Avert your eyes, idiot

Diana and Actaeon—Diana Surprised at her Bath, by Camile Corot (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    "It is no crime," Ovid writes. "To lose your way in a dark wood." 

    Gosh that's familiar. No wonder Dante places Ovid among the quartet of classical poets he encounters soon after getting lost in his own dark wood and blundering into Hell. Homer, Horace and Lucan are the other three. A little nod for just how much he, ah, borrows from Metamorphoses.
     Not to minimize that moment—I feel it's where modern literature begins. The poets welcome Dante—"Hey look, it's Dante!"—and they chat, though Dante turns to the reader and says, in essence, "I'm not going to bore you with what we talked about: poetic stuff."
     I had pulled down "Tales from Ovid"—translated by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband—because I read, on my friend Didier Thys's Facebook page, that the city council in Rome last Thursday revoked Ovid's exile, in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of his death. 
     Here I thought the Chicago City Council had a monopoly on empty symbolic legislation. The temptation is to conjure up some Italian Ed Burke—Edwardo Burkioni—suitcoat over his shoulders, one hand wrapped around an elbow, the other gesturing with a twist of the wrist as he rises in the assembly to correct the wrong committed against Ovid, punishment for what the Roman poet enigmatically referred to as "a poem and a mistake."
    A little late.
    Still, nobody should complain about anything that nudges us back to the ancients. The "lose your way in dark wood" line was in the opening of Actaeon—I had marked it with a Post-It note during a previous read, for reasons mysterious, probably the Dante echo.
    As so often happens in classical literature, the tale was particularly apt for our moment. Actaeon is a hunter. The day's hunt over, he heads towards his palace, becomes lost, and stumbles into a grove sacred to Diana, goddess of the hunt, who—whoops!—at that very moment is being bathed by her nymphs after her own long day of supervising all hunts everywhere.
    "Steered by pitiless fate" Actaeon comes upon the clearing, the pool, the bathing goddess, and is set upon by her attendants.

Screaming at him in a commotion of water.
And as his eyes adjusted, he saw they were naked,
Beating their breasts they screamed at him.

And he saw they were crowding together
To hide something from him. He stared harder.
Those nymphs could not conceal Diana's whiteness 

The tallest barely reached her navel. Actaeon
Stared at the goddess, who stared at him...

    Let's just say ... spoiler alert! ... that Diana does not take this intrusion well. Her weapons not at hand, the goddess turns Actaeon into a stag. He leaps away, straight into the slavering jaws of his well-trained hunting hounds. 

His own hounds. He tried to cry out:
"I am Actaeon—remember your master,"
But his tongue lolled wordless, while the air

Belabored his ears with hounds' voices... 

        Ironic, huh? Kinda like assorted movie and media moguls being torn apart by the very  24-hour-a-day publicity machine they helped create. Not that their crimes are as innocent as Actaeon's. But then there's a lot of random punishment tossed out in ancient times. Think of Noah's son, Ham, whose progeny gets cursed forever because he happened to notice his father reeling around drunk and naked in his tent.  At least the modern men who get lost in a dark wood and end up getting it in the neck have earned their punishment, to a greater or lesser degree. Progress!
    And the moral of the story is: if you blunder into the wrong glade, avert your eyes, idiot. 

          

Donald Trump doesn't like to be investigated; neither did Al Capone

     

     "What the hell is going on in Chicago?" Donald Trump asked a group of law enforcement officers at the FBI Academy on Friday. "What the hell's happening there?"
     Glad you asked, Mr. President.
     What's happening here is that murders skyrocketed in big cities in the United States in 2016 and Chicago is a big city in the United States.
     A 59 percent jump over the year before. Quite a lot, though other cities were worse—San Antonio jumped 61 percent.
     Which means what? You can't judge anything with a statistic as narrow as one year's increase over another. On that scale, Orlando would be the Murder Capital of America, with 169 percent increase in 2016 over 2015, because of the Pulse nightclub massacre. Crime in Chicago is generally down.
     If you look at a more significant statistic, the murder rate—the number of people killed per 100,000 residents—Chicago is behind St. Louis and Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans, Cleveland and Newark and Memphis.
     Not that it matters to the president. Trump doesn't keep bringing up Chicago to illustrate the knotty problem of urban crime, but to kick something at the headquarters of the FBI, an organization he had been kicking hard earlier that morning.

