This is nothing new...

Pinkertons escort strike-breakers in Ohio

     For nearly the entire first century of the American labor movement, workers organizing to improve their lives have been met with clubs and guns, wielded by compliant police forces and hired Pinkerton guards. Later, attempts to unionize lead to lock-outs and mass firings. Union ranks were peppered with spies, informants and saboteurs. Picket lines were ignored or set upon. It has never been easy.
     To this long history of repression add the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Wednesday in Janus v. AFSCME, ruling that nonunion workers can't be required to pay fees to public sector unions. The case stems from Mark Janus, an employee at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, suing because he felt that his $45 a month union dues violated his right to free speech.  One would think that a case worker would have more pressing things to worry about, but there you are.
    This ruling, allowing free riders to enjoy the concessions won from management but not contribute to the organization that wins them, is considered a devastating blow to the labor movement.
    Perhaps.
    But unions have suffered devastating blows before.
    The Knights of Labor had grown to 40,000 members when it struck for an eight hour day in May, 1886, then lost 75 percent of its membership in the next year, as business owners retaliated and clamped down. 
    Unions still went on to win that eight hour day, the five day week. Sick pay. Child labor ended. Safety regulations put in place, business owners complaining all the while that permitting workers to enjoy healthful lives and decent salaries would be the ruin of them. Donald Trump didn't invent lying.
    No union success was ever achieved without suffering a setback, a counterstroke, retribution and intrigue and betrayal. Every step forward met with a push back.
    Not every setback was from the outside, either. Unions, like all organizations involving fallible humans beings, were hobbled by internal division, corruption, extremism and racism. No account of the obstacles they face would be complete without mentioning them. Sometimes unions played in the hands of their enemies, making it easier for them. Nor have these problems gone away.
    Chicago had a key role both in the origins of labor and in its suppression. Fort Sheridan, remember, was purchased by the Commercial Club in 1887 and donated to the Federal government for the specific purpose of putting a U.S. Army garrison there, to be available to squash union activity in the city. 
    And indeed the troops were put in place and used, once, to suppress the Pullman Strike of 1894. Soldiers got the trains running again.
    This court ruling, coupled with the shameful endorsement of Trump's Muslim ban the day before, is a vindication of the hardball tactics that denied Barack Obama the chance to name Merrick Garland, and instead allowed Donald Trump to install Neil Gorsuch. That, combined with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote, who contributed to past erosions of American liberty, make for a black week, when the true enormity of the Trump disaster began to manifest itself. A man of bottomless pettiness, who hours earlier was attacking a talk show host and a Virginia restaurant, could be the most significant president in 75 years.
    Before Trump could almost be funny, with his wild insults and accusations.
    Now, not so funny anymore. 
   Before, at times it felt like they were winning.
   Now, it feels a little like they've won. 
   Let that feeling settle, for a moment. Let it register. Then shake it off.
   Because these setbacks are also a fire bell in the night to those Democrats still fretting over public comity and how nice they should be. Whether they can attempt the tactics that have worked so well for so long for Republicans. This is smoke in the air. There is no room for indecision anymore. This is disaster that must be battled. The Right is coming to burn up your freedom your livelihood, everything. No one can pretend to be confused or uncertain any more.
    That is the bad news. The good news is the union faithful, the American patriots, have suffered worse defeats. Bruised, battered, humiliated, they never gave up. Neither can we. The battle isn't over. It has just begun in earnest.

Bookstores come and go but books go on and on

     It would seem the perfect business model.
     Your suppliers bring inventory directly to your store, unbidden. It arrives continuously in shopping bags and cardboard boxes. Most sellers don't set prices, but generally accept whatever you decide to pay them. Then you mark up the goods to what you feel the market will bear and sell them.
     Half the time your suppliers hang around while you decide what pittance to offer, then spend the money you just gave them on the marked-up goods that others have previously sold you.
     When I first walked into Half Price Books, I felt a sort of vertigo. The books ... they were so cheap. So very inexpensive. Brand new books, for half of what they cost at regular bookstores, plus shelves and shelves of used books, not at jacked-up antiquarian bookshop prices, but for a few bucks. Sometimes a dollar.
     Now the store in Highland Park is going out of business. A letter posted on the door offers the bright spin:

"The independent bookstore industry has been lucky to see positive growth during the past few years. In fact, Half Price Books has opened two stores in 2018 including our new store in Vernon Hills. However, while things are improving in the book industry world, we as booksellers need to be smart about the business decisions we made."

