Obit week #1: Ronald Reagan: "From movie star to political star"

     The Society of Professional Obituary Writers is holding its fifth annual conference—"ObitCon 2017—in Evanston this weekend. I have been invited to attend and though I typically avoid all professional groups—I find them more dispiriting than inspirational—I think I'll stop by. I've enjoyed writing obituaries for 20 years, generally of famous people with connections to Chicago. It's interesting to learn about people's lives, and to send them off with the proper fanfare. I thought I would feature a few of my favorites today, Thursday and over the weekend.

    I'm particularly proud of is this one, for President Ronald Reagan, because I despised Reagan when he was in office, not realizing there was far worse to come. Despite this, I kept my own feelings in check—one definition of "professional"—and wrote a piece I believe was thorough and fair.

    

     Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, whose career glided with apparent ease from Hollywood stardom to the White House, died Saturday.
     He was 93.
     The only native Illinoisan elected president, Mr. Reagan exuded a folksy charm and warm humor that delighted supporters and infuriated opponents. A former corporate spokesman, he embraced big business and was a staunch opponent of communism and the Soviet Union, which he famously dubbed the "evil empire."
     "The Great Communicator" never lost an election. When he left the White House in 1989, public opinion polls showed him to be the most popular president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, Mr. Reagan also had his impassioned detractors, who dubbed him "the Teflon president," for his ability to deflect criticism, and found his immense charm hollow in the face of his policies regarding Central America, AIDS, the environment and defense expenditures.
     Mr. Reagan was the nation's oldest president—just two weeks shy of his 78th birthday when he left office—and he suffered from Alzheimer's disease in recent years that kept him mostly out of the public eye, though his name and legacy were invoked at the 1996 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.
     Ronald Wilson Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, above a bakery in tiny Downstate Tampico, the second son of Nelle and John Reagan. His father, a shoe salesman, was also an alcoholic, and more than one historian has suggested that Mr. Reagan developed his relentless cheeriness as a defense against his father's frequent drunken lapses.
     His family moved around frequently. Briefly, as an infant, he lived on the South Side of Chicago, and then in Galesburg, Monmouth and back in Tampico. When he was 9, his family moved to Dixon, where he went to high school.
     Mr. Reagan graduated in the class of 1928. "Life is just one grand sweet song," his yearbook caption read, "so start the music."
     He went to Eureka College on a partial football scholarship. There, he became active in student politics and was elected student body president.
     He graduated in 1932, with a degree in sociology and economics. The same year, he was hired as a sports announcer for WOC in Davenport, Iowa. He worked his way to WHO in Des Moines and became a local celebrity for his broadcasts reconstructing games from telegraph reports.
     In 1937, Mr. Reagan took a screen test, and Warner Bros. offered him a seven-year, $200-a-week contract.
     His first film, "Love Is on the Air," was a disposable B-movie trifle that set the pattern for most of his 50 or so films. Mr. Reagan was seen as a dependable, workmanlike actor, often playing clean-cut, all-American roles.
     He did act in several critically acclaimed movies, notably "Kings Row" (1942) and "Knute Rockne—All American" (1940). In the latter, his portrayal of dying football star George Gipp led to one of his presidential nicknames, "the Gipper." He made his last Hollywood movie in 1964.
     In 1940, Mr. Reagan wed actress Jane Wyman, whom he met while they were filming "Brother Rat" (1938). They had two children, Maureen and Michael (a third, born premature, died the day after birth in 1947). They were divorced in 1949. He was the first and only president to have been divorced, but it was not an issue in his campaigns.
     In the divorce proceedings, Wyman blamed Mr. Reagan's involvement with the Screen Actors Guild–and his wanting her to share his interest–as putting a strain on their marriage.
     Mr. Reagan honed his political skills in the guild, serving as its president from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960.
     He entered the Army in 1942 as a second lieutenant, rising to the rank of captain by the time he was discharged in July 1945. While his opponents made much of the fact that he spent the war making training films, Mr. Reagan's poor eyesight—he wore contact lenses his entire professional life—kept him out of combat.
     In 1952, he married another actress, former Chicagoan Nancy Davis. Mr. Reagan had met Davis when, alarmed that her name had gotten on mailing lists for left-wing organizations, she appealed to him for help.
     They had two children, Patti and Ronald, and appeared in several productions together. Nancy Reagan was to have a tremendous influence on her husband's life and was a powerful figure, both in public and behind the scenes, after he became president.
     Mr. Reagan's movie career slumped in the mid-1950s, and he signed on to host television's "General Electric Theater." His experience as a corporate spokesman, more than anything else, is thought to have influenced his switch from liberal Democrat to right-wing Republican—a move he did not formally make until the early 1960s.
     When "GE Theater" ended in 1962, he switched over to the TV series "Death Valley Days," which he hosted until 1965.
     By then he had become a political powerhouse. He co-chaired California Republicans for (Barry) Goldwater in 1964 and delivered a televised speech in support of the GOP presidential nominee that established Mr. Reagan as a major fund-raiser and rising Republican star.
     Despite his Hollywood success, Mr. Reagan tended to downplay his experience as an actor. When he first ran for the California governorship in 1966, he listed his occupation as "rancher."
     The first public office Mr. Reagan held was governor of California. He won handily, defeating incumbent Pat Brown by nearly a million votes.
     Mr. Reagan was a conservative governor, reining in spending and cutting the size of government, raising taxes and reducing welfare rolls. Talk of his running for president was almost immediate. He was put forward by the party's right wing in 1968 and won 182 delegate votes at the convention, third behind Nelson Rockefeller and Richard M. Nixon.
     Mr. Reagan was re-elected as governor in 1970 and support built for him to run for president if Nixon didn't run for a second term. In 1971, Mr. Reagan was the top pick among voters asked who should run if Nixon stepped aside.
     But Nixon ran for re-election.
     Mr. Reagan did not try for re-election as governor of California, leaving office in 1975. He spent several months on the lecture circuit, then announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.
     He narrowly missed pulling off a coup, receiving 1,070 convention votes, 60 short of what he needed to deny President Gerald R. Ford the party's nomination. Still, he delivered a stunning speech, ostensibly in support of Ford but of such power and vision that many in the hall saw it as confirmation that they had just nominated the wrong man.
     Mr. Reagan had a lock on the 1980 nomination, sweeping the primaries and driving out all rivals.
    He showed his rhetorical power in debating incumbent President Jimmy Carter, already handicapped by the dual woes of a miserable economy and the hostage crisis in Iran. Brushing aside charges that he would undermine world peace with a genial, "There you go again," Mr. Reagan delivered his famous question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
     The country answered a resounding "No." Mr. Reagan carried 44 states -- 90 percent of the electoral vote -- and received 8.5 million more votes than Carter, his margin of victory a full 10 percent of the popular vote.
     Mr. Reagan's inauguration was a day of high drama. As he finished his brief inaugural address, the Islamic revolutionaries who had been holding 52 American hostages in Iran finally freed them.
     His first formal act as president was to declare a national day of thanksgiving for the return of the hostages.
     Mr. Reagan's eight-year presidency nearly was cut short at the start. Seventy days after he took office, he was shot in the chest by a deranged man outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.
     He was rushed to George Washington Hospital, where he walked into the emergency room. He had lost three pints of blood, and doctors later said that had treatment been delayed for five minutes, he probably would have died.
     Even at such a moment of duress, Mr. Reagan displayed his quick wit. "Honey, I forgot to duck," he told Nancy when she rushed to his side.
     A vibrant man who enjoyed horseback riding and cutting wood at his California ranch, Mr. Reagan surprised everyone with his quick recovery.
     Significant occurrences of the Reagan years include the nomination of the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, and a brand of supply-side economics that was dubbed "Reaganomics."
     Mr. Reagan addressed the faltering economy that had helped elect him with a combined three-stage tax cut and slashed federal spending.
     The nation responded by going into severe recession—by late 1982, unemployment was at 10.6 percent, its highest since before World War II.
     But the economy gradually responded—whether on its own or in reaction to Mr. Reagan's medicine—and by 1984, matters were healthy enough for Mr. Reagan to win a landslide victory over Carter's former vice president, Walter F. Mondale.
     During the first debate between the two, Mr. Reagan seemed faltering and uncertain, and his age became an issue in the campaign. But once again, he used humor and a deft delivery to defuse the issue, quipping in the second debate: "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."
     People bought it. Mr. Reagan's electoral victory—525-13—was the most lopsided in history. He also carried 59 percent of the popular vote.
     The recovery that helped re-elect Mr. Reagan was built on borrowed money, however. Mr. Reagan's budgets added more than $1 trillion to the national deficit.
     Foreign relations under Mr. Reagan were marked by his firm anti-communist stand. His "Star Wars" defense program, which called for constructing a laser-guided anti-missile shield around the nation, was much discussed. Billions of dollars was spent toward its development, though many doubted that the system was technically feasible, and in the end it came to nothing.
     While Mr. Reagan had declined to meet with a Soviet leader during his first term, upon re-election, the Soviets softened their stance toward the United States, and Mr. Reagan embraced Mikhail Gorbachev when he rose to power, meeting with him four times at summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.
     Mr. Reagan considered his resilience against the Communists as responsible for the fall of communism across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.
     The culmination of Mr. Reagan's Soviet policy was the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty in 1987, slashing the stockpile of nuclear weapons and providing for on-site inspections.
     Mr. Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and provided money, arms and training to the contra rebels in Nicaragua in an attempt to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government.  
     The president clashed repeatedly with Congress over his support for the contras, and Congress' withholding of funding led to the great scandal of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra affair.
     In late 1986, it was revealed that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran in exchange for Iranian assistance in freeing hostages in Lebanon.
     This embarrassment turned into full-blown crisis when it became known that the Iranians were overcharged for the arms, with the profits illegally funneled to aid the contras.
     Though Mr. Reagan claimed not to know of the activities, he was harshly criticized by the Senate commission formed to look into the affair, and several members of his administration went to prison.
     After he left office, Mr. Reagan busied himself at his California ranch. In late 1994, he announced to the nation, via a handwritten note, that he had Alzheimer's disease, a progressive neurological disorder that erodes the mind and memory.
     Even after being found to have Alzheimer's, Mr. Reagan continued to go to his office at Los Angeles' Century City, exercise, chop wood at his ranch, golf and attend church on Sundays.
     In 1995, the Reagans allowed their names to be used by the Chicago Alzheimer's Association, which renamed its grantmaking division the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute
     While his family reported that Mr. Reagan remained physically strong and kept the good-humored "twinkle" so characteristic of him, his memory deteriorated severely in recent years as his disease progressed, and he often failed to recognize family members and close acquaintances, and was kept almost entirely out of the public eye.
     Reagan's oldest daughter, Maureen, died in August 2001 at age 60 from cancer. Along with Nancy Reagan, his three other children survive.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2004

