Respectable Republican Cloth Coat

    Today it has been one week since I left for Japan, and though there's much more to say, my mind simply balks at the prospect of trying to say it. Luckily, with Republicans crawling over Illinois, and Trump deciding he couldn't face the righteous wrath of Chicagoans, this column — which I wrote last month, but never posted —is of the moment.

     Waiting for the results from Iowa Monday, I found myself thinking of Pat Nixon's coat.
     If you recall, Pat Nixon was the tightly-wound wife of Richard Nixon, and her coat...well, I should probably just tell the story,.
     In 1952 Nixon was a senator from California—he was famed as a red-baiting hatchet man; think Ted Cruz, but with friends—running for vice president on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. As the election neared, controversy grew over a fund that paid Nixon's considerable political expenses, trying to cover the state of California, his airplane tickets and Christmas cards and such. The fund had $18,000 in it, about $200,000 in today's dollars, a third more than Nixon received as an annual salary for being a United States senator.
     A pittance in today's world of SuperPacs.
     But enough to raise questions whether Nixon was ethical enough to stay on the ticket. The Republican National Committee bought a half hour of television time and Nixon took to live airwaves, shamelessly pleading for support from viewers, touting his middle class lifestyle:
     "We lived rather modestly," he said. "For four years we lived in an apartment in Park Fairfax, in Alexandria, Virginia. The rent was $80 a month."
     As for his wife.
     "Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat."
     The famous ending shifted attention from the thousands businessmen were contributing to underwrite his political career to a particular gift.

One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don't they'll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something—a gift—after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was?     It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he'd sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the 6-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

    The speech was genius  and it worked. The gullible public, choked up over a dog, wrote in to the Republican National Committee by the millions demanding that Nixon to be kept on the ticket, and he was. 
    When Nixon ran for president in 1960, he kept pushing his humble roots. Pat was never to appear in a fur, and he forbade Cadillacs from carrying him in motorcades.
     That was not a qualm for John F. Kennedy. He loved Cadillacs. He loved being rich, and had his own private plane, The Caroline, named for his daughter. Kennedy joked that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had instructed him not to buy one more vote than necessary. "I'm not paying for a landslide," he had his father saying.
     Nixon lost to Kennedy, and while I don't want to paint a straight line between then and now, let's just say that if Donald Trump's victory in Iowa shows anything, it shows that our aversion to wealth has worn off.  For decades, Trump represented the worst gold-plated excesses of the super-wealthy, its shallowness and lack of serious intent. And now he won the Iowa caucus as a Republican. You wonder what Richard Nixon would make of this. He would be amazed. I sure am.

Japan Diary #5: Taking the Shinkansen

     KUMAMOTO— I flew over on one of the new Boeing 787s, and while I appreciated the accommodate-the-human-body-and-not-a-centimeter-more seating layout in economy, I was not awed. Even though you had all sorts of technology at your fingertips: the metrics the pilot was seeing, the clipping along airspeed—550 miles per hour. The fact that you were flying six miles up and it was 40 degrees below zero outside, a few feet to the left. 

     So interested, satisfied even. But not thrilled, not in the little boy giddy, look-what-humans-can-do way of seeing the Shinkansen bullet train pull up at Tokyo Station, of dragging my luggage above, nestling into seat, setting out my lunch, and soon clipping along at 174 miles an hour. 
     I wish I could explain to you how Japan, whose sclerotic economy has been in the toilet for the past 20 years, can maintain this national system of sleek electric trains, while the United States of America, self-proclaimed greatest country in not just the world but the known universe too, at least according to Republican presidential candidates, can barely field Amtrak, a wheezing tortoise slowed by pain meds. I've been on more than one Amtrak train, back in the day when I would still climb aboard, where the delay was longer than the trip itself. 
     We could never even board the trains the way they do here.
     "They're never going to make it," my brother says, as we stood on the platform. The digital clock reads 12:54. Our tickets say the train is to leave at 12:59. The train isn't even there yet.
     A whoosh of activity. Train rushes up, doors slide open, passengers stumble out, then others hurry aboard. A pause, then the train, all electric, takes off like a silent shot, sliding faster and faster. I check my cell phone: "12:59," turn it so he can see.
     "There goes that theory," he says. 

    This has not been an entirely happy trip. In part because of a jet lag that never went away: many hours staring at the ceiling. But the closest I got to joy was sitting on the Shinkansen, digging into a very good box lunch, pulling on an Orangina, watching Japan flash by. The nerve-shredded, exhausted gloom lifted, for a while.
     Another moment was arriving at Kumamoto, the city in southwestern Japan. I'm here for the birthday party of Kumamon, the town's mascot, a Quixotic quest that should leave me giddy, but doesn't. 
      The Kumamoto platform was completely bare of the bear decorations I half expected. No banners, no posters, no photos of birthday cake.
      "Wouldn't it be something if I had the wrong weekend?" I thought, darkly, on the escalator, going down. "Maybe there won't be any hoopla at all."
     At that moment I caught a glimpse of the giant head waiting below.

Japan Diary #4: More to it than just that bomb

     Hiroshima is a fun town.
     That will sound odd, almost sacrilegious to those who know just one thing about the 1oth largest city in Japan: that the first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped on it at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.
     But there's more to it than that.
     I admit I was one of those The Place The Bomb Dropped people. Ten minutes after I dropped my bags at the RIHGA Royal Hotel (big, swank, with pillbox-capped bellhops muscling your bags into your room) I was hot-footing over to the Atomic Dome. 
      Like most iconic images you've seen all your life,  the building looked smaller than it had loomed in imagination. Just the shell of a modest building,  a 1920s trade hall made eerie by having Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped from the belly of the Enola Gay, explode 600 yards above it, so that the blast came straight down and the walls were preserved. 
     But after that, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, some of the quietest room I ever walked through, jarring photos and melted glass bottles presented with a musty 1950a repetition and lack of modern curatorial verve. Lots of burned uniforms of middle school students—so many so it seemed a form of special pleading, as though to emphasize their own innocence; though I did note, with grim satisfaction, that one placard actually mentioned that Japan started the war, a rare bit of historical lucidity in a country often myopic to its own past crimes.  

