The mayor puts her foot down

     Watched the presidential debate Tuesday night. Not much to add to the general roar. The whole thing seems beside-the-point right now. One of these candidates will have to defeat Donald Trump. Or lose to him.

      Or Michael Bloomberg will swoop in and do the job. Though that seems improbable, no matter how many commercials he runs.  Besides, is another self-absorbed billionaire really the answer to whatever our country's real problem is?

     The next day, discussing the outcome with my younger son, he mentioned that South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is at a disadvantage compared to Joe Biden, since black Americans won't support him, because he's gay, and African-Americans have a particular animus toward gays.

     According to common wisdom. The idea is that, being devout church going folk, they hold the prejudices of the Christian faith a little tighter than most.
     The common wisdom. But is it actually true? I went looking for numbers. A Pew Research Center poll last year found that while 62 percent of white American adults support same-sex marriage, only 51 percent of black American adults do.
     A gap, though not a huge gap. Maybe the effect is magnified because it is more surprising to see blacks being homophobic—just as it is surprising to see them being anti-Semitic—because the of the charmed notion that, having been subject to such prolonged and systemic bigotry themselves, blacks might be more reluctant to inflict baseless hatred upon others.
     Pretty to think so. I don't see much evidence of that being true for any minority group. Racism is a kind of false power, and sometimes disadvantaged groups are even more quick to resort to it, having little else to boost themselves than to jeer at someone they can consider lower. Jews certainly have suffered tremendously at the hands of history, and while Jews, as a group, have certainly worked toward aiding the struggles of other minorities, they also, as individuals, are perfectly capable of expressing the vilest prejudices.
     There was an example of black anti-gay bias on display this week in the Chicago City Council. Mayor Lightfoot sponsored a resolution to look into whether LGBTQ businesses are discriminated against when doing business with the city. During committee debate Tuesday, several black aldermen took turns looking askance at it. Ald. Walter Burnett Jr., questioned whether white gay men can be considered victims of prejudice at all. "I don't think they're discriminated against," he said, incredibly invoking “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry,” an Adam Sandler yuck-fest where two straight firemen pretend to be gay to gain benefits. He wondered: how can you even tell whether a person is gay or not? What if people are making it up?
     On Wednesday, at the general meeting, Mayor Lori Lightfoot stood up and was having none of it.
     "I don't normally speak during City Council debates," Lightfoot began, in an angry rebuttal. “As a leader, as a black gay woman proud on all fronts, I have to say I’m disturbed by the nature of the committee discussion and the nature of the discussion here today...I will be silent no more on any issue when people say and do things that are offensive and racist, I feel I have an obligation to speak and so I am.""

     I won't go into her whole remarks. They're brief; you can watch them here. But I have to say, I continue to be impressed with Lightfoot. Yes, she is only standing up for her own, and that is not exactly a profile in courage. It is the least anyone can do. Still, she is without a doubt standing up. Often, when a person from a minority group comes to power, they promptly ignore that group, figuring their support is secure. Barack Obama was an example of that—not exactly going out on a limb to help black Americans. But Lightfoot doesn't seem as if she's going to fall into that rut. Good for her.

