Olympic flashback 2008: Celebrating oppression

     Everyone seemed to adore the opening of the Paris Olympics. Well, except fundamentalist Christians who, in their unshakable belief that everything is about them, decided that because one scene took place at a dinner table it was therefore mocking the Last Supper. 

     Myself, I found the opening ceremony dull — boat after boat filled with happy athletes — and switched over to re-runs of "House." 
    I haven't written a word in the paper — with everything going on, the Olympics seem very beside the point. But once upon a time I was all over them. This ran in 2008, just before the stunning opening to the Beijing Olympics — all those drummers — which, ironically, I thought of wistfully watching Paris's laser light show. This was back when we still worried about oppression in China, as opposed to oppression right the fuck here. 

     Olympic opening ceremonies tend toward Chinese-style epic pageantry no matter where they are held. From Seoul to Sydney we got squads of acrobats, platoons of uniformed teens twirling ribbons attached to sticks and other displays of massive hoopla.
     One can only imagine how much more eye-popping tonight's Olympic kickoff will be, since it is created by the Chinese themselves. 

     While we sit and absorb the agitprop, amazed, choking up at the inevitable Coke commercials with beaming youngsters handing gleaming red soda cans to old sages in conical hats and wooden clogs, we owe it to ourselves, as the freedom-loving Americans we once were and may yet be again, to pause and recognize the political reality underlying all this immense gloss.
     Did hosting the Olympics promote the rights of people in China?
     "Not at all," said Xiao Nong Cheng, executive director of the Center for Modern China, a think tank in Princeton, N.J. "This Olympics is bad, and China's people have lost even the smallest right to talk."
     Cheng pointed out that in the run-up to the Olympics, China, terrified at losing face on the world stage, suppressed its citizens even more than usual, and that indications to the contrary — such as a recent Pew survey — are merely lies.
     "The Pew ignored a basic fact that surveys in China, according to official regulations, have to be approved, and all the data filtered," said Cheng. "There are no independent surveys in China. These are controlled, manipulated surveys. The data is not reliable."
     He added that the world media, rather than turn a spotlight onto China, is instead muzzling itself in order to cover the Games.
     "If foreigners want to be in Beijing for the Olympics, they have to seal their lips and follow all the rules the Chinese government set," he said. "The Chinese government worries that the free expression of foreigners might signal to the Chinese people they are supposed to have rights to talk freely and have press freedom."
     There, just had to get that off my chest. Enjoy the Games.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 8, 2008

Google can pull the plug at any time

     Thursday I snapped awake at 2:30 a.m. And not groggy awake, either, but a super-focused awake that I suspected had something to do with the sleep aid I'd tried, sent by a Chicago company hoping for publicity.
     I will do them a favor and not get more specific, except to note their "vanilla lavender sleep latte" contains valerian root. It's supposed to be a sedative but can also cause insomnia. Big time. At 3 a.m. I gave up, padded upstairs and logged onto my computer.
     "Your Google Account has been disabled," I was informed, under a big red circle with an exclamation mark. "It looks like it was being used in a way that violated Google's policies."
     Sometimes this sort of thing can be a phishing attempt, trying to get your data. But I had a big hint that my Google account was indeed disabled: my blog, built on Google's Blogger platform, was gone. 

     If my mind hadn't been focused by the valerian, it was sure focused now. Getting the account back didn't take a lot of expertise — I clicked the big red "Try to restore" button and followed the prompts. Google popped back. So that was good.
     But the question remained: What happened? And how could I keep it from happening again? Email I could get by without. Mostly spam and come-ons touting supposed soporifics that turn out to be stimulants. But I had 11 years worth of writing on that blog.
     Google does not tell you what you've done to get your account booted. A truly Kafkaesque twist evoking the opening line of "The Trial": "Someone must have traduced Joseph K because he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong."
     Poking around Google, I found a laundry list of misdeeds Google suggests might earn banishment, beginning with: "Account hacking or hijacking" and including "Child sexual abuse and exploitation," "Harassment, bullying & threats" and "Terrorist content."
     Only I hadn't done any of these. The only thing I could think of is, my account was deleted exactly at midnight, and my blog posts automatically at midnight. Thursday's was fairly benign: A reader cc'd me a letter sent to City Lit, the Logan Square bookstore that created international headlines by booting a writer off its reading club list for the author's Zionist leanings.
     I ran the letter under the headline, "'Juden raus!' says City Lit bookstore.

