They dare return us to the old slavery

    The dog still needed to be walked Wednesday morning, as always. She didn't know it had been a late night, or who was just elected president. Snapping her collar on, and plunging out into the chilly morning about 6:30 a.m. felt normal. The leaves were colorful, the air crisp, the sun rising. The world was still here.
     Okay, I thought. We'll manage this. He can't really build the wall—unnecessary, vastly expensive and logistically insane. Start deporting those 11 million undocumented immigrants and the crops rot in the field. Dial back gay marriage? Can you really unring that bell? Umm yes. His vice president kicked a hole in the Indiana economy trying to do just that. Has that kind of right ever in the history of the United States been extended, and then a few years alter snatched back? "Sorry ladies, guess you won't be voting after all!!!" 
     Bargaining. That's what, Stage 3 on the Kubler-Ross grief scale? I seem to have skipped over No 1, denial—can't very easily deny this Hieronymus Bosch painting, transpiring in glorious red and blue before my eyes, with the New York Times real time win-prediction meter starting deep in Hillary territory then pinning itself for Trump. Denying the outcome would be like denying the sky because  it's stormy. It's right there, big as life, every time you look at it. A mighty nation brought low. Mass folly.
     At home, coffee was still here. Cafe du Monde. The papers arrived, freezing the midnight moment when the balance had not yet completely swung Donald Trump's way.
     I wonder if there'll be papers at all in 2020?
     Of course the world wasn't really, there, not the world as it had been the day before. By the time I got back, the emails were showing up.
    "I guess it's time to head back to Israel and get drunk..."
     And the phone calls.
     "You fucking kike Democrat boot-licker phony fucking journalist. I'm laughing at you, you faggot!"
     Trump fans reaching out to bind up our divided country. Adding their undervalued perspective to the national conversation.
     Phone numbers come up now when people call -- they don't realize that -- and in my pre-coffee fog, I phone one back, under the quaint notion that he would regret the bile so easily spilled into my voicemail. "Wrong," as the president-elect likes to say. Which did give the chance to leap back to Kubler-Ross Stage No. 2, anger, because it's infectious, and when somebody starts screaming at you, you tend to give back in kind. Mental note to self: don't call people back. Don't answer emails. Let them have their moment, ululating over the fraud whose lies they bought. They'll have time to regret what they've done.
     Or not. He'll just lie some more and tell them how wonderfully he's done, like they do in Russia.
     Though to be honest, the reader response was not really worse than could be gotten on any given day pre-Trump. We can't blame him for the vileness in the American soul. He didn't create it, it was already there. He just weaponized it, monetized it, for himself. Turning anger into political capital he could spend to buy the White House.
     The White House. Suddenly I saw those elementary school placemats with the presidents. Postage stamps. Those future kids, yet unborn, proudly memorizing the presidents, starting with, "Washington, Jefferson, Adams..." ending "Bush, Obama, Trump" and then whatever godawful specimen comes next. Because as bad as this is, it'll only get worse. Or not. We'll all get used to it, and it'll just be the Way Things Are. The pit-of-the-stomach dread of today—like somebody died—will just be a historical artifact, half trivial, half amusing, grandpa putting on a black armband when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected. Thought he was a tyrant.
     They say in American anyone can grow up to become president. Now we know what that really means.
    I called my parents.
    "How could people vote for someone like that?" said my father, 84. "He made fun of people with disabilities. And people could vote for him. It says something about our country, that's for sure."
     Yes it does dad.
    My mother, 80, got on the phone, all defiance, explaining that this simply means the first woman president will be Elizabeth Warren.
    "Dad and I will still be here in 2020," she said, "and we'll live to see that day."
    I sure hope so mom, I said.
     "How could this person be the president of our land?" she said.
Can't answer that one, mom.
    "I'm wearing all black today and reading 'Confederacy of Dunces,'" she continued.
     That's a plan. Mourn and amuse ourselves. The last Kubler-Ross stage is acceptance. This is what happened. The pieces of the vase cannot be glued back together. Is that acceptance? Or complacency, normalization? He'll be president, yes, but that doesn't mean we have to accept anything he tries to do: Barack Obama never got that courtesy. Acceptance is a luxury we can't really afford right now, a sort of privilege. Being Jewish, my rights won't be plucked away as fast as others' rights will--women, Hispanics, Muslims. But tying yourself into a knot of anguish won't help anybody.
     Which is one way of viewing it. Another is that we may have lost the battle, but not the war.
    The keening was endless on Facebook. I added David Remnick's mournful analysis, An American Tragedy, and Eric Zorn's excellent, grim, assessment, Can America Survive President Donald Trump? Spoiler alert: no.
    I posted my column, of course, the fourth written Tuesday, as events unfolded. And then, prompted by some essential rebellious gene, the La Marseillaises scene from "Casablanca," where the German occupiers singing "Watch on the Rhine" in Rick's Cafe are drown out by the French National Anthem. Something uplifting, defiant and apt, particularly the lines from the second verse, which they never get to, "C'est nous qu'on ose méditer/De rendre à l'antique esclavage!" 
   Or in English:  "It is us they dare plan/To return to the old slavery!"
   Mike Pence might lull himself to sleep thinking about cramming gays back in the closet. Donald Trump might have based his campaign on making every Hispanic citizen a suspected illegal alien, on defunding health care for poor women, or stuffing the Supreme Court with justices who'll dial back women's rights 50 years. He might have been carried to the presidency on the shoulders of the most motley band of alt-right haters to ever dart blinking into the sunlight, their ranks augmented by the grumbling dispossessed who'll swallow any flattering lies and don't sweat the details. But this isn't done yet, and they can't just start shredding modern life, not while free American citizens have a say about it. He'll be president, not king, and though he has Congress at his bidding, the struggle has not ended. It has only begun.  Allons enfants de la Patrie!

