DePaul law school ‘N-word’ flap: ‘Intent makes a word hateful’

"The problem we all live with" by Norman Rockwell (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

     This column was almost twice as long when I first finished it, and some important aspects were lost in cutting it to fit the paper. First, that the whole thing was prompted by not one but two thoughtful emails form reader Scott Zapel, a Glen Ellyn attorney. Second, that the above powerful painting by Norman Rockwell—with its subtle but unmistakable taboo word scrawled on the wall above the girl being escorted to school—ran in the Sun-Times without incident last week. "I'm not editing Norman Rockwell" an editor explained. Third, an explanation of why white people can and should comment on racial matters even though some think they can't and shouldn't. I saved the paragraphs to send to those who try to make the case for the latter.
      There were more points I couldn't even begin to enter into, such as the need for law school to anneal would-be lawyers for what can be a tough, demanding profession, one that is undermined if they have to cater to their sensitivities or risk being cut off at the knees by tremulous administrators. All the DePaul students did was wound a veteran teacher, undermine the value of their own degree, and present themselves as unwilling to face the fraught world into which they must practice the profession of law.  

     Let’s pretend that I am passionately against flag burning. It’s disrespectful. One day I am outraged to discover there is an organization that routinely burns flags. To make matters worse, this group is not some band of anarchists, but the American Legion, which collects worn flags and burns them in solemn ceremony.
     So I condemn the veterans’ group. Organize protests. Demand their suppression. And should somebody be so rude as to observe that I’m lashing out at the wrong people — you’re supposed to burn worn-out flags, it’s the respectful way to dispose of them — I reply, “Yeah, but anarchists are elusive. American Legion posts are so easy to find.”
     Would you experience a warm glow of admiration for me? No? Good, because that’s how I feel when the foes of what I am obligated to call “the N-word” manifest themselves, such as recently at DePaul University College of Law, where a professor, Don Hermann, had his class taken away after students complained when he uttered the lately unprintable word in the set-up to a legal problem.
     The professor didn’t hurl the word at a student, or toss it out as the punchline of a ribald joke. The offensiveness of the word was part of the issue students were to sort out.
     No matter. Haters who use the word vindictively, like my flag-burning anarchists, are not easily punished. But the professor is right there.
     Still, my gut impulse was to let the matter pass in silence. History is a horror show, people are hurt, and react in all sorts of curious ways. If some grasp at what they consider empowerment by conducting epistemological snipe hunts, why should I care? My copy of “Huck Finn” isn’t going to be sanitized. It isn’t as if I’m chafing to use the word. Yes, it felt silly not to be able to articulate what noun Ira Gershwin cut from “Porgy & Bess” in 1954; I can’t believe one black child would cry himself to sleep if I had.
     Context is everything. I can't 100 percent support Prof. Hermann because I wasn't there. On one hand, 50 of the 80 students in his class, given the chance to transfer out, did so, which doesn't speak well to his technique. On the other, he has taught college for decades, and if he were a raving bigot, it would have come out by now.
     I've taught college; it's a ballet, and if your students are rushing off to report you, then you haven't taken their measure. You should know before you leap if they're going to catch you.
     Being young, they're extremists, and miss the crux, what Dan Savage, appearing on Matt Fiddler's excellent podcast "Very Bad Words" explained in five words:
     "Intent makes a word hateful."
     Bingo. People get confused because the word is accepted from black comics but can undermine the employment of law professors. Rather than expend mental effort to gauge each instance, they react to the race of the user.
     An understandable lapse. It is a vile word, barbed with suffering from the past, present and—sorry to be the one to tell you—future. Trying to bar it from historical and artistic uses is futile, but is your right. As is mine to oppose you. Which I do because trying to ban a word is an insult to those who were lashed by it. The past is a bad place we must look at with open eyes. Were I to insist that history texts be scrubbed of photos of naked bodies of Jews being cast into pits in the Holocaust, because they're upsetting, I too would be wrong and worthy of rebuke.
     On Wednesday we marked 5o years since the assassination of Dr. King with respectful solemnity. A jubilee of progress it was not, as the sickness of racism festers in Americas. Our president is an unfit white bigot whose campaign was built on hate. The internet, a continuous howl of invective. The finely-honed sensibilities of the DePaul law students are not a sign of racial progress, but of frustration. Denied general victory, they clutch at tiny symbolic triumphs, no matter how vindictive. General white indifference to the controversy is a sure sign of just how illusionary their triumph is, because you know white folk cling to their prerogatives. I object because, in my view, if you respect somebody, you tell them when they're wrong.

