Ketchup: The Condiment of Controversy

     Having written, not even a year ago, about whether Chicagoans are permitted to put ketchup on a hot dog, the subject should be off the table, so to speak. There are more important issues.     
      But the Chicago History Museum is holding its 3rd annual Hot Dog Fest this weekend, and I could not resist sliding by at lunchtime Friday to hear Northwestern literature professor Bill Savage deliver a lecture entitled, "Ketchup: The Condiment of Controversy."
      "Why on earth do we take this seriously?" Savage asked a group of about 25 assembled on folding chairs at the southern tip of Lincoln Park.. "Sausages link—pun intended, by the way—to Chicago history in really profound and important ways." 

Bill Savage

      An expert in Chicago history, baseball, Nelson Algren (and, I should mention, the instigator and editor of my most recent book) Savage said the ketchup conundrum is "representative somehow of identity," tipping his hand in the process.
      "If you say upfront that if you put ketchup on your hot dog you're not a Chicagoan, that's like saying if you have certain beliefs you're not an American," he said, early in his talk. "It's a certain way of defining identity that I think we need to think about."
      And think about it we did, in one of those satisfying freeform thought exercises that start with something small and end knocking on the door of crucial questions. 
      Savage took a quick poll—the audience seemed evenly divided regarding ketchup on hot dogs, though most agreed that those who utilize the condiment lose the right to call themselves Chicagoans. Savage brought up an interesting question: how many felt it was okay, but only for kids? I've long suspected that my own inclination reflects a lingering childhood predilection, like a taste for those big squishy orange circus peanuts. Or maybe it had something to do with growing up a child of Eastern European Jews in Cleveland.
    "Food and food culture are intimately linked to different kinds of identity." said Savage. "Especially ethnic identity."
     He gave a brief history of Chicago's iconic Vienna Beef. "Two immigrant brothers came here and in 1893, at the World's Fair, had the brilliant idea to put a viener, a Viennese sausage, in a bun, and voila, the hot dog is born, or at least the Vienna Beef hot dog is born."
     Ohhh, Vienna. Wiener. of course. I never made the connection before. Learning that felt like finding a $20 bill on the ground.
     Judging who genuinely belongs here by what a person puts on his frank is one strange local custom.
     "The ketchup controversy, it's really anomalous," said Savage. "There's a lot of different Chicago fast foods and street foods where no one cares what condiments you put on it. No one cares what you put on your gyro. No one cares what you put on your Italian beef.  Nobody cares if you like sausage instead of pepperoni on your pizza. Or even deep dish versus thin crust. People may argue about it, but if you like deep dish, it's not like you're 'not a Chicagoan.' If you like thin crust, it's okay, who cares? Only ketchup on a hot dog is something where, if you like it, you're not a Chicagoan."
     He said there were many arguments against ketchup on a hot dog, and some of them "make a certain amount of sense." He cited Bob Schwartz, a Vienna executive who was in the audience, whose book on Chicago hot dog stands is called Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog —"Ketchup is basically sweet," Savage said. "It overwhelms other flavors, you don't want to do that." A philosophy I had heard when I attended Vienna's Hot Dog University. 
    But this isn't about balancing flavors. 
    "Far more often, people make moralistic arguments," he said, reading from a 1991 "Straight Dope" column where Cecil Adams. replies to a question about whether ketchup is proper on a hot dog: "This is like asking why Leonardo didn't paint the Mona Lisa on black velvet. Ketchup is destructive of all that is right and just about a properly assembled hot dog."
      Adams says that condiment tradition must be observed because: "Chicago is one of the hot dog's holy cities."
    "There's this insane religious rhetoric surrounding the no-ketchup-on-hot-dogs conversation," Savage said.  "When I did a hot dog tour for the History Museum a few months ago, I tweeted out, 'What do you people think about ketchup on hot dogs?' People responded [by] saying it was an abomination. It was blasphemy  it was unclean. All the rhetoric of religion and religious identity."     
     It's so over the top, you have to realize that it isn't the condiment being discussed, but the discussion itself that's important. It's self-perpetuating.
     "The reason why we talk about not having ketchup on hot dogs is because we talk about not having ketchup on hot dogs"  Savage said. "The fancy way of putting this, if you've got a PhD, is 'discursive reasoning.'  People keep saying you can't have ketchup on your hot dog so you can't have ketchup on your hot dog because people keep saying that, and that's the only reason." 
     So it isn't avoiding ketchup on hot dogs that's the distinctly Chicago tradition, the tradition is browbeating people for putting ketchup on hot dogs. Enter Mike Royko.
     Savage cited a 1993 column by the great Chicago columnist, quoting a scene in "Sudden Impact" where Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character expresses disgust with ketchup on hot dogs: "Nobody, I mean nobody, puts ketchup on a hot dog," says Inspector Harry Callahan. 
     But where did that idea come from? Here he mentioned a theory I've been developing.
     "Neil Steinberg ....has traced this gag back to '40s- and '50s-era cartoons where the buffoonish American, whether its Yogi Bear or Bugs Bunny, gets a nice steak at a French restaurant and then covers it with ketchup," Savage said. "The irate chef comes out with a cleaver and chases him down the street. Ketchup is a gag. It meant you were unsophisticated, meant all you want to do is cover stuff in red sauce because you don't have a palate. Of course Chicagoans, we all have palates. We all want to have taste."
     So the debate is a symptom of Midwestern cultural insecurity. Like recent immigrants hectoring their fresh-off-the-boat brethren to quiet down, behave, dress properly and stop embarrassing them so much, Chicagoans remind each other not to use ketchup so the swells in New York City won't look down their noses at us more than they already do. Thus the passion, the embarrassed intensity.  
    Savage concluded his talk by remarking on those who view ketchup as "inherently evil." and "using it is inherently bad and marks you as somebody who is not worthy."  This is the thinking behind hot dog stands that either don't offer ketchup, not even for fries, out of fear it might migrate to the hot dog, or warn their customers about using ketchup, a stance Savage called "fast food fascism." 

