Review No. 1

    "Out of the Wreck I Rise" is being published in a little more than two months, and while I'll try not to let the book completely hijack the blog, it is a big deal, at least to me, and I couldn't resist sharing our first review, from the Library Journal. 
     If it seems rather low-key to be excited about, that's their way. I've had them bend me over their knee before—being underwhelmed at what I write is kind of what they do—so this is close to a rave, particularly because it is starred: many libraries automatically buy books that are starred. Anyway, if this is like sharing my kid's report card, apologies. But I had to crow.

Library Journal

★ 07/01/2016Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steinberg and book editor Bader have compiled this collection of prose and poetry on the subject of addiction to help those who are still struggling or who are in recovery to find solace in the lives of great people who have also battled the disease. The writings are organized along the lines of an addict's journey—when the good times sour, the importance of time, and the power of embracing a new life. The experiences of well-known figures such as Etta James, Sid Caesar, and John Cheever are relayed in their own words, with feeling and lack of pretense. VERDICT Anyone affected by addiction will surely identify with the accounts included here, and thus, not feel alone in times of difficulty. 

Who are those people on the placemat?

     This column suffered for space. I normally get 650 words; I asked for more and got 900, so I shouldn't complain. Still, I lost Earl Sensenig talking about coming to Bedford from Lancaster to help build the new Mennonite community, and Charles Crumb talking about starting Bits of Time because of his love of antiques, and Rev. Reed quoting Chronicles. And I wasn't able to quite explain why I was doing it, how this country seems so divided, and the problem seems to be that it's easy to demonize each other and hard to try to understand. But I set out to withhold my own opinion and just listen to everyone on the placemat, and to their credit, everyone who picked up the phone spoke with me, candidly and at length. Despite being the dreaded mainstream media, they trusted me. And despite having a very different view of the world than they do, I liked them, and felt like we respected each other. It's a start.
   

    Paper place mats are not a celebrated form of communication, with neither the romance of messages in bottles nor the eager audience for fortune cookies.
     In fact, I didn’t glance at the place mat in front of me as we settled in at the Bedford Diner in Bedford, Pennsylvania, on our way home from vacation Monday. But my sharp-eyed wife drew attention to it, pointing out the services offered: Excavation. Well drilling. Hydraulic cylinder repair.
     “A lot of industrial,” she said, knowing I like industrial.
     A dozen ads, plus one for the diner and a word search. Here, I thought, are people who want to get a message out, who paid RAK Advertising, trying to be heard. I should listen. So I phoned them all.
     “Business is tough right now,” said Joe Ryan, 50, who runs Ryan Services, a general contractor. “It is somewhat slow. The natural gas business affected the area. We had the Marcellus (shale formation) right beside us in the Allegheny Mountains. A lot of drilling for natural gas. In ’07, ’08, companies out of Texas moved up, started drilling. They drilled so much, there was such an abundant supply, prices fell and a lot of people lost their jobs. We have work but not as much as we should.”

     To continue reading, click here. 

