Black History Month: John DePriest

     Given that our new president is virtually blind to the reality of black life right now in America—lumping it all together in one undifferentiated urban hell--it should not be surprising that his grasp on black history is nearly nonexistent.  

     "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more," he said at a commemorative breakfast Wednesday.

     Well, maybe a little surprising, in that he seemed to think Douglass, the most famous African-American in the 19th century, was either still alive, or obscure enough that his fame is still just getting out there, thanks to a boost from The Donald.

    This isn't to blame Trump too much. He name-checked the handful of historical figures--Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks--who get the same dutiful nod every Black History Month. 

    Which is why I alway try to broaden the scope to include people who are important but utterly forgotten. This is a column I wrote almost 15 years ago, after John DePriest's daughter asked if I could pull the newspaper's clip file on her father. I did, and wrote about the injustices he faced, the kind of injustice African-Americans faced routinely then and now.

 
     It was a hot, humid night, the last day in July, shortly before 9 p.m. John DePriest Jr., a CTA bus driver, was finishing his shift on the Windsor line.
 

John DePriest Jr. 

   DePriest had been a bus driver for about two years. A graduate of West Virginia State, he had a teaching position lined up and was driving a bus to earn money until then.
     He never made it.
     DePriest pulled his bus into a weedy lot at 79th and Coles. There were 11 white teenagers waiting for him. One had a gun.
     The year was 1959.
     DePriest had met two of the teenagers earlier that day. William Weber Jr. and Jerry Leenheer had been waiting for a bus with a couple of girls after swimming at Rainbow Beach.
     The bus stopped, but not right where they were standing. Words were exchanged. Weber, according to later testimony, shouted, "Stop, you black thing."
     DePriest, a decorated Marine vet who had been wounded at Saipan, fighting with the all-black 52nd Marines, did not take the slur calmly. He cussed out Weber, telling him to come back after he finished his shift and they would "settle" the matter.
     Weber went home, ate a slice of cake, drank a glass of milk, took a single-shot derringer he owned and went to meet DePriest.
     On the way, he enlisted the help of 10 other boys, ages 16 to 19. Some were friends, others just street toughs caught up in the promise of a rumble.
     The teens went up to another driver and, using a racial slur to refer to DePriest, asked when DePriest would get there.
     DePriest's wife, Dannette, was on the bus. He had told her of the trouble, earlier in the day, and she was riding along with him. She saw her husband confront the boys. She saw him turn, and begin to walk away. She saw Weber pull the gun.
     "John, look out!" she cried.
     DePriest turned, and as he did, Weber fired. The bullet pierced his heart. Weber, a student at Mount Carmel High School, fled.
     Later, Weber would say: "The gun just went off."
     One hundred CTA bus drivers formed an honor guard at DePriest's funeral.
     Weber was charged with murder. Leenheer and nine others were charged as accessories.
     From the start, the emotionally charged case was followed closely by many Chicagoans as emblematic of the city's persistent racial strife. The driver's father, John DePriest Sr., and the defendant's father, William Weber Sr., nearly came to blows in a hall at the city morgue during the coroner's inquest.
     "My son has never been in trouble before," Weber was telling reporters in the hallway. "He's clean of mind and body." At that point DePriest, overhearing Weber, shouted, "Dirty filthy scum!" and lunged at him, only to be restrained by relatives.
     All the boys refused to testify at the inquest.
     That November, at Weber's trial, the defense argued that DePriest had antagonized Weber by not stopping his bus promptly.
     "What is more provoking than to stand on a corner and have a bus pass you by?" asked defense lawyer John Coghlan Sr., who claimed that the prosecution was currying favor with "racial groups" and that the boy had fired by accident after DePriest menaced him. "Is the idea of defending yourself against their aggression prejudice?"
     As Coghlan was summing up, pleading with the jurors to return Weber "to his fine father and mother," Dannette DePriest screamed out, "What about my fine husband?"
     Assistant State's Attorney Lawrence Genesen said, "When teenaged wolf packs go out and hunt people because of racial prejudice, it is time we teach them they are responsible for their acts. We are asking that you sentence this defendant to the penitentiary for life."
     The first trial -- in November 1959 -- ended in a hung jury. Judge Daniel Covelli proclaimed a mistrial after just five hours of deliberation, causing First Assistant State's Attorney Frank Ferlic to publicly blast the judge.
     "The judge certainly didn't give the jury enough time," he said. "The jurors stood 8 to 3 for conviction. That wasn't close enough to call a mistrial."
     Covelli called Ferlic "a frustrated old lady" and offered to resign from the bench if his ruling was found flawed.
     A second trial was held the next month. This jury had no problem reaching a guilty verdict, and Weber was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was led away from the courtroom in handcuffs, sobbing.
     Leenheer and another teen, who claimed that they had run when Weber pulled the pistol, were cleared by a jury in May 1960. And a few weeks later, the eight other accused teens were set free.
     DePriest left behind an 8-year-old daughter, Jolyn, who is now 50. She has strong memories of her father.
     "He was a very handsome man, a very determined man," said the woman, who recently wrote the Sun-Times a letter asking for any information about the murder. "He had a lot of pride. He wasn't one to be pushed around. He was a strong family man."
     The murder left "a void in her life," she said, not only for her, but for her son.
     "It's important for African-American males to have strong role models in life," she said. "My son was deprived of that. He never had a chance to interact (with his grandfather). All he knows is what he's read."
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 29, 2001

