Remembering Max Beauvoir

Bakery, Haiti, 1987

     Max Beauvoir did something, a small thing perhaps, a gesture, but one that I've never seen a person actually do, before or since.
     But first I should explain how I found myself in his antique and book-lined study, sitting across a desk from the head houngan, or voodou priest, of Haiti, who died last week at age 79.
     My Northwestern roommate, Didier, had taken a job in Haiti with Catholic Relief Services and, hoping to show him some support and, I suppose, have an adventure too, I volunteered to visit for a few weeks. It was 1987, and Baby Doc Duvalier had just fled the country the year before. Democracy was in full swing, supposedly, and it was a rare moment of optimism for that tiny, star-crossed island nation. 
     Unemployed or, if you prefer, a freelancer, I justified making the trip by convincing the Atlantic magazine to consider a story about voodou. Thus I found myself scouring the countryside, looking for the distinctive flags and peristyles indicating that the ancient Africa faith —kind of a funky folk Catholicism -- was practiced there. 

Max Beauvoir

     Of course I had to meet Beauvoir, who was a significant figure in "The Serpent and the Rainbow," Wade Davis' factually-shaky 1985 best-seller on the supposed reality of Haitian zombies. Beauvoir, a chemist trained in New York and Paris who veered into the priesthood in midlife, was portrayed as half shaman, half hustler. 
      That's how he struck me, an oily figure, part menacing, part ridiculous. He subjected me to a tirade, an hour-long rant on the perfidy of the Reagan administration, claiming that the attempt on Reagan's life was his, Max Beauvoir's doing.
     "How did you do that?" I asked.
     "With a red candle," he replied.
      I did manage to score an invitation the next night to the big, showy ceremonies Beauvoir held regularly.
     When it came time for me to leave, he did the thing I hadn't seen before. He held his hands to the side and clapped twice, summoning a servant, a girl of about 12, to take me to the road to catch a tap-tap, the colorful communal taxis that criss-cross Port-au-Prince. On the walk out, I realized I had no small bills, only a $20 in my wallet. A tap-tap back the city cost one gourd, or 20 cents. Figuring I'd have better luck getting change from Beauvoir's servant than from a tap-tap driver, I gave her the $20 and asked her if she could break it. She in turn beckoned over a five-year-old boy, who took the twenty and ran off. I remember standing with her, watching the boy recede, thinking: I am not a savvy traveller.
    To my vast surprise, he returned a few minutes later, with a fistful of gourds, an even 100 of them, well-worn, crumbled brown bills that were soft with use, feeling more like leaves than currency.  I tipped him, and the girl, and climbed aboard a brightly colored taxi.
     The next day's ceremony struck me, at the time, as slightly "spurious"—more tourist show than authentic religious spectacle. But as the drums drove to a frenzied pitch and the mambos wailed, a woman seemed to reach into the fire and fill her mouths with glowing coals, smiling a bright orange crescent in the darkness. I was sure it was a trick, but it was a good trick.  