After Cook County scraps soda tax, try a tax on deceit

 
     When ordinary politicians lie, and the lie blows up in their faces, do they shake their fists to the sky and exclaim, "But it looks so easy when Donald Trump does it!"?
     I should call Toni Preckwinkle and ask.
     The Cook County soda tax was never about battling obesity or diabetes. Rolled out Aug. 2, the penny-an-ounce tax was met with public outcry stoked by ferocious advertising by the soft drink industry.
     The Cook County Board president kept insisting that, rather than a bald cash grab, the tax was instead a basic health measure, like flossing. Your kids are too fat, Preckwinkle told voters, and since you can't keep the little brats from guzzling Mountain Dew, I'm going to help you by picking your pockets.
    And to think people objected.
     But all those TV commercials, some $5 million worth paid for by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignored one simple fact, and I wish I had thought to check this a month ago: These taxes don't cut obesity.
     Cook County isn't the only fiefdom to attempt this stunt. About five years ago, over in Europe, nanny-state governments made a push to cut obesity. Turns out —who knew? — Europeans are also too fat, just like Americans. So Britain, France and other nations dabbled with jacking up taxes on fats and sugars, closely observed by an army of clipboard-wielding academics.
     What did they find?
     "The overall impact of a soft drink tax on calorie consumption is likely to be small," concluded "The Effects of A Soft Drink Tax in the UK" published in the May 2015 issue of Health Economics.
     Not only don't the taxes cut obesity but—and this is so delicious, were it not so sad—when it comes to poor consumers in particular, increasing taxes on unhealthy foods like sweetened soda has one of those counterintuitive effects that make human nature such a delight to ponder.
     A new study found that increasing tax on unhealthy food decreased the consumption of . . . wait for it . . . healthy food, as low-income consumers cut down on lettuce so they can continue to enjoy the junk they like best.
     "A nontrivial number of respondents in the low-income group (39 percent of the total) behaved in a manner opposite to the intention of the policy," noted "Distributional Impact of Fat Taxes and Thin Subsidies," published last month in The Economic Journal, referring to a study in France. "They allocated a larger share of their budget towards unhealthy food and a smaller share towards healthy food"
     Ah people, God love 'em.
     Of course there are lots of studies and, not being a politician, I must be fair and mention some studies support such taxes; Denmark, for instance, seems to have blunted butter consumption with a high tax. But still, it's most pronounced effect is not improving health but raising money.
     And that's an important effect. Cook County is broke, and somebody has to pony up money to run the place. Though why the burden should fall unduly on the shoulders of poor people who bring pleasure to their lives with Coca-Cola on a hot day is beyond me. Plus, I have to mention, from firsthand knowledge, that the tax was also a logistical and PR nightmare for groceries, who had to administer the tax.
     Customers were alienated. I still can hardly slink guiltily into Sunset Foods without feeling like the assistant manager is giving me the stink eye for trying to get back the Cook County tax they unfairly charged me on a case of flavored, though not sweetened, bubbly water.
     Now the soda tax is pretty much cooked, with 12 of the 17 commissioners on the County Board Finance Committee pledged to repeal the tax when the it meets Tuesday. The full board is scheduled to vote Wednesday.
      I guess the finance committee will just have to find something else to tax. A shame they can't conjure up a way to tax lying; the receipts would be enormous, though I imagine our political leaders would complain of their cost to their pocketbooks. To which we say: Well boo-hoo, just suck it up. It's for your own benefit.

