"I think the story is more important than the truth"

"The Nose" by Alberto Giacometti 

  
     Lies have a long afterlife for a reason. They scratch an itch, tell a satisfying story. Donald Trump's constant untruths boost his fragile ego, his false claims about the press are a cynical attempt to blunt valid criticism now and undercut damaging revelations certain to come in the future.
    Besides, accepting something at face value as true, because somebody says it's true, or there are news clippings assuming it's true, is easy. Much harder to ask, "Did this really happen?" and start to dig. That takes time, and energy.
    Which can be in short supply with a breaking news story. But are in abundance when writing an advance obituary. So I was disappointed to see a New York Times obituary of Dick Tuck by Robert D. McFadden repeat tales I knew to be untrue, stories that Tuck had admitted were untrue.
    Yes, it was a long time ago, while researching my first book, "If At All Possible Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks." But the book was published by St. Martin's Press, featured on the cover of Rolling Stone and on Good Morning America. It wasn't a best-seller, but it wasn't a secret either. McFadden, a Pulitzer Prize winner, couldn't have wondered whether these marvelous events in fact occurred. It isn't as if the University of California at Santa Barbara isn't still there. 
    Maybe it's best just to reprint the Tuck section from my book:

     Of all the pranksters in this book, perhaps the most vexing case is Dick Tuck. Famous for his determined hounding of Richard Nixon, Tuck has attached his name to some delightful pranks—the time he arranged for an old lady to embrace Nixon the day after his 1960 TV-debate drubbing and say, "Kennedy got the best of it last night, but don't worry dear, you'll do better next time." The time he signaled for Nixon's campaign train to pull out of the station while the candidate was delivering a speech from a platform at the back. The time he tricked Nixon, during a visit to San Francisco's Chinatown, to have his picture taken under a huge sign which said, in Chinese WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN? alluding to a scandal dogging Nixon at the time.
    So well-known was Tuck for his deeds that when the Watergate scandal first broke, Nixon's henchmen initially blustered that it was merely a Tuckish prank.
     It would be wonderful to say that Tuck is an exception to the Hugh Troy Syndrome—legendary pranksters whose feats melt away when examined closely. Sadly, that is not the case.
     The reason Dick Tuck falls within the book's scope of interest at all is that he traces his Nixon-baiting career to Nixon's run for California's Senate seat in 1950, when the Trickster waged a brutal campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas.
     A junior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Tuck was a campaign worker for Douglas. He was also in the history class of professor Harry Girvetz, who was contacted by Nixon's campaign headquarters—Tuck says—looking for an advance man to coordinate a campus appearance by Nixon.
     Girvetz, Tuck says, asked him if he would take the responsibility. Tuck accepted.
     "I picked the largest auditorium I could find," Tuck told a newspaper in 1973. "There was nobody on campus at the time and this place must have seated 2,700."
     Tuck also chose a time of 4 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. Since most classes were held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the campus was largely deserted. "We went to the beach Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Tuck.
     "Of course, only about forty people showed up. Then I held it up so latecomers could arrive. Well, Nixon and everybody there began getting impatient."
     While waiting for the latecomers to arrive, approximately half the people who had shown up left. Nixon impatiently insisted that they get going.
     "Finally, the meeting started and I got up to introduce him. During the introduction I proposed one hundred and three questions for Nixon to answer during his talk."
     "And then I turned to him with a flourish and said: 'And now here's Richard Nixon, who will speak to us on the World Monetary Fund."
    The appearance was a humiliating failure, and as Nixon was leaving, he called Tuck over and asked him his name. Tuck told him.
     "Well, Dick Tuck," Nixon said, "you've just made your last advance."
     A nice tag line to a great prank. The problem is, the entire thing is a lie; worse, one that Tuck has been repeating as true for the past 40 years.
     After examining 30 years of credulous newspaper articles, happily detailing Tuck's various exploits, I tracked down Tuck in New York, and he repeated his stories for me.
     They sounded true enough—filled with detail and largely consistent. Then there were all those clippings. And I certainly wanted to believe him.
     But the rally story started to unravel owing to Tuck's use of Professor Girvetz. No doubt mentioning a professor by name struck Tuck as the sort of small detail that adds veracity to a tale.
     But he overlooked the fact that Girvetz was famous as a liberal Democrat—a building at U of C-Santa Barbara is named after him. The notion of Nixon's campaign staff, no matter how harried, contacting a famous Democrat to set up a campaign visit struck me as highly odd. The archivist at U of C was interested in my quest, and combed the student newspaper for news of the rally. Nothing.
     I called Tuck back to see if he could provide me with more information—perhaps the date of the rally, or the name of a friend who attended. Suddenly, he was no longer the ebullient man I had spoken with before.
     "Your desire for truth troubles me a little bit," he said. "I think the story is more important than the truth."
     To give Tuck credit, under pressure, he finally admitted that not only was the disastrous University of California rally a fiction of his, but so was the train story and other pranks he is credited with.
     In his defense, Tuck claimed that the truthfulness of a story is secondary to its effect—look at Santa Claus, he said.
     But what he fails to see is that the lack of truth completely undermines the value of anything presented as fact. It taints the moral of the story. The reason people embrace Tuck's pranks is not because they are wonderful, timeless tales. People love the punch line—tricky old anal-retentive Nixon, the wily puppet-master, reduced to a laughingstock, red-faced in the empty hall, failing to finish his speech as the train pulls away.
     Tuck's pranks appeared to play upon Nixon's defensiveness, egotism, and lack of humor. To see the importance of it being Nixon, imagine playing a prank on Jimmy Carter, somewhere in Africa, pressing a rag soaked in sugar water against the lips of a starving infant. Not quite the same image. 
     Remember, what brought Nixon down was not the Watergate break-in, per se. Rather, it was his lying to cover it up, shameless and on television, gazing into the camera and distorting the truth for his own benefit.
    Kinda like Dick Tuck.