Letter to the future

Dear 2060 America:

     I was reading an article in the New York Times today, about the echo chamber between President Donald Trump and Fox News, and how a group of Central American immigrants moving through Mexico became, in the little fear-shriveled minds of the president and his supporters, a terrifying invasion. 
     And it occurred to me, in not all that many decades, when our country is certain to be 25 percent Hispanic — it's already 18 percent Hispanic now — you'll look back on this period and wonder how it could have been possible, how such an important element of this great nation could have been allowed to be abused. How such an often great nation, the United States of America, could have elected this unfit clown, this unashamed hater, whose thoughts and policies used to be found on vile booklets left on bus station urinals, as president of the United States. 
     You've got to wonder: What was wrong with these people?
     I wish I had an answer. It amazes us and we were there the whole time.
     Not to be glib about something so wrong, so dangerous. If you're wondering whether we knew that something horrible was coming, that all wouldn't be staff firing and inane misstatements of reality, well...
     Yeah, we knew. Or we should have known. People have already been hurt, our country has already been damaged, at home and abroad. Did we know that worse was to come? Yeah, we knew. Or should have known. Or let ourselves guess and then pushed the knowledge away. Or denied the obvious.
     At least I know. If I had to summarize the Trump presidency up to today, I would say: we've been lucky, so far. If Trump were a skilled tactician, if he actually had a malign agenda beyond aggrandizing himself, and saying anything to please those who support him, he could have caused enormous damage. 
     But that might be coming. Probably is coming. Because each day we drift away from what we used to be, a normal, fact-driven, respectable society that at least paid lip service to notions of fairness and equality. That's gone, and while you can argue we've had some pretty dark chapters in our history — the bad stuff is oddly a comfort now, a reminder that we've done some heinous screwing up before — at least we weren't being led by such a ridiculous asshat. At least we weren't what we are now. Something both ridiculous and terrifying, our usual courage led by the pants-wetting swagger of the chronically terrified. 
     In our defense, there is a lot of that going around. We didn't invent prophylactic surrender of our ideals. The British dropping out of the European Union because they were afraid they'd have to let in Turks. The rise of nationalism in France and elsewhere. The Philippines electing a murderous madman. Israel lurching further and further to the right under the wildly corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu. Even segments of Germany are thinking, "That whole Nazi thing, it wasn't so bad for us..."
     This is terrible time for democracy all round. 
     Yes, we used to lead the world, not catch its every ailment. Now we don't (lead) and do (catch). Now the rest of the world looks on at us with fear, confusion and pity.
     Maybe you do too.
     Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point. Usually I write for people today, but I wanted to drop this note in a pixel bottle and toss it in the electronic ocean where maybe you'll find it or, more likely, you won't. Assuming you'll care and, given what's happening in 2018, I'd expect a bull market in not caring about much of anything.
     A pity. You should know, millions of Americans in 2018 were aghast and ashamed and eager to do whatever they can to winch our country out of this ditch of idiocy it has slid into, upside down, wheels spinning. It's a big task, and I am certain the aftershocks of our folly will be felt by you in 42 years. My hope is, not too much. Try to understand the improbable nature of the threat, and the way amazement and disgust blinded us to what was really happening. Be kind, and forgive us. I figure, by 2060, when I'm 100, kindness will have come back in style. At least I hope so. Because it's sure in short supply now.
    With apology, regret and best wishes,
    
    2018 America

Notes from underground

J.J. Madia, in the tunnels under the Loop that he manages.