Kabuki Trump

     Journalism is a kabuki. 
     I've been saying it for years.
     What does that mean?
     Kabuki is a highly stylized form, a centuries-old type of Japanese theater, with long-established plot lines worn smooth from time, repeated again and again and again, with the same characters going through the same motions.
     Journalism too has its tropes, its cherished plots that withstand the test of time, and are performed over and over again by the same actors. 
     Look at Donald Trump's supposed gaffe in New Hampshire this past week A supporter prefaced his question by saying that Muslims are a problem in this country, and that Barack Obama is neither a Christian nor a citizen.
     "Muslims..." he said, his voice dripping with contempt. "We know our current president is one." 
     Trump did not correct him, and this led the news media to dab on its face paint, don its kimonos, snap open its fans, and begin to go through the motions of the classic tale, The Would-Be Leader Stumbles. Again and again we heard serious reporters ask gravely: Is this the mistake that would finally bring the high flying Trump down to earth? I almost burst out laughing, listening to the NPR panjandrums ponder the possibilities. 
    What planet are these people living on? Association with that kind of hateful rhetoric won't hurt Trump. Exactly the opposite; it's what put Trump where he is. He's been a birther for years. Heck, his acceptance of the supporter's hallucinogenic bigotry will no doubt make him more popular, as exactly the kind of bold truth teller that right wing GOP wackjobs adore. They'll be rolling at his feet like puppies, while Trump juts out his Mussolini lip and preens like Il Duce. 
     The man is a demagogue—he only has one message: embrace him, accept his Cult of Personality and he will save us from everything. I almost said he's dangerous. But thank God only a third of the nation are stone crazy right wing haters, and that will be our salvation. And I'll be honest. Say what you will about Trump, I'd prefer him in the White House, hands down, to Ted Cruz, a frightening nightmare image, not from kabuki, but out of science fiction. Every time he opens his mouth and lets another falsetto squeal of moral indignation out, I see his face 60 feet high, mouth moving grotesquely, uttering mendacious slogans, something out of Orwell, projected against the sides of public buildings. 
    We count on journalism, or what's left of it, to be intelligent. To describe reality, not to try to jam reality into the molds of our expectation so it takes a form we recognize. Trump isn't George W. Bush saying something stupid by mistake, he's Huey Long saying something stupid that he really believes and his followers really believe. Let's focus on that, not a witless rendition of hackneyed story lines that really don't apply to every circumstance. Trump won't be president, not because he'll blurt out something that reveals him as he actually is, but because only 33 percent of the voters in this country passionately lap up the poisoned gruel he's serving. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     A good restaurant blends food, atmosphere and service. A great restaurant will combine them in such a way that is uniquely its own, creating a vibe, a personality that no other place don't has. 
      Of all the thousands of eateries in Chicago, the place pictured above has something going on that no other restaurant has. Homey, yes. Good food, yes. And a staff like no other.
     Where is this? And what makes it so unique? 
     The winner will receive one of my dwindling stock of 2015 blog posters, which are going fast now that I've decided to plaster them up on walls, where they belong. A reader tweeted this photograph of a poster in the West Loop after a few weeks exposed to the elements, and it made me very happy. Get one before they're gone.
    Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

A helping hand from the men in black

Archbishop Blase Cupich

  

     "Masters and wealthy owners," Pope Leo XIII wrote in his encyclical on labor in 1891, "must be mindful of their duty."
     That duty, he wrote in "Rerum Novarum" ("On the Condition of Labor") is not, as the current governor of Illinois seems to believe, to meekly accept whatever crumbs fall from the table of the rich and the powerful, but to form their own organizations to fight for decent wages, reasonable hours, mandated breaks, safety standards and a humane work environment.
     "It is the duty of the state to respect and cherish them, and if need be, to defend them from attack," Pope Leo wrote, during a time of vicious anti-union activities, even more extreme than our own.
     It is heartening to see his approach embraced by Chicago's Archbishop Blase Cupich, who went to bat for Illinois' besieged labor unions this week.
     “History has shown that a society with a healthy, effective and responsible labor movement is a better place than one where other powerful economic interests have their way and the voices and rights of workers are diminished,” Cupich told a gathering at the Chicago Journeyman Plumbers Local 130 on the West Side Thursday. “The church is duty-bound to challenge such efforts, by raising questions based on long-standing principles.”
     Cupich's comments that fit nicely in with the general trend of Catholic clergy embracing the downtrodden, emphasized lately under the inspired leadership of Pope Francis, who arrives for his first visit to the United States this week.
     The question is not, as Gov. Bruce Rauner seems to consider it, whether Illinois would be a more welcoming work environment if laborers were stripped of their rights. It certainly would, just as it's cheaper to manufacture goods using near slaves in China than it is to produce something in Chicago. Nor does supporting unions suggest that they are right in all regards and never have corruption and excesses of their own.
     The question, as Cupich so clearly stated it, is whether it is moral to make people live like that, and whether our government will set itself against the interests of workers as a matter of policy.
     “We have to ask," Cupich said, "do these measures undermine the capacity of unions to organize? Do such laws protect the weak and the vulnerable? Do they promote the dignity of work, the rights of workers? Do they promote a more just society?”
     That is a big "No." Rauner is attempting to hold the budget hostage until he is given the weapons he wants to unleash against unions. I have been in a union for most of my career at the Sun-Times, and have seen first hand how it counterbalances, slightly, the power and control that rests with the owners. Without it, wages drop, security is gone, and workers find themselves at the whim of owners.
     I'm not in the habit of speaking for God, but if the archbishop wants to point out that undermining unions is immoral and contrary to the will of the Divine, a denial of the love that He feels for His creation, I certainly won't contradict him either.
     This is sadly nothing new. Read the following about unions and ask yourself: Blase Cupich in 2015 or Pope Leo in 1891?
     "It is the duty of the state to respect and cherish them, and if need be, to defend them from attack. It is notorious that a very different course has been followed, more especially in our own times. In many places the state authorities have laid violent hands on these communities, and committed manifold injustice against them; it has placed them under control of the civil law, taken away their rights as corporate bodies."
     That would be Pope Leo, 124 years ago. This is an old fight, one that has to be fought anew in every generation, and it's good to see the men in black on the right side once again.

