Flashback 2009: 'Losing Mum and Pup' is frank and funny

The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

    A long, busy weekend in New York City. Much fun, running around — lunch with a writer pal at the Century Association, a visit to the Treasures room at the New York Public Library, lunch at abcV, dinner at the Thai Diner, cheesecake at Caffe Reggio. Strolling Central Park AND the West Village AND the South Street Seaport and the reason we went here in the first place, a lovely wedding of a friend's son in Brooklyn.

     Monday morning we had a few hours free and headed to the Met, popping in on the Temple of Dendur. A small 2,000 shrine to the sons of a Nubian leader shouldn't be affected by a contemporary American humor writer. But I can never see the place and not think about Christopher Buckley. I don't believe I've ever shared that column here — let's fix that.

      Our parents leave us with a puzzle. If we're lucky, it's a simple, move-the-stack-of-discs-from-one-peg-to-another kind of puzzle we can solve with a little effort and then feel darn good about ourselves. Clever children.
     If we're not lucky, it's one of those jangly metal messes of bent nails and twisted loops, something we struggle over for the rest of our lives, flinging it aside in frustration only to pick it up again and again, determined to figure the thing out, somehow.
     And when our parents die, all hope of help is gone — no chance of anyone taking the jumble from our hands and saying, "Oh here, you do it like this . . . " A quandary millions of Baby Boomers are experiencing, and Christopher Buckley has done us a service by setting aside his usual job — crafting comic novels — to chronicle a grim period in 2007 and 2008 when his parents, conservative ringmaster William F. Buckley Jr. and New York socialite Patricia Taylor Buckley, both died.
     The book was published last week and its title — Losing Mum and Pup —hints at what Buckley has accomplished. I winced when I first heard it, chatting with him last September about his recent novel, Supreme Courtship. Rich people, writing frankly about their lives of privilege will, unless they are very careful, end up sounding like Thurston Howell III complaining about his daiquiri. The words "mum and pup" give off a tennis-anyone? tang of the snobbery that smoothed every polished river pebble syllable spoken by William F. Buckley. My affection for him being what it is — nonexistent — I worried that his son, one of the few contemporary novelists I really like, was about to veer off the path.
     My worry was misplaced. Christopher Buckley is so frank, so funny, that all class envy is defused. One forgives him his Swiss boarding school and yacht parties as he struggles to send off his difficult parents, who weren't always there when he needed them, but certainly are here now. After his mother's death, he keeps his ailing, channel-surfing father company. He writes:
     "I was supposed to leave mid-July on a long-planned trip to California. One night as we watched the first of three — or was it four? — movies, he said apprehensively, 'When are you leaving for California?'
     " 'I'm not, Pup, I'm going to stay here with you.'
     "He began to cry. I went over and patted him on the back. He recovered his composure and said somewhat matter-of-factly, 'Well, I'd do the same for you.' "
     "I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn't. A year or two ago, I might have said it out loud, initiating one of our antler clashes. But watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point."
     Either that moment sends you bolting for the bookstore, or you've been bequeathed the puzzle page from Highlights and don't know it. Not being a fan of his father's, I wasn't offended, as some conservatives were, by Buckley's depictions of humiliating medical problems and agonizing hospital scenes. Certain details do stagger — his mother's memorial service is held at the Temple of Dendur, the Nubian temple rebuilt inside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bill for the event's audio/visual salute comes to $20,000, a detail Buckley delivers as farce:
     "The audiovisual subcontractor, a competent and agreeable man named Tony, presented his estimate. I whistled silently at the $7,000 price at the bottom of the e-mail, but I thought, Well, we're only going to do this once. A month later, my learning curve took a sharp turn upward when Tony presented his final bill and I realized that I hadn't read quite all the way to the bottom of his e-mail attachment. The $7,000 was for equipment. The labor cost came to an additional $13,000 on top of that. As I type this a year later, I'm able to chuckle — finally — at my ineptitude at e-mail attachment reading. I can hear Mum's ghost muttering, Twenty thousand dollars? For a few television screens and a microphone? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?"
     He hasn't. Buckley retains his wits and his wit — in several spots I laughed out loud, and found myself, for the first time, interested in William F. Buckley. I've never read anything by him; he was never exactly the hot author in my squishy liberal Democratic circle. But after I finished Losing Mum and Pup I felt compelled to trot off to the Northbrook Library and check out Right Reason.
     Our parents help us, then we help them. We begin as their dream, the poet said, then they become ours. Christopher Buckley has sketched his parents at their lowest, last moments and used the crisis to frame a portrait of their lives that is rich and alluring, heart-breaking and hysterical. It is filled with interesting tidbits — the Washington Monument is 555 feet high; Henry Kissinger cries easily — and practical advice: Don't smoke. If you're a veteran, make sure your family knows the location of your DD-214 certificate, proving your honorable service, if you want military honors at your funeral.
     And lastly, love pardons many sins. Buckley could have taken these same facts and written a version of Mommy Dearest if he didn't so obviously adore his parents, warts and all, a reminder that the love we give to our children is returned to us, if we are lucky, when we need it most.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 18, 2009

