We're all guardians of American values now

Morgan Library, New York City

     When the Sun-Times eliminated its library, years ago, as one of the many cost-cutting measures that allowed the paper to survive to this day, I learned about it when our last librarian stuck her head into my office.
     “Well, I’ve been fired and they’re shutting down the library,” she said. “Since you’re the only person who uses it, come take what you want.”
     I liberated a hand truck, muscled a couple 7-foot bookcases into my office, then started transferring the most useful volumes. As I did this, the librarian took a yellow legal pad and began writing down which titles I was removing. She didn’t get far before an awful realization clouded her face: it didn’t matter anymore. There would be no library for these books to be missing from, and no librarian to care where they were. She left me to my task; a few days later she was gone, and I never saw her again. 
      That haunting moment came to me again this week, as protesters took to the street to decry the presidential election. To whom are they complaining? Donald Trump? The American people who just elected him? The czar? If only he knew! Like my departing librarian, they were showing fidelity to a structure of official values that had simply evaporated.
     At least she was talking to a sympathetic audience, me. What the protesters accomplished was to comfort the very person they were protesting against, serving up a chance for the false equivalence that got him elected in the first place. See? Violence! These incidents counterbalance our candidate winning office by maligning vulnerable minorities for 18 months, his campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," itself a coded credo for nationalism.

To continue reading, click here.

Ink

     The night the Cubs won the World Series — less than two weeks ago, as difficult as that might be to believe — I slid by the Field Museum for the Founders' Council party for their new tattoo exhibit. 
     It was the sort of thing that sounded like a good idea beforehand — I'm not a big sports fan, why not take in something cultural when everybody else is holing up at a sports bar? Although I admit, a half hour before the opening pitch, sitting in a theater at the Field, listening to two ethnographers discuss tattooing in the Philippines, well, I wondered just what was wrong with me.
    But the Field people set up a big flat screen in the lobby. And the show was interesting, surveying a practice that has been part of nearly every society, throughout time. They created silicon torsos and commissioned some of the best living tattoo artists to decorate them; it seemed a clever solution to how to display the designs without offending our Midwestern standards of prudery.
      Tattooing is not my thing—I remember three years ago, when I wrote an article examining the practice in Chicago, I considered getting one — nothing elaborate, just a simple orange dot, say, the size of a pinhead, on my inner forearm, to see what it was like. But I knew, as soon as I imagined doing it, that I couldn't. I'd hate having it there, probably end up gouging it out of my arm, just to be rid of the thing.  I have a hard enough time buying glasses.

    Which is silly, because our lives tattoo us whether we like it or not, every line, every spot, time's artwork upon our faces. Whether we are happy or sad, sour or easy-going. We tattoo ourselves silently, inexpertly. I admire people who can do it cavalierly. But I'm not one of them. 
    Even though I wouldn't want one, I did appreciate the designs, particularly this modern America eagle by London artist Alex Binnie, who melds traditions of Africa, the North Pacific and New Guinea into what he calls "urban primitivism." I couldn't get a tattoo, as I said, but if I did get one, I hope it would be something like this. 
     In a clever move, the Field Museum has set up a working tattoo parlor, where top Chicago artists will put designs on customers, of which there was no shortage. In the first three hours, the president of the Field told us, they received 2,900 calls from people who wanted tattoos applied at the Field. The waiting list has 1,000 people on it. The tattoos cost $250 each, and the artwork must be selected from among 42 designs. The first public sessions are Nov. 19.
      I always thought that tattooing had become so popular in the United States in the past decades because we had lost the tribalism that glued people together for millennia, and this was a way to ape it. But as the recent election shows, the tribalism never really went away. Society was just focused on the new globalism, which we thought was the future, and now seems as if it might have been a phase, a veneer that can be puffed away by a small percentage of the country falling this way instead of that on a particular day. Tribalism reared up, like a bushman on the savannah, and drove a spear deep into our notions of America. 
     Enough. The tattoos have a cartoonish beauty, such as these designs from Sailor Jerry, a famous Hawaiian artist of the 1940s and 1950s. They have an innocence, a joy. 
     If a big tattoo show seems a stretch for the Field, that might be because the exhibit was developed by Musee du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac, Paris' newest major museum, which opened in 2006 on the Left Bank of the Seine. It runs through April 30.


