Summer! Time for baseball, beaches, and complicated spinal surgery

     How’s your summer going? Pretty good? Glad to hear it. Mine has been ... interesting: the past six weeks or so have been spent getting ready for, enduring, then recovering from spinal surgery. Not something that typically goes into the newspaper. But I found the process ....interesting, to say the least, and hope you do, too. I’ll relate the story this week in three parts. If I’m wrong, well, there’s always next week.
     

      It couldn’t be a normal ailment — no cancer, no heart disease, no failing kidneys. Oh no, no, not for me. Odd duck that I am, it had to have something obscure: stenosis, which sounds like zeneosis, the imaginary disease I cooked up to entertain my boys when they were small and we’d visit their zayde at Skokie Valley Hospital. I had fun imagining ever-more terrifying Hot Zone symptoms, and threatened to to march them up to the Zeneotic Ward to see for themselves if they didn’t behave.
      Stenosis is real, however, a narrowing of the spinal vertebra. I learned I had it in 2015, getting a CT scan after I slipped on ice while walking the dog. The doc suggested I “keep an eye on it,” and, like any sane man, that meant I ignored it completely.
     But six months ago my hands started to go numb. Not that numb; I still could type. So no big whoop, we’re all numb nowadays, more or less. I employed the same ignore-it-and-hope-it-goes-away strategy that worked so well when the interior light on the Honda Odyssey started flashing during hard right turns. Eventually, the problem fixed itself. Truly, a miracle.   

You can't really see it on this screen grab of the MRI
but it shows the collapsing discs pushing against
the spinal cord, and that pesky bone spur, spearing
itself where it doesn't belong.

     
     But this didn’t go away. It got worse. My feet started getting numb too, then my calves. Unlike Republicans with climate change, I connected the dots and saw where this was heading. Plus my wife told me to go to the doctor, and I’ve learned to listen to her.
     My physician ordered an MRI. (Practical tip: Pay an extra $10 and they’ll give you a DVD of the image you can tote to future consultations.) Later, his office called to say the stenosis was severe and compounded by a bone spur. He suggested I see a surgeon at Illinois Bone and Joint Institute.

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Old Books from my Library #7: The Natural History of Nonsense

     Stupidity wasn't born into the world on June 16, 2015, you know, heralded by Donald Trump's descent on that escalator at his garish Fifth Avenue high rise. 
     It has a long, deep, rich history and, as someone who interacts constantly with the often credulous and boggled public, my job has, by necessity, acquainted me thoroughly with the deep roots and widely spreading branches of the Tree of Idiocy. The choice being to continually bemoan the fact or instead study it, appreciate it, almost savor it. I choose the second route.
     About 20 years ago, I wrote a book on the subject, "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances." Needless to say, I was not the first person to do this, and in conducting my research I assembled a small library of books on human misapprehension of reality.   
     I first thought, for today's final installment on old books, to discuss Paul Tabori's The Natural Science of Stupidity, published in 1959, and The Art of Folly, following in 1961. Tabori was a scholar who spoke several languages, and the books are rich exploration of the idiocies of ages past. It was through The Natural Science of Stupidity's chapter on the law that I discovered one of my favorite books, E.P. Evans' 1906 The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. 
      But something about Tabori, a certain denseness combined with his scholarship, struck me as a wrong note to end this week's series. Then I noticed a book with a lighter touch,  shelved right next to Tabori (I try to shelve my books thematically, to aid in retrieval). That is the last and most recently-published old book I'll address this week, Bergen Evans' 1946 The Natural History of Nonsense.
      Evans, a fellow Ohioan, was no slouch either: he attended Harvard and went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. A professor of English, he explains the origins of the book this way. In 1934, he picked up a hitchhiker. "He was friendly and above all talkative, and I was at first amused then awestruck at the immensity of his ignorance. It was not that he was wrong about so much as that he was so colorfully wrong, so militantly wrong!"
      That rings a bell, huh? Perhaps he had encountered some time traveller from our present era, when aggressive stupidity, united by the internet, has taken on a power and authority of its own and, needless to say, elected our first ignoramus president. 
     Evans is a sharp writer—he taught English at Northwestern for 40 years—and the problem with addressing his book is the temptation to just quote the whole thing. It begins with the good news, acknowledging our culture's slow crawl toward sense:

