Flashback 1995: Bob Watch debuts

Illustration by Jeff Heller

     Journalism is disposable. Reporters who don't get that are fooling themselves. A fraction of the population ever sees our work, fewer still read it, and that handful forgets what they read the next day, if not the next minute.
     That said, scraps of my oeuvre linger. Every few years someone will dredge up my 2004 book "Hatless Jack" and, oblivious of what it's about, seek out my opinion on how Kennedy killed hats. 
     And Bob Watch, the monthly ad hominem vivisection of Tribune columnist Bob Greene that debuted in the Chicago Reader 30 years ago Monday, Jan. 27, 1995, under the slogan, "We read him so you don't have to."
     I'm not sure why, of all my stuff, Bob Watch should persist. Perhaps it has a sharp-edge that people like. A crystalline meanness. The great Gene Weingarten recently cited Bob Watch after dredging up a Bob Greene column on Bob Evans, which he identifies as the worst column ever written, a prize that Greene seemed to vigorously vie for. I felt honored that the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner remembered me.
     I should tell the story. Spy magazine had come out and I decided: "These are my people." I flew to New York and spent some time with founding editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson. While I was there, I pitched stories, including Bob Greene — but he was already in works, and I ended up writing the sidebars to Magda Krance's gleeful keelhauling of Bob. (My favorite was "How a Press Release Becomes a Bob Greene Column," where I selected columns of his that obviously had come from corporate ballyhoo, then contacting the companies to get ahold of the relevant releases that sparked Bob's muse. I'll have to dredge that up and share it someday. The similarities alone should have cost Greene his job, had anyone in authority at the Tribune been paying attention. Spoiler alert: they weren't).
     The Spy pieces caught the fancy my friend of Cate Plys, then an editor at the Reader, who suggested I take a whack at Bob every month. This was my first entry. I'm surprised at how brief it is: a mere 428 words But I manage to pack a lot of scorn in a small space. It's poignant to be sharing it now, as the Reader is laying off its staff and seems destined to crumble and be swept into the dustbin that awaits us all. I hope they can survive — the Reader has always provided an important outlet for perspectives that would never otherwise be shared in the mainstream media. Like Bob Watch, which ran for two years, and began this way:

     Those who sincerely admire and respect Bob Greene – who read his columns aloud to entertain their dozens of cats, perhaps – should leave the room now. We don’t want to upset them.
     That leaves those of us who can rationalize his existence only by inverting the normal expectations of readership – instead of excoriating his faults, savoring them. We pick up his column with a tingle of anticipation – how awful will it be? Will he content himself with another effortless sputtering of baby talk, lavished over one of his pitiful handful of themes and interests? Or will he reach some new benchmark of idiocy?
     Bob loves imperiled kids, and himself holds a key role in the chain of abuse. Parents torture their kids, DCFS ignores them, the schools and the courts bungle the situation, and, finally, the tiny emaciated survivors are led into a room where Uncle Bob awaits, cooing sympathetically while he boosts them onto his knee for the Final Abuse, the flopping out of his revolting pity.           This week he sallied day after day, again and again, to the defense of “a little boy in deep, terrible trouble,” an unfortunate he called, “with typical folksiness, “Joe.” Last week it was a class of handicapped students who had lost the services of a speech therapist. The last sentence of this column, where Bob appeals to Mayor Daley to personally intercede, is a joy. You can see the mayor of Bob’s fantasy world – porkpie hat, big cigar, sitting in the bathtub – crushing the paper in his little fists and squeaking “Why, why, this is an outrage!”

     The next day, Bob rewrote the New York Times obit of Victor Riesel, the columnist blinded in 1957 when acid was thrown in his face by union thugs. Bob begins the tale by conjuring up his beloved idyll of 1950s Columbus, Ohio, where little Bobby Greene learned about the courageous newspaperman who wouldn’t back down. Though Bob gets almost halfway through the column before he remembers to mention Riesel’s name, he implies that the “kid reading the paper [who] wondered about the man behind the glasses” was inspired by Riesel’s example. We are left marveling how a blind man’s bravery helped embolden one special little boy to someday become Bob Greene, nostalgist of courage, boldly speaking his truths and letting the chips fall where they may, whether he is daring to openly worship Michael Jordan or mourning the passing of toaster covers.
     Bob doesn’t quite come out and say it but, from his vantage point, Riesel’s sight must seem a small price to pay.

