Do Jews go to heaven?

     A college friend was getting married, and arguing with his mother who, as mothers will, was trying to micro-manage the event.
    "You're going to serve shrimp cocktails at the reception of course," his mother said. 
    'But neither of us like shrimp cocktails," he replied.
    "You have to serve shrimp cocktails," she reasoned. "It's a Jewish tradition."
    
    I thought of that exchange—if you missed the humor, shrimp aren't Kosher, thus observant Jews don't eat them—this week, after Monday's column on Pope Francis' remark about how insulting speech should expect a punch. As often happens, the point of the column—why is the pope apologizing for violence?—was ignored by those who preferred to zero in on what they considered a lapse. In looking for an example of how the Catholic Church insults me, I picked the lowest hanging fruit: its belief that Jews go to hell. 
     That drew a fusillade of response.  Based on my replies, you'd think the Roman Catholic Church were some squishy, c'mon-in-everybody faith famed for its acceptance and inclusion, like Unitarianism or Baha'i.
     "Wrong, wrong, wrong!!!" wrote Gloria Callaci. "That's as untrue and inflammatory -- pardon the pun -- as the old claim that Jews like to sacrifice Christian children!" She continues.

     Rather, Jews are considered our elders in the Abrahamic faith which is shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Their holy covenant is considered to be valid by the Catholic Church and to be respected by Christians. After all, Jesus lived and died as a Jew; he was never a Christian, let alone a Catholic! We believe that God wants ALL humans, even atheists, to enjoy eternal life with Him, not just Christians. That's the "official line."

     "The Catholic Church does not really teach that Jews wind up in hell," writes Brother Tom Mahoney, at St. Laurence High School. "I would not continue to belong to a church that did." 
    "A practicing  Catholic, and I don't believe all Jews go to hell or only Catholics get to heaven," writes Harry Gortowski.
     They seemed to be basing this on their own experience. They were Catholics, so they knew.

     Those who offered up evidence ended up aiming slightly down and to the left: demonstrating, not what Catholics believe about heaven and hell, but rather that Catholic officialdom has said nice things about Jews over the years.

     "Your comment was that the Church places all Jews in hell just for being a Jew.... that is false," Robert Carroll wrote. "Benedict XVI wrote his book Jesus of Nazareth in conjunction with Rabbi Neusner and this collaboration was based on sincerity and admiration for each other's understanding — this would not have happened if the Pope was saying doctrinally that all Jews are subject to eternal damnation...

     Maybe.
     Some comments were the usual, "Oh-you-hate-us!" swoon. Some demanded an apology. Many were very thoughtful, such as this, from Charles G. Bolser, C.S.V., pastor of St. Viator Parish:

     I just finished reading your recent commentary "Pope stumbles over Hebdo." While I do agree with your premise, I would like to offer one correction - "Where do Jews end up? Hell. Our children? Hell. Damned to eternal torment in a fiery furnace for the unforgivable crime of being ourselves. That isn't a doodle on a magazine, that's the official line, softened with various throat clearings to make it appear less vile, but here nonetheless." I will agree that at one time, that was the official teaching. Jews, Protestants, Muslims, Atheists, etc., etc., were condemned to Hell - for many reasons. However, as most institutions or organizations do over time, they experience new insights and wisdom as they break from the traditions of the past - painfully and slowly, but break nonetheless...  

     My point however, is that the Catholic Church today does not hold, teach, accept or approve of your statement under any circumstance. There are still many "out there" who do, but they are not the church. The Church, as defined once upon a time by a famous Irish writer is "here comes everybody." Like all organizations we live with extremes on both the left and the right with most somewhere in the middle as life continues to evolve and transform the world.     I agree with your comments on tolerance, but would also push it a bit. I would hope that we could all not just accept diversity, but to respect, honor and treasure diversity in all forms. When I look at our universe and our world, in all of its grandeur and beauty, I find that diversity is the key to growth and life, while conformity results in death. This holds true for the physical evolution of life, but also true for the intellectual and spiritual. There is no one religion or belief that says all that can be said as life continues to unfold in mysterious and wonderful ways, but always engaged in a struggle - painful at times, but at other times wonderful to behold in the simple and compassionate works of so many individuals.