Abandon all audacity of hope, ye who enter here

     Donald Trump won.
     An incredible turn of events which, when you pull back and look at the globe this past year, makes a grim sense. We should have seen this coming. Maybe we did see it, but it was so incredible we couldn’t believe the evidence of our eyes.
     Across the world, globalism is in retreat. Great Britain dropped out of the European Union in June. The Philippines elected a murderous madman as president, in the form of Rodrigo Duterte, who promptly began to fulfill his promise to kill drug dealers and drug users.
     Like it or not, the United States is part of that world.
     Seven years since the end of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Americans lost patience with the old politics. With regular politicians. And elected a man who violated all the usual norms, gleefully, without consequence. Howard Dean yelped and his candidacy was dead. Trump famously declared that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose one vote. He did about everything else but fire that shot, insulting, in no particular order, Mexicans, POWs, women, Muslims…it might be easier to list the people he didn’t malign.
     Now he’s our president-elect.
     On Monday, Trump said in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “You have one day to make every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country and your family come true.”

     And the country believed him.
      A stunning repudiation of Barack Obama and everything his administration stood for — his cerebral approach, his inclusiveness, his care for immigrants, for health care. “The Audacity of Hope.” All out the window now.    
     Any minority, particularly Hispanics, Muslims and Jews, who have been feeling increasingly frightened by Trump's embrace of the "alt-right"—a motley of heretofore obscure haters and far right reactionaries—can't help but be even more afraid now. What will our future be like?
     The presidency of the United States of America is the first elective office that Donald Trump has ever held. While that was true for a number of U.S. presidents, they were either military men, like Andrew Jackson or Dwight Eisenhower, or held appointed public offices, like William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover. Donald Trump is sui generis, a figure unprecedented in American history.
     For now, the markets will plunge—500 points in Dow futures last time I looked—the world will gape in shock. And we will get to see just what Donald Trump will actually do. Will he build that wall? He promised to. Will he start deporting 11 million undocumented Hispanic immigrants? He vowed he would. Temporarily bar Muslims from entering the country? He suggested that, too.
     Nations have stood at the crossroads before. In 1932, the United States elected Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany elected Adolf Hitler. The results don't need to be elaborated upon here.
     The polls were wrong. Hillary Clinton led most of them, for months. She won every poll of the American people except the one that counted.
     Trump is a man who has never run a city, never mind a state, never mind a country. Who deals in crude generalities, who makes promises that not only can't he keep, but also that can't be kept.
     Trump promised to "Make America Great Again." The slogan implied, directly, that we were no longer great. That our greatness had been stolen by invading Mexicans, by—get used to hearing the phrase, because he promised to say it a lot—radical Islamic terrorism. By job-snatching Chinese and untrustworthy Europeans. And that global conspiracy of bankers.
     Hillary Clinton argued that our greatness was in our diversity, that we were "Stronger Together." But Clinton lost, and Trump won. What that means we will begin to understand in the weeks and months and years to come. It would be overly dramatic and premature to say that the light that America held to the world has gone out, dowsed by electing an unashamed bigot and demagogue. But it sure is flickering, for a lot of people, the ones who aren't rejoicing tonight.
     I predicted this at the end of September. Just as I wish I had been wrong about his winning, I hope I'm wrong about the dire results. He was a Democrat once. Maybe he'll go back to being a Democrat. In his second term. I suppose I should leave you with some words of comfort. We are still the United States of America. We survived the British burning our capital and a Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II, the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. We'll survive this too, somehow. Buckle your seat belts, it's going to get bumpy.
     And Donald. Guess the system wasn't rigged after all, eh?

