Establishing a perimeter

 

     Business took me by City Hall just after 12 noon Thursday. Prompt fellow that I am, I got there a few minutes before my appointment, so killed time by wandering around the ground floor. Sometimes there are interesting displays, for a holiday or civic organization. 
     Nothing in the display department. But there were a number of police officers, milling about, conferring. Six, eight, maybe 10. "Establishing a perimeter" is the phrase that came to mind. There were several cops on the street, standing watch,and inside the doors, creating space, directing people in that space to step away. Waiting expectantly. Obviously something was about to happen. I took up position on a step and waited too.
     In hurried Mayor Brandon Johnson. At first I felt disappointment — I had planned to never set eyes on  him in the four years he'll be in office until he is replaced by literally whoever wants the job. My personal protest to his contempt for the press, so vital in a free society. And now that plan had been scuttled. Too late now; there he was, right in front of me. A dapper man rushing by.

     For one second I considered shouting a greeting. "Hey Mayor Johnson!" But didn't want to startle him — or all those police officers. I'd end up wrestled to the ground. And what would be the effect on the mayor? If half of what one hears is true, he's a man under pressure, someone to be pitied, not confronted. Besides, the cops made sure I was far enough away that I couldn't casually extend my hand and say a few words. He'd glance in my direction and keep going. At least I can say I've never spoken to him; a consolation prize. I remained mum.
     A few seconds, he was in the elevator and gone. Later, a person in-the-know told me — off the record, alas, — how he is the worst Chicago mayor in city history, and the civic helm is spinning while downtown crumbles and money flees as if Chicago were on fire. I like to think the situation isn't as bad as that, and considered bringing up Levi Boone, who sparked the Beer Riot. But that was in 1855, rather a reach back in history. I hope things aren't that bad. Then again, hope is not a strategy.

Everything not forbidden is compulsory

  
     My wife and I were discussing breakfast cereals the other day. I mentioned how, in previous years, every half decade or so I would develop an inexplicable hankering for some sugary staple of my childhood: Cocoa Krispies, mostly, or Captain Crunch or Lucky Charms.
     "Lucky Charms, ewww," she said.
     And sometimes, I recall, I'd actually go so far as to buy a box of Cocoa Krispies, and have a bowl or two — well, I must have polished off the box, eventually. Or maybe the boys helped. 
     But now that I'm easing into my dottage, I never do that, but have settled on just two cereals: Wheat Chex and Shredded Wheat. They are the only varieties I buy or eat.
     Not that I mix them together. My wife does that. She'll mix three cereals, together in one bowl, a practice I look on with something akin to horror.
     "Miscegenation!" I'd mutter, back when I'd tease her about it, employing an antique term for race mixing — I might be the only person who deploys that word as a light breakfast tease. She can have her Cheerios and her Total, her Grape Nut Flakes and Corn Flakes — particularly that last one. I haven't eaten a single Corn Flake in 25 years. Yuck.
     Wheat Chex, and Shredded Wheat, eaten alternatively, for variety, on the day or two a week when I don't have my traditional English muffin and grapefruit.
     I'm not saying they're the only cereals in the world, or the best. But they're the ones I like. Because you reach a point in life, where you know what you want, and ignore what you don't. I'd no sooner waste a breakfast eating a bowl of Rice Krispies than I'd read a John Kass column unprompted — surprisingly similar experiences, now that I think of it: bland little kernels, of rice or language, emitting a quiet sort of strangled shriek as they dissolve into a soggy nothing.
     I'm not saying change is possible — for instance. My wife had the strange and exotic practice of putting fruit on her cereal. Bananas, strawberries, blueberries. This struck me as some weird healthful craze, like running in the rain or doing calisthenics at your desk. I didn't have any joke on par with miscegenation. I just looked at her askance — or rather, tried not to look at her at all. Fruit on cereal? Where does she get these insane ideas? Some website? "Seven offbeat things to do to catch your man's attention at breakfast."
     Although. Marriage has a gravity. A tacit traction. Couples have a tendency to draw toward one another. And we've been having breakfast together for 40 years now. So one fine day — I don't remember when — I was drawn toward her practice. Maybe I was bored. Maybe we had a particularly large store of blueberries to dispose of, and I didn' want them to go bad. But I put some blueberries on my Chex.
     And they were .... good. The cool sweet soft orbs nicely offsetting the crisp savory wheat squares. The taste of blueberries a counterpoint to the Chex. I liked them together, and got into the habit of heaping a half cup of blueberries onto my cereal, which complicate the cereal eating process, as they must be removed from the refrigerator and washed and drained.
     But it got so that — and this is why I'm writing this overly-detailed and admittedly almost psycho post about breakfast cereals — I couldn't eat breakfast cereal without blueberries.  "Let's pick up some blueberries!" I'd say, at the grocery. I became savvy of the wide price swings — $2.99 a pint, $6.99, varying widely with the season.   

