Ivanka Trump gets facts wrong in tweets displaying coded message of bigotry

     One of the editors at the paper asked if I would cobble together a quick reaction to Ivanka Trump's stupid tweet today. At first I tried to say no—if I started responding to stupid Trump tweets it would quickly become all I'd ever do. But he seemed to want something so, obliging fellow that I am, I did my best to accommodate. 

     You know what I miss? Good old-fashioned, Southern-style 1950s-era bigots. Axe-handle wielding sheriffs and George Wallace; they were loathsome, they would inflict horrible harm, but give them points for candor. They snarled the hatred in their hearts. They didn’t try to dress it up, to be clever and speak in codes.
     At least not to the degree they do today.
     Now take Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, whom the president seems to be grooming for some undefined role on the international stage, maybe Queen of the World. Suddenly Chicago was in her gunsights on Tuesday.
     Maybe out of sympathy for her father, whose dog whistles and semaphore flags to bigots and white supremacists was partially stifled, certainly temporarily, by the pair of mass shootings, in El Paso and Dayton, apparently committed by hardened haters. The poor man was forced to condemn white nationalism, which musta hurt.

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Expensive but worth it

Battle of the Titans, attributed to Francesco Allegrini (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      Cornwall, in the southwest of England, has sandy beaches, complete with surfing and, I was surprised to discover when I visited, palm trees..
      And in that sand, titanium, first noticed by one Rev. William Gregor in 1791, though he wasn't able to identity the black sand he had found, leaving it to a more skilled German scientist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who discovered the metal independently in 1795 and named it titanium, after the Titans of Greek mythology because, to him, the name had no meaning and therefore "could give no rise to any erroneous idea."
     If you're wondering what sent me down this particular rabbit hole, blame Jack, a reader—among hundreds who wrote in with their thoughts, experiences and good wishes last week during my three-part series on spine surgery, thank you all very much—who wrote:
      "Who knew element 22 would be your blessing."
      Element 22 is titanium, which I mentioned because it is a cool-sounding, Space Age metal. Which was all I knew about the substance, though that "22" reminded me that titanium, as opposed to, say, steel, is an element, with its own atomic number (any guesses? C'mon. Think hard. You've had a hint. . . Sigh: 22). 
     An atomic number, is you remember your high school physics, is the number of protons at the nucleus of an atom. Hydrogen has one proton, thus its atomic number is 1. And titanium has .... anybody? ... 22, putting it between scandium, 21, and vanadium, 23, on the Periodic Table. 
     It is indeed a cool substance. Stronger than steel but almost 50 percent lighter, titanium is used mostly in airplane parts—a Boeing 747 engine has 9,000 pounds of titanium—both  engines and airframes—about 66 percent of titanium processed—with the rest going into chemical plant pipes and valves, expensive wristwatches and, let's not forget, medical devices. 
      So how come did it come about to be used to shore up balky spines?

     "In the 1950s, surgeons noted that titanium metal was ideal for pinning together broken bones," notes my go-to reference on these matters, John Emsley's excellent, dare I say, invaluable book "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements" (Oxford: 2001). "It resists corrosion, bonds well to bone and is not rejected by the body. Hip and knee replacements, pace-makers, bone-plates and screws, and cranial plates for skull fractures, can be made of titanium and remain in place for up to 20 years."

     "Up to 20 years?" Sheesh, now they tel me. Nobody mentioned that before. You mean I have to go through this again, and in my late 70s at that? Oh well, I guess I'll worry about it in 2039.

      What else? That black sand that Rev. Gregor discovered wasn't pure titanium, of course, but titanium oxide—TiO2, or one atom of titanium bonded with two of oxygen, which are very useful in covering things up, thus is found in paint (where it replaced lead, fallen from favor after it was discovered to poison people) to lipstick to sunscreen. 
     Not to take anything away from Gregor, an amateur chemist, but someone was bound to find it: titanium is the 9th most common element on earth, making up .44 percent of the crust, and is found in most rocks, sand, clay not to mention most plants, animals and stars in the night sky. 

