The view is only blocked if you wanna watch the game...

     Illusions are crucial in baseball.
     We pretend that players are devoted to their teams and their cities. When, in reality, the average player has the same deep loyalty to his team that your average hooker has to whoever is buying her drinks at the moment.
     We pretend that the games matter and that each game is a test of skill, when top players turn out to be as juiced as racehorses and the only crime is being found out.
     And generally I don’t like to mess with another’s delusions. Life is a long time, and it helps to believe in something.
     But this kerfuffle between the Chicago Cubs’ current ownership and the operators of the neighboring rooftop party playpens are based on two huge fictions that just cry to be pointed out by somebody.
     I guess that somebody has to be me.
     Fiction one: The rooftop owners, the Lakeview Baseball Club and Skybox, who sued to stop the team from erecting advertising and giant video screens that they claim would block their views and thus hurt business.
     What views? You mean the tiny ants at home plate? And what makes them think that the businessmen gathering to drink beer and gobble hot dogs and duck their responsibilities for an afternoon care about watching the game directly? The people packing the bars around Wrigley don’t have any views; they’re all watching the game on the nearest flat screen.
     Heck, half the fans inside the ballpark don't watch the game — not that there's ever much of a game to watch. At any given time half the fans are lining up to get beer or dispose of it, wandering the concourses or checking out their phones, and half miss the 30 seconds of actual action that occur in any given three-hour baseball game.
     I'm not sure this is what U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall had in mind when she said the rooftop owners haven't shown any evidence their business might be harmed.
     The mistake the rooftop owners made was in drawing attention to the possibly obscured views. Who cares? Sure, some patrons might complain they can't actually see the plate. Buy 'em a free beer and tell them that's how it goes and they'll shrug and be happy. You're paying for ambiance, or what ambiance will be left after the Ricketts are done wrecking Wrigley and vicinity. It's as if, unable to relocate to Addison (the town, not the street), the family has decided to bring Addison to Wrigleyville, transforming an urban gem into Disney's Baseball Experience.
     Which leads us to the second illusion: the charmed notion that the money from the additional advertising will go toward getting better players who will propel the Cubs to a World Series. Pretty to think so. But from the ham-handed, arrogant, kill-the-golden-goose managerial style of the Ricketts clan, I can't imagine that happening, nor imagine a providence so perverse that it would allow Tom Ricketts to smile his smug, frozen, lipless smile in triumph over a pennant win. Fate is cruel, but I don't see it as being that cruel.
     All this might be moot anyway — another game where the Cubs have victory in their grasp in the 8th inning and then lose in the 9th. All the federal judge said is she wasn't going to stop the team from installing their obstructions now because the rooftop owners haven't shown the harm it would do to business. They could still lay out evidence that their customers are flocking to Hooters instead, and the judge could yet order the Cubs to take their signs down, and wouldn't that be a season highlight dwarfing anything conceivably occurring on the field?
     My guess is their business will be fine. The Law of Ironic Bad Publicity states that controversies over potential flaws draw far more people to a product than are repelled by the flaw. If I sold a soft drink, "Neil's Special Elixir" and authorities were concerned it contained some herb that might cause cardiac arrest, the number of people who would learn about my product's existence from the bad publicity and flock to buy it before it was pulled from the shelves would dwarf the few timorous souls worried about their hearts.
     So I expect rooftop owners to get more business from this, not less, as new customers line up to enjoy the rooftops before they're driven out of business, since laying eyes on the game is so far down the hierarchy of beer, buddyhood, bratwursts and blowing off an afternoon. I'm not the average fan; to me, a sporting event is watching the superstar Bulls play, not watching whatever nonet of nobodies the Cubs are fielding this year. Still, I'd rather sit on a rooftop chair and stare at the back of the Wrigley Field Jumbotron than sit behind home plate at U.S. Cellular Field and watch the game. Because say what you will about the Cubs — and if it's negative, it's probably true — they'll always have this going for them: At least they're not the Sox.

Black History Month: A black child under Hitler

     History should never be boring: if it is, you're doing it wrong. Whenever Black History Month rolls around, it always seems that the history being presented—Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman—is intended for people who don't know history at all. Maybe that benefits some people—"Tell me more about this Martin Luther King fellow!"—but I imagine a lot of people tune it out, because they already know. Which is too bad, because there is fascination aplenty when you wander off the well-worn paths of the overly familiar. This is one of my favorite columns that centers on black history, about a Chicagoan I imagine will be unknown to most.