Sixty-four thousand

Drug users, Lower Wacker Drive, December, 2016

      64,000.
      You aren't supposed to start a sentence with a number, never mind a stand-alone sentence or paragraph. 
      Maybe it should have been:
      Sixty-four thousand.
      Either way it looks wrong, which is fitting, since 64,000 is the number of Americans who died from drug overdoses last year. That just seems wrong, and is, though the figure is accurate.
      News to me. I'd have guessed the number half as much. But deaths from drug overdose have shot up—compare that figure to some 40,000 Americans who died in highway accidents in 2016, and that was a particularly bad year on the road, due to more texting and more driving in general, because of lower gas prices.
    The figure popped out of this fine New York Times story about Dr. Thomas A. Andrew, the former medical examiner in New Hampshire, the state hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, who quit his post after 20 years and entered the seminary in the hopes of steering young people away from using and dying from drugs instead of cutting them up after they already have.
      Overdoses, the article pointed out, are the leading cause of death among people under 50, and the problem is so severe that OD deaths have actually cut two months off life the average life expectancy for Americans.      
     As terrible as was the killing of 58 people a week ago in Las Vegas, that is the death toll from drug overdoses about every eight hours in America, 365 days a year. If only we could focus our attention on the daily, pervasive problem as intently as we focus on this relatively rare one. But that is our way—scared of sharks while shrugging off heart attacks. 
     And as with gun deaths, drug overdoses have powerful financial interests, in this case pharmaceutical companies, that encourage pervasive use while ignoring, more or less, inevitable misuse of their products
     The problem can only be expected to get worse, as our government tries to fight drug use through increased punishment, and because of our general inability to admit to social problems, never mind do anything about them. 

Metra raises a stink

     Two stories:
     1) Twenty-five years ago, my wife and I were in Paris, getting ready to take the TGV down to Cannes for a mid-winter sojourn at the Carlton (I've been waiting a quarter century to write that sentence). 
     The evening before, we thought we would buy some provisions for the trip, some bread and cheese, and went to Fauchon, the great supermarket. I bought a can of lime tea, my tribute to Proust, which I still have, and we tried several cheeses and settled on one.
     Then we returned to our hotel.
     Within an hour or two, the cheese we had bought began to reek. The odor filled the room. We had to put the cheese in a garbage can and set it in the hallway.
     The next day, settling into our seat for the high speed journey to the Cote d'Azure (TGV stands for "Train à Grande Vitesse" or "very fast train") when we took a breath and recognized the smell of the same cheese from the night before, the meal of the people directly behind us. 
     We looked at each other and laughed.
     2) Then last week, I was getting onto the Metra train, pressed the black oblong on the door, stepped into a train and caught the distinctive miasma of McDonald's—McStench. I looked down, saw a woman digging into a big red cardboard pouch of French fries. Feeling nothing toward the woman but pity, I span 180 degrees on my heel and found another car. 
    These two episodes would never had emerged from the bog of memory and fused in my mind were it not for this sign, glanced stepping off of the 5:12 at Northbrook on Friday. If you can't read the words, the message from  P. Ewe says "Ticket. Check. Stinky food. Check. Annoyed fellow passengers. Check!" 
     Granted, Metra is famous for confusing, pointless and counter-productive communications—from announcements of trains arriving that have already arrived to the garbled station announcements to various glyphic signs and symbols. 
    But this one takes the cake, so to speak. Four flaws come to mind:
    First, this sign, to the degree it is directed at anybody, is intended to shame would-be carriers of stinky food, encouraging them to consider their fellow riders. Question: who thinks of their food as "stinky"? Answer: nobody in the world. "Stinky" is an assessment that others, who are not consuming the food in question, make. The people eating the food like that kind of thing. They don't notice anything objectionable, or they wouldn't be eating it.
    Second, the most common offender, the smelliest food found on Metra trains is ... what? The aforementioned McDonald's of course, whose oil is as rank and distinctive as a corpse. And where do Metra passengers typically buy their putrid-smelling food? At the McDonald's at Union Station. Metra is urging you not to buy the food they're selling at the train station (which, I know, is not owned by Metra, as the railroad always points out when some part of it falls on the heads of commuters. But still. Why put up signs? Go yell at Amtrak.)
     Third, punctuate much? How about "Ticket? Check. Stinky food? Check. Annoyed fellow passengers? Check!" Question marks are free.
     And finally, have you ever been annoyed at somebody on a train because of how their food smelled? Oh, as in 25 years ago in France, you might notice it. You might even be bothered by it, like last week. But trains are big, long places. There's always somewhere else to go. No need to expend energy getting angry at somebody. So the posters are appealing to people who don't know they're being addressed, for the benefit of easily-annoyed parties who might not even exist. Nice work Metra. Your dollars at work. 

Rich Cohen's "Story of a Curse" captures Cubs glory

Rich Cohen, right, at Harry Caray's on Kinzie.

     Rich Cohen is having a better life than I am. He's younger, handsomer and his books sell better. Keith Richards thinks Rich Cohen is cool. The only whisper of coolness I can claim is that I know Rich Cohen.
     Most galling, he's a better writer than I am. His recent book — he's written 11 — was about the Rolling Stones. I ate it up, even though I have no interest in the band. That's the definition of a good writer: someone who can hold your attention on a topic you otherwise care little about. I had zero curiosity about Lyndon Johnson until Robert Caro hooked his fingers into my nostrils and led me through three thick books about LBJ like a drover pulling an ox with a ring through its nose.   

