America deserves Donald Trump

     I was at the Lincoln Memorial earlier this month, and studied the face of Daniel Chester French's Lincoln. He looked pissed, and that right foot lifting slightly, as if he were about to leap up and stride out of that shrine and start kicking ass.
    And why not? The Union is in disarray, as always. Our cherished freedoms are held cheaply by the paranoiacs and psychopaths who dominate what passes for political discourse in this country. Relentless plutocrat and egomaniac Donald Trump is leading the polls in 2015 is something you'd expect in a bad nightmare dystopian movie from 1989. Yet there it is. Get in the game Abe. We need you. We need somebody. 

     America deserves Donald Trump.
     Don't we?
     Nearly a quarter of Republicans agree: They want him to be president. Twenty-four percent prefer Trump over actual politicians such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio.
     Yes, that Post-ABC poll was mostly taken before Trump's jaw-dropping slap at Sen. John McCain's war record. But Tuesday, when those poll numbers came out, the general feeling was not that Trump had destroyed himself and this was the final gasp of might-have-been before the real estate developer slumps offstage in shame. The usual, one-awkward-shout-and-Howard-Dean-is-history dynamic doesn't seem to apply to Trump, who refused to be embarrassed for slurring every American POW who ever lived, and instead busied himself slamming Lindsey Graham and giving out his cellphone number.
     Times change. Gary Hart's campaign was scuttled because of one weekend with Donna Rice; Donald Trump married Marla Maples and nobody even remembers.
     So Republicans think we deserve Trump because he represents their angry rejection of all things Washington: politicians, policy, Barack Obama. Trump, remember, was denying Obama was born in this country long after even zealots let the fantasy drop.
     Now Democrats, look into your hearts.

     We believe this country deserves Donald Trump too, don't we?
     Haven't we turned our political life into a theater of the absurd? Don't we acknowledge that shiny surface appearance trumps — no pun intended — inner merit? Hasn't money hijacked the electoral system, flowing easily around all feeble efforts to constrain it like a swollen river around a rock?
     Sure, some Democrats will embrace Trump cynically, as the quickest way to drive the GOP into a ditch, leaving a clear stretch of dry highway for Hillary Clinton to cruise into the White House.
     But we could also accept Trump as the punishment we know we deserve. For being lightweights, for never embracing what we believe with a fraction of the passion of the Fox News crowd.
     Remember, Clinton has also been running for president for the past few weeks. She might as well be campaigning on Pluto, a smudge photographed by the New Horizons spacecraft as it raced by. Trump straddles the American stage like a colossus.
     Maybe we're getting used to him. We've seen him on TV, read his books. We buy his wealth=quality logic.
     Trump doesn't need position papers. He doesn't need policy experts. He just has to be himself, pure ego, pure demagoguery. Maybe he'll blow up, maybe he'll call Taylor Swift a whore and the country will turn on him.
     Or maybe he won't. I keep thinking of Ronald Reagan, the guy we want to add to Mount Rushmore. The country forgets what a joke he was, at first, the Bedtime for Bonzo B-grade actor who paused from selling Borax to run the nuthouse of California and won GOP hearts by being more dynamic than Gerald Ford, which is not that hard to do.
     Sure, Trump might implode. But how is the GOP going to settle down with staid old Jeb Bush after Trump? It can't.
     Insulting McCain will pass; McCain's a stiff, the guy who lost to Barack Obama by 10 million votes. Not that we should hold the Trump inauguration quite yet. I'm of the opinion that Trump will self-destruct on live TV during the Aug. 6 debate. It will be his "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" moment with the whole country watching, aghast. But that might be my giddy, people-are-good-at-heart optimism.
     Right now, Trump is a win-win-win for America. Either he flames out — win — and makes the country grateful for a Jeb Bush candidacy, something I would not have previously thought possible.
     Or he takes the GOP field — win — and allows Hillary Clinton to waltz into the presidency in a cakewalk.
     Or Trumps prevails and becomes president, terrifying the world with the awful, limitless possibility that is America, raising the specter of a country lost in shallowness and worship of wealth finally getting the leader we so richly deserve.

Goodbye old tree.

    People never had trouble finding our house.
    "It's the one with the giant maple in front," I'd say, "the one with the tire swing."
    That was enough. They'd see the tree, massive, 60 feet tall and almost as wide, then behind is, hiding, our 1905 farmhouse.
    The tree was one of the oldest in Northbrook: easily 125 years old, and was perhaps the best feature about our place. A living link to the 19th century. 