     I contacted both the New York Times and McFadden and informed them of the problematic sections of the obituary. Neither responded. Which is also disappointing. I'm open to the idea that, as people tend to do when they possess a bit of personal knowledge on a subject, I'm exaggerating the significance of this lapse. But it seemed at least worth mentioning. Truth is either important, or it's not.

Local kid steals spotlight in boffo Beckett ‘Boy’ star turn

Zachary Fewkes (center) with Aaron Monaghan (Estragon, left)
and Rory Nolan (Pozzo)  Photo by J Lauryn Photography.

     Zachary Scott Fewkes is only 12. But he has been skipping school in Lake Zurich recently to hang out on the Chicago waterfront with a pair of Irish bums.
     And his parents approve.
     Then again, these are no ordinary Hibernian hobos, but two of the most famous homeless men in literature: Vladimir and Estragon, the talkative tramps in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” currently on stage at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
     As frustrating as their task is — miserably killing time on a barren heath, with its one bare tree, waiting for someone who never arrives — the roles, played by Marty Rea (Vladimir) and Aaron Monaghan (Estragon) are diva turns compared to Fewkes’ character, “Boy,” who shows up at the end of the first act to deliver a message: “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.”
     An easy role to overlook. The reviews in the Sun-Times and Trib name four of the five actors — Chris Jones refers to “a quartet of masterful performances,” cutting Fewkes out of the ensemble entirely, even though his character has not only an under-appreciated importance in the meaning of the play, but a unique acting challenge.
     The four adults are seasoned actors from Galway’s renowned Druid Theatre, with a long list of roles and awards between them.

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'People gather to forget about life's realities'

      I actually didn't need to write a column for Monday. A vacation day, in theory. But my column on the Ivan Albright show came together quickly and I realized I could write another and say something about the flag and the protest without cutting into my holiday weekend.
    I'm glad I did. Lots of reaction to my Memorial Day column, from people who loved it, to those who cancelled their subscription.  So much reaction that I began to categorize it. Three types: praise, insult and argument. Of the three, the argument is the smallest group—takes effort—and the most interesting, because a few readers people made various points I hadn't thought of or had under-appreciated. The email I found most persuasive are those who said, in essence: We watch sports to relax. We don't want our societal problems shoved under our noses. We want a beer instead.
     That was summed up best by this, from a Chicago firefighter. I've added paragraph breaks for readability. 

