Ed Burke’s unwelcome birthday present

Graphic by Harebrained, used with permission.

     Edward M. Burke turns 80 in a week. In an alternate universe, his half-century-plus on the Chicago City Council would be celebrated in the days leading up to Dec. 29. Instead, he could be going to prison.
     Before Burke was an alderman of the 14th Ward, he was a policeman, as was his father, Joe, before him — well, a Cook County sheriff’s policeman (and an alderman). Close enough. And though Burke was on the council for 54 years, the longest anyone has served on that body and a safe bet to be the longest anyone will ever serve, the swagger of an untouchable Chicago cop always clung to Burke. It was baked into his skin, his soul.
     Only he was touchable, as Thursday afternoon’s verdict showed. Heck, not merely touched, but beat down. Thirteen of 14 counts — bribery, extortion, racketeering.
     On one hand, the verdict was no surprise — based on the evidence presented in court, collected in recorded conversations with former Ald. Danny Solis, once of the 25th Ward, Burke sounded guilty, like a man who wanted to make sure that a Burger King franchisee used his law firm for its tax work in return for Burke’s not blocking the permit for a new driveway.
     On the other, it was pitiful. Not just to see the lion of the council humiliated — there was some satisfying payback in that, at least to anyone who ever encountered the Burke arrogance firsthand, so tangible it was almost a physical Chicago landmark, like the Bean. But the triviality of it, the pettiness, the way the Field Museum, having refused some kind of intern post to Burke’s goddaughter, scrambled to appease him somehow.
     In a nation where the inflamed ego of longtime politicians is driving us into the ditch on all fronts, it’s revolting to see it on a local level, a Chicago institution groveling before a man who feels his slightest requests should be acted upon, even without ever having to be made.

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Rocky mountain high

     The steady drumbeat of bad news — war in Gaza, fascism on the march abroad, "democracy hanging by a thread" at home — missed a beat Tuesday evening, as the good news radiated out from Colorado: the state supreme court had ruled that Donald Trump cannot be on the ballot there, since he was an insurrectionist in open rebellion against the United States government since Jan. 6, 2021, rendering him unfit to hold office according to the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution.

      A very satisfying, "The emperor has not clothes!" moment. For those of us dwelling in the reality-based world, anyway.
      Hope flickered. Maybe the legal system, abused and insulted, ravaged and humiliated — I almost said "beaten," though not quite yet — will surprise us by standing up, straightening her garments and telling Trump to get the fuck off her.

     That's premature. The United States Supreme Court is still packed with Trump's hand-picked toadies, and respecting the rule of law versus servicing their guy is probably too much to expect. Clarence Thomas is wholly corrupt — bought and paid for by right wing donors, not to forget his wife is practically a Jan. 6 insurrectionist. The chance of them upholding the Colorado decision is somewhere between zero and none.

    Still. Colorado reminds us that as bad as it is, the game is not over. As terrifying as the general support of Trump is — though not in any way mysterious. The duped are invested in the scam. Get your head around it — there are cards to play. As my son said when I asked him, in 2016, why he wasn't as frantic as I was and am, he said, coolly, "The institutions are strong."

     Not quite as strong now as they were before seven years of the most mind-blowing carnival of idiocy, venality and cowardice imaginable — actually beyond imagination. I would not have thought it possible. Just last month, Trump brought up, unprompted, accusations that he had been urinated on by prostitutes at an encounter at the Moscow Ritz Carlton in 2013. "I'm not into golden showers" the former and likely future president confided to his audience, who cheered. There were zero repercussions. A story you probably missed because it was immediately lost in the continuing shitshow of jaw-dropping wrong that is Donald Trump and Red State America. Even when things do linger, like his comment that he would be a dictator "on day one," few felt the need to observe that this wasn't really new, coming from the man who wanted the Constitution to be suspended so he could be declared president by fiat.

