Yes, we knew it sometimes rains in Chicago

       
     Sometimes what you don't write is as important as what you do.
     For instance.
     On Thursday, I was trucking to the train after a long, soggy day at work—it wouldn't have been so damp had I stayed in the office, but I grabbed the No. 22 bus up Clark Street to stop by the Chicago History Museum to do some research, and that was closer to scuba diving than commuting.
    Anyway, I looked over the Orleans Street Bridge and notice that Rahm Emanuel's brand new section of River Walk was under an inch of water. 
     "You'd think the geniuses at the city would have factored in the idea that sometimes the river will rise..." I thought to myself. I wondered whether I should send the photographs immediately to the paper. Maybe they could splash them—pun intended—across the front page. "RIVER WALK ALL WET!" 
     But something stayed my hand. As safe a bet as assuming other people are stupid often is, you don't want that to be your default. I waited. From the radio that evening, I learned two inches of rain had fallen that day, the most rain in one day for the past 18 months. A rare event. 
   "What if ..." I thought. "The River Walk was designed to be inundated by the river, for an hour or two after freakish once-a-year deluges?" 
    As luck would have it, on Monday I spoke with Dan Burke, the chief engineer at the Department of Transportation. We were just winding up our conversation about an unrelated matter when I told him I had seen the submerged section. He said, in essence, yup, that's what's supposed to happen. 
     "Everything in the River Walk is designed to be flood tolerant," he said.
     The factuality of mainstream media is being emphasized a lot. But they also do the "pause and think" thing and the "do I have all the facts" thing and the "is this fair?" thing. Not everyone does, and we see the result.



      

Americans insult Trump; Americans insulted Lincoln. Discuss.

 

     A friend posted to Facebook his list of "25 names for the current occupant of the White House." Most can't be quoted in a family newspaper. But some can: "President Yam" and "Commander in Thief" and "The Tang-Toned Baboon," — my friend's an artist, so many refer to Trump's alarming sprayed-on tangerine skin tone.And while I admired them — "Cheetolini" is my favorite, as Trump has perfected that Il Duce lower lip pout of contemptuous authority — they also stirred up something that's been bothering me for three months, and I might as well try to figure it out.
     In mid-January, Trump's inauguration was looming. Being of a historical bent, I turned to the past for perspective. There was, of course, Nixon's 1969 inauguration. Protestors chanted "Four more years of death!" A press corps that had been smirking at Nixon, with justification, for 20 years, suddenly were aghast to find this grubby former Red baiter assuming power. Syndicated columnist Russell Baker described the festivities this way:

     "Physically, it was a day out of Edgar Allan Poe, dun and drear, with a chilling northeast wind that cut to the marrow and a gray ugly overcast that turned the city the color of wet cement. No graves yawned and no lions roared in the streets in the Shakespearean manner, but the gloom of the elements seemed to have infected most of the proceedings."

     The other inauguration that came to mind was Abraham Lincoln's, for the simple reason that half the country hated him, too, vehemently, passionately. As the South bolted for the exits, their outrage — caused, never forget, because Lincoln intended to take away their slaves — overflowed, and they damned him with all they had:

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Have Donald Trump's lies killed hoaxing?

   

