Push back against the Chinese, but not too hard

Photo by Ross Steinberg

     Given how important China is to our economy, and what a pivotal role it will play in the global future, it's alarming how little Americans know about the most populous nation on earth. I would bet that not one in 100 could name its new premiere (Li Keqiang, and no, I didn't know either) and few grasp either the hostility that many Chinese feel toward the United States, or understand where their animosity came from. 

     Man-in-the-street interviews are usually the lowest rung of journalistic tedium. Tapping regular folk on the shoulder, collecting their unexceptional opinions about passing issues — “Why yes, it is cold.” “No, I prefer the fat Elvis stamp.”

     But one particular temperature-taking sticks in my mind and haunts me, more than a dozen years after I read them: the man-in-the-street chats with Chinese citizens after an American surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter plane collided April 1, 2001.

     The U.S. plane, an EP-3E Aries II, was a prop-driven mule — it looks like a passenger plane from the 1950s — plodding along at 207 mph when a Chinese J-8 fighter began buzzing it. The jet clipped one of the EP-3E’s four propellers. The Chinese jet broke in half and crashed; the U.S. spy plane was able to land on the Chinese island of Hainan.
     If anyone should have been indignant, it was the Americans. Our plane was operating in international waters. The Chinese pilot caused the accident. But interviews with the Chinese revealed seething belligerence.

     "The United States thinks it can do anything it wants to us," a delivery man surnamed Wu told The New York Times. "Saying you're sorry isn't good enough. Americans need to know we aren't afraid of their bullying." They were hopping mad.
     As the two governments maneuvered to end the crisis — the crew of 24 ended up being held 11 days — the Chinese government seemed as worried about placating the intense nationalism of its public as they were about the Americans. A swath of the Chinese citizens viewed the incident, in which their pilot was killed, as the latest in a series of national humiliations going back to the Opium Wars that had to be avenged.
     "The battle is not over," Chinese officials reassured their public, which felt the U.S. was being let off the hook for its aggression.
     The episode gave me a sinking feeling that China won't be content forever churning out khaki pants and raking in our money. Once China's on top of the world, they're going to want to do something with it. Nobody ever bought a bike they didn't ride.
     The Hainan incident was eclipsed five months later by 9/11, an event greeted with glee in some quarters of China. But that feeling of aggrievement has not gone away, as evidenced by the latest Sino-U.S. faceoff.
     The issue is a block of airspace in the East China Sea, which the Chinese two weeks ago announced is now an "Air Defense Identification Zone" that could not be entered by aircraft from other countries without receiving their permission first.
     On Friday, a pair of American surveillance planes, accompanied by 10 Japanese aircraft, flew into the zone to see what would happen. What happened is the Chinese scrambled their fighter jets, and suddenly the world feels like a more dangerous place.
     The specifics are trivial; two uninhabited flyspeck islands that Japan controls but the Chinese say rightfully belong to them.
     Still, this is a high-stakes balancing act. If we back down and let China make whatever claims it wants, then we are living in China's world, and we will not like that world. If we press them too hard, however, we'll be fighting with China, and that would be bad.
     When dealing with China, time is our friend. Capitalist democracy is self-administering, and we've seen China soften, just last month announcing it was dropping its one-child policy and forced labor camps for political prisoners. That's still far from becoming Evanston writ large, true, but the longer we don't slide into World War III with them, the more remote that possibility becomes. Ten years ago we worried about war between China and Taiwan. Now China and Taiwan seem happily on the road to getting married.
     The Obama administration urged U.S. airlines to respect China's no-fly zone, even as U.S. military planes defy it. That makes sense. This situation won't be helped by a Boeing 767 with 300 people aboard being shot down by some trigger-happy Chinese top gun, a new Lusitania to drive Americans into the same kind of bellicose frenzy that some Chinese people seem already in.
     The Japanese, on the other hand, ordered their commercial carriers to continue to fly through the disputed space without offering notice, so as not to give the Chinese claims legitimacy. That makes sense, too. Yielding to aggression leads to more aggression.
     The American domestic situation has been so messed up, between political gridlock, government shutdown, economic morass, health care rollout fiasco and on and on, that we didn't worry much about the rest of the world. Now that seems like another luxury we can no longer afford. Hello China.

Holiday weekend worst time to fly, except for all the others.

