God of the car keys

 

Rev. Otis Moss

                                        And almost every one, when age,

                                          Disease, or sorrows strike him,

                                        Inclines to think there is a God,

                                          Or something very like Him.

                                                                                      —Arthur Clough

   "So what's your connection to all this?" I said, my standard opening line at weddings of strangers and luncheons such as the one I found myself at last week. I was standing awkwardly at a large round table, waiting for the program to begin and people to sit down.
     "Well, I'm a man of faith, and I care about the environment," he said, explaining that he's highly placed at  the Department of Natural Resources. "And you?"
      "Well," I said, not really thinking. "I'm not a man of faith, and I've never cared much about the environment. But Rev. Sauder asked me to come." 
     Rev. Brian Sauder, a Mennonite minister, and executive director of something called Faith in Place. (Slogan: "Stronger Congregations for a Sustainable World.") He had invited me to their "annual celebration and fundraiser" and not having anything better to do, I shrugged and went.
     The Chicago-based group, as best I could glean by the speeches, attempts a heretofore unimagined union of religious faith and environmentalism. Usually those two forces are at odds. Christianity's basic take on the Earth and its riches is that God gave the whole ball of wax to mankind to ruin however we please and it's all going to come to a fiery end any moment anyway, which is a good thing, because then the blessed goes to heaven, where nobody worries about recycling. Judaism is fairly mum on conservation too—the environment is what you scurry through to get to synagogue—though some of the newer, touchier-feelier offshoots, such as Reconstructionism, try to correct that by occasionally holding a service outdoors.
      But this group not only promotes the idea that religious values are environmental values, but are gathering all faiths under the same tent in their efforts to heal the world physically while nurturing it spiritually. Christians. Muslims. Jews. The invocation was delivered by Dr. Manish Shah, of the Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago—Jainism is an ancient Indian faith that stresses nonviolence toward all living things, so he fit right in. Dr. Shah brought his mother up to deliver the benediction he had known as a child. 
     The main speaker was Rev. Doc. Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on West 95th Street, who spoke of putting a green roof on the church (some old school parishioners wondered aloud at the barber shop why he was putting a putting green on top of the church) updating Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" in to "by any greens necessary," and was so forceful and entertaining that I was tempted to go up to him after and say, "Is there still time to get you to run for mayor in February? Because we need someone to scare Rahm." Maybe next time.
     The luncheon—vegetarian, natch—ended, and I never really got the chance to talk to my host, Rev. Sauder, which was too bad. He has a degree in natural resources and environmental sciences from the University of Illinois, a masters in religion from the Urbana Theological Seminary and and MBA, which makes him not quite your stereotypical Bible thumping preacher from Tazewell County, where he grew up. Some other time perhaps.
     On my way out the door, an interesting occurrence. I hurried to the coat closet, but my raincoat wasn't there. I went through each hanger carefully, Once, twice, three times. It still wasn't there. My good Burberry raincoat. Ah, but there was a second closet -- I had never been to the hall before, on the second floor of UBS Tower. Relieved, I went to that closet. The coat wasn't there either. Meanwhile, another man arrived and announced that he couldn't find his coat. "No kindness goes unpunished," he said. Having company seemed to confirm that we had been robbed. A spree. I felt a sinking feeling, an awful, is-this-happening? pit of the stomach feeling. A big sign on the closet said, in essence, "If you lose your coat, tough." I would have to go report my loss to Rev. Sauder. That seemed necessary, but really, what could he do about it? The poor man would be embarrassed. Why had I come to this at all? I looked one more time. The number coats were thinning out. Nothing on the floor. Maybe somebody had taken it by mistake...nah. That wouldn't happen to two coats. The do-gooders have been fleeced while listening to talks about bees and flowers.
    I was slowly walking back into the hall to deliver the bad news to the minister when I noticed a third closet. There my coat was. I put it on with joy.
     "Thank you God!" I exuded, out loud, quite the departure from my attitude at the beginning of lunch. I smiled at myself, recognizing how, in moments of duress, or relief, suddenly the long-scorned deity takes form before your eyes. As I once told my older son: "When you find yourself in jail—and trust me here—suddenly there's a God." I suppose I do believe, but in what George Carlin called "The God of the Car Keys." When you lose something, it's, "please God, help me find it!" Or, I suppose, when you find something you thought you had lost, He's the guy you thank, despite yourself.
   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Now this is strange. It kinds looks like a bank vault, but it's not. Or a crypt of some kind, which is also way off. It's in the private zones of a semi-public building, far underground, and that's all I should say, because you guys have been nailing these so consistently.
     Better for me to talk about today's prize, a bag of whole bean, full-bodied, richly wonderful Bubbly Creek Coffee from the good folks at Bridgeport Coffee. I've been drinking this stuff hand-over-fist: it's knocked Cafe du Monde right out of the No. 1 spot, just by its consistent drinkability and robust wonderfulness.
     You know the drill. Place your guesses below. Good luck, though at this point you should be wishing that to me.