     For a queasy moment yesterday, I worried that I would be the only person to attempt an April Fool's joke, that the national moment had grown so contorted, we were now beyond parody. What satire could be floated when we have a president who coins a new and incredible fallacy with every breath?
     But it was a tradition, and I had an idea, and sent it out into the world, and it was extraordinarily well-received— soon I was getting Tweets from Brazil and Japan and Russia.
    Nor was I alone. The Washington Post ran a round-up of dozens of pranks, though concluding it was, for some reason that remained unclear, a "hoax wasteland." (Mine wasn't included; they posted the story before my blog went live --a number of hoaxes were thinly-disguised corporate puffery unleashed days early; here I thought I was pushing it by jumping the gun six hours, rationalizing I was shifting to April 1, Moscow time).
    Then again, why not begin at the end of March? Or the middle? Or in August? Untruth has slipped its mooring and now stalks the land, and April Fool's Day expands, the way Christmas begins the day after Thanksgiving. My estimation of the national mood was utterly wrong: rather than April Fool's being shunned, it is growing. We're all pranksters now, enjoying our own private feast of fools.
     The Trump stamp turned out to be my best day by far, as far as numbers go, in the three and a half years I've written this blog. Which I attribute to two factors:
    First, the genius of Tim O'Brien, the graphic designer who created the Trump stamp at my request. I had greatly admired his parody of the Little Golden Books, and was emboldened to ask him to help me with a prank. My original idea was far cruder—a modern U.S. stamp honoring Hitler, cooked up by Trump's alt-right buddies—but Tim guided and refined the notion to a Russian tribute to their catspaw Donald. 
    To my delight he agreed and -- unbidden -- Photoshopped the two pictures, which drove home the verisimilitude of the hoax. I approached Tim hardly expecting a respected pro like him to react, and can't emphasize how cheerily he entered into the spirit of the thing, taking my pitiable proto-idea and rounding it into something of majesty. I can't thank him enough. 
    Second, anything related to Trump is red meat flung into the straining, baby bird mouths of the public, feeding their—our—bottomless, Hindenburg-erupting-into-flame-once-a-minute fascination with all things Donald Trump. This is sometimes dealt with as something shameful, that the public should find the fortitude to overcome our impulse to gaze in mute horror -- or, I supposed, wet-lipped admiration -- at this most improbable figure in American history, the love child of P.T. Barnum and Huey Long. 
     I can write a column where I spend the day grappling with some real-life, non-Trump social issue, interviewing stammering survivors, and write the most moving piece imaginable, and it won't attract half the attention to be snagged by checking the headlines, cracking my knuckles, and taking an hour to rhapsodize over whatever godawful stupidity Trump said or tweeted last.  It is manful restraint and a doctor's devotion to duty to ever write about anything else, and if my boss decided to peg my salary to my clicks, not to give him any ideas, that is what I would no doubt immediately start doing, along with posting naked pictures of Scarlet Johansson, real or fabricated. 
     Years ago, I wrote a nostalgic piece about my hometown in Ohio, and my editor accused me of parodying a rival columnist who constantly waxed nostalgic about his precious Columbus. And I remember replying, "Bob Greene didn't kill nostalgia. His doing it all the time doesn't mean I can't do it once." That goes double for Donald Trump and fantasy. Just because he and his supporters live in a self-flattering dream world doesn't mean that clear-headed people can't dream, can't prank and jest and offer up jovial stunts on appropriate occasions. At least we don't forevermore insist the products of imaginings are true, they have to be, because we said them, and we are always right. Our egos are so tiny that we must pretend we are always right. 
     In that spirit: the Russians didn't create a stamp for Donald Trump—not yet anyway. Something to look forward to.  
     

"NO! I'm talking silver bullets!"

      I was sorry to hear that long-time New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler passed away Wednesday at 74.  He always brought a sense of the surreal to the classic cartoon form. Of the 1,600 cartoons he had published in the magazine, the above was always my favorite, dear to my heart because, well, it suggests the hard practical reality, the arm-twisting and ball-busting, that lie behind every successful image.  
   Or as Saul Bellow puts it, in The Adventures of Augie March, "everyone has bitterness in his chosen thing." How it looks from backstage is very different from how it looks from the audience. That's just the way it is. 
    
   

Trump shocks come fast, furious and postal

Dimitry Strashnov, center, CEO of Pochta Rossi, the Russia postal service, looks at first day ceremony for Trump stamp. 

     The most outrageous thing about Donald Trump is that there is no most outrageous thing. There can't be. The man is a constant whirlwind of outrage. Nixon had the drip drip drip of Watergate.  Trump is a fire hose of ethical lapses, a new Watergate every day if not every hour. Outrage over Tuesday's shock barely builds before Wednesday's jaw-dropper arrives, and those still going on about Monday's astonishment seem positively mired in the hazy past.

      Thus I was only mildly surprised to read in Linn's Stamp News, and nowhere else, that two weeks ago the Russians featured their pal, President Donald Trump, with his own postage stamp. This is the first time the Russians have ever honored a U.S. president, and while the Russian issued the stamp without explanation, it doesn't take a genius to see what is going on here. One hand washes the other.
     Trump's reaction was pure, well, Trump: "I'm much better looking than that," he told Fox News' Brett Baier. "I am a very, very handsome man."
    What adult says things like that? 
    Yes, on one hand, like so many of the tawdry occurrences during the Trump administration, this is dwarfed in significance by worse excesses: his war against immigrants, Muslims, the environment, health care—thwarted at the moment, but just wait—against a free press, fair elections, free trade, internet privacy, the very idea of factuality itself, our most precious possession...the list goes on, but you see what I mean. 
     Nor do we need the Russians to issue a stamp in order to illustrate their fondness for our 45th president—their machinations to throw the election to him demonstrated that aplenty. 
    And yet. Somehow. Maybe because I'm a former stamp collector—that's why I check Linn's Stamp News from time to time—the new Trump stamp somehow embodies all these ills in one flimsy paper parcel. 
     This isn't the first time the Russians have honored those in the West who do their bidding, you know.  In 1990, the Soviet Union issued a stamp honoring British double agent Kim Philby. But the Trump stamp is, in a sense, worse. Philby was dead when the stamp came out. Trump is very much alive and doing, well, whatever it is he's doing that makes the Russian love him so.  
     The Trump stamp, by the way, was designed by an American, graphic designer, Patrick O'Neil, who has not only created stamps for a number of infamous regimes, including a series of stamps glorifying Saddam Hussein, but also created the graphic presence for the Pakistani military government, including a pamphlet entitled, "Why Am I Being Tortured?" 