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Flashback 2012: Plenty of guards, but no prisoners

     I heard from a reader who said he enjoys the column, even though he's moved far from Chicago and, Nosy Parker that I am, I not only thanked him, but asked where he had moved. He said Hillsboro, where he worked in the prison. I furrowed my brow — did I not visit that prison? No, two hours down the road, in Murphysboro. Which brought up this story, the classic example of making lemonade when life serves you lemons. My former Sun-Times colleague, gone into governmental PR, invited me down to write a story on the prison. But after we drove the six hours to Murphysboro, southeast of St. Louis, we discovered there was a prison, but no prisoners. Not wanting to waste the trip, I adapted.

    The other memory is that I hadn't brought a  photographer on the lengthy trek, but held my phone at arm's length, above my head, clicked once, and shot the eerie blue-tinged front page photo at right. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

    This is twice as long as a regular column, so if you want to bail out, you have my permission, though it does have some interesting details.

    If you make it to the end of this rather long article — that's how we flew back then — I'll give you an update on the prison. And the photo atop the blog is not in fact a jail, per se, but the Virginia Military Institute. 

     MURPHYSBORO, Ill. — Every weekday morning, three dozen guards, teachers, supervisors and counselors — the preferred term is “juvenile justice specialists” — gather here at the blandly named Illinois Youth Center/Murphysboro, the second newest of eight prisons the state runs for criminals under 18.
     When IYC Murphysboro was constructed in 1997, it had a capacity of 100 teens, later expanded to 156. Its population today, like every day since mid-July, is zero. The steel bunk beds are unoccupied, the pool table and gymnasium unused. Only those paid to tend the non-existent prisoners come here anymore.
     Not that they stay long.
     At 8 a.m., there is a roll call of the staffers in blue polos and beige khakis. Then their workday begins by their leaving, together, in six white state vans, traveling in a convoy to the equally blandly named Illinois Youth Center/Harrisburg, 46 miles away, where there are young offenders to be overseen.
     Two and half hours — one-third of their 7½-hour shift — will be spent in transit, at full pay. The state spends $30,000 a month in transportation alone, not only for the vans, but mileage for 30 other employees who transport themselves to Harrisburg and get 55 cents a mile, the state rate.
     Which makes this sleek, brick facility — fully staffed with trained juvenile justice professionals but devoid of actual juveniles — a perfect symbol of the financial free-for-all going on in Illinois as the state tries to figure out how to stop spending billions of dollars it doesn’t have and how to rein in billions more it has committed to spend but won’t get in pensions, salaries and upkeep of hundreds of programs, including juvenile justice facilities it may or may not need.
     Meanwhile labor unions, such as the two representing workers at IYC Murphysboro, battle through the courts, the media and the Legislature in a desperate attempt to keep from losing what they’ve spent years to gain.
     In March 2011, the budget for Murphysboro was cut in half. Then in June, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice announced it would be closing two adult prisons, Tamms and Dwight, and two juvenile correctional centers, the Southern Illinois Adult Transition Center, in Carbondale, and IYC Murphysboro — on Aug. 31.
     “The state can no longer afford these facilities,” Kelly Kraft, a spokeswoman for Gov. Pat Quinn’s budget office, said in an email.
     The governor said it would save $88 million. Local politicians took the closings — and the prospect of hundreds of jobs lost — hard.
     “It is stunning and sad the lengths this governor will go to punish Southern Illinois,” state Sen. Gary Forby (D-Benton) said when the closings were announced.
     The state has been trying to close the four facilities ever since. But as yet, all four remain open. The Illinois Senate voted earlier this month to override the closings, but the House of Representatives last week refused to act, meaning they will close, maybe, unless the courts decide otherwise.
     “It’s this weird bureaucratic thing,” explained Ashley Cross, chief of staff at the Department of Juvenile Justice.
     When the closings were announced, only 11 Murphysboro staffers accepted transfers to other facilities, while the rest insist on being based here. At first, the juvenile justice specialists were put to work mothballing the facility — inventorying hardware, moving boxes, waxing the floors, or trying to. But that didn’t work well, and there was much complaining. So the specialists have been shipped to Harrisburg to help out there.
