ignore his misses as hits and his idiocy as sense. Those people were here when Trump showed up, and they''ll be here when he's gone. They viewed the eight years of Barack Obama as an unmitigated disaster, and they will view the eight years of Trump as the pinnacle of success. These are their glory days, whatever happens. They will not be denied the enjoyment of them, and if reality does not conform to their desires, they'll imagine a new reality that does, Trump will tell them it is so, and they will believe him. Nothing can change that.