Black Lives Matter

     The thing about Jews is, we don't like to go to synagogue, or practice the requirements of our faith. We recognize Judaism as the team we were born onto, but find life too short for saying prayers or following kosher or any of that stuff. That said, some of the rituals are cool. We do like challah, though matzo, not so much, unless its rendered into matzo brei—egg matzo—a breakfast dish, which we eat with sugar, never salt. Jews enjoy bacon and pork chops too, though we draw the line at those big pink glutenous canned hams. Yuck. 
    Oh wait, maybe that isn't Jews in general. Maybe that's just me. Yup, definitely me.
    See, I have trouble doing what so many individuals seem to do automatically: presenting themselves as the spokesmen, the embodiment and voice of their entire group. I know why they do it: it adds oomph to what is really their opinion. Me and all my friends, standing notionally behind me, nodding in agreement, in my fantasy world.
     But Jews are not me. Or you. They are this enormous range of people representing a wide spectrum of beliefs, from black-hats ticking off every single commandment, to Stephen Miller, the president's shadowy, serpentine Goebbels. Every group is enormously diverse and complicated. I don't see how anyone can argue that fact, and in reality, they don't. They just ignore it.
     Not only do people making statements pretend to be representative, but so do those who embrace them. Whom you accept as a spokesman for others says more about yourself than about the group you are trying to characterize.
    On social media, the act of sharing the voice of the member of a minority group is often a kind of tacit slur. For instance. Social media throbs with that video of Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer Ariel Atkins explaining why looting is okay.
    “That is reparations,” Atkins told NBC Chicago. “Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.”
    That's dumb, and I imagine that most responsible people of all hues consider it dumb, and unhelpful, in that it allows folks to dismiss the entire movement as a rationale for stealing Gucci purses. 
     Sure, many are going to reject the Black Lives Matter message anyway, and if not over Atkins then they'll find someone else. Remember, many, maybe most people aren't looking to engage in the world in a meaningful way, but to cherry-pick facts that support exactly who they are and intend to always be. 
     But why make is so easy for them to do so?
     While against violence and chaos, I nevertheless support Black Lives Matter because I know both history and current events. I particularly like "Black Lives Matter" as a slogan, a rallying cry, exactly because it is so understated. Compared to "Gay Pride" or "Never again!" or "Black is beautiful," "Black Lives Matter" is so modest, so utterly unobjectionable. "We have significance. Our lives have meaning." Who could argue with that?
     And the answer is, "Lots of people."  Those who hate seeing police held accountable counter with "Blue Lives Matter." White supremacists float "All Lives Matter," as a kind of code that the only lives that matter are their own. 
     "Black Lives Matter" is part of a fine tradition of setting a subtle snare. If you look at the key moments in the Civil Rights struggle, the line is drawn, not at something grand — the protests are never over the right of Black people to sit on the Supreme Court. But over something ordinary: riding on a bus, eating at a lunch counter, attending 2nd grade.
     A simple ask, that nevertheless draws out the haters, forces them to reveal themselves, to battle something prosaic. To oppose basic decency. To make them show up with their dogs and firehoses, then, or their pepper spray and batons now. And in that sense, BLM should do as much as it can to distance itself from the looting and riots that often follow their protests. If after his encounter with Alabama cop, John Lewis had led marchers to burn Selma, he would not have been as revered and effective as he became, nor would that encounter at the Edmund Pettus bridge be remembered the way it is. Not doing so hurts BLM and their cause.
     In my opinion. Of course I'm one guy, and a 60-year-old white guy at that. I am not speaking for all white folks, nor all 60-year-0lds, nor all Jews. Unfortunately.

