Guest voice: Shadow people might startle but losing local journalism is scarier

Photo by Karie Angell Luc

      I've known Karie Angell Luc for many years, and always admire her work ethic, her photographs and her positive disposition. So I was shocked, a few weeks ago, when she told me she had abandoned journalism because she felt threatened while doing her job. That is not the town I thought we live in, and I am not willing to let it become like that. I told her she could not give up, she is not alone, should not stop doing what she loves, and that her fellow journalists have her back. I offered to write a column about her situation, but she preferred to do that herself and run it here, and I am glad that I can share it with you. If anyone in Northbrook feels Karie is someone who can be pushed around, they are sorely mistaken.

     With the holidays here, I wish to be kind. As 2024 winds down, I am reevaluating who I am.
     I am thankful for my opportunities and hope to uplift others.
     I joke I have two personalities. One who smiles to be patient with patients. As a proud qualified immunizer, I can give a good shot in the arm. I care about patients and their privacy.
     Then there is this other me who needed a shot in the arm. I believe the truth is the truth and that’s that. This other side of me wears this silly but sensible vest (like a mom purse). I carry no pen and newsgather on the latest iPhone.
     Sports announcers do color commentary and play by play. I do pray by pray. I make things up as I go on faith.
     So, as this one-mom-bander or solopreneur who loves local journalism, I must say the truth.
     I feel unsafe.
     And guess where I feel the most unsafe?
     Here in my own leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.
     Now that really ruffles my second good sport personality. At home, I have Etsy handmade plushies to snuggle with on my couch while I squeeze in precious moments watching Svengoolie or the Hallmark Channel (when allowed by football fans) while laptop editing photos after assignments. 