'Everybody Needs an Editor.' Always has been true, always will be.

     Communication is hard. It must be, because we're so bad at it. Many of us, anyway. Sometimes. Often. Not that we tend to be aware of it. We thunder away online, oblivious, pouring forth an endless stream of tweets and texts, manifestos and slideshow presentations that border on criminal dullness and inaccuracy.
     To reach an audience consistently, delivering an intended message, you need to work at it, constantly. I've been writing a newspaper column since I was 15, and though I've managed to achieve a certain facility, the process still requires concentration and effort. I still manage to fail spectacularly now and then, if I'm not careful and sometimes even when I am. It's hard to develop an edge and easy to lose one. Frequent sharpening is required to avoid dullness.

   To this end, a welcome whetstone for communicators is being published this Tuesday: "Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Concise Writing" (Simon Element $24.99) written by a pair of Chicago communications professionals, Melissa Harris and Jenn Bane, and edited by former Sun-Times colleague Mark Jacob. It's a boon for those who don't have a clutch of eagle-eyed newspaper editors picking over their prose.
     For those weaned on Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," reading "Everybody Needs an Editor" will be an eye-opener (I almost called it "ENAE," but took to heart the advice on page 144: "Don't overuse acronyms"). It outlines how to write email subject lines and speeches, how to fire someone and how to resign. Filled with useful tips, both specific and general, the book warns against overuse of quotation marks, of shouting via ALL CAPS (they do have a habit, either good or bad I can't decide, of illustrating what not to do by doing it), and encourage vividness. I was surprised to see several tricks I thought were genius divinations of my own — such as to use photo captions to tuck in additional information you couldn't fit into the body of your story.
     "Everybody Needs an Editor" also offers a primer on the role of artificial intelligence.
"AI can improve your writing," they write (at least I assume they wrote it, as opposed to merely prompting a machine to do it, then buffing the result). "Think of it as a tool, like spell-check: It should be used in conjunction with human judgment and expertise."
     Soon writers will polish AI-generated copy more than they compose original work.
     "Increasingly, writers will not be putting the first draft down; 100% of their writing experience will largely be editing," said Harris in a Zoom interview. "We truly believe that editing [AI] ... making it better, is going to be the future."

To continue reading, click here.

The opposite of "great."

Head of Medusa, by Damien Hirst

    That the Russians have been pouring money into the pockets of popular Trump influencers comes as no surprise. It's not the smoking gun in Donald Trump's hand, yet. But if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck... The man has no beliefs other than larceny, and his almost canine devotion to Vladimir Putin ... well, what explains it? You almost hope Trump's in the Russian's pocket; you'd hate to think he's doing this for free, panting at Putin's feet year after year just because he so admires dictators. Somehow that would be even worse. Though that could very well be the case. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
    Not true. It is astounding to see how easily the Republican Party follows along, swinging 180 degrees around to his way of thinking.  From huzzahing for Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy to cheering as the Russians savage Ukraine or, at the least, claiming the invasion of a European democracy and slaughter of its civilians is none of America's business. Heck, Russian tanks could roll down Pennsylvania Avenue and the Republican leadership of today would turn out in their slinkiest dresses, ready to service them. 
     These latest revelations will mean nothing at all, to his supporters. To those of us committed to saving American democracy, it is another reminder, as if one more is necessary, of  how high  the stakes are, and what we are fighting for.

