Flashback 2015: America would survive Trump ... right?

   An email notified me Friday that someone had "upvoted" a post of mine on Tremr: Is Donald Trump the President America Deserves?

     Tremr? It didn't ring a bell. These social media platforms come and go. You're not supposed to click on such links, but I clicked anyway — I couldn't imagine a scam that narrowly focused. There was a brief essay written eight years ago, by me, apparently. And here's the odd thing. Its general tone — Trump would not be the end of America — was the exact point that readers were making yesterday on my Mailbag post about the dangers of a potential second term. But those I was pushing back against; I'd come full circle, 180 degrees.

     For a moment, I wondered if perhaps I hadn't written it, that it was somehow assembled by AI. "Deep Freudian bunkum." Did I really write that phrase? Checking my email, there is a note from a Trent McNish on Dec. 2, 2015. "We run a weekly debate, kicked off by a respected journalist or author, and next week we’d really like to run something on the theme of your article," referring to something I'd written in the Sun-Times about newcomer Trump that previous July. I can't quite make out what Tremr is now — something of a ghost ship, a charred, sailless hull bobbing on the great debris ocean of the internet.

     It's interesting to read the piece again, just as a bit of Trumpalia. My suggestion that Ben Carson or Ted Cruz would be worse isn't embarrassing — the truth is unknowable, and I do believe that Cruz would have been more methodical, less self-obsessed and blundering, and therefore could cause more damage. 

    Anyway, enough prelude. I return you to that innocent time in American life when the presidency of Donald Trump was merely speculation. Although, in my defense, America DID survive Trump. So far.

  

     It's December. 

     Which means the nightmare sideshow of the Republican 2016 presidential campaign has been in full swing for about five months now, every minute of it starring that improbable figure yanked from the deep Freudian bunkum of the United States, that supercharged Id with its own jet, Donald Trump. 

     The laughter that the media and fellow Republicans greeted Trump with, the teeth-gritted, can-you-believe-this-guy amazement has long ago shifted into a cold river of panic running through the soft underbelly of Conservative America. 

     And while history tells us that the early primary darlings flame out and just become bad hangover memories, this field of candidates is so sub-par that comfort is hard to find.

 (Not) The Worst of a Bad Bunch

      The awful truth about Trump is that he isn't the worst running. By far. 

     Donald Trump is Solon the Lawgiver compared to Ben Carson, the doctor who went from being the deracinated pet black man of the religious right to leading the polls along with Trump, his eyes at half mast, murmuring his near-insane pronouncements which, devoid of fact or even sense, were seized on as glyphic truths by his fans.  And neither of those two men approached the hellish unfitness of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a demagogue from the Joe McCarthy mold, hated by Democrat and Republican alike in Congress, a fraud hiding his Princeton and Harvard roots, his banker wife, behind a smokescreen of false populism. 

     Mustering bravado last July, I came up with an approach to observing this ongoing canard without chewing my paw off to escape. I blustered that, if one of these guys became the president of the United States, we would deserve him. 

     It was my way to sop up spreading panic with a display of courage. 

     Maybe it was no more than a facile line, a way to anticipate living with the crushing understanding that a nation of 310 million people had selected a Donald Trump - or a Ben Carson, or a Ted Cruz - to lead it for the next four years. Because how bad would that really be? 

America Would Survive... Right? 

     We survived eight years of Ronald Reagan, and he co-starred in a B-movie with a chimp and had a wife who consulted swamis when setting the presidential schedule. 

      We survived eight years of George W. Bush, a man who resembled Alfred E. Newman, physically and intellectually. 

     If Hillary Clinton self-destructs - as Clintons are wont to do - we'll survive whatever boob the Republican Party designates as heir. Or is that being glib? Is that an insult to the thousands of soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians butchered in Bush's ill-advised wars. 

     I guess what I'm asking is: how much does the president really matter? All bad presidents have good qualities: Nixon created the EPA, Reagan ended the Cold War bloodlessly. And all good presidents have their bad qualities. Barack Obama deported a huge number of illegal immigrants and failed to close Guantanamo Bay. 

     Does it matter who wins next November? And if Donald Trump squeaks into the Oval Office, won't that be what the country secretly wants, needs, and deserves? Discuss.