    "I bought the tree," I'd tell visitors, "and the house came with it."
     In autumn, it was a mountain of orange and yellow. In winter, framed severely against the blue sky. It sprang to life every spring, and in summer was green and cool, interjecting itself between our house and the sun's fierce transit.
     The bark was thick, creased, more like armor plate, like something on a gnarled prehistoric beast.  How many hours did I sit on the front porch and just stare at it? It was age itself, serenity itself, the embodiment of permanence, of true beauty that endures forever.
     But trees, like people, do not actually live forever. And our tree was slowly dying. We noticed it years ago. We tried tending it, hired arborist after arborist to pump nutrients into it, wire together its sagging gigantic limbs—that enormous branch, pointing due south, seemed ready to crack the tree in half.  
    Every year there was more deadwood, and every year we'd cut the deadwood out and hope for a rally, or at least for the decline to stabilize, though no expert thought that possible.  It was slowly falling apart. On morning, maybe five years ago, a 10 foot section that must have weighed 200 pounds  was noticed dangling, about 20 feet up, right above the sidewalk, a sword of Damocles. I ran to the hardware store, bought sawhorses, blocked off the sidewalk and called a tree trimmer to get it out before it killed someone.
    One tree company, asked for an estimate to cull the deadwood, just turned in a proposal to remove the tree and grind out the stump. Our initial request had not made sense to him. Another guy just looked me directly in the eye and drew his finger across his throat. I felt like we were  giving CPR to a corpse.
     The arctic winter of 2013/2014 was particularly hard on it. We cleared the deadwood away, again, and hoped for  miracle. But this year it came back looking worse than ever.  The bark fell away in sheets. The ants moved in. The sap bled down the white, barkless trunk, as if the tree were weeping.
     Still, I was going to remove the deadwood again, give what was left another summer. But that one huge arm of the street shot out over the sidewalk. I wasn't just gambling with my own life, kneeling down to pick up the papers, always tossed directly underneath, I wondered if the last thing I'd hear would be a loud "crack" and I'd look up just in time to get a kisser full of tree.
     I was also gambling with the life of everybody who walked past. All the kids in the neighborhood.
     So we took it out Monday. I surprised my wife with how calmly I took it, avoiding the hoopla I might have felt compelled to indulge in. No ceremony, no ring of neighbors holding hands, encircling its enormous trunk—10 foot six inches in circumference. No poems, no tears. We did not, as we had considered, have the lumber treated and turned into furniture. That would have made it all somehow worse, by its paltriness, like erecting a sail to try to stop the world from turning. I paused at the top of the stairs Monday morning, took one last look, then headed off to work. I never even said, "Thank you." But then again, trees aren't doing what they do for the thanks. That's just how they are.
     My wife tried to put the best spin on it.
     "It's dying," she said. "Maybe it's in pain."
     Hard to tell. I don't think so. It's not as if you could ask it. Either way, it's not in pain any more.
     It helps that last year, I planted an identical sugar maple under our dying giant's dry branches. And I made a point of gathering a half a dozen seedlings that our fading Goliath had thrown off. I'll take these orphan saplings out into various spots and plant them, to give the old guy a new lease on life. That's the lesson nature teaches. Each of us dies, every tree dies too. But trees still go on. Life goes on. The new maple has a century to go, but it'll get there. I won't, but it will. Someone else will mourn its passing.

