Impeach Trump?

     Impeach Trump? You're kidding, right? Impeach him for what? Pervasive toxic jerkishness is not, alas, a high crime and misdemeanor, the standard set out in the Constitution. 
    Or do you think he can be impeached because his campaign colluded with the Russia during the election? Is that even a crime?  
    If it is, don't you imagine that there are a plenty of cringing underlings for Trump to casually kick into the ditch? While the Donald smirks his personal responsibility away and fires off a few dead-of-night tweets glorying in it all? Nothing has stuck to him yet. Why would this?    
     Besides, who would do the impeaching?  Congress, right? The Republican Congress. The same trembling cowards who can't even utter a word criticizing the most unfit leader our nation has ever seen are somehow going to magically pivot and great rid of him? After they shelved all their supposed beliefs and principles to meekly shuffle wherever he decided to lurch today. It's like expecting a spinning weather vane to hop off the old barn and point your way through a forest.
    Won't happen. It surprises me to hear people speculating it could happen. Magical thinking, on par with believe-in-fairies-or-Tinkerbell-will-die. And it's such a pathetically easy solution. Deus ex machina; let's just wish this away. A denial of hard realities not dissimilar from the kind of head-in-the-sand outlook that got Trump elected in the first place.
     And like many fantasies, destructive in that it distracts us with daydreams from the hard work at hand. You don't need to harvest the crop if you are convinced gnomes will do it. And there is hard, right-now work beyond breathlessly awaiting what the Washington Post will dig up next.
     Whenever the subject comes up, I shock the people taking a big lungful of the pipe dream by saying, "Impeach him? It's far more likely we'll re-elect him." They stand there, exhaling, the blissed out grin dying on their faces.
    We should be talking about his reelection, not his impeachment. I can see reelection happening. Easily.  It's the far more likely outcome — if somebody wants to put down his money on impeachment, and I can put and equal sum down on re-election, winner-take-all, I'll grab at that bet.  But you'll lose.
     His base is standing with him, more or less. The Democrats have nobody. And it's happened before. The pattern is already there. History is not a schematic for the future, but there are hints and lessons there. Since those spinning impeachment dreams drum up Richard Nixon, who resigned after the gears of impeachment began to grind him. So let's go with Nixon. 
    In 1968, he defeated Hubert Humphrey, an unloved political hack not unlike Hillary Clinton.  While Nixon drifted to the center -- he created the EPA, went to China -- the Democrats tacked left, nominating George McGovern, who was so progressive he lost 49 states. 
     So sure, the impeachment process swung into action against Nixon. But he was also re-elected, after Watergate began to grab headlines. 
     The Bernie Sanders sideshow could convince the Democrats that a similarly radical candidate—though not Sanders himself, thank you God, for one because he'll be 79 in 2020—can have a chance in hell, which Sanders wouldn't have had once America took a good hard look at what was behind his slogans, which wasn't much. We're not a radical left nation. We can't even find our way to national health care, like every other nation on earth with indoor plumbing. 
    Don't get me wrong. Given the daily shocks that the Trump administration serve up when he isn't abroad, deeply humiliating the country, giving NATO a kick (I wish I could believe Putin pays him directly for this kind of thing; my gut tells me they just both think alike) and re-assuring the Europeans that their traditional tacit contempt for America is finally justified, no one can say when whatever smoking gun, tawdry tape, or grotesque cruelty or stupidity will finally pry his supporters' fingers off the door jamb. It's possible.
    But don't hold your breath. There's no reason to consider it now. We just elected the guy last November. And in once sense, we got exactly what we paid for. Nobody can say they were deceived by Trump—sure, he made all these mendacious promises that he didn't even pretend to try to keep. But it was clear he'd do that, particularly since half of what he promised was patently impossible. If voters could screw their eyes tight and vote for him in November, what makes you think they won't stay that way for the next eight years? Opening your eyes to Trump now would be like opening your eyes under the ocean. It burns. 
     The only focus should be: elect Democratic Congressmen in 2018. Then we can talk impeachment, provided we're still allowed to talk at all. Until then, find a decent presidential candidate for 2020 who won't be so flawed she lets a notorious liar, bully and fraud get his tiny hands on the levers of power.

