The Vital Role of Snacks in Recovery From Addiction

     The Saturday Fun Activity is back for a surprise visit—I found myself in a location that I thought might stump you. And since that, traditionally, the Fun Activity doesn't post until 7, I thought I would let you know, and give you something to consider until then: I'm speaking about recovery at Harper College a week from Tuesday, and, well, to be honest, I'll feel silly if it's just me. Please do consider coming. Not only is it free to attend, but there are snacks and, really, who doesn't like snacks? In fact, that is the theme of my talk: "The Vital Role of Snacks in Recovery from Addiction."

     Kidding, the talk is titled, "Recovery is the True Path of the Hero," a theme which I'm looking forward to discussing, ideally with you, Nov. 21. And yes, there really will be snacks.

Being alive is heroism aplenty

     In truth, we are but sentient gnats, crawling around an enormous, churning, steamy globe which, in turn, is itself a mere warm speck hurtling through the black and frozen void of  a generally empty cosmos utterly indifferent to us, we moist splats of life that ooze and wheeze and shudder for a single instant and then vanish forever.
     So of course we try to puff ourselves up, concocting awaiting heavens filled with ornate glory. Of course we conjure golden deities lavishing their divine attention on our endlessly significant selves. Four score years of messy life is not enough, we are not satisfied just to exist, that highest of honors and rarest of privileges. No, we need to also be brave, strong, peerless, both the apex of nature and the pinnacle of humanity, standing on the heads of our lessers, basking in their praise. 

     Saturday is Veterans Day. Patriotic soul that I am, enamored with tales of action and courage, I was excited to stumble upon one of those amazing tales so apt on such holidays: an aged vet, his heroic deed unsung, the story told now, just in time, before the waves of time and memory roll over the champion. I made my phone calls, then visits, conducted my interviews, took my notes, transcribed my recordings, scoured the internet, read dozens of pages of material.  I began to write. I had tears in my eyes. Thrilling stuff. Heroism.
     It was 4 a.m. Thursday when my eyes, now dry, blinked open and I thought: "What if this isn't true?"
     Because really, as much as I dug, it came down to an amazing story that one man was saying, richly detailed, filled with verisimilitude, facts and dates and places, official-looking documents that, on closer inspection, did not quite prove what had been claimed. It was an incredible tale, which was the problem. Incredible is very close to "not credible," or should be.
     I'm not going into the exact details, not to be coy, but because the story isn't in the paper, in part, because we don't want to out the guy. A major metro daily is a big bazooka to turn on an individual whose crime is, in essence, losing touch with reality, concocting a self-flattering fantasy and taking it to market to see if anyone will buy it. We're not the sheriff of old men basking in unearned glory. A few hours of frantic extra digging showed that not only wasn't it true, but other people already knew it wasn't true. "The entire story is fiction" said one historian I found at the last minute. "His claim is preposterous."   
     I can't remember ever yanking a story in this fashion, and as much as it represents a fuck-up on my part—I was rushing to make Veterans Day, and should have done this work last week, should have pressed harder, sooner. But I was mesmerized by the narrative, incredulous at the idea that someone could construct it all out of whole cloth, and certain that as I beavered away through his story that the verification I needed would present itself on the next page, just around the next corner.

   It didn't. 

     My bosses saved me, because I was happy to serve up the entire complicated mess as it was, a steaming bowl of contradiction, as a story that might be true, might not—you decide! You got a tale of heroism plus, as a bonus, a nagging mystery to unpack. I convinced myself it was even better this way. Complicated and enigmatic, like life itself. 
     That just won't fly, the editors chorused. Keep digging. I did, and on Thursday afternoon found one, two, three smoking guns. A damning archival document dredged out of a military web site and my two concurring historians.
     I felt so good, almost proud, standing at the edge of that cliff, pinwheeling my arms. Let me tell you why. We judge the media by what they publish, but we should also judge them by what they do not publish when a story falls below our standards. The rampant speculation, fabrication and distortion that geysers online, particularly from the Right Wing press, is anathema to those of us in what they glibly slur as "fake news." We sweat this stuff, or try to. 

     Up until yesterday, I was worried that any doubt I cast on his story would be seen as insulting a hero, and I had an answer ready. Challenged, I would say this:
     The soldiers who we honor today were not fighting for the flag, not to venerate a piece of colorful cloth affixed to a stick. Rather they fought—and fight—for the freedom of thought that the flag represents, and what can be freer than to look at a thrilling tale and ask, "Is this true? Is the hero really a hero? Are the facts as they are being presented really facts?"

     Some leaders demand loyalty, blind obedience even. They tilt their heads back and puff out their lower lips as if they were Il Duce. That isn't America. America is a lean Yankee, stepping back and squinting his eye and examining the goods. Is this real? Is it quality? Or are you pulling the wool over my eyes, mister? We are a dubious country—at least those of us who haven't become eager dupes—and should always be proud of that. Skepticism is American. Credulity is not, or shouldn't be, though it too often is.
     So no column in the paper today. By the time the story was spiked it was after 3 p.m., and I was tapped. I put on my jacket and my cap and walked out into the gathering Chicago evening. The city was glittery in the twilight, the people rushing home, dark forms under twinkling lights. I felt oddly happy, the relief of a guy who almost stepped in front of a bus but then didn't, who pulled back or, rather, was pulled back by the steady hand of a heroic passerby. 

