The Saturday Snapshot #14

     I could have written about the centennial of Armistice Day without actually visiting the Elks Memorial at Diversey and Lakeview. But I knew it was a singular space, rococo, enormous and empty, from when we lived three blocks away at Pine Grove and Oakdale. I wanted to make sure it was still open, and still as unpopulated as I remember.
    Yup. I showed up an hour before they closed, and the log said I was the second visitor. The docent told me they get 500 visitors a year. An Elks official later changed that to 500 a month, either way, that still constitutes a very few people for a dome almost as large as the Jefferson Memorial. I'd bet not 1 out of 100 Chicagoans knows it's there, and not one in a thousand has gone.
    I took photos for my column on the effects of the war on Chicago, but also couldn't help but snap this little tableau, set up in a side chamber that featured cases of military memorabilia from America's 20th century wars. The memorial was completed in 1926, and dedicated to the 70,000 Elks who served in World War I and the thousand who died in the war. It was subsequently re-dedicated to include veterans from World War II, in 1946, and later to vets from our more recent wars.
    To be honest, the general emptiness, while no doubt a source of unease for the Elks, is fitting. The essential truth of those who die in war is they are gone and don't come back, and what better way than an ornate hall empty of people. Perhaps that is what inspired someone to set up this ill-advised tableau of mannequins, which only made things worse.
     We give a lot of chin music to the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, air force and marines. But that supposed respect doesn't extend to, oh, visiting a gorgeous shrine set up in their memory. Of course a 100 years is a long time. Their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives, are gone. The only people who could mourn now—really, the ones most affected, whose loss is greatest—are the children never born to the soldiers who never come back. With the right eyes, they crowd the empty hall of the Elks Memorial, sealed off from the living world they never were permitted to enjoy.
     

100 years since the end of World War I, a bloodbath that shaped Chicago

"The Armistice: The Field of Battle, Europe, November 11, 1918” by Eugene Francis Savage (detail)
in the Elks Memorial in Lincoln Park. 

     World War I glows in American memory. Handsome doughboys in leggings and wide-brimmed hats. Dashing air aces like Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker in white silk scarves, piloting those wonderful wood-and-wire biplanes with their evocative names: Sopwith Camel, Curtiss Jenny.

