"Driven by history"

     Computers of course are binary. Everything we see on a screen, from a full length Hollywood movie to a text message to the period at the end of this sentence, is broken down into a series of 0s and 1s. Those are the choices. On or off. Yes or no. There is no 0.5. There is no "maybe."
     All too often people can be binary too, thanks to tens of thousands of years of Darwinian survival conditioning. Fight or flight? Friend or foe? Nuance is a fairly modern concept, and still gets lost on a lot of folks. They like "God commands this!" They aren't comfortable with, "Here are your options. Choose four." 
     Take history. Whole swaths of the country seem to believe our nation is either "great," that is, a perfect place that has never done wrong, or sunk in "carnage" brought by outsiders. Nuance is lost on them. Anything that falls below the heroic in American history is a personal insult.  Racism is a myth. Oppression a lie. The worst thing that ever happened in their American history is George Washington chopping down a cherry tree with his little hatchet, and even then, he redeems his wickedness with his honest confession. If their children learn about actual bad things that really happened in the past, it makes them feel bad, about themselves. In theory. Or maybe even in actuality. Maybe because they sympathize with the evildoers. They hate to see it suggested that the Confederacy was gung-ho about slavery. They hate to see it suggested that the South lost the Civil War and I suppose, given the politics of the moment, they might have a point there. 
     Real history isn't about absolutes. It is never black or white, but shades of meaning, depths of complexity. Not one cause but a dozen. Which is one reason I'm such a fan of Chicago's TikTok historian, Shermann "Dilla" Thomas. He goes places. He can be giving you a tour of Bronzeville and suddenly start talking about the Marx Brothers, who lived there over a century ago. His Chicago is never the simple child's drawing of cliches that outsiders like to offer, but a rich, varied tapestry of people and places, achievement and heartbreak. 

      Speaking of the latter, we last visited with him two weeks ago, when I broke the story that ComEd had lured him out of his safe union berth then showed him the gate. Some people would sulk after that, but Dilla has been busy, creating new material.
     On Friday he dropped Episode 01 of his "You Don't Know Chi" YouTube program. Off the bat, he's into nuance. "Now we're either in Chatham or Grand Crossing," he begins, walking down a summery street. "But we can figure that out a little bit later."

      It had over 4,000 views its first day, and is well worth 13 minutes of your time. Ostensibly about the Chicago bungalow,  it ranges over a variety of subjects, including the warmth of neighborhoods like Chatham and South Shore, and a rib joint to add to your must-visit list.  

     As a historian, Dilla's an essentially upbeat guy — as am I — who nevertheless has no reluctance to plunge into the messy and the unpleasant.  But Dilla manages the neat feat of being positive while giving full recognition to history's troublesome places.It's fast-paced and well-produced. Professional, but not too slick. And he always ranges across the spectrum — Mahalia Jackson lived at 82nd and Indiana and, oh yeah, her house was bombed.

     There's no need for me to act as a filter; you should just go watch.

     He's joined by rapper Rhymefest — collaborator with Kanye West, co-writer with John Legend and Common of "Glory" from the movie "Selma" — who supplied what, to me, is the most valuable thought of the episode. I'll provide the answer below. 
    First you should watch the video. Go to YouTube and plug in "You Don't Know Chi!" 
    Finished? Really? C'mon, go back and give it a try. It's fun and easy and you'll learn stuff. I sure did.

    Now you're done? Good.

    It was Rhymefest remark about the scratches and damage on his Grammy, how it being manhandled by the kids he's shown it to is a good thing. 

     "If it didn't have any scars on it, that means I'm not using it for anything," he said.

     That's good sense, and a thought I've never heard expressed before. As someone who can get worked up over that kind of thing — a scratch on a thermos, a ding on a car — I'm going to try to take Rhymefest's attitude to heart. There's always more to learn, from history and each other. I'm looking forward to Episode 02.

Image atop blog is a quilt by Bisa Butler.

Shermann "Dilla" Thomas, earlier this year, in an anechoic chamber at Shure Microphone. 

