Where's H.L. Mencken when we need him?

H.L. Mencken

     As Donald Trump, the most idiotic and unfit man to run for the American presidency in living memory, deforms our political discourse, it can be a comfort to remind ourselves that imbecility is nothing new, but has a long, rich tradition in American politics. And no voice more clearly outlined what he called the "booboisie" than H.L. Mencken, whose 136th birthday was Monday. 

     He injected his venom into the relatively benign figure of Warren G. Harding. What would he have made of a poisonous sac of mendacious malice like Donald Trump? One likes to think he'd dice Trump into cubes. But given the way Trump, like the Terminator, can be blown apart by criticism and censure and the mercury drops of his solipsistic essence just reconstitute, the red eye blinks to life, he pulls himself to his feet and continues on his inexorable march to the White House. 

    This originally ran in 2006.

     Anniversary stories are lazy journalism. Every day is the 75th anniversary of this or 25 years since that. Births and battles, deaths and discoveries. In a dynamic world where so much is new and fascinating, it seems shameful to turn your back on the thrilling present and sit around regurgitating the well-chewed past, working up an air of false wonder that it has been 100 years since Mr. Fig met Mr. Newton.
     But anniversary stories do serve a twofold purpose. First, they remind us of the passage of time. The 30th anniversary of the Queen song "Bohemian Rhapsody" might not have meant much to you. But as a guy who twisted crepe paper, decorating a gym, to the song when it was new, it was bittersweet to realize how much of my life — the good part, I suppose — has slipped away.
     Second, they do inform certain people of what they may have missed. As routine as those Dec. 7 Pearl Harbor commemorations are, every year there must be a new crop of youngsters who say, "Gee, Dad, did you realize the people who make Pokemon also bombed our ships?"

HE SAW US AS THE IDIOTS WE ARE

     On the train Wednesday night, a neighbor asked, "How's the column going?"
     "Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the death of H.L. Mencken," I replied, rather literally. "I thought I would write about him."
     He looked at me blankly.
     "Who's Mencken?" he said.
     Sigh.
     Henry Louis Mencken, the bard of Baltimore, the American Anti-Christ, was the most famous newspaperman of the 20th century, bar none. In the 1920s, the nation hung on his biting, acerbic observations in a way not seen before or since. In a profession where the work is by definition disposable, where little we do holds interest for a week, never mind a year, Mencken's words have endured, and are still sharp, 50 years after his passing and 80 after his heyday.
     Read Mencken on government:
     "Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right."
     It could have been written yesterday, in response to the Alito hearings. 

     Read Mencken on faith:
     "The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense."
     Who has the guts to write that kind of thing today? No matter what topic a writer tackles, odds are Mencken was already there, and did a better job. Feel like complaining about telephones?
     "The thing, indeed, becomes an unmitigated curse," he wrote in "The Telephone Menace" in 1927. "The telephone has become as great a boon to bores as the movies are to morons. . . . What is needed is a national secret organization, with members bound by a bloody oath to avoid telephone calls whenever possible and to boycott all persons who make them unnecessarily."
     That secret group is needed now more than ever.
     Quoting Mencken is addictive, and I have to stop. He was no knee-jerk critic — he wrote in praise of his favorite composers, writers, artists, and pioneered study of the American language. But his lasting contribution was to hold up a mirror to the United States in all its naked idiocy. Not only has Mencken not been topped, but in our culture of victimhood and complaint, we have slipped into a state of permanent babyhood where any extreme statement leads to demands for apology and censure. This week, a young columnist at the Los Angeles Times began his column, "I don't support our troops," and though the rest of the column went on to back our soldiers in ways sunshine patriots forget to do — calling for improved benefits and such — his tart opening sentence brought howls for his head. Mencken is still current because, alas, we have not changed.
         —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 27, 2006