     Perhaps the best way to introduce Hans J. Massaquoi is to mention two huge crowds he finds himself part of at different times in his life:
     The first is an ecstatic throng lining the Alsterkrugchaussee in Hamburg, Germany, in 1934, cheering and shouting sieg-heil as Adolf Hitler rides by in an open car.
     The second is the immense audience gathered before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963 to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
     That Massaquoi, 73, a former editor at Ebony magazine, was an enthusiastic participant in both events, and has fond memories of both King and Hitler, is a dramatic tribute to the mutability of human beings.
     Massaquoi's story — of growing up black in Nazi Germany—is an incredible tale. Told in his new book, Destined to Witness (Morrow, $25), it would be ridiculous and improbable in fiction. But it is not fiction.

     Just how Massaquoi ends up being born in Hamburg is itself fascinating. His grandfather, Momolu Massaquoi, is a tribal king in Liberia who loses his crown in a power struggle and is dispatched to Germany as Liberia's consul general.
     Momolu's eldest son meets and romances a 16-year-old Hamburg girl, Bertha Baetz. They bring Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi into the world, without benefit of wedlock, on Jan. 19, 1926.
     The waning days of the Weimar Republic are not typically painted in the rosy hues of Eden. But when you're a young boy, anywhere they feed and love you is idyllic, and young Hans is cooed over and adored as much as any tot can be.
     Then the political wheels in Liberia turn, his father and his extended family scatter to various safe havens, leaving Bertha and her dark-skinned son to fend for themselves in Hamburg at the exact moment that the most monstrous racist regime in history is coming to power.
     Perhaps the biggest shock of the book is: Life for Hans is not all that bad. Sure, urchins trail after him, chanting "Neger, neger, schornsteinfeger," ("Negro, Negro, chimney sweep"—the title of the book when it was published in Germany, where it was a best-seller).  But he has lots of friends, and the Nazi machine, busy eliminating much more locally populous elements, never gets around to him.
     Like his schoolmates, little Hans adores Hitler, and doesn't associate his occasional personal difficulties with his beloved Fuhrer. When his Tante Fatima —the only member of his father's family who is sometimes on the scene — asks him what he wants one Christmas, he requests a Hitler; Goering; Goebbels figurine set. And she buys it, despite the taunts of the toy store owner. (Fatima herself is a marvelous personage—a brilliant African woman who speaks six languages, she bops through Nazi Germany in a big afro and a leopard coat, an amazing anachronism, like watching a newsreel of the Nuremberg rallies and spotting Brandi on the platform).
     As the 1930s progress, it dawns on Hans that he isn't quite accepted as a 100 percent German boy. The Kafkaesque horror common to such narratives creeps in. Jewish teachers at his school disappear. Hans isn't allowed to use the playground anymore. His mother loses her job.

     Black memoirs often feature strong mothers, and Hans' Mutti, albeit white, stands with the best of them. When a drunken SA trooper drags 8-year-old Hans into a beer hall crowded with brownshirts and is about to hoist him on stage "apparently as an exhibit of rassenschande (racial defilement)," Hans' mother rages into the room, stares down the trooper, and retrieves Hans.
     The ironies and twists are too numerous to recount. Hans has a hard time shifting his loyalties from Max Schmeling to Joe Louis. He manages to survive the Allied bombing, which pounds much of Hamburg to smoldering rubble, then nearly is lynched by a mob mistaking him for an American flier.
     The road from ruined Hamburg to his aunt's tarpaper shack in Barrington to Lake Point Tower is long, the story too incredible even to summarize. It left me wanting to know how Massaquoi, who two years ago retired to New Orleans, after nearly 40 years at Ebony, resolves all the conflicting sights and feelings and memories in his own mind. Do they reside easily or do they conflict: the proud Hamburger and the proud Chicagoan, the boy who begged unsuccessfully to be let into the Hitler Youth and the proud paratrooper with the U.S. Army.
     "My life is so intertwined, so mixed up, I don't know if I've ever really unraveled it," he told me. "I sometimes wonder when I look back on my life how I can comfortably embrace the whole situation, all the experiences I had. But I feel quite comfortable with it. When I go to Hamburg, I feel like a local Hamburger. When I'm walking around Chicago, I definitely feel at home in Chicago."
     Most accounts of World War II are horror stories, and rightly so. Which makes Massaquoi's exceptional tale all the more precious. Horror eventually numbs you, and it is reviving, and heartening, to learn of this intrepid black child and young man who, through a combination of guts, smarts, luck and a really good mother, manages to waltz through the darkest abyss of the 20th century and come out whistling.
               —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 5, 1999