     That's true. According to the American Booksellers Association, sales at U.S. bookstores are up 5 percent this year. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of independent book outlets rose 35 percent.
     But a rising tide does not lift all boats. Some vessels swamp and sink. The Highland Park Half Price Books closes Sunday, July 8.

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Little Free Library

     Wow, talk about a firehose of reader email. My column yesterday, a plain-spoken reaction to the poisonous eruption of textbook racism vomiting forth from the White House over the weekend, just pinned the needle. I spent a few hours trying to answer, then gave up and began ignoring it—letting a few dozen responses gather in my Spam and Trash folders, giving a quick once over through squinted eyes, then deleting.
      Not that it was all bad—I know I sometimes give that impression. Actually, a large number of people grateful to see reason reflected in the newspaper, easily as much as those outraged to see their support of a flat-out bigot clearly described. The response was a kind of inverse Bell curve—very little in the middle, with steep slopes on either side. 
     For today, I pulled on hip boots, grabbed a squeegee, metaphorically, and went to work trying to arrange the muck into a kind of tableau that could be shared and understood. What supporters of Trump do to rationalize their perfidy is sorta interesting. They focus on the insult of calling them what they are—"You're saying I'm a bigot! I'm offended!"—instead of considering that they're being called this because they carry water for a manifest racist. Or they recast the matter—"This is what liberals do when someone disagrees!"—as if it was a potato-potahto matter of equal significance. "You envision an America where all races are treated as equal citizens, I see a Christian white supremacist state where freedoms are ignored to maintain minority right wing power; can't we just agree to disagree?"
     But a weariness quickly set in. What's the point? To whose benefit? Certainly not mine. Why think on it? I've already done that too much—particularly when you can consider this colorful "Little Free Library" that went up recently in my leafy suburban paradise, in front of Greenbriar Elementary School, where my boys learned their letters, a serene brick structure a block west of our house. 
    Very soon after this charming  purple, orange and green cabinet caught my eye, The Northbrook Tower, a sprightly and readable free weekly, ran an article telling all about the box, crediting Greenbriar librarian Collen Sanchez for the idea. According to the article—by Grady Bruch, editorial intern, credit where due—the concept began in Wisconsin in 2009, and from there spread. Now more than 4,000 Little Free Libraries grace a nation in dire need of grace. I was impressed that this attractive and professional work of folk art was created by Greenbriar students, themselves, not some professional artist elsewhere. Good job kids! Well done. Three elementary schools—Greenbriar, Meadowbrook and Westmoor each have one. 
   Inside is stocked with children's books, free for the taking, though I won't be partaking soon. My house already has too many and I have no one to read them to. Which gives me an idea. The boys of course will want to pluck treasures to delight their own progeny, who'll arrive one of these days, sooner than expected, given how the years have been snapping by. That leaves us with plenty. I think I'll make a habit of, on my walks with Kitty, of taking one from our house and donating it to the Free Little Library, now and then, where it can be savored once again, as books should be. There is joy to life—it isn't all Donald Trump and and self-blinded fans driving a great nation to its knees in shame. There is color and hope and generosity and children's books tucked behind glass doors in Little Free Library boxes. 


 

Donald Trump is a racist leading our country toward disaster

"The Collector" by Damien Hirst

     Let’s consider the lives of a few average Chicagoans, chosen at random.
     There’s … John Wayne Gacy. He was … let’s see … a pedophile who murdered 33 boys and buried them in his crawl space. There’s …Richard Speck, who raped and killed eight student nurses in a single night of terror. A third? Umm, Jeffrey Dahmer was a Chicagoan — well, he actually lived in Milwaukee but once cruised down to Chicago to find a victim, which qualifies him. Not to forget typical Chicagoan H.H. Holmes, whose grisly killings during the World’s Columbian Exposition are chronicled in “The Devil in the White City.”
     Gosh, those typical Chicagoans are all mass murderers, aren’t they? Makes an impartial observer coolly assessing the facts suspect that Chicagoans are a pretty dangerous lot. I’m surprised anybody dares step foot in the city, packed as it is with brutal psychopaths and twisted killers.
     What’s that you say? This is not a random selection of Chicagoans? Rather, I’ve obviously cherry-picked these individuals specifically because of their depraved actions. That rather than representing the city as a whole, they are extreme exceptions. The vast majority of Chicagoans don’t kill anybody, ever, but are decent human beings just trying to live their lives as best they can.
    I was being deceptive, wasn’t I? And why would I do that?
     Maybe because we just witnessed an identical show of deception on the part of the President of the United States. Over the weekend, Donald Trump replied the national outcry at tearing immigrant children from their families with a loathsome display of deception, exactly along the lines demonstrated above. The president and the White House both firing off tweets of shocking crudity. Here’s one:
     “Laura Wilkerson lost her son Josh in 2010. He was tortured and beaten to death by an illegal alien.”
     And another:
     “We are gathered today to hear directly from the AMERICAN VICTIMS of ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.”

