Mailbag

      Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. He bought a free hand to shape American government for $288 million, the amount he pumped into Donald Trump's campaign during its last months. There seems something horribly lopsided about that. Then again, as with all corruption, beyond the shock that people do it, is how little they sell out for.  What value can being secretary of state bring to Marco Rubio that will counterbalance the deathless shame of defending why the United States needs to annex Canada?
     As patriotic Americans look on in horror at the wholesale demolition of our government, Trump fans are right on board with every new jaw-dropping folly. I am reminded of that all the time, thanks to my mail, such as this letter that arrived Saturday. 

Dear Mr. Steinberg,

With all due respect, our country is broke. Yes, clean water, food and air as well as safe, functional cities where people can make a living are vital, however without examining every expenditure, including defense and entitlements, we simply won’t make it. There is so much unnecessary spending, duplicative agencies, fraud and theft. The OMB agrees that the situation is untenable. Politicians have paid lip service to this for years, but finally someone is actually doing something. Mr. Musk is an extremely bright, uniquely qualified individual who doesn’t need the attention, death threats and abuse. You see him as flawed, but regardless, we need him to succeed. We should support and pray for him for without him, the best we can hope for is a rapid, continual decline. Look at all of the formerly great Western powers.

Thank you.
Respectfully,
Jeffrey S.
Chicago, IL

     I abbreviated his last name, to save him abuse. Normally I wouldn't write back — what would be the point? But he was polite, and I thought about how to reply. Now that I read it a second time, I wish I had said that even if Elon Musk were proceeding in a half-defendable way, we still would not want our country in the complete control of an unelected billionaire. 

     But he is not proceeding with even the barest care or caution. Like Trump, Musk is an anti-American nihilist, a worshipper of fascists, not to mention a self-dealing egomaniac, and millions of Americans will suffer for years from functions the government once did and now no longer does. Countless people around the world who once benefited from the generosity of Americans will perish. They're dying now. I should have said that.
     But I'm tired — it was a long week — and so I rolled out a version of my standard reply when someone is feeding me the Red State Party Line. 

Dear Mr. S.:

If I wanted to hear the Fox News talking points, I'd watch Fox News. None of what you say is true, though I wouldn't dream of arguing with you. And even if it were true, which it isn't, why would the solution be kneecapping national parks and veterans benefits as opposed to — let's throw out a crazy idea — taxing billionaires their fair share? You'd have to think hard and explain that one to me. Though I'm not expecting you to, since parroting what you're told is easy, independent thought is hard. Thanks for writing.

NS

     Of course he didn't reply. They seldom do. Because they're only pretending to want a conversation. What they are actually doing is hocking their delusion into a handkerchief and then showing it to you, expecting you to share their admiration and wonder. I think it surprises and offends them when somebody doesn't. They can't imagine how that is possible.

 

Attention must be paid

     

     I love being a member of The Art Institute. That means whenever I am in the vicinity and have a couple hours to kill — such as a week ago Friday, when I had time between the end of a long lunch at The Dearborn and the beginning of a good-bye party at the Billy Goat — I can slide over and see what's new.
     In this case , what was new, for me anyway, was the large "Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica" show that opened in mid-December, exploring the complicated political, social and artistic movement fostering unity among Black people around the globe. There were many arresting artworks, but I particularly admired Ebony G. Patterson's compelling 2014 "Invisible Presence: Bling Memories."
     These richly decorated coffins, wrapped in colorful fabric and dripping with braid and tassels, were carried in a carnival procession, "a mock funeral–cum–political protest" in uptown Kingston, Jamaica, where Patterson was born and lives when she isn't residing in Chicago. She's worked with coffins before — while in Trinidad in 2011, she did a work that paraded coffins down the street to mark the murders that occurred while she was in residence. 

     The idea is that the deceased, on their way to the cemetery, put on one last show. The 2024 MacArthur fellow called these coffins "powerful declarations of individuality" where the deceased says, "you may not have noticed me when I was alive, but you will damn well see me when I leave."

How great is a nation, really, if you can't drink the water?