Trigger law "a nightmare scenario for women"

     There’s no need to worry now that Donald Trump has nominated conservative Colorado judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, with an eye on overturning Roe v. Wade, and could name additional conservative justices in the future. You live here in the good old blue state of Illinois. Hillary Clinton country. Your ability to control your own body won’t be threatened, not like that of all those poor women in Texas and Indiana and other backwaters.
     Right?
     Wrong.
     Ladies, meet 720 Illinois Criminal Statute 510, as described in the Abortion Law of 1975. The bill grudgingly admits that abortion is legal, for the moment, but restates Illinois' belief that a fetus is a full human being from the moment of conception, and declares:

". . . if those decisions of the United States Supreme Court are ever reversed or modified or the United States Constitution is amended to allow protection of the unborn then the former policy of this State to prohibit abortions unless necessary for the preservation of the mother's life shall be reinstated."

     In layman's terms: the moment Roe is overturned, abortions are banned in Illinois unless the mother's life is at risk, one of four states to share what legislators call a "trigger law." The other states are Kentucky, Louisiana and South Dakota.
     If you've never heard of it, join the club.
     "Very few people know," said state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago. "The reaction is the kind of shock and disbelief you might imagine. It is the virtual smack up side the head."
     “If the Supreme Court ever overturns Roe, immediately in the state of Illinois all abortions become illegal and criminalized,” said state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, who has introduced House Bill 40 into the General Assembly to void the trigger law. “To get ahead of what might be a nightmare scenario for women in this state, we should strike those words. We need to be ready in case the worst happens, the unthinkable.”
     The bill also removes provisions in Illinois law that deny insurance coverage for an abortion to women who depend on Medicaid and State Employee Health Insurance. Fifteen other states already provide such funding.
     Why wasn’t this done years ago?
     “People never took it seriously when we would raise it in the past,” said Lorie Chaiten, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project at the ACLU of Illinois. “But people are taking it seriously now.”
     “I think if we had tried to do it in the past, even the recent past, we would be a laughingstock because [overturning Roe] was never going to happen,” said Kelly. “We would have had same reaction: ‘Why are you fixing something that’s not broken?’ We knew it wasn’t fine, and we’re here now. Now it is an emergency. ”
     The good news is that the current justice only replaces Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. His replacement will return the court to the balance it already had. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83; Anthony Kennedy is 80. What if Trump should last four or eight years?
     “We’re very concerned,” said Brigid Leahy, director of public policy at Planned Parenthood of Illinois. “If Trump has the ability to appoint another justice, we do not want to wait to see what happens. We want to make sure abortion stays safe and legal in Illinois.”
     What are the bill’s chances?
     “We’re hoping,” said Feigenholtz. “We’re going to call this bill in committee as soon as they convene, in early February.”
     “I really hope that some of the more moderate folks who have said over the years, ‘I can’t be with you on this, I would never let it become illegal,’ meant it, because I’m coming back to them now and I expect their vote,” said Kelly.
     This affects women, not only in Illinois, but surrounding states.
     “Illinois is a safe haven for women,” said Leahy. “We have already seen over the last 10 years, a very concerted nationwide effort to pass state level restrictions that make it so difficult for women to obtain abortions. They’re already leaving their home states, coming here to Illinois. Planned Parenthood sees women from surrounding states. Iowa and Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky. It ends up being easier for them to travel to Springfield.”
     And should readers be moved to try to act on this, what should they do?
     “Call their state representatives,” Feigenholtz said. “Make sure their legislators are supporting HB 40. This is going to be the most important piece of women’s legislation in this general assembly.”
     “We are working all day and all night to pass this bill so that women in this state can have access to save and legal abortions,” she continued. “We are not going backwards. We are not. We just can’t. We’re going to fight to the end on this.”
     Here we disagree. We obviously are going backwards. We just elected President Backwards, who is going to sign pieces of paper until the country marches back with him into their imagined past. The question now is: how far?