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Cherry on top

     Back in the day, maraschino cherries went in Manhattans. They were useful little items, because when the drink was drained, I could fill that awkward minute before the arrival of the next by digging out the ragged bright little red wreckage and popping them—I preferred two; more festive that way—into my mouth. Ah, life is sweet!
     A small jar of the vivacious little fellows showed up in our fridge—my wife was making sundaes for her book club, one of four uses of maraschino cherries that spring to mind: cocktails, sundaes, fruit cocktails and in the center of grapefruits.
    No Manhattans, sundaes or fruit cocktail lately—we stopped buying fruit cocktail when the kids hit junior high. And grapefruit is out because I habitually eat mine whole for breakfast, peeling them like an orange and eating the entire segments. No slicing in half, ergo no center to place a cherry. And no cherries, usually.
    But the big yellow fruits have been so sweet lately, big-hearted soul that I am, I urge my wife to join me in partaking. She likes her grapefruits halved and segmented. A doting husband, I abandon my preference and prepare them the way she likes them, fussing over the bisected citrus with a little curving serrated knife. Though recently, looking at my half, something seemed missing, and I remembered the jar of cherries, forlorn in the fridge, abandoned since the book club, without Manhattans or sundaes to stir interest (fruit cocktail we bought, ready made, from Del Monte. Nobody composes the stuff themselves out of cans of mushy pears and smooshy bits of apricots—that's how fruit cocktail started, in the 1930s, as the leavings from canning fruit). 
    Voila. The result looked so perfect, I had to snap a picture, and, having the photo, now must write something to occupy you on a Sunday, a perfect day for perfect grapefruit presented perfectly with pizzazz.
    The obvious question: where did this odd pairing come from? The healthy, natural sour yellow grapefruit and this miniature red orb of sweet toxic shame. I remember the practice from the 1960s, which means it had to be a hold-over from the 1950s, when wives made fancy breakfasts for their husbands as part of their general program of keeping a happy home. Maraschino cherries were part of the whole Jello mold, Baked Alaska, parfait world of what passed for deluxe fine dining. Grapefruits were the stuff of resorts—you really had to go to Florida to get proper grapefruits, or have them ship up North in heavy cardboard crates, as my grandmother in Miami did.
    When did maraschino cherries begin being centered on grapefruits?
     First you need the cherries. I guessed "maraschino" had to be Italian, like "mascarpone." Bingo. Marasca refers to a "small, black cherry" grown around Zara, once Italy, now in Croatia, according to the OED, and "maraschino" is a liqueur distilled from the marasca cherry.
    The word is a little over 200 years old; Percy Bysshe Shelley puts it in the mouth of one of his characters in "Oedipus Tyrannus": "Give me a glass of Maraschino punch." The association between cherries and drinking was such that in a long list of words meaning "stewed," H.L. Mencken includes the evocative "cherry-merry" in his The American Language: Supplement One. 
    Neither natural cherries or cherry liquor are the bright red cherries in sugar we think of today. Those arrived on our shores about 1900—cherries in alcohol to preserve their journey from Europe, and show up in headlines concerned with their healthfulness such as this, from 1907: “Maraschino Cherries Violate Pure Food Law.” 
    So that takes care of the cherries. I actually wrote an exegesis on grapefruits, which migrated from the Caribbean to Florida about 1830, and boomed along with the intercontinental express and Florida real estate in the early decades of the 20th century.
    "The grapefruit to-day the aristocrat of the breakfast table and one of Florida's most valuable products was once not so long ago was believed to be worthless except as medicine," Ida Donnelly Peters wrote in "Grapefruit at other meals" in the February 1914 Delineator, "and was allowed to become overripe on the trees,  fall to the ground and there blacken undisturbed," 
     She suggests serving grapefruit with oysters, or as part of puddings and gelatins. Maraschino cherries are there too, but merely included among the general fruit salads of nuts and other delicacies designed to go into grapefruit shells. Just eating the grapefruit, unaltered, does not seem to have been an option. 
     Maraschinos have a typical cameo in Janet M. Hill's article "Seasonable and Tested Recipes" from the July, 1915 issue of American Cookery. Her description of "Half Grapefruit for Luncheon or Dinner" starts out promisingly enough—"Cut grapefruit in halves, crosswise, to make two portions from one fruit"—but then, as far as I can tell, the chef removes the hemisphere of grapefruit pulp and, apparently discards it, filling the skin cup with "half-sections of orange or preserved peaches, plums, pears, cherries, or pineapple; or fill the space with grape juice, confectioner's sugar, bar-le-duc currants or a maraschino cherry." She doesn't explicitly instruct you to discard the grapefruit pulp itself, but it never goes back in the skin either.
     So we have maraschino cherries being mixed into grapefruit recipes—there was a lot of broiling of grapefruits going on. How did cherries get placed in the center of grapefruits? I couldn't find textual proof of the practice's origin, so I will have to stray into conjecture: they look good there, a cherry or something: some place halved strawberries in the center of the grapefruit, and those work as well. 
    I always thought of the cherries as a festive touch, and was pleased to see that attitude supported in a 1937 publication—the oldest reference to the practice I could find after minutes of research—called "Gleanings in Bee Culture" that first drizzles the cut grapefruit with honey, naturally, and the cherry added should the situation call for it.
    "If there are to be guests, or the meal is to be a particularly festive occasion, place a well-drained maraschino cherry in the center of each half grapefruit."
     Notice that "well-drained." Otherwise, the cherry would leave a mark when removed. That could cause problems. In their reflections on living in New York's famed Carlyle Hotel as girls in the 1950s, daughters of the manager, the real-life models for Kay Thompson's "Eloise," had strong memories of those maraschino cherries delivered by room service to guests, because they would steal them off trays in the hallways.
    "We got in so much trouble for that," Marilise Flusser told the New York Post. "[The staff] would say, 'Girls! That means the bellboy has to go all the way downstairs to replace the cherries because now there's a red stain [where the cherry should be] and we can't give that to the clients!'"
     Thus the decadence of serving yourself a maraschino cherry on your grapefruit when it is not a festive occasion or you are not a guest in a fancy hotel. My wife never joins me in my maraschino cherry orgy—she's sweet enough without it. But what is life if you can't indulge in a solitary spree? Besides, if I didn't use them to decorate my grapefruit halves, the cherries would be there forever. So I don't feel bad grabbing one to turn a half grapefruit into a 1950s extravaganza of elegance. At only 8 calories, it is luxury I can afford.

