Inauguration Day is coming and I haven't a thing to wear

 

     A colleague once found himself committed to the locked alcoholism ward at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Though we were not friends, I decided, being a sort of self-designated official greeter for recovery, it might be a fine thing were I to visit him there.
     Lutheran General is where Elton John got sober. If you ever saw "Rocketman," it's amusing to contrast the place as it appears in the film — arched hallways, Roman columns, brass sconces — to the dated, sprawling facility on Dempster. No self-playing grand piano noodling in the lobby, no life-size fiberglass whale hanging from the ceiling, none of the other fripperies found in the finer downtown or North Shore medical establishments.
     Arriving, I got the sense there wasn't a conga line of visitors. Finally I found someone to let me in, show me a locker to stash my possessions — a strategy to cut down on visitors passing booze to residents — and eventually was ushered into my co-worker's room.
     He wasn't in shape to receive company — restrained, with wide leather cuffs strapped to his wrists and ankles. I settled myself into a chair, radiating what I hoped was cheerful solicitude. He looked at me and started talking incoherently, a babble of nonsense syllables. I nodded, eyes wide, for 10 minutes or so before I decided I'd done my duty and fled.
     This episode came to mind when I asked my wife if she intends to watch the presidential inauguration, and she said she probably couldn't bear it. I said that I feel obligated to. Duty-bound.
     There is a value in showing up, bearing witness, being there, if not to the person being visited, then to the person doing the visiting. I doubt very much my few minutes in Park Ridge registered on the booze-shattered psyche of my former colleague. But it certainly stuck with me, one of those little helpful reminders that as refreshing as a big glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks might seem at any given moment, best to stay on the path instead. Avoid the ditch.
     That's why, even though everything I've written over the last decade, taken together, has not diverted the country from its running plunge into the abyss, I still feel the need to pay attention, through latticed fingers, and offer occasional commentary — not for the nation's benefit, but mine. And maybe yours too.
     Actually, a program I'm familiar with offers a variety of tips that might prove helpful to us in enduring what is to come. Over my desk is a plaque that reads, "One Day at a Time," and that is helpful, today being all we have.
     Then there is the escape of rote activities. When I went into rehab — 20 years ago this fall, my the time does fly — I think I spent five days cleaning the basement. I remember sweeping a line of fine gray dust across the concrete floor and thinking: This is very zen. Like being in a monastery. I easily have four years' worth of deferred household chores, if not 40. Now is the perfect opportunity.

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"A sense of closeness and carefree happiness"

     Monday's column on media maven Robert Feder — the man who urged me to join Twitter a decade and a half ago — getting tossed off Facebook drew a lot of response. One anonymous comment stood out:

     "Having noticed Facebook's sharp decline over the last few years, I think they're just making sure actual human-created content doesn't get in the way of the AI-generated pink slime that clutters the platform now."

      I've noticed that myself. We are always being told how AI is getting better and better. But most of what I read from it is near gibberish, like the above, recently plucked off Facebook. 

     I can't be sure it was produced by AI — it could, I suppose, been written by someone in some unimaginable basement boiler room in Mumbai, grabbing historical photos and slapping blocks of words under them.

     But it has the wordy obliviousness of AI. The suggestion that the photo "exudes a nostalgic allure" not only uses four words where one would do ("nostalgic") but it almost entirely wrong. That description might make sense to a machine or harried sweatshop habitue. But the photo is obviously a piece of 1920s cheesecake. Which becomes clear, if it isn't already, when you consider the woman's bare arms, stockinged leg and — most significantly — the man's right hand planted on her ass.
      Yes, I realize that pooh-poohing AI has become the go-to move for me, and I imagine I'll be doing it until the day the Sun-Times quietly lets me go and substitutes an AI-generated version of my column, dubbed "Ne*l Ste*nberg" or some other barely legal expropriation.
     Kidding. They'd never go to the effort. When I'm gone, the newshole will just close around me, like the surface of a pond after a stone has been thrown in, as if I were never there. 

When Facebook decides you are not a real person

"Hey Facebook — ecce homo!" Behold the man. Robert Feder, right, in the flesh at my older son's wedding in Michigan in July. The popular social media service shut down his page Jan. 1.

