Chasing the elusive Butterfly of Responsibility

     If this topic seems familiar, it began as yesterday's blog post, but when I got to work Thursday morning, the question still hung there, with colleagues from fellow reporters to Mike, who supervises the coffee room, asking me who was responsible. (If you're coming late to the game, this issue began Wednesday with a chunk of concrete falling on a commuter's head). I didn't solve the mystery of why the party legally obligated to make the repairs isn't doing so. But I sure tried. Late in the day Union Station announced it was shutting down the Madison Street entrance indefinitely. I didn't know whether to feel proud or guilty. 

     My wife never learned to touch type. In the mid-1970s, a young woman learning to type seemed to be punching her ticket for a life of secretarial work. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a writer, so I sat in a 7th grade classroom listening to a voice on a 33 rpm record intone, “F F F, J J J,” while dutifully tapping keys on a Royal manual typewriter.

     It also meant I typed all my beloved’s law school papers while she was barreling through the Chicago Kent College of Law. (All save one; I made her find a typist once, out of pure contrariness). Still, typing those papers gave me an appreciation for the law, for its storytelling qualities. I thought of those complex take-home exam questions this week when concrete chunks plunging from the plaza above Union Station drew me into the world of legal responsibility.
     Pencils ready? Then let’s begin.
     1) A commuter railroad delivers passengers into a station it does not own. That station is owned by another, national railroad. But the national railroad does not own the air rights above the station, secured by real estate investors constructing an office building in the mid-1960s. All this takes place in Chicago.
     If a chunk of concrete falls from the plaza belonging to the real estate investor’s office building and hits one of the commuter railroad’s passengers, who is responsible for this tort?

     a) The commuter railroad, Metra;
     b) the national railroad, Amtrak;
     c) the owners of the office building, 10 S. Riverside Plaza, a real estate investment firm called Callahan Capital Properties
     d) the city of Chicago?

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Chasing the elusive Butterfly of Responsibility

     Yesterday's column on a passenger getting beaned by falling rubble got a lot of attention on TV. But what amazes me even more than chunks of debris showering upon commuters' heads as they slog through the loud, smokey, dim stygian underworld of Union Station is the resultant rondo of official evasion so convoluted it sounds like the set-up for a story problem on a law school exam.
     Let's try to state it clearly. Pencils ready? Then let's begin.
     1) Metra runs a railroad that delivers passengers into a building it does not own. That building, Union Station. is owned by Amtrak, the national rail service. But Amtrak does not own the air rights, which it sold to 10 S. Riverside Plaza Ltd. when a 21-story office block was constructed above their tracks in the mid-1960s.
     If a piece of plaza dislodges itself from the underside of 10 S. Riverside Plaza and hits a Metra passenger walking through the north platform of Amtrak's Union Station, who is actually responsible for the tort? Metra, which ferries people into harm's way? Amtrak, which owns the building they are conveyed into? 10 S. Riverside Plaza, which runs above the people and the building, and is the source for crumbling concrete being subjected to the laws of gravity if not the laws of the state of Illinois?  

      Is it a) Metra; b) Amtrak; c) 10 S. Riverside; d) the injured passenger, or e) the city of Chicago?
     A toughie, right?
     We know how Metra feels ("Sorry, not my table.") And we how Amtrak feels ("Sorry, not my table.") While I had a good guess about how 10 S. Riverside Plaza—or more precisely, its owner, Callahan Capital Properties—feels, I didn't want to put words in their mouths.
     I called Noah Gens, general manager of building operations for 10 S. Riverside Plaza, and asked him, or more precisely, his voicemail: If you are responsible for this, as Amtrak says you are, then why aren't you fixing  the hazard that you are responsible for fixing?
     He did not, as I expected, leap to reply, perhaps adhering to the If-I-ignore-the-problem-it'll-go-away mentality that is serving Metra and Amtrak so well.
     Amtrak meanwhile, on Wednesday, offered this bit of enlightenment, which I will share in full since, hell, this is a blog:

Amtrak statement:Amtrak is working with partners at Chicago Union Station to ensure a safe environment for all passengers. While it is the responsibility of the third-party property owners to maintain the property over the tracks, Amtrak has brought in an independent contractor to continue inspections and reinforce overhead protections, where appropriate, to immediately secure the area for the safety of passengers and the general public. During this time, three tracks remain out of service however we’re working to minimize delays. Amtrak has invested considerable resources to address these issues in the past and will continue to work with property owners, the City, and Metra to do so in the future. If third-party property owners fail to inspect and maintain the property over the tracks, Amtrak will take appropriate steps to ensure public safety, including taking legal action. In a similar case in Chicago, Amtrak and Chicago Union Station invested more than half a million dollars in repairs in the interest of public safety.

