New York boldly goes where Chicago went ... in 1984

     Most Chicagoans have never been to New York City. That's too bad. I know the local fashion is to despise the place, sight unseen. But I have been there, many times, for business and pleasure. New York is not without its allures. Manhattan has an energy that generally eludes Chicago. There is interesting architecture, a noteworthy theater scene and numerous good restaurants.
     True, the place is provincial as hell. I know that is the opposite of expectations — Chicago is supposed to be the Midwestern cow town, full of rustics who escaped Iowa and Kentucky and still have pig slop ground into the seams of our boots as we stand gawping at the tall buildings.      But New York is far more parochial. That Saul Steinberg drawing, compressing the nation between the Hudson and the Pacific into a bare brown rectangle? That's actually how they view the world.    

     Earlier this summer, Eric Adams, New York's mayor, announced a daring experiment. He said ... and I can barely get this out without laughing ... he said the city will now introduce rolling garbage cans with hinged lids, crowing that now, instead of piling their garbage bags in the street, a Gotham tradition as ingrained as hot dog carts, this new, Space Age technology will be embraced.
    "We're going to catch up with everyone else and get these plastic bags off our streets," Adams promised.
     Raising the question: How far ahead of New York is Chicago, rolling trash can-wise? How much catching up does New York have to do?
    Forty years. Forty years ago, next week, in fact. On Sept 5, 1984, in the 8th Ward, the first wheeled garbage cart in Chicago was tipped into the first garbage truck equipped with a lift. Four other wards also took part in the pilot program.
     At the time, Chicago's garbage record was nothing to brag about. For decades, garbage collection was a notorious mess of patronage, inefficiency and almost unfathomable squalor. Before World War II, apartment dwellers routinely threw garbage out the windows, as in medieval times. They had to be threatened with fines to do otherwise.

     In the 1940s, half of Chicago's alleys were “lined with open piles of filth.” Only about 15% of garbage found its way into a metal can with a lid. A third of the trash was heaped in “old washtubs, battered baskets and boxes.” A quarter was left in open piles, with the last quarter dumped into large concrete containers. Garbage collectors went at the piles with shovels.

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Flashback 2012: How far back will they roll the clock?

     We progress by the inch. No, by the millimeter. No, it can't be the millimeter — that's metric, and so stinks of the European socialism that we, as Americans naturally abjure.
      Maybe that's the bright spin. Maybe we progress, not incrementally, but not at all. Sometimes I look back on an old column and almost despair. Look at this from 2012. A dozen years ago. Republicans were trying to ban gay marriage and abortion in the Constitution. They're drumming on the same fixations now, having made astounding progress compelling the keyhole peering meanness that a solid majority of American oppose. A reminder that Trump didn't lead the Republicans to their sorry state — their sorry state conjured him up, like a demon. Not a cause, but a symptom. This column even includes a cameo from Ann Coulter, who popped up this week mocking Gus Walz, a teenager with social adjustment issues. I thought she was already sunk into obscurity in 2012. Again, I was being optimistic. This shit hasn't gone away. It's never going away.

     ‘This horror, this nightmare abomination!” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1852. “Can it be in my own country!”
     She was referring to the institution of slavery. And while it might be a tad strong to equate the sense of moral revulsion that slavery evoked in enlightened persons in antebellum America to the indignation sparked by aspects of the current U.S. political climate, there are without doubt correlations.
     Today people are not enslaved because of the color of their skin; chalk one up for progress. They merely have their human rights, such as to marry and form families, denied based on sexuality (in the case of gays) or the ability to conduct their reproductive health dictated by others (in the case of women).   

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Smithsonian)