Fatso's Last Stand lectures its customers. 

     "Are we a free people?" he asked. "For me, the hot dog stand is the ultimate democratic space: Everybody is equal. Everybody gets in line. Everybody orders what they want. You pay. You get it. It's cheap. It's fast. You eat it. You go. When you're in line you're not better or worse than anybody else and nobody is better or worse than you. All men are created equal in the hot dog stand. So when there are hot dog stands where certain kinds of identities are imposed rather than embraced, I get my back up a bit. This is about formation of identity. There are always a negative and a positive way to go about this. The positive way is to emphasize what we share, what we have in common, and in Chicago this is related to neighborhood identity. The other side of that is the negative definition: you're not like us so we push you away. Do we emphasize the things that connect us, or the things that divide us? I wonder sometimes if it's possible for people to create a positive identity without also having a negative identity. But I do think it's possible to emphasize the things that unite us rather than the things that divide us. That's a decision. You decide to do that."
     He didn't quite say it, but, like any good lecturer, Savage led me to a realization based on all that had gone before. During the question and answer session after his talk, I stuck up my hand.
    Could the ketchup question be a parody of the actual animus that Chicagoans have for each other? "It's like a mimicry of the real hatred we have... in a mock way, like kids with toy swords."
     That makes sense to me. It's so hard to condemn your neighbors nowadays. Race, religion, sexuality, all out the window, for the most part. The ketchup eaters are safe villains, however, permitting us to exercise our deep desire to be better than somebody else, in our own estimations, and then to let them know about it in a direct fashion.  Savage allowed that the ketchup kerfuffle might permit us to channel our scorn by "sublimating it into something tamer."
     After more questions and hearty applause, Savage—who leads a hot dog tour for the History Museum at the end of October—and I went off to Frankie's Beef for lunch. And though Bill prefers his hot dogs with mustard and onions, and I almost always opt for the simple, soft purity of just mustard and ketchup, we both, in honor of our surroundings, went for the classic Chicago Hot Dog with all the trimmings: mustard, onions, neon green relish, pickle, tomatoes, celery salt. I even got the sport pepper. It seemed the thing to do, a tribute to the wonderful diversity of this city and its hot dogs, The Frankie's dog was quite good, despite a certain lack of ketchup.