The Elks Memorial is only a little shorter than the Jefferson Memorial

     Yes, terrifying tanks and machine guns and barbed wire. But those songs! We can still hum the songs. “Over there, over there, send the word, send the word, over there.” We’re wearing some of the fashions a century latter, even if we don’t know it. Where do you think the “trench” in “trench coat” comes from?
     War nostalgia is a particularly perverse form of human folly, and must be resisted. Savoring the pomp and drama that is certainly there, while glossing over the incomprehensible human cost, the death and suffering and loss, is a grotesque insult. It’s like envying someone whose spouse has died because of all the goodies at the funeral.
     Thus with the centennial of the end of World War I this Sunday, the famed “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” we are obligated to remember the war fully, not just its joyful conclusion. The full scope and horror, and deep significance that echoes today.
     World War I was a bloodbath of incomprehensible proportions: 37 million casualties. Almost 9 million killed. Two million French soldiers died; 460,000 at one battle, the Somme. The French Army lost 27,000 men — half the number of Americans killed during the entire Vietnam War — on the first day of the Battle of Frontiers, Aug. 22, 1914. Another 2 million Germans.
     The United States—which entered the war only in April 1917, and took nearly a year to get significant numbers of troops overseas—suffered far less: 112,000 dead, half of those from disease, particularly a flu epidemic that fall.
     No wonder we're so fond of World War I.
     This doesn't even bring up the issue of World War II, which historians agree was a mere continuation of World War I, begun 21 years later, a pause to let a generation grow up to replenish the ranks of cannon fodder.
     And for what? I'd defy most Chicagoans to explain why World War I was fought. The most historically-savvy might offer up Archduke Ferdinand being assassinated in Sarajevo, causing various alliances to creak into motion and soon everybody was fighting. But what issues were behind that? Old grudges, old territorial spats.
     Chicagoans can be proud that our city resisted the war. Our mayor, Big Bill Thompson, might have become rightly known an avatar of corruption during the Roaring '20s, but he joined a widespread scorn for the war. Part was pure ward and ethnic politics.
     "Chicago is the sixth-largest city in the world," he said when President Woodrow Wilson— whose re-election slogan in 1916 had been "He kept us out of war"—declared war anyway the next year. "The second-largest Bohemian, the second-largest Norwegian and the second-largest Polish."
     Pacifists who'd been hounded from other cities found refuge in Chicago. Thompson invited one group to meet in Chicago, but Gov. Frank Lowden sent the National Guard up from Springfield by train to try to stop them.
     Freelancers abounded. The American Protective League indexed 18,000 registered German aliens and began performing "character checks" for the federal government. The teaching of German was dropped from public schools. Bismarck School became Funston School, and the City Council dutifully scrubbed away German street names.
     World War I influences life today in ways we might not think about. Wilson instituted a federal income tax to pay for it.
     The Great Migration began in 1916, as Southern blacks were drawn by jobs vacated by men enlisting or being drafted. Chicago's black population nearly doubled in two years, from 58,000 to 109,000.
     The war jump-started Prohibition, both because it got people used to government rationing comestibles, and because big Midwestern brewers—Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, Anheuser, and Busch—were German and easy to demonize. The war also energized women who, fresh from the factories and war volunteer work, pushed all the harder for the right to vote, granted in 1920. By war's end, they had stepped from the parlors forever. "In saloons women drank openly with men" the Tribune noted in a story on the Nov. 11, 1918 celebration. Headline: "Loop goes wild."
     Chicago has a number of monuments to the war. The "Victory Monument" at 35th and King honors the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an all-black unit that fought in France. There will be a variety of events at churches and VFW halls. At Cantigny, in Wheaton, visitors are invited to bring their own bells to ring at 11 a.m,. then join in a "Victory Tea."
     The Elks National Memorial in Lincoln Park is probably the most significant tribute to World War I in Chicago and, ironically, is closed Sunday, though open from 12 to 4 p.m. until Nov. 15.
     The enormous dome, nearly as tall as the Jefferson Memorial, is tucked at the corner of Diversey and Lakeview. Dedicated in 1926 to the 70,000 Elks who served, later re-dedicated to embrace veterans from other wars, most of the art is the high-minded 19th century tributes to "Charity" and "Brotherhood." But if you visit—and you should, admission is free— go into the back, into the Grand Reception Hall, one of the most ornate rooms in Chicago, and look at the mural to the right of the door. This is "The Armistice: The Field of Battle, Europe, November 11, 1918" by Eugene Francis Savage, and it skirts the loftiness of the rest of the artwork. Hope is chained to a gun carriage, lofted by soldiers who look half joyful, half crazed. By a dead horse, the corpses of their colleague stare blindly or reach their imploring hands to heaven. The clock on a shattered church is stopped at 11—the celebrated hour of the Armistice. Above it the Madonna, clad in blood red, holds out her hands, bent at the wrists, a gesture of "Stop!" Her plea of course went unheeded.
     The Elks say that the shrine is visited by almost 10 people a day when it's open, April 15 through November 15. Wednesday, when I visited, there had been two.

The clock at the bottom, stopped at 11, marks the end of the war.

Sure Disney is fake; but it's such GOOD fakery

 

     On Election Day, I posted a photograph of myself wearing a Mickey Mouse "VOTE" pin. A reader saw it and mentioned that her daughters works for Disney World, which reminded me that I had visited there with my family, almost a decade ago. My reaction to the place might surprise readers—it certainly surprised me. I've never posted this column on the blog. In this uncomfortable political moment—is there any other kind lately?—I thought it a good time to dredge this out of the vault and share it with you.

     ORLANDO, Fla.—"Doesn't Disney World remind you of McDonald's?" my 13-year-old asked, as the Disney Magical Express, aka a bus, neared the sprawling theme park's main gate. "Aren't they based on the same ideals of sameness?'
     I twisted the iPod buds out of my ears—I was fortifying myself for arrival at the Magic Kingdom with Mozart's "Requiem Mass"—but didn't answer, my eyes fixed on the archway as it loomed. I was not, yet, in Disney World. I could, still, turn back. I had never, technically, been to Disney World. But once I entered, I will always have visited, a stain I could never erase. "Better you than me," our neighbor had scoffed, and more than one reader proudly announced they would never, ever go, as if it were a moral imperative.

