China now, Facebook later? ‘A new model of totalitarianism’

     Halloween is over, but there's still a lot of scary stuff out there.
     Among the continuing terror attacks — as opposed to good old-fashioned homegrown mass killings, which somehow don't count — and Congress sharpening its shears to fleece the middle class and Donald Trump doing what Donald Trump always does, it takes the heart of a lion just to uncurl from your fetal ball, stand up and face the day.
     So I hate to add one more worry.
    But have you ever had two unconnected aspects of life resonate with each other? One big and one small? So they seem to mean something?
     Like last week's Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and a blog post of mine being kicked off Facebook.
     The congress, in case you missed it, sealed Xi Jinping as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. Immediately "he proclaimed the regime’s intention not just to become the world’s leading power, but to establish a new model of totalitarianism," according to a Washington Post report.
     At the same time, I went to Facebook and posted Monday's column on the sale of Howard Tullman's art collection, containing many, many naked women.
     I wouldn't dream of trying to run a photo of his art harem in the paper. Newspapers defer to our older, more conservative readers, and nudity upsets them. But the internet? Another story entirely. I splayed a particularly flesh-filled photo atop a post on my personal blog — paintings, drawings and watercolors, remember. Then I posted it on Facebook, which featured the photo atop the entry.
     For exactly two minutes.
     Then Facebook yanked the post down, declaring it a ....

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The photo that Facebook wouldn't publish

Chief was past retirement age a decade ago

     The controversy over Chief Illiniwek, the former University of Illinois mascot banned by the NCAA a decade ago, was "back with a vengeance" last Friday, as the Champaign-Urbana school's homecoming parade was disrupted by anti-chief protesters, and an informal chief was forced to flee under police escort. 
     Looking over the controversy in my column, I have to admit it didn't bring out the best in me. Good Clevelander—and lifelong Chief Wahoo fan—I backed the chief for years, promoting the idea that history belongs to everyone and anyone can take it and put it to whatever uses they please. History isn't "owned" by the group that comprises it now. 
    But that view lacked empathy, and while I rarely wince at columns I've written in the past, I wince at those. Because I changed my mind, eventually, with some guidance by my colleague Steve Patterson, who is part Native-American, I came to realize I was making a category error: the chief isn't a creative character facing criticism: he's a brand logo whose time has passed.
    Even the columns where I get behind scrapping the chief have a certain edge to them—I got a lot of harsh flack from activists, and tended to bite back. Three such moments:

     Get rid of Chief Illiniwek. It's enough already. I like tradition as much as the next guy, and hate to see the grim Native American activists and their anti-U.S. view of history win. But when you get a major national college accrediting body saying that the Chief might undermine the value of a University of Illinois education, it's time to cut the cord.
     He's a mascot. He's supposed to be fun, not be this source of constant dreary conflict year in and year out. Sure, he's a tradition, but pick anything else—an apple, a cowboy, a shoe— and in 100 years that will be the tradition.
     You think if people stopped buying Planter's peanuts, turned off by its lying, dandified Mr. Peanut (it just struck me—the top hat, the spats, the monocle; he's gay, isn't he?), that Planter's wouldn't dump him in a moment and create Gomer Goober or whatever? Of course. The U. of I. is a business too, and when a mascot turns too many people off, it's time to call Leo Burnett and order up a new one.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 27, 2004

