Unlike hell, you can return from Phoenix

    Chicagoans, nestled in the bosom of the greatest city on earth, have limited interest in the bland nowheres beyond its borders. Therefore, as a columnist for Chicago’s preeminent daily newspaper, I try not to bore Chicago readers with places that aren’t Chicago and therefore don’t really matter.
     However. With temperatures in Chicago predicted to hit 100 degrees Wednesday, I feel obligated to share my recent experience in a certain sun-blasted city, despite it not being Chicago.
     Specifically, Phoenix.
     If you know one thing about Phoenix — and who doesn’t? — you know it is very, very hot. Surpassing 110 degrees for 31 consecutive days this summer. Fate dictated I fly there last week.
     Going to Phoenix in August must seem mad. In my defense, it was one of those duties parents sometimes find themselves shouldering, in this case delivering a cat to its owner, a young man associated with the federal judiciary there.
     While I did consider simply landing, handing over the beloved pet, then catching the next fight home — it is Phoenix, after all — that seemed a failure of imagination. Besides, there was a single aspect of Phoenician life I was curious about: the temperature. What must that be like? The hottest I’ve endured as a resident of Chicago was 105 on July 13, 1995. I still remember walking one block to the dry cleaners, then returning to our apartment on Pine Grove Avenue and lying down, utterly drained. 

     But 111 degrees is ... not bad, particularly if you are lounging by a pool. Yes, the concrete is too hot to step upon with bare feet, the metal rail leading into the water too hot to touch. But once you are submerged up to your chin, 111 degrees is just fine. It is, as they say, a dry heat.
     Beyond the heat, I couldn’t imagine what else Phoenix might offer. An art museum of some sort, no doubt. But so vastly inferior to the Art Institute that going would just be sad. Third-rate works by familiar names, larded with forgettable local efforts. I never considered going.
     As my host drove me around, showing off the Sandra Day O’Connor United States Courthouse — quite beautiful — Phoenix unfolded, a rather uninspiring hodgepodge of junior colleges and welding supply yards, interspersed with occasional streets of high-rises of the most anodyne architecture imaginable. Occasional silhouettes of mountains in the background, trying to add interest. It was as if someone shuffled together Franklin Park and Central Station and began dealing cards.

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Watch your aft

The life rafts are in the two big overhead compartments aft, or behind, the wing exits.

     Flying is not the special event it was when we'd take a plane to visit my grandmother in New York City, and I'd be escorted up to the pilot to receive my golden Pan Am wings. But it still is a journey, a process of imagined significance, and I try to pay attention. Even to the pre-flight safety spiel, which is tuned out so routinely by regular air travelers that it starts with a little plea to pay attention.

     I do. Pay attention, that is. Set aside my magazine, look up from my iPhone. Out of politeness for the human being standing a few feet in front of me, and from a personal interest in small differences.
     For instance, I noticed last week, flying to Phoenix, that the attendant now stipulates that only one alcoholic beverage can be ordered at a time, and no outside hooch can be consumed on the plane — no doubt a reaction to the rising number of booze-fueled assaults on flight attendants as our social fabric frays to a pile of thread and rags. The obvious solution would be to end sale of alcohol on flights, but that would leave money on the table, and airlines just can't do that, which is part of what has wrecked air travel. So it can't be that big of a problem.
     I also noticed a particular nautical term — "aft" — I'd never heard before in the pre-flight talk. Mentioned twice, in reference to where we might find life rafts. In two overhead compartments, "aft of the wing exits." Not that there would be much call for rafts between Chicago and Phoenix. And the raft storage lockers were obvious enough, hanging from the cabin ceiling above the aisle. Still, I wondered how many passengers knew that "aft" refers to the area of a ship toward the stern, or back, the place where the tiller or propellers would be, as opposed to "fore," which is the bow, or the front of a vessel. I'm all for using uncommon words; just maybe not in the emergency instructions. "Disembark expeditiously from the aircraft..."

     It might be worth mentioning that when the airline industry began, a century ago, its terminology was borrowed from sailing. Thus airports and airliners, not to forget pilots (a pilot guides a ship into harbor), galleys, cabins, etc. Planes were initially given names, like ships, and christened with a bottle of champagne broken over the propeller hub. 
     Though to me, the most striking thing about the flight was the facial expression of the attendants. A general exhausted, zombified look as they droned the snack choices — fruit snacks or a 30 calorie quinoa chocolate wafer — to one row, then the next, then the next. Staffing is a problem everywhere — our flight home was delayed an hour while a replacement pilot skedaddled over from Los Angeles — and I figure airline attendants are more overworked than ever, not to forget the aforementioned abuse. 

