Storm coming

Storm approaching O'Fallon, Illinois, by Evie Levine

   
     Years ago, when my column took up a full page and I ran a jokes at the end, sent in by readers, I received a chuckle from someone who identified himself as a "nephrologist." 
     I quickly checked the dictionary, and was charmed to discover, I thought, that this meant he makes his living studying clouds. I was compelled to ask him about it, and he set me straight. A nephrologist is a kidney specialist.  
     Oh. Not "nephologist"—one who studies clouds.
     That's life. You think you've got someone dreamily gazing at the heavens but, on second glance, it's another wage slave poking into somebody's lower back.
     Yet there are a few of us who make our living thanks to clouds. In May, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a charming article on the wonderfully-named Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the equally-delightful Cloud Appreciation Society.  I haven't joined yet only because I can't decide if membership is quaint or strange.
     What is it with clouds? In the photograph above, snapped Wednesday morning by my cousin, Evie Levine, there are the appealingly weathered farm buildings. And the windblown, bright green mid-summer corn, with its yellow tops. But it's the cumulonimbus clouds, low, grey, louring, that make the picture sing, that adds the drama. 
     Maybe the allure is that clouds can alternate between being so placid and puffy, white, motionless, floating above us, then suddenly turn turbulent and roiling, dark, threatening. Maybe that's why they're so fascinating. Or maybe because while they look like they're floating, they're actually falling, at a rate of about eight feet a minute, according to my 1926 copy of "Fogs and Clouds" by W.J. Humphreys, which has been sitting on the shelf for years, just waiting for this moment.
    Maybe that's it—placid and turbulent, both aloft and descending. They're just like people. 
   

Does this beard make me look like Steven Spielberg?

     If you are curious as to how the process works—and no one has asked, so maybe you're not, but I'm telling you anyway—I wake up, and write something, either for the paper or here or both. It goes online, and in print, and people react to it. 
    My subject is basically what's on my mind. Tuesday it was the you-look-like-Steven-Spielberg trope. I started writing something, then Abner Mikva died, so I wrote his obit—he seemed so hale when I had lunch with him in January, I thought there was no rush. Then I returned to this column. 
     Which seemed fine .... until an editor had the idea of taking my picture, and running it next to Spielberg's. I looked at the two, and had this thought, for the very first time: "Shit. They're RIGHT. I DO look like Steven Spielberg. Fuck. I look WORSE!" 
     Which sort of put me in a quandary. I thought of yanking the column back. But that seemed panicky. If I did that every time I had second thoughts, nothing would ever get printed. The higher road seemed to be, heck, show some spine, leave it out there. Probably be ignored, like most everything online, but if it provokes a geyser of derision, well, so what else is new? 

     My wife sleeps later than I do — beauty’s privilege. At home, I use the time to write stuff. On vacation, I go to the hotel gym.
     But the oil light went on during our drive East, so I figured an early-morning trip to the Jiffy Lube was in order.
     In the waiting room with coffee and the Post, a Jiffy Lube employee, Louis, called my name and began a canned pitch: we should also rotate your tires and change your transmission fluid and . . . .
     No, no, no. Just the oil.
     That bit of robotic business out of the way, Louis blinked, and seemed to notice me for the first time.
     “Did anyone ever tell you you look like Steven Spielberg?” he said.
     People tell me that all the time, so much that I have a canned reply.
     “I don’t look like Steven Spielberg,” I said. “I’m just a Jewish guy in a baseball cap and a beard....”

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Clinton lead shrinks, widens

     In general, I tend to defend the media—a vibrant part of democracy, it's part of what keeps us from being Russia. 
     
     But sometimes I do feel a flash of the loathing that such a big hunk of the public seems to feel.

     Such as Tuesday, when I read this headline, from The Hill:

     Clinton lead shrinks to five points in national poll. 

    And then, a few hours later, this one, on Twitter: 

    Clinton expands lead over Trump to 13 points: Reuters poll.

    So a lead that shrinks and widens, to either 5 percent or more than twice that, depending on who's being polled and who's doing the poll and who's doing the reporting, apparently. 

    Leaving us totally unenlightened. 
   
    All together now, repeat after me, the classic words of Christopher Marlowe:

    "Why this is hell; nor am I out of it."
    

Abner Mikva: 1926-2016

     The Mikva Challenge people tell me I had one of the last interviews the revered jurist and legal mind gave. When I took him to lunch for his 90th birthday in January, he was so full of pep that I never thought of writing his obituary, a melancholy duty that I performed this morning. What popped out, to me, from his long and extraordinary life is how he faced the same fanatical opposition we are facing now, with success and grace—the NRA spent six months and $1 million trying to block his federal bench Senate confirmation. And failed. Something we liberals need to bear in mind. Our cause is right, and we should not weaken just because are opponents are brutal and relentless. If those who would undermine and destroy the country are strong, we just need to be stronger.

     Abner Mikva brought his sharp legal advice and principled worldview to all three branches of government — he was a congressman, federal judge and presidential adviser. He stood up to Richard J. Daley, for years, and managed to survive hizzoner's efforts to destroy him.
     And if that weren't enough, if giving legal advice to Bill Clinton and encouraging Barack Obama to try for the White House weren't enough, Mr. Mikva, who died of cancer at age 90 on Monday, was also the young man who tried to volunteer to help the Democrats in 1948 and was told by a ward heeler: "We don't want nobody nobody sent," coining the immortal distillation of political cronyism.
     "That's Chicago for you," said Obama, remembering the phrase when he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mr. Mikva in 2014. The president called Mr. Mikva “one of the greatest jurists of his time,” someone who “helped shape the national debate on some of the most challenging issues of the day.”
     Obama on Tuesday issued a statement saying Mr. Mikva "believed in empowering the next generation of young people to shape our country. Ab’s life was a testament to that truth. ... Like so many admirers, I’ve lost a mentor and a friend."

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Riding the Washington Metro

 

     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.

Take my 4th of July presidential mediocrities quiz!

     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's last warning

     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.