So Mayor Johnson’s NOT going to Mexico?

     Media folks can be so negative.
     After Mayor Brandon Johnson announced he was going to the southern border — America’s, not Hegewisch — I was licking my lips. This is what we journalists — OK, just me — call “a duck in a bucket.”
     Imagine: the large galvanized pail, filled with water. The placid mallard, gazing up innocently as I raise the metaphorical double-barreled shotgun of scorn, squint one eye, smile, then squeeze both triggers. A simultaneous blast and quack of alarm, cut short, and gone in a cloud of feathers.
     Too easy. First, the border inspection tour is a cherished cliche of the right wing. Put on your Carhartt coat, slap a look of Ted Cruz concentration on your mug as you stare fiercely at a group of miserable refugees huddled a safe distance away. Use ing their misery to buff your image among those not savvy enough to be disgusted.
     For the mayor of Chicago to volunteer to perform that charade — it’s like his attending a Trump rally to see what they’re like.
     Besides, Eric Adams, mayor of New York, just went to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia to tell them “New York City is full,” an empty gesture immediately denounced as a “paid vacation.” So Johnson’s trip, had it happened, would have been parroting a bad New York idea. Next he’ll suggest that Chicagoans pile garbage on the sidewalk.
      I was rubbing my hands. Christmas is coming early this year ...
      And then Johnson has to go and ruin it by canceling his trip, in reaction to the chorus of ridicule along the lines of, “Why don’t you investigate the city that you are theoretically mayor of instead, and acquaint yourself with the myriad problems right the flip here?”

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Autumn lake

    

      If I were a big important national columnist, with a big important national following hanging on my every word, I would feel obligated to weigh in daily on the ghastly news continually arriving like so many shells raining down on us.
      But here, on this hobby blog, with my ragtag bag of fans, who for some unfathomable reason like this stuff, I don't have to pretend to make sense of the insanity of the Israel-Hamas War, as it is now being called, according to official AP style. I don't have to try to explain what is to be done with immigrants — that's Friday in the Sun-Times — or set up a felt board and use Mr. Sun and Miss Moon to illustrate what Jim Jordan's double defeat in his attempt to become Speaker of the House means for the future of Trumpism. 
     Instead I can share with you an image of this lovely lake, which is ... well, better not say, in case you decide to rush there. What I will say is that the view, in this direction, was the solitude and serenity of this weathered old grey wood building, crouched amongst the explosion of yellow leaves, placid before still water. Though it was not an isolated lake. There were lots of people all around me. But I chose to face away from the crowd, for a few precious moments. I recommend it highly. The problems will all still be there waiting when we turn around. 

Is razor sharpness heritable?

Cafe reader, Amsterdam

     For all my vaunted rationality, there is an undercurrent of mysticism in me. That's nothing to be proud of — it's as common as dirt. But nothing to be ashamed of, either . . . I hope.
     What do I mean? I was reading the New York Times obituary of Louise Glück, the great American poet who died Saturday. How to describe her? Kind of the anti-Mary Oliver. If nature in Oliver's poems is affirming, redemptive, serene — those reassuring wild geese flapping into view to tell us everything's okay. -- then Glück's world is “bleak,” “alienated” and “austere.” When Glück writes "I set myself on fire" the reader wants to blaze alongside her.

      The future Nobel laureate allowed me to use seven of her poems in the literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I wrote with Sara Bader, and I was grateful, and felt perhaps an even stronger kinship than the one inspired by reading her poems, since we'd spoken several times and money changed hands. I wrote about her three years back, and you can read more here.
     The Times spoke of Glück's "remorseless wit and razor-sharp language" and then dropped this little factoid: "Her father, Daniel, was a businessman and a frustrated poet who, among other things, helped invent the X-Acto knife."

     Say no more! My mind instantly connected that "razor-sharp language" to the small triangular heads of those hobby knives. As if her incisive genius were inherited, almost pre-ordained.
     Which is both silly and how people think. Though why should it be? We do take something from our parents — that's undeniable. Maybe the silly part is anthropomorphizing the X-Acto blade into Glück's raw voice. Very Mary Oliver-ish of me, now that I think of it. Oh well, I suspect that, as much as I admire the Glücks of the world, I'm really a softie at heart.

Copyediting is life.

 

     The guard took my bag and wheeled it through an imposing bronze gate — the First National Bank of Jersey City, retrofitted into the Hyatt House Hotel. Waiting for a claim check, I did what I reflexively do — read, in this case a sign posted in front of me: "For Roof Top entrance, please go around the corner to our York Street entrance."