Remembering Professor Paul Green

Paul Green, left, at the City Club, 2012

 
     People die. But the spirits that occupied those perishable bodies live on, in the memories their friends, loved ones and associates who remember them.
     I remember Prof. Paul Green, who died Saturday at 73. The dean sine pari of political scholarship in Chicago for years, teacher, writer, oft-quoted source, public speaker, serving a key role at City Club luncheons, where he was chairman, handling the delicate task of deftly stage-managing the programs and politicians, collecting questions and delivering them, while puckishly deflating folly, correcting error, and adding a running commentary of his own that was frequently more valuable than what was being said by the speaker, at least when that speaker was me.
    People also live on in their acts of kindness. Paul Green, director of the Institute for Politics and Arthur Rubloff professor of Policy Studies at Roosevelt University, was the fire axe behind glass for working journalists — or again, at least for me, I can't speak for the others, but I assume I was not alone. Paul knew the answers, and he would guide you through understanding what he already knew. He was patient. He was available. He was modest— sometimes he received credit. Sometimes his insight was passed along as a particularly astute observation of my own. 
     And for those of us lucky enough to write books, we also can live on in our words committed to print. Sunday I took down my well-thumbed copy of The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, edited by Paul Green and Melvin G. Holli, and Green's insight lived again. 
    I re-read his biography of Anton Cermak, who walked Chicago's streets once more under Green's concise description, his "large and heavy-set physique coupled with his capacity for anger," a poor public speaker almost taking pride in his coarseness. 
   "Yet this man who trusted few people, who was not a good mixer or back-slapper, and who generated loyalty through ethnic attachments and shred political deals emerged as boss of Chicago," Green writes. "Why? The simple truth is that Anton J. Cermak was a political survivor who eventually outlasted his old opponents and outsmarted his new ones."  
     That last line might serve for Green. Though he had no opponents, he had smarts in abundance and outlasted half a dozen mayors he wrote about.
    In the conclusion of the book, Green offers an observation that our current mayor would have been well-served to bear in mind.
     "No mayor has been able to bring true reform to the city," he writes. "At the same time, no word in Chicago history has had more meanings, more champions, and more causes, than reform. From Medill to Washington, no mayor has run for office without espousing major reforms to improve city life. However once in office, Chicago's chief executives have found that most of their constituents were not 'ready' to replace power politics with reform politics." 
    So it didn't start with Rahm Emanuel promising to fix the system and ending up being fixed by it. 
    But not to let the politics he loved overshadow the man loved by so many. To return to his essay on the only foreign born mayor Chicago has ever had:
    "Cermak was a winner," Green concludes. "He demonstrated that if you were smart enough, tough enough and lucky enough, you could have it all in Chicago politics." 
     I did not know Paul Green well enough to know whether he indeed "had it all." But he had a lot, and was certainly a winner who had something that few politicians ever possess: the affection and respect of his contemporaries.     
    "Paul was loyal and grateful," Jay Doherty, president of the City Club, said Sunday. "Fun to be with. He will be sorely missed."
    Yes he will. There will be a tribute held in October, date to be announced, at Maggiano's of course. It will certainly lack the wit and sparkle found in abundance at meetings where Paul Green was present in person. But we will invoke his spirit to fill the void as best as we can. 

     To see Paul Green in action, go to the 27 minute mark of my 2012 talk before the City Club. 

    

Freedom from Fear

Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Fear."

     When the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, 15 years ago, my boys were 4 and 5 years old, and it was natural that I'd view the event through my feelings for them. The month wasn't out, and the country was debating what to do. If you've forgotten how we ended up in a land war in Afghanistan, this column from the end of September, 2001 will help remind you of  the thinking at the time—the World War II mentality is significant. We make mistakes because we're always fighting the last war instead of the next one. I can't say I'm proud of being swept up in the passions of the day. Still, despite the saber-rattling, I did manage to nail one truth: "This is  war against Fear."

     On the day the unimaginable became real, late in the evening, after hours of drop-jawed TV watching, keyboard pounding and simple shock, I ended up, as always, with my wife, standing in my boys' bedrooms, watching them sleep.
     I said, as always, "I'm going to check on the boys," though, in truth, they never need checking. They're always there, always sleeping, in a pile of toys, their breath slow and measured, their relaxed faces the faces of angels.
     The truth is, I'm not checking for their benefit, but for mine. To deliver a kiss that isn't squirmed against. To reassure myself, before I go to sleep, that they're still there, right where they belong. The same way that, if somebody gave you a chest of gold and you stashed it in your closet, next to your shoes, you'd probably stick your head in to take a peek at it from time to time, just to make sure.
     On the evening of the day the unimaginable became real, the contrast of those familiar, peaceful rooms--the reassuring night lights, the sock monkey, the guardian Pinocchio--with the mind-warping horror of the day, the heart-crushing thought of all those lost sons and lost daughters, lost mothers and lost fathers, conjured up, for me, a memory of a painting by Norman Rockwell called "Freedom from Fear."
     It was part of a series of paintings called "The Four Freedoms,'' inspired by a speech that Franklin Roosevelt gave trying to put steel in the spine of a nation quavering before a world gone mad with terror.
     It was January 1941. The Nazis had rolled over Europe and were battering at Britain. Japan was gobbling up its neighbors. In America, the isolationists were arguing that the fight wasn't our fight. Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters were practically flinging kisses across the Atlantic at Hitler, convinced that the world would be better under Fascist domination.
     Roosevelt set out to explain to Americans why they had a stake and why they needed to be ready. He said "It is immature—and, incidentally, untrue—for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world." He set out exactly what cherished rights we stood to lose: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear.

