Something about Sweden

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     The mail has been filled with fine distinctions lately. This exchange doesn't require any explanatory set-up. 

Mr. Steinberg;
     Me Again, that Medill kid who sat behind you saying newspapers exist to preserve democracy.
     “I have no particular interest in seabirds, the Baltic Sea or Sweden,” you wrote recently.
     Well, you just knew that would come back to haunt you. I view it as your cleansed version of Trump’s “shithole countries.”
     What a slight on my ancestors!, who created a large part of the “built environment” you now park yourself in before spreading your carbon footprint on the Metra run to suburbia. Back in the days, WTTW says, Swedes built Chicago.  

     Then, your recent column on poetry and politics further revealed your anti-Swedish bias.
     How could you totally ignore a fellow Chicagoan: one of the greatest, a three-time Pulitzer winner (how many on your shelf?) named Sandburg who espoused social justice long ago. He had a few words to say about Lincoln.
     This is more than a mental fog arriving on little cat feet. I bet you’d be first in line to rename Sandburg Village in today’s cancel culture, claiming Sandburg had a thing against barbers.
     There must be some anti-Scandinavian prejudice at work here; otherwise how can you explain denial of a guy whose politics certainly would resemble yours.
     I won’t go into Walgreen and some of the other Swedish ancestry notables who graced your fair city. You’re probably a CVS shopper anyway.
     I bet you think Andersonville was named for Anderson Cooper and that you never set foot in Ann Sather’s restaurant, or the Kungsholm for that matter!
     Next, like those in San Francisco, I suspect you’ll call for the renaming of Leif Ericson Academy on the West Side, claiming he was no more than a Viking plunderer.
     Makes me think that “You Were Never in Chicago.”
     Thank God, or Odin, that WTTW can set you straight.
     I suggest sampling the Ann Sather sticky bun recipe provided below and then engaging in some remedial history while watching You Tube videos of Burr Tillstrom and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, another great Chicago Swede.
     I won’t go into a discourse about Sweden itself: You can freshen up on the Nobel prize, Volvo, Dag Hammarskkold, Olof Palme and Astrid Lindberg and the mystery writers Stieg Larsson etc.
     If I were you, I’d start with Vilhelm Moberg, “The Emigrants,” who wrote about the Swedish diaspora to the US, a topical subject today.
     Hard to understand that a fellow who makes a career on knowing Chicago was so dismissive of its Swedish heritage.
     Hope to see you June 22 at Swedish Days in Geneva.
     Stay healthy and don’t get carjacked. 

     Carl Swede

     Not his real name. The last name, that is. His real first name of course is Carl. I might have pointed out that I not only have read Dag Hammarskkold's diary, but also owned a Volvo. But, manfully resisting getting into particulars, I replied:

     Dear Mr. Swede:

     I hope you're joking. But in case you're not, I would draw your attention to the word "particular." I said, I have no particular interest in Sweden, which you, again assuming you are, alas, in earnest, manage to conflate into some kind of slight. As if you expect, no demand that everyone be especially interested in all things Swedish. Why? It's a big world. Why not allow Sweden the average amount of interest given to other Scandinavian countries?
     I think my point is made. Just in case you are serious—email is a cold medium, and it can be hard to tell—would you mind if I ran your letter on my blog? They might also tend to not give the Elongated Country its full measure of attention, and I believe it would enlighten and educate my readers.
     Thanks for writing.

     This is the point where people usually vanish. But Carl replied, and while you might want to bail out here and go about your business, cutting and pasting takes a moment, so I'll run the correspondence out, with his reply.

     Well, yes, you can run it with the following understanding.
     This probably will be the closest for me getting a byline in the Sun-Times (yes, I know it’s not part of the paper).