    When the choice is go somewhere or not go somewhere, my default is: go.
    Because you never know.
    Not that I rush out to every opportunity.
    That would be impossible.
    Not to mention tiring.
    But when it's a 50-50 coin toss, when I'm teetering on whether something is worthwhile or not, my little personal rule pushes me over the edge.
     Though it doesn't always work out.
     For instance, last week.
     A British film crew was in town, shooting some kind of engineering special in the freight tunnels under the Loop, the ones that flooded so disastrously in 1992. The producers had read my 25th anniversary story online. Would I, a nice woman wondered, mind talking to their cameras about the flood?
     Well...
     On one hand, I could be on British television 24 hours a day and never know it. Any advantage to me would be slight.  Hours of my precious time would be spent to benefit some person not myself.
     On the other, it meant going down into the tunnels—how often do you get a chance to do that? (I had, just a year ago, for the story; but still...)
     Not to forget the allure of TV. Being on TV means something. It is significant, and British TV, double significant. They're so refined, the Brits. My flashing appearance could lead to something....
     True, I had to be at City Hall at 8:30 a.m. to do it. But heck, if I didn't, I'd be doing the same old pottering around the office I always do. Put yourself out. You never know. Maybe these TV folks will become my best friends.
     So I'm there, by the bronze "CITY HALL" sign at 8:30 a.m., bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I get a text from the producer. Traffic. Running late. That happens! No worries! I slide over to Petra's for a cup of coffee, thinking of H.T. Webster.
    You don't remember H.T. Webster, a cartoonist popular between the world wars. Don't feel bad. Nobody does. Except for, I suppose, me. His claim to fame was creating the character "Caspar Milquetoast," star of a series of panels he called "The Timid Soul." In one, poor Caspar stands in the driving rain and, well, it's easier to just show it.
    That's how I felt, a half hour and a $4 cup of coffee later, still waiting for the TV crew. Eventually they showed. Handshakes all around, and down into the bowels of City Hall we go. Boots on, reflective vests, hard hats, we follow J.J. Madia, the city worker whose full time job it is to make sure those tunnels don't flood again.
     To tell you the truth, the Brits—producer, cameraman, sound guy—were not as friendly as I expected. A little distant almost. And as one hour folded into two, it dawned on me: they weren't talking to me, they were talking to Madia. I was just ... well, there, for no particular purpose, sloshing in the water after them.  
     At 11:30 a.m. I decided I had enough. I was supposed to meet my brother, back at Petra's, for lunch at 12 noon. He's be sitting in a booth, gazing at the door, wondering where the flip I was, while I was standing up to my shins in water 40 feet underground. The crew was busily filming Madia expounding over some aspect of the tunnel. I decided to go back myself. I knew the way.
     Or, rather, I thought I knew the way. Turns out I didn't, which I learned when I came face-to-face with a steel bulkhead at a dead end I was certain I hadn't been to before. Getting lost would be bad: there are 39 miles of tunnels under the Loop.
     I turned around, pushing away that sinking, oh-I'm-screwed feeling and, heading back down the tunnel, saw Madia's flashlight, way ahead of me at an intersection of tunnel—I had taken the wrong turn. The Brits were a little nicer since after I left — the producer apologized, and explained that she had put me down for 11:45. A miscommunication. We shot me standing at the corner of Randolph and LaSalle, talking about the Flood. The producer handed me my fee: a dollar.
    Afterward, I had lunch with my brother—that was good, some redemption from being in the neighborhood. A good conversation, as always. Off to the station, waited half an hour for the train, and caught the 2:35.
     Maybe my "go and see" approach needs adjustment, I thought. Maybe the lesson is to stay chained to the computer and work and don't go to iffy opportunities. My new attitude toward such opportunities could be: "Fuck you. Find some other sap to fill your empty airtime."
    No. Just because something doesn't work, once, isn't an indictment of the philosophy. Baseball players employ the walk-up-to-the-plate-and-swing strategy, even though it fails two out of three, that doesn't undercut the value of their approach. You can't get a hit every time. You still keep swinging.
    The train was stopped at Morton Grove. A medical emergency, the conductor announced. The emergency, I realized from muffled screams on the sidewalk, involved a man who had gone berserk in the next car and was being subdued by about eight officers. I joined a group of suburbanites watching blandly from a couple car lengths away. The troubled man was joined by a young lady, also screaming and twisting and flailing as three cops dragged her off.
     Better you than me, bub. Watching the crisis settled my mood completely. A complicated thing, life. Work had lately seemed particularly burdensome—I sent my new 5,000-word story on smiling off to Mosaic Tuesday night—and this lost day turned out to be a reminder that I actually enjoy my work and hate to be interrupted without good reason. A reader among the knot of inconvenienced commuters struck up a conversation with me, waiting for the cops to drag the pair off. That new Sun-Times web site, he enthused. It's fantastic! I told him I was glad to hear that. I won't say it made the previous eight hours worth it. But it helped. 

Remembering Roger Ebert

     In addition to April 4 being the 50th anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., it is also the fifth anniversary of the death of Roger Ebert, the admired film critic of the Sun-Times. If you are wondering why I'm remarking on one rather than another, it's that I looked back over what I've written over the years about King and was not impressed by anything in particular, considered what I might add to the already extensive conversation now, and decided my thoughts were too scattered to bear sorting out.
      On the other hand, this obituary, I believe, bears re-reading, because it reminds us that in addition to changing the way America watches film, Ebert also had an important role—perhaps an even more important role—in changing how we think of sickness and disability. It was the single most read story the Sun-Times posted in 2013, and while at first I thought "save it for 2023," my second thought was, "post it now; maybe you won't be writing this in 2023."