     Activists often have an uncanny way of perpetuating the very stereotypes they claim to be fighting, and unwittingly presenting a more negative image of their group than the supposed slurs they are fighting against.
     Take Native Americans outraged over Chief Illiniwek, the beleaguered Indian mascot of the University of Illinois.
     Now, I've gone on record in the past saying that the university should dump the chief, not out of any particular concern for the bruised feelings of activists—a vindictive, joyless lot, I can tell you, based on personal experience. But just because the chief has become a perennial liability, as a logo, and when your brand is dragging business down instead of promoting it, it's time to get rid of the mascot or at the very least take the kerchief off of Aunt Jemimah.
     Myself, I think they should change the chief into a cowboy: Cowboy Bob. He could do a lariat demonstration before games. The kids would love it.
     Though getting rid of the chief will help the image of Native Americans. Not by removing the dance, which strikes me as rather benign. But rather by muting the protests, which inevitably cast Indians in a harsher light than the thing they are complaining about.
     The grandson of the chief who sold his ceremonial outfit to the university is now demanding they give it back, even though the school paid $3,500 for it. There is an obvious echo of the old cliche about . . . you know what, I'm not even going to go there.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 21, 2007

     OK, I'll say it: There was always something a little, um, odd about the guys on the pep squad. I know it's athletic, in a way, and I know they get free tickets, and can show school spirit, and hang out with the female cheerleaders, if they want to. . . .
     But still . . .
     And these two guys at the University of Illinois, trying to preserve their right to dress up like Chief Illiniwek by filing a lawsuit, claiming that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees their right to prance around before athletic events . . .
     That's just crazy.
     I don't have a right to—oh—dress as Cowboy Bob, the mascot I hope will replace Chief Illiniwek, and demonstrate my skill at lariat twirling before games. Someone has to control what goes on at games, and that someone is the school.
     Chief Illiniwek—whom I supported for years—has become a burden, and a surreal, pointless issue that only gets stranger and stranger. If he is retired after Wednesday—as it seems he will be—then we may all say together: "At last!"
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 18, 2007

As Russia meddling plot thickens, focus on what matters most

     Now it gets complicated.
     On Monday, special counsel Robert Mueller III named former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, in a 12-count indictment related to laundering Russian money. An hour later, George Papadopoulos' guilty plea, for lying to the FBI about his relations with Russia, was unsealed.
     Cue the timelines and relationship charts.
     Those of us old enough to remember Watergate — sigh, the scandal in the early 1970s that brought down the Nixon administration — recall just how labyrinthine this kind of thing can become, a sprawling opera buffa with an enormous supporting cast of bagmen, functionaries and tangential-yet-important lowlives.
     Nixon — Richard Nixon, the president — was forced to resign as even his supporters began recognizing his guilt in 1974. I assume people of today know that, but then again, assuming Americans know stuff, whether history or science or current events, is not a winning strategy anymore. Assuming it ever was.
     Knowing stuff is hard. Life is complicated, which is why people prefer to dream up conspiracy theories and simple pat explanations for complicated situations, or distract themselves from news they don't like with shiny objects — "What about Hillary?" — little snow globes they can give a shake. Will any investigation, no matter what it finds, lure them out of their hall of mirrors?
     That question will be answered down the road. Before we get lost in the minutia of the investigation, waiting for the tide of prosecution to start lapping at the steps of the White House, assuming it's not there now, we should remember to look at the big picture, and always keep in mind the most important thing.
   
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Mueller's Russia probe: the first shoes drop

     History is lived in retrospect, but reality unfolds moment by moment.

     We know that former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort turned himself in to the FBI Monday is the first shoe — two shoes, as he was joined by business associate Rick Gates — to drop in the Robert Mueller III investigation of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. For those of us who see the Trump administration as a siege of un-American values, it is an encouraging moment of hope after nine months of continual shocks, of jaw-dropping veers away from responsible leadership and good government.
     But we don't know if it's the beginning of the unwinding of the chaotic Trump administration. Or the beginning of further descent into lawlessness as the president pushes back with all his twittery might. He is already condemning the investigation — by a special counsel his own Justice Department appointed — as a "witch hunt," urging, with the "what-about-this?" reflex that passes for rebuttal of late, that Hillary Clinton be investigated instead. He might still simply fire Mueller, despite the Constitutional firestorm that would ignite.
     Charges against the two include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder millions of dollars and making false statements — charges you can watch already being shrugged off by Republicans who spent years going after will-o'-the-wisps like which email server Clinton used and whether she had broken State Department email guidelines
     This is the first shoe to drop, but there will be others. The way these investigations work is, the authorities begin on the outermost ring of a criminal enterprise and work themselves toward the center. The blind loyalty that Donald Trump demands from all those under him — indeed, from all Americans — is seen differently when viewed in light of a prison sentence. Think of a centipede sitting on the edge of the bed at the end of the day, taking off shoe after shoe, each one bigger than the last, each one falling with a bigger clomp.

