When I learned that my older son would be spending the summer interning in Washington, D.C., my immediate concern was for his safety, though not because of the threat of terrorism or predatory senators. I worried about the train. The Washington Metro marked its 40th anniversary with a spate of bad publicity about how decrepit, run down and dangerous it is—nine people died after two Metro trains collided in 2009.
Or, short of disaster, I worried if it would be able to get him to where he needs to go. Stretches of the system are going to have to be shut down, sometimes for weeks or months at at time.
We went to visit the lad recently, and stayed in North Bethesda, taking the Red Line back and forth into DC, giving me a chance to thoroughly inspect it. I was interested in how bad it is, and how the system differs from Chicago's "L" and Metra.
The stations are vast, dim, with indirect lighting on barrel vaulted, honeycombed ceilings.
The DC system was the handiwork of Chicago's underappreciated, tormented architect Harry Weese. In designing the Metro, he created "some of the most powerful public spaces of our time," New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in Weese's obituary in 1998, calling the Metro, “among the greatest public works projects of this century." The sections where two stations intersect “induce an almost religious sense of awe”
The trains? Not so much. The first car we got into was one of the 40-year-old relics from when the system was unveiled as Washington's Bicentennial Birthday gift to itself. It was, I noted with amazement, carpeted, whatever the original color was now a salmon brown. I hard to marvel at the hubris of that. Maybe the original wallpaper peeled away.
Every time a train pulls into the station and stops, there is a full five-second delay before the doors open. I'm sure you get used to it, but it was just long enough for me to wonder whether they'd open at all, or perhaps, the whole car would just burst into flame instead. My wife, trying to put a bright spin on it, pointed out that the delay allowed riders to not have to stand up until the train was stopped, a bonus, of sorts.
The Metro is one of the deepest subway systems in the world, which required the enormous escalators leading down into and out the system, entrances that seemed so Jetsons in the late 1970s. Now the escalators are often broken, forcing passengers into that mincing Geisha quickstep people fall into when trying to get up and down broken escalators.
And because the stations are under the water table, there is evidence of seepage everywhere: streak doors, corroded metal. It turns out they didn't fully waterproof the thing when building it, as a false economy, and now part of the $1 billion repairs it needs it to be retroactively sealed.
In its defense, the Metro got us where we were going. The system also tells you how much is left on your transit card when you enter and exit a station, a trick that Chicago's Ventra card devices cannot manage to do. While Chicago has the efficient one-fare-takes-you-anywhere system, in Washington, you pay when you leave, the charge depending on how long of a trip was taken, which makes sense, and is what they use in Tokyo, but adds another layer of complexity.
Back in Chicago, taking the "L" to the Cubs game Monday, I had a renewed sense of appreciation for our system's clean, new cars and lack of water damage. The Metro was a triumph 40 years ago; now it is a rebuke, and a reminder that we not only expect a government that makes the trains run on time, now, but demand one that remembers to maintain them so they keep running into the future. To do otherwise is to betray both our past and our future.
Oh cheer up. It’s the Fourth of July. Yes, anyone who loves this country has to be worried that by next July 4 Donald Trump will be president and the red, white and blue, star-spangled banner we all love will suddenly seem a soiled pennant of shame.
Put it in perspective. Should the ultimate infamy occur this November, and America’s fearful and ignorant elect a bigoted fraud as president, be reassured: he won’t be the most flawed individual ever to hold the highest office in the land. Well, OK, he will be the most flawed individual ever to hold the highest office in the land. But he’ll have plenty of second-place company.
In celebration of Independence Day, a quiz on some near-Trumpian mediocrities the American miracle has somehow survived.
1. Trump won’t be the first president whose arrival in office was greeted with sorrow. Who was deemed “probably the man of smallest caliber who has ever been made president of the United States”?
a) Thomas Jefferson
b) Calvin Coolidge
c) Harry Truman
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Elie Wiesel died yesterday. The internet was instantly flush with his warnings about complacency in the face of evil, arriving within hours of the Donald Trump campaign re-tweeting an image of Hillary Clinton juxtaposed against piles of cash and a Jewish star, an image taken from a white supremacist web site in an act of either utter stunning ignorance or sneering anti-Semitism, and which is worse?