     I'd go to eat some cereal, realize we were out of blueberries, and put the box back. They'd become essential to cereal eating, like milk. What was once forbidden was now mandatory. 

     The title of the blog, is from "The Once and Future King," by T.H. White — the English novelist, not to be confused with Theodore H. White, the American political writer. "The Once and Future King" uses Arthurian legend as a protracted allegory for the battle against totalitarianism. Wat, after being turned into an ant by Merlin, approaches an ant hill fortress with the slogan, "EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS MANDATORY" emblazoned over the entrance to each tunnel. 
     "He read the notice with dislike," White writes. "Though he did not understand its meaning." There's a lot of that going around.
     For now, we retain our options, in all things great and small. For instance, my wife also eats breakfast cereal as a snack, popping dry Cheerios into her mouth like a toddler. I'll sometimes join her, while we chat, and participate in the odd culinary ritual, but more for the sociability. It's not something I would ever do on my own. I do not eat cereal dry as a snack. Yet.

Photo atop blog is from Darren Bader's 2020 "fruits, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad" installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

What color is a trusted face?

     A police officer I know shared a link to a Chicago Police Department video encouraging cops to apply for the 2024 sergeant's exam. The five-minute video was produced for internal CPD consumption, but someone posted it to YouTube, labeled "CPD 2024 Sergeant's Exam."
     The video begins with a stolid white-shirt, two pens snugly beside his gold star, looking directly into the camera.
     "Hi, I'm deputy chief Rahman Muhammed ..." he says. "I would like to encourage all eligible members to please visit The Wire and sign up to register for this year's sergeant examination, given May 10. CPD is looking for the next generation of dynamic leaders to help to move this great department forward. I look forward to seeing all of your enthusiastic faces on examination day."
     All of their enthusiastic faces? Really? Because as the video unfolds ... well, let's give it a look.
     "I want officers to know this goal is attainable, with hard work and dedication" says Sgt. Arshanette L. Chambers.
     "I encourage you to have at least one study group. It helped me out tremendously," says Sgt. Enrique Martinez.
     Six more officers urge hard work. To an outsider, it's an unexceptional piece of management propaganda. So what's the trouble? Let's slide over to Second City Cop, an unofficial, relentlessly toxic Chicago police blog, and tune into the chatter:
     "The only white is the shirt"
     "Not one Caucasian in that mentor group. ... This is very insulting and straight up racist. This is the new city of Chicago, unbelievable. They do not even try to hide the total hatred for the Caucasian police officers."
     "Irish need not apply."

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America: Freedom, volleyball and the 'L.'

 

Shiringul, 21, was impressed by our rail public transportation system.

 

     Americans have no idea what we have. Not a clue. If we are ignorant of our own country, we're completely, blind pig ignorant of the world.
     Okay, that's unfair. I haven't met most Americans. I should probably water that down. Many Americans seem to have no idea what they've got...
     Which is still a shame. Because nothing makes you love American more than travel.
     Not that there aren't wonderful places in the world. I remember coming back from Paris, looking at Chicago, and thinking, "Why do I live in this cowtown when I could live in Paris?"  

