Does the law help or hinder?

     PHILADELPHIA: George Washington didn't want to attend the Constitutional Convention, never mind be its president. But duty called, again, and the weary general left his beloved plantation over the summer of 1787 to sit for three months in a mahogany armchair that is still there, a gilt half sun carved into the back.
     My wife and I found ourselves in the City of Brotherly Love last week, to attend a wedding. We had the chance to do a bit of sightseeing. I chose the Barnes Foundation, the eccentric private museum gone public. More Renoirs than you can shake a stick at.
     And my wife, officer of the court that she is, chose Independence Hall, the former seat of the Pennsylvania legislature, now shrine to the idea that Americans, at one point in our national story, could, if not exactly set aside their selfish interests, then bend them a little toward a national unity in such short supply nowadays.
     Visiting Independence Hall, like visiting the Liberty Bell, is free, but for the former you need a timed ticket. Requesting a ticket at 9 a.m. got us one good for 11 a.m., and I scanned nearby attractions, looking for one that might be worth two hours.
    "What's the 'National Constitution Center?" I asked a ranger, who said in essence, "it's a center dedicated to our nation's Constitution." Not much to go on, but enough to send us shuffling there to see what it was about.
     We ended up in "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government's Effect on the American Diet," and if that sounds like traffic school to you, it's good you didn't marry me or my wife, because it was a toss up which of us were more delighted. How could you not love an exhibit that tells you, right off the bat, that Thomas Jefferson smuggled rice out of Italy in his pockets, risking a death sentence, to see if it could grow in our nascent country?
     "This is so cool," my wife gushed. "I love this."
     The centuries-old relationship between our government and seeds mirrors the national schism we have now. In the 19th century, the idea was to kick start agriculture and get the hardiest plants into the hands of farmers. So the government not only gave seeds away for free, but sent scientists around the world to find more. Eventually putting the government on a collision course with the seed industry, which couldn't turn a profit selling what the government gave away, one of the countless ways business and government clash.
     Chicago is well-represented, alas, in the section on tainted foods, which included a series

of South African postcards mocking tainted canned meats.
     Just before 11, we pulled ourselves away, with great reluctance, and bolted for Independence Hall, where we met our guide, park ranger Helen McKenna, a 21-year National Park Service veteran. You would think her talk would be a bored recitation of Founding Fathers minutia. But other than pointing out Washington's chair, she explained that guides to independence Hall get to write their own presentations, and proceeded to deliver a short tutorial in American freedoms that probably was more challenging than many college classes.
   

Not happy to live in a nation of laws.

 McKenna asked our group to consider whether we think that the law protects our freedoms, or limits them. Then she asked that we divide ourselves accordingly and explain our choices. I joined the 50 or so people on the side who feel protected by the law, facing seven on the other who feel hobbled by it, which augurs well for the Democrats, since the belief that law maintains and supports our social order is a distinctly Democratic notion, while the idea that it hobbles our God-given freedoms and must be pared back in all places, is the Republican mantra.
     Afterward, I quizzed McKenna on how the groups usually divided themselves, and she said it varied widely. She's had entire school groups of African-American students gather on the "limited freedom" side and when she asked them to explain why, they said, "Trayvon Martin."
     I wasn't used to tours of historical locations being mini-civics lessons, and wondered how that came about.
     "It is a new thing," said Jane Cowley, public affairs officer at Independence National Historical Park. "It's called 'facilitated dialogue.' Our park rangers interpret history, interpret the resource for our visitors. It's a technique used to engage the visitor, as you experienced."
     It is not a practice limited to the rooms where our nation was born.
     "The interpreters (or tour guides) research, prepare and present their own programs both in Philadelphia and throughout the country," said Kathy Kupper, the park service's national spokesperson. "This practice allows the material to be fresh, not feel canned to the interpreter or the audience. They do have guidelines to go by such as the theme of the tour must be consistent with the overall goals and themes of the site, for instance at some point during the tour of Independence Hall, the ranger will let you know that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed in the building. From there, the ranger could craft his or his tour and go in several directions. A good ranger is constantly adapting the tour to fit the audience, tying in facts and ideas that can help connect that particular audience to the resource."
     Does this ever present a problem? Intellectual analysis of our history is not very popular with ... umm ... certain sections of the electorate. 
     "It's definitely received very positive reviews from all the visitors who have taken the tours," said Cowley, adding that some 3.6 million people come through the park, which includes the building where the Liberty Bell is housed, the Ben Franklin Museum, plus several other sites.