    It is a buoyant thing to be in the truth business, working with people I respect, who had my back, and in general a boon to be alive and to not feel the frantic need to be glorious or a hero or live forever. They suffer from a curse—born of deep insecurity and feelings of unworth, no doubt—a kind of addiction, as we see in people who have achieved wealth and fame yet find it never enough. Who need nine houses, or would scorch the planet and kneecap democracy so they can get an extra $10 billion in the next fiscal year. Breaking their teeth, King Midas style, on their golden fruit. 
     Give me real fruit. I hope I can continue mushing my face into a dripping melon, unseen and unremarked upon, grinning with simple satisfaction, blissfully ordinary, unheralded, mundane. That I can amble into my own decrepitude and, unlike this guy I got to know over the past few weeks, not find myself clawing at life as it recedes, trying to dig up a false distinction that I don't deserve, claiming to have secretly written "Infinite Jest" or beaten Barack Obama at pick-up basketball or won two Pulitzer Prizes. 
     This is not to pooh-pooh soldiers who do heroic things. That is definitely important, and something they should be proud of, assumed they did what they are supposed to have done, and something they should be honored for doing, especially today. Though a word to the wise: let others do the honoring. It's already suspect and half curdled when the praise comes from the hero himself. That said, to point out that we who never got the chance to rescue our crew mates and defeat the Germans single-handedly should not despair, nor be tempted to conjure up imaginary greatness for ourselves. There is a heroism in facing quotidian life, and we all do it, earning our medals the hard way, in anonymous solitude and silent struggle, every goddamn day.

Leaves falling like rain

     For a supposedly rational guy, I have my share of mystic habits. I will, presented with the opportunity—a clear night sky—wish upon a star. Or, after chicken, break a wishbone or, after a Chinese meal, not only read the fortune cookie fortune, which could be written off to social pressure but, if it seems propitious, also tuck it away for future private contemplation. 
     And those are the more mainstream occult rituals; I have a few kabalistic quirks that I assume are unique to myself. For instance, in the autumn, I like to catch a leaf during its transit from the tree to the ground. Meaning, while in the air—just scooping off the earth won't do. 
     Achieving this feat somehow is "good luck." I have no idea how long I have been doing it or when the tic started. It seems an artifact from a solitary boyhood spent wandering around the de-populated but treed streets of Berea, Ohio in the early 1970s. 
      Grabbing a leaf in flight is more difficult than it sounds—leaves are asymmetrical, and twist and jink their way through the air, falling as if avoiding your grip.
     Actually, "falling" is too passive a word to describe what happens to leaves in autum. Despite the season's common name "Fall," gravity isn't pulling the leaves down, nor is wind pulling the leaves off. Rather the trees are flinging them away, using special cells located where the leaf stem meets the branch called "abscission" cells, whose name shares the same root as "scissors"  and which perform the same function: cutting away the dead, no longer productive leaves so as not to sap scarce winter resources until new ones can grow in the spring.
     Whether we consider them falling or being tossed away, leaves were fluttering down in abundance Wednesday morning. Returning from my walk with Kitty, I noticed the cimmaron ash that I planted 17 years ago and has now attained a 40-foot height thanks to religious applications of expensive anti-ash borer elixir, was dropping its leaves at a prodigious rate. They fell like rain, in bunches.  I hurried over and ... 
      You know, the fall vs. cut duality is also echoed in the type of the tree: "decidious," meaning trees whose leaves fall, a word whose Latin root, cadere, to fall, is very close to cædere, which means to cut, and is the root of "decide," harkening back to when making a determination was equated to cutting through the knot of a problem.  (It's a shame it wasn't the other way around, because the "æ" in cædere is a dipthong called an ash, which would be fitting to my tree and I better stop now).
    Where were we? Ah yes, leaves, from my as-yet-unkilled ash, raining down. So much that they made noise. I positioned myself under the tree and, with golden oval ash leaves practically pelting me, raised my hands up, fingers spread, Kitty's leash looped around one wrist. The first three or four eluded me, but I managed to catch one, if "catch" isn't taking too much credit—it veered into my open hand and I closed my fist around it and snatched the thing.
    Good luck achieved, I released the leaf to join its friends and headed inside to breakfast, though not before shooting a brief video to document the phenomenon. 

   
     

Students learn to be much more than farmers at Chicago Ag

    

      If your lettuce wasn't an enticing shade of green this summer, maybe the problem is you weren't fertilizing with fish poop.

     The rows of lettuce at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences were so appealing, it was all I could do not to tear off a leaf and pop it into my mouth. That seemed rude, so instead I fled over to peer into the murky depths of one of the four big tanks where tilapia swim, generating their contribution to agronomy, their soiled water used to water the plants. The fish themselves eventually are fried at a school party.
     The Chicagoland Food & Beverage Network was holding a symposium at the school Monday about the city's role in food and agricultural education, and invited me.
     While bad-mouthing Chicago Public Schools is a constant theme in both public life and journalism, and not without reason, the system's pervasive problems have a way of obscuring gems like Chicago Ag, as students call it. 
     The school sits on 72 acres in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood, half of which is planted with crops. Last summer the school raised sunflowers, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, pumpkins, both orange and pink (for breast cancer awareness), Swiss chard, kohlrabi, broccoli, peppers, watermelon, cucumbers, mustard greens, cabbage, onions, okra and soybeans.
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Joan Sanford shows the Chicago High School of Agricultural Sciences' cannulated cow.