    But I didn't move.
    Travel also offers the opposite. A reminder of wonders we take for granted back home. I was in some Haitian backwater, years ago, waiting for a bus to take me back to Port-au-Prince. As the only blanc within miles, I drew a crowd, curious and eager, with people imploring me, "Help me come to America! Help me come to America!"
     Finally I had enough. 

     "Why?" I asked one man. "What do you hope to find in America?"

     He got very serious and thought.

     "In American, I understand," he began. "There are roads that go over other roads...."

     At that moment I realized that I hadn't seen a single overpass in the whole damn country. And if you had never seen one, the idea of one road lofting into the air and overleaping another road, well, it would be a wonder, hard to wrap your head around.

     Think of that next time you go under a viaduct. 

     I thought of that moment last Tuesday, talking with two Afghani sisters for my Friday column on immigrants applying for their residency permits. Next to travel, speaking with newcomers is an excellent window into our world, a mirror to notice what we might not see otherwise. 

     I asked what it was like, coming to America.

     The older sister, Zeyah, answered in such a ethereal fashion that I didn't try to summarize it in the paper. She spoke of walking across the campus of Northeastern Illinois University. That's it. She didn't exactly specify what about that walk was extraordinary. To be there. Walking across campus. With so many other different types of people. And trees. Going ... wherever she pleased. With no one watching her, keeping tabs on her, following her, placing demands on her. Her whole life suddenly in front of her, her life now hers, to do with as she pleased. That's the sense I got anyway, maybe I was projecting.

     I asked her younger sister the same question. What is being in American like?

     "America ..." she began, succinctly. "It's a dream."

     How so?

     "So cool. So clean. I have my freedom."

     For instance, she can decide whether to wear a hijab or not — an option unavailable to women under the Taliban. She can work, go to school, choose what to study, play on a volleyball team.

    That much got in the paper. But there was more. She said something about lack of insects here. I asked her what made volleyball in Afghanistan different then volleyball here, and she gave a long answer which boiled down to: coaches, supervisors who know what they're doing and help.

     She mentioned something rarely gets cited when the glories of America are being recounted.

    "We don't have trains in Afghanistan."

     "Trends?" I said, misunderstanding her accent. "Like music trends?"

     "No trains," she laughed. "Red Line. Blue Line. Oh my God."

     The 'L.' You might think trains make noise and have delays and people smoke on them now. To her, they mean you can go wherever you want. I checked the train situation in Afghanistan. A couple lines in the North. Kabul started trying to put in a train system. Last year.

    I live by the Metra track. I can turn my head and see trains. Honestly, I'm already glad they're there. The commerce of the country, and convenient as hell for me. But I'm also going to try to remember that they're also somebody's dream come true.

His work usually has to be nude to be this notorious

 

     Paul Gauguin abandoned his family in France and sailed around the world seeking paradise in Polynesia. He married a 13-year-old Tahitian girl. "Are you not afraid of me?" he asked.
     That type of thing is frowned upon today, and the placard next to one of Gauguin's paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago dispatches the issue thus: "Gauguin's predatory behavior toward young girls was a well-documented and integral aspect of his self-fashioned artistic persona."
     OK then. Gauguin's paintings are still on display, as they should be. Qualms over the personal lives of artists are so random. The Medicis were bad guys, too.
     Yet time mediates their excesses. As does fame. No matter how badly Picasso treated his mistresses, his big rusty baboon — made of the same COR-TEN steel as the building behind it — will still be on display at the heart of Chicago.
     Art is a window into the past, and the past is often a terrible place. The Art Institute is being vigorously reminded of this over a small pencil drawing — 17 inches by 12 — tinted with watercolors, "Russian War Prisoner." An undistinguished sketch by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, possessing none of the raw sexuality for which he was infamous.
     Schiele died at 28 of the Spanish flu, and the drawing came into the possession of Jewish cabaret star Fritz Grünbaum, whose art collection was mostly snatched by the Nazis after he was shipped to Dachau concentration camp.
     Except this drawing, the Art Institute insists. The Nazis missed this one. Maybe they were careless.
     His heirs disagree, and have been suing to get the collection back. Nine of 10 works have been returned. My colleague, Emmanuel Camarillo has been documenting the lawsuit, accusing the museum of "willful blindness."