    Until about a hundred years ago rational men live like spies in an enemy country. They never walked abroad unless disguised in irony or allegory. To have revealed their true selves would have been fatal. Today this status is more that of guerillas. They snipe from cover, ambush stragglers, harass retreating rear guards, cut communications and now and then execute swift forays against detached units of the enemy. But they dare not yet risk an open engagement with the main force; they would be massacred.

     In that sense,  we live in a better time. It is at least a struggle, sometimes an evenly-matched one, the forces of reason and the forces of delusion occasionally meeting on equal ground, Godzilla and Rodan, grappling for control of our culture. 
      For being 73 years old, the book is astoundingly current, particularly when it comes to the resilience of folly.
     "The sudden emergency of presumably extinct ideas reminds us, in a similar manner, how near to darkness we really are," Evans writes.
      Or, to put the above into current vernacular: Look, Nazis are back.
      Evans marches through myths about animals, the tendency to anthropomorphize them and project all sorts of human qualities, like "chivalry," upon them. For instance, the once-popular idea that oysters take cues from a dynamic leader.
     Moving on to human follies, we encounter some current in the immediate post-World War II era, now entirely forgotten: women war workers worrying that welding would make them sterile, or they might become pregnant by handling the material that went into fire extinguishers. Earlier, women were told they could conceive after bathing in a tub that a man had used. We also explore the long history of women claiming to give birth to animals; litters of rabbits, for instance.
     The book builds toward that most pernicious form of ignorance, then and now: bigotry, demolishing untruths about black people (Evans shocked his contemporaries by taking Ralph Bunche to lunch at the Northwestern Club). It makes for squeamish reading, as Evans outlines beliefs so vile we can hardly bear to articulate them nowadays. Then it's on to Jews, and the general tendency to embrace what flatters your biases and reject what doesn't. Turns out this did not begin with Trump either.
     "Many tests have been devised to determine whether race and intelligence can be correlated," Evans writes. "And those who believe that they can and that the  white race is intellectually superior to all other races have seized with triumph upon those results that support heir belief, while rejecting with indignation those that do not." 
     Evans shares a quote from John Stuart Mill the particularly resonates: "Of all the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences."
     Good thing we've put that nonsense behind us.
     He concludes by pointing out that while a minor error can be amusing, "no error is harmless," particularly when related to groups of people and affairs of state.
     "Obscurantism and tyranny go together as naturally as skepticism and democracy," he writes. "Belief is the antithesis to thinking. A refusal to come to an unjustified conclusion is an element of an honest man's religion."
    Evans died in Highland Park in 1978. You can read his very interesting New York Times obituary here. He was once a presence on television as well.
      Since I began with the opening lines of the book, let me conclude with its final sentiments. There is no need for me to underscore their current aptness. Take the average person:

      In being asked to believe without evidence, he is being asked to abdicate his integrity. Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

    Sorry, I have to highlight that one line: "All tyranny rests on fraud." Ain't that the truth?