      That also used to be different. It didn't happen often. But there used to sometimes be a sparkle, a smile, a very human interchange between air traveler and airline staff. Or at least a realistic facsimile of such a thing. I suppose the day will come soon when we fly standing up, hanging on support bars, with beverages shot into our mouths from spigots. So I guess the thing to do now is to appreciate the human touch, such as it is, while it's still here, sort of. Human staff are expensive and won't be around forever.

    

He's never going away.

"Hell Hounds Rallying Round the Idol of France," by Thomas Rowlandson 
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      It's the whining that most exasperates me. Don't they ever tire of it? Yes, Donald Trump is famous for the lies that firehose out of his mouth, as easily as he draws breath and almost as often.
     But it's the constant complaining that drives me mad, if I didn't tune it out — I can't imagine watching Trump's interview this Wednesday with Tucker Carlson, his half-clever way of drawing whatever scant interest there might be away from the first Republican presidential debate, a gathering of gnats, all of whom, with the exception of born-again Chris Christie, can't even muster the internal fortitude to string together a few critical words against the liar and bully, fraud and traitor whom they would defeat.
     Republicans obviously want that kind of thing, though again, it boggles the mind as to why. It would be bad enough to gawp at the destruction of American democracy for a Julius Caesar. To yield your vote and the protection of a functioning judicial system in favor of Alexander the Great.
     But for this guy? That enormous baby, moaning and bellyaching. Waving a series of bogeymen over his head — mommy, Muslims are frightening me! Waaa, I can't sleep because trans people are using the toilet! Poor me! The deep state is hurting me! The world is rigged against me! It's unfaiiiiiir!!!!

     Remember, he was going on about the election being fixed in 2016, in case he lost. His squeaking past Hillary Clinton — but her emails! — shut that up, until 2020, when he actually did lose. Then the fig leaf he's slapped over every defeat he's ever experienced — the game was fixed, because that's the only way I can ever lose! — went from passing lie to an eternal, constantly-parroted verity of the Republican Party. Most Republicans believe, vis a vis nothing, that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. And yet they still participate in elections; you'd think, having been cheated in some ineffable way they can't explain, never mind prove, they'd give up on elections. And go straight to force and violence. Which is kinda where they are heading now.

     This is our new reality. Even when Trump passes from the scene — at 95, surrounded by toadies and handlers and mistresses and enablers — these mini-Trumps will ape him, trying to duplicate his success. At least when we die, and go to hell, we'll know exactly what to expect.

Vovomeena

     As a rule, I don't think much of slogans and truisms, particularly when offered in a commercial setting.

     However, this billboard, outside Vovomeena, the place where my son and I had breakfast in central Phoenix Friday morning, caught my fancy. Not an especially profound sentiment, perhaps. But true, and useful. Something to bear in mind, or try to, particularly as politics keep fracturing and the fate of our democracy teeters in the balance. I don't recall ever seeing it stated so plainly. You tend to want to feed stupid, mean, toxic people back their own stupidity, meanness  and toxicity— that seems like justice. But it really only brings you down to their level. Besides, they're better at it. They've had more practice. Believe me, as a newspaper columnist, I've often had the experience of responding instinctively to some base abuse, wait for the reaction, and realize that, duh, once again I've been out-stupided by an idiot.
     Maybe having just tucked into an excellent breakfast made me in a more receptive mood. The service was first rate, the setting, relaxed and lovely. Being on vacation, I indulged in a $19.95 smoked pork chop, sitting on a homemade waffle topped with apple-maple syrup and a layer of scrambled eggs and accompanied by a Portuguese donut. (The unusual name of the restaurant, Vovomeena, is a tribute to owner D.J. Fernandes' grandmother; "vovó" is Portuguese for "grandmother" and his is named "Meena."). 

    A lot of food, and I left behind a good deal of the eggs and waffle. But ate every bit of that pork chop, which was juicy and delicious. Breakfast held me all day — lunch was a whole grapefruit supplemented by a package of dried fruit and nuts from Starbucks, plus a cranberry juice cocktail on the plane. I'll admit, Phoenix as a city did not immediately impart its charms to me — maybe my second visit this winter will unbox those. But Phoenicians, as they are indeed called,  sure know how to serve food. Every single meal was a treat.