     Rightly or wrongly, Stowe’s heartfelt cry echoed in my mind spontaneously this week, a cold clanking heard when I reluctantly focused my attention on the Republican Party as it prepares to hold its quadrennial political convention in Tampa on Monday, assuming a hurricane doesn’t wipe out the city first.
     It’s hard to believe, in 2012, that Americans can not only hold such backward, morally indefensible ideas but boldly urge they be written into the Constitution, the operating code of our country. The Republican platform would amend the Constitution to ban both gay marriage and abortion. Yes, it’s only a party platform, and yes, party platforms are generally chin music designed to motivate the fringes, who live in permanent hope that the modern world will somehow yet be dragged kicking and screaming back to the homespun Eden of their imaginings — we’ll drop-kick gays back into the closet, where they belong, women will be taught to marry young or else keep their knees together and, if they don’t, go off and birth their bastards in shame. It boggles me that anyone would want that, but clearly they do, though not of course in those terms.
     They prefer to invoke God, and at least they’re being honest, because being against gays or reproductive choice are purely religious scruples. People who are not in thrall to their own faiths and unable to imagine moral frameworks other than their own do not, as a matter of practice, try to dictate women’s gynecological business. They’ve so muddied the argument with talk of babies, few realize the key point is not when, but who. Who decides? They decide. They seize the right to make this decision, based on their own religious tenets, then would deny the same privilege, by law, to everybody else.
     Slavery is illuminating here for a variety of reasons. First, it answers the question: Is the United States capable of oppressing entire classes of people, despite its Founding Fathers’ hoo-ha about liberty and freedom? Answer: You bet, for nearly 100 years, officially, and then an unofficial extra century.
     Second, it asks: Did religion aid in this atrocity? Why yes. God Almighty smiled down upon slavery, and of course — to listen to the Southerners — the slaves themselves were worthy of their fate, for a variety of gross, imaginary traits and flaws, some of which are the same sexualized slurs imputed upon gays. (Aside to black readers: Yes, I know it is possible to be both black and a homophobe. Yes, I know that some African Americans resent the suggestion that the mindless bigotry they faced is comparable to the justified contempt that gays draw upon themselves by, ah, being who they are. Different situations entirely, you say: skin versus sin. I grasp your point, and disagree completely; sexuality is no more a choice than skin color. I couldn’t decide to be gay, could you? But your objection is noted.)
     National politics is often jarring, because morality tends to be local, built on family and community. We in cities tend to be liberal, tolerant Democrats who prefer addressing actual problems to cooking up imaginary ones. In Chicago, it’s easy to forget how immigrants are hated in the Southwest, or how tightly religion clutches the throat of education in places like Texas or Mississippi.
     Not that you have to leave Illinois to find glittery-eyed fanaticism. When I was in Springfield for the state fair, and picked up the local paper, the State Journal-Register, I was genuinely shocked to find its editorial page carries the column written by far right attack beast Ann Coulter — I would have bet cash money that she existed only in an electronic netherworld of online haters, occasionally ducking behind a bush to disgorge another monstrous book of twisted thought. And here she is, defending Joe McCarthy in the biggest newspaper in Springfield.
     It might be easier were all morality decided locally. Then Texas could teach creationism and the South could secede again, unchallenged this time to ostracize gays, ban abortion and, heck, re-establish slavery while they’re rolling back the clock. It had its supporters then, it would have supporters now.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 24, 2012

Flashback 2009: A retiring CPS teacher speaks her mind.

     Today is the first day of school for the Chicago Public Schools. A realm I don't write about much, because it is so broad and complicated, and the Sun-Times always has excellent education reporters who cover the topic like a damp shirt. But occasionally I do, such as this 2009 story about a CPS school for children with special needs. It actually was a significant visit, for me, because I wrote it up for what became "Driving with Ed McElroy" in Granta and led to the University of Chicago Press publishing my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago."

    The second part — this was back when the column filled a page — is a reminder of the time when a certain British poster, now a visual cliche, was newly re-discovered.