That seemed apt, as Wiesel's life after being liberated from Buchenwald was one of warning — his most famous book, "Night," begins with a villager returning to his home with tales of death camps that nobody believes.
The warnings always seem overblown. Evil strikes people as unbelievable—it can't be serious. That's why evil thrives. You don't believe what's happening until it's too late.
Today, it isn't that nobody believes Trump is a racist and a bigot—it really can't be argued, with his blanket condemnations of Mexicans and Hispanics, his mockery of women and the disabled. But rather that a swath of America doesn't care. Worse, it's the reason they like him. Trump gives permission for bigots—who are bullies and thus cowards at heart—to strut about in mid-day, suddenly halfway decent.
And in this they are in keeping with the rest of the world, where globalism and diversity are under attack by those who feel the world has changed too much, and who want to go back to some imagined earlier life when they were isolated and in charge, at least in their own perceptions.
In that sense, it must always be remembered that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. First we had to have a despised serf class of 11 million undocumented immigrants allowed to fester, blocked the road to citizenship that our parents and grandparents enjoyed. We needed 20 years of Republican assault on the media, on the idea of facts, of knowledge, of experience, of science, where a man who has never been elected to public office can flog that as a qualification for the presidency, out of one corner of his mouth, while the other corner interviews vice presidential candidates who know their way around government.
The Jewish Star pinned to Hillary had just enough deniability—a graphic error. Unlike Muslims, Jews can't be reviled directly, unless it is through the ploy of anti-Zionism, where Israel is held up as some kind of unique transgressor nation that shouldn't exist. If you're wondering why the horrors of Syria unfold with muted outrage on college campus, while every sophomore is ready to man the ramparts damning Israel, it's because the killing fields of Syria are done by Syrians, and who knows a Syrian? While Israel's unfortunate and unwise occupation of the Palestinians are done by Jews. The easiest way to clarity there—not that many are searching to clarity—is to remember that in 1966, when Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan, nobody knew or cared about either and Israel still had to be destroyed, and its neighbors were poised to try. That is where the territories came from. They too, like Trump, are more a symptom than a cause and, like Trump, should they go away, the larger problem will remain.
"I'm a frightened Jew," Wiesel said, at a luncheon for the United States Holocaust Museum in Chicago in 2007. I remember thinking, sitting in the audience, that that was over-stating the case—are Jews not now enmeshed in the fabric of American society? Of Western democracy? Maybe not so much, based on the not-subtle dog whistles that Trump is sending out to his white nationalist friends. Not so much, based on the rise of Le Pen and the other pro-Fascists in Europe. Not so much, seeing how England would scuttle its economy and international standing for a decade if not forever in order to disentangle itself from the framework Europe set up after World War II in a vastly successful bid to grow economically and not fall to killing each other again.
If the Brits will leap out the window, a self-inflicted defenestration to avoid having to comply with lumber standards, imagine what they'll do to others.
That's the problem with warnings — you never know which ones are important. The genie of nationalism and identity, once let out of the bottle, is very hard to put back in. In keeping with his campaign of fraudulence and fear, Donald Trump is playing upon the worst instincts of America, and a much wider swath—not quite half, not yet, but that could change—is responding. Maybe that means he goes down in epic defeat in November. Maybe that means he wins. Nobody knows, but we're going to find out, and if you're optimistic, you shouldn't be.
I keep thinking of another classic, almost as important as Wiesel's Night—Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. A speculative historical novel where anti-Semite aviator Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the United States begins to lope after Germany in repression of Jews. It's a chilling book, because it is so real. People have a wide range of capacity for good and ill, and it comes down to who is leading them and what they are being told.
