Some insults cannot be ignored

 

    Yesterday morning, EGD hit 10 million pageviews since it began on July 1, 2013. That seemed a big, round number, so I took at screenshot of the blog odometer and tweeted it, then went about my business. 
     A significant moment. Though it didn't strike me as hugely significant. Yes, quite a bit of clicks. But half are from China, meaning they're not actual readers, but some kind of robot spider doing ... God knows what. Trying to break in. Good luck fellows — that's like tunneling into a abandoned elementary school. Not sure what you're hoping to find.
     A more significant figure is 680 — that's the number of real live subscribers following the blog. Every morning I fire off a mass email to my mailing list, giving them each the day's post. A steady trickle of new people ask to have their names included on the list, and every so often someone asks to be taken off. I politely thank them for their previous interest, and never think to refuse — I don't want to force my words on anyone. If you aren't happy, then this isn't for you. I set you free.
     Until Saturday, that is, when I got this unprecedented email, from John F. Take a read:  

     Hello Neil…I’ve enjoyed your masterful writing, insights and turns of phrase. Brilliant, all of it. Except you’ve proven to be way too much Chicago-centric for me and, unrelated but relevant, your unnecessarily snide remarks about CNN’s ongoing political coverage (yes, based on the Harris/Walz thing) smack of too much Trumpism for me, and ANY defense of Trumpism, even the slightest, is way too much for me. Under the cloak of guilt by association, he and his cult-like followers are too much evil, in ALL ways, for me. Please remove my email from your list. Thank you.

    As much as I liked his beginning — "masterful!" —  and am guilty-as-charged for Chicago-centric, I have to admit I was gobsmacked by the rest. First, I didn't find fault with CNN's ongoing coverage — I don't watch it — just this one particular program. 

     Second, I've been accused of being a lot of things, but offering "too much Trumpism" is not one of them. If you read Saturday's post, it wasn't critical of Kamala Harris or Tim Walz in any way. Just a fairly moderate expression of disappointment with CNN for being trivial in its Thursday interview with the candidates. They asked nothing about abortion, or the opioid crisis, or a dozen other hot button issues.  Merely served up Trump's insane "she's not Black" calumny to get a reaction (which Politico promptly and nutsily cast as Harris skirting the issue) and asked about a dramatic photo, about Gus Walz crying. Tangential stuff. Frankly, I was worried I was just disgorging the general liberal opinion of the interview that I had absorbed on X. But I had to write something...
    I considered John's accusation. My initial thought was, "You work for CNN, don't you?" Then I thought harder and wrote back:

     Typically, I add people when requested, and also delete them when requested. I don't want to be anywhere somebody doesn't want me to be. That said, your suggestion that my post today is somehow a defense of Trumpism cannot be simply accepted unchallenged.
     I've been ridiculing Trump since the 1980s, when I wrote for Spy magazine. Yes, as a debater, I know that sometimes you yield a point in order to win a larger one.    But your accusation is sui generis — no one has ever said anything like that before — and rather than let you depart in error, I would humbly request that you stick around and perhaps look more closely. I'll start by saying that extremism is a Trump crime, and so taking a manichean view of him does his cause more benefit than harm. As Nietzsche said, when battling monsters, one must take care not to become a monster. I will not let you go and become a monster. Here, read this piece I wrote about Trump six years ago. That is not a man defending him in any way. Please reconsider.

     Nothing back from him yet, and I'm starting to think I never will hear anything. That's people for you. Honestly, I wondered if this isn't a Trumpie play-acting, trying to jam a barb through the armor — really, how could any sentient being come to that conclusion? But no Trumpie would make up an email like that.

    Not a biggie. For a blog as popular as mine — 10 million hits and counting! — I feel like I'm still delivering personal attention to my readers. I hope that maybe I've inspired John F. to step away from his way unfair assessment.  My entreaty could work. "A kind word turneth away wrath." If he persists in wanting to exit the fold, of course I'll grant his wish, cut him loose and let him drift off and be forgotten. You really can't argue with folks anymore — they're too set in their ways. But that doesn't mean a person shouldn't sometimes try, just for the sake of general principles.