     Ouch, you see where that clunks, don't you? That doubled "entrance." It should be, I thought, 'For Roof Top access, please go around the corner to our York Street entrance.' Eliminates the redundant word.
     Sometimes using the same word over and over is powerful, each repetition resonating and building on the uses that went before. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields..." Churchill's June 4, 1940 speech isn't improved by plucking out those last two uses of "fight" and making it something like, "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall battle them on the landing grounds, we shall resist in the fields." It's weakened, if not wrecked.

     A more difficult call is when to drop redundant single words. Above, when I mentioned Churchill, first I used just his last name then, thinking of AP style, added his first, "Winston Churchill." Then lost "Winston." Some writers are so familiar there is no need for first names. "Shakespeare's sonnets" is fine. "William Shakespeare's sonnets" is overkill. 

   I'm amazed at how often, on labels, completely unnecessary words are left on. 

   Last week my wife and I were having bologna sandwiches for dinner — hey, it happens. She took a package of chicken bologna from the refrigerator. I'd never buy chicken bologna in a thousand years. It's like buying a beef drumstick. But bread was toasted, Plochman's applied and voila, dinner. At one point my gaze fell upon the bologna package.
     "What?" my wife asked, noticing me looking.

     "I'm copyediting the label," I said, tapping the motto curving along the bottom of the red and yellow logo: "Glatt Kosher Product." "You don't need the word 'Product' — 'Glatt Kosher' is sufficient. 'Product' doesn't add anything meaningful."

     Of course, there's a lot of that going around.

Strengthen one another

 

     Family obligations took me to New York for a quick visit — one full day and out. But I happened to arrive Friday, just in time for the "Day of Rage" that Hamas had announced to inflict their wrath on any random Jew who happened to be nearby.
     Which was worrisome, because I'm nothing if not a random Jew. Would it be safe? Myself, I wasn't concerned, but my loved ones were worried, as loved ones will be.
     So I'm waiting for my plane, about 6:30 a.m., and this gentleman is in line with his two sons — first I noticed the yamulke on the younger boy, about 7, and the fringes of his tzitzit. I saw them and thought, "If he can face the world today, so can I."
     At that moment the man whipped out his tallit, put on tefillin, and began davening his morning prayers, right there in line. Not a lot of wind-checking among these folks. No reading the room. I took one photo, and though I am not a pious person, as you know, thought of a line from Isaiah, "Fear not, for I am with you." That's why he can do this, my wife later explained. Because he believes God is protecting him. I almost pointed out that God is notoriously lax when it comes to watching out for his Chosen People, particularly last week. Hope springs eternal, I suppose. Maybe God means well, but is clumsy. Or pre-occupied. All those physical laws to keep straight, all those galaxies to keep twirling.
     On the plane, he sat a dozen rows ahead, still in his prayer shawl and phylacteries. I wanted to say something to him, out of free-floating goodwill and my own anxiety about going out and about looking like someone from the cover of Der Stermer. But I was aware from past experiences that religious Jews do not always welcome uninvited expressions of solidarity from their weak-tea religious brethren. Just because the Lubavitch are the Welcome Wagon for piety doesn't mean other ultra-orthodox sects are. Some have more of a leave-me-the-fuck-alone vibe.
     I happened to stow my backpack in the compartment over his head. During the flight, I went to get a snack from the backpack, mulling over what I wanted to say to the Orthodox Jew, should I get the chance. What came to mind was one of the few snatches of Hebrew I know: Hazak, hazak v' nit'hazek, which means, "Strong, strong and may we strengthen one another."  It's usually said when a congregation has finished reading a book of the Torah, and struck me as a something that could be repurposed as an expression of encouragement. Or not. I'm no expert on these things. More like someone trying to reconstruct a kindergarten teacher's manual based on having gone to kindergarten, long ago.
     I kept the phrase Hazak, hazak v'nit'hazek on the tip of my tongue, ready to deploy it, even as we left the airplane. He lingered — I wasn't quite up to planting myself and waiting to fake a chance encounter. Finally, I cast a final backward glance, and then vanished into Newark International Airport. Probably for the best. 
       The word hazak unlocked a memory, however. I was at a bar in Jerusalem, back in the day. The Red Windmill? I asked the bartender for a traditional Israeli drink and he made me a bieru hazaka (בירה חזקה) — a "strong beer" — consisting of a glass of ale with a shot of arak dropped into it. It did the trick, and reminds us of how the ancient and the modern mingle in Israel. IF Jews don't belong there, they don't belong anywhere, which is sorta the point anti-Semites are trying to make. Anyone who suggests that the Israelis just abandon their ancient land a) are being by definition anti-Semitic, by expecting Jews to do something that no other people would be glibly expected to do and b) have never been to Israel. It's such a small, beautiful place. There isn't much comfort to be found in this current nightmare of slaughter and atrocity with no end in sight. But this is undeniable: at least they're fighting over something worth having. You can't really blame the Israelis for wanting to be so strong and tough that nobody can take their land away. That's what we do, what every other country tries to do. 

