Former classmate teaches lesson in compassion

   
      One of the downsides of feeding the Internet Beast is that it places a very high, almost exclusive, priority on facile riffing about whatever the web's fixation of the second is, and a low value on going out and learning about ordinary situations in the living world, which is the fun part of being a journalist. That's why I was so excited to start to write for Mosaic, the London web site of science and health run by the Wellcome Trust, a large British charity. Earlier this year, I spent a few weeks, off and on, at the University of Illinois' Craniofacial Center, researching an article on facial disfigurement that will go up on the website, and here on my blog (and, possibly, in the Sun-Times) on June 13.

     One of the great things about Mosaic is they run all sorts of additional links, videos and enhancements with their stories, and my editor there asked if this column, which I refer to in the Mosaic article, a look at how society views the disfigured and what their lives are like, were available online. I said it wasn't, but I could post it here. 

     So here is a 1998 column that shows how long I've been interested in this topic. When the story goes up, I'll probably strip off this little explanatory text out, so as not to confuse international readers arriving from the Mosaic site, and merely say:

     This is the original Sun-Times column mentioned in Neil Steinberg's June 13 Mosaic story on the disfigured and society.

     When I went to elementary school, there was a girl in my class named Cynthia Cowles, who had a deformed face. Her nose was smashed in, her eyes set far too wide apart.
     She had many operations. The doctors would try to reconfigure her face to something approaching normal. She would disappear from school for a while, then return, freshly scarred. This went on for years.
     She went through her ordeal with, as I recall, no support whatsoever from her classmates. Just the opposite. Kids are generally beastly, and we were free to be as beastly as we wanted to Cynthia Cowles, unencumbered by a shred of guilt or shame or remorse. Her deformity put her beyond the pale of sympathy.
     I can't remember any specific unkindness. Tormentors tend to be forgetful. In fact, I didn't even recall that I was the ringleader, instigating the teasing of Cynthia Cowles, until I called my mother to ask her about it. She recalled that Cynthia Cowles' mother called her, when I was in first grade, and asked her to do what she could to control me. But that was difficult to do.
     "I felt helpless," my mother said. "The things you were upset about, you'd open your mouth about."
     Truth was, I was terrified of deformity. That's why I gave Cynthia Cowles such a hard time. I was so uneasy with deformity that I was on guard just flipping through the c's in the dictionary, because I knew under "contortionist" there was a picture of a person twisted into a pretzel, and I couldn't risk happening upon the sight unprepared. I would turn the pages slowly around "CO," steeling myself for the shock.
     I've never quite figured out where this fear came from, but I suspect it was simple unfamiliarity. You tend to fear what you don't know.
      Over the years, the fear went away. This job helps. After spending a day at the morgue, or watching a plastic surgeon perform a nose job, you don't jolt so easily. I can flip through the c's in the dictionary easily now. 

   All this came back to me last week, with the Sept. 21 issue of the New Yorker, which included a four-page Benetton ad featuring handicapped children. The first page is a gorgeous fashion shot of a boy with Down's Syndrome. Turn the page, and there is a two-page spread of a mother holding a boy whose hands are curled and jaw frozen by some sort of spastic condition. The mother cradles him lovingly.
     And finally, the fourth page is a grinning boy who, well, you can't tell what's "wrong," with him, if anything. Which is clever, if intentional, because readers are left examining the happy, freckled face of this child, trying to jam him into a category.
     Benetton, the Italian fashion designer, is famous for its jarring ads. They often are accused of taking advantage of graphic images to promote their label. But I think they should get credit for helping to extend the narrow boundaries of accepted "normality."
     Had Cynthia Cowles, or someone like her, appeared in a fashion ad in the New Yorker in 1969, I think we would have treated her better.
     Once I had been reminded of Cynthia Cowles, I couldn't let the matter drop without trying to make amends. I found her number and phoned her.
     Wonder of wonders, she was glad to hear from me.
     "I saw you on 'Oprah,' " she said. "You still play with your shoelace when you're nervous."
     She's married, for the last five years, and lives in Ohio. I told her I was sorry for how I acted in school, but her memory, thank God, did not jibe with mine.
     "If you were mean to me, there were so many other people who were so much worse," she said. "I recall you as being one of the kinder people. You were the one in eighth grade who came to visit me in the hospital -- you told me your mother made you come, but you stayed a half hour, very uncomfortably -- and brought a box of stationery."
     There was no rancor. In fact, she had sympathy for me.
     "You got teased for being fat, and got teased because you couldn't skip," she said, recounting how the gym teacher tried to drill me into skipping. "You were real good at galloping, but you couldn't skip."
     I had never known what was wrong with her, so I asked.
     "I was basically born without bone in my nose, and the front of my forehead was not closed," she said. "I'm hydrocephalic, which means my head is bigger than it should be, which put pressure on my brain."
     She had more than 60 operations in school. "Now I'm done," she said.
     We had a great conversation, with lots of laughing. She told a story about turning around and socking a kid who was teasing her; she was terrified because the assistant principal saw her do it.
     "But he just gave me the thumbs-up sign and said, 'If you didn't I was going to,' " she said.
     Socking the kid had been liberating for Cynthia Cowles. "My mother always thought if you ignored it, it would go away," she said.
     And I must say, I felt liberated myself, from a guilt that had gnawed at me for years until, with a lucky assist from a magazine ad, I turned to confront it.

