Flashback 2011: Spiders can bite you in many ways

   
      Monday I finally did something I've been meaning to do for months — walk through the Chicago Botanic Garden with its president, talking about the artwork installed for the 50th anniversary. That'll run Monday in the Sun-Times.

     During our walk, I mentioned this column, about hanging out with spider expert Jim Steffen, and thought I'd share it here. That word in the third paragraph, "epigyne," means exactly what it seems to: the female sex organ of an arachnid.  A reminder that the language, like nature itself, can be wonderfully specific. Steffen was an emeritus senior ecologist at the garden until his retirement last year.

     Determining the sex of a spider is not so very much different than determining the sex of a human baby: You flip it over and check out the equipment.
     Unlike with the baby however, with a spider, you need a microscope to get a good look at its sex organs, which are both very small and very complicated and — also unlike the baby — you really want the spider to be dead.
     “You can imagine, if you had a live spider and you flipped it over, it’s not going to sit there,” said Jim Steffen, an ecologist at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, as I peered into a microscope and admired the dainty epigyne of a crab spider collected in the Mary Mix McDonald Woods, a 100-acre oak forest within the Botanic Garden, which for the past 23 years Steffen has been nudging back toward its pristine state.
     Nature is interconnected, so caring about trees — the oaks have been here 10,000 years while the ash, the Norway maples and the other riff-raff less than 200 — led Steffen to focus on leaf litter, the fallen leaves and debris on the ground under the trees.
     “I was interested in what was happening with the leaf litter,” he said, “because what we have discovered with woodland restoration, as invasive species invade the woodland the litter layer degrades.”
     And by figuring out what’s happening with the spiders in the leaf litter, Steffen gets insight into the ecosystem as a whole.
     Invasive species, both plants and animals, are hardy imports from around the globe that have a tendency to crowd out local flora and fauna. Some have suitably awful names — leafy spurge, poison hemlock, goutweed, hairy fireweed — others do not: baby’s breath, Queen Anne’s lace, wild strawberry.
     And buckthorn. Longtime readers will recall my endless War Against Buckthorn. I smiled, encountering my old nemesis in the Botanic Garden, like Sherlock Holmes detecting the hand of Professor Moriarty in a particularly sticky business.
     Somewhat like a character out of Conan Doyle himself, Steffen is trim, 60, with a neat white mustache. He lives in Winthrop Harbor. Perhaps all you need to know about his personal life is that when I asked him what he does as a hobby, he answered, “I collect seeds on the weekend.” He also gardens.
     Learning that the spiders are killed in order to study them gave me pause. I feel bad when called upon to kill a spider. Didn’t Steffen, as a man devoted to nature, also feel bad?
     “No,” he said. “If I took you for a walk through this part of the woods here, you would probably kill several hundred thousand insects — springtails and spiders — walking. Every time you put your foot down you’re stepping on something.”
     Somehow I reached the age of 50 without ever hearing the word “springtail” — it’s a tiny (¼-inch long or less) primitive insect-like thing with a curled tail used to hop away from danger. We looked at a few under the microscope — a springtail looks like a brown crumb with personality.
     “It’s a group of organisms not looked at too closely,” Steffen said, noting that a volunteer, studying creatures that showed up in the spider traps, found about half a dozen new springtails that science had yet to give names.
     We ended up at the Botanic Garden’s ecology lab, and I was struck by the contrast between the wild disorder of the green, sun-dappled woods, with hardy oaks and nefarious buckthorn, and this cool, pristine white room with its gray counters, sleek microscopes, rack of Kimax lab glassware, orderly rows of metal boxes of slides and spider-filled little vials. On the bookshelf, apropos titles: Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora, All About Weeds by Edward Rollin Spencer and How to Know the Grasshoppers, Crickets, Cockroaches and Their Allies by Jacques Hefler.
     After two hours I was just getting started, but Steffen began sorting slides, and I realized I was keeping him from important work. Besides, I’d already collected enough information for three columns (I haven’t even talked about the sex lives of spiders. Male spiders engage in foreplay and treat their beloved to dinner — a male will wrap a fly in silk and present it to the female, though, unlike men, or at least unlike most men, he will then do the deed while she’s still eating).
     Nor have I touched on spiders’ solitary quality, nor their venom — almost all spiders are poisonous, though only a few have poison in enough quantity or strength that can harm humans. Nor have I mentioned our outsize fear of spiders, which are everywhere.
     “You’re never more than a meter away from a spider, wherever you are,” said Steffen.
     Whether that’s good or not is up to you.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 13, 2011.