Old Books from my Library #6: The Secrets of the Great City

    Is this book thing getting old? Maybe.  Then again, today is Day Six, and were this "Kama Sutra  Week," I suspect that by Day Six reader interest in unusual sex positions might be flagging. So what hope can old books have?
      But it's Saturday, so I'll leave you with the title page of what is the oldest book in my library, Edward Winslow Martin's* 1868 The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, The Mysteries, Miseries and Crime of New York City.
     It is a textbook example of 19th century lasciviousness disguised as virtue (a dynamic, now that I think of it, that has continued with ease into the 21st century). Few self-respecting Victorians would sit down to savor the goings-on within brothels and clip-joints without first sprinkling a few shakes of moral censure over their repast. We aren't ogling "the darker sides of city life," oh no no no, we are investigating them and learning what to avoid. Reading what Martin dubs "a simple narration of actual facts ... designed to warn the thousands who visit the city against the dangers and pitfalls into which their curiosity or vice may lead them." These are the places you shouldn't go, the stuff you shouldn't do. 
     "It hoped that those who read the book will heed its warnings."
     So yes, we get public parks and schools, the newspapers and investment houses of this teeming city of over one million souls. But that's mere smokescreen; then we're off to the business at hand, in chapters with titles such as "Poor Girls" and "The Street Boys" (not sure why males get the definite article that females are denied. More important perhaps). "The Social Evil" "Assignation Houses" "Street Walkers" "Dance Houses" "Thieves" "Divorce Lawyers" "Swindlers in General"—you get the idea. 
     I should probably give a sense of the writing style. A typical foray into Gotham by "a beautiful maiden, born in a village on the Sound," pure as the driven snow, "reared in innocence and virtue until she reaches her seventeenth year" and makes the fatal mistake of visiting New York City for the first time:

      She is dazzled with its theatres, its balls, its Central Park, the Broadway confuses and intoxicates her, but opera has divine charms for her musical ear and she is escorted night after night by a man with a pleasing face and a ready tongue. .. She is persuaded to take a glass of champagne. She is finally persuaded to drink an entire bottle of champagne. That night the world is torn from under her feet. She has tasted the apple of death.

     Pregnancy and ruin quickly follow. She struggles as a seamstress or a dry-goods clerk, but is only postponing her inevitable plunge into the river (almost needless to say, with a cry of "Mother") from whence she will be dragged out, days later, "a mere greenish mass of festering corruption."
     The male version of this transit, which I will spare you, is amply illustrated on the title page, above, which was the real reason I bought the book—I think I paid $1 for it in a threadbare shop. I gave a framed color photocopy as a parting gift to a friend who was heading to New York to work for a newspaper, and posted it on my older son's Facebook page when he headed off to NYU. So far he seems to be heeding its warning and avoiding the company of The Fancy. 

   
* The author of such lurid fare—this book was "not for sale in the book store" and could only be purchased by subscription—would not use his actual name. Edward Winslow Martin was a pseudonym for James D. McCabe, a Virginian, born in 1842 and educated at the Virginia Military Institute. He served the Confederacy during the Civil War, and wrote some 30 books, including guidebooks, plays, a collection of religious martyrs, plus biographies, including one of Robert E. Lee, whom he corresponded with.



         

Old Books from My Library #5: Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases

     
     abandoned hope
     abated pride
     abbreviated visit
     abhorred thraldom

      I can't remember what possessed me to purchase Grenville Kleiser's FIFTEEN THOUSAND USEFUL PHRASES, saddled with the enormous subtitle: A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK OF PERTINENT EXPRESSIONS, STRIKING SIMILES, LITERARY, COMMERCIAL, CONVERSATIONAL, AND ORATORICAL TERMS, FOR THE EMBELLISHMENT OF SPEECH AND LITERATURE, AND THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE VOCABULARY OF THOSE PERSONS WHO READ, WRITE, AND SPEAK ENGLISH.
      I do know that I've had the book over 40 years, for a reason I will get to, eventually.  
     My hunch is that, as a young man, I was taken by the pure striving quality of the thing. Here were Useful Phrases, Significant Phrases, Felicitous Phrases, Impressive Phrases, according to the table of contents, which Kleiser calls a "Plan of Classification." Some had become hackneyed cliches, some were just strange. 

fly to platitudes
foredoomed to failure
given to extravagance
ground to atoms
harassed to death
hostile to progress 

    Some were useful. "Fly to platitudes"—I kinda like that. Though I didn't buy it so I could apply myself to its program of study, where Kleiser, writing in 1917, urges his student to read pages of the phrases aloud, then underline those that resonate—in pencil, naturally—and eventually copy out phrases out in their own handwriting. The fact the book cost $2.45, according to the figure penciled inside the front cover, might have entered into it. 
     "This exercise is a great aid in developing a facile English style," he writes.

     Swift as a swallow heading south
     Swift as lightening
     Swift as the panther in triumph
     Swifter than the twinkling of an eye.