     Everyone in the media is scrambling to fill the endless expanse of the Internet while still maintaining professional standards — I don't know if we've gotten worse at it, or I'm just noticing more surprising lapses, such as this ham-handed post from the Daily Beast. On one hand, error is intrinsic to writing, and the fault you find in others today could be found in you tomorrow. On the other, we can't just let any blunder slip by unnoticed, escaping under the "There But For the Grace of God Go I..." clause.

     So I’m up at 5 a.m., too early to start working. Might as well browse online. As a change of pace, I slide over to the Daily Beast, the online remnant of Newsweek. Naming the site for the London tabloid in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel “Scoop” surely seemed more clever when they first thought it up than now, when some slice of America must avoid it, assuming, with that name, it must be the house organ for Satan.

     I’m rewarded with “20 WORST AIRPORTS FOR THANKSGIVING TRAVEL.” A list! We readers love lists! It can be “15 Most Useless Facts to Waste Your Time Reading” and we’re there. Oh, No. 6, “Lists Like This One.” Yes indeed, spot on!

     Of course I want to know how Chicago fares after the Daily Beast analyzed its "reams of statistics" in order to name the worst airports to pass through, based on arrival and departure delays, both during the year and for Thanksgiving weekend.
     No. 1 was San Francisco (whew!), where a quarter of arrivals and departures are delayed on an average day, rising to 29 percent of departures delayed on Thanksgiving.
     I figured Chicago would be up there, and Midway is No. 2, though if you look closely, you see something odd: 20.2 percent of Midway arrivals and 30.7 percent of departures are delayed on average. But Thanksgiving 2012 stats show 18 percent of arrivals and departures are late. So it's better to fly at Thanksgiving than most times, which sort of undermines the whole point of the post.
     Newark, N.J., is third, with numbers that again suggest it's far easier to fly at Thanksgiving (27.6 percent arrivals delayed during the year versus 15 percent at the holiday; 25.3 percent departures delayed year-round; Thanksgiving drops to 14 percent).
     Nothing in the slide show—photos of waiting, frustrated travelers at various airports — addresses this incongruity. Do they read their own posts? O'Hare, at fourth, is the same: delayed departures during Thanksgiving are almost half average year-round delays, 14 versus 27.2 percent.
     Airport after airport, they're all like that. The headline should have been: "THANKSGIVING IS BEST TIME TO FLY." It's hard to say whether they just started with a concept — list the busiest, most-delayed airports at Thanksgiving — then didn't notice that the stats tell an even more incredible story: It's better to travel over the holidays, probably because travelers are scared off.
     I consider this more evidence we've grown so accustomed to complaining about air travel that it's become a reflex; we don't even think about what we're complaining about anymore. Jets are a modern marvel, and I wish travelers would stop bitching. You never see articles about people who live in refugee camps complaining about living under a tarp and lining up for potable water. They cope with it. But the media offers pampered airborne business folk and vacationers shaking their fists at their hard lot.
     Stop whining. Get to the airport two hours early and flying is usually a breeze. Expect to wait. Bring a book. Smile at the big, shuffling line for a security check that does nothing at all; it's almost like a religious ritual we do in honor of 9/11 ( that would be interesting. Instead of patting you down, the TSA should anoint your head with oil).
     Whatever happens, roll with it. I flew to Colorado with my older son in February to visit my folks. We didn't depart until 12 hours after our flight was scheduled to leave. It was still fun. The evening flight was overbooked, and they kept requesting volunteers to be bumped to the morning, something I'd never consider — inconvenient! But my son wondered, "Why not?" It helped that my mom had been carping about us arriving too late at night, and I realized being bumped would a) get us there the next morning, voiding mom's concern; b) reduce the invariable "Long's Day Journey into Night" span of the visit and c) put a pair of $400 vouchers in our pockets. Next thing I knew we were on a bus, bound for a nearby Holiday Inn. It was an adventure. Next morning, we used our meal vouchers to feast on a lavish Wolfgang Puck breakfast.
     We're going back to the airport to use those vouchers this Christmas Eve. If I have a 500-pound man in the seat in front of me and a pair of toddler twins with ear infections wailing in back, on a plane that is three hours late taking off, I will not feel ill-used. I'll have a good book, and if the plane lands wheels first, I'll consider myself lucky.

Are the Bulls really going to quit now?