Guernica

 

     In September, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid  announced that it is lifting its 30-year ban on visitors photographing Pablo Picasso's masterpiece "Guernica." Which sparked a brief flicker of envy in me — I was there a year ago, and of course itched to capture Picasso's stark images of the horror of the first aerial terror bombing of a civilian population.  I figured the scenes could be useful someday. Never realizing just how soon or just how awfully apt.
     Before the artwork, I was tempted to flout the rules, and take a picture anyway. But it was their painting, their museum, their country, their history, their grief. I was a guest, and so tried to be respectful and behave. No pictures.
     And you know what? Freed of the distraction of trying to capture a photo of the painting, which is 25 feet across, I was able to just look at it. 
     Able to look at it and shed tears. It was an overwhelming moment. Thinking of the people and the horses and the bull, all broken and shrieking, the mother wailing with the dead baby in her arms and the alarms at night.

     Picasso had a commission to paint something to display to bring attention the cause of the Republicans — a motley of socialists and communists and anarchists, fighting Franco and his Nationalists, who had the Nazis and their Luftwaffe on their side. But Picasso was stymied until the bombing on April 27, 1937. Horror has a way of squeezing out those creative juices. He created an enormous canvas, 11 feet tall, using black and white matte house paint. This, I thought, this is what cubism was made for. I was never a particular fan of either Picasso or his style. But this redeems both, conveying such as stark and fractured chaos, the suffering and death.

     The painting was shown in Paris — which surrendered too quickly to be bombed — then spirited to the United States, and placed at the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso, and later his estate, would not allow "Guernica" to return to Spain until the fascists were gone, and it did not get there until 1981.     
     I thought of "Guernica" of course as Israel started to pound Gaza, the shocking human toll of destruction from above. A horror that they obviously find necessary to inflict, but that no feeling human being can welcome. Something no feeling human can do anything but mourn. Most of the 1,600 dead at Guernica were women and children — the men were off fighting — and there is little question that the attack on Gaza will mostly slaughter innocents as well. 
     Whose fault is it? All the furious finger pointing misses, to me, the essential, obvious truth: it's everybody's fault. The two parties involved. How could it be anything else? The Palestinians for holding out for the impossible — to return to Israel and find the Jews vanished and their great-grandparents magically alive again, tending to their olive groves. Not to forget for supporting Hamas, a terrorist group dedicated to Israel’s destruction, which started the present cycle of mayhem and death. And the Israelis for their out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach,  for decades, packing Palestinians into their ghetto, nibbling away parcels of land for another settlement. A role so inverted, such a parody of the treatment of Jews over a thousand years, it almost makes me believe in a God, a devious, malicious deity, crafting the ultimate contrapasso punishment for Jewish pride, pressing us into the role of the oppressor. Left unsolved, the problem festers and grows, as both sides saw away at the same old failed tactics. 

      "For they sow the wind," the Bible says, in Hosea. “And they shall reap the whirlwind."
     After I posted a photo of the painting — not taken by me — on the cover of my Facebook page, as a sort of indication of general feeling, one reader shared this story, probably too neat to be true: A German officer sees a photo of "Guernica" in Picasso's studio. "Did you do this?" he asks. "No," Picasso replies. "You did."

Mailbag

     A stressful, arduous, time-sucking week, for reasons beyond Israel — which is really saying something — and too complicated to explain. I'll write about it, eventually. Until then,  time to open up the mailbag with a few of the many emails inspired by my column on the enormity in Israel last Saturday. And to give you a heads up — if a post over the next few weeks is along the lines of, "Hi, busy, talk among yourselves," well, if you could, please roll with it. Lot going on.

Mr. Steinberg,

     Thank you for your op ed in yesterday's paper (How does this end?). I, like you, are not real hopeful. My daughter and I were discussing this tragedy the other day. My daughter, who is an atheist, said this, the worst thing to happen to the human race is religion. I think she might be right.

