Flashback 2010: It's time for 'retard' to go

Porgy at the Lyric Opera

     Sunday's Chicago Polar Plunge had a record haul — some $2 million — for the Special Olympics. As someone with an eye on language, I find myself idly wondering whether "special," which can veer toward an insult on junior high school playgrounds, will someday be dropped in favor of a more positive word. I weighed in on the subject 13 years ago, when the Special Olympics took aim at "retarded," a word that, sadly, is still very much in use.

     Last season, when the Lyric Opera put on "Porgy and Bess," two aspects fascinated me.
     The first aspect was racial. Great music composed by a white Jewish guy, sung by an all-black cast. Art, but filled with odious stereotypes.
     The second involves disability. Porgy is "a cripple." Originally, he pushed himself around on stage in a goat cart. But times change — now he hobbles on a crutch.
     When lyricist Ira Gershwin updated the opera in 1952, a certain derogatory term for blacks was cut. "Cripple" could stay. In a column, I tried to specify which racial slur got axed, and an editor expunged it.
     Which bothered me — I differentiate between a word hurled on a playground or from a stage and explaining exactly which term has been cut. But I also understand that such matters are highly sensitive. We used hyphens instead.
     Which brings up the word "retarded." The Special Olympics is pushing on to scrub "retarded" from the language. As if on cue, the cartoon "Family Guy" featured Ellen, a character with Down syndrome, provoking Sarah Palin's well-exercised sense of victimization.
     While I differentiate between art and life — I don't believe children live in a better world if we bowdlerize Huck Finn — there is also crossover between the two realms. If "Family Guy" has fun with Down syndrome, then certain viewers might feel entitled to do the same.

REMEMBER 'FEEBLE-MINDED'?

     I don't like to equivocate. My gut instinct is against sanitizing culture — it can be counterproductive, even laughable. Will it really be progress when Bess sings, "He's a disabled indee-vidual an' he needs mah love"? I don't see it.
     The actress who plays Ellen on "Family Guy" is Andrea Fay Friedman. She has Down syndrome and she thinks her role is funny. Isn't it the worst kind of paternalism to, in effect, try to get her fired because Sarah Palin is uncomfortable with seeing the subject she milks for sympathy being treated as a source of humor? People are either full adults out in the real world, or they're a special victim class who need coddling, and it's disingenuous to push for one and then, when they do something you don't like, invoke the other.
     And yet. Were developmentally disabled people secure in the mainstream alongside the Irish and accountants, we could happily debate the cultural desirability of mocking them. But given that recognizing their full humanity is a fairly recent development, it seems that we should at least acknowledge that ridicule, though funny in entertainment, is destructive on a personal level.
     The issue here is not what Sacha Baron Cohen says in "Borat," but what people say in their own lives, and here, while racial taunts and religious slurs have generally been sent to the woodshed, "retarded" hasn't, and it is time to put that term out to pasture.
     Words change their meaning. When The Association for Retarded Citizens was founded in 1950, it was aiding people who were still called "feeble-minded," not as insults, but officially, as in the "Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth."
     "Retarded" was a neutral, modern term, then. It isn't anymore, having been twisted into a taunt over 50 years.
     Yes, whatever term replaces it will be equally corrupted eventually — notice the tone of grinning mockery that a junior high school student can invest in the word "special" and you realize this is a footrace between those whose experience makes them sensitive and those fortunate enough not to care, between those who would have an inclusive society and those who would chuckle at its most vulnerable members.
     Sometimes — often — that is the same person. I laughed when Borat mistook "retard" with "retired," and would no sooner see it cut from the movie than I'd rewrite "The Merchant of Venice" to remove the religious references.
     But that doesn't mean we have to cling to our present attitudes. Times change, and so does what is considered funny. In 1950, a child with Down syndrome was a humiliating family stigma. You'd dump that child in an institution and never speak of her again. Progress for people with disabilities paralleled advances in civil rights and feminism — heretofore marginalized groups struggling to reach their full potentials. Humor changed too. "Amos & Andy" isn't funny anymore; maybe someday "Borat" won't be funny, either.
     In 1953, Dale Evans, wife of cowboy star Roy Rogers, penned a book, Angel Unaware, about their daughter Robin, who was born with Down syndrome. Doctors told her to have Robin institutionalized. Instead Evans, inspired by her deep Christian faith, posed the little girl in family publicity photos. The book sold 400,000 copies in the mid-1950s, and parents who otherwise never let their children out of the house felt comfortable bringing them to Roy Rogers rodeos, because of his wife's book.
     They felt safe there.
     I believe that any person with a heart, facing this complex issue, would rather err on the side of those children, would want them, not merely to get out of the house to see a cowboy show, but to also go to school with other kids and work at a job, if they could, still safe and accepted, without their lives being made a hell by would-be wits looking for someone to abuse.
     That's what it boils down to. "Porgy and Bess" is still great, without the offending word. Alas, we lose a convenient butt of jokes — a concern to us satirists. The pool of potential victims does shrink alarmingly. But don't despair — there's always Canadians.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 22, 2010