     Norman Rockwell responded with a series of paintings. You might recall the most famous of the four, "Freedom from Want," which shows the happiest family ever recorded in the history of art, abuzz as a gigantic, golden brown turkey is set before them.
     "Freedom from Fear" isn't quite as memorable. Just a simple scene--a mom and dad tucking in a pair of kids. You really need to read the headline on the newspaper in the dad's hand to grasp what is going on. The headline reads, "Bombing Kills/Horror Hits."

    I never realized what it felt like to be the bulwark between a terrifying world and your children. It made me realize what we have riding on this. Parents stand between their children and the grim reality of the world, or try to. But there is only so much we can do, and there comes a point--now--when you have to say a prayer and hope your leaders do the right thing, whatever that might be.
     This is a war against Fear. Those who are trying to portray the pending military action as a crusade against Islam, a racial war or a conquest of Afghanistan are missing the point. Race is not a factor, religion is not a factor. If Timothy McVeigh and his band of losers were holed up in Idaho, we'd go into Idaho and get them, and if the state government there tried to stop us, we'd get them too.
     When battle comes, it will have one goal—to reduce the certainty that more children, more parents, more friends will suffer the kind of anguish that people all across the world suffered last week and are suffering still.
     If you can't support that, then what can you support? If you are so doubtful of your right to exist that you can't imagine fighting for it, if you pause from rolling in unworthiness at the feet of chickens to take this grave moment and stand up and declare that America doesn't have the right to protect itself because we eat meat or support the ACLU or have not always acted nobly as a nation, then I say, "The hell with you." We'll win this victory without you, and you can go sit in the corner of history along with Lindbergh and Chamberlain and all the other quislings and appeasers.
     It astounds me that people could preach inaction at a time like this. That, like Lindbergh, they could put their faith in the ultimate goodness of those itching to murder us. To suggest that we should kneel before them and call upon their scant mercy.
      I am not a hater. I feel sympathy not just for my kids, but for all kids, all people, all those sitting placidly beside their yurts in Afghanistan, or wherever, all who will be caught up in the crossfire, and I wish they didn't have to die. I wish they'd abandon their murderous—and ultimately suicidal—hate for us. But I doubt they will.
      Inaction would only encourage more destruction in the future. And no encouragement is necessary. The terrorists are no doubt thrilled by their recent success and inspired to more. They can hardly wait, and it will take boldness and vigor on our part to stop them. We are, as in World War II, coming late to the game, late to a fight the world has already been battling, and will have to make up lost ground.
     Every evening since the day the unimaginable became real, I stand over my sleeping boys and fear they'll be caught up in the Great Anthrax Release of 2005 or take a mortar round in a trench in Central Asia in 2015. But I'll be honest. I don't fear that much. Because I know that we live in a great country, a powerful country. If we could be attacked by the Axis, unprepared, and turn around and whup 'em, then how can we not be up to this task? This country, as Roosevelt said in his Four Freedoms speech, is "soft-hearted but cannot afford to be soft-headed." We dropped our guard, yes, we drifted into a false sense of security—a peace-loving nation will do that. Becoming complacent was a mistake. But we are not complacent now.
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 2001

Yellow plastic flowers.

