The Great Creepy Clown Panic of 2016

     Up until Thursday, when my boss asked me to look into the creepy clown phenomenon, I had studiously avoided the subject, just because it seemed one of those scraped-from-the-corners-of-the-Internet kind of things.  In mid-August someone dressed as a clown tried to lure children into the woods in South Carolina — maybe — the thing got on the Internet, where all sorts of scary clown videos and reports sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Maybe a prankish teenager or two or 10 jumped the gun on Halloween and wore masks to frighten younger children, and a squad of Barney Fife police chiefs in various Hickburgs dutifully issued press releases and threatened any Bozos who would use their face paint and rubber nose to cause alarm to steer clear of their particular Mayberry.
      It did not add up to anything significant, in my view, except for connoisseurs of mass delusions. I am neither frightened nor intrigued by clowns. They just seem another inexplicably popular and widespread phenomena, like stock car racing.
     But I am nothing if not a dutiful employee, and if my boss wants me to "find one of these scary clown guys," that's exactly what I would attempt to do. Looking online, I saw the outlines of what seemed a classic case of hysteria — children seeing things — given a 21st century twist as the sparks of immature fancy were been fanned into a brushfire by the Internet.
     "These are illusionary clowns," I told my boss. "They don't exist in the living world."
     Except. One college student detained by security at University of Illinois—Chicago. There was a photo of his apprehension, though he explained that he was a "performance artist" doing some innocent, non-threatening activity, and they let him go. That seemed a good inroad into this nonsense. I phoned U of I and invited them to reach out to this unnamed student and offer him a chance to tell his tale of miscommunication, perhaps plug his particular brand of art (which, to be honest, I also doubted the existence of, assuming that "performance artist" was the lame excuse this mope blurted out upon apprehension).
     But nothing was forthcoming from the school. I considered going to campus and poking around but, to be honest, that did not seem smart use of my time.
     My boss was disappointed.
     "I'd like to talk to one of these guys to understand why they thrill themselves by scaring people," he said.
     I almost said, "Who doesn't?" I'm the guy who told my boys there was a monster living in our basement (in my defense, it was a scary, perhaps dangerous basement, and I was trying to forestall their exploring it). I also seem to recall telling a tentful of sleepover boys the "Hook" story and then returning to rake my fingernails along the side of the tent. It's the sort of thing people are doing now with clown masks and finding themselves subject to arrest.
     I did observe that the Guardian had actually dispatched a reporter to South Carolina, as Ground Zero for the Clown Epidemic. No clowns were found, but a lengthy story nevertheless ensued, one of dozens if not hundreds. Perhaps I'd best set off Southward in search of scary clowns. Dedicate some resources. Work the story in the fine tradition of investigative journalism.
     My offer was not snapped up.
     As I like to say, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. As I was heading out the door on Friday, I noticed the mask above at our tech bar. Its owner, a colleague in her 40s who I should add is niceness incarnate, explained that they were yanking them from the stores so she snapped it up, for only $12. Her daughter was having a bonfire -- perhaps she would put it on and creep around the house. Or wake up another child with the mask.
     You could see her savoring the thought.
     But then the cold reality of our tremulous times sunk in.
     "I'm hesitant to do that in my own yard!" she said, indignant. "You'd think people would have better things to worry about."
     Which is the rub of it, in my opinion. They do. Which is why we have a clown scare, the same reason people worry about sharks but not heart attacks. These mass hysterias are caused, in part, by stressful time. Between the Scariest Clown of Them All, Donald Trump, still having a shot at the presidency, and Syria and ISIS and Zika and God knows what else, of course the kids would start seeing clowns in the woods, or thought they were seeing them. Mix that into a safety fetish that threatens to deform our proud culture beyond all recognition, a zero tolerance lack of discernment on the part of lower level authorities like school officials, then we have our current Clown Crisis based on next-to-nothing. And suddenly it is a terrorist act to wear a clown mask, just as joking was made into a crime by the TSA.
     Enough. The Web is our Great Aggregator, and it can magnify things which are very small. Every hamlet has a walking man, some poor soul with mental challenges wandering the margins, muttering to himself.  But if every small town paper began reporting on him, it would seem an invasion, and the larger outlets would investigate the Army of Muttering Men while pundits analyze What It All Means.
     It means, to me, that — stop the presses — people are frightened and imaginative. That pattern recognition lends disparate occurrences the illusion of cohesion, of significance. That despite falling away in big chunks, there is still an awful lot of media. Maybe too much. Put "scary clown" into the Nexis database and 501 articles show up over the past month. Now that's really frightening.