Trump: An opportunity as well as a curse

     Yes, Wednesday is the first anniversary of Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.
     And yes, were I so inclined, I could don sackcloth, dab myself in ash, and squat at the city gates, beating myself on the head and wailing. 
     I could go the "Nakba" route—evoking the word Palestinians use to describe the founding of Israel, "catastrophe." And there is no question that a Trump presidency has inflicted lasting damage on this country.
    But lots of people can be counted on to express that. And to be honest, my heart isn't in it. We are heading for catastrophe, too. But we also now clearly see what for years could be ignored. And you can't fix a situation that you don't yet recognize.
     Sometimes terrible occurrences can have good results. Something awful happens, but then you become aware of it, and change and things get better. And if there is one thing that is true about Donald Trump, as I've said before, he's a symptom and not a cause. He is the same lying, bullying fraud he has always been, subtle as a brick, obvious as can be. 
      Nearly half of America voted for him anyway.
      That is the terrible part. America elected him. He spread his goods—xenophobia, malice, deceit, delusion, ignorance—and 63 million of us signed on up. 
      The question now: is Trump our rock bottom? Or are there hells below this one?
      At least we now get to see what it's like to have a leader like him. Where those qualities take us. The sort of people who will support a Donald Trump—81 percent of Evangelical Christians. Imagine how that will sit in elections to come.
     Lots of people are in denial—that's what got Trump elected in the first place—but not everybody is. Trump's poll numbers are at historic lows. Pushback is enormous and immediate.
      I don't want to put too rosy a spin on it. Refugees have been turned away, healthcare undermined, haters emboldened. The Republicans are busy suppressing voting rights, skewing the system to bind the whip in their minority hand.
      All troublesome. But we are not watching the American Reich rise. Not yet anyway. The marchers in Charlottesville found themselves outed on Twitter and lost their jobs. Red-hatted gangs of thugs are not prowling the streets. ObamaCare was not repealed. The line-the-pockets-of-the-rich tax reform seems too horrible to actually pass. When you look at whatever environmental regulation or safety policy is being scrapped, odds are it was enacted five years ago. We aren't going back decades in time, not yet anyway. 
     Maybe we had to go through this to get to the other side. And I'm not even convinced that Trump is the nadir. We could get Ted Cruz and who knows what kind of Trump 2.0, more polished, more effective. There are hells below this. If Donald Trump, elected one year ago, is the rock bottom that we bounce up from, then America will have gotten off lucky, again. I can't tell which, because I live in an area where revulsion with Trump is the norm, and I've pretty much filtered out all his fans by now.
     This is a process. The election of Donald Trump is an x-ray with a big tumor on it. The tumor was already there. Better that we found out, and as painful and terrifying as this treatment is, it is treatment nonetheless. We can't say our problems are hidden from us anymore. The situation is painfully clear. Success is uncertain. But the battle lines are drawn. We see the eyes of everything ugly in this country, staring starkly back at us. Recognizing electorate who would embrace this, has to be the first step in fixing whatever the problem is, in building a better country. Trump didn't have to happen, but he did, and it is an opportunity as well as a curse.
   

Federal government tries to blind Chicago to grim gun statistics

     When Republicans are shrugging off the need for any kind of rational gun policy — not that they ever consider it — they enjoy mentioning the high murder toll in Chicago and pretend that doing so proves their argument.
     “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Oct. 2, drop-kicking the issue in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre.
     “The most stringent gun laws in the U.S. happen to be in Chicago,” Donald Trump tweeted in 2014. “and look what is happening there!”
     What is happening here is that Chicago — though banning gun sales but not gun ownership — is ringed by suburbs pumping guns into the city and by states whose lax gun laws provide a direct pipeline to the city’s streets.
     Legal gun sales are a big part of the problem. The Sun-Times outlined that situation again last week. According to the second “Gun Trace Report,” the work of the Chicago Police Department and the University of Chicago Crime Lab, more than half of the 27,500 guns recovered by CPD between 2013 to 2016 came legally from 5,000 federally licensed gun shops in Illinois and other states; almost a quarter from Indiana.

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Noooo! Not the . . . time change!

    Is it me? Or did Daylight Saving Time seem to end extra late this year? It didn't, still the first Sunday in November, just like last year and the decade before. Maybe a flashback from prior to that, when it was the last Sunday in October.

     Change is hard, as this column from 2009 recounts. And just a reminder, since it can be hard to get your head around. The amount of daylight doesn't actually change. What we do, besides getting an extra hour to sleep, is shift the framework of time we use, so that dawn comes earlier. Sunrise was 7:27 a.m. Saturday, but 6:28 Sunday, after the time change. It was done for a variety of reasons, but the most convincing was so that kids wouldn't have to go to school in the dark. 

     Don't worry, you'll get used to it. Or not. 

     Americans seem to be supporting President Obama's efforts to extend health coverage to all U.S. citizens. Yet we can't get rid of the penny. We are happy to let the government run the military, trust in its competence, content to place the lives of our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, in its care. Yet running some banks is beyond federal abilities.
     I don't understand people—we're so strange, so inconsistent when it comes to change. Huge issues fly past us—a debt that will burden generations unborn is laid upon our shoulders without a murmur. But we get rattled twice a year by the moral implications of Daylight Savings Time. The great engines of daily journalism can cough and sputter without raising alarm outside of those who are actually drawing a salary from newspapers. But just try to suggest we shift over to the metric system and listen to the general public howl of complaint and concern.
     My theory? It's BECAUSE we can't bear to grapple with the big stuff that we make such a fuss over the small stuff. Unable to forestall death, we distract ourselves by slathering our wrinkles with cream.