     I enjoyed your article.  This entire situation is controversial and divisive.  One thing I’ve asked and never gotten a satisfactory answer on is regarding the timing of the protests.  I’m a firefighter in Englewood so I’ve seen my share of society’s problems and injustices up close.   
     What if, while in uniform, I decided that instead of doing what my job required I would take a knee in protest.  What would happen?  Would I be considered a person exercising their 1st amendment rights or a person not adhering to requirements of my employment?  
     I don’t have to be a firefighter.  If I don’t like the rules the fire department imposes while I’m in uniform, or out of uniform for that matter, I can resign and pursue a different employment.  
     As for my question above, my opinion is that while I’m in uniform, being paid for my performance in that uniform I am required to adhere to the rules and regulations set forth by the fire department.  If I want to advance any agenda or set of beliefs on my days off, or my own time I am afforded that opportunity and it should not be infringed on.  I believe the same is true in the NFL.  I applaud the players wanting to use there social status as a means to improve society as a whole.  Just do it on their own time.  Not when 55,000 people paid to see them perform in that uniform.  
     It’s no different to me than a music artist preaching during their performance.  I don’t want to hear it, I paid to hear you sing, dance, act.   People go to sporting events, concerts, etc. to escape life’s difficulties if just for a few hours not to be reminded of how bad things really are!  If I wanted that, I’d watch the news.  So I ask again, does the timing of these protests really help social injustice or is it just self centered performers with a look at me complex?  I don’t think we’ll ever truly know.  I do know one thing however.  If I went through with my scenario above about not doing my job and protesting instead I would be disciplined.  Severely.  And rightly so.  When you put on a uniform to go to work whether you’re a UPS driver, police officer, flight attendant, or even a football player you are agreeing to act in a manner that is decided upon by your employer.  Perhaps the most important uniform is that of Military members.  
     On this Memorial Day, as we honor those that gave their life for our freedoms, people who wore that uniform until the end, maybe we should re-examine whether one day a year is enough for their sacrifice.   Maybe, we as a society need to reminded before sporting events and other venues where people gather to forget about life’s realities for a while about the sacrifices that were made to allow us to live as we do.  Maybe standing in a respectful manner for a two minute patriotic song is exactly what this country needs.  Being told to rise, kindly remove all caps, and pay attention as we honor America with the singing of our National Anthem is not forced patriotism, it’s respect that has been bought and paid for by every single person who has worked to make this country the place it is today.   The fact that so many don’t see that is the real problem.  

     I could poke a few holes in this—sports events are to have fun and forget life's harsh realities, when it comes to protest, but also a time to honor the courageous fallen. Which is it? My understanding is that these patriotic displays originated during wartime, as an attempt by professional franchises to deflect the question, "Why aren't these strapping young men fighting?" Seems the public bought the hype all too well, as it often does.
    But I don't want to re-argue the point. I suppose I would add that going to a knee during the national anthem is a very quiet and under-stated kind of protest, and it seems the protesters are being blamed for the over-reaction of the people doing the blaming, for the way their protest was seized and twisted and made into a political football by the president and his ilk. But we can have this discussion another day, and no doubt will. Thanks everybody for writing in. Well, almost everybody...

Do we salute a flag that represents forced displays of what you don't believe?

     I love the flag.
     Mine is frayed and faded from use. I'll put it out on Memorial Day, to honor the fallen, place my flat palm over my heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
     Nobody forces me.
     Like all loves, there was the initial infatuation period. Making construction paper pilgrims in elementary school, becoming fascinated with American history. Reading Samuel Eliot Morison's epic "The Oxford History of the American People" at summer camp in my mid-teens.
     We were the good guys. The Americans kicked Hitler out of Europe. The Rangers up the ropes and into the teeth of the German machine guns at Pointe du Hoc and the raid on the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt. When my boys were old enough, I gave them a copy of "Air War Against Hitler's Germany" thinking they'd love it like I did.
     They didn't. Times change. The parts of history that were hardly a distant murmur when I was growing up took their places in the narrative, like silent witnesses slipping into the back of a courtroom. One by one, called to the stand to testify.
     The more you learn about our country, the more conflicted the story becomes. I like to think it's still a basically good story about good people, with continuous lapses. But I understand those who think otherwise. The only actual U.S. Army Ranger I know went into the service a gung-ho patriot and came out a radical anti-imperialist, someone for whom the American tale is one long atrocity, sodden with horror.
     Am I supposed to contradict him? I think he's right, factually. But I'm a basically cheery fellow, and want to believe I live in a good place, with exceptions.
     This mutual respect, despite disagreement — I think he respects me, we drive up together to the same pal's place on Lake Superior every summer — is what makes America a great nation, and not one of those fractured nest of warring wasps that ruins so many others. America: I love it, you condemn it. I think you're wrong, you think I'm wrong, and we have a conversation, driving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

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'Every military casualty of every war has contributed to our freedom'

  
  

    Patriotic Americans honor the sacrifice of our nation's military without glorifying war. Not always as easy or as clear a distinction to make as it sounds. It can be a short leap from commemorating soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to valorizing every conflict. And not one we should automatically make, because it softens us up for the next war. Which is always waiting around the corner, and easier to start if we feel it's necessary, by definition, because they're always necessary, even laudable. 

