Mike & me

   
     I would never say that I had a favorite reader. There are so many thoughtful voices and faithful followers, I'd hate to have to choose one.
     But Chris Wood is right up there, if only for his regular Facebook posts showing photos of himself, watching the Bears game, enjoying a cigar and an Old Style in his garage—living the life, I tell myself whenever I see him lofting a brew, denied to me by a cruel and vengeful Creator.
     So when he asked if I would tell a story I alluded to, about famed columnist Mike Royko threatening to break my legs, well, I gave it a shot. Then sat on it for a week. It was ... I don't know, nostalgic and slight and not up to my professional standards, such as they are.
    But it's 9 p.m. on a Monday, and nothing better has presented itself. So here it is, at his request. The blame, of course, is entirely mine.

     Tim Weigel invited me to dinner once. 
     I can't remember why. He drank at the Billy Goat, I drank at the Billy Goat, back in the days when you could still smoke in a bar, and we both did. Cigars. I hazily recall the cigars having something to do with our meeting. We asked each other about the cigars we were smoking, struck up a conversation, talked and drank and smoked cigars. 

Tim Weigel

     Now Weigel was a bright and affable man. He had gone to Yale, surprising for a journalist, never mind a TV sports personality. He had also been movie critic Gene Siskel's roommate. 
    Anyway, we chatted, and became friends. I remember him coming over to my apartment in East Lake View to attend a cocktail party, in between the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts. I admired the brio of that. 
     He returned the favor, inviting me and my wife to dinner over at his home. The appointed day and hour came, and we drove to Evanston, where Weigel lived. I had his address written on a piece of paper, but was confused when I arrived at the spot where his house should have been. 
    Across the street was an enormous baronial mansion. That couldn't be it. Tim read the sports on TV. He wore loud jackets. On the other side of the street, more modest homes. But none the right address. I gazed at the address in my hand, puzzled. 
      This was in the early 1990s. Before children. Before GPS on cell phones. It had to be summer, because there was a man across the street, mowing his lawn. I approached him. Did Tim Weigel live around here? I asked.
    Sure. He pointed at the baronial mansion. 

Mike Royko

    Oh. Right. Television. Sports. I can be so naive sometimes. 
     We were greeted at the massive door, and the evening melted away from there. I seem to remember a wife, a radio personality of some sort. Tim had a EuroCave in his dining room—a special refrigerator for wine—that impressed me. We made use of it. 
     At one point Tim asked me about a certain former colleague of mine who had gone to work for Mike Royko, the top columnist in the city, then and forevermore. The colleague, well, I had better draw the veil here. I gave my opinion, which was not kind. 
     The conversation would have dissolved into memory but, unbeknownst to me, Tim had hired one of the Billy Goat's part-time bartenders as a bottle washer and general lackey back in his kitchen—an expansive, near-industrial kitchen, I seem to recall—and the bottle washer/lackey overheard that part of the conversation, which I discovered Monday, when the phone in my office rang.
     It was Royko's employee. Not happy about my unkind assessment. I'd relate the direct language but, after 25 years, the specifics are lost. What is not is the sense that I had stuck my arm into a cage and it was now being chewed on. 
     The line went dead. The employee had hung up. I can still recall the oh-I-am-so-screwed feeling in my gut as I held the dead receiver. 
     I'll be frank; I don't tolerate bad blood well, but like to be at peace with everyone. Tranquility is the old man's milk, as Jefferson said, but certain young men like it too. Pour oil on the waters, I thought, and called back. I would apologize and placate the employee, so as not to hear my name called at the Goat one day, look up and get an ice pick in the eye.
     I dialed the number for Royko's office.
    Only the employee didn't answer the phone; Mike Royko did. Now he was yelling at me. I only recall two parts of the conversation. One was me pleading, "Aw, c'mon Mike, what has the world come to when a guy can't get tight with friends and bad-mouth the competition." Or words to that effect. And Royko saying that he would break my legs, probably break my fuckin' legs, if ... and I'm not sure what circumstances would trigger that. Maybe if I badmouthed his legman again. Maybe if he saw me again. I'm not sure.
     In years to come, I would retell the story anyway, to grab at a certain whiff of authenticity, a kind of contact high. Royko was the real Chicago deal and I crossed paths with him enough for him to threaten me, which had to count for something. It wasn't as good as getting socked, wasn't Bernie Judge throwing a typewriter in the newsroom, but it would have to do.
     To be honest, I never had the Royko-envy that so distorted other columnists' work. I would have liked to have had a decent exchange of words with him while he was alive, but quickly realized that it would never happen. After he died, when readers would write to me and tell me that I was no Mike Royko, I would write back and thank them, pointing out that Royko was a mean drunk—often, though he seemed to have his moments of warmth and decency with people who weren't me—and one of his sons ended up robbing a bank. It was an end that I worked quite hard to avoid, still do, and I'm glad someone noticed my success at it up to this point.
     That's it. As I said, not much of a story. 
     