Candid biography of cartoonist Mauldin shines light on worst of war

 

        No fallen soldier actually benefits from the empty platitudes that rise from a million Facebook pages on Memorial Day. The fulsome and generic praise that passes for "honor"—and I've been guilty of it myself in the past and no doubt will again in the future—seems more designed to make the speaker feel a warm bubble of self-satisfied civilian complacency than to reflect the actual miseries and horror of service; "sacrifice" is too glittery and false a word. 
      This column was actually a book review, but I think it touches upon the reality we are whitewashing today with our lip-service. It ran when the column took up a full page, and I've left in the sub-headlines and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     The youngest soldiers who served in the Second World War are in their late 70s now, and an estimated thousand American World War II vets die every day. They are sent off in a blast of "Greatest Generation" tribute, patriotism and nostalgia, which is only fitting, on a personal level, though it does get a bit cloying and of course is a gross simplification of what actually happened.
     Thus it is a refreshing tonic to read Todd DePastino's new biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, which, like its subject, picks candor over mythologizing.    
     Mauldin was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, famous for creating the Willie and Joe characters in World War II -- unshaven, exhausted foot soldiers yearning, not for glory, but for dry socks and a hot shower. Mauldin was on the staff of this paper for 30 years, and died five years ago this month.
     While he is best-known for his World War II work -- and the grieving Lincoln statue he drew the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated -- Mauldin continued, for decades after V-J Day, to provide a refreshing counterpoint to the tendency of people -- particularly military men -- to rhapsodize their past heroics. During the Vietnam era, DePastino notes, Mauldin "reminded those who complained about draft evaders that during World War II, 'the draft board had to drag most of us, whimpering, out of the bushes.' "
     Some 400,000 American soldiers died in World War II, so of course their sacrifices -- and the sacrifices of those who survived -- should receive commemoration. So long as we also remember that the heroic tales we tell ourselves -- as usual -- are only the shiny surface of the story. There is more.

SOME SHOT THEM FOR SPORT

     

     During the last nine months of World War II, Todd DePastino tells us, more American soldiers fighting in Europe died of alcohol poisoning than of communicable disease. In Italy, 20,000 U.S. troops deserted their units -- one reason the military brass tolerated Bill Mauldin's syndicated blasphemy was because the truth was far worse, and they hoped that collapsing morale might be bolstered if the men could see a faint reflection of reality and laugh at it.
     Meanwhile, on the home front, a sizable chunk of the American public was eager to make peace with the Nazis and declare the whole thing a draw. Which is why the Allies had a ban on depicting dead soldiers, for the same reason George W. Bush tried to keep Americans from seeing flag-draped coffins, as an attempt to undercut demands for peace.
     "Such candor might increase sentiment for a negotiated peace with Germany, a position shared by nearly a third of Americans in mid-1942," DePastino writes.
     Since Mauldin specialized in presenting soldiers, not as the spit-and-polish warriors of home-front propaganda, but as mud-caked mopes seeing how flat they can press themselves to the ground, it's fitting that DePastino renders World War II, not as the heroic moment of moral clarity we prefer to remember, but as a terrifying ordeal where the good and bad guys could be hard to sort out. In this book, American soldiers rape and kill, driving around Morocco shooting Arabs for fun.
    "Some shot them for sport," DePastino writes, " 'like rabbits in the States during hunting season,' as one American explained in a letter home."
     Then there was Naples. DePastino calls the city under American military control "the largest black market in history" with stolen Allied supplies accounting for 65 percent of the city's per capita income.
     "Cargo pilferage in Naples attained levels unprecedented in the history of warfare," he writes. "Food, clothing, fuel, medicine, blankets, cigarettes, and vehicles disappeared in such large quantities that by December 1943, Allied infantry were receiving only two-thirds of the supplies earmarked for them."
     This was not brazenly done under American noses; rather, it was brazenly done with enthusiastic American help.
     Not to give the impression that the underside of the war is all that DePastino shows us. There are truly moving moments, such as Gen. Lucian Truscott's Memorial Day speech.
     "Before a crowd of Army luminaries and VIPs from the States, including several U.S. senators, General Truscott climbed onto the speaker's platform and turned his back on the audience; his address, he informed the crowd, was for those lying beneath the endless rows of graves in the sandy soil of the Anzio beachhead."
     And what did Truscott say?
     "He apologized to the men arrayed before him for sending them to their deaths. It was his fault, he said, and the fault of all those commanders who order men into battle. He had made mistakes, the general admitted, and those errors had cost lives."
     Truscott "promised that in the future if he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do."