Why these orders?

     Let's step back and take in the big picture for a moment.
    On Friday, Donald Trump signed his nonsensical Muslim ban, barring all refugees from Syrian and travelers from seven Muslim nations, none of which was involved in the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing or, indeed, any terror attack on American soil. 
    On Tuesday he'll name a Supreme Court nominee whose central purpose is to overturn Roe v. Wade. And very soon, maybe also Tuesday, he will sign an executive order permitting bigots to point to their supposed religious values when shunning and abusing gay people, plus permitting adopting agencies to deny gay couples the chance to have a family based on their own baseless prejudices, cloaked in a fig leaf of supposed faith.
    Why these three groups, these three issues? Because empty security theater, abortions, and being forced to bake wedding cakes for gay people are the three most pressing problems facing our nation?
    No.
    There is a commonality to all three. Trump is doing these because he can. If he, oh, allowed Jews to be banned from hotels, as was the practice in the 1950s, or blacks from public swimming pools, as was done in the 1960s, the outrage would even be greater than we're already seeing displayed by decent, patriotic Americans over the Muslim ban, Trump's disregard for women and—projecting into the future—his anti-gay orders.
     And in a sense, he has to. He ran on a platform appealing to the fears and bigotries of his base, and now he has to deliver the goods. They expect it.
     Keep this in mind. Haters are cowards, and rarely say--anymore--"I don't want to see brown-skinned people." "I despise Jews" or "Black people frighten me." So they offer up reasons: safety. Religious freedom. The rights of the unborn imagined into "babies."
    And it works. We buy it. We fall to arguing their reasons, as if we didn't realize that these are just smokescreens. Security doesn't matter. Trump's anti-Muslim ban makes us less secure, not more. Babies don't matter -- they sure don't care about refugee babies. And religion doesn't matter. Christian faith could just as easily be cited as a reason to celebrate gay marriage as to ban it. They point to faith because we're accustomed to giving people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to faith. And we shouldn't, not when it's being used as a pretext to claim damage that is not in fact there.
     So don't get sucked in. Trump was swept to power by haters who do not make distinctions. What they do is attack who they can, when they can, how they can. Now it is Muslims, women and gays, because they are vulnerable. Next it could be you.

Where's the Queen of the Night when we need her?

Photo by Andrew Cioffi. 

     The arts are always there, waiting to shelter us. When the news from Washington gets too grim, too relentless, too crazy, there is comfort and sanity, order, beauty and justice in a book, in a play, in music.

     Not forever. You don't want to shut off reality completely. By keeping track we know when it's time to rush downtown and howl down our captors.
     But nobody can be aghast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That'll kill you as sure as jack-booted thugs will.
     So it was with gratitude that last Wednesday morning I popped into the Civic Opera House to peek at the Lyric Opera of Chicago's rehearsals of "Carmen"—I'm taking 100 readers to that classic Bizet opera next month, and will have a column about the opera, the rehearsal and the contest ... as soon as the marketing department gives me the green light. But just hearing the music, seeing the dancers, even in a rough rehearsal space. Suddenly a certain demagogue was Jupiter: a giant gasbag rendered into a dull spot lost amidst the much brighter stars. 