     Before the Stones, Cohen wrote "Monsters" about the 1985 Bears. I enjoyed that, and know little about football and care less. I spent more time reading Cohen's book about the team than I've spent watching Bears games over the past decade.
     How does he do it? Sharp writing spiked with fascinating facts, like the unexpected connection between the name "Bears" and the Cubs, the topic of his latest book, published Wednesday, "The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse.
     In it, he offers three things: first, a history of the team filled with amazing trivia — Zachary Taylor Davis was the architect of both Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park — and unexpected juxtapositions. I knew Hack Wilson lost a ball in the sun, and I knew he had a great season, hitting 56 home runs. But I didn't realize one followed the other, that the standout season was poor, sodden Wilson's desperate attempt to erase the shame of missing that ball.
     Second, Cohen, who grew up in Glencoe, chronicles his own lifelong love of the Cubs, despite their curse, "a futility that lasted so long we turned it into a religion."

To continue reading, click here.

"Thoughts and prayers ain't enough"

 

    Cynicism comes so easily nowadays. The country is divided by hatred and mutual incomprehension, our divisions longstanding and entrenched, our leaders paid off or impotent. Lies spewing from corrupted news sources, with no agreement which is fair, which foul. Our president is a superannuated infant, reflecting the worst among us, astounding even the most jaded every single day with his bottomless baseness and continual bad faith. 
     What hope for progress is there? Haven't we been steadily deteriorating for years, decades? 
     Umm no, not really. Fifty-eight Americans were killed Sunday by mindless violence. When I was growing up, that was a good week's casualty list in the Vietnam War. The last administration did actually catch the will-o-the-wisp of health care, not in an ideal form, but one much improved, available to millions of people, heretofore cut-off. The unexamined hate that used to be just accepted, the stage convention of our public life, the curtains and the scenery, now seems glaring wrong, in many quarters, and is challenged. We can't avoid the horrors, they fill our vision. But the good is there too, if we look for it.
    Or bumble upon it. I was walking the dog Tuesday morning and there was Lee Goodman, who lives a few blocks down my street. Writing on his garbage can. Which is something he does, getting the word out. Lee quit his practice as a lawyer a couple years back to devote his energy, full time, along with his wife Nancy, to repealing the 2nd Amendment.
    A quixotic quest, in an era when even discussion of the possibility of discussion is shouted down by paid lackeys in government and their duped constituents. But he's doing it. He wrote a book, outlining his ideas. Tuesday he emblazoned his garbage can with a sign: "Thoughts and prayers ain't enough," a rebuke to the hypocritical pro forma pieties that our leaders mouth in lieu of actually doing or saying anything. 
     In one light, a futile act. How many people go down Center Avenue and see a garbage can? In another, a testament of faith in the ultimate victory of rationality, of goodness. The internet has raised communication to a howl, where reaching a million pairs of eyes is nothing. Only a start. Still, there are those quiet voices speaking to anyone who will listen. Even an empty street.
     We talked a bit. The new Dick's Sporting Goods on Skokie Blvd., he said, is carrying long guns. He led a protest there the night before, and was pleased with the turn-out. Hunting rifles and shotguns are not the problem, in my view, and opposing them only gives credence to the right wing canard that the left wants to ban all guns everywhere. Lee goes over the line, sometime, in my view, such as when he protested the installation of an old Army howitzer by Village Hall. 
     But Lee's committed anti-gun, no half measures thank you very much, and I understand the purity of his stand. If all the people pushing for silencers and armor-piercing bullets can cash their checks and mail out their hyperventilating fundraising appeals, then Lee can organize his quiet protests and deliver his trash day messages. If there were more people like him, then maybe our country wouldn't be in the mess it's in.
     He isn't bowing his head in resignation at our national disgrace, but is doing whatever he can to combat it, and I have to respect that, and add what little boost I can, barely more than a sign on a garbage can, but it's all I've got.
     After I wrote the above, I noticed this tweet, from my friend Rory Fanning, which sums up what I was trying to say better than I could manage:

The Monty Hall Problem

     Monty Hall died Saturday, a fact I learned after it was posted on the Facebook page of my brother-in-law, a retired math professor.

     And if you're wondering the connection between the host and creator of "Let's Make a Deal" and mathematics, then you are not familiar with The Monty Hall Problem, a simple yet vexing statistical puzzle. 
     Simple, if you see it, and vexing, if you don't, particularly for those trying to explain it.

     Remember the show: Would-be contestants in the audience wore outrageous costumes to the television program taping, waving signs and props, hoping to catch Monty's attention and be selected to compete. They would swap what they had brought, bartering their way higher and higher, hoping to get to the final challenge, which involved three doors, cleverly named Door No. 1, Door No. 2, and Door No. 3.  Behind one of the door was a new car.

     The lucky contestant would be asked to pick one of the three doors — let's say she picked Door No. 1. 
     Then Monty would announce that he would let that contestant stick with the door she picked, or choose another door. But first, he'd say, let's see what is behind one of the doors you didn't pick. He would open, let's say, Door No. 3, and reveal a burro, or a goat, or some such thing.

     Now, Monty would say, do you want to stick with the door you picked, Door No. 1? Or would you like to take your chances with Door No. 2?

     What should the contestant do?

     The average person trying to puzzle through the problem might say, "Okay, the chances of getting the new car are one in three at the beginning and, tossing one door out, become one in two, but that holds for either door, so it doesn't matter whether you stick or switch. 

     That's wrong.  

     According to statistics, the contestant should always switch. The odds are better with the other door, and not just a little better, but twice as good. 

     How can that be?

     The quick trick to understanding is to imagine two types of strategies: Always Stick, and Always Switch. 

     In order to get the car, what must Mr. Always Stick pick in order to end up with the new car? He must pick the door hiding the car because later, given the chance to switch, he won't, and is left with his initial choice. To get the car, he has to pick the car right off of the bat.

    And what are the chances of picking the car first thing? One door in three, or 1/3.

    Now thinks about Always Switch. How does Miss Always Switch get the car? By picking the car? No, because if she picks the car, she'll later switch away from it. So to get the car, she has to pick one of the donkeys. And what are the chances of picking a donkey? Two in three, or 2/3. 

     So Always Stick's chances are 1/3, and Always Switch 2/3, or twice as good.

     Do you see it? No? Don't feel bad. My experience is that people often don't. A lot of people. Twenty-five years ago, after "Ask Marilyn" columnist Marilyn vos Savant presented the problem, up to then the stuff of obscure mathematical journals, in her popular column in Parade Magazine, readers deluged her with mail claiming she was wrong. 