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Can't wait for these "handymen" forever

      James Thurber was blind, nearly. His increasingly sightlessness gave him a very keen ear for language. He loved word games and odd accents, and had a wonderful smooth rhythm to his writing.
     Nowhere is this on greater display than in his short story, "The Black Magic of Barney Haller," a seemingly simple tale of a Swedish handyman. 
     "Barney is my hired man," Thurber explains. "He is strong and amiable, sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily competent."
      So far, so good, the image of the capable helper that any ham-handed wordsmith would covet. 
    There's more, however.
    "But he is also eerie: he trafficks with the devil."
    As evidence of this, Thurber offers the obscure remarks Haller is always saying, starting, during a thunderstorm, "Once I see dis boat come down de rock."
     The phrase plays to Thurber's darker fears.
     "It is phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread," he writes. "Boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood, old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the window at midnight."
     It is the beauty of the last part of that sentence—"old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the window at midnight"—and others like it that lodge Thurber under your skin.
     Well, my skin anyway.
     In the story, which perfectly captures lazy summer evenings in an old country house, Thurber figures out what that particular phrase means—"a bolt coming down the lighting rod on the house; a commonplace, an utterly natural thing."
      I won't recapitulate the entire story. It isn't online, alas, but it's in The Thurber Carnival, which Amazon will sell you for two dollars, and you should own if you don't already.
     I think of Barney Haller whenever my wife, with occult powers of her own, tries to summon up a handyman. There will be some significant task around our 110-year-old house that needs doing, and she will muse idly that we should get a handyman to do it. 
    In years past I might snap, "Handyman? What handyman? Find him! There are no handymen."
     We have, in the past, hired skilled men to do various tasks. But they always do a bit of work then vanish, irretrievable. Part of my annoyance is based on that, part based on the fact that my wife is wishing for these supposed handy men because she is convinced that I am unable to do much of anything when it comes to home repair. Even though I can.
     I'll never forget her shock, almost anger, when she came home to find I had installed a pair of light fixtures in the boys' rooms—another task for the supposed handyman or the even-more elusive "electrician."
     "Well, mister, I hope you popped the circuit breakers first," she said, referring to the switches in the basement controlling power to the various parts of the house.
     "If I didn't pop the circuit breaker," I said, evenly. "I'd be dead."
      Anyway, after a decade or so of hearing my wife muse about someday getting a handyman to put in a linen closet in an old closet on our third floor, I girded my loins, took the first week of December off as vacation from work and tackled the job myself. 
     Now a week might seem like a lot for a closet, but I am, as my wife would point out, not accustomed to this kind of thing. I have to work slowly, methodically, to keep from screwing up, and then to fix the screw-ups I manage despite being careful.
     It took a day to clean the lathe and dust and to chip out obstructive strips of plaster with a hammer and cold chisel then clean some more. Then go to Home Depot and buy bead board, shelving, industrial glue and trim. Then I had to build an inner box to hold the bead board, the second day, and put the bead board up the third day, then paint it and glue the trim in. The whole thing actually took six days—I had to go downtown for a lunch one day—the same time it took God to create the world.
     But God has more experience with this sort of thing, supposedly.
     It came out fine; I wish I had thought to snap a photo of it beforehand, but setting forth on the project it did not strike me as being in the Realm of Endeavors One Writes Blog Posts About.
     My wife was suitably delighted—exclaiming "Perfect!" again and again. That was good. And I was oddly pleased to have spent a week's vacation building a linen closet. That said, I'd still have preferred a handyman do it while I relaxed. Were such people available outside of fiction, that is.

Gun control starts in your own house

     The 5th anniversary of the Sandy Hook slaughter caught me off guard Thursday. In recent years, I've pretty much stopped reacting to these ever-more-common tragedies. What's the point? Why bother? Nothing ever happens.

     But I was curious as to what I wrote in the wake of Sandy Hook, and came up with this. It stands up to the half decade test, and seems a concept seldom raised, and worth raising again. At least it's about something that can actually occur. 