     Maybe because I was learning to write myself, gazing at papers spattered with comments in red pen. The book seemed to have the aura of all those who had gone before me, earnest young men in their high celluloid collars and green eyeshades. There is one instruction of Kleiser's that I did take to heart and practice, not at his behest, I believe, but coincidentally—I do sometimes tuck away phrases encountered in my reading that might be useful in a column someday. Or as Kleiser urges:
     "As an enthusiastic student of good English, you should carefully note striking and significant phrases or literary expressions which you find in your general reading. These should be set down in a note-book reserved for this exclusive purpose."
     That's habit is what led to my last book (last in the sense of "most recent" and, I'm beginning to suspect, "final") "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader. Alcoholics Anonymous wasn't exactly floating my boat, particularly the writings, which had a tang of 1930s Boy Scout Handbook. But in my own reading, I would encounter sentiments that I found powerful, and would either mark them with a Post-It or jot them down. So Kleiser was obviously onto something. He wrote books on writing, speaking, self-improvement.
     The book, I've just discovered, had a certain notoriety in the Internet age, being at times the most downloaded volume on Project Gutenberg, an early online publisher of out-of-copyright volumes.  Why? According to writer Phil Edwards:

It’s the perfect resource for modern spammers using a technique called word salad. Spammers found his book and started downloading it in droves.Word salad spammers use random phrases to get past spam security filters, because your spam filter sees these legitimate phrases as indicators of a real message (though, in the case of spam, they never are). Kleiser’s book is the perfect resource for spammers: vetted phrases that are already sorted into a separated list.

     There's an irony for you. This use of Kleiser's phrases by spambots to defeat filters was the exact opposite to the personal touch that Kleiser offered—and I think this is my favorite part of the book—hidden deep on the list of his books opposite the title page.  The first 13 are similar titles—"HOW TO BUILD MENTAL POWER" and "HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC" and "HOW TO ARGUE AND WIN" and such. 
     But that 14th, well, let me share it in its entirety:
     "GRENVILLE KLEISER'S PERSONAL LESSONS IN PUBLIC SPEAKING and the Development of Self-Confidence, Mental Power, and Personality. Twenty-five lessons with special handbooks, side-talks, personal letters, etc. Write for terms."
     "Personal letters, etc." The great man, himself, former instructor of public speaking at Yale Divinity School (for just two years, apparently) would help you, directly, writing letters to you, Mr. Striving Individual, to aid in your quest to attain self-confidence and a personality, for a fee to be determined privately.
      I don't know why I loved that, but I did. It was so small ball, and augured our current moment, when most writers from Stephen King on down are shaking hands and trading slaps with readers, one-on-one, on Twitter and half a dozen other platforms. 
     
     tainted with fraud
     teeming with life
     tense with expectancy
     thrill with excitement 

     So how do I know that I've had the book at least 40 years? That's easy. Freshman year at college, I briefly drew a comic strip for the Daily Northwestern. I turned it in, had it accepted, and all that was left was to come up with a name for the strip, a task that overwhelmed my 18-year-old self. I dithered, and suddenly the first strip, and its title, were due. In a panic, I consulted my Kleiser, which I imagine I did not bring from home, but must have purchased, probably at the newly-opened Bookman's Alley. There, in the left hand column of page 54 between "taciturn magnanimity" and "tameless energy" is the phrase "tactical niceties." Something about that resonated with me, and I named the strip, which didn't last more than a dozen installments, "Tactical Niceties."

Old Books from my Library #4: Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms.

