Madison honors prankster

Leon Varjian

     I've only been to a couple of Chicago City Council meetings in my journalistic career. I distinctly remember just one, a debate over whether elephants should be barred within city limits.
     Which gives you an idea of why I seldom go.
     There were also endless motions to honor various individuals, police officers and Boy Scout leaders and such. Official resolutions are not generally news. Which is why it's so extraordinary that the moment I heard the Madison Common Council is honoring Leon Varjian, I had to tell you.
    Not for the honor, per se — Wednesday, Feb. 23, is Leon Varjian Day in Madison — but because I suspect you don't know who Varjian is, and I do. I'd like to dust off a chair in the back of your mind and invite him in.
     With a warning: Once he's there, comfortable, Leon Varjian has a tendency to never leave.

     He was from New Jersey, with all the brashness and bravado associated with that state. In the 1970s he studied mathematics at Montclair State before earning a master’s at Indiana University. Varjian tried to join the working world like everybody else, taking a job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. He lasted 18 months.
     “It was awful,” he later recalled. “I couldn’t stand it. You get up every morning, get on a bus and go to work with a bunch of pasty-faced commuters, sit behind a desk all day, doing nothing and come home at night. I just couldn’t stand it.”
     Most live our lives that way. But Varjian was one to push back at the dull routines. He quit, fleeing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Enrolling in just one class, he occupied himself cooking up a variety of stunts, such as asking students to sign a petition to change the name of UW-Madison to “University of New Jersey,” so “students could go to a fancy East Coast school without moving.”
     If I ever write a movie, it will be about Varjian, and begin with him, at a booth in the school quad, long-haired, droopy mustached, collecting signatures.
     In the spring of 1978, Varjian formed the Pail and Shovel Party and campaigned for vice president (“that’s where the power is”) for the Student Government Association. He and his running mate, Jim Mallon, dressed as clowns. They promised, if elected, to change the name of Madison to “Cheesetopia.” They promised to bring the Statue of Liberty to Madison.
     “Honesty, integrity, responsibility,” a campaign flier began. “Pail and Shovel doesn’t believe in any of them.”
     They won.

   

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Guns and baby shoes

   People are incredibly plastic vessels, in that we stretch to cover an enormous range of thought, capacity and action. From mute to loquacious, sharp-eyed to blind, artistic to actuarial. 
     Incredible, really. 
     I was walking the dog by Village Hall in the old leafy suburban paradise a while back, and in a single glance saw the entire 180 degree spectrum of human behavior.
      You've got the sign, warning passersby against going into Village Hall with handguns, those hard metal mechanisms of instant death. And no doubt there are people carrying guns who need the warning, even in Northbrook. A reminder that, for every individual who carries a gun for legitimate purpose, cops and bank guards and such, there are 100 who use them as totems, as lethal blankies, to calm their fears within and protect themselves from enemies without, real and imagined. 
     Mostly imagined.  Especially in Northbrook.
   And the baby's shoe. Take a good close look at it. Gorgeous, really. A beautiful shoe. Two-tone real leather—or what looks like real leather.  Artistic stitching. Comfortable, user friendly Velcro straps. The toddler wearing that shoe chose his parents well. 
     A shoe that somebody designed, and somebody made, and somebody bought, and a fourth person found in the street—babies, as anyone who has ever raised one knows, have a genius for kicking away their footwear undetected, and the more expensive the shoe, the more prone a little fat foot is to fling it away, unseen. 
     So some big-hearted good Samaritan found the shoe, and placed in this obvious spot, where mom or dad would be more likely to find it. A pleasing marriage of concern and cleverness. Oh look at that, poor kid, poor mom! I'll just jam the shoe above this sign, where it'll be seen. The sign warding away those who might be carrying handguns around the mean streets of Northbrook because, gosh darn it, they just don't feel secure without one, and if somebody, perhaps driven insane by how badly Northbrook has botched its commercial development, goes bursting into the Village Hall and starts shooting up a zoning board meeting, they'll be ready, maybe. 
     In the meantime, their gun is posing a hazard, of some degree, to themselves and their loved ones, 24 hours a day. 
    Quite the range of possibilities. People. Including myself, walking the dog, seeing the shoe and sign and trying to synthesize it all. I try to focus on the shoe makers, wearers and returners. But those gun makers and buyers and users, they have a way of spoiling the fun, don't they? 
     