    

Hot Dog University serves up frank secrets

Mark Reitman

     The Chicago History Museum is holding its 3rd Chicago Hot Dog Fest this weekend at Lincoln Park. A gathering of scholarship, music and hot dogs, it's just the thing to spice up a weekend in August. Tomorrow I'll report on Bill Savage's critique of the Ketchup Question. In the meantime, since the Saturday Fun Activity has been solved, I thought I would post this special Saturday extra, recounting my studies at Vienna Beef's famed Hot Dog University. 

     Selling hot dogs.
     Must be the easiest job in the world, right?
     You take a hot dog, you slap it in a bun. If the customer wants mustard, you squirt on mustard. You hand the hot dog in wax paper to the customer. You take the money.
     Bing bang boom. What's the big deal? What's there to learn?
     That was my thinking when I heard that Vienna Beef runs "Hot Dog University" out of its plant at 2501 N. Damen—a two-day, $695 course to teach people how to sell hot dogs.
     What does it teach? How to boil water?
     I sign up, dubious, telling myself, I don't have to stay for the whole two days; if it gets dull, I can bail out after a few hours. Slip away to use the restroom and never come back.
     It doesn't get dull; I pay close attention, the entire two days, get my diploma, and only wish this article could be long enough to convey the freewheeling mix of streetwise economics, consumer psychology, ethnic sociology, food service history that Mark Reitman—his business card reads "PHD (Professor of Hot Dogs)"—serves steaming out of his hot dog cart of wisdom over two eight-hour days.
     All delivered in a manner of utter seriousness, part Army colonel briefing his troops on what to expect after they hit the beach, part junior high school health teacher walking his seventh-grade boys through the facts of life.
     Take a matter as simple as potato chips.
     Not so simple.
     "All I sold off my cart were hot dogs and drinks — I didn't sell chips. But I'm going to talk about chips, potato chips with hot dog carts," Reitman tells his six students, minutes after class has begun, while he is still outlining his "philosophy of hot dogs."
     "See here in Chicago, chips don't go with hot dogs. If you go into a hot dog stand, you get fries with a hot dog. If you grew up in Chicago the only time you had chips with a hot dog were if you are outside at a picnic on a white paper plate, OK?"
     Those words "picnic" and "white paper plate" are infused with a bewildered disgust.
 

Mark Reitman lectures to a Hot Dog U class.

