Book bullies

"The Board of Censors Moves Out," by Eugène Delacroix (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     When Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville announced June 9 that someone is plucking books from their displays and hiding them in the store, they didn’t specify what sort of books are being taken.
     I assumed the stashed volumes were books about queer youth and trans acceptance and such, the segment of human behavior currently singled out for special harassment by those who feel entitled to establish limits on human nature that maximize their own comfort.
     But that isn’t the kind of book being targeted.

     “Any book with a cover showing a person of color on it gets covered up,” explained Ginny Wehrli-Hemmeter, director of events and marketing at Anderson’s, 123 W. Jefferson St., one of the largest independent bookstores in the Chicago area.
     About 50 books have been found tucked behind other books. Police have been notified; a man, caught in the act, was confronted.
     Nor was my next thought — that this must be a freakish anomaly — correct. Can people really be offended by the sight of a children’s book about Jackie Robinson? In 2022? This has to be the handiwork of some lone-wolf, west-suburban hater indulging in repairable acts of racism, I figured.
     Sadly, it is not.

     While other large independent bookstores in and around Chicago — the Book Stall in Winnetka, Powell’s in Hyde Park — do not report similar vigilante mischief, it is endemic at public libraries around the country.
     “The books overwhelmingly being targeted deal with the lives and experiences of LGBTQ persons,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the office for intellectual freedom of the Chicago-based American Library Association.
      But it is by no means limited to them. The lives of Black persons also are a particular focus, she added, “under the false idea that books about Black people are some kind of ‘critical race theory.’ There is a lot of rhetoric that’s being used to vilify these materials. It’s truly tragic.”

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Making coffee

   

      Practice makes perfect.

     And after uncounted mornings of making the coffee, measuring the scoops of Major Dickason's Blend beans into the grinder, filling water into the coffee maker while it grinds, washing the pot and filter holder, setting the filter in place, I've got it down to a science, achieving the steaming pot of Peet's perfection with the minimum of motion. Efficiency of action. Uniformity of result.
     Until something goes wrong. Every now and then, I'll leave the ground beans in the grinder and turn the coffee maker on, realizing my mistake only when I take a sip of hot dirty brown water. Or pour ground coffee into the grinder. Or, as in this case, skip the grinding part and dump the whole beans directly into the coffee maker — the result, I believe, of that bag of ground coffee (Dunkin' Donuts Hazelnut. My wife likes it. What can I do? It's her house too). My theory is, sometimes using ground coffee throws off my game. Introduces confusing variables into my finely tuned coffee system.

     And at first you feel stupid. Gaze at the mistake with bovine incomprehension. Ah gee, I do this every day. I must be slipping. And then, hurrying to fix it, you realize, if you do something long enough, eventually you'll make a mistake. That's human nature.

     Here being a writer helps. Because no matter how good you are, mistakes are always made in writing, and you have to check for them, because they're always there. As I like to say, "Too right is two air." Whoops, what I mean is, "To write is to err." But that's true for life too. Don't beat yourself up over the mistakes. Correct them and move on. Enjoy the coffee, extra steps and all.

Answering dad’s questions

Robert Steinberg, at home in Colorado in February.

     “This is a beautiful house,” my father says, sitting in our living room, looking around. “Everything is so perfect.”
     Our house is 115 years old and not at all perfect. More like a tottering jumble. The aluminum siding is dinged and piebald. Paint peels off the radiator in front of him. There are gaps in the scarred floorboards at his feet. The window panes are loose. One stairway banister snapped in half and is inexpertly repaired.
     “Thank you Dad,” I say. “We like it.”
     I don’t argue with my father, don’t correct him. He can observe the same thing, or ask the same question, over and over, and I reply in a steady, patient voice.
     “Thanks Dad. It’s home.”
     I first noticed him doing it 10 years ago, when we were visiting my parents in Colorado. Dad got stuck on a book coming out.
     “This book, how long is it?” he’d say.
     “Two hundred and fifty-six pages,” I’d answer.
     Ten minutes later.
     “And this book you’ve written. How long is it?”
     “Two hundred and fifty-six pages, Dad,” I’d answer.
     In February, we moved him and mom here. He started in on a new question.
     “When do you think you’ll retire?”
     “Never, Dad. They froze our pension in 2009.”
     “Are you retired?”
     “No Dad, not in the usual sense of the word.”
     One benefit of this repetition is that I can play with my responses.
     “Do you think you’ll retire soon?”
     “... maybe in a couple years.”
 