Karie Angell Luc

     My cups of comfort are my family and by golly, am I proud of them. But when this truth teller finds dirt in backyard soil, and despises easy-sweet-spoonfed-soundbites sugar coated as official responses from happy dance public relations folks, journomom emerges.
     For a self-employed reinventor lacking time for chores, I’ve seen household dust bunnies and danger. I was at George Floyd protests with no COVID-19 vaccine. I had no one at my back but a frontal PPE mask.
     My husband stopped me from driving to Kenosha, Wisconsin to cover that protest where I might have met that vigilante rifle toting dude.
     I did interview Bobby Crimo in person in 2020 at a downtown Northbrook corner protest. Like most cell phone recorded interviews, folks get erased as did Crimo, who backpedaled on providing a name. Then this same kid smiled at me in a photo I made published again on July 5, 2022. That Highland Park parade shooting suspect has that telltale facial tattoo.
     Crimo could have had a gun that day. The parent in me wishes I could rewind time to offer mom sense. Crimo was dressed as Where’s Waldo. I cringe seeing that Halloween costume. People were killed and injured.
     Aftershock. I still picked something close to that intersection, covering Northbrook Village Hall where I could walk to, if needed, having one family car. I was welcomed heartily. But evolution caused coverage to become controversial with Freedom of Information requests (FOIA), asks like that.
     Sure, I can take it when during a public meeting, I’m called out in a packed room. But the second time I’m called out, I stand up and make photos as visual journalists do.
     Maybe this ain’t worth it with the hours invested. But who’s gonna regularly show up in person, take photos and snapshots, text snippets, fact check not easy legalese and replay audio on village videos to ensure people are quoted correctly? We have these journalism labs and accelerators saving local news. Do I exist?
     I have news for them, good local journalism is fading like newspaper printed ink. Add in tax escrows for freelance risk. Don’t even bring up artificial intelligence.
     What happened last summer was the final straw. I received social media backlash for a story I broke about a proposed tax. People who won’t invest in local journalism past a paywall accused me of publishing misleading facts. I almost didn’t cover a veterans event amid the backfire. I feared their special occasion would get ruined if angry folks working doors away confronted me. I then photographed Northbrook veterans outside for a later assignment and was heckled by a business owner in front of them.
     I will not let veterans down. Do the work. Do what you know.
     My mind decided to fire Northbrook. Heck, Village Hall threatened to fire me in a past life. I skipped covering one community event to avoid naysayers. Then came a request to cover a Northbrook Park District/village event because no one else could do it. It should be safe, right?
     When I covered a Northbrook protest after the Oct. 7, 2023 story regarding Israel, Northbrook Police Chief Christopher Kennedy kept me safe. Kennedy has always been gracious to me but is now abruptly gone.
     So I covered this village/park district op, minding my own business as I mined, and a sanctioned vendor who is 6 foot 2 overshadowed me as I made photos in front of the stage. Imagine a yelling vendor invading your physical space. No filed complaint but Northbrook Police spoke to this person.
     Northbrook Park District Executive Director Chris Leiner said via email on Nov. 21, “When you reported an alleged physical incident…I promptly involved the Northbrook Police.
     “The business owner provided a different account of the events,” and the district, “has not made any modifications to its relationship” with them, Leiner said.
     So I guess it’s a wildcard then to keep using a vendor who may purposefully vacate their post at public bookings.
     Being freelance is lonely. I was thrilled to run into Neil Steinberg. With Neil’s shot in the arm, I got back up on the horse after I fell. I returned to Village Hall. Neil stood up for me by showing up to sit down next to me at a Nov. 12 meeting. I had been in that boardroom once since Aug. 27 to vote early.
     To amazing editors, thank you. To local journalists, please try your best with limited resources. If it gets too tiresome but more crosses the public safety line amid unsustainable economics to pay leafy and lofty hometown bills, find a reasonable gig or reinvent.
     It’s a shame local entities cannot be held accountable by consistent watchdog journalism. It’s shameful when people think they’re too big to apologize when they have the chance. I was just doing my job in a public setting where what was said and published was spoken openly in a public space.
     In the 1980s, my former news director, the late great Glen Moberg, said we did great news on a shoestring.
     Shoes with shoestrings. I can’t trip in my fuzzy black slippers, sandals or winter boots, using taxed second-use Northbrook plastic bags tucked between dry cozy socks worn on slushy assignments.
     I am 62. My comfort zone can be no danger zone. With those grounded low camera angles that make it harder to get back up, I won’t drag anyone down with my shadow. But I will stand up for what’s right.

Is this the Thanksgiving to 'Consider the Turkey'?

     Americans don't put much stock in philosophy — or so I assume. Whenever somebody else makes a sweeping statement like that, I always scowl, thinking: "Really? How do you know? Met 'em all, have you?"
     My guess is that most Americans don't consider philosophy — I mean, just look at them. Nor weigh thorny ethical issues. If you asked your average fellow citizen to name a living philosopher, they couldn't. Alex Jones doesn't count.

     This isn't to lord myself above anybody — the only living philosopher I could name unprompted is Peter Singer, and that is only because of the kerfuffle he caused decades ago by posing a thought experiment: that if you have a severely deformed baby, it's morally justifiable to kill it, provided you replace it with another, less afflicted child. Many people, among them disability rights advocates and parents of children with special needs, didn't like that.

     To me, Singer's argument is easily refuted by shifting the metaphor, slightly, to this: If you have a neighbor you don't like, it's OK to kill him, provided someone else moves next door. While that might work fine from your perspective, the logic falls apart when you consider the viewpoint of the neighbor being killed. Ditto for that first baby.

     Singer is, unsurprisingly, an animal rights advocate. The author of the 1975 book, "Animal Liberation," he's been at the forefront of trying to get society to be less cruel to beasts.

      This is a long way of saying that when I noticed Singer has a new book out, "Consider the Turkey," I thought it would be a Thanksgiving treat to read the brief, bright yellow volume. A treat for you, that is.