Purim duty.

          "Esther before Ahasuerus," by Artemisia Gentileschi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Religious observance was never my strong suit. Usually I'm being prodded by someone else. My parents, for the first decade and a half of life. My wife for the past, gee, four decades. Otherwise, I tend to let things slide.
     With the exception of a few small gestures that I've absorbed and will perform unbidden. Leaving a Jewish home with a mezuzah on the door, I will reflexively touch it and then kiss my fingertips, which, now that I think of it, can't be hygienic in this COVID era. I never thought of mezuzahs as fomites (sigh, physical objects that transmit disease). Though I bet someone has. Sure enough, Israel's chief rabbi, David Lau, encouraged Jews not to touch mezuzahs, because COVID. Given our dwindling numbers, it makes sense for the faith to skew toward self-protection. 
     Speaking of danger, Purim, which begins Monday night, along with Passover and Hanukkah, are what I consider a they-tried-to-kill-us-but-couldn't holidays. Instead of the Egyptians or Greeks, we have Persian King Ahasuerus. While the Passover story is told by reading the Haggadah at a Seder meal, and Hanukkah gets conveyed in really bad songs, the Book of Esther is often acted out in a synagogue — my mother still talks about the turn I did as a teenager as Haman, the evil adviser to the king who tried to do the Jews in.
     I imagine the Purim story is far less familiar to non-Jews than the Exodus. Without going into too much detail, bad guy Haman wants the Jews dead. Scaffolds are erected, but Ahasuerus's hot new wife, Esther, a secret Jew, intercedes on their behalf and saves them.
     This story actually has a fleeting recent relevance to American politics, When Donald Trump took office, the more sentient Jews worried that, despite his continual lip service to the State of Israel, having a stone bigot in office might not ultimately be good for the tribe. Stephen Miller — or sometimes Steve Bannon — seemed a nearly Haman-like figure. 
    Which led worried Jews (or is that redundant? Judaism and worry being tightly twinned) to invoke Trump's daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism in order to marry Jared Kushner. 
      "Can Ivanka Trump become our Queen Esther?" is how the Forward, the venerable New York Jewish newspaper, put it in a headline. She would intercede with King Trump and keep him from whatever edicts he would lay down against us, forgetting that a) the objects of bigots are fungible, and once hatred is tolerated it gets around to everybody who is considered fair game and b) Ivanka wouldn't go out a limb for anybody.
      There was something truly pathetic in the "she will be our Esther" trope and it didn't take long for Jews to give up the notion.
      "Ivanka Trump Fails the Queen Esther Test," the Israeli daily Haaretz headlined in 2017, describing a situation that should have been no surprise.
     "During the first two weeks of the Trump administration, Ivanka hasn’t been seen fighting for anything" the newspaper wrote. "Rather disastrously, Ivanka appeared callous and out-of-touch when she uploaded a photograph of herself and her husband onto Instagram dressed elegantly for a night on the town, as protests over immigration ban were erupting. Unflattering comparisons were made to a different queen — Marie Antoinette."

     Turns out indifference toward suffering is hereditary.
     "Ivanka and Jared’s silence has been deafening, as hate crimes against Jews skyrocket along with other forms of racist violence including three waves of bomb threats to Jewish community centers across the country," Haaretz wrote.