      Titanium shows up in some odd places: titanium tetrachloride is used in smokescreens and skywriting because it puts out dense smoke when mixed with water. The star in a blue star sapphire is due to titanium. 
    I should wind this up before I go completely into the weeds, but can't before I point out that Frank Gehry's masterwork, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is covered with 33,000 square meters of pure titanium. Local yokel that I am, my immediate thought was to wonder whether that means our own Pritzker Bandshell, also designed by Gehry, is also titanium. No such luck: stainless steel, no doubt as an economy move. And maybe a smart one. While prices vary according to grade, titanium, is very expensive to produce, roughly 100 times the cost of stainless steel. 
     "It's use has been thwarted by its cost," diplomatically noted Michigan's Titanium Processing Center. But not in my case: nothing but the best for my spine. 

Burn me!

A man kneeling and placing a laurel branch upon a pile of burning books, by Marco Dente (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    My columns and blog posts are not exactly setting the world on fire. Not raging across the dry tinder of social media. More like sending out a quiet ripple in a puddle of regular readers. On good days. 
    I'm okay with that—I kinda have to be; not a whole lot of choice in the matter. The few occasions when I did manage to strike a spark—getting mocked by Rush Limbaugh, for instance, or finding myself ridiculed on Fox News—I quickly felt scorched, and was only too happy to return to normal, and for my cool cloak of anonymity to be wrapped around my smoldering shoulders again.
     The Washington pundits and East coast TV babblers—it seems lucrative, but nothing to be proud of. An enormous electronic Punch & Judy Show full of confused shrieking, brickbats flying, babies wailing. Don't get me wrong, I'd jump at the chance. But I'm not too broken up that the chance never came. This is enough. 
     And yet. There is a joy in being held in contempt by the contemptible—the pride that writers in the 1970s felt at making Richard Nixon's "Enemies List." 
     So there is one regret I've been harboring in secret: that I never drew the ire of our president, Donald Trump. Hasn't happened yet and probably never will. That isn't surprising. He's pretty much reacting to Fox News, and I'm never there.  Still, I think Trump's scorn would be something I could look upon with pride though, as with all badges of honor, there is something embarrassing about even admitting to wanting it. A hunger I would never confess to. But a friend sent me a Bertolt Brecht poem on Saturday—I am blessed with friends who pass along poems, which is better than notoriety—that so perfectly captured the feeling I harbor regarding Trump, I just have to share it, even though doing so requires copping to this shameful desire.
     The poem is titled "The Burning of the Books," translated from the German by Michael Burch: 

     In a thoughtful analysis of the poem, Dutch poet Kamiel Choi points out:

     Observe that Brecht writes “burn me” (verbrennt mich) rather than “burn my books.” The famed bon mot by Heine, ‘Where they burn books, they will too in the end burn people’ has been fully internalized here.

     Which leads to an observation of my own. Unlike Hitler in Nazi Germany, Donald Trump was inflicted upon a fairly free and open society. Even so, notice the speed and rigor with which a solid 40 percent of the population lined up behind his lies and cruelty. Willingly, happily, gleefully, without any threat necessary, nor any intimidation stronger than the nasty tweet I covet. Imagine how much greater that exodus from American values would be if there were the whisper of force behind it.  
       Maybe we won't have to imagine it.  Maybe in his second term, he'll move from caging refugee children to caging others. Unimaginable? It always is. As Milan Kundera wrote, the border where all convictions, faith, love, human life lose meaning is not, as we imagine it, "miles away, but a fraction of an inch."
       Now it costs nothing to oppose Trump—some trolls on Twitter. But what if you could lose your job? Your life?  Who would oppose him then? You? Me? We can only hope we never have to find out.
       Brecht fled Germany in 1933, shortly after Hitler took power. The poem above is from a 1939 collection, Svendborg Poems, named for the town in Denmark where he lived early in his exile. I probably should say a few words about him. Known best as a playwright: "The Threepenny Opera" and "Mother Courage and Her Children" Brecht also was a librettist, writing the words for songs such as "Mack the Knife" and "Alabama Song," which I'm sure you've heard, at least the version by the Doors, never knowing the words were written by a German poet. He died in 1956, but as with the best writers, his words live on. 

So much part of America we hardly notice

     This is an unusual circumstance. I wrote today's blog post last night, when I came home from Northbrook Days, updating it first thing Sunday morning to incorporate the Ohio slaughter. Upon reflection, it seemed a more fitting column to run in the newspaper than the one I had prepared—a trifle about a Twitter phenomenon called #ManholeCover Monday. My bosses agreed. So this links to Monday's column, posted early.  We'll boot Manhole Cover Monday to a week from tomorrow, assuming there aren't even worse mass shootings next weekend which, sadly, is not exactly a safe bet. 