Technology is always changing, except for the Shure Model 55

     There was a lot more I wanted to fit into here, such as the fact that the first time electric loudspeakers were used in public was in Chicago -- at the Olympic Theatre in September, 1912, when Bell Telephone and Western Electric rigged 10 speakers to transmit sound effects from backstage. Or that "microphone" is like "cursor," one of those words that started with one kind of technology and ended with another. Two hundred years ago "microphones" were ear trumpets—something the hard-of-hearing used to make small noises larger, hence the name. Still, I really enjoyed my visit to Shure, and hope some of that enthusiasm came across. 

     Of course it stands out.
     In an era when hi-tech design means some version of the Apple lozenge, all brushed steel and rounded corners, how could you fail to admire an example of 2016 technology that owes its look to the chrome grille of a 1937 Oldsmobile.
     The Shure Unidyne Model 55 Dynamic Microphone debuted in 1939 and has been in production ever since, more or less unchanged. A few tweaks: the quarter-sized diaphragm inside, glued to a coil of wire that turns sound vibrations into electrical impulses, went from aluminum to Mylar. The inner windscreen, once cloth, is now foam.
     The company that sells them, Shure Incorporated, started in Chicago in 1925 and has staked out an enviable position both revering its past and working at future innovation, or so it seemed to me when I toured its Niles headquarters.
     I assumed the Helmut Jahn building was designed for Shure, since its decorative screening so boldly evokes a microphone. Actually, it was built for Ha-Lo Industries.
     “They went bankrupt building the building,” said Michael Pettersen, director of corporate history, overlooking a few other factors, like Ha-Lo’s disastrous purchase of Starbelly.

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Musings of 18th century giant still relevant today

   

     Sometimes I surprise myself with what I can get away with putting in a newspaper column, which tend to be about, you know, news.  Samuel Johnson isn't close to news — has been dead for 232 years, and his life isn't exactly crackling across our social consciousness. It should be. I called up this column to share it with an acquaintance and realized, while I was at it, I should share it with you here.