MEMORIAL DAY 2008

     We arrived early at the parade this year, setting up our blue canvas folding chairs along Cherry Street, staking out a good spot.
     We needn't have bothered -- when the parade began, a half-hour later, there was still plenty of open curb space. The neighborhood certainly wasn't jamming the route.
     We're a nation at war, I thought, as the well-scrubbed fire trucks strobed by. Yet we don't act that way.
     Maybe that's a function of living in a leafy suburban paradise like Northbrook. Not exactly a military town. We enjoy the benefits, but the price is being paid by someone else.
     After the fire trucks, the vets, carrying the banner of the George W. Benjamin American Legion Post 791. As they approached, those lining both sides of the street stood up and applauded.
     Two marching bands — from the junior high school and the high school — a troop of Boy Scouts and of Brownies and then it was over. Eight minutes, start to finish.
     Afterward, my wife and I went to the park at the center of town, to hear the speeches and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner."
     As the speakers spoke of honor and sacrifice, I held my notebook. But I only jotted down one sentence.
     "Every military casualty of every war has contributed to our freedom," said Maj. Gen. Clifton Capp (Retired).
     I rolled that sentence over in my mind all the lovely Monday afternoon, sitting on my front porch, watching the flag undulate in the spring sunshine, trying to pick apart what it means.
     It's the safe view, of course. Every soldier a hero, every skirmish important, every war unavoidable.
     And as long as it is relegated to the past, you can't argue it — nobody wants to question the value of sacrifice.
     But buried in there is a troubling implication — the suggestion that every time the military is sent somewhere to fight, our freedom is on the line. That's certainly what supporters of the war in Iraq seem to believe. But is it true, or is it circular logic? Are we fighting in Iraq because our freedom is on the line? Or do we feel our freedom is on the line in Iraq because we're fighting there?

              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 28, 2008

How to talk to old people

Astronomicum Caesareum (Metropolitan Museum)

     Like comets, the kids return this time of year. On schedule, their wide elliptical orbits in time and space, through semesters and colleges and foreign countries, loop back, one more time, home to familiar ground. 
    My oldest has impacted back into the house, his room turned from pristine shrine to a crater, strewn with ejecta, rubble, books and clothes and cables and backpacks. 
     A meteor shower of friends zip past the house, kids I've known since grade school, now lean, clean, tall, well-scrubbed proto-adults. Aborning stars all.
    I go out to walk the dog. Some late model SUV in the driveway. At the wheel, a young man curled over his phone. No need to actually walk up to the house and ring the doorbell. That's as old-fashioned as churning butter. A simple text: "In the driveway."
     I step around the front of the car, dip my head, angle into his view. He looks up and is out of the car. These kids move fast.  
     Beaming mightily, as if viewing something highly amusing. 
     Hey, I say, good to see you. What are your plans after school? The Wharton School of Business slingshotting him into the world.
     "Infometrics at Facebook," he says, adding "Silicon Valley," helpfully, just in case "Facebook" draws a blank the way  "infometrics" does—something about numbers, I imagine. Too much pride to ask. Instead I say something positive about Facebook: "Very useful service." 
     "And how about you?" he says. Being polite. We're peers now. Just two employed persons trading data. "Still at the paper?" He doesn't know himself whether the paper exists or went out of business five years ago—how could he? It's something a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
     "Still the same," I say. "Every day somebody employed at a newspaper still has a job is a good day." 
      He smiles, indulgently, benevolently, eyes twinkling.
     "Well, it's good that you're keeping busy," he concludes, as if trying to put the bright spin on something that might otherwise seem impossibly trivial. I make some additional small talk — how are his parents? What movie are the boys seeing? They had hoped for "RBG"—a movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But it wasn't playing. So "Deadpool 2."  
     My son comes out, and, taking my cue as if dismissed, I wish them a good time, turn and hurry  down the street.
     "Good that you're keeping busy." Good that you're keeping busy!? Ouch. As if my job, my career, my life, were some quaint, marginal activity, a time-killing hobby: making corn husk brooms, spray-painting pine cones and attaching googly eyes so they resemble owls and trying to sell them at craft fairs.  Tossing cards into a hat. A kind of recreational therapy.
    Keeping busy.
    Well, that's how it must seem, I suppose. That's how they talk to old people. No use my complaining about it. That's what old people do. Complain. About the world not paying attention to them enough. Not making a bigger deal out of their pebble of a life. This is how it should be, right? Try to think back to when you were that age. Old folks were a puzzlement, an enigma. Their lives were obviously over—old, failed, neutered, decrepit. And yet they were still here, unwanted, unneeded, shuffling around. These odd alien life forms with their weird post-mortem existence. Nobody has the heart to tell them they've died, not yet, and so, in temporary ignorance, they propel forward a few steps, like decapitated chickens, on muscle memory and habit, leading their sedentary, dwindling, declining existences.
    And it could be worse. When I pause to recount the above exchange to a woman down the street, she says—as soon as she finishes laughing, recovers her breath, eyes watering, gasping, which takes some time—that her daughter, about the same age, will cut her off in the midst of delivering some bit of maternal wisdom with: "Why do you talk?" 
     Double ouch. Girls are harder, all parents I know say that. My boys might think—certainly think, "Why do you talk? Why are your lips moving? Why are you speaking to me, as if I could possible listen, care or benefit?" 
     But they don't actually say those words, out of pity perhaps, or utter indifference. Or maybe politeness. That's it! Politeness. They know how to talk to old people. So take comfort in that. At least they're polite. To our faces. We did that much right.
      This is all as it should be. My wife keeps saying that. This is why we raised them. So many parents have kids sputtering on the launch pad. "3...2...1..." and instead of the big roar and the fiery ascent, a fizzle and puzzled looks all around mission control and an immediate inquiry into What Went Wrong. It would be an insult to those parents for us to regret, too loudly, too much, the perfect blast-off. Of course the youngsters have to scorch the earth, the launchpad, to push against us, in order to overcome the earth's gravity, to defeat the force holding them back, and power upward into the heavens. Of course the ground doesn't like it. You don't have to like it. You just have to accept it, and you don't even have to do that, because what you like or don't like, accept or don't accept, matters a whole lot less now. Comfort yourself with the thought that, maybe, they'll toss a glance back at the blue dot dwindling behind them, maybe a single nod in approval—a good place to come from, the home planet. They'll at least keep track of it for a brief while yet, if only for navigation purposes. A fixed point for them, a reassuring thought for us, to try to believe, while enduring the roar of liftoff and waiting for the ringing in our ears to subside. 