Postscript:  Hans Massaquoi died in January, 2013, at the age of 87. His book was made into a movie in Germany.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay train fans—and you know who you are—if you're so good, then where exactly is this curved stretch of track located? Typically that would strike me as unfair—you've seen one set of tracks, you've seen 'em all.  But actually all the clues are there for you to pinpoint it precisely and, if not, well then I win, finally.
      The winner will receive one of my limited edition, signed and numbered blog posters, certain to become a collector's item someday.
       Okay, not certain. Nothing is certain. But I sure hope they might possible become a collector's item, and stranger things have happened. And if not, well, maybe you'll appreciate yours, a $21 value, should you place the scene above and win it. Remember to register your guesses below. Good luck. All aboard!

"The most difficult cuts I've ever seen"

     Illinois was 50th out of 50 before.
     Dead last, of the 50 states, behind Mississippi, behind Alabama, behind Texas, for services to help people with disabilities live independently.
    That was five years ago.
     Now dig a hole, because Illinois is going lower, as Gov. Bruce Rauner's new budget, unveiled Wednesday, chokes off help to Illinoisans struggling to get by.
     "It's going to be huge," said Gary Arnold, spokesman for Access Living, which supports independent living for those with disabilities. "Tens of thousands of people are in these programs."
     Sister Rosemary Connelly, the 83-year-old nun who founded and directs Misericordia, the North Side residence for people with cognitive challenges, did not mince words.

Sister Rosemary Connelly, and Terry Morrissey

     

     "The budget scares me very much," she said, "because they're trying to resolve a problem on the back of God's most vulnerable people. It's so unfair, if this is a society that really cares about people."
     In addition to community support, care for the emotionally disturbed, as always, gets hacked.
     "Mental health always seems to get cut first," said Tiffany Taft, a licensed clinical psychologist in Oak Park. "Because of the stigma associated with it. It's easier to sweep under the rug."
     Taft pointed out that, in Rauner's defense, this kind of budget is nothing new.
     "It's been ongoing; Quinn did it too," she said. "I think it's horrendous."
     Taft can't take Medicaid patients, so spends hours on the phone trying to find public clinics whose waiting lists aren't three months long.
     "They cut options to people in crisis," she said, "and then they wonder why people go on shooting rampages."
    Like many private charities, Misericordia, uses public funding, and when that falls short, must make it up the difference with private donations. Last year that meant finding $15 million in donations. With the new budget, that jumps to $21 million.
     "I don't know if I have that capacity," said Connelly. "We're worried about the future."
     And they're in a better position than most.
     "So many people scared silly by this budget," said Connelly. "Looking beyond Misericordia, looking at Catholic Charities."
     "It's hard to tell right now," said Monsignor Mike Boland, president of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago. "It'll affect a lot of our programs if fully implemented the way it is, it will greatly affect the most frail people in the state, especially frail seniors...The budget is balanced on the backs of every poor people. It'll affect all our early childhood centers. This has a negative impact, a very negative effect, upon all the populations we serve."
     Director of Catholic Charities for 15 years, Boland has seen austerity budgets. But never one like this.
     "This is probably the most difficult cuts I've ever seen," said Boland. "I never seen these kind of profound cuts proposed. It's just so incredibly challenging to all of us trying to care for people who oftentimes don't have anyone to speak on their behalf."
     For those long in the business of extracting funds from the government to help people, a common refrain is that the announced budget, dire though it is, isn't the end, but the beginning of the true battle.
     "We have a new administration; they've got a lot to learn," said Tony Paulauski, executive director of The Arc, the largest disability advocacy organization in Illinois. "We would like the opportunity to sit down with them and educate them of the importance of community living. This is the first step in a budget process that's going to go on four or five months."
     Access Living's Gary Arnold pointed out that one of the cruel ironies of the cuts is that since they dismantle programs that allow people to live on their own, they'll end up back in institutions.
     "You lose your independence and it costs more," he said."If the goal is saving money, we're going about it the wrong way. The right way is good strong programs that support people with disabilities in integrated communities and their own homes."
     Yes, Illinois is in a terrible financial hole. Cuts have to be made. But picking over the stories about Rauner's 2016 budget, all you see are programs for the poor, for children, for the homeless, for the mentally ill and physically challenged. If there is a cut that's going to hit businesses, that's going to affect rich people like Bruce Rauner, maybe encourage them to own five mansions instead of nine, I missed it. The pain is going to be felt by the sort of people who never show up at Rauner's cocktail parties.
     Sister Rosemary said she has to wonder what motivates the governor.
     "I think it's a real indictment of a philosophy of resentment [that] there are people who need more help and have to depend on the goodness of others," said Connelly. "What we're doing is important. I wish the governor would come and take a tour."
     Paulauski did mention a bit of good news: Illinois is no long the last state; it has climbed to 49th when it comes to providing community services to people with disabilities.
     "We're ahead of Mississippi," he said. "I remain optimistic."