    Where was I? Oh yes. Sunday morning found me driving, at my wife's direction, to Tel Aviv Bakery on Devon Avenue, early, for the ritual buying of the hamantaschen, in honor of Purim. Some demands of faith are easier to comply with than others.

Welcome to the club

Door knocker, Barcelona 2022

  
     Last week Everygoddamnday.com received several hundred new subscribers, thanks to the good offices of Eric Zorn and Charlie Meyerson. Since some of those newcomers seem to be taking a trust drop into the unknown, based on their complete faith in the two aforementioned journalists, I thought I would take a moment today to explain what they've signed up for.

     For the past 36 years, I've been on staff at the Chicago Sun-Times. For 26 of those years, I've written a news column. This blog was created almost a decade ago, after I mouthed off to the publisher and got myself suspended. If you are interested in the details of that episode, you can find them here, along with a test drive in a 2013 Bentley.

     The suspension only lasted a week, but the blog has been published every day since, without fail. More than 3,000 posts. Because I still have a job, I've never been much interested in monetizing the blog. It does run cheesecake ads, literally, from Eli's Cheesecake. But I don't charge for subscriptions, or accept donations, and only started blasting out a daily email because Charlie convinced me it was stupid not to. The email itself is not a newsletter, though I try to tuck some interesting detail of the day ahead, if there is one. Its sole purpose is to wave that day's link under your nose, as a convenience.

     My column runs in the newspaper Monday, Wednesday and Friday, usually, and on those days I post the first six paragraphs or so of the column, and then link to the paper for the rest, because they pay for it. The paper does not charge for subscriptions, now that we were taken under the wing of Chicago Public Media, a 501(c)3 charity. But to read the full column, they do require you register once by giving your email. If this violates your sense of propriety, then by all means, don't do it. But with Alden Capital gutting the Tribune, the Sun-Times is now the preeminent newspaper in Chicago, and being an informed citizen means taking time to read it. Given that our forefathers stormed Normandy Beach in part to protect our freedom of the press, it doesn't seem too great a sacrifice to ask that you share your email. 

     On Saturdays, I invite friends to pinch hit, and I suppose any reader who wanted to take a swing, since I consider you friends, or at least friends-in-the-making. The other three days I either write new material, or haul out something germane from the archive.

     Readers are invited to comment, but comments are posted at my discretion. If you made a comment and it wasn't posted, ask yourself: did I suggest the proprietor is an idiot? Did I wax at length about something I read on Q-Anon? Was I being insufferable? That might explain it. 

     I truly appreciate corrections, with a few caveats. There is no need to apologize, or be concerned with nitpicking. To write is to err, particularly here, where I have no copy editor. Try not to glory in the act of correction. No need to muse whether I mean 'hte," the acronym for high terpene extract, or merely mistyped "the." It's the latter. 

     There is a search bar on the upper left corner, and if there is a topic of particular interest to you — grapefruit, concrete, heart transplants — I encourage you to explore. Odds are I've written something about it. You might enjoy the first post, explaining what I'm trying to do here.

    That's about it. Feel free to ask questions. I almost always respond, because I'm grateful for every reader. Well, almost every reader. The blog is intended for people who like this kind of thing. If you no longer want to receive email notifications, simply ask to be removed, pay the $200 removal fee*, and your name will be taken off the list. For the rest, welcome aboard, and I hope you enjoy reading Every goddamn day.

* Kidding. There's no fee. 

Works in progress: Charlie Meyerson

     My pal Charlie Meyerson has been bringing Chicago the news for a long time — the last two decades in the 20th century, nearly, at WXRT and WNUA, followed by 11 years at the (turn, spit) Tribune before returning to radio for award-winning tours at WGN and FM News.

