People will believe anything they see on TV

Great blue heron, Chicago Botanical Garden, 5/4/14

     Half of the 12.8 million people living in the state of Illinois would move away, if they only could find a way to break their chains. And about a fifth — 19 percent — say they plan to do so in the next year. Just load up the old Model T and head, well, anywhere. That happy place that isn’t Illinois; 17 percent believe Illinois is the worst state in the United States.

     Golly. 

     While the temptation is to deflect that with a quip — something like, “And after this past winter, who can blame them?”— it does seem a moment that calls for, if not soul-searching, then at least critical thought. We live in a hellhole, apparently, and didn’t even know it.

     My first instinct was to see if the poll was commissioned by Bruce Rauner. He’s staking his political future on convincing the electorate that our home state is a lousy place to live. Maybe he’s behind this.

Great blue heron

     Nope, Gallup poll. Fairly reliable. Illinois, dead last, with twice as many residents yearning for elsewhere than top-rated Hawaii. There, only 23 percent would like to move, though Gallup doesn’t record where. Where do you go to improve your lot if you’re already in Hawaii? Heaven, I suppose. 

     What’s going on here? 

     The Gallup folks wonder if it’s not due to the corruption that is uncovered here (oh sure, blame the media...) I don’t buy that. While we do miss the money siphoned into the pockets of these crooks, is it a reason to move? Blagojevich was  embarrassing but did he really make you want to leave? I mean, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California and being shamed in the media for fathering a child out of wedlock with his maid, did people start fleeing California? And we in Illinois have to be tougher than Californians, annealed as we are by our annual five-month plunge into the subzero icy blast furnace that is winter. 

     Illinois isn’t the poorest state, by far. It’s flat, yes, but has a nice lake adjacent to the part where most of the people live, plus several significant rivers. I don’t want to start slagging other states, but the number of people “extremely likely to move” is 10 percentage points lower in Indiana than in Illinois: 19 percent here, 10 percent there. Really? Almost half? Have you ever been to Indiana? From the post-apocalyptic moonscape of Gary, where tearing down a single eyesore high-rise shell downtown is hailed as an elephant step toward renewal, to the anodyne nowhere of Indianapolis and everywhere in between. Start listing the cities in Indiana: Fort Wayne, South Bend, Muncie, Evansville. . . .  How far do you get before you rush outside and kiss the ground?   

     Maybe it isn’t that Illinois is so bad, but people here are simply ambitious. Part of ambition is dissatisfaction, yearning for something better, and that often involves vague desire to go somewhere else. We’re like the heroes in a Bruce Springsteen song — one from 30 years ago, I mean, when he was still good. Restless, with our tricked-out ’51 Mercury in the driveway, some babe draped over the bench seat, tapping our feet, sick of home, wanting to go . . . anywhere. I’d rather live hungry in Illinois and be restless, dreaming of a better life, than grow fat with contentment in Indiana.

     My theory? Two things at work. I still blame Rauner, no matter who did the poll. If you turn on a television during the past three months, you see what? Commercials from Bruce Rauner telling us how lousy Illinois is. That has to have some effect — people drive Kias and drink cotton candy-flavored vodka. They believe TV ads, no matter how dumb. Call it the Rauner Effect.

     Second is the Mountain Effect. The most popular states in the poll—Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado—have mountains, which Illinois certainly does not, and egos inflate at elevation. Maybe it’s the thin air. My folks live in Colorado, and I could be living in Colorado, too, but the people there are so filled with self-satisfaction it’s like they’re ready to pop. They sit at their outdoor cafes guzzling chai and adjusting their ragwool socks, talking about their last colonic cleanse and how great it was to do yoga at dawn at Burning Man. They give happiness a bad name. I would rather be miserably trudging through the killing wind of Chicago on the worst day of last winter, eyes cast down on my steel-toe Red Wing boots, than some sandal-clad Boulder barista blissed out and playing the pan flute on the Pearl Street Mall.

     Just 1,000 feet difference between the highest and lowest spot in Illinois. Four of our last eight governors went to jail; one is still there. Our next governor might be a sneering half-billionaire who believes complete lack of experience qualifies a man for a difficult job. So what? We’re a tough state for tough people. Those who count love it.

Want to be loved, Rahm? Learn from Rob Ford.

