The Great Loop Flood, 25 years on

     My first thought was: A bomb went off.
     An atomic bomb, maybe. Why else would thousands of office workers be evacuating the Loop at midday?
     The truth — not that we knew it right away — was far less cataclysmic but in a sense even stranger.

     It was noon, and I was getting ready to head downtown for the 2-to-10 p.m. shift as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. I turned on the TV in that pre-Internet era, and the noon news showed workers carrying files, streaming from buildings downtown.
     In September 1991, workers aboard a “spud scow” from the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company had been on the Chicago River, replacing rotten pilings — those wooden poles driven into the river bottom to protect the foundations of drawbridges from errant boats — at the southeast end of the Kinzie Street bridge.
     Putting new pilings exactly where the rotted ones proved difficult. The bridge tender’s house was in the way. So they moved the new pilings — wooden telephone poles chained together — about a yard south. Just enough of a shift — by a foot, it was later estimated — that it cracked the ceiling of the network of tunnels that crisscross downtown underground.
     The arched tunnels were hand-dug around 1900 ....

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J.J. Madia, the city employee in charge of making sure the tunnels never flood again. 

Garry McCarthy's real friends would be telling him not to run

     The reattachment surgery must have been a success.
     Former Supt. Garry McCarthy, whose manhood resided in a jar on Rahm Emanuel's desk for nearly five years while he ran Chicago's troubled police department into a ditch, seems to be working himself up toward taking a crack at steering the whole city.
     I misstate the case. The East Coast transplant is not himself considering candidacy. But "a lot of people" are urging him to run. He is just the reporter, odd for a man who so scorns the media. Just passing along information, noting that he himself is not the mayoral sort. Politics is "not in my DNA," McCarthy said. He's "not very good at that."
     I bet. In that light, maybe the surgery wasn't a complete success — the man can't even float his own candidacy without fobbing off the blame onto others. We are supposed to see this feint as modesty — a cliche 400 years ago when Shakespeare put it in Richard III's mouth: "Alas, why would you heap these cares on me? I am unfit for state and majesty."
     McCarthy wants to be begged. He expects us to throw our hats in the air, let out a cheer and demand the salvation he is too humble to offer without prodding.
     I'd prefer a list of those friends' names. Who are they and why do they think McCarthy should be our next mayor? Aren't we already enduring one bantam cock on the fifth floor? Is their solution really finding a different rooster?

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They're so cute when they're small

    The chemical attack by Syria's Bashar al-Assad that killed scored of civilians, including dozens of children, appears to have touched whatever portion of Donald Trump's heart isn't reserved for himself.
   “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies! — little babies,” the president of the United States said Wednesday, “that crosses many, many lines. Beyond a red line, many, many lines.”
     Which is so odd. Put those babies in the arms of their parents, strand them in a miserable refugee camp somewhere, and they are proto-terrorists that the United States has no responsibility for whatsoever.
     But let those same babies, stranded in Syria and killed by Assad who, like Trump, is best buddies with Vladimir Putin, and we get this unusual display of Trumpian sympathy for people who he can't see in any convenient mirror.
     This flash of humanity could be a lie; highly probable, given that it consists of words that came out of Donald Trump's mouth. The stuff about crossing red lines, just another swipe—veiled for Trump—at Barack Obama, who said chemical attacks would be a red line that, if crossed, would demand action. Then Obama did nothing.
    Which is what I expect from Trump. Whatever action Trump might be considering didn't even involve saying empty words about the Russians who, if they aren't stirring the poison gas and pouring it into bombs for Assad with big funnels, are helping him every other way.
 

Every vote is a little act of faith in democracy

     "What shall . . . we use . . . to fill . . . the empty . . . spaces . . . where . . . we used . . . to talk," I sang quietly to myself, lyrics from an old Pink Floyd song, early Tuesday morning as I headed to the polls to vote in a meaningless suburban election.
     If ever there was an election to miss, this was it. An uncontested village president. A lone candidate for clerk. A solitary assessor. Three library trustees vying for three slots. Of 14 races, two, count 'em, two, fielded more candidates than offices.
     Why waste the time? Why confuse my poor little dog? Her walnut brain, seeing the jacket go on, rejoiced: "A walk! A walk!" Why leave her at the front door, wilting, as I slip out the back at 6:20 a.m.? At that hour, there was no line. I was the first voter of the day, the only voter, with six election judges keeping a watchful eye as I made my satisfying fat green electronic check marks. Nobody arrived while I was there. Early voting is no doubt a factor. But still.
     Why bother?
     Because I've never missed voting in an election. Not once. My little sacrifice of time, some drops of routine life sprinkled on the altar of democracy. This act, making those marks, is what creates authority. Delegates power. Expresses the will of the people.
     The will of some people. Two-thirds of eligible voters don't bother with local elections. Even in last November's epic presidential contest between a steely longtime politician and a thin-skinned newcomer, 40 percent of registered voters didn't see anything to get them off the couch to vote.
     Were they right?

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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.