      "The National Park Service also interprets all of our history, the good and the bad and the sometimes controversial," said Kupper. "Our sites include Japanese internment camps, Pearl Harbor, cold war sites, a Confederate prisoner of war camp, battlefields, places where people were enslaved, etc. All the information provided must be accurate and properly sourced. A good tour also presents multiple points of view. However, sometimes a tour of one of these sites or a tour of any site that is particularly thought-provoking or presents different points of view might not appeal to a visitor."
    I bet. Though it certainly appealed to this visitor. 

  McKenna left us by holding up a enlargement of the sun at the back of Washington's chair, and quoting Benjamin Franklin.
     "I have often looked at that behind the president," Franklin wrote, "without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting."
     Franklin decided that it was indeed a rising sun.
     But that was 228 years ago. What about now, McKenna asked? Would you agree with Franklin? Is the American sun rising or setting?
     "What would you say to him," she asked, "and what examples would you cite?"
     That's easy. I know what I would tell Franklin, and the example I would offer: the tour I had just taken. As I was both pleased by the agriculture exhibit and doubly-pleased by the fact that the woman I married loved it too, so I was both intrigued by the issues that McKenna raised, and delighted that we live in a country where a government tour guide is free to raise them. For that alone, I side with Franklin: rising, still.

Flashback: All Summer Long

     
     Pans are more fun than praise. My column Wednesday on Leonard Pitts' new novel, "Grant Park," was hobbled by the fact it is a pretty good book. The review referred almost wistfully to another novel by another columnist—"All Summer Long" by Bob Greene. I couldn't resist the urge to dredge up my infinitely more satisfying treatment of it, which ran in the Reader 20 years ago. I loved the fact that it was presented deadpan as a review that just happened to be written by Bob's nemesis, Ed Gold, as if it weren't the latest link the clanking chain of malice that was BobWatch. The bit of publishing gossip beginning the third paragraph was possible because Bob and I shared a publisher at the time.

All Summer Long
By Bob Greene
(St. Martin's Press; $5.99)
Reviewed by Ed Gold

     There were moments while reading this unremittingly awful novel that I just wanted to close the book, turn my face to the wall, and die.
     Staring hour after hour into the Freudian cesspool of Bob Greene's psyche, delivered in a septic stream of 437 pages of predigested prose--devoid of a single metaphor, sharp image, or fresh idea--was practically a soul-shattering experience.
     All Summer Long was said to be the coveted novel that Bob extracted out of Doubleday, his pound of flesh in return for Hang Time, the highly lucrative kissy-face to Michael Jordan. The two years that passed before paperback publication, plus the novel's devolving to the inferior St. Martin's Press, point to its vanity press nature. As do the blurbs from publications such as the Cape Cod Times, the Flint Journal, and the Muskogee Phoenix and Times Democrat.

   The plot is pure Bob wish fulfillment. The thinly disguised Bob character, an aging TV journalist named Ben Kroeger, dragoons his two best friends into abandoning their families and spending "one last summer" in a journey across the country. "We had said that it was going to be the best thing we had ever done," writes Bob/Ben, as if the three men were bringing vaccines to impoverished African villages instead of lounging around motel pools.
     Bob's fake premise is further undermined by his insistence on presenting the lark as a pure, shimmering quest, a search for the grail that everyone immediately grasps and then reveres. The irony of these three boobs trying to regain the sort of magic summer now being denied their own cast-off and fatherless children never occurs to anybody, least of all the author.
     Falsity sprouts on every page. The wives of both friends have obligatory little scenes where they give their blessing to Bob/Ben. One wife, with two small children, says, "I think it's important that he gets out for a while and sees some things. . . . I want him to have this summer." The other says, "Ronnie works hard. Ronnie deserves to relax." Bob's ersatz women are fake in a way seldom seen outside pornography, but then again, so are his men. In fact, the book has only one character—Bob Greene—given different aliases and manners, but all reflecting back, hideously, to the same pulsing pathology.
     Mercifully, only a hint of the book's complete wrongness can be conveyed here. Much will be familiar to Bob readers: the scenes whose sole purpose is to recycle old columns, making patties of the regurgitated mash of past fixations—Elvis, television, baseball, television, the Beach Boys, more television. I kept waiting for Baby Richard to toddle past.
     A special warning must be added: Bob procures a love interest for himself. Mary, a 23-year-old "really beautiful" tanned athlete jogs up to Bob/Ben on the beach and breaks through his natural midwestern reserve with a fusillade of praise for his high-caliber journalism. She's hip—she listens to Taylor Dayne. She calls him "chief." They go through a high school romance, holding hands. Mary, laughing, pokes Bob/Ben playfully in the arm. Bob/Ben solemnly explains the magic of Brian Wilson.
     They hop into the sack, but not before Bob/Ben mercifully draws the veil, so to speak, as Mary is taking off her shirt and rubbing her bare chest against his. Only the numbness caused by the preceding 200 pages kept me from leaping out a window at this point, the way young men were said to do after reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.
     Heck, perhaps Bob has established a new genre here: unintentional horror. Parts of All Summer Long are as terrifying as anything Stephen King ever wrote, grotesque enough to make the most blood-drenched P.D. James novel look like Pat the Bunny.
     Read it at your own peril.