     I stayed on the bus. We entered the kingdom. There was a smattering of applause, the way people clapped when a different bus I once rode rolled into Jerusalem.
     We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, its majestic, soaring lobby filled with African art. There were giraffes and zebras grazing on the savannah outside our balcony. A few hours later we were watching tigers—real tigers—frolic and wrestle amongst overgrown temple ruins.
     This isn't the travel section, but enough readers asked me what Disney World was like that I should try to relate a bit of our stay.
     Those who haven't been there invariably invoke its falsity—it isn't the real world, it's Disney World. That's absolutely true. If Disney were trying to approximate the actual Africa, they would need to place 5,000 desperate refugees living under plastic tarps in their savannah instead of antelopes.
     In that light, reality suddenly seems over-rated. What those who haven't been don't realize is Disney offers some very well-done falsity, giving you a taste of things that, without Disney, you might never experience at all.
     For instance. For the handful of hardy souls who have actually hang-glided over the Golden Gate Bridge, I'm sure the Soarin' ride at Disney is a pale imitation of the actual experience of winging across San Francisco Bay.
     But for those of us who never have and never will, it was jaw-dropping—and I don't mean "jaw-dropping" as cliched metaphor, but as dry description. My mouth was hanging open.
     Walt Disney created the original Disneyland, he said, because he wanted somewhere to take his two daughters, and as a place to bring your kids, Disney World works fabulously. Everyone could satisfy a different goal while still being together. My teen wanted thrills, so we hit Space Mountain and Expedition Everest. The 11-year old wanted grub, so we ate churros and Mickey waffles.
     My wife wanted to master the Disney system, with its Fast Passes and secret codes, and delighted as each activity she meticulously planned months earlier—the Cirque du Soleil, the popular restaurants—found favor with her family.
     And me? I was also interested in thrills, grub and family. But I wanted something to think about, and Disney World offered a college seminar: Faux Reality and Its Visions of the Future.
     If you approach Casablanca—the real one—from the sea, as I have, you are confronted, not with minarets, camels or tents, but with an unbroken chain of modern high-rises. It looks like Miami. The Moroccan section of Disney World, on the other hand, might be small and fake. But at least it looks exotic.
     I savored that one of the wonders offered, sincerely, by Siemens in its "Project Tomorrow" exhibit —"Going to the mall? Your car will find a parking space and valet park itself"—is mirrored, precisely, in a black and white 1950s newsreel clip shown ironically in the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater.
     Disney World often told us to "celebrate your dreams," and I did stop, standing on Main Street, USA, while the parade was passing, to wonder what indeed my dreams might be. They aren't as threadbare as those served up by Siemens, thank God, but not much sharper either, and I resolved right there to cook up better dreams, an insight worth going to Florida for.
     None of the drawbacks people warned us about proved significant. The lines were short, sometimes nonexistent. The crowds, rather than being jammed with rude, grotesque fellow citizens, had a surprising number of sleek, button-nosed French families. I considered whether they came as an expression of Gallic contempt. But they seemed to be having fun, and my guess is they came here grasping at a classic American experience, the way my wife and I hurried to the Follies Bergere in Paris. It wasn't because we thought French ladies still wear crinoline skirts.
     Too many highlights to list—those tigers, great 3-D shows, good food. The drawbacks—a few tired attractions, two of which broke down while we were on them, one incoherent laser extravaganza which locked Mickey Mouse in a Manichean struggle with the forces of evil.
     If I had to single out a single best moment, it was one morning, waiting for a bus. A common Disney World experience that turned suddenly extraordinary when my teenager implored, "Tell us a story." He hadn't asked that in years, and I pulled out one of the chestnuts the boys used to love to hear, and told it one last time.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 6, 2009

‘Borne back ceaselessly into the past’ — Trump, racism and ‘The Great Gatsby’

     Tom Buchanan does not shine in “The Great Gatsby.”
     Rather, he lurks in shadow, eclipsed by Jay Gatsby, the pink-suited millionaire mobster of the title, not to mention Buchanan’s wife Daisy, an effervescent flapper based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great love, Zelda Sayre.
      Buchanan was a Yale classmate of the 1925 novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who calls him, “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven,” a rich brute in riding clothes, “a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat.”     
      Fitzgerald gives Buchanan exactly one intellectual passion.
      “Civilization’s going to pieces,” Buchanan interjects violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
     Carroway hasn’t, so Buchanan explains:
     “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