      Touring the museum took 30 minutes. And then what? Turns out, there's great shopping in Hiroshima: which boasts an endless expanse of outdoor malls, with arching glass ceilings and colorful lights. There were candy shops and stationery shops, bookstores, department stores. My wife had expressed interest in fabric, and I popped into a kimono shop, where the roll of flowered cloth I thought would look nice on our wall cost only $2,500 — or would, for someone who could afford to buy it. It was so beautiful I squinted and tried to imagine that maybe it would be a noble husbandly gesture to buy the thing, and only the thought of my wife being forced to murder me when I came home and bury the body where it would never be found stayed my hand.  

      My brother, who is traveling with me, and I paused in front of a place offering oysters, and considered a pre-dinner snack. But then we noticed the place served "whale bacon" for 720 yen, and while curiosity made us take one step toward the place, moral revulsion made us decide we didn't want to patronize them at all, not even for oysters. A good call, as we found a branch of Ohsho, whose ethereal gyoza have ruined the crescent-shaped dumpling for me anyplace else. For dinner, my brother insisted we try something called okanomayaki, a local favorite that looked to me like glop: noodles and seafood and egg and barbecue sauce all mashed up on a grill. I resisted at first, but he prevailed. 

Okanomayaki,

    "Rarely do I have the chance to introduce someone as worldly as you to the a new food experience," he said, buttering me up. It worked. The stuff was great: Fumichan is the name of restaurant, if you ever get out this way. 
     Heading back to our hotel, we raved about how refreshing Hiroshima was after the dense chaos of Tokyo, and my brother paid Hiroshima the ultimate honor.
    "It's like Chicago," he said. 

Japan Diary #3 — Tokyo Subway

     Chicago has some 2.7 million people, using 102 miles of its L subway system.
     Tokyo has 13.8 million people and 121 miles of metro subway. 
     Do the math: five times the population using just 20 percent more track. It gets crowded. 
     Hurrying through the maze of stations, trying to get to the right line, the right track, is like being in an M.C. Escher etching come to life, with surreal masses of people flying in all directions, platoons fleeing up and down stairs, ramps, escalators. If I looked up and saw mobs pounding across the ceiling and walls it could hardly seem more otherworldly.

      It was amazing that no one seemed to be slamming into each other, yet somehow all the hurrying commuters slid around one another. 
     On the platforms, people form lines behind where the doors will open, and while I didn't see any of the famous "pushers" who used to jam people into the trains, I could see the reason they'd be employed. 
      About 100 people a year in Tokyo die by falling in front of subway trains, usually after drinking, and to try to cut that toll, a number of stations I visited had an impressive automatic gate system, where the track is completely walled off from the platform, with doors that slide apart a moment before the train doors open. 

     Other cities around the world have them—Paris is another—but American metropolitan governments don't find them worth the $ 1 million or so they cost for each station. Though about 50 people a year die in New York, putting it roughly on par with Tokyo, the idea of barriers there was dismissed.
    The Tokyo subway also has "Women only" cars, designated by pink signs, for women who want to ride the subway without being fondled by chikan, or "gropers." But only during the morning rush hour. I'd say we don't have those on the Chicago "L" because they're not necessary, but I can't state that with any authority. 

Japan Diary # 2: Rain

Imperial Palace grounds.

     TOKYO —The plan was to start Monday touring the city's Harajuku district, talking to the Lolita goths and costumed cosplay kids who hang around the bridge there about Japanese concepts of cuteness, for my article. 
    But it rained. The weather report had said, "Scattered Showers," but they never scattered. They stayed together, pelting down hard, all day. Really, it was like the opening scene of "Rashomon."
     So Plan B. I walked around the Imperial Palace, waiting for the rain to stop.  The place was utterly deserted, such a contrast to the unbelievable density of the Tokyo subway. Then, when I realized the rain wasn't letting up, I gave Harajuku my best shot but, it was raining, there too, and while there were shoppers, the street scene folk who usually enliven the landscape were staying dry. 
     Across the bridge is the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and since I was standing in front of the entrance, I took refuge there, and toured its gardens, contemplating my mission. I was rewarded with a conversation with a pair of garden guards about yuru-kyara—the official mascots I'm writing about—that helped focus my thinking on the subject.
    By 2 p.m., after ... eight full hours walking in the rain, with another few to go before it let up, I was steaming up my glasses over a bowl of hot ramen. I'm not sure whether it was the best ramen I've ever eaten, or merely the most appreciated. But either way, it brought me back to the room. I only slept an hour last night -- even though I had only slept an hour on the plane, my body still thought it was 12 noon, not 2 a.m. So a nap seems in order. 

Japan Diary #1: How about some pig's rectum with that?

     TOKYO—It's been so long that I've sat among smokers at dinner that I forgot that, in Japan, it's still a thing. It didn't bother me before, so didn't bother me now at this Yakitori bar in the Kabukichan area of Tokyo. In fact, it sort of added to the I'm-in-a-foreign-place vibe, to be among young people puffing away. The food was still good, hot from the brazier, impaled on flimsy wooden stick.s. I had all sorts of skewers — tomatoes wrapped in bacon, grilled asparagas with chicken, pork belly—I drew the line at the more exotic fare, such as sparrow, or pig's rectum. The drink to the left is a Nippon soda, which comes with a clump of ginger, and I found it tasty, in a gingery kind of way.