        While I could feel the goodwill of writers such as Rev. Bolser, I just didn't buy it. Is he really claiming that, when it comes to getting into heaven—what this is about, remember—the Catholic hierarchy doesn't think that being Catholic is necessary?  Observing the sacraments is not necessary? Just be nice to folk and don't commit crimes and an eternity of sitting cross-legged at the feet of the Jesus you don't believe in awaits you. Is that the official line now?
    And while the honest answer to Rev. Martin Deppe's question—"On what basis can you claim this as the “official line” of any Christian denomination?"—was "intuition," I figured it wouldn't be that hard to find the actual language. 
    And it wasn't.
    As a proud owner of a 17-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia, I'm happy to have any opportunity to use it, and therefore justify the real estate it occupies in my office. The entry on "Heaven (Theology of)" boots Jews out in the opening line: "Heaven is the state of happiness of those who have died in Christ."
     Jews, I shouldn't have to point out, do not believe in Christ (well, not in the divinity of Christ. I believe Jesus existed, and had a lot of interesting things to say, but I can't believe that gets me waved past St. Peter). 
   That is not to say that there are no Catholic teachings that prop the door open for Jews, but those seem to be designed to slip in Moses, Abraham, etc., and if you read them closely the exception is made for those in ancient times who didn't have the opportunity to embrace Jesus Christ, not, as I state in my piece, those like myself and my kids who defiantly remain Jewish despite the chance of salvation dangling before our eyes.
     No being in heaven implies being in hell. Where else is there? I skipped over to "Hell (Theology of)," conveniently in the same volume. It does take a bracingly non-literal view of hell that, I will be honest, was surprising. "Only as a mental abstraction can hell be a thing in itself."
     It too is heavy sledding, but as best I can understand, hell is separation from God, and thus everybody who doesn't believe in Jesus is already in hell. "Hell is not justified in sin alone: behind sin is unbelief...separation from God is the theological idea of hell."
   Of course, it could depend whether they mean separation from Deuteronomy God or Holy Trinity God. In the former, that wouldn't necessarily put Jews in hell, only atheists.
    My Catholic Encyclopedia was published in 1967, and, responsible reporter that I am, I thought to check a more recent text. Maybe gates to heaven were thrown open in more recent years. 
    The Catechism of the Catholic Church: Second Edition, under the Libreria Editrice Vaticana imprint sounds both relatively recent and fairly official, "Revised in accordance with the official Latin text promulgated by Pope John Paul II." 
     What does it have to say? It took a bit of searching; no wonder people prefer to simply imagine to be true whatever most suits their purposes in any given situation. But eventually I found it, line 1034, appropriately enough under "IV. Hell" 

        Jesus often speaks of “Gehenna,” of “the unquenchable fire” reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost.⁶¹⁴ Jesus solemnly proclaims that he “will send his angels, and they will gather... all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire,”⁶¹⁵ and that he will pronounce the condemnation: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!”⁶¹⁶     1035  The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.”⁶¹⁷

      "Refuse to believe and be converted" -- that would be Jews, would it not? 

     Not to belabor the point--though that is a succinct definition of religion if ever I heard one: belaboring the point.
     So I was right. But that is not the end. I learned something from this, beyond validation of my credo that most people who offer corrections are themselves wrong (Several people said, "I was never taught that Jews go to hell." Of course not. They don't have to. It's understood). 

     What I carried away is that the Catholic faithful diverge from the official teaching on a lot more than just contraception. So much so that they don't even know what the official teaching is any more. This is nothing new either. One of the many delights of reading The Divine Comedy to my older son was 31 cantos into the third book, Paradiso, when Dante pauses from staring agog at the glittering roseate heaven, with angels coming and going, like bees, their faces aflame with glory. He points out, almost as an aside, that half of heaven made up of Jews.
    That was the cause of some controversy in the church, and not because Jews were so welcome in heaven. But I loved it, and considered it a reward for sticking through hundreds of pages of recondite Florentine politics and Catholic theology, not to mention all that weeping and fainting and mooning over Beatrice. A tip of the hat from my hero, the way, when I was a boy and my brother and I met pitcher Phil Niekro at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. We were thrilled when, taking the mound for the Braves, he waved to us, sitting in the boxes. Or so we thought, I'd swear on a stack of Bibles that he waved, and wouldn't want to know the dry truth that he of course didn't see us, he couldn't have, and was merely waving to the crowd that we were part of.
     Sometimes you need to believe, and ignore the facts at hand. Religion, like language, is plastic, it changes over time, and drawing attention to a faith's outdated, ignored precepts can be a kind of bigotry, for which I am sorry, though, in my defense, it was inadvertent. As with every religious issue, there is a harsh way to view it and a humane way. I could say, "These Catholics, they don't even know what their own religion teaches." Or I could say—am saying, because I prefer this view—that change is hard, and takes a long time, and often regular people are far ahead, ethically, of the institutions that are supposedly leading them, but instead are being dragged behind by them.  Inclusion is a very modern idea, but not a purely modern idea. Dante obviously practiced it. And most of my readers who complained were complaining because they consider their faith to be a kind, loving, inclusive religion that welcomes all people into their special paradise. Or at least they want to seem that way, which is a start, and actually a very encouraging thing to report, and I am glad to do so.

