Rachel Maddow fires at Trump, blows off her toe

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. Alaska Hawaii (detail) by Nam June Paik

      Like a lot of people, I noticed Rachel Maddow's tweet Tuesday evening, the one where she ballyhooed having Donald Trump's tax returns. Something smelled wrong about it, but it didn't cost anything to turn the television on at 8 p.m. and see what was up. 

       I have to admit, I've never tuned into her program before, though I've caught snippets, online, and she seems an intelligent person, good-hearted and thoughtful. 
     But generally, getting your news from television is like trying to breathe through a straw: a lot of effort for a little result.  Fox News is unwatchable agit-prop for right wing zealots, and CNN's reputation died when Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared in 2014, the network veering into some weird Twilight Zone of round-the-clock speculation, time-filling and tap-dancing. It was closer to performance art than reportage, with crazy speculation and holograms, a stain that can never be removed.  MSNBC, well, I really didn't have a preconceived notion about them. Somehow related to NBC. 
     So my expectations were not high. Maddow began by ... well, I can't say exactly what she was doing. "Setting the stage" someone tweeted, when I began urging her to get on with it already. Establishing that yes, people were in fact interested in Donald Trump's tax returns. And those returns could show all sorts of interesting things, like being indebted to some Russian gentleman who paid more for one of Trump's houses than it was worth. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The same couple ideas, worn to a nubbin like a toddler's adored blankie. Then a commercial break. We were introduced to David Cay Johnston, who won the Pulitzer Prize -- not the gold standard of excellence she seems to imagine it to be -- who has a book on Trump out, and received the two-page photocopy in his mailbox. Twenty minutes into the show ... nothing.
     I went to the kitchen for a snack.
    Eventually, after much waving of the photocopied return, it was revealed that, in 2005, Donald Trump earned $158 million and paid $33 million in taxes, and it was so obvious, at least to me, that Maddow had been played— by Trump. You want taxes? I can see him sneer, here's taxes. The few pages that don't show the depth of his enslavement to the Russians, or his miserable cheapness at charity, or any of the dozen deficiencies that make Trump an unfit president and are the reason he wouldn't release them. He earned a lot of money in 2005 and payed a defendable share of tax. This wasn't a revelation, it was a blow job under the desk, the tax return version of that New York Post headline "Best Sex I Ever Had." You could tell it was a plant because the White House confirmed its authenticity, and the pro forma howl of outrage was just a wee bit muted. 
     I understand there is time to fill and eyeballs to attract. But the Donald Trump presidency is a true crisis, and goofy shit like this minimizes it. Maybe, in my ignorance, I gave Rachel Maddow a stature she didn't deserve -- a friend who watches MSNBC said the entire three hour block on MSNBC is always talking heads hyperventilating about every Trump nuance "like their hair was on fire." 
    Our nation is in danger. This is not the time for publicity gimmicks and cheap stunts to hook an audience. A hundred and fifty years ago, newspapers would print melodramatic fiction. You'd get to the end of the story and there would be a line, "And that is what it might have been like had all the animals escaped from the zoo Tuesday!" The modern world killed that, supposedly, and Maddow's tax return PR grab was a step back toward P.T. Barnum because what she claimed, while literally true, wasn't true in the way she pretended it to be. She didn't actually have what she pretended to have: something significant. It was like my claiming I have a new Ferrari when what I really have is a new Ferrari tire. 
     Whenever I write about Trump or anything related to Trump, my readership goes up 50 percent. So by that logic, I should write about Trump continually. I don't because a) some days a half dozen outlets say everything there is to say about that day's outrage and I don't see the need to pile on or echo; b) four years is a long time, and we need to take a break from just gazing in horror at the calamity; and c) other interesting and important stuff doesn't stop going on just because our country is on fire.
     If the sun were suddenly about to explode, but we had a month to live, we would not want to spend it reading "New Details on Sun Exploding" every single minute. We'd get it, and only want to hear truly significant stuff ("Here's the Date the Sun-Will Explode.") Nobody wants a list of stars that aren't blowing up in a month.
      That's why I avoid the "orange Chee-to" cheap jabs at Trump. I don't care that Melania is staying at Trump Tower, or that he golfs every weekend even though he promised he'd never take a vacation. That lie has to get in line behind all the others and it's a long line. What I care about is that he is a deeply un-American hate monger, in thrall to the Russians, who is working to undermine the country morally, economically, physically -- yanking away health insurance from 24 million people, many of whom are so out to sea they voted for the man. That every day he works to undermine the legitimacy of the media, the courts, the idea of truth itself. He's a liar, a bully and fraud. The rest is just window-dressing. 
     That's what's important. And Maddow yelling "Fire!" Monday night, well, it makes battling the blaze that much harder. It gives Trump the chance to say, "See, the media scum saw the taxes," when we didn't see anything at all. It casts an important voice into disrepute -- she could say she has Steve Bannon's head on a pike, details at 9 p.m. EST, and I'm not sure I'd tune in.  Rachel Maddow is still one of the good guys, but less an asset today than she was Monday. And the worst part: it was a self-inflicted wound. Someone dangled a few photocopies at her, she drew too fast and blew off a toe. 