   "Hot dogs and chips are something that you serve at home. But now, chips are very, very important on a hot dog cart, because you want to use those putting together what some of the fast food places have called a 'Value Meal.' You're not going to make money on the chips, but by putting chips with a drink and the dog you get them to buy a drink, which they normally wouldn't buy, so you make a couple cents on the chips, you make 75 on the drink, you make your money on your hot dogs."
     In other words, sell a hot dog for $3, a drink for $1.60, and chips for .50 and you'll sell a lot of $3 hot dogs. But offer a $5 lunch special of the three, and people will clamor for that and you'll make more money, and making money is what selling hot dogs is about.
     To that end, we learn about hot dogs, both skinless and natural casing. We slip into white lab coats and hair nets and tour the steamy, chilly, clangorous Vienna Beef plant, with whining power saws and chirping forklifts, starting where workers use hooks to turn big sides of beef as they trim off strips of fat.
     "These trimmings are going into hot dogs immediately," says Reitman.
     Extra fat is essential because, contrary to expectations, these hot dogs aren't made from cows — they're made from bull meat, a leaner flesh that requires extra fat.
     By the time we repair to a test kitchen mid-morning to sample hot dogs and Polish slices on toothpicks, we all know each other and our stories. A pair of brothers-in-law planning a cart across from the entrance to the Milwaukee Zoo. A former Allstate executive, let go after 25 years, opening a stand in Kenosha. A cop from Greenville, South Carolina, an engineer from West Virginia.
     After lunch at Vienna Beef's substantial public cafeteria, patronized by everyone from truck drivers making deliveries to company owner Jim Bodman, we talk condiments.
     "If you plan on making money, it's got to be busy, and you can't dress a hot dog," Reitman says. "It just doesn't work. Let people dress their own dogs."
     Not that this is without risk, particularly if you are offering a Chicago-style hot dog, with mustard, onions, relish, celery salt, sport peppers, and that profit killer, tomatoes.
     "I never served tomatoes," Reitman says. "You get somebody who loves them, they can use $2 worth. They're there making a salad out of my hot dog."
     Reitman of course analyzes the eternal ketchup conundrum.
     "Two out of three people" in Wisconsin put ketchup on hot dogs, says Reitman, who ran a stand in our neighbor to the North before beginning Hot Dog U. in 2006.
     As opposed to Chicago, "where it was blasphemous if you put ketchup on a hot dog."
      "I'll give you my feeling on that," he says. "Always put yourself in your customers' shoes. It's not what you want. It's what your customers want. People here at Vienna Beef would probably rip out my tongue if I said it's OK to put ketchup on your hot dog stand."
     Because, he says, ketchup throws off the subtle zeitgeist of the Chicago-style dog.
     "We add corn syrup to the hot dog, it's a sweetener," he said. "So it begins by getting the sweetness from corn syrup. Then that neon green relish, one of the first ingredients on that neon green relish is sugar. Then your tomato which is not a vegetable, it's a fruit, so you have that sugar in there. The addition of ketchup to Chicago-style hot dog exacerbates the amount of sugar and sweetness in it.
     "My philosophy is this: Whatever a customer wants he should be able to dress his dog. We have Hispanic customers, they request mayonnaise. You ever have mayonnaise on a hot dog?"
     And off we go on mayonnaise, spiced with lime and used in Tijuana Bacon Dogs and Sonoran Mexican Dogs. You need to know what your customers want and have it there— Grape Crush if you're on the West Side, mandarin orange Jarritos soda in Kenosha. You won't make money selling it, he says, because it's expensive, but some people will like you just seeing it on top of your cart.
     The next day it gets really interesting.

At the Restaurant Depot.

      
     We meet at 8 a.m. in the cavernous expanse of Restaurant Depot on Division, an enormous facility— merchandise is packed in pallets going up 40 feet—where you can buy anything from a mammoth industrial range to an oven mitt to tongs, which are complex.
     "In the world of tongs, there are good tongs and bad tongs," says Reitman. He brandishes a $1.91 spring loaded tong. "This over here is a very bad tong. It's like a razor blade—very easy to nip your finger."
     He picks up an $8 pair of tongs. "Spend the extra money. And buy two, because you're going to drop it in the hot water, eventually, and how are going to get it out?"
     Aisle by aisle we go through the depot, talking cups — offer one size ("Give people less choice," he says) — talking straws, onions, ice cream. Styrofoam hot dog containers are not Chicago — wax paper is, because one costs up to a nickel, and one costs a fraction of a cent and both "end up in the garbage."

Working the line at Vienna's cafeteria. 