Nobody misses South Parkway Blvd.
     When Marshall Field's became Macy's, my heart sorrowed along with everyone else's for the long-time Chicago merchandising icon, and raged against the brash Manhattan interloper, which chucked our beloved green comfort object, apparently, to save money on shopping bags.
     That is, until a clutch of change-adverse Chicagoans started picketing the State Street store, demanding it go back to being "Field's."
     "Save it for Darfur," I grumbled, abruptly welcoming Macy's into my heart. Now that the traditional adjustment period has passed, I can actually say, "Meet me at Macy's" without having to once again go through all five Kubler-Ross stages of grief (Must I? Oh all right: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).
     So while I'd have happily called the Sears Tower the Sears Tower for the rest of my life, I cannot pretend that calling it the "Willis Tower" is a rend in the time/space continuum.
     Alas, this is not a universal opinion. My electronic village square at Facebook tells me that groups such as "Chicagoans Against Willis Tower" (34,253 members) and "I Refuse to Refer to the Sears Tower as the Willis Tower" (6,292 members) and at least 20 others have sprung up to lobby for the status quo.
     Of course these are groups that assemble with a few keystrokes—I bet if you asked them to gather in an actual physical location and donate a dollar, you'd end up with nine people.
     Plus, their easily expressed call to the ramparts is ridiculous—"Chicagoans, let's take a stand! The Sears Tower will forever overlook Chicago." Yeah, right.
     First, it's hypocritical. I am absolutely certain that if the Willis Group approached any of those Sears Tower boosters on Facebook and offered to pay a quarter of their rent in return for calling their abode "The Old Willis Place," that every single one of them would leap at the deal. I sure would.
     Second, it's futile. Question: How many aggrieved e-mails from Chicago will it take to persuade the Willis Group in London to NOT rename the Sears Tower? Answer: none, because a dozen or a million are the same in these cases. If you're going to lobby pointlessly in a time-wasting exercise of appealing to the deaf, then send your e-mails to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and demand that he free enslaved Tibet. At least your empty exercise is for a noble cause.
     The Berghoff is gone. Marshall Field's is gone. Meigs Field is gone. Now the Sears Tower is gone, and why not? When was the last time you went to a Sears store anyway? If you really care about the Sears name, go to a Sears right now and buy a socket wrench set. Otherwise, stop crying; it's embarrassing.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 16, 2009

Wagner the feminist? "Walküre" a sort of "Thelma & Louise" on the Rhine.

Elisabet Strid

     "I haven't read the synopsis yet," my wife said, as the lights lowered at exactly 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Civic Opera House, an early start for the debut of Wagner's "Die Walküre"
     "Don't worry about the plot, it's nonsense," I said. "Just enjoy the music."
     A moment later, I was about as close as bounce-in-my-seat excited as I ever get. Then again, Sir Andrew Davis had just dug his spurs into the flanks of the Lyric Opera orchestra and it sprang forward into the fluttering, insistent "storm" prelude—if you're not familiar, think a a distant cousin of the pulsing arrival-of-the-shark motif in "Jaws."
     Not that you need Cliff Notes to understand what's going on. There is Sieglinde, sung with power and precision by Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid, making her Lyric debut. She's chained to an enormous ash tree, arching priapically across the stage, yet does her best to be hospitable to a guest, wounded warrior, Siegmund, who, perhaps through his own good breeding—his dad's a god, we discover—never says, "Hey, what's with the big chain?"
     At the end of "Rheingold," the first part of the Ring Cycle, performed at the Lyric last year, Sieglinde was forced to marry the brutish Hunding who — you know, I 'm not going to wander off into the thicket of the plot and lose you. Not just yet anyway. 
    Let's just say that, an hour later, during the first intermission, I quipped. "That was the most elaborate ode to incestuous adultery in musical theater." Or should it be "adulterous incest?" Either way, my wife, always a quick study, explained she knew that Siegmund and Sieglinde were brother and sister when Hunding said he recognized a familiar gleam in his guest's eye. (The names aren't quite the giveaway they seem in print because Siegmund is coy about his name, calling himself "Woeful.")
     Even listening to beautiful music for five hours, the mind tends to wander, and during "Walküre" I found it idly exploring two separate rooms.

Christine Goelke, singing Brunhilde, contemplates her suitors.

     The first was picking out all the mythological story lines either touched upon by or lifted from Wagner—Norse mythology, of course, with its treasure and dwarves ("Walküre" is the second part of Wagner's epic four-part "Ring of the Nibelung," "Nibelung" being a Teutonic word related to either a dwarf or a race of dwarves) Greek mythology (Wotan and Fricka being the Norse version of Zeus and Hera) with some King Arthur (the sword in the stone, er, tree) and even Sleeping Beauty, with all that maiden-awakened-with-a-kiss business. 
    As for stories lifted from Wagner, the Lord of the Rings, of course (the ring, the dwarves) plus aspects of Harry Potter (such as the sword that only showed up in times of duress, and the practical side of the fantastical, like the giants demanding the ring as payment for constructing Valhala, like the most demanding contractors ever) and even Star Wars (the brother and sister hot for each other though, unlike Leia and Luke, realizing the connection stokes the passion of these two instead of quenching it).
     The twins, by the way, belong to Wotan—sung with complex humanity, almost tenderness by bass-baritone Eric Owens—and the second act features him in black tie, in a cool grey deco-ish Valhalla suspended midway between the proscenium arch and the stage. being browbeaten by his wife Fricka (who is hellbent against Siegmund and Sieglinde for their incestuous union—hypocritically since, at least in the Greek version, she herself is both Zeus' wife and sister).  
    Fricka isn't happy about how he's about to come to the aid of Siegmund when he battles Hunding, and wants him to call off Brunhilde and her eight Valkyrie sisters.
    The second act had me thinking—and I think this connection is a first in music criticism—of Henry Winkler, aka "The Fonz." Director Garry Marshall and I once got to talking about his TV show "Happy Days," and he was saying how Winkler was excellent at "laying pipe," aka coming on stage and explaining complicated plot developments in way that wasn't too tortuous on the audience. In Act 2, Wotan gives the back story to how we got this point. 
   After I finished playing Name the Mythic Reference, I wandered into What-is-this-all-about? Yes, yes, a bunch of Nordic (and German and Greek) heroic hooey. But what's it mean?  As the opera progressed, a single revelation came to mind, and I'm going to present it just as it came to me, an admittedly crude epiphany. 
     We were in the 3rd Act act—spoiler alert!—Siegmund's dead, and Sieglinde is fleeing Wotan's wrath. Brunhilde helps her, because, well, she carrying her ... nnn, doing the relationship calculus... bastard half nephew, the future Siegfried. The two women clasp hands, powerfully, and I think: "Oh, this is a chick flick. Or rather, a chick opera." 
    I know that's a stretch, but hear me out. 
   Look who moves the action in "Walküre." In Act 1, Sieglinde escapes her chain (somehow, we don't see it done) drugs her husband Hunding, arms his enemy with some kind of holy sword, and then the two head off for hot Teutonic incest in a springtime wood in winter. No shrinking Madam Butterfly she. 
    In Act 2 Fricka ("Frigga," by the way, in Old Norse, leading to our term "Friday") looking like a 1940s movie goddess, browbeats Wotan into calling off his Valykuries and tacitly allowing the death of his son. He orders Brunhilde to stand down, but she disobeys him, forcing Wotan to deploy his spear and do the deed himself.
     Act 3 opens with the famed "Ride of the Valkyries" set effectively by director David Pountney into a chilling abattoir,  the valkyries in blood-soaked white dresses riding full-size metal horses through the air above slain heroes wheeled around on gurneys by orderlies in bloody aprons and masks, a bracing corrective of field hospital gore to balance all Wagner's war-father nonsense. 
     Then we shift into a kind of Teutonic "Thelma and Louise" as Brunhilde goes completely off reservation, rescues Sieglinde and whisks her to safety. Then, when Wotan shows up to punish his wayward daughter, her sisters form a #MeToo defensive ring around her, brandishing children's chairs, a lovely distaff touch. As Wotan sentences Brunhilde to marriage to whatever dolt of a man can push his hairy way through the ring of flame he sets around her, a motley collection of loutish supernumeraries closes menacingly in. Ugh, men.
     Reader Michele Kurlander, in the Facebook remarks on this post, pointed out one other significant aspect that, perhaps tellingly, I overlooked during the opera: 