   Being Americans, we tend to ignore foreign countries, even a nearby foreign country like Canada, which is just to the north of us, for those uncertain on geography. Maybe especially a foreign country like Canada because, really, what's going on in Canada? Not much.
    Except for Rob Ford, of course, the mayor of Toronto, who has "arguably become the most famous Canadian in the world," according to Robyn Doolittle, the Toronto Star reporter whose new book, Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story examines a man who is the refutation of every cliche about Canadians being dull and ordinary and passive and bitter and resentful and...well, you know. We all know about Rob Ford, blustering around with his various addictions, his cantilevered gut hanging out, like the fatter, drunker, less sophisticated older brother Chris Farley never had. 

Rob Ford

     Now Ford is in Chicago, supposedly, undergoing rehab, perhaps, at an undisclosed location. Or maybe he just passed through Chicago on his way to get rehab somewhere else. Or maybe he isn't in rehab at all, maybe that's just a ploy to get out of Toronto until the heat is off. Maybe he's a a party—that's more likely.
      But here's the interesting thing about Ford, in my view. The last poll I saw had him with a 43 percent approval rating. Still. Contrast that with Chicago's fitness fanatic mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose approval rate is 14 percent. So obviously these men aren't being judged on their personal lives. (Makes you wonder if all the chin music about the importance of politicians' characters, particularly during campaigns, is just a pretext for the media digging for private dirt, and for bitter candidate mudslinging. Maybe we don't really care how they behave; we just want the juicy details).
   

Rahm Emanuel

 We know what Rahm has done to garner disapproval: close schools without the requisite hand-holding and regretful clucking and cooing; try to fix the pension mess, which upset union workers who want those pensions; and in general struggling to solve the enormous woes of the city. That has made him unpopular, among the various groups whose ox would get nicked by his reforms. The mass of Chicagoans, whose future hangs in the balance, don't seem to care much. We'd rather go over the cliff than tighten our belts.
    That said, what has Rob Ford done to make himself popular? It can't be the boozing and drug taking, per se, right? 
    "To his loyal supporters," writes Doolittle, "Rob Ford is a man of the people, someone who has never claimed to be perfect and whose only goal is to defend the little guy; a politician who will return your call, look after your money and tell it like it is."
     That isn't quite the high standard that Canadians employ when, oh for instance, condemning the United States. There has to be more than that.
     "As mayor, Ford has had plenty of victories," writes Doolittle. "He repealed the unpopular vehicle registration tax, got the TTC designated an essential service"—TTC is the Toronto Transit Commission. In other words, he made the trains run on time— "and secured valuable concessions from the unions."
     Union concessions! Well, that ought to be encouraging to Rahm. The public may hate you for trying to fix the pension mess with the unions, but maybe if through some miracle you actually do it, it'll help your shoe-leather-high approval numbers. Or maybe that's just Canadians, who seem to have more of an interest in the real world and its problems than Americans, whose political system at times seems a noxious blend of complete hallucination, blind pig ignorance and concentrated spite.
      Still, there has to be some lesson here for Chicago's mayor. Maybe get himself video-taped—not smoking crack, of course, too out of character and it might affect his blood-oxygen levels during his next Triathlon. But maybe...eating a hot fudge sundae at Margie's Candies. A big smear of chocolate around Rahm's mouth, drinking from the little stainless steel pitcher, moaning with pleasure....
     I mean, at this point, it couldn't hurt him. Eight hours of crisply-photographed murmuring into a cell phone in the back of a black SUV and reading to kindergartners in CNN's "Chicagoland" only made his popularity problem worse. We need grainy video, late-night Rahm, biting into a jaw-distending Sptritzburger, grease running down his chin. The image that Rahm wants us to see—Rahm Emanuel, hero—isn't going to help him.  That's the Rob Ford secret. Voters don't want leaders who think they're heroes. They don't want iron disciplines multi-millionaires with the body-fat index of a hyena. They despise arrogance because it jabs a stick into their own desperate sense of unworth. They want to be led by regular joes, by human beings, even flawed human beings, even complete fuck-ups. Maybe especially complete fuck-ups. Gives 'em someone to feel superior to. People love that. A word to the wise....

Saturday fun: Where IS this?

