Better laugh now, before tragedy sets in

     

     If this seems slapped together, it was. Sunday morning I turned in a complicated, long story on colon cancer I'd been working on for a few weeks. Then mid-afternoon, as a string of coronavirus developments pushed it out of the paper. No room. But there was room for a standard-length column, so I batted out this and hoped it flew. I'm not sure it does. I think my point, to the degree I have one, is that if 9/11 started in tragedy and we learned to laugh again, the novel coronavirus is starting in farce and ending in tragedy. 

     You want to hear something strange and a little scary? I felt great Saturday morning. Walking the dog, breathing the frosty air, taking big strides—well, what constitutes big strides for me. An unexpected surge of energy.
     I had no idea why. I hope it wasn’t the snow day, society’s cancelled, End of Times drama of the United States collectively ducking into a crouch, readying itself to start receiving full body punches from the coronavirus. But with journalists you never know. We can’t help but ooo and ahh at the big fire for a moment or two before catching ourselves and remembering the people leaping out the windows.
     Maybe I was just well-rested.
     Social media fixated for some ungodly reason on people buying lots of toilet paper and others condemning them for buying lots of toilet paper. I took to Twitter to try to offer up a silver lining in all this before, you know, thousands of Americans start to die and nothing seems funny anymore, which I distinctly remember as being the bitter icing on the tragedy cake of 9/11.
     I tweeted out a series, beginning with “Look on the Bright Side #1: No sign of Rudy Giuliani.”
     Because this was twitter, people were reacting instantly, pointing out that this was wrong: Trump’s unhinged consigliere was on Fox News, flapping his gums about the crisis. That’s what I get for never watching Fox, and for being an optimist. I keep thinking, with life or death hanging in the balance, the presidential clown show must come to an end.
     But of course it doesn’t. It just gets worse.
     I tried again.
     “Look on the Bright Side #2: Trump not crowing about the stock market.”

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Ennobled and demoralized.

     Stayed home all day Saturday. Following the news online. Reading. Like waiting for a storm. Edie made chicken noodle soup. That helped.
     We see what's coming. Yet it's hard to believe. Walking the dog in the morning I felt ... almost buoyant. That's weird, right? Inappropriate. But understandable too. As a child, I liked storms. And even though I tell myself this will be something bad, it doesn't feel bad, not yet. People are still prattling on about toilet paper. So a disconnect, between the mind and the heart, what I know and what I feel. Which itself is unsettling.
     Human, I suppose. I believe I've been a consistent enough critic of Donald Trump in the nearly five years since he cannonballed into national and world politics that I can make one small observation that may seem in his favor without being accused of apologizing for the would-be tyrant.
     His underplaying the coronavirus threat — saying it was under control, or would quickly pass — is being waved around social media as clear evidence of his utter unfitness to lead. It certainly is. The man is a buffoon, a liar, a traitor, and more. So many flaws it's wearying to even list them.
     However. Closing your eyes to peril is also very human. Routine has a momentum, and we tend to want to keep it going along its intended path, even when there is an obvious bump, or detour, in the road. We don't let go of it without leaving claw marks.
      At least I don't.
      I remember almost 25 years ago, in July, 1995, when the Chicago heat wave was killing people across the city — as with COVID-19, also mostly the elderly — and the medical examiner was holding press conferences, outlining that day's toll of what would be nearly a thousand heat-related deaths in Chicago. Even as the bodies stacked in refrigerated trailers in the medical examiner's parking lot, I distinctly remember looking at the television and wondering, "Now, is this a real phenomenon, or just Donoghue calling every corpse that shows up at Harrison Street a 'heat-related death?' He's a showboat. I wouldn't put it past him. How could it be that many?"
     It was real. This pandemic is real too. Though it doesn't seem real. Not yet.
     Maybe I'm deceived by all the false alarms in the past. The predicted storms that never came. The blizzards that proved to be a dusting. Missed us. I know how people get worked up over threats that are not there, they exaggerate. Maybe that's what causes me to be reluctant to acknowledge the looming disaster. If it's to be a disaster. I'm too aware of the possibilities of panics, mistakes, mass hysteria.
     There's a great story, "The Day the Dam Broke" in James Thurber's "My Life and Hard Times," where he recounts "that frightful and perilous afternoon in 1913 when the dam broke, or, to be more exact, when everybody in town thought that the dam broke."
     Nobody knows how it started—perhaps a young man in high spirits breaks into a trot, or a husband remembers he is late for a lunch date with his wife. In a moment hundreds of people are running for their lives, shouting "Go East! Go East!" Even though the dam hadn't broken and, even if it had, it wouldn't have reached them in the East part of Columbus, Ohio. No matter.
     "The fact that we were all as safe as kittens under a cookstove did not, however, assuage in the least the fine despair and the grotesque desperation which seized upon the residents of the East Side when the cry spread like a grass fire that the dam had given way," Thurber writes.
     Astounding how quickly society shut down over the past few days. Air travel, restaurants, sporting events. Of course the thing feels like a snow day, a lark, when it should feel like ... something else. The calm before the storm. These extraordinary steps are to keep people safe, and I can't be faulted for hoping that they might work. For feeling safe.
     That's the irony here, an irony worth pointing out. The more effectively we wash our hands, avoid crowds, cancel events, etc., the more blunted the pandemic might be, the more we'll feel those precautions were unnecessary, an overreaction. Even though they weren't. We'll never really know how much they helped, or what we avoided. Unless we don't avoid it. Talk about a dilemma. For some Americans, these weeks and months to come will be a time of tragedy. That's a certainty. And for the rest it'll be a story about stores being stripped of toilet paper. That too is par for the course.
    "We were both ennobled and demoralized by the experience," Thurber writes. Sounds about right.