     Enough, people are saying, again, this time in the wake of Friday's horrific school massacre in Connecticut.
     We have to DO something.
     Well yes, doing something would be nice. Though you have to pause a moment first to contemplate a belief system that requires 20 dead children before it snaps to attention.
     Give credit to advocates of gun rights. They know what they believe. They believed it Thursday. They believe it today.
     They put their money where their mouths are, their boots both on the ground and firmly on the necks of their representatives. They pull out their wallets and slap them on the table.
     Give them our grudging respect. No need of a slaughter to stir them to action. In fact, slaughter doesn't stir them at all, except to read aloud the script in their hand that says: "More guns."
     A few days before this happened, after the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanded that Illinois join the rest of the nation and craft a concealed carry law, I had an idea. My idea was: I gotta buy a gun. Not for protection - I live in Northbrook. I take Metra. The last time I felt myself physically threatened was . . . umm . . . never.
     But as a columnist, I thought it would be interesting to carry a gun around. As a stunt. Buy the gun, take the course, conceal and carry. See what happens.
     I floated this idea by my wife. Her eyes narrowed.
     "Not in my house," she said, severely. I explained what a sharp column it would be. Front-page stuff! It wouldn't be forever; I could sell the gun back. She didn't care a bleep what I had in mind: no gun. Period.
     Because guns are dangerous.
     To be honest, I felt thwarted. But I didn't push—we had months to figure this out. Then Friday happened. Twenty children shot down. As horrifying as it was, our fellow Americans buffed the horror to a hallucinatory sheen. The shootings are an Obama conspiracy to push gun control! This illustrates the urgent need to end gun-free zones! If only those teachers were armed . . .
     Shades of the offensive fantasy that — since I'm Jewish — gun nuts feel obligated to send to me, floating the notion that had only the Jews of Europe been armed before World War II then, golly, the Holocaust would never have happened.
     Pretty to think so.
     But the Polish Army was armed. The French Army was armed too. Didn't help them much. Guns have their uses, but if they were the magic totems of protection that gun advocates seem to believe they are, then we'd all live in a very, very safe country.
     And, obviously, we don't.
     There could have a been a police officers' convention at the Sandy Hook School and those kids would still be dead. Police officers, if you haven't noticed, are shot and killed too, despite their training, despite their guns.
     No, actually I think my wife nailed it, as she often does. "Not in my house." Is that not a manageable start? Before we talk about laws, before we fall to arguing over specifics, over magazine capacities and what makes an assault rifle, we need to address the panting American passion for weaponry and violence. Those zombies, you realize, are just a thin disguise to let you guiltlessly enjoy watching people shot.
      Until we address that, we'll do nothing — or, rather, continue doing nothing. The Connecticut killer got his guns from his mother, who owned them legally. And frankly I can't imagine a nation where any change could be embraced that might prevent that. There are many disturbed people. They all have mothers. If the blame rests anywhere — leaving forever open the question of whether insanity affects our right to hold this killer accountable — it has to lay with mom. She wasn't disturbed. She kept her guns — "for protection," natch — in such a manner that her troubled son could get hold of them. If she didn't know, who was supposed to know? If she couldn't stop him, how was the United States government supposed to stop him?
     I believe we have too many guns, yes. But I also believe that the National Rifle Association is a convenient bogeyman for lazy liberal consciences that need to see dozens of first-graders die before they rouse themselves, temporarily. Any one of a hundred Democratic plutocrats could match the NRA's spending tomorrow, and it wouldn't mean a thing. Not until we realize that most Americans don't want stricter gun laws — they want them to be more lax, or stay the same. We think all those Clint Eastwood movies are true, and we stockpile all these guns to keep us safe. Only they don't keep us safe. "Not in my house" — that's a start, a small but important step, and you don't need to hire lobbyists to make it work.
      —Originaly published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 17, 2012

Next WLS will be stocking Lake Michigan with zebra mussels

 

I explained the story behind this enigmatic tombstone a couple years back.

     

     I had never heard the name "Chris Plante" before Robert Feder tweeted news Thursday that the D.C.-based personality is replacing Bob Sirott and Marianne Murciano on WLS radio.
     The latest example of  huge and distant media companies—in this case, Georgia-based Cumulus Media, owners of WLS and 445 other radio stations—deciding that what is easiest and cheapest to offer is also best for listeners everywhere. One size fits all.
     That said, I like to keep an open mind. Off to The Chris Plante web site. There, the first thing I read was his most-recent tweet: "What do you think was the REAL lie of the year? Perhaps 'Russia, Russia, Russia'?"
     Ah, the Trumpian Fallacy in rampant splendor. Take a truth you don't like—like Bob Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged-for-now collusion with Russia—insist based on nothing that it's a lie. Then hold your breath and see how many buy it.
     Quite a few. Particularly in places like Georgia.
     In Chicago, not so much.
     Feeding lies to the deluded has been a growth industry, with Fox News and Breitbart growing in size, power and profitability as a whole segment of America seals itself off into an echo chamber of self-deception and hysterical faux victimhood.
     Chicago is not immune—you should see my email. But at the risk of provincial pride, we do still value independence.  The Sun-Times is run by a former alderman and a group of union heads. The Trib, for all its historical aspersions toward internationality, is run by a local tech whiz.
     Our radio gems stand out for their uniqueness—WBEZ, WFMT, WBBM—not because they're funnels for whatever sour pap they're fire hosing from the coasts.