     

The lady or the law?

      The photo to the right, of course, is the scrum of people crowded around the Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci's masterwork on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. 
     I commented upon it after  visiting last spring. The crowd was so dense you could feel the humidity coming off their bodies—the gallery where the painting is displayed reminded me of a high school gym. 
     Now direct your attention to the photograph below, also at the Louvre. 
     Do you recognize the black basalt column? Don't feel bad if you don't. I imagine most people will draw a blank . 
    Take a second look.
   

     Any idea?
    It's the Code of Hammurabi. 
    Not the oldest set of laws—though the basalt stele is over 3,000 years old. But the "most complete and perfect extant collection of Babylonian laws" to come down to us, discovered in what is now Iran in 1901. 
    The code contains 282 laws, related to a range of areas: contracts, marriage, divorce, assault, theft, liability and punishments. 
     Parts are familiar to this day, such as No. 196, spelling out a classic concept of justice:
     "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone. If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman he shall pay one gold mina. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price."
      This "eye for an eye" might at first blush seem ancient and brutal to us now, though not as much as we'd like. Known as "lex talionis"—the law of retaliation—to this day it's the justification we use to execute murderers. You took something away from someone, now we're taking the same thing. It's odd. If we merely plucked out an offender's eye, it would be considered barbaric. Yet snuffing out an entire life is somehow less so.

     Notice also that the punishment meted out depends not only on the crime, but the person upon whom the crime is committed. The status of the criminal was also significant. 

     In that way, the code is different than our current laws. In theory. We like to think that we've progressed from days of ancient tyrants, though in this way the code has us beat: status, both of victims and perpetrators, is in practice an important factor, still—maybe the important factor—even though our law pretends it isn't. A death in one part of town is not the same as a death in another. A rich man lawyers up while a poor man sits in jail because of some piddling bond he can't pay.

     Maybe we would be better off if we were honest about it and wrote this injustice into our laws. At least then it would be clear.
     Though my goal isn't to criticize law; it is the only thing, a thin wall of words, that stands between us an despotism. Even in ancient Babylon they knew that. Nowadays, we tend to forget. 

     I want you to notice one other thing about the Code of Hammurabi. Look at the photograph again. What's missing? Take a second. Anything not there? Glance back at the Mona Lisa for a hint.

     People. The room is completely empty. I sought it out because I knew it was there and wanted to show my wife, a lawyer. I knew she would enjoy seeing it, and she did. But the masses don't bother. They pack into a gallery to see a painting they are already vastly familiar with. And probably don't even know that one of the earliest examples of the framework of law that supports all of our lives is in another gallery, largely ignored. 

    It's a worrisome neglect, because our fidelity for the law is of the utmost importance, as we in the United States will find out, sooner than later. Do we really value what we have? Do we understand its magnificence? 

    Between the Mona Lisa and the code, which is the true wonder? Which is the greater example of genius? 

