"What a man, my hero, my brother."

     The hypocrisy of some people can really be breath-taking. Perhaps "suffocating" is a better word. Here conservatives fulminate for seven years against Barack Obama, inveighing against him as illegitimate in every regard: not an American, not a Christian, not commander-in-chief, not someone whose word carries any weight or meaning. No Supreme Court justices for this joker.
    And then Muhammad Ali dies. And these same conservatives cavil against him for ... ready? ... being a draft dodger. For failing to comply with government orders regarding Lyndon Johnson's undeclared war in Southeast Asia.
    One of many examples from my mailbag Sunday:
    "What in the HELL is wrong with everyone?" Fran Borowski cries. "M. Ali was nothing more than a FREAKEN DRAFTDOGER !!!!!! END OF DISCUSSION."
     For her, perhaps. And I guess for me, too. Either you see Muhammad Ali as the American hero he is. Or you're lost in past ideology.

     There's a lot of that going around. I tried pointing out, for all the good it did, that Ali did not "dodge" the draft. He stood up, refused induction, and took the consequences for his actions, which we were very steep—loss of millions of dollars in boxing purses, sentenced to five years in prison, excoriated by the armchair chicken hawks of the day.
     The passing decades did allow most to see Ali as the hero he was. But many seem stuck in 1967. Dick Esgar begins:

     I am not going to read your article today.  I read Morrissey's and thought it was very good, I would expect yours is also. I enjoyed Ali a lot, he was the greatest fighter that has lived. But he is not 'KING OF THE WORLD', or he would have went into the military like he was suppose to. I was never drafted, but if I would have been, I would have gone.

    And fought bravely, no doubt, and won medals, if not the war itself, single-handed. We always rise heroically to the challenges we never face, in our own minds.

Esgar continues:

My brother in law, was drafted, and died at Fort Polk, La., in basic training, 26 years old, from blood poisoning, he got from a cut on his hand that did not heal, and crawling around in the dirt. There is no place for anyone that does not answer the call or respect our Flag. And as I have told you before, it has got worse since Obama took office

     Sounds like an argument for avoiding the draft, not obeying it.  A military that valued its soldiers would have cleaned that cut. I wrote to him:

     Muhammad Ali served his country better than 100 men who went sheeplike to their deaths. Sad that, after all this time, you don't see it.  

    Let's not end on that note. I believe the Muhammad Ali story ultimately says something good about America, and so let's give the final word to John W. Wilson.

     It was June 1965 when I received a letter from the President of the United States of America. It was an impressive letter in bold italics and gold embroidering around the border and quite intimidating. It said "greetings from the President of the United States of America, you will report for induction no later than 08:00 hours on 06/15/1965. Failure to report as instructed may result in a $10,000.00 fine or imprisoned for 5 years and or both". I knew when I registered for the draft at 18 years of age that this could happen, but the army had not entered my mind. I did not want go because of the civil rights struggle and the disrespect and abuse by Chicago Policemen and the not allowing Black men and women the right to register to vote. I was not protected by the constitution why should I have to serve. But I went and turned out that I was told by my company commanders that everything I did was outstanding. Fired expert with the M-14 rifle hitting 75 targets in 75 attempts, running 10 seconds off the world record in the mile in army combat boots and fatigue pants, missing expert with one of the most difficult weapons the army .45 caliber pistol by one shot. Unheard of at that point in time. I was offered on 5 different occasions during my two years of active duty to go to officer''s candidate school which I refused each time. Years later after serving in Viet Nam and back home my cousin who served was berating Ali as a coward for refusing induction into the service, I replied no he is not a coward, I am the coward because I did not want to go into the service, but I was too afraid of prison and the fine I would have to pay for not reporting. I loved Ali for being a man that took on the powers of the US Government. I met Ali many times in Hyde Park and he would always greet me and others with genuine concern and a warm embrace.What a Man, my hero, my brother I am so glad that I was blessed with the good fortune to have known this great leader, great warrior and wonderful human being. 

Photo exhibit drums up hope inside Cook County Jail

     Imagine you’ve organized inmates at the Cook County Jail into a photography class. Hard to do, since most of us can’t imagine volunteering anywhere, doing anything, not even for an hour stuffing envelopes at a local church. Never mind approaching Sheriff Tom Dart, persuading him to let you into the jail, then digging into your own pocket to buy cameras to place into the hands of hardened men more accustomed to using their hands to throw gang signs.

