The dead are never gone on Facebook

    I would never have thought of J. David Moeller again. He was not my friend. I had never met him.
     He was, however, a Facebook friend, who commented on my column, sent in the jokes that used to end my column, right up until he killed himself in 2010.
     His birthday was Aug. 9, and Facebook—like a dim-witted cat dragging something unwelcome into the house—invited me to wish him happy birthday.
     Considering it, I visited his page, saw his actual friends leaving messages of missing and heartbreak. I said nothing, but thought of this column, from seven years ago, that addresses this online world, which was new then, and now is just how things are, for good and ill.

     A Facebook friend killed himself Friday. News came the way news does on Facebook, via a wall post.

     "We lost a mutual friend, Neil," Leigh Stone Eckroth wrote. "Actor, writer J. David Moeller took his own life on February 19, he left parting words on his profile, under the photo section . . . Very sad : ( "    
     I knew Moeller from his frequent postings of wry observations and as a contributor of jokes to this column. We never actually met.
     Those who knew him better bid farewell on his Facebook page:
     "David, you were such an amazing and sweet man," wrote one. "Your wit and humor and your intelligence . . . you have left a huge hole in our hearts."
     The sentiments seemed both private and public, a jarring juxtaposition. Once newspapers avoided mentioning the fact that someone committed suicide -- it was seen as intrusive. But that ship seems to have sailed.
     Amongst Moeller's 320 wall photos and 156 profile pictures is the image of a sheet of yellow legal paper. "My Dear Friends," it begins, in neat blue handwriting. "I'm sorry. I cannot go on . . ."
     Moeller was 64. He was a character actor with a half century of bit parts in movies, TV and on stage, doggedly pursuing a career that did not lavish him with rewards.
     "Moeller, who speaks with a faded Texas drawl, grew up in the Lone Star state and knew from the age of 3 he wanted to be an entertainer," wrote Stefano Esposito, in a Sun-Times profile published last year. "He has acted in Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Geneva, Switzerland -- among other places -- and now Chicago. To make ends meet, he has also driven cabs, done stand-up comedy at a strip club and worked as a telemarketer selling bulk trash bags."
     He could act. Hedy Weiss ended her 2008 review of Irish playwright Owen McCafferty's "Scenes from the Big Picture" with:
     "But it is J. David Moeller, a 'listener' most the time, who brings it all to a gorgeous Beckettian conclusion."
     Suicide is a mystery, and I won't pretend to offer insights here, except to observe that it seems to claim the witty, the kind and the unusual far more than it does the dull, the mean and the ordinary.
     The Facebook aspect makes it all the more unsettling. I know that suicide notes have posted on Facebook before, though there is still a disconnect, at least for me. The venue seems inappropriate. I don't want my children tweeting from my deathbed, and when I die, I don't want anybody posting frowny faces.
     At first, I wasn't even sure Moeller was really dead -- I'm of an era when seeing something on a Web page is only an indication that it might be true. Moeller was certainly waggish enough for us to hope this could be a stunt ("I thought, 'Oh, it was a prank -- he's fine and I took the bait,' " wrote a friend).
     Alas, the Cook County medical examiner's office, a very real institution on Harrison Street, confirms that it received his body. The cause of death is being withheld, pending toxicology reports.
     I joined Facebook because the paper told us to, and have found it a mixed blessing. It does have a practical purpose, providing a sort of hive intelligence to tap into. I remember rolling into Salt Lake City last summer and feeling unmoored -- what was I doing with my boys in Utah? I posted words to that effect on Facebook, and somebody immediately pointed me toward Ruth's Diner. Next thing we knew, we were eating red trout and eggs and chocolate malt pudding and all was right in the world once more.
     Facebook expands your circle. It takes your actual friends—who ironically are less significant on Facebook since you see them in the flesh world—and adds this strange online penumbra of quasi-friends you sorta know.
     Every once in a while one of them pops up in the actual world—remember when that Norwegian lady blew into town last year and married a guy she met on my Facebook page in a ceremony atop the Willis Tower?
     Of course, it was much stranger and more complicated than that. The guy apparently forgot to tell his former wife and children that he was getting remarried, a situation I discovered when his 11-year-son phoned to ask: Who was this lady marrying his father? A very real, deeply awful moment.
     Sometimes I wonder if the drawbacks to Facebook, as both a time sinkhole and an emotional minefield, outweigh the benefits. But I also know the technology genie never goes back in the bottle.
     Posting your suicide note on Facebook feels extra wrong, but then new technology always seems undignified. The teams sent out by the military to notify families of the death of servicemen harken back to the day when it was considered rude to give bad news over the telephone.
     The night before he died, Moeller posted two thoughts.
     The first was completely prosaic, about the Olympics" "Local boy goes good . . . Evan Lysacek wins the Gold!"
     And then, a minute later: "None but we know the rooms we roam, the beds we lie in, the houses of our mind."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