     Two theories: one, I somehow managed to wander around the Loop for the past 20 years and just never notice this enormous hunk of, er, modern art prominently displayed in the lobby of one of our better-known downtown buildings. 
      Or two, I have seen it before, but my mind, in some kind of natural protective mechanism, just wipes itself clean of all memory of it, hitting some kind of mental reset button, perhaps during the REM sleep cycle. 
      Now regular readers know that I sometimes look askance at public art. But the Picasso in Daley Plaza is the Pieta compared to this thing, and Dubuffet's Snoopy in a Blender in front of the Thompson Center is the Venus de Milo.
      So the standard question: Where is this? Plus two bonus questions: 1) what is it? And 2) what do you think of it? And since the subject is art or, rather, "art," the winner will receive one of this blog's fine, limited edition posters, suitable for framing. 

Another few inches down the slippery slope

     A bad guy does something bad. It hardly matters what. He robs a bank. That’s it. He robs a bank, at gunpoint, and now he’s standing on the sidewalk. One hand holding the big bag of loot with a “$” on the side; other hand whips out his smartphone and calls his accomplice to bring around the getaway car.

     Only there’s something wrong with the phone, a short circuit. The phone explodes. Blows out an eardrum. The bad guy’s writhing in a pool of blood when the cops screech up to haul him off to the hospital, then jail.

     We’re all happy, right? Justice done. Bad guy caught. Robbery thwarted. The world made better. On to the next topic . . . lunch.

     Oh wait. There is a qualm, one single, lingering, nagging little problem with this satisfying scenario. That robber’s phone. Why did it explode like that? What does it say, perhaps ominously, about my phone? Might it explode, too, not when I’m robbing a bank, but while I’m doing some mundane, good-guy activity? That’s a tad worrisome.
     The above summarizes my reaction to the Donald Sterling scandal, where—to summarize for those reading this in 2026—the owner of the LA Clippers basketball team, a nasty, despised billionaire (is there any other kind?) with a long history of racial callousness was recorded telling his much younger female pal not to take her black friends to games. On Saturday, it was broadcast on the celebrity dirt website TMZ, and there was a day or two of shock—shock!—that somebody could hold these opinions. Then Adam Silver, the new head of the NBA, banned Sterling from games for life, fined him $2.5 million and pushed him to sell his team and, I guess, slink off into the shadows so he will trouble us no more.
     All richly deserved, by all indications. If there are any mitigating circumstances—his work tutoring puppies, perhaps—no one has stood up to cite them. And I'm certainly not defending Sterling. The various complexities—for instance, the recording perhaps coming from a maybe mistress (or "archivist" she claims) being sued by his wife to regain whatever baubles Sterling lavished on her to entice her to keep his company (or his documents).
     But. It's the swift journey from private slur to public destruction that gives pause. What exactly is the new social standard here? Because most people are not tuning forks of consistency and unblemished civility. They say stupid, rude things in private. They make mean jokes and, I imagine, speak to their husbands, wives, lovers and archivists in a way they don't want on TMZ.
     This issue echoes beyond aged bigots. Just as this sordid saga was unfolding, the U.S. Supreme Court began deciding under what circumstances the cops can take your cellphone and squeeze out the many secrets it contains, then prosecute you for them.
     I don't want to get all 1984 doom and gloom here. Society has a way of balancing as we adapt to our pocket miracles. A few junior high school Romeos get prosecuted for pornography after sending nekkid photos to their Juliets, but eventually we realize this isn't the best use of the legal system.
     Heck, maybe shaming via smartphone, if indeed Sterling's rant was recorded on a phone; it's murky now, will turn out to be a good thing. If enough jerks are ruined by recorded misdeeds—the mayor of Toronto is finally getting help now that another video supposedly showing him smoking drugs has surfaced—enough careers torpedoed and money lost, maybe people will behave. Once God was watching over us, and we did right because He knew every wrong act, every truant thought that crossed our minds. Now everyone has an iPhone or a Galaxy, and if Rahm Emanuel picks his nose in public, he risks becoming the Booger Mayor.
     So let's all line up in the street with our pitchforks and issue a rousing "hurrah" as Sterling is paraded past, straddling a rail. No loss to me—I never heard his name before a few days ago. But as we return to our cobbler's benches and chicken coops, we should puzzle over that bothersome question: What is private? Does anything you say become a public statement that can wreck you just because someone else records it? Was there perhaps a teensy bit of transference in the swift justice meted out to Sterling? 