Christopher Jacobs

   Still, imagine you’ve done all that and held your first photography exhibit in the jail.
     What’s your next thought? If you were Chicago music photographer Christopher Jacobs, it is “Now I’ll organize the prisoners in my second photography class into a drum circle.”
     “After our first show, I was out in Venice Beach for the Grammys and I saw a drum circle and I thought, ‘Bingo, that’s my next thing,’ ” explains Jacobs, a professional photographer, standing in the gym of the jail’s Mental Health Transition Unit on the grounds of the old boot camp just east of the jail.
     The photos on the gym’s yellow cinderblock walls reflect a narrow range of subject matter by necessity. “Our canvas was super-limited,” says Jacobs. Bars, fellow prisoners, plants from the garden, the therapy dogs Jacobs brought in one day....

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Muhammad Ali was at home in Chicago

  

    There are certain famous people who lived in Chicago for a stretch of time whose presence never quite attached itself to the psyche of the city, either because they were very young, like Bobby Fischer and Golda Meir, or because they were here very briefly, like Ronald Reagan, or kept a low profile. 

     Muhammad Ali was neither young, nor low profile, nor was his stay here brief: he lived in Chicago for a dozen years, at the height of his fame. Yet for some reason he isn't particularly associated with the city. My guess is that, like Oprah Winfrey, his fame was so vast, it transcended place. 

    Ali passed away Friday, and his relationship with the city seemed to merit a separate story, and this ran in the Sunday paper alongside his obituary. 

     Cassius Clay was born in Kentucky, but Muhammad Ali was born on the South Side of Chicago.

     Ali lived in Chicago, where he found his faith, for about a dozen years. He would cruise in his Rolls-Royce down Lake Shore Drive or stop in for a steak at Gene & Georgetti.

     Ali, who died Friday at 74, got married and started his family here and would have fought one of his bouts for the heavyweight championship of the world here, too, but politics prevented it.

     The young boxer first came to Chicago in the late 1950s to compete in Golden Gloves tournaments, held at the old Chicago Stadium. Heavyweight Ernie Terrell, who was to have boxed Ali in Chicago, said the future champ made a big impression even then....

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Muhammad Ali: "The king of the world" dies at 74

    When the bell rang to begin the seventh round of the heavyweight championship of the world that long-ago February day in 1964 in Miami and a battered Sonny Liston, slumped on a stool in his corner, spat out his mouth guard instead of standing up, it was the ridiculed long shot, Cassius Clay, on his feet, ready, who realized first, a moment before anyone else, what had just happened. Shooting his arms into the air in triumph, his mouth a wide ‘‘O’’ of joy, he managed a brief victory dance alone in the center of the ring before pandemonium erupted and the world came over the ropes to embrace him.
    ‘‘I am the greatest!’’ Clay shouted into the microphone that would be stuck into his face for the next half-century. ‘‘I am the greatest! I am the greatest! I’m the king of the world!’’
     And so he was, for one more day as Cassius Clay, then for decades as Muhammad Ali, the only man to win the title of heavyweight boxing champion three times, a reign interrupted in 1967 by his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. Army, a moral stand that stalled his boxing career and deprived him of the fortune he could have earned during three years in his prime, but cemented his fame as a revered cultural icon.
     Ali was a brash, bragging, rhyming champion who, despite riches, still cared deeply about social issues, ‘‘a new kind of black man,’’ to use his phrase, fearless, proud, independent, who expanded what it means to be a hero and introduced many in this country to the Muslim faith. Ali settled into decades as a sort of roving ambassador, controversy fading into universal affection, ending up among the most beloved, most recognizable, most important stars of the 20th century, without question the most significant athlete who ever lived....

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Bashing the demonizers

Detail of "Eyes to the Front or The Inevitable Outcome of Class Struggle" by Jerry Truong

   
    Sometimes, when I answer an email, the recipient seems amazed to hear from me. 
    They seem to expect silence. Or some kind of staff reply. 
    No, no staff. And not responding, even to rude people, seems itself rude.
    So I read lots of email, and try to muster some kind of reply. 
    And in reading so much email, patterns emerge. 
    Today, I'd like to draw attention to two common words.
    "Bash" and "demonize."
    They are used only in one circumstance, as far as I can tell: when conservatives are fairly criticized about something which, being conservatives, they just can't face directly.

    So rather than address the nature of the criticism, they categorize the criticism itself as unfair, crude.  

    If I point out, for instance, as I did in April, that Indiana has just passed a truly medieval law requiring aborted fetuses to be buried in coffins or cremated (because they're  babies, you see?) then ... well, let William Duffy explain it. 

    "You've got the balls to bash Indiana as a racist place with your civil rights garbage statement," he wrote.