Exhibit holds magnifying mirror to our wrinkled, decaying 'Flesh'

Ivan Albright. Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, 1929–30.
Gift of Ivan Albright. © The Art Institute of Chicago.

     Can you be the fan of an artist because of the title he gave to one of his paintings?
     Ivan Albright is Chicago's most famous painter. Born in North Harvey, he studied at the School of the Art Institute. The Art Institute of Chicago holds more of his paintings than any other museum, though typically just three canvases are on display at any time.
     One, his portrait of an aging woman sorrowfully contemplating her ravaged face in a mirror, "Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida." Furrows of cellulite under harsh white light, the polar opposite of every romantic portrait ever painted. Albright is staking out his turf: decay and age, not in soft Rembrandt glow, but as nightmare, a realm that 70 years ago he had to himself*—predicting all the graphic shock art that came later.
     He is certainly contemporary in how he leapt to other media. The second painting often on display is his most famous, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," a life-sized portrait of Oscar Wilde's debauchee, commissioned by MGM and featured in lurid Technicolor in the otherwise black-and-white 1945 film. 

     And third, the painting that makes Albright special in my eyes. An enormous still-life of door, weathered and warped into its frame, a painting he titled, "That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. (The Door.)" Why? Maybe the sentence echoes in my regret-based interior ecology; it sent me by the Art Institute to see the new Albright show, which opened earlier this month: "Flesh: Ivan Albright at the Art Institute of Chicago."
     The door isn't actually in the exhibit—it's a few galleries over. Maybe it doesn't fit into the "Flesh" theme.  

Ivan Albright. Head of My Father, 1935/36.
 Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection.
© The Art Institute of Chicago.

     It's a modest show, one room, but well-worth a visit. I knew a bit about Albright—that he's the father-in-law of former secretary of State Madeleine Albright, for instance. But I did not realize that his father Adam Albright was a painter of sugary, idealized children. His son's entire career, all the burst veins and dead fish flesh, could be considered an elaborate revenge upon the old man.

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* Originally I prefaced this with the observation that I am not an art historian, but that got cut whittling this to size. What I should have done is gone with that flash of self-awareness and not ventured about Albright being in the forefront in this regard, because he wasn't, according to reader Tom Hohman, who writes:, 

     Albright certainly did not have this "realm...to himself". See Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Weimar artists banned by Hitler. They were on the vanguard of the German New Objectivity Movement. Dix particularly explored the same subject as Albright but decades earlier.

     I regret the error, and leave this in, as opposed to just removing it, as a cautionary tale about letting your idle conjecture stray beyond the borders of your actual knowledge.