Rolling Stone has second thoughts

University of Virginia

    I've been meaning to point this out for a while, as this whole rape-on-campus dialogue grew, and today's announcement from Rolling Stone seems as good a time as any. 

      If the problem were professors’ children being kidnapped and held for ransom, nobody would talk about the ability of universities to investigate and solve these cases. Nobody would demand they develop systems for better analyzing ransom notes. We would look to the police. Such crimes are their responsibility.
     Yet when the crime is women being raped on campus, however, for some reason colleges themselves are expected to step in as surrogates for the cops, who are thought to be ... what? Too insensitive, too public, too something? I’ve never read an adequate explanation. Yes, police departments sometimes mishandle sexual assault, but given the ways schools routinely minimize, cover up and botch rape investigations, or fail to punish perpetrators when they do determine guilt, it’s hard to imagine how they could really do a worse job of it.
     The University of Virginia became embroiled in scandal last month after publication of a Rolling Stone story about “Jackie,” a freshman who was raped, supposedly, in 2012. It is an example of what happens when crimes are not reported when they occur. The details, as published by the magazine, are shocking. No boozy seduction that shifted into coercion, but a brutal three-hour gang rape, allegedly, by seven members of the Phi Psi fraternity, that left Jackie bleeding and dazed.
     She did not go to the hospital. She did not call police. Her friends talked her out of it.
     “We’ll never be allowed into any frat party again,” one says. Astounding.
     After the story, “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was published in October, repercussions were swift — bad national publicity prods inert schools into action, another reason these crimes must be reported. The school suspended its Greek program while it investigated the charges.
     Since then, holes were punched in the story. The frat did not actually hold any events the weekend of the supposed party. People she had named as members were not, in fact, members of the frat.
     On Friday, Rolling Stone stepped back.
     “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” editor Will Dana wrote in a statement. “We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.”
     A little late to be taking this seriously. Rolling Stone (and I should say, for full disclosure, I wrote a number of articles for the magazine in the 1990s) had a duty to find out exactly what had happened before going with the story, not afterward. Apologizing now for causing a fuss is lame.
     “Discrepancies” do not mean a story is made up. You would expect a person undergoing such trauma to get a few things wrong. Another reason why it’s important for them to a) call the police and b) go to the hospital and collect forensic evidence.
     Without calling the police, the risk of crimes going unpunished, or ignored, rises. Because we live in a country where people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and we would not want to live in a place where that wasn’t true. While most rape accusations are not fabricated, some are, enough that we insist that the accused get their day in court, or their say in an article tarring a fraternity and a university.
     This is not to let schools off the hook. They have a responsibility to see that students who are found to have committed these crimes suffer repercussions. One major reason women are reluctant to report rape is that, even when the case is solid, all too often no one is punished but themselves, for having spoken out. That has to change.
     Yet, this story did not appear in a vacuum, but in a political setting where the rights of victims, and supposed victims, are trumping the rights of people being accused, both truly and, at times, falsely. Politically correct dating rituals also creep into the issue, muddying it further.
     Now the threat is that the pendulum will go the other way. That frat louts and colleges under the gun to provide safer environments will heave a sigh of relief and say, “See, it wasn’t true.”
     That is a mistake. First, this case could still be true. Second, even if this particular crime did not occur, rapes regularly happen on campuses, and colleges must do a better job of teaching students how to react: by calling the police, by going a to hospital.