     Should Murphysboro be closed? Unlike an adult prison population that bursts at the seams as the failed drug war jams the courts and jails, over the past decade, young offenders have been diverted away from incarceration, not by a drop in crime, though crime is dropping, but by new laws and policies that encourage judges to direct teenage criminals into cheaper and more effective community-based programs.
     When Murphysboro opened 15 years ago as a 100-bed boot camp, a spike in teenage crime had nearly doubled the juvenile prison population in Illinois in the previous four years.
     “We were busting at the seams,” said deputy director Ron Smith.
     Conditions in Illinois, which created the idea of a separate juvenile justice system in 1899, were among the worst in the country. That’s all changed. In the state of Illinois now, there are 939 youths — they don’t like the term “prisoners” — between the ages of 13 and 20 now held in six juvenile facilities, one-third of the number in 1997.
     “We are at an all-time low in our juvenile population,” said Smith. “The lowest since 1985.”
     For the past few years, Murphysboro has housed half the number of kids it was designed to hold. A declining population was not met by a similar decline in staffing, which sent cost-per-inmate soaring — $142,342 per youth at Murphysboro, according to the state, which is what put the facility on the block.
     “We didn’t pull kids out of Murphysboro — they attritted out,” said Smith. “We just didn’t need it, and it slowly attritted down to nothing.”
     That isn’t how the juvenile justice specialists see it — they would like Murphysboro to reopen and return to a boot camp.
     “It was a great program; unique,” said Greg Foreman, president of AFSCME Local 2335, one of the two unions representing the Murphysboro workers. “The things we did for the kids were above and beyond anything that the other institutions provided for them. The staff here actually developed relationships with these kids.
     So this is all about the kids?
     “Yes sir. It’s all about the kids,” he said.
     Murphysboro is minimum security — despite its 12-foot fence topped with razor wire. But Harrisburg is maximum security, and the Murphysboro workers worry that youths being sent there are mixing with hardened criminals.
     “Not everybody belongs in a maximum-security prison,” said Gary Cline, a union steward, noting that at Harrisburg, “everybody gets treated as a thug, a murderer, a rapist. Not all incarcerated juveniles are like that. I’ve seen kids who look like they’ve been in car accidents because they’re minimum-level security kids who were housed in a maximum-security prison.”
     Murphysboro, meanwhile, had “24 hours a day, seven days a week” supervision and a safer environment, according to its staffers. “It’s a great place to be,” said Don Julian, a clinical services supervisor. “Kids can’t get raped here. There’s almost no opportunity for suicide. It is the safest there is, no doubt.”
     That’s why most of the Murphysboro workers say they refused the chance to permanently transfer to Harrisburg or other juvenile facilities. They feel that many youth being sent to Harrisburg don’t belong there.
     Murphysboro “is the only facility in the state of Illinois with open bay housing,” said Cline. “There are some who are starting off on the wrong path, they come to a place, a minimum-security place like this where they can get turned around, not only best for juvenile and best for future victims, but it’s financially best for the state, to get these guys turned around and productive at this young age.”
     What’s happening next? The prison, 15 years old, has the feel of a new facility, and a quick stroll shows the money spent on it, from the five top-of-the-line Estwing hammers in the wood shop to the $5,000 unbreakable Lexan door in the kitchen — everything that looks like glass in the facility is actually Lexan.
     The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, instructing the lower court to “dissolve the injunction that has blocked us from closing Murphysboro and the other facilities. We’re waiting for an order from a judge allowing us to close the prisons,” said Abdon Pallasch, assistant budget director for the state. “The courts set their own timelines. Once the judge does that, we can make Murphysboro’s closing official.”
     Until then, the devotion the specialists have to their place of employment baffles some. “Times are tough now in Southern Illinois,” said Jim Clarke, the engineer left in charge of the building, who calls the staffers “crybabies” for resisting the changes. “They are going to be made. Everybody says, ‘The choices must be made, but don’t cut my facility.’ I don’t mean to insult some very, very good people, talented people. But don’t whine because they’re moving you to another facility. Be thankful you have a job.”