      Many people I've tried to explain the problem to just can't get it, to my eternal frustration. What throws them off is the final choice, between two doors, seems like it should be 50-5o, because they know one door has a car and one a burro. They are forgetting the winnowing process, the throwing out of the third door, which affects the odds for switching. The odds for sticking remain what they were at the beginning—one in three; but tossing out one remaining door changes the odds considerable for taking the door that isn't thrown out.

      Let's put it another way. I am going to give you a choice between two wallets, and your goal is to find the wallet stuffed with cash. Wallet A is picked from a pair of wallets, one containing cash, one empty. Wallet B is selected from a group of a hundred wallets, only one of which contains cash. Of the two wallets I offer, which wallet should you pick? Even though you are being presented with two wallets, you should always pick A, because the odds of B containing any money are very small. Thus can the odds of picking between two things not be 50-50.

     Very confusing, I know. And I probably should have addressed the slaughter in Las Vegas instead. But honestly, at least this problem has an actual solution that can, with the application of brainpower, be solved. The other one seems merely impossible, at least for now and the foreseeable future. 

Before Americans can talk gun control they have to have empathy

     Hiking is fun. It's exercise amid nature, among trees and birds.
     There is also the sense of being far from civilization. Though that was blunted Saturday at Starved Rock State Park, where there is a problem with visitors blundering off cliffs. So many boardwalks and railings have gone up that I felt, at times, not so much like a pioneer striding through virgin forest as a cow being herded through a chute into a slaughterhouse.
     As we walked, talk turned to the constant staccato pops drifting from across the Illinois River. "What is that?" a trail mate wondered. Small explosions in a quarry, maybe? he ventured.
     "Gunfire," I replied. "Some big gun range with people blazing away at old refrigerators." Bingo, I later discovered, online. The Buffalo Range Shooting Park in Ottawa, with rifle and pistol ranges, skeet and trap, and a shooting pit.
     Also fun. Though it was eerie Monday to hear that exact sound — the stutter of automatic weapons — on the videotapes from Las Vegas, where a deranged man fired on a country music festival, killing 59 and wounding 525, the worst mass shooting in modern American history.
     Facebook immediately lit up with people wondering whether this latest horror is enough to nudge us, finally, toward meaningful gun control. It was all I could do not to start time-wasting Facebook spats by jumping in with, "No, of course not."
     Why? Well, it never is — not in recent years — though sensible gun laws would still be useful, and sponsors of a bill loosening restrictions on silencers pulled it, for now. I'd like to imagine restricting high-capacity magazines might come next, but I doubt it. It's imaginable.      While firing streams of bullets at old washing machines is certainly fun, balancing that fun against increasingly common slaughters, a unified and rational country might come to that decision, the way we decided to require seat belts even though, at the time, men complained they rumpled their suits. I don't like the chutes at Starved Rock, but I understand their purpose.

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You can hear me talk about this column with WGN's Justin Kaufman here.

And that's why Trump is president

I don't watch Fox News. I don't have to, I can discern its talking points just by what my readers parrot back to me. For instance, on Monday I wrote about Trump's racist air horn—"dog whistle" implies a subtlety he no longer feels required to adopt—and I got in response emails such as this, thoughts planted in their heads by Trump and Fox News, sprouting as neatly as rows of seedlings in garden.

Neil,

President Trump definitely should not have sent the tweet, "they have to have everything done for them." PR suffers a catastrophe and his tweets never help any situation. He was wrong.

I think he is frustrated, as I am, with a US territory so horribly in debt caused by mismanagement and overspending by its local government. Didn't Congress just give them $100 billion of our tax dollars? They could have and should have since they are on an island, been better prepared for a hurricane, by improving their infrastructure over the years. Instead the local government borrowed and wasted billions. In effect, they didn't do anything to help themselves. The PR citizens seem to be completely different from the citizens of Houston, all over Florida, New York, New Jersey, etc. All those other communities and local governments seemed to have the "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" mentality, unlike PR

—Mike K. *

Yeah pal, I bet the fiscal management of Puerto Rico has been a big source of frustration to you...

Racists—and I haven no idea if this reader is one, though he does an amazing impression—are also cowards, so don't express their hatred directly. Rather they hock up reasons, even nonsensical, hypocritical reasons. Our national debt is $18 trillion. His reasoning—Trump's reasoning—that nations in debt should not get relief, or are somehow responsible for their own woes, would mean that nowhere in the United States is worthy of help. Which perhaps is what he's going for. Anyway, I had to share this.

But why stop here? Let's look in my Spam filter, for readers I've previously blocked because I just don't want to have their spew irritate my eyes.

Some 80% of them are on disability or welfare. 80 billion in debt. .  Federal oversight needed as bankrupt. 65% obesity rate .  Write about that.  So yes. These “ brown skinned “ folk. Are welfare dependent pigs .
—Bill G.

You want more? There's more. But that's enough for now, though I reserve the right to add more as the day progresses. Sheesh. 

* I decided to shield the writer from being publicly associated with his thoughts, as a kindness, because even if he isn't aware enough to be embarrassed, he should be.

Trump's Puerto Rico tweets show we are heading away from who we are

     UTICA, Ill. — Sometimes people ask if I ever write columns in advance, to have one in the can. I tell them the truth: You really can't, because they go stale so quickly. Events have a way of hurtling past.
      For instance. Say so you hope to slip away for the weekend by tramping around Starved Rock State Park. So you write a column Friday morning, oh, suggesting that Donald Trump will be president for another seven years and change, so the best thing sentient people can do, rather than howling in horror at each new jaw-dropped lapse, is to tend your own garden, live your own rich life, baking English muffins and keeping track of the slow-motion train wreck in Washington only periodically, out of the corner of your eye, through latticed fingers. Otherwise it's just too disturbing.
     Then Saturday morning arrives to find our president lashing out at the beleaguered people of Puerto Rico, writing a sentence so freighted with racism that will go down in infamy, or should:
     "They want everything to be done for them," Trump wrote. "When it should be a community effort."
     Ignoring that isn't an option; being disturbed isn't a distraction, it's a patriotic duty.
     "They want everything to be done for them." Let's unpack that sentence. "They" are . . . who? Not hurricane survivors in general. Not the people in Houston and Florida. "They" are Puerto Ricans, 3.4 million American citizens, a status Trump no doubt discovered a few days ago.
     "Everything." That would be recovery efforts, restoring electricity and rebuilding infrastructure after Hurricane Maria ravaged their island Sept. 20. "Done" that would be their government snapping into action, instead of the president mocking them from his golf course in New Jersey. "For them" — these lazy, entitled brown folks, the ones he's been ridiculing since Day One of his camp...