There's a really good smoked pork chop hiding under all that.

The freedom to say, "Stick 'em up!"

    Let's say I rob a bank. Nothing fancy. Nylon stocking over my head. Gun in my hand. Rush up to the window, point the gun at the trembling teller and say, "Stick 'em up! Gimme all the money."
     At which point I'm immediately arrested, as criminals often are. They're not geniuses, very stable or otherwise. Quite dumb really. An off-duty cop, in line behind me, makes the nab. I'm cuffed, led away.
     At my trial, my lawyer arises and airily begins my defense: "The First Amendment is the bedrock of our American freedoms. Take it away, and the rest of our quality of life crumbles. As free citizens, we are within our rights to make all sorts of statements: 'Down with the government!' or 'We need a new constitution' or 'Gimme all the money!' How sad a day it would be, when a simple imperative sentence considered against the law. Not eloquent, perhaps, not fully formed 'Give me all of the money, please,' we might prefer. But still a statement of entreaty, a request, one that no man should be prosecuted over...."
     How well would that argument go over?
     Not well, I'd imagine. Not in a world of sanity and fairness which, sad to say, we seem to be slipping away from.
     Because there are Donald Trump's lawyers, trying to frame his alleged plot to overthrow American democracy as a free speech issue. These were legitimate questions being asked by a responsible leader. A polite inquiry into the election process.
      "It attacks his ability to advocate for a political position, which is covered under the First Amendment," Trump attorney John Lauro told PBS. A political position of pressuring individual election officials, one-on-one, to overturn the election, dozens of failed lawsuits, constant airing of claims he absolutely knew to be untrue ("You're too honest," Trump told Mike Pence).
     "All of that is protected speech."
     As with any conspiracy theory, he scrapes together a ragtag bag of allegations and innuendo, fantasy and prevarication, and presents them all as a cohesive whole.
     Is there a fraud who would not use that argument?
     "My client, your honor, is not the quack peddling Neil Steinberg's Cancer-B-Gone Elixer that the prosecution just described, but a man of honor, asking legitimate questions about the medical establishment and offering a possible cure in the form of his $100-a-bottle pyramid program, which is not the 'pathetic scheme' outlined in the charges, but a growing, promising field of legitimate research in the medical community, Wishfulfillmentarianism, where the natural, innate engines of gullibility within the psyche of the patient are harnessed to promote good health..."
     We'd laugh if any other cheap crook tried it. But when Donald Trump does the exact same thing, as much as we'd like to laugh, we can't. Because too many people take this idiocy seriously for it to be funny.

111 degrees in the shade

   

     To be honest, when I stepped out of the air conditioning of Sky Harbor International Airpot in Phoenix Wednesday morning, I expected to be hit with a red hot hammer. After all, this is the city being crushed by the full brunt of global warming, 31 consecutive days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That has to be brutal.
     Yes, it was only 103 at the time, about 11 a.m. I'd experienced hotter, and perhaps that was affecting my expectations, memories of that 105 degree day in 1995. Back then, I'd walked a block to the dry cleaners in East Lake View and immediately home to lie down, wrung out, spent.
     Six hours earlier, it had been 58 degrees when I'd walked the dog in the early morning cool of Center Ave. I'd considered wearing a jacket, but figured, "Enjoy it while you can."