      We can't solve our racial divisions or address the skewed slaughter in our streets or fix our schools. But we sure can boot this racist into history over something he told his girlfriend and/or archivist. He seemed to richly deserve it. But maybe the next guy won't. Those glad it happened to him won't be so glad if it happens to them. I can't help thinking that this is one of those societal moments we will look back on with a shiver.

Knitting together the public and the private

     We leave the decoration of public space to others. The city, not us, puts up bus stops and rents out billboards on those bus stops. It plants trees and strings them with lights in the winter. In summer, building owners plant flowers and put out flags.
     We don't. We walk through, minding our business, occasionally glancing around. Picking up garbage on the street that you yourself did not drop is practically an unbalanced act. Planting a tree on the public way is probably a misdemeanor of some kind. 
     Occasionally an individual will embellish a public space -- those memorials you see on highways marking where people have died in road accidents, whitewashed crosses and teddy bears and displays of sad plastic flowers.  It shows just how reluctant we are under normal circumstances to project ourselves into the public sphere, that it requires a terrible tragedy to move someone to decorate the side of the road. 
     Most folks, that is. Artists, however, take a different relationship to common space. Enjoying the freedom that creativity brings, and a certain degree of expected boldness, they understand that they can, if they choose, contribute to the beauty of our urban landscape, though the rest of us don't always appreciate it when it takes the form of, oh for instance, graffiti.
      In 2012, Pete Dungey, a British artist, created what he called "pothole gardens" -- little plantings in what are normally eyesores and dangers. It was part of a project he named, delightfully, "Subvert the Familiar," an important role for art.    
     In that same spirit, I noticed and admired this pink and blue striped handle cover that somebody knitted for the Big Belly garbage compactor at the corner of Madison and Wacker Drive. It was not an accidental act. Somebody had to conceive it, create it, and affix it to one of the corporate garbage cans that represent the fire sale sell-off of Chicago's infrastructure. I admired that it was so subtle. It wasn't showy. It was just there.
     What's the handle's purpose? Hell if I know. To pad and protect the fingers of those throwing stuff away? To look pretty? To get people like me thinking? Something else? I hope there isn't some common, well-known, prosaic explanation. "Geez, Neil, those are the pink and blue knit handle cozies that Girl Scouts have been putting on garbage can handles for years. Where have you been?"
      I noticed the knit cover on Sunday, on my way into the Lyric to see "The Sound of Music," and instantly quizzed its PR staff, wondering if perhaps it was some Austrian decoration—the trashundrecepticalmittenfruppy—they had put out, in some unfathomable cross-promotion of the musical. No, not them, they said. 
     The subject didn't weigh on my mind. But I did think about it, trucking south on Wacker Tuesday, and was pleased to see it was still there, not a tatter shred, but quite intact. The power of yarn. One reasons we usually don't arbitrarily decorate public spaces is the assumption that our loutish fellow citizens would destroy whatever we do, for the sheer joy of destruction. But the handle remained, at least for two days, perhaps because few noticed it, perhaps because those that did got into the unexpected whimsy of the thing and let it be. I like to think that is a factor. 

Update:

     When I wrote the above, I measured the odds of hearing from the person who knit this, decided they were slight, so didn't bother appealing to the public for an explanation. What I didn't realize—duh—is that there are very few isolated expressions of individuality nowadays that can't be immediately slotted into a movement, a genre, a term. In this case, it is "yarn bombing," or ... ready? ... "guerrilla knitting," and there are far more elaborate examples to be found around Chicago, such as these at Logan Square. The practice has its own Wikipedia page, which trace the practice back to the 1990s, and shares some clever examples, such as wrapping a tank at a military museum in Germany. 
     I wouldn't mind hearing from a yarn bomber (nice to hear that term given a new meaning) about the appeal, though a very good guess immediately springs to mind. People who knit, who like the physical act of knitting, are faced with the challenge of what to do with the result of their passion. There are only so many loved ones who are willing to accept so many scarves, sweaters, afghans, etc. Thus yarn bombing seems to offer a perfect solution. Takes a lot of knitting to wrap a tree. Plus you get to be artistic and neighborly too.