     "Bash." Like with a sledge hammer. (I won't even start on "civil rights garbage." I'd bet that those three words have never been strung together, but of course I'd lose). 

     Or when I pointed out that John McCain had replaced his record of heroism with one of craven cowardice by endorsing Trump after Trump insults all POWs in general and him in particular, A.L. Jones of Park Ridge wrote:

    "For sure your use of Memorial Day to bash McCain and the continuation of your personal dislike against Trump were really in bad taste." 

    "Bash" implies a certain whack-a-mole crudeness. One is not touching a point with the finger of satire and truth, but blindly clubbing away. (Though I have to savor Jones' "personal dislike," as if there is no other reason to hate Trump than petty grievance. Trump isn't a madman who would destroy the country; I'm just holding a grudge).
    Moving on to the second word, If I point out that Donald Trump, the likely presidential candidate of the Republican party, has said a variety of bigoted, idiotic, and anti-American things, and that all Republicans are implicit in these positions if they support Trump, no matter how grudgingly, then I am "demonizing" them. 

     "My problem with you is that you deminize folks like me who disagree" wrote a reader calling himself "Mysterious Johnson," who was writing to inform me that he was returning after boycotting me for my various sins, and was perhaps surprised when I was less than warm in my welcome (and no, I did not point out his spelling error. When someone is utterly mistaken, as Johnson is—he feels his sincere religious convictions should allow him to revoke the civil rights of gay people, aided by the law—there is no need to snipe about spelling). 

    Or, to drive home just how popular "demonize" is, savor this, from the endless wheedle for money that comes from Ron Paul.
    "But our national media would rather demonize our Second Amendment rights than the misguided “gun-free zone” policies that only embolden bloodthirsty thugs and madmen!"
     What does that even mean? "Demonize our Second Amendment"?
     At this point, I don't think I could in good conscience use either "bash" or "demonize." And anyone who does is halfway to being dismissed. The words are just so moist with the tears of self-pity, the bully pouting because he has been put on the red chair in the corner, completely forgetting what he did that got him there. 

    So I try not to use "bash" and "demonize." And if you use them, you might want to pause and reflect whether you are in the wrong and don't know it. A lot of people are in the wrong and don't know it, but feel if they can just grab the right label to slap on their dilemma, they will magically be in the right. They won't.

Can we bring our divided continent back together?

     “What is the Continental Divide?” my wife said.
     A natural question. We were standing Tuesday at the “Continental Divide Overlook” at Eldorado Canyon State Park in Colorado. I wish language allowed me to convey the view — even a photograph would fall short. A sweeping, 50- mile wide panorama, starting, to the left, with the snow-capped Rockies, unfolding through pined mountainsides, distant valleys and rock gorges that set me pondering a possible connection between “gorge” and “gorgeous.”
     I puffed the dust off my high school geology. “It refers to drainage,” I said. “The Rocky Mountains form a ridge, north and south. A drop of rain falling on the west side will, eventually, make its way to the Pacific Ocean. On the east, to the Atlantic.”
     Hiking back down, the words “continental divide,” echoed in my head in a way that has nothing to do with hydrology. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that spans a continent. And we sure are divided, big time.
     What divides us? Race, class, religion. Politics form the most gaping division right now. The differences are sharper than ever, with the Republicans firmly anti-government, pro-business, anti-immigrant, pro-white, anti-gay, pro-religion, anti-women (though they would argue they support women by making their difficult moral choices for them). And the Democrats pretty much the opposite.
The Republicans offer up presidential candidate Donald Trump, an unstable amateur who has never run for public office. And the Democrats are assembling, in typical, shambolic, herding cats fashion, behind Hillary Clinton, the former senator, former secretary of state. Not to forget Bernie Sanders tagging along, a nagging reminder that even our divisions have divisions.
     You'd think a few miles on Rattlesnake Gulch Trail would be the perfect place to forget all this. But days into my supposed vacation, I had Trump on the brain. I found myself snapping photos of canyon walls and tweeting them with the caption, "It ain't Donald Trump that makes America great." The media was accused of focusing on Trump too much—I disagree, it's called "reporting the news"—but now that he has a scarily real chance of becoming the president of the United States, it's the responsibility of every patriotic American to point a quivering finger at his latest horror and scream, "Noooooo!!!"
     This might be naive. We are so polarized, no one switches loyalty, no matter what. I sincerely believe that Donald Trump could go on television and drown a litter of puppies—really cute, golden retriever puppies—one by one, serving their damp little bodies into the audience with a tennis racquet, and his fans would shrug and explain that's just Donald being Donald, sticking it to the old, drowning-puppies-is-bad establishment.
     Getting to nature is beneficial, the chief benefit being you realize how big, old, and indifferent the earth is to all our striving. Or to quote my favorite Park Service warning sign, "The mountains don't care."
     So we have to care. And the main question we need to care about is this: Do all these divisions matter more than the one thing that unites us? And that one thing, in case you don't know, and many seem not to, is that we are all living here, all Americans, together, on our respective slopes of our Great Divide.
     A year after 9/11, some grew nostalgic for the sense of shared purpose the attacks brought. We wondered when we might feel that again—maybe if space aliens attacked, we could band together again. But we don't need aliens for our way of life be threatened. We do that already. Nobody can hurt us like we can hurt ourselves. Even after Trump is—please God—defeated, the division will remain. We will realize that Trump wasn't a cause, but a symptom. We have proved ourselves very good at falling apart. It's getting back together, bridging this continental divide, that is the trick. We're the United States, remember. The founders put it in our name. So we wouldn't forget.

