What will become of the divided city?

 

  

     Politics is local. It is also eternal, in that the dynamics that shape one time are invariably mirrored in the next, century after century. We think we've come so far and then, looking back, realize we're still where we started.
     Florence in 1300, for instance, was divided between the grandi—the big fish—and the popolo, aka, everybody else, as Prue Shaw neatly puts it in her vastly enjoyable new book, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. That passage had already sparked Chicago in mind when Shaw served up this comment about Dante exploring the underworld:

     An urgent desire to know what lies in store for his birthplace is one of the driving forces of the narrative in the poem. Dante's anxious questioning of Ciacco, the first Florentine he meets in hell, encompasses ...the city's future: a che verranno/ li cittadin de la citta partita ("what will become of the citizens of the divided city?") 

     Exactly. "What will become of the citizens of the divided city?" Can a question evoke Chicago more poignantly? What will become of this most segregated city? Where are we going, separately and together? Do we have any control over where that place may be? 
     With this rattling about in my brain Monday, I gritted my teeth and finally plunged into Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic, which as been getting a lot of attention over the past week.  It's quite long — just as The Divine Comedy is divided into cantos, so the article consists of 10 "chapters." Though you can still polish it off in under an hour and I suggest you do so. 
    Coates lays out something that is clear to anyone who considers the matter honestly: that the poverty and dysfunction that are the hallmark of many black communities in Chicago and across the country are the direct result of slavery and its aftermath. That said, I used to think the idea of reparations was a futile symbolic hobbyhorse ridden by those horrified at actually addressing our problems concretely. Now, I'm not so sure.
    The piece is calm, historical, well-reasoned and — as so often is the case in the push for civil rights — argues for something both very small in practicality and enormous in meaning. There is a bill introduced into Congress every year, Rep. John Conyers' HR 40, which would study the issue of reparations. That's all. Not pay out a dime. Just explore the issue. It has never been passed, and Coates feels that it should be passed, not just out of fairness, but because our nation will never be whole, he argues, will never move beyond a past that still hobbles us, unless we do.
     I'll let you form your own conclusion, though I came away thinking this: a) he's completely right and b) he's appealing to the same sort of people who created this system in the first place. I hate to be cynical, but society has been divided, not just since Dante's Florence, but since Cain and Abel. It's hard to appeal to a humanity that isn't there.
    But if change is impossible, there's no need to talk at all. Things do change. At least they can. 
    His argument has a powerful twist that allows the thoughtful person to at least hope it could have traction. Usually, when discussing reparations, writers who bring up German reparations to Jews after World War II do so simplistically — Jews got it so why shouldn't we? Coates is far more subtle and informed — he points out how Germany's paying reparations to Israel not only helped Israel create its economic infrastructure, but helped Germany regain its lost moral standing in the world. Our nation, whose greatness has entered such steady eclipse, could use the idea of reparations, not to repair the wrong of slavery — that is patently impossible — but as a jumping off point to repair itself while salving an old injury. We wouldn't consider reparations for the benefit of blacks — not a strong motivational force in America today — but we might do it for ourselves.
    Then again, seeing how global warming — the ultimate self-interest — has been received, hope seems foolish. We haven't the heart to keep wealth from pooling obscenely now, never mind the will to consider the horrendous injustices of the past and the legacy that perpetuates them to this very day. The divided city will stay divided. Rahm will call Chicago "the most American of American cities" without ever considering whether that is praise or damnation.
     The past is a bad place, and many suffered there. You can't throw a dart at the globe and find a country that wasn't based on robbery and murder and wrong. And yet. Is there another nation where the past so manifestly deforms the present? Where ideals of equality are so baldly rendered into lies? Perhaps they all do. Coates makes reparations into a code for the notion that we truly are, as I said this morning when I put out the flag and recited the pledge, hand over heart, "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
     Pretty to think so, as Hemingway might say. 
     I'm not doing Coates' thoughts justice. The article centers on Chicago, and is well worth the time of anyone who cares anything about the city. You can read it by clicking here. 
   