      One standard I use to judge nonfiction is: Did I learn anything interesting? I certainly did here. President John F. Kennedy was the first to pardon a turkey, in an offhand quip, though the practice didn't get going until George H.W. Bush.

     Turkey presidential lore is quickly dispatched with, and we get down to the specific abuses turkeys suffer in gigantic farms.

     That goes against my personal experience — I once visited the Ho-Ka Turkey Farm in DeKalb County, the largest such operation in Illinois, and while I didn't quite want to join the gobblers pecking at seed in the yard, the place did not strike me as a horror that would change anybody's dietary habits.

          Singer shares, in great detail, how commercial turkeys are conceived. He carefully — I almost said "lovingly" — goes over the artificial insemination process which, I admit, I had never previously imagined. Without going into detail, as you might be eating your breakfast, let's just say there are people whose job it is to extract semen from turkeys by masturbating them 10 hours a day. Suddenly being a newspaper columnist doesn't seem such a burden.

     With the lack of balance endemic to animal rights sorts, Singer goes on to point out that having sex with an animal is a crime, and treats the insemination as rape, which I imagine humans with experience in that area might take exception to.

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The Fort

     In Wednesday's column about  woodworking, I might have given the impression that I've never touched tools before. That isn't true. This post was ready to go over the summer, then never ran. I'm not sure why.
     Maybe I wanted to keep The Fort private. I haven't mentioned it here before, to my recollection. A structure built in the backyard for the boys when they were small. Maybe it was somehow special, to me — the boys won't care one way or the other — and I didn't want to turn it into material. Not everything is for public consumption. You're allowed to keep some things for yourself. But that ship has sailed, hasn't it? Maybe I just didn't want to offer up to public scrutiny an amateur structure that I designed and built. That sounds right.

     This is from my unpublished travelogue, "The Quest for Pie," written about a five-week trip across the country I took with the boys in 2009 when they were 12 and 13. In this section, I am wondering whether to really go through with the trip, simply because I said that we would.

     Selfishness is a father’s friend, or can be. If you view everything you do for your kids as a sacrifice, every effort as putting yourself out over something you aren’t interested in and getting nothing in return for your trouble, then you’re going to end up not doing much with them. Where luck comes in is when a dad does what he wants to do, and it ends up being good for his children as well. 

     This trip thing, I realized, might work to my advantage. I had been beavering away at the newspaper business for years, for decades, scrambled to the top of this small hill at the very moment it was being washed away. Now I was king of the damp, dwindling mound. Why not take a break to travel, to reflect? What was I afraid of? 

     And I had a previous experience, a template for rashly committing myself to an endeavor that turned out to be both a ton of effort and worth it. We moved to the suburbs from the city nearly a decade earlier, when Ross was about to enter kindergarten. That wasn’t a coincidence. The Chicago public schools try hard but fall short — way short. Ross was a bright, mischievous, talkative little boy, and just the thought of sending him to a substandard city school felt like contemplating child abuse. The public schools weren’t good enough and we couldn’t afford private school. Hence the suburbs, our only option. Ross was as nostalgic and change-averse as any 5-year-old, and didn’t want to go. Hoping to soften the transition, I promised him that, after the big move, he would have a play fort in our ample backyard. What kid doesn’t want a play fort?

     A couple years later, we’re living in our old shambling ruin of a home, an aluminum-sided former farmhouse built in 1905, on its half-acre lot in Northbrook with The Forest running down one edge.

     “So…” I said, probing. “What do you want to do this summer?” 

     “Oh I don’t know…” Ross said, laying the trap. “I wouldn’t mind playing in my fort.” 

     He looked hard at me. Oh right the fort, I thought. I did promise you that, didn’t I? I should pause here to touch upon the idea of unfulfilled paternal promises. When I was growing up, my father often told me how, when he was a boy, his father Sam, a sign painter in the Bronx, tricked him into working every Saturday morning at his sign shop with the promise of a real Lionel train set, the Holy Grail toy for boys in the 1940s, which my grandfather claimed he had already acquired, and was on a certain high shelf in the sign shop, waiting to be earned. He pointed out the box to my father on his first day at work. 