21 things that are true no matter who is elected president

     The presidential race was still too close to call at our first deadline Tuesday night. But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions from this most dramatic, historic and vexing race.

1. Why is it surprising that this ordeal just won’t end? The election was very close, revealing not only a divided country, but an evenly divided country. No wonder we have such difficulty getting anything done. Half the country wants to move this way, half that. Of course we’re being torn apart. The once-great United States is like a two-headed horse in some shabby vaudeville review.

2 Global warming, health care and immigration are still huge problems. We just held an 18-month presidential campaign and barely discussed what to do, except float a few diametrically opposed bullet points: build a wall, create a path to citizenship.

3. If Trump wins, his foes can take comfort in the fact that he is erratic — he calls it “unpredictable.” He proposes and abandons policies, makes promises and then denies he ever made them, with blinding speed. We really don’t know what he’d do.

4. If Clinton wins, well, her foes can take comfort in the fact that she’ll have to reach out to them to get anything done. The question is how vigorously she’ll be spurned by disappointed Republicans. If history is any judge, really vigorously.

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Election day, 2016

     This is the 13th presidential election in my memory, not counting being irked that the 1964 Republican convention pre-empted "Mr. Magoo." So starting with the 1968 battle between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the first contest I really noticed in detail, one where, at age 8, I insisted my parents take me to the Berea, Ohio Humphrey headquarters so I could snag a campaign button, which I still have.

