"Death is not an event in life"

     Several months ago I gave a speech to a luncheon at Chicago's Standard Club. I didn't think much about the locale beforehand — the Standard Club was founded by German Jews, who thought highly of themselves, and used to keep out their unwashed Eastern European brethren. The line I like to float about the Standard Club is, "it's the rare Jewish organization that discriminated against Jews."
     That sense of smug jollity vanished when I walked in the lobby, and realized the last time I had been there, two years earlier.  Jeff Zaslow was in town, staying at the club. We were grabbing a quick lunch and met in the lobby. Despite his great success—author of "The Last Lecture" and other huge best-sellers—we managed to stay friends, I think, because we shared a certain level of workmanlike professional pride. We were two schleppers in the same trade, two Jewish wordsmiths, peddling our wares, shrugging and sighing and exchanging tales of the difficulty of pulling into a strange town with a handcart of sentences to sell. 
     When he died, in a traffic accident, two years ago today, I thought mainly of myself. I don't have a bunch of good friends, and now one of the best was taken. I wasn't going to write about it — I owed him that, not to turn him into material — wasn't going to go to the funeral. What would be the point? Jeff wouldn't be there, and I had only met his wife once. It wasn't as if she'd miss me.
      But Eric Zorn — a better man than I am — was going, and I would be damned if I was going to let him drive by himself to flippin' Detroit in this lousy February weather that had already killed Jeff. I didn't want him to go through it alone. So we drove out there, talking about Jeff, talking about lots of things, attended the funeral, which was gut-wrenching and beautiful, in turns, attended by a thousand people, and came back, 600 miles in one day. I'd like to say that the funeral gave some kind of closure, that I was glad I went, but it didn't and I wasn't. 
     The day after I returned, I was sorting things out, or trying to, and wrote the following column. Really just to make myself feel better. A strange column. Actually, it was even odder the way I originally wrote it. My relationship with Jeff was a joshing one, the kind guys will sometimes have. He was always more serious than me. I remembered him calling up, and I asked how he was doing, and he said, grimly, "Not so good — Randy's dying" — Randy Pausch, the Carnegie-Melon professor whose parting talk was the subject of "The Last Lecture."
     "Well he better be dying," I replied — alway the weisenheimer — "or else you're going to end up weeping on Oprah's sofa." "The Last Lecture" is based on the idea that Pausch was dying, and if it turned out he wasn't, well, good for him, but it sort of kicked the book's entire premise out from under it. Maybe you don't think that's funny, but that's what kind of guy I really am, and Jeff tolerated it better than most. 
     In fact, the original ending of this column got sliced off by a concerned city editor.  It ended this way:

    It was only the next morning, waking up feeling a fraction of the chill that his close friends and loved ones will be feeling for years, a thought came that made me smile, one that might even have made Jeff smile, albeit while shaking his head: “If there were a God, it would have been Mitch Albom instead.”  Cold comfort, but a start.

      "It's like you were wishing he were dead," the horrified city editor said. 
      "Better him than Jeff," I replied. But I saw his point, and wrote the ending the column now has. Though I figure, with the more freewheeling ethos of the web, and on a blog that has nothing to do with the Sun-Times, officially, and with the passage of time, I can get away printing it now. I can't imagine Mitch Albom, Detroit sports columnist and author of "Tuesdays with Morrie" and similar treacle, will give a damn one way or the other. 
     Anyway, when I go, I'd want my friends—assuming I have friends, and I'm already one short–to remember me in some way. So I want to re-post this column from the Sun-Times, as a Yartzeit candle to Jeff, who was a really good and decent man, who left a void in my life. "It is not often," E.B. White wrote, "that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." "Not often" is a wild understatement. I'd say almost never.

     Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a list of numbered propositions, each leading to the next. Number 6.4311 begins, “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

     For the person who has died, that is. That person is whisked away to whatever reward or void awaits us after death.

     It is those of us who have not yet died who live through death, big time, who must cope with it, particularly accidental death, which radiates outward, sending shockwaves, first to those at the scene, stunned to find death intruding onto an ordinary day. Then to the officialdom who must deal with death regularly and handle the particulars. Then exploding into the lives of family, who suffer the most and, finally, the thunderclap reaches the outer world, where people hear it and look up, moved to the degree they knew the deceased.