     My father cleaned brushes and painted what he could that Saturday and on many Saturdays to come. Then one day, curious, he got on a chair to take a peek at this train set he would be getting, and it turned out the box supposedly filled with his reward was merely the transformer from a neon sign. There was no train set. There had never been a train set. 

     Something about that story lodged under my skin. Maybe it was the high shelf, or the bald lie of my grandfather’s. The haunting image of a train set that wasn’t there, compounded by the variety of half-plans that my father, despite his own disappointments, nevertheless had dangled in front of me. We would climb Mount Rainier together. The family would move to a series of cities, from London to Baltimore. He would buy a car for me when I turned 16. It never happened. Nothing ever seemed to happen. 

     Okay, that’s harsh. Good things did happen. They did. When I was a teenager, my father spent two summers working in Boulder, Colorado and took the family along. We hiked the Arapahoe Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park. When business took him to Europe, we all went to Geneva for a month, then London and Paris for a week apiece. One summer, while I was away at camp, my father built in our backyard something we called “The Shed,” but was actually an attractive, well-built, two-story A-frame structure — cherry-stained, matching our home, with double doors that swung out to store the lawnmower and his tools on a tongue-in-groove floor below solid enough to drive a truck on, with a wooden ladder that led up through a trap door to a space above, a secret clubhouse just for me with a skylight window that opened. It was fantastic, and that I would initially overlook it and give the impression I was raised in a closet should tell you something important about myself. 

     Memories of that structure were foremost in mind while I was dismissing, out–of-hand, the play fort kits that suburbanites buy at garden centers and put outside their custom-built, million-dollar homes. The kind with the little strip of green fabric as a roof and the flimsy yellow slide. Those pre-fab forts struck me as an astounding lapse, a mystifying cheapness, similar to how some people stick stackable white plastic chairs out on the luxurious wrought iron balconies of their four-story townhouses. My father designed and built The Shed; I would design and build The Fort. For who wants to be a lesser man than his father? 

      I bought a big pad of blue-square graph paper, sharpened pencils and sat planning with a ruler at the dining room table. The Fort had to sleep four — two sons and two friends. It had to have a ladder and a slide and a cargo net. It must be made of cedar: there would be no need for stain or paint.

     Eventually the drawings were done — careful schematics, precise scale plans, thanks to a mechanical drawing class taken in 7th grade. A front view; a side view, a 3-D view. The Fort wasn’t in a tree, but stood on four five-foot-tall, 6 x 6 beams standing atop four concrete footings. To support the structure, the footings — I calculated — should be three feet deep. How much concrete would you need for four cylindrical footings, each 10 inches in diameter and a yard deep? Nearly a thousand pounds, dry. 

     A week passed. Two. I contemplated the drawings. Really, very nicely done, very skillful drawings. The fort had a porch and a flagpole. It looked like a lot of fun to play on, and a world of work to build. I’d never done anything like it. An incredible task, to actually construct this thing. What was I thinking, taking on this burden? Just because I’d promised my son I would? The most complex structure I had built up to that point was a compost bin behind the garage, a rectangular box lined with chicken wire. Building it took a day. 

     But if I balked, what would I do? Show the drawings to the boys someday, tell them: this was the fort I was going to build you, but I chickened out? That sounds familiar. My Lionel train set on the high shelf. 