Watch out for crossing guards

 

Carol Alvarado

    "Did you hear the sirens?" Carol Alvarado asked in a grave tone as Kitty and I presented ourselves at the corner of Center and Cedar in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.
     Sirens? What, the tornado sirens? I did a quick reality check. Is this the first Tuesday of the month at 10 a.m.? No, Thursday, 8 a.m.
     "Two police cars and an ambulance," she explained. "The crossing guard at Cherry and Meadow got hit by a car." 
      I gasped.  A driver had stopped and told her. 
      "He's alright — he was up and walking around," she said.
     That's a relief. We continued talking.
      Mrs. A, as the children call her, is the sort of person you stop and talk to, and I usually do, if only a remark about the weather — grateful for the good, sympathetic toward the bad. To me, that is part of a life well lived: to not be in a rush, the mad scramble that is the default mode for so many, rushing to and fro in their seemingly charmless lives. Better to pause, linger, notice things, talk to people. You never know what they have to say.  

    When we're not discussing meteorological fine points, we often talk about the mad, salmons-to-spawn scramble of the drivers blasting up and down Cedar. Drivers who just don't want to stop. You can almost sense their coiled impatience, being forced to slow down by some guard, just to let these pedestrians pass. She won't even try to step into the crosswalk if a car is less than half a block away because they have a tendency to keep going.
    "Drivers go around me," she said. "Or they don't see me. Wearing this." And she spread her arms out, with her high-visibility safety neon yellow-green coat and hat, and flashing handheld red stop sign. "How do you not see me?"

    After Kitty did her business — "standing on a dime" is how I think of it — I considered heading over to Cherry and Meadow for first person investigation. But I figured the guard was either receiving medical care or rattled enough for one morning without the media showing up too.
    A call to the police seemed in order. Since I'm not in Chicago, the police called me right back.
    "Yes, we had a minor incident over at Cherry and Meadow," said Rich Rash, community relations supervisor for the Northbrook Police Department. "A vehicle turning left with sun on the windscreen, as the truck was turning the crossing guard was right in his pillar. He couldn't see him, but it was a very, very slow turn. The guard jumped out of the way and fell on his back and elbow. There was no contact. He'll probably be a little stiff, but he's okay. The driver was very, very apologetic. He was shaken up too." No citation was given.
    The suburbs get a lot of flack, but we do tend to operate on a more humane scale. I suggested that this might be an opportunity to remind motorists to look out for and respect crossing guards. Sometimes they seem to want to go around the guards, like bulls surging past a toreador. 
    "They do that," laughed Rash. "Everybody's always in such a rush. We want to let everybody know to use due caution and be patient. If the crossing guard is in the intersection, the law is they have to stop movement until the crossing guard is out of the way and onto the sidewalk."
     So slow down. Give it a try. You'll be safer and, who knows, maybe even happier. Because I am not in a rush, after we talked about the accident, I chatted a bit further with Alvarado, 81, who ran an accounting firm with her husband, 87 who, on nice days, sometimes sits in a chair nearby while Carol does her crossing duties. She's crossed children here for six years and plans to remain at the post for a few more, until the pride of our block, a dynamic 9-year-old who happens to be my next door neighbor, moves on to Northbrook Junior High. We both had attended her outstanding star performance at the Northbrook Park District as SpongeBob Squarepants in the eponymous musical. How many crossing guards attend the plays of children they help across the street? Mrs. A. does.
     "My husband wondered how she could absorb all those lines," she said. "And I told him, 'She's playing a sponge.'"
     She looked at me. I looked at her. For a smart man, I can be amazing slow on the uptake. She saw my incomprehension.
     "Playing a sponge," she repeated. "Absorb her lines."
     Ah, I said, laughing, and went on my way, quite fortified by our encounter.
       

Mailbag

    I tend to share emails that are laughably hateful or oblivious, out of hey-look-at-this amazement more than anything else. A typical specimen is:

Neil. Fascinating In the same article that you referred to the “Staff of 100 fact fixated news hounds["], you also engage in ridiculous hyperbole, to wit: “Did I mention the real chance of democracy dying in America next year?” Makes it difficult to buy the whole “fact” assertion.  Bob Johnson.