Trump joke isn't funny any more

General John "Black Jack" Pershing

     Conventional wisdom says that Donald Trump is going away.
     Any minute now.
     Cooler heads, supposedly still in charge of the Republican Party, are convinced that once a few of the crowded GOP field drop out, his popularity will plunge and he'll be relegated to the dustbin of extremist zealots who excited the fringes early in primary season then faded away.
     Those 7.8 percent of South Carolina voters who cast a ballot for Jeb Bush in South Carolina Saturday will, now that he's given up, embrace Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or any of the remaining non-Trump candidates.
     I sure hope so.
     Because while I, like many Americans, at first smiled in a kind of rapt, fascinated horror at Trump walking, unscathed, through a succession of lion's dens that would have shredded other candidates, his victory in South Carolina, and the vile hate-mongering he committed leading up to it, have to make any patriotic American reason recoil in disgust, and finally realize: this isn't funny anymore.
     South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. To this day, South Carolina nurtures its bigotry more openly than most places in 21st century America. It was only last year that its state government offices finally took down the Confederate battle flag, 150 years after Appomattox.  Demonizing black people, at least publicly, has fallen from acceptability, even in South Carolina, so those who try to comprehend a confusing world by hating others have turned their attention to Muslims, susceptible because some terrorists claim to be acting in the name of Islam.
     On Friday in Charleston, Trump trotted out a story about General Black Jack Pershing in the Philippines.
     “Early last century, General Pershing — rough guy — they had a terrorism problem,” Trump began. He never explicitly says Pershing was dealing with Muslims, but in the half-sly way that bigots have, sets it up this way: “They have a whole thing with swine, and animals, and pigs. You know the story."
     "He caught 50 terrorists who caused tremendous damage and killed many people. … He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pig's blood. And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person he said "You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.' And for 25 years there wasn't a problem, OK?"
     After the applause died down, Trump added, ”We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant and we better start using our heads or we're not going to have a country."
     Trump told his audience they could read about it in their history books, though “not a lot of history books because they don’t like teaching this.”
     Actually, not in any history books, because it isn’t true. The story is a lie.
     But set aside its untruth — Ronald Reagan confused what happened in the movies with what happened in real life. Look at Trump’s intent in telling the untrue story. To direct hatred at Muslims and, in doing so, draw votes to himself.
     Think about that.
     I don’t understand how a candidate does that on Friday and on Saturday wins a statewide primary, even in South Carolina. Muslims are frightened and aghast, of course, but to anyone who belongs to any persecuted group, or simply cares about people, it should be a firebell in the night. For Jews, it is the blood libel, given a slight twist. For blacks, it is the state that enslaved them, looking for a new victim to abuse. For Catholics, women, gays — anybody really, who belongs to a group that can be ostracized and maligned — to hear Trump say it, to see his opponents, maybe hoping for a VP spot, not call Trump out on it, it should grab our attention like a house ablaze next door.
     “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant and we better start using our heads or we’re not going to have a country.”
     Because a country with Muslims in it isn’t America, I guess.
     They said the same thing about Jews. They said the same thing about blacks. We didn’t belong either.
     How can we let Trump do this?
     Maybe Trump is a joke, maybe he’ll go away and just be a bad memory. Some blame the media for paying attention.
     “Neil, I can’t believe you would give this asshole a minute of your time!” reader Glenn Hoffman wrote.
     Here’s the deal, Glenn. I’ll stop listening to Donald Trump when Republicans stop voting for him. If he’s a joke, he’s a bad joke. If he’s a joke, it isn’t funny. If he’s a joke, too many people are laughing along. If he’s a joke, he’s a joke that has gone on far too long.

Pope bested by a higher power

     I wrote this Friday morning, but it already feels like some antique commentary on Free Silver. Since then Donald Trump has won the South Carolina Republican primary, after a truly despicable play on anti-Muslim hysteria, recycling some century-old canard about Islamic soldiers being shot by bullets dipped in pig's blood. By comparison jousting with the pope seems quaint, the relic of an era when the most monstrous demagogues did not prance on the public stage, never mind gain mainstream support from the Party of Lincoln.  