     Roger Ebert loved movies.
     Except for those he hated.
     For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.
     “No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”
     Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago.
     “We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away,” said his wife, Chaz Ebert. “No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition.”
     He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.
     He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.
     On Tuesday, Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December and would be taking “a leave of presence.” In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote “I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.”
     Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His site, rogerebert.com, had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feed had more than 841,000 followers.
      Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize — the first film critic to do so — but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.
     The same year Ebert won the Pulitzer — 1975 — he also launched a new kind of television program: “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel on WTTW-Channel 11. At first it ran monthly.
     The combination worked. The trim, balding Siskel perfectly balanced the bespectacled, portly Ebert. In 1978, the show, retitled “Sneak Previews,” moved to PBS for national distribution, and the duo was on its way to becoming a fixture in American culture.
     “Tall and thin, short and fat. Laurel and Hardy,” Ebert once wrote. “We were parodied on ‘SNL’ and by Bob Hope and Danny Thomas and, the ultimate honor, in the pages of Mad magazine.”
     His colleagues admired him as a workhorse. Ebert reviewed as many as 306 movies a year, after he grew ill scheduling his cancer surgeries around the release of important pictures. He eagerly contributed to other sections of the paper — interviews with and obituaries of movie stars, even political columns on issues he cared strongly about on the editorial pages.
     In 1997, dissatisfied with spending his critical powers “locked in the present,” he began a running a feature revisiting classic movies and eventually published three books on “The Great Movies” (and two books on movies he hated). A second column, his “Movie Answer Man,” allowed readers to learn about intriguing details of cinema that only a Roger Ebert knew or could ferret out.
     That, too, became a book. Ebert wrote more books than any TV personality since Steve Allen — 17 in all. Not only collections of reviews, both good and bad, and critiques of great movies, but humorous glossaries and even a novel, “Behind the Phantom’s Mask,” that was serialized in the Sun-Times. He even wrote a book about rice cookers, “The Pot and How to Use It,” despite the fact that he could no longer eat. In 2011, his autobiography, “Life Itself,” won rave reviews. “This is the best thing Mr. Ebert has ever written,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times. It is, fittingly enough, being made into a documentary, produced by his longtime friend, Martin Scor­sese.