     

Captain Crunch, Defender of Christmas

     Captain Crunch loves Christmas. 
     The criminal conspiracy of Snap, Crackle and Pop, not so much. 
     Judging from this special Xmas-themed box of the Captain's tooth-murdering sugary cereal, noticed on the shelves of Target the other day, conveniently juxtaposed with the season-denying Kellogg's Krispy product ... well, let's just say the outraged Fox News diatribe writes itself: "'Who is Kellogg's trying to fool? 'Holiday colors?' Those are green and red, the traditional colors of Christmas as outlined in the Holy Bible..."
     The president of the United States lit a match under the traditional War on Christmas bonfire last week. "You don't see 'Merry Christmas' anymore," he whined. "You see 'Happy New Year.' You see red. And you see snow."
     Crunch good! Krispies bad! Need I point out that Crunch is based on corn, an American product, while Krispies contains rice, harvested in Southeast Asia? 
     My first instinct was to ignore this seasonal disorder as trivial compared to the true outrages and quasi-treasons Trump commits daily. Just another example of the why-are-you-hitting-yourself bully tactic so often used by the Right, of conjuring up some idiotic stance and then pretending someone you don't like embraces it. Nobody is offended by "Merry Christmas." There is no effort to dampen the holiday that pervades every corner of American society from the moment the Halloween candy is put away until the New Year's decorations are taken down. Barack Obama said "Merry Christmas" all the time—MSNBC put together a pointed highlights reel of him saying exactly that, again and again and again. What Obama didn't do is make a big deal of it, weaponizing Christmas, tainting it, as Trump does everything he touches. By the time he's done, "Merry Christmas" will carry an emotional wallop somewhere between "sieg heil" and "fuck you."
    Why pay attention at all? That's easy. Because there is a larger point here.
    The entire GOP worldview is based on false victimization. Their own victimization, conjured up to mask an ugly truth. In a world of true victims, Republicans sympathize with only themselves. Why? Because they can no longer traffic in the open language of hate, of supremacy—they can't simply despise specific groups as inferiors. It isn't done anymore, at least not openly. The next best thing is to imagine offenses that they are the victims of at the hands of those they hunger to condemn. Thus gay people are not simply people, trying to get married, raise families. No, they have an agenda, to destroy straight marriage, to corrupt children (I wonder if Republicans will be able to repeat that one with a straight face after Roy Moore wins on Tuesday. Sadly, they will. We live in the Golden Age of Hypocrisy). 
    That's why Mexicans have to be murderers and rapists, Muslims have to be terrorists. Otherwise Republicans would just be hating people for no reason, and even Donald Trump has enough dim self-awareness to realize that won't fly, thanks to a century of glacial progress.
     Remember where "Happy Holidays" came from. Fifty years ago it was merely assumed everyone was a white Christian. Trust me, it's true. I was there. Inclusion meant tucking in a grating Hanukkah carol into the Christmas Concert, sung condescendingly for the class Jew, who was expected to be grateful. 
    At some point, educators—and TV stations, and cereal makers, and anyone involved in interacting with the public—began to realize that their classroom, their audience, their customers, were actually quite diverse. They weren't all white. They weren't all straight. They weren't all Christian. It was odd to have a Christmas concert in a school where half the students didn't celebrate Christmas. So they began to nudge the net open a bit wider. A "holiday" concert. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas.
     Fox News grabbed it like a hungry dog and began shaking. This, like gay marriage, like a functioning immigration system, like anything that acknowledges the existence of people who make our nation's terrified third uncomfortable, is simply unacceptable. They lack the honesty to say, "I don't want them here. Their existence detracts from my fragile self-image. I wish they would go away." 
    Accommodating them is an insult. It is oppression, and implies these non-Merry-Christmas-saying creatures also belong. That it is their country too. Trump's Christmas posturing might seem trivial, and at one level it is. But at another it reflects an elemental part of his basic appeal: the illusion that American can be undone, the projector of time run backward, and the shrinking white Christian majority return to its lost Eden where their inferiors bowed their heads and stepped off the sidewalk, mumbling apologies, as the country's true owners strode by, masters of all they surveyed.