     A woman was hit by a train and killed a block from my house Thursday evening. The idea that something had happened presented itself in the form of police lights, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, to the left, as I sat in the van at Walters and First Street, waiting to turn left about 4:25 p.m.. So I turned right instead, to get away from the commotion.
     "Probably a broken crossing gate," I explained to my passenger, as we proceeded on our way. But there was that helicopter, which suggested something more dire. Later my wife, who heard the news from neighbors, who find out these things instantly, told me a few details: a woman had been hit by the train and killed.
     The first question I had was not whether she was old or young, whether she was somebody I knew or not—odds are she wasn't, as I don't know many people. The first question I had was whether it was an accident or suicide.
    Why that question? What doest it matter, to me, a stranger? I suppose as somebody who rides the train regularly, who almost daily crosses the tracks, walking the dog, doing errands, and watches how careless people are around the trains, surging around the lowered gates, blundering along with their eyes locked on their cell phones, I was looking for a data point to use to bolster my conviction that people don't understand the peril that the trains represent. A cold reaction.
     I never -- I realize only now, writing this -- thought, "Oh the poor woman!" Someone being killed horribly, pulverized by a train, a couple hundred feet or so from my front door. Is that a lack of sympathy on my part? A hundred and seventy-five thousand people die every day in the world; you can't ache for them all, and why does a death localized to my neighborhood elevate it to realm of something to be cared about?
     On Friday, getting off the train after arriving back mid-day from the city, I noticed this little bouquet of plastic flowers, to the right, and walked over. A cross of votive candles, a small ceramic cross. This must be the spot. Not where people usually wait. Evidence of suicide; a person would come here, a little away from where people wait on the platform, to do the awful deed. 
    An old, Biblical notion, of spots being cursed or blessed. I stood there, and tried to feel whether grim death clung around this spot. It didn't. I wondered whether the loss of life—the night before—somehow changed or sanctified it. It really didn't, in my eyes. The shrine might grow, but knowing Metra they would sweep it away in good time, and that would be that. Walking the block home, I speculated on the details of the woman. How old? Forties? No. Thirty-seven, I decided, based on the Marianne Faithful song, "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," about a woman who kills herself. "At the age of 37, she realized she'd never ride through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair."
     Is that a reason to kill yourself? Is anything? What the world would be like if every spot where someone had died? Permanently marked, a landscape dotted with pots of plastic yellow flowers, sitting on curbs and night tables. We would get used to it, I suppose. Death is after all a part of life, the end that awaits us all.  A thought that weighs lightly when the latest to join the rolls of the vanished is someone you do not know. This time. 

    Postscript
    The Tribune reported that a 39-year-old Northbrook resident had stepped in front of the train deliberately, according to witnesses, about 4 p.m.  Thursday.

Thanks Ganesh.

     Yes, I'm an agnostic who never believed in God for a second.
     But I'm still human.
     So for some reason — some kink in the neural network — this thousand-year-old Indonesian statue of the Hindu god Ganesh cuts through my wall of spiritual cynicism. 
    Actually, I know the reason. It is because Ganesh is described as, "Remover of Obstacles."
    Who doesn't want to embrace that? Particularly when the entity ballyhooed with this obstacle-removing ability is so placid, so centered, so elephantine. 
     So when I pass, hurrying through the ground floor of the Art Institute, to the modern art wing perhaps, I usually pause, stand before the innocent millennium-old lump of sandstone and say, "Please Ganesh..." and usually some plea involved with the writing, publication, sale or promotion of books, an endeavor just chocked with obstacles. 
     I figure, it couldn't hurt. And Ganesh, to his — her? its? — credit, never explains to me why whatever it is I'm hoping for won't come true. 
     Thursday night, my new book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise" was launched at the Poetry Foundation. My wife was there, and my brother Sam. My co-author, Sara Bader, and my agent, Susan Raihofer, of the mighty David Black Literary Agency, both flew in from New York.   Kind friends agreed to read with me — Rick Kogan, Carol Marin and Bill Savage. Plus many old friends took the time to come, such as Cate Plys and her husband Ron Garzoto, and Kier Strejcek, from Northwestern, and Magda Krance, from the Lyric Opera, and the great Ed McElroy, and the good folks from the University of Chicago Press, and many more, all joining a standing room only crowd of enthusiastic readers. 
     I can't say for certain if it was those passing prayers to Ganesh that made it all happen — actually that was Steve Young and the fine folk at the Poetry Foundation. But I can't say that the great stone god didn't help in some abstract way beyond reasoning.  Thanks Ganesh.

Did I really see this sign?

     There's always a way out. You can question the science: science has historically been wrong; maybe it's wrong now. Happens.

     You can question the source: she lied once about A, years ago; maybe she's lying now about B. Possible.