     A thinly-disguised reference to an actual book, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy,” written by Lothrop Stoddard, published in 1921.
     Almost a century old, yet as if ripped from the headlines.
     The bad thing about World War I, Stoddard writes, is how it weakened “white race-unity” and set the stage for “the subjugation of white lands by colored armies.”
     Stoddard must sense that bit of fear-mongering is a bit much, so pulls back.
     "Such colored triumphs of arms are less to be dreaded than more enduring conquests like migrations which would swamp whole populations and turn countries now white into colored man's lands irretrievable lost to the white world."
     This is exactly the cry that Donald Trump used to become elected—"Build the wall!"—and returned to with fever these past few weeks. A few thousand ragged refuges walking across Mexico became the dread "caravan" bringing criminality and disease and terrorism.
     Why? Hatred sells. It works. Riles voters up. The appeal of fear was not defeated Tuesday, no matter the outcome. Nor can it be lain at the feet of Donald Trump. He just found it, a sparkly toy, and began waving it over his head. Trump would have put it down again if people didn't cheer. They did. They always do—some do. A lot.
     They're cheering around the world. This isn't a vice unique to America. Nationalist groups are gaining power from Brazil to Hungary. They offer perceived greatness by demonizing marginalized groups, turning the world's victims into menaces. That's why lying is so intrinsic to their success. It isn't just Trump. Bigots have to lie, in order for their worldview not to fall apart in the light of actuality. You can't admit to brutalizing others to feel better about yourself; no, no, your victims have to be attacking you.
     "It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things," Buchanan says, drawing scorn from his wife.
     "We've got to beat them down," Daisy whispers, "winking ferociously."
     Fitzgerald views this clearly.
     "There was something pathetic in his concentration..." he writes. "Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas."
     Hateful notions of white supremacy could seem stale in the early 1920s, leftovers from the Civil War, embraced by Hoosiers in hoods but on the wane. Fitzgerald had no way of knowing they would become popular again, here and abroad, policy in Germany, which would press them to their logical conclusion.
     That's what makes our current historical moment so unsettling to the mindful. We don't know if these brush fires the president keeps carelessly starting will go out on their own or form a general conflagration.
     Facts and news are being daily assailed. Exactly what kind of performance are we setting the stage for?
     The racism of the 1920s was more straightforward, more honest, with its talk of Nordic superiority. Now we speak in codes. Unable to demonize immigrants? Condemn illegal immigrants. Shy about vilifying black people? Attack social programs. Reluctant to scapegoat Jews? Slur billionaire George Soros.
     By all means, celebrate Election Day, to whatever degree voters turn their backs on the Trumpian offense against American values and human decency. But don't dare let yourself get smug. The fight is not over. It is never over.

                                                                                     Musée d'Orsay, Paris
 

An Election Day prayer

      Are prayers like wishes? In the sense that, if you share them with others, they won't come true? I'm not sure what the official policy is, religious dogma not being my speciality. But my guess is no, since so much of praying is done in public. Nobody ever shushes a congregation appealing to God so as not to undercut their entreaty.
     A reader wrote to me on Monday:
     "Woke up around 3 o'clock one morning this week finding myself praying about the election. Is that a sickness?"
     No, that's natural. If you love this country, you want to see it delivered from the Trumpian madness now, before it moves from a shameful near-miss to a nation-wrecking disaster. 

     It's too late to avoid the former. And the latter is a definite possibility no matter what happens today. Do not underestimate the ancient forces at work here, the ugly prehistoric energy that our president is tapping into to bring vitality to his zombie cult. 
     But trouncing the GOPs at the polls Tuesday would be a step-away from the abyss. I don't believe in God, never have for a second (though am not an atheist, for reasons I've explained before). To be honest, I have difficulty accepting that others believe in God. Really?

     Still, inspired by my reader, I did something unusual, something I have only done a few times in my life. I got down slowly on my knees, clasped my hands in front of me, and began:
 

     Heavenly Father,

     Or Mother, as the case may be.

     Trying not to fixate on the gender of Majesty Incarnate

     Something of a liberal vice....
     Start again.
     Divine God.
     Of whatever orientation celestial

     Who watches over us.
     Cast all Republicans into the pit of electoral defeat.
     Send Bruce Rauner packing back to his nine mansions.
     Make Peter Roskam eat the cold gruel of not-enough-votes.
     Defeat Ted Cruz utterly in Texas.
     Despite the damn polls.
     Let the Democrats take control of House.
     And, heck, the Senate too.
     You are the Lord Almighty.
     You can do it.
     Just as you freed Jews from Egyptian bondage.
     Free those who still care about American freedoms
     From the chains of Trumpian demagoguery. 

     And towel-gnawing imbecility of his followers.

     And for this we will praise You.
     And ourselves, since we got off our liberal asses
     And did it.
     Together
     With Your help
     Or without.

     Who can say?

     Just in case, we invoke You.

     Our mighty Fath...ah, Moth...ah Parent.

     Who watches over us

     And saves us from our follies

     Sometimes.
     Maybe.

     We beseech you.
     Whether out of sincere belief.
     Or just to be thorough.

     In case beseeching gets you off the sidelines 

     and into the game.
     And if it doesn't.

     Well at least we tried. 

     And we'll get them.

     Next election. 

     If there is a next election.

     Amen.

     And yes, I spoke that aloud, on my knees, hands clasped.  Covering all the bases. Now the ball's in ... Their court. And yours. Go vote if you haven't already. And pray. It couldn't hurt.