Candidate cookies, Bennison's Bakery, Evanston

     And true to its unlucky #13 status, this election has been, by far, the most jinxed, sordid, troubling , jaw-dropping affair of the baker's dozen, if not in the wide sweep of American history, for reasons that hardly need to be articulated at this point. I read one pundit who, trying to argue that it wasn't the ugliest campaign ever, reached back to the 1800 battle between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, which isn't exactly a compelling case for this election's ordinariness.  
    But now, at the end, or the end of this part anyway, a bit of summation is in order. Where to begin? From Trump descending the escalator at his namesake Manhattan tower to call Mexican immigrants rapists — the hook set deep in the mouth of the media that left them flailing on the line from that point on — to the motley crew of 16 GOP debaters, to the passionate Bernie Sanders insurgency, to the chill figure of Hillary Clinton who, alone among them all, seemed to understand what this was about: choosing someone to run the government of the United States of America, not break further it apart.
     The Republicans have been locked in a 30-year trench war to tear down that government, brick-by-brick, ever since Ronald Reagan taught them that if society changes so much that you can't directly oppress the people you hate, you can kneecap the government that helps those people and and lower your taxes in the bargain. They've been sliding down this chute for decades, only to plop at the feet of Donald Trump and sedition.
    Trump was the last man standing at the Republican pygmy wrestle-off, and the GOP, to its deathless shame, more or less lined up behind him, the Bushes notwithstanding—and really, names like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and the word  "valor" don't usually belong in the same sentence, but now they do. 
    Donald Trump. So much has been said about him it seems overkill even to type his name at this point. Bigot. Fraud. Liar. Misogynist. Bully. I will go to my grave marveling that a man like John McCain can be directly slurred, and see all American servicemen in general and POWs in particular mocked and dismissed, and support the guy anyway. It defies understanding.  
   Bigot. Fraud. Liar. It's a shame the GOP has already worn out slurs by hurling them willy-nilly at their opponents, because they ring hollow now when justly applied. Trump had a way of echoing back any charge directed at him, an "I'm rubber, you're glue" stunt that, alas, was only one of the many juvenile aspects of this Schoolyard Election. 
     It's like the Hitler analogy -- it's been overused to much, that when you finally get a guy who talks like Hitler, passing around Nazi -- whoops, "alt-right"—paranoid fantasies as fact, raving about international conspiracies and grasping bankers, it's only good for an eye roll. Oh that again?  You become the Boy Who Cried Wolf. And there was some debate whether he was more of a fascist buffoon, like Mussolini, than an actual menace, like Hitler, though that would depend if the man achieves power or not. Still, it is an apt comparison; Trump allowed the lowest rung of anti-Semites to hoist him upon their shoulders, merely grinning at the attention. He even has his own Goering/Goebbels, fat/thin duo of fawning underlings in the shrill, gaunt, fist-pounding Rudolph Guiliani and the ever-sniveling lardbag Chris Christie. 
     Though to be honest, nothing Trump said sparked quite the visceral disgust as on Monday, when he said, "You have one day to make every dream you ever dreamed for your country and your family come true." 
    By voting for him of course. Trust drop into daddy's arms and he'll take care of everything 
    No programs. No plans. He never explained how he was going to do any of this, because of course he won't. It's all snake oil and bullshit. And Americans lapped it up. As awful as Trump is, you can't blame him — he didn't create these people, he just goaded them on, drew them out. The blame is ours. A freedom loving people. Howling to be enslaved.
     Clinton seems to be winning -- she preserved her narrow lead in all the polls-- but Nate Silver still gives Trump a  35 percent chance of winning, which is better odds than the chance of tossing a coin and getting heads twice.
    Not that a Clinton victory will end the dark forces that Trump has so skillfully summoned. They were there all along, and now in blinking the light and normalized, they'll batter even more relentlessly at the foundations of our government and society. Maybe if Trump's defeat is massive enough, they'll go slink back under their rocks. But I doubt it. Assuming he isn't elected president—and I'll exhale only after he isn't—how could we have come this close? Any joy at Hillary's election will have to be mitigated by the grotesque sight of what's under the rock Trump kicked over. The only comfort: they were already there. Trump didn't create them, he only exploited them. Not a cause, as I've been saying for a year, but a symptom. Being the folks who believe in facts and science, we can't decry the fact that we are now aware of this noxious reality. As Sarah McLachlan sings, "Better I should know."
   And if Trump wins? Well, then bar the door, Katie. We sail off the edge of the world, outdoing Britain which dropped out of the European Union with a thud last June, throwing away economic prosperity in terror at the prospect of Turkish immigrants.. I don't know what the country will look like then, but it will be dark for four years, if not forever. It's hard to imagine, and I'd prefer not to. We don't have to worry at this point, all we have to do is wait for a few more hours and we'll find out.

"My Christian duty is to not support evil"

Trinity Christian College students Zach Fitch, Josh Coldagelli and Karlyn Boens discuss their choices for president.

     So how to end this awful campaign? I did not feel like thundering against Trump—I've been beating that drum for a year and a half. One more thump won't make a difference. I prefer to yield the floor to someone who isn't me, and evangelical students seem a good way to understand whatever it is that's going to happen on Election Day.

     As a former editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal, my first impulse was to call Wheaton College. But the administration there, still curled up in a defensive ball over the school's shameful canceling of its students' health insurance (because ObamaCare was requiring it offer contraception), and their cack-handed fumble of a professor who put her religious faith into practice by wearing a hijab in solidarity with beleaguered Muslims, refused to cooperate. "I don't know we would do that," their director of media relations sniffed. "We don't usually facilitate that kind of thing."    