 SPUNKY GUY WHO COULD DRAW

     A Life Up Front is the first biography of Mauldin. It won't be in stores for a few weeks. Sorry for jumping the gun, but it's such a wonderful book, and I can only begin to describe how it captures Mauldin's complex, tragic, funny, fascinating personality. Some events almost defy belief, except that you can't make such things up. Mauldin, on his own from an early age, returns home at 17 to show off his new ROTC uniform to his alcoholic father. "He arrived at the old homestead to find Pop drunk and naked, wallowing in a bathtub filled with homemade beer," DePastino writes. " 'There he was,' Bill recalled with laughter decades later, 'pissing in the beer and then scooping some out for a drink.' "

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Bill Mauldin could make the most mundane matter into a joke. On the physical exam that admitted his scrawny, 110-pound self into the Arizona National Guard five days before it was federalized into the U.S. Army, Mauldin said:
     "They didn't really test our eyes, they sort of counted them."
                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 2, 2008

Ramadan (whenever it began) is more than just fasting

     Crossing Devon Avenue, walking up to the Muslim Women Resource Center, my first thought was that the organization had somehow convinced the Grocery & Meat Market to let them camp out in a corner of their store, as the two entities share the same green sign.
     The truth is even more surprising.

    

        "The store is our social enterprise," said Sima Quraishi, executive director of the MWRC. "We've been running Muslim Women Resource Center for the past 15 years. Two years ago, when the governor cut down the budget, we decided that we should do something to make some money so we don't have to lose our staff. This is what we came up with. Giving back to the community. Our main goal is to sell to the community and also hire community members."  

       The market looks like your standard, small, ethnic city grocery. A haphazard assemblage of items from floppy bags of fresh naan to bottles of frozen camel's milk. A variety of chutney and some enigmatic items, such as bags labeled "Broken Sugar."
     I was visiting because Ramadan — the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and a time of spiritual renewal — was beginning sometime this weekend. (Don't ask exactly when because it's complicated "We don't know," said a staffer at the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, suggesting I survey a few mosques and gather their opinions.)

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The humdrum life is thrilling enough

 
     This past week was a particularly lethal one on Mount Everest: four climbers killed. Which made me think of this column, written—ack!—over 20 years ago. It has the shades of immaturity upon it. I don't think I would quite so casually mock a father-to-be who had just died in a mountaineering accident. Though I am proud of making the connection between mountain climbing and drug use. And remember, at the time I wrote this, I had been on paternity leave, helping tend a newborn for seven months. So I had something of the mania of a glittering fanatic myself, deep in his own struggle up the mountainside. 