Yellowstone National Park

     The leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook dropped off a quintet of bottles this week, large squat containers, neatly arranged in a thick clear plastic bag. The letter accompanying them explained that water quality is being tested. We were to fill these five bottles, then they'd be picked up so the water could be checked for lead and copper.
     I suppose I could have bristled at this, considered it an intrusion upon my precious personal liberties, and tossed the bottles. Don't tread on me! The effort by the Environmental Protection Agency is exactly the sort of wasteful government overreach that our dear president, Donald J. Trump, is committed to excising root and branch.
     But honestly, keeping tabs on the water we drink seems something the government ought to do. When I phoned the village, I was told that this effort would be done every six months for the next five years. I couldn't help think, grimly, "Sure it will." I am not confident there will be an EPA in five years, nor an America, at least not one you or I would recognize from past experience.
     That experience leads me to expect the water to be checked, along with bridges and airplane engines. The mail should arrive. When I take my handful of pills in the morning, I don't sniff them for the telltale odor of arsenic; I'm confident the Food and Drug Administration has done that already, thanks to the taxes I pay, without going through an agony of indignation at the thought they might also be used to buy hot lunches for poor children or maintain trails at a national park.
     Have you ever gone to a national park? They're quite nice. In 2009, the paper went bankrupt — struggling to exist is nothing new here at the Chicago Sun-Times — and part of the effort to keep afloat, we were all forced to take two weeks of unpaid leave. That inspired me to take my boys on the road, to California. Five weeks, seven thousand miles, nine national parks — Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Rocky Mountain and Redwood.
     Before we left, I called the first park we'd be hitting for guidance. This is how I described the process:
     "They have a phone number you can call, to talk to a park ranger, and it felt odd, to be sitting in my office at home, looking at the bright green leaves of the saucer magnolia tree, talking to some briskly polite ranger in Yellowstone. I phoned twice, so relieved to be able to consult an expert about what was best for us to do that the magic of telephones, dulled by long familiarity, flashed anew for a moment—from my home in Northbrook to a ranger’s office in Yellowstone National Park. Fantastic."
     Would anybody be there now to answer the phone? I wondered about that when Elon Musk was carving apart the National Park Service, not only sending platoons of rangers packing, but insulting them as layabouts in the process. I remembered mailing in my application to secure a back country camping permit on Hell Roaring Creek Trail.

     "Exactly one week later, an official-looking letter arrived in the mail. 'YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK—BACKCOUNTRY RESERVATION CONFIRMATION. Reservation #09-R1090 for 3 People, Travel by Foot.' God bless America, something in the government still works."

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The joy of competency

Strother Purdy, a CSW instructor and experienced cabinetmaker, skillfully applies some brute 
force to a student's table. And yes, I bought one of their way-cool sweatshirts.

     Sometimes I smile at how far short my imagination falls of any given reality. When my wife suggested we go to Spain, I was initially taken aback, wondering: "Why would anyone want to go to Spain? What's in Spain?" Before conjuring up ... wait for it ... bullfights and ... that's about it. 
     I had no idea that Atoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia was waiting for us in Barcelona. 
     That is standard for me. Years before, when I contemplated the arrival of our first child, I thought I'd better go out and get a set of Dickens. Honestly, I looked for one in used book stores, the plan being to read it to the babe during what I imagined would be the immense yawning empty spaces of child-rearing. I did not consider being a dad would be a frenzy of constant activity broken up with too-short periods of exhausted collapse. I hardly had time to read the back of a sugar packet, never mind, "Little Dorrit."
    My younger son and I signed up for Introduction to Woodworking last fall. Whatever I expected the Chicago School of Woodworking might be, the reality was much better. Enormous. Unbelievably clean and orderly. A team of experienced, focused, energetic instructors. With room after room of unimaginably cool, enormous machines that made the stuff at Home Depot seem like so many penknives and potato peelers.   

     Now I was nine weeks into the second course, Methods of Mortise and Tenon Joinery. Ready for the last class. Which, we were told, would be spent gluing together the pieces of the end tables we'd just spent two months crafting.
     Conjure up what gluing together a table might involve. Tell me it isn't just me. Gluing together anything, I imagined, involves ... pots of glue, right? Dabbing the glue on the appropriate spots with a brush of some sort, maybe holding two pieces together while they dry. It seemed a sedate, easy, solitary process.
     Wrong.