A. Bartlett Giamatti, the late Renaissance scholar, Yale president, and commissioner of major league baseball, was correct when he said that the sport was "designed to break your heart." Unlike baseball, in basketball, the heartbreak is more of an accident, an afterthought, a by-product. Maybe because basketball is too fast-paced, or too recently popular, to evoke the deep soul-sickness that baseball can. But it comes close. Even if basketball can't break your heart, it sure can put a few deep cracks in it.

     Life is a long line at a snack shop. You finally get to the front, order your Coke and they hand you a pretzel. Enjoy your pretzel. Life is buying a ticket to Las Vegas and being flown to Dubuque. Change of plans. Explore Dubuque.

     Sports is not life, of course, but a concentrated simulacra of life: thrill, hope, triumph and, yes, disappointment, all packed into one maddening, chaotic, endless enterprise.

     I ignored sports most of my life because I was no good at them, and my father didn’t know a baseball from a basement. But occasionally my interest was sparked. In the 1970s, the Indians. In the 1990s, the Bulls. My wife loved ’em, the city loved ’em, and I tried to love ’em too, though Michael Jordan, excellent as he was, flubbed the hero test for me by being a jerk. He seemed mean, up close, taunting his teammates. Maybe to glory, yes. But nobody wanted to be Scottie Pippen.
     Frankly, I like the current crop of Bulls far better. Derrick Rose is not a jerk. The MVP with the extra gear to the basket. With a quirky supporting crew. Passionate Joakim Noah, scowling Carlos Boozer. And the rest: Gibson. Hinrich. Deng. Not to forget my kid's hero, Jimmy Butler, whom he was cheering from the start for reasons I plumbed but never fathomed. He loves Jimmy Butler because Jimmy is the best.
     We went to a preseason game, yelled our hearts out, then settled in for something new to me: a season where I knew the team, knew the players, knew what was going on.
     Then Rose blew out his knee. Again.
     My first reaction was selfish. Oh, great, I finally surrender to this stuff, reach a point where my question at breakfast is, "Are they playing tonight?" Where tipoff finds me on the sofa, ready to savor the action. Little Neil, a sports fan at last. Now this.
     That lasted 10 seconds. Then I thought of Rose, not the player, but the person. The poor man. How awful this must be. How hard he worked this past year, getting healthy, absorbing the tsk-tsks of the entire city. He's back, not even a dozen games.
     "He looks fragile," I kept saying, watching Rose play. Turns out I was right; the one time I would have preferred being wrong.
     My 16-year-old, whose grasp of sports is more "Moneyball" than athletics, explained why the team will now be broken up so that the Bulls can lose and get better draft picks.
     Can that be true? I'm naive, yes. But that can't be the plan. It feels like surrender. "A seasonlong wake" as my colleague put it. Why can't the team that's left rise to the occasion? Why can't Jimmy Butler become the star my kid thinks he is? They almost did it last year. What are fans supposed to do while waiting for the draft? Watch a lousy scrub team lose? That doesn't sound fun.
     And what's Rose supposed to do now? An outsider would say he's already won, beat the odds, grabbed the brass ring. If he doesn't squander his money, he can own car dealerships and have a happy life.
     Or can he? The road back is even more fraught. Not only is there the pain and struggle of recovery, but once he gets into shape there will always be fear, every time he puts his foot down, it could happen again. It's already happened twice. Einmal ist keinmal, as the Germans say, und zweimal ist immer. "Once is never and twice is always."
     Those are the stakes. Still, I don't see a choice. Rose, like each of us, can't dictate outcomes, only effort. Fall down, get up, maybe shake your fist at the sky and start again. "It's called trying," I tell my boys.
     Last season, without Rose, was still fun to watch. I would rather see Noah and Butler and Boozer flail against better teams and lose than have them shipped to other teams and watch some temporary cast of new nobodies — The Chicago Generals — rack up the losses we need to maybe, maybe, draft a star player. Who'd enjoy that?
     The team can't wait, cargo-cult like, scanning the skies for Rose to return, or for a new draft-pick hero. It has to play hard now.
     My apologies for caring. It is a change, I know, and against character. I've never met Derrick Rose, but he seems a fine young man dealt a bad hand. There are a lot of those. I am confident he will play that hand, best he can. You don't have to win a championship to be a hero. Sometimes your big play occurs when you blow out your knee, again, and are counted out. I do not expect him to quit. He has his job to do, the Bulls have their job to do, and fans have a job, too. "I will be conquered," the great Samuel Johnson, no stranger to adversity, said. "I will not capitulate." That sounds like a game plan. Disappointment comes, adversity arises, yet you somehow overcome. Is that not what sports, and life, is all about?