Would-be friends

"Waiting for the Stage," by Richard Caton Woodville (Smithsonian Museum of American Art)

     Facebook is kinda curdling, along with everything else. Getting weird and unpredictable. It changed its entire look last week, then allowed me to change it back, which I did, hungry for consistency. Then Facebook told me that it would change over again anyway, soon, and then I won't be able to change back.
    What's the point of that? Either change or don't. It's like they're playing with us. I guess given how stuck we are with Facebook, we should consider ourselves lucky Facebook doesn't start doing all sorts of random shit, turning the screen 90 degrees, so we have to sit with our heads angled hard to one side to read.
    Because we'd do it. We're addicts. So I guess we're lucky Facebook doesn't start fucking with us, just because it can.
    I'm not sure what the point of the thing is anymore. Scrolling the news feed, I see how messed up my friends are, what nutbag conspiracy crap they've fallen for, or how they've wandered into some distant pasture of irrelevance. Arguing is pointless.
    Unless of course they say something that reflects exactly how I believe. I'm fine with that.
    Odd stuff keeps happening. Monday I got 15 Facebook friend requests. On an ordinary day I get none. Or one or two, from youths in Ghana, or lonely hearts in the Philippines. 
     Some Q-Anon infiltration squad? Organized Targeted Individuals? I looked at them, and they seemed fairly normal people. Russian bots designed to do damage once admitted? No ... seemed really real. Not the usual fashion shot of some busty young lady with an Urdu man's name. But actually people—all men—with hundreds of friends and posts.
    I sent them all this message:

    "So I got 15 friend requests this morning, which is very unusual, and I'm wondering what is going on. What prompted you to ask to be my friend today?"

One replied:

     You appeared in my friend suggestion, and you are my favourite Chicago columnist.

     Good enough for me! Another:

     You came up in my feed last week though I didn’t see you before. I related to your Drunkard book so long ago and appreciate your writing. I can see why you might be suspicious in this climate so just ignore the request if you’d like. 

     Of course not! Welcome to the party! A radio host wrote:

           Your line of work, my line of work, and our mutual friends!

     Okay then. C'mon in. Everybody who had a halfway sensible answer was friended. The rest, the majority, deleted. Obviously, some microscopic circuit clicked and I was dangled in front of a horde of Facebook users and 15 bit. 

      No, this isn't really going anywhere. I had a column slated for the paper for today, and here, about the Republican National Convention. But it got spiked, which doesn't happen much. Not a quality issue, I am told, but more a space issue, a game of musical chairs that I lost. Or something to that effect. Anyway, I'm not dwelling on it. Things happen. It isn't that my fierce truth was yanked back by the Powers that Be. More likely they opted for real news over the same old Neil Nattering. Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you. Some days I have two columns in the paper, so it seems fair play there should be a column day where I have none. As to why I'm not posting the column here anyway, well, call that a judgment call. I might want to cannibalize it later in the week.

   

Three cheers and a tiger

     Strange. I really don't talk much about writing books here. 
     Several reasons, I suppose. I don't want to create the impression that producing a high quality newspaper column doesn't take up  all my time and energy, 24/7. The skilled carpenter doesn't want to be caught on the job, whittling away on his side project.
     Second, I suppose there is a certain magic act quality to books. You undermine the effect if you show the machinery to the audience, the hollow compartment in the top hat, the years of gerbil-on-a-wheel effort required to produce a manuscript. Better to pretend it isn't happening then,  every few years just produce the finished volume—"SHAZAM!!!"—from out your sleeve, along with a few fluttering white doves.
     Those two motivations seem better honored in the breach than in the keeping.
     So I was grinding through the May 2, 1893 Chicago Record on Monday, reading about opening day of the World's Columbian Exposition for my next book. Being reminded, yet again, of the glory of having several news outlets cover a story. Because the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Daily News inflicted the drudgery of the unedited speeches, the opening Columbian ode, in all its stultifying glory, while the Record reporter seemed to be lost somewhere in the crush of the mob, slogging through the "cheerless drizzle" and the yellow mud, while the speeches were an inaudible garble somewhere far away. Women fainted, soldiers held back throngs with fixed bayonets. Everything was late. Not the happy Cracker Jack and Ferris Wheel image of the fair that abbreviated histories tend to present.
    Though eventually the Record catches up with President Grover Cleveland, in town to press the gold-and-ivory key to start opening (is it the key that gets the machinery going, or is it a certain young man conspicuously waving his hat?) 
    The Record followed Cleveland to the train, where this sentence stopped me.
     "As Mr. Cleveland was alighting from his carriage at the station gates three cheers and a tiger were given with a will."
      For a moment, I thought a big cat was presented to the president, as a parting gift. But the proximity of "tiger" to "three cheers" sparked some dusty memory of the after echo of pre-World War I collegiate football, something in an old Mickey Rooney movie perhaps. 
    Into the Oxford English Dictionary. First reference defines "tiger" as "a large carnivorous feline quadruped," a word whose origin is lost in those unknowable countries to the East ("a foreign word, evidently oriental, introduced when the beast became known.")
     "Oriental" is a taboo word now, by the way. In case you didn't know.
     I kept reading.
     Bingo: "8. U.S. slang. A shriek or howl (often the word 'tiger') terminating a prolonged and enthusiastic cheer; a prolongation , finishing touch, final burst. "
    The first usage listed is in 1857, with plenty of mentions online among soldiers on both sides during the American Civil War. "Three cheers and a tiger" is almost a cliche by 1893, not to mention a contemptuous bit of American enthusiasm, as reflected in this remark from the London Daily Telegraph of Oct. 8, 1880, cited in the OED: "'Three cheers' in properly hearty unison, without the hysterical American supplement of 'tigers.'"
      Judging from descriptions elsewhere, the tiger itself is a kind of enthusiastic growl. 
      We are still a passionate people, lost in zeal. The election is proof of that. But somehow, I have a hard time picturing the kind of "hip-hip, hooray!" cheering that our great-grandfathers seem to have done, never mind capped by a yowl of inarticulate, feline joy. 
    How come? Why are verbal tigers following actual ones into oblivion; indeed, racing ahead of them and arriving at extinction first?
    Theories: Maybe it's just a matter of style. Maybe people are too busy taking cell phone pictures to give a few "rah rah rah, sis boom bahs." Maybe we've simply forgotten the practice, or are so atomized that the idea of doing anything in unison is alien to us. That last one sounds right.

