"The drama of that plastic act"

Home + Housewares Show, 2015

 
     Friday's column on Passover contained this sentence: "We pretend that religion is changeless and eternal, but the truth is it's plastic and mutable."
     Which prompted regular commentator Double B to object:

     "Upon first read, I was insulted at the idea that religion is plastic and malleable. Why not like wet clay? ... Surely its a better representation than plastic. Plastic is so... terrible. It is so modern and terrible for the environment. It takes big machines to heat and form it."

     I sighed, and told Double B — gently, I hope — that he was falling into a trap I call "The Two Definitions Problem." A word has a primary definition, and many assume that it is the only definition. When our language is so — I almost said "plastic" — variable, the same term can have one, two, or a dozen very different meanings and shades of meaning. If I throw down my hand and walk away, leaving it there, and a reader objects that this is impossible — it is possible, if that hand is a quintet of playing cards and not the fleshy appendage attached to the. end of  my wrist. One word, "hand" two definitions. 
     I immediately pulled down Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755:

 plastick adj. [πλαστική] Having the power to give form. Benign creator! let thy plastick hand/Dispose its own effect. Prior.

     In fact, "plastic" is especially appropriate when applied to religion, as the molding power of the Lord is inevitably cited in early definitions. Three quarters of a century later, Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary loses the final "k" but keeps the divinity:   

PLASTIC ... Having the power to give form or fashion to a mass of matter; as the plastic hand of the Creator; the plastic virtue of nature.   

     The word is the opposite of modern; it's ancient. From the Greek, πλαστική — plastiki —"that may be molded." There is a common variant, itself 700 years, that builds upon that base — "plaster" — though my Oxford English Dictionary traces "plaster" to a related Greek term meaning, "to be daubed on or over."
     Even a seemingly modern term such as "plastic surgery" far precedes the artificial substance — The Lancet first used it in 1837. "Plastic explosive" goes back to 1905, to a kind of putty.
      My 1978 Oxford English Dictionary spends two-thirds of a page on "plastic" and never gets to what the current online Oxford grudgingly calls, in definition 3b: "Any of a large and varied class of materials used widely in manufacturing, which are organic polymers of high molecular weight, now usually based on synthetic materials, and may be moulded, extruded, or cast when they are soft or liquid, and then set into a rigid or slightly elastic form."

     That's the trouble with online — with no space limitations, people do rattle on.
     The first usage suggesting "plastics" are a certain group of malleable materials was coined by Leo Baekeland himself, the inventor of what he called Bakelite in 1907. In 1909 he wrote: "As an insulator..it [sc. Bakelite] is far superior to hard rubber, casein, celluloid, shellac and in fact all plastics...It can be used for similar purposes, like knobs, buttons, knife handles, for which plastics are generally used."
     This was when plastics were a miracle whose arrival may have saved the elephant — billiard balls could be made of Bakelite and not from ivory. During World War II, such compounds tended to be known by brand names — Nylon, Lucite, Plexiglas. 

     "Plastic money," aka credit cards, was coined in 1974 and "referred to the material of which such cards are made, but also alluded to plastic's connotations of artificiality and meretriciousness," notes John Ayto in 20th Century Words. 

     The same year, "plastic" as a stand alone term for a credit card was used. "She had a whole purse full of plastic," Dan Jenkins writes in Dead Solid Perfect.

     "Plastic" held onto its link to creativity. "For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other consideration," Pablo Picasso is quoted saying in Gilot and Lake's  1964 Life with Picasso. "The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic act."

     By then, the low cost of plastics led to their seizing the lead role among consumer goods. The default meaning became what the online OED calls, "Artificial, unnatural; superficial, insincere."  In the 1967 classic movie, "The Graduate," the crass materialistic world has just one word of advice for Benjamin Braddock: "Plastics."

    Plastic as pejorative was already a few years old, such as this, from the Daily Telegraph in 1963: "The plan's promoters must not take it amiss if, winking an eye, some of our elder oysters inquire whether plastic houses might not connote plastic people." 

     "Our elder oysters"? What's that? British slang uses "oyster," logically enough, as a tight-lipped person, one who is perhaps silent to hide his ignorance.
     "I never knew anybody so close, you old oyster you!"J.B. Priestley writes in Angel Pavement in 1930. 
     And off we go on a tangent (and not a straight line or plane touching a curved line or surface, but a completely different line of thought or action). That's the joy — and drawback — of etymology. There is no end, until we roughly tear our attention away to more pressing, if less fascinating, matters. 