'Grant Park' mixes racial history, thriller

     Had Leonard Pitts Jr. entitled his new novel "Central Park" or "Golden Gate Park," had he set it in New York or San Francisco, it never would have touched my hands.
     But he called the book "Grant Park," prompting an editor to pluck it out of the endless slurry of galleys that flows into the newspaper, and jam it into my mailbox, where petty local pride made me agree to read it, if only for the pleasure of flagging the howling errors that Pitts, who lives in Maryland, would try to pass off as genuine Chicago color.
     Pitts is a syndicated columnist, and my first thought was: columnists can't write novels. I sure can't. They create a supercharged version of themselves and jiggle the resultant marionette through some improbable adventure. My sight was no doubt clouded by painful memories of Bob Greene's execrable "All Summer Long," with its cuties blundering up to SuperBob and confessing their admiration for his high-quality journalism.  Then I thought of Pete Hamill — his novels are nearly literary, meaning that they carry a whiff of actual existence. And Bill Granger's skilled thrillers. And Carl Hiaasen's funny Florida gothic.
     Hope bloomed. I possessed exactly two facts attached to Pitts' name when I opened the book. First, he wrote a strong, defiant column immediately after 9/11. And second, he's black, and it's an indication of the sort of white obliviousness so infuriating to Pitts that, even knowing this,  I was still mildly surprised to find his novel is about black people.
     At first it seemed like Pitts had fallen into the Bob Greene trap. His hero, Malcolm Marcus Toussaint, is a successful, almost adored columnist who has two Pulitzer Prizes, one more than Pitts himself. His newsroom includes people like Amy, a "20-something white girl" who tells him, "You're the whole reason I'm here," as if a career in journalism were a good thing. (I've had students share a version of that sentiment, closer to, "You led me to believe I could get a job," hissed through tears).
     It is Election Day, 2008. The book serves up surprise after surprise, and it's difficult to relate the plot without spoiling what, I'm glad to say, is an enjoyable cliffhanger. But I'll try.

Leonard Pitts Jr.

      Toussaint is tired of "white folks'
 bullshit" and writes a column saying so. Most papers in America would wave it into print it with a sigh and a few dashes, but the column is rejected, so Toussaint contrives to have it published anyway. He and his boss Bob Carson are summarily fired from the Chicago Post, the newspaper Pitts conjures up, perhaps not realizing that doing so risks pushing his book into the fantasy genre (while he's giving Chicago a third major newspaper he might as well add orcs and flying brooms and complete the effect.)
     Then Toussaint vanishes and Carson sets out to find him. There are too many coincidences—how did the guy on the tour boat wind up in that bar so quickly?—and the writing never soars, though Pitts does a solid job of navigating the perilous dilemma, heartbreak, frustration and irony of  being black in 2015.
     What redeems "Grant Park" is  Toussaint's backstory, delivered in textured flashbacks of Memphis, 1968, where his father was a garbage man in the midst of the sanitation workers' strike. Toussaint is there, at Martin Luther King's elbow, and so is Carson—his interracial love affair with fellow student Janeka unfolds poignantly. Their lone sex scene—we journalists are squeamish about sex—conveyed with all the fumbling and humiliation of real life.
     Back in 2008, we meet a pair of Carl Hiaasen-grade white supremacist low-lifes, one named Dwayne, which seems a requirement of some sort, who have a mad scheme to kill Barack Obama at Grant Park that night.
     Speaking of Grant Park. I did find my howlers, most geographical. "A place on Michigan Avenue," is described as being "about two blocks from Grant Park" which is akin to describing somewhere as being on Sheridan Road, two blocks west of Lake Michigan. In an afternote  Pitts claims such mistakes are intentional, and one does nudge the plot forward, but most have no use, plotwise, so that seems disingenuous. Chicago is a lot bigger than the shoebox diorama Pitts seems to have in mind.
     The Chicago Post newsroom also doesn't jibe with newsrooms as I understand them. As the popular Toussaint is abruptly shown the gate. I kept thinking of the stern don't-do-that-again finger wagging the Chicago Tribune gave Clarence Page in 2012 after he accepted $20,000 and was flown to Paris to speak at a rally for an Iranian terrorist group. His Post bosses never pause to worry about Jesse Jackson picketing the paper, a reminder to Pitts that it isn't only whites who can have trouble recognizing their own privilege.
    But those are quibbles. The bottom line is that ... here comes the money shot ... Leonard Pitts has written a taut thriller that weaves together a stark look at America's tortured racial past with a fast-paced tale of terrorist conspiracy and love rekindled.  