    

Flashback 2006: Fighting the Middle East war in a Chicago cab

July 2014 Pro-Palestinian march

     Some extra reaction to my Wednesday column, thanks to Fox News, which did that thing they do where they break my column apart and post it, exaggerating the most controversial bits. I think they do it to sic their readers on me — ring the Pavlovian bell, get the pack salivating. I won't reprint any of it. Let's just say: not the best goodwill ambassadors for the State of Israel. 

     In that column I mention that I've written about the Palestinian-Israel situation occasionally over the years — not much, because it never changes. This column from ... 18 years ago is evidence of that. It's from when the column filled a page, and I've kept in the subheadings. Fox News is free to do with it what they will. 

OPENING SHOT

     "What do you think about the war?"
     The day wasn't going well already. I had an interview in Evanston but absent-mindedly got on the Kimball instead of the Linden train. Now I was in Albany Park. So either catch a train back or grab a cab. I was supposed to be there in five minutes. So a cab, and a cabbie glaring at me in the rearview mirror. I didn't need to read his license to know where he was from.
     "The war . . . in Lebanon?" I said, buying time. "It's a tragedy, of course. The Palestinians, they need a place to live. . ."
     That was enough. "The Palestinians have a place to live,'' he fumed, "it is the Zionists who must find somewhere else. . ."
     I gazed out the window. He went on and on.
     "One soldier!" he spat. "One soldier is killed and for that hundreds of children must die! Children are being blown up."
     ". . .and not by us. . ." I imagined him adding. The hypocrisy moved me to argue.
     "Hezbollah fires missiles from residential neighborhoods," I said. "It's as if you used a baby as a shield to rob a bank, then blamed the police for shooting the child."
     This of course made things worse. The cabbie quickly moved on to Hitler, and he once thought Hitler was wrong but now he sees how right he was. . .
     "Pull over," I said. We were miles from where I was going.
     "Aha!" the cabbie said. "What I'm saying makes you mad."
     "No," I said, wearily. "I've heard it before. I'm just not going to pay to listen to it."
     So I got out, on Broadway, the cabbie lowering his rear window so he could hurl a few parting tidbits.
     My question is this: How long until it breaks out here? The crisis in the Middle East, slugged out by proxy in the U.S. Because you know it will. Somewhere. Some day.

'RACISTS GO HOME!'

     It could have happened Monday; a hot day, 95 in the shade. Several thousand people — not the 5,000 organizers claimed, but a good turnout — filled Federal Plaza, waving blue and white flags around the orange Calder sculpture, supporting Israel.
     Across Dearborn, a counter demonstration alongside the Dirksen Federal Building. Only about three dozen people, but one very loud loudspeaker.
     "Israel is a terrorist state! Stop the killing, stop the hate!" rhymed a young lady wearing jeans and a checkered scarf. "Israel is a racist state! Stop the killing, stop the hate!"
     She led the chant through "Hatikva," the Israeli national anthem and over the "Star Spangled Banner."
     The pro-Israel rally offered up a variety of political leaders — Rep. Mark Kirk, gubernatorial candidate Judy Baar Topinka and Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who spoke forcefully and well.
     "All of us who support democracy and the rule of law must come together and condemn the terrorist acts of Hezbollah and Hamas,'' Madigan said. "We must let Israeli citizens know that people across the world who love democracy support them."
     Meanwhile, across the street, the chant was "Racists go home!"
     The police lined Dearborn to keep the two groups apart. I worked my way across the street and approached the girl leading the chants and stood there, waiting for her to pause. She noticed me and, to my surprise, tried to hand me the microphone, thinking that I wanted to speak next.
     Had I presence of mind, I would have seized my chance to lead an anti-Israel rally, taken the microphone and began shouting, "A secure Israel and a free Palestine, neighbors in peace!" or some such sentiment completely unacceptable to these people. Who knows what might have happened? "HOSTILITIES CEASE IN LEBANON AS WORDS OF SANITY SPREAD AROUND GLOBE. "He touched us," said Fazza al Fazool. "We were so wrong. . ."
     Instead, I raised my notepad and pointed sheepishly at it. She handed off the microphone to somebody else and we stepped aside to talk. She was Lara Elborno, 19, a student at the University of Iowa but from Chicago, a native of Kuwait but an American citizen.
     "Ten times as many Lebanese and Palestinians have been killed than have Israelis," she said. "Israel is aimlessly targeting civilian populations without any accountability, and the U.S. unfailingly supports Israel."
     I went back to the Israeli side, marveling how nimbly Elborno slipped into the language of PC propriety: Israel is a racist state, of course, because of its religious nature, as opposed to say, the whole frickin' Arab world, where Elborno would risk being stoned as a whore for going out in public without her chador, never mind attending college, never mind leading a rally.
     I'm a big believer in words, but sometimes they fall short and lose meaning. Arguments with cabbies, slogans at rallies — Israel exists because its brute force is greater than the brute force of its hostile neighbors, nations that keep their oppressed populations diverted from their own misery by inciting them over a convenient bogeyman.
     The counter demonstration lasted longer than the rally and I stuck around, convinced that if I waited long enough, a candor greater than concern for children would emerge. I wasn't disappointed.
     "From the river to the sea!" Elborno yelled into the microphone. "Palestine will be free!"
     That's more like it. "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." The river she is referring to would be the Jordan -- Israel's eastern border. The sea, the Mediterranean, its Western border.
     And the "free" is not religious freedom, nor freedom of speech, nor of the press. Israel has all those.
     She meant "free" in the sense of "gluten-free," as in, devoid of something, and the something she wants the land devoid of is so obvious there is no need to spell it out: "Palestine will be free of Jews."
     That is why you never hear Palestinian activists speaking of two nations living in harmony. Because that is not their goal. The goal is all the Jews gone and Israel back in Muslim hands. That is why we have this bloodletting year in and year out, and until that changes — or Israel is destroyed — the problem will never go away.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 21, 2006