    "Society is held together by communication and information" — a sentiment perfectly true in 2010, though James Boswell wrote it in a book published in 1791.
     Friday I finished reading Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, and while its 1,433 pages cannot be summarized in a newspaper column, I hope you won't mind my trying to anyway. Every 1-0 Cubs/Phillies snooze fest gets reported; why not this?
     Johnson is an epic figure, both for his literary output and his physical person — a huge, unkempt man, his face scarred, blind in one eye, he twitched and muttered, and was both a figure of ridicule and the greatest English man of letters between Shakespeare and Dickens.
     His 1755 dictionary — a massive effort he compiled alone with half a dozen clerks — endeared him to his countrymen, particularly since the French assigned 40 Frenchmen to their dictionary, and they took 40 years to finish. Johnson took seven.
     His would-be biographer Boswell went to London as a 22-year-old Scottish lawyer with a cheerful "desire of being acquainted with celebrated men of every description."
     Boswell succeeded, hanging out not only with Johnson, but economist Adam Smith, artist Joshua Reynolds, statesman Edmund Burke, actor David Garrick, the cream of Georgian London. Unsatisfied, Boswell slips over to France to meet Voltaire.
     Such a man can't help dropping names, and in the same all-caps fashion that zealots use today. Here Boswell's about to dine with Johnson for the first time.
     "I had gratified my curiosity much in dining with JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, while he lived in the wilds of Neufchatel," Boswell writes. "I had as great a curiosity to dine with DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON."
     Johnson is so fearsome that Boswell is surprised to find good food — veal pie! — on a decently set table.
     "I supposed we should scarcely have knives and forks, and only some strange uncouth, ill-drest dish,"Boswell confesses. "But I found everything in very good order."
     Not cuisine, but Johnson's genius for wit makes the book enjoyable.
     "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," Johnson says.
     "Sir," Johnson says, ending a discussion of the worth of pious resolution. "Hell is paved with good intentions."
     Marrying a second time is "the triumph of hope over experience."
     No one is better at taking down mediocrity.
     "He is not only dull, but the cause of dullness in others," Johnson says.
     The American Revolution is going on. Johnson, a royalist, puts his finger on the hypocrisy that would haunt the new republic.
     "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" he asks.
     Boswell can't resist jumping in. He dutifully records Johnson's objections to slavery — "No man is by nature the property of another" — and then must register his own objections to such "wild and dangerous" attempts "to abolish so very important and necessary a branch of commercial interest." An institution that — opponents of gay marriage please note — Boswell argues, "in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued."
     I enjoyed Boswell's hidebound thickheadedness almost as much as Johnson's brilliance. He recoils at someone who shook David Hume's hand.
     "I took the liberty to object to treating an Infidel writer with smooth civility," he says, suggesting instead the philosopher should be kicked down the stairs.
     "An Infidel then shall not be treated handsomely by a Christian," he writes, voicing a sentiment troubling us now that we hear it from other quarters.
     They talk of sexual equality. Boswell is shocked that his father is considering leaving any inheritance to his sisters.
     "You ask by what right your father admits daughters to inheritance," Johnson writes. "Ask yourself, first, by what right you require them to be excluded?"
     They are vexed by the same media problems that vex writers today.
     Booksellers protest to Parliament over threatening new technology, "cheap editions of the most popular English books," causing publishers to "suffer from an invasion of what they had ever considered to be secure."
     Johnson's work is borrowed without payment or credit.
     "It was seized on with avidity by various publishers of newspapers and magazines, to enrich their publications," Boswell writes.
     Johnson is forced to take out an advertisement complaining "those essays are inserted in the newspaper and magazines with so little regard to justice or decency, that the Universal Chronicle, in which they first appear, is not always mentioned."
     Instead, his work is stolen "with the most shameless rapacity."
     In another current touch, there is a comments section in the edition I read. The margins are filled with notes by Johnson's friend, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, who considered Boswell a parasite and a liar and eagerly contradicted him.
     "Not I — never had," she writes, when Boswell quotes Johnson saying she had high regard for the Scot. "I thought him a clever & a comical Fellow." So feedback is nothing new.
     I'm not expecting you to run out and read it — it took me months, and I think you have to be a certain sort to finish. But it was comforting, somehow, to see that the shifting media landscape of today, with its whir of websites, resonates so neatly with a distant time of broadsheets and pamphlets.
     "We must read what the world reads at the moment," says Johnson, waving off suggestions that the "teeming of the press in modern times is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much."
     The spread of information is always good.
    "It must be considered," he says, "that we have now more knowledge generally diffused."

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 9, 2010

Hazelden battles opioids by dispensing them

     “Do you have any questions about your prescription?” asked the gal behind the pharmacy counter at CVS.
     “Yeah, how do you keep from becoming addicted?” I replied. She was taken aback, smiled uncomfortably and muttered something like “Oh you’ll be fine” before pushing the bag at me.
     I wasn’t worried about myself. I was picking up opioid painkillers for my son, suffering from an inflamed throat that felt like “swallowing broken glass.”
     In one of those coincidences that would look trite in fiction but happens in real life, I had just been on the phone with William Moyers, vice president of public affairs for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. He was in Chicago for a speech and called me, well, because that’s what vice presidents of public affairs do.
     “Opioids are the Trojan horse of addiction,” said Moyers. “They sneak up on us and our families and communities like no other substance of misuse. That’s what makes it so scary. They’re clean, easy, legitimate and omnipotent.”
     That’s what worried me. Fifty percent more people died of opioid overdoses in 2014 than died in car wrecks. Some 75 people die every day in the United States from opioid overdose, an “epidemic” which suddenly is being compared with the HIV-AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
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"Das Rheingold," ripped from the headlines