State of the Blog: Year Three

    "Sooner or later, it just becomes your life," sings Bruce Springsteen.
    Not to compare this blog to prison, which is what the song "Hard Time" is about.
    Though both do have certain daily routines. Jail has head counts and mealtimes and cell inspections; the blog has click counts and post times and reader comments.
    With the end of the blog's third full year today—1095 consecutive days—it's now a bona fide ingrained daily part of my life, and maybe yours too. But just a part, a small part for you, and a larger-yet-still-not-all-that-big part for me. More of a regular duty, like flossing, only I don't floss with equal diligence.
     Enough throat-clearing. To the all-important stats. Year One brought 385,679 hits. Year Two, 499,423. This year ... drumroll please ... 577,617, as of Wednesday morning, or 48,134 a month, for an increase over the previous year of about 13.5 percent.
    Thirteen point five percent.
    Not the sort of skyrocketing leap the internet is famous for.
    Roughly half the increase of Year Two.
    I'm not going to smear ash on my head and squat at the virtual city gates in mourning over my rate of readership increase slowing. I shouldn't care at all, and I suppose I really don't, not much, since I'm soldiering onward anyway. It gets more readers a month than "Moby-Dick" got in its first 30 years of publication, not to compare the two.
    The news is generally goodish. June, and seven of the past 12 months, scored above 50,000 hits, which I decided is some kind of threshold of significance. Last August topped out at a record, 59,998. Nobody seemed to miss the 2016 poster, so not doing one was a good call. Though I do have an idea for a swell 2017 poster, so I might create one anyway, just for the fun of it. There was a flash of real media recognition: every goddamn day was the only news organization to cover the arrival speech of the Sun-Times new publisher, Bruce Sagan, and Crain's Chicago Business used a photograph of mine, crediting the blog, so that was fun. 
     Still, the value of the blog seems greatest to myself. When I reached into the buzz saw of gun nuttery earlier this month, I could carefully explain what happened right here, without worrying about getting the thing into the newspaper. The process was medicinal, and helped me squeegee the right wing spittle off my body.
     The blog made a little money, thank you Marc Schulman and Eli's Cheesecake, which for the third years ran advertisements at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The ads led to at least one order, I am certain, because I ordered a cheesecake and sent it to Tate—or, more accurately, his kid, at his request—as thanks for his scrupulous volunteer copyediting of the blog. Which reminds me, I should write a post on the idea of Gratitude Sweets...
      Another day. At moments when there is not a lot to say I've been trying not to say a lot. So in closing out Year Three, thank you for reading, and for commenting, and for caring about this almost as much as I do. This blog strikes me as significant, and while that must be an error on my part, driven by the vanity and myopia that inspires so much error, it is my error, and I am sticking with it. Everyone else clings to their folly, why should I be any different?
   

Constantine, Michigan

    On the road, my wife and I try to avoid fast food restaurants because they serve not just crap, but boring, familiar, unhealthful, unappetizing crap. 
     Which means picnic lunches, if we've prepared them. If not, then venturing away from the tollway, looking for the ever-more-elusive local restaurant. At the back of my mind is "Mom's Diner," with Mom—curly haired, fat cheeks, powerful forearms, rolling out the pie crust, gazing out the window, somehow knowing we're about to arrive. ("Howdy. Take a seat anywhere. Leave room for pie—they should just be cool by the time you're done with supper.") 
    Yes, I know. There is something of the connoisseur's delusion to the idea—Mom's Diner can be lousy too; worse than McDonald's (at least once a trip I point out that local roadside eateries were so famously slow and consistently horrible that nationwide chains were embraced particularly for being quick and clean).
    But part of our vacation fun is searching out a bit of local color, and seeking homemade pie.
    And sometimes learning something. 
    Heading home Tuesday, I pulled off the road at the exit we were passing about 12 noon and we found ourselves in Michigan, heading north on 131. There was a commercial traffic bypass, and a "Historic" downtown local route. We went historic, ending up on Washington Street, the main drag of the village of Constantine, on the St. Joseph River.
    One glimpse of the downtown and the restaurant almost became moot. It was a once prosperous, small red brick storefronts with turrets and trim, now empty and forlorn. A town on hard times, which was mystifying, because there were several enormous agricultural companies—Pioneer Seeds,  Monsanto corn—on the outskirts. Maybe they were completely mechanized, because whatever profits they generate obviously aren't being spent in downtown Constantine. The ice cream parlor had gone out of business. Most of the windows were empty, or covered with plywood painted black. The several amateur efforts at retail, craft stores and such, had died on the vine. 
    To be fair, several buildings had their moldings brightly painted and seemed to have thriving businesses: a cafe, an art galley. But fully 80 percent of the downtown strip was shuttered.
    We ate at the Harvey Restaurant, which the waitress told us had been in business since 1908 (actually, 1903) making it the oldest restaurant I had ever been in that retained not a whiff of whatever charm it might have once possessed over the decades. It was 70 percent empty at lunchtime on Taco Tuesday. A grilled cheese sandwich cost $2.
     After lunch we explored downtown. Maybe I have election on the brain, but I kept thinking this is why people are willing to support Donald Trump, in spite of all reason and the demands of patriotism and humanity. They'll follow anybody who promises to deliver the country from this sort of dismal descent in to ruin. If you saw your town turn into this, it would be heartbreaking. It was sort of heartbreaking when it wasn't your town, just to come upon it for the first time.
     Later, I tried to find out what had happened to Constantine: named for the Roman Emperor, for you fans of irony. The population didn't vanish—the village is as big as it ever was, 2,000 people, the same for the past 25 years. There was a bypass put in three years ago, the idea being get commercial traffic off Washington Street. Maybe it worked too well and siphoned all traffic out of Constantine's downtown. 
      So maybe the injury was self-inflicted. Maybe there's some other factor I haven't considered. A big Walmart in nearby White Pigeon, perhaps, that sucked all the business away. And this isn't to suggest it isn't a nice place to live: we saw children playing on swings, an elderly man on an enormous John Deere mower cutting grass. So no insult intended. I liked the place, tipped well, and was glad to have left money there.
      But the general sinking feeling we felt, walking around, lingered with us. I felt zero big city hauteur. The presidential election has killed that in me, for good I hope. If the populist revolt that gave us Donald Trump's candidacy is indeed thwarted, then Agenda No. 1 needs to be to figure out how to get these buildings in Constantine unboarded and back into business. They had a purpose when they were built. They need a purpose again. 