Americans should pay more taxes

     I don't write about the boys much anymore. But my older boy's visit home from college served as an entryway into talking about a subject sure to be on everyone's lips this week—tax policy—and I figured, "why not?"

    We bundled our 19-year-old to Midway on Sunday for the flight back to California. But if you’re expecting a weepy my-boy-is-gone column, that wasn’t true in August when he first left, and it’s less true now. Sometimes you just have to be grateful and shut up. He was home for a month, during which there was frequent fun and zero crises, which I recognize as the rare good fortune that it is, like winning the lottery. Cash your check and the less said the better.
     No arguments, but we did have some heated discussions. My son seems to believe that the point of conversation is to get under the skin of others, as a kind of sport, and since I know exactly where he gets that trait, I can’t complain too much, though it was vexing at times.
     For instance, we were settling into our seats in the Civic Opera House — we saw both “Porgy & Bess” and “Anna Bolena” — and I looked around, marveling at the theater’s gilded beauty, and said one of the squishy sentimental things I am prone to say at such moments.
     “Maybe 50 years from now you’ll be here with your son.”
     “Or 100 years from now,” he replied.
     A strange statement. I paused, looking for a fingerhold.
     "Well, you'd be 119," I ventured. "You probably won't live to be that old. You probably wouldn't want to live to be that old."
     "By then," he said, "the Singularity will allow our intelligence to be uploaded onto machines."
     The Singularity? Ray Kurzweil's fairy dust about technology reaching some critical mass and humans injecting their intelligence into machines?
     "That's the silliest thing you've ever said," I replied, shocked to hear him endorsing such claptrap. "There's no indication that'll ever be possible. We aren't anywhere near that. It's science-fiction fantasy."
     He defended the notion until I was thoroughly aghast, then sat back, pleased, announcing that no, of course he didn't believe that at all, he was just seeing how agitated I would get arguing against it.
     Did I mention he wants to be a lawyer?
     "You know," I said, annoyed, "I get enough of that from readers without you luring me into pointless debates over something we both agree on." Eventually the opera began.
      The other thing he said that lingered was during a dinnertime political discussion. He said he is in favor of low taxes, which I was about to shrug off as more of the cold-blooded conservatism popular among college kids today. But then he added, "which is why they should be raised."
     That seemed a conundrum. In favor of low taxes so they should be raised? OK, I'll bite.
     "Our taxes are very low," he said, "compared to most other developed countries."
     "So . . . " I said, catching his drift, "if we want taxes that are merely low, we'd have to raise them?"
     That's true, and props to him for knowing it. The anti-tax mantra is so steadily chanted in this country, a lot of people don't realize that if you use the world as a model, we have it good.
     The average American pays about a quarter of income in taxes, which puts us 25th on the list of developed nations. In the European Union, it's about a third. Italy, Greece and Belgium pay over 40 percent of income in tax.
     Taxes are the fissure that forms the central divide in American political life, the chasm between Republicans - who believe in a nation of self-made Robinson Crusoes, where government is the problem and the solution is to starve it of money and watch it die - and Democrats, who believe we are all part of one society that should function by educating children and repairing bridges and caring for the mentally ill, and all that takes money. Tax money.
     Like gun rights, this isn't really open to discussion. It's closer to religion than political belief. We all hold our positions and defend them. The alarming shrinking of the middle class and the burgeoning of wealth among the already wealthy is only a concern to Republicans as rhetoric, since the middle class votes and the GOP wants those votes.
     The Republicans in Congress have already been starving the IRS, since it not only collects taxes but collects taxes on Republican groups, which is an obvious vendetta, even though cutting funding to the IRS results in poorer service to all Americans trying to pay their low taxes.
     Taxes are on everybody's lips since Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed some $320 billion in tax increases over 10 years, mostly for the highest-income Americans, who have been enjoying the fruits of the recovery over the past five years, offset by tax breaks to the shrinking middle class. The Republicans are shouting that this is redistribution of wealth, as if that were a bad thing.
     I haven't decided whether my kid's conservatism is another joke - a pose designed to unsettle dad - or just what a white shoe big firm contract attorney looks like when he's 19. But I took the realization that Americans get off easy when it comes to taxes as a hopeful sign that he's living in the fact-based world. Now if I could just get other people to join him.