The Thurber story was based on a real event, March 12, 1913

   

Notes from the Current Crisis

Northbrook Public Library

     When the Village of Northbrook sent an email Thursday announcing that after Friday the library will be closed for the rest of the month, the harsh voice of Clarence, the angel from "It's a Wonderful Life" practically screamed in my ear: "They're closing down the library!"
     And the NBA. And Broadway. And much of public life. But it was the library that prompted me to action, 4:30 p.m.—it was closing at 6 p.m. I grabbed a half dozen books around our living room that need to be returned, either already- or never-to-be read, and walked over: the library is literally in my backyard, or, rather, through my backyard, over a berm of trees, past the community vegetable garden, and through the parking lot of Village Hall.
     It wasn't quite a mob scene. But there were a dozen people in line to check out books. I had never seen that. I went upstairs to the New Books section, grabbed a few volumes that might prove useful in researching my next book, and got in line. The librarian who checked out my book was wearing latex gloves. He asked me if I knew the library was closing for a couple weeks. I said I did.
     I felt glad that in addition to hoarding toilet paper, that people are also hoarding books. A hopeful sign. Then again, the strange toilet paper situation—shelves stripped—did not cause the sense of superiority or condemnation it seemed to evoke in everybody else. I have what my people call rachmanis—something stronger than sympathy but weaker than pity—for such people. This is a scary moment, and if you can comfort yourself with a big cube of Angel Soft, or a copy of Emily Dickinsen, or just about anything else, well why not? Later that evening I stopped by Target for cat litter—not as a hedge against the End of the World, but because we need cat litter. I was relieved to find litter in bountiful supply and also on sale—normality tends to endure. The bread, however, was completely gone.

Target, Friday night

   

We can’t learn from art we can’t see

Dettail of "Outstanding American Woman" mural by Edward Millman at the Al Raby High School.

     One way to see a slice of Edward Millman’s take on women in American history is to fly to New York, cab to the Whitney Museum and pay $25 admission for “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art.” Wander around what The New Yorker called “a thumpingly great” exhibit until you see a monochromatic drawing of a woman grappling with men in gas masks. That’s it.

     Or, if you are at the Al Raby High School for Community and Environment in East Garfield Park, simply drop by the lounge near the entrance and savor the entire 54-foot-long, full color Federal Art Project mural, originally titled “The Contribution of Women to the Progress of Mankind” — the title’s irony no doubt lost when the fresco was completed in 1940 at what was then Lucy Flowers Technical High School. 

Cartoon for "Contribution of Women" mural
by Edward Millman, on display at the Whitney

 

     Now restored to its original glory, this Millman mural has been renamed with the more acceptably anodyne, “Outstanding American Woman.”
     What makes this mural relevant today is that it was whitewashed over the year after it was completed.
     Not because Harriett Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is depicted comforting a slave, an image seen by some as an offensive example of White Savior Complex. I am reluctant to point that out, lest the Chicago Public Schools be tempted to whitewash the mural again.
     Because CPS officials are once more flirting with the get-yourself-tied-in-a-knot-over-old-murals business, censorship always being the easiest way to hush the complainers. Only now it is the Left being “insulted and triggered” by depictions of the past that, rather than being too grim — in 1941 an all-white school board deemed the Millman mural both “subversive” and “depressing” — are not grim enough to suit their view of American history as a continuous slough of oppression and atrocity.