     Jeff Zaslow died in a car accident Friday, as you’ve probably heard. Longtime Sun-Times readers will fondly recall his thoughtful, human and funny advice column that ran from 1987 until 2001, or his best-selling books such as The Last Lecture.
     I don't do grief well — I'm self-centered and over-analytical, a bad mix — and no sooner feel loss then immediately start questioning it, to see if it's legitimate. Jeff's death came as a sickening shock, yet I instantly pulled back, certain that I occupy too distant an orbit among his concentric circles of friends to be entitled to feel awful, which is reserved for his wife and daughters and family, the true epicenter of suffering. Any hurt I feel must be ersatz, overdramatic.
     No matter how I tried to focus my thoughts on others — Jeff's genius, the key to his life: he was a big-hearted, generous man, a true friend — I kept returning to my own experiences with him. Memories bubbled up, random stuff, as if my brain were venting everything it knew about Jeff Zaslow, from the fact that at birth, he was delivered by Dr. C. Everett Koop, the future Surgeon General, to his sister's hand-made picture frames, to his love of Bruce Springsteen — we once went to a concert together — to the day, almost 25 years ago, Jeff was being given his welcoming tour of the Sun-Times newsroom and I hurried over, curious to discover just what kind of idiot leaves a job writing front page stories for the Wall Street Journal to advise women how to get stains out of a broadloom rug on page 27 of the Sun-Times.
     If a Russian novelist tried to create two separate characters to split the spectrum of qualities a writer can possess, he might cook up Jeff (happy, concerned for others, frenetic, sincere) and me (melancholy, self-absorbed, shambling, sarcastic).
     Jeff wanted to help everybody. He held those enormous Zazz Bashes at Navy Pier because he got so many letters from lonely people, and wanted to fix them up with each other, to give each one a shot at the joy he found with his own wife, Sherry.
     I thought he was crazy. "Jeff," I'd say, "You're not a social service."
     When I got the awful news — we have the same literary agency — I dutifully phoned it into the newspaper. "Do you want to write something?" an editor asked. I said "No." The planet of my ego is such — think Jupiter — I knew it would be impossible to launch a tribute to Jeff without having it circle back and crash into myself.
     "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is the final line of Wittgenstein's book. Good advice. I wanted to honor Jeff by shutting up, an underappreciated art form.
     But silence felt even worse. We Jews bury our own, and standing at Jeff's graveside, mutely waiting for my turn with the shovel, I stared at my shoes and tried to block out the sound of his daughters weeping. "This is the worst thing in the world," I thought. "I hate this I hate this I hate this."
     Silence has no utility, it isn't a sharp enough blade to scrape at the icy loss that Jeff's death frosts over the world. I wish I could wrap this up tidily, with an inspiring thought that counterbalances the tragedy in the world and leaves you with a smile. Jeff was so good at that. Alas, he is not here, a hard fact that touches on the often cruel nature of life, one that we lucky enough to have known Jeff will struggle with for a long time.

It's a dirty, thankless task...

     At some point over the past several weeks of this endless winter, one of the nearly 1 million passengers who use the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus system every day contrived, in a manner best not contemplated, to transfer a wad of chewing gum from his or her mouth, to a spot on the floor toward the rear of one of the city’s 1,859 buses. It eventually became a quarter-sized black splotch.

     Now Venus La’V Caston has to clean it up.

     It is just after 11 p.m. in the sprawling CTA bus depot at 358 S. Kedzie, one of seven facilities around Chicago. It is where, after a day of navigating the salty slush of Chicago streets and ferrying passengers who — in another process best not considered — will leave soiled adult diapers behind, plus food wrappers, newspapers and all the more traditional dirt and trash, the city’s bus fleet is hosed down, scrubbed up, swept out, looked over, and in general readied to go through it all again for another day.

     This winter has been particularly hard on the cleanliness of public transit.

     “In the extreme cold, more people are using transit, more people tromping in snow, ice and mud,” CTA spokesman Brian Steele said.