The squirrels win a round

    Human beings have a genius for ignoring warning signs.  In matters big and matters small.
    An example of the former is found if you've been following the for-the-textbooks corporate meltdown at Boeing over the 737 Max, with mocking emails painting a corporate culture 180 degrees opposite to everything they purported to be. Negligence that will end up costing a thousand dollars in real losses for every buck saved through corner cutting and betrayal of their standards. You wonder why there wasn't one adult in the room, screaming bloody murder over this act of corporate sepukku. Who quit in protest? Nobody, apparently.
     Why? Because they're humans, and humans tend to shrug and overlook. Look at climate change. The whole world being destroyed before our eyes. Ho-hum, from some quarters.
     Nor does the issue have to be huge to spark willful blindness. We run the gamut, from leaking levees to fraying shoelaces. We see the trouble brewing. We think: "I should do something." Then do nothing. Even on tiny matters.
     As an example of small negligence, consider the bird feeder in my backyard. On Wednesday, I looked outside and noticed that my foolproof anti-squirrel system—a clear shower rod supporting a circular baffle—had collapsed, the thin plastic of the rod finally being degraded by the elements. It had done so a couple times before, and I had always managed to rig it back up. The thing to do would be to buy a new rod, but that would take a trip to the hardware store and $5 or $10.
     "I'll have to fix that before a squirrel gets in," I thought Wednesday, doing nothing.
     Then Thursday, this. A loathsome squirrel, face down my bird food. My birds' food. He must have shimmied up the pole (the shower rod keeps squirrels from grabbing the pole with their powerful, robber's hands) and pried off the cover. These squirrels are so devious, I wouldn't be surprised to find one picking a Yale lock.
     I should, I thought, stride outside and immediately fix it. But that would involve putting on boots. Which would require first putting a sock on my right foot. Which is still a task that requires concentration and not a little pain. I made a mental note to take care of that ASAP.
     Friday, the squirrel was back, bird feeder diving again. And I resolved, the very next time I'm outdoors, to be driven—I can't yet drive—to the hardware store and grab a new pole, get things back in shipshape order, so that the feeder can serve the valued members of the Steinberg yard community, aka birds, and not provide further energy to the loathed and already plenty hyperkinetic interlopers whose presence might be tolerated, but should never be encouraged, even through inaction.

 

Strange interlude 2008: The house without bling

     This post-surgery recuperation is taking longer than I expected. Two full weeks now. Apologies. It's frustrating for me too. But I have to kinda take my body's lead on this thing, and the body says, "chill." Some stretching exercises, some physical therapy, and I'm done for the day. Even posting this seems almost a bridge too far, but I think I can manage. It's hard to read much, never mind write anything. Maybe next week.

     Thank goodness there is royal scandal, although honestly, it quickly morphed, in my eyes, from some nutty British crown-watching kerfuffle, to Something Significant About Race, influenced by this revealing Afua Hirsh piece in the Sunday New York Times, and BuzzFeed's jaw-dropping comparison of press coverage of Kate Middleton v. Meghan Markle. 

     I'm tempted to just leave it at that. But this is my blog, and I should join the party. So I wondered what, if anything, I wrote about Prince Harry over the years, and found this, when the Drudge Report outed him during his military service. Frankly, the fact he served in a combat zone should buy him significant goodwill, and my prediction is that Harry & Meghan's recent pushback against the racist British press will someday be seen as among their finest hours. I left in the breakfast table conversation about bling because, well, I had to. For the record, the younger boy is the least ostentatious 22-year-old I ever met. So I guess my anti-bling pushback worked.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     See? Journalists aren't quite the scum you think we are. For 10 weeks, Britain's Prince Harry had been fighting with his unit in Afghanistan, and the normally rapacious and cut-throat British media kept the whole thing in a cone of silence, until his cover was blown by the Drudge Report (is Matt Drudge having a good week, or what? First the American media swallows his Obama-in-a-turban photo, hook, line and sinker, then he eats the British press' lunch and leaves them muttering about bad form).
     In return for not turning a blaze of publicity that might get the 23-year-old royal killed, the British media was granted access to take photos and conduct interviews with him. It seemed a win-win situation all around. Perhaps their role in hounding Harry's mother -- Princess Diana -- to her grave gave the Brits a rare sense of duty.
     Is it bad that Drudge blew his cover? Well, somebody had to feed the news to him, so if Drudge knew, it was hours away from hitting other Web sites anyway. Still, the whole episode shows that restraint is possible, even in this day and age.