Photo by Todd Rosenberg

     And they pay me for this....
     That afternoon, I blew off all responsibilities and caught the last matinee of "The Magic Flute." A new production, transferring Mozart's 1791 tale of love, bird-catching, and Masonic hoo-hah to the post-war suburbs—it's basically become an entertainment staged on the patio of a revolving suburban Cape Cod home. The three Genii, usually falsetto boys in white wigs on a magic ship, now have cowboy hats and sheriff badges.
     I don't always like the staging decisions at the Lyric, but this one, for me, worked, the Levitown aspect underscoring the inherent weirdness of the opera. Or maybe I just really, really needed it to work. No need to bother with the plot—I'm not sure why anyone ever mention the plots of operas. They're all the same: the couple meets, falls immediately in love, gets separated, reunites, to live happily ("Magic Flute" et al) or die protractedly ("Aida," "Tristan und Isolde").
     Though the news has a way of intruding. "Flute" begins with our hero, Tamino, being chased by a dragon (a rather Chinese-New-Yearish dragon, this being an entertainment at a suburban home). The dragon is slain by an arrow shot by the Queen of the Night's three Ladies, though the heroic deed is claimed by their feckless bird catcher, Papageno.
     For this, the Ladies clap a padlock on his lips (causing him, delightfully, to have to hum one of Mozart's songs). But you can't go through a whole opera like that, and the Queen shows pity, removing the lock so he can chatter, though not before the Ladies extract a vow.
     "So you will never tell a lie, or brag about a deed done by another?" they sing. Papageno agrees, and they all rejoice.

If only every liar had

a lock like this upon his mouth

then would hate, calumny and rancor

be replaced by love and brotherhood!

      Sing it, sisters! 

      No need to point it out, right? I didn't think so. We're all there. The three Ladies in the "Magic Flute" picked up on a Papageno's single lie right away, and he was punished for it.
     Shame that doesn't happen enough in real life—that's why we need fiction. In real life, if you get away with it, maybe because you're really rich and surrounded by fawning sycophants, then lying becomes a pattern, and you lie more and more, and can't acknowledge it and can't stop. That's what makes it pathological.
     The only question I have is this: if you are a liar lying about everything in order to prop your ego up and pretend like your disasters are successes, can the people who have thrown in their lot with you really not notice? The cowardice of Papageno is funny because,well, it's an opera. In real life it's shameful.

     I don't want you to think that I spent the three hour opera brooding on politics. And lying is not really intrinsic to Mozart's comic opera. Though it sure is to ours, at the moment, though whether this tale ends up a comedy or a tragedy, well, we're still working that out.

Fear and loathing in the cat food aisle

Photo by Sebastian Farmborough

    The haters won. In the recent presidential election at least. Our country was invaded from within and now we have to watch, powerless, as they give their fears and biases the strength of law in our once-great nation.
    The only defense — at the moment — is to object, to loudly state the truth, declare the wrongness of this, and reaffirm our abused American values. President Donald Trump signed a brazenly-bigoted executive order Friday barring all refugees from the United States for four months, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely, and barring immigrants from seven Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
    Chaos ensued worldwide. And while, yes, protesters gathered spontaneously at airports and pushed back and a federal judge stayed the order, whether over the long term the courts will be respected any more than the media or any other pillar of American democracy that Trump is kicking at is doubtful.

    The pretext was to avoid terror. But this comes from the dynamic of welding terrorist acts committed by Muslims to their faith, while writing off non-Islamic acts of terror as being due to something else. This bias was shown when Trump said he would encourage the entry of Christians, who are also persecuted abroad, though nowhere near the numbers or severity of people in countries like Syria.
     This shameful prejudice will cost the lives of people who could have become upstanding American citizens, draw justifiable scorn upon our country, and make the United States less, not  more, secure. The only comfort—cold comfort—is the knowledge we are not alone in this prejudice, nor is it anything new, as this column from 2009 reminds us. I think this explains why Donald Trump was elected as much as anything can. It was written back when the column contained subheadings, and I've left those in.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Two weeks ago, the people of Switzerland voted to ban new construction of minarets, the towers associated with mosques.
     Which raises the obvious question: How many minarets are already in Switzerland? There must be a whole lot, to provoke this extraordinary ban.
     How many? Guess. Ten? Fifty? A hundred?
     Four. There are exactly four minarets in Switzerland. And now that's all there will ever be.
     Italy is considering a similar ban — odd, since, traditionally, Germany usually took the lead in this sort of thing. You'd think, in Europe, they'd be a little reluctant to go down the step-on-the-scary-minority route. They've been there before.