Making sure the jets have clean fuel to gulp

    This might seem out-of-left-field. But there is a simple explanation: the Navy asked. Would I like to talk to a sailor from Chicago? Of course I would. And for you PR sorts, a reminder of the importance of timing. As I was finishing writing this Tuesday, I heard from the Navy Office of Community Outreach in Millington, Tennessee: would I, they wondered, like to talk to a sailor from Chicago? It never rains, it pours. This one aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. Normally I would love to, I wrote back, but I've got one, running tomorrow. Must be some kind of military charm offensive. Though there is an important lesson, when it comes to dealing with the media. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask. At the right time, of course. 

    Aviation fuel is not spring water. It doesn’t travel in small plastic bottles but through miles of often corroded pipelines, or it’s pumped into greasy truck or railcar tankers, or transferred to enormous, not-quite-clean ocean-going tankers. 

     When the fuel gets to its destination, for instance the USS Abraham Lincoln nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, you cannot simply pump it straight into the belly of a jet fighter about to take off. Not if you don’t want something bad to happen, like the water and sediment the fuel has picked up in its long journey fouling the jet’s engines while it thunders across the carrier deck.

     “Any bad fuel, and the plane will go directly in the water,” said Chief Petty Officer Cory Lee, a 1991 Taft High School graduate who has served his country in the U.S. Navy for the past 22 years and is aviation boatswain’s mate in charge of fuel aboard the Nimitz-class carrier. That means he’s responsible for making sure the fuel doesn’t clog airplane engines or cause any other of the other deadly problems that can occur if it isn’t handled with shipshape precision. 

     His job is “real simple,” Lee said.

Chief Petty Officer Cory Lee

     “We receive fuel out at sea, from a refueling ship,” he said over the phone. “We bring it onboard; we have approximately 187 tanks on the ship. We put the fuel in the tanks where we purify it, send it through a filter, just like at a brewery — the same concept as Budweiser. When we send it up to the flight deck they get clear, bright fuel.”  

While cleaning the fuel, it takes vigilance to make sure it doesn’t blow up. “We have to take a lot of safety precautions,” he said. 

     Lee, 40, grew up on the West Side and didn’t have money for college. But he had a role model: his cousin, Jacqueline Williams, serving in the Navy. “She was telling me all the places she visited,” Lee recalled. “That kind of brightened my curiosity. So I joined the Navy right after high school.” 

     And did he see the world?
     "Oh yes, yes I have," he said. "A very large part of it. Not everything, but I saw a lot."
     And his favorite parts?
     "I would say Spain," Lee said. "Spain and Italy. I like the scenery."
     He gets back to Chicago about once a year to visit his mother, Delores Lee, who still lives on the West Side, and she appreciates what the Navy did for her son.
     "It's helped him, helped him out a lot," she said. "It made a man out of him. I'm proud of him. I tell him all the time."
     The Abraham Lincoln is 25 years old, and saw action around the world, particularly during the Iraq War. It was on its flight deck that President George W. Bush landed for his famous "Mission Accomplished" visit. The ship went into port in March 2013 for three years of top-to-bottom overhaul, from the reactors to the hull, to carry it through the next 25 years. The 2,500-person crew is living ashore - Lee has a house in Newport News, Va. - though several hundred crew members redeploy to various Navy ships to keep their sea legs.
     Lee oversees rebuilding the fuel system.
     "Right now we're in a shipyard environment," he said. "Taking a lot of pumps, motors and valves out of the system, remanufacturing all the equipment."
     The overhaul will take until fall 2016 to complete. By then Lee plans to be close to retiring from the Navy.
     "I'm actually about to graduate with an MBA from St. Leo University," said Lee, who earned his undergraduate degree from Park University while in the Navy. "That takes a big portion of my off-duty time."
     What are his plans when he gets out?
     "I want to open up my own business, maybe financial management," he said.
     What, I wondered, has the Navy taught Lee that he'll bring to his civilian career?
     Lee replied by speaking about the dangers of walking around an active flight deck.
     "You can get sucked into an engine," he said. "If you're real tall and walk without bending, a helicopter can chop your head off. Everyone has to look out for each other. And there's a saying on the flight deck: 'Keep your head on a swivel.' "
     In other words: Take care of your co-workers and be aware of everything around you.
     Good advice for business, and for just about everything else in life.