"Pain is the great destroyer of language"

Gold Star Monument, "I gave my best to make a better world,' Nashville, Tennessee.

   
    This is one of those columns where writing it was the easy part. The daylong trick was cutting it from 1100 to 679 words. There was the poetry aspect and the head trauma aspect and the VA botching its job aspect, with the very quotable Dawn McGuire saying things such as "I feel like I'm married to Wittgenstein" of her time getting her masters of divinity at the Union Theological Seminary. It wasn't on point, but how often do you get to use a line like that? 
    I somehow managed. If you want more of McGuire, do get her new book, American Dream with Exit Wound, which I've read and recommend, or her previous one, Aphasia Cafe. You can hear her reading a heartbreaking and smart poem from it, "Aphasia Breaks the News," originally published, mirabile dictu, by the American Academy of Neurology Journal, by clicking here. 

Dr. Dawn McGuire

     Neurology, the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology, publishes papers on brain science with titles like "Vesicular acetylcholine transporter defect underlies devastating congenital myasthenia syndrome."
     It also, marvelous to relate, prints poetry. And yes, the poems are peer reviewed.
      In 2012 it published "Poems from the Aphasia Cafe," from a book by Dawn McGuire, a San Francisco neurologist and poet. McGuire's poems echo her work with shattered minds, particularly wounded veterans — "aphasia" is a term for loss of speech through brain injury. McGuire, who grew up in Appalachian Kentucky and studied at Princeton and Columbia, does not mince words when talking about the vets under her care.
     "They come back and are expected to reintegrate without any attention to the fact they are often very young men who have been asked to really split their psyches and do things that the culture and family they grew up in would find abhorrent," she said. "There's nothing like boot camp for reintegration, where they can see they've been split by these experiences, by what they've done, what's been done to them. There's no way for vets to re-enter the regular community."
     Boot camp for returning vets is a great idea. We put soldiers through intensive training before they serve, but they're left on their own when they come home and often need help most.

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A pocketful of seeds

     Well, Northwestern's basketball team is in the NCAA championships for the first time in its 78-year history, leading to an interesting question.
    Do they stand a chance?

    "No," said a Wildcat sophomore of my acquaintance, showing that school spirit is hereditary, "they're just not that good."
    Though that was not the interesting question I have in mind. That's coming up.
    "Even if they win Thursday," he continued, "they go against the No. 1 seed, Gonzaga."
   Which leads to a more interesting question. What's Gonzaga? I had never heard of it in my life. It sounded like a type of cheese.
    Gonzaga University founded in 1887, a Jesuit school in Spokane Washington. Proof that: a) you can have a really good basketball team, the best in fact, and be obscure. and b) sports is good publicity, since, assuming I am not the only one who hadn't heard of the school, people are sure hearing of it now.
    But even that isn't the really interesting question, at least to me. Here it comes. 
    "How did 'seed' get to be a term for ranking in sports?" I wondered. Seeding is when, in a championship, the best teams or players are paired against the worst, early on, so that the top contenders don't knock each other out early in the tournament. 
     The boy had no idea regarding its etymology. I guessed it might be a corruption of "seat." 
     Back at the office, the mothership Oxford English Dictionary offered a full page plus of definitions. The word itself is a thousand years old, the first meaning given over to varieties of grain, bran and plants. The second definition seemed promising."The germ or latent beginning of some growth or development." That might fit with participants in a championship ranking. Then on to lobster roe and bubbles in glassmaking. 
      On a hunch, I turned to the Oxford Supplement. Latecomers that didn't quite work their way into the main show. To cease flowering, small crystals in liquid ... bingo! "Sport, esp. Lawn Tennis. [f. sense *II of the vb]. One of a number of seeded players in a tournament." 
    The first usage is from 1933, from The Aldin Book of Outdoor Games. "'But why put my beloved lawners last?' wails the Thibetan 'seed.'"
    The quote marks show it's a novel usage, at the time.
    The reference to a verbal form sent me back to the main dictionary to scour closer, in case I overlooked something in all those seeds. Yes, the II usage of the verb. "To stock with inhabitants" and a 1627 reference, garbled with age, "Here bigines at noe pe ledepe toper world to sede."
    Hmmm, that's not very satisfying. I looked online. Zip, except for this NPR segment from yesterday that said, in essence, "it's from tennis." Nice digging guys! 
     H.L. Mencken's three-volume The American Language had nothing except "seed" as a charming dialect past tense of "see." Fun, but not exactly on point. 
    Then I turned to Wentworth and Flexner's  Dictionary of American Slang, which did offer this definition of seed: "A young man with little ability or promise of future success."
   Ooo, tempting. A slow pitch, right down that pipe, to mix my sports metaphors. No! I'm not going to say it. We do not traffic in the obvious. But a good point to end. Go Cats!
     