The Shed endures

 

     For the past 20 years or so, we've hosted Thanksgiving. Big boisterous events packed with food and family. But this year we had an offer we couldn't refuse — spend the holiday with our younger son's new in-laws in Cooperstown, New York. That's quite a drive, and we stopped the first night in my hometown of Berea, Ohio.
     I might not have gone out of my way to eyeball the old house. I saw it, what, 10 years ago? But our host suggested the nostalgia tour, and we swept over. The circle where we played kickball seemed so very small, and I stood at home plate a moment, waiting for a boy now older than I am to roll a ball that wasn't coming. 

      I remembered that when I recently wrote about The Fort I built the boys, a reader expressed interest in seeing The Shed that my father constructed — by himself, during the three weeks I was at summer camp, start to finish, which is about two years quicker than I took to build mine.
     So I gingerly stepped into the side yard and snapped the photo above, hurrying away before the homeowner might notice and jump to shoot me. "This is Ohio after all," I said. 
     In my day there was no decoration — and a tall rectangular window in front that has been painted over. Or boarded over — maybe the glass was shot out too many times.
     The new owner is obviously a golfer, judging by the bric a brac scattered everywhere. And why not? It's his house, and it's a free country — so far, though judging by the number of Trump flags I saw snapping in the buckeye breeze, that could change. My hometown friend urged me to knock on the door and present myself as the original occupant — my father would take his lunch here and watch construction proceed. I was reluctant but, joined by my wife so as not to present "some scary solitary man," I rang, waited a moment then, relieved, hurried away. 

"To remember these things..."

I bought the Virgil quote button from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers in Wauconda. 

      Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are far greater works, but I still prefer Virgil's Aeneid. The first two, being Greek, are spare and powerful. The third, being Roman, brawny and ostentatious.  To compare them is like comparing a pair of those flat, featureless neolithic figurines to a feathered Mardi Gras mask. One is timeless, one fun. 
    Maybe I prefer the Roman ruin because I can pluck more useful sentiments from Virgil. Thoughts that you can carry in your pocket like coins. Tu ne cede malis. "Yield not to evil." The line continues, "... but go forth all the more boldly to face it." That's a plan, right? Hard to argue "Give in to evil..." Oh wait. Maybe not so hard. Not in those words, perhaps.
     Or consider the button above.  Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit, the "j" pronounced like a "y," "youvabit." Odysseus and his men are stranded on a bleak, rocky shore, and the leader hides his own worries, trying to buck his men up. 
     "Call up your courage again," he says, in the Robert Fagles translation. "Dismiss your grief and fear." Then he delivers the line on the button: "A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this." 
     I first read that when I was still in elementary school, in a 1947 story called "To Remember These Things" by Milton White. It ran originally in Seventeen magazine, but I found it in a Scholastic paperback, "Best Short Shorts." God, how I loved getting those Scholastic books — you would order them in school, then they would arrive, and you got to keep them. I still have my yellowed copy of "Best Short Shorts."
     Though oddly, in the story, a nostalgic slice of the end of high school, Luke Connors' Latin teacher translates it as "And in the future it will be pleasant to remember these things," banishing that all important "perhaps." That isn't right. "Forsan" means "perhaps."
     More importantly: will it be pleasant to remember these things? To recall this particular moment, atop the hill before the steep plunge into whatever we've got coming? Could it possibly be pleasant? For people such as ourselves, I mean. I suppose that depends on what happens next. Maybe these will be the Good Old Days. Jesus, I hope not. Then again, as I always say, hope is not a success strategy.

     

Flashback 2007: Killing the dream — History will be a harsh judge of how U.S. has treated immigrants

My boundless professional respect and personal admiration for Sen. Dick Durbin has nothing — nothing! — to do with the fact that he sometimes shows up at my book signings, such as above at Atlas Stationers in 2016, where he poses with co-owner Therese Schmidt. 

   Happy birthday, Senator Dick Durbin, who turned 80 last week. Even though I am on vacation, I would be remiss not to wish him the best. Sen. Durbin is old school, in that he is an unshowy, no-nonsense public servant, harkening back to an era when people wanted the government to do stuff. He was raised under the wing of that platinum bar of probity, Paul Simon, and in a way can be considered Simon's heir on earth, not a compliment I bestow lightly. 