    Plus more people seeking shelter.
    "We have seen increase in number of homeless individuals on our trains," he said.
     Buses arrive after their runs, which could be two hours or 12. The bulk roll in between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m., when ridership plummets. First, the buses have their coin boxes removed and spirited to safety by the city's revenue department. Fuel tanks are then filled, and then one of two cleaning regimens is enacted.
     There is the daily "general clean." The buses go through a power spray, like in a car wash, and workers with long brushes scrub the wheels. Inside, the garbage is first swept out, then the salt and grime mopped off the floors, and windows and surface wiped. The entire process — refuel, wash, clean — is supposed to take 15 minutes, though that is a flexible goal.
     "There's no quota because you never know what you're going to find on a bus," George Cavelle, director of maintenance, said.
     That list of found things is very long, not always something you want to read over breakfast, and includes a microwave oven.
     Periodically, there is the "deep clean" — think auto detailing, but for a bus — where the stainless steel is polished and gross blotches of gum removed. The CTA tries to deep clean buses and train cars every 14 days, though now with the heavy winter use that real figure is once every 20 days. The deep clean takes about four hours for a 40 foot bus, six hours for the 60-foot "accordion" bus, though again, that is an approximation, as some buses come in heavily abused, or damaged, or covered in graffiti, and thus take more time to get ready to go out again.
     If buses seem cleaner than L cars, there's a reason: They are. L cars get used more and cleaned less, with a cursory operator walk-through at the end of the line, and the same deep clean every two weeks, but no nightly general clean unless an L car is flagged as being in urgent need. The L also lost 65 servicers in a felon work program, because of union complaints, so they moved over to cleaning buses.
     Cavelle said he has instituted some efficiencies. For instance, previously garbage would be swept out the door of the bus and into the depot, in a pile, "and then they would come back later and spend an hour cleaning up the mess they had made," said Cavelle, who changed that. "We took a step back and said, 'Why are we doing double the work here?' Culture is always the hardest thing to change."
     Technology lends a hand. If you've noticed less graffiti scored into the windows, thank a peelable protective plastic coating that the CTA started putting over bus windows in 2010, plus as many as 10 cameras per bus.
     Several of those cameras blandly watch as Venus La'V Caston takes a bottle of Intercon Breakthrough, a citrus degreaser used to clean clogged drains and remove tar.
     "Just pour a little bit," she says, splashing the liquid on the splotch of gum. She takes a special tool — a little metal scraper with a grooved attachment that mirrors the grooved bus floor, and scraped away the gum. A few passes and it's mostly gone, a small victory in a tiny skirmish in a war that never ends.
     "Sometimes," says La'V Caston, 31, who lives on the West Side, "you have gum from back to front."

"Soon we will marry and our woes will vanish"

Isabel Leonard

     In desperate need of warmer climes, like most Chicagoans in this arctic February, or even a simulation of warmer climes, I slipped out of work Thursday afternoon and shivered my way over to the Civic Opera House, to plunge into Iberian sultriness for a few hours and, while I was at it, hear some music too. 
     The Lyric's new production of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" takes place—and don't feel bad if you didn't see this coming—in Seville, Spain, and before a note is sung, set designer Scott Pask's arching doorways, wrought iron flourishes, Spanish tile fountain and orange and yellow light help the audience escape our icy confinement, the frozen grey-white mounds piled like prison walls outside. 
    Perhaps because "Seville" contains some of the most familiar operatic tunes that an American of my generation can hear—the soundtrack from Warner Brother's classic 1949 Bugs Bunny short, Rabbit of Seville, which we practically listened to in the womb, absorbing repeatedly for years while sprawled on the living room floor in our jammies before Saturday morning television—the music seemed exactly right. That overture, and Figaro's first aria, racing and joyous, almost an aural cartoon, is why we start going to opera. As much as I thrilled to it—the overture, composed when Rossini was in his early 20s, sounds like something written by Mozart on amphetamines—because it was so familiar, what really caught my attention were the secondary aspects of the production: the set, the lighting and, particularly, the acting, which is not always a strong suit in opera productions. Often the performers do little more than just stand there, stiffly, and sing, which can be more than enough, but here the music is delivered with considerable comedic deftness and dramatic finesse. It isn't quite a musical number from The Carol Burnett Show, but that did come to mind.
     Right off the bat, director Rob Ashford serves up an earnest, shuffling motley of hired musicians—Count Almaviva's threadbare orchestra, here to woo the lovely Rosina (played by New York mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, a woman of considerable beauty.  She is actually the first character we see, from the back, standing on her guardian's balcony and the thought — perhaps better left unsaid — occurred to me that this alone would be enough to provide an afternoon's entertainment, and the fact that people would soon sing and move around and a performance would be put on was a lagniappe, a mere added bonus).
     She ducks back inside, alas, and the count, played by Alek Shrader, sets the tone with a truly funny comic preening, as he is torn between showing off his best profile—he's no slouch in the looks department either—to the aforementioned balcony, now empty, and twisting his head to see if his beloved is on it. The count's disappointment is our own.
   

