'The choice is up to you'

Leaving my office at 401 N. Wabash for the last time, 2004 (Sun-Times photo)

     The entire staff of the CIA received buyout offers this week. I got my buyout offer Tuesday.
     Ha ha, see what I did there? Both sentences are true — one can play games with this writing stuff — and while I did interview with the CIA fresh out of college, under the charmed notion that my year of Russian language gave me a snowball's chance, whatever they were looking for, I wasn't it.
     A condition that lingers, apparently, since my offer came from the Sun-Times.
     "Here's a bag of cash, Mr. Ego, take it and scram ..." But that too is deceptive. I wasn't singled out for my abrasive personality. Everybody got offers, though mine was big enough — I can be a jerk — that I surprised myself by thinking about it.
     Again, deceptive. The amount was determined, not by my capacity to cause headaches for my superiors, but the 38 years I've been on staff.
     "It's nothing personal," said Michael Corleone in The Godfather. "It's just business."
     A business shredded by the grinding tectonic plates of technology. At the same moment the government is being torn apart in an orgy of unrestricted Republican institution-wrecking. A lot of people making hard personal decisions, while the choice of what kind of country we are seems suddenly settled. The United States used to consider itself a force of good projected into the world. We welcomed refugees at home, brought hope, democracy and clean water abroad.
     Now the United States Agency for International Development was declared "a criminal organization" by our shadow king, Elon Musk, and summarily disbanded. I'm not sure the intention was to yield the field to his business partner, China. Though that will certainly be the result.
     So yeah, it's self-absorbed of me to focus on my own little drama while the government is literally being wrecked around us. But that's being covered elsewhere, and besides, to paraphrase Stalin, a person losing his job is a tragedy, a million losing their jobs is a statistic.
     Besides, the big picture is almost too horrible to contemplate. The Department of Education is next, for the crime of imposing uniform standards on a country keen to sink back into regional intellectual darkness, unbroken by any intrusive light from without. Tennessee might be able to expel evolution from its curriculum just in time for the centennial of the Scopes Trial this summer; 100 years and not an inch of progress — they can put that on their license plates.

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Flashback 1987 — Haiti's dilemma; Impoverished country needs, but distrusts, U.S.

 

Bakery, Haiti, 1987.

    Anyone who has ever traveled around a Third World country knows the depth of misery that can be found around the globe. To think that a central effort of the United States to allay that suffering has been scuttled by an unelected shadow king, to save money to give to rich fucks such as himself, is an enormous shame to add to our ever-growing tower of humiliation.
     The irony is, such aid was always problematic, and didn't always lead to the gratitude that our current leader craves. It required knowledge, wisdom, care and nuance, and those are out of style nowadays. I went looking for past columns that address the work USAID does — or rather, did — and found this from long ago. It's twice as long as a usual column, but I think well expresses the challenges the United States will now be shirking entirely. 