     We do not live in a time of nuance. 
     That might be the understatement of the year. 
     Gross insults pinball around Twitter. A hundred million blowhards firing their blunderbusses of bullshit in every direction as fast as they can load 'em up. Aiming is an esoteric nicety. Not to forget the ringmaster of our circus of naked spite, our president, who hourly issues statements that are monosyllabic and crude, fractured and false.
      Then again, 1942 was not a time of nuance either, but of terror bombings and mass murder. We forget that, bad as this is, there are many Hells below this one, and 1942 was a deep and hot one. Yet G. & C. Merrian Co. of Springfield, Massachusetts nevertheless felt confident bringing out Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms. There words are defined, not singularly, but in context with each other, allowing for gradations of shading and significance to be discussed. Of course I love it.
     What, for instance, is the difference between baggage and luggage? Never thought to ask, right? Turns out to be regional, at least once upon a time.
     "Baggage is the usual term in the United States in the United States and in Canada, and luggage in Great Britain," the book explains. "However, baggage is occasionally used in Great Britain in its older sense of army equipment that is being moved (in a baggage, or supply, train) and luggage is coming into common use in the United States as a collective term for trunks, valises, suitcase, and the like."        

     The third term, impediments "is used humorously in all English-speaking countries for baggage or luggage regarded as an encumbrance," and since that is an dusty anachronism, as far as I can tell—at least I've never heard that usage—it is a reminder that the book is 77 years old, and thus limited in its trustworthiness, as its failure to include the current popular usage of baggage as referring to one's emotional and social past is an indication. I'd almost suggest that's the first definition, the answer to "I've got some baggage with me," being "Well, maybe you should see a therapist." 
    Despite this liability, just because a reference is dated does not mean it isn't useful, as any fan of Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary knows. The baggage definition goes on to include "Minx, hussy, wench," which would be useful in, say, critiquing the libretto of "My Fair Lady," where Henry Higgins sings, somewhat mysteriously to modern ears: "Should I take her in? Or throw the baggage out?" 
      Considering the way we media sorts have twisted ourselves into pretzels trying to find the ideal word to describe the president's addiction to saying things that are not true, I of course gravitated toward lie, falsehood, untruth, fib, story to see what illumination might be found there.
     "Lie is usually felt to be a term of extreme opprobrium because it implies a flat and unquestioned contradiction of the truth, and an intent to deceive or mislead." That last part, intent, is key; the speaker's knowledge that what he is saying is false is essential for the lie, or as Webster's notes with an illustrative quote from Johnson: "He lies, and he knows he lies."       
     This raises a quandary. As frequently as I refer to Trump as a liar—it's one of the trio of essential qualities I use as a shorthand, "liar, bully and fraud" a synecdoche to represent his far flung galaxy of sins, I do sometimes sincerely wonder if I am being unfair. Does Trump actually know what he is saying is untrue? Or, indeed, does he know anything at all, or just randomly utter statements depending on the situation with no concern about their veracity or memory of contrary stands he has taken, sometimes minutes before? If he actually believes the veracity of whatever words happen to be tumbling out of his flapping lips or, more likely, spinning off his fluttering fingers, can he really be said to be lying at all? Is a lunatic who claims to be Napoleon lying? I'm not sure.
     Falsehood is a much milder term, "not only less censorious than lie, but it is also wider in its range of application. The term may or may not imply sinfulness or criminality, for it applies not only to lies of any degree, but to fictions, such as literary fictions, polite fictions, some legal fictions, and the like."
     Hmmm....the book showing its age again. I'm not sure "falsehood" would ever be applied to literary fiction anymore. It's just not the vernacular. But still, there is value here. For instance: "Fib is colloquial, often childishly colloquial, term for an untruth or for a trivial falsehood." 
    We might have struck on something. Except for the trivial part—Trump's lies are often vastly significant—the elementary of immaturity in "fib" might be just he thing for our current president.  Plus "fib" is very short: a good headline word. "Trump fibs rib libs" seems like a headline worth having in your back pocket for future use.  
     The problem with a book like this is knowing where to stop. The definition immediately above lie also applies to our current political scene: lickspittle, defined as "parasite, sycophant, toady, hanger-on, leech, sponge, favorite."     
     But were I to start trying to suss out whether Rudy Giuliani is more of a sycophant or a toady, or whether Alan Dershowitz is better described as a hanger-on or a leech, we'd be here all day. And the point of these is to do less work than my actual newspaper job, not more. I think it's about time to get back into the paper. This relaxation is hard work.
     