Nathan Gunn

   The winter-numbed Chicago audience must have been as primed to enjoy itself as I was, because this is the first time in my memory that a scene change at the Lyric received applause—though admittedly it was quite a scene change, from the arched exterior of the home of Dr. Bartolo, Rosina's tyrannical guardian, to the inside, a smooth transformation of shifting wrought iron screens and ferns and silhouetted characters and orange light, which unfolded like a mechanical egg and was delightful. There was another great moment in silhouette—the entrance of Figaro, the "luckiest man alive," a resourceful ladies man and general fixer, trailed by five adoring misses, to sing his famous ode (click here to hear it and see the Lyric trailer)  to himself and his life ("Work is easy and fun"), a fast-paced patter song which reminded me that the swagger of rap music is only the braggadocio of Italian opera, updated.  Nathan Gunn is a likable rogue as Figaro—he had a Huey Lewis quality, for those up on their '80s pop, with the same hairstyle, the same smug, yes-I-am-good-looking twinkle of self-satisfaction.
     Though I generally prefer dark entertainments — give me "Faust" over "Cosi fan Tutte" any day — there was enough edge to keep the show from slipping into treacle, from an aria — la calunnia — in praise of slander, one noting the silliness of old men who marry, and a discourse on the limitations of opera, by the aforementioned coot, Dr. Bartolo, played with a pleasing mix of leaping randy menace and nodding flustered senility by Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli. 

Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader

     The happy ending goes on too long for my tastes — sort of a Wagnerian death scene, only joyous. Here people do stand around singing a tad too much, as if this ornate music box of a show were winding down a little early, and maybe a few turns of dramatic business, some additional directing, could have helped. That said, Act II contained two great moments that I will remember for the rest of my life.
     One was Rossini's storm, which takes place just before the count and the ever-useful Figaro arrive with a ladder to spirit Rosina away. There is no singing, no characters onstage at all, just billowing sheet-like curtains, the surging orchestra and furtive figures hurrying around at the back of the stage, flashes of lightning, a general sense of foreboding and drama, like a half-remembered storm from youth, swirling portend that peaked for a moment of unexpected ... well, something verging on terror, a quick intake of breath and then it was over, but a deeply affecting bit of stagecraft. That five seconds alone made me glad I came.
    The other moment came toward the finale, when Rosina realizes that the poor man she fell in love with is actually the wealthy and powerful count. She steps toward the audience and her face does the slightest of twists. Not quite a lifted eyebrow, but a tiny flutter of delight, a Scarlett O'Hara flash of congealed sauciness —a count! — that drew applause just for its sly perfection.
      That's how well-crafted the Lyric's production of "The Barber of Seville" is—the audience applauded a set change and a facial twitch. The music is pretty good too. 

Photographs courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago
     

Divvy Diary: Why did the rooster cross the Loop?

     This could have been written without the Divvy aspect, but people seem to have an endless appetite for anything involving the bikes, and I was riding one Tuesday when I met this man and his bird. Plus, I suppose, there wasn't a whole lot to say of interest, beyond the fact that I saw a rooster strolling down Randolph Street on a very cold February day in Chicago. 