STUDS TERKEL IS NOT BLING

     "Dad, can we get Bling Water?" asks the 12-year-old, the Sun-Times spread on the kitchen counter before him, open to news that the Trump Hotel is selling water for $25 in crystal-encrusted bottles.
     "No," I say. "We are not a household that embraces bling."
     He keeps talking, but I am lost in reverie. My boy, 15 years hence, 350 pounds, wearing a sequin baseball cap turned sideways. Bedecked in gold pendants and chains, he sits on a folding chair in a circle of large, similarly-appointed men.
     "Sure we had love, a roof over our head, food on the table," I say, out-loud to the kitchen, approximating his voice, channeling the future scene, where he brushes away a tear as sympathetic, bejeweled hands are placed on his shoulder. "But we had no bling. My father never valued bling. I hated him for that."
     My wife, the cheerleader of the status quo, jumps in.
     "We went to the opera last night," she says. True—'The Barber of Seville.' Lovely. "The opera is bling."
     "The opera is not bling," I insist.
     "We sat in Studs Terkel's seats," she continues—the guy next to us told us that Studs once sat where we were sitting. "That's bling."
     "Studs Terkel is not bling!" I spit, fiercely. "He's a literary icon but not bling. He's 95. He has red socks."
     "Studs is a fan of the Red Sox?" says my wife, puzzled.
     "No he WEARS red socks!" I retort. "Red socks are not bling."
     "I think red socks are kinda bling," she says, deflating.
     "Why can't we get the water?" my son persists. I expect the Marx Brothers to burst in at this point. Somebody has to lay down the law.
     "I am de faddah," I say, in my best Laurence Olivier in "The Jazz Singer" voice, "and I say, we hef no bling in zis household."
     I glance from boy to boy.
     "You kids . . ." I begin, my voice dripping contempt. "With your bling, and your hip, and your hop. I forbid it! I will not hef der hip und der hop."
     And I storm off to work.

                                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 2, 2008

Chicagopedia: ketchup

Memphis, by William Eggleston (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     A newspaper is a universe, or should be. A sky filled with all sorts of stars and planets, comets and asteroids, moons and meteors. Thus, despite being the most rational of men, or trying to be, I don't mind the horoscope, or the comics. I understand that not everything is for me: it's one of my superpowers. 
     Thus I was happy to see the new sports wrapper, even though I don't follow sports, and happier to contribute to it at the end of November.  I love our ongoing series on wall murals—interesting of themselves and a great way to get to know hidden corners of the city. I was happy to contribute to that too, and meet the great Jeff Zimmerman. I'm also glad they're bringing back Chicagopedia, our hand guide to Chicago ways and means through its distinctive use of language. The powers behind it asked if I wanted to contribute anything, and I've done several. This is my favorite so far:

ketchup /ˈkeCHəp/ n.  1. A sauce made primarily of tomatoes, vinegar and corn syrup. 2. A condiment which, when deployed on hot dogs, is considered by some to exclude the user from being a "true Chicagoan," whatever that is, when, in fact it is the concern, and not the usage itself , that is distinguishing as, 3. A code word for Chicago authenticity, visa a vis its non-use on hot dogs, by writers of advertising residing in other cities, recent transplants and others who for reasons unfathomable pay attention to the condiment choices of strangers.

The I'm from Chicago Polka (for piano)

     Maybe Al Capone did us a favor. 

     Chicagoans wince at having their international reputation tied to a 1920s gangster, still, after all these years. Or Michael Jordan. Or whatever shard of Chicago urban culture washes up on a distant shore (if that metaphor can even be used in the digital age. Though it sounds so much better than "flashes on a distant screen.")
     But this? Regular readers know that I routinely make use of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's vast online collection of free, downloadable images to illustrate my efforts here. The Met is useful but, I've found, has limits. It doesn't have everything, and sometimes the site is a dry well. So when I saw that a consortium of 14 Paris museums had opened up their own image portal, I had to take a look.
     What to search for? I could have plugged in "Renoir" or "automobiles" or "Notre Dame." But being provincial myself, I plugged in "Chicago"—let's see what images of us they harbor—and was rewarded for my local pride with this sheet music.
     The "I am from Chicago Polka." For piano. With the image of one of the more ridiculous one-man-band rustics ever engraved That's when I sudden felt a flash of gratitude to Scarface. Is this how the French saw us? Is it how they see us now? Is it who we are?
   