     Score: Trump 1, Pope Francis 0.
     In the latest jaw-dropping moment of Donald Trump's jaw-dropping march to the White House . . . whoops, make that his protracted flash across the American political heavens, the New York real estate billionaire tussled with the wildly popular leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics on Thursday and came out the clear winner.
     Back before presidential politics became a stumble through a hall of funhouse mirrors, the idea of a candidate talking trash at the pope would be impossible. But, if nothing else, the 2016 elections will go down in history as an epic expansion of the realm of the possible.
     What made this episode unique was that it did not stem from a preemptive Trump attack. From his tarring Mexican immigrants as rapists to whack-a-moling war hero John McCain, then POWs in general, then Fox host Megyn Kelly, then mocking a handicapped reporter and suggesting that all Muslims should be barred at the border because, well, they're Muslims, Trump likes to fire first.
     Instead, this time it was the pope who, during his trip to Mexico and asked about Trump, unleashed this:
     “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”

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The pavement in hell.

     Email hasn't quite fallen into the realm of nostalgia along with semaphore flags, smoke signals and handwritten notes sealed with red wax. 
      But the truth is, with text messages and tweets and Facebook posts and comments, you just don't see a lot of emails anymore. They're not yet down there with telephone calls. But let's put it this way. I had a column Friday in the Sun-Times on a timely topic—the FBI demanding that Apple create a "back door" to hack its own iPhones so that they can peer into the locked phone belonging to the couple who murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California Dec. 2. The column ran on page seven, took 2/3 of a page, with photograph, and was promoted on the front page, with a picture of me and everything.
     Four emails. 
     But that wasn't the sad part. The Internet has created a typhoon of communication and any given peep is apt to be lost in the general howl. I get that. The sad part was what the four emails said. They ... well, no need to summarize. 
    The first one read:

You disappoint me. I thought you were better than this. You actually think that your life is so interesting that the feds would bother to take notice of what's in your precious little I phone? I actually think they (the feds) have a lot more to do trying to identify terrorist cells within our country than concern themselves with your playlist. If opening that iPhone means acquiring credible information to protect us with, what do I care about Apples proprietary software. If they are that concerned, just have their techs do it in the Apple lab and hand it back to the feds open. What's the big deal?

     The second one read:

During its existence, every civilization, or every nation, is forced by circumstances to make choices--how to manage their land, which alliances to make and what form of government to embrace. I would seem that in order to protect its citizens from external (or for that matter, internal) danger, the government is most efficient when it has the most information regarding those who would do its citizens harm. Further, turning over the I-phone in question to Apple for the express and not repeatable purpose of unlocking its contents is certainly reasonable given that the phone's user (and not its owner) gunned down 14 innocent people. It would be good not to have a repeat of that episode; remember that privacy is a privilege; freedom from harm is a right.

     The third one read:

    Neil I read as much of ur article as I cld until I had to run outside and hug a tree and look for a whale. Why did Apple open up 7 other phones when requested by the FBI previously? Did they do it because their stock price was on all time highs but now because it's about to make a new 52 week low, it provides a hypocritical opportunity to pander to the uninformed in an attempt to polish up their reputation? Haha! U really believe there is privacy? That is 7 separate back doors developed. Ur co just sold my email address for 7 cents. If u had my home phone it's a quarter. That's what Apple considers ur privacy worth

     And the fourth one... oh heck, you get the idea. 
     A uniform chorus, saying, in essence, let's swoon in the arms of the government, let them paw through our sock drawer, and maybe no one will hurt us.
     "Government is most efficient when it has the most information regarding those who would do its citizens harm." And that is...everybody and anybody? And notice the second writer, who conjures up "not repeatable purpose" when the whole issue as laid out by Apple is once they create this way into their phones, it will exist and get out and anyone can use it, not only the government, but criminals and terrorists themselves. He missed the entire point, the nut of the issue, blinded by...
     Fear. The Republican Party is the Fear Party. They're afraid of immigrants. They're afraid of minorities. 
    And they're afraid of terror. They're terrified, literally. Which is both natural and exactly what the terrorists intend. They lunge at anything they think will take the edge off their fear, no matter how counter-productive. They stock up on guns, ignoring that each gun endangers the owner far, far more than it provides any kind of guarantee against all that they're afraid of. They'd bar the immigrants who make our country strong, whose arrival is what stands between the United States and the demographic death spiral ruining places like Italy and Japan. They hate every embodiment of the government and then turn to it with a cry to run their lives and protect them from shadows.

     "Freedom is not free." That's the buzz line false patriots use when paying lip service to the military. But what does it mean? It means that there is a cost to freedom, a risk. Part of that risk is not letting the FBI rip open our lives and root around whenever they please, all in the name of security. "Hell is paved with good intentions," the great Samuel Johnson once said. How can they not see it?
     Four emails. I don't want to leave you with the impression that's an average day. Usually it's more like 40. Maybe everybody was outside, enjoy the warm, windy weather. Maybe their courage was blown away in the breeze. I hope they find it again when the winds stop, maybe flapping in the tree like an errant plastic bag. 