America is being told lies by a demagogue who would divide and ruin the country. Elie Wiesel warned of such people in life and, in death, he warns us still. Anyone who doesn't view the election of 2016 as a looming disaster that must be avoided just isn't paying attention, to the present or the past.
Donald Trump is coming to Chicago to squeeze cash out of local tycoons who find it easier to give money than to think. Ron Gidwitz, whose family has been wealthy for a century, is heading up his local cup rattling effort, forgetting that while Trump will flash across the heavens and be gone in November, please God, the shame of supporting him will linger.
I, on the other hand, am in the rather comfortable position of having warned of Trump's unfitness to be president for ... gee ... 16 years now. I was wondering what the first column I wrote about Trump was, and dug up this, as true today as it was then, alas.
What would you take to a desert island?
I don't know why that question is supposed to be profound.
But each generation of journalists seem to find that this simplistic bit of fancy somehow probes the depths of a person's character, particularly a politician's character, assuming politicians have character. It shows what they value.
The first time it was asked, maybe it did. Now it's just another tiresome ritual in an election process that seems to become more tiresome and more ritualistic with every passing year.
The true idiocy of the question was driven home to me recently when I caught a snippet of the "Today" show on NBC.
There was Donald Trump, living out his current personal phantasm as political candidate.
Matt Lauer was trying to lob a few of Trump's inconsistencies back at him. First he addressed Trump's having lumped the presidential candidates into what Trump had called the "Lucky Sperm Club."
That's shorthand for children of pampered privilege who would be nowhere if not for the accomplishments of their parents (on the money for Bush and Gore, somewhat accurate for McCain, and not at all accurate for Bradley).
But isn't it true, Lauer asked Trump, zeroing in for what he thought was the kill, that your father was himself a rich real estate developer, just like you? Doesn't that put you in the same club of acorns falling not far from their paternal oaks?
Nah, said Trump, with the glib assurance of the idiotic. You see, he said, my father was a rich developer in Brooklyn. He never made it to Manhattan, like I did. Big difference. Lauer let him off the hook and moved on to the famous desert island quandary. Someone among this year's crop of ace political journalists had posed the matter to everyone running, and they had served up the requisite pious posturings: books, a Bible, the candidate's family.
Trump had answered: "a supermodel." That was certainly a change of pace, and the type of flip statement that passes as free thinking in our current sad political clime.
Lauer brought this up to imply that by claiming to want to pass the days before rescue cavorting with a supermodel rather than reading the Bible with his family somehow made Trump unworthy to hold the highest office in the land, and Trump backed away, claiming the whole thing was in jest.
In my mind, I find the supermodel answer on par with the Bible/books/family answer. Neither would do much good when it came to surviving on a desert island. The supermodel would just curl up in a fetal ball and whine about wanting Evian water and Benzedrine.* The Bible and books would be ruined in the first hard rain. And what kind of sick monster would wish his own family to be marooned with him on a desert island, to share his doom as provisions ran out and the elements overwhelmed them?
Why doesn't anybody ever answer the question with: a 55-gallon drum of water? Don't you want the leader of the free world to be the type of guy who would rather bring a desalination system or a short-wave radio to his desert exile, as opposed to literature? I know I do. Find the guy who says he would bring a 65-foot cabin cruiser with a full tank of gas to the hypothetical desert island. He's the guy we need.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 2000
* And yes, the sexism of this line jumped up and poked me in the eye when I read it too. For the record, I renounce the sin, and apologize. I'm sure there are many resourceful, dynamic supermodels who would rise to the task of surviving on a desert island, in a far more capable fashion than I would. In my defense, I was a callow lad, still in my late 30s, when I wrote this.
Well, THIS was an oversight.
After the state of Rio de Janeiro declared a "state of public calamity," its governor warning of the risk of "a total collapse in public security, health, education, mobility and environmental management,” I couldn't resist re-tweeting a 2013 column on the mayor, Eduardo Paes, chiding me for lampooning the International Olympic Committee selection of his city for the 2016 Olympics. I thought I'd toss in a link to the original column but, to my surprise, in the first flush of doing this blog, I didn't post it here in July, 2013. Time to correct that. This is the piece that got Brazilians in a knot. Turned out, they should have spent less energy being indignant, more getting ready to host the world.