Flashback 2008: "Sympathy for the Daley"

Managing all that stuff isn't easy. A room at the Northwestern University Archives in 2023.

     January is a cold month, and it should come as no surprise that death has been busy. Wednesday, the day the obituary for my esteemed colleague Rich Hein ran in the paper, a classmate asked me if I had heard that Pat Quinn died. I had not.
     Quinn was the archivist at Northwestern University, and given my affection for research, of course I knew him, and benefited over the decades from his enthusiasm and expertise. He was especially helpful when I was writing my pranks book, though whenever I visited Deering Library — a vast improvement over the tri-towered mess of poured concrete that is the university's main library — I would pop in and visit.
     When Pat retired in 2008, I noted it in the column, which I reprint here in full since it is — he said modestly — a hoot. Plus its general tone explains why my invitation to speak at Northwestern's commencement has been slow in coming. The original online headline was, "Sympathy for Daley — So he's not George Clooney — Chicago's scrappy mayor can teach Northwestern's pampered graduating class a thing or two."
     This was from when the column ran a thousand words and filed the page, and I've kept in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT ...

     What a bunch of babies.
     Even considering the constant embarrassment that Northwestern University has been inflicting upon its shuddering alumni lately, this is a new low, as NU's pampered undergraduates send up a chorus of complaint because their commencement speaker is Mayor Richard M. Daley.
     A "slap in the face to graduating seniors" one whined.
     Well . . .
     I've been writing about Daley since he took office, and I can't remember ever feeling as much sympathy for him as I do now. It's hard to write a commencement address and a pain in the ass to deliver one, never mind to a gang of 21-year-olds from Scottsdale and Connecticut who have their dander up because you aren't the Dalai Lama or George Clooney or somebody they can brag about to their chums at Stanford (Oprah Winfrey!) or Harvard (J.K. Rowling!).
     Say what you will about Daley, but being the son of the former mayor didn't guarantee him his job — not the way many spurning him will have their careers handed to them on a platter by Dad. Daley had his perks, but the long knives were also out for him after the old man died. Daley's path was uncertain, and he learned a thing or two that might help an ambitious graduate.
     Last year, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was the commencement speaker. Nobody howled about the TV star, but the embattled city mayor gets catcalls.
     This is what they call "a teaching moment." For years, Northwestern liked to festoon its official materials with the best advice a graduate can get, spoken by Adlai E. Stevenson:

     "Your days are short here," he said. "This is the last of your springs. . . . And don't forget, when you leave, why you came."
     Is that really why the Northwestern Class of '08 went to college? To bask in the reflected status of some rock-star commencement speaker?

SPRING 2008

     "Free Sun-Times!?" a bright young man in mod eyeglasses half exclaimed, half asked, poking a folded paper in my direction as I cleared the steps at Union Station and broke into the fresh air and sunlight of Madison Street.
     I subscribe, of course. But that copy stays at home with my wife, so I buy the paper at the Northbrook station. There's another copy waiting on my desk. So I'm covered, Sun-Times-wise. But I was so glad to see somebody waving the flag, that after weighing the merits of wasting a promotional paper vs. supporting the boys in the trenches, I smiled, thanked him and took it.
     The exchange slowed me down a couple of seconds, enough that, a few steps later, when I glanced down at the green water of the Chicago River as I passed the center of the Madison Street Bridge, I saw the front edge of something massive moving out from underneath.
     It was the Robert F. Deegan, out of Thorofare, N.J., a huge barge, its width spanning a third of the river.
     I settled against the rail to watch the enormous vessel pass under my feet, all gray metal walkways and red rust stains. Pushing it was a tugboat, the Donald C. Hannah — nearly 90 feet long, with a 2400 horsepower engine — out of Lemont.
     It took a minute for them to move a block south toward St. Louis. I watched the boats recede, joined by a solitary gull circling around. The barge and the tug cleared the Monroe Street bridge, and the gull peeled off.
     Taking its cue, I headed toward work, stepping into Harry's Hot Dogs at Randolph and Franklin to quietly set the folded newspaper on the orange linoleum counter, where somebody could find it.