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, December 13, 2012 

    IYC Murphysboro remained closed for five years, when Gov. Bruce Rauner re-opened it as the Murphysboro Life Skills Re-entry Center, designed to help offenders prepare to adapt to life outside. Between 75 and 150 inmates live there, though during COVID that number swelled to 200. 

Saturday pinch hitter — Jack Clark: "A fly at my desk"

     I've known mystery writer Jack Clark for many years, and enjoy his novels. When I hocked spit out of a dry mouth last Saturday (well, writing a brief bit about the Art Institute's Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit, so not exactly twiddling my thumbs) Jack gently reminded me that he had offered me a perfectly good essay on a subject that literally everybody can relate to.

     Every so often a centipede will get trapped in the bottom or my bathtub or kitchen sink. I’ve never figured out how they get there or what they’re searching for. They’re probably hot on the trail of one bug or another. That’s one of the good things about centipedes, besides being nocturnal and very cool looking; they slither around all night hunting for other insects to eat. During the day, they sleep and generally keep themselves out of the way. 

     But even with 15 sets of legs, they can’t seem to get up from the bottom of the tub or sink. It’s usually morning when I find one of them scurrying around in the depths, making futile attempts to get up those slippery slopes. I’ll usually use a flexible piece of plastic or cardboard to try to help them along. This almost always drives them into a state of terror. They think I’m attempting to kill them, and sometimes I accidentally do. Or I mutilate them so badly that the only remedy is to finish the job. They’re fragile creatures, believe me. Those little green legs are not even close to being heavy-duty. 

     Usually when they do get to safety, they scurry away and quickly slip through some crack in the baseboards, looking like one of those articulated buses as they disappear into that dark world behind the walls. 

     I had a houseguest recently. He was also nocturnal and the centipedes terrified him. He also told me they looked gross. I thought this was pretty funny, considering he was from California. You want scary? They’ve got tarantulas out there in the Golden West, not to mention bears and mountain lions. And, as far as gross goes, some of their rats live in trees. What could be grosser than that? Isn’t bird shit landing on your head bad enough?

     One day as a truck driver, I made a delivery to a small desert town east of Los Angeles. We were moving one sister in with another. They were both well past retirement age, a couple of sweet old ladies, I thought at first.

     It was a very hot day, 110 or something like that, which is not unusual in that part of the world. When we opened the front door to bring the furniture inside, a few dozen flies came in as well. The heat had obviously sapped most of their energy. They didn’t buzz around like regular flies. They floated slowly and barely made a sound as they soaked in the shade. 

     As we were leaving, I apologized to the sisters for letting the flies in. 

     “Oh, don’t worry.” One of them flashed an evil grin and waved an arm above her head. “The vacuum will take care of them in no time.” 

     I closed the door and left the flies to their fate. But I’ve often wondered if in the cool of that desert night, with the air conditioning taking a well-deserved break, the sisters might have heard a plea-like buzzing coming from deep in their front hall closet.

     I’ve occasionally vacuumed up a spider, but never intentionally. As soon as you start waving that hose around, most of them know it’s time to abandon the web. 

     Year ago, in France, I was staying in a hotel in a village about an hour northwest of Paris. It sounds charming, I know. In reality, it probably had more in common with the Bates Motel than with the cute little place you might have imagined. 