   The whole trip to Japan has been very low key. The flight, on a new American Airlines 787, was filled but not crowded or hellish. I slept for an hour, which gave me energy to last until ... well, it's nearly 10 p.m. now, or 7 a.m. Chicago time. I don't feel exhausted or jet lagged or anything. Maybe that's tomorrow. 
    If you look at the menu below, you'll see it's fairly cheap—110 yen make a dollar. The hotel is very small, but clean and modern and inviting, and also inexpensive; it set me back $80, a reminder that Japan has been in recession for a long, long time.
     Okay, the last thoughts in my head have drained out. A shower and sleep. 
     If you want something to discuss, consider one reason the Japanese economy is in such trouble is their population is dwindling—the place looked empty on the train from Narita, though it got denser quickly as we approached central Tokyo. It has no border with Mexico and far fewer immigrants (though much more signage, not only in English, but Chinese and Korean than when last I was here, so the place is certainly more multi-cultural). Remember that being anti-immigrant is not only morally wrong, but it's economically disastrous too. G'night.  
      
     

Japan is a strange place

Samuri armor, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

     About 2 a.m. Sunday, Chicago time, I'll be stepping off a plane at Narita airport in Tokyo, if all goes as planned. I decided, since I dredged up old columns on LA for my trip to Los Angeles last month, I shouldn't almost immediately subject you to a week of that regarding Japan, and would try to provide some fresh reporting in real time. But travel and jet lag being what they are, I thought, until I can get myself situated and both experience something noteworthy and find the opportunity to tell you about it, not to mention a Wi-Fi connection, that I'd set the scene with some thoughts from my last visit to Japan, a quarter century ago.

     The army of reporters swarming over Nagano, dazzled by the Olympic glare, seems to have lost sight of one noteworthy aspect of Japan: It is a tremendously strange place.
     Not to the Japanese, I'm sure. They grew up there. They're used to it.
     But to Western eyes — all right, to this Westerner's eyes at least — spending even a brief time in Japan, a few years back, was enough to fix it in my mind forever as somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shangri-La.
     For instance: umbrella condoms. That's certainly not what they are called there, but that's what I called them. You go into a department store and there are huge rolls of long plastic sheaths designed to slip over your wet umbrella so as not to cause inconvenience while you shop.
     In the places without umbrella condoms, there was something even odder: big umbrella racks. People would leave their umbrellas at the front of the store, with a reasonable assurance that the umbrellas would be there when they returned. Strange, right? Like believing in the tooth fairy. They did the same thing with their shoes at the entrances to temples and certain restaurants. In my country, that practice would result in a lot of barefoot, angry people.
     Frankly, I got the impression that in Japan they could have numbered cubbyholes at the entrances of stores for people to place their wallets in — so the store could rub oil into the leather, or polish the credit cards — and not only would people do it, but the wallets would be there when they got back.
     Some of the weirdness was close to genius. I have deep, sincere admiration for Japanese bathrooms. Many are modular units — the entire room molded out of a single piece of fiberglass. Some toilets have the sink built into the toilet tank. When you flush, a spout of water automatically fills the sink, which drains into the tank. It's very clever; no dirty faucet handles to touch, and the water used washing your hands is then used to flush the toilet later.
     The system seems even more sophisticated when you realize that nearly every other toilet in Asia is a hole in the floor between two footpads.
     Not in Japan. In Japan, taxicabs have a mechanical device that allows the white-gloved driver to fling the rear door open for you, so you don't have to undergo the agony of touching something as dubious as a public vehicle's door handle. Not that I could afford to take a taxi in Japan, but the concept is still admirable, nevertheless.
     There is also something called Tokyo Tower, a giant television tower about the same configuration as the Eiffel Tower, but several times larger and painted orange (again, strange). Go to the top of Tokyo Tower, and you can see the entire city, though God knows why you'd want to, because Tokyo is a cluttered agglomeration of charmless architecture that looks like 100 downtown Dallases assembled together in a 10-by-10 grid.
     In Japan, they have graveyards for fetuses. I happened upon one next to Tokyo Tower. Each grave had a tiny stone statue of a baby. The mothers would knit little caps and bibs for the stone babies, and stick toy pinwheels next to them. Poignant. When the wind picked up, all these pinwheels started going. It was eerie, particularly when I got a translation of some of the messages that had been left at the graves. For example, people who were feeling guilty about an abortion wrote something like "Dear Baby — we're awfully sorry about this. Forgive us . . ." Supposedly the buddhist monks who run the place make a fortune.
     Service is big in Japan. That's one of its best features. Whenever I buy something in a store in Chicago and observe the listless clerk deigning to ring up the sale and fling my purchase in my general direction, I think about how they do things in Japan. I once saw a Japanese clerk run — run — to get an item for me. I stayed at a resort where dinner was brought by a woman in a kimono who crawled into the room on her knees, carrying the food on a lacquered tray. Try finding that at a Sheraton.
     I was in Japan to visit my brother, who worked at a firm there. And the oddest thing of all was something my brother's boss did. He arranged to take me out for a drink. It struck me as unusual, but I was game and went along. (Japan is a drinker's paradise. They sell bottles of scotch from vending machines on train station platforms).
     We sat in a hotel lobby, he, smoking away (everybody smokes there), me, perched on the edge of my seat, wondering what this all was about.
     As it turned out, he just wanted to get to know me. See what kind of family his employee came from. Determine whether I was on a mission to bring my brother home. Just a concerned, friendly employer looking out for the best interests of his company and his people.
     Weird, right?