     You can question the medium, the publication or web site or network that the source and the science are conveyed in. That darn liberal media. They skew and spin and dance to the music wafting out of hell. They have an "agenda" — everyone has an agenda, including PTA meetings. But somehow, just calling it an "agenda" makes it somehow suspect.
     Fox News — the top cable station — and the Wall Street Journal, the top circulation paper, and the Drudge Report and Breitbart and the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller and on and on? The rebel alliance. A small band of heroes, facing off against the massive might of The Atlantic.

     The bottom line is nobody believes anything they don't want to believe. No matter the facts. No matter the sources. No matter the media. We all vanish in the comforting soft fog of our own convictions, our familiar opinions. I happen to think mine are right. But then who doesn't? 

    The mists of certainty, of self-regard, of outrage, gather around us, so thick, we don't see each other anymore. We can barely see our own hands in front of our faces, so we go with the hand and discard the rest. It seems a recipe for destruction, does it not? A great nation, blind, paralyzed, sinking in the tar pit of history. Not a cheery outlook, true, but then you are free to ignore it, and probably will.  

You have to figure the rules out for yourself

     Whenever I go to Target with my wife, I’m like a bored 6-year-old. She’s busily checking items off her list, muscling slabs of paper towels into the huge red cart while I wander off, not quite humming “la la la,” but gazing dreamily around finding . . . what?
     Sometimes products. “Affresh Washer Cleaner”? Really? People clean the inside of their washing machines? Whatever for? What’s next? “New Soap Soap! Makes your yucky soap bars springtime clean!”
     Sometimes people. School is starting, so mom/child duos were stocking up on necessities for that first flap away from the nest.
    “Do you want it?” a mother said, holding up a dish rack — a dish rack is a plastic coated wire assemblage for holding dishes while they dry, I should mention, in case any freshmen still read the paper.
     “I don’t even know what that is!” the daughter huffed, in a tone of exasperated annoyance that compressed a decade of mother/daughter conflict into one phrase, spoken in the tone of "I hate you mom and can't wait to get away from you and your constant dish rack pushing."
     "For doing dishes," the mother explained, flatly, one of the 100,000 little nudges a parent must give a child during the excruciatingly slow slog toward adulthood. Washing dishes, I should point out, again for those theoretical freshmen, is a process performed after your parents collect your dirty bowls and plates off the sofa and before those plates appear, as if by magic, back on the shelves ready to be used by you.
     We don't have much drama in the Steinberg household. Then again, the boys are 19 and 20 — not boys anymore — and besides, both were gone most of the summer. The rising junior was in Washington, D.C., at a right-wing think tank ("Just don't become heartless" was my sole piece of advice); my sophomore was wrangling 13-year-olds at a summer program at Northwestern ("I'm never having children," he informed me, several times, and I smiled that turnabout-is-fair-play smile).
     We drove out to see the older boy in June. It happened to be at the height of the right-wing fuss over my attempt to buy an assault rifle, with Rush Limbaugh hooting in ridicule and Fox News running little morality lessons that were almost entirely false. We met the boy at his office.
     "Well, you've had a relevant week!" he said, smiling. I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, feeling that 20 years of parenting effort had been rewarded.
     The younger one offered us reward as well, pulling out a deck of cards and announcing he would teach us a new game, "Mao."
     "It isn't like '52 Card Pickup'?" asked my wife, on guard after years of whoopee cushions, snapping gum packs and powder that turns milk solid.
     Mao is like Crazy Eights. You try to get rid of the cards in your hand, only in Mao you learn the rules by playing. The dealer establishes the rules in his own mind, but does not reveal what they are. Instead he assigns penalties as you violate the rules you haven't been told. "Penalty for not saying, 'Have a nice day,'" he might say, sliding a card off the deck into your hand, while you puzzle over what happened.
     At first it all seemed arbitrary and frustrating. My wife was almost standing to quit when I shot her a look, practically guiding her back into her chair with my eyebrows.
     "Kent is teaching us a game," I said and, to her credit, she got my point.
     It turned out to be fun. Most card games are stupid and almost automatic — the only time I truly regretted being a parent was years ago, grinding through endless rounds of "War." But Mao demands rigor; you are placed in a situation where you don't know the rules and the only way you can find out what to do is to play, pay attention and learn from your mistakes. Rather like life.