     When I carried my suitcase into my room, I found that spiders had gotten there first. They’d taken up residence in every corner. I found a cup and spent a bit of time catching one spider after another, and then tossing them into the vines that grew just outside, then I closed the window.

     The spiders didn’t come back that night, but plenty of other insects did, mosquitos and other annoying pests. In the morning, I opened the window before I left. When I came back later in the day, the spiders were back in their familiar corners. The other pests stayed away for the rest of my visit. 

     I’ve seen plenty of spiders in France but not a single window screen. I believe there is some connection.

     Back in the U.S.A., I watched one spider eat another high on one of my bathroom walls. It was truly gross, and it was grosser still knowing that it was probably a female spider eating a male just after they’d had sex. Where are your demands for equal rights now? 

     I waited until she was done with every last morsel of her late lover. She was still basking in the afterglow when I caught her and tossed her and her last supper straight into the toilet. “Happy now?” I shouted as she circled the bowl on the way out.

     I’ve often wondered what happened when you flushed an insect. They might drown on the way down, inside that measly gallon and a half of water. They could die of trauma from bouncing off the sides of the drainpipe. If they make it to the bottom, they’ll probably find plenty of other creatures waiting. Rats, opossums, and frogs, to name a few, plus scores of insects to eat or be eaten by. If they manage to keep floating along they’ll probably end up going down the Sanitary and Ship canal to the water treatment plant in Stickney. 

     If they can get past that, well, then they’ll really be on their way; the Des Plaines River to the Illinois, to the Mississippi and down to the warmth of the Gulf of Mexico. It might even be a pleasant ride.

     One afternoon, I was writing away, when a little black housefly came by and decided to hang around my desk. He wasn’t very annoying as flies goes, no loud buzzing, bumping, or putting his dirty feet on my arms. He just wouldn’t go away.

     I was involved in whatever I was writing so I tried to ignore him and keep going. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, I looked up and there he was taking a stroll inside my half-full coffee cup.

     Well, this was almost too easy. I put my hand over the cup, trapping him inside. To get him outside, I’d have to open two doors. This would not be easy with one hand holding the coffee cup and the other covering the top. I’d managed it plenty of times before, but this time I took the lazy way out and headed for the bathroom instead.

     And, in truth, I was a bit pissed at the fly. Not only was I going to have to throw out some perfectly good coffee, but the writing had been going okay for a change. I’m not talking a Pulitzer or a National Book Award but maybe a halfway decent review on Amazon: “The middle was a little murky and some of the characters seem to be thrown in for no apparent reason, but not a bad book overall.”

     “Enjoy your vacation,” I said, and I flushed the fly and the remains of my coffee away.

     I went back to my desk but I’d lost whatever inspiration I’d had. So I didn’t fell that guilty about sending the fly to the depths. I figured he’d survive the fall. But how was he going to get through Stickney? A fly dumb enough to get caught inside a coffee-cup trap probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance in what has sometimes been called the crappiest place on earth.

     I finally got back to my legal pad and was busy scribbling away (always do your first draft in longhand, that’s my advice) when I heard a buzzing. I looked up and a shiny golden brown fly was heading down the hallway right towards my office. He was flying faster than any fly I’d ever seen, faster than a speeding bullet, it seemed to me, even louder than the most powerful locomotive. As he came closer, I realized that this very angry looking fly was aiming straight for my head. I leaned far back in my chair and the fly changed directions with me. At the last possible moment, I grabbed the legal pad and held it up to shield my face. My chair started to topple over backwards. I threw the legal pad away, reached for the safety of my desk, and pulled myself back upright.

     I could suddenly hear my heart beating. The buzzing had stopped. The people upstairs were tromping around as usual. Had I actually hit the fly when I’d tossed the legal pad? “Take that, Mr. Fly,” I shouted in triumph. The next instant I had a horrible thought, Oh, dammit. Was that Vince? This was my big brother. He’d died about two years earlier. Had he stopped by for a visit? Had I just knocked him to smithereens after first flushing him down the toilet?

     I’m serious here.

