My opponent is a fiend who likes Joe Biden

Mayim Bialik is the latest host of “Jeopardy!”

    My routine is fairly fixed. I wake up, write something, walk the dog, eat something, water the flowers, write some more. A little exercise, maybe run an errand and it’s time for dinner. Not what I would call a life of thrill and triumph. Maybe even a rut. Even so, it’s my rut, shuffled by me, and I’m content enough. It not only could be worse, it will be.
     At least there isn’t a lot of television. Sometimes, if my wife is working downtown, I’ll sneak in half an hour of “Peaky Blinders,” a BBC program about a violent crime family in the 1920s. There’s a quality about Irish actor Cillian Murphy, a wide-eyed, expressionless stare that is endlessly satisfying to watch. Another numb, shell-shocked witness to numb, shell-shocked times.
     My mother, however, is in the hospital, and for the past two weeks I try to drive there every day, sit at the foot of her bed, and make small talk. Wednesday I was there at 3:30, and she announced it was time for “Jeopardy!”
     I don’t have to explain what “Jeopardy!” is, right? A popular game show where answers to questions on a range of subjects are given to three contestants, who try to provide the questions that evoke them. “Jeopardy!” debuted on television when I was 3, and I’ve been watching it ever since, when somebody else watches. “Let’s watch ‘Jeopardy,’” is not a thought I’ve ever had.
     Since I’m always with company, I like to blurt out the answers to show off how smart I am. There is something very circle-of-life about watching it with my mother now. We watched it in the mid-1960s, hosted by Art Fleming, on our black-and-white Zenith. And we’re watching it still, on a flat screen TV, almost 60 years later. That’s sweet, right? Or horrible. Or both.
     This being primary season, most commercials were a Punch and Judy Show of Republican candidates having at each other. Their opponents are all liars and scoundrels and, worse, closet Democrats, either on their payroll, or harboring the secret shame of having voted for Joe Biden. Montages of awkward photos narrated with frozen contempt.

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Is that the Second Coming or the First?

     All religions are nonsense given a somber patina by the span of centuries and the endorsement of millions. I get that. All have some useful moral precepts they pretend to endorse — treat people kindly, don't kill folks, etc. — that are perfectly fine unadorned and on their own. But believers feel obligated to dress up their basic morality with the most rococo impossibilities and time-killing ritual imaginable. Angels. Prayer. Heaven. Miracles. That kind of thing.

     And I understand that any hope or suspicion that my own team might be slightly less ridiculous than the norm is mere self-love and chauvinism. Jews believe their own forms of silly, tedious spoodle: the obsessive waste of keeping kosher. The years spent learning an arcane language like Hebrew. Debating the Talmud. 

     But at least those are the familiar, acceptable tranches of gibberish.  There is something extra disturbing when a faith conjures up something new and ridiculous.

      Not that the tendency of Lubavitch-Chabad Hasidic Jews to announce that their late leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is the messiah is anything new. Ever since he died in 1994, and his flock eagerly awaited his resurrection (which, spoiler alert, did not happen, yet) the sense that he has come to usher in a new age is embraced by many — Joseph Newfield claims most — Chabad Hasidim.  

     Non-fanatical Jews are either ignorant of this, or embarrassed and try to pretend it doesn't exist. Even the Lubavitch often downplay the Schneerson-as-savior bit. They generally like to present a benign, earnest face to the world, as joyous cheerleaders of Judaism, hoping to move the world toward salvation with each tiny act of religious obligation, whether pressing weak tea Jews to wear tefillin and pray, an imposition I have written about, or encourage Jewish women to light Sabbath candles, or distributing matzo at Passover.  To be honest, I find them inoffensive and admire their ability to conceal the contempt they must feel for supposed Jews who don't do any of the obligations they consider essential for living a good life. To add to those 613 commandments of Judaism a 614th, to believe that a cleric dead more than a quarter of a century is the second coming of Christ is a step too far, and off-brand for them, so they suppress it.

     Which might be why true believers are now opting for a more in-your-face approach. The world is becoming less restrained, more vigorous about imposing one's private fantasies on others. Why should Jews be any different? I saw these mini-posters slapped on Walk signs on the East Side of Manhattan during my recent visit. As with all expressions of zealotry, you have to wonder what impact the fervid perpetrators hope to have. Do they really expect any Jew not already on their bus to see these little posters and think, "He is? Oh good! About time." Perhaps it's more an expression of power: we're here, we actually believe this enough to march around Manhattan with stepladders and posters and paste. Deal with it. 