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 8, 1998

Busy

     So, I said to my wife, sitting at a casual lunch at Roti on Randolph Street in Chicago one day last week: the trouble is, between fact-checking the galleys and writing the columns and the blog posts and getting ready for my trip, I just can't get a week's worth of posts ready ahead of time for Every goddamn day while I'm away.
    "So leave it blank," she said, in the tone someone would say, "Today is Tuesday."
    But, I continued, there's the promise implicit in "Every goddam day..."
    "'Every goddamn day' is a metaphor!" she almost shouted. "For life! The relentlessness of life. Not that you have to write every goddamn day..."
     Easy for her to say. She's not the one who has to watch the online trolls dancing in a joyous conga line around you, laughing and pointing. Or, worse, realizing that no one notices or cares. So my plan is to write from the road, or the airport, or train station, to keep you posted on my travels.
    Assuming it's possible. Japan is far away. Maybe their Wi-Fi won't like my laptop.
    Anyway, another busy day yesterday, between working on an advance column for the paper, proofing my galleys and getting ready for the trip, and today was the first day in two and a half years where I woke up and realized I had entirely forgotten about the blog. But I didn't want to leave you completely high and dry. I do have a promise to keep.  So here you go. I'll check in from Japan tomorrow, if I can. 
   

Flying into fear

     Paris. London. Rome. Jerusalem. 
     Sure, I'm an international traveler. Flitting about the globe like a luna moth—I'm off to Tokyo on Saturday—wearing a bespoke suit, crisply folding my International Herald Tribune in airports from Copenhagen to Hong Kong to Vilnius, stifling a yawn as I notice that my flight takes off in 20 minutes and I had better finish my espresso and amble over to the departure gate, wherever it may be ... 
     No, that's a lie. I'm a stressed out traveler, dressed in my sensible walking shoes,  one hand clutching the lump of my wallet through my clothes, the other my boarding pass, printed out at home 23 hours and 59 minutes before the flight's scheduled departure, using an elbow to nervously guiding my rollie bag, expecting Homeland Security to wrestle me to the floor at any moment, on general principles. 
    But I can aspire, can't I? Why should Donald Trump be the only one with carte blanche to shout down reality and substitute a more flattering image? If a crude, mendacious, gold-plated, blustering P.T. Barnum of a fraud like Trump can insist he's serious presidential timber, then I can pretend I'm Daniel Craig, picking a piece of lint off my lapel and nipping a martini as the hanger in Qatar explodes behind me. 
    I saunter into the airport with the ease of a duke, taking the morning air at his estate...
  
     To continue reading, click here. 

Blood on the tracks

    

    When I first moved to the suburbs, in 2000, I was fascinated by Metra, and did a number of columns on the rail system, such as this one, where I rode in with the engineer and talked about the toll pedestrian deaths take on Metra employees. There have been two this week on the northern lines, which seem like a lot. I also sat down with a Metra honcho to talk about odd questions I had about the rail service. Fans of irony will note that the official fielding my questions was no other than Phil Pagano, who nine years later would step in front of a Metra train himself, ending the complex hash he had made of his life. It was not only tragic and senseless, but an unfathomable insult to everyone who worked at Metra, because Pagano, of all people, must have known the impact such deaths have.

     'We're late," said John Appel, the engineer driving a 3200-horsepower Metra engine toward the city at 70 miles per hour.
      That we were. But just seven minutes late. Only railroads care about being seven minutes late. That's on time everywhere else. Heck, seven minutes late at O'Hare Airport is early.
     I was riding with Appel, in the control car of the 8:17 a.m. Milwaukee line from Northbrook. The engine was in the back, and we were in a little cab area tucked into the top of the foremost passenger car.
     My ride was something of a fluke. Ever since I began the commute in the city, I've been noticing what I called "Metra Mysteries," odd aspects of commuting that I couldn't quite explain. What are those piles of sand doing on the tracks? Why do the switches burn bright blue in winter? I had guesses but didn't really know for certain.
     I approached Metra, and they sat me down with Phil Pagano, the executive director. Pagano answered my questions -- we'll get to them in a minute -- then, in discussing the various ways frantic commuters risk death to avoid being late for work, said I should really ride with an engineer to see the Auto Thrill Show for myself. He wasn't kidding.
     "Right around the gates!" said Appel, pointing to a woman zipping her car across the tracks, maybe five seconds ahead of the train. He said he's had commuters cling to the outside of the train as it pulls out. One unfortunate woman attempted to get from one side of the train to the other by crawling under. The train pulled away, maiming her.
     "It's unbelievable what they'll do," said Appel. "So many horror stories. We all have foolish moments, but here it can cost you your life."
     Appel doesn't want to talk about the suicides, the people who walk to meet the oncoming trains. Metra gives you three days off, mandatory, when that happens, and offers the services of a counselor.
     "It's terrible," said Appel, who called his job "12 hours of boredom interspersed with three or four 10-second intervals of sheer terror."
      He would, however, talk about the time a semi-trailer carrying beer decided to back onto the tracks just as the train was racing toward it at 70 miles an hour. It was, needless to say, memorable.
     "The 18-wheeler wrapped itself around the engine," said Appel. "You never forget that sort of thing."
     Appel was suitably businesslike in discussing his profession. There is a pleasing sense of dignity, of seriousness of purpose and respect for the customer that has lingered in railroad employees while fading nearly everywhere else. I loved that, despite the fact that I was riding with the engineer, the conductor nevertheless insisted on punching my ticket. Otherwise, it would be stealing from the railroad.
     Before we run out of space, on to the Metra Mysteries.
     Q. Just before the train departs, the lights go out for a minute or so -- I think of it as powering up the atomic core. What's happening?
     A. "They're unplugging the train from standby electrical power," said Pagano. They have to do this before they power up the diesel; otherwise the 500 kilowatts produced by the engine's generator -- enough to power a block of suburban homes -- would "fry the system."
     Q. So what's with the piles of sand on the tracks? There can't be that many ill passengers wretching from the platform.
     A. "A traditional braking mechanism," said Pagano. Basically, the engines have reservoirs of sand which, if thetracks are slick or they're going a bit too fast, is dumped over the wheels to give them traction.
     Q. What about the burning switches out in the yard in winter, obviously to keep them from freezing; isn't that kind of low-tech?
      A. "These are techniques people learn through experience," said Pagano. "For a while, the industry went to hot air blowers, steam machines. Nothing worked like the gas switch heaters."
     Q. Anything that can be done about the cell phones? Can't users be forced to ride in special cars, isolated from the non-obnoxious riders?
      A. "We've come up with some creative posters," he said. "The biggest abusers of cell phones are lawyers. The things they talk about in public -- business and clients -- it's phenomenal." He said that experiments of confining them to special cell phone cars, where they can bother each other, have not worked. "They tried that on the East Coast, and the New Yorkers found the conductors have a lot more important things to do than monitor people's cell phone use."
      Q. I've noticed that a good number of my fellow riders start lining up to get off the train at Western Avenue. Are these the same people who bolt out of the Lyric Opera during the last aria? What's their rush?
      A. "It happens all over," said Pagano. "Every train, a small group of people want to beat the crowd. All you're doing is going to work."
      Q. I always notice all the coffee cups, ticket stubs and newspapers left behind by my fellow passengers. Don't they realize somebody has to clean up after them? Didn't their parents teach them anything?
      A. "The majority of people are conscientious," Pagano said. "There's no doubt probably a pretty significant group -- 30 or 40 percent -- who are, I wouldn't say slobs, but who leave their papers and soda cans behind."
      So now you know.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 20, 2001

