Flashback 2011: One quarter of the country has gone crazy

Generated by Dall-E.

     The good news is that the vise grip that Donald Trump has on the Republican Party seems to be slacking. The bad news is that they don't need him to continue the carnival of crazy. As I've been saying for years about Trump: he didn't create the environment he thrived in. Not a cause, but a symptom. In case this isn't clear, I offer as evidence this column from 2011 that tills the loamy soil that Trumpism, and other fact-free totalitarian causes, bloom in. Trump cut his political teeth as a proponent of birtherism, but didn't even merit mention here.

     The expression "my jaw dropped," is usually metaphorical, the writer reaching for some oomph beyond "I was really surprised."
     But reading the New York Times/CBS poll released last week that 25 percent of all Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans — believe President Obama was born outside the United States, I could feel the muscles in my jaw go slack and my chin dip.
     Why is this so amazing?
     Well, first, let’s review the evidence that Obama was born someplace other than Kapi’olani hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961:
     There isn’t any.
     None, nada, nothing. A slop bucket of rumors and lies. As opposed to the overwhelming hard proof that Obama was born exactly where he said he was born — a state birth certificate, not to mention two local newspapers printing birth announcements.
     So why does a considerable and growing chunk of the country — one in four, the same percentage of Americans who are men over the age of 37 — embrace this fallacy?
     The short answer is they believe it because they want to believe it. Belief and fact have almost no relationship to each other — we should know that by now. There is no situation so clear-cut that it cannot be twisted into a hall of mirrors. The 9/11 attacks were the most documented crime ever. Did that stop the conspiracy theories? No way.
     That said, why do 25 percent of us want to believe Obama was born in foreign soil?
     It’s obvious when you ask yourself what happened in November 2008. The nation elected its first African-American president, a Democrat. Of course that would inspire some to say, "Whoa, wait a second, this isn’t happening. This guy can’t be president!"
     He can’t? Why not? Well, umm, because he wasn’t born here. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
     Conspiracy theories flourish among those who find the truth too uncomfortable to tolerate. America being the victim of terrorist attacks made the nation sympathetic — better, in some minds, to view the United States as the perpetrator. The same dynamic inspires Holocaust denial. People don’t deny the Holocaust because of lack of evidence — those Germans, sticklers for bookkeeping. Rather, the Holocaust is uncomfortable, inconvenient to those wishing for the next one, and thus nutjobs like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad find it easier to just grin and insist it never happened.
     Obama being president of the United States is uncomfortable, inconvenient, for a lot of people, and rather than acknowledge that a majority of Americans elected him to an office he is entitled to hold, it’s easier to declare the whole thing a sham.
     Just as Holocaust denial is, on its face, anti-Semitism, so the birther movement is clearly racism. I’m reluctant to say that because racism has become such a frayed charge in recent years, thanks to professional wolf criers like the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Carol Moseley Braun. But just because some overplay the race card doesn’t mean that racism ceases to exist. Electing a black president might have been a milestone, but it did not make the bigots automatically wink out of existence, unfortunately. Where did they all go?
     To me, the sort of people who in 1961 would say, "Obama can’t be president because he’s a n-----," now, 50 years later, are saying "Obama can’t be president because he’s not an American." Progress!
     Although I refuse to believe that haters constitute a full quarter of the country. My hunch — or perhaps just hope — is that the birther mania is fueled by a hard core, say 2.5 percent, the full-time bigots, psychos and partisan operatives who come up with these lunatic theories and weave loose threads into this elaborate tapestry of delusion. Then the other 22.5 percent look at the "issue," feel it resonate in their guts, let out a few moos to tell a pollster that it all makes sense to them, then drop their muzzles back into the silage.
     You know what? I’m going to start a movement right now, insisting that Obama can’t be president because he isn’t 35, as the constitution requires. Barack Obama is only 32 — he was born in 1979. There, you read it in a newspaper. That this claim is false, contradicted by all evidence and common sense might be seen as a stumbling block, but not judging from the success of the birthers. People will believe anything that scratches their itch, and would much rather change the facts of the world than alter their opinions.
      Twenty-five percent. The jaw drops, the eyes pop, the mind reels, the heart breaks.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 24, 2011