    So I shrugged, sidestepped the administration entirely and used this Internet machine to start rounding up Wheaton students directly. Then Trinity Christian College, which obviously doesn't have the shame issues that Wheaton labors under, said, in essence, "C'mon by!" and I spent a pleasant hour with their thoughtful, articulate students and then a second hour wandering the campus. This column suffers from space constraints in the paper—I would have liked room to more fully bring out the students' thinking, which was more nuanced than I could relate here, and touch upon some of the more interesting elements of campus, such as the existence of an Ozinga Chapel, named for a patriarch of the well-known concrete company, who was one of the businessmen who got together in the late 1950s and bought the former Navajo Hills golf club and turned it into a Christian college—the old clubhouse is now the administration building. Another day.

     Zach Fitch, 20, a junior at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, views Donald Trump as a deeply flawed candidate. But he’s voting for him anyway.
     “He says ridiculous things, sometimes really inappropriate things,” said Fitch. “Yet, I’d rather have somebody right now who is a little more toward my beliefs — he doesn’t like abortion. I feel like he’s my more evangelical vote. I would like somebody better, but God can change anyone.”
     Geena Calomino, 21, a senior at Trinity, drawing upon the same faith, finds that impossible.
     “As my first election, I feel horrible that I have to decide between these two candidates, because I don’t agree with what they’re doing, either of them,” she said. “But I cannot and I will not support someone who puts down women and makes fun of the disabled. . . . To have a president or presidential candidate who openly does that is horrifying to me.”
     The American public, exhausted by the 2016 presidential election, finally collapses across the finish line Tuesday. Having written dozens of columns parsing every aspect of this bitter and historic race, I decided not to add one more voice telling voters what to do. But rather to yield the field to young people, grounded in a particular morality, and see what illumination they might offer. So however the vote falls, we might better understand what just happened. On Friday, while the city was celebrating the Cubs victory, I visited this 1,200-student college in the southwestern suburbs. The administration gathered a half dozen students. Each took a different approach. Josh Coldagelli, 21, a senior, won’t vote for anyone....

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The column we didn't need: "A kind of victory"

 

     The Cubs won the World Series. The Sun-Times quickly posted the column I wrote to celebrate the occasion, and it got a lot of traffic -- actor John Cusack retweeted it to his 1.8 million followers. That was nice. 
     The next morning, a regular reader, Kirk Steinhaus, remarked on an aspect that everyone else overlooked, and posted his thoughts under the column on Facebook. He wrote:

I think that we are missing something. You posted this blog last night within five or maybe ten minutes after the Cubs won. It tells me that you had written it before they won, also telling me that you had written a contra-blog to post if they lost. Can we read that one too?

     That caught me off guard. I answered:

Hmmmmm... I'm not sure that would be appropriate. Let me think about it. Something seems amiss.

     What seemed amiss was the magic act quality of journalism. You don't reveal how it's done. As it is, I feel uneasy pointing out that I write obituaries of famous figures months, even years before they die. It's obvious—how else do you get eight pages about the complicated, fascinating life of Muhammed Ali online within 15 minutes of his death being announced? Yet it also seems like something a professional would not draw attention to. "Don't worry folks, the lady is safe, squished up in half the box. I don't really saw her in half."
     Plus there is a braggadocio quality to admitting the work that goes on ahead of time. Your waiter doesn't say, "You know the cook showed up at DAWN to bake that bread!!!" Don't brag. Braggarts are punished.

"The Dugout" by Norman Rockwell

     I talked about it with a couple colleagues, and an editor, and nobody thought running the "Cubs lose" column would violate some cherished journalistic norm. While I was puzzling on it the New York Times  "Insider" blog shared a Cubs lose graphic and page layout they had obviously expended so much effort on that it seemed a shame to let it remain unseen.  The Times is a class act, and they obviously felt it was okay.
      Then again, it was a beautiful painting, an homage to Norman Rockwell's famous 1948 Saturday Evening Post cover, "The Dugout."  Which led to a second qualm about this column. It isn't very good, in my mind, because it echoes an essay,  "Looking Failure in the Face." Yes, it was written by me in 2007, and yes, it ran n Forbes magazine, so few Sun-Times readers would be familiar with it.  But I try not to repeat myself, and while the words are not the same — it isn't plagiarized — the overarching concept, "Dante turned failure into success and so can you," is identical. Re-reading the column after a few days, it seemed a lazy, overly-facile journalistic solution to the problem of the Cubs losing the series.
    Well, considering that my column is not supposed to run at all on Thursdays, yet I turned in two, one if they won, one if they lost, maybe not so lazy. And there is an allure to the idea of unpublished works. When the Cubs neared the pennant win, Ald. Joe Moore wrote, reminding me that I had mentioned in a column in 2003 that I wrote an editorial about the Cubs winning the pennant that had made me cry and made my mother cry, and that I would tuck it away until they actually won. Should they win the pennant, he asked, can we read it? Amazed he remembered after 13 years, I tore up my office looking for it -- we've gone through a computer system or two since then and I don't have it electronically. But it's lost.
    Might as well put this online where I can find it someday. And besides, I am nothing if not a full service columnist, and since a reader requested it, and since none of the reasons not to settled the question in the negative, and since I have to fill this space today somehow, with apologies for its derivativeness and for a build-up longer than the column itself, here is the column that would have sought to comfort people had the Cubs lost which,  thank merciful God, they did not. They won.