Is it okay to get a needy child a dog toy for Christmas?

      Eleven months a year we get to be as selfish as we please, maximizing our advantage, straddling our small piles of loot, grinning, marveling at the view.

      But come December, well, a new dynamic kicks in. Echoes of a birth long ago, if you prefer, or a cultural cross check, a glance at society’s weakest members before we all plunge into the icy slush of winter and our hearts freeze up along with everything else.

     We don’t start caring for just anybody, of course. That would strain our delicate systems. So I’m not being called upon to buy some 24-year-old dishwasher those Dr. Dre headphones he’s had his eye on. 

Children, though, are a different matter. Somehow their poverty registers, cuts through our fog of self and raises a tingle in our anthracite hearts, as strangers are asked to help out their struggling parents. 

      The display went up in our office. Tinsel. Christmas stockings. Ornaments. A basket of letters from boys, a basket from girls—an odd distinction. Perhaps a bid to encourage response by tossing gender solidarity into the mix. A chance to buy a firetruck or doll for that son or daughter you never had. 

     Why should I take the time and money to benefit an unknown kid? One known only by a single, hand-scrawled note? Because I am a sap, and can imagine the poor kid staring at the empty spot beneath the tree if I don’t. Life disappoints soon enough. It shouldn’t disappoint you when what you want most in the world is a remote control dune buggy. 

     Sighing—sap, sap, sap—I pick the top letter, from a 1st grader at Burroughs Elementary, where 99 percent of the students live in poverty. “Dear Santa,” it begins, promisingly. “How are you? How are the reindeer and Mrs. Claus? When I go to school I always do my best...” And so on. “Can you please bring me a soccer goal net, soccer goalie gloves and soccer shoe spikes...”

     Hmm...that’s quite a request. I envision myself at the register at Dick’s Sporting Goods. “That’ll be $312.47, please, Mr. Sap.”
     Perhaps just picking the top letter shows a failure of initiative on my part. Maybe the letter underneath it is even more worthy.
    "Dear Santa Clause" - a future lawyer, perhaps - "I have been very good. How is Mrs. Clause?" Etc. "I would love a new pair of sneakers or legos and a game for a PS3 it's called Batman arkham Asylum. Please!"
     The specific game gives me pause. Not for the price, but the quest. I remember racing miserably from store to store as time ran out - should have ordered online! Looking for a certain doll, a Little Miss Twisted Bodi Image, ending up with its generic equivalent, the Miss Tax Free Industrial Zone Young Person Figurine, knowing I was both going to trouble and disappoint a child.
     I realize that, left on my own, I will paw through the letters until I find a child asking for old notebooks, so beseech a young co-worker to just pick a letter for me. She does.
     "Dear Santa," begins Rashel, a first-grader. "Good evening Santa Claus. How are you? And how are the reindeer? Can you tell me? I help my mama a lot with the washing can you please send me a stuffed santa claus toy, a one Direction cd? Or a doll. Please bring me these. I will be happy."
     Off to Target. The CD is easy; the stuffed Santa, not so much. I don't wander Targets much — are the other shoppers always so stunned looking? Kinda grim. Like survivors stumbling out of a disaster. Plenty of Santa ornaments. Santa hats. I spy the perfect stuffed Santa. Cute, nylon, $9.99. Well, that was easy. As I get closer I notice a possible sticking point. Santa is a dog toy. No worries, I think: the tag can be clipped off and the child no wiser. I pick it up. An entire cloth saddle hangs below. A "Santa Rider" dog toy designed to ride on the back of a dog. Insulting and cruel. I examine the juncture between Santa and the brown saddle. Perhaps it could be cut away. I put it back, thinking of both the brown residue at Santa's bottom and the shame of buying a needy child a dog toy for Christmas.      