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Pasta in comforting shapes

     History will note that when the Steinberg household finally decided to act decisively to face the growing global coronavirus pandemic, and stood together in their kitchen Tuesday evening, and examined their larder, my wife's first dynamic step in our Total Safety Plan was to command: "Get some Cream of Wheat."
     I wrote it down, in pencil on an index card: "Cream of Wheat." Not to put the blame on her. In truth, I too had been thinking of Cream of Wheat lately—we have been out for a while, as I manfully consumed bowl after bowl of the Maypo I badgered Sunset Foods into stocking and now feel personally responsible for consuming. Guilt was one thing, survival another. I heartily agreed. It goes without saying it was the red box, the long cook, two-and-a-half minute variety. When society is tottering on the abyss, it becomes all the more important to maintain standards.
     We had just gotten off the phone with our older son, who said that NYU Law would be offering classes remotely for the time being. He could just as easily take them at home, and I urged him to do so, to get out of New York City and back to Chicago before they blow the bridges into Manhattan, like that scene in "I Am Legend."
      "Are you making preparations for a quarantine?" he countered.
     Good question, lad! Honest answer: no, not in the slightest. I had just turned in a column that treated the whole matter in a somewhat light fashion, certainly not the society shattering disaster that it seemed to lurch toward in the six hours since I had filed.
     So I was open to the idea that I had underplayed the situation. Quarantined? Yes, that was happening. If one of us became sick, and we were homebound, with only GrubHub, DoorDash, and 20 or 30 nearby restaurants that deliver, what would we do? How would we survive? We needed to stock up.
     "Soup" my wife said, suggesting Campbell's condensed—save space!  And Wednesday, my work done, I headed over to Sunset, and did get a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle and a can of Tomato Bisque. Just the thing for riding out martial law. I also went for Progresso Italian Wedding Soup—not condensed, but we'd need something festive in the gloomy days of disease.
     Then "pasta." Doesn't go bad, always welcome. Sensing a trap, I had tried to find out what kind of pasta by replying, "Fettuccini okay?" I like fettuccini. It's flat and chewy.
     No, fettuccini is not okay, she said. I was to find "pasta in comforting shapes." That's one of the 27 top reasons I love my wife so. You could lock Beatrix Potter, Johnny Gruelle and Mary Engelbreit in a room for a year and force them write down cute concepts, one after the other, and they still would never come up with anything close to "pasta in comforting shapes."
    To me, that meant one thing: wheel-shaped pasta. "Choo Choo Wheels" was the brand my mother bought when I was a child. There was a locomotive on the box which, if you cut out the wheels, turned into a toy engine. And while there were indeed wheel-shaped pasta at the Sunset, that seemed a tad desperate, a frantic, crisis-induced regression toward childhood. They had four boxes of Barilla for $5, catering to the world-is-ending market. I went for rotini, rigatoni, medium shells and elbows, for that ultimate comfort food, mac and cheese.
     Five pounds of Jasmine Rice, in case society actually does come to a skiddering halt, not that we need it (I told the boy that I had prudently stored up enough excess energy, in the form of body fat, to get by for a few months, maybe two, without any additional nutrition necessary). Napkins and toilet paper—in our defense, we were getting low on both, though TP seems to be the de rigueur panic purchase, for reasons I can't fathom. Isn't societal collapse the very time when you least need toilet paper?
     There was one thing that Sunset did not have, or at least I couldn't find. Zippo lighter fluid. I'd been out of fluid for a while—actually lit my last few cigars with a match, talk about tossing civilized standards to the wind—and I stopped by Ace Hardware for a bottle.
     Getting home, I filled my brass Zippo and produced flame. Fire good! Now, with that and my Gerber LST knife in my pocket, I was ready to flee from the coronavirus-maddened neighbors storming my house to get at my toilet paper to stem their COVID-19 sniffles. My wife and I could escape to the Somme Woods to begin civilization anew.
     Wednesday night President Donald Trump spoke to the nation, cancelling most flights from Europe excluding, inexplicably, Great Britain, no doubt for some jaw-dropping Trump business-related purpose that will come out later. Then the NBA cancelled its season. And Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced they have the coronavirus, which is sorta like Raggedy Andy and Raggedy Ann getting sick. Suddenly, that long-forgotten, pit-of-the-stomach, post-9/11, nothing-is-funny-anymore tickle of dread began stirring.  The Washington Post quoted the projection from a former CDC director estimating that a million Americans could die before this is over. Maybe more. Maybe less. Nobody knows.