    It probably deserved no answer, but I answered anyway:

     You do know that Donald Trump is running for president? I hate to be the one to tell you. His election could mean the death of democracy in this country. That isn't an opinion. It's just a fact, one that remains true whether you realize it or not. Thanks for writing.     NS

     That said, I don't want to give the impression that ALL my correspondence consists of trolls sniping. I do receive deeply thoughtful letters, such as this:

Dear Neil Steinberg:
     Last August, you wrote a column about how you are prohibited from making political endorsements, under the Sun-Times new legal status as a not-for-profit financial entity. You finished by saying that your column, in any case, was no more than, “…a twig snapping in a bonfire the size of a barn. The entirety of responsible professional journalism has been blazing away at Donald Trump.”
     Your modesty is endearing, but it obscures the fact that your column actually is a mighty big twig in the regional and syndicated news bonfire. I’m saying this now, because I’m convinced that we each need to do whatever we can, and as often as we can, to keep a would-be dictator from becoming President.  There will be plenty of time for fatalism later
     What prompted me to write you today, is that I have just read Robert Kagan’s two recent opinion pieces in the Washington Post about the likelihood of a second Trump term. Kagan counters the current arguments used to assuage fears, and focuses on the enormous political and financial power that will accrue to Trump after he wins the Super Tuesday Republican primary on March 5. I trust that you have read Kagan’s piece.
     As for the possible fate of my beloved Sun-Times, what is at stake If Trump wins the presidency is not only its nonprofit status, but its Constitutional freedom of speech. The mainstream media, in Trump’s own words (as borrowed from Stalin) is “the Enemy of the People.” And he has announced his plans to use the justice department to go after his critics in the media.
     Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that you and your colleagues already haven’t had conversations about how far you might push the envelope in order to prevent this catastrophe. I only write today to lend encouragement to you and your coworkers to take whatever risks you think you can to stop Trump, before it’s too late.
     Finally, I want you to know that I am incredibly impressed and encouraged by how the Sun-Times has become a great paper again. And I trust you will do all you can to rouse us readers from our complacency and so prevent our democracy from becoming yet another dictatorship.
     Respectfully yours,
     Tom Golz

     An honest concern deserves an honest reply, and I thought hard, and did my best to respond as candidly as I could:

Dear Tom Golz:
     Thank you for your thoughtful letter. I too read Robert Kagan's columns, and felt they were spot-on, if lengthy, summations of the peril our nation is facing right now. The really scary part is that his proposed solution — newfound courage among Republicans — is exactly the quality whose general lack has brought us to this crisis. GOP timidity isn't a bug, but a feature, as the techies say, and I can't see that changing, certainly not before March 5. To me, the whole game is Biden winning re-election; alas, and as Kagan points out, that can be easily torpedoed by a third-party candidate like Jill Stein. Or a stroke.
     To address your thoughts on the Sun-Times leading the charge to save democracy, I brought up that very subject at an open meeting last Thursday, explaining to the powers-that-be that this is a moment of grave national peril, and did they really want to look back at it, years from now, and know they sat on the sidelines because they're worried about their 501(c)3 status? I wish I could say their answer was encouraging, but it wasn't really an answer at all. More of a we'll-get-back-to-you-on-that murmur. I'm not holding my breath.
     My plan is, as always, to say what I think needs to be said, when it needs to be said, and if the paper won't print it, despite my best arguments, well, then that is their right. As I sometimes tell readers who demand to know how I can permit some top level misstep or another: I just work there; I don't run the place. I do have my blog, which draws a respectable number of eyeballs. I've already been writing columns about the Israel-Hamas war there, not bothering to turn them into the paper because doing so causes such a quivering bolus of alarm, hand-wringing and nit-picking that it's hardly worth it. Were the Middle East waiting breathlessly for insight from me, I might feel worse about that, but — spoiler alert — they're not. That might be one reason I'm writing a two-part series on baking bread this week.
     Recognizing that I am not the greased hub on which politics twirls is not humility, it's just true. In 2016, I knew Trump was going to win, after Brexit, and said so, repeatedly. No matter. I do take comfort in knowing that Illinois went for Biden by 17 points over Trump in 2020. They don't need me telling them what to do.
     I hope that isn't timidity. I've turned in my resignation in the past, and will do so again, if need be. While you don't rack up 36 years on staff by stalking off in a huff over editorial disagreements, no writer worth his salt flaps in the wind of whoever is signing the checks. If I get sacked in the process of fighting for democracy, then I couldn't hope for a better exit. "I would not lose so great an honor," as Henry V says.
     Finally, I thank you for your closing observation about the Sun-Times ascendancy. That is, to me, very encouraging. Even with our fraught charitable status, there is much to be optimistic about. We are bringing on fresh, enthusiastic talent faster than I ever remember it being hired, and they're writing excellent stuff, covering Chicago as it deserves to be covered. As for me, I am confident that I'll be able to provide assistance to the good guys when the time comes. There are many ways to skin a cat — I suppose I'll have to write a chain of historical columns about the rise of Hitler and count on my audience to read between the lines. One aspect that Kagan dismisses that I think about a lot lately: America has always had extraordinary luck. Not at all times in all things — were that true, Trump wouldn't be the front-runner. But at key moments we caught a lucky break — we elected FDR in 1932 while Germany elected Hitler. It could have just as easily been the other way around. I like to think fate won't desert us now.
      Don't get me wrong — I don't intend to count on chance. I plan to oppose Trump with every fibre of my being up to and — if need be — after his re-election. Terrifying as our time is, it is also the rarest of things — a moment of true historic importance. I compliment you for the letter you sent — nobody else has written anything close — and hope you continue to do what you can, when you can. As will I.
     Neil Steinberg