     Michaels? Nothing. Pier One? A soft Santa beckons. No, he's a wine bottle cover. Hurrying through the aisles, a big, round, friendly, Santa bobs into view, his coat a soft wide twill. Hardly daring to hope, I pick it up; not a tea cosy, not a purse. Just a stuffed Santa, hands flung wide, waiting to hug a 6-year-old girl. I check the price, can't find it, shrug. These things are made by slaves in China; how much could it be? To the register: $32. I gulp. Guess they're treating those sweatshop workers better lately. Easier to pay the freight than continue the quest.
     If a person as selfish and cheap as myself can do this, so can you. You can get your letter to Santa by visiting suntimes.com/Santa, or calling 312-300-4193 until Dec. 16.

Neil Steinberg, not dead at 54.

    Several readers of yesterday's column on advance obituaries wondered if I had written my own obit. I answered, "Of course not." A person is too biased, too clouded by the fog of self, to write his or her own obituary. I remember a late colleague—Bill Braden—who did do exactly that, leave his own obit behind when he retired from the paper, and it was both leaden and puffed up and I deleted it and wrote his obit myself, when the time came. I'd hate to fall into the same trap, eyes wide open. 
     But one reader persisted. Sure, it would be biased, he said, but "I'd read it and I think I would enjoy that unique insight Maybe you should write it as a column!"
     Hmmm.... while I am not a short order cook, or a cocktail lounge pianist taking requests, there is an idea there. Almost a challenge. Sure, it might be a mistake, but it could be my mistake. Suddenly refusing to do it seemed, not prudence, or modesty, but a kind of cowardice, and I thought it might be fun to give it a crack and see the result, which you will find below. If it's wrong, well, I'll try again with something else tomorrow.
     Since people skim these things, and can be surprisingly thick (I sure can be; for years I thought the Kinks song "Lola" was about a girl), I should clearly state that, as of Wednesday evening, NEIL STEINBERG IS NOT DEAD, and while my dying in the night before this is automatically posted would be one of those just-too-strange ironic marvels that get so much play online, I'm not planning on that. Though if I do expire suddenly, through a wild coincidence, take comfort that I would savor the ensuing spurt of attention which, as you can glean from this obit, is generally in short supply, at least compared to my expectations. Not that I'm complaining. It's been a swell life, in the main, even boiled down to a thousand words. 

     Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis—in English, "Juvenal"—was a Roman poet, little known today and, judging from the utter lack of mention of him in contemporary writings of his era, and his own bitter complaints, also little known during his own lifetime, in the late first and early second century A.D., when he wrote the 16 satires that have come down to us today, concerning a range of topics, from the viciousness of women to cannibalism in Egypt. Juvenal always seems to be crouching in some rich patron's doorway, waiting hours to be seen, wondering if there'll be any table scraps left from the feast the night before.
     Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, was a fan of Juvenal's acid wit, not only reading him with savor, but taking comfort from Juvenal's life when considering his own career spent churning out daily journalism, essays that could be sharp and funny, and strove to cast an intelligent eye on his times. Despite being well-wrought, his work had no discernible impact on the world around him, other than to serve as his livelihood and keep what small band of readers he had generally entertained, or at least occupied.
     Steinberg, XX, died WHEN and WHERE.
     His columns in the Sun-Times, which he began writing in 1996, and his various articles and editorials, reflected his wide range of interests: reading, Chicago history, opera, science, math. He would comment on the news of the moment, but also delve into obscure areas as diverse as the concrete industry, a group collecting dead birds that strike buildings downtown, and the translation of show tunes into sign language. He particularly enjoyed visiting unusual factories and businesses, and wrote columns on the cardboard tube trade, the manufacture of table pads, and the S&M dungeon on Lake Street.
     He was the author of eight books, also on odd subjects, from his first, a history of college pranks, to "Hatless Jack," a book about the decline of the men's hat industry, to his pending volume, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," which uses poetry to help alcoholics and drug addicts strive toward sobriety. It was written with New York author Sara Bader, and The University of Chicago Press is publishing the book in 2016. He cared deeply about his books, and it's telling that he would use his own obituary to plug them. 
     Neil Steinberg was born in Ohio and grew up in Berea, a small town in the western suburbs of Cleveland. His father Robert was a nuclear physicist who spent most of his career at NASA and later painted. His mother June taught students with learning disabilities. 
     He wrote a column for his junior high school and high school newspapers, and came to the Chicago area to attend Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, graduating in 1982. 
     Steinberg initially intended to be a novelist or humorist, finishing a novel at the Ragdale writers' colony in Lake Forest, and publishing humor in magazines like the National Lampoon and Spy, and writing for several programs on the Nickelodeon cable channel. But his day job as an editor and columnist at the Barrington Courier Review led to a job at the now defunct Wheaton Daily Journal which led to the Sun-Times. He joined the staff in 1987.
     He also wrote for many other publications, such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Forbes and the New York Daily News.
     In 2008, he wrote a memoir of his struggles with alcohol, "Drunkard," and the process of accepting his alcoholism made him better able to accept everything else, including his humble position well toward the bottom of the greased pole of money and status. He felt blessed that he truly enjoyed researching topics, setting words down, and having the freedom to select his own subjects, generally. He decided that he might as well be content with how things turned out, because there was no changing them now and, besides, as with Juvenal, perhaps someday somebody would determine that it had actually meant something significant after all.
     On July 1, 2013, he began a daily blog, everygoddamnday.com, as the name implied, writing every single day, without fail, and took satisfaction in the idea that it would sit in cyberspace, if not forever then for a long time, serving as a kind of rump immortality, and such people who might be interested could visit it and perhaps take away something valuable, such as his favorite lines from Juvenal, this description, from the Third Satire, of the cranky Roman pundit's envy of an aristocrat in a sedan chair navigating a congested marketplace:

    The crossing of wagons in the narrow winding streets, the slanging of drovers when brought to a stand ... When the rich man has a call of social duty, the mob makes way for him as he is borne swiftly over their heads in a huge Liburnian car. He writes or reads or sleeps inside as he goes along for the closed window of the litter induces slumber. Yet he will arrive before us; hurry as we may, we are blocked by a surging crowd in front, and by a dense mass of people pressing in on us from behind: one man digs an elbow into me, another a hard sedan-pole; one bangs a beam and another a wine-cask against my head. My legs are beplastered with mud; soon huge feet trample on me from every side, and a soldier plants his hobnails firmly on my toe.

     Steinberg loved that last detail, the centurion stepping on Juvenal's foot. He felt it reached across some 1900 years and made the vexing commotion of ancient Rome come alive again. He strove to do something similar for early 21st century Chicago and fancied that, occasionally, he succeeded. Whether anyone will care 1900 years from now is impossible to say, but, as Steinberg would observe, were he alive, "A fellow is allowed to hope."
     Survivors include his wife Edie, sons Ross and Kent, as well as his parents, his sister Deborah and brother Samuel. Services are private.

The media starts burying you long before you're dead.