    

‘The bad that is bad now’ began a long time ago

     When Dorothy Parker heard that Calvin Coolidge had died, she quipped, “How can they tell?”
     Which about summarizes my reaction to news that Donald Trump is wrecking the U.S. Postal Service.
     Without question, new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has hurt the USPS during his brief tenure, particularly by ending overtime.
     It’s also true that some changes he’s being blamed for, like pulling out high-speed letter sorting machines, were already in the works. 

Mack Julion

  
     “You cannot say horrible service in Chicago started this spring,” said Mack Julion, a Chicago postal worker for 23 years and president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 11. “Bad service in Chicago began at least a year ago and got worse during the pandemic.”
     An institution as enormous as the post office is like an ocean liner. It takes time to turn. DeJoy showed up in June.
     “The directives we hear are coming from his office have yet to hit the workroom floor in Chicago,” Julion said. “The bad that is bad now, that’s basically Chicago management. He can make it worse. You can’t cut overtime in Chicago because we don’t have enough carriers to deliver the mail. Here’s, that’s unthinkable.”
     And unworkable....

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Not anytime soon.

Chalked sidewalk plea, Northbrook, Aug. 20, 2020

      One common mistake among middling writers of opinion is to take whatever emotion they are experiencing and universalize it.  The viewpoint being aired is not their own particular private perspective. Oh no no no no. Nothing that singular. Nor are they responsible for airing this set of notions. Not at all. Rather, they are merely reporting and seconding common wisdom, merely conveying the vox mundi. 

     Haters do this a lot; Trump supporters often slip into the first person plural, like a tiny creature puffing up, trying to look bigger, adding heft—in their own minds if nowhere else—to their taunts. "We read your column and have to chuckle..." 

      I try not to do this, try not to conjure up imaginary friends and dragoon them to nod in approval behind me. Try not to fall into the trap of those, as Thoreau so neatly put it, "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.”

     So I'm reluctant to announce that, five months into the pandemic, the public has entered into a new, brittle phase. It would be easy to do so: tempers are short, eyes narrowed, teeth grinding. Maybe they are, generally. It sure seems that way.

     Or maybe it's just me. Maybe 150 days of ... sitting around and writing stuff, with occasional forays into the living world, have made me ... slightly punchy. Ground down and hopeless. Certainly welcoming other people's expressions of strain, such as the sidewalk art above. The frustration, the fed-up-ness, detected in others. Not schadenfreude. I'm not glad they are unhappy. But rather, I am glad not to be alone.