     I did have a thought I would share with Republicans if it were worth bothering to share ideas with them: Aren't you tired of this? God I am. As much as I shudder at thinking of America becoming a Hungary-style dictatorship, I'm just so weary of the house-of-mirrors blather, the constantly lying, exaggeration, whining. Colorado, with its crisp mountain air, provided us a gust of that most bracing, invigorating and hard-to-find-lately scent: hope.

‘Art can take you to a particular place’

Claes Oldenburg "Ghost Version II" (Art Institute of Chicago)

     “Contemporary art, unlike modernism, is not a style,” said Giampaolo Bianconi, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, as we passed a Claes Oldenburg light switch sculpture. “It simply means things that are happening right now, in the present.”
     We were in an empty gallery on a recent Tuesday. The Art Institute is closed to the public on Tuesdays — thank you COVID! — but I was there on a singular mission: to better understand contemporary art.
     I’d gone to the museum with my wife, younger son and his fiancee. We naturally headed straight to the Impressionists — the museum practically funnels visitors there, through the entrance doors, up the stairs, toward Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”
     Only the young lady announced she didn’t care for this pointillist nonsense. And off the happy couple went, headed for the Dutch masters. My wife and I were left behind, blinking.
     We met up later in the modern wing, for drumbeat denunciations of the what-kind-of-garbage-is-this? variety. I mustered the best defense I could, then realized reinforcements were needed.
     Bianconi and I paused to admire Alma Thomas’ abstract “Starry Night and the Astronauts.”
     “The artists we’re looking at here have asked themselves in a sense the same question your future daughter-in-law was asking ... ” said Bianconi.

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Remembering Frank Babbitt at Christmas

     Frank Babbitt approached me, maybe 15 years ago, after we stepped off a Metra Milwaukee District North line train that had just disgorged its passengers at Northbrook station, and were waiting in the crowd for the gate to go up. He said he enjoyed my column and, as usual in such circumstances, I said thank you and changed the subject to himself. Who was he and what did he do? He told me he was a violist for the Lyric Opera.
      This was a double thrill. First, I was a regular attendee, and took 100 readers every year to a night at the opera. And second, my older son played the viola. I asked Frank if he gave lessons. He said he did. Later, I asked Ross if he wanted private viola lessons. He did.

     Thus began my casual acquaintance with Frank Babbitt, a talented musician and deeply cultured man. He lived on Glendale Avenue, maybe a mile from my house, and I enjoyed dropping Ross off for lessons. 

    I also enjoyed picking him up, standing in the entryway for a minute or two, listening to the rich tones of the viola and Frank's thoughtful instructions, eyeing his shelves of sheet music, his piano, and various mementos from his travels with his wife, Cornelia, herself a musician who plays the cello, their instruments cast about in attitudes of readiness. They had three boys of their own, slightly older than mine, who would be coming and going.   My younger boy also briefly took voice lessons with Frank, who was a powerful singer.  He came over to our house once for a poetry reading party — we asked guests to bring a poem to recite — and his rendition put the rest of us to shame, an eagle among sparrows.

     Knowing Frank made going to the opera even more of an occasion. At intermission my wife and I would make our way to the front row, and wave to Frank in pit — he'd be there, immensely handsome in his tux, and if he noticed us he'd wave back. Sometimes we'd catch the train home together and talk about the performance.

     Some years, during the holidays, he performed a one man show, based on the 1868 reading script that Charles Dickens used for public presentations of "A Christmas Carol," accompanying himself on the viola. We saw him do it twice, first in 2011 at St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Park Ridge — parishioners brought home-baked cookies for the reception afterward, which enhanced the occasion. The second time, in 2016, at the Winnetka Community House, for maybe thirty people. I tried to drum up interest, both in the paper —"It’s an extraordinary, intimate evening of live storytelling and music, the tale delivered the way it was meant to be, in Dickens’ language, enhanced by Babbitt’s resonating voice and rich viola" — and on EGD, and remember urging Frank to make a bigger deal out of it — it was such a marvelous performance, he should be doing it at the Chicago Theater for a thousand people, not for three dozen in a church meeting room. But nothing ever came of that, nor of the opera about Clarence Darrow we talked about writing together, during one of the train rides we shared when we bumped into each other.
     He was also a proud member of SEIU Local 73, the musicians' union, and I remember him, joined by other musicians, briefing me on whatever labor difficulties were going on at the time. He taught music at Loyola, and contacted me when 300 non-tenured track instructors there went on strike in 2018.