     Roger Joseph Ebert was born in Urbana on June 18, 1942, the son of Walter and Annabel Ebert. His father was an electrician at the University of Illinois, his mother, a bookkeeper. It was a liberal household — Ebert remembers his parents praying for the success of Harry Truman in the election of 1948. As a child, he published a mimeographed neighborhood newspaper and a stamp collectors’ newspaper in elementary school.
      In high school, he was, as he later wrote, “demented in [his] zeal for school activities,” joining the swim team, acting in plays, founding the Science Fiction Club, co-hosting Urbana High School’s Saturday morning radio program, co-editing the newspaper, being elected senior class president.
     He began his professional writing career at 15, as a sportswriter covering the high school beat for the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana.
      Ebert went on to the University of Illinois, where he published a weekly journal of politics and opinion as a freshman and served as editor of the Daily Illini his senior year. He graduated in 1964 and studied in South Africa on a Rotary Scholarship.
     While still in Urbana, he began free-lancing for the Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News.
      He was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he planned to earn his doctorate in English (an avid reader, Ebert later used literary authors to help explain films — for example, quoting e.e. cummings several times in his review of Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)
     But Ebert also had written to Herman Kogan, for whom he free-lanced at the Daily News, asking for a job, and ended up at the Sun-Times in September 1966, working part time. The following April, he was asked to become the newspaper’s film critic when the previous critic, Eleanor Keen, retired.
     “I didn’t know the job was open until the day I was given it,” Ebert later said. “I had no idea. Bob Zonka, the features editor, called me into the conference room and said, ‘We’re gonna make you the movie critic.’ It fell out of the sky.”
     Ebert’s goal up to that point had been to be “a columnist like Royko,” but he accepted this new stroke of luck, which came at exactly the right time. Movie criticism had been a backwater of journalism, barely more than recounting the plots and stars of movies — the Tribune ran its reviews under a jokey generic byline, “Mae Tinee.” But American cinema was about to enter a period of unprecedented creativity, and criticism would follow along. Restrictive film standards were finally easing up, in part thanks to his efforts. When Ebert began reviewing movies, Chicago still had an official film board that often banned daring movies here — Lynn Redgrave’s “Georgy Girl” was kept off Chicago screens in 1966 — and Ebert immediately began lobbying for elimination of the censorship board.
     e had a good eye. His Sept. 25, 1967, review of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde” called the movie “a milestone” and “a landmark.”
      “Years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s,” he wrote, “showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to.”
     It was. Though of course Ebert was not infallible — while giving Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” four stars in the same year, he added that the movie’s “only flaw, I believe, is the introduction of limp, wordy Simon and Garfunkel songs.’’
     Ebert plunged into what turned out to be a mini-golden age of Chicago journalism. He found himself befriended by Mike Royko — with whom he wrote an unproduced screenplay. He drank with Royko, and with Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel. He wrote a trashy Hollywood movie, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,’’ for Russ Meyer, having met the king of the buxom B-movie after writing an appreciation of his work.
     In later years, Ebert was alternately sheepish and proud of the movie. It was the first “sexploitation” film by a major studio, 20th Century Fox, though Time magazine’s Richard Corliss did call it one of the 10 best films of the 1970s.
     It was not Ebert’s only foray into film writing — he was also hired to write a movie for the Sex Pistols, the seminal British punk band in the late 1970s.
     Eventually, Sun-Times editor James Hoge demanded that Ebert — who took a leave of absence when he went to Hollywood to write “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” — decide between making films and reviewing them. He chose newspapering, which increasingly became known because of his TV fame, which grew around his complex partnership with Gene Siskel on “Sneak Previews.”
      “At first the relationship on TV was edgy and uncomfortable,” Ebert wrote in 1999, after Siskel’s untimely death, at 53. “Our newspaper rivalry was always in the air between us. Gene liked to tell about the time he was taking a nap under a conference table at the television station, overheard a telephone conversation I was having with an editor, and scooped me on the story.”
     In 1981, the program was renamed “At the Movies” and moved to Tribune Broadcasting. In 1986, it became “Siskel & Ebert & The Movies” and moved to Buena Vista Television, and the duo began the signature “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system that Ebert invented.
      “When we left to go with Disney . . . we had to change some things because we were afraid of [violating] intellectual property rights,’’ he said. “And I came up with the idea of giving thumbs up and thumbs down. And the reason that Siskel and I were able to trademark that is that the phrase ‘two thumbs up’ in connection with movies had never been used. And in fact, the phrase ‘two thumbs up’ was not in the vernacular. And now, of course, it’s part of the language.”
     “Two thumbs up” became their registered trademark and a highly coveted endorsement that inevitably ran at the top of movie advertisements.
      After Siskel died in 1999, Ebert auditioned a number of temporary co-hosts and settled on Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper in 2000. At its height, “Ebert & Roeper,” was seen on 200 stations.
     “Everyone keeps asking me for my favorite Roger Ebert story, or the one thing about him most people might not have known. Here’s the thing: Roger Ebert has already told all the best Roger Ebert stories in far better fashion than I ever could,” said Roeper, who continued the show after health troubles forced Ebert from the airwaves in 2006, until both men quit in 2008 after a contract dispute.
     “And whether you ‘knew’ him only through his reviews or his Twitter feed or his blog, or you were lucky enough to have been his friend for many years, with Roger, what you saw and heard was the 100 percent, unvarnished, real deal,” Roeper said. “There was no ‘off camera’ Roger. He was just as passionate, smart, stubborn, genuine and funny behind the scenes as he was in the public eye. He was a great writer and an even better friend.
     “They can remake movies, but no one will ever be able to recreate or match the one and only Roger Ebert.”
     All that need be mentioned of Ebert’s social life was that in the early 1980s he briefly went out with the hostess of a modest local TV show called “AM Chicago.” Taking her to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner, Ebert suggested that she syndicate her show, using his success with Siskel as an example of the kind of riches that awaited. While she didn’t return his romantic interest, Oprah Winfrey did follow his business advice.
     In his memoir, Ebert writes of a controlling, alcoholic, faith-obsessed mother whom he was frightened of displeasing. “I would never marry before my mother died,” he wrote. She died in 1987, and in 1992 he got married, for the first time, at age 50, to attorney Chaz Hammel-Smith (later Chaz Hammelsmith), who was the great romance of his life and his rock in sickness, instrumental in helping Ebert continue his workload as his health declined.
     “She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she is the love of my life, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone,” he wrote.
     In addition to his TV and newspaper work, Ebert was a fixture at film festivals around the world — Toronto, Cannes, Telluride — and even created a festival of his own, The Overlooked Film Festival, or just “Ebertfest,” which he began in Champaign in 1999 and dedicated to highlighting neglected classics.
     Between 1970 and 2010, Ebert made yearly visits to the University of Colorado’s springtime Conference on World Affairs, where he has presented frame-by-frame critiques of classic movies to enraptured audiences.
     He had also used the conference to speak on a variety of subjects, from his romantic life to his recovery from alcoholism — he stopped drinking in 1979 — to the problem of spam email. In 1996, Ebert coined the “Boulder Pledge,” considered a cornerstone in the battle against spam.
     “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message,” Ebert wrote. “Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”
     Not only was Ebert eager to correspond with and encourage skilled movie bloggers, but he also put his money where his mouth was, investing early in the Google search engine and making several million dollars doing so.
     Ebert received honorary degrees from the American Film Institute, the University of Colorado and the School of the Art Institute. He is a member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame and was honored with a sidewalk medallion under the Chicago Theatre marquee.
     He first had surgery to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid in 2002, and three subsequent surgeries on his salivary gland, all the while refusing to cut back on his TV show or his lifelong pride and joy, his job at the Sun-Times.
     “My newspaper job,” he said in 2005, “is my identity.”
     But as always with Roger Ebert, that was being too modest. He was a renaissance man whose genius was based on film but by no means limited to it, a great soul who had extraordinary impact on his profession and the world around him.
     “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs,” he wrote, at the end of his memoir, “Life Itself.” “No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
     Survivors, in addition to his wife, include stepchildren Sonia and Jay, and grandchildren Raven, Emil, Mark and Joseph.