Happy Chattanooga!

 

     Three blog posts in a row on Thanksgiving, and not a murmur about Hanukkah, which began Wednesday night. "What's the matter?" the reader might ask, "ashamed?" No, indifferent. Hanukkah is a minor holiday for children that got blown out of proportion ... well, I have an old chestnut that explains it. This piece is noteworthy for where it first appeared—on America Online in 1996. Once upon a time, when the Internet was new and dial-up, if you clicked on the AOL logo, it would give you a surprise, a cartoon, or an essay. The editor of the AOL surprise feature was John Scalzi, who went on to a successful career as a science fiction novelist. I wrote the very first one, in fact, and a number to come, including this one. It hasn't been seen since. Its title is an allusion to the strangled way some mangle the pronunciation of what is also spelled "Chanukah" and I was dumbfounded to get emails from people in Tennessee, confused and angry because they suspected their city was being mocked by a Jew. The first glimmer that when you write online, you also write for readers beyond your intended audience. But they remind you.

     Imagine you move to Mars.
     The Martians are a pleasant lot. Not too different than you, really. They have holidays, just like back on earth. The biggest Martian holiday is called the Grand Galloon; it comes at the end of April, around the time Arbor Day takes place in the United States.
     We won't go into the details of the Grand Galloon—let's just say it has to do with the Martians' deepest religious beliefs. They make such a fuss about it that Martian society addresses little else in the weeks before the Grand Galloon and everyday life grinds to a halt when the great day finally arrives.
     Of course the Martians are curious about you, who have no Grand Galloon. Poor you. How do you live?
     Lest they dwell on this misfortune, the Martian ask about Arbor Day, which takes place at approximately the same time. Tell us about Arbor Day, they say. It's sort of your Grand Galloon, isn't it?
     Well, no, you answer. Arbor Day is not Galloonish at all. It's about planting trees. No big deal.
     The Martians ignore this explanation. At school, they pause from their Galloonery and demand that you stay a few words about trees. You try to point out that Arbor Day isn't that meaningful to you. The Martians smile and give you saplings.
     That's Hanukkah. A tiny Jewish festival. I can think of half a dozen more important dates on the Jewish calendar. Hanukkah marks a Jewish uprising against the Greeks in 168 BCE.* Jews decided to commemorate the event by lighting candles and eating potato pancakes.
     And that's it. Except that Hanukkah occurs in the vague proximity of Christmas—the two holidays are a measly 19 days apart this year. So Hanukkah, or Chanukah, as some spell it, in a futile attempt to capture that garbled Hebrew sound that is neither "H" nor "ch" but a little of both, gets conflated into something it isn't; a rival to Christmas.
     When in fact it really is the Jewish Arbor Day (not literally. There is a Jewish Arbor Day—Tu B'shvat, that never gets talked about since it doesn't arrive around Christmastime, even though it is as significant a holiday as Hanukkah, if not more so).
     There are problems with making Hanukkah into Christmas' Semitic twin. First, Hanukkah doesn't have enough stuff. No good songs, to start. Christmas carols are beautiful—"Oh Holy Night" and "Silver Bells" and "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire." I can get choked up just listening to "Little Drummer Boy" and I've never celebrated Christmas in my life.  
     There is no good Hanukkah literature. Christmas has Dickens and the Waltons and "It's a Wonderful Life."
     And Hanukkah? Hanukkah has a song about dreidls, those little tops associated with the holiday. ("I have a little dreidl/I made it out of clay/And when it's dry and ready/Dreidl I will play...") It's a dumb, grating song with only one note in it, and there's no more horrifying, humiliating experience a Jewish child can have than, 50 minutes into a music class filled with the lovely tunes of Bach and Irving Berlin, to have some solicitous music teacher clap her hands together and say, "Okay, now we're going to sing a Hanukkah song," while gazing at the one Jewish child, who is trying to dig a hole in the floor and hide.
     Hanukkah literature consists of a few grim Eastern European tales and Jospehus, the traitorous ancient Jewish historian, recounting his self-serving version of the uprising that he managed to both lead and betray.
     Getting back to dreidls. Dreidls are a strange addition, anyway. They're a gambling game that somehow got grafted onto the holiday and, in an attempt to have something to toss at Christmas, got puffed up into an icon as well. It's as odd as if Easter were associated not only with bunnies and eggs, but with roulette wheels, or pairs of dice.
     This is not to pooh-pooh Hanukkah. Taken on its own merits, Hanukkah has some wonderful qualities, the first and foremost being latkes, those potato pancakes fried and eaten with applesauce or sour cream or, in my case, both.
     Latkes are one of the great philosophical creations of mankind—hot sand salty and starchy and just delicious.
     If given the choice between the Maccabee story and latkes, where I would decided which would be preserved for future generations and which consigned to oblivion, I'd pick latkes in a heartbeat.
    Who knows? Maybe the latkes came first. But Jewish kids were too embarrassed to say that we had an eight-day celebration of potato pancakes. thanking God for them and crowing that we, as a people, had brought them into the world.
     So we tagged the story of the Maccabees and the miracles onto it, and added a menorah ad a dreidl and a few other trapping to obfuscate its real purpose. I wouldn't be surprised. History can be quite cunning that way.