Apple bites back at the FBI

     My hiking boots are falling apart. So I went to REI. But their selection of Keens is spotty, so I jumped on the company website.
     Far more sizes and styles. But there is a downside. Now whenever I log on to Facebook, I'm nagged.
     "Shop KEEN footwear Now," Facebook demands, with a photo of the very boots I'd like to buy, though in my own good time, thank you very much, and not because I'm being browbeaten by an algorithm.
     My way of saying that privacy was not exactly enjoying a golden age before a judge ordered Apple to create software to thwart the anti-snooping program in its iPhones that wipes clean their memory after 10 abortive tries, so the FBI can crack a phone belonging to the terrorists who murdered 14 people in California last December.
     Apple's reply, in essence, is "in your dreams," though more eloquently, in an open letter from CEO Tim Cook.
     "The U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create," Cook writes. "They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone."
     Apple's point is that if the genie is conjured up and handed over to the FBI, it will exist, and the online world being what it is, once it's out of the bottle, no one knows where it'll go. Edward Snowden proved if you want something secret distributed broadly, put it in the care of the federal government.
     "The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals," Cook writes. "The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe."
     Cook called for discussion; what he got is society lining up along the standard fault lines. Republicans, who make a show of scorning government when the sky's clear, did their usual rainy day reversal, suddenly rolling at the feds' feet like frightened puppies.
     “Who do they think they are? They have to open it up,” Donald Trump said Wednesday, as if the iPhone were a tin of tuna. "We have to use common sense.”
     Ben Carson, using his common sense, and perhaps confusing this situation with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, said the country might have to wait until Obama leaves office to resolve the FBI/Apple stand-off.
     Ted Cruz, meanwhile, took a break from being the most frightening Republican candidate to observe “Apple has a serious argument” before he reverted to form and added that refusing the FBI's request is like defying a search warrant.
     And Marco Rubio, also true to form, punted.
     "There has to be a way to deal with this issue," Rubio said. "I don't have a magic solution for it today . . . but I do know this: It will take a partnership between the technology industry and the government to solve this."
     The Democrats did no better. If Rubio kicked the can down the road, Hillary Clinton booted a towering, end-over-end punt, calling for a "Manhattan-like project" to find a way for law enforcement to snoop on the phones of the terrorists in our future without undermining security for everybody else. Bernie Sanders was, perhaps wisely, mum on the issue, as far as I can tell.
     When I got my first iPod, having all my music somehow crammed into this sleek, small, aluminum lozenge made me proud to be a human being, to be part of the same species that created such a thing. I have an Apple laptop, plus four iMacs — even though they cost more, because I decided in this one aspect, if nowhere else, I'd have the best. And an iPhone, one I do not want the government sticking its big bazoo into, if it can be avoided.
     And as proud as I am of these devices, I'm prouder that Apple is making a stand for privacy, what little privacy remains. Because as public as our lives are now, with our friends ballyhooing their lunch daily on Facebook, there are hells below this one. At least our public confessions are voluntary. As bad as it is to be hounded by a boot company, it would be worse for the FBI to pop up on Facebook pointing out that they've noticed I have "Isis" by Bob Dylan on my iTunes playlist, and would I mind stopping by their office for a little chat?

Chicago loses Oscar business

Sun-Times file photo

     I'm not sure how much civic pride Chicago residents ever actually took in the Oscar statuettes being produced locally, but that fact sure was embraced by the media.  Here was a bona fide local angle to one of the biggest stories of the year, the Academy Awards. We might not produce many of the actors and actresses joyfully leaping onto the stage to get their moment in the spotlight, but we sure as hell could make the hunk of metal they were handed when they did win. 