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Suburban mystery

     The Chicago Botanic Garden is a 10 minute drive from our home in the leafy suburban paradise. A tremendous boon that I've written about here many times. Maybe too many, but you get what you pay for.
      It isn't the only stunning natural expanse we have at our disposal. There is one even closer that I seldom write about because ... well, I'm not sure why. The Trail through Time is itself a wonder, with fields of prairie grasses and large oaks, plus a soccer field and a playground and a large oval around a reservoir. It reminds me of the Valemount trail by my parents' old place in Boulder, except for the Techny Tower, looming in the background. If you haven't been inside, find a way — go to one of their occasional concerts. It's like a European cathedral.
     Friday, after an indulgent birthday dinner of a jumbo char kosher hot dog and fries from Little Louie's, eaten in the downtown park — more natural beauty — we walked off our sins on the trail. By the soccer field, I noticed this tree.

    "Is that a balloons?" my wife said.

    We decided it was a ball. Which raised the question of how it got there? A powerful but misdirected kick? An intentional insertion? Did a kid climb the tree? It's really far in there.
     "If I were a kid, I'd be throwing baseballs at that until it came down," my wife said.

     Kids nowadays, no initiative.

     Or heck, maybe they had, maybe an hour had been dedicated trying to get the thing down. Failed attempts to climb the trail. Baseballs thrown in vain. We'll never know. We dedicated less than a minute to the question before moving on. 

Erecting a billboard for the blind

    

     Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the specifics of the reality being ignored hardly matter.
     That’s a key to understanding what’s going on right now, but not something that gets stated plainly. So I’ll say it again:
     Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the specifics of the reality being ignored hardly matter.
     Remember when Donald Trump bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote? An uncharacteristic thing for him to say, in that it was true. But subsequent events bear him out, and we free of his mesmeric influence should never forget it. He doesn’t lead a party, but a cult. If your followers believe in you no matter what you do or say, then they are acolytes, not citizens. It’s faith: God is good no matter how many landslides He sends, sweeping away the village school. Ditto for Trump. He is their god. They certainly adore him like a deity.
     The facts presented are clear. After Trump lost the 2020 election, he tried to hold onto power by coining the lie that he had actually won, based on nothing but bluster, then bullied and pressured others to either believe him or act as if they did. He knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t care. Nor did his followers. When Trump could not marshal enough compliant officials to reject the votes cast by the American people, he summoned a mob to Washington D.C. and set it on the Capitol at the exact moment Congress was certifying the election. It was an attempted coup.
     The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol began public hearings Thursday. While part of the country tuned in, aghast and enthralled, a significant segment dismissed it out of hand, ahead of time, reflexively, easily, the way they smirk at climate change and shrug off gun violence. Fox News didn’t even carry Thursday’s hearing.

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The race to lose to J.B. Pritzker

   

     Look at a map.

     Illinois is an oasis of blue state humanity in a desert of red state neo-fascism. Here, women's rights, immigrants welcome and science respected. There, the Handmaid's Tale, build-the-wall and science is what the most conservative parents in a school say it is.
     So despite the mega-millions pumped into the Illinois gubernatorial race, I haven't really been paying close attention, assuming that whoever the Republicans toss up against him, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has to be re-elected. He battled COVID smartly. He worked with the rebarbative Lori Lightfoot the best anyone could. It hardly matters which Republican neophyte he defeats.
     I do have a particular distaste for Richard Irvin, the Aurora mayor and ventriloquist's dummy sitting on the knee of Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois, opening and closing his wooden yap while $50 million worth of advertising spews out. Irvin tarred opponents for voting for Joe Biden without ever revealing who he voted for—not wanting to be outed as a former Democrat, or damned as a MAGA wannabe. Wanting to both lure Southern Illinois's considerable population of MAGA zombies to lope in his direction while not repelling off what old style conservative Republicans remain and aren't really paying attention.