On MLK Day, don’t shortchange the message

Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

     Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a tall man. Five-foot-7 at most, and prone to pudginess. His grandeur was not physical, but moral, verbal, philosophical and spiritual. When he opened his mouth, he donned wings and would soar, taking his audience along with him.
     Except, of course, for those left earthbound, who remained unmoved by his vision of an America where people are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
     Maybe that’s why I never cared for the King Memorial in Washington, D.C. First, the statue doesn’t look enough like him, in my estimation. Second, the entity honoring King is the same federal government that allowed the FBI to hound him, bugging his hotel rooms and tapping his phones, peddling his darkest secrets as punishment for the crime of trying to make the country a better place.
     Even setting that aside, the government rendering the man into granite 30 feet tall is still a two-edged honor. Official approval helped and hurt him. One of the many challenges King faced was being co-opted. King was a man squeezed — haters to the right, radicals like Malcolm X to his left, impatient young people pushing up from below, inert officials clucking concern from above.
     For the past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in King’s brief life and turbulent times because I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of “King: A Life.” The first major biography of King in decades is written by Jonathan Eig, the Chicago author of “Ali: A Life,” the truly excellent, bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali (and the truly excellent, bestselling biography of Al Capone and the truly excellent, bestselling ... well, you get the idea).
     “King: A Life” is such a nuanced, detailed biography, it’s like having Martin Luther King sitting in your living room, reading a newspaper. Every day, I get to join him, to hurry downstairs, pour myself a cup of coffee and get to know the man better. You’ll have to wait until May when it’s published, but don’t worry, I’ll be sure to remind you.

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Not quite so many bullets

Shooting arcade in Kissimmee, Florida (photo by Carol Highsmith; Library of Congress)

     First the good news.
     Someday soon — this month, maybe, this year, certainly — someone in Illinois is going to be mad about something. Doesn't matter what: girls won't date him, a coworker cracked a joke, just learned that Biden faked the moon landing. Whatever, this unnamed person is doing to want to kill a bunch of people, He'll — and it's always a guy — head to the local gun shop. These shops always seem to be on bleak expanses of industrial nowhere. And he'll want to buy an assault rifle with which to spray their school or store or whatever.
     And they won't be able to. Because of the new law signed in Illinois last week.
     Not that we should have the big Problem Solved Party quite yet. There's less good news. Unless they're stopped because of the law beefing up the ability of the state to keep guns away from known crazies, they'll still be able to buy a gun. (After the mandatory 72 hour waiting period in Illinois, to allow for a background check and perhaps let a person intent on murder cool off). Just not one holding as many rounds. Ten will have to do, instead of 30. Which isn't the vast improvement it seems if you get one of those first 10 bullets. But if someone cold-cocks him while he's swapping out magazines, then, heck yeah, the law works!
     How much of a victory is that? Well, it's a start. Ten rounds is still a lot. Just the bill becoming law — it also bans "switches" that can permit guns to fire in full automatic mode, and makes extends the ability of courts to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous persons — is a reminder that we are still a nation of laws, despite the tough talk of would-be frontiersmen. We aren't all shooting out our differences. Yet.

     Bottom line: it's realistic to hope that there will be some group of persons who are only alive because this new law saved them, even though they'll never know.
     That's the good part. And honestly, my first impulse is to celebrate that progress — passing laws about guns! Who would imagine? But then the candid moderate in me has to observe that we're really taking aim — ooh, wrong metaphor, it really is embedded in the culture — we're really addressing only a tiny fraction of the problem.
     In 2020, the most recent year full stats are available, 45,222 Americans were killed by guns, more than ever before, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
     Of those, most — 24,292, or 54 percent — were suicides. Another 19,384, or 43 percent were murders, and of those murders, mass shootings accounted for ... 38 people, using the FBI definition of a mass shooting. If you use the looser Gun Violence Archive definition, 513 people, or a little more than 1 percent of the fatalities.
     So while, yes, bans on assault rifles, whatever they are, and high capacity magazines are fine, and if I could press a button and have every state follow suit, I would , it's also the low hanging fruit.
     A tougher nut is to make people understand that the guns they buy to indulge in some Clint Eastwood, get-the-drop-on-the-bad-guy fantasy is actually the gun they're going to stick in their own mouth at some dark night of the soul, or that their 6-year-old is going to take to school one day to shoot his teacher. (A bad, example, because so rare). That his teenager is going to use to kill himself with — guns are the leading cause of death in children in the United States, 4,357 in 2020. No other developed country comes close.
     But then, there's a direct relationship between gun ownership and gun death. Not of bad guys coming in the windows. Of the owners. For all the sneering and shade throwing our fellow citizens in the backwater areas of the country, the gun death rate in Illinois are less than half what they are in Wyoming or Mississippi. If liberals were bad people, like conservatives, we'd push for more guns, because red states are predominantly the people killing themselves and each other. But we're not. So we cheer for even the most limited progress. Like the Illinois law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last week.