MY WAR AGAINST BUCKTHORN

     Call it "buckthorn suppression," the stroll around my property, with its narrow stretch of woods on the east side, eyes on the ground, pausing to bend over and pull up the small buckthorn sprouts that grow everywhere no matter what I do. You need to catch them early, when they are 2 or 3 inches long, because very quickly they're 6 inches tall with roots so deep you have to dig them out.
     Having had to saw down several 15-foot tall versions of the gnarly, bethorned tree, I know the danger of neglect, but still am surprised by my zeal. It is against the law — the Illinois Exotic Weed Act, to be specific, as amended in 2004 — to "buy, sell, offer for sale, distribute or plant" buckthorns without a permit, and they will only be issued to those experimenting with new ways to kill it.
     As is common with zealotry, my animosity against this plant, with its deeply veined, oval leaves, is catching. When we went to the Brookfield Zoo last Sunday, it was my wife who kept pointing out that much of its 216 acres are choked with buckthorn.
     Deeply ironic that a facility dedicated to preserving creatures from natural habitats around the world would play host to this destroyer of Illinois vegetation — invasive plants crowd out and kill native species. In its defense, Brookfield Zoo is aware of the problem.
     "We don't have enough staff to keep up with it," said Nicole DiVito, a spokeswoman. "We're doing as much as we can. Occasionally, we're getting volunteers, and slowly getting rid of it."
     I asked her to let me know next time Brookfield has its Let's Kill the Buckthorn Day. I'll help. Because, really, what's the point of highlighting the biological diversity of the earth, if every plant is going to be the vegetable cousin of the cockroach?

PERSONAL NOTE

     Patrick M. Quinn, the archivist at NU for 34 years, is retiring today. As luck would have it, I called him to check the Stevenson quote, and he pointed out — in characteristic fashion — that Stevenson did not say it at NU, but at a senior dinner at Princeton in 1954, and that Northwestern, also in characteristic fashion, alas, seized it as its own, for years, until he stopped them. Thanks for all the help, Pat. Good luck and God bless.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2008

Is this column antisemitic? Gosh, I hope not

 

     I'm no semiotician — an expert in the study of symbols — but I am Jewish and know antisemitism when I see it. An octopus with a hook nose straddling the globe, its waving tentacles holding missiles and moneybags? Definitely. Particularly if it is marked with a Jewish star. That's a giveaway.
     Swastika spray-painted on a synagogue door? Absolutely. Elon Musk extending his arm straight out in a Nazi-like salute — well, he's an odd duck, given to weird jigs and twitches. And since he's gone on record supporting neo-Nazis in Germany, I'd say debating the meaning of a gesture is beside the point.
     Bottom line: Just as I cherish my right to speak freely, so I do not lunge toward offense, nor leap to stifle others. When I was passing through the Chicago Cultural Center last week, showing it off to a Chicagoan who had never been inside, we passed by the "U.S.-Israel War Machine" that this week is causing a fuss. I paused. My underwear remained unknotted. I took a photograph, thinking it could be used when addressing a certain kind of hysterical anti-Americanism. We moved on to look at the gorgeous Tiffany dome.
     A valuable skill, moving on. I was surprised, and disappointed, Thursday to open the Sun-Times and read a story about the puppet, and a nearby one of Benjamin Netanyahu, being labeled antisemitic by 50th Ward Ald. Debra Silverstein, the City Council's lone Jew (I was the only Jew in my elementary school. That's rough. I hope Silverstein isn't constantly being called on to stand up and explain what Hanukkah is about. Embarrassing).
     She asked the city to take the display down.
     Sigh.
     Debra, Debra, Debra. Did the creator of "U.S.-Israel War Machine" pay you for this bit of press agentry? Because you took a crude papier-mache caricature sitting unnoticed in a seldom-visited corner of the Cultural Center — remember my friend, who lives blocks away, had never set foot inside — and slapped it into the pages of the Sun-Times. Nice work. Maybe next you can organize a book launch for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
     I love Israel, I'm a Zionist, and I hope that a thousand years from now there is still a Jewish State of Israel. I also think Benjamin Netanyahu is the devil, that he left the door open for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and my big puppet of him would have longer fangs and more blood dripping off his fingers.
     Does that make me an antisemite? I suppose in some eyes. The same way my thinking that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be in prison instead of the White House makes me a traitor to many. I think it makes me patriotic.
     Sympathizing with yourself is common as dirt. If we look at the problems in our world, 99% of them are from people so enthralled with their own precious selves that they are unable to grasp the humanity of anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't understand why it's so difficult to accept that a lot of people with connections to the Palestinian territories, either through family or culture or inclination, are upset over the situation. I certainly am. And some of those people might want to express their outrage. With a pair of big puppets. At the Cultural Center.

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Ending birthright citizenship will create a permanent, rightless underclass

 

     This column ran in the paper yesterday. 