Go to the National Portrait Gallery

Shaker cabinet on display at the National Portrait Gallery

     Heading home, bathed in that end-of-the-vacation relaxed calm, with not a lot to say, except this: Next time you're in Washington, D.C., go the National Portrait Gallery. It's great.

     I'm a creature of habit, and go to the same places: the Museum of American History, the Air & Space Museum, and other places with "Smithsonian" in front of their names. I'd never been to the National Portrait Gallery; I thought it would be some dry collection of presidential portraits, and while those are indeed there, it also offers a thoughtful exploration of the world of human images, with an impressive modern art museum tagged on as well. Luckily, my older son, working here for the summer, took me there, and what a wonderful place it is. That's all I have to offer: next time you get the chance, go. You won't be disappointed. I didn't know what was there, but now I do. And so do you.

The secret shadow government uncovered

    Conspiracy theories are insults to history, a shortcut for credulous people to ape intelligence. I understand that. They allow those unwilling or unable to process how life actually works to try to make sense of a confusing world. They offer tidy explanations to untidy realities, and are almost a kind of faith in God: stuff doesn't just happen, but powerful forces make stuff happen. 

     Usually I am immune to such things, and view them as the sad commentary on the limitations of human intelligence that they are. But I must be susceptible too because, well, maybe I should just tell the story.

     We were walking south on 14th Street in Washington D.C. toward the American National History Museum when I spied this pair of flags. One the American flag, obviously, and the second, well, I didn't know what it was. Three red stars and two red bars. On a flagpole equal in height with the American flag. An attractive and well-designed flag, yet not a flag that was familiar to me — how odd to see an unrecognizable flag. I looked around, to see where I was, and noticed the same flag on a white vehicle parked on the street. On a number of white vehicles actually. 

     What's going on here? My first thought—my very first, immediate thought—was this was obviously the shadow government that nobody knew about, yet had a kind of sovereignty and its own flag (which shows you the idiocy of such theories: like the shadow government that nobody knows about is going to announce itself with a big honking flag).  The United Corporate Overlords of America, maybe.

     No idea where that came from. Too many James Bond movies maybe. I somehow kept my fears of the Big Strange United States Agency That Runs Everything in Secret Yet Has Its Own Flag (these conspiracy theories just naturally get more and more wild) subdued while I toured the Smithsonian, saw the Star Spangled Banner (at least that hadn't been replaced by some strange banner acknowledging our subjugation to the International Monetary Fund). We met my son outside the museum—he couldn't be expected to be anywhere before noon on the weekends. As we walked back north, heading toward sushi burritos for lunch (much better than they sound) we passed the flags again. I pointed the flags out and wondered what they could possibly be. 

    "I don't know," he shrugged. "The Washington D.C. flag, I guess."

     Which of course it is. We were passing the District of Columbia's government building. The flag, I discovered, is based on George Washington's coat of arms, adopted only in 1938. I'm not alone in admiring its sophisticated look: in 2004 it was voted the best designed city flag in the United States. 