     The Blair Early Childhood Center is one of those Chicago schools you've never heard about. Nobody was ever shot there. It has no football team. This marks the first time its name has appeared in this newspaper.
     Which is a shame, because Blair — which serves 103 public school students with severe medical and mental conditions such as Down syndrome and autism — is bright and clean, with small groups of students, aged 3 to 7, some in padded wheelchairs, gathered around teachers, who sing songs, read stories and present lessons.
     The school is at 6751 W. 63rd Place, far afield from my normal wanderings. But I was taken there by Ed McElroy, that grand gentleman of Chicago. While I'm reluctant to say that I go anywhere Ed asks me to go, the truth is I never turn him down and never feel sorry that I accompanied him somewhere. He knows the city block by block, almost inch by inch.
     Among the many teachers we met at Blair was Deanna Dalrymple, painting in Room 107 with a semicircle of first-graders decked out in smocks.
     It turned out that Dalrymple, 65, is retiring today. The graduate of Chicago Teachers College knew she wanted to be a teacher since age 4, but ended up in special ed the way so many of us end up places — by happenstance.
     "I started out 45 years ago at Christopher School," she said, of another CPS school for children with exceptional needs. "They were in desperate need of special-ed teachers. I had two months to wait for my assignment, and had taught blind children, so thought I would go to Christopher and teach for two months."
     That was in 1965. Two months became almost half a century. When Blair school opened, 25 years ago next October, she shifted there.
      The Chicago Public Schools are not without controversy. Most teachers, like any profession, are muted by self-interest. To speak their true views is to risk unemployment. But a person poised on the cusp of retirement has no such constraints. So? I asked, licking my chops. Any frank thoughts from 45 years of teaching she'd like to share?
     "I get so upset when someone talks about all the bad in the Chicago Public School system," she said. "But there's so much good. So much good being done for every child. What our children get is phenomenal. You see the care here. A child comes in, sometimes can't walk, can't talk, can't do anything, and they come out and these children walk and talk and feel good about themselves."
     OK then, in the spirit that I'd have reported it if she delivered a stinging indictment, and in honor of Deanna Dalrymple's 45 years of hard work with kids that you or I might have difficulty teaching for 45 minutes, I believe she has earned her say. Congratulations and good luck.

See you soon, Bob

     I'm not normally a 10 o'clock TV news kind of guy — I get up early, absorb news all day long from all seven of the distinct sources from whence news comes (can you name them? There are seven, at least).
     Give up?

     Newspapers, of course, then TV, radio, Internet, telephone and — these last two are toughies, particularly for the young folk — conversation with others and news that you yourself observe happening.
     By 10 p.m. I'm usually done with news and reading — the boy and I are 800 pages into War and Peace, slowly slogging onward, like Napoleon in midwinter.
     But I was in front of the tube Wednesday at 10 p.m. to see Bob Sirott do his final broadcast — at least for the near future — on the WMAQ-Channel 5 News.
     He was — as always — cool professionalism itself, and did not take my suggestion, made earlier in the day, that he mark his departure by mooning the audience, nor delivering a Howard-Beale-like tirade against NBC management, which failed to offer Sirott a satisfactory deal.
     Instead, what he said at the end of the program was:
     "Keep calm and carry on — thanks for being there and see you again soon."
     Mmm, that's rather oblique, I thought. The next morning I caught up with Bob. Why the low-key hail and farewell?
     "I thought, you know what, this isn't exactly Chet Huntley saying good night to David Brinkley for the last time," he said. "I'm not that important, I'm also not going anywhere. I'm taking a vacation now; when I get back right away I'm on WGN radio at noon. It would have been a little self-important and pompous, so I opted to go with something a little more subtle."
     "Keep calm and carry on"?
     "I stole that," he said. "If you Google it, it has become popular again, because of the economic strife."
     The quote sounded to me like Churchill, but there's an even more interesting history — British authorities, preparing for German invasion in 1939, printed the advice on a poster designed to brace the besieged populace. But the Germans never invaded Britain, so the poster was never used. It was rediscovered in recent years and resonated with grim economic times — times that make Sirott reluctant to present his abrupt unemployment as hardship.
     "For a lot of people, it's 'Adios, don't let the door hit you in the ass,'" he said. "I'm a really lucky guy. I got zero to complain about. I'll be back on TV, doing something."

Today's chuckle:

     Television: A medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.

           — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 12, 2009

DNC in Chicago offered energy, talent, hope: Here are 4 key takeaways

     I'm not a political reporter, in the same sense that I am not a sports reporter — I find my passion elsewhere. But just as sometimes I'm called to cover sports, so the Democratic National Convention was too big a story to miss. I spent a very long day Monday, hoovered up everything I needed, and couldn't see a reason to go back, watching the rest on television — which my friend Eric Zorn points out is the way the convention is supposed to be experienced. I ended up writing four columns: an opening day scene setter based on the 1932 convention, a focus on Mayor Brandon Johnson, a look at the protests, and this summary, an assignment running in the paper Sunday. I don't know about you, but I'm more than ready to move on.