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Why all the naked women in art?

     What's with all the naked women?
     See, that's why people hate the media. Here Howard Tullman, investor, patron of contemporary art, the dynamo behind the 1871 high-tech incubator at the Merchandise Mart, a force on the Chicago scene, invites me into his home, his sprawling 5,000-square-foot River West residence crammed with hundreds of arresting artworks and what do I notice? The vibrant colors? The large scale? The dramatic chiaroscuro?
     No. I fixate on that most images are buck nekkid women, pouty, chesty, except for the naked girls who aren't. What's the story here, Howard?
     Tullman just laughs.          
     You can see them for yourself, on the Leslie Hindman Auctioneers website, "Property from the Collection of Howard and Judith Tullman." The sale starts at noon Monday.
     I've known Tullman since he ran Tribeca Flashpoint, a digital media arts college. He's a flashy personality himself, who rubs some people the wrong way — heck, sometimes he rubs me the wrong way.
     But we both are able to get past that. Tullman because he likes publicity, and me because I like talking to a guy who regularly lets drop fascinating bits of information, such as when Rahm Emanuel couldn't get back into his home in 2010, he camped out in Tullman's harem.
     "He lived in my home surrounded by a million naked women," Tullman said.
     Tullman is stepping down from 1871 and selling off about an eighth of his collection for a variety of reasons, like raising money for his arts foundation.

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Lincoln is coming and boy is he pissed.

     Am I the only one to notice that the right foot of Abraham Lincoln is arched upward? As if he's about to leap out of his throne in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and bind the Union together once again? Even if it means, again, kicking the ass of a group of traitors violating every tenet of this once great and proud nation? 
     He looks as if he's just noticed something he doesn't like, maybe a Russian-canoodling fraud and liar living in his former residence. I don't think there's a patriotic American alive today who hasn't had his faith in this country in the sanity and decency of his fellow Americans deeply shaken this past year. But Lincoln is a reminder that our faith has been shaken before, and we have been divided, and suffered before. Actually far, far worse than this. And as ghastly as the particulars are, we are in many way far better than in the past. There is no slavery. The fields of America are not soaked with American blood. Millions of Americans might have blinded themselves to the truth. But others see it, and speak it clearly. And we still have laws, laws that can be mocked and brushed off only so long. Then they slowly tighten around malefactors and justice, inch by inch, is done.
    Or so we can hope.

Rise of printing sparked Luther's Reformation 500 years ago

     There is no evidence that an Augustine monk named Martin Luther, unhappy with a popular fundraising tool of the Catholic Church, actually nailed his list of complaints — the famous "95 Theses" — to the door of the All Saints' Church at Wittenburg exactly 500 years ago. He never claimed to have done so, and the story wasn't circulated until after his death.
     We do know that he distributed them in a letter dated Oct. 31, 1517, to the archbishop, listing his 95 criticisms about the enthusiasm with which the church was selling indulgences.
     An indulgence was a piece of paper that, for instance, shortened the time that had to be spent in purgatory. The church had been vigorously selling them to raise money to rebuild the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
     This bothered Luther a lot, not because he was so liberal, but because he was so pious. He prayed, he fasted, he flagellated himself. Luther was getting to heaven the hard way, and it galled him that a rich man could just loosen his purse strings, dig out a few coins, and cut in line.
     "The treasures of indulgences are nets that are now used to fish for the wealth of people," reads thesis No. 66.