    Northbrook Days, a mid-summer carnival, is usually held at the little park in the village's downtown, the funnel cake stands and Tilt-a-Whirl set up among the giant oak trees and on the ball field.
      There's live music, games, a beer tent. It's fun.
      But this year the festival was abruptly moved from its usual location for the past 95 years to the parking lot at Northbrook Court, on the edge of town. All our neighbors were abuzz about it. The park district said something about soil being impacted, but that seemed dubious; the scuttlebutt was, there were personal conflicts among various officials. Dark Forces were at work. 
       My initial inclination was to simply not go. The boys are grown and gone, and while my wife and I like to stroll over—we live a couple blocks away—for a look and a corn dog, hopping in the car was something else entirely. And when we got there, what fun would it be to wander a concrete parking lot next to the shuttered Macy's? I assumed no one would go.
    But curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to see the new locale for myself, and I suggested going to my wife, who readily agreed.
     We arrived at twilight, had our traditional Boy Scout lemonade, explored a bit, ate some pretty good Indian chow from a Wheeling place called Siri, ran into some parents of our boys' friends we hadn't seen since previous carnivals. Hands were shaken, hugs and information exchanged.  
     There was a pretty decent turn-out. And a good amount of police officers, which was natural and comforting, given the 20 people slaughtered at a Walmart's in El Paso, Texas, earlier in the day. My wife had been worried enough to tell me that she loves me just before we left for the fair, in case we were killed at mass-shooting. I thought that was overdoing it a bit. Our nation had already had its gun massacre for the day, and so we'd probably be safe until tomorrow. 
    That was true, but just barely. Another shooting, nine dead in Dayton, Ohio, took place at 1 a.m., while we slept. 

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Flashback 1998: Hometown is just a distant memory

    I was supposed to be back in my hometown this weekend for the wedding of my friend's daughter, a girl I've known since birth. I felt bad missing it—originally, I tried to schedule the surgery for AFTER the wedding, but my wife put an end to that, and I saw her point: if I damaged my spine waiting a month to go to a wedding, not to mention the travel, and the dancing, and whatever, I would never forgive myself. Nor be forgiven. 
    As it was, I had this column about my hometown already cued up and ready to go. Last month I was friended on Facebook by the prettiest girl in Berea High School in 1978, the homecoming queen. We messaged a bit, in a convivial fashion, and I reminded her of when I asked her to prom—not seriously, I knew she already had a boyfriend; more as a piece of personal performance art, something a newly-confident 17-year-old would do as a lark, because he could, maybe to show he could face the rejection that any ambitious person is going to face every single day. She was very kind about turning me down.
     I mentioned that I had written a column about our home town, 20 years ago. I've considered reprinting it in the past, but it never seemed to quite pass muster. A little flat, maybe. 
     But the beast must be fed, and I think this rises to the standard for a quiet Saturday in August. Besides, there is an interesting tidbit about how this column was received. The Sun-Times editor-in-chief at the time, a flamboyant, pink-cheeked, white-haired slab of a New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, phoned me the evening this ran, perhaps a bit squiffy, and accused me of slipping a parody of the Tribune's treacly sentiment-junkie and fellow Ohioan, Bob Greene, into the newspaper—somebody must have suggested that to him. 
      That kind of call didn't happen often—it might never have happened, before or after— and I remember taking a breath, and evenly explaining that I would NEVER do that. I was indeed born in Ohio, in Berea, and that every word in the column is true. Furthermore, just because Bob Greene has wrapped his thick fingers around Nostalgia and is squeezing with all his might doesn't mean he has murdered the emotion for others, and I'm entitled to feel maudlin about my dying home town. I distinctly recall saying, "If he can do it a thousand times, I can do it once." 

The Army-Navy surplus store in my hometown. Growing up
in Berea, I never noticed anything unusual about the name. 

     BEREA, Ohio—The Fashion Shop is shuttered. The movie theater, too, its green and yellow marquee blank. The bank is now an antiques store. You can step behind the counter, right up to the gleaming stainless steel vault door and admire the pristine gears and massive pins inside. Within the vault itself, lacework is on sale.
     For the last two decades, whenever I returned to my hometown of Berea—every year or so—I marveled at how time had passed it by, this little town of 35,000, just west of Cleveland.      
    And pondered a haunting question. 