Yield not to Evil.

    Friday was a busy day. It dawned rainy, which for a moment I hoped would free me from the obligation of attending Northwestern University's 160th commencement—a relief, since commencements are long and windy enough as it is, without adding actual wind, and rain, and cold.
   But no sooner had that emotion registered than I realized, to my surprise, that I didn't want commencement to be washed out. This was a celebration for thousands of people, including myself, my wife and son, and they we had all earned this ceremony. I wanted to go and, the deciding factor, my kid wanted to go. So we dressed in layers, brought garbage bags to sit on, and headed to Ryan Field.
     It was not that bad—not too cold, with a flannel shirt and a fleece and a rain jacket. And not too wet, tucked high under the lip of the stadium. NU president Mort Schapiro was funny as ever, and kept the thing moving, shortening where he could. The music stirred. Opera star Renee Fleming delivered a light, funny, truly inspirational address, urging students to "Find Your Voice," a talk that I thought of summarizing, but instead decided to just encourage you to watch here. 
    After the degrees were conferred and "Alma Mater" sung, lines of graduates tossing their arms around each other and swaying, touchingly, we headed outside of Ryan Field, found our very wet, cold and happy boy, hurried to his apartment for dry clothes, then off to his favorite place to eat—Todoroki on Davis. We lingered and laughed and sushi-loaded, then he peeled off to watch the World Cup, we went home to nap.
    Waking up, I took the dog on her late afternoon stroll, I thought about this post. I could write about a commencement speech, a subject I already touched upon Thursday ... or ... it is end of June; June 22, to be exact. As it happens, the paperback publication date of "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," by Sara Bader and me, the book that the University of Chicago Press published in hardback in September, 2016.
    That was a big deal, with a launch party at the Poetry Foundation and notice in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and lots of publicity. The book ripped through six printings and rose to No. 36 on the Amazon national bestseller list.

The new paperback edition was published Friday.