     The cruelty of slavery was so extreme that every aspect of the shameful institution does not get proper consideration. Once you get past loss of personal autonomy, enforced labor without compensation, brutal punishment, separation of families, obliteration of culture ... there's more, but that will do ... there isn't much emotional space left to consider slavery's multigenerational aspect, though that certainly was one of the more horrific features.
     You were a slave because your parents had been slaves. Your children, even if fathered by the man who owned you, a common occurrence, would also be slaves. As would be their children. And their children. Onward into eternity.
     Take a moment and try to imagine how grotesque this is. As a parent, I take comfort that my boys are better than me in almost every regard, leading lives that are smarter, less troubled, an all-around improvement. I can't conceive of the agony of being certain your children would be doomed to a fate exactly like yours, to toil in a field. Or worse.
     If you're wondering why this bit of American history bobbed to the surface now — it's isn't even Black History Month yet! — that's because among the flurry of executive orders President Donald Trump issued after his inauguration Monday was one aimed at ending birthright citizenship.
     Enshrined in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment has been law since the Civil War. It begins, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
     In a nutshell, if you're born here, you're a citizen.
     Since even the president cannot change the Constitution — you need a two-thirds majority in Congress and approval of three-quarters of the states — the Trump administration is arguing that the 14th Amendment has "never been interpreted" to grant universal citizenship to those born here. Another untruth to add to the tally.
     The legal crack that the Trump administration is trying to squeeze through is the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" part. If your parents aren't citizens, the argument goes, then you are not subject to the oversight of the United States but an unwelcome interloper whose only relationship to the law is being sent back to wherever you, or your parents, came from.
     The American Civil Liberties Union has already filed a lawsuit against the order, calling it "an attack on a fundamental constitutional protection, and one that is central to equality and inclusion." The 14th Amendment, the ACLU said, "is the cornerstone of civil rights in the United States," and "every attack on birthright citizenship, from the 19th century until now, has been grounded in racism."

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Rich Hein: Sun-Times photo editor whose theatrical work was art

"The Iceman Cometh," directed by Bob Falls, at the Goodman Theatre, 2012 (Photo by Rich Hein)

     Rich Hein looked through the lens of his camera into the hearts of people. He shot the city for nearly half a century, taking thousands of images that captured the human condition, first for suburban newspapers, then for 40 years on staff at of the Chicago Sun-Times, rising to become its photo editor.
     "Rich was a tough but fair boss," said Alex Wroblewski, pausing from shooting the inauguration of President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday for Agence France-Presse. "I wouldn't be where I am today without him. He opened the door for me. A sweet and gracious man."
     Mr. Hein, 70, died Sunday in Naperville. He had felt chest pains, drove himself to Edward Edwards Hospital, waved off a wheelchair, and walked into the ER, where he collapsed and could not be revived.

     "He was an all-around photographer, he could do anything," remembered John H. White, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Sun-Times. "He could do any kind of news. I always called him 'The Professor' because he was a teacher; he'd explain things. He took the time to teach me many things. He was a great photographer, a great educator."
     "Rich was always so calm, just always chill and cool, easy to talk to, easy to be around," said Robert A. Davis, a Sun-Times staffer for 14 years before going on to become a top international photographer. "He never got too excited. Slow and steady."
     That steadiness was put to the test in 2013, when the Sun-Times abruptly fired nearly its entire photo staff — except for Mr. Hein.
     "He felt very guilty about it," said former colleague Rich Cahan. "He's sitting there, and everyone else is gone."
     Mr. Hein was left the photo editor — a term he hated — supervising one young videographer, and whatever freelancers he could rope in.
     "He didn't want to be the only guy left," said Ashlee Rezin, the Sun-Times' current photo editor. "His running joke was that, on his tombstone it would read, 'He complied.' Because he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. But he did so much more than comply. He was the quiet, calming, level-headed backbone of the photo department."
     But it allowed him to do something he excelled at: nurture a staff of young, energetic photojournalists.
     "I think he really loved giving opportunities to young photographers," said Rezin. "He loved when somebody wanted to work, and wanted to do well and wanted to learn from him. He enjoyed that mentorship role. I used to ask him for a critique: 'How did I do?' Whenever I didn't do the greatest, he would look at me over the top of his glasses and say, 'Do you really want to know?'"
     In addition to his Sun-Times work, Mr. Hein was a fixture on the Chicago theater scene, shooting publicity stills for stage productions.
     "His photos for the theater community were artworks themselves; they were gorgeous, " said Bill Ruminski, a news editor at the Sun-Times.
     "He was a wonderful, wonderful guy, beloved in our community," said Robert Falls, the former artistic director of the Goodman Theatre.