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And I didn't even mention the death of Hugh Hefner

     I had two columns in Friday's paper: a cultural look at Hugh Hefner (that had begun as an obituary and then morphed as the needs of the paper changed) and this reaction to Gov. Bruce Rauner signing House Bill 40, and thus spiking our state's 40-year-old "trigger law." It was one of those quickie, reap-the-clicks pieces ordered up at the last minute and batted out. But not without, I hope, a certain charm. I did think of tucking Hefner's passing into the lede as the third good thing that happened to women this week, but didn't want to risk  celebrating the man's death, though he may have deserved it.

     Talk about a good week for women. Talk about progress.
     On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia announced, in a royal decree, that next year it will tip-toe into the 20th century by finally allowing women to drive automobiles, as if they were fully cognizant human beings.
     Then on Thursday, Illinois' Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose record of inertia, wheel-spinning and fencepole-sitting is second-to-none, revealed that he would wrap his fingers around a pen and sign House Bill 40.
     HB40, you should know, is the law that establishes that should the religious fanatics that Republicans have been stuffing the Supreme Court with actually reverse the widely popular Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the "trigger law" that the bowl haircuts down in Springfield passed in 1975 would not automatically ban the procedure in Illinois.
     Most women in Illinois no doubt did not realize that the trigger law, formally 720 Illinois Criminal Statute 510, was dangling over their heads all this time, ready to ban abortion the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned,
     The only other states with such a law are Kentucky, Louisiana and South Dakota.
     The new bill, sponsored by state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, was filed almost three years ago. Rauner, who ran in 2014 stating he would not delve into "social issues" either by pushing to restrict abortion, or to reduce the ability of state-employees or poor women to get the procedure, began waffling publicly like Hamlet.

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An agnostic goes to synagogue

Leonardo DaVinci, "St. John the Baptist"

     Yom Kippur is today. 
     This ran five years ago—five years ago today, in fact—in the Sun-Times. It is particularly relevant, alas, now that Alabama Republicans have chosen Judge Roy Moore to be their senatorial candidate, a religious fanatic who thinks his idea of God should trump our nation's law. It also mentions Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz who, double alas, passed away in 2014.

     Every columnist has a few hobbyhorse causes he likes to ride. One favorite of mine is the idea that government shouldn't promote any particular religion. I like it because, despite being so obvious—a diverse nation of many faiths, we can't exist in harmony if the law backs just one—many folks still can't seem to wrap their heads around it.
     Raised in their own insular worlds, they lurch upon the national stage with their great idea—prayer into public schools!—never pausing to consider whose prayer will be put in school (theirs, naturally; is there any other kind?) It is satisfying to inform them that, yes, there are other people who believe other things, a half dozen faiths per classroom, and adding prayer to schools would make them more chaotic than they are now.
     Such reasoning can't be merely accepted—that would involve changing their minds, and most are hardwired to prevent that—so instead they accuse me of hating religion. People to whom fairness is unfamiliar still perceive, in a foggy general way, that fairness-based arguments can work, so they want to grab at that advantage themselves. They say: You're disagreeing with me! You must hate me in a fashion similar to how I hate you! What about tolerance of my bigotries?
     For the record: I think religion is swell. Life is a long time, you need help to get by, and faith is perfect for that. Religions tend to be old and are embraced by many, so there's tradition and company, plus food and music.
     OK, not always food. Yom Kippur was earlier this week—the holiest day of the Jewish year, a fast day. Not that I'm the sort who believes that God Almighty is peering down from heaven, quill pen poised over the Book of Life, waiting to see whether Neil Steinberg toddles off to synagogue or not. But my wife announced she was going to services at the Lubavitch Chabad of Northbrook. That was different. The Lubavitch are a highly observant branch of Judaism—think beards, black hats, fringed garments. Typically not the corner of our faith that my wife and I would snuggle in. But unlike most synagogues, they don't charge a fee to worship on the high holidays—typically most synagogues see it as a chance to make hay.
     Our previous temple membership fell victim to the recession. So free helped. Though in my secret heart, I felt distant from the process, brooding as I put on my suit: Every year this stuff seems more ridiculous. I could be attending an animistic goat ritual performed by Ghanaians and couldn't feel less affected.
     I didn't say that aloud. I'm trying not to complain so much, and when I had shared similar thoughts in previous years, my wife just smiled and replied, "You always say that, but you end up getting something out of it."
     I had never been to a Lubavitch Yom Kippur service; I expected it to be all in Hebrew, expected a scene from Vilnius in 1754, the low drone of ancient syllables uttered by men in prayer shawls. I would slink in, as out-of-place as a peacock among penguins, perch awkwardly in a corner for a few hours, and then flee unchanged, grateful to be gone.
     That's not what happened. A surprising amount was in English. They not only weren't hostile but warmly welcomed us freeloaders. Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, director of Lubavitch Chabad in Illinois, gave a sermon that I didn't transcribe, but can be summarized thus: We're glad you're here. Because Orthodox or Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist, whatever, we're all Jews. We should be Jews together and do Jewish stuff. We should be good to people, give them m'vater - space, respect.
     "We're not judgmental," Moscowitz said, a concept that many faiths, still hoping to convert the entire world, by persuasion if possible, by law if not, might want to contemplate. Religion should be voluntary. Moscowitz said the Lubavitch are here, doing the things they believe in, and hope other Jews will come and join them and see that they're good. (And maybe kick in a little something. He did allude to having electric bills to pay, a soft-sell invite to those present to help, which of course we will; we're not utter schnorrers, as they say in Yiddish, not mooches).
     But that isn't why I'm writing this; that wasn't the surprising part. The surprising part was, when I was done, after ... geez ... five hours over Tuesday and Wednesday, I felt better. Not that I felt so bad going in, but I felt better. Life seemed more palatable. I will forever deny that grace or God or anything like that had any part. It was just nice to sit in a room among other people and hear familiar prayers and think about being a better man for a few hours, with no email or Facebook. I came out renewed, though not—and this is important— also feeling the laws of the United States should be changed to funnel people into Lubavitch services. In all candor, the place was packed, and if none of you ever go, that's fine with me.
     My wife merely smiled at my glowing report. "You say that every year," she replied.

               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 28, 2012

Hefner idealized women; women didn't reciprocate

    The naked women were supposed to be temporary.
     Just until Hugh Hefner's new magazine got off the ground and could afford to hire top writers.
     "Later, with some money in the bank, we'd begin increasing the quality and reducing the girlie features," remembered Hefner.
     That never happened. Instead Hefner, 91, who died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, kept the erotic photos and the literary quality. In the process he became an important figure in 20th century America—a cultural icon, a successful businessman whose business just happened to be built around pornography. A vigorous advocate for 1st Amendment, civil and gay rights who yet had difficulty including real women in his vision of dynamic equality, a champion celebrating unembarrassed consumerism and the female form, albeit idealized, airbrushed and safely naked or nearly.
     As Hefner once described it: "pretty girls, night life, food and drink, sports cars, travel, Hi-Fi music with emphasis on jazz."
     Like a boys' secret clubhouse, girls were not welcome, something Hefner was upfront about in the magazine's first issue.
     "If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you," Hefner wrote in the undated November, 1953 issue, assembled in his South Side kitchen. "If you're somebody's sister, wife or mother-in-law, and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion." 
     Such pats on the head did not go down well with increasingly-outspoken women.