"These are not dark days"

Photo courtesy of Tasos Katopodis  

     On Oct. 29, 1941, Winston Churchill returned to his alma mater, The Harrow School. To welcome him to their venerable institution, founded in 1572, the boys sang their school song, including an additional verse, written in his honor:

                           Nor less we praise in darker days
                                The leader of our nation,

                           and Churchill's name shall win acclaim 

                                 From each new generation.*

     The prime minister took exception to the phrase "darker days," even though, the past year, Britain had been facing the Nazi onslaught, alone. 
    "These are not dark days, these are great days," Churchill said. 
     I thought of Churchill when I saw this very Churchillian bulldog, Penelope, wh0 belongs to Tasos Katopodis, the fiance of Sun-Times photographer Jessica Koscielniak.  After a reporter, Jordan Owen, wondered why the Today Show has a puppy but the Sun-Times doesn't, Jessica tweeted this photo of Penelope standing guard on some circulation racks in our old 9th floor newsroom.
    I saw her tweet and it got me thinking. 
    That newsroom is gone, the staff squeezed into a smaller space on the 10th floor. Instead of a conference room, the morning news meeting is held in a corner, our staff, like beleaguered rebels plotting resistance in a cave, figuring out the next day's paper standing up, on the fly.
     Not the ideal circumstance.  But then, the ideal circumstance has seldom been an option at the Sun-Times. That would be the Tribune, and we see what they do with their vast resources; sometimes a lot, other times, not so much.
     Must be nice. We, we've always had to fight with one hand tied behind our backs. But fight we do, soldiering on, we making do with less (and less and less). Yet we fill our role, an important role, monitoring what's going on, sharing what we find out with the city, the world. We do our duty, sometimes by excelling, sometimes by merely existing to excel another day. 
    Friday night I was at a show, and caught sight of Hedy Weiss, our drama critic. Thirty years of theatrical experience, out on the town again to critique yet another performance. And Fran Spielman in City Hall. And Natasha Korecki, welcoming Bruce Rauner to Springfield with a Bronx cheer that managed to put both the new governor and his 10th home in their proper places. Tom McNamee, leading our lean, mean editorial board. Tim Novak, Chris Fucso, Dan Mihalopoulos whetting their axes, ready to take the next corrupt fat cat down. Richard Roeper, seizing the mantle of our fallen Roger Ebert — how many people would even dare to try that? Mark Brown, Mary Mitchel, Rick Telander. Carol Marin. Carol's kind of my canary in a coal mine. She's a class act, and excellent at what she does, and at a point where she doesn't need to work anywhere she doesn't feel comfortable. So if she's working here, we must be okay, we must have something going.
     I could go on, but you get the picture. It can be a hard place to work, but as I keep telling myself; we still have a lot. The forces of technological change batter us like wave after wave of German Junkers. The bombs drop, the explosions rock, the smoke clears, and those who are left standing blink at each other in wonder, dust ourselves off, root around in the rubble, and begin placing brick upon broken brick, same as always. 
     Or maybe this is just me, maybe I'm trying to put a bright shiny gloss on a bad situation. How can I not? The Sun-Times is where I live. The one place that, when I was just starting out, lifted a wing, gave a whistle and invited me to nestle in. The vestige of an economic system that once prized the sort of tangential stuff I do. My column doesn't break news. I don't cover sports. It's really half philosophical rumination, half cathexic obsession over the minuscule, half vaudeville.
     Yes, three halves...impossible. Fittingly impossible, since the whole thing's impossible, almost a miracle.  No one would ever create a newspaper today. Web sites come and go, announce their bold intentions, flicker for a year or three, then are gone. We live in a time that is a continual monsoon of words, a surfeit that gets worse and worse. Talk used to be cheap. Now it's free. Free is a hard business model to thrive upon.  We exist in a narrowing band between worth less and worthless.
     So thriving is out, for the moment. But we endure. I'm certain someday it'll all vanish and will then seem as if it had been a dream. But not yet. Not today. The Sun was launched Dec. 4, 1941, to be a liberal, pro-Democrat, pro-Roosevelt counterbalance to Col. McCormick's far right wing, isolationist, practically pro-Fascist Chicago Tribune. Pearl Harbor came three days later. Bad timing from the start, our business model immediately mooted. But we did not give up. 
     Which is what made me think of that Harrow School speech. An incredible bit of oratory. Churchill picking that dire moment to talk about imagination.
     "You cannot tell from appearances how things will go," Churchill began.   

Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are, yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist, certainly many more than will happen, but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. 

      I don't want to be an apologist for the paper; we do not always live up to our own expectations or our readers' expectations. I sure don't. Sometimes I read my own column the next morning and slap my forehead at what I should have said but didn't, or did say but shouldn't have. I am chastened but not devastated because tomorrow is always another day. No time to beat ourselves up because we have another chance to get it right. That's the glory of a newspaper. Always another day, even knowing that nothing lasts forever, no matter how much we might want it to. ("How many summers," the poet Mary Oliver asks, "does a little dog have?")
     The Sun merged with the Times, a feisty photo tabloid, and printed its first edition Feb. 2, 1948. So 67 summers, so far. And I have been there for 27 of them. I like to think it was not time wasted.  Good summers, with another looming over the horizon. I have no idea what this year brings, but I know what I'm trying to bring to it, every single day, the spirit that Churchill evoked to the boys at Harrow:

    This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

    But who is the enemy here? Technology? That can't be. Technology always wins. Technology is our friend. It gave us the printing press, we can't complain now that it is taking it away. The economy? The economy is always right. If people want to play Angry Birds and not read what's happening at City Hall, well, maybe Angry Birds is more important.     
     No. Never. Never never never. That can't be true. I refuse to believe that is true. Which would make, not people, but the indifference that can grip them the enemy. Fitting, because twas always so. Battling indifference is the essence of journalism. To take a subject that readers know nothing about and care even less, whether global warming or corruption or a puppetry festival, and try to get them to know some and care some. To say, "Hey, wait a minute. This is interesting. This is important. Pay attention to this." The new battle is just the old battle returned. I'm proud to be part of an enterprise dedicated to fighting that fight, for as long as it can, come what may. 
    And now we have a dog, our own Sun-Times puppy. A dog always helps.

     * Churchill material is from the excellent, "Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches," Selected by His Grandson, Winston S. Churchill (Hyperion: 2003)

The pope stumbles over Charlie Hebdo

     So what's the take-away?

     From the whole Charlie Hebdo atrocity.


     What's the lesson? The moral of the story?
   

     Naive questions, since in this, as in everything, at the end nearly everyone learns what they already believed at the start. The fearful have another reason to condemn Muslims en masse for the actions of a few. Free speech advocates can point to the popularity of freedom of expression, thanks to all those millions in the street in France. Terrorists have a textbook example of how a couple AK-47s can rivet the world's attention.
     

     How about this lesson: respect religion — all religion — or suffer the consequences?
     

     Did anybody learn that from the killings in Paris?
     

     The pope, apparently.
     

     "If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch," Pope Francis said last week, on the way to the Philippines. "It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others."
     

     You cannot? Since when? I would argue that you can and, at times, you must.
     

     But only at times. I don't mock the Catholic Church often only because it does such a good job of mocking itself, of undercutting Jesus' teachings in ways so clear that no commentary is necessary.
     

     But were I to decide to mock the church, I'd like to reserve the right.
     

     It's only fair.
     

     After all, the church mocks me.
     

     Where do Jews end up? Hell. Our children? Hell. Damned to eternal torment in a fiery furnace for the unforgivable crime of being ourselves. That isn't a doodle on a magazine, that's the official line, softened with various throat clearings to make it appear less vile, but here nonetheless. The fact that the pope isn't emphasizing it every Sunday is the sort of false politeness he seems to be demanding.
     

     I should have seen it coming. The Catholic Church being also subject to the crude derision of the French weekly, Catholic leaders were quick to try to use the slaughter as a teaching moment.
   