     Once upon a time, I dreaded appointments at the University of Chicago. That meant driving the better part of an hour on the Edens, finding a parking meter for a couple hours downtown, doing a bit of work at the office, then jumping onto Lake Shore Drive, trying to avoid a ticket driving the ridiculously slow posted speed to Hyde Park, then trying to find a spot there , knowing I’d have to reverse the process.

      Now I take the Metra Electric. It costs $3. The prospect alone is enough to make me happy. Then Divvy showed up in July, with a station at the Merchandise Mart, right outside my office door, and a station on Michigan Avenue steps from the Millennium Park Metra Station entrance. To be tucking in at the Quadrangle Club at noon, I need to take the 11:30 Metra Electric, and to get that, rather than walk 20 minutes, I can Divvy for six. My joy is compounded.

 

   On Tuesday, I return from Hyde Park, weighed down with books from Powell’s on 57th Street (I limit myself to three so I don’t buy 30, and build an extra 20 minutes browsing time into any campus visit). At the station, I notice that someone in Metra sees to it, mirabile dictu, that there are real fresh flowers in a vase on the men’s room sink — purple daisies, yellow lilies and carnations. Kudos from the press; with such details is a glorious city made.

     Outside, I yank a bike from its dock, walk it across Randolph, hop on and am pedaling west, about to turn north onto State when I see something that, in 30 years of wandering the Loop, I have never seen before: a rooster. An orange rooster. Just standing at the corner, as if waiting for a bus. I pull onto the sidewalk, set the kickstand, and take a few pictures, doing my reporter thing. The rooster did not seem to belong to anyone, but a crowd had gathered.
     “I’m from the city. I’m not used to live animals on State Street,” exuded Erick Russell, a passerby. “I didn’t know roosters were so pretty,” said another pedestrian.
     On the ground was a piece of cardboard, a sign, and I figured its owner must have stepped away. It occurred to me that, this being downtown Chicago, leaving a $1,200 bike unattended with my REI bag bungied into the front carrier, was an unwise practice. So I rolled it three yards away to another Divvy station right there, slammed the bike in and grabbed the bag, only to realize I had managed to trap the strap in the station’s docking mechanism (Practical Divvy tip: Remove personal items from front rack before docking your bike).
     In the time it took me to fish out my fob, the imagined scenario formed clearly in mind: The strap of the bag remaining jammed the mechanism, the bike refusing to budge. The panicked call to Divvy. The 20-minute wait for the van to arrive. The grinning mechanic, a young man in a jumpsuit, greasy hair falling in his face, using exotic tools taken from a case, a crowd gathering, while I stand helplessly by, the rooster pecking derisively at my ankle.
     “We had another elderly gentleman get his suspenders caught in the docking port once,” the Divvy repairman would drawl, concentrating on the mechanism. “Somebody called the police instead of us. Poor guy had his pants half off by the time we got there. Can’t figure out how he did it, or why he was on a bike. These old people,” a quick glance in my direction, “don’t know when it’s time to give up the trappings of youth.”
     In the real world, I pulled the bike out, freed the strap, jammed the bike back in and turned to meet Jose, the owner of the rooster, whose name is Garfield, after the park where they live.
     “I found him in the park,” said Jose, who declined to give his last name but said he is 48. His breath was perfumed with a scent I will call eau de booze. “I’ve had him since he was a baby.” He held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.
     Jose had a battered black rolling bag and explained how when the bird becomes cold, he stashes him in the bag to warm up. They sleep together in the park, which is a problem because the rooster, which is 7 months old, is not housebroken, evidence of which Jose indignantly showed me on his jeans. He has been homeless for five years, since being injured, he said, and he turned, lifted his shirt and displayed a long scar down his spine.
     The rooster definitely drew a crowd, and made me think of beggars in Paris, who often pair with cats, knowing that humans feel pity toward animals far more readily than they open their hearts to other humans. I gave a buck toward the upkeep of the bird, wished them both well, freed the bike I rode in on and was on my way again.