     The weather was calm, the air, still. It was just after lunch when I set up my base camp, on the southern ridge of the green sofa. The view, of the rocking chair and the expanse of the dining room beyond, was fabulous.
     If conditions held, my goal was in sight. I was almost there, drifting off to a pleasant slumber, when my wife clattered into the room, performing some sort of chore. My eyes snapped open. The elusive quarry would have to wait for another day.
     Napping doesn't enjoy the good publicity that mountaineering does. I have no idea why. Naps are far more pleasant and attainable. Plus the odds of perishing in a freak storm, the way eight climbers on Mount Everest did recently, are almost nil.
     Perhaps if naps had better hype—a few hyperkinetic TV commercials showing paunchy guys wearing their Snooze Nikes as they sprawl on comfortable couches, a few blowzy memoirs with titles like My Naps on Seven Continents—then some of those climbers would have stayed home, and been alive today.
    As reluctant as I am to detract from the grand, operatic techno-tragedy of dying climbers cell-phoning in their last words to their soon-to-be widowed spouses and half-orphaned children, somebody should point out, if only in a hushed whisper, that these people are idiots, throwing their lives away in pursuit of a transcendent thrill.
     That sounds harsh. Outdoorsy types—clerks at mountaineering shops, board of trade members who've taken a few adventure vacations—will disagree, of course. They'll evoke all sorts of piffle about sportsmanship and Just-Do-It-itivity, and facing the ultimate challenge. The same fairy tale we've been telling ourselves for a century.
     In the beginning, there was the excuse of exploration and science. Now the climb is just a meaningless, cargo-cult imitation of those early expeditions, done for self-glorification. People climb Everest to prove something to themselves, as a personal accomplishment, as an adventure.
     Fine, so far. But isn't that little selfish? What about their families? What about their kids? That view from the top of Everest must be really something, to be willing to risk it being the last thing you ever see. That climber with the wife who is seven months pregnant—if he wanted a thrill, he could have gotten one by just hanging around the house for another two months. Perhaps even a bigger thrill than climbing Everest—he'll never know now, will he? The tragedy isn't that he was killed; that was just bad luck. The tragedy is that he went.
     Seeking thrills, in general, is overemphasized. Perhaps I'm just a cautious type, but I find life plenty thrilling, right here at home. Sometimes just merging onto Lake Shore Drive at Fullerton is enough wild adventure to last me a week.
     If there was a difference between the climbers who died from bad weather on Everest and the junkies who died that week from bad heroin in Baltimore, I would suggest it is a minor one, a fine shade of athletics and legality that has little bearing on the end result. Both groups were paying money to enjoy a dangerous sensation. Both found the routine of life too burdensome to be endured.
     Given our public distaste for chemical adventures, the wholesale endorsement of physical thrills—from bungee jumping to hang-gliding—is something of a mystery. Isn't the danger of heroin the basis for making it illegal? Why are adventurers seen as heroic and addicts as pathetic? Just custom? Or maybe the thrill of physical adventure is "earned" through sweat equity, and drugs are seen as lazy and therefore repugnant.
     The immensity of any potential thrill must be balanced against the smaller, daily thrills endangered by grasping at it. I remember, back in college, a friend of mine once extended a handful of LSD tablets. "Here, take one," he said. "They're great."
    I was sure they were great. But I was also worried about chromosome damage—a false concern, perhaps. "I'm sorry," I told him. "I just can't see my wife someday giving birth to a calf's head, and her looking at me for explanation, and me shrugging and saying, 'Sorry hon, but I just wanted to get high.' "
     Perhaps that is timidity. And, to be honest, I have at times regretted not taking the acid. People speak highly of the experience. That was my chance and I blew it.
     On the other hand, I'm here. Maybe I would have taken the acid and promptly jumped out a window. People do that. And, in balance, measuring the potential fun of a 24-hour LSD trip versus the 17 good years I've had since then, I think I made the right decision. Normalcy isn't that bad. It can even be thrilling at times—provided that your wife doesn't go around making a ruckus.

                                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 19, 1996

Trumpet the good news, mutter the bad

     Listen to Pat Gengler, spokesman for the Kane County Sheriff's Office, telling CNN on May 13 how a SWAT team took down Tywon Salters after he grabbed a correctional officer's gun and took a pair of nurses hostage at Delnor Hospital in Geneva, and you'd think the operation was a textbook example of police efficiency.
     "The officer was able to get away," Gengler said of what happened after Salters took a 9 mm handgun away from Officer Shawn Loomis. "The SWAT team made a decision to make entry into the room. One of the SWAT team operators did discharge his firearm, striking the inmate and killing him."
     Nothing about Loomis possibly hiding in a hospital room after losing his weapon.
     Nothing about Loomis perhaps failing to alert anybody that there was an armed felon on the loose.
     And absolutely nothing about a nurse hostage being shot by the SWAT team — or possibly being raped during the three hours law enforcement was trying to figure out what to do.
     To learn that, you have to read a lawsuit filed against the Kane County Sheriff's Office, Loomis, in particular, and Apex3 Security, the company that's supposed to provide security in the hospital.
     That lawsuit, filed Thursday, makes alarming reading.