   

    As you might have heard, People magazine killed off screen legend Kirk Douglas this week without waiting for the formality of his death, posting his obituary along with the bold “DO NOT PUB” intended to prevent such an error.
     A number of readers sent me the Gawker item revealing this blunder, knowing that I write advance obits for the Sun-Times.
     If they expected me to share a snicker at People’s expense, they thought wrong. It could happen to anyone and does. All media outlets are short-staffed and scrambling.
     No, what caught my attention were the comments under Gawker’s story. Readers were surprised at the idea of advance obits.
     “Do publications frequently have obits for famous people pre-written like this?” one Gawker devotee wondered. “I would love if someone could comment on this article and tell me if this is a common practice.”
    Allow me. It is common, and while that might strike you as odd, even macabre, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine it otherwise. Imagine Richard Nixon has just died, and your job is to capture his complicated career: as red-baiter, vice president and leader straight out of Greek tragedy. Once you might have had until, say, 7 p.m. for the task. But it being 2014, your boss would like it up online immediately, so as to capture the elusive clicks that are our God now.
     Imagine that responsibility falling into your lap. Scary, huh? Hard to dig very deep.
     Better all around if you accept that Nixon is mortal and will someday die (he already has, in 1994; sorry if I’m the one to tell you) and get busy before the fact.
     I started writing obituaries because I worked the night shift, had time on my hands and am unable to sit around doing nothing, waiting for something to catch fire. Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz had come to my apartment and officiated my brother's wedding. Marovitz was an amazing guy — fan dancer Sally Rand was his date to the opening of the Empire Room in 1933 — and getting on in years. So I wrote his obit, then fell into the practice, writing many others, from Ronald Reagan to Sid Luckman, Frank Sinatra to George H.W. Bush, whom I should point out is not dead, but has an unexpected Chicago connection, which you will learn about when that sad day occurs.
     I continue to write advance obituaries for the simple reason that someone ought to. It's almost a duty. You see a need and are obligated to respond. It's professional negligence not to. Take a recent example, the late Mayor Jane Byrne. I wrote her obit because I attended Rahm Emanuel's inauguration in 2011 and noticed the frail, stooped former mayor slowly crossing the Gehry stage.
     Better get started, I thought. One of the first things I did was read her excellent autobiography, "My Chicago." Because I had years to work on it, I could comb other city histories and talk to her associates. The obit was ready to run years ago. So while Byrne's obituary was tossed online in chunks by the Tribune, as if it were a breaking news story or, more likely, they were writing it just as fast as they could, we posted ours in its entirety. Zing!
     Yes, having the last word on a person can make you cocky, and I fight that. Once Rich Daley said something particularly brusque and charmless to me. I opened my mouth to reply, "You know, I wrote your mother's obituary. I wrote your wife's obituary. And I wrote yours, too, so why don't you cut me a little slack?" But I held that rudeness back.
     Daley notwithstanding, some of the most fun moments in my career were a result of writing obits, from asking former 5th Ward Ald. Leon Despres about his date with art icon Frida Kahlo (she was beautiful), to sharing tea and really good cake with Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers. Because I had written her obit, I knew a lot about her, and would drop pertinent factoids about her into print. Which caught her attention. A correspondence developed. Eventually I asked her to dinner. Her secretary called: "Ann doesn't go on dates," she said. But I could come to her apartment on East Lake Shore Drive for tea. 
     She sent her limo. It was a lovely visit. At one point Ann narrowed her eyes and asked, "Why are you here?" Not agile enough to lie, I replied: "I wrote your obituary, Ann, and was wondering what the truth is about you and your sister." Her twin, Pauline, wrote the also-successful Dear Abby column. Ann was enough of a newswoman, she didn't bat an eye.
     So yes, someone has to prepare this stuff in advance. What pops up on your screen doesn't write itself magically in an instant. The Internet can't change one essential truth: Speed is the enemy of both quality and accuracy, as People magazine recently demonstrated. It still takes time to absorb a full life and boil it down into 1,000 words.

"What kind of fuckery is this?"