A conversation on matters racial

    What is racism? It isn't just knee jerk hatred of some group, but an entire framework of perception or, rather, misperception. Not just ignorance, but a forced skewing of the world, a filtering, to keep the despised category viewed negatively. Thus, for instance, Holocaust denial. Since the ultimate atrocity runs the risk of casting Jews in a poignant light, as victims of an incredible wrong, perhaps even deserving of sympathy, it's easier to wave it away — never happened, another Jewish lie — than try to grasp its implications.
     Racism leads to a fixed gaze at the negative qualities of the feared minority, and a dismissal of positive qualities. We saw that in the "English only" crowd which complained about a beautiful Coke commercial that ran during the Super Bowl Sunday, and featured immigrants enjoying regular activities while singing "America the Beautiful" in a variety of languages, which is anathema to those locked in their own white bread box. It boggles my mind that anyone would be so ignorant and twisted and oblivious as to object. But they did. 
     Yesterday's post, and column in the Sun-Times, was about one of the more puzzling realities in our society. Why is there so much poverty and dysfunction in African-American urban society, when other groups, even foreign-born blacks, come to this country, adjust, and thrive? What holds African-Americans back? The column touched upon an experiment that seems to demonstrate that impulse control, key for making the sacrifices that helps a person, or group, accomplish goals, is more difficult when you believe the game is rigged. That seemed a hint at what is going on here.
     Most of my email was from people intrigued with the subject. Then there was this  reaction from a reader, who we will call only by his first name, Richard, since he seems to be an attorney, and therefore perhaps litigious:

It keeps getting harder to explain the failure of African Americans to succeed when other "groups" do so well. The current rationale apparently is that after 40 years of affirmative action, a trillion dollars spent on the War on Poverty and African Americans in all sorts of successful positions including POTUS, that as a group, African Americans haven't yet understood that the path to success is open to them. The 70% out of wedlock birth rate, school drop out rates and high numbers of blacks in jail are cited as things preventing success as if the blacks themselves had no role in creating those roadblocks in the path to success. Here is another theory. Blacks are held back because government is still treating them as if they can never succeed on their own. No one is coddling Asians, Indian Americans, Cubans etc. (BTW take the "America has been tough on blacks" element out of the discussion - where in the world, including Africa are blacks as a group successful by American standards?) If politicians want to fix this problem, quit making failure by blacks so expected and so comfortable.

   The key words in the above are "coddling" and "comfortable."  Richard seems to be arguing that African-Americans have it especially easy in this country. Affirmative Action -- an attempt to get blacks into colleges and jobs, is the reason there's a high incarceration rate among African American men.
    How to respond? The safe thing to do would be not to. "Thank you for writing," and leave it at that. But I'm always tempted to probe this mindset, and I write back to anyone who is halfway civil. He was civil, or trying to be. I replied:

 You think African-Americans are coddled in this country? Thanks for writing.   NS         

    He answered:

           I think they are treated like children. 

    Again, I was tempted to end the conversation. But he at least was talking. I thought a moment, then wrote:

That all depends on how you treat your children. Welfare was corrosive, but in  case you haven't noticed, Bill Clinton got rid of welfare. Anyone who thinks that black Americans have it cushy and thus deserve whatever they get a) doesn't know what life is like outside of their cocoon b) already has hatred in their heart and is trying to rationalize it by blaming the victims. Thanks for writing.

     Richard was not about to back down. He replied:

So a person who thinks lowered expectations for blacks is holding them back - not an inability to see there is a path to success for them in America - is either a) ignorant or b) racist? Pretty standard response when argument fails.

    Again, I try not to waste time engaging with people who cannot re-evaluate themselves, and who dismiss your sincere beliefs as the "standard response." But the inconsistencies in his reply, its general tone of Fox Newishness, and the fact he, sadly, speaks for multitudes, were overpowering. I wrote:

"I think they are treated like children" says nothing about expectations, lowered or otherwise. Are we arguing here? What is your argument? I don't see one. I've made my argument, you replied that blacks have it cushy. I said you're mistaken, and now you're claiming ... what?