Memorial Day 2014

Wyatt Eisenhauer

  

     Strawberries are ready for picking in mid-May in Southern Illinois. So when a U.S. Army car pulled up to the small gray house in downstate Pinckneyville almost exactly nine years ago, Gay and Fred Eisenhauer had dozens of people in their strawberry patch: workers filling orders and drivers who stopped to pick their own at 45 cents a pound. 

     The two soldiers walked to the front door, where they were met by great-niece Raygan, 6, who told them that Aunt Gay had said that anybody trying to come in the front door should be told to go around to the side. The worry: muddy boots.

     So the pair went to the side door and knocked again.

     “When I seen who they were,” Gay Eisenhauer remembers, “I said, ‘Raygan, go get Uncle Fred at the strawberry shed.’ ”  

     Together, they heard the worst news that a parent can hear.

      “Are you father of Cavalry Scout Wyatt D. Eisenhauer?” Fred was asked when he arrived. He said he was. “We are sorry to inform you that on May 19...” 

     Their 26-year-old son, a private first class who hadn’t been in the Army a year, had been driving a Humvee in Iraq when the vehicle hit an improvised explosive device. The two soldiers with Wyatt would remember only a flash and then waking up in a hospital in Germany. Wyatt didn’t make it. 

     How does a mother react to such news?

     “In all honesty, it felt like an out-of-body experience,” Gay Eisenhauer says. “I was just floating up over everyone looking down. It wasn’t real.”

     Gay’s next thought was of Wyatt’s older sister. 

     “I called my son-in-law at work and told him, ‘You have to tell Rebecca. You have to go to her.’ ”

     Rebecca Anderson lives a mile from her parents, across corn fields and a dirt road. She had just been picking at the strawberry patch but had gone home. 

     Her husband walked in, looking sick, pale. 

     “What are you doing home in the middle of the day?” she asked him. “Did you get fired? What happened?” 

     “Wyatt’s dead,” he said.

      Rebecca Anderson started screaming at her husband “It’s nothing to joke about!” she cried, hitting him. “It’s nothing to joke about!”

     Wyatt D. Eisenhauer was one of 3,527 American servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war, one of the approximately 840,000 Americans who have died fighting for this country since the Revolutionary War. 

     On Memorial Day, we are supposed to remember their enormous sacrifice and the loss felt by their loved ones, although it’s impossible to give those numbers any kind of meaning, since it’s hard to do justice to even one....
    "He was very inquisitive," says his mother. "He wanted to know how things worked and why they worked. He would take it apart, try to put it back together . . ."
     "He was kind of like a genius when it came to mechanical things," agrees Anderson. "He would build dune buggies, go-karts."
     Wyatt studied at Southern Illinois University. After school he started work. But his life didn't feel complete. His father, grandfathers, great-uncles had all served.
     "He talked about it for several years," Anderson says. "He just felt that he could give back. It would be an opportunity for him to do more, to do something really worthwhile."
     His sister was reluctant to see him enlist.
     "I was in support of him, but the selfish part of me, no, I didn't want him to go. I was going to miss him," she says. "My brother and I were really, really close growing up, being in a rural area, most afternoons and evenings and summers we were always together. He was my friend and playmate, growing up.
     "Family was really important to him," she continues. "He wanted to be married, always laughed and said, 'The reason I haven't got married yet is I want to find a woman (who will) give me 12 kids. I'll have a whole crew of them.'"
     There was a girlfriend.
     "He really cared for the girl," says Anderson. "Probably would have proposed marriage with her. I often wonder about that, think about what my nieces and nephews would be like."
     Wyatt Eisenhauer was buried on Memorial Day 2005.
     "Memorial Day carries a little extra punch for us," his mother says. A friend from high school played taps.
     Over the years, the family has thrown itself into work with organizations helping families cope with the loss of soldiers and helping vets when they return.
     "I think that we can become desensitized," Anderson says. "When you think of the troops, it's almost like they're not real, these people. For me, it was so important he didn't become a statistic, he didn't become a number. It's become a passion of mine to help all of our fallen to be remembered. To talk about loved ones. They each had goals, each had lives to live, loved ones who thought about them, personalities that were unique."
     Not everyone gets this.
     "Even some of your close friends misunderstand," his mother says. "Everyone tells you you've got to get over it, you've got to move on. The thing is . . . you don't get over it. That hole, you have lost a piece of your heart and nothing is going to fill that. Only Wyatt had that part of your heart . . . I don't understand when people say, 'You need to move on.' My question is: 'Tell me where to move to and I'll go there.' "
     When you talk to his family, it's easy to focus on that hole—the nieces and nephews who'll never be born, the engines that will go unrepaired. His family wants to talk about his life, and does. But the loss has a way of creeping back. The strawberry patch, for instance. You can't pick strawberries there anymore.
     "We haven't done it since he was killed," Gay Eisenhauer says. "We just didn't have it in us."