This is not my anemone

      "This is not my anemone," I said, with mock surprise. My wife looked down, at the flower bed in front of us at the Chicago Botanic Garden, read the sign I had just read, and sighed.
     A pun, and not a very good one. I pronounced it "enemy." But it's really "ane-mone."
     So worse than a pun, a mangled pun.
     Humor itself is a low form of writing—fragile, fleeting—and puns are a subchamber of that. "He who would pun would pick a pocket" Alexander Pope wrote, in the Duncyiad, perfectly capturing the sense of disrepute related to gimmicky wordplay.
     What's the appeal? I think it has something to do with connecting words. There's some kind of hardwired joy, for those unfortunates afflicted with a propensity to pun, with drawing a line from one word to another.
      Being funny is secondary. For instance, like many boys, I played with slot cars, and of course became familiar with their various little motor parts. The brushes, the armature. When I came to Chicago, seeing the street name "Armitage" conjured up "armature" in my mind. It wasn't in any way witty, so I didn't say it aloud, but I think that automatic connection, one word to another close to it, flipping meanings, is what drives the punster.    
     The link forms in mind and there's nothing to do but toss it out.  My wife, since she's usually the one around, in usually the victim.
     Or benefactor. Sometimes puns are funny. You might remember the Pope quote being spoken by Doctor Stephan Maturin in "Master and Commander," after Russell Crowe's Captain Jack Aubrey makes a pun. He points to a pair of weevils crawling on the table and asks the ship's surgeon to pick one. After some goading, Maturin picks the larger one. The captain is triumphant.
    "Don't you know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weavils?"
    That sets the table aroar, but there was a lot of drinking going on, which usually helps a pun.     
     Though sober puns can sometimes hit. My wife and I were working in the garden, it was hot, and we were thirsty. She mentioned that she had made some mint iced tea that was waiting inside.
     "I put some of this mint in it," she said, gesturing to our tub crowded with fresh mint, which has to be restrained so it doesn't take over the garden.
    "That's good, that'll make it extra-minty," I said, then paused, the the pun forming before my eyes. "As opposed to excrementy, which would be bad."
     I'm not sure whether that was funny, but she laughed, and  I laughed too. Maybe you had to be there.

Happy 90th birthday, Ed McElroy

Sharon Fountain, left, and John L. Smith, right talk with Ed McElroy at the Chicago Crusader. 

     Readers of "You Were Never in Chicago" will remember the chapter called "Driving With Ed McElroy." What they probably don't realize is that Ed is responsible for the book's existence: it was that chapter, originally an article in the Chicago issue of Granta, that prompted the University of Chicago Press to ask me to write a book about this fascinating city.
     And that is just one way that I'm in Ed's debt, for generally taking me under his wing and showing me the ropes in the city. I could not let Ed McElroy's birthday pass unheralded. He turns 90 Monday, and the big party at the Beverly Country Club is today. This is a longer version of a story that ran last Monday in the Sun-Times. 

     Ed McElroy is making his rounds.
     Natty in a pinstripe suit, the shirt and tied picked out for him by Rita Marie, his wife of 60 years, he parks his black Cadillac in a no-parking zone on Halsted Street and strides into the  office of the Bridgeport News, briefing me on the way: the editor's husband is a Chicago fireman, the owners and I share a religion.
     "The guy who owns the paper is one of yours," he tells me. "His father was a friend of mine. Really Jewish too."
     If that seems a slightly startlingly remark in this day and age, well Ed is not quite of this day and age. He's 90, or will be on July 20, a living, working slice of the Chicago way that somehow has magically escaped the claw of time, a shoe leather and handshake man in an impersonal electronic world.
     

Ed McElroy talks with Janice Racinowski at the Bridgeport New.