     Dante Alighieri never got the girl. Beatrice Portinari, the love of his life, whom he first saw in the streets of Florence when he was 9 and she was 8, married someone else. Then she died young, at 24.
      Heck, Dante didn't even get to live out his days on the streets of his beloved Florence. He threw his lot in with the wrong political faction, was exiled and sentenced to death if he returned. He spent his last years sleeping on other people's sofas, basically.
     "Bitter is the taste of another man's bread," he wrote. "Weary the tread up another man's stairs."
     Kind of a loser really. But he made the best of it, forging his "Divine Comedy," immortalizing his lost Beatrice, placing her at the gates of heaven, and creating a fiery hell to roast his real-life enemies for all time.
     Quite the accomplishment.
     That is the art of life, which does not consist of one triumph after another. Instead, it is a chain of trying and failing and putting a brave spin on it and making your defeat into a sort of victory.
     When the Cubs dropped a second World Series game to the Cleveland Indians and their lights-out pitching, I cheerily observed that the Cubs had also been down two games to one against the Dodgers, and that worked out just fine. Don't give up hope!
     After Saturday night's loss, well, there was still Jason Kipnis, Northbrook's very own, slugging the first three-run homer hit against the Cubs in a World Series game at Wrigley Field since Babe Ruth did it in 1932. For the wrong team, true, but at least someone from the Chicago area was having a good night. I knew his father, Mark Kipnis, a lawyer for this newspaper who got unfairly singed when Hollinger International went up like a gas refinery explosion. It's nice to think of the karmic wheel spinning skyward for him too.
     I was ready for the Cubs to drop Sunday night's game. But they won that game. Then the next, in epic fashion. It was the Indians muffing easy fly balls. And suddenly the prize that had eluded the Cubs for so long seemed in their grasp at last.
     Only it wasn't, of course. The dust settled after Game Seven and it was over. The Cubs lost, as they always do.
     And yet, remember, the Cubs were in the World Series. They were there, somewhere they hadn't been for 71 years They made some errors, but they were not hapless. They were beaten by superlative pitching. Usually the Cubs lose by choking; this time they were strangled.
     I'm not a baseball expert, but I don't see the shame here. We were conquered, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, we did not capitulate.
     Nobody wants to lose. But we shouldn't be terrified of defeat either. Look at Donald Trump. He's so scared of losing that he's already babbling excuses. The election is rigged. The media biased. Wah. Which makes his defeat even more certain. He's running into the arms of the thing he's most afraid of.
     No need for excuses. I'm not a sports fan; I went to the opening of an exhibit at the Field Museum Wednesday night. But I know the Cubs winning would make people happy, and so I wanted them to win. But as with any victory, there would also be a cost. If you ask what makes the Cubs special, as a team, only two things really stand out: Wrigley Field and their 108 seasons without a World Series win. Each adds to the mystique. Sure, you could build a bigger, more modern ballpark. But it wouldn't be Wrigley, and the Cubs wouldn't be the Cubs.
     So sure, they could have beaten the Indians. Came close. But then they wouldn't be the Cubs, not the Cubs we knew, but some different team, the kind that wins a World Series. If you look at the Red Sox, winning the Series in 2004, 2007 and 2013 made them less the Red Sox that people loved and more of a Yankees Lite.
     By all means, be disappointed. Then make the best of it. All told, it worked out pretty well for Dante. He didn't get the girl. But he got the fame he hungered for. The Cubs didn't win the series. But they got to remain the Cubs we've always known and loved. And that's a kind of victory.