Charles Lecocq

 Plenty of information on the artifact to unpack. "Ch. Lecocq" is Charles Lecocq, a French composer of light and comic operas in the latter half of the 19th century, little remembered today.
     "La Vie Mondaine"—"Social Life" or maybe "Worldly Life"—was an three act opera of Lecocq's, first performed at Paris' Théâtre des Novelties on Feb. 13, 1885.
     The large "Arban" at the bottom refers to Jean-Baptiste Arban, a big-deal composer and conductor at the time.
    That'll do. I probably shouldn't go too far into the weeds in dredging up the history of 1880s French musical comedy, except to note that the polka had indeed been a craze in France—in the 1840s. Lecocq evoking it in the mid-1880s reflected his slide into irrelevance that began decades before his death in 1918.
     But what is the explanation of the yokel illustrating the song? Chicago's reputation as an ethnic enclave? Perhaps it reflects French hostility toward America in general and our cities in particular. 
     "The city was pitiable, ugly and boring," Philippe Roger writes, in "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism," referring not specifically to Chicago, but to the French 19th century view of American cities. "It was banality incarnate, quintessentially parochial."
     Chicago certainly was a cow town, a hardship post.
     "Bread is almost unknown in Chicago," French diplomat Francois Bruwaert wrote, recounting the joy of discovering a French bakery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition.  Lacking proper bakeries, Chicagoans attempt to produce bread at home and do so "badly."
      Bruwaert's visit, reproduced in the classic "As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors 1673-1933" (edited by  Bessie Louise Pierce) is a delight of contempt and self-reference. The World's Fair is worthy only to the degree it celebrates France. Bruwaert tries "toasted corn," aka popcorn, and finds it "detestable," while allowing "it suffices to occupy the youngsters." In his defense, he does eventually suggest something that will "most surprise the foreigner who is enterprising enough to come as far as Chicago" is that the city is "beautiful," and he marvels that it could rise from a swamp in the span of 50 years.
     I had hoped that the lyrics to the song would offer fresh wonders. But when I finally found the entire 11-page score online I discovered that, alas, it is an instrumental. Probably just as well. If there were lyrics, my hunch is they would not be an ode to Chicago's splendor.
     No need. We supply that ourselves. Continually.