Don't block the coconut shrimp!

     The Swiss ban is based on fear, which, sadly, the Swiss do not have a monopoly on, as this e-mail illustrates:
         
           Neil,

    I was in Costco in Niles yesterday around 5 p.m. The store was packed. I was going in to buy cat food. The pet food section is on the far wall, at the corner. As I approached the cat food, I saw three women in full on burkas. Completely cloaked except for their eyes.
     They were kneeling and praying to Mecca. In a COSTCO. In the USA. I gotta tell you, I was totally freaked out and totally enraged. At that moment I wanted to attack them, physically. Really. I couldn't believe it, and I thought it was totally wrong. If you have to pray to Mecca, don't go to Costco. I got my cat food, and walked past them and I just said, loudly, "This is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA."
     What could I have done? I wanted to complain to the management, but by the time I got through the line to pay I just wanted to get the hell out of the store. That experience totally made me sympathize with the woman who pulled the headscarf off the Muslim woman on the South Side. I am not a religious person at all, but I was enraged. What is going on? What do you think about that? . . . I had a cell phone with a camera, and I wanted to film them but I couldn't do it.
Thanks!

     Here she gives her full name and place of employment -- which I, a kind soul, will withhold.
     I wrote her back:

     While I appreciate your candor, you should realize that this is one of those times when a complaint says a lot more about the complainer than it does the thing being complained about. A few questions—What is it about a Costco that makes it less appropriate a location than anyplace else for those women to pray? Had they been a trio of elderly women doing the rosary at the coffee shop in a Borders bookstore, would you also have been "enraged"? If the answer is no, then it isn't an issue of people praying in commercial public spaces, but how they pray and what kind of space they pray in. Is Costco somehow especially sacred to you? I mean, I know they hand out that coconut shrimp, but still . . .
     And what does "This is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" mean to you? I thought it meant that this is exactly the sort of place where a woman, however she dresses, could feel safe from being attacked by strangers enraged by her attire, as opposed to, say, Saudi Arabia, where she might be attacked for wearing a short dress. Is the Saudi way actually the American way?
     Frankly, if you're sending this to me, then you haven't quite grasped what I've been writing, lo these many years. As the saying goes: Hating other people is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die. Had you viewed this calmly, an argument could be made that if we allow religions to start using our discount stores as places of worship, then the aisles will be clogged and we won't be able to get to our cat food.
     That is reasonable, and I would agree. But it is also a long way from rage. Would you feel the same if a group of Christmas carolers were blocking your way to the cat food? If Islam is so offensive, then why were you the one who was "enraged" in Niles, while the Muslim women were the ones praying to God?
     My older son's junior high school math teacher wears a full burka with a face veil, something I was surprised to discover at parent-teacher conferences. When I later asked my son why he hadn't mentioned that before—it seemed interesting, the sort of thing one might toss out in casual conversation—he said, and I quote: "You know, Dad, you taught us that kind of thing doesn't matter." I'm proud of that. Turns out she's a good, enthusiastic math teacher, a fact that would have been lost to me had I worked myself into a knot over her outfit. As it was, it took me maybe 30 seconds to get used to talking with a woman wearing a veil, a path I heartily recommend.
     It's still a person under there.
     Thanks for writing. I don't usually argue with readers, one-on-one, at least not at such length. But yours is, alas, a common attitude that most people don't have the lack of inhibition to actually come out and say, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try to set you straight.

Best,

Neil Steinberg

                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 13, 2009

Birds of a feather

Photo by Karen Garrett, Forest Preserves of Cook County.