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti On a plane traveling recently to this small Caribbean country, not one but two men were carrying padded dashboards. Several people held onto portable black and white televisions, as well as assorted boxed items such as baby walkers and blenders. One young man carried a small suitcase filled entirely with packages of sandwich cookies.
     "There're bringing in the hard goods," said Didier Thys, a Belgian in Haiti with Catholic Relief Services. He went on to explain that since the economy of Haiti is so fractured, anyone coming back from the United States brings as many manufactured products as they can, to sell at a profit later.
     Also on the plane were five young student priests from a Catholic seminary in Boston, and a half dozen or so Baptist missionaries, the latest installment in a steady stream of Americans, and other foreigners, who come here to contribute their efforts to relief projects — vocational training, literacy programs, housing, nutrition, health care, food aid, reforestation — sponsored by organizations such as the United Development Agency, Catholic Relief Service, the Peace Corps, the Baptist Mission at Kenscoff, and others.
     While these programs provide real benefit to the Haitian people and economy, they also present a dilemma in the minds of many Haitians, and some Americans. The aid is needed, but accepting the aid raises the specter of Haiti becoming dependent to the United States, that along with the money and programs comes a silent itinerary that will subvert Haiti's gingerly progress toward self-determination, after years of repression.
     But before anything else can be said about Haiti, it must be understood that this is a nation in the grip of numerous crushing problems. International organizations usually describe the problems in numerical terms. More than a year after the overthrow of President for Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, the statistics about Haiti are still shocking: 50 percent unemployment/ underemployment, 80 percent illiteracy, 87 percent of the households without running water, per capita income of $369 a year.
     But being statistics, they mask a harsh reality that defies numerical description. To really understand what these statistics mean, you have to take a walk through the sloping, hot streets of Port-au-Prince, the capital city of this crowded nation of 6 million.
     Fifty percent unemployment means that at any given time, there are as many people standing around — marking time, playing dominoes, hustling, begging — as there are working. In a country without a social welfare system, some people have never held a job. Those with jobs cling to them and perform them diligently, even though a good daily wage in the city is $3, and a woman working eight hours in a hemp factory in the countryside may earn 90 cents.
     Lack of potable water means that people get water where they can find it. Large crowds form around public taps, and most people get water to their homes by carrying it in large buckets balanced on top of their heads. Those who can afford to drink bottled water religiously avoid tap water, which can carry enteric diseases. Everyone else drinks from the taps and, frequently, from the open sewers at the side of the road.
     High illiteracy means that the most popular newspaper in the country, the Haiti Liberee, has a circulation of only 7,500. There is one public college to serve the entire nation, and to become a doctor, you have to leave the country. Many don't return, which is why in rural areas of Haiti there is one doctor for every 42,000 people. Lack of an educated public also makes it that much harder to affect any kind of change. Harder to provide vocational training. Harder to foster democracy (only 5 percent of the public voted in the last election, to select representatives to draw up a new national constitution.) The official language of the country is French, but 90 percent of the population speak Creole, and can communicate in French with difficulty, if at all.
     Most distressingly, though, the average annual income in Haiti is $369, making the country 650 miles southeast of Miami the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. In this shattered economy, people scrape by in all manner of marginal ways. Burning wood into charcoal, which is then sold as a fuel, is so popular that the country has become deforested, resulting in massive erosion. People work as draft animals, pulling huge carts of lumber up hills, or set themselves up on a street corner, selling tomato paste by the teaspoon to make 3 cents on a can.
     Into this nation, beset by numerous intractable problems, America pours money — $100 million in aid in 1987 — and relief workers, "hundreds and hundreds of them," according to Jeffrey Lite, public relations officer of the U.S. Information Service. "I'm told more than in any other country."
     Many Haitians — and Americans working in Haiti — worry about the impact of all this assistance activity. While intrusive, quid pro quo demands, such as the Protestant missionaries who require natives to renounce their voodoo religion before they receive medical aid, are rare, the very act of accepting the aid is seen as putting Haiti at risk of becoming a satellite of the United States.
     "The U.S. is seen in contradictory ways, which is not surprising, considering the U.S. is a big, powerful, and nearby, and Haiti is small and weak," said a U.S. Embassy official, who asked not to be identified. "Countries don't like to depend on other countries, but they also need the aid. You hear the phrase `Haiti is not for sale' a lot, as if the people of the U.S. somehow wanted to buy Haiti and put Haiti under its thumb."
     The Haitian fear of domination by the United States is given a bit of perspective by remembering that the U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, to oversee Haitian debt payment and customs activities. It is a memory that has not escaped the Haitians — the date "1915" can be seen painted in red on walls in Port-au-Prince.
     A good example of the controversy over U.S. assistance is found in the area of food aid. Over 10 percent of the Haitian population — 700,000 people — depend on U.S. handouts for their daily sustenance.
     "A lot of food aid is criticized, usually by well-fed people, who say its another way to make Haiti dependent," said a U.S. Embassy official. "Except people are hungry and without the aid they would be seriously malnourished, or worse."
     "The food thing is delicate," said John Hogan, director of Catholic Relief Services, which is a major food distributor in Haiti. "I can sympathize with people who say just giving food away can be a disincentive to production."
     The key to food aid, Hogan said, is to use it as a base, a "temporary support," until people can begin feeding themselves.
     "It behooves everybody who's involved to sit down and say: Where should we be with food in a few years? What's the sense of the Haitian leadership? How do we, in certain places, increase development technical assistance and decrease food aid? Maybe in some places you have to continue food aid because you can't get development going."
     Despite American concern over tailoring programs to meet Haitian needs, there is a lot of hostility directed toward America by the common people.
     "As far as people are concerned, they aren't really very happy with the American government," said I. Michel Meincheind, a Catholic Priest at Petite River des Nippes, a parish of 25,000 people west of Port-au-Prince. "People are very concerned in terms of the American plan for Haiti. Americans want Haiti to be a supply of cheap labor for the American economy. There is a general anti-American attitude here, in part because of what America did with the pigs."
     "What America did with the pigs" is a perfect example of the dilemma of American involvement in Haiti. In 1980, swine flu — which had come to the country in a ham sandwich aboard a Spanish airliner — was decimating Haiti's swine population and threatening to spread to U.S. pork producers. It was decided — by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USAID and the Haitian government — to completely eradicate the island's swine population, and replace it, entirely, with a more resistant strain of hog. The program, while sound in terms of practical, big-picture health planning, took years to implement and caused great deprivation for peasants, who depend on their pigs for financial security.
     "The systematic slaughter of all the pigs in the country was a catastrophe for the peasants," said Meincheind. "Maybe there should have been a system of looking at each pig to see if they were sick, instead of wiping them all out. Revenues in the countryside are based on pigs, and until we get pigs, nothing will get better."
     To make things get better, to make development work — to launch job programs, build homes, improve farming and nutrition — American organizations have to convince Haitians of their good intentions, that any temporary dependency that comes from accepting assistance is offset by long-term gains to be made. It is a goal that assistance workers apply themselves to with a commitment and seriousness they hope is apparent to their Haitian hosts.
     "I wouldn't be here if I didn't think what I was doing was correct," said Ira Lowenthal, an American anthropologist working for USAID. "My basic approach to this country is, number one, I love it. Number two, it has virtually insurmountable problems. It has inherited an historical legacy which is overwhelmingly difficult as it plays itself out in a modern age of overpopulation, declining soil fertility, increasing foreign exchange problems, declining tourism and whatever else, and anybody who's here with a sincere desire to help, who doesn't think they know more than Haitians themselves about what to do here, and doesn't try to preempt the sovereignty of the country, is needed here.
     "The country needs all kinds of resources and commitment. It needs it primarily from its own citizens from every level of society, and it needs it from anybody else who wants to lend a hand."