     My son had to miss the last class, due to the demands of work. I told him if I succeed in completely gluing my table together with time to spare I would then glue his, too, to save him having to take the make-up class. 
     Ha. Double ha. Working fiendishly, with the help of all my classmates, I was lucky to finish my own table in the two and a half hours allotted.  

  

My table, made of maple and cherry.

   I did not realize that gluing a table is a mass, brute force undertaking where the entire class has to set upon each table, one at a time, glue brushes and spatulas flying, so as to finish before the thing dries out of kilter. I did not realize the number of big rubber mallets that would be necessary, with considerable pounding pieces into place. The table needs to be square, aligned. Thus various pieces have to be rammed home then braced using big Jorgensen Cabinet Master Parallel Jaw Bar Clamps, sometimes applied directly to force pieces into place. 

     I did not realize that everyone had to do it together, one table at a time, because glue dries quickly.

     I was horror struck when the entire class was invited to begin learning on my table, first thing. It was like showing up for what you thought was a picnic and finding instead you had to trust drop off a cliff. I divided my time between dabbing glue into mortises and grabbing squares of paper towel moistened with spit to prissily clean up glue others had slopped on my finely finished cherry and maple surfaces. When the thing was done, with eight orange Jorgensen clamps squeezing it together, my little table seemed like some kind of crazed wooden alien beast being restrained for transport to a moon prison.
     Here's the thing. I did the entire final class a second time, assembling another set of tables. I wasn't sure how many other students in the mortise and tenon unit would miss their various last classes — the school does seem to attract lawyers trying to keep a foot in the living world of tangible reality — so showing up bright and early Saturday for my kid's make-up session to lend a hand with his gluing ordeal seemed the kind of boss dad flex that I've mastered.
     There were four other students, and a teacher who pitched in, so it wasn't as if we were alone, père et fils. Still, I was very glad I'd come, not just to aid my son, nor the personality-effacing challenge of doing woodworking against the clock. But having just done this all the previous Monday, I actually was the one beside the teacher who knew what we were supposed to be doing. So I could point out where a piece was being put on backward, or advise someone to line up the grain with another piece, and in general proved more helpful than I normally would.  Not only did I get a table out of it, but a whiff of something far more precious: a sense of competency in an area where previously I was completely inept. The joy of knowing what you're doing. Gluing together the table a second time was really fun. Another aspect to the process I just did not expect.

     My son and I were too preoccupied to get ourselves into a weekend session of the third class, Techniques of Machining Wood, when it begins next week. These classes fill up fast. And frankly I think he could use a breather — I know I could. But are 100 percent committed to snagging a pair of spots in the session that begins in May. While I've decided not to take the buy-out — I think, having until Sunday at 5 p.m. to change my mind — I'm not 100 percent confident I won't be canned anyway. Woodworking will then come in handy, to both pass my greatly expanded free time and maybe pick up some pocket change.

Gibbs, the school dog, likes to hang out by the window, waiting for trains.

Fighting anti-Semitism by hurting Jews.

