GOP profiles in courage resist "danger to the Republic"

     The Houston Chronicle endorsed Richard Nixon. Three times. Not only for his successful runs at the presidency in 1968 and 1972 but his failed bid in 1960, calling him “the better way for Americans.” It supported Ronald Reagan twice, the Bushes four times. It backed Mitt Romney, as you would expect of a Republican newspaper in a Republican city in a Republican state.
     On Friday, the Chronicle endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, long before it would normally reveal a preference.

     “The Chronicle editorial page does not typically endorse early in an election cycle,” it noted, adding that it is already painfully clear that to support Donald Trump “is to repudiate the most basic notions of competence and capability.” The newspaper continued:

“Any one of Trump’s less-than-sterling qualities — his erratic temperament, his dodgy business practices, his racism, his Putin-like strongman inclinations and faux-populist demagoguery, his contempt for the rule of law, his ignorance — is enough to be disqualifying. His convention-speech comment, ‘I alone can fix it,’ should make every American shudder. He is, we believe, a danger to the Republic.”

     True, on rare occasions the Chronicle has supported Democrats — Johnson over Goldwater in 1964, Obama over McCain 44 years later. But their defection from the party is part of a significant Republican refusal to back its own candidate, one that deserves attention and applause. Because for patriotic Americans who care about their country, just the fact that Trump is running is profoundly sad, and says something dire about the judgment of our fellow citizens. We need a boost, and these GOP profiles in courage will be remembered long after the peril is past....

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Don't wait until Labor Day

    Typically, I am a great fan of photography as illustration. But sometimes pictures fail you. The Sistine Chapel comes to mind. No reproduction of Michelangelo's masterpiece prepared me for the thing itself, the sheer hugeness and grandeur of its scale. 
      Or the Chicago Botanic Garden. When  I saw the above study in green and yellow, it seemed so charming, I snapped a few pictures. But when I looked at the photos back home, they seemed flat, stilted. Something had been lost.
     You had to be there. Which is a good message for a beautiful Sunday. Photographs are not real, the on-line world less so. Sometimes you just have to be there and see a thing yourself. Edie and I spent a solid hour walking through the Botanic Garden this morning, not counting the time we studied the lovely exhibit on trees and woodworking. You don't necessarily have to go to the Botanic Garden, but try to go somewhere. July has flown. August is next. Don't wait until Labor Day to get out into it. 

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      Vanity is embarrassing. Or should be embarrassing. Au exaggerated appreciation for oneself doesn't seem to give much pause to Donald Trump. But that itself is a cautionary tale to the rest of us. Don't be like him.

      So I hope this isn't a startling confession of ego and self-delusion.

      But I operate under the assumption that the columns and posts I write merit reading, or re-reading, even a year, or two, or three after they are written. I try, when I write them, to go for a tone that does not depend too extensively on the the particular issue of the moment, but instead clutch at a certain universality. You won't see a column on some fine point of the budget debate. I don't care, now, and assume few of you do as well, and none of us will care later.

      Toward that end, each morning I re-tweet what was posted on everygoddamnday.com one year, two years and, since July, three years ago. So many more people read the thing now—July will be another record month, averaging above 60,000 hits—that I thought I'd dangle past topics by readers, since they will be fresh discoveries for them. 

     These return visits have been exclusively something encouraged in the free-fire zone of Twitter. But recently Blogger began allowing us to highlight posts on our blogs, and I've added an element directly to the right of the main post  that will showcase what was here on this day in years past. I could do all three, but that's a lot so, after tweeting the stories having their birthdays, I'll select (or "curate" to use the dreaded buzzword) one post that I consider the most notable. Give it a glance and, if it seems intriguing, a read. And thank you for your patronage. 

A break from politics, sort of, with Japan's top bear

 

    This ran in the Sun-Times Friday. I didn't post it here, because I figured people had read enough about Kumamon Tuesday and wouldn't want more. But then I realized, some might have been put off by the 6,000-word treatise that ran in Mosaic, and might appreciate the 650-word, reader-friendly version. Plus it does have some elements not in the original. And how long can you puzzle over a photo? So, just in case, here it is:

     “Tell the world about our Kumamon,” urged Hoei Tokunaga, as we shook hands goodbye after a weekend together last March. That one sentence, so sincere, almost beseeching, somehow summarized my week in Japan.
     Tokunaga’s title is assistant deputy director of the Kumamoto prefectural government. In reality he is a coat holder for a teddy bear, one of 20 functionaries wrangling the massive business dealings, intense media interest and hectic publicity schedule of Kumamon, an imaginary black bear with red cheeks that is among the most popular mascots in Japan.
     Kumamon’s handlers claim he is on his way to becoming bigger than Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty. So I might as well introduce him to you, given that he is almost unknown in this country. In Asia, Kumamon sold $1 billion worth of merchandise last year.
     You may have noticed we are not talking about politics. That’s intentional. If President Obama’s passionate evocation of the power and glory that is America left you unmoved Wednesday, if Hillary Clinton’s address Thursday only intensified your doorjamb-biting hatred for her, what am I supposed to do? Politics is a 24-hour hobbyhorse and sometimes, to remain sane, a person should get off and let it rock by itself for awhile. Friday, the gateway to the weekend, is the perfect day to take a break. The bad dream that is Election 2016 will be waiting for us Monday, right where we left it.

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Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This photograph looks, to me, like an architectural drawing from the 1960s, of some ooo-the-future modern structure, dwarfing the obligatory human figures tucked in for scale. 
     Where is it? If you're thinking, "Can't be Chicago," you're on the right track. But a place enough Chicagoans have been to that there's a chance somebody will recognize it. 
     As for prizes, well, to be candid, winners have not been claiming them, so we can do away with the canard. If the person who guesses correctly wants one, they can ask, and we'll find something suitable. Which also makes me suspect that the Fun Activity has run its course, again, and it's time to retire it. Thoughts? Otherwise, place your guesses below. Good luck.

Rahm Emanuel, dead man walking

     So how bad is it for Rahm Emanuel?
     This week, in the New Yorker article on why Barack Obama failed to close America's shameful black hole prison at Guantanamo Bay, Rahm Emanuel is portrayed as the Machiavellian manipulator who urged the president to leave the imprisoned to rot there forever and focus on more significant policy issues. 
    But it's worse than that.
    At the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Barack Obama's video showed our mayor-to-be warning that the affordable care act would cause him to lose the 2012 election. Better to leave millions uninsured than take a political risk.
    But it's worse than that. 
    The media erupted with hoots of how he was "thrown under the bus" by his old boss.
    But it's worse than that.
    He was a ghost at the convention, a "fading star," to be kind, denying that obvious fact, wandering like Lord Jim, trying to escape his shame, his lapse over the Laquan McDonald shooting following him, quacking like a pull-toy duck. Not at all the power broker he was last time. Back in Chicago, his staff is fleeing the 5th floor at City Hall like rats scurrying down the cables of a ship sinking at the pier.
    But it's worse than that. 
    I contemplated writing something on the mayor's woes for the newspaper. Then I shrugged, and thought: Why bother? It's Rahm Emanuel, dead man walking. Nobody cares about him anymore. He's not even worth making fun of. 
    Instead, I wrote about an imaginary black bear who's very popular in Japan. 
    That's how bad it is. 

Shooter for hire

     When you cover a swirling, four-day story like a national convention, it helps to have a home base. Since the newspaper didn't send me to Cleveland until the last minute, I couldn't get into the press center, and had to improvise. That involved setting up shop at Johnny's Little Bar, which was ideal for several reasons: it was only a couple blocks off Public Square, they would charge my phone for me behind the bar, and the burgers were pretty good. 
    It did get crowded, and I would slip upstairs to the empty banquet room, where I met Noah Brooks, a freelance photographer from Florida. We got to talking. There is an enormous gulf between those of us lucky enough to still be on the staffs of what remains of the great news organizations, and everybody else, in the slurry, fighting to find work and to be paid. He was on his laptop, trying to find somebody interested in his photos, trying to find somebody to toss $50 his way.
     He showed me some photos he took in Ukraine during two recent trips there. If they seem

Noah Brooks

unusually artistic, that was his goal. "I was really looking for two things: art and war," he told the Ukrainian Chicago Magazine.  
     I wanted to help him get his work seen, and told him if he sent me a few photographs, I would put them up on my blog, for what it's worth. He did, and here they are. He's hoping to go back to Ukraine in September, and could use a few connections who might be interested in working with him. 
    I don't get the sense that the photo editors of the top press organizations are reading my blog. But you might know somebody, or be involved with a social agency that needs dramatic photographs of war situations, or be involved in one of Chicago's many cultural or artistic organizations that could use his work. If so, I've got just the guy for you. He can be reached at noahbrooks99@gmail.com.