     If you are going to stiff your contractors, make sure they aren't giants. 
     That isn't the typical spin on "Das Rheingold," the opening salvo of Richard Wagner's epic Ring Cycle.
     But these are not typical times.
     I was fortunate enough to join the full house Saturday night welcoming the opening of the 2016/2017 Lyric Opera season, and now that our incomparable critic Hedy Weiss has weighed in with her typically spot-on review, I feel safe to poke my nose out and sniff the start of what is certain to be a whiz-bang season, complete with beloved barn burners "Carmen" and "The Magic Flute." 
    "Rheingold" starts with one of the most famous passages in music, Wagner's 136 bars of E flat tonic chord. Given the composer's eventual supporting role in his nation's slide into homicidal madness in the 20th century, that groan always struck me as the modern world waking up and fluttering one red eye, all the more significant when you consider that Wagner composed it in the early 1850s.  
      Put it another way. At the exact moment Wagner was blending Norse myth and aural thunder to create"Rheingold," our own national composer, Stephen Foster, was penning "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair."  
     This is a new production of the Ring, and I admired director David Pountney's spare, almost Becketian way it begins, the Rhine River emerging wondrously from a satchel, and the dwarf Alberich with his tramp's bowler hat. He lusts after the Rhinemaidens, capering about on their rolling industrial platforms, steals their gold (memo to guardian nymphs—don't tell strangers how to steal your treasure)  then forges that gold into the all powerful Ring in his subterranean hellscape (yet another homage to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis.") 
    The plot, as with many operas, is too convoluted to bear recounting. But Wotan, king of the gods, has hired a pair of giants, Fasolt and Fafner, to build his fortress and now is reluctant to pay their agreed-upon-price, his sister-in-law Freia. He dangles the gold he doesn't actually have, another Trumpian ploy.
    "Rheingold" is more of an hors d'oeuvre compared to the table-groaning feast of the next three operas in the cycle, "Walkure," "Siegfried," and "Gotterdammerung," and just hearing a snippet of stormy themes to come while Donner blows the mists away from Valhalla was enough for me to want to leap to the rest of the action. But in due time. The Lyric is doling them out, one a year, and then hitting the entire cycle in 2020 for those with the will and the backside stamina to surmount it. 
    My wife, no Wagner fan, pronounced it "magic" and says she now intends to see the entire Ring, a completely unexpected come-to-Jesus moment. 

    "It gets better," I said, thinking of the music. 
    Only one moment in the two-and-a-half hour opera clunked for me, conceptually--Wotan's fortress is spied in the distance as a tiny wooden mock-up of the gears and pulleys arch of the stage set. I get where they're going, but it's such a tiny framework of brown sticks, evoking, for me, the wee witch's house in "Hansel and Gretel," and seems more a false economy than a defendable dramatic decision. No wonder Wotan didn't want to pay the giants their fee. 
    But that is a quibble in a night of splendor. Given the critical guffaws that some new "Rings" have received, and the technical problems that have plagued other productions, the Lyric can't help but sit back, satisfied that they have launched their massive vessel well upon its stormy sea. 
    The swapping of love for power and gold. The crushing down of workers under your power. The indifference of our leaders—Eric Owen's Wotan was an oddly absent figure, overshadowed by half a dozen other characters. Great art is always timely, but this production might be a little too timely. Then again, it has only just begun.
     
     

Don't throw away your vote on Gary Johnson

     I was well on my way to writing for today's paper about a completely different subject, when I realized I thought my Sunday blog post was on a sharper topic — Libertarian Gary Johnson — and I decided to go with that instead. So while this is on the same topic as yesterday, and has a few shared elements, it's been pretty much refurbished top-to-bottom.

     Just as many other Americans are contemplating doing this year, I threw away my first presidential ballot by registering a protest vote.
     It was 1980. I was 20 and worldly as a tadpole. Voting for Ronald Reagan wasn’t a possibility for me — I considered him evil, the guy who, as governor of California, sent cops armed with shotguns into People’s Park, then shrugged off when a student protester was killed with, “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed you must expect things will happen.”
And Jimmy Carter had gone insane during his first term in office. I truly believed that, then and now.
     So who was left? An independent named John B. Anderson, notable for his shock of white hair and 50-cent gas tax.
     What’s the difference between then, and those who now plan to register their unease with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton by voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party’s Jill Stein?
     A lot.

     Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter, mired in the hostage crisis and the energy crisis and a few more crises that don’t leap to mind. He received 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Anderson took 6.6 percent of the popular vote, meaning that if myself and every single person who voted for Anderson instead voted for Carter, Reagan would still have beaten him handily. Our votes didn’t matter.

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Flap your arms and vote for Gary Johnson

     Traffic can be terrible on Chicago expressways. There are these massive jams, and what do you do if you need to get somewhere quickly and the expressway is at a standstill? This column suggests you simply turn off your engine, step out of the car, flap your arms and fly. Not only will you get to your destination much quicker, but flying instead of driving will be an unambiguous message to those in authority at the highway department that they better get their act together and fix the congestion problem before motorists vanish into the air like so many winged birds....
     What? That's impossible you say? You can't simply flap your arms and fly? Oh right, that's true. So I guess that my suggesting you do so, well, it doesn't help much. At all in fact. Indeed, it's kinda stupid, isn't it? I'm recommending an impossible course of action that, if attempted, would accomplish nothing.
     There's a lot of that going around. For instance, the Chicago Tribune endorsing Gary Johnson. Which is actually worse, because I'm joking and they're not, apparently. Yes, the chances of the Libertarian former governor of New Mexico winning the presidency are marginally better than your becoming airborne by vigorous arm agitation. But not by much, and for all practical purposes it's the same.
     Gary Johnson not only can't win, he shouldn't win. His sole appeal is that he's neither Hillary Clinton, who people can't stand for a variety of hollow reasons, or Donald Trump, who people can't stand because he goes out and works hard to deserve their contempt every single minute of every single day.
     Despite being practically unknown, Johnson still fails miserably—the moment he gawped at the word "Aleppo," drawing a blank at mention of the epicenter of the Syrian war, is really all you need to know. Being aware of the most important international crisis of the past three years isn't just a requirement for a potential world leader, it's a requirement for a responsible resident of the world, and being that unplugged means Johnson deserves nobody's vote.  There's more, but that's enough. The only thing you need to know—and some people don't—is that George W. Bush won in 2000 because independent vanity candidate Ralph Nader drew enough of the thinking vote—the alleged thinking vote— away from Al Gore. If enough people vote for Johnson, it'll happen again and Donald Trump will win.
     That isn't how the Tribune sees it.
     "We reject the cliche that a citizen who chooses a principled third-party candidate is squandering his or her vote," the newspaper wrote Friday, joining the throng this election season rejecting obvious fact. "Look at the number of fed-up Americans telling pollsters they clamor for alternatives to Trump and Clinton. What we're recommending will appeal less to people who think tactically than to conscientious Americans so infuriated that they want to send a message about the failings of the major parties and their candidates."
     Send a message to whom? President Trump? And what would that message be: "you won but it isn't our fault because we voted for a person who isn't you?"
     A message that says, "We sat on our hands and watched people crazier than ourselves elect a bigoted, sexist, impulsive, ignorant, bellicose, tax-shirking fraud whose undeniable bad qualities are so numerous that it becomes tiring just to list them."
     Or should that message be: "We voted for a Libertarian loons who wants to privatize government rather than a former senator and secretary of state who adheres to the admittedly-unpopular notion that the role of the government is to get stuff done"?
     Gary Johnson is the Pontius Pilate, I-wash-my-hands vote. Doing something to make yourself feel good under the illusion that you are making some kind of statement, when what you are doing is holding your own sense of moral purity above that of the country, protecting yourself from consequences by voting for somebody who can't win. Flapping those arms and soaring away, in taking your own fantasy flight, leaving your earthbound fellow Americans to figure out the mess they're in. It's better to stay home.
     How did this happen? How did the Chicago Tribune join the handful of papers in the country—the Detroit News is another— to endorse Gary Johnson? I could offer theories. But I have friends at the Tribune, so won't insult them by speculating what went wrong. I don't know, for certain. But I do know that I used to have to dig into the distant past to illustrate how out-of-touch the paper can be, remembering Col. Robert McCormick wrapping himself in the flag, urging the country to be nice to Hitler under the charmed notion that if we do then maybe he'll leave North America alone. Now I have a much more recent folly to hold against them.