Being Jewish in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s

   

     The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opens in Jackson today. The president of the United States will not be attending the ceremony.
     For a while it looked he would. The man elected on a platform of naked bigotry, encouraging hatred against people based on their skin color, nationality, and religion, would actually show up and pretend to care about prejudice. As if he belonged at such a museum in any other capacity than a cautionary exhibit.
     But Donald Trump either doesn't know how he is rightly perceived, or doesn't care, and on Monday said he would be going. Only after civil rights icons like Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) and others refused to participate in the opening if Trump were present, did someone on Trump's staff with a capacity for shame decide that the president would not attend the public festivities, but would tour the museum privately, like the scorned pariah he is. 

     Jackson, Mississippi, if you don't know, has an astounding history of racial and religious oppression, as I mention in the column below, reviewing a book about growing up there Jewish in the 1950s. The book is filled with telling, touching details—one that I didn't put into the column, yet stays lodged in mind, is when the Ku Klux Klan marched through Jackson in the 1950s, Edward Cohen's father knew which neighbors were under those sheets because he had sold them their shoes.

     Jews don't believe in heaven. That isn't bandied about much. It seems almost rude. Sincere people are trying to embrace this incredible construct of harps and clouds and halos, and we're not playing along.

     I suppose some Jews believe. But heaven isn't part of the official program. I sure don't buy it, instead keeping the party line: Departed loved ones live in the memory of those who love them.
    For instance: To conjure up my grandfather, Irv, whom I adored, I don't have to speculate about angels. I can see him, in my mind, reclining in his green Barcalounger, sipping a Pabst, smelling of cigarettes and Luden's Cough Drops, watching "The Price Is Right." He loved "The Price Is Right."
     The problem with not having a heaven to safely dispatch departed relatives, like children shipped off to eternal summer camp, is that it places a deep responsibility on you. If they exist only in memory, then you have to remember them. It is your responsibility to rescue them from oblivion.
     Which is one reason I so admire Edward Cohen's new memoir, The Peddler's Grandson (University Press of Mississippi, $25). In fewer than 200 pages, he constructs an ark rescuing not only every relative he ever knew—with their quirks and foibles and eccentricities—but charting their improbable journey from Eastern Europe to Jackson, Miss., of all places, where they dwelled, outsiders, running a clothing shop.
     Jackson in the 1950s and 1960s is sketched through stunning details. When the P.A. system at Chastain Junior High school announces President Kennedy has been slain, the students cheer, wildly. Later, "Sesame Street" debuts nationwide, but not in Jackson, because it shows black and white children playing together.
     Still, Cohen never paints Mississippi in the grim hues we Northerners expect. Despite frequent bigotry, it's a great place for Cohen to grow up. That's perhaps the biggest surprise of the book. Jackson is nice; it's home. He loves it, then and now.
     Cohen's story is the story of anyone set apart for one reason or another. How much do you give up in order to fit in?
     The process began in the late 19th century, with grandfather Moise, fresh off the boat. After his new companions persuade him to take part in a snipe hunt, he reverses the humiliating joke by viewing the whole thing as bonding, certain "that he had undergone some redneck rite of passage."
     Poignance and humor jostle each other, as when the abrasive Rabbi Perry Nussbaum— outspoken enough on civil rights to get his house bombed by the Klu Klux Klan—sends young Cohen out on Halloween to collect, not the usual candy, but pennies for UNICEF.
     "The United Nations was regarded in Mississippi as, at best, a communist lesion on the country's independence, at worst as the nesting place of Satan," he writes. "I set out, wearing my mouse costume, into the heart of John Birch-era Mississippi." The results can be imagined.
     Cohen is at first desperate to fit in with his entirely gentile school. He lobbies his mother for a Christmas tree; she resists, then strikes a compromise—he can have a tree in his bedroom. The image of the little boy shutting his door after supper, plugging in the single strand of lights around this tiny, pathetic branch of a tree, was the most moving image for me in the whole book—a sad, funny encapsulation of yearning and denial.
     Southerness and Jewishness are not often juxtaposed. But, like chocolate and peanut butter, they go well together, especially in the hands of an author who has both love and a clear eye:
     "One can hardly hail from two more historically losing causes than the South and Judaism," he writes. "Both my cultures have long, tragic pasts, and not one jot of it has been forgotten."
     Strong words, and he argues them well in a beautiful book.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 28, 1999