    A paperback publication ... well, not so big. In fact, it only manifested itself with an oblong cardboard box the U of C Press sent me a month or two ago containing a huge stack of business cards, carrying part of one quote from the book, "YIELD NOT TO EVIL" — Virgil, from "The Aeneid" — on one side, against a pleasing sky blue background. On the other side, the cover of the book—which, if you are unfamiliar, walks readers through recovery from alcoholism or addiction, using literary quotes. The cover is quite tiny, almost illegible. There is a blurb from the New York Journal of Books, "A vivid and accessible panoply of literary and philosophical wisdom" and a promo code to get 20 percent off the paperback.
     Not exactly a full-page ad in the Times. I've wondered whether a passerby, finding this card, would have an idea what it is hawking, particularly without resorting to a magnifying glass. 
    But something. A charmingly low tech bit of ballyhoo. They didn't tell me what to do with the cards. I've been leaving them in public spaces, at airports, in doctor's offices, on the seat of buses and above, at a bus stop on Madison Street, just west of Racine, where it has sat for weeks, waiting for somebody to notice.
    I know the feeling.
    I'm not sure if that's good (it's still there, available to be found) or bad (nobody has yet taken it).  But that kind of ambivalence comes with the bush leagues of publishing. I'd never say I'm glad to be obscure—that would be a lie. But I can say obscurity has a value. I have a number of friends who have had huge, best-selling books. And it distorts them, and forevermore they want huge, best-selling books ,and just regular selling books are a disappointment. Fame is an addiction like any other. You taste it, you crave more.
    Not me. I'm well along the process of getting a deal for my ninth book, another small affair at a small publisher that will cast out a ripple and no more. I'd be an idiot to expect anything beyond that at this point. Yet lack of expectation has not rendered me hopeless. Just the opposite. The mid-list melancholy has fallen away, replaced with a sort of gritty determination, almost a zeal. I'm writing the book because I like the topic. It's interesting and I enjoy doing it, just as I like setting these little cards carefully in public places, my little protest against the cosmos, my tiny manifestation of self. I don't have to worry about being brought down to size; I already am down to size. This is the place where I live, writing my odd little books, giving away essays every goddamn day here, carefully setting these little cards, and I do with almost a cleric's devotion, lighting the candle, saying the prayer. Maybe God hears. Maybe He doesn't. No matter, the prayer get said anyway.
    Work can be like a prayer, if you love it. The doing of it, your success. All the success I'm going to get, anyway. And if a little money comes, that's a small bonus, a consolation prize for participating. Hardly relevant, as the satisfaction wasn't because of a line of zeroes. I loved writing that book. Now out in paperback. I had to plug it here, well, because, as I tell young writers, if you don't care about your work, then nobody will. Which sounds grim, and sometimes is. But sometimes if you care, that's enough.
       

No media sideshow is complete until Ann Coulter bites the head off a chicken

Shield with Head of Medusa (Uffizi Gallery, Florence)

     The word "Geek" has developed cachet. It's practically a compliment. No longer paired with "computer"—the tech aspect is assumed—it refers to someone proficient in all things digital. Fashion-challenged and socially awkward, yes, but that'll change once the stock options get cashed. Geek is good. There's a Canadian web design company called "Geek Power"
     Yet "geek" originally had a very different meaning. My trusty Dictionary of American Slang explains:

geek n. 1 . A carnival or circus performer, considered a freak, who performs sensationally disgusting acts that a normal person would not, e.g., eating or swallowing live animals ... A 'half man, half animal' sideshow performer of gory, cannibalistic feats such as eating live snakes, biting off the heads of chickens...

     Sideshows are gone. Or rather, they've gone electronic. As the nation recoiled in revulsion this week at children of refugees being torn from their parents, up popped Ann Coutler to the distressing images into context. She told Fox News:

These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks, 24/7, right now...These kids are being coached, they're given scripts to read by liberals.

     Sensationally disgusting indeed. You see why I immediately thought of bored townsfolk lining up outside a greasy, tattered tent, the barker funneling them in as they hand over their nickels. The stooped geek shuffles onto a tiny stage, clutching a struggling bird tightly by the neck. Some kind of introduction, to build suspense. Then the fowl's head goes into the snaggle-toothed mouth. The jaws come down. The crowd gasps and recoils.
     At least in a circus, you know it's an act. I wish I could say the same regarding Coulter.. When challenged, she insists she believes what she says, no matter how patently false. Maybe she likes to stay in character. Maybe she's that far gone. If so, she has good company. Malicious hallucination is so popular nowadays, I'm expecting to see it on postage stamps, the "American Conspiracy Theory" series.

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