‘I will change your life with this bread’

Dobra Bielinski

     Dobra Bielinski brought her own bread to China.
     “They have white bread,” she said, dismissively, noting that her hearty, seed-laden bread kept her alive for a two-week trip.
     Bielinski is the owner of Delightful Pastries on Lawrence Avenue. Readers on Monday enjoyed our preliminaries before settling down to work on two breads, a potato and roasted onion sourdough loaf, and an oatmeal porridge bread.
     “You can see the chunks of potatoes,” she said, tamping dough into rectangular molds with her knuckles. “You can see the chunks of onions. This is a nice dough. I love it.”
     Like any fine chef, Bielinski’s all about sourcing ingredients.
     “A ton of onions I brought from Wisconsin,” she said. “Making wild onion soup I foraged for mushrooms.”
     Why are Wisconsin onions special?
     “I love them,” she said. “They caramelize really nicely. I don’t get the big ones, I get the medium sized ones. I love roasting potatoes and onions together, This bread will go well with pate, go well with New England clam chowder. It’s going to be faaaaabulous with that.”
     Lunchtime approached. We sat down and ate ... you might want to skip this part if you’re eating, say, a bologna sandwich on Wonder bread for lunch. The envy might kill you.
     A bowl of Bigos — hunter’s stew, a sauerkraut-based pottage with pork sausage, smoked bacon, dried plums and mushrooms. Her own horseradish sauce. A superlative apple cider that made me think of the cider at Alinea. Thick slices of warm rye bread.
     “I will change your life with this bread,” she said. “Let me get some butter. Some delicious fabulous Wisconsin butter.”
     She held the loaf.

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Potato and roasted onion sourdough loaves. 

In baseball news....