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 3, 1987 

The Machines Are Learning, and It's Getting Spooky

Created by Google Gemini AI.

     A year ago, I asked Google's Gemini AI to write a column boosting artificial intelligence in the style of Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times. It instantly spat out a snappy patter that was a bad parody of me, with lots of winking Chicago references. AI is supposedly constantly improving, so I was curious: Has it actually gotten any better in the past year? I asked Google's new 2.0 "experimental" Gemini for an AI update, again in my style, which I present here (anything in italics is still me). It came up with something that begins:

     Remember when AI was just some nerd stuff, a bunch of guys with pocket protectors arguing about neural networks and whether a toaster could ever truly understand the existential dread of a Tuesday morning?      

     Well, forget all that. This ain't your grandpappy's AI. This ain't even your dad's AI. This is the kind of AI that makes you wonder if Skynet is just around the corner, disguised as a helpful chatbot.
    Last year, AI went from "kinda cool, I guess" to "holy crap, is that a threat to my livelihood?"

     Not bad, right? It even threw in bullet points and boldface:

• The writing's on the wall, and it's in a font I can barely read. AI can now churn out essays, poems, and even screenplays that are, frankly, better than some of the stuff I've seen on Netflix. My inner playwright is weeping, but also, honestly, a little impressed.

     That part about the inner playwright weeping is true, but not because AI is so impressive. I was at a party where a young man said he was writing a play. "Writing plays is hard," I replied. And he said, no, not really; he's having AI generate the dialogue. I gaped at him, open-mouthed.