Can anybody play the fake news game? Donald Trump's secret Russian childhood

By Sergey Sudeykin (Metropolitan Museum)

     Donald Trump was born Dimitri Brataslav on Nov. 12, 1941 in the Soviet city of Smolensk. His parents died during the brutal winter of 1942, and he was raised in a state orphanage, where his proclivity for English and his ability to shape shift at will caught the attention of the NKVD, or secret police, which spent five years training him as a sleeper agent until, at age 15, he was smuggled into the United States, landed on Long Island from Soviet submarine and placed under the care of Brooklyn developer Fred Trump who, in return for $50,000 a year in US dollars, agreed to raise the boy as his own son, the idea being the lad would eventually help the Russians gain access to the New York real estate market and the New Jersey porn industry...
     Oh, none of that is true. But I was considering the farrago of conspiracy theories and the daily blunderbuss blast of falsehoods—the president publicly lies, on average, 10 times a day, according to the Washington Post's count—and I got to wondering: Why do Republicans get to have all the fun?      
     To continually fabricate any nonsense they feel props up their otherwise unsupported and unsupportable causes? Why can't Democrats, facing an entrenched movement of growing white nationalism and anti-minority hysteria, avail ourselves to similar tactics?
     Sure, it's dishonest, and wrong. But how tempting. We could simply make stuff up. Join the party, so to speak. From the vast troll farms of their Russian pals, manufacturing Facebook pages and tweets by the thousands. Up through Fox pundits tossing out any fear as a possibility: George Soros, funding the Central American caravan! To every GOP leader saying whatever they like: we'll protect health care for those with pre-existing conditions! Secure in the knowledge that whatever Fox nodding head they're talking to is never going to reply: "What? The caravan might be infected with smallpox! That's insane! The disease entirely eradicated decades ago."
   I mean, how would Republicans reply if Democrats started also conjuring delusions? That the press is lying? That the news is fake?
     Ah, ahahahahaha. See, that's the problem with their boy-who-cried-wolf strategy. It's predicated on Democrats being honest, generally. And that is something the definition of a Democrat. Exist in the living world, try to help real people other than yourself with their actual problems. Works for me.
     Some say our honesty and decency ties one hand behind our backs, skews the playing field. It is unfair. If you're up against a skilled cheater, you can either cheat or lose.

To continue reading, click here.

 

Barber Shop story

     "Let me tell you a story," said Leonel Hincapie, the proprietor and staff of the Magic Scissors Barber Shop in Northbrook. He stopped cutting, and settled himself in a chair across from me.
     This was unusual. Not just unusual, unprecedented.
    Typically, our conversation begins with my entering the shop, several blocks from my home.
     "Hello Leo," I'll say.
     Sometimes there will be a customer, usually a man far older than myself. Sometimes not. Sometimes the barber will be in his chair, almost dozing.
     "Do you feel like a bit of business, Leo?" I'll say. Or something like that. Then I take my place in the seat, and tell him how I want my hair cut: same as always. That's about it. I'll close my eyes. WFMT plays soft classical music. Occasionally, I will ruminatively pick up a clump of cut hair and blankly examine it. He will say something about the gray. I will chuckle and cast the clump away. The haircut takes a long time, a half hour at least. The warm lather on the back of my neck signals we're reaching the end. Afterward, I thank him.
    "Thank you for your art," I'll say.
    But this was something different. Leo was sitting across from me, in the customers' chairs. I paid close attention.
      "I am from Colombia..." he began—I knew that. What I didn't know is that he grew up on a farm. A coffee farm. He left the farm, he said, and came to America, many years ago.
     "Ten years ago, I went back," he continued. To his father's old farm.
     "Did you meet anyone you knew?" I asked.
    No. But the coffee trees were still there. And he carefully collected 20 beans from the trees located on his father's old farm.
     Back in Northbrook, he planted the beans.
     "Nineteen of those 20 beans died," he recalled.
     But one lived.
     He showed off a tree in the corner of the shop, lush and dark green, maybe five feet high.
     That was it. I got up, still wearing the barber's drape, admired the tree, and congratulated him on it. Then I sat back down. He continued with my haircut.
     Not much of a story, I suppose, as far as stories go. Not heavy on plot. But I have thought about it since then, maybe because it is so simple, so enigmatic.
     And it does have a point, and the point is this:
     The tree lived. The 19 others didn't. But this one did. Not only that, but it was a coffee tree in the corner of a sleepy barber shop in Northbrook. How many times over the years have I sat next to that tree, thumbing through Chicago magazine, waiting my turn? Never realizing that the plant next to me was a precious memento of a South American boyhood, long ago.
     Now I know. And so do you.