All together now: "Thank you Congressman Shimkus!!!"

     Apologize? Why would anybody want Rep. John Shimkus to apologize for scoffing, during last week's debate over the GOP gutting of the Affordable Care Act, at the idea that men should be required to pay for prenatal care? The issue is, he said the next day, "simple."
     He's right. It is simple. We should all thank him and I will, right now: Thank you Congressman Shimkus.
     Because in this swirling political era where the chaos at the top of government sends out echoes of confusion, where today's baseless charge or policy enormity can barely be grasped before it is replaced by tomorrow's, Shimkus' question provides a simple moment of clarity, a line you can be either on this side of or that.
     Why should a man be made to buy insurance that includes prenatal care when a man obviously cannot have children? Why is it his business?
     You can see the thinking behind the question. It shows through like a tadpole's guts. Are we not free people, each caring for his own private affairs? Isn't suggesting otherwise just squishy liberal it-takes-a-village-collectivism?
     It's a trick question, because it involves women, whose rights are so automatically trampled by society that we hardly notice. Bearing and raising children is women's work. Thank you Rep. Shimkus, Republican of Illinois. If we flipped that question around, and asked what business it is of any man whether a woman gets pregnant or not, or ends her pregnancy or doesn't, Shimkus' party would have a very different answer. Of course it's his business. It's everybody's business except, perhaps, the woman herself, who can't be trusted to make that moral choice.

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Spring forward

  