Children of privilege

Not our house

     When my older son was 16 or so, he would go to parties. I would usually drive him—kids nowadays don't seem to be as keen to get their licenses as my generation was.
     After following complex directions, down streets I'd never heard of, through winding subdivision I'd never been to, I'd finally edge the car onto a block far nicer than ours, a vista of sprawling new brick structures, big homes with elaborate stonework and landscaping, homes that didn't have crazy lawns mottled with crab grass and creeping charlie. The circular driveway, clotted with cars—none of them from 1991—wasn't black asphalt, dotted with potholes and crumbling to rubble around the edges, like ours. I would stop 4o feet from the tangle of arrival and he would hop out and race happily toward the festivities. 
     "Have fun!" I'd call wanly after him.
     Occasionally, picking him up, I would tiptoe into some marble foyer with a big brass chandelier, and catch glimpses of lacquer dining room tables and expensive newness. A clatter of music and voices would be heard, muted, from deep within the house. Eventually a mother or sister or some person associated with the house would take notice of me, cowering there beside a sea of shoes—the carpets!—and my boy would be summoned and we'd flee.
     After a while, I realized that while he was always going over to other places, he never had his friends to our house—our 1905 hand-made farm-house with straw insulation. Not a McMansion, true, but not without charm, of a sort. A certain down-at-the-heels beauty, if you ignore that the aluminum siding is not all of the same color and the floors are not exactly level. It has a spire—I consider the spire very fancy. Hand made by some farmer out of iron strips, as I could tell when it blew down in a storm. Kids would love partying at a place like this. It has a back deck and a yard and everything. 
     After my hints were ignored, I eventually came out and asked directly: Why did he not have his friends over our place? Why not host a party yourself? Fun!
     There was a silence. He looked at me with sorrow. Did I really not know? Must he actually explain?
     "Father," he began—he calls me "father," I believe, in an attempt to add some kind of classiness and dignity to our woefully hectic, scattered and down-market lives—"our house is not a nurturing environment."
      Ouch.
      "Not a nurturing environment?" I repeated, wounded. "In what way? In what way is this not a nurturing environment."
     "We don't have a pool table," he replied. 
     That helped. I smiled, relieved. Oh, well, yes, no argument there. Can't expect the gang to gather around the old chess table—Italian, drop walnut leaves, bought back when we had money. Not quite the same effect I suppose. Had I realized that a pool table was necessary to nurture children, I of course would have set my sights on one. But I hadn't and now it was too late. Too late for a lot of things. To take up ophthalmology, for instance, and make sure there was that pool table in the basement instead of just boxes and seepage. Thank God every other home in Northbrook already has a pool table, so my son can be a free rider. So at least they're available. He is like the barefoot child, cadging scraps from the back kitchen steps of chums. Maybe I could buy him a package of those blue cubes, used to chalk pool cues. He could bring one in a little box to his parties, his contribution to the cause. The Steinbergs, they may be down and out, but they have their pride...