                —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 20, 1998

Cynthia Ungemach died Dec. 31, 2018.

Hastert, Duggar aren't the real scandal

     It stays submerged.
     We glimpse it, then turn away as it disappears again. But it always comes back.
     A popular TV show implodes. We chatter about its fallen star. No sooner does the scandal start to fade, however, when a new one emerges: the former Speaker of the House is accused of paying a fortune to hush it up.
     Dennis Hastert's cash kept it quiet for years. Josh Duggar, reality TV star of "19 Kids and Counting," eked out a dozen.
     Their secret shame becomes fertile ground for public comment and eventual remorse. Hastert admits no wrongdoing, yet. Duggar does. "I acted inexcusably" he says, and TLC, to its credit, doesn't excuse him but yanks the hit show amidst general half indignant, half amused clucking about the frequent hypocrisy of those who flaunt their superior standards.
     Each case is easy to chatter about. Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post trenchantly observed how the Duggar crime is "a reminder of how badly the cult of purity lets victims down," portraying them as ruined bikes, cups of spit, chewed gum, as if their entire value lay in their sexuality. As with priests, when there are no sexual outlets, it's sometimes sought in the wrong places."
     "When all sexuality is a sin, when even holding hands is off limits, there isn't a clear line between permissible, healthy forms of exploration and acts that are impermissible to anyone, not just the particularly devout," she writes. "This gospel of shame and purity has the potential to be incredibly harmful because it does away with important lines."
     True enough. But there's much more to this than specific scandal, much more than further evidence of how dysfunctional the devout can be. We analyze individual cases, the life of one politician or one TV star, looking from one tree to the next without ever seeing the forest. Without ever realizing we should start talking about the tremendous toll that sexual and physical abuse takes on our general society right now, today, and into the foreseeable future. The true scandal isn't what Dennis Hastert might have done to boys at Yorkville High School or what Josh Duggar did to five girls. The scandal is how frequently this sort of thing, and far worse, happens.
     "People in law enforcement call it the biggest secret in American society," says Paul Biebel, presiding judge of the Cook County Criminal Court. I recently stopped by his office at the courthouse at 26th and California, a jumble of books and boxes, as he prepares to retire from his nearly half-century legal career. Conversation turns to the defendants found in his courtroom time and time again. They are, with astounding frequency, people who were abused, physically and sexually.
     "With physical abuse, it affects the brain," Biebel says. "What you'll find is a high percentage of street prostitutes were abused as girls."
     He sees it over and over, in perpetrators of heinous crimes and in low-level repeat offenders who just can't get their lives together.
     "What causes these people to screw up their lives so badly?" he asks. "Why is that? They grew up in very abusive households."
     Biebel's observations are anecdotal, but research backs him up.
     "When you do surveys of women in the criminal justice system, huge numbers were sexually abused," says Jody Rafael, a senior research fellow at DePaul University's College of Law. "Research samples in jails and prisons show the number of women in prison who have been victims of rape and sexual assault and domestic abuse are off the charts compared to the general population of women."
     She says that decades of a "lock 'em up and throw away the key" approach didn't work. "As we built more prisons, it got very expensive" so much so that more economical, more productive and, incidentally, more humane strategies are being tried. "We're moving away from retribution," she says. "We really have turned to seeing many of these people as vulnerable and victims needing a different approach, especially those connected to drug crimes. Treatment alternatives as opposed to locking them up for drugs. We're really viewing the drug possessor as a person with a medical problem that needs to be cured. We're in the midst of a change."
     About time.
     Before I leave Judge Biebel, I ask him: Given the pervasiveness of the problem of sexual abuse, why do we so vigorously ignore it?
     "It's too hard," he says. "It's a hard issue."