      At which point Richard fell silent, either satisfied in his intellectual victory, or not willing to waste further time grappling with the Lunatic Left. I don't often print replies -- the comments section is for that -- but I wanted to preserve our exchange, just because it reveals a mode of thinking that is no doubt common. The high crime on Chicago's South and West Sides, the brokenness of our schools, the plague of drugs, are because society makes it too easy for those who fail. Their lives are a bed of ease, of free breakfast programs and blocks of surplus government cheese. If many black people don't do well, it's their own fault, and the society that shoved them into that box can sleep easily, knowing it has done all it can and its generosity was met with grinning abuse. All those after-school programs, the prenatal care — that's why we don't have more black fire fighters. We've made being in poverty in Englewood such a sweet deal, that nobody can stir themselves to try to escape it. I wouldn't think anybody in the world would believe that, just as I never imagined that the Coke commercial would send xenophobes howling to the ramparts. But it did, and obviously they do feel that way. The point of the column is that a roadblock to African-American success is that, no matter how they strive, society will often be arrayed against them, casting their successes as undeserved freebies, their sufferings as self-inflicted. I think Richard's perspective sheds light on the validity of that fear.

What marshmallows tell us about failure

     More than 40 years ago, a psychologist named Walter Mischel gave children a test that was very simple yet was to become one of the most famous experiments in psychology. 

     He offered the kids a choice: Enjoy a treat now — a cookie, a pretzel — or wait and have twice as much of the treat later. The experimenter left the child alone for 15 minutes with the goodie, often a marshmallow, and the test became commonly known as the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.

     Mischel and his colleagues then tracked the children over years, and what they discovered was that those who waited to get double the sweets did much better in life — in school, in the workplace — than those who broke down and ate the initial treat. 

     That makes sense, when you think about it, since delaying gratification is the ladder you need to get most anyplace worth getting to. It’s what lets you study instead of going out, lets you bypass the alcohol and drugs that might feel good now but extract their penalty down the road. It’s what lets you nibble your salad every day, knowing how good it’ll feel to be thin in six months.

     The study gets mentioned from time to time. Yale Law professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in The New York Times at the end of January mentioned it again, in a thoughtful essay wondering why some groups in America do well and some don’t. 

     It isn’t a question of race, they argue. Indian-American families earn double the national average. Asian immigrants jam prestigious schools.
     They maintain that the combination of pride and insecurity that comes with being an immigrant is key: "Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry."
     Coming to a new place, you have a sense of pride, even superiority, in the people you left. Being in a society ready to ignore your kind or push you aside gives you an insecurity, a drive to prove them wrong.
     To these two qualities, the authors add a third: gratification control. (Their essay is adapted from their forthcoming book, "The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.")
     Toward the end of the article, the authors turn their attention toward something that has always puzzled me: why some ethnic groups overcome the odds and bigotry arrayed against them and do incredibly well, yet large communities of African Americans remain stuck in poverty. It isn't a simple matter of encountering racism — Haitian immigrants come to Miami and do far better than blacks already there. Yes, African Americans faced or are facing cruel and complex social pathology, which the authors list, in part, as including "slavery, systematic discrimination, schools that fail to teach, employers who won't promote, single motherhood and the fact that roughly a third of young black men in this country are in jail, awaiting trial or on probation or parole."
     And then they invoked the marshmallow experiment, writing:
     "If members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don't think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control. Researchers at the University of Rochester recently reran the famous marshmallow test with a new spin. Children initially subjected to a broken promise — adults promised them a new art set to play with, but never delivered — almost invariably "failed" the test ... By contrast, when the adults followed through on their promise, most kids passed the test."
     That's it. That's why, even as the outward restrictions of institutional racism slowly fade in this country, mass African-American poverty persists even as other racial minority groups arrive on our shores, collect themselves and thrive. The idea — deny gratification now, work hard, study hard and your rewards will come — is a much tougher sell on the West Side of Chicago. It seems a lie because, for many, it is a lie, particularly in this economy, when working hard and getting an education is not necessarily a roadmap to a successful future, no matter your race.
     So while a Korean immigrant can come to this country, open a business and work hard, convinced the American dream is waiting, many African Americans trying to do the same face a double bind: Not only must the path to success be open to them — when so many times before it has been blocked — but they must also believe it is open to them. Otherwise, they face a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure that scientists can measure but politicians can't fix.

Meh: This year's Super Bowl commercial fall flat.