Susan L.
DeKalb IL

 Dear Ms. .L.:

     A lot of good comes from religion — Dante, Bach, cathedrals — but a lot of bad as well. I tend not to blame religion — I say it's like a hammer: you can build a house with it, or you can hit someone in the head. Same hammer. Ask the question this way: without religion, would human beings be kinder than they are? Probably not. Religion is just the vehicle for channeling that very human tendency to be monstrous. Thanks for writing

     NS

Mr. Steinberg,

     I have read your pieces in the Sun-Times for a long time. Noticeably absent in your piece “How does this end?” was the exploration of how apartheids and genocides have ended, not just political conflicts. Where was the comparison to the Khmer Rouge, Pinochet, Stalin, and colonizers of Africa and the Americas? And while it is not popular in America these days to address the irony and brutality of Israeli-led apartheid tactics and the genocide of Palestinians to Nazi Germany and the Gestapo, you are in a position to delve into this paradox. It’s a fine line to walk without being branded an antisemite, which I know you are not, but you are skilled enough to do it. I am a friend of Jews and Muslims who have family and coworkers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, and our text chains grapple with these issues more profoundly than your article. I challenge you to dig deeper and provide a more nuanced exploration and answers for your millions of readers to “how does it end” than “sit and watch in horror.” You were right that I didn't like your answer - not because it was a brutal truth, but because the question deserved more gradation and exploration. I look forward to future opinions.

Thank you.

Liz D.

     Dear Ms. D.:

     Those are some odd examples you bring up — I assume you just looked for history's villains. The Khmer Rouge won. So did Stalin, judging by the Putin era. The Blacks in South Africa were a huge majority, and they didn't go around killing Afrikaners. But I'm not sure what kind of dialogue can be had with someone who goes on about the brutality of the Israelis, without a word about the Palestinians' refusal to live in peace. A selective sensitivity for brutality. Where was your concern for collective punishment last Saturday? Or more to the point, what is your solution? Were you a Jewish Israeli, how eager would you be to live in a Palestinian state?
     That said, I'm sure you are sincere in your concern for this issue, and appreciate you writing.

      NS 

     Can you please explain the facts around what others have said is the continuing Israeli encroachment and construction of homes in Palestinian territory?
     Thank you,
     Margaret B.

Why? What part don’t you understand?

     My understanding is Israel was not given all the territory after WWII that it is building homes on.

     Yes, and the United States was stolen from the Native-Americans. Yet if one were to kill your grandchildren, you would think poorly of him. Perhaps you might want to extend that same courtesy to the Israelis. Thanks for writing.

NS

Mr. Steinberg,

     Violence between a state and terrorists cannot go on forever and ever. It was unacceptable in Ireland with the British, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Kosovo, Algeria, and it is so between Israel and Hamas.
     Here are some ways to end it.
     The superpowers like a couple of the U.N. security council states must confront both Israel and Hamas and defang them both. Then while they bluster over being forced to disarm, the two sides must be put in a room and kept there until they work out a solution. If not two states, then an intermingled state. If not with their current leadership, then an entirely new set of leaders.
     Or, to borrow Thomas Friedman's word, these knuckleheads use nuclear weapons to shock themselves and the rest of the world into recognizing how this recurrent mayhem ends in searing light and heat and radioactivity. A nuclear weapon is a genie that must never be let out of the bottle, but I can in my worst nightmare imagine the cork pops off because of hate, anger and vengeance for continued wrongs. Lacking reasoned restraint, a nuclear explosion is too possible.
     Or, Israel is forced to vacate Palestine and given another land for their home. Yes, it's in their bible, but the bible is not a real estate covenant no matter the claims it makes. The Jewish people are wonderfully industrious, intelligent and purposeful. If they could make their current landscape bloom, they can do it again elsewhere. The Palestinians will receive their desired land, and the Jews keep their holy sites. I know this is pie in the sky, but anything is better than the blood-soaked sands.
     Or, a no man's land created by and operated by international peacekeepers who do not let hostilities disturb either side.
     Palestinians cannot be pushed into the sea. Jews cannot be eradicated. These recurrent outbreaks of murderous, destructive violence must not continue. The families on both sides, especially the children living through this horror have hate in their hearts. Somehow hope has to push out the hate.
     You, sir, cannot leave me, your reader, hanging in despair over the endless spate of violence. This must stop.
     Don

Dear Mr. N.:

     "Israel is forced to vacate Palestine and given another land for their home." Exactly what other land do you suggest? And how will the people who now have claim to that land feel about it being given away? I appreciate you sharing your plan with me, but it is not what I would call . . . practical.

     NS

Hamas-Israel war reveals university antisemitism

     Hi Neil – in the wake of Hamas' despicable attacks on Israel, many have been shocked to see the level of antisemitic vitriol coming out of America’s universities. . .

     "Reveals"?