Friendly if you belonged

     Jackie Schaller died last Saturday at 90. The owner of Schaller's Pump, the legendary Bridgeport tavern, was given the proper affectionate send-off by our inimitable Maureen O'Donnell in the Sun-Times. But these old South Side guys, they weren't Teddy bears. They had a toughness that lingered right into old age, as I found out, a little, when the great Ed McElroy took me to Schaller's in 2009, leading to Jackie Schaller's memorable cameo in my 2012 memoir, You Were Never in Chicago:

    For lunch today, Ed takes me to Schaller's Pump. From the outside, the place seems unremarkable—a modest two-story brick building, a large welcome to White Sox fans painted across the wall. In the gravel parking lot, I mention that I was last here with Mary Mitchell, a black Sun-Times columnist who was hesitant to walk into Schaller's because of its reputation, unsure of how she would be received, though the regulars warmly welcomed her once she did muster the courage to go in. 
     "The only black you'll see here is the cook," says Ed.

Jackie Schaller

     On the inside, Schaller's Pump is also unremarkable — your standard small, dim neighborhood tavern, with an elbow-worn wooden bar and a dozen tables. Patrons are older, all white, and Ed knows most of them. We sit down and are joined by Jackie Schaller, a tiny man in a blue cardigan, not two years older than Ed but looking far more elderly, shrunken, pale — his face seems like soft stone worn away by a river. His grandfather started the bar in 1881, and it has operated continuously since then — all through Prohibition, which merely required installation of the peephole that's still in the side door. Schaller calls Ed "Eddie" and they reminisce. 
     "Who took you to your first World Series?" Ed says, and they both laugh. To St. Louis in 1946 to see the Cardinals beat the Red Sox. "I drove down in my car," says Ed. "The Chase Hotel. A guy I knew took care of us."
     Schaller is cooler toward me. Though in Ed's company, I'm still a stranger and a newspaperman at that.
     Did Schaller know his grandfather, I ask. Did he know the man who started the tavern?
     "Yes," Schaller replies.
     Silence.
     What was he like?
     A pause. "Five foot one," Schaller says, without a trace of warmth. Nothing more.
     An older black couple arrives and is shown to a table nearby, where they quietly eat. Times have changed, in some ways, and not in others. I ask Schaller how old he is.
     "My birthday is Jan. 15," says Schaller. "Do you know what day that is?"
    I shrug—nothing comes to mind.
    "Martin Luther King Day," Schaller says, with a quick flick of the thumb toward the black couple. There doesn't seem to be malice in the gesture—those days are gone—but maybe the memory of malice....
     Ed orders a hamburger and a glass of milk. I order a steak sandwich and a cup of coffee, with only the briefest glance of instinctive longing at the men having Budweisers at the bar. Jackie moves off, to see after a big group of tourists arriving at the back room. Ed tells me a little about him. "World War II guy. I think he got hit," Ed says, describing how Schaller went from an eighteen-year-old playing on the St. Leo Light Basketball Squad and mouthing off to the priests to a soldier fighting in the jungles of the Pacific. A common path for the boys of Ed's generation. They played ball, they went overseas, they fought, they got hit, they came home.
    "All those guys. Overseas. Bronze stars. You couldn't get a better bunch of people," says Ed. "All out of Visitation Parish. In Chicago, you know, we go by parish. Especially South Side. Visitation—it's like the pope lived there." Ed holds up his hands in amazement. "Unbelievable, Visitation. So many priests came out of there. So many policeman. Commanders. Firemen. It was so friendly."
    Friendly, of course, if you belonged.