Ed McElroy visits the Bridgeport News
     "How many years you and I go back?" Ed asks editor Janice Racinowski, sitting in the otherwise empty office.
     "Well, let's see..." Racinowski replies. "I'm going to be 58 next year. I started when I was 15 going on 16. So, 43 years."
     There is a lot of that with Ed. He knows you, he knew your father, he sometimes knew your grandfather. I'm slightly surprised, almost incredulous, when I meet older Chicagoans who don't know Ed.
     I should admit up front that I am not writing about Ed the way I would write about any random Chicagoan. Ed's my friend, so whether hailing him on his birthday is self-indulgence or news, well, I'll let you decide. But favors to Ed have a way of rebounding well for all concerned. Last month I went down into the Thornton Quarry because Ed asked me to—I only vaguely knew the quarry was there. The story led the Sun-Times web site for most of the day, the public rapt to learn about the huge hole they've been driving by forever.
     So was I helping Ed, or was Ed helping me? Or a little of both, the truest definition of the Chicago way.
     Ed McElroy was a radio reporter for WJJD in the 1950s and 1960s, and as such has chatting up everyone from Martin Luther King to Jackie Kennedy. He has represented judicial candidates, police organizations. He visits dozens of small newspapers and brings them good news, literally.
     "We leave the bad news to the bigger papers," says Racinowski. "This is all just neighborhood news, meetings, stuff we feel people would be interested in, for their benefit."
     Some of that material comes from Ed, photographs of awards dinners, of the honor ceremonies. He drops them by, picking up stacks of paper to show his clients, always pausing to chat.
     "He's one of the nicest gentlemen you'll ever meet," says Racinowski. "Fantastic stories. I love listening to the older stories. "
     Like the story about his wedding.
     He married in 1955, two weeks after Richard J. Daley was elected. Ed had worked on Daley's unsuccessful 1948 campaign for mayor. But the outgoing mayor was his mother's friend, so some delicate negotiating was in order.
     "My mother came from 31st street, and so did Martin Kennelly," says Ed. "For eight years he was mayor, my mother knew him quite well. So Dad Daley gets elected, he's going to be an usher at my wedding. Then my mother said 'Edward, Mayor Kennelly has to be at your wedding.' I said, 'You know ma....' 'Edward, the mayor has to be at your wedding.' 'Okay mother, he'll be there.' So we worked it out. Kennelly came to the church and Dad Daley came to the reception.."
     By then he was announcing six-day bicycle races, female baseball leagues, and part of that was drumming up publicity.
     "I used to announce stock car races. An editor said, 'Ed, if you could get a picture I could run it.' People liked that I came around. then I got into more the public relations side."
     On the public relations side, Ed makes himself useful. He's driven several future presidents around Chicago.
     John F. Kennedy to name one.
     "In 1959 Dad Daley called me, said I want you to go out and pick up the senator from Massachusetts," remembers Ed. "I said what's his name? 'John Kennedy.' Don't mean a thing. What's he look like?" They ended up on Rush Street, for dinner and a few nightclubs.
      Barack Obama to name another.
     "This kid from Hyde Park gets elected state senator," says Ed. "Now I'm not in love with people from Hyde Park. That's where Despres comes from" — Leon Despres, 5th ward alderman and do-good reformer. Ed, being old Chicago, is no fan of do-good reform. "I'm not paying too much attention to Obama. [State senate president Emil] Jones says, 'Hey, be nicer to this guy.'"
     Ed told Jones, 'Well, he's one of yours, I don't like him."
     Still, Ed complied.
     "So I start being nice to him. I bump into Obama at this party, he's all alone. 'Where are you going?'' Home. 'I'll drive you home.' Drive him on a couple rounds of the district. Never a foul word. None of that cheap talk. As high class as could be. So I take him one day to Beverly Review."
 

Bob Olszweski Jr.

   "Barack Obama sat in this office right here," says Bob Olszewski Jr., the Beverly Review's editor-in-chief, in the cramped, shabby offices at 105th and Western. "Ed came by, wants us to meet this guy. 'Barry Obama!'' Yeah, whatever. Editors roll their eyes and cringe because you know, a lot of the stuff Ed sends out is PR. But there always somebody from the neighborhood or from the area, so I can justify it, and the help he has given us over at the paper ... whatever Ed McElroy wants around here, he pretty much gets."
     Ed also stops at the Crusader, at 6400 S. King Drive.
     "Ed knows everybody," says John L. Smith, the ad manager. "Ed is a great guy. Everybody in the neighborhood loves Ed. Been one of the few people who come and help every community. He does everything. He helps everybody. We have never, ever called him on anything and he did not respond. Ed has always been there. I don't remember when he wasn't."
     You don't have to ask Ed the secret to reaching 90. He has never had a drink or smoked a cigarette. Or drank a cup of coffee. Or gambled. Or chased skirts.
     "I played full court basketball three nights a week until I was 75 years old," Ed says.
     Still, at 90, there is a whiff of sadness.
     "Now almost all my friends are dead," says Ed.
     And the city has changed. Coming out of the Bridgeport News, he spies an orange parking ticket slapped on the windshield of his Cadillac.
     "A ticket on Halsted Street!" Ed marvels, as if he can't believe it.
     Still, despite the occasional indignity, Ed keeps scrambling, basically, because he always has.
     "Life is tough. My dad died when I was four years old. He died in 1930. There was my mother, with three boys, and what the hell does she do?"
     He makes both a living, and a lot of friends.
     "Ed McElroy is a fine American," says Olszweksi. "He knows life is about helping others and they'll help you....Ed came in and offered his help and he's done nothing but help us from the day we met him.... The old fashioned way. Go meet people. put the shoe leather in, get to know people, establish relationships... So there's a bunch of love out there for this man, I tell ya, a lot of people know him and love him. They don't make 'em like this anymore,"
     Olszweksi turns to me.
     "How did you meet him?" he asks.
     "I've always known Ed," I reply.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Summer is going fast. Have you been away? Made any plans to get away? Perhaps to the ... well, where is this thing, silhouetted against the summer twilight? It shouldn't be that difficult: how many of these are there? But maybe it'll take a few tries. Maybe not. Either way, post your guesses below. The winner gets a limited edition 2015 blog poster, suitable for tacking onto the wall. Good luck. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     At first, it might seem that this Chicago electrical vault manhole cover is impossible to place. But if you are conversant in the esoteric language of Com-Ed service glyphs, you can easily determine exactly where this ...
     Kidding. Actually, the Saturday puzzle is being posted at 7 a.m. today, since I previously said that I would do it, as a favor for those who sleep in yet want a chance to crack the puzzle, then promptly forgot, provoking complaints. So all you night owls, apologies, but you'll have to check back in the morning for the actual Saturday Fun Activity. Get some sleep. 