Don't let all the grim news keep you from a happy Passover

     Rabbi Meir Moscowitz stopped by the house Monday. On a traditional pre-Passover mission: to drop off shmura matzo — special hand-baked unleavened bread.
     Of course we talked — that's what Jews do. Moscowitz is regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois. The Chabad are traditional, old-school Jews — the ones you see in beards and black hats, walking from synagogue down Devon Avenue on Saturday afternoons — and joyous cheerleaders of the faith.
     We have history. He inquired after my sons — I brought him up to speed on the weddings, the pending birth. I reminded him that his father, Daniel, had been at my younger son's bris, at our condo in the city. I was working on the new book when he arrived and had a line in Hebrew I'd been puzzling over. I hurried upstairs and got a century-old postcard. He translated the passage for me.
     Passover starts Saturday evening, and Jews around the world are getting ready. Tuesday morning my wife picked up a half of cow's worth of brisket — OK, 11 pounds. I've been pondering readings and tracking down attendees. RSVP people! It's only polite. Just 15 this year, a light crowd. Some years we're nearly double that. My brother-in-law, Alan, typically leads the service, being older, wiser, and understanding Hebrew. But he's in Oregon, visiting his daughter Rachel, a young rabbi installed with a new congregation. So the responsibility falls to me.
     I'll do my best, aided by my brother-in-law Jay. Some families blast through the Seder in 15 minutes. We take ... let's see ... close to seven hours when Alan leads, more like five when I do. We bog ours down by piling on additional material. Last year, the pall of the Oct. 7 attacks hung over the Seder. We had a chair kept empty, with the photo of a hostage on it. A poem was read explaining why Elijah won't be coming this year — the tardy prophet busy tending to the truly bereft.
     It all got a bit much for me. Later, I wrote in the paper:

     "Mostly, I'm a go-along-to-get-along type of host, so I smiled and nodded at almost anything anybody brought to the table. Though the smile grew tight as the Seder progressed. At one point I felt compelled to point out that this is not our first rodeo, suffering-wise, that Jews held Seders in concentration camps, and that while I'm all for recognizing the crisis, I would hate for Passover, at heart a celebration of freedom, to lose its sense of joy, obscured by current events."

     Which is a deliberately protracted way of saying I was fertile ground when Rabbi Moscowitz shared a column by Rabbi Mendel Teldon, "Can we please stop talking about antisemitism?" In it, he argues that Jews think we're honoring past suffering and avoiding future pain, when in reality we're letting the people who hate Jews deform and define us.
     "Here’s the truer truth," Rabbi Teldon writes. "This narrative isn’t ours. It’s a story written for us by others. Clinging to it keeps us in their grip — always reacting, always haunted."
     Makes sense to me.
     "When I was growing up," I told Rabbi Moscowitz, "the Holocaust was so present, Judaism seemed like a death cult." And between that, war in Gaza and antisemitism, sometimes it still does.
     Antisemitism shouldn't be the main topic, for a variety of reasons. First, President Donald Trump is gaslighting it into a club to bludgeon free speech. Second, there are more important issues, like creeping totalitarianism. In our email inviting the flock to Seder, my wife and I wrote:
     "Given the national circumstances that greet this year's Seder, let's discuss how freedom is imperiled in America today and how we can face these challenges."
     That's a tall order, if you want to also sing "Chad Gad Yad" before 11 p.m. But if you can't fix things, at least you can discuss them.
     Small acts. When frantic readers ask me what to do, I tell them to do what they can.
     The passage I'd asked Rabbi Moscowitz to read was a play on Proverbs 27:10. "Better a friend nearby than a brother far away," meaning the people close to you are your family.
     We pretend that religion is changeless and eternal, but the truth is it's plastic and mutable. We mold it to our own purposes, picking and choosing what suits the moment. That's why faith can both hurt and heal, why the Seder can run an hour or seven or not at all.
     I told Rabbi Moscowitz that I would read the column he recommended. He had other weak tea Jews to visit, and departed with sincere wishes for a happy Passover.