    I went looking for mentions of Durbin in my column, and found this, from 17 years ago. It's  just too goddamn current not to share. Of course Durbin sponsored the DREAM acts, which would have let young Mexican immigrants who came here as children become citizens. Of course we wouldn't take that path. Of course we would take the road leading to our former and future president, who will start building his detention camps on Day One, with trains packed with those we should have allowed to become citizens but for the color of their skin rolling on Day Two. I thought things were bad then, and had no idea the subcellars of shame below that one, waiting for us to dig our way down into them. 

     Even the Correction at the end is current, as the paper is pressing to gather the staff back at the office beginning early next year. 

     This was from when the column filled a page, and I've left in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Haters always have their reasons, always always always. Good, solid, reasonable reasons, at least in their own minds. If you tapped any Southern slave owner on the shoulder, he could unspool a litany of exactly why blacks should remain forever slaves — because they're inferior, because they can't learn, because God Almighty intends them to be slaves — reasons that nauseate us today but made perfect sense to them, then.
     Give our modern world credit. The "illegal" canard brandished by those who want a permanent underclass of Hispanic serfs — shorn of rights except the right to work hard at crap jobs until deported — is a stroke of genius. You can be the most rule-averse, speeding, tax-cheating, shoplifting American miscreant and suddenly you're Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes if it means keepin' down them Mexicans.
     Forget that we invite them in with our open borders. Forget that some have been here for decades. Forget that our mechanism for citizenship is broken. Their papers are not in order, so they must be made to suffer and their children made to suffer, as evidenced by the Senate's craven rejection of Dick Durbin's DREAM Act, the one shred of immigration reform that should have been completely unopposed, a modest plan to let teens brought here as children qualify for college assistance or join the army and harbor hopes of becoming citizens of the country where they have spent most of their lives.
     These are days of shame. Someday, in the country we are assuredly becoming, we're going to look back and ask why we responded this way, who we thought we were fooling with our fig leaf of illegality and how we could have believed it hid our failure to act as decent Americans and compassionate human beings.

FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE . . .

     No sooner have the 17 children hung up their little coats and backpacks, than Bev Sugar — what an apt name for a kindergarten teacher — begins leading them through the basics of the letter "H."
     "See if you can put a line between upper and lower case 'H,' " she says.
     It's 8:55 a.m. A beep and then a voice from a loudspeaker.
     "Good morning! Good morning, one and all!" enthuses Jill Weininger, principal of Greenbriar Elementary School in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.
     There is a bit of business about birthdays and lunch and recess.
     "And now would everybody please take a moment to think about your day."
     Five seconds pass.
     "Thank you very much. Now let's stand for the Pledge of Allegiance."
     This moment of silence was created by our bowl-haircut legislators in Springfield as their disingenuous way to return prayer to schools — they won't admit that, of course, but there is no other explanation.
     Some see it as the edge of the wedge for religion in school. If so, it is a very thin wedge. Frankly, I wasn't perturbed about it before my visit — not everything is a slippery slope — and afterward it seems particularly benign, the final wheezing gasp of state-backed faith.
     Or as Weininger says: "It's not the hill to die on."
     Sure, it's unnecessary, another straw on the sagging backs of our schools. But it isn't close to the biggest state-mandated waste of time. Frankly, I'd rather my boys started school doing the rosary if it meant we could get rid of a few standardized tests.
     I ask a few of Ms. Sugar's students what they think about during their five seconds of introspection.
     "The same thing every day," says Ben. "Computer lab!"
     "The good times," says C.J.
     After the law was passed, District 28 leaders discussed how to implement it. The pre-moment language was kept carefully neutral.
     "It's against the law to direct their thinking," says Weininger.
     "Yeah, we wouldn't want a school doing that," I reply.
     Setting the time span was a challenge.
     "They don't define 'moment' in the law, thankfully," says Weininger.
     They considered 15 seconds, but that proved too long.
     "You have to find something that works for kids 5 through 14,'' she explains.
     They tried 10 seconds.
     "That's still really long."
     Thus the five-second moment.
     Two weeks in, complaints are minimal.
     "We've heard from a parent," says Weininger, who has the dream answer for concerned parents.
     "I'm bound by law,'' she says.

