29 days for black history, 366 for white

     February is a Leap Year this year, which means there are 29 days for the dual-edged sword of Black History Month instead of 28.  Valuable focus on a neglected and vital part of American life or another forgotten ghetto? I've tried to sort it out over the years and come up short.

     February is upon us, and with it Black History Month. Which revives the perennial question: If blacks are a vital part of American history -- which of course they are — then why put them in a separate month? Is this not segregation? What's wrong with their history being neglected . . . whoops, I mean, being taught year-round, with the rest of American history?
     It's an irreverent question, of course, but one I suspect lurks at the back of many white minds. Where's our month? If February is Black History Month, why not make March White History Month, and the papers could run thumbnail sketches of, oh, say Richard Petty, Saul Bellow and the polka.
     Well, the answer is rather like the response parents give smartmouth kids who ask why there's a Mother's Day and a Father's Day but no Children's Day: "Every day is children's day." Every month is white history month, and while the legacy of neglect has been addressed in recent years, its effects are still there.
     When I learned my American history, back in the 1970s, blacks showed up suddenly in 1770 in the form of Crispus Attucks, who is promptly killed in the Boston Massacre. ("Isn't that like the white man," I imagine some readers thinking, "he brings a black man into the history books just to kill him.")
     A couple more flashes -- the Civil War, Selma -- and that was it.
     So perhaps a little catch-up is in order. Besides, the problem isn't teaching black history in February -- it's not teaching history the other 11 months. If you want to make March into Memorize the Presidents Month, I'll stand with you.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2007

INTERESTING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

     My beef with Black History Month is it implies that somehow black history is outside and separate from American history. It isn't. Black history is American history, and vice versa. That said, people of all races are so generally ignorant of everything that has gone before them, any artifice that helps fill the gaping void is to be welcomed.
     The problem is that most Black History Month efforts are directed at children — as if they're the only ones who require a vague idea of the past — and thus we get the same tales every year: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Martin Luther King and his dream.
     What about something for those who've mastered the basics? There is, for instance, the question of how outsiders viewed our system of slavery. Charles Dickens, at 30 the most famous author in Britain, came to America in 1842 to tour the new republic, visiting prisons and insane asylums and textile mills. He never made it to nine-year-old Chicago, settling for St. Louis instead. Dickens was a keen observer, repulsed by the ubiquitous American habit of chewing tobacco and experiencing a wave of guilt when, on his way to Washington to meet President Tyler, he found himself in a slave state. Dickens writes:

     We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for at the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 11, 2008

Who buys a bookstore?

     On her 16th birthday, a high school junior named Allison Brown walked into the Book Bin and got a job as a clerk. Eventually she rose to store manager and now, 39, she became the Northbrook store's owner.
     That caught my attention. I've been a loyal Book Bin customer for 15 years, since moving to the leafy suburban paradise. As I amble on my rounds, from grocery to hardware store to post office, like the bear in a Richard Scarry children's book, I pop in to chat, buying books that catch my eye or are recommended. 

     I had to know: it's hard enough to find somebody who buys books, nowadays: what kind of person buys a bookstore?
     The same kind, it turns out, who walked in 23 years ago to get a job at one. She was not particularly bookish.

     “I was sporty,” said Alli, now married and going by Allison Mengarelli, as we had a cup of tea in the comfortable chairs at the front of the cozy store, with its fireplace and model train circling above the children’s section. “I played soccer year-round. It wasn’t that I was money-oriented.”
     If it wasn’t the books and wasn’t the money, what was the allure?
     “I just loved how I felt when I walked into the bookstore, ” she said. “For me, [I thought] ‘I want to feel that more, so I’ll get a job there.’ I think I was responsibility-oriented. I had a weekly baby-sitting gig from when I was 11 to when I was 18. I rarely missed a Saturday when I wasn’t baby-sitting for this family. I wanted them to count on me.”