The shortest bucket list ever

Man and dog resting after a run, Nashville

     I am morally opposed to bucket lists of all kinds, those bossy catalogues of experiences that every upper middle class person ought to aspire to. One hundred books, places, restaurants, whatever, that you must—must!— read, visit, eat at before you die. In order to live a full and complete life. According to someone else, to some low-wage assistant editor at a fading magazine or web site who never met you.
     To me, it's as if the martinets of fashion, driven out of the business of dictating our clothing choices by general slovenliness, regrouped around lifestyle for their last ditch stand at ordering people to do something.  We may not be able to ordain your skirt length, anymore, but we sure as hell can demand you go to Prague. You can't die and not see Prague. 
     Really? Just watch me. 
     The world's a big place. You could sit down and start reading books from this moment until you take your last breath, and you would still miss wonderful works of literature. You could stand up, and begin a Conradian wander across the earth and still miss fabulous places. The idea of generating lists of obligations is such a dreary eat-your-peas, fill-in-the-stamp-album notion, I'm astounded anyone has ever done it once, never mind made it a tiresome journalistic cliche.  
     I've been to a number of very nice cities. London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Tokyo, and such. But I'd never suggest that you must go to these places. You should. It's not a bad idea, if you are so inclined. But lots —the vast majority of people in the world—have never been to any particular place, and to suggest that their lives are somehow incomplete because of it is another form of cultural imperialism and intellectual arrogance. Paris is filled with Parisians whose lives are neither charming nor fulfilled despite their being right there. You could read half of Moby-Dick and cast it away, hating the book. There's a lot about whales.
     When I look at my own life, at things I've done that I'm most happy about, most proud about, never show up on anybody's list. I've never seen "Get sober" on a bucket list, but I'm glad I did. Or "Have children," though that's an adventure that beats the hell out of bungee jumping into some gorge, not that I'll ever considering doing that. 
     If I had to compose a list, if you put a gun to my head and made me, I'd recommend people get a dog. Because I never had a dog, never wanted a dog—in fact, was dead set against them. I didn't even want to touch a dog. My dad was from New York City. We never had dogs.  When my older boy began pressing for one, I replied. "You're not asking for a dog, you're asking me to pick up dog crap twice a day and I'm not going to do it." He was eight or nine. 
     But my younger son also wanted a dog, and asked for it for his bar mitzvah, and that was the loophole that brought us Kitty. I was terrified at the time—I sincerely thought the dog would ruin our lives. She didn't, and now that care for her as devolved to me, as it invariably does, I'm really glad we have her. Walking Kitty is the most normal thing I do, often the highlight of my day, and as we take in the air, morning and night and noon if I'm around, I think, "I'm really glad I got a dog. My life is so much fuller." 
     That said, I be reluctant to put "Get a dog" on my never-to-be-written bucket list, because all that really says is that I like having a dog. You, a completely different person, might not, due to whatever persistent personal flaw makes you immune to a dog's charms. 
     Of course, I didn't want a dog either.
      So maybe I could take a risk and write a very short bucket list, because if you really are the sort of person who'd be unhappy with a dog, well, that's awful, and you should get a dog and endeavor to change yourself while there's still time. So, as much as I thought I'd never do it, here's Neil Steinberg's What You Must Do Before You Die list:
     1. Get a dog.
     At least you won't have trouble remembering it.         

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I did not look up and see this.
     Rather, I looked up and saw this. 

     But with sufficient climbing, and head craning, and body angling, and I was able to get the result above, which has a certain satisfying balance.
      So where is this oblong tableau? It's sufficiently obscure that a hint is in order. It was mid-afternoon Friday, the work was done, and I sort of hit a wall and thought, "Get out of here, poke around." So I hopped on the Divvy at the Mart, took it north, then south, and then wandered around on foot until I came across this.
     Let's sideline Dale -- he won last week. But all you non-Dale readers. If I'm looking up and seeing this, where am I?
    The winner will receive one of my not-so-special-after-all 2015 blog posters, of which I have a superabundance. Good luck.