* In the original, I had the uprising a) occur in 70 AD, b) be against the Romans and c) fail, three jaw-dropping errors whose origin I can only speculate (we had a new baby at home, the festival is indeed as minor as I say, so much that even guys like me, fairly well-schooled in my religion, have a loose grasp on the particulars). Not wanting to propagate error, I fixed it in the text, but figured I should own up to the gaffe here.

Thanksgiving Festival #3: Turkey Day's Feast of Facts

     One of the challenges of Thanksgiving is the problem of just what to talk about for hours with all these strange people who show up for dinner; members of your own family, apparently. I thought I would lend a helping hand. The Bears won't be losing to Detroit today, but otherwise everything is the same as our festival of nostalgic Thanksgiving columns concludes. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, enjoy the day, save room for pie.

     The downside to Thanksgiving can be summed up in two words: Uncle Harold.

     Everyone has an Uncle Harold. Or maybe an Aunt Flo. Whatever the name, they're the distant relative, or relatives, whom you never see and suddenly have to converse with for two hours while waiting for the turkey to be done.

     What to talk about? Certainly not the Bears. Not this year, anyway. So with the challenge of making conversation in mind, the Sun-Times has assembled this selection of answers to 25 intriguing Thanksgiving questions:

     1. So turkey the bird, Turkey the country. Mere coincidence?

     Not at all. Europeans somehow got the notion that turkeys came from the East. The French thought India and called them poulets d'Inde (the Germans, fantasizing even more specifically, placed turkeys in Calcutta, calling them Kalekuttisch). The English -- and you saw this coming, didn't you? -- imagined the birds came from Turkey.

     2. OK, so where DO turkeys come from?

     Scholarly opinion seems to settle on Mexico, where the Aztecs first domesticated the birds. So, in a sense, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner is, at its heart, a Mexican feast. Ole!

     3. Turkeys are really dumb, right? They drown looking up in rainstorms?

     The drowning story, according to breeders, is just a legend.

     4. Why do you get sleepy after eating turkey? Is it just that you're so stuffed, or something else?

     Tryptophan, an amino acid in turkey meat, is thought to relax people.

     5. Either way, it isn't any good without cranberry sauce. So how does the great American public vote: jellied or whole berry?

     Jellied. Two cans of jellied are sold for every one of whole berry.

     6. Cranberries are one of only three fruits originally native to this country. What are the other two?

     Concord grapes and blueberries.

     7. Wasn't there some big cranberry scare a long time back?

     In November, 1959, a government researcher announced that a herbicide used by some cranberry growers caused cancer in lab rats. Sauce sales plummeted.

     8. The stores have racks of Thanksgiving cards. That's a recent attempt to commercialize the holiday, isn't it?

     Not according to Hallmark Cards , in Kansas City, Mo. A company spokeswoman said that Hallmark sold its first Thanksgiving card in the early 1920s and Thanksgiving postcards for 50 years before that.

     9. They sell many of those?

     Not really. Industrywide, according to Hallmark, about 30 million Thanksgiving cards are sent, or about 1 percent of the number of Christmas cards.

     10. So where does Thanksgiving rank, card-wise?

     No. 7, behind June graduation and ahead of Halloween.

