"Don't give up the ship."

 

Battle of Lake Erie (Unidentified artist: Fenimore Art Museum)

     The good news is that the blog post I wrote for today turned out well. The bad news is that it turned out so well, I decided to run it as a column in the paper on Wednesday.
     That does suggest a hierarchy, where columns are expected to have a bit more heft than blog posts. I suppose that is true. Since blog posts run — all together now — every GODDAMN day, they can be lighter, more personal, less, oh I don't know, newsworthy.

     Though blog posts do have aspects that columns can never enjoy.  I can, for instance, swear in blog posts. 
      Fuck.
      See? That could never happen in the newspaper. Though I've tried. Every time I get a new editor, I explain that I'd like to begin a column, "Fuck this," and introduce the word into the paper for the first time ever, to untie the hand bound behind our backs. No dice. 
     With the blog, I can root through my photos, grab a picture, and riff on it. Like the primitive painting above of a crucial moment in the Battle of Lake Erie, on Sept. 10, 1813, when Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry left his crippled flagship, the Lawrence, and crossed over to the Niagara to carry on the fight. 
     It's always meant a lot to me for various reasons. 

     First, the battle took place about an hour from where I grew up, in Berea, Ohio. And visiting the Perry's Victory & International Peace Memorial on Put-in-Bay has been a regular summertime treat for myself, and my children after me. (The peace being celebrated is between the United States and Canada, a sadly relevant detail given our president's insistence on ridiculing and threatening our literal closest friend).

      Second, Perry had taken the words of Capt. James Lawrence, "Don't give up the ship," and had them stitched into a battle flag. A sentiment I used for my 2004 memoir about crossing the ocean with my father.

     Third, the flag is a reminder of the importance of flexibility to victory. The "Don't give up the ship" flag was flying from the Lawrence the moment Perry, umm, gave it up. Which would seem contradictory, even hypocritical. But that is what the tide of battle demanded. A tactical retreat that was both necessary and worked. The flag was still flying when Perry and his men reboarded the Lawrence to accept the British surrender. Sometimes you pull back to win.

    Fourth, Perry had perseverance. The British were far stronger than we were in 1812, when war broke out. They were hot to avenge the loss of 30 years before, and claw back land that wasn't theirs, the sure sign of tyranny. They burned the President's House — though that is not how it became the White House, to cover the scorch marks; a myth of history too popular to disappear. 

      We need to cleave to what actually happened. As in 1812, the situation in our country is bad. Powerful forces that would douse our freedom stride the land, largely unopposed. We need to remind ourselves that at numerous times in American history Things Looked Bad. We have been rocked back on our heels more than once. Suffered humiliations worse than this. And while this assault from within, this traitorous rear guard assault, is perhaps the greatest threat our democracy has ever faced, our nation will face it, and it will prevail. Because if a weak, self-obsessed, ignorant, blundering swine of a man like Donald Trump can destroy America, the true essence of America, then America was not the strong bastion of freedom that I still believe her to be. Now we are brought low. And a great number of things will have to happen before we can stand tall in the world of nations once more. But a firm commitment to never surrender is key to making those things occur. Don't give up the ship. Unless you have to. Then do, to carry on the fight another way, on another ship. The key is to never give up the struggle, never indulge in defeat, in surrender, a luxury that none of us can afford.
    There, that will do for a Tuesday.

Oscar Wilde quipped, Dylan Thomas drank, W.B. Yeats shopped

W. B. Yeats (National Portrait Gallery)

     W.B. Yeats went shopping on Michigan Avenue, where he was so taken with a wardrobe trunk that he bought it, despite having been admonished by his patroness, Lady Gregory, to avoid extravagance during his 1914 American tour.
     The Chicago Daily News editorial page, unaware of Yeats' spree, patted readers on the back for welcoming him:
     "When Chicago, the home of the tired business man, can furnish a profit to grand opera companies and an enthusiastic audience for Poet William Butler Yeats, does it not indicate that idealism hereabouts is triumphing over materialism?"
     Sophisticated visitors not only scratch our boostery itch, but remembering them returns greatness to a human scale. Yeats later regretted his luggage purchase, because his topcoat wouldn't fit —giving a whole new meaning to his line, "the center cannot hold" — until his hostess, Poetry Magazine founder Harriet Monroe, showed him how to fold it properly.
     St. Patrick's Day is a moment when parodies of Irish culture, such as green beer and plastic derbies, get far more than their due. So I use the holiday as a pretext to plunge into more authentic, less generally embraced aspects of Gaelic heritage. In past years I've joined Yeats in lauding Hazel Lavery, the Chicago woman who graced Irish banknotes for 50 years.
     This year I found myself thinking of Irish poets who visited Chicago, such as Yeats, who came here three times. I got the idea by noticing that Sunday was the 75th anniversary of Dylan Thomas drinking at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap — Thomas was Welsh, of course, but we can consider him Irish by marriage, and of course everybody's Irish on St. Paddy's Day. Much myth tends to surrounds such events, but Thomas both signed the bar book and penned letters home on stationery from the Quadrangle Club, where he stayed.
     "My love, oh cat," he wrote to Caitlin Thomas on March 16, 1950. "This is not, as it seems from the address above, a dive, joint, saloon, etc., but the honourable & dignified headquarters of the dons of the University of Chicago. I love you."
     Seamus Heaney also drank at Jimmy's, as my pal Eamonn Cummins observed when we had lunch last week with Brian Cahalane, Ireland's consul general to the Midwest. midwestern United States.
     Ireland doesn't just send poets. She also ships her share of undocumented immigrants, and I wondered whether they are feeling the boot of the federal government on their necks the way, oh, Venezuelans or Ukrainians are.
     "We've been told informally the Irish aren't a target," Cahalane said. "We don't have a sense of a crackdown. The focus centers on immigrants coming across the southern borders."
     Wonder why that is. It is worth remembering, on a day when the Irish are being joyfully embraced as beloved civic darlings, just how vigorously despised they were when they first came to America. The Irish were dirty, lazy, physically ugly. And drunken, of course — that we mark the occasional with a public bar crawl is one of those ironies that would shame us if we ever thought about it.
     So rest assured, in future years, when Chicago's bountiful Venezuelan community is being feted, their rum lofted, their poetry read, with every restaurant serving up trays of arepas and pabellón criollo for Simón Bolivar's birthday, the current federal government vendetta against them will be just another bit of colorful history, like Mrs. O'Leary's cow, which we don't even realize is a petrified slur reflecting the common view of the Irish as careless firebugs, made quaint by time and lack of context.

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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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