Chicago Fire Week #5: Firemen in pajamas

I had planned to round out Chicago Fire Week with my story about the Paxton Hotel fire, but it somehow never made its way into Nexis, and this one is perhaps even better, because it's representative of a problem in the department. I've been talking about it when I give speeches to PR groups for the past 15 years, a perfect example of how a hostile media office can turn a generic puff piece—the fire department starting to issue pajamas—into something negative. 
     The Chicago Fire Department began issuing pajamas in 1999, because firehouses were increasingly coed and you couldn't ask fire fighters to sleep in clothing unless clothing was provided. But the fire department, stung by some video that a local television station had run about a beer party in a firehouse, didn't want to cooperate with this story. He said they would drop off a pair of pajamas, but wouldn't allow us to photograph a firefighter actually wearing a pair. So we had to pose a photographer in the pajamas, for illustrative purposes. Nor would they say enough to round out a brief news story. So I had to go looking for someone who would say something, in this case a pissed off union head, who explained why the money being wasted on sleepwear should have been spent on better protective clothing.  A textbook example of turning good press into bad by holding grudges, which should be saved for junior high school.  It's a vicious circle: the fire department, like cops, bungles opportunities for good press, so disproportionate amount of press about them is bad, which makes them more bitter and press averse, which leads to more bad press.  It's sad really. 

     The phrase "firefighter pajamas," conjures up images of cotton PJs, about a Size 3T, brightly decorated with hook and ladder trucks and red helmets and Dalmatian doggies.
     The reality is not quite so festive.
     The new standard issue Chicago Fire Department pajamas -- or "authorized sleeping attire" -- are dark blue shorts and V-neck T-shirts, each decorated with the Fire Department logo. They're a part of the uniform as of Wednesday.
     But in the troubled Fire Department, even an issue as initially simple and innocent as pajamas is fraught with controversy.
     "It's humiliating, absolutely," said Bill Kugelman, president of Firefighter's Local No. 2. "The money that they're using for this could be used for other purposes, like safety and health and equipment."
     Fire Department spokesman Will Knight said he had "no idea" what the pajamas cost.
     Kugelman said he had just returned from a union convention in Washington, D.C., where the pajamas were the cause of much merriment at Chicago's expense.
     "We were the laughingstock," he said. "It was the talk of the seminar."
     On the record, firefighters -- who tend to keep an eye toward department politics -- were uniformly positive about the change.
     "They're comfortable," said John Sullivan, a 20-year veteran at Engine Company No. 98, on Chicago Avenue just east of Michigan. "They fit."
     Off the record, they were more critical.
     "Some of the men think it's ridiculous," said a firefighter who didn't want his name used.
     Ridiculous enough that someone at the department created a parody of the general order establishing the sleepwear. The joke "general disorder" mandating "nightly jammie checks" offers this synopsis:
     "It is the policy of the Chicago Fire Department that the fully grown personnel of legal majority (otherwise known as adults) who comprise this department and who operate equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, make life and death decisions on a daily basis and manage to lead normal, healthy and productive lives are not capable of making a decision on how to dress for bed."
     After initially suggesting there was no particular reason for the new sleepwear, fire officials admitted the change had to do with the growing number of women in firehouses. Of the 4,200 Chicago firefighters, about 200 are women -- mostly paramedics -- and they share fire stations during 24-hour shifts.
     "More and more female firefighters are on the job, and that is only going to increase," department spokesman Kevin MacGregor said. "We'll eliminate any kind of problems that could occur. . . . That's what we hope to do with this thing."
     Kugelman said he imagined the move was done with sexual harrassment lawsuits in mind.
     "Why else would they do this?" he said. "No other department has them. People are wondering why in the hell we have jammies when we don't even have bunker gear (special protective clothing). New York City got bunker gear and cut their injury rate by 85 percent. They don't have jammies."
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 2, 1999