Nature red (and pink and blue) in tooth and claw

Casper

    We have three houseguests over winter break. Two East Coast law students, in deep rest mode, at least when not reading submissions to the various law and tax review journals where they are on staff. And a black kitten named Casper, acquired this fall by the younger boy because, well, I suppose his life wasn't complicated enough.
     "He must need a cat," I said to my wife, offering as good an explanation as any.
     We certainly didn't need another one, or so we thought, prior to Casper's arrival. Our loyalties were fully invested in the aged Gizmo and Natasha, resting regally 23 and a half hours a day at the foot of the bed. Plus our old house itself: how would it fare under the kitten onslaught?
     It took about 15 minutes after the arrival of Casper—flown in at great expense—for me to shift from wondering how we are going to adjust to this third cat, to scheming how to convince our boy to leave him behind. This, despite a certain genius Casper had for running directly across my post-surgical thigh, with such consistency that I took to placing a pillow over it, protectively, just in case. This, uncharacteristically, did not seem to cool my feelings for the kitty.
     "Just look at how happy he is!" I'd marvel, as Casper cavorted with, aka chased, our two old cats. And Kitty, our dog, was practically vibrating with enthusiasm, as if Casper were a personal present and plaything. "Having an entire house to roam in....not confined to a small apartment. It would be cruel, don't you think, to take him away from all this?"
      Nice try, he said, in words and expressions.
      Part of the smooth adjustment of all concerned must be credited to my wife. Unlike our cats, acquired in the early years of the 21st century, Casper is not declawed. Apparently, in recent years declawing—the medical term is "onychectomy"—the once standard procedure is now a holocaust, and the Humane Society of the United States, and other pro-pet groups have come out against it. Last year, New York became the first state to ban it, and a variety of cities, mostly in California, have done the same. A pet owner declawing a cat couldn't be held in lower regard if he ate the beast instead.
     I couldn't find any recent statistics, but in 2011, 60 percent of cat owners said declawing was okay, and a quarter of U.S. cats were declawed, though those figures might have shifted to reflect a near decade of bad publicity regarding what one vet called "de-toeing"—the procedure removes not only the claw, but the nail bed and last digit of a cat's toes.
    "If performed on a human being, it would be like cutting off each finger at the last knuckle," the Humane Society notes.
     Not being a fan of projecting human neuroses onto the animal kingdom, I don't really get worked up about such fine points: I'm not about to apologize to Gizmo and Natasha for having them declawed (and cats, if you're reading this: it was the woman who did it.)       
   Me, I have an inherent ability to dismiss such matters. We rescued our dog, Kitty, from a breeder; you can judge us lightly, harshly, or anywhere in between, as you see fit. It's all the same to me. I was concerned, not how our pets would fare in intra-kitten skirmishes, but about the future of what few sticks of furniture we possess that are not already battered into ruin. 
      My wife, who knows about such things, urged the boy to deploy claw covers, which I had never heard of or imagined. To our mutual amazement, he did. If you are unfamiliar with the things, claw covers are basically glue-on fingernails for cats, keeping their sharp claws from inflicting damage.
     Commonly referred to as "nail caps," they are inexpensive, available everywhere and—most unexpectedly—come in a variety of neon colors.  Yes, I notice online that some folks are aghast at claw covers too, for a variety of increasingly implausible and esoteric reasons, the bottom line being they hate people and want humanity to die off so as not to inconvenience microbes. 
     Nature is cruel; claw covers are not. Having gone to Animal Care and Control to watch them gas cats, I can't get too worked up over any minor infringement on the dignity of animals. I suppose I draw the line at costumes, but it's a free world, and I wouldn't try to stop you. To me, claw covers seem a practical, easy solution—putting them on and periodically replacing them is no big deal, the boy says. They are festive, and God knows we'll need a little festivity in the long, cold, grey slog between now and Valentine's Day.  Or, I keep having to remind myself, between now and when Casper and his current owner leave next week. 
   

Strange Interlude, 2008: Return to sender

     Well, I did something Thursday that I have not yet done in 2020: put on pants. Which is my subtle way of saying the recuperation proceeds apace: slowly but surely. I also began reaching out to sources for what I hope to be my first column when I return. Small steps. 

     I stumbled upon this looking for something else, and liked it for two reasons: one, a reminder that a dozen years ago email used to be far more significant than it is today. And for my visit to the Rotary which, needless to say, never asked me back. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I including the godawful joke I coined about Barack Obama at the end because it seems cowardice to delete it. What is the old saying? Dying is easy; comedy is hard.

OPENING SHOT ...

     Every few seconds, the computer on my desk emits a pleasant three-note glissando chime — do-do-dooo — telling me another e-mail has arrived.
     Well, it was pleasant 20 minutes ago. Now, it's getting annoying, as dozens, then scores, then hundreds of messages arrive, all announcing that my e-mail has failed to reach its destination and is being returned.
     Not that I'm sending them—I'm writing a column, or was trying to. Now, I'm deleting e-mails by the hundred. A bank of computers somewhere — some musty basement in the Ukraine, or a stifling, windowless warehouse in Nigeria — is "spoofing" me, using my e-mail address to send out thousands of scam e-mails touting an online casino. "Are you our next massive jackpot winner?" it asks. 