     Never confuse reasons with results.
     The government is withholding $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University. The reason being given is that the New York institution supposedly isn't doing enough to fight antisemitism.
     To convey the actual result, consider a metaphor: Imagine a Chicago synagogue threatened by neighborhood Nazis. So I go spray-paint a big red swastika on the front door, explaining this will satisfy any antisemites who might be tempted to go inside and cause trouble.
     Would you say, "Well done, Neil! That'll keep the congregation safe." Or would you suspect that, pretense aside, I'm actually hurting the very people who I am pretending to help? Because that's the practical result of clawing back nearly half a billion dollars from Columbia, which though not quite a synagogue, has an undergraduate population that is 23% Jewish. Princeton University's is less than 10%.
     Meanwhile, 10 other colleges whose campuses were riven by pro-Palestinian protests during the war in Gaza, including Northwestern University, have received letters from the Justice Department warning them that they too are on the block.
     Don't get me wrong. Did student protests at various colleges, in the heat of the war in Gaza, often end up harassing Jewish students and calling for the destruction of Israel? Sure. Is that kind of thing going to happen in any situation where large groups of 20-year-olds are permitted to say what's on their young minds? Again, sure. Defunding colleges for that reason is a ruse, the way that imposing tariffs on other countries because Americans abuse a lot of their fentanyl is a ruse.
     In this era when language is degraded — I can't bring myself to say "meaningless" though we've bought the ticket and are on the platform — one shouldn't get caught up on reasons. Bullies are cowards and liars. They rarely say, "I'm hitting you because I'm a bad person and like it." They always gin up excuses: "He bumped into me," or "I didn't like his face." The reasons are supposed to explain away whatever wrong act is being done. They don't, and it doesn't help when the victim falls into the trap of assessing the validity of the excuse: "Hmm, maybe I did look at him funny...."
     I would never pretend to read the government's mind, no longer having the microscope I got for the boys when they were growing up. But one can connect the dots. With the Department of Education being disbanded, government scientific research frozen, study results censored, facts suppressed and the media threatened, demanding that elite universities gag their students feels par for the course. It's all part of a war on the learned and on free expression.
     Judaism is a religion, but it's also a culture, and that culture values education, Stephen Miller notwithstanding, and believes in speaking out. Jews tend to think about stuff, then ask questions. Attacks on education, like attacks on free speech and tolerance, are attacks on Jews. And if Jews aren't in the cross-hairs at this particular moment, give it time.

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Flashback 1995: Addicted to the Street — How Drugs Lead to Prostitution

    

                                    From "The Immortal Plena," by Antonio Martorell

   On Monday, I wrote about the unique Chicago social service agency, The Night Ministry. That got me to wondering how many stories of mine they've been part of — dozens. This is the first, and one of those stories that burn in memory. I'd spent the night with the Cook County Sheriff's Police, arresting sex workers on Cicero Avenue. It was a revolving door — they'd be back on the street before the paperwork was finished. Toward the end of the shift, I wanted to talk in-depth to one of the prostitutes, and we picked Pamela Bolton at random. A choice that troubled me and I came to regret, because two weeks later she was picked up and murdered. I never knew for sure that the police saying she had AIDS led to her death, maybe by a former customer. But it was possible. Nobody had ever murdered her before...

     "How old do you think I am?" she says, turning her face under the streetlight; a worn, freckled face, under crinkly red hair, a face spotted with open sores. A kind viewer suggests she is 35 years old. "I'm 31," she says.
     Her real name is Pamela Bolton, but they call her "Cotton," for the drawl in her voice that harkens back to her youth in St. Louis and a half decade in Memphis, before she was a street prostitute.
     Bolton is a regular. "Just about every guy in county vice and every member of the Cicero Police Department has arrested her," said Paul Olson, a vice investigator with the Cook County sheriff's police. "We know she has hepatitis. We believe she has AIDS, but she won't admit it."
     Exactly why a person becomes a prostitute is a complex question. Drugs are a major factor.
     "The biggest problem with these girls is they are drug addicts," said Ted Kowalski, an associate judge in Branch 29 court. "I have seen hundreds of them. They all have drug habits."
     Behind the drug use is frequently a history of being abused.
     "The majority have been sexually abused in the past," said the Rev. Peter Brick, project coordinator for The Night Ministry, which does outreach to prostitutes. "My belief is that sexual abuse seriously damages one's self confidence. One result of lowering of self-concept is to feel good by escaping into drugs, and prostitution can then follow."
     Of her upbringing, Bolton says only, "I come from good family. My daddy was a police. If you had told me when I was 10 years old that I would be out here doing this, I would have laughed."
     She has been a prostitute for 12 years, and has been arrested hundreds of times, to no effect.
     "Oh baby, I walk Cicero Avenue like it's legal," says Bolton, who was arrested the day before by Maywood police and released a few hours later.
     A prostitute will charge whatever she thinks she can get, Bolton says; $10 from a drunk immigrant, $50 from a "scared, paranoid white man."
     "I'll tell you this," she says. "Any girl who tells you she won't do it for $10 is a liar."
     Bolton has three children. Her youngest is less than a year old — a "trick baby," meaning the little girl was fathered by a customer.
     "Right now this lady named Nancy's got her," Bolton says. "DCFS started having her, because she had cocaine in her system. But I got somebody to take temporary custody. Still, she was 8 (pounds) 4 (ounces). She had 10 fingers and 10 toes and a head full of hair. I don't know how it happened, but she is Puerto Rican or Italian. She's beautiful."
      Perhaps because their job involves such an assault on their dignity, prostitutes tend to be proud — of themselves, their demeanor, even their choice of trade. Even when reality contradicts what they're saying.
     "I was raised very well; I'm very well-dressed all the time," says Hope, another streetwalker, wearing her dress, it appears, backward, so that her tattooed breasts show through the plunging crisscross straps of what should be the back.
     "I come from a pretty influential family in St. Louis," Bolton says. "I've got a boyfriend who would support me if I wanted him to."
     So why, then, be a prostitute? Bolton says she has no choice.
     "Prostitution is one of the worst addictions you can have out here," she says. "This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin. I still can't come away from here. This is home. My 3-year-old's daddy would take care of me for the rest of my life if I let him. I don't have to be out here. But once you get into this, you can't stop it. Lord knows I've tried. I do go home occasionally. But I go stir-crazy. I can't take that life. Too dull. This is what I'm used to. I can't get out. I can't stop. I cannot shake this."

