Technology nostalgia

The Lights of Other Days, by John F. Peto

     Glance at this painting at the Art Institute.  
     Not a famous work. Not "American Gothic" or "Nighthawks." Hung on a panel in a display of 19th century American design, perpendicular to the gallery, so I had to lean in to try to take a proper photo of it. 
     "The Lights of Other Days" by John F. Peto, a minor tromp l'oeil artist. 
     Still, the century-old work gave me pause, because he's doing something we like to do, and imagine is a modern emotion—rhapsodizing past technologies. In this case, the lightbulb, which had replaced the candles used for centuries, was about 25 years old and spreading rapidly. Peto gathered the dusty, tossed out candle holders and lanterns for one last group shot the way, for a decade or two, authors used to laud their typewriters, the whap-whap-whap of the keys, the thunk of the carriage return.
     Until they said, "Aw, the hell with it," and got a computer.
     You could see the nostalgia for a flame lit world. The soft glow. The romance.     
     But not so much that we still do it. We could. Candles are still around. You could light your house with them. But you don't, because it's bothersome and expensive and you'd end up burning the place down. That happened back then. 
     A reminder that nostalgia is a filter, a screen, that only lets the good part through. We remember the glow and not the burned down houses. 

You've been warned, honey

     Hey ladies!
     Put aside your mixing bowl of cookie batter, or lapful of tatting, or supermarket tabloid, or whatever inconsequential thing is occupying your tiny little attention span at the moment. Gather around. Old Uncle Neil has something important to discuss exclusively with my female readership.
     And no, this isn't another liberal cri de coeur — whoops, sorry gals, "cry from the heart" — over Donald Trump's raging sexism, his continual put-downs of women and descent into vulgarity. Yes, that kind of thing is infectious. No doubt part of the pathology explaining Trump is the unspoken male desire among his reality TV fans to get back to living in a man's world. Less worrying about bruising the delicate sensitivities of feminists. More seeing who can pee the farthest.
     To be honest, a Trump nomination, while steadily moving from impossible farce to inevitable tragedy, is in my mind still among the realm of Things too Awful to Imagine. And perhaps with good reason. The GOP establishment isn't frantic because of Trump's policy stands — they agree with him; they want a wall. No, they're frantic because in any half-sane world, Trump loses to Hillary Clinton.

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Killing kitties is hard

  

     City Council is considering an ordinance that forbids animal shelters, including Chicago animal care and control, from killing unadopted pets. The bill pushed by Ald. Ed Burke, the father of ill-considered ordinances, which makes me wonder whether all aspects of it have been thought through. Will it, like the plastic bag ordinance, make the situation WORSE, by jamming shelters with animals they can't get rid of?  What will become of the tens of thousands of animals that come into custody of Chicago and are not adopted? It reminded me of the time I slid by the city animal control center to watch them euthanize animals.

     Too bad you didn't stop by the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control and adopt that gray-and-white kitty I saw there the other day, because now Jennifer Harnisch has to kill it.
     And killing kitties is hard. They can't simply be put inside the big rolling blue metal cages along with the older animals and wheeled into the gas chambers. Kittens are too young; they have too much hemoglobin in their blood. Harnisch has to grab each kitty, individually, and inject it with an overdose of sodium pentobarbital.
     That isn't the tough part, however. Picking up kittens and injecting them is easy, physically—at that age they are so trusting, so affectionate. The tough part is thinking about it. Although, like anything repeated over and over again, it becomes routine.
     "You get used to it," said Harnisch, 26, who said she is "bothered but not haunted" by her job at the Southwest Side center. "It's still very hard. I try to zone it out and not think of the actual act I'm doing. I don't think I could bring myself to do it if I knew."
     That thought came back to me a lot. I don't think people know. Know, for instance, that the puppies they drop off, rather than being extra-adoptable (people love puppies) are usually killed the next day. They can't be adopted until they're fixed, they can't be fixed until they're 2 months old, and young ones can't be kept that long.
     Even in the new facility, built in the mid-1980s, with cheery red-enameled brick and clean interiors, there is room for only 600 animals.
     That sounds like a lot. But last year 28,314 dogs and cats, with a good number of rabbits, guinea pigs and the occasional strange beast (such as a Sonoran Sidewinder) were brought to Animal Control. Only 1,677 left through the front door -- adopted into homes. Another 1,318 were recovered by their anxious owners.
     And the rest? Do the math. The majority -- 25,319 -- left through the back door, dead, in big fiberglass tubs filled with thick plastic liners. Pull back the plastic and take a look. They appear to be sleeping.
     Putting them to death is relatively painless, supposedly, but still not pretty. The animals, in groups, are placed in one of three gas chambers -- stainless-steel cubes about 4-feet-square, with a sliding door of scratched and smudged glass.
     A worker stands in the next room and pushes a button, watching through two chunky glass blocks built into the wall. The process takes 25 minutes. Carbon monoxide, pumped from tanks, fills the cubes.
     The dogs yowl and scratch. They move even after they are dead. Eventually the chambers grow quiet, and the gas is evacuated. Then the bodies get dumped. The Department of Streets and Sanitation sends trucks to take them to the incinerator on Goose Island: 369,274 pounds of pets last year.
     Last week, the city announced an increase in Animal Control staffing and adoption advertising so that fewer dogs and cats are destroyed. Actually eliminating the practice seems impossible right now.
     To stroll through Animal Control is to pass from sweetness to horror and back. You have to steel your heart.
     There, in the break room, is Popeye, an adorable Boston terrier that is one of three pet mascots at Animal Control. He's missing an eye -- he was hit by a car and his previous owners, confronting the prospect of medical expense, abandoned him.
     There, in the room with the buttons that start the gas, is a guillotine with sheet-metal sides and a long, rusty-yet-sharp-looking blade that is driven down pneumatically. Not that they use it to put animals to death—it's only used in rabies cases, when state laws mandate that the brains be examined. The heads are sent to the Health Department.
     This all makes grim reading, but the executive director of Animal Control, Gene Mueller, didn't try to hang a lot of fancy tinsel on the operation.
     When I asked him how he rationalized his job, he said this:
     "I'm a veterinarian. I'm involved with animals because I love animals. I have the terrible duty for society of disposing of their mistakes. We try to provide a humane method of euthanasia for these unfortunate animals.To end up here is far better than being run over by a car or tortured or some other horrible fate."
     Hard to argue that. Hard to see what happens at Animal Control and then ignore it. Ignoring it is part of the problem. People have these romantic notions about animals. They don't want their pets neutered—oooh, too unnatural. They don't want them to be kept indoors. Oooh, too much like jail. They want them to experience motherhood.
     "What everyone thinks is, 'I can find homes for these six puppies,' " Mueller said. "What they fail to understand are the implications. First, they've taken six homes from shelter animals, animals that already exist and will be destroyed because they don't have homes to go into. Second, you have no control over what is done with those puppies. You give them away, each could have six puppies. The problem increases geometrically."
              —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 11, 1998