In moments, trauma unit turns into "war zone"

     I clearly remember the moment, my hand on the old brass doorknob of my apartment at Logan and Mozart, the telephone ringing through the dark wooden door. 

    "Don't answer it," I told myself. 

    It was Friday, my day off, since I worked Sundays, and I was heading to the gym. 

   "Just leave," I thought.

     But being a reporter is a calling, like a priest. I sighed, went back inside, answered the phone. The City Desk, of course. The Tribune, they said, was running some big piece on trauma centers, starting Monday. Trauma centers were expensive to run, and closing down. I was to go to Christ Hospital, soon to be the only Level 1 trauma unit on the South Side, and spend 24 hours in their emergency room, then write a piece. 
    For Monday. 

    Okay, I said. Being a newspaper reporter is a calling, like a...

    I got Christ's PR person on the phone. 

    "I'm going to have to talk to the board," she said. 

    "That's fine," I said. "But do it quickly. I'm heading to the hospital right now, meeting a photographer there. You can either let us in or have us arrested."

    They let us in. A different era. The problem I faced was that very little happened for the first 20 hours I was there. I caught a few winks on a stainless steel table in an examining room, worried as I drifted off that I'd wake up being operated on. 

    To show how long this has been an issue, this article is more than 25 years old. Holy Cross, at 68th and California, which gets bypassed by the ambulances in my story, announced last week it is spending $40 million to upgrade to a Level 1 trauma center. 

     

     Everything changed at 1:35 p.m.
     After hours of coffee, pizza, chat and routine treatment of cut noses and sore throats, the call came into the Christ Hospital emergency room Saturday afternoon: Two men with serious gunshot wounds were on their way.
     An operating room at Christ, soon to be the only hospital serving the South Side with an advanced trauma unit, was readied for surgery. Specialists whom another hospital might take hours to find were immediately contacted and put on alert at Christ. Doctors, interns and nurses gathered to map out plans.
    "Why don't we make the chest wound the 99?" said Dr. Joe Mueller, giving priority to a 33-year-old man who police told them by phone had been shot just above the heart.
     Other patients were wheeled away. Supplies were laid out: intubation tubes, packs of syringes, gauze and gallons of medical fluids.
     Paramedics soon rushed in with the first victim. In agony, he tried to jump off the gurney. A dozen doctors and nurses held him down. Nurses slit off his pants while doctors began the "90-second-survey," rolling him on his side to check for other wounds.
    The big man, with homemade tattoos, cursed the doctors, then cried out in pain.
    "Hold my hand, hold my hand," he said, and a nurse gripped his fingers.
     Paramedics who had wheeled in a very old man stood waiting for attention. They were brushed aside by another group of paramedics with the second gunshot victim, a 19-year-old.
     The shooting victims had wounded each other on West 69th Street over a dice game. Twenty-dollar bills still lay on a gurney.
     The ambulances carrying the men had bypassed two other hospitals — Holy Cross and St. Bernard — because they are not part of Chicago's shrinking trauma network. Instead they came to Christ Hospital, at 4440 W. 95th St. in Oak Lawn.
     Even as the trauma team divided itself between the two gunshot victims Saturday, nurse Cheri Aardema put down a phone and announced: "We've got another one coming in. IV drug user with multiple stab wounds. Used heroin two hours ago. Here in 10 minutes."
    By 3 p.m., one resident described the emergency room as a "war zone." A technician, arriving to make a scan of the victims' hearts, took one look and left the room to pass out.
     The key to understanding the difference between a trauma center and a standard emergency room is one word: readiness.
     Any hospital could have inserted tubes to drain the gunshot victims' chests, taken X-rays or cut into their ankles in search of the saphenous veins to hook up lines to pump liquid into their shocked bodies.
     But as a trauma hospital, Christ had to be prepared for whatever happened. If an aneurysm suddenly burst in a brain, neurosurgeons were ready. Cardiac surgeons were standing by in case bullets had damaged a heart.
     It follows that since trauma hospitals must be ready for almost anything, usually their capacities are not needed to their fullest. In fact, for three solid hours earlier that day, from 3 to 6 a.m., no patients were treated in the unit.
     Other "Code 99" trauma calls Saturday were false starts. A "gunshot wound to the left chest" arrived at 12:40 a.m. The trauma team assembled. The operating staff readied.
     But the bullet had been deflected by a rib; the only time the patient was in real danger was when he lit a cigarette while an oxygen tube was taped under his nose. The trauma team bandaged him up, replaced lost fluids and told him to put out the cigarette.
     One hundred six people came into the emergency room Friday, the day before. They were a varied group: an 18-month-old boy who drank bleach, a 93-year-old woman with a fever of 105, a man with a sore throat, a drunk with a blood alcohol level of 0.436, several victims of minor car accidents, a hurt wrestler, a fireman who inhaled smoke, four people who breathed hydrochloric acid fumes at a factory, and dozens more, none in danger of dying, none a trauma patient.
     Despite the high cost of trauma care, Christ joined the trauma network in 1986 "first, (because of) what it does for our educational program," said Dr. Gary Merlotti, head of emergency services. "You cannot run a surgical residency without trauma.
     "It's important for prestige. If you want to become a community hospital, that's well and good, but if you want to be more than that, you need to provide trauma services. Also, the concept is consistent with our philosophy and vision."
     The network started out with 10 hospitals but will soon be down to six when Michael Reese ends its participation next month. As hospitals drop out of the network, the time it takes to get patients to the remaining trauma centers grows longer, cutting into the "Golden Hour," or crucial period after an injury occurs when trauma care is most effective.
     "With all the trauma centers closing down," paramedics have to struggle to keep people alive longer until they can receive trauma care, said paramedic Jim Gleeson, who brought in one of the wounded men from the dice game.
     Merlotti said there are enough trauma centers in the network, as long as they are evenly distributed. But since trauma centers cannot be moved, he said, redistricting is needed, or new centers should be opened. Whatever happens, Christ Hospital will stay in the network, he said.
     "If we leave the trauma system, it will collapse," he said.
     As a trauma surgeon, Merlotti was called in when the two gunshot victims arrived at Christ. After they were stabilized, he checked their heart scans.
     Suddenly, at 3:40 p.m. the room was quiet again. Merlotti gazed at the pile of bloody material left by the gunshot victims, who had been moved upstairs.
     Musing on the huge financial losses that have forced hospitals to drop out of the trauma network, he estimated that the bill for the gunshot treatment could be $2,000 for each patient, though he doubted that the hospital would ever get the money.
     Many trauma patients are uninsured and cannot pay for the expensive care, adding to the financial burden carried by a trauma center.
     "We could charge them $20 and have difficulty collecting," Merlotti said.