    That changed, the Sun-Times reported Wednesday, because the Academy wants them made of bronze, which our R.S. Owens doesn't do. So now New York media will be traipsing to a factory there, the way I did years ago when I drew Oscar duty, and filed this report:

     Wrap your hands around the most famous product that Chicago's R.S. Owens & Co. manufactures and odds are that, after you register its heft and weight for a moment, you will gaze out at an imaginary audience and begin a speech.
     "They thank their mothers, they thank the academy," said Scott Siegel, president of the company that makes the Oscar statuettes to be given out, amid maximum pageantry, tonight in Los Angeles.
     While the Owens company typically gets a burst of publicity at Academy Award time, the Oscars are only a tiny part of their business.
     As expensive as the 50 24-karat gold over silver over nickel over copper trophies might be (the company doesn't reveal what they cost, or how much precious metal is in them) it wouldn't be enough to keep the 60-year-old manufacturer's 180 employees busy all year in Owens' 82,000-square-foot plant at 5535 N. Lynch.
     That is done by all the other prestigious awards that Owens makes -- the Clios, the Emmys, the MTV Video Music Awards and hundreds of other cast-metal trophies.
     Each trophy has its own particular challenges. The Oscars are multiple-plated, requiring dips in baths of chemicals and washes in sulfuric acid. The Emmys are even more complex, with a sphere of copper rings that must be individually cut and welded together. The MTV Video Music Award -- a lunar astronaut saluting an American flag — has to be cast in four pieces and assembled.
     Owens makes two types of trophies. The first, such as the Oscars or Emmys, are licensed — what the company calls "captive molds." That means Owens can only make as many as the licensing group desires, and no more. It can't start selling Oscars on the side, though there is one in the company showroom, along with a bronze hot dog in a tux and crown, a metal Super Mario and several hundred other statuettes, orbs, pyramids, animals and figurines, some of them famous -- the copies of the Super Bowl Trophy given to team players, for instance -- most of them obscure.
     The rest of the trophies are "stock" — two-handled loving cups and stars of excellence and such. Anyone can call up and order one or 100 or 1,000.
     "Thirty years ago, our business was 95 percent stock, and five percent licensed," Siegel said. "Now it's the other way around. Most stock trophies are plastic and very low end."
     Owens & Company doesn't make the plastic kind. Siegel explained that while business people know the value of receiving a quality trophy, the bulk of stock awards -- school awards, Little League trophies -- are given to kids, by adults who tend to want to cheap out on the prizes.
     "Corporate people still want quality," he said. "Kids want quality, too, but the adults are in charge of expenditure."
     Making a metal trophy from scratch is a lengthy, expensive process. Say a widget company wants to give its salesman of the year a bronze widget on a wooden pedestal. Owens will hand the prototype widget to its master craftsman, Manny Steffan, who will look over the widget and see how difficult it will be to cast in metal.
     "Certain jobs cannot be done," he said. "Sometimes you have to simplify." He might suggest that a stylized widget be used, to cut down on production costs.
     While a simple piece — say a globe — can be cast in a two-piece mold, complex figures need multiple-piece molds that fit together like a puzzle. Steffan once did a bronze ice castle whose mold came apart in 34 sections. (The 13-inch-high, 8-pound Oscar is made from a single mold).
     The company is careful about its estimates, because if it underestimates the amount of work needed, it will lose money on the job. Siegel points to a lovely turn-of-the-century trophy topped by an ear of corn, given by a cereal company to its most productive farmer. The company brought it to Owens to be reproduced, and it didn't realize just how tough the job would be."It took us a year and a half," Siegel said. "We lost our shirts on it."
     Once a price is set, Steffan goes to work. It can take two to four weeks to sculpt a model, and up to three months before the molds are done and the first trophy is made. Molds must fit together with small tolerance for error to keep down the amount of flashing -- spilled metal around the seams that must be laboriously ground off and polished. The Owens plant is filled with workers at grinding wheels or wielding hand files, doing away with flashing.
     Siegel's grandfather was in the pigeon supply business, selling food and accessories to people who kept pigeons as pets. His father worked for him as a teenager.
     "In 1938, my father went downtown to get two trophies for a customer's store," Siegel said. "The trophy company thought he was a dealer, and gave it to him wholesale. He made $ 8 on the transaction, as much as he made in two weeks. So he decided to go into the trophy business."
     Like many children of successful businessmen, Siegel resisted following his father's footsteps. He taught high school for seven years.
     "I didn't want to have the rest of my life scripted for me," Siegel said. But the lure of business proved too great, and upon getting his master's degree at Northwestern he joined Owens.
     Few companies can point to a product that will be as happily received and carefully cherished as a trophy. Siegel walks by rack after rack of John Phillip Sousa medallions -- to be given to high school band members -- Boy Scout emblems and spiked globes to be given out by a cable TV network in India. But Siegel said he doesn't really think about his products being dispersed worldwide.
     "To tell you the truth, I think more about how to produce a good product and how to be efficient," he said.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 23, 1998