• The music's changed, man. AI can now compose original music, from classical sonatas to surprisingly catchy pop tunes. It's like a thousand different composers jammed into a blender and hit "puree." Is it art? I dunno, but it's definitely something.

     I went looking for a "surprisingly catchy" AI-composed pop tune and ended up listening to "Daddy's Car," a muddy mashup of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, whose lyrics border on gibberish. "Unsurprisingly lousy" was more like it.

• The images are getting … uncanny. AI art generators are now spitting out images that are so realistic, you'd swear they were photos. Want a portrait of your cat as a Renaissance noble? Done. Need a photo of a talking squirrel riding a unicycle? Consider it accomplished.

     Gemini AI did, I noticed with unease, take far longer to create the image (above) of a talking squirrel riding a unicycle than it did to write my column. Not bad, right?

     But here's the thing: it's not just about the cool stuff. It's about the implications. Jobs that were once considered safe — writers, artists, musicians — are now facing an uncertain future. What happens when a machine can do your job better, faster, and cheaper?

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Tales from the woodshop

 

     Monday night was woodworking class. Nearly halfway through making my end table. Maple shelves with cherry legs and rails. A minor crisis — I took some wood home last time, thinking it was scrap, and it turned out to be something I needed yesterday. But the teachers are nothing if not accommodating, used to dealing with the full spectrum of blundering, and I was guided through creating replacement pieces and got my work done before class ended. 

     Mistakes happen, and usually can be corrected. That's part of the joy of workworking, one of its central lessons. If you recall last time we popped in, I was regarding with boggled horror my terrible dovetail joint. I considered how rarely do adults get to do things they're really bad at. They learn to avoid them, so don't dance, don't speak in public, don't express their emotions. 
     Me, I try to power on through. To be good, you have to be willing to be bad. I signed up for the second class at the Chicago School of Woodworking, "Mortise and Tenon Joinery." Though I deserve no credit for persistence. I took the second class for the same reason I signed up for the first ; my younger son asked me, a development I've taken to referring to as "The Pulitzer Prize of Parenting." Though this time I couldn't help spilling the beans. "I know I'm not supposed to say this part," I said. "But I'd sign up to spend two and a half hours a week tossing playing cards into a hat with you." 
     The kind of squirmy, over-sharing thing a dad would say — well, that I would say. My dad was a nuclear physicist for whom sentiment was an irrational number of no practical value. So I veer the other way, though worrying it's too much. "Dad was always saying 'I love you,'" the boys will grumble to each other, bitterly, in 2055. "I hated him for that."
     A mortise, by the way, is a recess designed to accept a projection, called a tenon. I could pretend that above razor sharp joints reflect a huge increase in my skill. What they represent is the value of machinery. I'm sure a skilled carpenter can make some wonderfully precise cuts with a wooden mallet and chisel. But I am not a skilled carpenter. We learned the basics with Japanese hand saws and brass marking wheels. Now we've moved on to the most extraordinary power tools — massive Felder professional machines that make the stuff sold at Home Depot look like potato peelers.
    Yes, you have to be careful that you don't feed your fingers into the blades. But there are safety guards, and with Mad Eye Moody's epithet ringing in my ears — "Constant vigilance!" — I keep focused and perform my tasks, under their constant watchful eye, with intently but without so much terror. I've kept my fingers on my hands, so far, and the teachers stress the value of keeping that desire foremost in mind.
    I went back and looked at that first dovetail joint, which I kept, as a token of humility. Actually, it wasn't as bad as I recalled, that second to the bottom mortise, which got kinda chewed up — I could get the yips with the chisel — but did not look that terrible, from a distance. 
     A reminder: we progress for many reasons. Being able to look back and detect improvement is a good one. Everything is a process. Those who passionately wished that the years 2017 to 2021 would be a nadir in the decline of the United States were, sadly, mistaken. Our rock bottom is still out there, waiting for us.  The sooner we get there, the sooner we will begin improving. A joy, it will be, someday, perhaps, to remember even this.

      

New Mexico gets to stay ... for now.

Worker assembling a globe at Replogle in Hillside in 2018.