Vote early if not often

      Tuesday, March 15, is the presidential primary in Illinois, and for the first time in my adult life I won't go to the polls on Election Day.
     Not only won't I be voting, I can't.
     It's against the law.
     I'm tempted to let you chew on that a bit, like the old riddle that stumped people in slightly more sexist times, where the man and his son are in a car wreck, the boy is rushed into surgery, and the doctor there says: "I can't operate on that boy, he's my son!"
     Any idea? (About the voting. The doctor is his mom; you knew that, right?)
     The reason I can't vote March 15 — and good for you who got it — is that I've already voted, on Monday, Feb. 29, at the start of early voting. First time. I'm a creature of habit. I like dutifully marching off to the polls on Election Day. But I'm going to Japan in a few days, and while I'm supposed to get back March 14, I don't want to be stuck on a plane diverted to Guam, gnashing my teeth at the delay, tortured by the thought I'm missing my chance to toss a pebble on the scales for ....
  
     To continue reading, click here. 

Unstoppable

    I've heard from anxious readers, wanting reassurance. 
    Tell us, they say. Is Donald Trump unstoppable?
    The question is echoed in headlines. "Is Trump unstoppable?" asks a headline on The Hill, and dozens of other publications.
    Unstoppable? God no, Donald Trump is not unstoppable. 
    Stopping him is so easy that I'm certain it's going to happen. I try not to traffic in predicting the future, but you can take that to the bank.
    When panicked Republicans talk about Trump being unstoppable, they mean by other Republicans. And in that they are correct. Marco Rubio is punching too far above his weight to have any chance. And Ted Cruz is too universally-despised: with good reason, by the way. Given the choice between the two, I'd take Trump without hesitation. Better an erratic egomaniac than a laser-focused monster. One reason the GOP is so terrified of Trump is because his conservative beliefs are so recent and lightly held. He could get into office and go back to being a Democrat.
     But he won't get into office. Because Hillary Clinton is going to stop him. Not that Hillary is so great a candidate, mind you. Lots of baggage—the negative word for "experience"—and a personal style that is as careful and measured as Trump's is reckless and improvised on the spot.
     But as long as 51 percent of Americans haven't gone batshit crazy, to use the term that Sen. Lindsay Graham used last week to describe the Republican Party, then it's going to be Hillary.
     And I'll tell you when the moment is going to come. Trump's trademark activity is lashing out at people's personal characteristics, in a low, mean fashion. And Clinton's, remember, is restraint. So they'll be having a debate, and he'll lay into her for some physical trait, make some gross, leering comment, and Hillary Clinton will just look at him, her face frozen in cold loathing, and say something about how that's not the way Americans want their president to be. And then it'll be all over but the voting. 
     At least that is what I hope. 

And you think YOUR school feels like a jail...

     At the end of September, I let out this cry of frustration over not being allowed back into the Chicago public high school inside Cook County Jail, which I visited in 1987. That led to me finally being allowed in, in early January. The tour seemed fairly ordinary, but then I started hearing from former teachers, criticizing the school, and I realized why they hadn't wanted me in; not mere bureaucratic inertia, but concern over how they'd come off. I tried to thread the needle and both do the feature I had in mind, and include the concerns of the former teachers. This story isn't fish nor fowl, but at least it got into the paper. 
    