     There were so many ways the Democratic National Convention could have gone wrong.
     Start with thousands of impassioned protesters in the streets of Chicago, butting up against a police department that has not always risen to the occasion.
     Add dozens of speakers, many stepping, blinking, onto the national stage for the first time, some of them children. Broadcast live.
     And yet, as they'd say at this summer's other big summer event, the Olympics, the Democrats stuck their landing. The protesters stayed in their lane, mostly. The cops did their job well, even though most of that job involved enduring 12-hour shifts, standing around, waiting.
     Remember where the party was just five weeks ago — a bag full of howling cats tied to the cinder block of President Joe Biden, whose deer-in-the-headlights debate disaster seemed to kill his chances of reelection. and maybe hope for a functioning democracy too.
     Then, Biden did what he should have done a year ago: withdrew.
     And Kamala Harris, his heretofore unexceptional, unnoticed and unloved vice president, locked down the nomination in 24 hours and went from virtual nonentity to adored superstar faster than anyone since Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris.
     Given that dramatic starting point, had the DNC offered four days of Chuck Schumer tossing cards into a hat, the party mood would still have been buoyant. Instead, it was a parade of talent that got labeled with the sports cliche "a deep bench."
     The only way to summarize the four-day party is with a four-item list, one highlight for each night. There isn't even room for Doug Emhoff, the first "second gentleman," who's so comfortable in his skin that he made being a divorced Jewish lawyer from New Jersey sound practically iconic, like being a lumberjack.
     On to the daily highlights:
     Monday: Biden, whose heroic denial of self-interest — or tardy acknowledgment of reality — allowed his party to soar, had his moment in the sun. Well, 47 minutes actually. But he delivered the goods: "We're in a battle for the very soul of America." If that Joe Biden had shown up to the debate, he'd still be the candidate.

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"A sad ending to a sad story"

     When I heard the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had gone and done it, I of course felt bad — for him, at least for the decent human being he had once been, long ago. And for his family. I'd gotten to know his brother, Chris, a little, when he was head of the Merchandise Mart, and found him a smart man, energetic, devoted to family and dedicated to social justice. I knew how proud he was of his father's legacy, and how fiercely he tried to protect it from those who'd tear down his memory. 

     But he was powerless to protect that reputation from the rolling besmirchment that is RFK Jr. As terrible as it must have been to see his brother descend in vaccine nuttiness and paranoid conspiracy theorizing, to see him now outdo himself by kissing the ring of Trump is, as Chris and his family wrote in a letter released Friday, "a sad ending to a sad story ... Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today are a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear." Speaking of their father in the present tense underscores just how real he is to them, still, 56 years after his death. 

         Robert Vickrey (Smithsonian)

     And it is a sad story. RFK Jr. lost his father when he was 14. He struggled with heroin addiction for decades, became a respected environmental lawyer, but then changed. I remember reading a story about RFK Jr. thundering against the windmills he once boosted when they were going to be put within sight of the family compound at Hyannisport. Maybe the good-for-you-but-not-for-me hypocrisy somehow tore his mind apart.

     I haven't talked to Chris since his ill-considered, poorly-executed run for the governorship in 2018. I'd pissed him off by writing a column saying, in essence, if he really cared about what he says he believes in, he'd drop out and support Dan Biss, because otherwise they'll both lose to J.B. Pritzker (which is indeed what happened). No Nostradamus, I saw Pritzker as a scion of wealth and nothing more, failing to sense what a magnificent governor he would turn out to be.
      Rather than consider my advice, Kennedy was angry and felt betrayed. Loyalty is very big among those who resent being judged by their words and actions. We never spoke again. That's okay. I get by, though I did enjoy our conversations, and what, despite our widely divergent stations in life, at some moments felt like actual friendship. (Even though, now that I think about it, at the time I quoted to him Aristotle's line about how between master and slave there is no friendship). When the news broke Friday, I rooted around for Chris's phone number, thinking to send him a supportive note during what has to be a difficult moment — save grudges for junior high. But I actually know several Chris Kennedys at this point, and didn't want to bother the wrong one. Probably just as well. I can't imagine him caring one way or the other. I'm surprised I do, but then, I'm slow to give up on people.

    As for RFK Jr., this really isn't the "sad ending" his siblings envision. If only it were. Alas, again, they are putting the bright spin on an erring family member. RFK Jr.'s story is not at its end, unfortunately, but now continues, to a fresh hell, the humiliation of being a Trump acolyte. Take a glance at a piece I wrote in 2016, "Chris Christie in rags" about the "stunned, miserable stare" on Christie's face when he found himself standing in Trump's rogue's gallery of supporters, just another supernumerary to the Great Chee-toh God, hoping to huff a contact high of ego and power. The former governor of New Jersey later tried to reinvent himself as a person with a functional conscience, and speak out against Trump. Too little, too late. Or as I sometimes will write a reader: a person who thinks that Donald Trump is a good idea for this country can't really expect anyone to care what he thinks about anything else. It's the same reason you don't ask homeless people for stock tips. I wonder as RFK slides deeper into the Trumpian netherworld whether it will ever occur to him that he had done this to himself. 