Northshore Notes: IRL

      Not quite grumbling, I padded up to my office Friday night, thinking, " Well, I hope Caren has something FUN to share with us." She does. Again we are in synch — this week I noticed that the more time I deliberately spend away from social media, the happier I am.

By Caren Jeskey

     Last year Netflix and I broke up. An Irish goodbye seemed the best. With a click of a button the streaming service that robbed me of thousands of hours, thousands of dollars, and a whole lotta sleep — think back to "Breaking Bad" if you can stomach it — was gone.
     There are free streaming sources that air well-crafted and informative pieces without the hell of constant pop-ups, such as BBC Reels. They offer short pieces — how whispering took over the internet, leeches: the therapy used by Stalin, and the power of psychedelics. They also have LongReels (about 15 minutes). You might not want to miss a a 50 year old audio recording of a disappearing language.
     Incidentally, psychedelics is a topic I’m learning about this coming Tuesday night via Zoom, hosted by the Schaumburg Library (which also hosts book groups, Photoshop lessons, and other free virtual and IRL events).
     hoopla® is another streaming option, stocked with digitized treasure troves of libraries. I have found that watching a funny or arty movie, or watching a few short reels, is more satisfying and less numbing that the six-season binge pattern. 

     Detangling from being a slave to tech is a process. I’m personally not aiming for abstinence, just a better balance. Zuckerberg is smart as hell and makes it hard to reduce the clutter of "friends" one has on his blue platform. He makes it as hard as he can to say goodbye. I thought about deleting my Facebook account, but I use it for several satisfying professional and hobby groups. I also have photos and memories tucked away in the Facebook cloud. So, I opted to unfriend my hundreds of connections, one tedious step at a time. The Eye of Sauron does not graciously allow you to set your own boundaries with his free-ish web-based toy. (Free only if I don't value my own time while sitting on my arse and making him richer). It took a good long time, but now I am a proud facilitator of a total of six Facebook friends — Neil of course, four mentors, and a dear friend who passed away. We keep him alive in this way.
     Last Fall I also said farewell to using Amazon, and to Prime. The best part has been shopping IRL, or at small Etsy and privately owned shops where I can chat with the owners and support the folks I want to support. The kind owner of a rock hunting supply company sent friends free scoops to give them a little bit of love after losing a loved one, and their home, on Sanibel Island during Ian. I know it's not much, but I also know they will smile. Tech-culling has cleared the way for more awesome adventures. Less reasons to be tethered to the laptop. I received an iPad for my birthday last year and my tech-savvy sister removed all distractions. No messaging, no Gmail, no App Store... nothing but Insight Timer and the Safari browser that I mindfully use for light-hearted pleasure.
     This past Monday turned into a nine hour beach day. It was the first of 38 days we’d seen the gosh darned sun. I needed it. I rounded out hours of playing unselfconsciously — the child in me dancing in the sand and singing to the waves — with working from my car parked in the sun, windows down and moonroof open. At the water’s edge at the Lighthouse Beach I noticed a piece of blinding white pottery glimmering in the sunny waves 7 meters or so offshore.
     I love to collect pottery shards. This was no shard. It was whole, intact plate, face down. (I keep meaning to throw my waders in the car for moments like this). I snapped a couple of photos of this unusual find, and headed to Walker Brothers for breakfast. (I’ve been craving their apple pancake for about 25 years now. It was every bit as good as I remembered). I had posted the plate photo on a Facebook group of Great Lakes treasure hunters, and the crowd spoke. I was to immediately return to the Lighthouse, take my boots off and go get the damn plate. I obeyed. It was not nearly as hard as I’d made it in my mind. A pretty gray dog accompanied me while her person filmed the excursion.
     After I’d dried my feet and put my warm boots back on, the spry dog leapt back and forth in front of me, waiting for me to throw the frisbee she was seeing. As dogs do, she quickly forgot and went back to frolicking.
     I hopped back onto Facebook that evening. Hundreds of fellow shard addicts had followed the story of the whole plate closely. They weren’t even disappointed when I shared that I realized it was just a $15 ceramic plate made in China.
     Good times were had by all.