Trump isn’t toast yet

Gen. Douglas MacArthur signs the Instrument of Peace during Japanese surrender ceremonies on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945. (US Army Photo)

     World War II lasted exactly six years. Six years and one day, to be precise, from the German Panzers rolling into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, to the Japanese signing articles of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
     A long time. An era.
     Speaking of experiences that seem to go on forever, Donald Trump has already been gleaming at the center stage of our transfixed national attention for longer than World War II was fought.
     From June 16, 2015 — setting aside his previous career as real estate tout and TV game show host — when he descended that glass escalator in the gaudy marble lobby of Trump Tower and announced, “The American dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better.”
     And people believed him.
     To Monday, when the FBI raided his equally tasteless Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, reportedly looking for classified presidential records that he took with him instead of turning them over to the government, as the law requires.
     Seven years, plus seven weeks. And counting.
     Of course, unlike the ceremony in Tokyo Bay, the Mar-a-Lago milestone is not the end. Nowhere near. If the nation has learned one thing from the entire Trump fiasco — and it might not have, but let’s pretend — it’s to never put too much emphasis on any one event or statement, no matter how jaw-dropping or norm-shattering or horrific.
     Never count Trump out. So long as the former president has breath to lie with, he’ll plow forward, masses of supporters furiously following along in his wake, like pilot fish hungry for chum.

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A couple of crows on a tree in my backyard

     Between my backyard and the village property beyond is a line of trees — healthy pines, with the exception of one very dead tree that no doubt will be removed soon. Stepping onto the back deck, I glance at the top, and was rewarded by seeing a large black bird, a crow, perch there, soon to be joined by a second. They surveyed their surroundings while I watched them.

      Usually, crows are encountered on the ground, flapping a few dozen yards off. Up close, they can be unsettling. They always give me pause, as harbingers of something. It must be their impenetrable black color. Their size. Some big birds are impressive —herons, hawks. Crows are just large. There's something ominous about them.

     I'm relieved to see this isn't a bias peculiar to me.

    "The Night-Crow cried, aboding luckless time," Shakespeare's King Henry VI exclaims.
     "Crows are most associated with corpses and dark death," Diana Wells writes in her essential "100 Birds and How they Got Their Names." A question she doesn't answer while skipping through the numerous ways crows impact our language, from scarecrows to Jim Crow to eating crow. My favorite being "crowbar," which she suggests is named for "the crow's strong curved bill."
     A bill—I'd call it a beak, though the words are synonymous—used to sometimes eat other birds, or steal their eggs, or pluck their feathers to line their own nests, a quality put to good use in a letter by Horace when chiding a lesser colleague, encyclopedist Aulus Celsus, in this translation by David Ferry:

    ...He's been advised, and surely
It's good advice for him, that he should write
Out of himself and out of what he knows
And stay away from those old writers he reads
In Apollo's library on the Palatine.
Someday the flock of birds might come back asking
To have their brilliant feathers given back
And the crow, stripped naked, is certain to be laughed at. 

     Lines Robert Greene surely had in mind when defaming William Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers."For me, the duo in my backyard echoed, not Shakespeare, but Thomas Mann, whose "Death in Venice" is crammed with auguries. Gustav von Auschenbach at first rejoices at being on holiday in the plague-bound city, thinking back to his Teutonic home, "the scene of his battles in the summer, where the clouds blew low across his garden, and terrifying storms put out the lamps at night, and the crows which he fed were swinging in the tops of the pine trees."
     Wells doesn't address "to crow," as in boasting, and I thought of my game of which usage came first; in this case, the bird or the brag? But of course the bird would have to come first, its distinctive "caw" or "crah" easily applied to self-congratulations, noises that would have to explain its name as well. "Crow" is practically an onomatopoeia.
     The OED starts with the great Dr. Johnson's definition, "a large black bird that feeds upon the carcasses of beasts." Though they'll eat just about anything: carrion, insects, berries, with a particular fondness for cultivated grains — hence scarecrows. The usage is over a thousand years old.

     Among the crow-based phrases the OED touches upon, "to have a crow to pluck or pull (rarely pick) with any one" is to have a disagreeable, awkward matter that must be gone over with another person. That would seem a bit more evocative than the standard "bone to pick." The boasting, swaggering meaning is 500 years old.