     My Dad, rest his soul in Evergreen Cemetery (87th & Kedzie) would be pleased. He was a Sun-Times reporter covering Stevenson and Eisenhower campaigns in the ‘50s and was an early Nieman Fellow.
     1) I’m not on Google Docs or whatever the others writing emails to you use. I don’t want my email address used, just sign it Carl Swede, please. No city.
     2) Yes 93 percent of it was written with my tongue in cheek, or aquavit in throat, but there is a kernel of truth that’s as topical as today’s news about Charles Blow calling for a new black diaspora to the South by blacks to build a critical political mass.
     Mine goes to the loss in Chicago of a vibrant ethnic community (Swedes) now all but forgotten, thus the sensitivity.
     Swedes, when the Chicago story is told, deserve more than your description of the “average amount of interest given to other Scandinavian countries.”
     Gone are the groceries, clubs, bakeries etc. replaced by a museum in an awkward Andersonville location with ever-diminishing connections to Swedish culture. What’s Swedish about Swedish Covenant Hospital?
     Where did all those Swedes go? You can say that about many ethnic communities.
     Like Blow’s nostalgic call, what would it take to bring them back, or those who ran the now-lost Jewish deli, Italian gelato shop or German bakery?
     What have we lost by this loss in our urban fabric? By keeping these communities, does that mean we’re keeping others out?
     Yet we all crave getaways to Holland, Mich., or Frankenmuth, or Solvang, Ca, or Bishop Hill to capture those cultures. But when we arrive, we find ourselves in a romantic time warp with tinsel having no connection to today’s culture and politics in Sweden or whatever country.
     If we were presenting truthfully Sweden today, we’d need a strong Islamic presence and a bow to the Chinese owner of Volvo.
      3) Thanks for pulling your finest Chuck Berry on me. He had “No PARTICULAR Place To Go.”
     4) If you do use it, I hope to invoke Swedish Mrs. Olson, remember her?, and that we can meet at your location, central or suburbs, for a cup of coffee. This isn’t an onerous request because I’m 2200 miles away, and won’t be there for many months.
     Now that you know that my contribution was partly in jest using you as an opportunity to vent, I hope the offer to run it still stands.
     It would go well with a photo of an unshorn Sandburg or Tillstrom with Kukla Fran & Ollie.
    Best,
    Carl Swede

Most important Black History Month ever

 

     Timothy Thomas Fortune was a New Yorker. But don’t hold that against him. Nobody’s perfect, and he faced challenges greater than ours: Born into slavery in Florida in 1856, he moved to New York, where he spoke and wrote — he edited Booker T. Washington’s autobiography.
     In 1890, Fortune gathered 141 delegates from 23 states to Chicago on “the free soil of Illinois” for the first meeting of the National Afro-American League, an early civil rights organization. Fortune gave an impassioned speech, trying to move his audience to action.
     “Apathy leads to stagnation,” he said. “It is a narrow and perverse philosophy that condemns as a nuisance agitators.” Those who stand up, he said, are in fact essential to establishing their people as proud, free, equal and valued American citizens.
     Fortune saw a different path than history took: He thought the violence America used against Blacks ought to be met in kind: “The arsenal, the fort, the warrior are as necessary as the school, the church, the newspapers and the public forum of debate,” he said. “It’s time to fight fire with fire.”
     Were I a teacher, I might ask my class to discuss whether Fortune’s strategy would have worked better or worse in the slow crawl toward attaining the rights the Constitution hints all Americans deserve.
     That isn’t why I picked Fortune to kick off Black History Month. But for what he said when listing the reasons for his organization. The first is: “The almost universal suppression of our ballot in the South.”

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Welcome to my office, belatedly

  
     If I had to summarize the lessons of the Trump era in one sentence, I would say, "The Trump years were a painful lesson in the toxic danger of self-absorption, though many people were too fixated on themselves to notice."
     I'm as guilty as anybody—okay, not as guilty as those willing to scrap our democratic traditions, their own physical well-being and truth itself in service of a monster who whispers sweet nothings in their ears. But still pretty damn self-centered.
     Though I'm aware of it, and try to fight it, and occasionally succeed. I like to think that counts for something.
     For instance, in October, James Finn Garner, leading "Inside for Indies," a laudable effort to drive folks to independent bookstores for the holidays, asked me to give a tour of my home office. He didn't have to ask twice (well, okay, he did, but that was more from disorganization and delay than reluctance. I was glad to do it, eventually). There is something enticing about showing off your space. I definitely remember being in 7th grade, navigating the difficulties of Roehm Junior High School, and there being a hip young teacher, Miss Jones, a big 1973 afro, and I remember thinking, "If only Miss Jones could see my bedroom, she'd understand."
     Anyway, I showed off my office, in a video I shot myself, and the result was suitably low production value that I didn't see need to share it beyond the leaf-in-the-wind of Twitter and the raise-a-finger-and-clear-your-throat-in-a-riot of Facebook. Leading, after only 10 weeks, to a grand total of 177 views on Facebook, which give you an idea of the kind of small ball I'm playing here. Frankly, I was glad not too many people saw it, between my skipping the punchline in the 55-word story I read (the title is "Published") to my godawful attempt to read a Louise Glück poem.
     But a regular reader objected. A while back, and again this past week, Jakash writes:

     I asked about this once and you replied that you were considering it. I'll ask one more time and then never mention it again.
     Half of the commenters to your EGD post yesterday remarked about the photos of your old S-T office which accompanied it. (I was one of them, but still...)
     I think they, and certainly some other folks, would be interested to see that video of your home (and months-long primary) office that you filmed for that independent-bookstore supporting online series a while back. Maybe you don't agree, or maybe you have another reason for not wanting to post it. Which is fine, needless to say.