Leonard Pitts, Jr. will be speaking at the Harold Washington Public Library, 400 S. State Street, Wednesday, Oct. 14 at 6 p.m.

Fall color

Fall, 2014

     "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago," the Chinese proverb tells us. "The second best time is now." 
     On that scale, planting a  tree a year ago seems the worst of both options. Not long enough to show much discernible progress. Not recent enough to carry any afterglow of the optimistic act of planting a tree.
     But planting this sugar maple 20 years ago was not an option; the proper time travel technology is not available.  Besides, I lived in East Lake View then, in a walk-up condo. I wasn't planting any trees anywhere.
     I moved to the suburbs, inheriting a bunch of trees, including a mammoth sugar maple that was perhaps 150 years old. And it was only last year that I finally came to grips wit with the idea that our beloved old behemoth was really going to go, that all the arborists in the world could not save it. That even even trees get old and die. So it was in the fall of 2014 that I  planted a sugar maple across the walk from the doomed tree in our front yard.  The new tree didn't even have leaves.  I considered the sapling not so much an act of hope as a rude gesture at cruel nature. You're taking this one? Fine, Mother Nature, fuck you, I'm just going to plant another one just like it. Howdya like that? 
     It was, by comparison, a broomstick of a tree, a pathetic pole I could fit my hands around. 
    "It'll be really something," I told my wife, "...in about 100 years. We won't be around then of course. But someone will." 

Photo by Shelly Frame

     To be honest, I sort of forgot about it. The thing wasn't much to look at, more of a reminder of what was lost than anything else. 
     Winter came and went. Then summer—I reassured myself that it was alive,  kept it watered so it stayed that way.  My expectations were minimal.
     As mankind so often does, I had underestimated nature. 
     We were on the East coast last week, traveling from Boston to Philadelphia, when one of our neighbors—we have wonderful neighbors—emailed us this photo of our new tree, which marked its first full autumn in our yard with a spectacular display of the deepest, richest orange I have ever seen on a tree. 
     I can't tell you how comforted I was by that blaze of fall color that popped unexpectedly from our new stick. A reminder that nature is neither cruel nor kind, it just is. Cruelty or kindness are human constructs that we layer upon nature's regular and perfect activities. 
    It is humans who label, who interpret. And what that little tree's virtuoso display reminded me was while individual trees, like individual people, certainly grow old and die, that trees and people, as a class, both endure, and the new generation, though smaller, at the moment, still has wonders aplenty up their sleeves, and will deal them on their own timetable. We just have to be patient and wait for them. 

Your flight's canceled, but you can set a spell

     A line of white rocking chairs are scattered along between Terminals B and C at Boston's Logan airport. Giving people a place to sit, and relax, and momentarily escape the exhausting slog of air travel. My eye was caught by this older couple, watching the planes come and go. There was something incongruous about them, the white haired man and wife, I assume, turning an anonymous airport causeway into their front porch or local Cracker Barrel, watching, not the mule nibble on kudzu, but a phalanx of vehicles through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window. 
     Turns out that rocking chairs in airports is common, as documented on the web site, The Verge, which traces the phenomenon back to 1997, when a photo exhibit on front porches at the Charleston Douglas International Airport included rocking chairs as props. When the exhibit ended and the chairs were removed, flyers complained, and the chairs were returned. 
      The chairs took off, so to speak, after the 9/11 attacks, as a low cost, low tech way to encourage calm among travelers.  Now they are found in a number of airports around the country. Sacramento's are made of teak. 
     This is really a new twist on an old practice. Introduced in this country in the 1700s, rocking chairs found their way into institutions in the 1800s—"Rocking Chair Therapy," it was called. 
     There is some science behind the idea of rocking chairs to battle stress. A 2005 University of Rochester School of Nursing study found that seniors who rocked in rocking chairs grew less anxious, and calmed down more quickly when they were upset, cried less, and asked for less medication. 
     "Our goal is to keep people out of institutions," said the program director at an senior day program that participated in the study.
     Not that the chairs help keep anyone out of the institutions of airports; just give them something to do when stranded in one.
     I didn't sit in the chairs—I had a rental car to pick up—but will give them a try next time I've got a few hours to kill waiting for a delayed flight.
     So, a charming idea, but a charm that might also be worth resisting. It's as if the airport is saying: We can't spare you the time-killing TSA security theater. And we can't keep a third of the flights from being delayed. But we can set out a few rocking chairs to blow off the stress our poor performance causes. I'm not sure if that's something to feel good about.