Indulgence issued by Pope Sixtus IV

      You can see an actual indulgence — from Pope Sixtus IV, raising money for an expedition against the Turks — on display at the Newberry Library in a fascinating exhibit, "Religious Change and Print: 1450-1700," that runs through Dec. 27.
     The show connects the beginning of the Reformation to the rise of printing, beginning with a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. The publication of a Bible using moveable type, we tend to forget, was itself a radical act, moving the Holy Scriptures from hand-copied, vastly expensive work owned by churches, into mass-produced, less-expensive reading material that could eventually find its way into the hands of regular people, who could then fancy themselves free to not only read it, but to analyze and dispute what was within. Soon those people were printing books of their own, plus pamphlets and broadsheets. Printing and heresy went hand-in-hand.
     "They're very closely connected," said David Spadafora, president of the Newberry. "Print right away becomes a very important medium for people like Luther to get their views out to a wider public than could possibly otherwise have received them."
     The Reformation, as Luther's protest became known, was not the first break in the Catholic Church— branches had been sheering off since the 1st century, with the Great Schism of 1054 perhaps even more significant, leading to the East and West divisions.
      But Luther's schism gained momentum quickly with the help of printing and the desire of the faithful to take more control of their spiritual lives. Protestantism became important in the march toward modernity, a journey that saw God move from something defined by priests and manifested through relics and miracles, into something practiced by individuals. God went from living in the church to living in your heart.
     After Luther, "faith could not be coerced, and secular powers could not legislate in the spiritual sphere," writes Euan Cameron, professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
     Though not for lack of trying. The Catholic Church was quick to push back against Luther. Pope Leo excommunicated him in 1520, amid general cranking up of repression, as noted in the Newberry's exhibit, in one of the sharper sentences I've read on a museum wall:
     "No institution better encapsulates the official goals and approaches of the Catholic Church to regulation than the Inquisition."
     Half a millennium ago, remember. They did get better. Because repression only works until it doesn't; then it fuels the fires it's trying to extinguish. "Lutheran" was first used as a slight by Catholic authorities trying to emphasize the human, as opposed to divine, source of these new ideas.
     Luther himself did not want want to name his movement for himself—he wanted his followers to simply call themselves "Christians."
     Martin Luther became famous after his Ninety-Five Theses were made public in 1517, which explains his prominent portrait on the title page of his 1520, "De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae," or "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church." | Courtesy of the Newberry Library
     "After all," he wrote, "the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone."
     Not to give Luther too much credit. Once he started questioning Church authority, Luther was surprised and aghast to find people started questioning him.
     "Definitely," said Spadafora. "That's one of the reasons why on the one hand, Luther really wanted to put Bibles in people's hands, on the other hand, he came to realize they were doing interpretation much more individualistically than even he felt comfortable with." (Nor was Luther, a fervent anti-Semite, comfortable with Jews, but that's a topic for a different day).
     One lesson, in our own time of shifting values and communications upheaval, is the importance of talking to people in the way they want to be spoken to.
     "Luther very cannily begins to use German, begins to use the vernacular and makes sure a lot of his materials are printed in the vernacular," said Spadafora, "vernacular" meaning "common speech."
     "Whereas the Catholic church is relatively slow to respond in the vernacular way. They lose the battle over the argument because they are slower and appealing in Latin to a different audience," Spadafora said. "We see this in social media all the time."
     Today the Catholic Church still dominates Christianity, at least numerically: 1.2 billion Catholics, compared to about 900 million Protestants. Since both groups tend to view Muslim sectarian bloodshed, say between Sunni and Shia, as representing that faith's inherent violence, it might be useful to remind them that modern scholars estimate that 50 million Christians were killed by one another in the centuries of Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggles that followed Luther's brash act.
     That schism has somewhat healed—last year Pope Francis formally apologized for the Catholic side of the slaughter, and the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations have signed agreements within the past decade recognizing the legitimacy of each other's baptisms.