     In recent years, he's been behind Chicago Public Square, a fine aggregator site and valued supporter of this blog.
     He wrote to me, taking issue with something our fellow email columnist, Eric Zorn, said in this space last week, and I invited him to be this week’s “Works in Progress” guest blogger.
     I should add, given our declining media landscape, it's fun to facilitate a good old- fashioned Media Spat. Though if Eric wants to come raging out of his corner and whack Charlie with a folding chair, he'll have to wait two weeks, as I've got Lane J. Lubell lined up for next Saturday, writing about the movies.
     Take it away, Charlie:

     With affection for both of you — to Neil, who was kind enough to call me an “old friend” five years ago this week as he re-posted one of my favorites to his blog; and to Eric, a fellow early adopter of email with whom I love playing music many Saturdays in Oak Park—I need to set the record straight on Eric’s assertion that, in 2003, he started “the Tribune’s first blog.”
Unless one is distinguishing between “the Tribune” and “chicagotribune.com”—and I wouldn’t—Daywatch, which I helped launch in 1999, was the paper’s first blog.

     I’ll happily cede Eric the title of “the Tribune’s first print columnist to have a blog,” but I joined the Trib in 1998 precisely as a champion of continually updated web logs — with which I’d been experimenting in the weeks before my hiring there. Given that the paper’s “breaking news team” was doing this in March 1999 and given that the word “blog” didn’t materialize until “April or May 1999,” Daywatch clearly counts as a blog before blog was a word.

     Anyway, what I did for more than a decade at the Trib is what I’ve been doing daily at Chicago Public Square since January 2017: Rounding up the work of talented reporters and columnists—including Zorn and Steinberg—in an award-winning independent news briefing posted to, yes, a blog and delivered by email to thousands of people who care about Chicago and the region.
     Plus, they get a weekly news quiz!
     And I’d be honored if you Steinberg fans were to join their ranks—free—by signing up here. (Although note that Square will be on hiatus until March 13.)
     Or you can let us take care of it just by tapping this link to send an email we’ve prepopulated for you.
     See you in your inbox.

This interview never happened

     What does “off the record” mean?
     My understanding is, it means you aren’t going to quote someone. That whatever conversation you have is only meant to improve your understanding of a situation. Or person. Otherwise, what would be the point of ever having an off-the-record conversation?
     Still, even though I’ve been in this business 40 years, I don’t traffic in hard news much, and there are details of the off-the-record tradition I’m uncertain about. Can you even say the conversation occurred? That 45 minutes were spent sitting in a certain office on the 5th floor of City Hall last Halloween, talking to a particular elected official who, shall we say, didn’t have the best week? I believe I can.
     Can I mention what I said? I wasn’t off the record. I made some suggestions. How about talking about the challenge of being a mother while running one of the largest cities in the United States? “It might humanize you,” is what I actually said. Tact, not my strong suit. I prefer to think of it as being blunt.
     Officials sometimes try to slip a shiv, anonymously, into their adversaries without leaving any fingerprints. “A high city official said...” It’s also a fig leaf for the frightened. If you don’t trust yourself, or anyone else, or if you are so thin-skinned you can’t risk that anything you say that might be held in an unflattering light.
     Elected officials are sometimes torn between seeking the attention they crave and receiving the scrutiny they shun.

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Flashback 2000: Do-good effort won't do any good

 

The Triumph of Fame, by Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   Did you wake up Wednesday morning with a wincing unease that could be unwound as, "Gee, I'm glad Lori Lightfoot lost. But Paul Vallas? Really? He's the best we've got?"

      Thinking to ward off this sour feeling with information, I plunged into the archive, looking for what I've written about Vallas. The short answer is: not much. A reformer turned hired gun traveling bureaucrat, he was good at signing pledges like the one mocked below.  A pledge that Vallas blithely violated, at least the "I will discourage all forms of prejudice by others at every opportunity" clause, when he allowed the caustic Fraternal Order of Police to climb into bed with him without a murmur of protest. The fact that Vallas felt obligated to put some daylight between himself and Gov. Ron DeSantis when the Florida fascist came to town says everything. I like to think this all means Chicago will welcome Mayor Brandon Johnson come May. But if we've learned anything, it's that we minimize the Aggrieved White Person vote at our peril.