     Aw heck, if it's important to you, sure. So, with apologies in advance, you want me nattering on about books and writing in my home office for a dozen minutes, you can find it here.

Texas notes: I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

"Unhappy Ghosts Crossing the Styx" by John Doyle (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Rationalists are challenged by accounts of the irrational, like today's post by Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey. I think I'll shut up—an underutilized skill set of mine—and let her tell her story. Life is a mirrored disco ball, and not every facet has to reflect you, or me.
 

    BMX biker boys wowed us with their tricks at Fountain Square in downtown Evanston during endless summer days. We’d bike the few miles from our north Chicago neighborhood to the charming suburban town square to watch them pop wheelies and do loop de loops in the air. It seemed they were able to fly. We were smitten. Sometimes they’d flirt and we’d swoon. We’d finally tear ourselves away and race down Asbury trying to get home by curfew, and pedaled extra fast when passing the haunted house.
     It was a sleek white modern structure with no windows that we could see, and an abstract twisted humanlike sculpture on the front porch that scared us with its strangeness. The building that just didn’t look like a house seemed to have been dropped from Miami or somewhere else far away, cold and unfeeling. It did not fit in amongst the old rambling wood framed homes with wraparound porches set back on huge yards peppered with stately ancient oak trees. We decided ghosts lived there.
     One day, many years later, a friend of a friend asked me to dog sit for her Labrador Retrievers on that same block. The dogs and I ran around loving each other like Kermie and Miss Piggy. We ran through fields and took day trips to Lake Michigan. We’d wear ourselves out and then fall into heavy sleeps that prepared us to do it all again the next day.
     One night I left the pups and went to a meditation event at the local yoga studio. My friend offered me a ride home on his bicycle, and I hopped on. When we got back to the house we lay in the grass, stargazed and told each other stories until we got sleepy. He biked off and I went inside.
     After walking the dogs I wanted to spend extra time with the puppy Ella, a golden beauty. She would soon be locked into her own room to sleep, as she was prone to eating sideboards and whatever else struck her fancy when no one was looking. The old guy, Beau— a big chocolate lab— would get to come upstairs and sleep on the floor of the bedroom with me.
     We were in the TV room at the front of the house, and I was petting the dogs and half watching a show. Suddenly, Ella ran out of the room into the living room and started barking furiously up into the chimney of the fireplace. I figured it was a bird or squirrel and coaxed her back in with Beau and me.
     Just then I heard footsteps upstairs. Not “are those footsteps?” but clear, loud steps that sounded like they came from leather shoes worn by a man. I looked out the window to see if maybe I was hearing something from the neighbor’s place; after all, these old wooden houses were sure to carry sound. But no, that was not it. The house next door was hundreds of feet across a lawn and there was no way I could hear steps from that house.
     The footsteps stopped, then started up again. Ella barked. Beau’s ears perked up. I froze. I called a friend and told him what was happening. He was concerned and offered to come over, but he lived all the way in Hyde Park. Besides, the footsteps had stopped and of course they were just my imagination (I told myself).
     I was tired. I put Ella into her room and Beau and I went upstairs to sleep. I’d almost forgotten about the footsteps by then.
     In the middle of the night I woke up. For some reason I was sitting straight up in bed, and Beau was standing on the bed— very odd since he never got up on the bed at all. He was staring at me, and it seemed he was trying to tell me something.
     I looked over to my left. There they were. A translucent, man and woman in old fashioned ecru and sepia tinged sleeping gowns. They were petite in stature and their faces were serious, stoic. They just looked at me calmly, and I looked at them, paralyzed. After a few moments they turned and left the room. The walked out of the door and down the hall. Somehow I knew they’d be heading up to the attic, with an entrance tucked up into the hallway ceiling.
     I went back to sleep. The next morning I stripped the bed and brought the sheets down to the basement along with the towels I’d used during my stay. The owners of the house were coming home so it was time to clean up and clear out. Ella came into the basement with me and barked into every corner. I felt unnerved but went through the motions. I noticed what looked like a tree trunk in the center of the old damp concrete basement. I realized that a main support beam was, in fact, a tree trunk that had not been sanded down. It was beautiful and also added to the feeling of rawness of the innards of this ancient house.
     I decided I’d go to a Tai Chi class that day, taught at a local church by a man from China. He was renowned in the are for his masterful skills, and a sought out teacher. When I got there he welcomed me, as he does all new students, and I started my practice. When we finished he told me that the class meets for two hours more, in the library of the church, to study Taoist philosophy and the roots of Tai Chi. I joined them.
     I felt like I was in the twilight zone when I realized the topic of the day. Ghosts. They talked of ghosts like they were real and shared teachings of why ghosts exist and how to help them if they appear to you. Apparently they are there because they are not resting, and you can welcome them and perhaps they will feel free to leave this realm once they feel appeased.
     I’m not saying I believe any of this; that was just what was being taught that day, and the synchronicity was incredible.
     A few months later my friend— the one who'd introduced me to Beau and Ella’s humans— told me that her 8 year old son had informed her “I will never sleep at ‘Johnny’s’ house again. This boy was friends with the kid who lived in my ghost house. He told his mom “I hear a woman and man talking all night up in the crawl space and they keep me up.”
     Years later I saw the couple who live in that house. I said to her “there’s something I want to tell you but I have been afraid to since I thought you'd think I was crazy.” “Oh,” she said. “You saw the ghosts. I’ve never seen them but they show themselves to visitors.”