‘Hey kid, want some candy and a button?’

     Oh, c’mon.
     Everyone is being so mean, beating up on poor Lori Lightfoot for trying to pressure Chicago Public School children into joining her mayoral campaign. The same campaign that sent an email prodding CPS teachers to enlist their charges to spend 12 hours a week working for free for a Chicago mayor sunk to a nadir of unpopularity not seen since Levi Boone closed the city saloons on Sundays.
     It isn’t like this is the most questionable gambit to gin up mayoral campaign support in the city’s history. There have been worse.
     Remember Joe Gardner? Mild-mannered water reclamation district commissioner. Round glasses. Threw his hat into the ring against Mayor Richard M. Daley in the 1995 primary.
     I was sent to attend Gardner’s announcement rally.
     Here’s how I later described the event:

     I started to notice something strange about the crowd. They seemed a lot more hostile than you would expect from a campaign kick-off crowd, which is normally a pretty cheery bunch. A lot of young, angry guys milling around. I commented to a savvy photographer that I didn’t realize so many young men in baseball caps and oversized pants took such a passionate interest in politics.
     ”They’re Gangster Disciples,” the photographer said. While I didn’t check for membership cards, it certainly seemed to me that Gardner was padding his crowd with gang members.

     I had the presence of mind to ask Gardner if he intended on making a policy of recruiting gangs into his campaign.
     ”I don’t separate people on the basis of gang membership or non-gang membership as long as members and leadership are engaged in positive things,” Gardner replied, before rhapsodizing gangs as an unappreciated force for good, a brand of starry-eyed cluelessness I thought was the exclusive domain of Hyde Park liberals circa 1969.
     Daley beat him like a drum, almost 2 to 1.
     So give Lightfoot credit. At least she hasn’t reached out to Chicago street gangs. Not yet anyway. And the unwise email to CPS should be a passing embarrassment.

  

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Flashback 1997: In toyland, it's not all games

           

    I can't believe I've never posted this before. Of all the factory visits I've made in this city, Strombecker is among my favorites. That "grime-darkened wood barrel" I saw there lives in my memory — it was like something you expected hardtack to be store in aboard a clipper ship crossing the Atlantic in 1850. And yes, I only went because I loved their little cars as a child — and yes, the one above is mine.  In 2004, Strombecker was purchased by Processed Plastics Inc., a struggling Alabama toymaker, which closed down the Chicago plant in 2005. 
    

     The Strombecker Corp. didn't have a hit toy this season. No Tickle Me Elmo, no Beanie Babies, no Sing & Snore Ernie. It didn't have a hit toy last season, either, or the season before that.