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"Then I realized it was true"—Lillian Ross and Jake LaMotta

     There's so much to read in a newspaper, and our attention span is so diffused nowadays, by tweets and posts and the constant pressure of where we might be other than here and what we might be reading other than this, that I sometimes flip through the paper hurriedly, first noting what's there, before I set down to read this or that article that catches my attention.

Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Ross

   So it probably says something about me that I initially skipped over the obituary of Jake LaMotta, the Raging Bull of boxing fame, in last Thursday's New York Times, but settled in on the 2/3 page headlined, "Lillian Ross Dies at 99; A New Yorker Reporter Whose Memoir Rankled."
     The memoir, Here But Not Here: A Love Story was about her half-century-long affair with William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and though it was published after his death, Ross's book drew "furious" response. Charles McGrath, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it a "cruel betrayal" since Shawn's widow was still alive. "a tactless example of the current avidity for tell-all confessions."
     A similar chorus of outrage had met her most famous work, a profile of Ernest Hemingway, "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" which chronicled the author's stopover in New York in 1950, capturing his staccato pidgin speech ("He read book all way up on plane," Hemingway said, of a fellow passenger. "He like book.") and near constant inebriation.
     "Nothing more cruel has happened to an American writer," Irving Howe wrote in the New Republic, ignoring the fact that Hemingway both approved the piece before publication and afterward praised it, as well as Lillian Ross.
     Then again, I find the greatest indignation is not from people directly affected by a piece of writing, but from third parties, aghast by proxy, on the behalf of people they assume must be done wrong by the way they were handled in a story. The Ross obituary does not mention, and history may not record, what Cecille Shawn felt about Ross's relationship with her husband—which, after 50 years, you imagine she knew about—or the book.
     It's almost as if many people—but not all—have an allergy to candor, so much that they have to express it when given the opportunity.

Jake LaMotta

     Even though that impulse—to condemn unpleasant truths, to endorse heavily-shellacked versions of reality—is antithetical to good writing, and part of the leap a writer makes is deciding, if not to suspend care about what subjects think about a particular work or passage, to push that priority far down the list.
     As I always say, the reason most people can't write is not because they can't string words together, though that's a factor, but because they draw away from expressing the frank truths that make for good writing. They are more worried about some acquaintance than about the most important person, the reader.
     Though not everyone shies away hard realities.
     When I finished Ross's obituary, I turned to LaMotta's, and in it, he summarized perfectly what I had been thinking reading the strong, in my view unfair, reactions to Lillian Ross. The Martin Scorcesse movie that made LaMotta famous to a new generation, "Raging Bull," was a masterpiece, but certainly did not paint the violent, abusive fighter in a positive light. Nor did LaMotta expect it to.
     "I kind of look bad in it," LaMotta told the New York Times. "Then I realized it was true. That's the way it was. I was a no-good bastard. It's not the way I am now, but the way I was then."
     LaMotta was not a writer nor sophisticated thinker like Charles McGrath or Irving Howe. But he had a realization that escaped both of them: that truth is itself a kindness, more flattering than a bucket of honeyed lies. A fiction writer crafts how things could have been, maybe how they should be, creating characters who seem real, and has a free hand because there are no people to be flattered or insulted.
     A non-fiction writer has only reality, and the degree that writer is faithful to reality, and not what the subject might like, or the publication might prefer, determines whether, like Lillian Ross, a particular writer is remembered and cherished or, like the dozen of other profile writers who no doubt tackled Hemingway in 1950, instead are justly forgotten. What her contemporaries condemned her for then was the very thing most valuable about her now.

Trying to see the future through clouds of drones

     The clouds in the east were pink early Tuesday, painted by the rising sun.
     It was about 6:30 a.m. I was taking our dog Kitty on her morning stroll and did what people nowadays do upon seeing anything unusual: whipped out my iPhone and took a picture.
     Why? Who knows? Possible Facebook cover shot. Potential blog illustration. The truth is, it's a habit. Almost a reflex. I worry I'll step in front of a truck someday and lunge to snap its picture as it bears down on me when what I really should be doing is leaping out of the way.
     Clouds documented, I continued on. A buzzing sound. I looked up: high in the sky, a drone, lights winking. I looked down: standing directly in the center of the intersection, a young man bent intently over a control box.
     The young man never looked up as Kitty and I approached. I stopped and — what else? — took a picture of him. Intrusive? One's expectation of privacy standing in the middle of an intersection is quite small or should be. We rounded the corner of Briarwood and headed down Center Avenue.
     Are the skies soon going to be thick with these things? Delivering books for Amazon, sushi for GrubHub. Each house with its droneport, a 4-by-4-foot platform, raised off the ground so the squirrels don't get at the fruitcake your Aunt Agatha sends.
     The future is hard to perceive. Maybe impossible. So many ways to misread what's coming. There is what I call the Arthur C. Clarke Syndrome. Clarke, the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," extrapolated a few moon landings to expect colonies on Mars. Are drones this year's Space Food Sticks? Or the Model T in 1910?

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Every baby is allowed to carry a whip

      My older son published an article last week about a secret website where hundreds of his Pomona College classmates  gather to trade hateful memes they consider funny. The provocative piece set several balls rolling. Far right freakshow Milo Yiannopoulus sic'ed the Internet on him. The school opened an administrative investigation into the web site. The publication, the Claremont Independent, where my son had been managing editor, fired him for writing the article they had just posted. Craven though that was, to their credit, the Independent kept up the article that had irked them. While reading the comments section, the repetitive, dull and counterproductive—these are exactly the people you WANT to dislike you—expressions of malice from Milo's minions reminded me of this column from five years ago. 