From J. David Moeller:

     Those baby-changing stations don't work. I put my baby in one, closed it up and when I opened it again . . . it was still a baby. I was hoping for a new laptop.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 24, 2010

Traitors to our country should never have been honored in the first place

Stonewall Jackson, Virginia Military Institute

     Say I take up a hobby: drowning puppies in a bucket, then using a tennis racquet to serve their limp, dripping carcasses at neighborhood children who flee, shrieking, while I laugh and laugh.
     You object to this practice, citing cruelty to animals, to children.
     I reply, "What? You don't realize what a huge problem over-population is among pets? You don't care about animals? And obesity is a major problem among the young. How can you oppose exercise?"
     Welcome to what passes for discourse in America, 2017, where no moral lapse is so extreme that it can't be reframed and explained away.
     A mob of Nazis march, on the pretext of defending Civil War monuments. The marchers clash with counter-protesters, then return to the holes they came from. Decent Americans exhibit their displeasure by pulling down the same monuments the Nazis used as pretext, those honoring traitorous Civil War leaders who took up arm against their own country — our country — in open rebellion trying to preserve the grotesque institution of slavery, monuments often set up in the 20th century as a middle finger to Civil Rights protests.
     Our current leader, Donald Trump, can't bring himself to sincerely denounce racism, so instead expounds on the Nazis' excellence, so much that corporate CEOs, not a group famous for morality, draw away in visceral horror.

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The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg

    You open the world to your children and then, if you are lucky, they open their world to you.
    I was not particularly fond of contemporary art—I'm more of a French Impressionism fan—but then again, I didn't know much about it either, and ignorance and dislike are brothers. 
     I've grown to appreciate it more over the past couple years, and only now, having spent a few hours at the impressive Takashi Murakami show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, did I realize why: my older boy.
     It was he who prompted us to go to The Broad, the new privately-financed Los Angeles mecca of recent art. It was he who, in April, dragged us to the Palazzo Grassi in Venice to see Damien Hirst's massive "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable."
    And while it wasn't he who took me to the MCA Tuesday to see a retrospective of Japan's top contemporary artist, the show opened in June, I wasn't racing there either, not until my kid came home Saturday from his internship in LA for a couple weeks. Then my first thought was, "Hey, there's a Murakami show at the MCA—wanna go?"
     He did.  
     Rooms filled with enormous canvases that somehow manage to be both freeform and precise, explosions of color and tracts of black and white. Murakami struck me as the apotheosis of high school artists, his blizzard of arhats, stylized Buddhists recalled faces scrawled on the notebooks of artsy fellow students at Berea High School in the late 1970s, dreamy-eyed girls with names like Ariel and Autumn.
     I particularly liked his Yves Klein tribute flower wallpaper—as I thought of it. Something daft and commercial. 
     If you go, make sure you see the films of Murakami overseeing squads of employees—he has some 250 at five studios around the world— slim youths in colorful jumpsuits and paper masks slathering paint over large wood-framed stencils he computer cuts to make his enormous images. And in the middle, pot-bellied, with a scraggly beard, round glasses and earbuds screwed in his ears, the Artist, transferring his images onto paintings that cover museum walls and sell for millions.
     In one room, with huge resin and steel guardian figures on each end, were a pair of paintings that carried the name of the show—The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, his comment on the resilience of survival. A Japanese saying about regeneration, the extreme step taken to survive, the moral of the story being the octopus grows a new leg to replace what was lost. 
    In tiny letters on these paintings Murakami had a surprisingly anxious, aggrieved personal statement, about the young artists he tried to help and who "betrayed" him and how generally troublesome his life was. 
     I suppose he could be looked down on for that, but as Walt Whitman said, "How beautiful is candor;" somehow that spirit, the self-exposure, endeared Murakami to me—of course it would, since I too am in the self-revelatory line, though with far less remunerative results.
     Still, it's good to know that someone is making a smash success of whimsical self-pity, and curator Michael Darlings cannily convinced Murakami to present his not-all-that-hot early works in the first room of the show, jammed with young people, to whom this should be an inspiration, because he does not come off as a genius, just someone who combined work and luck and a vision and made it. 
     Murakami thinks of his production process as similar to making a movie—"Star Wars" was an inspiration—and coming out of the show indeed had that return-to-reality sense you have after seeing a good movie.
     The show runs until Sept. 24, but go sooner than later, as the MCA might have to go to timed tickets, just to handle the crowds. 