     Stepping through the automatic airport doors, I even formed phrase, in my mind, just to be ready, "Jesus fucking Christ!" Or some such thing. It was on the tip of my tongue.
     Only the 103 degree heat was ... bearable. Not a shock at all. Dry heat, as they say and ... could it be? ... slightly balsam-scented. Phoenix smells like a hotel sauna.
     As the temperature rose, I went about my business. Delivering my younger son's cat (I can almost hear readers who learned their parenting skills watching "The Great Santini" lunging for their keyboards to lecture me about how I am a ruinously indulgent parent. Spare me; based on how my boys turned out, you don't have a leg to stand on. Off the charts).
     We swung by Phoenix's main drag, such as it is, and the Sandra Day O'Connor United States Courthouse. Phoenix is depopulated at 12 noon. Hardly anyone on the street. At Home Depot, where I went to buy the lad the cordless electric drill that every householder should own (note to Great Santini set: shhhhhhh) groups of Hispanic men waited under trees. Day laborers, waiting for work. I bet the heat they feel is much different than the heat I shrugged off, dashing in and out of air conditioned cars and buildings. So let's stipulate that. I can only report what I experience; I'm not the all-seeing-eye.
     Phoenix reminds me of Los Angeles, not an actual city at all, in the Chicago, cohesive-place-with-a-downtown-and-neighborhoods, sense, but more of a random agglomeration of disparate locations united in a municipal totality. Streets of tiny ramshackle houses gave way instantly to the ballpark for the Diamondbacks. ("How do they play baseball in this?" I asked my son, and he pointed out that the field is covered and air conditioned, which seems wrong). The stadium yielded to a stretch of office buildings, then back to cement plants and flooring outlets, welding supply companies and yards of lawn statuary.
     I tried noting the colors of the buildings, but here words failed me — maybe it's the heat. There was red brown and copper brown and rose brown, khaki and beige and khaki beige, a spectral wheel of brown: dun brown and tan brown and brown brown, with the occasional bright yellow and faded red for variety's sake, with lots of old mustard and yesterday's oatmeal.  Blame the sun — I saw more cars whose paint jobs had been seared off in two days in Phoenix than seen in two years in Chicago.

      There are many junior and community colleges and trade schools. As we drove Interstate 17, heading to dinner, I began to notice all the billboards were for personal injury attorneys, but left off one salient detail — the lawyers' names. Instead they read "Husband & Wife Lawyer Team" and "Accidentjustice.com" and nicknames like "Sweet James" and "Rafi."

     My guess is their targets have limited English skills. Digging around, I found the Arizona Republic dedicated an episode of its Valley 101 podcast on this very subject. Like most podcasts, it's an incredibly slow-moving 22 minutes of time-filling and tap-dancing — including an eye-crossing number blast probing whether Arizona has more lawyer billboards than other states, beginning with the protracted story of how, in 1977, lawyers advertising became legal in Arizona. 

     The key question — why so many personal injury lawyer billboards compared to billboards for supermarkets and accountants and every other form of human endeavor? — wasn't raised, never mind answered.

     Though one lawyer interviewed on the Arizona Republic did say, "If you have any soul at all, you have to kinda hate lawyer advertising."

    Yes, but why? That was asked.

   "Why does it feel like we're surrounded by them?" host Kaila White wonders, calling Mark Breyer, who with his wife Alexis constitute, "The Husband and Wife Law Team." 

    "The reason is ... " Mark Breyer begins, promisingly, then says, in essence, they're trying to reach people. Stop the presses!

     "If anyone can be your client, then casting a wide net kinda makes sense," host White reveals.

      The obvious answer of why we notice them — because they're numerous and crude, with their stupid nicknames and sledgehammer get-cash-now tone — is finally hinted at, toward the very end of the podcast, after 22 minutes of life I'm never getting back.
     After lunch, it reached 111 degrees, and I retired to a chaise by the pool. It was warm, but not unbearable so. My biggest trouble was my eyes — running and smarting. Did I say it's a dry heat? It is. A very, very dry heat. 
      The biggest way the brutal Phoenix heat manifested itself was when I went to relocate from the lounge chair to the pool. I went to step onto the concrete and drew my bare foot back. Too hot to walk upon. I put on my flip-flops, and walked over to the stairs. The metal handrail was too hot to touch. I slipped off one sandal, then the other, and stepped into the water.  

     We ate well , and since readers do both live in  and occasionally visit Phoenix, I probably should go into detail. Lunch the first day was at the Welcome Diner at 10th and Pierce, where I had the "Carol" sandwich — smoked pork shoulder, Carolina BBQ sauce and tangy coleslaw on a fresh baked biscuit, with homemade lemonade and a slice of their hibiscus cherry piece 

     Dinner was a place my kid discovered because it's in a strip mall by the Goodwill, the lyrically named "Soup & Sausage." I tried kvass for the first time — think a rye bread soda, not sweet, almost like an NA beer, but dark. And a platter of pierogi — chicken, onion, and two sour cherry — a pair of well-crafted sausage, and a mound of sauerkraut.