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Not forgotten

     Writers cheat death. Briefly. Sometimes. 
     That doesn't mean they don't die. They do. The writers themselves that is. But that their work echoes for a while. If they're good. And lucky. Not most writers. Most writing barely lives on the page the day it's published, never mind has any hope of lingering.
     But writers who are good enough and lucky enough ... like Studs Terkel, who died almost a decade ago—the 10 year anniversary will be this Halloween — but whose name came up twice Tuesday.
     The first was a reader, asking me to recommend Terkel books. That was easy: "Working." "Division Street America." "The Good War." That'll get you started.
     The second was at lunch, with my pal Tony Fitzpatrick, stopping back in Chicago between stints in Paris, shooting his excellent TV series, "Patriot." We talked about art and the French and acting and politics and food and Chicago. 
     Then conversation drifted to Studs. Tony was a particular friend and admirer—"Hope dies last," the title of Terkel's book on political action, is tattooed on his forearm. We talked about him, about his clash with the late Steve Neal.
     Our conversation made me want to hear Studs' voice. I knew him, casually, and was a guest on his radio program on WFMT. But I only interviewed him once for a column, after he was robbed in his home, and I suspected there was more to the crime than the witty tale making the rounds of the media.
       A pithy line will go halfway around the world while the complex truth is still pulling on its boots.
     The first couple of times I read Studs Terkel's brazen demand to a burglar who had broken into his home and stripped him of $250—"Hey, now I'm flat broke; give me 20 bucks!"—I smiled at the 87-year-old literary lion's quick-witted bravado. The crook gave Studs a $20 bill. Tough old bird. Nice little story.
     But by the third reading —and the line has, since Mike Sneed broke the story in her July 22 column, appeared in nearly two dozen newspapers and magazines all over North America —I began to wonder: Was it all really that simple, or could there be a less attractive crime story hidden behind the neat tale? A home invader rouses an elderly couple from their bed in the middle of the night. The husband is confronted by the crook, who robs him. Sure, he got $20 back. But did the event really have the fun, flip quality the quote suggests?
     "It had an amusing touch in retrospect, not during it," said Terkel, in his Uptown home. "It happened so quickly, I couldn't believe it. I had turned the lights out about 9 o'clock. I kept a little TV on, watching the Sox game—the Sox lost to the Brewers. Near midnight it was.
     "The hallway light goes on. I think it's my wife going to the bathroom. I reach out to say something, and I touch her. She's there. So it's not she. A figure is coming toward me, a figure in the shadows, coming toward me. A tall figure."
     Even at that point, Terkel—as most people would—clung to the hope of a benign explanation.
     "I think: It could be my son. He has the key. It turns out to be somebody else. A guy. I reach for the light. He rushes to me and turns out the light, his hand over his face. He was as surprised as I was."
     The burglar kept shouting, "Where's the money? Where's the money?" But Studs couldn't hear him.
     "I'm practically deaf," he said. "I have hearing aids, but I take them off at night. He's saying something, but I don't understand it. I keep saying, 'What is it you want? Keep cool. Take it easy.' "
     Was Terkel frightened?
     "I guess I was," he said. "It was too sudden, too dreamlike. I went to get my hearing aids in the bathroom. He follows me and turns the light off, his hand still over his face."
     Terkel worried about the safety of his wife, Ida, who has not been in the best of health lately.
     "I didn't know what was going to happen," Terkel said. "If he's desperate. . . . I told him, 'Wait, take it easy. This woman is not well.' "
     Criminals are sometimes placated by money. Terkel, who went to the currency exchange earlier that day, produced a roll of cash. He handed it over, realized he was busted and made his request for something back. He got a 20.
     Terkel nearly said something that, for him, is even more telling than the witticism that has been so widely quoted.
     "I almost said, 'Thank you,' " said Terkel. "He hands me money, and I feel grateful. I think I might have said, 'Thanks.' "
      Terkel, an old-school leftist, finds a certain irony in that.
     "That's the free market for you," he said. "It was my roll of bills a moment ago; now it's his roll of bills, and I'm asking him for a handout."
     (I should mention, in the slim chance that a reader or two might not be familiar with Terkel, that he is the nation's great chronicler of the common people. Even those who question his politics must admit that his classic and best-selling books, such as Division Street America and Working, placed ordinary people into the context of history long before it became fashionable. I think The Good War is among the best books ever written about World War II.)
     None of that mattered to the burglar. Unlike when Terkel was mugged in the 1980s—which also made the papers—the burglar didn't seem to recognize him before fleeing.
     Terkel, his anger up, followed the burglar, until he saw an accomplice downstairs in the kitchen.
     "I'm hollering, 'How did you get in? How did you get in?' " Terkel said.
    And then the moment came that I had suspected was there, obscured by the cool and satisfying brio of his oft-quoted request.
     "Then I got scared. Right after that," he said. "The fright comes later, when you think of what might have happened."
     Fear, and anger.
     "Of course you feel angry. I was mad I lost 250 bucks. It's an invasion of your privacy. For some reason I was cool, but maybe that was my protection, my masquerade."
      The burglars had pushed in a broken-down kitchen air-conditioning unit. There's a new one there now, securely bolted. And the Terkels keep a light on downstairs while they sleep.
     "Keep cool and keep the lights on," advised Terkel. "What's the old song: 'Let a little light shine'? The detective said (burglars) don't like any sign of life in a building. Keeping a radio on is great, too."
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 1, 1999