     Like somebody turning a reflection on their glasses into an alien mothership, I instinctively thought up a wild, complicated, wrong solution before considering the simple correct one, creating a shadow government in my head before I thought of the unique little district we were traipsing through. The typical crazy fiction rushing in to fill a vacuum of fact. But that's people for you, and I'm people. Let it never be said that, despite aspirations otherwise, I can be as dense as the next guy, if not more so. So a little embarrassing, yes. But not too embarrassing that I can't tell you about it. 

The summer before everything changed, maybe

       
     The presidents were not all men of greatness. The briefest stroll through the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's exhibit on the presidents confirms that. There was dim party tool Warren G. Harding and crony catspaw Ulysses S. Grant. The feckless and imbecilic James Buchanan and the tragically twisted Richard Nixon. 
    You couldn't be blamed for thinking, "Donald Trump will fit right in with these clowns." 
    But I didn't think that. Instead I fought off creeping dread by focusing on the pillars of greatness: George Washington offering his resignation when he could have been king (told that Washington was returning to private life, George III quipped, "If he does that, sir, he will be the greatest man in the world.") Abraham Lincoln holding the nation together with his honesty and his Biblical eloquence. "All men are created equal."
     Britain pulled out of the European Union my first morning here. The news filled with the spectacle of a nation submitting to xenophobia and fear, leaping off a cliff at the behest of mavericks who had no plan other than to trash the system and see what happens next. It's like burning down your home to marvel at the pretty fire.
    And I couldn't help but feel: we're next. It's in the air, madness. Like before a war. "The lights are going out, all over Europe." 
     Usually it's a thrill. This time, it was scary to walk through these wide federal plazas, with their gleaming beige stone buildings. To think, "This is the Department of Commerce that Donald Trump will be responsible for. This is the White House where he will live." 
      With the bad news from Britain, as the country, in an act of collective derangement it instantly regretted, voted to be a smaller, more cut off and less prosperous nation, it was easy to suspect we had now entered a world gone mad, that the populist rage that has for so long simmered under our politics had truly exploded. Angry people don't weigh their best interest. They knock over lamps.
     Brexit is strike two -- strike one was the Philippines electing that murderous madman, Dutarte. Will Trump be strike three? Intelligence is out of favor. Sacrifice is out of favor. Patriotism, the cheap veneer zealots spray paint over their un-American acts. Trump's jaunt to inspect his property, his crowing that the collapse of the pound will help drive tourists to him, would look exaggerated in the Onion. I would have thought that such a performance would send Trump's fans away, shaking their heads. No, they love him even more, for being so self-centered, just like they would love to be, if only they had actual selves of their own to center around.
     That sounds alarmist, maybe even hysterical, and probably is. I hope it is. But the vendors are selling Trump t-shirts on the mall. A Trump sign is on display at the Smithsonian already. Vanguards of his arrival, perhaps, and reminders that he is already here, now, running somewhere. Donald Trump is a fact of history now. Even if he is—please God—defeated, he still ran.  No so deep a shame, really. Nobody walked around mourning that Barry Goldwater ran as the Republican nominee in 1964.
    But it could be worse. Maybe will be worse. Definitely could be. 
    The British leaving the European Union shows that people will act contrary to their self interest if you poke at their fears. The prospect of having some Turks move in down the street was enough to make regions opt out of something that was giving them economic benefit now, and they are only now realizing it, in what has to be the worst hangover ever. 
    The Washington Post ran this tragic paragraph Saturday:

     Polling showed the areas that had the most to lose and the least to gain from the Brexit are precisely those where the referendum saw the most support. In other words, the places — the most export-heavy regions —most hurt by the economic disruptions caused by Brexit could be the places that pushed hardest for it...

     The people who will be hurt most by Donald Trump — the uneducated, the poor — are those who most want him to wave his wizard's wand over their problems and make them go away. Like those who got health insurance through Obamacare and still hate Obama, their passions and fears overwhelming everything else.
     This is probably the last time I'll be in DC before the election. And I don't want to give the impression that I stumbled through the place in an agony of dread over Donald Trump. I had fun, as I always do. But those Trump t-shirts, and the enormous "TRUMP" sign outside the old Post Office, being developed into yet another one of his properties, no doubt using someone else's money. They seemed like warnings. The smart money says he'll give us all a good scare and then go away, leaving 53 percent of us sadder and wiser. But then, the smart money also said that Britain would stay in the European Union.