     “For me, the question is: are your high-minded Jesuit social justice values anything more than a marketing ploy?” he said. “Do you really, truly live them not just in word but in deed.”

     The Babbitts moved to Chicago, and Ross put down his viola as too time-consuming, to my great sorrow. Frank always said he had a talent for it — good hands — and he did. We fell out of touch after that.

     Frank Babbitt developed a particularly aggressive form of cancer — in January, his friends set up a GoFundMe page to help with expenses, and by February he was gone. We miss our absent friends more at Christmas, and Frank doubly so, because of his wonderful embodiment of Dickens and "A Christmas Carol." The holiday classic famously ends with Tiny Tim not dying of his unnamed sickness, but living, which is a satisfying way to end a work of fiction. Alas, we do not live in a well-crafted story, but in a cruel and chaotic, all too real world, where beloved figures sometimes do not get better, but vanish offstage, trading music for silence, leaving a hole in the lives of those who knew them. It seems the very least we can do is remember they were here.

'Success is a journey'

     You don’t often see a judge cry.
     But Cook County Circuit Court Judge Lauren Edidin was repeatedly brushing away tears on Thursday — though she would be quick to point out it was not in her own courtroom but at a decidedly emotional event: the latest graduation ceremony of the Skokie Mental Health Court.
     “I’m really going to try not to cry,” she told those gathered at the 2nd Municipal District courthouse in Skokie.
     Mental Health Court is one of three types of Cook County’s 20 “problem-solving courts.” The other two are veterans court and drug court. Rather than trying to punish non-violent offenders — the accused must plead guilty to participate — these courts try to address the problems that pave the way for criminality.
     The work is time-consuming, often frustrating, occasionally rewarding environments where members of the legal community band together, often in their spare time — Edidin was praised for devoting her vacations to the effort — to help disentangle those caught in the legal system.
     “We help participants learn how to live and succeed with their illness,” Edidin said. “This program exists to help participants find long-term housing, set up treatment plans, receive job training, obtain insurance and Social Security benefits. The program formulates individual plans, based on participants’ specific needs.
    “That is so important. With that, they have a higher likelihood of success. Our program supports participants with kindness, understanding, tough love and encouragement,” she said.
     Emotions were high not only because Deborah L., Ashur N., Lamont O. and Kathy R. were celebrating their exit from the criminal justice system, but Edidin was retiring after 12 years on the bench. That was why Chief Judge Timothy Evans took the time to be there, along with about 50 fellow judges, public defenders, assistant state's attorneys, staffers and family members.

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Flashback 2010: Veterans Court assists vets the rest of us forget

      I attended a graduation ceremony at Cook County Mental Health Court on Thursday, for a column running in Monday's paper. It's one of three "problem-solving courts" the county runs. Another is veterans court, which I mention in the story, and have written about several times over the years. This is the first one, in a story timed for Veterans Day:

     Cyril Hall isn't the kind of vet you'll probably have in mind when you put out the flag tomorrow for Veterans Day. He didn't fight in Iraq or Afghanistan — he's 51, an Army combat engineer who did bridge repair.
     Hall doesn't have a job — he's on disability for a bad back. (The idea that vets as a group can't find jobs, or have trouble holding jobs, is a myth — the unemployment rate for all veterans is 8.1 percent, better than the rate for the general population).
     Hall has battled drugs, and was arrested for possession of a controlled substance.
     "It wasn't mine," he says of the bag of drugs that led to his arrest, which brought him here, to the Cook County Criminal Court Building at 26th and California. Blame was put on him "since it was closest to me."
     But in one respect Hall represents a military elite — he is among the 54 vets enrolled in Cook County's Veterans Court program, formed last year as a "specialty court."
     "We have drug courts, mental health courts — Veterans Court is an extension of that," said Criminal Division Presiding Judge Paul Biebel Jr., who heard about such courts in Buffalo and Tulsa and thought they were needed here. "A lot of people who come in here have issues."
     We are a nation that just went through a mid-term election and barely talked about the two, count 'em, two wars we are currently fighting. We can hardly force ourselves to pause from fretting about the economy to pay attention to soldiers fighting and dying on our behalf every day, never mind those who fought in previous wars, particularly vets who get in trouble like Hall. That's what this court does; it gives vets not a legal break, but support they are entitled to.
     The real work of Veterans Court does not take place when Circuit Court Judge John P. Kirby enters his courtroom and all rise; rather, the heavy lifting of helping these vets get back on track goes on an hour beforehand, at a pre-court meeting, in a room so crowded with staff — I count 19 people -- there isn't room for them to sit around the table. Representatives from the states attorney, public defender and sheriff's offices are here, along with those from the U.S., Illinois and Chicago offices of veterans affairs, plus probation officers, drug counselors, homeless coordinators, legal clinics.
     "Everybody was already up and running," says Kirby. "Every program here was in existence. We just put everybody in the same room and said, 'How can we work with veterans the best that we know how?' "
     One by one, Kirby reads the names of the vets on today's court docket, and the caseworkers involved report regarding drug tests and program participation.
     "Looks like he's been attending all his meetings . . ."
     "He came back positive for cocaine . . ."
     "We're just waiting for the results so we can fax them over."
     Kirby occasionally asks pointed questions: "Have we reached a member of his family? There was one there, early on . . ."
     To qualify for Veterans Court, an accused vet has to be charged with a crime the law doesn't require jail time for if convicted.
     "We don't take violent crimes or sex crimes," says Kirby. "We are looking for people who commit probational offenses."
     Afterward, the vets whose progress — or lack of progress — has been reviewed appear in court. Some are in custody, brought in wearing sand-colored DOC scrubs. Some are in street clothes — untucked button-down shirts mostly. Some are appearing for the first time.
     "I've been informed you are a veteran," Kirby tells a young woman.
     "I was in Iraq," she says.
     "What I am going to do is have you interviewed by our veteran's team," says Kirby.
     Veterans are a special class for two reasons. First, their service to the country implies that — at least at one point — they had more on the ball than the average street criminal. And second, as vets, they qualify for services that aren't available to non-veterans. Help is available to them, and Veterans Court tries to make sure they get it.
     "A veteran comes in, we want to treat that person as a whole, not just a case before us," says Kirby. "If he needs treatment, if he needs housing, we have Volunteers of America, Featherfist, for housing. If other issues, we send him to the John Marshall clinic."
     Not only is Veterans Court the right thing to do, but it works, as a crime-fighting tool.
     "The year prior, the individuals entering our program had 278 felony arrests total," says Kirby. "A year later they were four — that's a decrease of 98.6 percent."
     There are three other Veterans Courts in Cook County besides Kirby's, with another set to open in Bridgeview next month — that's where Hall's case was, before an alert assistant public defender suggested he transfer to Kirby's courtroom.
     "I wish they had this years ago," Hall says. "It is working. I'm not doing any drugs anymore because of it."
     None of this laborious attention is patriotic bluster. It's not what people have in mind when they stick a yellow ribbon magnet on their cars — and fewer even bother to do that anymore. But as the needs of vets grow, merely "remembering" them rings hollow, something we do more for our benefit than for theirs. All the unheralded people working to make Veterans Court happen actually help real vets to get their lives back. More of us should do the same.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times Nov. 10, 2010

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.