Dear International Olympic Committee:
Howdy! Long time no talk to. Four years. Where does the time go?
I know you've probably forgotten about Chicago, ever since you gave us the backhand in fall 2009, and in the first round no less.
But we remember. Yes, we do. What Chicagoan who stood in those crowds—dressed in our civic best, as it were, holding a hand-picked bouquet, gussied up to the tune of $50 million in city-buffing money, waiting, eager for the good news—can remember the deflating letdown, the shocking dismissal, the confetti trickling out of our slack fingers into the street, watching benumbed as Madrid, Rio and Tokyo skipped onward without us.
Ouch.
And in case you are tempted to ascribe this to bitterness, we'll happily note that the Olympic games are three years away, so everything could still work well. Hard to imagine, but it's possible. The protests rocking Brazil—hundreds of thousands of people, in 100 cities last month, the streets of Rio in flames this week—could ebb, and everything could somehow be fine in 2016. We add our sincere hopes and prayers that it will be so to those of the world.
Although one little question keeps waving its hand over its head, going "oh oh oh!" and begging to be asked. So I'm just going to call upon that question and be done with it. Ready?
Here's our question:
Sorry yet?
Because you could have had Chicago. Which isn't a city without problems. Lots of problems. Streets in certain neighborhoods raked with deadly gunfire every weekend. Pension giveaways one straw away from cracking the government's back. School teachers laid off by the thousands. And I'm sure, had we gotten the 2016 Olympics, as we should have, there would have been grumbling aplenty about hosting a big quadrennial party for the world's athletic elites in the midst of all our concerns.
But I bet we could have done it without firebombs. Without the military breaking out the tear gas and the rubber bullets. I bet our population wouldn't rise up against the Olympics, the way they're doing in Brazil, which is also upset about hosting the World Cup in 2014.
Chicago hosted the World Cup, along with eight other cities, in 1994, which was such a non-crisis to us that I bet a lot of people who were around then don't even remember it. I do—it was hot. That's it. A city like ours knows how to do this kind of thing. We planned a victory party for several million Blackhawks fans in, what, three days? Tear gas proved unnecessary.
No hard feelings, IOC. Maybe next time, assuming we feel like going through all the bother to try to win your silly Olympics. But I don't expect that. Most Chicagoans, rather than yearn toward our lost Olympics, are glad. We got off light, and now can get to sit back and watch Brazil try to manage the task, which might be more fun than hosting would have been. You can't say you didn't have your chance. And you blew it. You could have had gold, but settled for bronze.
Best,
Neil Steinberg
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 24, 2013
I don't know if today's fun activity is easy or hard and, honestly, I don't care.
I just wanted to post a photo of this large, sulking, naked gentleman.
If you've seen him before, you might recognize him right away.
If you haven't, well, good luck.
He is really, really big — that's a clue.
In fact, I'll provide a second photograph at bottom to give you a hint just how big.
Pretty cool, huh? I thought so.
The winner gets — should he or she want it which they probably don't — one of my 2015 blog posters, which I need to get rid of because, goddamnit, I'm making a 2017 poster, whether anybody wants it or not. I want it.
Place your guesses below. Good luck.
Just a reminder. It's Saturday. If you're wondering where my blog post is, that posts at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, so people who aren't insomniacs can have a chance to solve it. The above photo is NOT the puzzle. It's Coe Lake, in my lovely hometown of Berea, Ohio, photographed on a post dinner stroll. Go to bed.
The Metro is one of the deepest subway systems in the world, which required the enormous escalators leading down into and out the system, entrances that seemed so Jetsons in the late 1970s. Now the escalators are often broken, forcing passengers into that mincing Geisha quickstep people fall into when trying to get up and down broken escalators. 