      No, I'm not. Not me. This is nothing personal — they have digital spiders crawling over the Web, grabbing e-mail addresses and using them to try to fool computer filters into thinking an actual person is writing to them.
     And even though my involvement is accidental, there's something disquieting about having the fallout from this attempted ripoff collecting in my inbox. I don't know why I feel moved to delete it immediately — but I do. I want it out, as if it were diseased, or might drown me.
     I wish some of those sociologists studying Yanomamo Indians in the Brazilian rain forest and nomads in the Punjab would instead cast their attention to what being connected 24 hours a day into this enormous, often-enigmatic grid does to people, to all my plugged-in friends, frantically thumbing their BlackBerries as they walk down the street. I'm all for the Internet, but, like The Phone Company, it has its dark corners. From the froth-flecked lunatics who, unlike objects in the rear view mirror, appear much closer than they actually are, to the vile extremes of humanity only a few keystrokes away, to being bothered in your office by electronic scamsters a dozen time zones removed.
     So I delete and delete and delete and delete. It isn't terribly difficult, and there is a sense of sweeping away the bad. It's almost like weeding. At first.

LIFE AMONG THE ROTARIANS

     With phantom rejected e-mail messages clogging my in-box, I hopped a cab to the Union League Club for a Rotary Club of Chicago luncheon.
     If Facebook is new networking, then this is old networking — flesh-and-blood people with their names on big round badges, gathering at round tables to exchange business cards and chat before listening to whatever speaker was snared into accepting the job — in today's case, me.
     My hunch is that many people cling to a Sinclair Lewis view of groups such as the Rotary, the Elks and the Lions. A half-censorious, half-sneering sentiment left over from after World War I, when fraternal groups were the hidebound sentinels of Main Street status quo. With perhaps a bit of lingering 1960s scorn tossed in, a relic from when change was in the air, and anything that smacked of business was bad. The Rotary was The Man.
     But young people are entrepreneurs now, or want to be, and it's easier to name billionaires under 30 than it is to name rock stars. After exchanging banalities with your "friends" — Facebook code for people you've never met and most likely never will — a Rotary Club meeting feels positively revolutionary: real people in a real room, talking about their common bonds.
     George J. Kondik, a visiting Rotarian from Weirton, W.Va., seemed genuinely pleased that I know Weirton is the home of National Steel, though he probably wouldn't have minded being spared the reason why — that I took a bus there, with my high school girlfriend, to celebrate New Year's Eve 1979 at her sister's house.
     "That's where I first saw cable television," I said, with a bore's attention to detail. "Because of the mountains."
     Brian Sabina, just 24 and seemingly interested in helping people, despite having graduated from Northwestern, explained his new philanthropic group, "Reach the World." Jean-Hui Yao was the first college student I met who has a business card announcing the fact that she'll receive her master of science from Medill in December.
     Yes, none of us is a titan of industry — I'm not George Will, and none of the people digging into their beef stew were Warren Buffett. There was more than one toupee in evidence, and the general tone among the younger people was one of utter earnestness.
     But you have to grow where you're planted, and we can't all be Bill Gates and George Soros huddling in our Gulfstream Jetstars. There was a brief ceremony where visiting Rotarians — from Switzerland, from Taiwan, from Salinas, Calif. — presented little silk banners from their home Rotaries, and in turn received a banner from the Chicago Rotary, which is where the whole thing began in 1905.
     I like that. Any organization that exchanges little silk flags is all right by me. You can't do that online.
     Yes, there is a fleetingness to the social contact — the business cards inevitably go into a drawer, and are swept away at some future date. But when you are being inundated by a droid e-mail army of gibberish messages churned out by robot spiders, there's nothing like black coffee and sincere conversation to give you the strength you need to get back to the office and start deleting.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     The media has been noting that there are few Barack Obama jokes and no funny ones. The reasons range from the high hopes he inspires in his serious supporters, the frothing hatred in his detractors (it's hard to make a funny joke when you're foaming) to the additional level of complexity brought in by racial considerations.
     Does anyone out there have a good Obama joke? I tried to cobble one together and couldn't do any better than:
     If Barack Obama is such a big fan of change, then why is he always wearing the same suit?
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times July 23, 2008