     Vince was my first or second reader for most of my life, and he wrote a bit himself. When I was young and he’d read something I’d written, he’d always tell me it was great. This was nice to hear, of course, but it’s not very helpful. As I got older he started to tell me the truth. That’s usually not so nice to hear, but it is usually quite helpful.

     One day he was flipping through the manuscript of my latest novel. He started at the beginning and kept turning pages. I thought this was a good sign. He hadn’t found anything to complain about yet. 

     He got in fairly deep and finally stopped.

     “Here it is,” he said, and he showed me where he’d drawn a line from one side of the page to the other. “This is where your story starts.” He pointed. “Cut all that other stuff.”

     That other stuff was the first 50 pages. And he was right, of course. After I cut all that other stuff, what was left became my first published novel.

     So it’s not that surprising that Vince might stop by my office if he got the chance. He couldn’t be a fly on the wall because my desk is in the middle of the room. If he wanted to see what I was working on, he’d have to hang around a bit closer. Even with those five beady eyes that flies have, he probably was having trouble with my atrocious handwriting. Maybe that’s why he kept hanging around.

     Vince wasn’t a big coffee drinker, but he’d try just about anything. It used to drive him crazy that I would go back to the same restaurant and order the same meal over and over again.

     You probably think I’m just trying to amuse you here or that I’m off my rocker. No. This really happened. I flushed a dark fly down my toilet and a while later a golden brown one came back and almost knocked me out of my chair. I’m not a religious person. I haven’t spent much time thinking about the possibility of life after death. I figure I’ll find out or I won’t before too long. But maybe that old idiom about the fly on the wall has been around so long for a very good reason. Maybe it’s rooted in truth. 

     If you do get to come back as an insect or animal or who knows what, maybe a tree or a traffic signal, I hope you get to come back more than once. I hope Vince gets a better reception the next time around. 

     The way I look at it, a very dark fly had gone into the toilet and then, a half hour or so later, the same fly had come back, now a much better-looking golden brown— or maybe that wasn’t gold. But he’d come back pissed, and it looked like he wanted to let me know how he was feeling. And that was so much like Vince. He’d tell you what he thought, sometimes with a bit of humor, but there was no guarantee about that part. 

     I never could find the fly’s remains. I don’t take that as the sign of a possible miracle. My office is usually a mess. The other half of the room is my workshop/tool room. I lose small objects all the time. 

     I keep waiting for another fly to act in a similar fashion So far, none seem to be interested in hanging out. I do pay more attention to them than ever before.

     I don’t flush insects down the toilet anymore. But I still eat meat and even seafood now and then. 

     It’s been decades since I’ve bought into the view that humans are superior beings. My argument against is pretty simple: In the last century, somewhere around 100 million people were killed in wars alone. Who knows what that number would be if we included the shooting, stabbings, hit-and-runs, and all the other ways we kill each other in civilian life as well?

     And then there’s this century to think about. Seems to me, it’s already circling the toilet bowl. 

     How’d you like to be a fly on the wall the day it finally goes all the way down? Although, now that I think about it, that just might be the safest place to be.

You don't have to have children to enjoy life. They do help. Unless they don't.

The Newborn Baby, by Matthijs Naiveu (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The most difficult endeavors are often also the most rewarding. Climbing Mount Everest, surviving Marine boot camp, raising children, are taxing but also fulfilling. Well, I can't vouch for the first two. But that third one — I have considerable direct personal experience. Trust me: being a parent is hard. And exhilarating.
     Back when my friends were having babies, I sometimes greeted the happy news of a pregnancy by describing what I called my "parenthood epiphany." It went like this:

     The week we brought Ross home, I was sitting in the new blue rocking chair about 3 a.m., staring numbly down into his red, distorted, howling face. And a startling thought formed in my exhaustion-sapped mind: Ohhhhhhhh, so this is why those teenage girls kill their kids. Now I understand. We're 35 years old. We have all the money in the world. We desperately wanted this baby, for years. It's the third night. And we're going OUT OF OUR MINDS!