      Or not. I truly don't mind that people embrace an enormous spectrum of spiritual hoo-ha. It makes them feel better. Life is a long time, laden with boredom and tragedy, and it helps to have a pretty story to glance at when the world gets ugly. It's a shame they can't believe it quietly, and must try to wangle their ridiculous notions in the faces of those simply trying to get down the street unmolested. But such is the world. Yes, claiming this guy is the savior — if he is, then why aren't we saved, huh? What's the hold-up? — is part of the ugliness, not part of the relief that faith can offer. But then, that's me. And the world isn't all about me. As the years go by, I'm more and more certain of that. It's a shame religions couldn't push that concept more. That's a good word worth spreading around. 

What are offices for?

     “We should have both worn babushkas,” I whispered to my wife, after the guard scanned our IDs, took our photos and directed us toward the bank of elevators, one already open, waiting to whisk us to the 39th floor. “I should be carrying a chicken.”
     Well, not both. I was being succinct. My wife’s hair would be in a kerchief, but I would wear some large, sincere peasant hat. Plus a scattering of straw on our clothes.
     “That’s how I felt when my parents came to see my office,” my wife remarked.
     Of course she did. Most kids do. While not as culturally prominent as traditional rites of passage, like communion or commencement, the parental office visit is no less real. The pivot between the first quarter of life — childhood, education — and the subsequent half century of adult employment.
     Though like everything else, the Mom and Dad Inspection Tour takes on new meaning thanks to COVID-19, and our often depopulated workplaces.
     It’s less traumatic, for starters, when your new colleagues are mostly virtual. There is nobody to cringe before. Our inability to embarrass our unflappable older son, even a little, sapped some of the fun.
     “These are my parents!” he called across the polished wood and granite vastness, to a group of well-scrubbed young people.
     “Nice to meet you!” one young man shouted back, though we hadn’t met, or even broken stride.
     “He’s my summer associate,” our boy explained.
     I’ve been in my share of swank law firms, with glass conference room walls that turn opaque at the touch of a panel. But this joint, in New York’s financial district, took the prize. It had the quiet immensity of a pharaoh’s tomb, or an unused set for the movie version of an Ayn Rand novel directed by Fritz Lang.

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Bottomless

 

     Our son works in the Financial District in Lower Manhattan. So when we visited him last week, we got a hotel room next to the new One World Trade Center, steps away from the site of the old, and of course we paused to contemplate the 9/11 Memorial, "Reflecting Absence."  

     If you've never been, the footprint of the north and south towers of the old World Trade Center have been preserved, two squares formed by bronze parapets, listing the names of the 2,983 people who died that day in the terrorist attacks, plus those lost in the 1993 precursor bombing.
    Water cascades 30 feet down each side — the largest manmade waterfall in North America— and in each pool, what I consider the brilliant stroke, is "a smaller, central void," in the words of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Those two square pits you can't see the bottom of, a perfect physical evocation of endless grief after profound loss. You yearn to see a bottom, but there is no bottom. Only emptiness.

    The design, by the way, was done by an Israeli-American architect, Michael Arad, his work picked out of more than 5,000 submissions. While not generally a fan of memorials, some events are so enormous, our humanity demands it. Which makes me wonder how we will commemorate COVID. Arad has proposed something interesting to honor the 50,000 New Yorkers who died of COVID: a "floating sanctum" at the bottom of the Central Park Reservoir.  It would only appear when the water is lowered for maintenance. Most of the time it would be out-of-sight, which is fitting, since even the most terrible events submerge in our consciousness. Time heals whether we want it to or not.

     “I liked the idea that for one week each year, you could access a place in the city that at other times is just a submerged memory,” Arad told Architectural Digest. “The Reservoir exhales, the level of the water sinks, and the dam appears so you can traverse it on foot.”

     I imagine, on that one week a year, it'll draw quite a crowd. For a long time. But not forever. Nothing is forever. Not even grief.