     Robert Feder is a real person.
     I know this from our countless interactions over the years, starting when he was the media critic at the Sun-Times. I would wander back to his tidy office on the fourth floor of 401 N. Wabash to pick his brain, schmooze, brag, complain, enjoy the pleasure of his company.
     I especially liked to run thorny journalistic dilemmas past him because, as anyone who knows Feder is aware, he has an oak-ribbed ethical framework. Not just a real person, but a good one.
     In the years since, I have confirmed his existence time and again, on the phone, over lunch. At his daughter's wedding and both my sons' weddings, even though attending the first involved a six-hour drive up to Northern Michigan. Who does that? A friend, I suppose.
     Alas, Facebook did not ask me to verify Robert's humanity before dealing him a blow that he announced on X this way:
     "As 2024 ended, Meta permanently disabled my personal Facebook account, saying it 'doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.' No idea why. My appeal was denied without explanation or recourse. Now I have no access to any of my content or contacts. What now?
     Robert is integrity on steroids. I groped for something to say. "Oh, that's terrible!" is the best I could do. And it is terrible. I've been on Facebook for 16 years. Part scrapbook, part mnemonic device, both a block party and a shrine to my precious self. I look at Facebook far more than I look at the sky or the grass.
     Then I did what any friend does for someone who suffered a loss. I phoned.
     "It's traumatic; I'm grieving," Feder said. "The fact that they could just take it away, just like that, without any human intervention, is just appalling to me."
     The incident might not be worth airing in public, were it not a glimpse of the world we are all hurtling toward. Someday, we will not just get booted off of social media but admitted to — or rejected from — college without human eyes ever weighing credentials or reading essays. Medical procedures will be permitted, or denied, without an actual doctor glancing at a file.

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Editor's note: Meta reinstated Robert Feder's Facebook account the day after this ran.

'No crying in baseball'? There is if you visit the Hall of Fame

 

     I did not expect to cry.
     But there I was, misting up in the lobby of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Not even past the ticket taker, and I could feel my eyes moisten.
     Before me, a trio of statues: Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente and a sign explaining the importance of "character and courage" to the national pastime.
     Gehrig's words echoed in my ears, just as they had reverberated across Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939.
     “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break," Gehrig said, referring to his ALS diagnosis. "Yet today ... I consider myself ... the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

     I am not a sports fan. No question there. But I was a baseball fan, from age 6 when I went with my grandfather to my first Cleveland Indians game, until my mid-teens. I knew the Brooklyn Dodgers were the "Boys of Summer" because I read the book of the same name. I also read "Me and the Spitter" by Gaylord Perry and "Strange But True Baseball Stories" and ...
     "This might be more complicated than I anticipated," I said to my wife, as we went in.
     "Why is the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown?" she had asked, the day before. We had come to central New York State for Thanksgiving at our younger son's new in-laws' woodsy retreat. The Baseball Hall of Fame just happened to be here. I'd visited it, oh, just 50 years ago, on some family trip in the mid-1970s. My only memory: brass plaques. I had no burning desire to return. But my wife seemed to assume that, being here, and my being a man, we simply had to go. What else could we do?
     "Because Abner Doubleday invented baseball here in 1839," I replied, with the supreme confidence of the misinformed.
     Only he didn't. The Doubleday story is entirely fictional, as admitted early in a display at the Hall of Fame. A convenient lie marches on no matter how many barbs of truth are planted in it. The museum does its best to set the record straight.
     "In fact, baseball was played decades earlier, evolving from similar bat and ball games," a display notes. "Doubleday didn't invent baseball ... baseball 'invented' Doubleday, a thriving legend that reflects Americans' desire to make the game our own."
     I couldn't help but reflect on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, clinging to their spurious Lincoln stovepipe hat. Where is their display explaining that the whole thing is fanciful, if not fraudulent?

Chicago's role in America's pastime
     There was a lot of reflection back to Chicago. The commission that gave Doubleday his undeserved honor was established by an early star of the game, Albert Spalding, a former White Stockings pitcher and manager (that team actually became the Cubs). Spalding left his mark on the game by starting one of the nation's first sporting goods stores, at 108 Madison Street. It was Spalding who pressed first basemen to wear gloves and catchers to wear masks — measures then considered babyish — so he could sell them the equipment.
     The Baseball Hall of Fame offers a first-rate museum, not flinching from delving into complexities of race and economics, with plenty of fun stuff too. There is a hallway devoted to baseball cards, including the coveted Honus Wagner rarity.
     Steve Dahl's army helmet from Disco Demolition is on display. I never had reason to envy the man before, but he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame and I'm not. So kudos, Steve.
     I tend to read museum displays carefully, and noticed a chart titled "BASEBALL'S BILLIONS" on the exploding value of teams from 1990 to 2020. There was something I already know intuitively, but never saw laid out in hard figures before.