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Del Close: In the midst of tragedy, the possibility of laughter

"Slaughter of the Innocents," The Vatican Museum

     Last week I went to the opening of the American Writers Museum, which I appreciated more than expected. They have a Hall of Fame, of sorts, of Chicago writers, cleverly presented on moveable banners so they can add and subtract as circumstances dictate. I noticed—with a mix of satisfaction and unease—that I had met a full half dozen of the iconic writers showcased: Mike Royko, Ann Landers, Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow, Roger Ebert and Del Close. Quite a lot really. I hadn't thought of Close in a while—I spoke with him at the wake Bill Murray threw at his hospital the night before Close killed himself, and saw him on the stage as Polonius in Robert Falls' "Hamlet." I glanced at the obituary I wrote for Close in 1999, and thought it might be suitable for this grim, terror-tainted week. We should not of course laugh at the individual victims of specific tragedies. But certainly must laugh at the general tragedy of the human condition, one where insane religious fanatics commit atrocities against children, trying to lure good people into accepting the hatreds which so define and limit their lives. We are supposed to be terrified—I would say being bitterly amused at the ultimate futility of their efforts might be a far more valid reaction.

Del Close

     In the famous Second City comedy sketch taking place at the funeral of a man who died by jamming his head into a gallon can of baked beans, that detail—to make the cause of death a big can of Van Camp's pork and beans—was provided by Del Close, whose morbid, risky brand of dark comedy formed generations of American comedians.
     Mr. Close—teacher, actor, director, pagan, junkie, occasional lunatic and fierce iconoclastic spirit behind Chicago's beloved comedy troupe, as well as friend and mentor to its biggest stars—died of complications from emphysema Thursday at Illinois Masonic Medical Center. He was 64.
     "There is something irresistibly funny about a funeral," he once said. "More basically, I think the point is that beyond the deepest tragedy, there is laughter. Even in the midst of tragedy, there is always the possibility for it."
     Mr. Close acted not only in troupe comedy but in serious dramas. He was acclaimed as Polonius in the Robert Falls' landmark "Hamlet" at Wisdom Bridge and appeared in several motion pictures, including "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."
     His death came the day after about 50 of his friends feted Mr. Close as he sat in a wheelchair in a basement room of the hospital.
     He was "an amazingly intricate human being," said Second City producer Kelly Leonard. "Notoriously prickly, tremendously warm and very funny," he specialized in humor that's "dark and subversive," Leonard said.
     Mr. Close grew up in Manhattan, Kan. He was a second cousin of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ike once showed up at a Close family Thanksgiving in the years before he became president. Mr. Close ran away from home as a teenager, getting his first taste of show business as an assistant in a cheesy bit of vaudeville called Dr. Dracula's Tomb of Terror.
     He attended Kansas State College on a bass drum scholarship and was a classmate of James Dean's. He auditioned in 1957 for the St. Louis branch of the Compass Players, the precursor of Second City.
     Mr. Close was part of the original St. Louis cast, performing in the Crystal Palace. The cast moved to Chicago to become Second City, but Mr. Close went to New York, becoming a stand-up comic in the company of people such as Lenny Bruce. After taking in a Bruce show with Second City founding director Paul Sills, Sills reportedly said to Mr. Close, "If you can ever find out what Lenny is taking, by all means do it."
     What Bruce was taking was heroin, and Mr. Close followed Sills' advice to a fault. He not only became a heroin addict; he was proud of it.
     "He relished his narcotic past," Bob Woodward wrote of Mr. Close. "He wore his track marks from the needles like a badge of honor."
     Mr. Close appeared off-Broadway in a musical, "The Nervous Set," in 1959. But an arrest for marijuana possession cost Mr. Close his cabaret card, and, unable to perform in New York nightclubs, he returned to Chicago, where he joined Second City, sharing directing duties with Bernie Sahlins.