Samuel Johnson

     There is nothing new under the sun.
     Life today, as always, is filled with odd juxtapositions and taunting ironies generated by the eternal vanity and reflexive meanness of human beings.
      Yet for some reason—perhaps to flatter ourselves that the hardships we face are even harder by pretending they are novel—we like to think our challenges are something new, unique in the history of the world, when they're really the same old hardships in new wrappings. A few details are different, but whether you are being attacked with a sword or a bullet, or your character maligned on parchment or an iPad, the result is the same.
     A few weeks back, I discussed abortion in my column, and whenever I do, it brings out a certain class of people who apparently deplete the entirety of whatever small store of human sympathy they may possess by fretting about the fetuses of women they will never meet, because they're sure not very nice people when it comes to writing to newspaper columnists.
     And as much as I should be used to this, being the dewy-eyed, aw-gee kind of guy I actually am, at moments, certain acid attacks can seep under the armor and linger.
     I was standing at the old Daily News Plaza at the end of a long day, finishing a cigar, brooding over this, using my new phone to delete unread emails from known nutbags—a difficult thing to do, because curiosity gets the better of me, and it seems uncivil, even when I know what's going to be in the email because it's all that person ever says.
     So I was standing, deleting, puffing, thinking of how unusual a world we dwell in, with all this anonymous electronic venom to be washed away everywhere you go, and how previous generations, bathed in civility and manners and string quartets didn't have to worry about this sort of thing.
     Ha.
     As it happens, I was reading Hester Lynch Piozzi's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson. Johnson is the great man of Georgian era British letters, famous for his colossal dictionary. Piozzi was his ... well, it's complicated. The wife of his friend, brewer Henry Thrale. Later his hostess, confessor, tea pourer, rumored dominatrix.
     Whatever she was, she wrote a highly enjoyable book about him, and no sooner did I grimly reflect on the storm of electronic malice that any writer who says anything has to endure nowadays, than minutes later, on the train, I happened upon this passage regarding "slight insults from newspaper abuse."
     "They sting one," Johnson says. "But as a fly stings a horse." The horse may twitch, but it never goes after the source of its affliction. "The eagle will not catch flies," Johnson concludes, mixing metaphors and species. (Here I thought it was Mike Royko who first said that).
     But not everyone could be so detached. Piozzi mourns several friends of Johnson's, one who "fell a sacrifice to their insults, having declared on his death-bed to Dr. Johnson, that the pain of an anonymous letter, written in some of the common prints of the day, fastened on his heart, and threw him into the slow fever of which he died."
     That still happens. Not to hardened columnists, of course. But how often do we see poor young people kill themselves over some anonymous electronic abuse? And while we adults are made of stronger stuff, in theory, we do have to teach our children and remind ourselves to not let such nastiness fasten on our hearts, nor to indulge in pointless counterpunching.
     Another Johnson friend, Piozzi writes, was Hawkesworth, "the pious, the virtuous, and the wise," who "for want of that fortitude which casts a shield" against attack "fell a lamented sacrifice to wanton malice and cruelty."
     That isn't why I write this. It's the next line that I just have to share:
     "All in turn feel the lash of censure, in a country where, as every baby is allowed to carry a whip, no person can escape."
     Every Baby is Allowed to Carry a Whip. Now that's a new sentiment. I'd like a T-shirt with that line on it.        

A t-shirt company actually made me a shirt, which is cool.

     
     Amazingly, she concludes—as we all must—that such anonymous verbal cruelty serves a purpose and should be tolerated:
     "The undistinguishing severity of newspaper abuse may in some measure diminish the diffusion of vice and folly in Great Britain. And though sensibility often sinks under the roughness of their prescription, it would be no good policy to take away their license."
     So wrote Hester Lynch Piozzi in 1784. As true today as it was then. Or, to flip open our Bibles and quote Ecclesiastes.
     "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
     To put that thought another way—the phone may be new, and the phone may be smart, but we who use the phone, alas, are all too often neither new nor smart, and we rarely have thoughts anywhere near as advanced or marvelous as the technology that conveys them.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 9, 2012

If you're free to stand, you're also free to kneel

     The flag in front of my house was tangled Sunday morning, wrapped around the pole.  I hate when that happens, so paused to set it right.
     After doing so, I said the Pledge of Allegiance. It's a powerful little ditty, both nostalgic and prescriptive, something we recited in grade school, but also something outlining the nation as it should be. I'm sure you know it:
     I pledge allegiance
     To the flag
     Of the United States of America
     And to the republic
     For which it stands.
     One nation.
     Hmm-mm-mmm
     That last part is supposed to be "Under God." But "Under God" was inserted by Congress in 1954, trying to show that the Soviet Union isn't the only government that can interfere with its citizens' sense of the divine. Sometimes, feeling charitable, I'll say "Under God." Other times, feeling feisty, I won't. Hey, it's a free country, or used to be.
     I also registered a second protest. Instead of putting my right palm over my patriotic heart, I kept it balled in a fist in my pocket, to show my personal objection to the doofus my beloved country elected president.
     The guy who Friday tried to whip up his aggrieved white guy base by calling on football teams to fire players who register quiet protests similar to the one described above.
     "Wouldn't you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He's fired! He's fired!'" Trump said.

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RIP, Frank Sugano

     The word Maureen O'Donnell used to describe Frank Sugano, in Sunday's typically spot-on obituary of the Sun-Times copy editor, who died last month, is "meticulous," and I have a story that illustrates why she used that word.
     When I was hired by the Sun-Times—along with Patricia Smith, the renown poet—our job was to be the staff of The Adviser, a midweek publication intended to give practical household tips to readers: how to clean your garage, how to grow a better lawn, stuff like that.
     I wrote a story, I'd say in late 1987. about what to do if you get a speeding ticket. It began something like this:

     Everyone has had the experience. You're driving along, not a care in the world, then glance in the rearview mirror, notice the flashing red and blue Mars lights, feel that sinking in your gut while your mind grapples with one thought:    Busted.

     Frank Sugano called me over—this was before email remember. He was concerned, he said, about a word usage.
     Which word? I asked.
    "Busted," he said. Isn't that drug terminology?
    I gazed steadily at him. I was 26 remember.
     "What word would you suggest instead?" I asked. 
    Frank thought a moment. 
    "Caught," Sugano said. 
     "Caught," I repeated, without emotion. I gazed at him some more, assessing my options. I didn't realize it, but he was just a few years senior to myself, having left the Tokyo branch of Stars and Stripes two years earlier. Erring on the side of prudence, I told him, slowly and measuredly, that I thought "busted" works fine in this context. But he was the copy editor, and of course he should do whatever he thinks right.
      When the next Adviser came out, my story was on the front page with a headline, in big letters: "BUSTED!" I'll have to dig in the basement and see if I can find it. But I still remember, 30 years later, how, with palpating heart, I had flipped to the story itself, to see if the second paragraph had been changed to "Caught."
     It hadn't. "Busted" remained, despite Frank Sugano's concerns. A good copy editor knows when to raise a question, and knows when to yield the field, and Frank Sugano was a good copy editor.