Trump mocks the pain of Chicago families

      I wrote this Tuesday morning, before Trump's frightening afternoon press conference throwing in his lot with white nationalist haters. Though it was tempting to react to the latest outrage, I had set aside one column already to react to Trump's tweet, and realized there will always be another shock around the corner—you cannot get ahead of the curve with this man—and it was probably better to let this fly and wait for the next shoe from our centipede of disaster to drop.

     "Meanwhile," Trump enthusiast Jack Posobiec tweeted and the president retweeted Monday, "39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?"
     Ooo, ooo, me me! I'll take that one.
     But first a little background, for those lucky enough not to be reading this at the grim moment of America in mid-August 2017. A nation roiled by a sudden geyser of racial hate—or, rather, being reminded of the hate always seething just under the surface. A tiki torch-bearing mud flow of Nazis and Klansmen and other assorted mutants in Charlottesville, Virginia, vomited out of the earth and into view Friday night. On Saturday they were met by counter-protesters, patriots and regular citizens who reject the never-true vision of America as a white, Protestant enclave.
     One of those haters, allegedly, sped his car into the peaceful protest, killing a woman. And our president, who will leap onto Twitter to denounce a teenager who asks a pointed question, blamed "both sides" then remained mum for days about the source of this attack on our values, perhaps because he knows how popular he is among haters, perhaps because several of his closest advisers seeped out of the same subterranean cesspool.
     Trump's failure outraged the country. Because we are not used to seeing such bald cowardice, such indulgence of the undercurrent of American life.  Not from the president. It's news.
     Chicago, on the other hand, is a big city where shootings happen every day. We are not the most dangerous city in America. We are not the homicide capital. Chicago has a pervasive gang problem and its murder rate is five times that of New York City's. So it has problems with violence, but those problems, while news, do not have the fresh horror of a president winking at Nazis.

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Snowman in August

     Art is the thing you go to see, that you seek out. 
     Last Thursday, that meant catching the Gauguin show at the Art Institute.  My wife hadn't seen it and though I had already, I accompanied her to see it again—Art is the thing you can see twice, another definition—I also had an agenda. 
      I wanted to see the snowman.
      I first heard of it a few days earlier. I was at a camp for kids with cancer at the Palmer House. The kids had just been to the Art Institute and seen the snowman. I've been to the Art Institute many, many times. I didn't remember a snowman. But obviously there was one now, and I wanted to see it.
    Why? Well, it was a snowman. At the Art Institute. In August. That is a certified, seal promise of whimsy, and the 2016 work of Swiss artists—natch!—Peter Fischli and David Weiss did not disappoint. A smiling, friendly snowman, in the classic three balled form, lacking the traditional carrot nose and charcoal eyes but radiating good will nevertheless. 
     He was outside, on the Bluhm Family Terrace—an apt touch—in his own little refrigerated aluminum vitrine. My son Kent pointed to the cord, visibly snaking away and plugged into a socket, and wondered if the point of the installation wasn't for someone to yank the cord out. I was intrigued, but not so much that I was going to be the person to give it a try.
     In his new book, Adam Gopnik refers to "violating the sanctuary of art" with "the displaced ordinary object."  It began with Duchamp's bike wheel, moved through Campbell's Soup cans and now what should be melting in the sun now preserved for ... well, a while.
     In the elevator on the way down, Kent wondered if it was art at all, and I said I thought it was. "Art, in my view, has to be one of three things," I told him. "It has to be clever in concept, masterful in execution or impactful in result." 
     The snowman certainly hits the first mark, touches on the second—a well-made little glass freezer—and got us both to the deck to see it. It isn't "Nighthawks" but it certainly is an asset. I'm not sure if it's permanent, but I hope so. 
      

Donald Trump promised he'd take America back. He didn't say where.