     Just saying that gives me pause. "Unhappy." It's such a whine. Such an unwelcome development. I glided through the first four months of pandemic on gratitude. April, May, June, July. Not fake gratitude either. Real, genuine, got-a-job, not-sick, kids-at-home thanksgiving. Dissatisfaction seemed a rude gesture to everybody in worse shape. The sick. The unemployed. The friends and loved ones of the thousands and thousands dead. That's unhappiness.

     This is ... well ... what? Blessing fatigue? I'm glad I didn't go down with the ship, glad I didn't drown with the others, glad there's still some water left in the canteen. But boy this lifeboat is starting to feel cramped. And the sun....

    Blessed. I know that. Blessed blessed blessed. I would say, brightly, "I'm having a good plague!" And I was. Both boys home, finishing up their spring semesters, baking bread and playing Bananagrams. "A stolen season!" I would say. My job, clicking along, as far as I can tell. 

     And while all that is still true .... maybe it's the looming election. What are the chances of Trump being defeated and going quietly? I'd say even odds for the first, and no way for the second.  So fairly certain some cataclysmic historic foundation shaking in six dozen days, as the worst human being to occupy the Oval Office grabs the curtains and shrieks as decent Americans try to drag him out and throw him onto the dustbin of history. 

    Reason enough alone to be grim. And it might not even work. There is no guarantee that these aren't the good days, before whatever horrific Sixth Act shocker comes lumbering in from the wings. Heck, Russian tanks, rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue—laugh, sure. But who could be surprised by anything anymore? 

    So yeah, the bright spin is slowing to ... the slightly glossy creeping rotation. Like hands of a clock—tick ... tick ... .... ... ... tiiiiick—the steady march of the calendar. What? Aug. 23? You're kidding me? How did that happen? What? Still 2020. Will this never end? 

    What do to about it? I tore out some drywall Saturday. Water damaged, from a leaky radiator. Needed to be done. Well, I can't go on vacation, but I can do this... I thought. It wasn't fun, but what is nowadays?

    

Texas Notes: Ernie

      It's Saturday, which means EGD's Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey checks in:

      Chances are you did not see the live mannequins posing in lucite boxes at Limelight, a club that stood for a few short years in Chicago in the 80s. Nor, some of you are thinking, would you have wanted to. 

      I, on the other hand, was in my late teens and felt like Madonna as my boyfriend and I got whisked inside as the friends of a 6’ tall model who worked the boxes. A goth woman dressed in black platform boots and a tiny black mini skirt stark against her milky white skin passed my boyfriend a little piece of blank paper. He somehow knew that it was her number in invisible ink. I missed the memo on that stealth technique so didn’t realize what had happened. He was so grandiose in his 21 year old glory that he bragged about it to me. I took the paper, ripped it up and threw it away. Ah, the good old days of being a club girl. My priorities were really in order.
     My then-boyfriend— I’ll call him Ernie— was in Chicago without proper immigration papers from Coahuila Mexico. After running away from home at the age of 18 (after my freshman year at DePaul) and telling my folks that I was moving in with a gay friend, I lived with Ernie and his two friends, also immigrants to Chicago. We drank tequila and grilled cheap cuts of beef on the grill on the back porch of our little apartment on Belmont near Damen. We played cards until the sun came up, watched TV, went to the park to throw balls around, and threw big parties. 