      It is perhaps the most useful mnemonic phrase: spring forward, fall behind. 
     At least it was, back in the day when we set our clocks. Now clocks -- on our computers, our cell phones -- pretty much set themselves.
     Still, helpful to bear in mind, as twice a year, once in the fall, and once today at 2 a.m., we try to wrap our heads around the complexities of Daylight Savings Time. 
     Expect a bigger hoopla next year. It was in March, 1918 when the House of Representatives voted 252 to 40 to pass a law "To Save Daylight and Provide Standard Time for the United States."
    Well, Standard Time had already been enacted, by the railroads, in 1883. Before then, each locality had its own concept of time and there was no particular need to synch them up. Noon was when the sun was directly overhead on Main Street. 
    It was only when the option of Daylight Savings Time—begun in Germany, a fact its opponents milked to maximum advantage—that Standard Time, set by the Union Pacific, suddenly became "God's time" set in the Book of Genesis and untouched ever since. 
     Columbus politicians might fan their soup with their hats, James Thurber once wrote, but they had enough good old-fashioned horse sense to know fiddling with the clocks was "directly contrary to the will of the Lord God Almighty and that the supporters of the project would burn in hell."
     There is such comfort today, when half the country seems lost in unreason, rejecting the science of climate change and vocally backing an unfit liar and fraud, to look back a century and realize that the American people have always had trouble with anything the least bit complicated.  Daylight Savings Time moves the clocks forward an hour in the spring so that when June 20 arrives, instead of the sun rising in Bangor, Maine at 3:49 a.m., as it would under Standard Time, the clock will read the relatively luxurious 4:49 a.m. instead. So the hour of daylight that most people would be sleeping through is shifted to evening.
    That would seem a bonus, but Americans (and Britons, and Canadians) fought it like a rend in the fabric of reality.
     "It prevents people from enjoying the air in the morning, when it is fresh and healthful, by compelling them to go in shop or office one hour before it is necessary one New Yorker wrote to Congress. "It upsets the schedule of all large manufacturing plants, as their working hours are arranged so as to take advantage of the summer daylight hours. It is the direct cause of overcrowding of transit lines during rush hours, as it causes everybody to go to work at the same time, where as under normal conditions different factories have different arrangement of working hours, thereby lessening the overcrowding of cars."
    Congress passed it, but some Americans simply refused to comply.
    "I'm fooled enough," a Charles Gale was quoted saying in the New York World, "without fooling myself on purpose."
    The move had been sold as a war expediency, and as soon as it was over, Congress sprang to end it. As usual, Southerners led the way backward.
    "God's time is true. Man-made time is false," said Rep. E.S. Candler of Mississippi. "Truth is always mighty and should prevail. God alone can create daylight."  
     "I am opposed to Congress undertaking to usurp not only the powers of the Executive and the States, but those of God almighty and seeking to fix the time when the sun shall rise and set," said Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi. 
    In July, 1919, Congress repealed Daylight Savings Time, twice, and President Wilson vetoed the bill, twice. But Congress overrode his veto.
    But as so happens when the federal government drops the ball, localities stepped in.
    "The Big Apple had taken a shine to Daylight Saving,"  writes Michael Downing, in his engaging book on America's struggle with the clock, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time, from which much of this account was cribbed.  "If this hadn't happened, residents of North America would have been permanently spared the annual stem-winding ritual and its attendant controversies." 
    Among the advantages of Daylight Savings, it gave the 9 a.m. open of the New York Stock Exchange an hour jump on London, allowing traders to take advantage of the London markets before they closed at 3 p.m. London time.  In 1920 New York City went back on Daylight Savings, and--pushed by stock and mercantile traders--Boston followed suit, pressing the Massachusetts legislature to draw in the whole state. As did Philadelphia and Cleveland, though Cleveland's law moved the clocks in the exchange and nowhere else.
    The split—with urban centers, plugged into the global grid, embracing daylight savings, while farmers, worried the cows would become confused, shunning it. Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, was famously a crazy quilt of varying time zones.  It was not until 2006 that, after much debate, the entire state decided to tamper with time as God intended it. 
     
         

$20,000? No? How about cookies?

     When I wrote about Leonard's Bakery in Northbrook earlier this week, the most interesting part never made it into the piece. The owner was not particularly chatty, so I ran Leonard's through Nexis, thinking there must be press on it. There wasn't. Not a word, ever, by anybody, over the past 20 years. Which is a shame because the place really is a treasure. Maybe I'll spend the day there for its 30th anniversary in August. 
    Well, there was one thing. This, written by me four years ago. I like how I contrasted my real-life emails with the upper echelon moral squishiness of a Tribune panjandrum. 
    There is an interesting typo in this—what I call a "brain cramp." When I refer to "rugellah," which are sweet little pastries of cinnamon and raisins, I'm actually thinking of "mandel bread" which are, like I describe them, soft versions of biscotti.  