     Indifference to professional sport is a hobby horse I've ridden for a long time now. It began because I was a fat kid, terrible at athletics, living outside Cleveland, whose Indians had built a comfortable nest in the cellar of the American League. Not to forget the Browns and Cavaliers, who were worse. Following sports seemed like digging a hole and staring into it. A waste of life.
     Working for a newspaper, with a whole department — the most important part, to many readers — dedicated to chronicling and celebrating sports, I felt safe occasionally raising an objection, or at least a counter-narrative, to the hullabaloo. I was proud to be the guy who almost asked Michael Jordan who he was. Proud that, the night the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, I attended a lecture at the Field Museum on tattooing in Polynesia. I wasn't alone; why not spread the word: you're allowed to ignore this shit.
     But sometimes I do manage to scare — or at least worry — myself, such as a few days ago, when I learned of the existence of Shohei Ohtani, the star on the Los Angeles Angels who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
     Ohtani is both a powerhouse batter and a fireballing pitcher — a sui generis combination in baseball, something that even I find interesting, which was the distressing part: the idea that, by generally ignoring sports, I was missing something worthwhile. Maybe sports isn't "The same thing happening over and over," as I like to say, and Ohtani is evidence of that. Maybe I've been negligent. Heck, I didn't even know the Los Angeles Angels were a team — when did they stop being the California Angels? (in 1996; quite a while ago, really. Though in my defense, they then became the "Anaheim Angeles," and who could be expected to note that? They started calling the team the "Los. Angeles Angels" in 2005).
     Well, there's no harm in making up for lost time — heck, even I dragged myself to the United Center a few times to see Michael Jordan play (and LeBron James, to please my wife). I could see catching a game at Wrigley Field to lay eyes upon Ohtani. 
     Why? There might be something to say about it. I could argue that American baseball has been becoming more Japanese for a while now. I went to a baseball game in Tokyo, back in the 1980s: the Nippon Ham Fighters versus the Sebu Lions at the Tokyo Dome, aka "The Big Egg." That part I remember. While of course none of the actual play sticks in mind, I do recall being impressed by the food — Bento boxes and sushi rolls, which can be found at many American ballparks, finally having moved beyond peanuts and Cracker Jack. The crowds were also segregated into cheering blocks, like at college football games, and at times entire zones of the stadium would leap to their feet and start chanting (Nippon Ham! Tatakai! Katsu! "Nippon Ham! Fight! Win!") Maybe if we started doing that here, it might cut into the dolour of the games.
     Anyway, my interest is piqued, if only to see what a stunningly bad investment that $700 million turns out to be. Even not following sports, I have the conviction that as soon as star athletes get a gigantic payday they generally shut down and are never as good again. Ohtani is 29. His elbow is already hurt from last year. I better go see him in 2024, because who knows if he'll even be playing afterward. Heck, Sandy Koufax retired at 30. So maybe there is something to this sports stuff after all, occasionally. Or not.

Baking bread with Dobra Bielinski

     “Are you ready to cook?” asked Dobra Bielinski when we met Friday morning at her Delightful Pastries — both a name and an apt description — on Lawrence Avenue.
     Well bake, technically. But I wasn’t about to correct her.
     Regular readers might remember my column on Bielinski from March 2022, when I featured her for Paczki Day. The holiday isn’t until Feb. 13 this year; so why am I back now, in December?
     We got along so well — I described Bielinski as “a bubbling cauldron of strong opinions,” — that I said I’d like to return someday and see her bake bread. An offer that 99 out of 100 people would let vanish on the wind. But the Warsaw-born baker is that 1 out of 100, if not out of a thousand. She circled back and reminded me of my suggestion that we bake bread.
     Bielinski had already been at it for hours when I got there.
     “I was up at 3:45 a.m.” she said, as I donned a soft white apron. “I had to have something to eat.”
     And breakfast was ...?
     “One of my worker’s mom is visiting from Poland, so she made this potato cake — basically potatoes grated with caramelized onion and little bits of bacon, they add tons of eggs and a little bit of flour, and just put it in a cake pan and bake the whole thing,” she said. “Then I had my mom’s leftover goulash.”
     If you wish you’d been sitting next to Bielinski with a spoon, please continue reading. Otherwise, you can check back with me later this week — I have a feeling this is going to linger into a second column. The problem with fresh baked goods: it’s hard to stop.

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Flashback 2004: World should mourn if Arafat dies peacefully

"Glad You Dead You Rascal You," by Herbert Singleton (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

     I was looking over old columns to see if I ever wrote anything worthwhile about the latest denizen of hell, Henry Kissinger — short answer, No — when I came across this, written as Yasser Arafat was dying. It still remains current, alas, though I did wince a the part about him having children's blood on his hands. Not the PLO monopoly that it used to be. The part about the budget amazed me — though I'm not sure if that's because I used to get a copy, or that I would then read it. And the God Force stuff is just fun. Back then, the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings.