     In my research, I got sidetracked to scarecrows. They're such literary figures, stars of horror stories and "The Wizard of Oz." And in the 19th century, metaphors — governments were tossing up this and that as scarecrows. I wondered how useful scarecrows actually were.

     Plenty, apparently. John Armstrong's 1840 "A Treatise on Agriculture: A Concise History of its Origin and Progress;the Present Condition of the Art Abroad and at Home and the Theory and Practice of Husbandry" recommends them. After a discussion of keeping insects off cherry trees by burning a mixture of pitch and sulfur, Armstrong notes, "Birds are here a more potent enemy; and the best remedy against them are old fishnets thrown over the trees, clapboards, scarecrows, and fusees."

     Fusee is an old term for flare. Clapboards hardly need explanation, except to note that they are still used. Little corellas, small white cockatoos that flock by the thousands, chewing on streetlights and causing "stress and concern" for residents of Alexandrina, according to their web page, which passes along "scaring techniques" from the South Australian Little Corella Management Strategy, including:

     "Two pieces of timber (approx. 400mm long x 35mm thick) with a door hinge at one end to join the two timbers together. Hold the clap boards up high and start clapping the boards together loudly when birds are present."

     Alexandrina is on the southern coast of Australia, not far from Adelaide. And here, it strikes me that we've come quite far from two crows on a tree in my backyard. They stayed there quite a while — a least five minutes, which I felt in my arms, holding up my phone to snap their exit. Finally, my patience was rewarded: one flew off and then, after another long pause, the other followed.

Another reason not to work in Indiana

Smithsonian Institution

     Congratulations! After years of gerbil-on-a-wheel effort at the Feinberg School of Medicine, you’ll be getting your degree in pharmacology this spring. The world is your oyster.
     But where to scale Mount Pharma? You could stay close to home and go to work for AbbVie or plunge into the sizzling hot San Francisco biotech scene. But you’ve already been in Chicago — well, titrating urine in windowless labs in Chicago anyway — for seven years. And the cost of living is so high in the City by the Bay. You’ll end up in Oakland if you’re not careful.
     Eli Lilly looks intriguing, and your paycheck will certainly stretch further in Indiana — median home values there are 20 percent less than Illinois. Yes, Indianapolis, where Lilly has its headquarters, is not exactly Fun City.
     But isn’t Indiana sinking back into some kind of medieval fiefdom when it comes to women, having enacted a near-total ban on abortion Friday night? The first state legislature to kneecap reproductive rights since Donald Trump’s personal Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.
     Nobody picks their career path based on convenient abortion access. And with what Lilly pays you — research scientists there can pull down $140,000 or more a year — popping into Illinois to do the deed won’t be more than an expensive annoyance.

     But the ban does set a tone, doesn’t it? Because zealots, like sharks, must move forward or they can’t breathe. Shutting down abortion clinics leads to controlling the ability of women to travel freely, or order certain medicines in the mail or even talk about particular medical options.
     Before long you’re living “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Do you really want to raise your family in the Republic of Gilead?
     What’s amazing is how fast Lilly understood their business model — hire smart people to invent new drugs — is threatened by Indiana telling women to shut up and get back in the kitchen. Hours after Gov. Eric Holcomb signed Senate Bill 1 into law, the 148-year-old company issued a public statement.

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Flashback 2000: Gary offers a few things to make visit worthwhile

     When a writer you respect gores your ox, it stings. So as fun as my latest vivisection of John Kass was, it did decry the painful erosion of civil rights in the former newspaper columnist's new home state , judging Indiana severely for it. Several readers living there raised a finger and said, in effect, "Ouch." While the throttling of freedom in Hoosierland does deserve constant, full-throated condemnation — Friday they passed an almost complete ban on abortion — there's no need to tar the whole state completely with one broad brush. It does still contain people — a majority, actually — who would yet breathe the air of liberty, if only they could, and the state does contain several pleasant spots. Just last year we enjoyed lunch at a brewery in Hammond. And in 2000, prodded by a line in the New York Times about tourism in Gary, I actually visited that star-crossed city to take in the sights, such as they are. I offer it as a conciliatory gesture to my Indiana readers, and afterward give an update on some of the people and places encountered below.