     "Welcome to Mr. Maloney's Science Class" reads a slide projected on the wall of Room 1306. Posters describe the circulatory system, the skeleton.
     "Today we're going to cool out a little bit and not worry about all our assignments," says John Maloney, projecting a laid-back teacher vibe, welcoming his new class at Consuella B. York Alternative High School. He outlines the grading system he'll use, stresses the importance of tidy folders, and says something that indicates we are not in just any of the 176 public high schools in Chicago.
     "I want to get your court dates," he says to his class of 10 students, who are all wearing identical school uniforms: beige scrubs with "DOC" — Department of Corrections — stenciled on them.
     York High School is the CPS high school within the Cook County Jail at 2700 S. California. The school has roughly 235 students — enrollment fluctuates day by day as students are incarcerated and released — ranging in age from 17 to 22. Only two 17-year-olds are left in the jail after most were transferred to juvenile custody last year. It has 56 teachers and administrative staff.
     Some aspects of York are like any high school: it has a mascot, a tiger. Come summer, there is a graduation with caps and gowns and proud parents.
     "It's a big to-do," says Marlena Jentz, director of alternative programs and education at the Cook County Department of Corrections. "Lots of crying and Kleenex."
     Some aspects are very different. The school is scattered among various divisions of the jail —male, female, drug treatment, protective custody, maximum security. Students in different wings don't encounter one another in class.
     "It's almost like having five or six different high schools that you have to run and manage" says Jentz.
     The students don't go to school because the law requires it but for a variety of other reasons.
     "Some are actually in school prior to incarceration, some do it because it passes the time," says Sharnette Sims, York's principal. "It gives them something to do while they're here. Some do it to impress the judge."
     Whatever school brings to the students, education behind bars is good for society: a recent RAND study found that inmates who participate in any kind of educational program are 43 percent less likely to return to jail.
     The first stop on our tour is the art room; art is mandatory at York. The art teacher is April Clark, 24. She has worked at the jail for four years since graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She finds her students in jail "just regular people."
     "I don't notice a difference at all," says Clark, comparing the York students to students at John F. Kennedy High School, where she was a student teacher. "A regular place with regular people who've made mistakes. They have the same issues, they go through similar things. The difference is they have a different environment. At JFK, they can go home, they can roam the hallways. In this case, a totally different atmosphere."
     In some ways, she said, it's a better atmosphere in jail, where classes are an hour and 40 minutes long.
     "It's more intimate and I have more time to teach, to expand their minds," she says. "They get a whole 100 minutes to work. As with other classes, there is much personal development, discussions of goals and attitudes. Clark's students do "body biographies," addressing "where their heart is, what their hands do."
     "They need to know they're capable of doing much more than people make them out to be," Clark says. "Art is all about self-learning"
     As difficult as it is to teach high school, period, in jail there is the added element of uncertainty. And even that can be spun into a positive.
     "I don't know I'm ever going to see them again," she says. "So we have to make the time matter. ... Every single minute I have with them, we make sure the time we have is not in vain."
     This being a Chicago Public School, however, it is not without controversy. In 2011, it was reported that as few as 20 students a year actually graduate from York, each costing some $300,000 in state money. A new block system, where semesters are 38 days long, was instituted, and graduation rates soared 60 percent. After I toured the jail, I began to hear from teachers who recently quit York, claiming the principal pressured them to give inmates credit for classes they never finished.
     "I left Jan. 8 after 18 years because the harassment is incredible," says Jackie Burger. "There have been three of us in the last two months who have done that."
     "They want a graduation rate so it looks better for the administration," says former teacher Scott Anderson. "I worked there for 10 years, I loved the school, loved the students, was nominated for the teachers award twice. Then last year some of the things that went on got so bad, I just quit. The culture was really toxic, a lot of unethical things with the credits. I did not feel I was teaching students the way they should be taught. The teachers were literally told they would be fired if they didn't give students a credit."
     "You can't have kids who can sit still that long for 100 minutes in a classroom," Burger says. "How do you issue credits in 38 days? Then teachers are forced to issue credits in 38 days. I had a student six days [and they are credited]. When my names on that, I'm responsible."
     Jail officials referred the issue to CPS which, characteristically, did not respond. It took me three months of pushing to get inside the school - at the time I wondered why, but the "toxic atmosphere" might be the explanation. Though the students themselves don't reflect that in the brief time I observed their classes and spoke with them.
     "It's alright, like a real school, a safe environment," says P.W., 19, who has been in jail for two years. (I agreed to not use their names.) He is sketching in an American literature class and says he wanted to be an architect. "Just because you're in jail, doesn't mean you can't make the best of it."
     Why go to school in jail?
     "Help me understand, open my eyes," says Little Drew, also 19, who hopes to be an electrician. "I'm seeing education is important."

Truth in advertising

    Browsing happily over my recovered photographs Saturday, I came across this photo snapped last October in Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, one of those hopping urban gustatory wonderlands, like Los Angeles' Grand Central Market, which are fun to visit and eat in, provided you try not to reflect  too ruefully on why Chicago's own French Market by Union Station is so dead in comparison.  Some academic should do a study and figure it out, so that we can fix the French Market. A great idea. But it just doesn't seem to be working, though it works in other places.
      I took this picture because I had just spit one of these Osso di Morta cookies into the garbage, and wanted to document what I eaten, or, rather, tried to eat. They looked so lovely, white and various shaped. But they tasted like clove-flavored brick, and only after looking at the photo and reading the sign did I notice the description—or I should say "warning"—"A hard, clove-flavored Cookie."
     It certainly was that. You can't accuse them of misrepresenting their product, though "A very hard, rock-like, cookie reeking of clove" would be more to the point. 
     Maybe the cookies are good dunked in coffee, or, better, grappa. Maybe those who grew up teething on them love them, and to those people, my mie scusi. Maybe they're an acquired taste, which isn't going to help me, because I plan to never eat another one as long as I live. 

Memento mori

     Death caressed my cheek, lightly, and in the oddest way.
     It was not precisely a caress, his cool fingers trailing across my skin, chilling me, and then gone.
     Not that. More like a sudden sting. Thursday night iPhoto ate my photos. All of them. Going back to 2009. Thousands of them. Gone.
     I don't know what happened. One moment I was working on my computer, getting my post for Friday ready, and I slid over to iPhoto to look at the pictures, and there were none.