   Back at Vienna Beef, we roll out Reitman's hot dog cart, fire up the burners, fill the water trays, and practice making ourselves hot dogs for lunch in a steady snow. Then we're behind the counter at the Vienna Beef cafeteria, taking orders from real customers as they reel off what they want on their dogs.
     "Are you ready to open a hot dog stand now?" a classmate asks me.
     "I'm ready to go back to the office and kiss the floor," I answer. "This is work."
     But work that pays off, or can. A few weeks later, I'm sitting in what could be considered the opposite of a hot dog stand — the plush, white-table cloth elegance of Petterino's, having lunch with Leo Melamed, the man who invented financial futures trading, the multi-millionaire chairman emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We discuss politics, poetry, Poland, but the subject that really animates him is hot dogs.
     "Freddy's Hot Dogs!" he enthuses. "I was a hot dog man!" And we're off on tales of after-hours pinochle and how the grease smell lingers on your clothes. A titan of Chicago business. You gotta start somewhere.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 13, 2011

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Chicago is a city, and cities are known for their buildings and crowds. But the above is also in Chicago, and there are neither buildings nor crowds. In fact, when I took the photo, it was just me. 
      Where is this solitary, verdant place? The winner will receive one of my store of fine Chicago Mailing Tube cardboard tubes, complete with end caps. And since it would seem chintzy if I sent an empty tube, well-constructed though it may be, I'll include one of my bottomless supply of 2015 blog posters—which I intend to greatly attrit of next week by wheat pasting them to walls in parts of the city a bit more built up.
      Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Plastic or even more plastic?

European starling

     The Law of Unintended Consequences isn't written into the statute books, or taught in law school, though maybe it should be because it rules over our lives with a stronger hand than almost any ordinance.
     Broadly stated, the LoUC says that if you do A, intent on causing B, you might unknowingly cause C, a result you never anticipated.
     For instance.
     If you go back 30 years, when cellphones were first being rolled out — as car phones, heavy bricks bolted in your trunk — they were presented as something that contractors at construction sites and traveling salesmen on the road would use to save having to spend time seeking out a pay phone. And if you asked back then, "And how will cellphones someday dramatically affect the racial dialogue in this country?" you'd have gotten a blank look, because nobody could have foreseen that each phone would come with a high-quality video camera and citizens wielding those cameras would document the tendency of urban police to brutalize black people and the resultant images would spark outrage.
     That's what happened. But is not the best example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, since cellphones weren't created to boost the cops. The most satisfying examples of the LoUC contain a delicious irony, where not only does something unexpected happen, but that unexpected thing is the opposite of what you were trying to do, like the anti-campus drinking programs that were found to cause college students to drink more. Or in 2000 when a Chicago Public Schools effort to encourage parents to walk their kids to the first day of classes led to a quarter of the students — some 100,000 kids — not showing up at all, after embarrassed parents who couldn't walk their children to school kept them home instead.The Law of Unintended Consequences is, in part, a function of complex systems, which is why it's so prevalent in environmental matters, when animals imported for Small Purpose A instead cause Huge Problem B. Fifty pair of European Starlings were released in New York's Central Park in 1890 and 1891 by a group trying to bring all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to this country, a lofty goal which no doubt brings cold comfort to those shouldering the $800 million worth of crop damage and disease that the starlings cause each year.
     My favorite LoUC environment story involves an Inuit tribe in Canada. Deprived of their livelihood — hunting caribou — by meddling environmentalists, the tribe sold their land to petroleum developers.
     You have to love that.
     Our recent plastic bag law in Chicago, which went into effect Aug. 1, might not be up there with the European Starlings or the Canadian hunting grounds, but it has the same exquisite irony. Last year, the geniuses in City Council, having abandoned the idea of addressing the city's actual problems, decided to go after flimsy plastic bags. It seems Ald. Proco Joe Moreno (1st) saw one stuck in a tree. So they passed a law banning lightweight bags at chain stores. But they allowed thicker, supposedly re-usable bags.
     Do you see the problem here? They didn't.
     I have on my desk, a pre-law Walgreens bag and a post-law Walgreens bag. The former is a thin affair and weighs 5 grams. The new bag is sturdier and includes an exhortation, "Please reuse or recycle at a participating store."
     It also weighs 21 grams. So the Chicago City Council, hoping to reduce the amount of plastic in landfills, quadrupled the amount of plastic in each bag that goes into landfills.
     Thanks guys.
     To be generous, maybe thicker bags will nudge consumers toward more recycling. Maybe this effort is part of the great societal shift toward living in a more renewable world. It's possible. No error is without some good.
     Still, thicker disposable plastic bags — Jewel-Osco is also using them to thwart the law — was not what the City Council had in mind. Moreno, who would not return my call Thursday, said in June, when environmentalists first flagged this problem, that the city might "change the ordinance and make it even stricter," perhaps by "not allowing [stores] to give away free bags."
     Not allowing stores to give away bags! That's the solution. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe it'll just make the problem worse in some unforeseen manner. You can try to thwart the Law of Unintended Consequences but, being a law, it has a tendency to thwart you.