     I haven't written much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because, honestly, I find him too repellent to contemplate. But I keep up with someone in the Kennedy circle, who met RFK Jr. a few times, and asked her what she thinks of him. "A shocking monster," she replied, without hesitation. And that was before he endorsed the greatest menace to American democracy since the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.  

    Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about John F. Kennedy's style — his brother Ted generously granted me an interview and sent me a kind letter after it was published — and like many Americans, harbor still a small wellspring of respect for a family that gave so much to the country. But the source of that spring went dry years and years in the past, and the ground around it has become dry and cracked. Just a fading, tattered memory among a dwindling band of people, a ruined dream that even some who carry the revered name and cursed blood  stopped caring about a long time ago. 

Sky's the limit.

     It isn't much of a photo. First, the shot makes the street look brighter than it was, at about 8:30, as I came back from walking Kitty around the point. It was pretty dark. The phone commanded me to hold still, and I did, while it sucked up what light there was from the streetlamp.
     But if you look closely, you'll see him. A young man on roller skates who had rolled past me on First Ave, holding a flashlight. He was doing a few circles at the intersection with Center, waiting for a car to pass. 
    That flashlight caught my eye because, as far as I recall, I've never seen anybody skate by at night using a flashlight to guide his way and, I assume, alert cars that he's there. Actually, I rarely see skaters at all. Or skateboarders, for that matter. I assume they're at home scrolling through Tik Tok. Maybe watching videos of skaters. 
     The caution of that flashlight made him relatable to me. I'm a cautious guy. I see kids on their bikes, in groups of three and four, tearing down the street at night, unilluminated, in their dark clothes, and think, "C'mon guys. Don't do that. Stuff happens." I remember having a light on my bike, a big chrome thing, streamlined like a jet liner engine nacelle. It tended to go out of whack, if I recall, the batteries leaking over time.
     But the overwhelming idea left me, in this illuminated skater's wake, was that I had never seen that before. Never. Not a guy skating with a flashlight. And there is something comforting in seeing a creative person do something new. Something hopeful. It's like that day at breakfast, probably 20 years ago, when a waitress asked my younger son how he wanted his two eggs, and he said he wanted one scrambled, one sunny-side up. I looked at him, amazed. In a lifetime of ordering eggs I'd never considered that I could split the order, and left to my own devices would have never imagining it possible. This kid, I thought, is unbound by dull convention. He could do anything. 

What does 'Free Palestine' mean?

     "From the river to the sea," the speaker's voice echoed across Union Park. "Palestine will be free."
     The sun was high and blazing Monday, the air electric with drums and chants and squawking bullhorns. Thousands of people milled around, holding signs, backpacks, bottles of water.
     The only way to cover such a sprawling chaos is to pick a person and dive in. I settled on a trio holding a banner 45 feet long featuring the thought of the day: "FREE PALESTINE." I approached the young man on the left and asked: Free Palestine ... of what? To me, the end of that phrase is obvious: "... of Jews."
     "Absolutely not," he said. "To me, it means the freedom in Palestine to live, to have food and water. To not be in an open-air prison. To not be exterminated."
     He said they were with Students for Justice in Palestine.
     "My personal goal, the reason why I'm here, is to call for a cease-fire and to call for peace," continued the man, 19, who did not want to be identified. "The situation is pretty complicated, to be honest. It would take a long time, but I do think a single-state solution could work."
     A future of peaceful coexistence was not exactly being floated from the stage.
     "Stop all aid to the racist, colonial, terrorist state of Israel!" the speaker shouted. "We will continue to march, until we ... achieve total and complete liberation of Palestine. From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free."
     At a New Students for a Democratic Society booth — echos of the 1960s SDS — I spoke with a young woman whose face was wrapped in a green keffiyeh.
     "Everybody has the right to exist, to live," she said. "We believe everybody should be liberated, but most importantly, the Palestinian people should be liberated."
     And the Jews?

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