Informed Delivery service gives you, and distant snoops, a glance at your mail

 

     "You got a postcard from the University of Richmond Law School yesterday," my older son told us during his weekly phone call from California. "Why didn't you tell me?"
     I answered before the implications of his question had sunk in.
     "Why should we?" I said. "Is there a chance in hell you're going to Richmond?"
     Both my boys, whom you might think of as toddlers, since I sometimes do, are graduating from college this spring (the younger one, champing at the bit to get at Life, graduating a year early). Both are heading off to law school in the fall, God help them and us all.
     "And you got a letter addressed to 'The Steinberg Family' from 'Edie,'" he continued. "What's that?"
     "It was from Cousin Evie," my wife, also on the line, corrected him.
     I asked to know what is going on, and he explained the United States Postal Service has a new feature, Informed Delivery, where you can receive email images of mail you are slated to receive today, or have received for the past week.
     "My name is still associated with your address, so I was able to sign up," he said.
     "This is really creepy," my wife said.
     "It is!" Ross enthused, happily. Suddenly I remember that this was the boy who put a chemical in my glass of milk, causing it to solidify. Who once took a screen shot of my iMac screen, and then contrived for that photo to be displayed on the computer, so nothing I clicked on worked, and it was only when I was at the point of grabbing the computer and hurling it out the window did he laugh and reveal the joke.
     Of course I raced to sign up. The terms of service are extensive, as is typical, and include a little speech about privacy:

For over two centuries, the Postal Service has valued Your privacy, and built a brand that customers trust. When using the Service, the information You provide is accessible to the Postal Service, but may also be collected by third parties such as the companies that control the operating systems of the particular application

     Why is that not comforting? The place can't even capitalize correctly. How are they guarding my privacy?
     The questions were multiple choice answers about places I've lived and, disturbingly, the loan on my car. A dedicated hacker could cut through them like a hot knife through butter. The Postal Service said that is not a problem.
     "I have not heard of any issues with it" said Timothy J. Norman, USPS spokesman for the Chicago area.
     Norman said the service has been very popular, reaching more than 8 million users.
     "This is one of the coolest things we have," he said "You actually see the images of the mail pieces for that day, in a grayscale."
     How long, I wondered, does the USPS keep those photos? Are they building a database of every letter every American receives?
     "I really don't know how long they're available,' Norman said. "I don't think we would probably keep 'em more than 30 days, if that long."
     Reassurance comes in the fact that it's the mail: not exactly a font of fascination, as the first email Tuesday telling me of the bounty I'd have waiting in my mailbox at home.
     One postcard offering FREE ADMISSION to learn about how "STRESS, HORMONES and HEALTH" can be harnessed to fight belly fat. Another from the Chicago Opera Theater is inviting me to a double bill of Donizetti's "Il Pigmalione & Rita." That's it.
     Our veils of privacy are being pulled away one by one. Turns out Amazon has already patented technology so Alexa can overhear a conversation—say, on the mental health of a close relative - and send you advertising for psychiatrists. Given that, I can flip a switch and turn my own damn lights on.
     I imagine the benefit people derive from previewing the mail —"Oh look, my Harry & David catalogue is coming!"— is dwarfed by the potential for abuse.
     Still, my son, whose capacity for mischief is boundless, seemed pretty excited.
     "Now I can know, 'Oh, Mom got mail from a mystery bank in Guam,'" he taunted. "This is so good for domestic abusers or stalkers."
     "Why did you sign up?" I asked.
     "I need to know each piece of mail that comes to the house," he said, reminding me how, when he lived here, we'd both race to the mailbox to be the first to savor the joy of flipping through the fresh stack of letters and periodicals.   
     "Now we don't have that struggle anymore," he said. "It's a valuable service."