    How could a business such as the Fashion Shop survive, with its window filled with the same ancient, chipped mannequins modeling what always seemed to be the same pale blue or green checked house dresses? How could the movie house, where "The Sting" played for a solid year in 1973, hope to keep going, with huge multiplexes opening in towns all around?
     The answer is they couldn't.
     I missed the foreshadowing. All the new discount stores on the road between the highway and downtown. They should have been a tip-off. Who'd settle for the Fashion Shop when there is a big outlet mall? Who would go to Milton's Shoes—also gone—when there is a giant discount shoe store?
     Nobody, that's who.
     I tried to tell myself that this is good. That the only constant is change; the sole reason I care is that this is my hometown. I reminded myself what a grim place Milton's Shoes had been, with its scary middle-age clerks, scurrying under the hawk eye of Mr. Milton to retrieve boxes of Buster Browns and Red Ball Jets from the mysterious back room. The stock of shoes, so limited, that in order to fit my EEE feet my mother eventually had to give up and drive all the way into Cleveland, to the palatial Scientific Shoes (yes, that was the name; do you think I could make that up?)
     Hard not to look at the town and feel a little sad. Not only is the place losing its charm, but it's doing so because of bad choices.
     In the 1970s, Berea demolished a big hunk of the downtown to build an open-air mall of charming brick storefronts. It seemed a dynamic step, but it turned out to be a blunder. The downtown stores were just hanging on in their turn-of-the-century buildings. Nobody could afford the high rents in the new mall; the entire thing went under. Every store. Now the mall's an old-age home.
     Don't get me wrong; God bless the elderly. But it does something to a town to put a nursing home at its center. Two, now that I think of it. The old hospital is a nursing home, also.
     The downtown in Berea faces a green triangle—The Triangle, they call it, home to a Civil War memorial, the same stone soldier who stands watch over many small towns. During my visit I saw a panoramic photo of the Triangle from 1928. Then, it was a broad expanse of green trees, with a gazebo and a lot of park benches.
     Now, the Triangle is much smaller, whittled away by street widening and parking space, a last attempt to lure people to the shops, shops that aren't there anymore.
     No more benches. No people downtown to sit in them anyway. Who has the time?
     I tried to tell myself that this is only what is happening in small towns all across America. In comes Wal-Mart, out goes the general store. Up in Evanston, Chandler's, the stationery store, and Hoos Drug are both closed now. A decade ago you couldn't go to Northwestern and not have a funny story about trying to get some Hoos family member to cash your personal check. And seeing Chandler's close was like having the post office go out of business.
     This is the way of the world, I told myself. Someday kids will wax nostalgic about DigiLand and SaveMax, when they are being replaced by whatever comes next. Onward and upward. Excelsior!
     I told myself this. But I didn't believe it.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 30, 1998

As 2020 vote looms, a steel spine will come in handy

     This is the last of three columns about surgery for stenosis, a condition where narrowing vertebrae compress the spinal cord. The first two parts ran Monday and Wednesday.

Before

     The doctor wasn’t sure what he’d find.
     If my bones were pliant, he’d cut little “doors” in three vertebrae, propping each open with a tiny titanium doorstop, so there would be room for the compressed spinal cord to shy away from that bone spur spearing it from the front.
      But, if the bones broke, he’d have to fuse the whole thing with a titanium plate and rods. That second possibility made me worried I’d end up as limber as the tin-man.
     So when I came to, after three hours, and learned that Plan A worked, and nothing had to be fused, I was ecstatic. Doctors would ask me how I was — doped up, bandaged over, with stents in each arm and a drain and a catheter — and I’d mumble, “ecstatic.”
      Strange. Newspapers review every new burger joint and off-Loop musical, yet never rate hospitals. Let’s fix that. I spent three full days and nights at Northwestern. The surgical care was excellent. The post-surgical care was ... quite good, with exceptions.
  

After

   Amazing how the reputation of a vast, $11 billion medical enterprise teeters on the back of whoever answers your call button. Most nurses were great; a few, not so much.
      The dividing line seemed to be what each thought his or her job was. Those who saw themselves as tending to the person in room 1009 — aka, me — were sympathetic and attentive. When they went off shift it was like saying goodbye to an old friend. Some, however, seemed to be merely ticking off boxes — go into Room 1009, collect a blood sample, then get out.
      A couple close-but-no-cigar moments, like the aide who brought the water I requested but then placed the cup just out of my reach and fled. I thought of that skeleton sprawled before a pitcher in “Snow White” as my fingers quivered toward the cup and I wondered whether pushing the extra few inches would roll me onto the floor. 