Old Books from my Library #3: Prejudices: Third Series

     It seems almost too easy to write about H.L. Mencken. Not to mention unnecessary. I mean, well, duh, who doesn't already know? 
     Lots of people, no doubt. And besides, awareness is not the issue. Even the most ardent fan, aka me, can benefit from the occasional prod, a reminder to dive back into the oeuvre. The fact is, that Henry Louis Mencken is one of those rarest of writers whose work defies time or place, someone worthy of constant study, whose life and work merits continual  contemplation. I'd say if I had to list my favorite authors, I'd rank them as 1. Samuel Johnson; 2. Dante Alighieri; 3. H.L. Mencken, and those three alone could easily occupy me between retirement and the grave.
     The Mencken books I use most often are not his most popular: "The American Language" plus its two supplements are valuable and unique reference works, true acts of scholarship, providing a deep dive into our nation's language and, by necessity, history and rituals. They are joined by Mencken's "A New Dictionary of Quotations" which I find useful when I am trying to find thoughts on subjects beyond the commonplace bruited about in Bartlett's and online. 
     I could have revisited his marvelous trio memoirs, "Happy Days," "Heathen Days" and "Newspaper Days," the latter consisting of the best illustrative story that a budding journalist could receive. (Applying to the city editor of the Baltimore Morning Herald the day after his father's funeral, Mencken, 18 and with no newspaper experience whatsoever, is told to go away, but looks so crestfallen that the editor has pity on him and tells him he may return the next day to see if anything is needed. He does, every day, for the next two weeks, with no result, until the 14th day, when he is told "Go out to Govanstown, and see if anything is happening there. We are supposed to have a Govanstown correspondent, but he hasn't been heard from for six days." And so his career began. 
     But for our purposes today I decided to flip open "Prejudices: Third Series." A handsome book, published in March of 1923, making it nearly a century old.  Which would make it dated, for most other writers, who have trouble offering up something relevant the moment it's published, never mind a thought that rings true 96 years later.   
    I did so, I should add, without any preconception of what is in it. I wasn't looking for a particular passage, just began on the first chapter, "On Being an American," confident that my efforts would not be in vain. Mencken's genius is such that his direct, sharp, pointed prose is certain to offer up gems in the first shovelful.  
    He did not disappoint; I never made it past the first chapter. I didn't have to.
    Are you puzzled by the Paul Ryans and Lindsey Grahams of our country? Once moral men who abandoned every one of their supposed values in order to service the liar, bully and fraud currently occupying the Oval Office? Not to forget all the Chris Christies and the other bootlickers and lackeys who traded whatever reputation they might have once had for a brief bask in the orange glow? How could that happen? Mencken explains that on page 18:

     Here is a country in which all political thought and activity are concentrated upon the scramble for jobs—in which the normal politician, whether he be President or a village road supervisor, is willing to renounce any principle, however precious to him, and to adopt any lunacy, however offensive to him, in order to keep his place at the trough.

    In that first chapter, "On Being an American," Mencken makes observations which even today's band of TV fireballers are too narrow to imagine and too timid to articulate even if the could. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants, Mencken agrees. But who were those immigrants who established our country?

     Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards. The land was peopled, not by the hardy adventurers of legend, but simply by incompetents who could not get on at home, and the lavishness of nature that they found here, the vast ease with which they would get livings, confirmed and augmented their native incompetence....

     Mencken was not perfect, but a man of his era, and therefore prone to the same faults—his own prejudices, a leaning toward the eugenic claptrap popular at the time. And he certainly suffered from pro-German myopia that kept him on the sidelines when Mr. Hitler arrived. But even a man given to contempt took the spin that Donald Trump puts on immigration now—that Mexico is not sending her "best people"—and gave it a novel twist that seems a far more accurate shade of reality: that none of our forebears of any nationality or race were the best people:

     The truth is that that majority of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants since the Revolution, like the majority of Anglo-Saxon immigrants before the Revolution, have been, not the superior men of their native lands, but the botched and unfit: Irishmen starving to death in Ireland, Germans unable to weather the Sturm und Drang* of the post-Napoleonic reorganization, Italians weed-grown on exhausted soil, Scandinavians run to all bone and no brain, Jews too incompetent to swindle even the barbarous peasants of Russia, Poland and Romania...the average newcomer is, and always has been simply a poor fish.