CTA Blue Line killings a mirror held to society

An unhoused woman on the CTA Blue Line's Forest Park platform in March, 2021.

  

     The Night Ministry is the last strand in Chicago's social safety net, helping those who have nowhere else to turn. If, after reading this, you'd like to donate to The Night Ministry to support their life-saving work, you can do so by clicking here.

     Four Chicagoans were killed on the Blue Line Monday. Execution style.
     Five days have passed, and already the crime is being crowded out by more recent atrocities; another four people — two students, two teachers — gunned down Wednesday at a high school in Georgia. A 14-year-old has been charged.
     But I want to think about that first quartet, on the "L" train. Something should be said. Officials certainly didn't waste time before stepping up and making pronouncements.
     "We believe it's isolated," said Forest Park Deputy Police Chief Chris Chin — the bodies were discovered at the Forest Park station, where the Blue Line ends after its 26.9-mile journey from O'Hare International Airport. "We believe it's random."
     Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx called the murders "inexplicable."
     I disagree with both Chin and Foxx. I believe the crime is not isolated, random, or inexplicable. Just the opposite. It is part of a widespread, systemic and easily understood pattern.
     What is the most common form of political discourse? Identifying groups of people who are different, then conjuring up and exaggerating harms they may commit to justify oppressing them. Because they are unworthy, practically inhuman.
     "Our country is being poisoned," said Donald Trump, a note he has struck many times. Immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the nation. They are "vermin." There's a list. Immigrants. LGBTQ+. And, at the very bottom, unhoused people. An eyesore and a menace.
     I don't want to make the common media mistake of leaping into the head of a murderer. Police have arrested a suspect, who's been charged with four counts of murder. Maybe they're mentally ill and thought they were shooting into four bags of laundry. We may never know.

To continue reading, click here.

Nip slip

  
     We stayed at a modest motel in Traverse City on our way back from our son's wedding in July. The place was next to a suburban neighborhood and, for want of anything better to do, we took a pre-dinner stroll through the vicinity, ambling toward a nearby park of no particular distinction.
     A few blocks in, I spied ... well, what would you make the picture above? I pondered the phrase, "There seems to be an enormous breast peeking out from the side of that garage." I didn't say that. What I said was, "Let's go this way." We ambled over.
     In the seconds it took for the thing to parallax from behind the house, I tried to imagine what use the perky mammary gland would have among these neat homes. Some carnival game perhaps. An huge 1970s paper mache artwork by a young Michigan version of Richard Lindner, preserved with a mixture of shame and pride by his conflicted parents. 

   Soon what came into view was something almost as incredible. A homemade hot dog cart. I immediately wondered what this said about my frame of reference, that I immediately thought "breast" and not "hot dog." I was also tempted to knock on the door and inquire about it. I am, after all, a graduate of Vienna Beef's Hot Dog U. Practically an official representative of Chicago hot dogs. I have a right to know. So ... for use at Boy Scout jamborees perhaps?  