Brunhilde wouldn't be at the top of an unscaleable mountain surrounded with a ring of fire so only her juvenile heroic nephew can get in—but instead would be wandering among the hairy dolts, sans Goddess powers, just waiting to be grabbed up—if she hadn't been so clearly smarter and more articulate and more all knowing than her horny Fricka-whipped daddy and almost talked him totally out of punishing her at all! Talk about woman power!

     That too. Wrapping up (the primary drawback to Wagner is that it's just so hard for anybody involved to stop) as I said in the beginning, the plot is best ignored. And really, it's the ... seventh reason you go to a Wagnerian opera, the first seven being, in order of importance: 1) music; 2) voice; 3) acting; 4) scenery; 5) costume; 6) set and 7) the story.
      Edie loved it, by the way, in those words: "I really loved that." Though she missed the horned helmets promised in Bugs Bunny (there is a certain joy in finding expected cliches in a famous work. I explained that for the past few decades directors generally drop the horned, or winged, helmets in order to appear a la mode). As for me, I'm planning to see it again in a couple weeks. Because really: how often do you get the chance? 
   

China now, Facebook later? ‘A new model of totalitarianism’

     Halloween is over, but there's still a lot of scary stuff out there.
     Among the continuing terror attacks — as opposed to good old-fashioned homegrown mass killings, which somehow don't count — and Congress sharpening its shears to fleece the middle class and Donald Trump doing what Donald Trump always does, it takes the heart of a lion just to uncurl from your fetal ball, stand up and face the day.
     So I hate to add one more worry.
    But have you ever had two unconnected aspects of life resonate with each other? One big and one small? So they seem to mean something?
     Like last week's Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and a blog post of mine being kicked off Facebook.
     The congress, in case you missed it, sealed Xi Jinping as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. Immediately "he proclaimed the regime’s intention not just to become the world’s leading power, but to establish a new model of totalitarianism," according to a Washington Post report.
     At the same time, I went to Facebook and posted Monday's column on the sale of Howard Tullman's art collection, containing many, many naked women.
     I wouldn't dream of trying to run a photo of his art harem in the paper. Newspapers defer to our older, more conservative readers, and nudity upsets them. But the internet? Another story entirely. I splayed a particularly flesh-filled photo atop a post on my personal blog — paintings, drawings and watercolors, remember. Then I posted it on Facebook, which featured the photo atop the entry.
     For exactly two minutes.
     Then Facebook yanked the post down, declaring it a ....

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The photo that Facebook wouldn't publish

Chief was past retirement age a decade ago

     The controversy over Chief Illiniwek, the former University of Illinois mascot banned by the NCAA a decade ago, was "back with a vengeance" last Friday, as the Champaign-Urbana school's homecoming parade was disrupted by anti-chief protesters, and an informal chief was forced to flee under police escort. 
     Looking over the controversy in my column, I have to admit it didn't bring out the best in me. Good Clevelander—and lifelong Chief Wahoo fan—I backed the chief for years, promoting the idea that history belongs to everyone and anyone can take it and put it to whatever uses they please. History isn't "owned" by the group that comprises it now. 
    But that view lacked empathy, and while I rarely wince at columns I've written in the past, I wince at those. Because I changed my mind, eventually, with some guidance by my colleague Steve Patterson, who is part Native-American, I came to realize I was making a category error: the chief isn't a creative character facing criticism: he's a brand logo whose time has passed.
    Even the columns where I get behind scrapping the chief have a certain edge to them—I got a lot of harsh flack from activists, and tended to bite back. Three such moments:

     Get rid of Chief Illiniwek. It's enough already. I like tradition as much as the next guy, and hate to see the grim Native American activists and their anti-U.S. view of history win. But when you get a major national college accrediting body saying that the Chief might undermine the value of a University of Illinois education, it's time to cut the cord.
     He's a mascot. He's supposed to be fun, not be this source of constant dreary conflict year in and year out. Sure, he's a tradition, but pick anything else—an apple, a cowboy, a shoe— and in 100 years that will be the tradition.
     You think if people stopped buying Planter's peanuts, turned off by its lying, dandified Mr. Peanut (it just struck me—the top hat, the spats, the monocle; he's gay, isn't he?), that Planter's wouldn't dump him in a moment and create Gomer Goober or whatever? Of course. The U. of I. is a business too, and when a mascot turns too many people off, it's time to call Leo Burnett and order up a new one.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 27, 2004