     11. There are so many classic Christmas songs. Any good Thanksgiving tunes?

     No.

     12. Really, none at all?

     OK, "Over the River and Through the Woods" and "Come, Ye Thankful People Come." Or there's folk singer Loudon Wainright III's depressing dirge, "Thanksgiving," which does have the benefit of making your family Thanksgiving truce, no matter how dismal, seem cheery by comparison.

     13. How about movies?

     "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" isn't bad -- Steve Martin and John Candy struggle to get home for Thanksgiving.

     14. How about touching Thanksgiving literature?

     It isn't quite Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but Erica Jong's How to Save Your Own Life, begins: "I left my husband on Thanksgiving Day."

     15. What about Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past? Isn't there a Thanksgiving scene in that?

     No, but the maitre d'hotel at Balbec does carve a turkey "with a sacerdotal majesty, surrounded, at a respectful distance from the service-table, by a ring of waiters who . . . stood gaping in open-mouthed admiration."

     16. All these football games! When did a pious holiday like Thanksgiving get associated with sporting events?

     Always was. At the very first Thanksgiving in 1621, the Pilgrims and the Indians entertained themselves with contests of shooting and archery.

     17. When did big games start getting held on Thanksgiving?

     Baseball was the Thanksgiving Day tradition in the 1860s and 1870s. By the mid-1880s college football took the spotlight.

     18. When did the NFL start broadcasting its games on Thanksgiving?

     That would be 1970, when the leagues merged and got their first national television contract, according to the league office in New York.

     19. But other games were broadcast before 1970, right?

     Absolutely. In fact, the team that will be beating the Bears today, the Detroit Lions, pioneered pro football on Thanksgiving, playing their first Turkey Day game in 1934. The Lions game has been televised since 1956.

     20. Any other neat NFL Thanksgiving traditions?

     As a matter of fact, Thanksgiving is a good time to pull pranks on rookies, such as in 1984, when a Pittsburgh Steeler rookie was sent to team President Dan Rooney to collect the squad's free turkey, which of course didn't exist.

     21. When did the tradition of Grandma slaving away in the kitchen while the men eat mixed nuts begin?

     That's one of the oldest rites of the holiday. The first Thanksgiving, for 150 people -- 90 Indians, the rest Pilgrims -- was prepared by four English women, assisted by a pair of teenage girls. And no dishwasher either.

     22. One more turkey question: Why is dark meat dark?

     More iron, according to one source. More fat, according to another.

     23. The evening news always has poor people lining up for their Thanksgiving dinners, courtesy of a charity. Where did that tradition start?

     An outgrowth of Victorian philanthropy, although back then they made an even greater public spectacle of it. Often the benefactors would gather to watch the poor eat the feast -- the less fortunate sometimes putting on a show of song and recitation first to entertain their hosts. In 1884, a Chicago department store set up a Thanksgiving feast in one of its windows and invited street urchins in to eat it while hundreds of passers-by gawked.

     24. Whipped cream in a can! Who ever thought of that?

     A St. Louis salesman named Aaron Lapin, working right here in Chicago. Lapin was trying to sell a wartime substitute whipping cream called Sta-Whip. Part of the plan was to create a "dispensing gun" that ended up as Reddi-Wip. Between 1948 and 1951, America's consumption of whipped cream doubled.

     25. Once and for all, sweet potatoes or yams -- which is it?

     Unless you're in Belize, you're eating sweet potatoes -- orange, dense, sweet, particularly when topped with marshmallows. Yams are yellowish and not eaten much in the United States. People call sweet potatoes yams, but they're not.

                          -- from the Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 1997

Thanksgiving Festival #2: Surrender, vegetarians!

Our holiday visit to Thanksgiving columns past continues with this good-natured poke at vegetarians. This was inspired by my brace of nieces, who always seemed to need special non-turkey items on the menu to accommodate their various dietary habits of the moment. I can't recall anybody mocking vegetarianism lately—I hope it hasn't drifted into the realm of unquestionable religious faith. I'd never accuse vegetarians of being humorless and self-important—but let's see if they stand up and make the claim themselves.

     Thanksgiving is a time when vegetarianism regularly emerges from semi-obscurity to flash brightly in the public eye for a moment before returning to its place on the shelf of marginal American idiosyncrasies, like nudism and faith healing, colonic irrigation and dowsing.