Go to bed.

         Due to popular request, from now on the Saturday Fun Activity will post at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, to give people who aren't insomniacs or Dale a better chance to win. 
      Or at least for today, given the chance of my automatically reverting to my routine next week. But I'll try to stick to the change, because it seems sensible and fair.
      Please check back after 7 a.m.     
      Thank you.

Serve and protect ... themselves

     The truly disturbing thing about the photograph of two cops brandishing rifles and grinning over the prone body of a black man wearing antlers (wearing antlers — how do you even do that? "C'mere buddy, put these antlers on and let this third cop take your picture before we turn you loose?") is not that it jarringly captures one moment of grotesque bad judgment and racial insensitivity a dozen years ago, but that it is also a perfect expression of the main ongoing problem then, now and into the foreseeable future of the Chicago Police Department.

     The motto on Chicago squad cars, "We Serve and Protect," is a phrase without an object. "We serve and protect whom?" The implication is the people of the city of Chicago, and to be fair, much serving and protecting goes on, all the time, all day, every day. Any discussion of the Chicago Police has to start with a caveat: that there are over 12,000 sworn officers, most doing their jobs in a laudable fashion, enduring an at times dull, at times difficult routine, performing acts of heroism, sometimes laying down their lives.
     But the ooze from the bad apples spatters them, big time. The routine competence and occasional excellence of the department is undercut by a general atmosphere that could be emblazoned on their cars as "We serve and protect ourselves." The attitude is that their job is so dangerous that their first duty is to each other, and it fosters an insular world of corruption and cronyism. Every illegally parked car with a pair of handcuffs or a checkered hatband hanging from the rearview mirror is a whisper of "I'm a cop; give me a break."
     And they do, on matters big and small, and it leads to cops like Jerome Finnigan, on the left in the instantly infamous photo. Finnigan is in a prison in Florida serving 12 years for robbery and home invasion. The other officer, Timothy McDermott, is still trying to get his job back, and the public has to shake its head that the Police Board voted 5-4 to fire him last October.
     Really? A close call? McDermott argued it was a youthful prank, and to the degree that could be true, you have to feel sorry for him. But the Chicago Police Department has long been a weight on our city's reputation. Try to pick an era without a jaw-dropping police scandal, from this latest embarrassment rocketing around the Internet to Burge torture to the police riots of the 1960s. It never ends.
     At some point the police need to at least give the impression they care, that the best interests of any officer who does any misdeed imaginable and some that aren't won't trump what is in the best interests of the department and the city.
     Finnigan and the three officers working for him logged 200 complaints without raising any alarm among their superiors, and when you look at how one of those complaints was handled, you see why. In 2002, Finnigan and his fellow Chicago Police officers broke into the home of Robert Cook, who turned out to be a Chicago firefighter. They beat him in front of his children. Cook filed a complaint. Here is how the complaint was handled, according to Cook's lawsuit against the city:

     The next day, May 30, 2002, an investigator from the CPD came to plaintiff's home to discuss his complaint. The investigator told plaintiff that plaintiff was a drug dealer and that his complaint was "bogus." A day or two later, the investigator returned to plaintiff's house and told him that if he pursued his complaint the police would cause him to lose his job. Plaintiff told the investigator that he would not pursue the case so long as the police did not arrest him, plant drugs on him, or have him fired. As the investigator left plaintiff's home, he told plaintiff, "just forget about this; otherwise kiss your job goodbye, and you're f----."

     Over the past decade, the city of Chicago has paid out $500 million in lawsuits based on such police work. A half-billion dollars. That's almost exactly the nut due on the ballooning police pensions. If cops weren't so adept at ignoring the malfeasance of their brethren, Chicago wouldn't be quite so broke.
     Police have a tough job, which they make tougher by coddling the rotten apples among them. We haven't had a Ferguson-type crisis in Chicago yet out of pure dumb luck. But luck only holds so long, and the Chicago Police Department must start policing itself better.