Sea birds, QAnon and the quicksand of conspiracy

Stormy Sea, by Eduard Hildebrandt (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The common murre is a big seabird, a type of auk found, among other places, on an island in the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Sweden. The New York Times science section ran an article about those murres on Tuesday and I read it, even though I have no particular interest in seabirds, the Baltic Sea, or Sweden. It was lunchtime and the Science Times was right there.
     I’m glad I did. The article explains how biologists are eagerly exploiting the pandemic shutdown of global travel to see what effect the departure of humans has on ecosystems such as the murre colony at the Stora Karlsö nature preserve. The general perception when it comes to the natural world is humans = bad. But here “the sudden absence of tourists at Stora Karlsö during the pandemic set off a surprising chain reaction that wreaked havoc on the island’s colony of common murres, diminishing its population of newborn birds.”
     Oh no! What happened?
     The murres aren’t the only birds in the area. There are also white-tailed eagles. Researchers discovered that the eagles don’t like people — and who can blame them?— so they stay away when tourists tramp about. But with people gone, the eagles are emboldened, and their presence, swooping around, throws the ungainly seabirds off their egg rearing.
     I love that. Because it supports my belief that the world is complicated, interconnected and counterintuitive. Though if scientists found the opposite — with people gone, the murres are having a jubilee — I’d accept that, too. Because I’m an adjust-my-outlook-to-the-facts kind of guy.
     The world doesn’t always tickle your biases. That seems, to me, a given. Not everyone got the memo, though. Many swap this enormous, beautiful clockwork of endless complexity for a little ball and cup contrivance of their own dry imagining. Because its plop-plop makes them feel better about themselves.
     On Wednesday, a video surfaced of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon) harassing Parkland massacre survivor David Hogg.
     “Why do you use kids?” she yells. “Why kids?”

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Flashback 1996: It's Pointless to Shift Gears on State Street

401 N. Wabash, 2004

     As a rule, I look back with satisfaction on past columns. That might be a bad thing. But this one is an exception that makes me wince, a little. Not just that it was wrong. Or terribly bad. But clunky. Definitely a little clunky. 

     Then again, it was my very first regular column, published 25 years ago today, and I thought I would celebrate by putting my feet up  and posting it without allowing myself too much embarrassment. I got better, over time.

     I probably should try to say something about 25 years of  writing a news column in the Chicago Sun-Times. Hmmm... God it was fun. Yes, I think that about covers it.