   
     Chicago is the most segregated city in America. They leave that off the brochures. No Southern backwater ever managed to balkanize the races as completely as Chicago has, first as a matter of official policy, and now as lingering tradition.
     So it was with more than the usual weary, ironic reporter's smile that I tore open an envelope from the city this morning and found my very own copy of the "Metropolitan Chicago Pledge," the Commission on Human Relations' latest attempt to justify its existence.
     First, to work us into a signing frenzy, the pledge bandwagon is rolled out and put on display: Mayor Daley has already signed. Cook County Board President John H. Stroger Jr., too. Ditto for Paul Vallas, the head of the public schools.
     I'm not sure whom that's supposed to impress. Now if Matt Hale or Lu Palmer had signed, that might signify something dramatic was afoot. But no.
     The pledge itself is a masterpiece of early 21st Century touchy-feeliness. It begins with three sentences, two simple ones and one tongue-twister that might have been crafted by the mayor himself.
     "I believe that every person has worth as an individual," it begins. "I believe that every person is entitled to dignity and respect." And then the Daleyian doozy: "I believe that every thought and every act of prejudice is harmful; if it is my thought or act, then it is harmful to me as well as others."
     Then the call to action:
     "Therefore, from this day forward I will strive daily to eliminate all forms of prejudice from my thoughts and actions. I will discourage all forms of prejudice by others at every opportunity. I will treat all people with dignity and respect; and I will strive daily to honor this pledge, knowing that metropolitan Chicago will be a better place because of my effort."
     Golly.
     The city plans to distribute this travesty to "youth-service agencies, places of worship, corporations, and businesses," in the form of "posters, bookmarks, and wallet-size cards." This is just hobbyhorsing — and given the endless meetings and discussions (whoops, make that dialogues) that no doubt went into this effort, not to mention the printing and postage, every Chicagoan has a right to greet it with a thumb to the nose, a wiggle of the fingers, and a moist blat of ridicule.
     Is there any reason we should accept this bit of empty symbolism from the same city that erected the nightmare housing projects we are still struggling to free ourselves from? The same city whose city council voted to ban Martin Luther King Jr.'s open occupancy marches 49 to 1? Of course not.
     The true insult behind the pledge is that racism is a deep, institutional problem, the sort of evil that surface do-goodism has no effect on whatsoever. Can anyone not in the direct employ of the department of human relations believe that any shred of racist feeling will be diminished because of this pledge? Impossible.
     And we haven't even begun to address the long, scary history of pledges and oaths of all forms. They're fine to inculcate patriotism in 6-year-olds, but after that they are usually studies in coercion and hypocrisy.
     We laugh at those old duck and cover civilian defense films from the 1950s because of their woefully inadequate understanding of the problem being faced. Just as curling up under your desk is of no use when the hydrogen bombs start falling, so weak albeit well-intentioned efforts such as this current travesty mock the seriousness of the problems they pretend to address.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 17, 2000.

It’s easier when you can pick your voters

     Pop quiz! Pencils ready? Then let’s begin.
     The 23th Ward is located:
     a) North of the 13th Ward.
     b) South of the 13th Ward.
     c) East of the 13th Ward.
     d) All of the above.
     The answer, of course, is “d” — the 23rd ward looks like a reverse capital F, closing its jaws around the squirming 13th, one of the many tortuous shapes created last year when the ward map of Chicago was gerrymandered into a crazy jigsaw puzzle, diluting the power that was supposed to be wielded by voters Tuesday.
     And we wonder why so many stay home.

     Early voting this year was historically high. Election officials estimate up to 42% of Chicagoans will vote. Not near half.
     Money was out in force, casting its proxy ballot — $1.2 million of Super PAC cash injected into the Chicago City Council races by real estate agents and various business interests.
     There were the usual last-minute shenanigans — anonymous flyers and phone calls, “concerned residents” blasting emails demanding certain candidates drop out, citing old speeding tickets and dusty alleged misdeeds.
     The Council races were the usual dog’s breakfast of the serious and the silly. Nine incumbents ran unopposed; others faced mobs of opponents in roiling battle royales. Almost a third of the Council either retired or announced their decision not to run — some because they are indicted or fancy themselves mayor, a prize not grabbed by a Chicago City Council member since 1876.
     This high turnover is ironic because, thanks to our am-I-toast-yet? mayor, the City Council is more of an actual branch of government than usual.     

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