Prize Possession

     The Sun-Times ran a story Wednesday —about physicist and former Fermi head Leon Lederman selling his Nobel Prize — that brought to mind one of my favorite stories I ever wrote, not so much for its execution, but for the idea sparking it. It was 1988, and the Small family had just started a new magazine called Chicago Times, and I wanted to impress them with my sense of quirk.  My first piece is below, on Nobel laureates, where they put their Nobel prizes when they get them home, and do they show them off to dinner guests. The original lede on this story was a non-sequitur —"Most people know that Albert Nobel invented dynamite, but few realize that his father invented plywood"—that appealed to me because I felt it set the proper surreal tone of focusing on a mundane aspect of the Nobel Prize (faithful reader Gry Haukland contributes this sublime item from Scientific American about trying to get your Nobel through airport security). But the editor rejected my beginning, so the story was printed the way it appears below, in September 1988, a few months before Lederman won his Nobel Prize in physics. Bidding for the medal starts at $325,000. As for my story, well, I hope it's worth the time it takes to read.

     On December 10, a new group of academics will be paraded, blinking, into the glare of global publicity in Stockholm, Sweden. There they will receive what may be the world's most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize, along with a payment of approximately $225,000.
     These laureates will be questioned about the discoveries and life work that led to their awards. But, if this year is like others, the really pertinent questions about the Nobel will go unasked. Where do the winners put the prizes when they get them home? And what do they do with the money?
     Luckily, the University of Chicago has produced fifty-five Nobel laureates, more than any other institution in the world. Consequently, answers are close at hand.
      "It's a lovely paperweight," George Stigler says of the beribboned two-inch-across, one-eighth-inch-thick solid gold medallion he received in 1982 for his work on economics and public information. "It's in my desk and I bring it out once in a while to amuse people."
     Stigler says he knows of one laureate who carries his Nobel Prize around, presenting the stamped profile of the inventor of dynamite at hotels, along with demands for discounts.
     Other laureates are more hesitant about displaying their prizes out of a combination of fear and modesty. 
     "The prize is usually in a safe-deposit box," says Jim Cronin, who, with Val Fitch, won it in 1980 for his work on subatomic particles called K-mesons. Cronin does have a facsimile prize close at hand, however.
     "What the foundation does, for a minimum charge, is give you a replica, a fake," he says. "It's sitting in the study with all the other memorabilia that I'm ashamed to show to anybody I respect. Maybe I'd like to, but I'm too embarrassed. But the children like to see it."
     Theodore W. Schultz, who received the prize in 1979 along with W. Arthur Lewis for pioneering work on economic transformation of traditional agricultural societies, found the idea of making a replica distasteful. He keeps his prize locked away in a special safe the Defense Department gave him to store classified documents. "I've not displayed it—once in a while my children may look at it, and that's about it," he says.
     As an economist, Schultz chides himself for holding on to the prize, which he calls "a gravestone that draws no interest. I could have sold it and drawn interest on it." But the man who was insightful enough to develop the idea of the importance of human capital recognizes that, in the grand scope of his personal finances, the interest off a Nobel Prize will not make or break him. "my marginal interest would have been quite low compared to knowing it's just there."     
     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the great astrophysicist who theorized the existence of black holes when he was nineteen and who won the prize in 1983, never thought about selling his Nobel. "What can one do?" he asks in a faint, philosophical tone. "You can melt it down for gold, or you can put it in a bank. I don't go to the extreme." Chandrasekhar did have a reproduction made, but then gave it away to his brothers in India.
     The "minimum charge" Cronin mentioned for the replica—other laureates estimated it was between $25 and $40—points out another interesting aspect to the award. "You'd be amazed," Cronin laughs. "They give you all this money, pay for your transportation and hotel, but if you want photographs—and they photograph the ceremony like crazy—they charge you $10 apiece."
     Cronin also dispels the myth that laureates use the prize money to "further their work." He says he used some of the money to put plumbing and a new porch on his cabin in Wisconsin. Stigler built a cabin in Canada. Schultz pointed out that travel expense to the ten days of festivities in Stockholm for twenty-nine family members "took a good hunk out of the prize." 
     And finally, for all the scientists working away in obscurity, dreaming of the day they will wow the academy in Stockholm with the scientific brilliance of their acceptance speech, Cronin offers a disillusioning revelation.
     "I put a lot of work into my speech," he says. "This was a social occasion, and my speech was a scientific paper—no jokes. It went over like a lead balloon."