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Wait long enough, and deer turn into whales

Ancient whale skulls (The Field Museum)

     Honestly? I was busy Monday morning. A colleague died suddenly Sunday, and I set to work writing his obituary. I hate to be coy, but don't want to scoop the paper. You'll find out Wednesday. So until about 3 p.m., I was talking to colleagues and bereaved loved ones, checking archives, writing.
     When I was finished ... well, I just didn't have the bandwidth to listen to even five seconds of the speech. Doesn't matter anyway. Who cares what a chronic liar says or doesn't say? He freed all the Jan. 6 rioters. So much for law and order. Signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as "the Gulf of America." An incredible self-own, like signing an affidavit to his own smallness, pettiness and triviality. What could I add to that? 
     Not that I don't have anything to add. I do: whales are descended from land animals. I learned this Sunday at the Field Museum. Actually, I misunderstood the plaque, and thought the take-away was "Whales descended from horses." Which would be truly marvelous, and had me wondering, almost indignantly, "Why has this information been kept from me?"

      But that isn't the case. The ancestor is a deer-like, hooved creature — the hooves threw me off, making me think "horses." They can tell by the ankles, apparently. 

      Somehow, small deer-like creatures aren't quite as delightful, though I don't see why that should be.  Maybe the "Ken Effect." Still, it shouldn't detract from focusing on what occurred. Food grew scarce, the deer-like beastie nudged itself toward the water to grab at fish, or plants, or whatever, and over a mere 10 million years ended up spouting plumes and being chased by Ahab. Dolphins did the same, evolving from a dog-like predator called a Mesonyx. The closest relatives of whales and dolphins now are hippos and cows. 

     Funny, I already knew whales were mammals. Rising to the surface to breathe, periodically. Live birth. And yet, somehow, never followed that through to its logical conclusion: how did mammals get into the sea? They were hungry, apparently.
     There is a message there that applies to our current fraught political situation, and I hope you won't mind if I spell it out. Life is a long, long time. Things change. A small deer can, in time, become a gigantic whale. If you wait long enough.

As Trump returns, be a Martin Marty, not a Billy Graham

Martin Marty in 2017

     Faith gets good press. But its real value depends on what precisely you put your faith in, and how you use it. As I've said before: religion is a hammer. You can hit someone in the head with it. Or build them a house. Same hammer. Your choice.
     Take two of the most prominent Chicago theologians of the past half-century, Rev. Billy Graham and professor Martin E. Marty. Each used their similar faiths to take vastly different approaches to the crises of their turbulent era.
     Graham, a minister ordained in the Southern Baptist church, used his popularity as a ticket into the White House. There he curled up in the lap of power and became the personal pastor to 11 commanders in chief, starting with Harry Truman and running through every president up to Barack Obama. He baptized Dwight D. Eisenhower and spoke at the funeral of his golfing buddy, Richard Nixon.
     He cast himself as a kind of spiritual adviser. But was really just a hallelujah chorus, offering moral validation. Graham sidestepped civil rights. He sneered at Vietnam War protesters. “It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something," he reassured his pal, Lyndon Johnson.
     You don't need the perspective of years to see Graham ducking the great ethical challenges of his day. Martin Marty, a Lutheran religious scholar, saw exactly who Graham was.
     “A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” he wrote in the Sun-Times in 1965.
     Marty's pulpit was far smaller than Graham's. But he used it vigorously to advocate for civil rights. When Martin Luther King personally invited him to Selma, he recruited colleagues and went. He not only opposed the war in Vietnam, but founded an organization, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, to do so.
     You can gauge the impact of each man by what he left behind. Graham left us with his son, Franklin, perhaps the coldest stone hater calling himself a man of God on the American scene today.
     Marty left us with the University of Chicago's Martin Marty Center, which works to encourage interfaith dialogue, viewing religion as something that should bring together people of different faiths, not drive them apart.
     Marty warned against acting as the "servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave."
     He reminds us:
     "Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive. To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it."
     I had lunch with Marty in 2017, when his book on Martin Luther's 95 Theses was published, and reached out to him to plumb his thoughts now. But he'll be 97 in a couple of weeks and avoids the public eye he used so well for so long. No matter, his voluminous writings — he is the author of more than 50 books — provide what we need.

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