Superstar

The Crucifixion by Gerard David (Metropolitan Museum) 

     During NBC's broadcast of "Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert" Sunday night, my wife would occasionally miss a lyric in one of the songs and turn to me with an inquiring look.
    "'What's the buzz? Tell me what's a'  happenin'" I'd say, or whatever the passage in question happened to be. Not because my ears are any better than hers. But because as a teen I memorized the entire double album, not intentionally, but by listening to it over and over again and, if I recall with a cringe, singing along. That sort of thing stays with you.
     I'd be hard-pressed to explain why. Maybe because of the electrifying music. Maybe because of the appeal that a story of a bunch of radical young people changing the world; that would certainly speak to a young person who wanted to at least make a dent. 
     Maybe because  the plot was new, to me. Being raised Jewish, I'd never encountered the narrative before—that surprised people when I told them. They had trouble believing I learned the details of the Easter story from "Jesus Christ Superstar." But really, where else would I get it?  Not like they taught it in synagogue. 
     So Pilate and Herod and Judas and, for the most part, Jesus, were all fresh characters. I bought the double album that everybody bought, with Murray Head and Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene, and also saw it on stage, during its record-setting run at the London Palace in 1977.
      So while I have an almost 100 percent consistency avoiding all must-see television, I was on the couch, in position, 10 minutes early. My wife required no prodding, showed up before the first note. The event seemed a throwback to an earlier era, when the nation would pause to watch some vaunted musical event. (The show drew 9.4 million viewers; so not quite the whole nation, more like 3 percent. But close enough to make it the most popular show of the evening, beating "American Idol" and "Sixty Minutes," if only by a hair). 
     The cold opening was a little unexpected—no intro, no throat-clearing, just cue the music and begin. And for a live production it went flawlessly after an initial glitch with the sound.
      How does "Jesus Christ Superstar" hold up?
      Surprisingly well. What "Superstar" did that was so unsettling to the powers-that-be in 1970 was to wrench Jesus away from the clutches of the grim church elders who had kept him prisoner for centuries, and hand the would-be Savior back to the people who first surrounded him, the apostles, particularly Judas. 
     "Superstar" tells the Passion story form the point of view of the man who betrayed Jesus, a twist on a classic narrative that would become standard in musical drama in musicals like "Wicked" where the villain gets his (or her) due. So it was in a sense apt that Brandon Victor Dixon was a far more engaging performer as Judas than John Legend was as Jesus. Christ here is a softer role to begin with, but at times Legend seemed  half asleep. It was as if they cast Ben Carson in the role. (I later learned that Legend produced the special, which would certainly explain how he landed the role). 
     Sara Bareilles, an impressive Mary Magdalene, would not be accused of somnambulism. With pre-Raphaelite beauty and a bell-clear voice, she stole the show from the Son of God as she worked through her conflicted feelings toward him (I'm tempted to say "toward Him," out of respect, but don't want to pander). 
     I'm enough out-of-the-swim, culturally, that I had never heard of either Dixon—Aaron Burr in "Hamilton" and with TV, movie and Broadway credits, or Bareilles, who has sold millions of records, er, downloads. I was barely familiar with Legend: a pop singer of some sort.
     Alice Cooper I recognized, though he was a stiff Herod, upstaged by his orange suit, with none of the leering, porcine dissipation I'd expect in the role—they'd have done better casting John Lovitz, though I suppose he wouldn't be as big of a draw.
     At a time when interpersonal agita far outstrips doctrinal orthodoxy, "Superstar" feels right, where what Jesus taught is a murmur compared to the hopes and complaints of who he taught it to, not to forget his own hopes and complaints. Nothing stood out in a bad way from the nearly half century-old libretto, though I did pause in "Everything's Alright" to wonder at Judas' complaint about Mary Magdalene using "brand new and expensive" oil on Jesus' feet, when it could have raised "300 silver pieces or more" to aid the poor. That must be some high-end oil.
     What really made the show, for me, was the ensemble, the look, feel and energy of the production. The Roman ruins arching overhead, the multi-level orchestra on scaffolding. I liked the hip haircuts, the tattoos, the dancing. The costumes were eye-catching, particularly the black quilted robes of the Pharisees.
    Speaking of which: I never agreed with those who accused "Superstar" of being anti-Semitic. Yes, the role of the Jews in the condemnation of Christ has been a pretext for anti-Semitism for millennia; no, that doesn't mean every artistic endeavor has to try to correct that real-life wrong. Their villainy is intrinsic to the plot; someone has to start the ball rolling for Jesus' downfall, and the leaders of the religion he's rebelling against are the obvious candidates. It's always a mistake to pretend that haters hate you for a reason. The hate comes first, the reasons afterward, and "Superstar" could portray the rabbinic court condemning Jesus as Yoda and the Jedi Council acting reluctantly out of love and compassion and a desire to execute God's plan and it wouldn't make a bit of difference on 4chan. 
       Sunday night set a high bar for Lyric Opera of Chicago's "Jesus Christ Superstar," opening at the end of April, this year's example of classic musical theater inhabiting the opera house. I was just wondering whether NBC's live production will dampen Chicago's appetite for more "Superstar" or whet it, and my wife, as if to answer the question asked, "We have our tickets, right?" 
     I thought hard.
     "Yes we do," I said.