     A globe is a handy thing. When I learned one of my favorite bits of local trivia — to pray facing Mecca, Chicago Muslims must turn northeast — I rushed to my globe for confirmation. On a map, that looks wrong. But a minute with a string and my 16-inch Replogle Library Globe and you see it is true — northeast, through Montreal. Because the world is spherical.
     While my globe is a lovely object — brass fittings, three carved lion's paw feet — it does have drawbacks. This one is old and out of date. There is a French West Africa and a Belgian Congo, remnants of a colonial past our new administration seems hot to revive.
     One of Donald Trump's first acts as president was to declare the Gulf of Mexico is now the "Gulf of America." Marking territory we do not actually own, like my little dog on a walk, laying claim to certain trees. A sign, not of strength, but weakness. I shook my head, smiling at the self-own.
     Then again, I don't have to leap to accommodate him. You and I and the rest of the world can continue to call it the "Gulf of Mexico" as it has been known for the past 400 years. But like Trump's attempt to cut federal funding to key programs, the renaming of the gulf will affect people who were never considered.
     For instance: One of the top manufacturers of globes in the world is Replogle, a venerable Chicago company for the past 95 years (overlooking an awkward period when it shut down in 2010, popping up in Indiana, until it took a good look around, realized where it was, and scurried back). Keeping up with the shifting sands of politics is a constant challenge for Replogle, and I wondered just how quickly they are following Trump's directive.
     "It's a tough business climate for both our businesses, newspapers and globes," Replogle CEO Joseph Wright began. I didn't argue.
     Replogle makes hundreds of models of globes in numerous languages, and reflecting reality as the locals see it is already in their skill set. Thus, Japanese globes show them owning the Kuril Islands, which the Soviets seized in 1945. Globes sold in India show them possessing all of Kashmir, which Pakistan takes issue with.
     So this isn't their first rodeo. The day East and West Germany reunited, Replogle globes showing a unified Germany were rolling off the line. Here, a little delay seems in order. Trump's fragile whims have a way of sometimes shattering when they hit hard reality. His funding freeze to thousands of federal programs, remember, was rescinded two days later.
     "In the United States, most turn to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names under the Department of the Interior," Wright said. "However, that is just a small starting point. We also look at which countries are recognized by the U.S. for inclusion. Also the U.N. Also NATO. Most large international waters are not under the control of any naming authority or treaty. Each country decides for themselves."
     Other companies selling products that cannot be readily updated are also playing for time, such as Chicago's purveyor of physical maps and atlases.
     "Rand McNally will await final legal and public review through the Secretary of the Interior’s office, as required in President Trump’s Executive Order, before making any adjustments to our Atlases and maps regarding the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America," the company said in a statement.
     Market demand is key. When Egypt insisted its border with Sudan be placed where they fancy it should be, rather than where it actually is, Replogle consulted the State Department, considered its minuscule Egyptian market, then shrugged and ignored the request. America's former allies whom Trump daily neglects and insults, when he isn't harming them with insane, self-destructive tariffs, are a larger market. They cannot be expected to start stocking up on "Gulf of America" globes.

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Enter "The Triangle Zone" for Valentine's Day with Eli's Cheesecake

 

    You don't need me to tell you that cheesecake is the essence of romance. Its sensual sleekness and cool perfection. The sweetness. The initial chill that warms, yielding wonderful flavor, like love itself.
    With the new Valentine's Day Eli's ad going up last week, of course I reflected on past voyages into the sensual side of cheesecake, its intrinsic share-ability, how going back to ancient times cheesecake has enraptured some of the greatest minds of Western civilization. You would think there could not be more to say.
    But there is more. Cheesecake is endless.
    I have not yet remarked on the shape of a wedge of cheesecake. But Japanese novelist Haruki Murikami has, in his pristine short story, "My Cheesecake-Shaped Poverty" published by The New Yorker in 2023. A poor young married couple rents a house on a piece of land defined by busy railroad lines. 
    He calls the lot "The Triangle Zone," and while that would have been sufficient, he elaborates thus:

    "Imagine, say, a round, full-sized cheesecake. Cut it into twelve equal pieces with a knife so it’s like the face of a clock. What you’d end up with, of course, are twelve slices of thirty degrees each at the tip. Place one of these on a plate and, as you sip your tea, take a good hard look at it. That tapered end of the thin slice of cake? That’s exactly the shape of the Triangle Zone I’m talking about."