 

    Promises made, promises kept!
     Donald Trump was always talking about how he would "take back America"—there were bumper stickers—and now look, he's actually done it. We've been taken back to the 1960s, with protesters clashing in the street over the weekend and a civil rights demonstrator killed in the street.  
     Or are we back in the 1940s? It felt that way Friday, with torch-bearing Nazis marching, sieg-heiling and chanting "blood and soil." It could have been an America First rally at the old Chicago Stadium in 1940.
      Although they were tiki torches. The bamboo kind costing $1.99 at Costco. That sort of ruined the effect. Give the original Nazis credit; they were sticklers for detail. Real torches are expensive and hard to find, but you're never going to seize control—assuming they haven't already, and with the Trump White House you never know—by cutting corners. Tiki torches in a fascist demonstration are like Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons at the Nuremberg rallies.
     Sorry. None of this is funny. After three deaths—the protester and two Virginia State troopers who died in a helicopter crash—the clownishly unaware street theater of men whose fondest fantasy is to be concentration camp guards slides into anguish and tragedy.
     Then again, that's what happens, and there's an important lesson there. Whenever I see these idiots, I'm not filled with terror, or concern--and you think I would be, as half the time they're chanting about Jews. Rather, I get an almost avuncular concern. I want to help them, to say, "Guys, guys, gather around. You do know that the whole Nazi thing did not end well for the Germans?" History focuses on their victims, and rightly so, but by the time the would-be supermen were done manifesting their superiority they had lost four million soldiers and another two million civilians. About six million Germans dead, for you fans of irony.

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An old classic reappears on the UVA curriculum

University of Virginia

     Of course it had to start at the University of Virginia.

     Well, no, it didn't have to be the University of Virginia. It just worked out that way.
     Truth is, the white supremacists could have had their march anywhere. There are enough of 'em.
      But UVA somehow fits. Not just for the Robert E. Lee statue.  Though being supported by Nazis—whoops, white nationalists, whoops, the alt-right—kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the disingenuous, we're-just-decent-Southern-folk-celebrating-our-historical-heritage argument, doesn't it?
     You lost; get over it.

     It isn't as if this is racism's first appearance at the University of Virginia and environs.

     Talk about celebrating heritage. 

     We have to keep that in mind. Trump might be wolf-whistling and permission granting, calling ollie-olllie-oxen-free for haters and goose steppers to come out from under their rocks, blinking into the light.
     But they were always there. He didn't invent them. 
     Just the opposite: they invented him. Or at least helped. Let's not blow them out of proportion, particularly since they like to seem bigger than they are. I never heard from a hater in his mother's basement who didn't speak of "we." An army of one. 
     And to pretend this is some awful new development is the kind of self-flattery that looks so unappealing on the right. Our nation is not so much changing into something new as reverting to something old. Something we thought we had escaped but obviously haven't.
     An awful old development.

     Granted, beyond the usual baker's dozen of pimply teens and bowl cut storm troopers. There were a lot of angry white guys with torches Friday night—tiki torches to be sure, the mom's-basement touch that always detracts from the Albert Speer perfection these guys are always lunging at and missing.  
     It would almost be funny except, of course, it's not.

     Particularly after Saturday, with violence spreading around Charlottesville, and a protester plus two state troopers killed—one of the counter-protesters, of course—and the president apportioning blame on both sides.
     The guy who mows people down in a car, the people mown down, potato, po-tah-to, plenty of blame all around. The police quelling the disturbance counterbalancing the haters who sparked it.
     At least Trump renounced his alt-right suppor... oh wait. No, he didn't do that. It's a big tent, Trumpism.

     Back in the good old days, hatred was more subdued, more genteel. When I heard the marchers were at UVA, I couldn't help but recall that racism was so strong there, the school has its own classic poem immortalizing it.
    "University" by Karl Shapiro begins:

"To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum...."

     Shapiro had lived in Chicago for a decade as a child, dabbled in poetry, got accepted into UVA—he had a recommendation letter written by William Carlos Williams. 

    He only lasted a year there before dropping out. But not before the school, founded by Jefferson, had left its scars on him, living in a world where his fellow classmates, he later said, saw "Jews as a cut above Negroes but not much."
     Shapiro returned the favor, plunging a knife deep into his school and twisting, though pausing to limn the lovely campus:

     "Where boxwood and magnolia brood
      And columns with imperious stance."

     Then he touches on the human pettiness belying its physical beauty, a place where "equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass." The poem was published in Poetry in October, 1940. Who could have guessed those would be the good old days? Now those so ignorant they imagine themselves superior run their unequals down and kill them.
     Why aren't I as worked up about this development as others seem to be? Maybe because, as awful as the doings in Virginia without question are, they seem a distraction. The threat to our nation posed by whack-job haters is still dwarfed by the threat posed by our whack-job president. And there is comfort to remember that we defeated a far stronger, far more pervasive, far more organized alt-right, whoops, white supremacists, whoops, Nazis before. And we will do so again. If I could tap one of these idiots on the shoulder and tell them one thing, I would say, "Hey Reichmarshal! You know, the whole 'blood and soil' thing didn't work out so well for the Germans. Just a word to the wise, er, I mean, to the stupid."