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"This rulemaking is necessary to address outdated regulations..."

 

"Conflict Management, or How to Not Be UnPatriotic," by Jerry Truong

    I try to be fair. That means giving people I criticize a chance to respond. Or governments for that moment, which I suppose are people too, somewhere under the bureaucracy. For instance, in Friday's column, when I was painting questions from Department of Homeland Security as silly, I felt obligated to ask DHS for its perspective on the situation. 
      Not that I was expecting an answer. Every corner mom and pop bakery tends to be mum nowadays on the allure of fresh-baked pies. But the Department of Homeland Security surprised me by responding — after the column was done and online, true. But in a timely enough fashion that I thought I should honor the effort that somebody went to by sharing my question and their answer.

Good morning!
I'm the page two news columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times I spent six hours yesterday at a law firm watching Afghani immigrants fill out DHS's Form I-485, "Application to Register Permanent Residence," and was struck by the questions regarding security. Some seemed to address situations that were literally impossible, like: did you work for the Nazis from 1933 to 1945? I'm wondering if anyone there could comment on them — from my perspective, they seem time wasting and without any practical value — anyone with bad intentions would not answer them honestly. But perhaps I'm missing something. Is an update in the works? Thanks.

Neil Steinberg

     The following was sent by the Department of Homeland Security. The "On Background" at the start means I may quote the material provided so long as I don't identify the sender. It's rather oblique, but after a careful reading, I believe they're saying: 1) We ask these questions because we don't want terrorists entering the country and, if we catch them in a lie we can prosecute them, though 2) we can't change the questions for various groups, though we know they're out-of-date and are hoping to change them someday and 3) the silly questions notwithstanding, we're particularly excited about these Afghanis, and so waive the fees we usually sock immigrants with. But you can judge for yourself.

On Background:

     As a component supporting the Human Rights Violators & War Crime Center, USCIS takes seriously the collaborative effort to prevent the United States from becoming a safe haven for individuals who engage – or have engaged – in the commission of war crimes, genocide, torture and other forms of serious human rights violations from conflicts around the globe. If you knowingly and willfully falsify or conceal a material fact or submit a false document with your application for permanent residency, USCIS will deny your application and may deny any other immigration benefit. In addition, you will face severe penalties provided by law and may be subject to criminal prosecution.

USCIS is unable to modify immigration forms for specific communities or nationalities, but the agency has previously committed to simplifying several major forms, including Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status. Additionally, USCIS intends to propose a rulemaking effort to improve the regulations governing the adjustment of status to lawful permanent residence and related immigration benefits.

     This rulemaking is necessary to address outdated regulations to improve efficiency and the administration of the adjustment of status of immigrants to lawful permanent residence in the United States, improve the quality of inventory data that DHS provides to agencies, reduce the potential for visa retrogression, and promote the efficient use of immediately available immigrant visas. You can read more about that effort here: View Rule (reginfo.gov).

DHS/USCIS remains committed to supporting Afghan nationals paroled under Operation Allies Welcome. The agency has exempted filing fees and expedited processing of requests for employment authorization, adjustment of status, and other applications and petitions for certain Afghan nationals as part of the administration’s ongoing effort to help those who assisted the United States in Afghanistan resettle, reunite with family, and build their lives in their new communities in America.

Flashback 2012: The riddle of the missing women’s voices in politics

Hydra and Kali, by Damien Hirst

     Facebook wheezes more and is useful less, day by day, with real people crowded out by advertising and snippets of movies. But the memories section does serve up posts from years past, and Friday offered this with my cryptic comment, "This puts a whole new spin on the question, 'Where are all the women?'" I was curious as to what might have inspired that, and re-read this column which, alas, is even more current now, after a dozen years than it was then. 