     Honesty, I thought the author of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" was going to go ... ah ... go other places one he had established the Triangle Zone. They can be quite racy, Japanese authors. But that's as far as he takes the notion, the rest of the story involving the couple renting the property despite the real estate agent's attempts to dissuade them. ("Isn't it too noisy?" he asks).
    Cheesecake certainly has its place in fiction. Stephen King told Bon Appetit magazine that he begins work on a new novel by eating cheesecake. "Cheesecake is brain food" he said, though it does not seem to be Eli's Cheesecake, which might account for his books' morbid tone.

     The internet has a grave idiocy to it which AI will struggle to overcome. I've seen several sincere references to George S. Wykoff's 1928 monograph "Cheesecakes in Literature" none noting that the thing is obviously a joke — people jested, even 100 years ago. Wykoff quotes Hamlet saying, "Thus cheesecake doth make cowards of us all." 

     There is undoubtedly cheesecake in Damon Runyon, though the Broadway chronicler displays an unfortunate prejudice for the New York version. 

     "Still you will admit that Mindy's cheesecake is the greatest cheesecake alive," Frank Sinatra's Nathan Detroit says to Marlon Brando in "Guys and Dolls."

      "Gladly," Brandon purrs.  "Furthemore, I am quite partial to Mindy's cheesecake." 

      I will point out that both characters are criminals whose judgment cannot be considered sound. Although the observation that cheesecake is "alive" does harken back to its animate, passionate quality. The stuff is practically a force of nature.

     Enough. We are avoiding the most important point — as are you. The important point is that today is Feb. 2, you have bought nothing for your beloved, because you are a laggard and in a relationship so long that you've become slack and careless. Love fades and founders on such laziness, which creeps in and rots even the strongest foundation while we remain unaware, until it is too late, and the carefully-built edifice that has protected us for so long comes crashing down on our heads.

    Fortunately I am here to help you. There is still time. You needn't look up from your silage to see your lovemate stamping out the door, suitcase in hand, too angry or indifferent to bother casting you a final look or a tart goodbye. That is because you are not going totake your relationship for granted. You are going to take decisive action by clicking here and ordering her — or him, or them (who am I to pass judgment on your preferences and arrangements?) the heart-shaped Black Forest cheesecake that Eli's so generously shares with the world. It is not only the right and honorable thing to do, but the only thing standing between yourself and heartbreak and loneliness.  You can thank me later.

"Because I have good sense."