Oh no, he's at it again!

     A circle is the collection of all points on a 2-dimensional plane that are  equidistant from a center point. We are all familiar with circles: an LP record is a circle. A hula hoop is a circle. A wedding ring is a circle.
    Many organizations use a circle as their logo. Target, for one, or Pepsi. Imperial Japan used to symbolize itself with a red circle.   
     The circle is one of many shapes. Other shapes include squares, hexagons and crosses. 
     Like circles, crosses are also popular symbols—Christian denominations use crosses to represent their faith. 
     But not all symbolic crosses represent religious groups. Railroad warning signs use a St. Andrew's cross. The American Red Cross uses a Swiss cross. Imperial Germany used a Maltese cross and, when the Nazis assumed power, they seized a Hindu symbol,  the swastika, which is a St. Andrew's cross with each arm turned at a right angle.  
      Oh wait.... I'm in trouble again, aren't I? No, not because I compared LP records to a hula hoops.  But I just ... oh gosh ... compared the Christian cross to the Nazi swastika. I said ... in essence ... that all Christians are Nazis.
     If you're a nitwit, that is.
     Happily, I don't write for nitwits, despite the obvious profit in it. I couldn't do it with a straight face;  my sincerity would trip me up. 
     But I also don't control who reads this. Thus, for days now, in the weird Punch & Judy Show that passes for political discourse in the United States, a paragraph very much like what I wrote above, from this column that ran in the Sun-Times April 18, has been bouncing around the lower rings of the Tea Party media hell, as they try to get traction out of something that was inoffensive to regular folk.
    I was writing about a lady named Hermene Hartman, the publisher of a weekly black newspaper, an obscure throw-away, who nevertheless was given $51,000 by Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to host a few parties. Then she sang his praises in print, never mentioning the cash she pocketed. My colleague Mike Sneed wrote a column deliciously revealing this stunning ethical lapse. The subject was irresistible, unfortunately.
     I didn't want to merely pile on, so I tried to give a little context. Hartman certainly didn't invent the practice. The powerful have always been buying support in the black community. Rauner isn't the first. I talked about black aldermen who spoke out against Martin Luther King. 
     At this point, for the column not to explode in my face like a loaded cigar, it was crucial to show that I wasn't just picking on black people, wasn't singling them out unfairly for special criticism. So I wrote this: 

Let me be clear: As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go. The Republican Party will deny global warming until the ocean laps at Pittsburgh simply because doing something about it crosses the immediate profit of the coal burners and oil companies and carbon spouters who write the checks. No tobacco company has any trouble finding people who, at a hefty salary, stare into the camera and say no, all that lung cancer stuff is just fiction.

     I included Jews intentionally, to show that I wasn't saying anything about African-Americans that I wouldn't say about my own team. There are bad apples in every basket. That isn't something that can be argued, in my view. It's just true.  
     But sometimes, trying to dodge the bicycle messenger, you step in front of a truck.
     To me, the most significant thing was not what it said about Hartman, who hardly matters, but what it said about Rauner, tossing fistfuls of money at a nonentity. If he wastes his own money like that, I wondered at the end of the column, what's he going to do when he gets his hands on yours?
      Reaction was muted, at first. Hartman of course called me to complain that I am a racist. (If I'm a racist, then why tell me? What do you expect me, the big bad racist, to do? Agree with you?) A few Jewish readers took exception to my mentioning the fact of Jewish collaboration. Typical was this, from "L Weber":

Isn't there enough antisemitism in the news already do you have to add more?...
I'm glad I was brought up open minded and not a sheep
Maybe you enjoy stirring the pot of hate that already exists, I don't

      The old, "Let's try to look good for people who are going to hate us anyway," argument. I couldn't resist writing L Weber back: 

Do you really think anti-Semites are weighing the facts before them, and then coming to their conclusions? That if we put a pretty Jewish face forward, that somehow we will win them over? That is just so sad. 