GARY, Ind. — How deep is this town's image problem?
     Driving here, I worried about my suit. It was my good suit: Would the air in Gary somehow ruin it? Corrode the cloth, melt the fabric into a crusted, spotted motley? I had decided to risk it in the name of image.
     Driving east on the Chicago Skyway, past the groves of high tension electrical wires and the rolling brown industrial scrubland, I detected changes in the atmosphere — first hopsy, then acrid, a definite tang, a tickle at the back of the throat -- and wondered if I had made a mistake.

     I was on my way to visit the tourist sights of Gary, which will host the Miss U.S.A. Pageant for the next three years. The beleaguered city is giving Donald Trump $1.2 million to bring the spectacle here to spur economic development and introduce the nation to the attractions of Gary, which would be better known were it not for "years of brainwashing by the media about the negatives of the city," according to Spero Batistatos, the president of the Lake County visitors bureau.
     As a passionate foe of media brainwashing, I felt obligated to go to Gary and assess its potential as a tourist destination.
     I started my day at U.S. Steel's Gary Works, probably the most prominent institution in Gary. Having enjoyed corporate tours from Ben & Jerry's in Stowe, Vt., to the Tabasco sauce plant in New Iberia, La., I thought I'd touch base at the visitors center.
     "Ain't got nothing like that," said the guard and, after taking a moment to savor the grim Dickensian splendor of the Works, I wheeled the car around and headed down Broadway.
     I remembered Broadway as one of the most shocking and dismal urban tableaus I have ever seen — 40 blocks of empty abandonment.
     That hasn't changed — maybe a few more people about. I appreciated the historic display of shuttered 1950s-era stores, signs and typefaces, generally untouched by progress or economic development.
     The man from the Lake County Convention & Visitors Bureau had suggested I meet him at the Interstate Visitors Information Center, which isn't actually in Gary, but Hammond. By then, I had learned that those promoting Gary take a rather, umm, expansive view that defines the Gary Metropolitan Area as extending from Wilmette to Indianapolis.
     You can't miss the Center (I-80; 94 to Kennedy Avenue South). An odd building designed around themes; in giving nods to the farm and steel industries it looks like a cross between a jet engine and a grain silo.
     Inside is clean, airy and modern — it opened just in December — with an engaging exhibit of poster art in the main hall and a permanent John Dillinger Museum filled with displays that are both intelligent and downright cool: authentic weaponry, period outfits, a Hudson Terraplane 8 auto, plus interactive displays (go into a bank lobby, then recall from memory details of the crime in progress). I thought my trip amply rewarded just for the letterhead of the Indiana Reformatory, which showed a portrait of a bespectacled old lady and the motto: "There is no love like the good old love, the love that mother gave us." I'll bet that melted many a hardened criminal heart.
     I was met by Shawn Platt, an enthusiastic young man vaguely resembling Charlie Sheen, who was going to take me to a few of the sights.
     But first, lunch. There is only one good restaurant in Gary, judging from the people I asked — and I asked half a dozen — who one and all recommended The Miller Bakery Cafe on Lake Street — and Platt and I repaired there for a festive meal.
     Gary Sanders, the chef; owner, joined us, and when I said I was visiting Gary's tourist attractions, he actually laughed, said, "Really?" and shot Platt a bemused, eyebrow-arching look.
     We dined on crab cakes, cornbread custard, and avocado-lime chicken on a risotto cake — all quite good, at least according to my admittedly broad tastes. I asked Sanders what he thought was the prime tourist attraction actually in Gary, and he sent us to the Aquatorium.
     The Aquatorium is the new name for the old Gary Bathing Beach changing house at Miller Beach. It sits right on the lake, a crumbling concrete structure with a certain aura of elegance: The concrete is formed to resemble Greek columns.
     "It's amazing in the summer how many people are on this beach," said Platt, as we walked among the deserted dunes. "It's just packed."
     There was a beautiful view I had never seen before — the skyline of Chicago, a distant gray toy city to the right, a wide gap, then the industrial sprawl of Hammond and Gary to the left. Quite pretty.
     "We don't claim to be a place where you could spend a week for a major vacation," said Platt, showing off the lobby of the Radisson, which isn't in Gary either, but has a waterfall. "Just a weekend getaway."
     That may be overstating the case. But I could see, when the weather gets warm, a person with either an unusual interest in Dillinger or two children between the ages of 5 and 15 might enjoy replicating my day — an hour at the Dillinger Museum, lunch at the Miller Bakery Cafe (they'll give the kiddies spaghetti for $6, and you New Zealand rack of lamb for $14) then a quick visit to the beach, which was deserted and lovely, with eerie, weed-topped dunes and a certain desolate beauty.