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 21, 1995 

One feeds minds, the other feeds bellies and offers warm socks

 

     Let The Night Ministry take you by the hand and show you souls in hell. Virgil to your Dante, a View-Master of the Damned, forcing your well-fed face against the eyepieces and clicking through scene after awful scene.
     The old woman, covered with huge MRSA sores — methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a hard-to-treat staph infection — slumped on a Humboldt Park bench. Those aiding the homeless deal with MRSA all the time. But police don't, and seeing her so rattled a pair of District 14 cops that they hurried over to a nearby Night Ministry medical bus making a scheduled stop.
     "Can you help us please?" one officer said.
     The teenage girl ejected from The Night Ministry shelter, The Crib, because there wasn't enough room for all the young adults with nowhere else to sleep that November night to curl up on foam mattresses on a church basement floor. Her housing plan for the night was a CTA fare card with $2.50 on it.
     "What am I going to do?" she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks, standing on a windswept Addison Street L platform. "I don't know where to go."
     And the three abject crack cocaine addicts huddled in a nest of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. I was tailing a Night Ministry nurse carrying a backpack to get to the cut- off places where the medical bus couldn't navigate — there are always hells below this one, lanes and narrow subterranean warrens below Lower Wacker Drive.
     I asked the trio if they minded my taking their photo. But honestly, they didn't care about anything other than getting drugs into their bodies as quickly as possible. Nearly a decade later, I'd be surprised if any of them are still alive.
     Why was I there? The Night Ministry is not only the last strand in Chicago's fraying social service network, caring for all those people too lost to even try to avail themselves to what scant aid is available.
     But they're also very good at letting the Sun-Times show the public the work they do. They've helped me write dozens of stories over the past 30 years, ever since I called them in 1995 to talk about sex workers the Cook County sheriff's deputies were arresting along Cicero Avenue. Whenever I've reached out to the Night Ministry for insight, they rise to the occasion.
     That's rare. Many organizations do good work but botch the communication part. They don't respond to inquiries, or they answer three days after the story ran. Or don't understand the assignment. Last week I reached out to Catholic Charities for a column on medical anxiety among the needy, asking to be put in touch with one of their social workers.
     What I got was self-promoting boilerplate beginning, "As a cornerstone human service provider and trusted partner within our region, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago provides vital services, including food, direct financial assistance, housing, counseling, and other support for more than 370,000 vulnerable people across Cook and Lake counties ..."
     All true but never addressing the matter at hand, therefore useless to me.
     I'm writing this today because the Sun-Times has joined with The Night Ministry for a joint cup rattle. The paper, itself a struggling 501(c)3 charity like The Night Ministry, has a goal of drawing 1,500 new donations to help keep the newspaper going. A small portion of each donation to us in March will go directly to The Night Ministry.

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