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Reaction from the rental company

     Chalk it up to both a sad commentary on the diminished state of the mainstream media, and the general screw-you reticence of large corporations. But reaction to stories from big business is so rare than when it does happen, especially unbidden, that is noteworthy in itself.
     My column on the New Orleans attack was only up for a few hours Thursday when I got an email from the New York branch of a global communications firm:
     "I am reaching out on behalf of Turo," Shea (Maney) Vilardi of Kekst CNC wrote. "We saw your story and wanted to pass along the latest statement from the Company. It is intended to be used in full. The statement should be attributed to a Turo spokesperson."
     "Intended to be used in full?" As opposed to plucking out the interesting parts? Kind of handcuffs me from doing my job, does it not? Then again, what they intend, and what I do, can be very different things. I have many bosses, but Turo isn't one of them. 

     That said, in the spirit of gratitude, I'll use their entire statement. You of course are free to skim:

     “We remain shocked and saddened by yesterday’s horrific events, and our hearts are with the victims and their families. We are outraged by the misuse of our marketplace by the two individuals who perpetrated these acts.
     "Every Turo renter is screened through a proprietary multi-layer, data-science-based trust and safety process. We utilize over 50 internal and external data sources to build, maintain, and improve on our best-in-class Turo Risk Score.
     "These individuals in question had valid driver’s licenses, clean background checks, one was honorably discharged from the US military, and the other was an active-duty Army green beret. They could have boarded any plane, checked into a hotel, or rented a car or truck from a traditional vehicle rental chain. We do not believe these two individuals would have been flagged by anyone – including Big Rental or law enforcement.
     "Turo operates a safe and trusted marketplace. As of September 30, 2024, we have collected data from over 90 million booked days, 27 million trips, 8.6 billion miles driven, through 12 years of operating history, less than 0.10% of Turo trips end with a serious incident such as a vehicle theft.”

     Turo had a lot to react to. In what at first seemed like coordination, but now is viewed as incredible bad luck, both the pick-up truck used in the New Orleans terror attack and the Tesla Cybertruck blown up in front of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel a few hours later were rented from Turo, a kind of Airbnb for car rentals.
     I'd known of such companies — I've borrowed a few automobiles from George Kiebala over at Curvy Road, an exotic car timeshare in Palatine. Though I'd never heard of Turo before Wednesday's attack. And I sympathize. They are in a delicate situation — this will boost their public profile, though not in a way even the most bottom-line obsessed executive would want (I think. Or hope anyway). So professions of sorrow and side-of-the-mouth self-exculpations are in order. 
     Not to be cynical. While I sometimes err in anthropomorphizing corporations, it does seem that Turo is disturbed by this turn of events. While I was preparing this post they wrote to me again, sending the following from CEO Andre Haddad. He seems genuinely distressed, and goes on at even greater length:

     "It’s been about 48 hours since the horrific attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas that shocked us all on New Year’s Day. We’ve spent these tense, mournful hours investigating, partnering with law enforcement, and working around the clock to figure out how our platform could be misused by the perpetrators of such atrocities.
     "Thinking about the victims and their families, I’m shocked, saddened, and, more than anything else, just simply heartbroken. Their stories are crushing. Their loss is unfathomable and unfair.
     "Thinking about how egregiously the two individuals who perpetrated these heinous crimes abused our platform, I’m outraged. These individuals had valid driver’s licenses, clean criminal backgrounds, and were decorated US military servicemembers — one was honorably discharged and was even awarded a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and one was an active duty Green Beret. They could have boarded any plane, checked into any hotel, or rented a car or truck from any traditional vehicle rental chain. We do not believe these two individuals would have been flagged by anyone – including law enforcement.
     "But of course, these two tragedies have made us look inward at our trust and safety practices. Our track record to date has been strong. We have facilitated 27 million trips, over 90 million booked days, spanning 8.6 billion miles driven, through 12 years of operating history, and less than 0.10% of Turo trips have ended with a serious incident, such as a vehicle theft. Every Turo renter is screened through a proprietary multi-layer, data-science-based trust and safety algorithm, the Turo Risk Score. We employ over 50 internal and external data sources to build, maintain, and improve on that Risk Score. This massive data set helps us drive actionable insights, and we continuously refine and enhance our algorithm. In addition to that investment in technologies, we’ve also assembled an experienced team of former law enforcement professionals in our Trust and Safety organization.
     "Despite this strong track record, and as an immediate next step while we wait for law enforcement to conclude their investigations, we’re consulting with national security and counterterrorism experts to learn more about how we can get even better and play our part in helping prevent anything like this from happening ever again.
     "2025 is off to an awful start. While I mourn today, I also remain committed to pioneering and sustaining a strong, secure, trustworthy marketplace for tomorrow."