     No. Impossible. I would build the Pyramids if doing so kept me from being a disappointment to my boys. I went to Home Depot, took one of those low rolling orange platform carts and piled it with nearly 1,000 pounds of concrete — a dozen 80-pound bags. The platform was very heavy, slow to get moving — you had to really lean into it — and tough to push. And at one point, between the concrete section at the far wall and the registers up front, I stopped and just stood there, thinking, “This is insane.” I hesitated for what seemed like a long time, in the middle of the vast warehouse of a Home Depot, frozen before a pallet of concrete, hands around the scuffed metal bar, my own life, stretching back in my head, and the life I hoped for my boys stretching forward. Hope for a life where they might be better off, better tended, better loved, just in general better than their father. I weighed the thought of returning to the concrete section, pictured sliding the bags back into their places. Looked at the thought, almost as if it were a small object nestled in my hand. Then I made a decision, firm and irrevocable, tightened my grip on the bar, bent forward and pushed that concrete until it started to roll toward the checkout counter. 

     The Fort took three summers to build, from the time I staked out the holes and began to dig, to when I nailed in the last cedar shingle in place and signed a hidden message to the boys high up on a beam facing the eaves. The three of us slept in it that night, the night I completed it, a jumble of pillows and sleeping bags, a rare warm November night. They never slept in it again. But they play in it sometimes, during Super Soaker battles and snowball fights. It looks swell, gentling aging in the seasons, the cedar slowly going to gray, like the guy who built it, and while I wish I had started a few summers sooner, I never regretted all the time and effort and money it took to build. I think some of the happiest moments of my life were standing out back in the summer sun, with the yellow DeWalt chop saw set up on the deck, a boombox blasting music, cutting the lumber for that structure, kneeling on the half-completed flooring to screw planks into place, standing up with a pencil behind my ear and a leather belt heavy with tools slung low on my hips. The big hexagonal-head stainless steel carriage bolts used for the ladder — stainless so they wouldn’t rust and streak the wood — were a joy to hold in the flat of my hand and contemplate; so well machined, they made me proud to be a human being. 

     The Fort was in mind when I considered the trip. I could ignore it, for a while, and did. But I could not abandon it. A promise is a promise.

Woodwork would work better, had I started long ago

 

     To be good at anything, you first have to be willing to be bad.
     No one who ever tried anything new, who ever walked out onto a dance floor or an athletic field, would dispute that. Proficiency is hard won, and you have to step on a lot of toes and muff a lot of easy catches to get there. Want to bake well? First you have to bake poorly.
     I know that. But knowing a truth, intellectually, and actually experiencing it are very different, just as writing "hitting your thumb with a hammer hurts" is not anywhere close to extending your digit and bringing down a claw hammer on it, hard.
     The truth of just how badly being really bad at something hurts dawned on me while standing at my workbench at the Chicago School of Woodworking, 5680 N. Northwest Highway, a few weeks ago, contemplating my first attempt to make a dovetail joint.
     How did I get here?
     Paternal love makes a person do many strange and expensive things. It caused me to quit a city I love and move to an anodyne suburb, enduring a quarter-century of reader ridicule and lousy Thai food. It prompted me to spend thousands of dollars on tennis lessons, college tuition, and more recently, wedding cakes. I thought I was pretty much done with that period of life, when my younger son asked if I wanted to take a woodworking class together.
     "Sure!" I said, despite smelling a trap. Nine weeks of 101 Introduction to Woodworking cost $495; I assumed I'd be tasked with making the arrangements and then could later dun him for his share, or more likely, not. My parents inspired me to always be open-handed and generous with my children, though ... choosing my words carefully ... not by direct example.
     Then the amazing part happened. He signed up for — and paid — for the class. I did the same.
     We began in mid-October — with seven others, heavy on the legal and computer professions. "I spend all my days looking at screens," said a cybersecurity expert, when we went around explaining why we were there.
     We identified types of wood and joints, and our teacher said something prophetic.
     "You're learning to cut things by hand," she said. "A lot of times it isn't going to look great."
     Got that right. We began working on picture frames. We busied ourselves at our tasks. My son and I didn't talk much. He has been woodworking as a hobby for a few years — he made a lovely coffee table for his apartment — and were I of a conspiratorial bent, I'd suspect that after a lifetime of me forcing him to learn skills that I was already proficient at — reading and swimming and such — he was now returning the favor, as payback.