Nine trucks

    Nine trucks. Mack trucks, mostly, with a couple Peterbilts thrown in for variety. Five parked on Center Avenue, four more around the corner. I counted. 
    Kitty and I were on the dawn patrol last week, making our eight block circuit of the neighborhood, when we turned a corner and were confronted with them. A sight that, in 17 years of stomping our quiet suburban streets, I had never seen. 
   A knot of drivers stood chatting with one another. 
    "Scheduling mishap?" I ventured—nine trucks seemed like a lot of trucks to park at 7 a.m. on a single block. I instantly imagined some computer snafu where nine trucks had been sent to do the job of one. It seemed the premise for a children's story: Nine Trucks. Kids love trucks. I know I do. 
     I couldn't imagine why so many were there. The drivers, holding their coffees, looked at me but didn't respond. A civilian. Or perhaps a language issue. Kitty and I moved on, admiring the brawny trucks, designed for hauling dirt.
     It didn't take long to realize they were there for the house that had been razed a few days earlier. It had seemed a not-particularly-decrepit house, new enough that I snapped a photo of it. But obviously not to contemporary standards of luxurious living. They've been building these lot-line crowding mansions lately. 
     Twenty years ago faux Norman chateaux were all the rage, with round towers and limestone details. I particularly scorned those. Now Burgundian behemoths are out and we are seeing what I think of as Little Sag Harbours, Atlantic coast edifices with wood shingles on the walls and lots of little windows scattered about, homes that should be on some sprawling estate in the Hamptons, not jammed into a suburban lot on the former prairie of Illinois. Their windows, instead of looking out on Oyster Bay, gaze through the windows of their neighbors. Some are six feet apart.
    The trucks obviously weren't bringing anything—the truck beds were empty. They were taking something away. The dirt from the foundation of the new house.
    Kitty and I came around again that afternoon—the afternoon walk. We are creatures of habit, the both of us. If I try to deflect from our routine she will stop in her tracks and stare at me, indignant. 
     The trucks were gone. But something new was there. A hole. And not just any hole. A foundation, the deepest basement I've seen on a new house--it looked 10 feet deep. For a moment I wondered if they could be building an apartment building in the middle of that residential block. It was that deep. And wide, it was as if they had dug up the entire lot; there would be no yard at all. I stopped to gawp at hole, and a guy in a hard hat wandered by, and I struck up a conversation—I'm good at that. 
     There had actually been 11 trucks, he said. Two more arrived after I left.  "That's all I could get," said the foreman. "I asked for 20."  He said deep, wide foundations are the new thing, all the rage.
    "It's even dug under the garage," he said. "We use re-enforced concrete for the garage floor."
    Maybe class envy is involved—the mere upper 10 percent gazing at the upper 5 percent. Whoever dug the basement of my house, 100 years ago, made it just tall enough for a man of medium height to stand, and then he has to dip his head to avoid heating ducts in a spot or two. I wish that farmer had gone for an extra six inches, but he was probably digging by hand, and having done that myself, I know how tempting it is to stop at Just Deep Enough and not an inch more.
    Now they dig to China, and span the lot. I can't imagine what kind of Hyde Park horror is going up, but I don't have to; we'll find out soon enough. A lot of money in the world, concentrated in an ever narrowing band atop our society, and they want every cubic inch of basement they have coming to them. It won't be pretty to look at, but that isn't much of a concern anymore. Maybe it never was.

Jews don't worship stones

     I'm actually on vacation this week, working on a long-delayed project around the house. 

     But I don't want to abandon you entirely, particularly as the news keeps coming, alas.

     Tired of tossing lit matches at the powder keg of the Korean peninsula, Donald Trump decided to shift Amateur Hour to the Middle East on Wednesday. He announced that the United States would be moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a reckless and destabilizing move, done against the counsel of his top advisers, one that pleases Trump's evangelical, let's-end-the-world-now-so-Jesus-comes-back Christians, and hard right Jews who support whatever folly Israel happens to be cooking up at the moment, and nobody else.