     In fact, the West Side toy company has never had a fad toy sensation: no Hula-Hoops, no Slinkies, no Monopoly. Not in its 121-year history.
     Still, Strombecker thrives, relying on the old standbys, the year-in, year-out building blocks of childhood — in some cases literally building blocks, with painted, natural wood and alphabet sets. Plus metal cars, bubble pipes, paddle balls, plastic farm animals, tea sets, army men, cap pistols and some 700 other varieties of common toys, mostly sold under its Tootsietoy brand, none of which has caused a riot at Toys R Us, at least not yet.
     In fact, the toy being manufactured one day earlier this month at Strombecker's Pulaski Road plant (it has another factory on Lake Street, three others in the United States and a Canadian plant) isn't even sold at Toys R Us. It's a gun — a Pony Boy Western-style six-shooter — and guns were kicked off the retail giant's shelves in 1994.
     The area where the guns are being cast has a high school shop class smell, oily and metallic. The guns are made of zinc alloy, which arrives in long, heavy ingots that are melted down and injected into molds, each mold making all the pieces needed to produce a pistol, the pieces held together by trees, like a model car fresh from the box. Strombecker also makes the rolls of red caps that go in the guns.
     Production is very low tech. One gun at a time. The mold opens, a worker uses pliers to grab the hot, flat tree of connected gun parts, hangs it on an overhead conveyor chain and greases the mold for the next injection.
     The six-shooter components spend 20 minutes cooling before another worker plucks them off, cuts the pieces apart with a press, triggers falling one way, left and right halves another.
     The raw pieces are tumbled to wear off sharp edges. The small tumbler used for trigger pieces is practically an antique: a grime-darkened wood barrel mounted on a spinning mechanism.
     The finished components, collected in green bins, are assembled by hand in the next room. Lula Williams, who has worked at Strombecker for 23 years, can put together the eight pieces that make up a Pony Boy pistol in less than 30 seconds, or about 130 an hour. Is there an interesting aspect to the job?
     "No, not really," she says.
     The guns are a reminder that the toy business is not all fun. Toys are a luxury item that rise and fall on public whim. The Toys R Us gun banishment is typical of the kind of problem that can crop up out of nowhere. A child molester in Australia called himself Mr. Bubbles; the scandal hurt sales of Strombecker's bubble liquid, which by unhappy coincidence is sold under the Mr. Bubbles brand name.
     Or F. W. Woolworth's. The chain's failure was more than an exercise in nostalgia for Strombecker; once Woolworth's was Strombecker's biggest customer.
     "We're not getting much business from them anymore," said Dan Shure, CEO and president of the company and the fourth generation in his family to run it.
     In addition to the occasional freak disaster, the market has grown tighter in many ways. For instance, the days when Detroit automakers paid to produce the dies to make Tootsietoy cars in their model lines — as a form of promotion — are long gone.
     To help make ends meet, the company moved its metal car production to China, where labor costs $3 a day, compared with $10 an hour on the West Side.
     Adaptability has gotten Strombecker to where it is today, selling $50 million worth of toys annually. Strombecker began in 1876 as the National Laundry Journal, a magazine for the commercial laundries.
     Impressed by the possibilities of a Linotype machine displayed at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the owners of the Journal bought one, figuring that if the machine could mold letters of type, it could also make little toys to give away as premiums to draw children, and their parents, into laundries.
     The first giveaway toy was, appropriately, a metal flatiron, later joined by a top hat, a Scottie dog, a shoe, a battleship and a race car.
     Sound familiar? By an odd twist of history, that original flatiron and other early metal toys can be seen, to this day, in every Monopoly set, since Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly, used the laundry freebies as tokens when he created his game during the Depression.
     By then, the company was packaging the little toys, selling them in cigar shops and magazine stands.
     In 1898, it teamed up with a Chicago classic, Cracker Jack, and provided the free surprise inside boxes of Cracker Jack for more than half a century.
     At the Lake Street plant, seven workers cut and package jump ropes, while nearby is the production line spewing out liquid bubbles — Strombecker is the largest producer of bubble fluid in the world, 30,000 gallons a day to be blown into bubbles by children in 60 countries.
     The bubbles flowing into colorful plastic bottles on the West Side in December will find themselves floating above children's heads from Seattle to Singapore.
     "I travel around the world," Shure said. "It's a nice feeling to be in a shop in Zimbabwe and see a bottle of our bubbles."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 25, 1997

‘We live better than the kings’

Jim Kendros

     “Good afternoon everyone. I’m very happy to be back again at Belmont Village. My name is Jim Kendros, and I had such a wonderful time being here before. We’re going to explore great music today.”
     An audience of about two dozen people, including my parents, gathered in the lobby of a senior living community in Buffalo Grove last week.
     “Today I have a program called ‘Mozart and More,’” Kendros continues.
     He plays “Carol of the Bells” on the piano. It quickly becomes clear that the lobby is not the best environment for a recital. Noisy conversations erupt. Phones ring. A few residents arrive, late and loudly. A janitor rolls a garbage can rumbling by.
     None of this fazes Kendros, talking major versus minor, diving into musical theory.
     “Chances are you have heard something we call the ‘incipit’ in music,” he says. “I-N-C-I-P-I-T. It’s a Latin word that basically means the smallest part of a melody.”
     Kendros does this for a living. He also lectures before concerts, as well as social clubs and libraries. He is a composer, creator of the Mount Prospect Overture.
     For me, just visiting here once a week can be an occasion for somber reflection. I wondered how Kendros views his audience.
     “They’re near the end of their lives, even though I hope they will live another 20, 30 years,” he told me, earlier, over the phone. “I would like to believe I’m bringing them not only new things to think about but helping them to feel younger.”

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