     Activists often have an uncanny way of perpetuating the very stereotypes they claim to be fighting, and unwittingly presenting a more negative image of their group than the supposed slurs they are fighting against.
     Take Native Americans outraged over Chief Illiniwek, the beleaguered Indian mascot of the University of Illinois.
     Now, I've gone on record in the past saying that the university should dump the chief, not out of any particular concern for the bruised feelings of activists—a vindictive, joyless lot, I can tell you, based on personal experience. But just because the chief has become a perennial liability, as a logo, and when your brand is dragging business down instead of promoting it, it's time to get rid of the mascot or at the very least take the kerchief off of Aunt Jemimah.
     Myself, I think they should change the chief into a cowboy: Cowboy Bob. He could do a lariat demonstration before games. The kids would love it.
     Though getting rid of the chief will help the image of Native Americans. Not by removing the dance, which strikes me as rather benign. But rather by muting the protests, which inevitably cast Indians in a harsher light than the thing they are complaining about.
     The grandson of the chief who sold his ceremonial outfit to the university is now demanding they give it back, even though the school paid $3,500 for it. There is an obvious echo of the old cliche about . . . you know what, I'm not even going to go there.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 21, 2007

     OK, I'll say it: There was always something a little, um, odd about the guys on the pep squad. I know it's athletic, in a way, and I know they get free tickets, and can show school spirit, and hang out with the female cheerleaders, if they want to. . . .
     But still . . .
     And these two guys at the University of Illinois, trying to preserve their right to dress up like Chief Illiniwek by filing a lawsuit, claiming that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees their right to prance around before athletic events . . .
     That's just crazy.
     I don't have a right to—oh—dress as Cowboy Bob, the mascot I hope will replace Chief Illiniwek, and demonstrate my skill at lariat twirling before games. Someone has to control what goes on at games, and that someone is the school.
     Chief Illiniwek—whom I supported for years—has become a burden, and a surreal, pointless issue that only gets stranger and stranger. If he is retired after Wednesday—as it seems he will be—then we may all say together: "At last!"
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 18, 2007

As Russia meddling plot thickens, focus on what matters most

     Now it gets complicated.
     On Monday, special counsel Robert Mueller III named former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, in a 12-count indictment related to laundering Russian money. An hour later, George Papadopoulos' guilty plea, for lying to the FBI about his relations with Russia, was unsealed.
     Cue the timelines and relationship charts.
     Those of us old enough to remember Watergate — sigh, the scandal in the early 1970s that brought down the Nixon administration — recall just how labyrinthine this kind of thing can become, a sprawling opera buffa with an enormous supporting cast of bagmen, functionaries and tangential-yet-important lowlives.
     Nixon — Richard Nixon, the president — was forced to resign as even his supporters began recognizing his guilt in 1974. I assume people of today know that, but then again, assuming Americans know stuff, whether history or science or current events, is not a winning strategy anymore. Assuming it ever was.
     Knowing stuff is hard. Life is complicated, which is why people prefer to dream up conspiracy theories and simple pat explanations for complicated situations, or distract themselves from news they don't like with shiny objects — "What about Hillary?" — little snow globes they can give a shake. Will any investigation, no matter what it finds, lure them out of their hall of mirrors?
     That question will be answered down the road. Before we get lost in the minutia of the investigation, waiting for the tide of prosecution to start lapping at the steps of the White House, assuming it's not there now, we should remember to look at the big picture, and always keep in mind the most important thing.
   
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Mueller's Russia probe: the first shoes drop

     History is lived in retrospect, but reality unfolds moment by moment.

     We know that former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort turned himself in to the FBI Monday is the first shoe — two shoes, as he was joined by business associate Rick Gates — to drop in the Robert Mueller III investigation of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. For those of us who see the Trump administration as a siege of un-American values, it is an encouraging moment of hope after nine months of continual shocks, of jaw-dropping veers away from responsible leadership and good government.
     But we don't know if it's the beginning of the unwinding of the chaotic Trump administration. Or the beginning of further descent into lawlessness as the president pushes back with all his twittery might. He is already condemning the investigation — by a special counsel his own Justice Department appointed — as a "witch hunt," urging, with the "what-about-this?" reflex that passes for rebuttal of late, that Hillary Clinton be investigated instead. He might still simply fire Mueller, despite the Constitutional firestorm that would ignite.
     Charges against the two include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder millions of dollars and making false statements — charges you can watch already being shrugged off by Republicans who spent years going after will-o'-the-wisps like which email server Clinton used and whether she had broken State Department email guidelines
     This is the first shoe to drop, but there will be others. The way these investigations work is, the authorities begin on the outermost ring of a criminal enterprise and work themselves toward the center. The blind loyalty that Donald Trump demands from all those under him — indeed, from all Americans — is seen differently when viewed in light of a prison sentence. Think of a centipede sitting on the edge of the bed at the end of the day, taking off shoe after shoe, each one bigger than the last, each one falling with a bigger clomp.

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Why all the naked women in art?

     What's with all the naked women?
     See, that's why people hate the media. Here Howard Tullman, investor, patron of contemporary art, the dynamo behind the 1871 high-tech incubator at the Merchandise Mart, a force on the Chicago scene, invites me into his home, his sprawling 5,000-square-foot River West residence crammed with hundreds of arresting artworks and what do I notice? The vibrant colors? The large scale? The dramatic chiaroscuro?
     No. I fixate on that most images are buck nekkid women, pouty, chesty, except for the naked girls who aren't. What's the story here, Howard?
     Tullman just laughs.          
     You can see them for yourself, on the Leslie Hindman Auctioneers website, "Property from the Collection of Howard and Judith Tullman." The sale starts at noon Monday.
     I've known Tullman since he ran Tribeca Flashpoint, a digital media arts college. He's a flashy personality himself, who rubs some people the wrong way — heck, sometimes he rubs me the wrong way.
     But we both are able to get past that. Tullman because he likes publicity, and me because I like talking to a guy who regularly lets drop fascinating bits of information, such as when Rahm Emanuel couldn't get back into his home in 2010, he camped out in Tullman's harem.
     "He lived in my home surrounded by a million naked women," Tullman said.
     Tullman is stepping down from 1871 and selling off about an eighth of his collection for a variety of reasons, like raising money for his arts foundation.