Postscript:

     To file under "Hope, There Still is." I received this Sunday morning:

     From one not-a-monster to another, I can’t help but admire the fact that you turned my anti-Trump screed into EGD column fodder. Good on you, but note my pointed use of “any” and “in the slightest” referring to the vile, indeed monstrous scourge of Trumpism, those words meaning too much for ME. I stand behind that belief.
     Know that I didn’t mean to ruffle the feathers of your defenders, now that I know you (and they) agree with us that the Orange Scourge truly is an existential threat to our very way of life. Project 2025 is no kidding matter.
     As for dredging up the ghosts of manichean (new to me, so I looked it up and actually learned something) and Nietzsche (didn’t he play for the Packers?) now THAT’s name-calling!
     Know too that I meant no harm, just a bit of friendly rhetorical jousting, which you’re VERY good at, every goddamn day.
     Carry on, Kind Sir, and yes, keep me on your favored list of 600 or so staunchest admirers.
     Cheers,
     John F,

Made you look!

 

    Yes, we tuned into CNN Thursday night to see how Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did in their first interview after the Democratic National Convention. Because the interview had been ballyhooed into an Event of Significance. My wife and I wanted to see how they did. 
     What we got was CNN triviality interspersed with bald attempts to catch the pair in a contradiction. What did Harris think when Trump said she wasn't Black? Didn't Walz once say he had carried a weapon during wartime? What about that cool photo the New York Times took of one of Harris's nieces watching her speak? What about Gus Walz crying?
     All deflected away more or less deftly — more by Harris, the former prosecutor, less by Walz, the former football coach.  The next morning WBBM prominently aired the quote where Harris squelched the "changed race" gambit with "next question." Emotion over substance. So what was all that blustering about "policy" about? Isn't not being a traitor policy aplenty? We can hash out their position on the Law of the Sea later.

     The bottom line that keeps drifting out of sight for the major media is this: they're running against Donald Trump. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor. Convicted felon. Who led an insurrection against the country and will do so again, given the opportunity. Who cares what Harris said about fracking in 2020? Who could possibly care? CNN apparently. It's like the old joke where the flight attendant pushes the cart down the aisle and says, "For dinner, we have chicken, or shit mixed with broken glass" and the passenger replies, "How is the chicken prepared?" 

Don't hold your breath waiting for that new Illinois flag

The Illinois state flag, below. Just about anything would be an improvement.

     Social media gets a bad name. But there are wonders to be found. Brooklyn graphic artist Max Kolomatsky started noticing crude handmade signs in his neighborhood, then redesigned them and photographed the vast improvements next to their inferior inspirations, posting the shots on TikTok. Seeing the result is like taking a lungful of sweet air after being underwater too long.
     The joy of good design does not get the press it deserves. Thus Illinois, an island of cool blue sanity in a churning red sea of backward-straining discord, should be lauded for holding a contest to find a new state flag. Kudos to Gov. JB Pritzker, who last year created the Illinois Flag Commission, and to Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who followed through Wednesday, announcing a contest to find a replacement.
     To quote Phil Connors, the TV weatherman trapped in an eternal Feb. 2 in "Groundhog Day," "Anything different is good."
     OK, not strictly true — Elon Musk-owned X is different though not an improvement. Fear of making things worse pushes people to prefer errors of omission over errors of commission. We become frozen, nostalgic and change-averse.
     The penny was a great idea when the United States began minting the Fugio cent in 1787. Now, pennies are a waste and an embarrassment. Like you, I never use the copper slugs, but, should the United States finally scrap them, I'd leap up and start doing one of those ecstatic Greek dances. Because, if we can finally do that, maybe we can, oh, make the leap into universal health care. Small steps.
     Not that Illinois is exactly a pioneer, flagwise. Utah, Georgia and Mississippi are already updating their flags, and Minnesota adopted its new flag in May. Their old state banner looked like someone had set a white dinner plate on a blue carpet and then thrown up on it. An indecipherable mess, replaced by a clean, simple, beautiful standard with two shades of blue and a single star. Illinois should do so well.
     As this might be read by someone who saw the story in the Sun-Times Thursday and is already busy with their crayons, a word of advice: Put the work in.