     When we met, Ernie told me that he was from Spain with a wealthy father and a 13 bedroom house. He was tall and had long black hair, and was quite the fashionista. I bought it, hook, line, and sinker until one day he said he had something to tell me. He asked me to sit down on the bed with him. Silently he passed me a black and white photo. I recognized him as a much younger man, and he was surrounded by a dozen more children and a plump and warm-looking woman, his mother. I’d listened to him talking to her on the phone for hours each week so many times that I understood every word he said to her, and I felt I knew her. Somehow I never learned to speak Spanish, to my regret. As I looked at the photo he revealed that the family I was looking at was his family in his home city of Piedras Negras. He had been afraid to tell me that he was born in Mexico. 
     One day Ernie came home in tears— the man who owned the retail store he worked for had died in a fire, right in the top level of the business. There was talk of suicide as the business was going under and the owner had his children to think about. It was a very, very sad day and took Ernie months to start to recover from. Thankfully, a man who owned a similar business a few neighborhoods to the south of us quickly gave Ernie a new job. There was a whole underground system that employed a crucial part of the backbone of our society. Sad that they had to live in fear while the oblivious shoppers happily purchased the large items folks like Ernie sold and loaded onto their backs and into trucks to be delivered to the homes of the privileged. These men had no days off, no PTO, no health insurance. They were grateful to be employed and they all sent most of their income back home to their families. Even Ernie at the young age of 21. This is the sole reason he moved to Chicago, to support his mother and siblings.
     I moved on from this relationship when I found out that Ernie had been dating another club girl; for six months by the time I discovered the truth. I was on the couch watching TV on a Saturday morning while Ernie was at work, and the landline rang. I answered. When she heard my voice the first question she asked was “who is this?” I said “Ernie's girlfriend.” She said “This is Ernie’s girlfriend.” 
      I got the essential details so he could not attempt to gaslight me— they had met at Avalon, a club on Belmont and Sheffield, when I was in the ladies' room. I remembered her. He and I had been admiring her style. I called for help and a nice lady named Dawn who I worked with at a luggage store on Michigan Avenue came right over to pack me up while I cried, and we got out of there. I had first called Ernie at work to tell him that I knew, and I was leaving. He rushed home and made it before Dawn and I had loaded up the last of my things into her car. He cried and pleaded and lied and told me he loved me. Good thing Dawn was there, a step-aerobics instructor in her spare time and quite tough. She shooed him away, ushered me into the car, and off we went. 
     Her roommate Paige met us there and they helped me settle into their spare bedroom in a rambling vintage apartment on Sheridan Road near Loyola , where they were students. The room had French doors that opened up onto a stone balcony, and a big, blue, soothing fish tank. We watched soap operas, hung out at Hamilton’s bar, spent nights in Barrington where some of their friend group lived, and I started to feel normal again. When Ernie came by with roses and tears they sent him away as I ran out the back door to the Lunt beach. 
     Years later I learned that Ernie and our roommates had not paid the last gas bill, and before I was able to turn the gas on at my new place the bill would have to be settled to the the tune of over $400. I knew where he was working and called the store. When I got him on the phone I demanded that he pay the bill. Within an hour he had paid it, in person, at an outpost on Milwaukee Avenue. I did not want anything more to do with him even though he tried although was already dating someone else. He said he’d leave her for me. I was too smart for that. Years later I somehow found out that he had married this lady, a cute Jewish woman who was a teacher and cheerleading coach at a high school on the northwest side. I hope he and his family in Chicago and in Mexico are doing well today.

‘Choose hope over fear,’ Biden says. We should believe him

     The paper asked me to write a short column for Friday, reacting to Joe Biden's acceptance speech at the end of the Democratic National Convention, with a hard deadline of 10 p.m. Thursday.
      So how does that work? Well, the key is assembling ahead of time. What is called "A-matter"—information that can be plugged into the column. Or in my case, preparing what I think of as a "holding column," a version that could go in, even if he didn't speak by 10 p.m., which I use as a framework.
      At 9 p.m., I plugged in information from the first hour, and then sat to see if Joe would start speaking before the witching hour. At 9:50 I phoned in: Could I have until 10:05? Sure. Biden began at 9:52, and luckily he weighted some of his most powerful remarks up front. At 9:55 p.m. I bolted upstairs, got the column together, wrote a headline and moved it at 10:02. Faster than I like to work, but what the circumstances required.  Then I went up to watch the rest of the speech. It was an exciting, hopeful, perfectly-measured address, and gave me hope that we just might drive our traitor-in-chief from office.
      "Trump isn't going to just roll over," I told my wife after. Now we face the cornered beast.

     ”Keep the faith, guys,” Joe Biden said early in the fourth and final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention on Thursday, talking to four union workers in a video.
     Biden later accepted his party’s nomination for president, promising, “I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”
     The whole night was a powerful, unexpected yet effective blend of religion and humor, of Common and John Legend singing “Glory,” and Julia Louis-Dreyfus hosting and delivering probably the sharpest line of the night:
     ”Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to help him get there.”

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