Warning: Too many warnings dilute the value of being warned

 

     The Santa Barbara Biltmore is swanky. An enclave of Spanish revival cottages tucked amongst lush vegetation and tiled fountains. Right on the Pacific Ocean, you can do a few laps in its enormous pool, then step onto a sandy beach.
     A guest in one of the bungalows, say Fremont — they each have names — could wake up, feeling luxurious and pampered, wrap himself in a thick white robe and, musing whether to splurge on a room-service breakfast in the charming little courtyard, lazily flip open the menu and, among the freshly squeezed juices and sinful waffles, be confronted with:

                                       WARNING

Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Birth Defects or Other Reproductive Harm May Be Present In Foods or Beverages Sold or Served Here.

Foods such as French fries, potato chips cooked in oil at high temperature can produce Proposition 65-listed chemicals such as acrylamide, which is known to the state to cause cancer. Broiling, grilling and barbecuing fish and meats can produce Proposition 65-listed chemicals such as benzo-a-pyrene, which is known to the State to cause cancer. Nearly all fish and seafood contain some amount of mercury and related compounds chemical known to the State of California to cause ...

     It goes on ... and on. But you get the idea. The warning even points out that drinking water out of the fancy Biltmore glasses might be a problem, since "consuming food of beverages that have been kept or served in leaded crystal products made of leaded crystal will expose you to lead ..."
     Welcome to California. The idea of the state being an asylum of health fanatics and lifestyle extremists might feel outdated, a 1970s cliche. Outdated because much of the country is imitating them now, with big business — hello, Whole Foods — catering to their whims.
     But stereotypes often have a grain of truth, and occasionally, California manages to top itself. Last Wednesday, a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge issued a ruling in a 2010 lawsuit that large businesses serving coffee must post cancer warnings or face a hefty fine because roasted coffee contains trace amounts of the same acrylamide that caused the Biltmore to try to slap its guests' hands away from the chips.
     News stories on the coffee warnings tend to overlook they’ll merely be a single chirp in a vast chorus of Golden State alarm.
     “The warnings are everywhere: parking lots, hardware stores, hospitals and just about any decent-sized business,” the Los Angeles Times noted in 2009, calling the law “a boon not only to environmental and public health advocates but to plaintiff lawyers, who have reaped significant settlements over chemicals that have never been proved to cause significant harm at the levels in which they are present. In 2008, for instance, a total of 199 lawsuits were settled, netting $14.6 million in attorney fees and just $4.6 million in civil penalties.”
     So … good for lawyers, good no doubt for the sign-making industry. So what’s the harm? The harm is that warnings over dubious perils dilute the value of warnings. Cigarette kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, and each warning label is a chance to reach out to a nicotine addict and nudge them toward changing their ways. Coffee doesn’t kill anybody — in fact, studies show that it’s beneficial to health — and so tagging it for some trace amount of something just trains the public to ignore warnings.
     You need to match the warning with the peril. The National Parks are good at this: visit Yellowstone, and stark signs advise you not to blunder into the boiling pools, because tourists do — 20 have died horrible scalding deaths. (In 2016, a 23-year-old from Oregon, leaning toward a thermal acidic pool to check how hot it was, fell in. By the time rescuers reached him, his body had entirely dissolved).
     Yellowstone does not, however, label every tree, even though you could be injured blundering into on, or receive painful splinters drawing your hand across it.
     There is one important warning that must be given before we move on. Warning: Bad laws have a way of sticking around —Proposition 65 was passed in 1986 by 63 percent of the voters. No one expects it to be repealed anytime soon.