      "Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned," said Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, on the day of the attack, as if reminding himself of a sad necessity. But that was throat-clearing before he rose to his true task. "Muslims have a right to be angry," he continued, citing some vulgar examples of Charlie Hebdo satire. "What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, I am in total agreement with them."
     

     I bet you are, Bill. Frankly, I could shrug off Bill Donahue. He no more represents the main current of Catholic thought than some imam in a cave in Afghanistan represents all Islam.
     

     But Pope Francis, on the other hand, is a disappointment. He seemed so promising, out of the gate.
     

     Though it shouldn't have been a surprise either.
     

      The biggest bullies cry the loudest when touched. The weak learn to get along. If you saw "The Book of Mormon," you know a more obscene, wicked, hysterical and spot-on lampoon of faith could not be conceived. Yet the Church of Latter Day Saints didn't shoot anybody. They didn't cluck sympathetic noises at those who shoot people. They took out advertisements in the "Book of Mormon" Playbill. They realized that a church, like a person, gets respect by earning it. Not by silencing critics, through murder or through a hypocritical appeal for tolerance that you yourself don't practice.
     

     What we are seeing here is a clash between two systems. Not East and West, not Islam and Christianity. It is between the ancient tribal notion that your faith, whatever it is, is the One True Way and anybody else is blaspheming in error, at best to be tolerated and converted through suasion, at worst to be destroyed. That philosophy gripped the globe from the dawn of time until, well, now, though it has weakened in places by the very modern idea that the world is made up of many equally valid — or invalid — approaches to sanctity and God, and that which one a person follows is up to the dictates of that person's heart.
     

     Tolerance doesn't mean everyone coos sympathetically at every conceivable moral system. Tolerance means you don't demand that others ape your deeds, words or thoughts. You can believe something without imposing it on others. If you've ever been in a synagogue, you may have noticed something missing. No stained glass portraits, no statues of God with a big beard. Like Muslims, we believe it is wrong to depict God — we aren't even supposed to say His actual name.
     

     In our view, every New Yorker cartoon of God on His throne is blasphemy. But we don't shoot up the New Yorker. We subscribe instead. Jews don't go around slapping cheeseburgers out of people's hands.
     

     Paddle your own canoe. Practice your own beliefs. Put the passion that you apply to forcing others to do things they don't believe into doing the good that your supposedly superior faith system supposedly represents. Why isn't the pope teaching that?

Puppetry Week: #7 "Everyone can't be Derek Mantini"

Moses (photo by Lorna Palmer)