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Lincoln is coming and boy is he pissed.

     Am I the only one to notice that the right foot of Abraham Lincoln is arched upward? As if he's about to leap out of his throne in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and bind the Union together once again? Even if it means, again, kicking the ass of a group of traitors violating every tenet of this once great and proud nation? 
     He looks as if he's just noticed something he doesn't like, maybe a Russian-canoodling fraud and liar living in his former residence. I don't think there's a patriotic American alive today who hasn't had his faith in this country in the sanity and decency of his fellow Americans deeply shaken this past year. But Lincoln is a reminder that our faith has been shaken before, and we have been divided, and suffered before. Actually far, far worse than this. And as ghastly as the particulars are, we are in many way far better than in the past. There is no slavery. The fields of America are not soaked with American blood. Millions of Americans might have blinded themselves to the truth. But others see it, and speak it clearly. And we still have laws, laws that can be mocked and brushed off only so long. Then they slowly tighten around malefactors and justice, inch by inch, is done.
    Or so we can hope.

Rise of printing sparked Luther's Reformation 500 years ago

     There is no evidence that an Augustine monk named Martin Luther, unhappy with a popular fundraising tool of the Catholic Church, actually nailed his list of complaints — the famous "95 Theses" — to the door of the All Saints' Church at Wittenburg exactly 500 years ago. He never claimed to have done so, and the story wasn't circulated until after his death.
     We do know that he distributed them in a letter dated Oct. 31, 1517, to the archbishop, listing his 95 criticisms about the enthusiasm with which the church was selling indulgences.
     An indulgence was a piece of paper that, for instance, shortened the time that had to be spent in purgatory. The church had been vigorously selling them to raise money to rebuild the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
     This bothered Luther a lot, not because he was so liberal, but because he was so pious. He prayed, he fasted, he flagellated himself. Luther was getting to heaven the hard way, and it galled him that a rich man could just loosen his purse strings, dig out a few coins, and cut in line.
     "The treasures of indulgences are nets that are now used to fish for the wealth of people," reads thesis No. 66.

Indulgence issued by Pope Sixtus IV

      You can see an actual indulgence — from Pope Sixtus IV, raising money for an expedition against the Turks — on display at the Newberry Library in a fascinating exhibit, "Religious Change and Print: 1450-1700," that runs through Dec. 27.
     The show connects the beginning of the Reformation to the rise of printing, beginning with a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. The publication of a Bible using moveable type, we tend to forget, was itself a radical act, moving the Holy Scriptures from hand-copied, vastly expensive work owned by churches, into mass-produced, less-expensive reading material that could eventually find its way into the hands of regular people, who could then fancy themselves free to not only read it, but to analyze and dispute what was within. Soon those people were printing books of their own, plus pamphlets and broadsheets. Printing and heresy went hand-in-hand.
     "They're very closely connected," said David Spadafora, president of the Newberry. "Print right away becomes a very important medium for people like Luther to get their views out to a wider public than could possibly otherwise have received them."
     The Reformation, as Luther's protest became known, was not the first break in the Catholic Church— branches had been sheering off since the 1st century, with the Great Schism of 1054 perhaps even more significant, leading to the East and West divisions.
      But Luther's schism gained momentum quickly with the help of printing and the desire of the faithful to take more control of their spiritual lives. Protestantism became important in the march toward modernity, a journey that saw God move from something defined by priests and manifested through relics and miracles, into something practiced by individuals. God went from living in the church to living in your heart.
     After Luther, "faith could not be coerced, and secular powers could not legislate in the spiritual sphere," writes Euan Cameron, professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
     Though not for lack of trying. The Catholic Church was quick to push back against Luther. Pope Leo excommunicated him in 1520, amid general cranking up of repression, as noted in the Newberry's exhibit, in one of the sharper sentences I've read on a museum wall:
     "No institution better encapsulates the official goals and approaches of the Catholic Church to regulation than the Inquisition."
     Half a millennium ago, remember. They did get better. Because repression only works until it doesn't; then it fuels the fires it's trying to extinguish. "Lutheran" was first used as a slight by Catholic authorities trying to emphasize the human, as opposed to divine, source of these new ideas.
     Luther himself did not want want to name his movement for himself—he wanted his followers to simply call themselves "Christians."
     Martin Luther became famous after his Ninety-Five Theses were made public in 1517, which explains his prominent portrait on the title page of his 1520, "De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae," or "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church." | Courtesy of the Newberry Library
     "After all," he wrote, "the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone."
     Not to give Luther too much credit. Once he started questioning Church authority, Luther was surprised and aghast to find people started questioning him.
     "Definitely," said Spadafora. "That's one of the reasons why on the one hand, Luther really wanted to put Bibles in people's hands, on the other hand, he came to realize they were doing interpretation much more individualistically than even he felt comfortable with." (Nor was Luther, a fervent anti-Semite, comfortable with Jews, but that's a topic for a different day).
     One lesson, in our own time of shifting values and communications upheaval, is the importance of talking to people in the way they want to be spoken to.
     "Luther very cannily begins to use German, begins to use the vernacular and makes sure a lot of his materials are printed in the vernacular," said Spadafora, "vernacular" meaning "common speech."
     "Whereas the Catholic church is relatively slow to respond in the vernacular way. They lose the battle over the argument because they are slower and appealing in Latin to a different audience," Spadafora said. "We see this in social media all the time."
     Today the Catholic Church still dominates Christianity, at least numerically: 1.2 billion Catholics, compared to about 900 million Protestants. Since both groups tend to view Muslim sectarian bloodshed, say between Sunni and Shia, as representing that faith's inherent violence, it might be useful to remind them that modern scholars estimate that 50 million Christians were killed by one another in the centuries of Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggles that followed Luther's brash act.
     That schism has somewhat healed—last year Pope Francis formally apologized for the Catholic side of the slaughter, and the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations have signed agreements within the past decade recognizing the legitimacy of each other's baptisms.