Don't forget why we dropped the bomb

     

     Today is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The debate over the morality of the bombing seems muted this year, perhaps by the renewed bellicosity of Japan, which, having whitewashed its history, seems hellbent to repeat it. I wrote this 10 years ago, reminding my lefty friends that, as ethically satisfying as it might feel to flagellate their country over the A-bomb, the decision was the right one.

     Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A doubly tragic anniversary in that, with the obliterating grind of decades, a significant number of U.S. citizens no longer realize what a miracle the atomic bomb really was.          Instead, they view it as yet another awful moment of shame in a history studded with offenses, whether subjugating Native Americans, supporting apartheid Israel or, on Aug. 6, 1945, murdering 160,000 civilians in Hiroshima for no particular reason beyond our own venality.

     That isn't how it happened. People forget. Japan was a brutal aggressor in World War II, whether it was the invasion of China, the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, or atrocities across the South Pacific. They killed with a guiltlessness that lingers to this day, in the bland, mistakes-happened shrug Japan extends toward its own history, a second crime that makes Germany, with its subsequent apologies, seem like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
     To ask if it was necessary for the United States to drop the atomic bomb is to display an unfathomable ignorance of history. The Japanese showed no inclination toward surrender. The firebombing of Tokyo, which cost 100,000 lives and took place all around the leaders of that nation, did not prompt them to even discuss giving up. Nor did the bombing of Hiroshima — it took a second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, to do that.
     Yes, we might have defeated Japan, eventually, at the loss of 500,000 or a million lives. But we had this awful technology, wrought from the can-do spirit of America. We should be proud of the atomic bomb, and any lingering doubts should be dispelled by honestly answering one simple question: Had Japan the capacity, in early August 1945, to drop 100 atomic bombs on the 100 largest American cities, would they have done it?
     No one with any honesty can pretend to doubt the answer to that.

HUMANITY FINDS A WAY TO ENDURE

     Odd. When I flopped my fingers on the keyboard, the above wasn't what I wanted to say. Oh, I believe it, in spades. But what I meant to point out was one of my favorite pieces of obscure historical trivia.
     We tend to think of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as separate events, because they took places three days apart. But the cities are nearby, and there were people who fled the bombing of Hiroshima only to be killed in Nagasaki, plus a handful who survived both. It says something terrible about the hand of fate — you escape one a-bomb, and here comes another. But also something wonderful about the tenacity of the human vessel. We worry about sharks. But there are people who were in cities hit by atomic bombs, twice, and lived to tell the tale.    
                              —Originally published Aug. 5, 2005