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 15, 1990

And when he goes away, it'll get greater

     September is half over, but Donald Trump is still here.
     Turning away our gaze and jamming our fingers in our ears isn't working.
     We have to look at him again, in advance of Wednesday's debate.
     The general media assumption since Trump burst into the GOP presidential spotlight in June has been that he'd eventually go off the rails and say something so staggeringly crude that even Republicans would be disgusted, would wake from their slumber, realize exactly who they are in bed with and hastily collect their panties for the walk of shame.
     But it's mid-September. Trump is still here, and the GOP is still in bed with him.
     Believe me, I'd prefer to leave the whole Donald Trump Phenomenon to historians and psychologists. I try to squint and think well of my country, try not to imagine that a major and once-respected party is romancing the erratic demagogue who would drag us into chaotic decline.
     So let's look at him.
     My gaze keeps falling on Trump's baseball cap: "Make America Great Again."
     You can buy it for $25 on his website.
     Make. American. Great. Again.
     It's his campaign slogan. I've already discussed it as a racist code.
     It's another way of saying "America Isn't Great Anymore." They wouldn't rally around that, even though that's exactly what they believe. America was great, before the Fall, back in the Garden, at some happy time, when white people ruled and minorities were either back in their home countries where they belong, making stuff for us, or stepping off the sidewalk with a mumbled "Howdy suh."
     "Make America Great Again."
     That's soooo familiar. Where did we hear that before? Step into the Way Back Machine, and set the dial to 1980.
     Ronald Reagan.
     Of course. The patron saint of Republicanism, the smiling presence who first taught them to hate their own government. So much cleaner than hating the people government helps, directly.
     "For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope," Reagan told the Republican National Convention in 1980. "And we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!"
     There's a lot going on in that sentence. Some Dante: "abandon hope ye who enter." A little FDR: "This is a great national crusade to destroy enforced idleness." Reagan liked to echo Roosevelt. He also threw out a lot of rendezvouses with destiny.
     "Let's Make America Great Again" was plastered on Reagan's campaign buttons, on posters. 