     Does a word ever just pop out at you, and you think, "Never heard that one before."
     That happens sometimes, you bump into some odd, obscure term like "qualtagh." Many people shrug; they can't even be bothered to look it up. ("Qualtagh," a Gaelic term referring to the first person met after leaving the house on special occasions.)

     But when it's a word that, well, sounds common, readily understandable, even on first hearing, a word you feel as if you should have heard but somehow incredibly haven't, it really piques your interest.
      Or mine anyway. I'm open to the idea that I'm strange in this regard.

Amy Winehouse

      I've been listening to the British singer Amy Winehouse a lot over the past week—late, I know. She died over three years ago. I was vaguely familiar with her, but she caught my fancy just now, with her muted trumpet voice, and I went on a spree, listening to her catalogue—when on the second or third hearing of "Me & Mr. Jones" the first line immediately after the intro suddenly came into sharp focus: "What kind of fuckery is this?"
     She says it three times.
     Well. 
     At 54, I thought I had heard every manifestation of that well-known, blunt, all-purpose Middle English word, a noun, verb and adjective rolled into one, the fire axe of language behind glass, to be brought out, well, according to need. I don't use it much for its literal meaning—"Hey honey, let's fuck" is not my style—but do find it helpful, especially as an intensifier, to convey focused sincerity—"Why don't you shut the fuck up?" I would have bet I could rattle off every alternative, gerund, portmanteau associated with it. 
     But "fuckery"? Something new, to me. 
     Worried I had just led a sheltered life, I asked my wife if she had heard the term, and she said no, then added, "We've of an older generation." Yes indeed we are.
     I plugged it into Google,  The first hit was the Urban Dictionary. "Nonsense. To make no sense. Bullshit."
     A start at least. That would mesh with Winehouse's song.
     Off to the full Oxford English Dictionary, which should have had the English etymology going back 500 years (when "fuck" or, more precisely, "fukkit," first found its way onto the page, in a bawdy verse by Scottish poet William Dunbar). 
     But the OED let me down. Nothing at all. Straight from "Fucivorous" ("Eating, or subsisting on, sea-weed." Who knew?) to "Fuco'd" ("Beautified with fucus, painted"—sigh, there's no end to it: "Fucus," "paint or cosmetic for beautifying the skin).
     See? That's why this blog is called "Every goddamn day." Because if you flinch from speaking directly about such matters, bowing to some antique notion of uprightness, you find your 12 volume dictionary defining a 17th century term for face-painting, but ignoring a word on the lips of half the world's population for the past half millennium. And they thought the shame was in a dirty word.
    Then again, my edition of the OED was published in the Dark Ages of 1978. Maybe the more recent—1995—New Shorter Oxford would redeem the brand and, indeed, it does feature "fuck" and a few of its cognates. 
      But no "fuckery."
      Gladly, they are not the last word either, and I knew just where to look: Jesse Scheidlower and Lewis Black's excellent but unfortunately-titled "The F-Word" (unfortunate, because if you're writing a book about the word "fuck," show a little spine and use the word in the title. A clothes store in Quebec could do it, so could a big publishing house. Or as Napoleon said, "If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.") 
     There it is, bold as life:
      Fuckery noun [FUCKER+-y, or FUCK + treachery]
     Their first definition was "a brothel," a meaning they trace to John S. Farmer and W.E. Henley's 1902 Slang and Its Analogues.    
     Obviously not Winehouse's meaning. In "Me & Mr. Jones" she isn't wondering what kind of a whorehouse she finds herself in.
     Nor does the second definition—"sexual activity; FUCKing"—shed light on the song, though it includes a line from this 1974 New Society review of popular porno Deep Throat: "Although she assesses herself a unique phoenix of fuckery, Ms. Lovelace does only what any accomplished whore is expected to do"—"phoenix of fuckery;" I not sure what it means, but I like the alliteration.