O (You Aren’t Fleeing to) Canada

Canadian cultural institution

The world’s a fine place and worth the fighting for. — Ernest Hemingway

     Every day that Americans agonize over abortion, decry the war in Ukraine or rake their fingers bloody over the brick wall of guns is another 24 hours closer to the day Republicans try to steal the 2024 presidential election, with better odds this time. More pliant secretaries of state. More true believers waiting in state legislatures. A hyper-partisan Supreme Court.
     And as much as I’m concerned about women’s rights, Eastern European atrocities, school massacres, etc., those issues pale compared to the prospect of the United States no longer being a functioning democracy. Where a candidate like Donald Trump can lose, as he did in 2020, by 7 million votes — quite a lot, really — yet insist he won and, far worse, be supported by an enthusiastic mob of leering lackeys and blind bootlickers.
     With that in mind, I posted on Facebook a chilling column by the Washington Post’s Max Boot. “We’re in danger of losing our democracy. Most Americans are in denial.”
     The very first comment ended: “The outlook is bleak. I’m going to study a move to Canada.”
     Again with the Canada.
     The “Ho for Canada!” crowd has to realize they represent a vein of weak, selfish, cowardice that is among the worst qualities of the Left, almost as bad as the subservient, anti-democracy terror that causes supposedly free Americans to sprawl before seditionists like medieval peasants groveling at the passing of a nobleman on horseback.

There are many potato diseases in Canada.

     First, have you been to Canada? It isn’t free; it’s empty. A nation a little larger, in area, than the United States with 1/9th the population. California has more people.
     Second, if the point is we are trying to avoid letting the United States devolve into the white fantasyland of Republican dreams, well, some 80 percent of Canada is white. I’m surprised Republicans aren’t mooning about escaping there. The national health care system must put them off.
     Yes, I understand there’s a “Why-didn’t-they-get-out-when-they-could?” dynamic. All those good German Jews who stuck around as the nation went insane in the 1930s, hoping for the best when they should have been on the next boat out of Bremen.
     But we aren’t anywhere near that, and if Democrats can find a spine, maybe we never will be. Pre-emptive surrender is not a success strategy. The United States isn’t 1938 Germany. It’s 1931. There is still time to avoid the catastrophe. But that takes work. And people.

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New York City is quiet

     On Wednesday, the day we arrived in New York City, we joined 3,432,047 other riders on the subway, according to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, or 58.2 percent of the ridership on a comparable day before the pandemic struck in early 2020. 
      As it happened, that was the last time we were in the city, Valentine's Day, 2020, and you could feel a palpable difference. It was a little quieter, the streets a little emptier. We always got a seat on the subway. Though accuracy demands that I point out the above picture was taken after boarding at the World Trade Center stop of the No. 1 train—near the beginning of the line. It got busier soon thereafter. But never too busy.

    I don't want to overstate the case. New York isn't a ghost town. Katz's Deli was jammed when we hurried there for our welcome-to-New-York hot pastrami sandwich and chocolate egg creme. (And what does a hot pastrami sandwich cost at Katz's? $25. In its defense, the sandwich must have had a pound of warm, juicy pastrami—we split it—and was worth every penny).
     The High Line, a hiking trail salvaged from abandoned elevated train tracks, was certainly populated, losing a bit of charm since we first went there, after it had just opened. "It's more crowded than the street," I groused. Still, an amazing amenity, and good to see it so popular. We walked the entire route.
     We did some fun things I can recommend. My son popped for the "Chaos at Hogwarts" virtual reality experience at Harry Potter New York. I agreed, but reluctantly—I couldn't imagine it being worthwhile. But it really was. You don VR goggles, a backpack, wristlets and foot monitors. The experience plunks you in the middle of the Hogwarts world, the VR headset augmented by fans and dripping water and vibration as you walk gingerly through the castle and finding yourself contemplating vertiginous vistas, the shifting staircases and dining hall and such. You have a wand, and help battle various creatures. Someday we'll occupy our movies as they unfold around us.   

     We went to the Guggenheim, not expecting much—we hadn't gone in years, and the main show highlights Vasily Kandinsky, who always left me cold. He hadn't improved, but we appreciated his twee, colorful paintings. And there was an unexpected treat, a show "Wearing Masks" by British artist Gilliam Wearing, on the issue of identity, that was challenging and weird and quite enjoyable.
     But the best part was walking the streets, seeing the buildings and the people. The murder rate here is far lower than Chicago's—I guessed a third; it's actually a sixth. There just isn't the sense of menace you can feel on some streets in Chicago, though that might have been visitor's naivete. I hesitate to say it: but New York feels safer than Chicago. 