     Nothing is sadder than a business that time has passed by. The typewriter repair shop, clinging to life. The 1950s era Chinese restaurant, with one customer at noon. The faded tea room in the basement of a once grand hotel, boldly announcing that ladies will no longer be required to wear gloves at the second seating.
     And State Street. The ailing address, turned into an odd hybrid pedestrian mall 17 years ago in a desperate bid to boost business, is now being changed back into a normal street.
     Not that it matters. Those with a financial or political stake will argue the problem with State Street can be fixed with narrower sidewalks and thornless honey locust trees. But who else thinks so? Who thinks that once traffic is allowed back, all those shoppers with money jammed in every pocket will suddenly skip Old Orchard and Woodfield and Oakbrook to make the journey to State Street, to shop at Wanda's Wig World or Cut-Rate Electronics? Who believes that?
     Mayor Daley, for one, apparently. He was at State Street Tuesday, speaking the right words —"dynamic," "rebirth," "boost," "economy" and "tourism"—and his pronunciation was beyond reproach.
     That's his job. Maybe he got back to City Hall and laughed his peculiar Poppin' Fresh tee-hee-hee giggle and said: "Well . . . it's neva gonna work . . . nope nope nope. Neva neva neva."
    Probably not. This is the same guy who is constantly dreaming up giant construction projects —casino mini-cities and transportation hubs and celebratory gateways—vast edifices that would make Ramses II blush.
     State Street is small potatoes, on the pharaonic scale. Perhaps that is why it is actually coming to fruition. There is nothing grand to what is being called the "de-malling" of State Street. Nor original. Nearly a decade has passed since Oak Park and many other communities across the country got rid of their pedestrian malls, attempting to cure the selfsame economic slumps that inspired construction of the malls in the first place.
     These things run in cycles. We can fully expect the city to take an even more frayed State Street, albeit one with Kentucky coffee trees, and re-mall the remaining wreckage, perhaps by order of Mayor Pippen, sometime around the year 2015.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm not mourning the loss of the State Street mall. It was nowhere near as historic as that Mies van der Rohe staircase in the Arts Club and twice as ugly. OK, three times.
     Unlike the Lake Street mall in Oak Park, which was beautiful, with oaks and fountains and benches. Merchants complained that residents were enjoying the parklike setting instead of going into their stores. So the street was put back in. Sixty percent of Oak Park residents opposed the change, but the merchants were delighted.
     "Tremendous," says Bob Proce, owner of the Razzle Dazzle costume shop on Lake Street. "Fabulous. It worked really well. Access is easy. If a guy wants to park his car, he can."
     This would seem to bode well for State Street. But, in a perverse twist, cars will not be allowed to park there.

   "No parking on the street, no standing—that same red city sign," said Sonya Griffin of the city Transportation Department. "That will be enforced."
     Lack of on-street parking may not be so bad, in itself. There's no parking on Michigan Avenue, either, and it still works, except for Stuart Brent. But Michigan Avenue has glamor— Tiffany's and Neiman Marcus and all that. Even if the various North Loop theater renovations actually succeed, how will that help stores during the day? How much glamor will 1920s streetlights create if they are in front of the same two-suits-for-$99 discount outlets lining the street today, with their flashing strobe lights and blaring loudspeakers? That'll pull 'em in from Wheaton.
     The mayor should know this. But Daley has usually been off base when pushing to build his pyramids. He fought for casino gambling even as evidence mounted in New Orleans and Atlantic City that casinos are a civic disaster. Daley similarly got whupped on the Third Airport by a bunch of Southeast Siders who outmaneuvered him, inspired only by the prospect of their homes being turned into Runway Seven.
     Perhaps the problem is genetic. Early last week PBS aired its two-hour special on Daley's father, Richard J., who was very good at commanding underlings but not so good at reacting to social change. He not only constructed the high-rise hells that plague the city to this day, but pushed through the expressways that encouraged downtown workers to flee to suburbia in the first place.
     Daley, the younger, claimed he didn't watch the program, an astounding act of resistance on his part. Were PBS dissecting my dad in prime time, I'd probably find a moment to tune in.
     Maybe he didn't want to see all those clips of his father in a hard hat looking over the construction of famous skyscrapers. Maybe that explains State Street. Daley is just so sick of being thwarted in his grandiose projects that he wants to build something, even if it is just a bunch of planters and subway kiosks. Not quite the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. But then we live in less heroic times, and a mayor has to grab for glory where he can.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 28, 1996

Dilemma at heart of sex abuse claims

 

“No one ever had a bad word to say about him.”

In late May, 2015, it was revealed that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert had sexually molested boys he coached in high school wrestling. The media descended on his hometown of Yorkville, Illinois. Those who knew him were shocked and supportive.

“He was a fantastic mentor.”

Hastert was charged, not with the abuse itself, but for structuring payments to silence the abused. Which isn’t quite a signed confession. But close.

“I would have known for sure. Something like that we would have jumped on right away.”

Only the good people of Yorkville didn’t know. Or knew and didn’t jump on it right away. Hastert admitted to molesting children and went to prison for 13 months.

“I hope it’s not true.”

Which sums up the view of those who know and respect Father Michael Pfleger, including myself, as the longtime firebrand priest of St. Sabina’s faces a pair of brothers who accuse him of abuse 45 years ago. 

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