     Sorry I didn't have a column in the newspaper Friday. Black people are to blame.
     Oh, did I say that out loud? Whoops. It's supposed to be unvoiced. I should have just pointed out that the newspaper has a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion effort, and let your imagination fill in the rest. 
     I need to work on the above if I hope to mimic the exact note of bone-deep yet tacit racism that President Donald Trump revelled in Thursday when discussing the tragic helicopter/plane collision over the Potomac, veering from his falsely pious evocation of thoughts and prayers for the victims, before he dove into his baseless accusations that the two Ds — Democrats and diversity — are to blame for the crash. Sixty-seven people died, and his minute of silence was followed by half an hour of baseless calumny. It would be shocking if we, you know, hadn't lost our capacity for shock years ago.
     Pressed how he could say that when the investigation of the crash has just begun, the President of the United States replied:
     "Because I have common sense.”
     Good old common sense. No need to spell it out, but let's try. You just know that Black people aren't as skilled as white. You just know that trans soldiers degrade the military. You know that Jews are greedy, Muslims terrorists, and immigrants, criminals and parasites. You know people with disabilities can't do a good job at anything other than bagging groceries. No proof is necessary, and any contrary evidence is merely dismissed. Water off a duck's behind.
     The sad thing — well, one of the many sad things — is there are valid reasons to be critical of DEI. I actually am a member of the DEI council at the paper, When I applied, I did so out of the exquisite sensitivity and devotion to fairness at which I excel.
     "Better to be inside the tent pissing out," I told my wife, "than outside the tent pissing in."
     The language I used applying to the program was more honeyed.
     "While I am not a member of any of the groups that are typically considered under the umbrella of diversity, I've always had a sensitivity to such groups, particularly the LGBTQ community," I wrote. "The paper has always been very supportive — I wrote the first (and to this day, really the only mainstream newspaper look) at the Chicago transgender community in 1992. I'm just now completing a look at how the Sun-Times covered race over the past 75 years, and while it was subject to the limitations and prejudices of its times, all told the paper has always led rather than followed."
     You'll notice I didn't say I'm Jewish. Jews, though certainly a traditionally oppressed group, have somehow lost our minority card. In part, I believe, because we tend to be white, and people buy the slurs against us. Why should the George Soros-funded octopus straddling the world, flailing its grasping tentacles, need a helping hand? DEI is about supporting worthy outcasts, not solidifying Shylock's grasp on his pound of flesh.
     Despite this, my argument worked. Or maybe they just admitted everyone who applied. Either way, I was accepted, and attended the occasional meetings. Which put me in a position to notice Trump tearing out DEI programs root and branch from the federal government with more than the usual perspective of Americans alarmed seeing their institutions re-calibrated to suit the whims of a bigot and would-be demagogue.
     Calling such programs "“radical and wasteful" Trump ordered all DEI-related employees to be put on paid leave by 5 p.m. his first Wednesday in office, in advance of being fired. Concern that any employee address inclusiveness in the workplace was so extreme the order warned against trying to shield such unworthies, demanding that agency heads quiz their underlings whether they “know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”
     I actually agree with that first assertion. DEI programs are radical in the sense that for the majority of American history, organizations would merely bar employment of disfavored groups. There is no risk of untermenschen proving their worth if you never let them even try. When Chicago hosted the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, Ida B. Wells picketed the fair, where a Black could not be hired a janitor. In the 1920s, colleges struggled to not admit "too many" Jews, so as not to corrupt their student bodies, the way they fret over the proportions of Asian students today.
     The Republican war against DEI is based on the premise that civil rights is over, the minorities won, that white Christians are the besieged community, and the situation must be set right by prying the fingers of these lesser folk from the ledge of acceptability. The thinking is: You can eat at the lunch counter at Woolworth's. So shut up already. The fact that Woolworth's is long gone is not a consideration.
     And true, such efforts create winners and losers. And sometimes it seems that DEI is swapping one unfair system for another. All of that could be discussed, if the current administration were not deploying DEI as a kind of modern shorthand for an old racial slur.

     Any valid complaint regarding DEI melts away when Trump is thundering that all such programs "divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”
     Actually, it is the president who is dividing Americans by race — or rather, sticking a crowbar into the division and prying back and forth, widening the chasm.
     Everyone harbors prejudice. Everyone exhibits discrimination of one sort or another at certain times and places— I wish we could grind that into people's heads. What I remember most distinctly from the first DEI meeting is this: I had vowed to just listen, to keep my yap closed — shutting up is an art form I struggle to master. But at one point "microaggressions" — small slights too minor to constitute discrimination but yet sting — were brought up.
     "Older employees don't know what a microaggression is," someone said.
     "Which itself is a microaggression!' I blurted out.
     I'd like to say my point was made, my colleagues nodding, wiser thanks to my insight. But it wasn't. Old people, like Jews, are scorned so automatically nobody even considers it prejudice. And so the work continues.

     In closing, I should point out that efforts at racial inclusion really did keep me from writing a column Friday. Because I worked a long day on the Martin Luther King Day holiday, rather than relax and contemplate our nation's progress, I asked to take a day off later on, rather than take extra holiday pay. My boss kindly reminded me I had that day off coming, so I took Friday. An outside observer might be forgiven for believing that this was entirely my doing — the decision to work, and to take time off. But that just means they're blind to the hidden hand of DEI machinations at work in our country today. DEI means nothing is ever your fault.  There will be not a mistake made in the next four years that our monster president cannot lay at its feet.