     The Thanksgiving feast is such a cherished cultural icon -- the roast turkey, king of the table of plenty -- that the thought of people snubbing it, willingly, is almost unbelievable.

     Of course it makes the news, perennially, like the gold coins in Salvation Army buckets at Christmas.

     And why not? Those of us who have been licking our lips for days, if not weeks, anticipating the warm, moist flesh of the turkey are mesmerized by the notion of those who shun it; viewing them with a mixture of horror and awe, rather the way you view those radicals who set themselves on fire as a political protest. An act of courage, of course. But at what cost?

     Turkey is essential today. Wherever you are -- sailors on the ocean, scientists at the poles, soldiers based in distant lands -- great pains are taken to bring you turkey. No matter who you are, no matter how abject and debased your condition -- felons in prison, the homeless packed into shelters, college students -- indifferent society suddenly mobilizes to serve up platters of turkey. It's almost a human right.

     Yet every Thanksgiving, some stout group of vegetarians is featured pantomiming a Thanksgiving feast, digging into their ersatz tofu turkey, or their soy protein turkey or, among the truly independent, doing away with even the chimera of turkey and eating a feast of leek cakes and yam pies and whatever garden clippings and reconstructed starch molecules they set before themselves and call food.

     I am of two minds when it comes to this. First is an earnest attempt to understand and accept other points of view. Vegetarianism has health benefits -- fat is bad and salt is bad blah blah blah.

     And it has moral justification -- preventing the slaughter of turkeys, nuzzling their young in a humanlike fashion, possessing a language and culture, yaddity yaddity yaddah.

     But that's just the shiny surface, the false face presented to avoid conflict. There is a deeper sentiment, one I keep buried, particularly around the several vegetarians I know, personally, who seem like fine, upstanding people, with no clear signs of emotional disturbance, except of course for a certain reluctance toward eating meat.

     That deeper, more honest feeling can be summed up like this: "It's Thanksgiving for the love of God! What's the matter with you people? Eat some turkey. Park your precious morals and your fine distinctions at the door, loosen your belt, and dig in. What right do you have to cling to your own beliefs on a holiday? How dare you make Grandma prepare some disgusting drumstick-shaped chick pea patties just for you? Join us! Conform! This is a moment to celebrate our collective abundance -- an abundance so rich it allows you to munch grass and without which you would be on your haunches right now snapping shank bones in half and greedily drinking the marrow. Abundance handed to us by God Almighty, don't you forget, who ordained in the Bible that we would eat turkey today with dressing and cranberry sauce then lay on the couch like beached whales watching football games all afternoon."

     There, I feel much better now. I've been meaning to say that for years, and now it's out. Let me apologize right away. I don't really care if you eat turkey or not. In fact, go ahead: Shun the bird. Shun turkey and steak and chocolate and Mozart and fashionable clothing.

     It's a free world. Dress in burlap sacks and go sit outside the gates of the city, eating groats out of a rough clay bowl. That just leaves more of the good stuff for me.
                        —from the Chicago Sun-Times, November 25, 1999

Thanksgiving Festival #1: Holiday treat the stuff of legends

     Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. No tedious religious obligations, no gifts to buy. Just family and food and more family and more food. I used to always write a Thanksgiving column, and since I didn't do a special week this November, the way I did the first four months—just too busy writing to dream up a theme—I thought, for the next three days, I'd reprise a few of my favorite Thanksgiving columns. Though I really never topped this first one, 16 years ago. 

    A lot can change in 16 years. We don't live in the city, so there's no trip down the alley. Thanksgiving isn't held at my in-laws' place; both of them have passed away and are deeply missed. Now it's at our house. 
    Some things, however, stay the same — I still make the stuffing, with apple cider instead of wine. I will admit, as glad as I am that I don't drink anymore, I do heave a wistful sigh at Thanksgiving, and the gleeful tone of this column will tell you why. Nothing to be ashamed of—fun while it lasted, and fun of a different sort now, plus one more blessing to give thanks for.

     How big a scoop of stuffing are you going to heap on your plate when the platter is passed around Thursday?

     If you're like me, it'll be a prodigious mountain, a brown bushel of savory joy, towering above the pale expanse of turkey, dwarfing the mashed potatoes, obscuring the yams, mocking the cranberries.

