City population grows by one

Frank Robert Schneider Sennett

     Congratulations to proud parents Denise Schneider and Frank Sennett, who welcomed baby boy Frank Robert Schneider Sennett on Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 3:54 a.m. Frankie weighed 6 pounds, 7 oz., and measured 20 inches long. All are doing well.
     And if you’re wondering what they’re doing at the top of the column, well, I originally intended to tag the happy news discreetly at the bottom. Why? Blame nostalgia. Not so long ago the paper boasted all sorts of bold-faced columns: Irv Kupcinet and Bill Zwecker, and of course Mike Sneed, who still runs on Sundays.
     There was a vigorous cosmopolitan swirl to those bold-faced columns. We weren’t a city of anonymous nobodies, hog-butchering and clock-watching unheralded and alone, but a glittering array of celebrities and quasi-celebrities and the connected powerful. Folks who counted. 

      Those days are gone, replaced by ... whatever the heck it is we have now. The top Chicago “influencer” is .... a 26-year-old make-up artist named Alexys Fleming, with 2.6 million followers on YouTube and 700,000 on Instagram. Not to take anything away from her. She seems good at what she does, and if the public is far, far, far more interested in learning how to transform into the Night King from Game of Thrones than in reading semi-witty critiques, the fault is not hers. (There’s actually more to Fleming than that; a diabetic, her ”Dumb Things People Say to Diabetics” video is funny and should be required viewing for anyone grappling with the ailment).
     But I digress. To tuck the news of little Frankie’s arrival at the bottom and let it sit there, to be honest, looked strange. And demanded explanation. And the more I explained, the longer it got and I realized that ... one of my favorite expressions when it comes to writing is a line from Napoleon: If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna. No half-measures, no shilly-shallying.
     So if we’re going to have a birth announcement, let’s do it up...

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Don't count those chickens quite yet.

      Boulder, Colorado is a liberal enclave if ever there were one, between the head-for-the-mountains University of Colorado, the swami spiritual Naropa Institute, and the geological layers of hikers and hippies-turned-techies and flush craft beer and herbal tea companies.. 
      The Boulder Book Store is perhaps the emotional epicenter of the town—not a single Ann Coulter best-seller in sight—and there I noticed this big display of oval stickers and rectangular magnets marking 01/20/21, "Trump's Last Day—Not soon enough!" 
       Pretty to think so.
       Maybe it is. 
       And maybe it isn't.
       My people have a term, a kina hora, which translates roughly as "evil eye." Not in the sense of placing a curse so much as knocking on wood. The idea roughly behind, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."
     Or, for those slow on the uptake: Trump might get re-elected. Then his last day would be 01/20/25. Not soon at all. That could happen. It's not only possible; it's probable—the president has an advantage, historically, and, say what you will, that asshole is president, and his herd of credulous dupe followers shows no sign of disillusionment.
     Recognizing the fact, that the deck is stacked against our country being delivered from the hands of its shame any time soon, is key to the Democrats' chances. Over-confidence was part of the galaxy of errors that led to Hillary Clinton's defeat. We should try not to reproduce her blunders, though this sticker, like so much going on right now, is not a cause for hope.
     I didn't buy one, but I got in line to buy some Belize chocolate. 
     "How long have you been selling those?" I asked the clerk, gesturing toward the display.
     "Since the beginning," she said, somewhat cryptically. 
     "I hope the date's correct," I observed. She didn't take the bait, but only looked at me, uncomprehendingly. 
    Trouble. 

Police forced to show courage legislators lack

     Virginia Beach is, to be honest, kind of a dump.
     “A tourist trap” is how I’ve described this unlovely coastal jumble of blockish ocean-facing hotels and pool-heavy motels, neon T-shirt and bicycle surrey rental stands, joints selling fried oysters and fish chowder, cramped stores hawking novelty shot glasses and Virginia is for Lovers beer cozies.
     We only visited because we were looking at southern colleges for the younger boy, and the grumpy dad doing all the driving insisted that he’d be damned if he was going to travel all the way from Chicago to the University of Richmond — lovely campus, great business school, they trust their kids with chunks of the endowment to invest, and the best mascot ever, the Spiders — without pushing 100 more miles and sticking his toes in the ocean for a few days.
     All things being equal, better to swim at Michigan City and save yourself a drive.
     There is, however, on the crowded and over-developed Virginia Beach boardwalk, a curious statue showing three figures, obscured up to their hips by a marble base, each with one hand interlocked, the other reaching down, as if offering passersby below a helping hand.
     It is the Virginia Beach Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Dedicated in 2012, it’s inscribed with 14 names of local officers who died in the line of duty. The bronze larger-than-life figures represent the police, the sheriff’s office and federal agencies.
     I thought of the statue after what Virginia Beach police chief Jim Cervera called a “horrific event of unbelievable proportion” occurred Friday afternoon: a dozen people murdered at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. Shot dead for ... well, whatever unknowable blend of petty grievance and flaring psychosis (and, never forget, easy access to automatic weaponry) causes a person to do such a thing.

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In new book, John Paul Stevens relates a lifetime of legal reasoning

John Paul Stevens in 2015

     I was engrossed when I heard former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speak to the Chicago Bar Association four years ago. Reading his new book was less captivating, for reasons I try to summarize in the Sunday paper today. 