    Most art—movies, books, plays, paintngs—is entirely forgettable. You experience it, shrug, and never think about it again.
    A great work lingers, however.
    Or even a very good work. I'm thinking of "Being John Malcovich." I haven't seen the Spike Jonze movie since it came out 15 years ago. Yet so many moments resonate. Floor 7 1/2 in the Merti-Flemmer Building, with its five foot ceiling, such a perfect metaphor for the cramped imposition of business life upon the human spirit. The small door that leads, improbably, in to the mind of John Malcovich, languidly ordering towels over the telephone, the epitome of haughtiness and celebrity, free to obsess over the smallest details of his success.
    And John Cusack, the unemployed puppeteer. Performing a complex classical set piece on the streets of New York, his delicate marionettes pantomiming frustrated ecstasy on either sides of a wall, sublime, erotic, earning him the applause of a punch in the mouth by an enraged passerby, offended for the sake of his young daughter. 
    Cusack, sprawled on the couch, watching Derek Mantini, "the greatest puppeteer in the history of the world," performing "The Belle of Amherst," operating a 60-foot Emily Dickinson puppet  off a water tower, a pure image of crassness rewarded.
   "Everyone can't be Derek Mantini," his wife says, trying to comfort him.
    Which is why I'm finishing out puppet week, despite complaints from the cheap seats. "Is it because you're getting too many clicks, too many readers?" my brother insinuated. "A way to thin the herd?" No, Puppetry Week is a concept, and, having invoked it, I'll ride it to the end. No point in bailing out now. If you're tired, well, tomorrow I tweak the pope, rolling up my sleeve and shoving my bare arm into the cage of the Opus Dei crowd. Come back then.
     And I have a duty. I'd feel wrong, cowardly, if I didn't applaud Blind Summit's "The Table," which opened Friday night at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and is running next week as part of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. 
     "The Table" almost defies description or, more precisely, will be impoverished by my attempts to describe it. We are presented with Moses, the Biblical patriarch, but Moses as a two and a half foot tall crabby, randy British homunculus with a cardboard head whose world is defined by a table, at first. 
     Moses is operated by three performers in black, in the Japanese bunraku tradition—Mark Down, the director, who had Moses left arm and bum, Sean Garratt, who had the other arm, and Laura Caldow, who had the difficult task of working the feet (yoga helps, she explained afterward).
    Though they don't cover their faces, the better to interact with the audience in a performance that is more vaudeville than high art. They bring a surprising physicality to the puppet, plus a balled-up anger, a rage at the constraints of his little table that'll resonate with every member of the audience whose lives are not as free as we'd like, which is all of us. There's something about puppetry which, to me, punishes serious stabs at high art — they seem ponderous. But when awash with humor, as "The Table" certainly is, with artistry and beauty in supporting roles, you can have a work of surprising resonance and power. 
     "The Table" makes for a great introduction to this kind of puppetry because it was so self-aware: Moses talks about himself, presenting a puppet show. The performers are gifted comics, great improvisers—when a helper, pressed into service from the audience, managed to yank off Moses' right hand, it became one of the highlights of the night, with Moses cringing in horror, waving his maimed limb. Tuesday at 10:30 p.m., when they get on stage with Second City, there's no question they'll easily hold their own. 
     The moment that will stay with me, however, is when they were illustrating how the puppet is manipulated to give it presence, to animate it, a process that doesn't really rely upon the puppet itself. They eased Moses into resting on a corner of his table and three puppeteers deftly lifted out -- what? His soul? The essence of performance?—and manipulated the air, basically. The audience's attention easily shifted from Moses, now an inanimate lump, to the void the three were putting through easy-to-understand paces. It was a magnificent piece of performing magic, literally creating art out of nothing. 
    At the end, they announced they would be trying out 10 minutes or so of a new piece, "Citizen Puppet," wanted audience feedback.  Almost no one in the sold out upstairs space at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater took the opportunity to leave. We all lingered 10 minutes, and then returned to our seats to a brilliant encore that began with Tina, a sour old lady observing, "Well you can call it a bean stalk if you like!" and mixing a babbling brook of small town village gossip with observations of this surreal giant green fairy tale phallus that has suddenly thrust itself into the sky. We meet Howie, a tiny elderly man on a bench, and Suki, a nasal teen. I thought of "Spoon River Anthology" meets "Jack and the Beanstalk" and would have happily watched 90 minutes of it.
      Blind Summit is performing "The Table" all this week at CST, adding a taste of "Citizen Puppet," which debuts in the United Kingdom in March, on Friday and Saturday night. If you go, you'll never forget it. If you miss it, you'll have to haul yourself to London to see them, or wait two years until the festival returns and hope they come back. That is not a risk I would suggest taking.


Photo atop blog by Xue Quian

Puppetry Week: #6 Surprise bonus! "Puppetry of the Penis"

     I know I said Puppetry Week ended yesterday. But someone reminded me of this column, which is about a sort of puppetry, and with the Saturday Fun Activity solved, I figured I would toss it up for your entertainment. It's only Saturday, the week isn't technically over. And this is one of my favorite columns—you can feel the shock of what I witnessed in the Georgian Room at the Drake Hotel. 

    Oh, Lenny, Lenny, we're so sorry. Come back. All is forgiven. 