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A visit from Lou Bovitch

      Yesterday's post about pausing to pray with some boys from a Jewish school prompted a Facebook friend to mention "Lou Bovitch," referring to the column below. It's flattering for someone to recall something that ran five years ago, so I thought it worth posting, not only for its own merits, but because it shows a certain softening in the author related to the visits. While I'd never go all pious on you—that would just be sad—it's natural for a veneer of religiosity to settle over man as the years go by, if only to guard against the various indignities of life.
     The poem "There is no God," by Arthur Hugh Clough captures this perfectly. It's from 1850, a reminder that those in the past weren't as rigid as we fancy them to be.

‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
   ‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
   It’s better only guessing.’

‘There is no God,’ a youngster thinks,
   ‘Or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
   Always to be a baby.’

‘There is no God, or if there is,’
   The tradesman thinks, ‘’twere funny
If he should take it ill in me
   To make a little money.’

‘Whether there be,’ the rich man says,
   ‘It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
   Are not in want of victual.’

Some others, also, to themselves,
   Who scarce so much as doubt it,
Think there is none, when they are well,
   And do not think about it.

But country folks who live beneath
   The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson’s wife,
   And mostly married people;

Youths green and happy in first love,
   So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
   Calls guilt, in first confusion;

And almost everyone when age,
   Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
   Or something very like Him.

     Oh, and if you're wondering what the line about nothing being funny in the fourth sentence refers to, remember the date: Nov. 3, 2010. The Republicans crushed the Democrats the day before in the mid-term elections.


     Want to hear something funny? Of course, you do. Me, too. Though I'm not sure anything could be funny today, let's give it a try.
     So I'm listening to my telephone messages, and I hear the burly, salt-of-Chicago voice of one of our security guards. "Hello, Neil?" he says. "This is the 10th-floor desk. You have Lou Bovitch here to see you."
     That alone drew a laugh from me. Despite never having met, or heard of, Mr. Bovitch, I knew exactly who was standing before the guard, asking in vain to see me.
     I guess some background is in order.
     It was a Friday. That's important. Every Friday, almost without fail, for nearly the past decade, I am visited by a pair of teenage boys in black coats and big hats -- missionaries, though they'd hate that word -- from the ultra-Orthodox wing of Judaism.
     They want me to put on tefillin, those little prayer boxes that Orthodox Jews wear when they pray, and to talk to me about the Torah portion being read that week.
     Sometimes I'm not in my office and miss their visit, like this time. Sometimes I'm busy, or not in the proper frame of mind, and tell the guard to send them away.
     But they're kids, they get gold stars toward, I don't know, a baseball mitt or a new Talmud or something, for visiting wayward Jews and goading them to perform their duty. "A coffee break of the spirit," a rabbi called it. Or maybe they don't get gold stars, maybe the effort is an utterly selfless attempt to repair the world -- it's their ideology, not mine.
     So sometimes I let them come down and give their spiel about this week's reading.
     The education may go both ways -- I see them gazing around the office, wide-eyed, as if they've never been outside before.
     "Do you read the paper?" I once asked.
     "Oh, no," one said. "We're not allowed."
     Of course not. Religion isn't generally about expanding your scope in life, is it?
     Sometimes I even put on the prayer boxes and say the prayers, which strikes me as very odd: an agnostic indulging in this exotic bit of religious theater, one that most Jews dispensed with long ago, when jettisoning most requirements of their faith.
     I've asked myself why I do it. For me, the natural, automatic reaction to such a time-wasting demand on a Friday would be to send them away. Scram, boys, and don't come back! That would be easy enough.
     Yet I don't. I see them more often than not. That they're in their mid-teens is a factor. They're kids. Kids fall under the umbrella of indulgence that Girl Scouts fall under. The League of Women Voters could never get away with selling those too sweet, generic and not-really-all-that-good cookies.
     There is also a shock value in going through the motions of ritual. Our offices have glass walls, and sometimes I'll be there, arm straight out, wrapped in a leather strap, big square black box on my forehead and on the back of my hand, uttering the ancient prayers, and some colleague will come trucking down the hall and catch sight of this strange tableau -- me locked in some weird prayer ritual with two black-clad kids. Their eyes will widen, they'll lose a step and then hurry on, wondering what to make of that -- the resident Arch-Cynic, the Anti-Zealot, if not the Anti-Christ of Chicago, lost in religious ecstasies.
     Nobody ever asks me about it.
     Did I mention the sect is called the Lubavitch, an ultra-Orthodox group that busies itself urging Jews do the rituals that they would do unprompted if they actually believed any of this stuff? The school the boys belong to is the Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago, at Morse and California.
     The Sun-Times' guard is new, so after the boys asked him to say the Lubavitch were here, he called me and said: "Hello Neil? You have Lou Bovitch here to see you."
     Well, I thought it was funny. Maybe you had to be there.
                                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 3, 2010