     The impulse passed as quickly as it formed. This was Trump country — flags welcoming his next presidency flapped in the breeze over pristine homes and well-tended flower gardens. I figured someone could just as well shoot me for approaching their house, and they'd probably never spend a day in jail because of Michigan's stand-your-ground law. "Why yes, officer, I honestly and reasonably believed that this frightening Jewish person was about to rape my wife and murder me in order to take possession of my highly valuable custom hot dog wagon..."

     Mystery solved, well enough, we continued on our way.

Not a problem that can be killed away.

Pro-Palestinian protest, Chicago 2014

     This is the high octane version of today's column, the way it read when turned into the newspaper Tuesday morning. If you'd rather read the print version that ran in the Sun-Times, you can find that here. 

     During the recent Democratic National Convention I attended a reception for the Israeli ambassador and found myself face to face with the husband of a member of the Netanyahu administration. The situation called for small talk. But what to say?
     "If I had a choice between getting rid of Hamas and getting rid of Netanyahu, I'd choose Netanyahu," I began, in my artless fashion. "There will always be another terror group to take Hamas's place. But I don't think Israel can ever have a worse leader than Netanyahu."
     He spun on his heel and strode away. So much for dialogue. I'd be more embarrassed at my rudeness, but obviously am not alone in this opinion, judging from the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who filled the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem after this weekend after six hostages were found executed in the tunnels underneath Gaza.
     I don't write about the Israeli-Palestinian mess much because nothing ever changes. I could pluck a column from 2004 or 2014 and post it and it would be just as current and just as futile as what I'll be writing today. To apply a logical concept — it's time someone did — both sides are making what is called a "category error." A category error is when you misinterpret the essential nature of what you're dealing with. Such as if you come home, find a tiger prowling your living room and welcome it as a stray feline and hope it will get along with your other cats. What you categorize as "potential pet" should in fact be seen as an "immediate lethal danger."
     The Palestinians traditionally treat Israel as a military problem. An approach which failed spectacularly in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, and that was when they had Arab armies behind them. They've been going it alone for the past 50 years, achieving greater levels of failure, leading to suffering, death and a dwindling area of land they actually possess.
     Israel, on the other hand, views the Palestinians as a long term management issue, instead of a pressing moral call to immediate action. That is, rather than solve the situation that fate has left on their doorstep, they blame the Palestinians' admittedly corrupt and — Oct. 7 notwithstanding — bumbling leadership, shrug, make do, and let another decade slide by. Rather the way Chicago handles its pension problem.
     Both sides have a policy of focusing exclusively on their own humanity, decrying their own tragedy while ignoring the tragedy they inflict, calling on the compassion of a public that, while often capable of extravagant displays of sympathy for the Palestinians, at the end of the day can't fix the problem and doesn't really try.
     Admittedly, logic doesn't do much in a highly charged emotional issue like this, with children dying every day and kidnapped babies being hidden in tunnels. It's like bringing a slide rule to a knife fight. I'm a little embarrassed to bring it up, except it would be nice to get past the current disaster so we could proceed to the next one.
     Speaking of category errors, I'd like to suggest that the "from the river to the sea" chant hurts, not Jews so much, who see its genocidal implications and feel more uneasy than usual, but Palestinians, hindering their ability to improve their situation by inflating their expectations. Israel has one of the strongest militaries in the world. Trying to fight their way back to an imagined past, they lose any hope of an actual future. Or to put it another way: Oct. 7 was not a convincing demonstration of their desire to live in peace.
     But if you bring up Oct. 7, Palestinian supporters instantly counter that, given the colonial crime that is Israel, in their estimation, they have a "right" to resist.
     Sure they do. And I have a right to jam my hand into a grinder. Doesn't make it a good idea. Was Oct. 7 a good idea? How's that working out? I'd suggest not so well, but I'm biased. Those urging a cease fire now should ask themselves what a cease fire achieves if the war starts up the next day after the next barrage of missiles.
     The first anniversary of the war is coming up. I won't write about it til then. Meanwhile, protests will disrupt college campuses, frighten passing Jews, and accomplish little. The war continues, the blood flows, and the sides seem further apart than ever. I wish they'd finally realize they can't kill their way or blame their way to a solution. They're tried that before and are trying it now. It doesn't seem to be working. The solution is where it has always been, in their own hands.