      Dinner in Phoenix Thursday night was at Taco Boy's — as much as I sometimes lament a missing possessive, the presence here made me itch to ask the oldest person behind the counter if he were the Taco Boy, and to congratulate him on his grammar. But the place was hopping, and I thought better than to bother anybody. The food hot of the grill and fantastic — the first taco I've ever gotten that was too hot to pick up when I unwrapped it.

     Speaking of hot. We were there about 7 p.m., and people were sitting outside, enjoying dinner on the patio. It was 106 degrees. But a dry heat. You get used to it.

Measuring a ruler

    

    Believe it or not, as much stuff as I write here, every ... goddamn ... day, not everything I write gets posted. Like this, a follow-up on last week's column on the Field Museum's show, "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery," that kept getting bumped by more pressing topics. Honestly, as the days piled on, given the third-rail aspect of the topic, I considered just adding it to the list of emergency, Fire Axe Behind the Glass columns to run should I get hit by a bus. Which is kinda what happened, given, that I find myself in Phoenix, where it hit 111 degrees Wednesday and is supposed to do the same today. But it's a dry heat ... More on that tomorrow, I imagine.

     The word "oriental" was retired from polite society a number of years ago because it smacked of the Western eagerness to view unfamiliar Eastern cultures as exotic. Egyptian hieroglyphics conveying tax rolls and recipes for beer were mistaken for incantations and other mystic hooha.  Asian women were fetishized into geishas and courtesans, part of the general practice of presenting classes of Others, not as complicated, multi-dimensional human beings such as ourselves, but flat cut-outs, redolent of incense, eroticism and intrigue.

     Finally scholarship rid itself of that attitude. 

    I thought.

     Though that Ripley's Believe It or Not view of the world came to mind while reading the comments after my Friday column on the "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery" exhibit at the Field Museum. I had spoken the silent part, wondering where the whitebread American death rituals were. The Field, with  charming and unexpected candor, said, in essence, two things: 1) "This is the stuff we collected" and 2) The white social baggage is in the heads of the visitors.

       Of course. Anthropology is generally the study of tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and nomads in the Punjab. While there is a fine tradition of Western academics turning that microscope upon ourselves, whether examining the social structure of city blocks or suburban cheerleading squads, that seems more the recent exception than the longtime rule. Why study ourselves? We know ourselves. We're familiar. We're normal, and the standard by which others are judged. Exploring ourselves would be like measuring a ruler.

     While I admired the pith of the reader who observed, "We don’t usually see horses or squirrels in the zoo, either," I disagreed with the thinking behind the remark. First, it's simply wrong. The Lincoln Park Zoo has a Farm-in-the-Zoo, with cows and goats and, yes, horses, or ponies anyway. A zebra might be more exotic, to us, than a horse, but it would be hard to argue that it's somehow a more intrinsically interesting animal.
     But it's also an antique way of thinking. The flip side of viewing the world as exotic is viewing ourselves as ordinary, the scenery and curtains that are to be ignored while taking in the rich pageant of life is celebrated. It is an equally defective way of thinking. I have no sympathy for the strident self-victimization of the anti-woke segment of this country, and that is not why I pointed out the lapse. What I was trying to say is, that when the world is being gathered and presented, supposedly in its totality, such as at the Field death show, I would like to be considered part of it. The multitudinous sins of my race — some of them perpetrated against my religion — do not exile their descendent from the realm of the living. Not yet anyway.

     Yes, the pendulum swings, and given the centuries of unashamed bigotry, it's a fine thing to see it going the other way. To a point. My central complaint about the "Death" show is that nobody considered the bulk of visitors might appreciate learning about a few of their own culture's many odd rituals and beliefs. It seems a failure to lay out Chinese hell but ignore Dante's hell.

     I hope this isn't all about ego, the boost of being showcased. I suppose there has to be some of that. But there are interesting aspects the Field left on the table. If we wanted to show the way Western society tries to thwart death, to negate it, those Victorian death photos, such as above, would be an apt vehicle, unfamiliar to most visitors. Or below, the circa World War I New York Police Department glass plate photographs Luc Sante unearthed and gathered in his chilling 1992 book, "Evidence." You can't say they aren't interesting. There's a danger when certain realms stop being considered worthy of contemplation. The NYPD tossed thousands of these glass plates into New York harbor — Sante, now Lucy Sante, was lucky to find a few boxes overlooked under a stairwell. When we don't consider the full range of history to be significant, losses are certain to follow.

from Luc Sante's "Evidence"