CORRECTION

     Though I have the luxury of working at home, if I like, I don't very often. I think it's important to be downtown, so I can go to the East Bank Club, gossip with my co-workers, eat at fancy restaurants and, oh yeah, find stories.
     The bad part of being at the office is that my books are at home, and I have an alarming tendency to pull stuff out of the air, intending to check it later. That's how "Arms and the man I sing" got ascribed to Homer's Iliad Wednesday when, of course, it is in Virgil's retread of the Iliad, the Aeneid.
     The truly sad part is that, thinking to check, I did step into the blizzard of cyberspace, and even though I saw it ascribed to Virgil, I somehow ignored the evidence of my own eyes, like that corpsman who noticed the waves of Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor early Dec. 7 but shrugged them off as bombers scheduled to show up later.
      "Arma virumque cano," one of the most famous lines in all literature. It's like placing "To be or not to be" in Paradise Lost.
     The upside is the bracing number of readers who leapt to point out the error — and nicely too. Well, nicely except for Hugh Iglarsh, one of those guys harboring a grudge for years who sees a mistake as a gap in the armor he can drive his spear into and work it back and forth. Wound delivered, Hugh. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus — "Sometimes even good Homer dozes," i.e. we all screw up. That's from Horace's Ars Poetica.
     I think.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     From Ross Steinberg, who turned 12 on Thursday: Five out of four people don't know their fractions.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 26, 2007

"A quartz contentment"

Nov. 6, 2024

 

    I'm on vacation, dredging up recent material written but never posted (amazing to think I write even MORE than what appears here. Almost makes a guy wish someone would sneak up behind me with a sock full of nickels and just coldcock me. Make the man STOP...)
    Anyway, I wrote this the morning after Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States, then decided it was simultaneously too melodramatic and too coy.  Although I noticed a reader posting these exact lines, so I wasn't alone in thinking of them. Hard to believe we're still in the same month, November. Not three weeks into this nightmare. "Yesterday, or Centuries before?" indeed.

     The sky was dull Wednesday morning as I walked the dog. Nobody was out even though it was after 7 a.m. It felt vaguely like a holiday, like New Year's Day. Part something special, part something off.  I thought, perhaps damningly, of Emily Dickinson's poem that begins:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -
And stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

     Not that there was any "great pain" Tuesday night. Trump leapt out of the blocks and never looked back. Took all seven so-called "swing" states. Won the popular vote by 5 million.  "Great pain" is a wild exaggeration, but that "formal feeling" nails it exactly. The street seemed like the set of a play, the sky, a painted canvas backdrop. 

     Dickinson continues:

The Feet, mechanical, go round -
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

     Was there any kind of contentment, quartz or otherwise? I certainly wasn't shaking my fist at the sky. Not "contentment" though, surely. More like a lack of desperation, almost a calm acceptance. I'm all outraged out. We believe in democracy, fine, this is democracy. This is what the people want, apparently. Let them have it then. What's the H.L. Mencken quote? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
     It's not what I want, but then I am not the common people, in that I have a good job, a solid education, lots of money in the bank, and gold-plated health insurance. This is not what I want, but so what? It's not about me. 

This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go —

     Again, "Hour of Lead" overdoing it, but "the letting go" right on the money. The 2024 race is too much to carry around your heart, though abandoning it is easier said than done.  I'm not ready to let go of the dream that is America. But I'm prepared to spend four years watching it trampled by malicious morons. I hope I am prepared. I am trying to be prepared. Though really, how could you be prepared? That is the Trump essence. A continual shock, a vertigo some Americans nestle into like mire and others can never get comfortable occupying, never get used to. Never close.
      A neighbor came the other direction on her morning constitutional.
     "Good morning," she said, grimly.
     "I can't do a good morning," I replied, not smiling. "So I'll say 'hello.'"

 

Quick snap

     I'm on vacation this week, running posts that somehow never made it online. This was written in August.

      One of the many things I've always loved about the Sun-Times is how ad hoc it is. Not a lot of time for meetings and programs — at least at my level, where we're too busy putting out a newspaper. Reporters never know when they'll be pressed into action, or for what. I remember one Saturday, when I still lived in Oak Park, years ago, the paper called. There was some kind of police incident on Harlem Avenue, a block from where I lived.