     I'm a stuffing man. I'm not ashamed to shout it. My entire life the other 364 days a year is just a shuffling, time-killing, joyless trance, waiting until the magic day when Thanksgiving stuffing returns.

     Sure, you are offered simulated stuffing at other times. There is Stove Top. And I have partaken in it, and derived comfort, like a thirsty man in the desert sucking on pebbles. But it isn't the real thing. Real stuffing must be labored over for hours.

     I know, because in my family, I make the stuffing. I am the patriarch, stuffingwise; the granddaddy of dressing. It's the only thing I know how to cook. But, like the idiot savant who can only play Mozart piano concertos, my one skill is sublime.

     I never would have learned of my skill if it weren't for my mother-in-law. A saint, that woman. She can lay out a Thanksgiving dinner for 30 people in the time it takes most people to peel an apple.

     But even family can't just show up holiday after holiday, 10 times a year, year after year, stuff our faces and run out the door shouting thanks over our shoulders without a little guilt eventually setting in.

     So we began volunteering to shoulder responsibility for aspects of Thanksgiving dinner. My sister-in-law took over the pies. And I took the stuffing. Everyone laughed when I volunteered. My mother-in-law prepared a few pans of emergency stuffing, just in case I botched it.

     But I didn't botch it. I nailed it. Stuffing the way it should be, moist but not wet, solid but yielding, savory without any single spice drawing rude attention to itself and ruining the warm and comforting embrace that is good stuffing. Stoical relatives who could read every word I've written without uttering a compliment grabbed me and kissed me on both cheeks, their faces wet with tears, babbling praise for the stuffing.

     For a period of years -- five? eight? more? -- the question would be floated during early November. "Is Neil making stuffing this year?" Then it gently transmuted into "Neil is making his stuffing this year?"

     But this year was the crowning triumph: Nobody asked at all.

     You have to have gone through the process of being absorbed into somebody else's family to recognize the bliss in this transformation. The wonder of being taken for granted, of being assumed.        

     Nobody asked whether I'm making my stuffing because everyone knew that I would. I always do. It's a tradition.

     No recipe. Nothing is written. I wing it. First, a couple of days before, I buy a bunch of challah breads; six, eight, depending on the size. These I dice into inch-wide croutons and toast on cookie sheets. Sure, it takes a long time, but so did the Sistine Chapel.

     Onions, celery and peeled apple, diced well and cooked until nothing dares to crunch. Chicken bouillon, for moistening. Oil, too. Mild spices: sage, thyme. And one secret moistening ingredient: red wine.

     I can't tell you how much red wine. Use enough but no more. I'm generally sparing with the wine that goes into the stuffing. The wine that, ummm, doesn't go in to the stuffing, but goes somewhere else, that wine I don't monitor quite as closely, if you catch my drift.

     No apricots. No raisins. No corn bread. Nothing fancy or strange. Leave that to Martha Stewart. If your family is burdened with the tradition of stuffing made from, say, White Castle hamburgers (which people actually use), OK, follow your creed, if you must. I will follow mine.

     Stuffing can't be ruined. You make so much of it, adding batch after batch of raw materials -- more croutons, more vegetables, more bouillon, more spices -- that should one element be overemphasized, it can always be corrected. You can always dice up more bread.

     One would think that the highlight would be the eating. Or perhaps the contemplating of the assembled plate: the bird, the stuffing, the cranberries, the yams, the mashed potatoes, the peas; like beloved actors in a favorite sitcom, each vital, each supporting the other, trotting out for another show, just like the one before, just like the next one.

     But preparation is really the top for me, the peerless thrill I wait for all year. The croutons toasting. The wine glugging, into the stuffing, into other places. On the TV, the parade, hosted by a pair of idiotic showbiz personalities whom I've never heard of previously and will never hear of again. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

     That moment is even better than the ecstatic reception my stuffing receives; relatives standing in their places, elbowing small children away, wrestling for the stuffing platter, those at the far end extending their plates out in one hand, the other hand making big arching gimme gestures, or simply pointing desperately at their wide-open mouths.

     The only other comparable moment is the walk down the alley, to the car. No one may carry the stuffing but me. It's heavy. It must weigh 15 pounds. There is the thrill of peril; the stuffing must not be dropped. The aroma steams up, mixing with the crisp bite of the November air. Celestial choirs of angels break into song. Thanksgiving is good. Stuffing is good. And making the stuffing is great.
                              —From The Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 23, 1997