Book Week #8: "Upon breach of my late vows"

     Book Week concludes today with a glance at my upcoming book. 
     The day before we left on vacation, I handed the copyedited manuscript of "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery" over to my co-author, Sara Bader. The book will be published next fall by the University of Chicago Press. It's an unusual book—we use quotes, from poems, from literature, from songs, movies, letters, journals—to walk the reader through the recovery process. The quotes are not just grouped, but mortised together, one leading to the next, so they form a mosaic, tell a story. Historical figures also appear, almost as characters, to help explain certain aspects of recovery. For the key issue of relapse, we use Samuel Pepys, the 17th century English writer. This is the beginning of the introductory essay starting the relapse chapter, called "Upon Breach of My Late Vows." When we began writing the book, I didn't know anything about Pepys except his diaries contain a candid account of his life. I assumed there would be drinking, and I was right. This is the first sample of the book to appear anywhere; I'm interested to hear what you think of it.

                             . . . and so the pewterers to buy a poore’s-box

                                   to put my forfeits in, upon breach of my late vowes

                                                    —Samuel Pepys, diary entry, March 5, 1662

     The vows that Samuel Pepys, the famously frank English diarist, had solemnly made to God a few days before, and would make time and time again, were to stop drinking wine and attending plays, two pleasures entwined in his mind. Putting aside the lure of the theater—then considered practically a mortal sin—Pepys offers ample evidence that long before there was the word “alcoholism,” there was the snare of drinking and its damaging effects, the struggle to resist and the tendency of that resistance to eventually collapse.

 

Samuel Pepys

   Two and a half weeks after buying a slotted box to hold the coins he fined himself for submitting to wine, Pepys is back at it. “And so to supper and to bed,” he writes, on March 22, 1662, after reveling with several ship owners, an alderman, and a captain, “having drank a great deal of wine.”

     The problem started early with Pepys, as it often does. Almost all that is known of Pepys’s college years at Oxford is a written reprimand chiding him and a classmate for being caught “scandalously overserved with drink the night before.”

     The lure of the wine shop would dog him well beyond his college years. In his diary, which covers most of the 1660s, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, he presents a detailed portrait of a busy bureaucrat—he was a high official in the British navy. Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) was a prominent figure in Restoration London—acquainted with both Charles II and Isaac Newton—a man consumed with desires: to earn a lot of money, to grope every pretty maid or underling’s wife who crossed his path, and to engage in a steady rondo of drinking then swearing off drinking. No detail was too trivial or too self-absorbed to escape Pepys’s attention, and shame seldom caused him to halt his pen, creating not only an invaluable historical record but also a unique portrait of a man in the throes of addiction. If there were ever a writer who conveyed the maddening, tiresome, head-on-a-board repetition of relapse, it is Samuel Pepys.

     Then and now, relapse is perhaps the thorniest problem in recovery. To acknowledge that it happens—that addicts routinely toss away their hard-fought-for sobriety—can sound to the desperate drunk trying to pick the lock on the cellar door like a kind of permission: Oh, I’m supposed to do this? It’s expected of me? Thank merciful God.

     But to ignore relapse invites the user to completely surrender after a single aborted attempt at sobriety, when usually it takes more than one, if not many tries. The mountain trail is steep and slippery. Few get it right the first time. And having gotten it right is no guarantee of future success, which is why people generally say they are “in recovery” and avoid claiming to have “recovered.”

     So the trick is to learn about relapse, then tuck the knowledge away and forget about it, like an insurance card in your wallet to be taken out in case of emergency. Hopefully you never use it. It’s far easier if you don’t have to. Then again, “easy” is not a concept of much practical use in recovery.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    This is why I hate most modern public art. The impulse to embellish public spaces that once created this amazing tableau, today would be channeled into some kind of irregular surface of broken chunks of concrete with plastic dolls embedded in them, wrapped in concertina wire and given a fey title intended to be evocative.
     I suppose it's easier, and cheaper that way....
     That said, where is this thing? I'll state the obvious: it's not in Chicago, but somewhere else. Normally I'd harbor hopes that it being outside of Illinois would be enough to gain me a few hours. But I know my Hive, and my hunch is, you'll solve this before breakfast, alas.
     Place your guesses below. Winner gets one of my 2015 blog post posters. Good luck. Have fun.