Notional babies and real women

     Sex makes men crazy.
     Sometimes quite literally.
     How many times have you read a news story about the jilted boyfriend who tracks down his beloved, kills her and whoever else happens to be around?
     What's the thinking behind that? Rejection, injured ego and an overwhelming impulse to lash out at a person you believe should be still under your control.
     Sound familiar? Our society is the same. Law and religion have always labored mightily to dominate women, to ensure females remain second-class citizens, shackled by vastly restricted rights. With a cry of "You can't leave me," the Senate just tried to defund Planned Parenthood, the most important provider of contraceptive and reproductive health services to women in the country.
     One deceptive tape cobbled together by an anti-abortion group was enough to set off Ted Cruz et al because crushing Planned Parenthood is what they want to do anyway. Narrow defeat does not mean the battle is over; it veers off in another direction. Lose the Senate vote? Let's shut down the government until we get our way.
     It's sure easier than facing the actual problems facing this country. As Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richard, said: "When those guys can't figure out what to do about jobs, and they can't, their first target is women."
     Not that Planned Parenthood's amped up foes put it that way.
     "We can no longer allow the atrocities committed by an organization that receives state and federal tax dollars, and that receives special tax treatment from the federal government," former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Friday. "The Obama Administration targets groups with the word ‘patriot’ in their name but does nothing to an organization that cuts apart and sells the body parts of dead babies."
     Listening to candidates fulminate against using fetal parts for medical research — a practice that is legal and has gone on for years — you can almost forget that they're against abortion. Period. Were the fetuses buried intact in mahogany coffins at Graceland religious fanatics would fight it just as fiercely. And when you look at what's upsetting them — using fetal tissue for science versus throwing it away — it seems they've got the morality of the situation completely backward, a common situation among the faith fogged.
     Of course the pious third is against using fetuses for science. They're against both abortion and science. Religion was against adults donating their bodies to science after they die. They react with fresh indignant fury, counting on the general public to overlook that it's actually the same old indignant fury in a new box.
     Don't take the bait. This is a long-term struggle. Each generation fights it anew. It never stops for the same reason the spurned boyfriend can't just sign up at Match.com and move on with his life. A certain sort of person can't accept the independence and humanity of women. It is an affront to their sense of themselves and, of course, God.
     Thus our mothers had to fight for the right to hold their jobs. The idea of a woman being a doctor or a pilot was laughed off. Our great-grandmothers fought for the right to vote, battling the same band of faith-addled men.
     Not that we're alone. In Saudi Arabia, women can't drive. And we regard that with smug Western superiority: "Oh, these backward Muslim nations." Meanwhile, U.S. senators are tarring American women as whores who will unthinkingly murder their children and sell their mangled limbs to ghouls unless responsible men step in and stop them.
     Just as with the fuming boyfriend, lurking in the parking lot with a handgun, rational discussion has little value here. Powerful men are going to do what they feel compelled to do. Whatever dysfunction or repression formed their cramped outlook has already occurred, manifesting itself as this glittery-eyed religious zeal. These are babies. End of story. Reply, "Oh, you care about babies? Great. Because I have 10,000 babies who are already born and wards of the state who are going to end up in Dickensian foster care; why not help them with some of the money you're pouring into trying to drag American womanhood back to 1915?" Abortion foes will just look at you blankly.
     Because the issue isn't really babies. They talk babies, but there are no babies. It's about sex, or more accurately, gender, and about conjuring up notional babies to rule over real women, who are so busy enjoying the rights that their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers won for them, they have a hard time focusing on the gang of right-wing Republican revanchists set on revoking those rights. The assumption is the Republicans can't do it. But they can. They're sure trying with all their might.

Happy birthday, U.S. Coast Guard

     Today is the 225th anniversary of the United States Coast Guard. Three years ago I noticed one of their powerful little speedboats cruising the Chicago River—or, rather, noticed the big ass machine gun at the back, and got curious as to what the Coast Guard does here. The resulting column is made more fun by an overly-cautious Coast Guard PR rep, who reminds us of a vital Communication Age truth: always know what's on your own web site:

     Chicago does not have a coast.

     It can't, in that a "coast," according to my dictionary, is "the border of land near the sea," and the city, despite its many glories, is not on the ocean.
     Though coastless, Chicago does, however, have a coast guard, a unit of the United States Coast Guard based at Station Calumet Harbor, whose job it is to patrol the Lake Michigan shoreline, as well as the Chicago River plus some 120 miles of connected rivers and waterways.