     "Chop skin hock," my neighbor called to me, from the rolled down window of her SUV, stopping on Cedar Lane.
     I paused, walking the dog Tuesday, and gazed at her with bovine incomprehension. Day by day, the world becomes more of a puzzle...
     "Chop...skin...hock," she said, articulating each word. Then drove off.
     We live in a friendly neighborhood, with everyone greeting and chatting with everyone else. Or maybe it's just me. Making my thrice-daily rounds with the dog, I love waving to Janet, the crossing guard, as she rolls past, on her way to her morning post in her heavy-duty Tundra pickup and anyone else I know, or don't know. There are maybe five core neighbors on my block, friends who have been over our house and had us over their house, and we almost always exchange a few words, if not talk for 20 minutes, people I've loaned power tools to, or borrowed them from. Anyone who makes eye contact gets a smile and a nod. I'm well-acquainted with the dozen or so dogs on the surrounding three blocks who are friendly, and the half dozen or so who are not (though sometimes I suspect it is the owner, and not the dog, who is actually unfriendly, and am not beyond mournfully informing Kitty as we walk away, "That's not a friendly dog," in a voice just loud enough to be heard).
     I wasn't particularly thrown by my neighbor's enigmatic message.  Still, I reported the remark to my wife.
    "She said, 'Shoppinghon,'" I said. My wife thought a moment. "Washington," she explained. "That's probably it." Nothing more needed to be discussed.
    I didn't like the mystery, but wasn't about to knock on her door and ask. "Hey, what was it you called to me in the street the other day?"
     It might be better not to know.  "Washington" made sense. These are strange times, and the bitter politics have filtered down to my Richard Scarry storybook street. Maybe somehow related to the women's march, a subject we'd studiously avoided the day before, being on opposite sides of the political spectrum as we are. But we can't allow that to poison our interactions too. Our dogs, oblivious to the changes in government, nosed each other and we talked about ... what? The large hawk that had settled into the tree across the street, in front of my house—our block has hawks, owls, birds of all kind. It's a wonderful thing. I was speculating on how nice it would be to have a camera with a long lens, for just such a moment. We had been idling, waiting for the hawk to take to wing so we could better see it, speculating on its identity.
    "Cooper's hawk," I said, with false confidence. A guess, more or less. She seemed skeptical, pointing out a bold white line on its tail.
    Now it was Wednesday morning and, as fate would have it, I was trucking home down Center Avenue just as my neighbor was pulling her SUV out of her driveway to take her daughter to school. I knew if I put on a burst of speed I could arrive at the spot where her car paused while she put it into forward. Her window was already open.
     "Did you figure it out?" she said. My blank look must have registered. "No," I smiled.
     "Sharp...Shinned...Hawk," she said. "You can tell by the white line on the tail."

Cooper's Hawk

Sharp-shinned Hawk

     Ah. The Sharp-Shinned Hawk. Very similar to the Cooper's Hawk and no shame in the error (if it was an error. The bird has flown, and I yield nothing, though I like to give people the benefit of the doubt). Cornell has an excellent guide to the differences between the two birds, on the scant chance than anyone beside myself cares).
     And the point is? When the youngest boy left for college, I announced we could now happily move to the city. My wife parried that we lived in such a nice block, and that we'd be fools to flee that. I couldn't argue. I'm sure it must be an illusion, but I swear I can feel the little blurp of happy dopamine squirt in my brain after pausing to chat with someone. We are social animals. At least I am. And if the subject is birds, all the better. At least the disagreements are subject to the underlying belief that we live in a concrete world of established facts and categories. A hawk is not a handsaw. Not yet anyway.

Manning our stations until relieved

    Twenty-one years ago today my first regular column ran in the Chicago Sun-Times. Which means I'm finally legal. I thought I would celebrate the anniversary by digging back into the archive for something relevant, and stumbled over this, written in 2012 for the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. (I don't have a column in today's paper because I took a few days off to finish my next Mosaic project).
     Why is this story of the Titanic's radio operators relevant? Yes, for the image of the great unsinkable vessel striking an iceberg through carelessness and going down. But more for its tone. With Donald Trump and his henchmen attacking on the mainstream media, they forget that, for many of us, this is not a job, this is a calling. If we wanted money, we'd have become rapacious businessmen like the plutocrats Trump surrounds himself with. But we aren't amoral charlatans like Trump et al, doing anything, screwing anybody for a buck, even ripping off struggling students trying to get an education at his ersatz college. We're trying to comprehend the world and present what's happening as best we understand it.  If Trump can't stand a single fact that doesn't shimmer with his supposed glory, the media is the opposite, following facts where they go, even if they make us look bad. There's a nobility in that.