     I mention all this to establish the mindset I brought to a conversation Saturday. Driving into the city for lunch—more on that later in the week—we were discussing the op-ed piece in that day's Sun-Times, about the phrase, "Check your privilege."
      My wife explained that this was merely an ad hominen attack, a way to silence another person by attacking who they are without considering the merit of what they have to say. Just because someone was well-off didn't mean they don't have a valuable perspective, she said. They should remember that when they met privileged people...
      The boys objected, both of them, immediately: we are privileged, they said. We come from a privileged family. We are of the elite.
     This struck me as ludicrous.
      "No!" I cried. "Nonsense! We are not privileged! We're frantically clutching to the last greasy rung of the middle class, a paycheck or two away from slipping off and tumbling into the abyss." I considered dragging George Orwell into it—what was his description of his family?  "Lower-upper-middle class." That sounds about right. Not "privileged." People of privilege have leisure. They take their summer vacations in Peru. They don't work every goddamn day of their lives like madmen bailing out a swamped and sinking industry as it settles into the water. People of privilege own lots of nice stuff. The drive German SUVs. They do not, as I did recently, get excited over buying a pair of Rockport boat shoes, so much so that they kiss the shoes. They yawn as the truckloads of goodies arrive. They live in big stone mansions with Doric columns and framed Bulls jerseys and wet bars and slate pool tables with red felt in their finished basements. Our basement is a dripping, dank, moldy, muddy horror show; like something out of a Stephen King story. I began to protest more, but was cut off. 
      "Educationally privileged," one of the boys elaborated, and the other agreed.
      "Oh," I said, stopped in my tracks. Dumbstruck. Educationally privileged. Well, umm, yes, that is correct. No argument here. We are educationally privileged. The Northbrook schools are beyond compare. In elementary school the teachers would send home poetry about how wonderful it was to teach our kids. They would bind their work into little books. My older boy's class took a trip over the summer. To China. Glenbrook South has a gross pathology class, taught at the hospital. My sons have not only never been in a fight in their entire academic careers, but I have never heard of a fight occurring. I suppose I could find fault, but it would take some hard thinking, and time, and I'm not sure what I would come up with. I suppose there has been a bad teacher or two over the past dozen years. So the schools are not perfect. But privileged? Absolutely. That would be the word. 
       I told the boys, well, yeah, in an educational sense, yes, definitely privileged. Conversation shifted to other subjects.
       I don't know why I was happy to hear them say that, but I was. At least they recognize it. And I guess I do too, now. Maybe I was just happy to be privileged in any sense at all. Privileged to have to work hard enough for stuff, to plan and wait and delay that, so when I do occasionally get something I want, I tend to really appreciate it. Maybe I was reminded of an essential truth. You can spend so much time looking up that you forget to look around. 