Our M & M race for Senate

     Illinois became a state in 1818, and its first two senators were elected to staggered terms: Jesse B. Thomas, for six years, and Ninian Edwards for two, before running for, and winning, his second, six-year term.
     This kept the senate elections staggered, generally, and formed two tracks, like M & Ms racing at a Bulls game, and it's easy to view them as in competition.
     Spoiler alert: Track No.1 is winning.
     Track 1's Thomas proposed the Missouri Compromise that limited slavery, and Track 1, as we shall call it, has seen a pantheon of greatness—Stephen Douglas. Paul Douglas—and skill, such as Charles H. Percy, Paul Simon and his protege, Dick Durbin who, since 1997, carved out a niche for himself as, if not a name that will echo through history, then a no-drama workhorse twirling a dozen policy plates at once, bringing home the bacon to Illinois, year-in, year-out.
     But on Track 2....

     It's first occupant, Edwards, who as governor sent the Illinois militia to ambush Indian tribes, was forced to resign midway into his second term, after being exposed penning anonymous, unfounded attacks on a political rival.     

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Escape from O'Hare, OR, the Farmers' Revenge

     It's a 12 hour flight from Tokyo to Chicago. Which sounds unendurable. But with in-flight movies, it's really not that bad, particularly for a guy who doesn't see many movies. I never thought about movies, ahead of time. I brought books. But instead I binge-viewed; I saw more on this trip to Japan—six total—than I have in the theater during the previous year ("The Big Short," "The Martian," "Bridges of Spies," "Boyhood," "Spotlight" and an HBO documentary on Banksy's month-long art project in New York City. 
     So the flight over and back, not a problem.
     The hour after we arrived in Chicago, however....a little harder to accept. 
     There's just something almost cruel about stumbling off the plane, breathing the air of freedom, thinking, "Ah, I'm home!" then turning the corner to see this mass of humanity shuffling through our Sham Security Theater. 
     I've gone abroad many times, but never remember it being this bad.
     There were three lines, one after the other.
     The first was the longest, but that at least kept moving. This line was the line shunting citizens to the banks of machines where you scan your passport, declare that you're not bringing in drugs and sides of beef and such,, get your photo taken in the worst, low rez, exhausted picture of your lives.
    Say, 20 minutes.  At least you don't have to hunch over a form with a pencil anymore, which is more than Japan can say. 