     Otherwise, it lights a fire under parties that need little provocation to unleash their basest instincts. Peace is now even more distant, hair-trigger tempers will flair, innocent people will die and nothing has been accomplished, except the kind of tough guy posturing that the right finds so appealing. 

     To be honest, there isn't much point to picking apart the folly of what Trump has done. All we have to do is step back and wait for the latest chapter of the half-century disaster to unfold.

    In the meantime, here's a visit I took to Jerusalem 13 years ago, as a guest of Magen David Adom, the Israeli emergency service. If you can, try to get to the end, because what the tour guide says reflects back on the whole situation. We're in love with land, but we used to stand for something, for justice. God has unleashed a number of his little jokes upon the Jewish people over their 5,000 year history. But if they've gone through all that only to end up as permanent jailers to an ever-increasing Palestinian captivity....well, the Big Guy wouldn't do that to us, or to them. Would he?

     JERUSALEM -- They don't call it the "Wailing Wall" anymore. For thousands of years Jews went there to lament the destruction of Solomon's Temple. But wailing is so, I don't know, negative, and Jews are trying to put a cheerier spin on life, where possible. So instead we call it the "Western Wall." Either way, it's an expanse of limestone blocks, the only remnant of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago.
     I took a cab to the Old City. We pulled up by crenelated ramparts. I strolled in the direction of the Wall, illuminated by floodlights. The sight stopped me in my tracks. Enormous limestone blocks, with tufts of greenery spilling out. Above it the golden Dome of the Rock. As I hurried forward, my dead relatives shuffled into mind. As if all those slaughtered Bramsons, sleeping in their slit trenches in Poland, stirred.
     What would it have meant to them, I wondered, to have gotten here? To do what I could do right now? My grandfather, Irwin Bramson, had been the only one of his large family to slip out of Poland before the charnel house doors clanged shut. I have a hundred letters from his relatives left behind, his brother Zalman, his mother -- my great-grandmother -- Devora. Letters describing the tough life in Poland in the 1930s, expressing joy over the birth of a baby—my mother—and asking if my grandfather might not send another bundle of warm clothing and, maybe, a little money.
     The tradition is that you write down prayers and tuck them into cracks in the Wall, so God has an easier time finding them. Several people gave me notes to put in, and I created my own note, a small triangle cut from paper from an envelope from one of the letters to my grandfather. I liked the idea of paper used by a doomed Jew in Bialystock ending its days stuck in the Western Wall, melting in the soft Jerusalem rain.
     What to write was a puzzle. You can't comfort the dead, can you? What could I ask God now to do for them? It's a little late.
     For being the holy focus of Judaism, the atmosphere at the Wall is surprisingly casual. People came and went, with no one in apparent charge. A Hasidic beggar cadged coins. A box of cardboard skullcaps stood unattended. Most of those praying at the Wall were from the ultra-Orthodox sects that populate Jerusalem, rocking back and forth. Some sat on the chairs scattered around or stood still at little lecterns. Others merely folded their arms against the Wall and laid their head down, almost as if resting.
     I slapped on a cardboard skullcap and walked slowly up to the Wall. I found an open spot, placing both palms flat against the stone. Then, leaning forward, I touched the Wall with my forehead and prayed.
     It seemed the thing to do.
     In 30 seconds I exhausted the store of Hebrew prayers I know by heart. So I prayed the standard pleas, for the health of my family, for the future of my boys, and—this is scary—to be a better person. Jet lag.
     Then, without forethought, I kissed the Wall—a big, full-lipped smack—lingered for a long moment, and then left. That kiss really surprised me. I hadn't planned to kiss the thing.
     Caught up in religious frenzy, I suppose.
     If I didn't quite find faith at the wall, I did experience a temporary suspension of cynicism, which might be about as close as I come. I didn't carefully observe the scene, as I should have. I didn't take notes. I forgot to estimate how high the wall is or how wide (nearly a city block, with the men comfortably praying at three-quarters of it and the women jammed in the rest. Islam isn't the only religion where women can get the short end of the stick).
     Reason quickly returned to me. Kissing the Wall, I later realized, was as hygienic as drinking a teaspoon of Ganges River water. The next day a wonderfully acerbic tour guide took us through the water tunnel running parallel to the Wall. He reminded us that the Wall is not actually part of the Second Temple. Rather, he explained happily, it is part of the retaining wall used to create the mount where the Temple stood. There was no religious reason for Jews to pray there.
     "The stones there are as holy as the stones in my backyard," he said. "A stone is a stone is a stone. Jews don't worship stones."
     He's right, I thought, feeling a little embarrassed about the kiss.
     But not about the note. The Jews weren't praying to the limestone Wall. They were praying at it. Which is a different matter. We don't worship stones, but we do venerate life, and remember those who came before us. This was the place that Jews all over the world hungered toward. They didn't want to come here because of the weather, or because of the Wall, necessarily, but because this was their place -- is their place -- the place where they can stand and pray and not be afraid (OK, the "not be afraid" part is still a work in progress).
     You can't comfort the dead. But you can do what you imagine, had they known, might have brought them comfort. Perhaps Zalman Bramson, trapped in Poland, tried to rationalize his fate by telling himself that at least his brother escaped and that maybe, just maybe, one of his descendants will someday find himself in Jerusalem. He will overcome his skepticism. He will take a 70-year-old scrap of paper, write on it a prayer asking God to bless the memory of a family he has never met, and place it reverently into the Western Wall.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 30, 2004