     Chicago doesn’t cherish local boy John Paul Stevens as much as it should. Maybe next year, when the former Supreme Court justice turns 100, he’ll get his due.
     Though now is not too early to kick off the celebration by reading his new book “The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years” (Little Brown, $35).
     An unfortunate subtitle — apparently the book was five years in the making, though you’d think in that time somebody at his publisher would have noticed that Stevens places the presidential election of Jimmy Carter in 1978, as opposed to 1976, the year that event took place in temporal reality.
     Not to start with a gaffe in a book that is, generally, an engaging if, by necessity, legalistic account of the key issues that frame our national conversation.
     Stevens is so long-lived, perhaps it can be forgiven if the years blur.
     He remembers going to the 1929 World Series at Wrigley Field and seeing Babe Ruth make his called shot in 1932. His father and grandfather built the Stevens Hotel — now the Hilton Chicago — and, as a boy, Stevens met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. His first job was as a wandering raisin tart salesman at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair, the fourth star in the flag of Chicago.
     Stevens was invited to become a Navy cryptographer, spending World War II deciphering Japanese communications, then returned to Chicago to get his law degree at Northwestern.

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The Saturday Snapshot: Missouri justice

     Miscarriage of justice is nothing new in Missouri.
     After the state last week became the latest to enact an abortion ban—for all intents and purposes—denying half of American citizens the basic human right of enjoying sovereignty over their own bodies, faithful reader Tony Galati offered this timely contribution to the blog, these stunning photographs of the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, where the infamous Dred Scott case was first heard in 1847 and 1850 on its way for its infamous date with the United States Supreme Court.
     Scott was a slave, born in Virginia about 1799, taken to Missouri in 1830 with his owners, the Peter Blow family. He was sold to an army surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, who took him to the Illinois and Wisconsin territories, which were designated free by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
      Upon his return in 1842 to slave-owning Missouri, abolitionist friends encouraged Scott, who was illiterate, to petition the court, arguing that his time as a free man in the territories made him free permanently. 
     Scott's case was filed in the then-unfinished St. Louis courthouse on April 6, 1846. He lost the first trial on a technicality, but was allowed to petition again. The Missouri courts, in a bit of ominous foreshadowing for proponents of the latest law depriving Americans of liberty, sided with the notion of "once free, always free," and Scott won his freedom in this building in 1850. 
     But the case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court by the widow of the surgeon.
     The U.S. Supreme Court, to its undying shame, decided in 1857 that no black person could be a citizen of the United States, a ruling whose wrongness is echoed today in the notion that no woman can decide when she wants to have a baby. It took the Civil War to correct the court's error; who knows what national fissure will be required to put this question to rest? Future generations will no doubt view the current machinations—the dying gasp of compulsory religion in this country—with the same sense of sorrowful bafflement that Americans today view the Dred Scott case.
     Unless they don't. The side of justice always assumes it will win in the end but, if we look around at the world today, we can see that just isn't so. 
    

Musician keeps memory of Tiananmen Square alive

Fengshi Yang conducts the East Meets West Music Arts chamber orchestra in a previous memorial concert. 

     Music is not going to topple the Chinese Communist dictatorship.   
     More and more, it seems nothing will.   
     But music is all that Fengshi Yang has.   
     “China is not getting better,” said the Columbia College music teacher. “It’s getting worse.”
     She feels obligated to do what she can: present another commemorative concert in her hometown of Naperville, performed this Sunday by the East Meets West Music Arts chamber orchestra to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, in which Chinese students demanding democracy were slaughtered by their government.
     China does what it can to suppress the memory of the massacre, using its complete control of the Chinese online media. There, you can get in trouble for even mentioning “June 4” or “6/4.”
     In 2012, when the Shanghai stock market fell 64.89 points at the time of the anniversary, Chinese censors began blocking searches for “index” and “Shanghai stock market.”
     China can’t suppress American free speech, yet, but its chilling influence is felt right here in America’s heartland. It has increasingly tried to impose its uncritical nationalism, casting honest history as mere bigotry. Chinese exchange students sometimes push to import the propaganda they grew up on at home to American campuses. I interviewed a neighbor, born in China, who 30 years ago was a student protesting at Tiananmen Square. An American citizen now, he asked me to not only refrain from using his last name, but also his first.

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Don't pick the flowers!

     The Chicago Botanic Garden is the biggest bargain in the history of ever. For $99 a year, you can stroll the grounds—rose gardens and walled English gardens, fruit trees and prairie, lakes and waterfalls, a formal Japanese garden and a woodland. Desert hothouses and profusions of tropical orchids. 
     And much more.
     My wife and I go there all the time, as often as we can. Just to stroll, talk, take the place in. We even go in winter, in February. The Botanic Garden is constantly changing. We always have a good time. It's like being in heaven, only you're not dead. 
      True, we do bring the personalities  we labor under when not in the garden. Which is not an issue for my wife, temperate as a spring day. And, honestly, not much of an issue for me, lulled into a calm, reflective, appreciative Chicago Botanic Garden state of mind.
    Usually. There are times when I revert to form, the flowers be damned. Times when, well, to paraphrase Boss Tweed, I see my opportunities and I take 'em.
    Such as this lovely orange flower, which we noticed in the middle of the path. A crowded path, right in front of the entrance. I quickly stooped to pick it up and hand it to my wife. 
     "Here," I said. "It would look good in your hair." 
     "The wind must have blown it down," she said, taking the flower, gazing at it appreciatively. I took a step back.
    "Hey!" I chided, in a loud, bold voice, waving my arms. "You're not supposed to pick the flowers!" 
     I can't honestly say everyone turned to look; I was focused on her. But she certainly squirmed as if they had. Joke accomplished, she tucked the flower behind her ear and we moved toward our car. A fun place, the garden.