    Once that line is surmounted, slip in hand, you are  then are shunted into the second line. Where you wait to hand the slip with the low rez photo to a customs agent, who eyeballs you, perhaps sniffs for the scent of decaying beef, then waves you on, where you get your luggage.   
     We were worried ours wouldn't arrive: they had paged us at the ticket counter at Narita just to make sure we really were owners of the luggage connecting from Kumamoto, which seemed an Ominous Sign. 
     But there it was, not in Malaysia at all, as we expected, but right there on the carousel, by the time we got to it. I grabbed my bag and was ready for the bolt to freedom, like a diver breaking the surface for the first gulp of sweet air, when we realized the only way out was to join yet another line, snaking around the baggage carousels, to get past the agriculture department, still looking for that beef. I watched a cute, twitchy  little beagle being led around the luggage, adding an absurd element. You want your police state to have German shepherds, not pugs. It was if there was a calliope wheezing in the corner.
      This cruelest line had no ropes to guide it, with people grabbing their bags from the carousel cutting in, as opposed to going to the back, the way suckers like me did. My brother started chatting with a Japanese businessman who was going to miss his connecting flight, and gallantly tried to intercede on his behalf.
    "What if you need to get to a connecting flight?" he asked a uniformed—I almost wrote "costumed"—employee.
     "It's a universal exit," he replied. "They couldn't care less."
      The people who heard that last sentence laughed, despite ourselves.
      "God bless America," I said. At least we're free to be honest about what a hash we make of things and how indifferent we are to the people we supposedly serve. We finally shoehorned by the agriculture guy, who took our low rez photo slips and waved us through.
      At that point, I phoned American Taxi, as I always do, and maybe five minutes later Cab No. 12 was waiting outside gate 5E to whisk me home, just like they said it would.
     I suppose that's the power of commerce as opposed to government. The feds already have my money, so any service they provide is nearly charity. American Taxi, however, wants my $30, now and in the future, and so have worked out a system where they  get what I need ASAP. 
    Not to slam the government, per se. We have Republicans to do that, and they've undermined the government, as if to prove their point. starving it of resources, so it is stretched and repurposed and multi-tasked, well, I suppose it could be worse and probably will be. And not to take anything away from the various Customs and Immigration and Homeland Security agents, who were doing their best, individually. Still, it's a sad commentary on our inability to get things right—I don't think we were ever required to pause more than 30 seconds at Narita when leaving Tokyo. 
     My brother summed it up best.
     "Thank God Chicago didn't get the Olympics," he said.  We could barely handle the regular arrivals on a normal Monday afternoon.


    

Flying home

     Well, the trip's over, and I'm flying home. I feel like I've been gone forever. My mind's too fuzzy to even try to write anything cogent.  But luckily I tucked away a little something, just in case.  Back to more substantial fare tomorrow.      

     So I took my 100 readers to "Romeo and Juliet" a couple weeks back. Everyone seemed to have a good time. One thing I noticed is the audience, which at the Lyric can skew toward the antediluvian, seemed considerably younger: college students. High school students, even. I assumed they were drawn by love of the romance of the familiar Shakespeare tale of romance.
    Or maybe not-so-familiar. 
    As we were leaving the lovely Civic Opera House, I overheard heard a young woman exclaim to another:
     "You didn't know they died?"

Japan Diary #6—Defending the castle

      KUMAMOTO—  Who doesn't love a castle? They look cool, first. They have this wonderful aura of protection. We all want to be safe within castle walls, secure against the danger and the enemies we know, or sometimes just imagine, are outside, trying to get at us.
     Arriving at this scenic place in southwestern Japan, a six-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo—I expected a rural nowhere—I was pleasantly surprised to find a vibrant city of 700,000, with a university and lots of bookstores, albeit selling books I can't read, and this edifice looming over the town.
    It's natural to head for the castle, to take a look around. 
    They give you a lot of history at these places. The 13 generations of Hosokawa clan shogun who held power here from when the castle was first built in 1607. Not that the building before us is that old — and I always sniff around for this detail when I visit these kind of places. Some sites hide it, but here they are fairly upfront. Burned in the Satsume Rebellion of 1877; the castle was reconstructed in 1960, which means we're the same age. 
      I'd say the castle is holding up better.
      That would be enough to chew on, just seeing a historic castle that is really a facsimile of a castle that what was once there. A sort of ghost castle. I suppose you could say it is the same castle, the same entity, in the way I'm the same person I was 30 years ago, except that my cells have more or less all been replaced with new ones.
     As I read my way up to the tower and down, pausing for that moment of frisson by the open air windows atop the thing, looking at that drop, imagining. Then I came to how the castle was burned down. Not by any enemy, though the enemy was both real and nearby. It was the defenders of the castle, putting some structures below to the torch, to deny their opponents access or a place they could set up artillery. Sparks from the flames they set were carried by the wind, swirling behind them and up the hill, and burned down the castle they were trying to protect. The castle defended them, but they couldn't defend it.
     Typical.  Whatever you fear, whatever you worry about, seldom can hurt you with the devastating efficiency you use to hurt yourself. The bogeymen the Republicans dread, from immigrants to Muslims to gays, are really only helping the country; the damage comes from the fires the GOP has been setting for 25 years, trying to stop their progress.

At first, the official story was that the rebel army burned the
castle down. The problem was, they hadn't arrived yet. 

     But let's not be political. You don't have to be an imploding political party to burn your castle. How many gun owners turn their guns upon themselves? Far more than ever thwart a criminal. How many good people break down fearing something they suspect is out there? The stress gets us far more than the things we're stressed about do. We're in a good position, safe, secure, behind the walls, but we don't accept it, and, trying for even more protection, burn the damn thing down ourselves, preparing for an enemy that might never come.