It couldn't hurt

Rob Chimberoff, who does pagination at the Sun-Times, greets (left to right) Yakov Rosenblum, 16, Mendel Friedman, 15 and Schneur Ehven, 16, 

     Prayer is defined as ... what? Talking to God? Praising His glory? Asking the cosmos for something you really want?
     That strikes me as a very limited definition. It seldom seems to work. And I just can't wrap my head around a Supreme Being as powerful and all-knowing as the Supreme Being supposed is who is also so insecure that He needs His holy ass kissed constantly.  
     I would suggest that prayer could be all sorts of things.
     For instance, most Fridays for the past 20 years, two or three Hasidic boys show up the Sun-Times offices to try to get me to pray. Because in their circles I am the notorious Meshumed fun Tshikago, or Apostate of Chicago, and the Lubavitch movement has vowed to win me over to their side.
     Kidding.

     The truth is there is some master list of Jewish office workers, and they go around trying to get them to put on tefillin—Yiddish for phylacteries, or prayer boxes—and say some Hebrew prayers. The tefillin are a black leather strap wound around your left arm—well, on my right, since I'm left-handed—and a small black box containing lines of Torah that sits atop your head, in satisfaction of Deuteronomy 11:18, "You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes." (Later in the passage the same words are slapped "upon the doorposts of your house," which is were mezzuzahs  come from).
     While most ultra-Orthodox sects of all religion are seriously into coercion, the Lubavtch are more gentle, low-key. They go around pushing tefillin out of the charming notion that doing so gets us all closer to the arrival of the Messiah (so in that sense, they're trying to bring about the End of the World. But in a good way). 

     And every week, Amy, the charming receptionist, sends an email telling me that the boys are here, and every Friday I can't act on it, because I'm home, or because I'm doing something else and didn't see it for hours later. I can't say I'm consumed with regret to have missed them.

    But this Friday, not only was I at my desk, but drinking coffee to beat the band. So much so that mid-morning I leaped up, briskly marched toward the front desk, and ran smack into Yakov Rosenblum, 16, Mendel Friedman, 15 and Schneur Ehven, 16, all students at Lubavitch Mesivta Chicago in Rogers Park. 

    Knowing when I was caught, dead to rights, I jovially waved them back to my office. On the walk, I told them about the only Bible story I quote with any regularity: Jonah is told by God to go to Nineveh and preach. Not wanting to, he flees to Tarkshish, or tries to, but ends up in a whale. Sometimes fate boots you toward Nineveh, so you just have to shrug and go.
    At the office, I automatically rolled up my right sleeve and took off my wristwatch.

   "You've done this before," one said. I don't think any of the boys had been there before. I tend to treat them as the same individuals, but the truth is, the teens who first came to see me are now no doubt rabbis in Montreal and Brooklyn with growing families of their own. 
    One of the boys wrapped the leather strap around my arm — I've never shot heroin, but there is something about wrapping the extended arm that always struck me as being like a junkie tying off his arm to raise a vein.  I also put the box upon my head, and repeated the Hebrew prayers after another one of the boys, haltingly and half-remembered.

     Why do it? A number of reasons. Altruism, mostly. The lads are here and want me to, to further the philosophical notions their sect possesses. 

    "You guys get points toward a bicycle or something for me doing this," I said, my standard joke, and they denied it, as the boys have done for decades. 

     It must also freak out passersby — I have a glass wall in the office. I like the thought of people walking by and seeing Steinberg lost in some arcane religious act with three black-hatted attendants. 
     And I do like that the Lubavitch are low-key, or at least as low-key as you can be showing up at people's offices in the middle of working day and dragooning them into your ritual. They never say I'm going to hell otherwise. They don't set off bombs. A lot of faiths could take a lesson from them. 