     The majority of sporting events viewed on television in the Steinberg household are Bulls basketball games, and usually we start watching 15 minutes or so after the game begins, which means that, through the miracle of DVR, my younger son, who jockeys the remote, can fast-forward through the commercials.  

      At first, I would argue that we should watch them —I don't watch much TV, and am interested in what advertisers are ballyooing and how they are doing it. Commercial are  fun, or can be. But I lost that argument, and now just sort of gaze wistfully at the images flashing past. Though to be honest, since a significant percentage of all commercials on TV are those horrendous AT&T "In my day" ads, I don't feel that bad, since every one of those missed is a minute added to your life. The only time I make him stop and back up is when Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner has another commercial claiming the multi-millionaire is a normal person, and that government is the one area in life where having no experience whatsoever helps you succeed. Those I want to see.
     The Super Bowl was an exception — here are where the costliest, most seen commercials on TV make their debut, and since I do think advertising is an art form, or can be, I wanted to watch them. So I saw them all.
     Meh.
     Few even reached the level of "good." Radio Shack had a cute spot on the theme, "The 80s called, they want their store back" that featured 1980s cultural figures — Hulk Hogan, Twisted Sister, Mary Lou Retton — ripping a store apart and hauling it away. The ad not only was clever, but addressed the central problem of Radio Shack—it is indeed stuck in a time warp, and since they can't change the name — Computer Shack? I don't think so — a store makeover is the next best thing.
     What else? Coke had an emotional tribute to immigration, with various American minorities singing "America the Beautiful" in a variety of languages while engaged in ordinary activities, that was moving but probably flew past most viewers, except of course for a few bigots who were appalled.  Budweiser scored with its puppy-and-Clydesdale love story, though really, when you trot out puppies, it's cheating. Audi had a funny commercial featuring a horrendous mix of a big and little dog, the "Doberhauhau,"  though its point "Compromise scares us too" is sort of a strain (though credit to Audi for creating an actual parody public service spot, not seen during the Super Bowl, that featured Lilith Fair stalwart Sarah McLachlan). Which is a general problem that the automobile ads have. Even the effective ones had little to do with cars, and half the time you forget which make was behind the commercial, though Maserati's was strange enough to stand out, with a feral child making a speech about small people climbing out from the shadows to claim their due: memorable, but in a bad way.
      While leads to the Bob Dylan ad for Chrysler, a follow-up from the excellent 2011 Eminem commercial for Detroit in general and the Chrysler 200 in particular. But while that ad had drama, and impact, and beautiful scenes of Detroit. Dylan's begins with, er, Dylan, a black-and-white photo of the back of his bushy 1960s head, and the fall-flat-and-lay-there question, "Is there anything more American than America?" (Why no, Bob, I guess not. America is the most American thing there is. Why?) By the time present day Bob steps out of an old-fashioned elevator cage, looking around the eyes like a transvestite at his day job and sounding, with his grizzled drawl, a bit like Albert Finney in "Big Fish" -- "American prahhd" — I remembered that nothing guarantees failure quite so much as trying to ape your past successes.  The commercial didn't make me think about Detroit cars so much as think about Bob Dylan, and who wants to do that? Like Detroit of 1995, he's been coasting for decades on past success, trying to pretend his various misfires didn't happen.  Maybe people a few years older than myself have this enormous store of goodwill for him, and will be happy just to lay eyes on the guy. But to me, he's the singer who put out the superb "Blood on the Tracks" in 1975, followed it up with the less good but still alright, "Desire," and "Hard Rain" and then found Jesus and became a parody of himself.  It wasn't quite Chrysler having Woody Allen narrate their commercial, but in the same realm of creepy old recluses you don't want to find prowling your living room. 
    But we've strayed from Super Bowl commercials. The Bud Lite "Are you ready for whatever happens" fantasy date went nowhere — again, the creepy Arnold Schwarzenegger in a wig playing ping pong probably seemed wild and fun on the storyboard, but was just weird and off-putting (though I liked Lilly the Llama, not enough to redeem the ad). 
     This was a year when the football game was far better than the commercials, though given that the game was a 43 to 8 blow-out that the Broncos were losing from the first play, that isn't saying much.