     A big job and, this being summer, with a job to do myself, I thought somebody ought to join the Coast Guard on one of its random lake patrols, to keep tabs on the situation.
     The Calumet station, a large white wooden structure built in 1933 has, well, their spokesman asked me not mention the exact number of sailors based here, in case al-Qaida is reading this. So let's just say too many to transport on a bus and too few to fill three (or, checking the official Calumet Station website, as a resourceful terrorist might, we could also state, as they do, that there are 42 active duty personnel and 32 reserves).
     They're well-armed—again, I was asked not to mention the exact weaponry but, again, it's all plain as day online, from the M240 machine guns mounted at the bow of their Defender speedboats, which you might sometimes notice patrolling the Chicago river, to the Sig Sauer .40 caliber automatics carried as sidearms (no big secret either, as lots of military personnel carry those).

   Of course, before al-Qaida could cause trouble at Station Calumet Harbor, they'd first have to find the place, which is a lot easier to do from the water—it's on Lake Michigan, naturally, just north of ComEd's State Line Generating Station. Coming from land, a least for the first time, you have to navigate through winding, largely abandoned streets, a confusing tangle to a North Sider, and something of a revelation: I would have bet money that there isn't an Avenue L in Chicago and I'd have lost. There is.
     Before patrol, a briefing. Petty Officer William Flores accesses risk—green, amber, red— and goes over weather, noting that, with the heat index, it could feel like 105.
      "It's going to be hot out," he says.
     The local Coast Guard has three main duties—to guard against terrorism, to conduct search and rescue of boaters in distress, and to encourage marine safety. Six sailors and I pile onto a 45 foot patrol boat—which the Coast Guard refers to, none-too-lyrically, as an "RBM," or "Response Boat-Medium." The boat is two years old, with a jet drive, which means it isn't pushed forward by anything as retro as propellers, but by twin 825 horsepower Detroit Diesel engines powering what amounts to a pair of jet engines—two Rolls Royce Waterjets that suck water out of the bottom and rocket it out the back. With a top speed of ... well, I'm not supposed to say that either, though the website says 40 knots. The thing can really clip along.
     The boat has all sorts of fun bells and whistles, such as an advanced FLIR thermal imaging and night-vision system, for finding people in the water. "I haven't actually found anyone with it yet, but it's a pretty good asset to have," says Flores, 24, who went to St. Pat's High School here and had to endure such hardship posts as Key West and Hawaii before getting himself transferred back to Chicago. "It's nice to get home," he says.
     Despite the fine weather, the lake off Calumet is oddly free of traffic. "I hope we can find some boats out here," says Petty Officer Tim Morley. We pass the harbor breakwall, source of regular business for the Coast Guard; about once a month a boater coming back from downtown manages to ram it. 

     "There are a lot of lights, and if you're not looking for them, you can be complacent and hit the breakwall," says Flores. "It's pretty damaging. Some people just don't see it."
     Finally, we have a catch. "We've got a boat up here, we'll do a boarding," says Flores. They do about 1,000 boardings a year.
     Unlike the movies, there are no stern warnings barked through megaphones, no radio contact. The two men aboard the Sundancer power boat "Almost Summer" don't seem to be fishing, just floating, watching the Coast Guard approach. Morley and Seaman David Durr hop aboard bearing paperwork.
     The two poke around, peer under cushions. The boat is found not to have a portable fire extinguisher, though it does have a fixed fire-suppression system—pull a handle, and it floods the engine compartment. Though that secondary extinguisher is important too.
     "He could have a fire in his berthing area and he'd be screwed," says Morley, later.
     "Almost Summer" is issued a warning and the Coast Guard moves on. "The biggest thing we make sure operating safely on the water and if not, educate them," says Morley.
     "Everyone strapped in?" asks Flores before gunning the RBM forward.
     "This is an awesome boat," says Morley.

                   —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 18, 2012