     I'm preserving these in full, not due to the company's injunction, which could just as easily be ignored. But as a student of crisis PR. And besides, if renting vehicles and then using them in terror attacks becomes a regular part of the American landscape, it'll be interesting to compare these statements to those issues after the 16th incident. I doubt Bushmaster sends out a cri du coeur every time one of their weapons is used to shoot up a classroom. 

      I'm also sharing this because ... well, I believe that no wonder should go unrecorded. You can't both complain about the general silence of corporations and then ignore them when they grab your sleeve and start chattering away. So what do you think? Too much? Their PR firm is part of the second largest global communications company in the world. Myself, I've have urged a little red-penciling. 

Rush to blame after New Orleans attack serves terrorists' aims

     For many years, I dismissed the idea of going out on New Year's Eve as "amateur's night." Packed restaurants, overwhelmed staff, slashed menus, jacked-up prices.

     Who needs it? There are 364 other nights to eat in restaurants; Dec. 31 is for staying home, eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough and watching bad local television.
     But Tuesday night we were lured into the city by old friends and — mirabile dictu — the night could not have gone smoother. Metra was on time and free. We caught the 156 bus at Union Station, entirely empty.
     "We're like rock and roll musicians!" my wife enthused, as our private bus lumbered into the Loop. We headed to Zanies on Wells Street. There we saw an impish young cast member from Saturday Night Live, Michael Longfellow. We grabbed a cab over to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, where the mood was festive, the food hot, the service good.
     Catching the 1:15 home — the trains held, thoughtfully, by Metra — we decided we might have underestimated this going out business.
     Nobody murdered us — that was fortunate, though I didn't think to be grateful when I finally got to bed about 3 a.m., a few minutes before Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove an F-150 pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and giving the American public a taste of what 2025 is going to be like.
     Not the violence, necessarily — we already have plenty of that, living in a country where our fellow citizens routinely decide to throw away the lives of innocent bystanders, plus their own, based on mental illness or political extremism — and those two are harder and harder to tell apart.
     But the reaction to the violence.
     "Shut the border down!!!" U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., the MAGA stalwart, demanded on X, sounding a common theme, after Fox News reported Jabbar had crossed into the country from Mexico two days earlier.
     But Fox was wrong. Jabbar hadn't come from Mexico — the truck had. Apparently Jabbar rented it from Turo, one of those Uber-like companies that offer vehicles owned by private individuals.
     Jabbar was a U.S. Army vet born in Beaumont, Texas. A fact hard to grasp by those who apparently can't see past his name.
     “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on X, hours after the news broke.
     The notable part of that sentence is Trump giving the impression he cares whether something supporting his prejudices is true. Remember, he's the guy who imagined crowds of American Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11. That it never happened didn't matter to him. He repeated his calumny rather than renounce it.

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Flashback 1996: Finding adventure in the concrete jungle

Banquet of Haarlem's Cavilermen Civic Guard, by Cornelis Cornelisz Van Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum)

     Times change, but Chicago is still a city with plenty of private clubs, and I believe I've been to most  — from the University Club, the Union League Club, the Chicago Club and the Cliff Dwellers Club, where I am honored to be a member, to the more obscure, like the Casino Club, which forced the John Hancock Building to redo its footprint by refusing to be forced off their land. Some are businessy, like the Metropolitan Club. Others artsy — the Arts Club of Chicago, obviously. Some are academic, like as the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago. A number, sadly, are no longer with us — the Standard Club, the Tavern Club and the Adventurers Club, which I wrote about in the go-go '90s, and share today because, well, I'm still on vacation, and can't face the prospect of putting words on paper, not until Thursday, when I'll have to come up with something for Friday. I tried to find out what happened to the Adventurers Club and could not — if anyone knows, please clue me in, and I'll share the information. I had just finished writing "Complete and Utter Failure" a couple of years earlier, and suspect the tone of this column was influenced by the chapter on all the expeditions that didn't make it to the top of Mount Everest.