Bob Greene redux, this time as Trib triumph

    

Emil Jannings in "The Blue Angel"

     Puh-leeze.
     I suppose it's inevitable, with sexual harassment pinballing around what's left of the media, that the mouldering corpse of disgraced Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene would eventually be dug up. 

     And I suppose it's equally inevitable that former Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, now curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, would feel herself the person to do it.  Lipinski takes yet another victory lap for the Trib finally firing the guy in 2002, as if his predatory behavior were not an ... well..."open secret" was the phrase I was going to use, but that doesn't quite capture it. "Well-known, endlessly-discussed fact" is more apt, since you couldn't turn around in a newsroom without bumping into revolted female professionals with tales of staving off Greene's crude advances.
     It was no secret at all. I wrote a column mocking Greene's column in the Chicago Reader and, in 1995, seven, count 'em, seven years before the scales fell from Lipinski's eyes, mentioned in print Bob's proclivity for luring young interns to hotel rooms, or pathetically trying to. 

     Not that it did any good. And to be honest, I had never been accosted by Greene. In fact, I never met him. I was far more offended by Bob's writing and worldview; his deplorable personal conduct was an afterthought, a dig, though at least it was that. For his bosses it wasn't something they'd consider at all, not publicly, not when they could maintain a willful, profitable blindness. 
     It's bad enough to ignore a problem for years and years, but to then present it as some kind of triumph of personal integrity prompted me to grab a shovel myself and do a bit of  disinterring.
     Ecce homo. I found this, a timely year-end review of Bob's work, using primitive America Online archive technology. Which, alas, did not extend to movies, because, I should note, that, upon looking for images now, I mis-remembered the ending of "The Blue Angel"—Emil Jannings is in the classroom all right, but in street clothes, not a chicken suit. 

     A forgivable lapse, I hope. Not my only one, which does make me uncomfortable, occasionally, with this whole grab-a-sin-from-40-years-ago-and-smear-it-on-someone cultural moment. Because people do change. Not Bob Greene, of course, his tragedy, and ours. Nor Ann Marie Lipinski, who dislocated her shoulder patting herself on the back in 2002 and is still at it. 
     But it does happen, and I am concerned that nuance will be lost, that the Al Frankens will be lumped in with the Roy Moores, and we'll end up with a new way to defame people but little actual progress.
     Still, if cracking open the past and hunting down sexual harassers means our society is actually improving, that the often degraded position of women is advancing, it will have been worth it. Though Donald Trump was still president last time I checked, so let's not take our own victory lap quite yet. Bad enough to hear the ululations of self-praise echoing from the ivory towers of Harvard. 