     Which I think I was supposed to be grateful to receive. But only lead to more questions, in my case:

Thanks though I'm confused. If it's their responsibility, then why aren't they taking care of it? If it isn't your responsibility, then why are you taking care of it? Any plans to sue them? It is, after all, their responsibility, not yours. Just curious.NS

     This lead to a phone call which, alas, was taken off the record after an on-the-record long sigh and a rueful chuckle on Amtrak's part. I learned the word "plenum" which is defined as "a space completely filled with matter" which I think, in this case, is a fancy term for "the plaza above the tracks."
     I was also directed to a Sun-Times story from last year which was supposed to enlighten me, but actually only made the subject even murkier, as it is about Amtrak suing, not 10 S. Riverside Plaza, but the City of Chicago for not taking care of the plaza since the city supposedly assumed responsibility for the task in 1980?
     Huh? The city? Where did they come from? The city can't be the mystery "third-party property owner" Amtrak is referring to; it doesn't own it.

     Though I'm not saying the answer is "e." Frankly, I don't know what the answer is. Maybe nobody does. Though for all practical purposes, the answer is "d," the passenger, who is basically forced to run a gantlet of hazards at Union Station—cascading liquids one prays are water, resultant ice from those liquids, crumbling pillars, walls and ceilings, construction equipment and scaffolding and, oh yeah, trains.
    Okay, enough for today. We'll put on our pith helmet, grab our butterfly net, and search for the elusive Butterfly of Responsibility again tomorrow, applying ourselves at both Rahm Emanuel's Hall of Mirrors, and the money matterhorn that is Callahn Capital Properties, a real estate private equity firm which seems to take great pride in the 160 million square feet of property it owns across the country. One assumes they also take pride in fulfilling their legal obligations to maintain that huge portfolio of profitable property so it doesn't fall down on people's heads. 

     But we'll let them explain that themselves.  If we can find them. And if they'll talk. Two big "ifs."

Union Station is falling down on commuters' heads

     One interesting aspect of this story was how I shifted from bystander to reporter. I gathered the concrete, with the man holding them, thinking they should be preserved, for the young woman who was hit. And I took a picture of the chunks, thinking I didn't want to hang onto them. But the woman was in the background, and I angled the shot to include her. I still wasn't quite in the reporter mode. I followed her and my wife back into the train car, said some reassuring words, then left with my wife.
    I got maybe 10 feet, realized this all should go in the paper, then doubled back and got the victim's name. 
     To be honest, even later, back at the office, I wondered whether I was blowing this out of proportion because I happened to be there; maybe this wasn't news, but just an incident that occurred in my vicinity.  But it seemed more real than riffing on Donald Trump's latest. Every TV station in town leapt to cover the story, so I wasn't alone in finding importance here. It felt good, catching the 9:45 to Northbrook after staying late, to see Metra had closed down the track we were on. That might not have happened had it not been in the paper.

     Union Station is dangerous. The place is falling apart in chunks, showering debris on commuters hurrying through its dim, decaying bowels. People get hurt.
     At least one person got hurt Tuesday. The Metra Milwaukee North line had just arrived on track 9 at 8:37 a.m. Passengers poured out to begin the loud, slow shuffle toward the Madison Street exit. Several pounds of concrete, blackened by soot, fell from the ceiling. A piece struck Hilda Piell, 48, of Northbrook, atop the head, fracturing her skull. She let out a cry and doubled over in pain.
      A smaller chunk also struck my wife, Edie, standing in front of Piell. But it glanced off her back, and she wasn’t badly hurt.
     “I thought somebody smashed me with their bag,” Edie said. “It was the debris that hit me, really hard. I turned around, thought maybe she had dropped her bag. There was still more stuff falling down.”
     I was next to my wife, lost in the commuter bubble, wearing Bose noise-canceling headphones. But I felt a spray of gravel and noticed Edie was gone, so I turned to see a woman crying, my wife comforting her, commuters flowing around. I yanked off the headphones; the roar of the station turned to a howl...

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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.