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Flashback 1992: A man of letters

Photo for the Sun-Times by Robert A. Davis

     In Monday's column, I mentioned finding the subject of this article in the Yellow Pages under "Currency Engraving." But I've never shared the story. Let's remedy that. 

     Yochanan Nathan's world might at first seem cramped between the nib of a turkey feather pen and a square centimeter of parchment, but to him it encompasses mankind and beyond, to the entire universe, and God Himself.
     "It's a very mystical experience, writing the letters," said Nathan, Chicago's only full-time sofer, or Hebrew scribe. "The letters are mystical in their nature. When God spoke, he created the Word; the Torah is the blueprint of the world, the force of the world."
     Jewish law requires that a Torah - the first five books of the Bible in Hebrew - be written by hand. The scrolls of scripture within mezuzahs, the narrow boxes found on the doorposts in homes of observant Jews, and within tefilin, the prayer boxes worn by Orthodox Jews, must also be hand-lettered.
     A good part of Nathan's business involves laboriously checking over other scribes' scrolls to make sure they meet the strictest standards.
     "There are little problems, a word left out, a letter may not be perfect," he says, displaying an Israeli tefilin scroll that looks like a flawless strip of carefully-rendered Hebrew letters.
     "This raysh may be too square," he says, indicating a letter that looks like an "L" flipped upside down. "I'll ask the question to someone more learned than I, whether it's too square or not."
     If the letter is not sufficiently rounded, Nathan says, the scroll, which took a scribe 10 hours to copy, will have to be discarded.
     While mezuzah and tefilin scrolls are his bread and butter, Nathan also sometimes gets commissions for the massive, eight-month job of copying a Torah scroll (less than a dozen are produced each year in this country).
     "Not too many Torah orders come in," he sighs. "Sometimes it takes some active solicitation."
     Written on parchment, with quills cut from turkey feathers and ink made from the smoke of burning olive oil, a Torah is created by a process unchanged for millennia.
     As required by law, Nathan utters each word, quietly, before he copies it. Nathan, who can copy letters for 2 1/2 hours without a break, says that keeping focused on the job is important.
     "You try to concentrate on what you are doing, so you don't make mistakes," he says. "But a person's a human being." For relaxation, Nathan says he likes to "get out a little bit and walk around."
      Nathan recently finished up a new scroll for the Chicago branch of the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Jews.
     In contrast to his work on the bulk of the scroll, which he copied in solitude in his small, debris-strewn office on California Avenue, near Devon, Nathan penned the last 10 lines of the scroll in public splendor under the soaring, gold-leaf ceilings and rocco sculptures of the Gold Room at the Congress Hotel, with a brass band playing and some 400 Orthodox Jews praying and looking on in a special ceremony.
     Afterward, Nathan took the scroll — now no longer the work of his hands, but the handiwork of God — and led the procession that danced down LaSalle Street, celebrating the addition of one new Torah in the world.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 27, 1992

Trans community is about much more than bathrooms and girls track debates

Six young people from the GenderCool Project gather in 2018 to promote trans awareness.