     Mr. Close began performing in the cast of Second City in 1962. It was not a placid relationship, and Mr. Close was plagued by his drinking, drug addiction and emotional problems, which sometimes required institutionalization.
     "Sheldon Patinkin, who wasn't yet the Second City director, used to pick me up at the loony bin and drive me to the theater, where I'd do my thing. Then he'd drive me back to the loony bin where I'd spend another day," he said in 1972. Sahlins said that he, too, used to pick Mr. Close up at a mental hospital so he could perform.
     Mr. Close was fired in 1965. "I deserved it," he later said. "I was always getting loaded, quite frankly."
     He moved to San Francisco, where he took small acting roles. He appeared in "Beware the Blob," being eaten along with Burgess Meredith, and in episodes of "Get Smart" and "My Mother the Car."
     Mr. Close hung out with the Grateful Dead. He ran the light shows at 1967 concerts as the group's "optical percussionist."
     He returned to Chicago in 1972 and directed Second City reviews consistently for the next decade, becoming close with stars such as John Belushi, whose talent he nurtured and formed.
     "He was particularly good with the new generation of Vietnam rebels—John Belushi, Harold Ramis, those people," Sahlins said. "He was a rebel, definitely a product of what we used to call the hippie generation. . . . He had an unusual capacity for leading young people, not always down the straight path. He was an inspiring director and teacher, even if sometimes the content was not acceptable."
     Belushi was particularly affected by Mr. Close, both professionally and personally.
     "I like the man's style," Belushi said of his mentor in 1978. "He can create with you, unlike so many other directors. He can motivate people. He's been my biggest influence in comedy."
     Mr. Close's first-floor Wells Street apartment, across from Second City, was also a convenient spot for Belushi, himself an addict, to shoot up. It was only after Belushi's death by drug overdose in 1982 that Mr. Close was able to shake his drug habit.
     He was let go, again, from Second City in 1983, and took his comedy workshops to CrossCurrents, then to the fledging ImprovOlympic, where he helped develop its signature piece, "The Harold," a framework combining audience suggestions into skits that end up working together.
     Mr. Close returned to Second City in 1988 to direct "The Gods Must Be Lazy," bringing in his ImprovOlympic standouts Chris Farley, Tim Meadows and Joel Murray. Critics credit Second City's current renaissance to the mid-'90s import of Mr. Close's acolytes from ImprovOlympic.
     He won three Jeff awards, a Chalmers award for directing Toronto's Second City, and a Charlie award for lifetime achievement from the American Association of Comedy Artists.
     "It's a grim business, this being funny," he said in 1975. "Every time you come up with a strong satiric idea, the world tops it. None of our reactionary military characters in the past decade could top the real-life line that came out of Vietnam: 'We had to destroy the village in order to save it.' "

                         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 5, 1999

Barrel of Monkeys makes writing more fun

     Children want to talk. The third-graders in Mrs. Javor’s class at the Chalmers School of Excellence strain their twig arms toward the sky, fingers fluttering, desperate for permission to say what’s on their minds.
     They have the desire but, at 8 years old, can lack the communication skill to make themselves heard. When called upon, some speak in tiny voices, inaudible a yard away, their disjointed whispers trailing off.
     Enter a Barrel of Monkeys.
     “My friends, hello!” booms Mary Tilden, striding into Room 202 with four confederates: Alejandra Zavala, Marianna Green, Jo Jo Figarella and Barry Irving. “I’m so excited to see you.”
     The next 90 minutes are a whir of free-form storytelling boot camp, where students are led through fast-paced exercises that are part kiddie Stanislavski Method actor training, part junior Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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