     But it's also a pause from the day, for me. Their reason strikes me as specious. I can't conceive of a world where the Supreme Being, throned in glory, looks up, smiling, thinking, "Neil's putting on tefillin. All riiiiight!" 
     But for me, the combination of the pause, the interaction with the friendly black-hatted boys, the doing of a small favor for them, the muttering of the ancient words, well, it all blended together to perk me up. Without going into detail I had been feeling particularly lousy Friday morning, one of those minor professional annoyances involved with the new book, one that 99 out of 100 writers would leap to have to go through in my place, but which just left me sour-stomached and frustrated and viewing the whole writing process, not as work I love, but as another damaging addiction.

     By the time the boys left, the problem, which had been a noxious fog surrounding me, blocking my view in every direction, was now a cloud on the horizon, large, yes, but no longer so present. And it was diminishing, and I was feeling my old self again. 

    Maybe that was unrelated to the prayer. Maybe it would have happened whether the boys showed up or not. But I'm not sure. The prayer probably didn't help. But it couldn't hurt.

Why 'Downton Abbey'?

     Chicagoans watch four hours and 47 minutes of television a day, on average, according to Nielsen, making us 13th in the ranking of big city TV viewing, a full hour less than glued-to-the-tube Cleveland, where they watch nearly six hours a day, one quarter of the time available for humans to live.
     Having spent my first 18 years in the Cleveland area, I can explain. You watch a lot of TV because, well, otherwise, there you are, in Cleveland.
     I tend to sniff at television. When people ask how I manage to write a regular newspaper column plus magazine articles and a steady stream of books, I reply, "I never watch TV."
     It's true. Excluding Bulls games, I don't turn the thing on, and never at a set time to watch a particular show. I haven't seen "Game of Thrones" or "Empire" or "Broad City" or "Veep" — in fact, I had to Google "Top TV shows" to generate the list of programs I haven't seen, because otherwise nothing came to mind.

     Since avoiding TV sounds precious, and I try to keep an honest column here, I feel compelled to confess that I recently went off the TV wagon, big time.

     Two words: “Downton Abbey.”
     Not only have I watched every minute of the first five seasons and the four (!) shows so far this year, the sixth and final season, but I’ve done so since the autumn, in one glorious orgy of elegant dinners and witty retorts and scullery drama. At some point every Sunday I look up and exclaim “Downton Abbey!” the way a 4-year-old would say, “Christmas!”
     It was all an accident. Half a decade of PBS hype sluiced off me without effect, water off a duck’s back. We were far from the lure of television — or so we thought — on vacation in October, hiking in Pennsylvania. My wife had found the picturesque hamlet of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and booked us in a picturesque bed and breakfast that had a decidedly unpicturesque flat-screen television.

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GQ sells its birthright for a mess of ice cream

     How magazines stay in business nowadays is a mystery. Some manage it by sheer excellence. I subscribe to three: The New Yorker, The Economist, and Consumer Reports. 
     The rest must resort to other stratagems....
     I was in the barber shop on Schermer Road a week ago Saturday, waiting for Leo to finish up with a customer. I turned my attention to a pile of magazines—are there enough barber shops and doctor's waiting rooms to keep the profession afloat?— and fished the July Gentleman's Quarterly out of the pile on a low table. Not my usual fare, but I figured, why not? See what the hip metrosexuals are up to. Nothing really registered until I got to this advertisement for Klondike ice cream bars.

     It seemed very familiar, even though I was sure I'd never seen the ad before. Nor have I ever eaten a Klondike bar, to my memory. Nor would I want to, even after seeing this ad. Especially not after seeing this ad. I paused, and began flipping backward through the magazine, until I came to this:

     
     The same stack of Klondike bars—the photo from the ad, under the serious sounding heading, "@GQREPORTS," which suggested information dug up by the hardworking hipsters on the GQ staff. I squinted hard and saw the word "promotions." Ah, paid content. 
    Here is how they described the wonders of the aforementioned Klondike bars:
    