     Would you be interested and available to speak to the JCC Women's Auxiliary Luncheon on Wednesday, September 5th at Birchwood Country Club in Highland Park? The topic would be politics. Love to have you! Please let me know.
     A funny 2006 "Saturday Night Live" bit begins with Steve Martin on his cellphone. "I'll be home by morning," he says. "I'm just doing this, uh, corporate gig . . . I don't know, some corporation." Then his hosts enter the room. "We are so excited to have you here," says one. "This is a great day for Hamas!"
     "Hamas?" says Martin, in a small voice.
      Martin isn't so sure he's the right guy to perform at "Hamas — a Victory Celebration." But the money is so huge he can't say no. And his hosts try to reassure him. "You are a hero here for your comic genius, your ability to play tender moments, and your well-known hatred for the state of Israel!"
     Life imitated art this week when Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial board member Clarence Page found himself in hot water for accepting $20,000 and a trip to Paris to give a three-minute speech before a suspected Iranian terrorist group. He says he had no idea whom he was talking to until he got there.
     That seems curious to me, having just gone through my own delicate if infinitely more low-rent negotiations for a talk. Forget Paris. I wouldn't go to Highland Park without knowing what I was getting myself into.
     "Politics" is sort of a broad subject. Anything else you can tell me about the talk? How many people do you expect?
     I should mention that, on rare occasions, I've gotten what I considered a hefty amount of money; Elmhurst College once paid me a few thousand dollars to deliver a lecture.
     We usually get about 50-70 to attend. Although, you could be a big draw. We'll give you lunch if you like. The food is very good
     Though I prefer to get paid, I often end up speaking for nothing, or whatever token the group wants to give. The Rotary gave me a lovely date planner. Twice. I've been given potted plants, paperweights. A synagogue once offered a plate of ruggaleh — think biscotti, only softer and Jewish — which then became my gold standard of excellence.
     Hmmmmm . . . I try not to speak for free. Do any of your ladies bake? I'm a sucker for ruggaleh . . . if you can have someone bake a plate of ruggaleh, we have a deal.
     The key question is whether speaking fees constitute bribes. People doing unethical things try to ritualize them — in the old days, crooked pols ran insurance agencies and anyone wanting to corrupt them bought a hiked-up policy. A similar scam would be: speak to us, we pay you a huge fee, and nobody has to accept envelopes stuffed with cash.
     The issue isn't bias. You can argue that Page — who, I should add, I've never met and rarely read — is in the bias business. He isn't paid to be neutral, but to give his opinions. The question is transparency — the idea is those opinions are based on his honest analysis of the world, not a $20,000 check cut to him in secret. That's why the Tribune has its policy, although it seems odd — they aren't against their writers taking money, per se, they just want to sign off on the transaction.
     To me, bias is on the page. You can be Simon Pure, you can send back the promotional pens sent to you at Christmas, and still let your personal prejudices ruin your work. Or you can be a cauldron of rigid notions, but set aside your own feelings — I wrote Ronald Reagan's obit for the Sun-Times and I despised Reagan. But the piece was fair and respectful and nobody complained.
     Ingratitude is a writer's best friend. I like to think that if Elmhurst College started, oh, refusing to admit black students, I'd leap upon them with a snarl, and not pause, thinking, "Gee, but those are the nice folks who asked me to give an Andrew Prinz Guestship Lecture for Political Awareness." I'm hard on Northwestern, and it gave me a scholarship.
     Neil — We will pay you! We are not asking you to speak for free. I will get you a pound of ruggaleh from Leonard's Bakery in Northbrook. Would $300 do it?
     It seems odd to even have this controversy in the era of Citizens United, when corporate money is deluging the American political process. I have sympathy for Page. One moment you're living the high life in Paris. The next your boss has you kneeling on a rail. Par for the course, that journalists still get in trouble for the crumbs that come our way. Of course, $20,000 is a very big crumb. A lot of money, though still too cheap a price to sell your reputation. But isn't that always the most shocking aspect of scandals? The smallness of the stake. Postage stamps, crystal. My guess is that 20 grand will look less and less to Page as the years go by. Not to be on a high horse. I might have grabbed for it, too. People tend to take what they can get.
     $300 is good. I've written you guys down for Sept. 5. You can skip the ruggaleh if you like.

                                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 6, 2012

As American as baseball, mom, apple pie and Jews

     It's the last Monday in February and 20 teenage boys are waiting in a gym in Deerfield. It could be any high school gym anywhere, except for the big silver mezuzah on the cinderblock doorway, an Israeli flag next to the American flag, and the banner reading "Rochelle Zell Jewish High School."
     Paul Chanan gathers the boys in a circle and begins the traditional start-of-practice pep talk.
     "Today represents the first day of what will be a real long journey to reach some very lofty goals," says Chanan, an options-trader-turned-teacher. "Coach Zouber and myself are incredibly proud to lead this team of great guys, of great competitors and of great community. This is going to be a joy for us, and we are honored to be your coaches. But we are going to ask a lot of you. ... We are going to ask that you give us everything that you have. ... We are going to absolutely 100 percent demand 100 percent from you, all the time. We are going to compete with great hustle. With maximum intensity. With aggressive style of play and with an unyielding passion for the game of baseball and for your team."
     "Yes coach!" the boys reply.
     Not realizing that Rochelle Zell is a new school — founded in 2001 — whose students range across the spectrum of faith, I went to practice expecting a scene out of Chaim Potok's The Chosen — earlocks and fringes flying as guys round the bases, outfielders punching their gloves and razzing the hitter in Yiddish.
     In Potok's novel, baseball is pushed by teachers because "it was an unquestioned mark of one's Americanism and to be counted a loyal American had become increasingly important."
     Rochelle Zell's team was started four years ago — not by teachers, but by a pair of freshmen, Jon Silvers and his best friend, Adam Gilman, both now 17 and co-captains.

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