     I told that story, not because I'm a bastard — well, not entirely — but because I wanted the expectant newcomer before me to realize that they were embarking upon a rocky journey. That if they found it difficult at times, it wasn't because they were bad parents, necessarily. It was just the nature of the beast
     Only the story didn't comfort the listeners, it concerned them — I can still see one colleague, an editor at the paper, backing away, eyes wide — and I eventually stopped telling it, so not to constrict my social circle smaller than it already was.
     This came back to me when I saw Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance being pilloried on social media for his remarks from 2021 that people without children do not have a "direct stake" in the country, but are, "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg ... the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children."
     There's a lot to unpack there.
     First, he's completely mistaken. Harris has two stepchildren, and the suggestion that they somehow don't count is simply wrong, as anyone who knows anyone with foster or adopted children — like Pete Buttigieg and his husband — or stepchildren knows.

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City Lit Books pares its reading list

     Gary Ashman is an attorney and a friend of this blog — he has a copy of the original EGD poster framed in his lovely, well-stocked home library. We have shared a cigar or two, and  he even briefly advertised on the blog when it first went live. We haven't conversed in a few years, so it was good to hear from him again. When I saw what the letter he was sharing was about, I asked if he would mind if I posted it here. He didn't. As a rule, I don't react to the lazy Manicheism and reckless Jews-don't-count rhetoric that sophomores and their equivalent wallow in lately regarding Israel and Gaza — there's too much of it, and I try not to traffick in the obvious. When one side premises its argument on, "First you give your country to someone else and disappear, then everything is solved..." there isn't much room for discussion. Plus you see how effective it is — it has gotten the Palestinians nowhere for the past 57 years; of late, the war continues, lives are lost, Netanyahu, who should have gone to prison long before Oct. 7, maintains his grip on power, and nothing changes. 

Vice presidents are always obscure — until they're not

 

Vice president Kamala Harris campaigns in Wisconsin Tuesday
 (photo for the Sun-Times by Anthony Vazquez)

     Say what you will about Northwestern University's former Medill School of Journalism, those annealed in its furnace tend to stick together. Two of my classmates made the complicated trek to Charlevoix, waaaay up in you-can't-get-there-from-here Northern Michigan, for my older son's wedding.     

     Back in the day, I also schlepped to keep up with my far-flung classmates — I think it was my way to be quasi-adventurous while having someone who knew the territory close by and, not incidentally, a free place to stay.
     So when Medill classmate Mary Kay Magistad based herself in Bangkok, freelancing around Asia, I slid by to offer my support. It was a memorable visit — how could it not be? I saw the king and queen of Thailand, at least from a distance, in a procession of red Mercedes ferrying them out of the palace gates, where I happened to be loitering.
     And I saw Dan Quayle, then the vice president, up close. He came to town and I couldn't resist showing up at his press conference. The motorcade arrived, police motorcycle outriders, communications vans, Cadillac limousines flown in on Air Force Two. At least a dozen vehicles, this long line of flashing red lights, a strobing parade of American power where, at the very end, a door flies open and disgorges Dan Quayle. I couldn't help think of that scene in a Bugs Bunny cartoon where a huge spaceship spits out a series of smaller vessels, Russian nesting doll style, until finally out pops tiny Marvin the Martian.
     Quayle was one of the more laughable vice presidents — remembered today, to the degree he's remembered at all, for telling a class he was visiting that "potato" is spelled "potatoe." Spoiler alert: It's not.
     But Quayle also represents all vice presidents, in his invisibility and inadequacy. Among the most astounding things of this very astounding week, after the fact of a powerful man doing a selfless thing for his country — Donald Trump had almost made us forget it is possible — was the alacrity with which the Democrats rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris.
     Not to take anything away from her many fine qualities. But it is a reminder that when you're dangling from a cliff from a sapling that's pulling out of the earth, you don't vet the person throwing you the rope too closely. The party ready to vote for Joe Biden's mummified corpse saw that dusty cadaver magically transform into a living, breathing, talking, fund-raising woman. Talk about an upgrade.

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