Saturday fun activity—Where IS this?

     It looks like an Apollo space capsule.
     But it isn't.
     It's displayed as if it were in a museum.
     But it's not.
     To see it you have to pay.
     But you're not paying to see it.
     It's in a very famous place.
     But it's not where it's supposed to be.
     What IS this thing?
     And where is it?
     Post your answers below.  The first correct answer will receive one of my dwindling stock of two-color, super-collectible blog posters. Good luck.

Jane Byrne turns 80

     Dear Mayor Byrne:

     Happy birthday! Early, I know — you don’t turn 80* until Saturday. But I want to deliver my best wishes ahead of the pack. 

     Since we live in a cynical age, I must swear, off the bat, I’m sincere. This is no Brutus-is-an-honorable-man take-down disguised as praise. Everybody deserves nice words on her birthday, and you more than most. You’ve already taken your blows. You came from the outside, defeated a sitting mayor who had fired you for criticizing his administration. Yes, there was that timely blizzard, which made your victory seem divinely ordained. But it was also your spunk. Or as you so eloquently put it, at the time, you “beat the whole goddamn machine single-handedly.” 

     That you did, that you did. After winning the Democratic primary in February, 1979 — the first time since 1927 that the slated machine candidate did not become mayor of Chicago — you crushed your Republican opponent, Wallace Johnson, winning 82 percent of the vote. I haven’t checked all history, but if there is a more lopsided victory here, I’m not aware of it.

     Winning the only electoral office you ever held escorted you into a spinning buzz saw. If Rahm feels cocky for surviving one major strike — the teachers — you endured three, one after another, in your first three months in office. You inherited a city awash in debt — jeez, does nothing change? — and so tried to cut back on cost-of-living increases, sparking the ire of city employees, who struck three consecutive months, boom boom boom. The CTA union in December, 1979, the firemen in January, 1980 and, in February, the teachers. 

     Madam Mayor — I can’t call you “Jane,” it feels too familiar and perhaps insulting, and I think you’ve been insulted enough. “Calamity Jane” and “Attila the Hen” and worse in a sexist era, slurs I’d be reluctant to reprint now, but your enemies did not hesitate to say then.

      And you made an A-list of bitter enemies.  Richie Daley was just the start.
     "An erratic and stormy person, she kept the city quaking during her first administration," wrote Nobelist Saul Bellow. "Appointees hired and fired without rhyme or reason whirled in and out of the revolving doors."
     That might have been true, but still, anybody Saul Bellow disliked is OK in my book.
     What do Chicagoans recall? You began the festival that got Taste of Chicago going. Millions have happy memories of standing in the middle of the street, licking barbecue sauce off our fingers, because of you. That's something. You started the revival of Navy Pier.
     You moved into the Cabrini-Green public housing project. It was a stunt, sure, but not a stunt we'd ever see today. Cabrini-Green is gone, and the poor people who used to live there . . . they sort of vanished, haven't they? I mean, they must exist, scattered in other places, but as soon as those high-rise projects came down, the city forgot their occupants. You, on the other hand, saw this intractable problem and tried to do something about it. You made it your problem. That took courage.
     That it couldn't be fixed, well, to me that is part of the Jane Byrne Lesson — the point of the story. We love outsiders. We root for David, not Goliath. So outsiders can and do win. But once they get their hands on the levers of power, well, somehow the darn things just don't work for them — you didn't invent that. Another outsider who took office a couple years before you did, Jimmy Carter, learned the same lesson, one taught over and over.
     I have your phone number and really wanted to call. But you haven't been in the press at all, for years, and I was reluctant to bother you. I last saw you, three years ago, at Rahm Emanuel's inauguration, slowly crossing the stage. I did phone your daughter to see if you'd welcome intrusion. She never got back. I get it.
     So even though you may have washed your hands of us — and who could blame you? — that didn't strike me as a reason we should ignore you. You were a pioneer — the first woman elected mayor in Chicago and even now, no larger city in America has elected another. You fought hard and had a quality I admire: you kept fighting. "I will be conquered," Samuel Johnson said. "I will not capitulate."
     You may think that you've been forgotten, erased from history. I know you were unhappy when Mayor Daley tore out your fountain. Maybe he did it to spite you — he's the type — or maybe a big fountain didn't belong in the middle of Wacker Drive. But it was there for a while, and Chicagoans still remember it.
     I sure do. The night I proposed to my future wife, we were crossing Wacker and stopped at the fountain — dedicated to children, remember? — and did a little impromptu ritual, anointing each other in the water, a kind of baptism of expectant parenting. It worked; the boys are 16 and 18 now. Thanks.
     Happy Birthday. Chicago has not forgotten.

* If any reader wonders how she turned 80 in May 2014 and died at 81 in November, the answer is she lied about her age, shaving a year off, and covered it up for years, according to my colleague Mike Sneed, who says she confirmed it with her daughter Kathy. 

"The law's delay..."