     With New Year's approaching I can't help but think of the classic movie "The Blue Angel," in which hot young Marlene Dietrich lures doddering Emil Jannings away from academe and into burlesque. The last scene shows the old guy back at his deserted schoolroom, still in the chicken suit from their nightclub act. He clutches at his old desk, weeping, emitting pathetic little chicken noises, as the enormity of his squandered life comes crushing down on him.
     Now, I realize it's pointless to hope that Bob Greene will be suffering similar pangs of remorse this December 31. It's too late for that.
     But can't you just see him? Wandering gravely from room to room, lit only by candles, trailing his fingers over the flat surfaces?
     Perhaps Bob too would be wearing a ridiculous costume—the tattered rags from some forgotten Bexley High School play. And he too would weep, as memories from the wasted year just past assailed him. The bells on his costume would jingle derisively as he moved through the dim hallways.
     We need not rely upon such conjecture to delineate the enormity of Bob's failure this year, pleasurable as it may be. There's an engine now available that can outline Bob's offenses against thought and journalism with greater precision than mere subjective adjectives like "repetitive" or "infantile" or "dull" ever could.
     I'm referring to the Chicago Tribune computer archives, which recently became available — at the usurious fee of $1.25 per minute prime time — on America Online.
     A few keystrokes and we see that Bob had written 167 columns in 1995 as we went to press. And that 59 of those columns were about Baby Richard. A solid 35 percent of his entire output — with zero practical effect other than making certain people think that by focusing on one white boy who has two sets of parents fighting to love him, they were exercising supreme compassion.
     Another 20 columns — about 12 percent — were spent denouncing major league baseball and embracing the scab players.
     Scanning over his year's output, I find it difficult to pinpoint a nadir, though I would cast my vote for the pair of columns he devoted last month to reprinting old movie lines and old newspaper leads. It was a classic Bob straw-man tactic, in which the untrue premise (that the written word is no longer valued) is followed up by the canard reaction (let's have an "experiment" to see which medium, newspapers of 60 years ago or classic films, is better). Jesus, couldn't he have just used a sick day?
     But why limit ourselves to the past year? The Trib archives also have a 1985-1995 search mode. You can view the full scope and horror of Bob Greene's world, the sad spectacle of his near-autistic fixation, suffocating narrowness, and tedious, head-crushing repetition.
     I've just spent some time there, and boy, I'll tell you, it's like going down to hell and staring up Satan's ass.
     In those 11 years, Bob has written 1,923 columns. More than a third—723—involve children, a reminder that before Richard there were Joseph and Sara and all the other wee ones Bob has used to cynically fill his columns with pages of court transcripts and letters of reader outrage.
     A quarter of the columns—484—mention television. Bob's home state of Ohio pops up in 170 columns. Another 74 feature Elvis Presley in some capacity--often a starring role. Thirty-six columns dredge up Bob's pointless fictional character, Mike Holiday, the supermarket bagger last heard from, mercifully, in 1993.
     Woody Hayes shows up ten times. One hundred and twenty-four columns pass through an airport; 72 mention a hotel room (though, oddly, none of these include a young intern). In a decade's worth of ostensibly soul-baring columns, none contain the words "hairpiece," "smarmy," or "too many vodka gimlets." Yet there are four references to Barbie, and two columns—nearly identical in content and five years apart—devoted to his old high school principal, C.W. Jones.
     Michael Jordan appears in 67 columns, just three more times than the word "mall" appears. Spend enough hours working the archives, and weird parallels will start to pop out. In his column of June 6, 1994, the word "Elvis" is repeated 23 times; exactly two months later, a column repeats the word "mall" 23 times. Of the 32 columns containing the word "brave," each uses "brave" exactly three times, except for the November 13, 1991, column, "The U.S. Shrinks to the Size of a Mall," which uses it five times.
     The clock moves toward midnight. The year 1996 stretches ahead of us, filled with promise and mystery. Only two things are certain: Bob will continue to boldly explore the bedpan ocean of his soul. And the Tribune is going to make a fortune on-line.
     —Originally published in the Reader, Dec. 21, 1995