             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 5, 2000.

     Spero Batistatos was with the Lake County visitors bureau for more than 30 years before being let go in 2021. He's now studying for a master's degree and teaching at the White Lodging School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Purdue University Northwest. Shawn Platt left the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority shortly after this story ran, did communications for Bank of America and Fifth Third Bank, and is now chief of staff & chief communication officer at Continuum Ventures in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Gary Sanders closed the Miller Bakery Cafe in 2010; it was reopened by new owners in 2013 and closed again in 2019. Sanders died in 2020 at age 53.

The Aquatorium marked its centennial in 2021.

North Shore Notes: Coyote

     As I padded upstairs at 3 o'clock in the morning to edit today's post from North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey, I reflected on how different she is from me. And how good it must be, I imagine, after six days of Neil Neil Neil (sigh, Neilneilneil) for readers to be placed into the hands of another writer, one of such boundless energy and mystic passion. 

     As if to illustrate that difference, today's post was particularly spiritual and celebratory. My edits were entirely stylistic — spell out numbers up to 10, spaces on both sides of a dash. I did add one word in the first sentence, "Pavilion." I'd never heard of the downtown concert venue simply called "the Pritzker" and to me that conjures up visiting the governor. And Caren later pointed out that the "the" could then go. 

     I almost plucked out the "ethically gleaned" and "ethically gotten" in the fifth paragraph, as a favor to her. They seemed over-the-top, to me. As if I wrote something like, "And then I ate a candy bar (paid for; not stolen)." But then, that is me, and I stayed home Friday night because it was hot outside and we were tired, my wife and I deciding not to picnic at Ravinia listening to the CSO, as we had planned. A writer has an obligation to be who they are, and an editor has the duty to let them. I satisfied myself with adding hyphens to the word pairs then, after studying the rules for compound adjectives, taking them out again, because they make perfect sense the way she wrote them.

By Caren Jeskey

"There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone."
     —Joni Mitchell, Coyote

     On Monday night two friends and I headed to Pritzker Pavilion to see Gabriel Garzon-Montana and headliner Ana Tijoux, part of the Millennium Park Summer Music Series. It was the best kind of Chicago night. In the 80s, no chance of rain, with a late sunset.
     My friends slid into seats near the stage at the center of it all. The wide open grassy field called my name, so I sat on a bench at the edge of the arbor that frames the Pavilion grounds, with the expanse of the lawn and the stage in front of me. But who was I kidding? There’s no way to sit on a metal bench when thick, fragrant, perfectly manicured grass is calling. I found myself barefoot in the green stuff, laying back and watching the occasional cloud, instinctively stretching my body as I loosened up.
     After the show, my Spanish-speaking friends filled me in. Ana Tijoux is a Chilean-French songstress whose parents were exiled from Pinochet’s Chile. She spoke a bit in English about the plight of little children trying to make the treacherous journey straight into the colonial U.S. of A. Right into where armed boys are proud. 

     I caught my breath as I imagined what’s happening there, right in the same moment that I — often ungrateful me — was gazing up at one of the world’s greatest skylines on a spectacular night. My only problem is trying to pull myself together with the privilege of having the safety, time and space to do so. Or at least to try. No one is chasing me.
     I’d brought a pair of (ethically gleaned) coyote bone earrings for my friend Sylvia to give to her beautiful daughter Vero. For years, (also ethically gotten) coyote teeth earrings were my go-to. I felt I had to have them on almost every day, and without them I felt naked. Last fall I accidentally pulled one off on a sidewalk in Humboldt Park one night. It fell to the ground and disappeared in the fallen leaves. A kind couple brought flashlights out and we searched forever, but it was not to be. I felt I’d lost a piece of my soul. I bought the bone earrings to replace the teeth, but it hadn’t worked. It felt right to pass them on.
     When my close friend Laura Rose — who’s now a mountain mama in Black Hawk Colorado — saw the huge teeth framing my face once, she commented. “That’s powerful medicine. Are you sure you want to wear those?” Her use of the word “medicine” to describe an animal reminded me of the teachings I’d had from Lakota and other people indigenous to the Americas.