Opening shot

    I hope that Yasser Arafat gets better. In fact, I'm pulling for a complete recovery. Even if he's dead by the time you read this, I hope he springs back to life. Re-incarnates. Because there is something deeply unfair in the prospect of his dying surrounded by friends and family in a hospital bed in Paris. Not when, if there were any sort of justice in the world, he would perish lying on his side on a gravel street, howling without company or comfort after having a long splinter of metal blasted through his eye.
     The man is a killer. Not only has he killed people himself, personally, but he plotted and organized murders of hundreds of victims. He is one of the authors of a philosophy of random murder that has inspired millions. That he spent years as a sham statesman, received in the White House and heaped with honors is one of the mind-boggling ironies of our ironic age. The man was given the Nobel Peace Prize, which washed away whatever shred of worth that might have clung to the once-respected bauble after they gave it to Henry Kissinger. They might as well pack the thing in a box of manure and straw when they hand out the next one.
     Arafat's worst crime? He betrayed his own people. He could have led them to peace, and instead led them down a blind alley to self-destruction and disaster.
     When he dies — any moment, judging by the reports — the news media will no doubt focus on Arab mourning. And there will unfortunately be a few Jews leaping around in Jerusalem, grinning and cheering and burning Palestinian flags, though that really isn't our style. But someone should point out what a shame it is to see Arafat go, as opposed to lingering horribly for a long, long time -- maybe just an hour for every child he had a hand in maiming. Because his manner of death is an affront to justice. It makes the most devoted agnostic yearn for a vengeful God and His furnace of hell.

Your tax dollars at work

     The $5 billion-plus-change Chicago city budget landed with a thud on my desk Tuesday.
     It's not supposed to be light reading, but I couldn't help skimming its thousand or so pages.
     What struck me was the wide range of occupations found among the city's 35,919 budgeted jobs, from Mayor (who pulls down a cool $209,915 a year) to the guy who picks up dead rats for the Bureau of Rodent Control (title: "Dead Animal Recovery," which would make a fun business card; wage: a not-bad $26.40 an hour).
     That's about a dollar an hour more than a Tree Trimmer gets in the Bureau of Forestry (I know we have lots of trees, but "Bureau of Forestry"? Urbs in Hortis indeed).
     The list goes on and on. Iron Inspector. Assistant Cable Administrator. Lamp Maintenance Man. Asphalt Raker. There are Caulkers and Steamfitters at the Bureau of Administrative Support, which also employs Hoisting Engineers and Stationary Firemen (who are, I would guess, paid less than firemen who are required to occasionally move).
     A few touches seem positively czarist. The Mayor's Office of Special Events has a Director of Protocol who oversees a staff of three. The Bureau of Streets has a Chief Voucher Expediter.
     I could fill this column and four more with tidbits gleaned from the budget -- do you know we plan to spend $3 million next year for the electricity used by traffic signals? You do now.

Save it for Sunday school

     This may come as a surprise. But I don't believe in electricity. Not in the conventional sense, of charged particles conveying energy. That is a lie forced on children in public school.
     I don't think I've mentioned this before, perhaps because the subject never came up.
     No, in my eyes, what comes out of your electrical socket and runs your toaster is God Force, the ineffable benevolence and power of the Lord Almighty put to practical use for the benefit of mankind.
     I find that makes a lot more sense than the so-called conventional theory of "electricity" -- and it's only that, a theory. I mean, where's the evidence? You can't even see the stuff.
     You might think that I'd have a hard time persuading others to consider my God Force view of electrical power. But I'm encouraged by the headlines. Down in Georgia, the courts are trying to figure out whether the government can slap a warning label on the biology textbooks, pointing out that evolution, like electricity, is only one in a range of possibilities, and we need to keep an open mind.
     Lest you think this debate is limited to Southern backwaters, up in Wisconsin, the Grantsburg city school board has changed its science curriculum to accommodate the teaching of creationism, so as not to limit science classes, in the words of their superintendent, to "just one scientific theory.'
     I'm all for that. Isn't that what education is:? Expanding our knowledge? Why not explore many options instead of cleaving to one party line? Just as the creationist origins of life should, of course, be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution preferred by atheists and a few activist judges, so I believe that my God Force electricity view should have widespread public airing. Teach both, and let the students decide!
     Not that I expect the struggle to be simple. For years, I've been trying to get schools to teach, alongside the standard canard that men landed on the moon, the very real possibility that the Apollo landings were a hoax. So far they have resisted. These supposed "teachers" can be so stubborn that way.

             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 10, 2004