Stay at home, just don’t get too used to it

Kitchen, by Liza Lou (Whitney Museum of American Art)

                                  “Stay home as much as possible”

                                                — Centers for Disease Control

     I’m embarrassed to admit, when first reading that CDC advice for “older adults,” my reaction was to spin a joke, adding, “... groan audibly when rising from chairs, and complain incessantly about how young people today don’t have a work ethic.”
     Because older people are already there. Staying home as much as possible is a marker of age as much as the calendar. That, and complaining.
     But it isn’t much of a joke if you have to explain. Yes, older adults have caution down cold, no urging from the federal government necessary. We old folks always act like airborne death is waiting right outside the front door. Mortality rears up when we contemplate almost any activity. I have not actually said to my boys, “For God’s sake, don’t go anywhere or do anything.” But I’ve thought it, and opened my mouth to say it, then held back.
     You could try spinning that into a virtue. Argue that excess of caution is how you live to be old in the first place. Though cautious myself, I retain just enough trace afterglow of youth to view that as a liability. All this fretting about the weather. My parents do it so much that I flinch at the idea of carrying an umbrella. It seems a defeat; leaving it behind strikes a blow against timidity.
     Notice I include myself as “old.” What is an “older adult” anyway? The CDC isn’t much help. A page called “Indicator definitions—older adults” includes both “persons aged ≥ 65 years” (not me) and “Older adults aged 50-64 years” (definitely me). I’m tempted to trot out the “you’re as old as you feel” chestnut. But I knew a man who was 102 and didn’t consider himself old. Spoiler alert: He was.
     Events seem to be hurtling past the “older adults” distinction anyway. Literally while I was writing the above, the Sun-Times told employees it is planning a one-day work-from-home test for most newsroom staff.
     Yes sir! As someone who has worked from home, to a greater or lesser degree, for decades, I welcome my brethren. Any advice to my newly homebound colleagues? Remember to shower once a day, whether you are going out or not, as an ablutionary gesture toward civilization.

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Whistling while the world crumbles

   The Dow plunges 2,000 points. The scary new plague spreads. The president is still an idiot.
   So why do I feel like grabbing a bamboo cane, leaping up so quick the office chair shoots out from under me, holding the cane horizontal in both hands, smiling broadly and breaking into a little soft-shoe, whistling?
    Doo, tah-doo, tah-doodily-doo, tah-doo....
    Maybe it is the nature of the comedian. What else am I supposed to do? Issue stock advice? Buy low sell high. List sensible health precautions? Wash your hands for two minutes in hot lye. Identify and condemn specific presidential lies? There's one and there's one and there's one. Bad! Bad! Bad!
     No, this is a time for pratfalls and pies in the puss. Which can be hard to achieve on the written page. One seltzer bottle is worth a thousand words. But serious times call for unserious measures. Always have. Inmates did joke in Auschwitz, you know (not that they were particularly funny jokes; I've tracked them down. At least not funny today. Much dark political humor that's hard to scan, what with translation and the passage of time. Then again, comedy is always situation specific).
     And I say that, knowing that people are suffering. Which is okay, because I'm not making fun of them—those losing big bucks on the stock swoon (and even if I were, heck, I'm among them, so I get the victim's Get-Out-Jail Free card). And while I am not dying of coronavirus, it could yet happen. That could  be me in a few months, and I hope if that is the case, I have the presence of mind to pull the oxygen mask slightly away from my face, and rasp at my wife, "You know ... if you'd let me drink myself to death ... I could have been spared this agony."
     As for Trump, ridicule is pointless: it bounces off him, and merely puzzles his followers. If you are so lost to reason as to think "Donald Trump" is the answer to, well, anything at all, then what good is satire, high or low, going to do? Not much. It's like shouting Latin insults at plants.
     Yes, there is privilege floating around somewhere here. I am not poor, or sick, or directly harmed by Donald Trump, beyond the harm of seeing a nation that I love laid low and shamed, and my fellow citizens, whom I really do try to understand and respect, establish themselves as credulous dupes and groveling lackeys who'll let themselves be defrauded, eyes open, and betray their country if some demagogue throws their particular fixation a biscuit? Or even if he promises to do so then doesn't.
    So sure, I can smile at the world falling apart in big pieces, since none of those chunks have hit me yet. One glancing blow and all amusement will drain away. Grim-jawed, I'll join the candlelight vigil in Daley Plaza, wearing a sandwich sign declaring whatever particular wrong lodged itself under my fingernail. I guess that's human nature.