     PC? No. An intriguing and possibly spot-on observation? I suspect so. That's something of the attitude embraced by Australians—"We're ALL dregs!"—and it's a shame that Americans, so desperate to scrape together some shred of self-respect by elevating themselves above any random stranger, can't do the same. 
      I could go on quoting Mencken all day, claiming that we need him now more than ever. Then again, we always do. One more example, from the same essay the previous quotes are taken from.  He is arguing that the traditional attitudes of the European peasant "are, with a few modifications, the habits of mind of the American people." Enjoy:

     The peasant has a great practical cunning, but he is unable to see any further than the next farm. He likes money and knows how to amass property, but his cultural development is but little above that of the domestic animals. He is intensely and cocksurely moral, but his morality and his self-interest are crudely identical. He is emotional and easy to scare, but his imagination cannot grasp an abstraction. He is a violent nationalist and patriot, but he admires rogues in office and always beat the tax-collector if he can. He has immovable opinions about all the great affairs of state, but nine-tenths of them are sheer imbecilities. He is violently jealous of what he conceives to be his rights, but brutally disregardful of the other fellow's. He is religious, but his religion is wholly devoid of beauty and dignity....He exists in all countries, but here alone he rules—here alone his anthropoid fears and rages are accepted gravely as logical ideas and dissent from them is punished a a sort of public offense.    

     I don't want to minimize the danger or crisis of the Trump administration, and certain aspects are, I believe, developments new and unwelcome in the wide sweep of American history: a president openly courting our enemies while glibly alienating our friends, a president consciously whipping up hatreds in a bald, brainless, shameful attempt to bolster his own popularity among his duped followers, a president suffering from a blend of staggering ignorance bolstered by bottomless self-regard. That is all true, an enormous magnification of whatever corollaries can be found in past presidents, and an augury of worse to come. But still, in many respects, the Trump tragedy is not so much a new disaster as a reversion to past patterns of operation, as Mencken so vividly reminds us. We've had this Carnival of Cretinism before. There might be some small comfort in that: as bad as this is, we have endured it in the past and survived. Maybe we can do so again.  