     That was Monday of last week. By Tuesday it was past. A pleasant phone call from Rev. James Meeks, who I also mentioned in the column. He didn't talk about the sympathizer analogy, but rather wanted to be clear that he bought his own plane ticket when he visited Rauner at his Montana ranch. We talked for quite a while and said goodbye on friendly terms.
      What I didn't realize is that the Quinn campaign had tweeted my Rauner story. That is really what touched this off, not anything I wrote, but the Quinn team injecting it into the political distortion machine (thanks guys) and then, realizing it had promoted something with a bit of bite, trying to pull it back.  (Ham-handed. Don't try to claw back tweets. Drives folk crazy). The right wing media—Fox News, WLS, etc.—which already IS crazy, picked up, not on the fact that Bruce Rauner paid $51,000 for the friendship of a laughable nobody whose primary skill is a bottomless ability to be insignificant. No, what upset them was, well, let a Fox Nation writer describe it: 

Chicago Sun-Times readers were stunned last week to find that writer Neil Steinberg has penned a column comparing black supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis against their brethren.

      Fabrication. No Sun-Times readers beyond Hartman were actually stunned, and she was pretty dazed to begin with.  When people are reaching to be outraged, they tend to blur—in this case, blacks who take cash to support Rauner morphed into "black Republicans." Readers of this sort of thing made their own, further abbreviations, until I was being accused of calling blacks people Nazis.      
     I heard from mouth-breathing morons from Florida and Texas, none of whom had read the original column, but who were spouting outrage on cue—it's what they do, apparently— and wanted me to know just what they thought of somebody capable of, well, offending them in some manner.
      The paper, I was pleased to see, stood behind me, re-tweeting the original column while it racked up clicks like a geiger counter at Chernobyl.  Meanwhile, I controlled my breaths and practiced calm. I have been working at nurturing a true indifference to the public howl, and this incident felt like a satisfying step in the right direction. Almost a breakthrough. 
     I even took a little pleasure in watching the carnival of buncombe, to borrow H.L. Mencken's delicious phrase. My favorite example was an opinion piece on an Illinois Republican web site by a trustee in Will County's Wheatland Township and—miribile dictu—an actual black Illinois Republican, who started off decrying the "insult" of my column, admitted that it was an improvement over the standard description of black Republicans as "Uncle Toms" and then, toward the end, served up this:

     The Democrats owe their cronies and the unions their campaign promises first; the Black folks can get what’s left over –a few more weeks of unemployment, food stamps, and no jobs.
    The Jews in Nazi-controlled Germany had to wait in line to get their scraps, too.

    Someone comparing black Republicans to Jews in Nazi-controlled Germany! I considered demanding that she apologize, but decided the irony would be lost.
    Are you bored yet? I sure am. I don't know how people spend their lives puffing up false outrage. I guess it's the political version of slasher films—create a bad guy and then enjoy visiting on him the cruelty that supposedly so offended you, because he "deserves" it. I actually heard from a self-described member of the John Birch Society—on Twitter, I sometimes check, to see what kind of person is writing this poison—who called me a racist, among other things. You have to marvel at that. It almost made the whole experience worthwhile. 
     Of course Rauner tried to make hay with the non-issue. He has no background in politics, and doesn't know what he's doing, or what's important and what isn't. If he runs the state half as incompetently as he's running his campaign, we might all be in for trouble. I am, for the record, sorry I wrote it, though not because it offended the complainers, who live in a state of permanent offense anyway, lurching from one supposed provocation to another. Frankly, I wouldn't be sorry if what I wrote consigned them to the fiery pit for an eternity. But rather, I'm sorry because who wouldn't be sorry for accidentally setting off these assholes and then having to spend time gazing in horror through latticed fingers at their cramped little world? 
    Anyway, to sum up, a list of examples is not a "comparison." If I say that many things come in groups of a dozen—eggs, months, Angry Men—I am not drawing a moral equivalence between 12 eggs and 12 Angry Men. Nor between pizza and hula hoops, beyond their roundness. Nor between Christians and Nazis—so go find something else to get worked up about. Enough. I don't like writing about trivial subjects, and this is a truly trivial subject. But it's a Tuesday, and it was either this or the cool knit pink and blue cozy that I noticed somebody put on a garbage receptacle handle on Madison Street. We'll save that for later in the week. 
     In the meantime, Bruce, now I've grouped together, not only blacks who get paid to support you and Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, but record albums and Target logos, and the Christian cross with the swastika. That ought to keep your campaign busy until the summer.