     Chicago has a particularly beautiful municipal flag, adopted in 1917 after a contest, albeit one conducted the Chicago way. The winner was a writer named Wallace Rice, who, in classic we-don't-want-nobody-nobody-sent fashion, suggested the competition, wrote the rules, judged the entries and declared himself the winner. Sometimes the best candidate for a job really is the boss' cousin.

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Have you been to New York City?

 

Manhattan skyline from Jersey City

     Maybe we'll enjoy the post factual world. Think about it. Trump gets re-elected — a coin toss right now. Democracy goes down the toilet, sure. But we all then can live in fantasy worlds of our own construction. We don't have to trouble ourselves with what is true and what is not.
     Because facts can be difficult things. My column Wednesday was about New York City introducing rolling garbage cans, 40 years after Chicago did. It begins with this sentence, "Most Chicagoans have never been to New York City." Of course I considered whether that is actually true. I couldn't find anything as simple as a survey — nobody asking Chicagoans, "Have you ever visited New York?" So I thought about it. My analysis went like this: 11 percent of Americans never leave the state of their birth — there are surveys on that. Fifteen percent of Chicagoans are children, who usually haven't traveled many places, never mind a city 700 miles away. Seventeen percent of Chicagoans live below the federal poverty line — not much tourism there, and New York is a particularly expensive destination.

Most Americans never see her.

     The tourism industry offers some clues. A 2012 Hotwire survey found 62 percent of Americans have never been to the Statue of Liberty — true, you can visit New York and not go, but it's high up on the must-do list. A 2018 VOA News study found only 30 percent of 2,000 Americans had been to the Empire State Building. Yes, New York reports 60 million tourists a year, which would mean the entire population of the United States cycles through every six years or so. But many are from overseas, and many are repeat visitors — I've gone at least dozen times, if not two.
   The search can lead you down all sorts of rabbit holes — are Chicagoans more or less likely to travel than the average American?  I decided to go with "most." Most Americans don't have a passport either (not that you need one to visit New York, but possessing a passport is connected with a tendency to take significant trips — like visiting New York. A 2018 Victorinox survey said 13 percent of Americans don't own luggage — hard to go to NYC without it). 
    I wasn't the only person to wonder about the opening sentence's veracity. An editor changed it to "Many Chicagoans probably have not been to New York City." Which irked me, first because of that "probably" — no, I thought, "Many Chicagoans have abso-fucking-lutely not been to New York City." I knew why the editor did it — the truth being hard to find, smart to dial back the sentence. I have a writerly edict about that — "It's better to be vague than wrong."
     But I have another imperative: "If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna." A line of Napoleon's. Meaning, don't be half assed.  If you want to say something, say it. Don't pussyfoot around. I talked to the editor and we changed it back to "most" and jettisoned that "probably." 
     The next morning — aka Wednesday — I had qualms. Doubt crept in, and and I  looked harder. Still nothing definitive, and Google now vomits up reams of Reddit pages of people speculating and chattering. I looked for a New York Tourism office in Chicago and came up empty. I fired a query to the New York City Tourism Office — the office is closed until Sept. 2. Maybe that's part of the problem. As social media and automatic systems grow, the availability of humans who can answer questions shrinks. I phoned, finally got someone. They're checking, but I bet they run into the same problems I did.
    Though I'm still working on the question. That's the beauty of this whole daily business. One may persist over time. I'm starting to fear this is a research failure on my part — the truth is out there, as they say, I'm just not finding it.  Maybe the hive can be of assistance. Is a correction in order? I'm still thinking Chicago consists of 51 percent homebodies, at least New York wise. That if 1.3 million Chicagoans have been to New York, 1.4 million haven't. Though I could be wrong.

Katz's Deli

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