     A father and son are driving in a car, the riddle goes. The car crashes, the father is killed and the boy is badly injured. So they rush him to the hospital, into the operating room. The surgeon walks in, takes a look at the boy, and says, “I can’t operate on this boy — he’s my own son!”
     How can that be?
     When Gloria Stivic tells the riddle on an episode of “All the Family” in 1972, Archie Bunker at first misses the premise entirely.
     “That’s easy,” he says, “a surgeon ain’t supposed to operate on his own family.” Her meathead husband, Mike, thinks the man who was killed is the stepfather. “The surgeon’s the real father!” he says. Wrong.
     Forty years ago, the riddle could stump people because nobody thought of women as doctors — it was a big deal. But guess what? Women could be doctors, and police officers, and soldiers, and members of Congress, as slowly women established themselves as American citizens on equal par with men.
     More or less.
     While it would be overreacting to say that recently we’ve been going backward, women’s rights are in the news of late, and not because women are reconsidering them.
     Our leaders and would-be leaders — all men — are hot to constrain, whether it is Rick Santorum thundering against not only abortion, but contraception and amniocentesis (all the same, apparently, in his book), or various state legislatures lunging for indignities to heap upon any woman bold enough to try to exercise her legal right to an abortion.
     Here’s a more modern riddle: The thunderous outcry that those of us alive in 1970s might expect just isn’t heard. Why? Not only didn’t you hear a squeak from women leaders, but I couldn’t even imagine who those leaders might be — Hillary Clinton? A tight-lipped diplomat. Condoleezza Rice? Timid. Nancy Pelosi? Guess again. You know there’s a deficit when you find yourself hoping that daytime talk show hosts — Ellen? Rosie? — might leap into the fray. Maybe they have and nobody noticed.
     But rather than take the Republican cue and be another guy opining about women (When fighting monsters, Nietzsche cautions, take care that you do not become a monster), I thought I’d contact an actual woman politician — they do exist — and see what they say. So I phoned my pal Kelly Cassidy, the outspoken, effective Democratic state rep from the 14th district.
     “It’s kind of hilarious, in a heartbreaking way,” said Cassidy, who is in a tight race for her seat. “The women are there. But what I find most ironic in all of this: the real flashback quality in this experience. I started working in Chicago in 1992, and it feels just like that. It feels just like the level of anger I started to see from Tailhook and the Anita Hill hearings. Women are waking up and realizing this is going on around them and they have to do something about it.”
     They are?
     “Birth control is not controversial,” said Cassidy. “It’s stunning to me that we’re having these conversations. It’s almost as if we have this cyclical sense, we have to be reminded these rights are tenuous at best and these battles are not permanently won.”
     Bingo. Freedom is not free, and as the generation that won so many victories shuffles into the sunset — Gloria Steinem is 77, Jane Fonda is 74 — the generations after them take all this stuff for granted.
     “We become busy with our lives,” said Cassidy. “And when a threat like this happens, the giant is wakened again.”
     That’s true, and that is why I’m not flapping around in the I’m-going-to-Canada tizzy that Santorum’s surge seems to inspire in so many of my Democratic brethren. The country’s changed. Women can vote. Gays aren’t going back into the closet. Even the religious faithful don’t want to be bullied from the pulpit — Santorum didn’t even win the majority of Catholic voters in Michigan.
     “We have great leaders. I see [Rep.] Jan Schakowsky really stepping up,” said Cassidy. “Perhaps because she’s our own we aren’t aware of her national role and her ability to rally folks on a national level. It is almost as if the ridiculousness from the right is so loud, and they are so insistent, they drown everything else out.”
     So far. On “All in the Family,” Edith, the dingbat, comes up with the answer: “The surgeon was the boy’s mother!” It stumped people back then. (“Who the hell ever heard of a woman surgeon?” Archie says). Maybe it stumps people now. Gloria’s feminist friend, Tammy, delivers the episode’s moral: “I don’t think men have the right to control women’s lives.” People said that kind of thing on television then. Now we have “The Bachelor.”
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 2, 2012