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A few "close-but-no-cigar" moments. 

Dems manage to slip message past CNN hoopla

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, by Nam June Park (Smithsonian Museum of American Art)

     Getting your news from television is like trying to breathe through a straw.
     It can be done. But takes effort and you risk suffocation. 
     At least I assume that would be the case. To be honest, I've never tried breathing through a straw. Just as I've never settled for getting my news from television. 
     Though occasionally I watch, typically after some big story—the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris—or during some special news event, such as the Democratic Presidential Debates in Detroit Tuesday and Wednesday night. Invariably I'm let down, seeing endless iterations of something I learned on Twitter five hours earlier.    

     I suppose there is comfort that the disappointment was more from the CNN hoopla than any Democratic misstep, which is refreshing. Fox News is unwatchable propaganda that must require a lobotomy to endure, but that doesn't make me a fan of CNN either. Five years ago I pointed out how they had abandoned journalism and lurched into performance art after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and every time I give it another try, I'm reminded of how what they do is not news but entertainment. Nearly a quarter hour passed at the start of each night, while CNN hyped the show you were already tuned into and waiting to watch, playing a sizzle reel of the various candidates that was half American Idol set-up, half WWE fight hype. Did they have to make it a cage match between Godzilla and Rodan to keep viewers from flipping over to re-runs of "The Big Bang Theory?" Maybe. 

     Then there was the presentation of colors. Now I love the flag, fly the flag, have no trouble seeing it honored, nor singing the National Anthem. Why CNN had to do so before a debate of our nation's most pressing problems is a mystery—I've poked around, trying to find an answer; maybe readers can help. I assume the Democrats insisted, to dramatize they're not the traitors the Republicans insist they are. If so it was an odd and time-wasting bit of reactive pageantry. Aren't the flag pins enough? 

      The CNN moderators—Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Don Lemon—seemed intent on creating drama, on getting the various candidates to clash with each other, or force them to admit they'll do something unpopular, like raise taxes, rather than explore the policies they were promoting.  Maybe CNN thinks that makes good television; then again, so would having Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arm wrestle. 

     Maybe that's next. Or maybe it's aimed at people who aren't me. I'm not really the target audience. The only way I made it through both debates was that I had my wife and younger son to provide running commentary and discussion, not to mention Facebook Scrabble on my iPhone to help pass the time—I didn't bother tweeting, as I did in years past, as Twitter is so clotted by ads and big footed by social media stars there hardly seemed any point in doing so.

      That's the bad news. The good news is that the Democratic candidates, all 20 of them, put on performances that ranged from credible to excellent in this second set of debates. There was much sensible emphasis on health care, one of the great social issues of our time. Even self-help guru Marianne Williamson, who delivered oblique calls to govern with love the first time around, scored points and even—dare I say it?—made sense at times.  Joe Biden, the front runner, got beat up on, though not as much this time, and had a tendency to clam up too quickly when the moderators tried to cut him off, a bad sign for succeeding in any coming mudpit wrestle with Donald Trump. Kamala Harris, the California senator and former attorney general, did well again, though not quite as well as before, while tech maven Andrew Yang did better. He kept to his one trick pony plan of paying every American a grand a month, and the concept—why should only farmers and Amazon get big government breaks?—started to make some sense. Corey Booker pushed for unity,  The first night Elizabeth Warren, whom I initially wrote off as a crank, appeared grounded, and even Bernie Sanders seemed less crazed, though he would do better not to yell everything he says.  He's on television, not standing on a stump in Vermont in 1850, trying to project to the top hatted listeners in the back of the crowd.

      Any one of them would be a far better president than Donald Trump—that goes without saying. As to whether they can win, given the natural advantage enjoyed by a sitting president, the fervor of his supporters, who back him in the face of a constant barrage of ethical lapses, racist statements and acts, and groveling before dictators, is another matter. But there is cause for hope—the seeds are in the ground, the sprouts are rising toward the sun, and at least the cloud of dooming locusts hasn't presented itself early in the season. They'll be plenty of time for desperation later, but I'm content to begin the first day of August with a ray of hope.