  
     Is that not the lamest block of copy you've ever read in your life? It's one thing to sell out and pretend that the average reading of GQ is having trouble deciding what kind of frozen comestible to ask his mom to pick up at Jewel. But "a little spice to their lives" doesn't even mesh with the idea of ice cream. Nobody wants spicy ice cream. It's repulsive.
     I don't want to make too much of this.  The actual, non-paid, produced-by-journalists-of- some-sort editorial content of GQ was never exactly hard-hitting reportage: more how to wax your pubes and an interview with whatever passing 20ish celebrity was enjoying his spasm of fame at the moment. The cover story of the July issue, "The Most Stylish Men Alive" is not only banal, but uses the cliched, tired, unfortunate "Blah Blah Blabbity Blah Alive!" structure pioneered by People magazine that leads one to suspect, grotesquely, that a future GQ might turn its attention to nattily-dressed corpses.
     So hardly better than a stack of Klondike bars.        And if you pressed a gun to my temple and demanded I declare the name of an endeavor that Ryan Gosling was involved with, I'd be a dead man. Movies, based on his looks.
     But still. All a magazine, all any publication has, is its credibility, its voice. And while that voice will be stilled if it goes out of business, it can also be so strangled by commercial considerations that it loses all meaning.
    Yes, there's a lot of that going around lately. Sponsored content is not the Kiss of Death. The Tribune has its Blue Sky Innovation and, from what I've seen of it, manages to pull the somersault off. The Sun-Times has a fat wad of USA Today living inside it, which I comfort myself by observing, "It's better than nothing." The key is to have stories that are actually interesting, in themselves, despite being sponsored or appropriated from elsewhere.  It can be done.
     I haven't tried it yet, but I've considered nodding at my advertiser. Like a diver bouncing at the end of a high dive, summoning his courage, trying not to look down. This blog is just ending its third season being sponsored by Eli's Cheesecake, a financial arrangement that gives me a sense of validation, plus spending money. And though I am vastly grateful to Marc Schulman for buying ads on my blog, and though I have Eli's cheesecake right now in my freezer, there by demand of my oldest boy, who loves the stuff, I have yet to figure out how to create some editorial content here without seeming like a complete sell-out and a fraud, or even if I should make the attempt. I mean, what about those readers who don't notice that nice new Valentine ad in the upper right hand corner, who are wondering, "If only there was some rich and satisfying desert substance I could send to the significant person in my life at Valentine's Day to show just how much I care?"
     Not that Eli's has ever requested it. But I do want to encourage them to return next year. And it seems almost a creative challenge, to put my head in the lion's mouth and pull it out. Why not write about cheesecake? I write about every other flippin' thing, every goddamn day. Cheesecake can be interesting too. 
     Is avoiding that topic courage or cowardice? The Tribune seems able to manage it., and they're a respected mainstream publication. Plugging "GQ sells out to Klondike bars" into Google reveals no outrage on the Internet, which can build up a mob of criticism over a 6-year-old's drawing for his mother. Maybe this is how we do it nowadays. Maybe caring at all about this kind of thing is an antique concern, like worrying about accuracy on Facebook. Thoughts? 

Preparing for President Trump

     President Trump. President Donald Trump. "... and in international news, President Trump arrived in Berlin today for the start of the NATO summit ...." The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.
    Sorry. Just practicing. Newspapers are nothing if not cheerleaders for the status quo. We howl, for a while, then we fall in line. This was driven home to me a couple Decembers ago when I was in Boulder as Colorado welcomed legal marijuana. The Sunday Denver Post suddenly read like High Times, with recipes for pot brownies in the lifestyle pages, tips for raising your own weed, and such a general sense of ballyhoo you had to smile.
     If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
     I've observed a lot of presidential elections — 14, by my count, from the day in 1968 when I pressed my parents to take me to the Hubert Humphrey headquarters in Berea, Ohio, and scoot me in to receive a "Humphrey/ Muskie" button, which I still have, to the current free-for-all contest of extra odd characters, like a brawl in the Mos Eisley cantina in "Star Wars."
     One thing I noticed, long ago, is there is a presidentification process, as various wannabes stride toward the White House, where the media starts slapping layers of varnish on the deeply flawed individuals who want to be president, just in case we have to keep looking at them.

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