    Legal woes are always distressing, even when you've done nothing wrong and are certain—well, as certain as you can be in the crapshoot of our legal system—of exoneration. So when I heard that a colleague at the Sun-Times was being sued by the subject of a story who—I have absolutely no doubt—was merely unhappy to see his words in print, I went over to commiserate, and later sent him this column from 2000 about the vicissitudes of the legal process. After I read it, for the first time in 14 years, I thought it might be helpful to others who find themselves in court. The only thing I left out was a bit of key advice my wife gave me for appearing before a judge: "If you find yourself in a situation where you can either speak or stay silent, always choose to stay silent." Very wise advice.


Wheels of justice turn v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w-l-y
        
    There are 73,728 small squares on the ceiling of Courtroom 1501 in the Daley Center.
    Not that I counted every square, waiting to stand before the bar of justice. I did the math. But I probably could have counted. I had the time.
     I had never been sued before, and found the experience not only hour-devouring and distressing but, in an odd way, uplifting. Looking back over this year of Sturm und Drang (that's German for "moving to the suburbs"), the lawsuit stands out as a lingering piece of unfinished business I should confront before 2000 can be dumped, with a grateful sigh, into the dustbin to make way for a shiny, new 2001.
    Being sued sucks. It is days in a windowless, airless room, somehow both too big and claustrophobic, waiting for your case to be called, staring dully at tiles on the ceiling, hearing the headachy murmur of legalisms just out of earshot, noting the starched exhaustion of lawyers, the unease of regular folk.
    There are motions and counter-motions. Many times I recalled that Hamlet, listing reasons to kill himself in his famous "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy, puts "the law's delay" up high, right after the pangs of despriz'd love.
    Sure, I could have hired a lawyer to handle it all. But first, I'm too cheap. Second, I can't roll over in bed without hitting a lawyer. Third, I wanted to experience the thing, firsthand, to feel its essence. I won't go into the particulars of what sparked the suit. Like most of what winds up in court, it was ridiculous and peevish. Suffice it to say it emerged from what happened between myself and a young man in line at a drugstore. Words were exchanged.
    The guy pulled a knife and ended up hauled off in handcuffs by the cops.
    As he was taken away, an officer said, "Be sure to show up in court or he'll sue you." But I didn't. He hadn't hurt me. I figured, in the scope of atrocities committed daily in the city, this little incident wasn't worth pursuing. I didn't want to waste my time or add to his woes.
    There is no hell in Judaism, no divine punishment for sins. So I saw being sued as a minor form of punishment—a purgatory—for not listening to the police officer (always, always dear readers, listen to the police officer. He knows).
    The process was made almost worth it by the judge (and I'm not polishing apples since the case is—I think—over). The guy suing me didn't have a lawyer either, and didn't seem to grasp the fine points of the legal system, such as the need to show up. Despite my passionate desire to get this over with, I had to admire how the judge—whose eyes conveyed a seen-it-all-twice weariness—tried to cut this guy every break, so that the avenues of justice would not be denied a person just because he happened to be in jail the day his motion was dismissed.
    The lawsuit ground on between August and early December. Quick for law. The odd thing was, as it progressed, I began to like the guy suing me. He had an Energizer Bunny doggedness I appreciated. Despite losing at each step, he pressed on, filing new motions, a Terminator of the Municipal Court.
    After our last—one hopes, in law you never can tell—court appearance, we rode down in the elevator together. "Well," I said. "If I don't see you before Christmas—though if history is any judge, I will—have a merry one." He replied that he reads me in the newspaper.
    I don't want to say that I'll miss court, because I won't. But I will cling to the lessons I've learned: Be unfailingly polite. Listen to the police. And forgive the people you cross swords with. So belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Mr. Guy-Who-Sued-Me. Among my usual lightly-held New Year's resolutions is the iron vow to keep myself out of court, if humanly possible. You might consider doing the same.
                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 28, 2000
 

Lucas museum might seem like a good idea, now...

     Have you been to the Flash Gordon Museum yet? Right next to the Adler Planetarium? Lots of fun. There’s a mock-up of Ming the Merciless’ throne room on the planet Mongo, and you can reach out and touch the fearsome Sea Beast ...