     Trump acknowledges its origin with Reagan, though that hasn't kept him from trying to trademark it.
     "This is a great country, but it's not being run like a great country," Reagan said in a 1980 TV commercial that ended with the tag line. "Let's Make America Great Again."
     Trump dropped the "Let's," since that suggests communal effort. Americans, led by Ronald Reagan, would join together to regain its lost greatness. With Trump, the implication is we don't have to do anything beyond elect him. He'll do the rest, starting with kicking out the Mexicans who are standing between us and greatness.
     Trump is aping Reagan's rhetoric. It got him elected, but did he follow through? Reagan was president for eight years; did he make America "great again?"
     A complex question, but I was there, and America was plagued by events that were not exactly proof positive of greatness. An economy mired in "Reagan Recession," with 10 percent unemployment and the worst stock market drop in history. Both the Marine barracks in Beirut and the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. Iran-Contra. Nancy and her astrologer. Not exactly our country's finest hour.
     I don't want to be too hard on Reagan. He had his successes too.
     And compared to Trump, Ronald Reagan is Aristotle. He said something — to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Chicago in August 1980 — that bears remembering. Thanking them for their endorsement, he noted the four previous VFW commanders had been Democrats.
     "When it comes to keeping America strong, when it comes to keeping America great, when it comes to keeping America at peace, then none of us can afford to be simply a Democrat or a Republican," Reagan said. "We must all stand united as Americans."
     "Keeping America great." Three words you'll never hear strung together by Donald Trump, because they imply that our nation is great still, and Trump believes the ship has sailed on American greatness. I don't believe he is correct; then again, he hasn't yet been elected president either.

Donald Trump: Godsend for Latinos

     The two words I most associate with the Republican platform are "immoral" and "unpatriotic." 
     An example of immorality is their stance on gay marriage—the denial of basic civil rights to people for no other reason than religious prejudice. They drape it in a smokescreen of an antique sort of religion, as an attempt to obscure its immorality. But fewer and fewer people are fooled.
     And the best example of their lack of patriotism is their stand on immigration. 
     Immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants, add to the strength, vitality and economy of the United States. Countries that severely curtail immigration, like Japan, are utterly fucked, demographically, with whole towns emptying out and a dwindling workforce that can't support its burgeoning population of retirees. 
     The United States has accepted, and been changed by, wave after wave of immigration: from Ireland, from Italy, from Eastern Europe. The Hispanic immigration has already happened, has already changed this country, for the better, unless you consider finding a bottle of salsa on a restaurant table an earthquake, or a whisper of Spanish a personal affront. Overblown concern for legality is a fig leaf, the same as religion and gay marriage, an attempt to hide something objectionable. Anyone who cared about America would recognize that we need to both fix our immigration system so that workers can come to this country safely and legally, and put a path to citizenship for those who came to this country and contributed to it despite our broken immigration policy.
     The Republicans, who let their bigotry trump—pun intended—their concern for the United States, would endanger our future strength in order to indulge their current fears.  They use Hispanics as so many bogeymen to whip up their base, and it's always been a mystery to my why the actual Latinos don't push back harder, and exert their political power. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. 
     Maybe that moment is finally arriving. 
     Like most responsible Americans, I view the advent of Donald Trump as a symptom of Republican pathology and dysfunction. But there was an engaging column in Monday's New York Times today by Ernesto Londono explaining why Trump, counterintuitively, might be just the motivation needed to wake the sleeping political might of our country's Hispanic population. 
     It's a question I've long pondered, and I've never seen the potential laid out in such a lucent way before. So while regular readers of my blog know this is not my habit — in fact, I have never done it before — I'm going to break tradition, and present the first few paragraph's of Londono's excellent article, with a link to the rest. I think what he has to say is that important, and hope you take the time to read it.

     I am rooting for Donald Trump.     Not because I want to see him attempt to build an impenetrable wall along the border with Mexico nor because I’ve been following his grotesque campaign with the kind of guilty gusto that got me hooked on the reality show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” I’m rooting for Donald Trump because he could unlock the potential of America’s Latino electorate. Hispanics, among the fastest-growing of all segments of eligible voters, played a crucial role in President Obama’s two elections. Yet, over the past couple of decades, pollsters and political operatives have regarded the Latino vote as a sleeping giant waiting for the right jolt....

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