Caution: Stupid Signs

    As if winter in Chicago weren't bad enough. Hard the heels of the bitter cold, the pelting snow, come these stupid signs set out everywhere.
    "Caution: Falling Ice."
    Caution? What does that mean? How is our caution supposed to manifest itself? What are pedestrians supposed to do? Look up, and get it in the face? As if looking up would give you enough time for anything more than "Oh shi...!" Turn around? As if you could navigate a route that doesn't include the signs, which are everywhere, so common that we barely notice them anymore. Cover your head? Veer off the sidewalk into the street, where the danger of falling ice is replaced by the greater danger of skidding traffic?
    What?
    Then again, the signs are not for pedestrians. They are attempts by building management to off-load responsibility for getting clobbered by an icicle from themselves to those walking by their buildings. And the signs seem to have some legal weight: building owners have an obligation to clear ice and warn pedestrians of hazards, and putting the signs out grimly informing you of falling ice are similar to the signs ordering you not to slip on  freshly mopped floors. Though why those signs don't serve, not as fair warning, but as proof the building owners knew of a potential hazard and did nothing, is a mystery to me, and I've quizzed legal sorts about it.  I addressed the subject last year, in a blog post about a man who was killed by a 100-pound block of ice walking into the Neiman Marcus department store on Michigan Avenue.
     This year seems to be the year that Chicagoans finally realized the idiocy of these signs, and started making fun of them. Over at the Wit hotel, the yellow and black falling ice signs contain a quip from Stephen Wright: "Every so often, I like to go to the window, look up, and smile for a satellite photo." I'm not sure how that applies to falling ice, but give them credit for trying.
    A cleverer sign is at the School of the Art Institute, as seen in this photo sent in by regular reader Tom Brashler. It injects a bit of whimsy into the otherwise obnoxious blend of threats of physical peril mixed with pallid cover-your-ass legalism. 
    I contacted the school to find out the back story behind the sign.

    "The signs were created by SAIC's Instructional Resources and Facilities Management team," said Bree Witt, a spokesperson for the SAIC. "We wanted to address the caution in a clever and playful manner, and also honor the fact that someone will inevitably deface the signage to form other words from "ice" as has happened in the past. And, let's be honest, in a city like Chicago, ice, mice, rice or dice very well could falling off the roofs of the buildings, so pedestrians should be aware of the possibilities. The signs have been well-received and it's great to see people taking photos and laughing as they walk down the street." 

    That must have been earlier in the week, when it was 25 degrees warmer. Right now I could have Jim Gaffigan walking on one side of me and Louis C.K. walking on the other, both telling jokes and tickling me as I rush through this frozen hellscape, and I wouldn't be laughing. But when the weather warms up and breaks, oh, 20 degrees, I'm sure I'll find my good humor again. 

Rock star

     It probably says something bad about Los Angeles, or me, or both, that when my wife asked if there were anything in particular I wanted to do in LA during our few days in the city, after visiting our son at college, the only thing I could think of was: "See the big rock at the Los Angeles art museum."
      Officially titled "Levitated Mass" —though I hope that Los Angelenos have the gumption to call it the "Big Rock," the way Chicagoans refer to our massive public sculpture, "Cloud Gate" as "The Bean." It's our God-given right to defy artistic pretense.
     I had seen a video of the 340-ton granite boulder's slow, well-planned 100-mile journey to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a rare unifying civic event in Los Angeles that doesn't involve earthquakes or riots, and something about the boulder's careful procession, greeted with exultation, tears and indifference, made me want to see the thing for myself.
     The mammoth stone is located above a concrete ditch and you walk under it, and my first thought was, "It's not so big." Perhaps the best way to encounter the work is unexpectedly, to see it on the horizon and wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you. Which is hard to do when you go expecting it to be there.
     The Big Rock certainly isn't the communal experience that The Bean is; in Chicago, people crowd around, touching it, viewing their own reflection. This being LA, visitors approach at regular intervals, in small groups, encounter the thing, and leave. If somebody is having their picture taken by it, others hang back, at a polite distance, so as not to ruin their shot.