Whew.

     Whew!
     That's the short version.
     At least the country hasn't gone completely crazy. Any loss for Donald Trump is a win for America.
     Close, but enough. Thank you, God, Jesus and Alabama. Roll Tide!
     The long version is more complicated.
     Put it this way:
     Shame and pride had a wrestling match in Alabama on Tuesday.
     Shame won.
     Even in a solid Southern red state that hadn't elected a Democratic Senator in a quarter century, the idea of electing Roy S. Moore—a Republican, yes, but also credibly accused of groping several young women and girls—to the United States Senate was simply too much for voters to bear.
     Even Republican voters. Even Alabama voters. Even in the debased, tawdry Era of Trump.
     Or as NBA legend and Alabama native Charles Barkley succinctly put it, campaigning for the victor, Doug Jones: "At some point we got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”
     That point is now.
     Okay, not now. It's not as if the state had a communal change of heart since November, 2016, when Alabamans voted for Trump almost 2-to-1 over Hillary Clinton.
     They just didn't want to be embarrassed by electing an alleged child molester. It's a start.
     That Moore was a bad judge, is a bad man, and would certainly be a bad senator, assuming the Senate didn't expel him immediately upon being sworn in, was not so much a factor as that electing him would look bad. Few Alabama voters seemed to care that he was dismissed from the bench, twice, for refusing to obey the law. They liked that. They're proud of that defiant attachment to faith, a Dukes of Hazard flipping off of the man.
     Doug Jones won. Even though his good qualities were eclipsed by his being a Democrat, and on the wrong side of the only moral issue that matters down there: abortion. His victory is still a reflection of the polarized, poisonous political atmosphere that this election does not change so much as ratify. Almost half the state still voted for Moore.
     Jones won. But his election won't change anything, not yet. The Senate will still be in Republican hands. And there is no defeat that Trump can't spin into supposed victory.
     Is Jones' win a reason to be glad? Sure. But a cause for celebration? Not really.
     People in Chicago only care about who represents Alabama in the Senate because that the contest was seen as a bellwether for the 2018 mid-term elections, a test to see if the Trump Rebellion is played out.
     Does Jones' win mean that Trumpism has reached his high water mark and will now begin to recede? Or is Jones' victory just a pause in the rainstorm?
     Celebration feels premature. Trump has suffered setback after setback since being finessed into office with—I believe—a boost from his friends the Russians. Obamacare withstood his onslaught, the military recently shrugged off his attempt to ban transgender troops. Everything bothers Trump but nothing fazes him. He's like that metal man in Terminator 2.
     Jones' victory is important because it nibbles away at Trump's thin majority in the Senate. It also reminds us of the power of shame. Doing the right thing because people are watching you isn't the best reason, but it will do.
     This is not the beginning of the end. Maybe, to quote Winston Churchill, it's the end of the beginning.
     There is no question that the Trump Administration will eventually fall apart, because it is a house built on sand. You can only get by on lies and bluster so long. Facts are facts. Climate change is real. Muslims and Hispanics make good, hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding American citizens as well as anyone else. Gays make excellent partners, if you are so inclined and responsible parents.
     The question is when.
     The answer: not yet.
     The election of Doug Jones does not mean that the historic intolerance and fierce partisanship of the Southland has been overcome. They have an enormous burden still
     This is a first step. Change is possible, yes. But change hasn't happened yet or Roy S. Moore would never have been the Republican candidate. Jones' win is merely one dry day in a season of flooding. That said, it is a welcome relief.