* Sturm und Drang = storm and strife

Old Books from my Library #2: Secret Chambers & Hiding Places

     We are not only the champions of our books, pressing particular titles on friends who might benefit from them, but we are also their protectors. A book is hardy, but also a vulnerable confection of paper and cloth binding, ink and photos and marble endpapers. A book should be shelved securely but not too tightly, guarded from bright sunlight, insects and careless tots.
     I consider myself as fierce a guardian of books as can be. But the human vessel is flawed, and once I lapsed. When we moved to this old farmhouse in Northbrook, one book, separated from the others, ended up in a box of magazine story notes stored in our basement. Our wet basement. Our wet basement that sometimes floods.
    The waters had subsided and drained away. I was drawing soggy sheafs of papers out of a sagging cardboard box when I came upon "Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places: The Historic, Romantic & Legendary Stories & Traditions About Hiding-Holes, Secret Chambers, Etc." by Allan Fea.
     I had bought it for an article on secret rooms and hidden passageways I had written for Games magazine—that's why it was with the notes. I can't convey the grief that cracked across my heart when I lifted the spongey, dripping, swollen thing.  My fault.
    Ironically, that story was the first time that I had used an electronic search, a set of  a dozen newspaper story titles on CD-Rom discs at Northwestern library, finding news articles about pot-growing rooms hidden in Cook County Forest Preserve buildings. I remember being so enamored with the possibilities that I called the company that sold the discs. It might be a trick of memory, but I recall the set being $3,000, but they might have been $3,000 apiece. I remember ordering my next computer, a Dell, without a CD-rom port thinking, "What's the point?" It was early 1992. 
     The Secret Chambers book was ruined, the cover warped and twisting back. The thing to do was throw it out. But the book was also published in 1901 on fine, ragstock paper and, frankly, I hadn't the heart. It was my book, I was responsible for it, and I had to save it, or at least try. I fanned the book open, then inserted typing paper between the pages and clamped it shut, under pressure and started searching, eventually coming up with Grimm Book Bindery of Madison, Wisconsin, a company in operation since 1854.
     It was, I recall, a lot of money to repair—$100 is the figure that sticks in memory—but I took it as penance, punishment to expiate the sin of being careless with a book. I mailed the volume away, and was thrilled with the result, it's deep blue cover embossed in letters of gold.
     I've never consulted the book since then, but doing so now, it is as I remember it, with chapter headings such as "Chapter XI: Mysterious Rooms, Deadly Pits, Etc." and "Chapter XIII: "Concealed Doors, Subterranean Passages, Etc."
     Who wouldn't want to read those?
     In all honesty, reading the book can be fairly heavy lifting—one story after another of the details of sliding panels in old English manor houses now long gone. Not a lot of narrative arc, as we wordies like to call it. 
     The book's main focus is British history, particular its bloody religious persecution, and the necessity of "priest's holes" where closet Catholics could stow their clerics and sacramental objects when the soldiers came busting in, sometimes staying for days at a time, ripping down paneling and searching for what had to be particularly well-concealed refuge (sustaining the terrified and starving priest during these long searches was a challenge, sometimes surmounted by tiny holes, where a hollow reed could be inserted and broth or marmalade blown through). Hiding places used by architects of the Gunpowder Plot are examined at length.
     The famous flight of Charles II after Cromwell's victory in 1651 is, regrettably, given short shrift, with Fea referring readers to his book on the subject, "The Flight of the King." More is made of his brother James II's peregrinations, involving secret staircases and dead-of-night escapes. And some attention to the travels of various Jacobites.
    Because these hiding places were, needless to say, hidden, they sometimes acted as time capsules, and it was not unknown for them to be found, containing clothing of a century past, strewn across an unmade bed in a precipitous flight long ago.  An example:

    A weird story clings to the ruins of Minister Lovel Manor House, Oxfordshire, the ancient seat of the Lords Lovel. After the battle of Soke, Francis, the last Viscount, who had sided with the cause of Simmel against King Henry VII, fled back to his house in disguise, but from the night of his return was never seen or heard of again, and for nearly two centuries his disappearance remained a mystery. in the meantime the manor house had been dismantled and the remains tenanted by a farmer; but a strange discovery was made in the year 1708. A concealed vault was found, and in it, seated before a table, with a prayer-book lying open upon it, was the entire skeleton of a man. In the secret chamber were certain barrels and jars which had contained food sufficient to last perhaps some weeks; but the mansion having been seized by the King, soon after the unfortunate Lord Lovel is supposed to have concealed himself, the probability is that, unable to regain his liberty, the neglect or treachery of a servant or tenant brought about his tragic end.

    You can read the book free on-line, by the way. Or buy a reprint for $15 or so on Amazon. The Grimm Book Bindery remains in Madison, and I phoned Charles Grimm, fifth generation book binder, to check in with him.
     "We get quite a few damaged books every week,' he said. "A fair amount of them Bibles." Though more and more they are repairing old and worn children's books.
     "Boomers are moving on in life and want to leave stuff for their grandchildren," Grimm said.
      While hurt books are common, soaked ones are not. 
     "Water-logged, not too often, thank God," he said.  Grimm suggested that if a book does become soaked, the best thing to do is what I did: put sheets of paper between the pages and press it while the paper absorbs the water.
    ""One the pages start sticking together, the real horror begins," he said.
     This is Grimm's busy seasons right now—they have to bring on extra staff. Can you guess why? I couldn't. No, not because of heavy rain. Rather, because of text books being reconditioned for school in the fall.
      "Text books are shot and rebinding text books is not nearly as expensive as investing in a new copy."
       Which raises an interesting question: why, with newspaper and magazines struggling to survive, do text books continue to be both very costly and prevalent? Because not every child in America has an iPad yet? That must be it. A topic for another day.