     Still, I was glad I went, glad that visitors are afforded the chance to pat Michael Heizer's $10 million sculpture (the rock itself was sold to the museum for $70,000, the rest was the cost of constructing a football field-sized transport rig, plus gas—15 gallons to the mile to run the carrier— plus the cost of crews snagging power lines, moving street lights, and generally clearing the way for the two-story tall, three-lane wide chunk of stone when it arrived in 2012.  Something makes you want to touch it, to register its solidity. (A shame the installation doesn't include a guard to shoo you away when you do touch it; that would be the perfect punchline. With art, grandiosity feasts while humor goes hungry).  And of course I had my picture taken next to it. You sort of have to.
     My wife, as always, not only read my thoughts but put them into comprehensible, concise form:
     "It's no Bean," she said. "I imagine the act of getting it here is better than the act of it being here." 
     Exactly. Or, put another way: the journey is the art. Without a story, it's just a big rock in an odd place. 

"A sea of misery"

In front of the Los Angeles Athletic Club

     My wife and I were walking across Pershing Square, a public space in Los Angeles which, like many parks and open areas here, has been occupied by the homeless.  She said she wasn't comfortable navigating this "sea of misery" and I didn't argue.  
     All things being equal, I would have preferred to stay by the ocean.
     But while planning the trip, my wife observed that we had stayed at Venice Beach a scant five years ago, plus a few days at Virginia Beach last summer, so we were practically soggy with ocean spray. I almost pointed out that half a decade is actually a longish time, and Virginia Beach was a different ocean -- facing right, at the Atlantic, instead of left, at the Pacific. But blue is blue, the salt water taffy's the same, I get that, and as she rightly points out, we are not beach people, though we are not step over the bodies on the way to the swish restaurant people either, which might make us oddities.
    The beach has its homeless people too. But not like this, to my memory.

Bradbury Building

     Like everyone else, we ignored them best we could. Our two days in Los Angeles were spent in the historic district, which, she is correct, is jammed with interesting Deco buildings that I did indeed enjoy, plus even earlier architectural marvels, such as the very Daniel Burnham-ish Bradbury Building, with its ornate ironwork, where key parts of "Blade Runner" were shot. There is a dynamic Central Market filled with food stores and eateries, the kind of vibrant place that Chicago's French Market tries and fails to be.
     We put in a lot of miles up and down Broadway — lots of Hispanic bridal and quinceanera stores, shop keepers who naturally hailed passersby in Spanish, stores buying gold to make into horrendous gold jewelry, apparently, a thriving business in phone cards and Disney towels and odd brand boom boxes.
     The place struck me as New York City in the 1970s, before gentrification took over. That's not praise, but a criticism. There were more homeless people per square foot than I've ever seen in New York, and we didn't even approach Skid Row — I was all for marching over to personally inspect the armies of the homeless camped there, but my brother-in-law, who lives in the historic Eastern Columbia Building, assured me that was a Bad Idea. I only took one photo—the one above, as we were parking to check into the Athletic Club — but I could have taken 50 of the men scattered about, like corpses in a Matthew Brady photo of a Civil War battlefield, sprawled where they fell, eyes half crescents of white. But taking photos of them unconscious, in such a state of humiliatingly public abject ruin, seemed wrong, a final insult, and I felt so conflicted doing it once that I never could take another.
    About 10 percent of all the homeless in the nation live in Los Angeles County — more than 50,000 people, though the count is disputed. That contrasts to about 7,000 people homeless on a cold night in Chicago. The Los Angeles Times carried a story about advocates trying to change the laws so the homeless can more comfortably go about their business in public; my sympathies tend to be with the public, who deserve to have parks and benches for their use, too.
    The received wisdom about the homeless is that they are you or I without a paycheck or two, but the truth, with the Los Angeles homeless, is more they are you or I after being deprived of the anti-psychotic medicines we need for the next 10 years while being marinated in multiple addictions and some organic mental disorders tossed in for good measure. Seriously crazy people, too far gone to even beg effectively, snarling and staggering and sprawling everywhere. The narrowing of the middle class is much remarked on, but another result of the Republican War on Government is the hollowing out of social services, the results of which are only too clear here in Los Angeles. A humane society would treat its mentally ill; not being that society, we step around them while averting our eyes instead