     Newspaper reporters quickly learn, if they're any good, to find their own stories. The only way to keep your job from devolving into an endless treadmill of zoning board meetings is to figure out what interests you and get busy. Otherwise, you spend your career being told what to do, and who wants that?
     Thus in my younger days I'd scan phone books, looking for ... I wasn't sure what. Something unusual. Once I called a number listed in the Yellow Pages under "Currency engraving," only to find a sofer,or Hebrew scribe. I'd phoned hoping to see a Brazilian bank note being etched and ended up watching a man finish penning a Torah scroll with a turkey feather.
     Once in 1992, I was browsing the classified ads in the back of the Reader and noticed a shop on Elston Avenue selling women's clothing in large sizes to men. "Now there's something you just don't see in the paper every day," I thought, and went over. Another key reporting skill: Go and find out.
     I quickly realized this wasn't a story about dresses; it was a story about people. There was a community here, holding secret dances — I went to one — and maintaining safe houses. Because a guy couldn't keep his female wardrobe in the closet at home, where his wife might find it. Often, she didn't know.
     The story "PRETTY, WITTY — AND MALE CROSS-DRESSERS KEEP CULTURE CLOSE TO VEST" ran over several pages in the paper. I'm proud of it, because there was no snickering. I used the pronouns my subjects preferred.
     Not that I understood it all. The subculture that, in the 1990s, were men dressing as women, seemed to vanish into men who were women and vice versa. I didn't exactly get it, completely, but that was OK, because it isn't about me — another superpower of being a reporter. It wasn't my job to pass judgment.
     When gays and lesbians got the right to marry, I wondered whether the trans community could slip through the door they'd kicked open. They did, for a while; then reaction set in.
     Big time, with the past election, as Republicans ginned up harms to focus on, making fear of trans a central plank. "Kamala Harris is for they/them," one heavily-hyped commercial went. "Donald Trump is for you." If only public health care was given the same attention.
     That not only won but framed the issue in such a way that many don't even realize how skewed it is. When we talk about trans, we talk about bathroom policy and fairness in sports, hormones and surgeries. Controversies, not people. Republicans who fall quaking to the floor if you suggest parents shouldn't bat the diphtheria vaccine away from their kids' arms suddenly are adamant they know best what care is right for youngsters they've never met.

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First you need a mountain....

Avalanche Peak, Yellowstone National Park, 2009

     So ... almost two weeks since the presidential election, and I still haven't assembled my reasons for Kamala Harris's defeat. It seems every pundit has done that long ago. Lack of focus on the economy? Her laugh? Too much support for trans folks? Too little outreach to pugnacious young men?

    I suppose my short answer is: it doesn't matter. Every disaster is a confluence of circumstances. The example I always use is a plane flying into a mountain. How does that happen? Well, first, you need a mountain. Shrouded in fog. The pilot, distracted by a balky warning light. The radar on the fritz. The co-pilot in the bathroom with stomach flu. 
    You can debate all those factors. "First you need a mountain"?! There are mountains everywhere. Planes don't typically fly into them ... it's the pilot's responsibility to see to that. Though the co-pilot should. As for the fog...
     It becomes kinda pointless, by the time you're using tweezers to pick passengers off the slope of some alp. However it happened, it happened. Learning lessons is a self-soothing fraud — ponder enough and it won't happen next time. Sure, sure, but right now we have to deal with it. 
     Or not. As the truly shocking appointment of yes-men and toadies to cabinet posts explodes in the press, a daily dowsing bucket of cold reality, I just can't dive too deeply into why Matt Gaetz shouldn't be the attorney general. I keep circling back to the quip which, alas, Louis Armstrong did not actually say when asked to explain jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know." A New York Times pundit already compared Trump nominating Gaetz to Caligula trying to appoint his horse as a consul. Not much rhetorical room beyond that.

     And if we I recall, we weighed and evaluated, thought and pondered aplenty before the most recent disaster. Maybe pondering is the problem — the other side seems to do just fine with hardly any thought at all.
     Honestly, I take a certain comfort in just how wrong these appointments are. I mean, appointing a Russian asset to head our intelligence services? That's World Class Fuckery. The thing about Trump is, there was nothing subtle about him. I almost said "nothing hidden," though I assume there are subcellers below the apparent, as hideous as that is to think about. The country bought the ticket; now they get to take the ride, dragging the rest of us along.
    But it isn't as if the full disaster wasn't there in 3-D living color for all to see. Or not see. Turns out, half the country just didn't give a damn. Well, if that worked for them before the election, maybe it'll work for us after. A guy can try, can't he?