    

Farmall Calendar: "It isn't just about tractors"

      Richard Schmitt remembers the first tractor he ever drove.
     “My dad started farming in the mid-40s — he had a Farmall F20,” said Schmitt, 82. “I was about 7 years old, and he taught me how to drive it. My dad still had horses, yet I couldn’t drive a horse; the horses he had were kinda wild-like.”
     Mechanized farming is such a given now, it might be hard to imagine that once farmers had to be persuaded to use tractors, which were both expensive and dangerous — a new one easily cost a year’s profits, and a quarter of the fatal farm accidents when Schmitt was a young man were caused by farmers being crushed by tractors. That had to be balanced against the ability to pull a bigger plow.
     “The horses couldn’t pull the 7-foot plow,” said Schmitt, who lives in Sterling, 100 miles due west of Chicago. “The tractor could pull a 7-foot disc, and the horses could only pull a 4-foot disc.” A bigger plow allowed for a bigger farm, more crops and — in theory — more money. “We were really farming big.”
     Now Schmitt owns 750 acres and 58 Farmall tractors, including five featured on the new 2017 Farmall calendar, which arrived on my desk last week, a welcome break from post-election turmoil. It was sent by Dan Herrick, an Oregon photographer with local roots, who works for a variety of websites selling farm equipment, including farmallparts.com.
     This is the second year he’s done the calendar.
     “My boss told me, ‘I’d love to see a Farmall calendar,'” Herrick remembered. “I said, ‘I know where a whole bunch of them are and can shoot them in their natural environment, all in north central Illinois.'”

     To continue reading, click here

"Please give him the respect that comes with that office."

     My older son said something once I liked to quote as an aphorism, because it's so true: "People are the worst!" 
     I'm not even sure exactly what it means. Just that emphasis on worst — I really like to get my back into it.  A general summation of how humans fail their lofty potential.
     I could write for hours on the subject. But today I will just focus on one aspect. Raw hypocrisy. How you can say and do one thing, applying a standard to someone else, for years, and then flip around 180 degrees when convenient and embrace something exactly opposite for yourself. How does a person do that?
   Consider this email from Sunday: 

     I got very upset when I read your column on Friday. Again, you were so critical and disrespectful to President Elect Trump.
     Stirring up more hate against him divides our country when we should be healing it and working together to solve our problems.
     Donald Trump was elected by the people and will be the President of the United States.
     Please give him the respect that comes with that office and support him when he does something praiseworthy.
     Thank you.

     Here she signed her name, which I will withhold, so as not to subject her to abuse. Nobody should experience that.
    To be honest, I've stopped answering most people. I think I added more readers to the filter Friday than I've added all year. I'm just so tired of reading their diatribes, their lengthy manifestos, their point-by-point bullshit refutations that are only persuasive if you already believe everything they're saying. I'm tired of answering, of trying to be polite, of doing that thinky-feelly thing I do. 
   But this one, I couldn't resist. This is what I wrote back:

     Question: did you give Barack Obama "the respect that comes with that office"?
     Really?
     Thanks for writing.

     No answer of course. You never get an answer.* They're shocked you wrote them back at all. And they certainly aren't going to jump through this intellectual hoop just because I hold it in front of their nose. They just shrug, I assume, and move on. It's not as if anybody does any self-assessment.  Not that anyone slaps their forehead and thinks, "Ohhhh! He means the way I slagged Barack Obama, a dignified, thoughtful man, as a secret Muslim terrorist, and castigated his elegant, sophisticated wife as Chewbacca, fooling myself that my dimwit racist code somehow went undetected, then spun around and salaamed at the feet of this foul-mouthed yam and his mail order bride wife and demanded they immediately be extended the full pomp and respect of the presidency despite their jaw-dropping 18 months spent appealing to the toilet of American political life. Yeah, I guess there is a double standard at work there."
    Nobody does that. It's naive to expect anyone would. My bad. What I've finally figured out is that honesty and reason can be as deceptive as deceit and folly, if you assume other people are using them, that truth forms some kind of hard bottom to the world. Reason can be the mat of woven rushes over the pit. Rather than assume sense, it is better to assume people are idiotic, mean, tribal, hypocritical.
    People are the worst. 
    There was no mystery here. The great tragedy is, it was all apparent. Anyone deceived has only himself to blame. The Democrats kept pointing out the inconsistencies, the lies, the fraudulence, and the hypocrisy. As if that mattered. It's like going to McDonald's and hectoring people in line about the calories. "Yeah, yeah, shut up, I'm getting a Big Mac and Biggie Fries anyway..."
     In the end, it didn't matter. None of it mattered. This election — maybe every election — was about what voters chose to focus on, what they felt was important. Not experience. Not judgment. Not temperament. Not fairness. Not character. 
       Trump supporters wanted change, and voted for him, end of story. It's like jumping off a cliff to feel the breeze. It's like going to a bar and ordering the strychnine because you like the bottle it comes in. 
     "You know that's poison," the bartender might even say. "It'll kill you."
     "That's okay," you say. "I'm looking for a change, and I really like the bottle and am really thirsty."
    "Okay..." he says, pouring a big slug. "It's your funeral."