     OK, OK, there is no Flash Gordon Museum next to the Adler, and a good thing too.

     If you are unfamiliar with Flash, he was very big in the 1930s, first as

George Lucas

a newspaper cartoon, then as a movie, then a movie serial, which kids in the 1950s and 1960s saw endlessly rerun on television.

     I bring up Flash as a reminder that fame fades, even huge fame, even “Star Wars”-level fame. It bathes its creator George Lucas in a golden glow now but will not last forever. Watching the city bend over backward to put his proposed museum on the Chicago lakefront, I hate to be a spoilsport, but I have to ask: Do we want this museum?

     What’s going to be inside? The museum’s website — still is clunkily wooing San Francisco, a move rejected by those in charge of the waterfront park where Lucas first wanted to put it — describes it this way:

     “The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum will be a center highlighting populist art from some of the great illustrators of the last 150 years through today’s digital art used to create animated and live-action movies, visual effects, props and sketches,” alongside paintings from Norman Rockwell — Lucas owns 57 — plus other classic illustrators such as Maxfield Parrish and J.C. Leyendecker.

     All good. So it’s not just going to be Mel’s Drive-in from “American Graffiti” and Indiana Jones’ fedora from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Your average tourist in 2024 won’t care much about those.

     I should confess here. I’m the rare moviegoer who liked “THX 1138,” Lucas’ first movie, a jarring sci-fi film with Robert Duvall, far more than “Star Wars.”
     I can remember seeing the first "Star Wars" debut in the summer of 1977, as a 17-year-old, worldly as a kitten. I walked out of the theater, disappointed and puzzled. Here you have a movie that is basically a two-hour running gun battle at close range between minions of the evil Galactic Empire and these four rebels, one of whom is 7 feet tall, and the ooh-scary stormtroopers can't so much as graze the wookiee's ear? Weak.
     It was downhill from there, and by the time the Empire was overthrown by teddy-bear escapees from a toilet paper TV commercial, the charm was lost on me.
     To give Lucas the benefit of the doubt, I assume he's savvy enough that his museum will take its "cultural arts" name seriously and not just be a showcase for his dusty mementos, though I note that "warehouse" is part of its description. Between the gravitas of the Art Institute and the edginess of the Museum of Contemporary Art, there is room for a museum that showcases the more popular aspects of culture: not just movies, but advertising, illustration, fashion.
     Still, someone should ask: Are tourists, for whom "Star Wars" carries the emotional heft of "Buck Rogers" - another big science-fiction movie series of yesteryear - going to line up for a museum dedicated to Arrow shirt ads and magazine covers, and the magic behind movies they've never seen?
     For the record, Lucas museum could be a great idea, something that graces our lakefront and gives the nearly 50 million tourists who visit Chicago another place to go.
     Or maybe not. Private museums can be bland money-making tourist traps, as anyone who has gone to, oh, the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., knows. If all the Lucas museum is going to offer visitors is a chance to pay $24 to see R2-D2 and C-3PO's actual costumes and then be shunted into the biggest gift shop of all time, is that really what the city of Chicago should support? It's not as if Lucas were putting his $300 million behind the DuSable Museum and relocating it to the lakefront. Given the educational and civic roles of the Adler, the Field and the Shedd, we need to look closely and ask what exactly Lucas is offering, who will control it, and do we really want it, not only now, but in the future?
     Museums as entertainment have a way of getting dated, fast. Look at the scrap of Disneyland that Springfield built around Abraham Lincoln. It opened in 2005 at a cost of $170 million, yet already is showing its age, in need of a big face-lift despite infusions of state cash. It's like Six Flags Great America regularly requiring a new high-tech roller coaster to draw a quickly bored public. Time passes, fame fades. We are all happy George Lucas is hanging around Chicago, where the winters are cold but the people are warm. Of course, let's consider his museum. But take a long look at it first. Because once it's there, it'll be there for a long time.