Steve Bannon

     Trump chief advisor Steve Bannon's comment this week, that the press should "just keep its mouth shut" and yield the microphone to him and his bundish buddies, because THEY represent real America, shows just how out-of-it all these goosesteppers truly are. That's never happening, and the fact that Bannon would beg for relief shows it's getting under his paper-thin skin, already, one week into their attempt to ruin this great country. Sorry Charlie. The media isn't going anywhere but up his ass like a swarm of hornets. We're at our stations, tapping out our distress signal as the cold water laps around our ankles. If they think it's bad now, just wait.




                                        Oh, they built the ship Titanic
                                          to sail the ocean blue
                                         And they thought they built a ship
                                         that the water couldn't go through.
                                         But the good Lord raised his hand,
                                         said the ship would never land.
                                         It was sad when the great ship went down.

     Or so the version went that we sang at Camp Wise, in Chardon, Ohio, in the 1970s, a song that had been sung at summer camps for the previous 50 years, is sung still, and might very well be sung forever.
     Exactly 100 years this Sunday, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, taking the lives of 1,500 passengers. With a weekend sure to be dedicated to its memory, the question is: why?
      Why this shipwreck? What about it so resonates in the public's mind? The Lusitania, torpedoed in 1915, took 1,198 lives and is a trivia question. Nobody sings about it.
     The obvious answer is that the Titanic story has something for everybody. There is luxury and poverty, heroism and cowardice, its midnight iceberg rendezvous a payback for the boast of being "unsinkable." Movies and books keep the memory alive, as does its presence in the language—almost everybody knows what rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic means.
     As the son of a radio operator, who grew up listening to the urgent chirpings of Morse code coming out of the Hammarlund Super Pro radio receiver displayed in his den, the part of the Titanic story that always gets to me is the heroic tale of the Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride.
     As the junior radioman—he was just 22—Bride had the night shift. It was just after midnight, April 15, 1912, and he was telling Phillips to go to bed, when the captain stuck his head into the wireless room.
     "We've struck an iceberg," Captain Edward Smith said. "You better get ready to send out a call for assistance."
     Ten minutes later Smith was back, telling them to start calling for help.
     Phillips began tapping out "CQD" —"CQ" meant "calling all stations" and "D" meant "distress" — as well as the ship's location and call letters, "MGY."
     "He flashed away at it and we joked while he did so," Bride recalled. "All of us made light of the disaster."
     Bride told Phillips that here was his opportunity to send an "SOS."
     "It's the new call and it may be your last chance to send it," Bride said. "We picked up first the steamship Frankfurt. We gave her our position and said we had struck an iceberg and needed assistance."
     Phillips reached the Cunard liner Carpathia. "Come at once!" he signaled. The liner replied it was 58 miles away and "coming hard." Phillips told Bride to tell the captain. "I went through an awful mass of people to his cabin," he later said. "The decks were full of scrambling men and women."
     Over the next two hours, as the ship slowly sank, Phillips kept sending out distress signals, hoping to find a closer ship ­— there was one, but its radio operator had gone to sleep. Bride kept tabs on what was going on outside.
     "I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it, I don't know," Bride later recalled.
     Phillips suggested "with a sort of a laugh" that Bride look out and see if all the people were off in the boats, or if any boats were left. Bride found one collapsible boat left, only because the men were having an "awful time" trying to get it free. Captain Smith returned to the radio shack one last time.
     "Men," the captain said. "You have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it's every man for himself."
     "I looked out," Bride said. "The boat deck was awash. Phillips clung on sending and sending. He clung on for about 10 minutes, or maybe 15 minutes after the captain had released him. The water was then coming into our cabin. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about."
     Bride returned to the collapsible boat, and was holding onto it when a wave crested over the deck and washed it away. He turned for one last look at the ship, "smoke and sparks were rushing out of her funnel." Bride lost hold on that boat and had to swim through the icy water to the other boats, as the band played "Autumn" on deck. Hands pulled him into another lifeboat. Phillips perished.
     For me, the Titanic radio operator story is a metaphor for life. It signals to us something about duty and perseverance in the face of difficulty. You're not the captain. You didn't design the ship. You don't own it. But you stay at your station, no matter what, tapping out your messages with all the skill you have, as long as you can, until relieved.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 2012

     Postscript: I like to act on a good idea when I see it. In the comments below, Bob Miller had a good suggestion. I jumped on Twitter and put it out there, for all the good that might do, and I'll try to tuck it in the column as well. Language is everything, as Newt Gingrich showed us, to a great nation's misfortune.