     Just a grid of gray squares, empty as the eye sockets of skulls, jeering skulls, leering at me.
     Where are your precious memories now?!?
     I leapt online. There are forums for this—none sponsored by Apple itself, oddly. But a variety of ad hoc advice blogs run by would-be experts. It's as if Honda didn't print an Odyssey owner's manual, just left problems for drivers to form ragtag groups and puzzle over like Platonic dialogues, wordy and digressive.
     Nothing they suggested, once I figured out what they were suggesting that is, actually worked. I held down the "Option" and "Command" buttons while summoning up iPhoto, checked the "Reconstitute Thumbnails" button, and waiting in hope.
     But nothing. Shut down the computer and re-started it.
     Nothing.
     I wasn't upset so much as focused, determined. I figured the photos were somewhere. I would most miss the ones from the 2009 trip with the boys out West. But those would still be on the chip from the camera, which I saved.
    I explored.  I found a file with all of 2009 in it—1200 photos—and imported those back. The trip, ironically, the one thing I had backed up. But at least something, a scrap of the original bounty. Maybe a reason to hope.
    Then I saw something called "BROWSE BACKUP." And it brought me to what seemed like photos, on the teraflop G-Drive external hard drive I bought over the summer when my iMac's guts were dying. I hit "RESTORE" and got a little spinning candy cane and the hopeful message, "REBUILDING LIBRARY." It seemed to grow very slowly — a good sign. Something was happening. I went to bed.
     I snapped up at 3:30 a.m., rushed to check. The photos were all back. No, not all. It stopped in June, in the middle of Kent's prom. For some reason, the past seven months weren't there. Maybe I hadn't backed it up since then —I have a tendency to unplug the drive. There aren't enough ports for a drive and a printer and to charge the phone.  But I thought I had.
     I went to work musing on this, the loss of the past six months. What, exactly, was gone? I was almost afraid to think about it, to reaching into the void and feel the phantom prick of something important. What picture would I miss?
     It was then that I felt The Grim Reaper, the chill touch, the low chuckle as I walked through all those strangers in the Loop. The pictures for the past six months were gone, as all the pictures would be gone, as I too would be gone, the way your most cherished objects end up sold for a dollar at a garage sale, your favorite shirt a tuft of color on a bale of rags being shipped by the container to Africa. We assemble these careful worlds, our mementos under glass domes, our photos tagged and properly backed up, in albums trimmed with lace, then Fate draws in a big breath and blows and it all scatters away. Your memories molder in a landfill, or are gazed at by distant descendants who didn't know you and don't care.
    Embrace your losses, Seneca says. View them as practice. A few drops in advance of the storm that is going to wash you away. A reminder: someday you will lose everything.  Find a lesson. Keep that external hard drive plugged in.
      Patek Philippe is right. We never really own things, we just take care of them for the next generation, and while there's a chance they'd value your $100,000 wristwatch, most of us don't have one of those, and the threadbare assemblage we spend a lifetime gathering makes for a few melancholy days in front of a dumpster for our progeny. We only possess one thing that is truly ours: time, the minutes and days and hours of our lives.  And that we have in both scarcity and abundance. An endless, or so it seems while it is unspooling, string of moments that are really just one moment, now, blundering alongside us like an eager puppy into the next moment, some good, some bad, too many spoiled and wasted and tinctured with anxiety over something like the loss of some bundles of well-organized electrons.
     Back at my desk, I couldn't help it. I thought about the photos since June. There really was only one that came to mind as a Loss. Kent, on the day we dropped him off at Northwestern, running through the Weber Arch. My wife and I positioned ourselves further along the path, and I caught him as he flew past, young and happy and in motion, literally running toward his future. I'd miss that photo if I never saw it again.
    Although.... Did I not like it so much that I posted it as a cover on Facebook? Yes, I did. We sneer at these technologies, and blush at our use of them, but they do have their value. A click delivered it safe in a grey strongbox at the bottom of my Facebook page. So not everything lost. A little, sometimes the best, remains — maybe the best is what lingers. Or perhaps I'm just returning to the illusion. Lucky me was lucky again. The best photo is here, the rest will be found or, if not, forgotten, which is their eventual fate anyway. The Pale Rider brushes past me but keeps going, galloping toward a rendezvous with someone less fortunate. Leaving me with a souvenir, the briefest touch on the cheek, a cold kiss of fingertips that caught my attention, left me gazing at where he vanished, wondering whether I really saw him at all. That's a gift better than photos, to realize, there is stuff, and there is time. Don't waste the important one worrying over the unimportant one.  Thanks for the warning, Mr. Death, I'll try to take it more to heart between now and when we meet again.

    Postscript: After work Friday I took a longer look at that "Browse Backup" function, and recovered all the photos until Thanksgiving. We'll accept December and January's photos as the slightest of scars, nothing to even feel bad about. The headline, "memento mori," is Latin for "remember to die" meaning, "remember that you will die," and sometimes refers to actual objects, tangible reminders, like the small skull carved from a cow bone pictured above. 


   
   
   

'Plump Trump, chump!'

     Let's play newspaper editor. Here is your green celluloid eye shade, your shirt garters and the stump of a cheap cigar to jam between your lips.
     Close your eyes. Imagine: It's mid-June 2015. A variety of news stories are vying for your attention. A crisis in Yemen. The resignation of Rachel Dolezal, president of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, who, despite her vigorous posing, is not really black. The House delays a vote on aid to workers displaced by global trade agreements. Pope Francis calls for action on climate change.
     And Donald J. Trump descends the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce that he is running for president and will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created and, oh yes, Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
     Squeak back in your chair, Mr. or Ms. Editor, gaze at the yellowed newsroom ceiling and decide.
     Lead with the NAACP, right?
     That's what many news organizations did.