     I keep thinking about Lenny Bruce. Arrested for obscenity at the Gate of Horn in December 1962. He held up a photo of a woman's breast, and the Chicago cops hauled him away.
     I'm thinking about him because of a show — I almost called it "a play" — called "Puppetry of the Penis," that opens next week at the Lakeshore Theater, on Broadway at Belmont. In case you missed the burst of publicity surrounding its sneak preview at the Drake Hotel (the Drake!), "PoP" consists of a pair of Australian gentlemen manipulating their privates into various shapes. They call it "genital origami," though, having witnessed the marvel with my own eyes in the Georgian Room of the Drake (the Drake!), I'd say it's closer to balloon twisting.
     And, as with balloon twisting, the performance is not particularly interesting (voila, a giraffe!) once the initial surprise of penises on parade in public wears off, which took all of three minutes in my case, though, to be charitable, I suppose a bachelorette party or group of Halsted Street boys out on the town might have fun. If they were drunk enough.
     What lingers is not the show, per se, but its reception by the city — a raised eyebrow, a shrug, and it's on to other things. Those with any sense of Chicago history, however, must shake our heads in awe. Look at where we are. Penises happily wangling every night at the Lakeshore.
     Should there not be a ceremony? A moment of silence? Something? Let's bow our heads for "Les Ballets Africain," a troupe of Guinean native dancers whom the Chicago police forced to cover their bare breasts with brassieres when they performed at the Blackstone in 1959. Let's light a candle for the 1948 production of "Mr. Roberts," whose producers had to have a long conversation with police censors over exactly what expression of approval a sailor would yip after spying an attractive woman through his telescope.
     Chicago was the bluenose capital of the nation. Why else do you think Nelson Algren was so bitter? We were censoring silent movies in 1906. "The James Boys" was banned as too violent in 1909. The heart breaks. Fifty years later, we were still at it. Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" was banned here because one member of the police censor board, a Mrs. Honey Fischman, found it obscene.
     Lest we get too self-satisfied, we have to remember that "PoP" is anatomical, but not sexual. If those penises were put to their intended uses, this would be a different story. Nor is it political. If those elastic members were formed into mocking images of the Bush Cabinet, perhaps our dormant civic outrage would have stirred.
     Not like the old days. Besides a fixation on sex, Chicago was not averse to banning anything that simply cast the city in a bad light. In the early 1930s, we banned newsreels that showed labor riots here. We banned the original "Scarface" because it suggested there were gangs and crime in Chicago. (Reminds one of our current mayor, who raised a stink about a film that suggested inner-city youth swear a lot.)
     We extended a similar courtesy to our friends, the Nazis. In 1938, we banned a "March of Time" newsreel because it suggested that Jews were being persecuted in Germany. "It was rejected because this country is friendly with Germany," explained police censor Lt. Joseph Healy.
     What happened? How were we saved from the simple-minded bowdlerization of the censors? Thank the rest of the country, which dumped police boards years before we did. Thank all the pornographers who stood their ground, from Hugh Hefner to the anonymous managers of the old "adult" theaters. Thank the ACLU. Thank the courts. Thank Roger Ebert, who helped lead the chorus of mockery that finally — finally — killed off our police censorship board, around about 1969.
     There is, of course, a price to pay. "Puppetry of the Penis" opens next week, and anyone who wants to part with $38.50 for a ticket can see it. Cable TV is a smutfest, and obscenities are seeping into that second-to-the-last bastion of morality, broadcast TV (the last bastion, sadly, is newspapers).
     I feel true sympathy for those raised wearing white gloves and hiding copies of "Peyton Place." This must be hard to take. Feel comforted by the fact it can sometimes be hard to take if you're younger, too.
     But isn't our current state vastly preferable to the past? To 1949, when Mayor Martin Kennelly banned Jean Paul Sartre's one act play "The Respectful Prostitute" sight unseen. "The title alone would be enough to ban the show," Hizzoner said.
     Remember the coercion that world required. You needed lots of police censorship boards and cowed theater owners and revoked liquor licenses to keep it working. Remember the hypocrisy. When the police were slapping bras on "Les Ballets Africain," the ever-irreverent Sun-Times sent a reporter out to the various clip joints to note the strippers, including Miss Lila Turner and her flaming, tasseled brassiere.
     Remember that Chicago would not allow Disney's "Our Vanishing Prairie" until after the scene of the birth of a baby buffalo was cut.
     Half a lifetime later, we have "Puppetry of the Penis." Mourn or celebrate, as you will. But the irony is almost too delicious for words.
     Lenny Bruce would have loved it, loved where our prudery eventually led us. I'll bet, wherever he is, he's having a good hard laugh at our expense.

    —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 14, 2003

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     There's nothing like a factory. Wander around a little, discover the most amazing devices.
     When I came face-to-face with this dripping ... contraption this week, my first thought was "Yuck," and my second was, "This'll stump 'em!" 
     Which is fanciful, because nothing seems to stump you. But this ... thing ought to give you a run for your money. It's in Chicago, located in a place of manufacture, and there I had better leave it.  You're too good to require tips. 
     The winner will receive one of my brand new 2015 blog posters, made in a limited edition of 100 in Nashville, Tennessee. They're already flying out the door. But you can win one of your very own by identifying the place where this messy apparatus can be found. Remember to post your guesses below. Good luck. 

Win me!