Wilmette notes: My Corona

     When I heard that our Northern Suburban Chief Caren Jeskey had come down with COVID, my first thought was: "Great! I can't wait to read her take!" But I suppressed that thought, and came up with a better one: "Oh no! I hope you're okay." Then slyly hinted: "At least you know what your topic will be for Saturday." She did not disappoint. Me, I'm jamming into subway cars and packed delis in New York City. So my COVID diary is no doubt next (And yes, the title is meant to be an echo of "My Sharona.")

By Caren Jeskey

     That dreaded moment when you know you have it. 

     Monday night, you're laying in bed, and your throat feels funny in a way never experienced before. It seemed that the mucus was especially clingy. Droopy Dog tired.
     You’ve been running away for over two years, successfully evading the evil beast, yet it turns out your days were numbered. (I am a big fan of talking about myself in the second person when I want to deny reality. It isn't me this horrible thing is happening to; it's this other person).

     When I woke up in the morning I tested myself using the cheek, throat, and nose swab method I learned from this smart Canuck video. As I squeezed four drops of the sample into the little hole on the testing strip, the pink liquid made its way from the solid control line towards to the T line. I was accustomed to the liquid permeating the rest of the strip without a 2nd line, but not this time. The second line was as dark as the first. I was positive for COVID-19. After 15 minutes it was still as clear as day. Same went for the 2nd test I took.
     Well, shit.
     I made the first available appointment at Physicians Immediate Care on Golf, my whole family’s go-to place for rapid antigens and PCRs. The first test, the antigen, came back negative. I asked the nurse to please do it again, using the 3 step process, and she balked. How odd. Even though it’s best practice, seems our medical system is not there yet.
     Hey Canada, you’re looking better and better and better. If I could only find a way there. Forever. (Editor's note: for a stinging rebuke to this line of thinking, see Neil Steinberg's column this Monday).

     She said they’d do a rapid PCR, which was fine by me. The PA came in with my official “You’ve Got COVID” paper. I felt I had failed in a huge way.
     I’d gone to a concert at SPACE on Evanston Thursday evening. I kept my mask on and was not close to others, except my friend, but I had a long conversation with a group of people outside after the show. I’ve learned that Coachella became a super spreader event. We are not safe, even outdoors, and especially the way I was behaving. I’m sorry. I stood too close and felt too comfortable with fellow humans, knowing that the surge was here. I’m not sure why I did that. I’m embarrassed. It may be the biggest mistake I've ever made.
     Or maybe it was this? I went to a family gathering on Saturday night, the first once since last summer when things were safer. I masked the whole time, with the exception of three or four quick photos. No one else was masked, except the family members I’d driven there with, and they stayed outdoors the whole time. My first thought was “did I give it to them” in the car to and from the party? That is, if I'd been exposed Thursday. That thought was just too much. So far they are in the clear, and if you pray please pray for them. If you hope, please hope for them. Let's all wish each other well.
     As I type this, the continual coughing segment of the adventure has begun. Folks I know have gotten pneumonia and lengthy bronchial coughs post-virus. A friend sent me a YouTube video about how to use certain stretches to keep the lungs in better shape while trying to force mucus up and out. There are variations that can be done without getting down on the floor, and Adrienne is my favorite YouTube yogini for floor work.
     I have followed public health guidelines and have not left my property since I was diagnosed. (Burns me up to think about the people I know who have been as reckless as flying just a few days after being diagnosed and are not following recommended quarantine and isolation guidelines in general.
     It occurred to me that I have the disgusting thing that has killed at least 1 million people in the U.S., including my former landlord Angelo back in April of 2020. A sobering, yet surreal, thought.
     I spent Tuesday sobbing on and off about the children in Uvalde. As the facts present, all I can think is “many so called ‘good people’ with guns could not stop one 18 year old with guns.” The Good Guys With Guns myth makes me want to vomit. And scream. And we have to be very careful. Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz have eyes on the Oval Office. God help us all.