     To continue reading, click here. 

   

Silvio Trump

Naples

     I only spent one day in Naples. We arrived to Italy by ship, my father and I, in summer, 1999, sought dinner in town, explored a bit, and the next morning left for Rome.
     But it was beautiful, in a quiet, laid-back, decayed sort of way. Men stood at coffee bars with their suit coats draped over their shoulders, like capes. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry. The buildings were all 100 years old, largely empty and gone to seed.
     Whenever I contemplate the looming decline of the United States—insisting that our country is "great" or will again be "great" does not and will not be enough to magically make it so—I take comfort in thinking of Italy. 

Trump

Berlusconi

     Not so bad, really. The highway of history, which used to run right through our land, was rerouted, long ago and now we sit in the sun in cafes and read the paper about stuff happening somewhere else. Little coffees in little cups with hard biscotti.  Idle conversations about nothing. Wild local politics fighting over the scraps of empire.
     Americans could live like that; and maybe we're going to get the chance to find out.
     After Nevada, with Trump's massive 46 percent win, nearly twice the vote gotten by his nearest opponent, the pipsqueak Marco Rubio, I said to my wife, "He'll be our Silvio Berlusconi."
     Yes, I know. Don't feel bad. We're Americans, world politics eludes us. Silvio Berlusconi was an Italian billionaire who served as prime minister for nine years, despite being, to quote The Economist, "unfit to be in politics—let alone run Italy."
     I'm not the first to make the connection. Rooting around online, comparing the two, I noticed that last September—a century ago, it seems, in this primary season, the Washington Post published an article equating the two.  And why not? The comparisons are clear.
     "Berlusconi started out as a wealthy demagogue on the brink of bankruptcy, whose celebrity was — like Trump’s — rooted in both real estate and popular entertainment culture," wrote foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal. "Berlusconi presented himself as Italy’s strongman, speaking like a barman, selling demonstrably false promises of wealth and grandeur for all. He made the electorate laugh while stoking fears of communists and liberals stripping privileges and increasing taxes. Presaging Trump, the Italian media mogul cast himself as the only viable savior of a struggling nation: the political outsider promising to sweep in and clean up from the vanquished left and restore the country to its lost international stature."
      “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I sacrifice myself for everyone,” Berlusconi said. Now we find Trump promising “to make America great again,” pledging to become the “greatest jobs president […] ever created.”
     Spoiler alert. Berlusconi didn't do any of that. He mired himself in a number of corruption and sex scandals and got himself sentenced to prison while the country went to hell.  The economy didn't soar; it cratered. In Naples, they had trouble collecting the garbage.
     "Trump managed to tap into real anger and disillusionment with an American political class owned by billionaires like him. He's taken populism to  new depths, tacitly embracing a call to 'get rid of' all American Muslims," Jebreal writes. "Berlusconi appealed to their most base instincts and sanctified their prejudices, rendering them unwilling to overlook the obvious hypocrisy and fallacy of his promises."
    That does sound familiar.
     "As prime minister, he repeatedly put his own interests before the country’s," The Economist opined in 2013. "He exacerbated popular cynicism about public life." 

     Familiar indeed. I would have thought it was impossible for Americans to be more bitter, divided and hopeless. But I'd bet Donald Trump is up for the task.  It is uncertain whether he'll actually grab the Republican nomination and then beat Hillary Clinton. But if he does win, it is an utter certainty that, like Berlusconi, he'll leave our nation in far worse shape than he found it, sadder if no wiser.

Madison honors prankster

Leon Varjian

     I've only been to a couple of Chicago City Council meetings in my journalistic career. I distinctly remember just one, a debate over whether elephants should be barred within city limits.
     Which gives you an idea of why I seldom go.
     There were also endless motions to honor various individuals, police officers and Boy Scout leaders and such. Official resolutions are not generally news. Which is why it's so extraordinary that the moment I heard the Madison Common Council is honoring Leon Varjian, I had to tell you.
    Not for the honor, per se — Wednesday, Feb. 23, is Leon Varjian Day in Madison — but because I suspect you don't know who Varjian is, and I do. I'd like to dust off a chair in the back of your mind and invite him in.
     With a warning: Once he's there, comfortable, Leon Varjian has a tendency to never leave.

     He was from New Jersey, with all the brashness and bravado associated with that state. In the 1970s he studied mathematics at Montclair State before earning a master’s at Indiana University. Varjian tried to join the working world like everybody else, taking a job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. He lasted 18 months.
     “It was awful,” he later recalled. “I couldn’t stand it. You get up every morning, get on a bus and go to work with a bunch of pasty-faced commuters, sit behind a desk all day, doing nothing and come home at night. I just couldn’t stand it.”
     Most live our lives that way. But Varjian was one to push back at the dull routines. He quit, fleeing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Enrolling in just one class, he occupied himself cooking up a variety of stunts, such as asking students to sign a petition to change the name of UW-Madison to “University of New Jersey,” so “students could go to a fancy East Coast school without moving.”
     If I ever write a movie, it will be about Varjian, and begin with him, at a booth in the school quad, long-haired, droopy mustached, collecting signatures.
     In the spring of 1978, Varjian formed the Pail and Shovel Party and campaigned for vice president (“that’s where the power is”) for the Student Government Association. He and his running mate, Jim Mallon, dressed as clowns. They promised, if elected, to change the name of Madison to “Cheesetopia.” They promised to bring the Statue of Liberty to Madison.
     “Honesty, integrity, responsibility,” a campaign flier began. “Pail and Shovel doesn’t believe in any of them.”
     They won.

   

     To continue reading, click here.