"You and I alone ... could fight this royal battle."

 

Human brains stored at the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois, 2013

     So I spoke to a neurosurgeon last week — in my professional capacity, I rush to add. Not for personal reasons. His hospital had pitched some achievement or another, and I, in that they-offer-you-a-hand-and-you-grab-their-elbow manner of mine, replied, "You know, I've never even spoken to a brain surgeon." 

    It worked. We talked, got on well. So now photographer Ashlee Rezin and I will, at some point in the near future, scrub up and watch this man operate on somebody's brain.
     Which is cool. Though not my job, per se, as a daily newspaper columnist. Except that I've made it my job, my portfolio being the realm of the interesting, and operations are interesting. I've watched a heart transplant and a lung transplant, a kidney transplant and Chicago surgeons in Vilnius putting a stainless steel rod in a girl's leg. A hip replacement — that was me, a video of the operation I underwent. Because surgeries are not something the average Sun-Times reader gets a chance to peer at, and I don't pass up an opportunity to share one. When a doctor at Northwestern rebuilt my spine, I spun it into a three part series. 
     I wouldn't mention this — no point in ballyhooing a story that could be months away from print — except that, jarred by the cleaver taken to the staff this week, I was tempted to begin this by cataloguing all the positions that the Sun-Times once had that are now gone. A jazz critic and a classical music critic, a book editor and an assistant book editor. A TV critic. A food editor. A travel editor. A medical writer. Five full-time librarians. 
     All lost. Along with 35 colleagues this week. The temptation is to focus on the past, on the loss, to sit in the ashes and cry. "We used to have a corporate jet and now look at us!" And maybe I should do that. But honestly, I don't have the heart for it. Nor the time. There was a moment Wednesday when I just felt so tired, and wished I'd left with them, and wondered what the future will be like, where the will to go on will come from.

     Then I shook it off, like a dog after a bath, and thought about watching brain surgery. The future for me will include looking at a living human brain. And talking to a man skilled enough to fix one. If he can do his job, I sure as hell can do mine. Writing a column, three times a week, trying to comfort Chicagoans living in a country driving to the brink of ruin — that's almost like a type of collective public brain surgery. Reaching into the mind of the body politic and rearranging. 

      That's worth doing, still. I get to focus on what is important or, when need be, completely ignore what is important and take a bubble bath in the trivial. 

     Make no mistake. It is daunting. And difficult. A colleague called Wednesday morning, someone I interact with a lot, and I let that colleague grieve and weep and vent about the various individuals who will no longer be at our side, working with us. No question. It'll be a loss keenly felt. But not insurmountable. I thought of — but wisely did not mention — Shakespeare's "Henry V," after the king fires up his troops to face fearsome odds against an overwhelming French force. 

     "God's will, my liege!" Westmoreland enthuses. "Would you and I alone, without more help, could fight this royal battle!"

    That is bluster. I did not say, "We'll put out the paper ourselves." We could not do that. But I thought it. And at times it might feel that way, to those of us left behind, shouldering an increased burden. We need to always remember that it is an honor to remain in the struggle.  This is a battle worth winning, whatever our reduced numbers, however stacked the odds are against us. Losing is simply not an option. Or if it is our fate, then we will go down fighting. 

Correction: Dylan Thomas was a Welshman. From Wales.

     Maybe all those years of living in Northbrook while writing about Chicago have made my brain soft. But when constructing Monday's gathering of Irish poets for St. Patrick's Day, I tucked in Dylan Thomas. Who of course was Welsh. Having been born in Wales. And lived his life there. As a Welshman.

Dylan Thomas

     I knew that. I've written about the pride Wales has for him. The information was somewhere in my brain.
     Yet not readily accessible when the moment called for it. Because there was Thomas, on page two, tucked after W.B. Yeats and before Seamus Heaney and Oscar Wilde.
     My blog readers leaped on the error when the column posted at the stroke of midnight — well, 12:13 a.m.
     "Dylan Thomas is Welsh, not Irish," someone commented, anonymously.
     The only thing worse than being awake at 4 a.m. is confronting your failings at 4 a.m.
     "Ah," I replied, at 4:03 a.m. "You'd think 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' would have been the giveaway. Do you think I can get through today saying I consider him Irish by marriage? Probably not. Maybe I'll try saying, 'We're all Irish on St. Paddy's Day.'"
     I went online and tucked a version of that into the column, pretending that I knew all along. I often wish I were as smart, or as eloquent, as the guy whose thoughts run under my picture in the newspaper.
     Shamefully, some rebellious mental sub-circuit immediately tried to justify the error. Well, I thought, we consider Oscar Wilde Irish, even thought he lived for years in London, so why couldn't...
     No.
     Wales isn't that far from Ireland...
     Don't.
     I actually checked: 154 miles from Swansea, where Thomas was born, to Dublin. That's like saying someone residing in Peoria lives in Chicago.
     Mistakes are a good way to air whatever corrosive narrative is running in the back of your mind, unnoticed. Mine, apparently, goes something like this: "You're a hack and a bumbler who can't do his job properly, who puts on this pretense of knowing stuff but in fact is the kind of ignorant stumblebum who would include Dylan Thomas among IRISH POETS when in fact he famously, no, VERY famously, is a [obscene gerund] Welshman from [the same obscene gerund] WALES!"
     It's good to get that out, from time to time. Cleansing.
     I don't like to make mistakes. But I do like copping to them, just because the ability to do so is rare. When you see someone whose ego is so inflamed — no names, please! — that any suggestion of error is an impossible affront, then taking responsibility for mistakes is a sign of confidence, almost a superpower.
     Still, gaffes in print make for a long day. The first newspaper reader weighed in at 9:03 a.m.:

     "Steinberg. Have you been drinking that green beer? The author of A Child’s Christmas in Wales? Maybe we say in Chicago that everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day but Thomas was not.
John D Cameron
(former waiter at the Quadrangle Club, not Irish either)"

     I sighed, deeply, then replied:
     "No, to the beer, green or otherwise. But yes, you are right. I own the sin. Maybe seeing his face on all those pub walls led me astray. It's fixed online. As for the print edition, you are the first to point it out. No doubt there will be more. Thank you for writing."

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"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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