* In this case I did, later Sunday:

Dear Mr. Steinberg, 

In response to your question, "Did you show respect to President Barack Obama?"The answer is Yes! REALLY
Thank you for considering my opinion.

To which I replied:

That's encouraging. Of course I will judge Trump by what he does. He already seems to be backing away from his most extreme beliefs, which is encouraging.

Tightly-wound flag

Watching evacuation of French army and flags

     Even before Donald Trump was elected president, I wondered what symbolic act would be justified should the infamy occur. I remembered an old photo from Life magazine, showing a weeping Frenchman in Marseilles in 1940, watching as the flags of France were evacuated to North Africa after the Nazi onslaught. Maybe it was time to put away my American flag, I thought. Store it in plastic until the occupation ends four years from now. Why let it fly over a country that has brought itself so low, delivered such an intentional blow to the freedoms we cherish?
    But that seemed defeated, timid. Better to let the banner fly over the country in good times and bad. I think that was the right decision.
    Though yesterday morning, I noticed it very tightly wrapped -- the wind. That happens. I usually go twist the flagpole so it hangs free and full. Typically, I do that several times a day.
    Not this time. Somehow, the tightly-wrapped flag feels right for this tightly-wound national moment. The election is one of those ringing disasters that drops from consciousness for a minute or an hour then comes back with the morning headlines or the phone call from a friend. And we are wound up in it again. Times are tight, in the sense of narrow, bound, difficult.
    This is something that is going to have to unwind itself—with all of our help, of course, in due course, and we are going to have to be vigilant if the rights of our fellow citizens are plucked away. But if you believe that Trump is a liar and a fraud — and I do — then that cuts both ways, and given that much of what he advocates is either unconstitutional, impossible or both, it makes sense that he will back away from the worst of what he was elected promising. He has already begun doing it, without much prompting from without.
     November is not half over. With December and most of January to come before he becomes president, with four long years after that. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we need to adjust ourselves accordingly. I can't go running to fix the flag every time some chance breeze sets it all awry. That's not my job, not any one person's job. Sometimes you have to be a little patient let things unfold and work themselves out. I'm not advocating indifference, but forbearance. Head up, shoulders back, gazing steadily at events as they unfold. Leave weeping to the French. You can't leap every time the wind blows. We will know when time for action will come, and it'll come soon enough. Now the thing is done, and we have to see what unfolds.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, I'm a sucker for a good curved building. I've been goggling Bertrand Goldberg's Marina Towers for nearly 40 years and still marvel at their funky 1960s corncob vibe. And don't get me started on the convex green loveliness of 333 W. Wacker, reflecting the passing river, the clouds. 
     Business took me to this one at lunchtime on Thursday, and I paused in front, to enjoy its decorative — yet useful in shading sunlight — metal vanes, extending beyond the top of the building, forming a ridge that is part palisade, part row of candles on a birthday cake.
    Where is this cool blue edifice? The winner gets this really handy "Don't Give Up the Ship" flag, the battle flag for — I don't need to tell you –  Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, who fought and won the Battle of Lake Erie against the British, both a reminder that our country has been through narrow straits before, and reflecting a steely resolve which we all could use at this moment. Or half of us anyway. Those with long memories might remember "Don't Give Up the Ship" is also the name of the 2002 book I wrote about my father, which is why I have a box of these things. I thought they would make good promotional giveaways. Oh well, it was worth a try. 
    Place your guesses below. Good luck. Have fun. 

Check back at 7 a.m.

   
    A million years ago, last week, I was cleaning out some file drawers in my office, looking for an editorial I wrote 13 years ago about the Cubs, and I found a few of these flags which, a century ago, on Tuesday, suddenly became relevant. 
    At the same time, I also visited a place I looked at and thought, "That would make an intriguing Saturday Fun Activity, if, you know, I still did that."
    Which I totally can, since I run the ship. So, inspired by the happy union of prize and photo, I'm returning the contest, at least for today. And if you remember the Fun Activity, it posts at 7 am., to give people who aren't insomniacs a chance to win.
    So check back at 7 a.m., and I'll have the photo up. It's probably really guessable, and my hunch is, you could use the flag.  
    Though to be honest, Trump is already backpedaling on ObamaCare. And so it begins. Still, a flag like this could come in handy.