     Time: precisely noon. Conditions: light snow, scattered clouds, an air temperature of 11 degrees. Destination: adventure.
      Alone, without dogteam or guides, I left the office, heading north up Wabash Avenue. I noticed several of the native Chicagoans, wearing their distinctive colorful hats and giant overcoats. At the corner of Wabash and Grand I caught sight of a bird of the Columbidae family — commonly known as a pigeon — on the wing. Breathtaking.
     Turning west at Grand, a few minutes easy walk — no difficult ridges, no streams to ford — before my destination came into sight. The Adventurers Club! Chicago institution since 1911. Home to all those brave enough to face nature red in tooth and claw and master her. I went inside and had a beer.
     My gaze was met by a walrus — stuffed, thankfully, one of the menagerie of big-game animals on display. At least two dozen trophies — a rhino, a moose, a cape buffalo, a sable, and many varieties of the antelope family — line both walls of the long room. Also, bears, full size, standing on hind legs, one grizzly, one polar, and a display case filled with shrunken heads and old pistols and other odd trinkets liberated from a variety of exotic destinations. If Ernest Hemingway is in heaven and has a rumpus room, it looks like this.
     "Look at this stuff," said Robert M. Stahl, officially the executive chef but, at the moment, club bartender, standing behind the club's small bar, under a disturbing array of knives and penises. The knives were exotic weapons such as Panay gutrakers and hooked disemboweling knives. The penises, dried and not very penis-looking, were from two walruses and a whale. I will leave it to the helping professions to discern any deeper meaning behind the display.
     If the volume of memorabilia is weighing on club members' minds more than it normally might, just by its gruesome strangeness, the reason is the club is being forced to move again. After spending 10 years in the old Red Cross Spaghetti Factory at 300 W. Grand, the club has to make way for loft condominiums.
     "We're being evicted," said Rick Homstad, club president, adding that the club should have its new quarters selected soon. "I think we're going to have a better spot than we have now."
     The Adventurers Club membership is tiny, as far as clubs go, with only 100 local members and another 100 non-resident members.
     Though small, and looking for a home, the Adventurers Club is by no means an endangered species (unlike many of its trophies).
     "It is a small club, always scraping by hand-to-mouth," said Homstad. "But we've managed to make it for 85 years."
     The club was founded in the heady days of African safaris and Great White Hunters — a letter from Teddy Roosevelt himself, on Sagamore Hill stationery, enjoys a prime position among the treasures, which include the lock and key from the Civil War ironclad Monitor.
     Club members champion an attitude that is not exactly embraced by every schoolchild nowadays. Members offer no apologies. In the current newsletter, new member Alan Rugendorf lists "killing in general" as among his hobbies.
     "When you're here, you're talking to people who have been quite a few places," said Homstad, when asked how the club reacts to the obvious criticisms in today's environment of pervasive touchy-feeliness. "We have a limited clientele."
     But a well-heeled one. Several members of the Walgreen family belong, as does auctioneer Leslie Hindman, one of its few female members.
     "I love the Adventurers Club," Hindman said. "I think it is the greatest group of people. Very diverse and a lot of fun and wild and crazy . . . guys mostly, and a couple of girls."
     Food was shared. Chef Stahl, who hails from New Orleans, gives an appealing Cajun flair to the Adventurers Club menu. Even the staunchest anti-vivisectionist might look kindly on the club after sampling Stahl's crawfish on angel hair pasta. Cheeks stuffed with chow, I eyed the morbid row of animal heads and thought: "Heck, why not? It's not as if we could bring 'em back to life or anything."
     Properly fortified and my priorities rationalized into place, I once again donned my down-filled Eddie Bauer arctic expedition jacket and battled my way back to the office. Dangers of every kind lurked about me. I noticed packs of dogs, several of them big and possibly vicious, as I passed the windows of the Anti-Cruelty Society.
     Thanks to cunning, and an easy-to-remember grid street system, I returned safely to the office, wise in the ways of the Adventurers Club and satisfied that I had accomplished my goal and accomplished it well.

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 29, 1996