On sale last week in Moscow

     If Trump offers endless outrage, there are at least a handful of comforts. First, American institutions have stood firm under the onslaught and that, combined with the determination of clear-headed Americans, his most egregious schemes, regarding immigration, regarding health care, have so far been thwarted. The nonsensical wall still remains on the drawing board. And there is every indication that the excesses that swept him into power over a far more qualified opponent will prove to be illegal as well as immoral, and that we might yet be spared four (or, shudder, eight) full years of a Trump presidency. 
      Meanwhile, though I haven't purchased any new stamps to augment my boyhood collection in years, I plan to shell out the $2.25 plus shipping for one from Loral Stamps, which specializes in Russian stamps online, and get my own copy of the Russian 25 kopek Trump stamp. Not as a collector's item, nor because I think they will become valuable. But because I believe it represents, as all good stamps will, an embodiment of its historic moment, a moment that sees an American president in thrall to our nation's bitterest opponent, and that opponent boldly blowing kisses back in his direction. It would look tawdry in fiction but it is, as this new stamp starkly reminds us, all too real.

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When you stumble out of that bar, at least cross at the corner

     In 2015 I looked at the red crossing flags of Evanston, a charming 19th century practice that somehow popped up in the 21st century. But only here on the blog. It seems something worth sharing with the Sun-Times readership, and this study of pedestrian fatalities seem the perfect opportunity.

     Seldom in modern society do you engage in an activity where anyone makes the suggestion: You know, this might go more smoothly if you wave a flag over your head.
     Celebrating patriotic holidays, perhaps.
     But if you attempt to cross the street at one of 11 busy locations in Evanston, you will find a white cylindrical container holding wooden dowels bearing red flags — unless delinquents have swiped them — and a stark sign warning: LOOK LEFT & RIGHT WHEN CROSSING — FOR ADDED VISIBILITY CARRY RED FLAG ACROSS WITH YOU." The concept is, you pluck a flag out of one container, cross in safety, then deposit it in the cylinder attached to the sign across the street.
     A little unsettling, isn't it? If the crossing is dangerous enough to demand flags, why not install a stop sign? Then again, perhaps being unsettled as you walk around town is a good thing.
     Pedestrian traffic fatalities are soaring in this country, up 25 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to a report issued Thursday by the Governors Highway Safety Association. Which means pedestrian fatalities are rising four times faster than auto deaths.

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Where is your home?

Child's sidewalk drawing, Northbrook, 2017

     "Home," wrote Robert Frost, in his heartbreaking poem "Death of a Hired Man," "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." 
      It's a fraught sentence, with more going on under the surface than might immediately appear. It has the perspective of youth built in. Implied is the prodigal, all possibilities squandered, arriving unwelcome on his familiar doorstep. The door is half opened, by a powerful arm. A surprised, almost angry glare. Then a sigh. A step back, the door now open all the way. Welcome home.

  Frost was 40—his birthday was this past Sunday—when the poem was published, in his collection "North of Boston" in 1914, for which he collected one of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Forty hovers between the man who shows up at the door and the man who opens it—Frost had already had his six children by then, and seen two of them die. If you haven't read the poem, you should do so now by clicking on the link above, as nothing here will reward your time like that will. 
    It's told mostly in dialogue, the cadences of New England: Ezra Pound thought it Frost's best poem. Though it isn't about the return of a son, but a broken down farm employee with no where else to go.
     I've always taken that line out and repurposed it, which you are allowed to do. It's my favorite line from Frost, who gets a bad rap, for "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" with its village and little horse and the woods, "lovely, dark and deep," not to mention those two roads diverging into a yellow wood. Based on that, he's thought of as sort of the poetic Norman Rockwell. Though, like Rockwell, he is judged harshly by what the crowd embraced.  And just as Rockwell came out slugging for civil rights, so there is "Out, Out" about a boy who cuts his hand off in a buzz saw. Frost saw poetry as starting in something real.
     A poem, he said, is “never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.”  

    "A sense of wrong ... a tantalizing vagueness." Lot of that going around lately.  Living in Northbrook for the past 16 years, it of course is my home, at least officially, technically. And while I am fond of the 1905 Queen Anne farmhouse where we live and raised our boys, when I walk to the park downtown, and sit on a bench, regarding the stillness, I can't say I feel that this is my home. Which raises the question: if not here, then where? Where might home be? My parents are both alive, in Boulder, and though I've been visiting there since 1973, Boulder certainly isn't home. Nor is Berea, Ohio, where I grew up, though I do love to go back, and can't help but notice we could buy four similar houses there for what our house costs here. 
    Digging deeper, I suppose home is where my wife is. That makes sense. Even on a Metra car, riding the train to work in the morning, has a warm, comfortable, sleepover feel with us shoulder to shouler, reading the papers in companionable silence. If not that, then home has to be something I'm still looking for, the impulse that caused me to set my sails at 18 and drift away in the first place. I'm assuming I'll know it when I see it. But maybe not.