And the parade passed by....

Cubs victory parade (photo by Dav Ero)

     "But you love parades!" my mother said over the phone, as I drove to Palos Heights Friday morning.
     It's true. I always troop to see the local Northbrook parades, July 4 and Memorial Day. I love to stand and clap when the vets march past, appreciate the marching bands, thrill to the fire engines.
      But it isn't like I'm rushing downtown to watch the St. Patrick's Day Parade. I see them if they're convenient.
     Which is odd, because I used to hate to miss parades. I have this memory, from being about 4, visiting my grandmother in the Bronx. I was just old enough to know there was a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And that we weren't going — my parents didn't even go into Manhattan when they visited my grandmother— why bother? What was there? I kind of pressed myself against window, straining to look down the streets and, perhaps, catch a glimpse of the parade I didn't know was miles away.  
       "I have a job to do, mom," I said. It was true. An interview set up before the Cubs won the series, on the campus of Trinity Christian College. They were nice enough to gather together students for me to talk with. I wasn't about to cancel so I could go see a parade. Duty first.
     The students were polite, thoughtful. I wandered the campus, located on a ... no, save it for Monday. Let's just say I was glad I went.  Other reporters covered the parade.
    I heard the hoopla on the radio as I drove back. And I have to admit, listening to Theo Epstein laud Tom Ricketts, made me glad I wasn't there. I'm not a fan. I went to one game this year. This was for fans.
     My wife sent me updates, from the kids drinking wine on the 7:36 Metra Milwaukee North train, to the happy high-fives in coffee shops. I gritted my teeth, and almost said, "You can stop doing that any time you like." But I held back. Why spoil her fun? She didn't mean to taunt me. I wanted to know what happened. A big day for Chicago. 
     People crushed into the city, from everywhere, just to see the players passing by. I get that. A communal celebration. A manifestation of how important it is to them. And I would never say a word against it. Many of societal ills come from a lack of exactly that: cohesion, unanimity, shared experience. Everybody there, everybody under a blue hat was a Cubs fan. No papers, no religious test. We need more of that, not less. 
     What does not taking part mean?  St. Augustine defined "city" as a group of people united by the love of the same object. So not to love that object, and not to partake in the festival. It was like pressing my palm against the cold stone wall, separating me from everybody else.
     Also a necessary function. There needs to be outsiders, observers, the guy who doesn't go, or who stands there, scratching his chin, apart from it all, watching. That guy has always been me. It started growing up in Berea, the only Jew in Fairwood Elementary School, watching the heads swivel in my direction as the one droning Hanukkah carol is rolled out for my benefit. Hating that, at first, wanting to vanish. But growing to like the difference. "What did you expect, horns?" I'd taunt people who said I don't look Jewish (improbably, because I look like the cover of Der Stermer. They must have never seen a Jew, and expected a skullcap and black coat). 
     I don't want to hide behind the faith. Plenty of Jewish Cub fans, no doubt, such as my pal Rich Cohen, who wrote a lovely piece in the New York Times about his lifelong Cubs fandom.  I'm just not a crowds guy. They puzzle me. When the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup, I was downtown at the paper, so wandered a few blocks south to see the double decker buses blow past. Shrugged, then went back to the office. Of course I could come upon the entire Blackhawks team playing a pickup game on the ice rink behind my house in Northbrook and I wouldn't recognize it was them or care particularly if I did. 
     At a certain age, you accept yourself, while being open to what changes and revelations come. And though I didn't go to the parade, I did notice something surprising. Before the series began, people asked me, growing up in Cleveland, which team  I was rooting for, and I'd shrug and say, "Doesn't matter. I win either way."
     But in the 8th inning of the seventh game, when the Indians scored, I did not cheer, but groaned and covered my face. And in the 10th I was on my feet, shouting for my wife, who couldn't bear to watch and had walked out of the room, to come back in, and we watched the next few minutes shouting and hugging. Not so impartial anymore. 

Michigan Avenue, Nov. 4, 2016

Photos courtesy of and copyright by Dav Ero. You can see more of his work at his website.