     I’d studied with teachers of the Lakota ways for seven years. I was welcomed to participate in inípi ceremonies (also called sweat lodges) and chanupa (also known incorrectly as a peace pipe) ceremonies. The curanderos and curanderas (medicine people) taught us to connect with Mother Earth, and to connect with our ancestors. To honor our heritage, and thus to honor who we are. The inípi itself represented the womb of Grandma, and the red hot rocks that warmed us were Grandpa. We sat on the dirt in the inípis we’d built, which were housed on a farm in Kingston, Illinois called Spirits Whisper Acres. It was a horse rescue farm, with a smattering of random “four leggeds” as my Lakota teachers called them. It took an army of us to get an angry bull back into the barn one time. Luckily, no-one was gored.
     When I came across a war manifesto written by Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation that railed against anyone who taught their ways to white people, I decided to take a break and did not return to that group. Since then I've spent just one long day and night in an inípi just outside of Austin, Texas. I met a gorgeous black horse there, and we hung out. Animals are so much easier than people sometimes. Oftentimes.
     After that big night out on Monday, I spent the next three days days inside my cozy cottage, missing out on some of the best days and nights Chicago has to offer. Last week I said that I was trying to look at it as hygge, and I am still trying; however, it felt more like going in and out of states of agoraphobia where I’d almost leave, punctuated with a feeling of rawness that seemed to expose every nerve in my body, as though my insides were on on the outside, topped off with a few heart-thumping panic attacks. But hey. Other things went very well this week and I am grateful to be alive, muddling through with the best of us.
     Finally, on Thursday after my last client ended at 5 pm, I put on some shoes and grabbed my helmet. I got on my bike and just went where the wind took me.
     As I rode down Old Orchard Road next to Dignity Memorial Cemetery I noticed a coyote standing in the grass next to the bike path, watching the cars go by. I wondered if he or she (they look alike unless you are closer than you should be) was considering crossing the busy road. I briefly considered halting traffic to make a safe path but then remember this is not a Disney movie. The coyote gracefully glided back between the slats of the metal gate, gave me a couple of good long looks from a safe distance, and laid down. They did a bit of grooming, then settled, head and eyes in my direction, ears perked up. Time stands still in moments like this.
     Later that night my friend Jesse Ray sent me a photo of a hawk’s feather. My main Lakota teacher’s name is Red Tail Hawk. Jesse discovered it in a bit of sticky tar on a freshly paved road near his house. Yesterday as I left for a doctor’s appointment I was pleasantly shocked to find a feather of my own. I realized that there are hawks in the trees all around me that I’ve been missing in the business of my overthinking mind. I will keep an eye to the trees and hope to spot one soon.

“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” 

          —Carl Jung

 

Taiwan on knife’s edge of freedom

     Most souvenirs are garbage. Cheap carvings made around the globe from the place supposedly being commemorated. Decorative spoons. Useless stuff.
     So it’s noteworthy when you have a keepsake that’s actually practical, like the 11-inch cleaver I’m looking at now, produced by Maestro Wu. A single piece of metal, lightweight and balanced. Flick your fingernail against the blade, and it rings for five full seconds. Sharp as a razor.
     I got it on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, 2,000 yards off the coast of China. I had flown to Taiwan to interview Annette Lu, then vice president, whose route to what she called “soft power” took her through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Chicago, putting her on the Sun-Times’ radar. She admired how freely people could protest here.
     My accommodating Taiwanese hosts asked, while I was in the neighborhood, if there was anywhere else in the country I’d like to visit beyond the capital of Taipei. I rather boldly asked to visit the island of Kinmen. As a fan of history, I knew that part of the Kennedy-Nixon debates centered on whether the United States would go to war with China over the fate of Quemoy and Matsu — “Quemoy” being what Westerners called Kinmen then.
     I bring it up because the nation is in the news, after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stopped by to visit on her Asian tour. When news of the trip was leaked, there was a disappointing outcry that it shouldn’t happen, that we need to be nice to Communist China so they don’t bully us even more than they already do.
     Some background, for readers unfamiliar: Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, is a democratic nation of 23 million perched in uncomfortable proximity to the People’s Republic of China and its 1.4 billion population. The communists increasingly insist they own Taiwan because ... well, they want it.
     As to why China, a nation of 3.7 million square miles, needs to absorb Taiwan, not half of 1% the size, well, it’s the same reason Russia needs Ukraine. They don’t. They simply feel entitled, the way any bully feels entitled to your lunch money. Because they think they can take it.

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