'A change is as good as a rest'

     

     Brendan Behan is not among the first tier of Irish writers: no Yeats, no Wilde, no O'Neill. A poet known for plays like "Quare Fellow" and memoirs like "Borstal Boy," his reputation took off a bit in the late '50s and early '60s before his untimely death, hurried by drink, at age 41. 
     So I don't think I'm admitting too much ignorance saying that I had never heard of him when, some time in the 1990s, I picked up "Confessions of an Irish Rebel" from a table in a bookstore and read its opening lines:

       'You're for the Governor in the morning,' said this dreary red-headed little Welsh Methodist bastard of a screw.
     'Thanks for telling me,' said I, in an almost English accent, as sarcastically as I politely could, 'but I'm not for 'im in the morning or any other bloody time, you little Welsh puff.'

Brendan Behan

     If that doesn't send you rushing to the cash register, nothing will.  He was deeply involved in the IRA and not reluctant to let people know.
     I have no idea where I encountered the other line of Behan's that I love. It's from the play, "Richard's Cork Leg," which I certainly never read or saw. However it got into mind, I find myself quoting it again and again to colleagues at the newspaper as conversation shifts, as it inevitably does nowadays, to the Sun-Times moving next month.
    "A change is as good as a rest," I say, crediting Behan.
    What exactly does that mean? Well change is frightening to contemplate. You won't be where you are now doing what you always do, but going somewhere new, doing something different. The armor of routine is stripped off and you must confront life unprotected.  It requires focus, alertness, the sort of qualities that come to you after taking a break, having a rest. It's revivifying, or can be, if you do it right.
    There's something optimistic to the sentiment, and I'm in an optimistic mood lately. 
    I worked at the old, trapezoidal barge of the Sun-Times building at 401 N. Wabash for 17 years, and I was nostalgic for that when we left. I still have a chunk of the granite facade on my desk. I had an office facing the river, with a sweeping panorama. The windows opened. It was nice. The party when we bid it farewell; let's just say, if you've never been to a party where the guests are literally tearing down the walls with hammers, I have.
     But what can't be avoided has to be endured, and in time—the past 13 years—I grew adjusted to the new building, a less distinctive, yet not without merits setting at 350 N. Orleans. It had its advantages. Closer to the train. Right next to the youthful hive of the Merchandise Mart. Convenient to the East Bank Club. Close to Gene & Georgetti.

View from the Sun-Times offices

      The view, I think I'll miss that the most. Across the river, to the cool green convex of 333 W. Wacker. Stunning. 
      But change happens. A skyscraper is going up, directly south, between 350 N. Orleans and the river, which would cut off our view anyway. Just as well we're on the move again, on our way to the West Loop, to North Racine, where we'll share quarters with a video and sound production company. We're all morphing into one cutting edge communications entity—not a "newspaper" anymore, though I'll continue to use the term, the way my grandmother called her refrigerator an "icebox."
    There is that element, that thought I'm sure older couples have when they sell their house, the house where they raised their children, and retrench to a condo: is this where the decline will set in? Am I going there to die?
     Possibly yes. Or possibly no. I view the move with Buddha calm and equanimity, because the important thing, to me, is that we still have a newspaper—whoops, high-tech cutting edge media entity—to move. It's as far from Union Station west as the current paper is east, and while it isn't as convenient to downtown, it isn't as if I'm always racing off to City Hall to go toe-to-toe with Rahm Emanuel.
    Technology whirs forward, time flows onward, and we're lucky to be in the torrent, our heads still bobbing above the water, gasping and thrashing and sputtering, but very much alive. 
    Speaking of the Irish, Behan once said: “They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues.” I believe that will remain true for the Sun-Times. The land under us might change, but our tongues will continue to wag, unharnessed, soon from the West Loop. 

Military should protect American from militarism

   

     The 2018 midterm election is a year away, and fundraising letters pour into my inbox like a firehose blasting into a bucket.
     Most get ignored. A few I glance at, just to register their breathless urgency: THE LIBERALS ARE TRAITORS! GIVE ME MONEY NOWWWW!!!!
     But one plea, from our neighbor to the north, stood out. Let me, without biasing you as to why, present an email received Wednesday from Fmr. Captain Kevin Nicholson, USMC.
     The letterhead reads: "Marine. Outsider. Conservative."
     The email begins:

Neil,     I’m a proud U.S. Marine Corps veteran and a proud conservative from Wisconsin running for the United States Senate to neutralize the threat of Senator Tammy Baldwin’s liberal extremism.     I joined the Marines because I saw a threat to America and wanted to do everything I could to protect the country I love.     I was deployed to the deadliest place in Iraq just weeks after my first son was born. My team worked to combat the growing threat to democracy around the world.

I can't print the entire message. It ends:

     It’s time to Send In The Marine.     Semper Fi,     Kevin Nicholson, Conservative Republican for US Senate     P.S. As a proud U.S. Marine Corps veteran, I answered the call to serve my country when the threat was abroad. I’m now ready to answer the call to protect my country from the threat in our own backyard.

     Anything stand out? Maybe the same thought occurred to you as occurred to me: "This guy's a Marine."

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