     Pressing on, we close in on Winehouse's intention: "3. despicable behavior; (also) treachery," quoting not only Stephen King's 1978 novel The Stand, "That was an act of pure human fuckery" but, coming full circle, citing the song that got us started on this: "2006 A. Winehouse Me & Mr. Jones (pop. song): 'What kind of fuckery is this?'"
     I suppose we could stop here. But once you start digging, you want to finish the job. If you set out to take Vienna...well, you know.
     Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, the 2005 edition, stands foursquare behind Winehouse's usage, defining "fuckery" first a brothel, and then as "unfairness, ill treatment, treachery," and"nonsense." Cassell's cites it as West Indies or "UK black," which sounds right.  The Rough Guide to Jamaica defines it as "irritating, bothersome, out of order" and offers a delightful example: "Dis man is pure fuckery." 
    "Non-English speakers regularly make good use of fuck's plasticity," explains Peter Silverton in Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing. "Jamaican English has the wonderful 'fuckery'. Pronouncd 'fuck-ree' and not considered bad language, it indicates injustice—'a fuckery dat', for example." 
     "Wonderful." See? It's not just me.
     The West Indies seems responsible for shifting the word from sexual matters to the realm of the political. The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English, published in 2008, offers "fuckery" as "oppression, the inherent corruption of a dominant society" and traces that usage to Jamaica in 1979.
     One reason it's always a good idea to root as deeply as you can, and an example of what happens when you don't, is served up by British writer Howard Sounes in a book he published just last year that includes a profile on Winehouse: 
     "Her vocabulary is particularly interesting on 'Me and Mr. Jones.' In this song Amy invents a word, 'fuckery', to describe the unreliability of her lover, asking 'what ... fuckery is this?' This twist on a well-worn vulgarity— simple, yet very expressive —may earn Amy a place in the Oxford English Dictionary in time."
     Ouch. Of course, Winehouse didn't invent the term—despite the lazy fantabulizing on Sounes's part (he also blew the song title—using an "and" instead of an "&." Not to mention ignoring the odds of there ever being another edition of the OED, at least not in print). 
     Speaking of the song's title, our subject today is actually part of the official title of the song, which is "Me & Mr. Jones (Fuckery)" according to EMI, the song's publisher. Needless to say, that last part tends to get left off.
      Sounes' howler brought to mind Frank Zappa's classic line that ""Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read."
     Though, to redeem the reputation of Amy Winehouse biographers, Nick Johnstone, in his Amy Amy Amy. The Amy Winehouse Story gets it right: "The third track, 'Me & Mr. Jones,' starts brilliantly, with the British slang term 'fuckery' slipping into the lyrics."
     If I hadn't gone on so long already, I'd pause to reflect on the use of "fuck" in pop songs. Feel free to discuss this in the comments, though we ought to set rap and hip hop aside as a separate catagory, since it's easier to list the words in those genres that aren't "fuck." I mean mainstream, major act pop songs. The Who's 1978 song "Who Are You," comes to mind, where Roger Daltrey sings, twice, "Who the fuck are you?" but sort of swallows the word, enough that it could slip on the radio. By 1995, when Alanis Morissette unmistakably and carefully articulates "And are you thinking of me when you fuck her?" on "You Oughta Know" the obscenity didn't create a stir, nor stop President Bill Clinton from citing her as a favorite artist, nor prevent the song from winning a Grammy.
    Anyway, I think that's enough. I hope you didn't mind my foray into obscenity, but if you remember, by the third day of the blog, we had dirty words being projected onto a screen during a lecture for parents of prospective freshmen at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel. It's high time to return to our roots. This is online, and I do reserve the right. It's a new world, Golda.

Postscript—a colleague at the Tribune shared this amusing video on the word "fuck" (though not including "fuckery"). See if you can spot the ironic misspelling in it. 
   
Post-postscript—Best exchange about the above column, by far:

    "I learned a lot from your column today..."
    "Oh right, mom, sorry. I meant to warn you about that..."