    I went downstairs and hurried over. The two moments I remember is arriving to see the police running in my direction, then turning and seeing the person I took for the bad guy, running away, with me between them. I pressing myself into a doorway to get out of the way. It seems incredible, now that I set it down — how was the situation not resolved before I got there? But that's what memory serves up. Maybe it was a dream that migrated into reality, in my mind.
     The other moments was when the article came out — it must have been part of some larger story, because it ended up played prominently. "Only at the Sun-Times," I smiled to myself, "can you be lounging in your underwear in bed at home at 4 p.m. on your day off and still make the front page the next day." I do believe it happened, nearly 40 years ago.
    This all came back Wednesday. I was at the Techny Prairie Rec Center, pressing dumbbells in the weight room, when the phone rang — my editor. Was I near an Illinois flag? he said. Could I get a photo of it? Photographers downtown had been dispatched to a police station and a post office and various sundry, no state flag.

     "Lemmee look," I said. I walked outside. Yup, there one was, right under the American flag. But there was no wind. The flag hung limply on its pole. "Wait a second," I said. "We need a breeze."  The breeze came up, I got my shot, sent in it, and went back to my workout. On Thursday there is was on page five. 

Barack Obama is a skilled orator

"Chicago Taking a Beating" by Roger Brown (Union League Club) 

     This week I'm burning through vacation days that I'd otherwise lose, and in order to make it a true vacation thought I'd post a few essays written then never published. The following is from mid-October, a million years ago. I imagine I held it back because I came up with something better, and it seemed too much inside baseball, not to mention touching the third rail of race — in a way I find acceptable. Of course you never know whether that electrical rail is live and will kill you or not until you put your foot on it and find out.

     I wouldn't call Barack Obama articulate. Or well-spoken. Even though he is obviously both  — that's why the struggling Kamala Harris campaign trotted him out in Pennsylvania last week to try to convince voters not to let petty considerations prevent them from doing their part to avoid handing our country over to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.
     But I wouldn't use those specific words — "articulate" or "well-spoken" — because ... do you have any idea why? I think this is a media thing. Because a few readers might complain, since Barack Obama is Black, that saying he is articulate somehow suggests that Black people generally aren't articulate or well-spoken, and is thus racist.     
     A stretch, certainly, but one some still make. Maybe trying to improve the world, maybe for the pleasure of lashing out, though the fashion peaked a few years back and I believe is in decline as the general world disaster gathers in strength like the latest hurricane off the Gulf Coast. Maybe the whole thing is an irrational fear of editors and, by osmosis, writers too. Maybe I'm cringing at the sight of a stick.
     It's one of those invisible calculations going on behind the scenes of what's left of the old media. I find the situation unfortunate, as a writer, since it pulls arrows out of our quiver and requires contortions and codes. 
     It affects not just praise, but criticism. You can't apply a cliche criticism about ethnic groups to an individual, no matter how apt. I sometimes forget this. For instance, last week, I wrote a column about Mayor Brandon Johnson's almost psychopathic use of race as a general shield against his numerous flaws. It began. "Respect Mayor Angry!" I liked dubbing him "Mayor Angry" it seemed to fit — and imagined I could use it during what remains of his sure to be brief life in the public eye.
    What I forgot was, at some point in the 1960s Black Panther sorts who were raging about killing whitey were dubbed "angry" and it became some kind of generic slur, the way "cheap" was attached to Jews. Ta-Nehisi Coates raised a tempest last week when idly speculating when conditions in his own life would proceed to an extent where he would join Hamas fighters in raping and killing whatever random Jews he could get his hands on, as a way to make this a more equitable world. Had he called those Jews "cheap" it would have been worse.
     It seems odd, to me, that Ta-Nehisi Coates can say such vile things and I can't call the mayor angry, but then the playing field has tilted one way, the theory being that doing so somehow makes up for it in the past being tilted another. I don't see how that works. But then again, I wouldn't, and comply with the situation as it is to get my stuff in the paper and keep my job for another two years. I changed the lede to "Respect the mayor. No matter what he says or does." Which wasn't the same, but starts off the column well enough.