     Then Bailey got on my radar with a single word. He will stop the "indoctrination" of our children. What we used to call "teaching history," but now Republicans are attempting to slur with their dubious practice of attaching a bad word to something unobjectionable, the way gay individuals wanting to marry each other are described as homosexuals pushing "an agenda."

     I'll say it again. No nation is great because everything they did is a chest-swelling jubilee. Part of being a truly great nation is the ability to confront reality, good and ill. Meanwhile, part of being a totalitarian state is fear that the truth will undo you and must be suppressed. Thus, in an undeniable irony, it is the courageous patriot who will stare unashamed at the full, true, sometimes awful history of any country, and the cringing traitor who insists it must be presented as an unbroken triumphal procession, who passes laws trying to ensure that his children pass through the educational system and end up as ignorant as himself. 

      Give Bailey credit: it works. Ya gotta put the slop where the pigs can get at it.

      A Sun-Times/WBEZ poll found Bailey leading Irvin by almost 2-to-1—guess money can't buy everything. Panicking, Irvin rolled out the tagline, “Cut the fat. Clean up Springfield." This is not only a despicable reference to Pritzker's girth, but a sign of typical Republican oblivious, since after years of austerity budgets, there really isn't much fat left to cut. What are they going to take the old meat cleaver to? Social services? Ah, hahahahahahahaha. 

      I don't want to minimize the importance of a Democratic governor. As the Republican Party becomes the party of sedition, state governors play a key role in either preserving or traducing free elections and a safe vote. Whether the GOP elephant, ravaged by the Trump virus, ends up with either Irvin or Bailey on its back, we have to keep a clear eye on what this race is about: preserving Democratic fact-based, human-oriented policy against creeping Trumpism and fascist fantasy and suppression. Pritzker will win by presenting who he is, while Bailey or Irvin will try to win by pretending to be what they're not.

Parson Weem's Fable by Grant Wood
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth

Wilmette Notes: Irish Eyes

     As it happens, there are a few cans of Guinness in my refrigerator right now, leftovers from the Hanukkah party. Hopefully, by summer's end, I'll find some guest to press them on. The fine Irish stout, and the men and women who serve it, have inspired many a tale, and prompt today's essay by our Wilmette Bureau Chief. 

By Caren Jeskey

     Neil shared on his Facebook page this story by Maureen O’Donnell about a legendary Chicago bartender John Colgan, who died recently at the age of 63.
     In the piece, columnist Maureen O’Donnell pointed out that “Mr. Colgan had given up drinking, ‘as it interfered with his passion for music and the need for a clear head in order to pursue his ambition of recording a CD.’” He was known for regaling patrons with beautifully sung Irish ballads as he poured creamy-topped pints of Guinness.

     I am grateful that the thought of drinking a Guinness does not sound good to me today. On many a heavy drinking day in the 90s, my friend Jayne and I routinely closed the 4 a.m. bar Raven’s, on Clark just south of Fullerton. Sometimes bantering with the bartender Jimmy was our night out, but more likely we’d have shown up at one or two in the morning after the shenanigans of the earlier part of the night had lost their luster.
     We’d belly up to the bar in jean skirts and cowboy boots, and chain smoke cigarettes. Drinks miraculously appeared, one after another, sent over by drunken patrons who must have wondered where all their money went as they sobered up the next day.
     When I read about John Colgan I remembered what it was like to have Jimmy in our lives. He seemed sober, but I’m not sure if he was. He was warm and kind, and we felt that we were coming home when we got to Jimmy’s bar. We always felt safe, and I believe we were. Coming and going from there was a different story, I’m sure. It’s amazing what we — well, some of us — can survive, if we are lucky, when we are foolhardy.
     I have a friend who’s a big drinker with a red nose who lives in Ireland, a musician of course. Whenever he comes to town we demand that he break out his guitar and lead us through the song "Will Ye Go Lassie Go." We all sing together and he stretches it out as long as he can for us. We depart feeling connected to our friends, and hopeful.
     Summer is finally upon us here in Chicago— my god it took a long time.
     “And we’ll all go together to that wild mountain thyme. All around the blooming heather will you go lassie go?” As I listen to John sing Safe in the Harbor and the Corries singing about wild mountain thyme I can almost believe that the world is a beautiful, lilting, safe place.