Put $25,000 in Kenneth Taylor's pocket

 

You can't click here, but click below and you'll be taken to this page.

     People ask me all the time: What can I do?

     How can I help the country get out from this horrible curse it has drawn on itself? 
     Because paying attention to a disaster doesn't slow its advent nor lessen its impact.
     Voting is key — obviously. But a little late for 2024, and a little early for 2026. If there is an election, that is, and if you don't think Donald Trump will try to thwart it, remember: he did it before. 
     So what can you do? Small things. Which isn't the right term, because they're not small to the people they benefit. Small acts coalesce into big ones. Remember, it appear as if the government is being dismantled randomly. But the bulk of destruction is against agencies that help the needy — young kids. New Mothers, Addicts. The poor. The disabled. People needing a leg up.  We are literally kicking Americans when they are down.
     Those people all still could use a hand.
     At the end of February, I took you to Mac's Kitchen, to meet some of the folks integrating back into society by serving really good hot dogs, hamburgers and sandwiches. You met Kenneth Taylor, an addict who spent years in prison, who got out, only to end up as near dead as a person can be and still revive. Who finally decided to turn his life around and is doing just that.
     Taylor shared his story with me, itself an act of courage. He was honest and real and made the difference between an ordinary column about a hot dog stand and a noteworthy column about a man who crawled out of hell and rejoined the living world.
     I was there for a few hours, and when I left, I gave my email to Taylor, and told him if he ever needed a friend in the media, he should feel free to reach out.
     Most people never follow up on an offer like that. But Kenneth did. The James Beard Foundation, which helps people like Kenneth form careers in the food industry, is doing its fundraiser, a popularity contest among chefs. The winner gets $25,000, which would put Taylor well on his way to starting that hot dog stand of his own he's been dreaming about.
      He's in second place right now. Tantalizingly close. You can vote for Kenneth for free, or kick in $10 and vote 10 times, or $25 and vote 25 times — that's what I did; it's easy and painless. (Before you give anything, consider this: although I did due diligence beforehand to determine that the contest is not a scam, some readers feel that the contest is still sketchy because most of the money goes to organizers, not an uncommon occurrence when it comes to charities — here is background regarding that).

    Join me by clicking here  — sooner than later, as I'm tardy getting this up. This stage of the contest ends at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10. Please consider hopping over and doing it. 

     Voting  is a win, win, win. The first win, if you give a little money, it helps the James Beard Foundation do its good work. The second win is the votes help Kenneth Taylor rebuild his life and pursue his dream.

     And the third win is for you. You want to do something to help our fracturing nation, and now you have, for today. Tomorrow you'll find another good thing to do, another small step back to becoming the country we imagine ourselves to be. And if nothing presents itself tomorrow, and you do nothing but refuse to give up on the United States of America, that's doing something too, and not something small either. Something big. Something essential. As I used to tell my boys, you can't quit your way to the top.

'We can fight like the world depends on us.'

Nancy MacLean

     "I got DOGE'd today," said an academic sitting next to me last week at the opening session of the Organization of American Historians. Meaning, the National Endowment for the Humanities NEH grant funding her job had been axed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, part of the general dismantling of our government, like a house being torn down with the family still living inside.
     With higher education and honest American history also under siege, I decided to attend the OAH's plenary session, "Historians and the Attacks on Education."
     David W. Blight, of Yale, president of OAH, opened the evening.
     "We as historians perhaps never have faced this kind of assault that we are facing now," he said. "We are a have to figure out: How do we defend ourselves? Do we know how? We're not terrific at leading social movements. We're terrific at research about social movements."
     Four panelists expressed themselves well enough. Then Nancy MacLean, of Duke University, author of "Democracy in Chains," got up and briefly explained how we got here. I don't often hand my column over to someone else, but will do so now, editing her remarks for space.
     MacLean said:
     "The carnival of cruelty enabled by 47’s reelection has very deep roots. Three key groups have been: 1) predatory capitalists; 2) white supremacists; and 3) religious conservatives, led by conservative Protestants oblivious to the actual ethics of Jesus.
     "Their combined political power has waxed and waned over more than two centuries. It surged in the run-up to the Civil War, as enslavers and their allies aimed to hold power at any cost, including treason. It was subdued for a time by Reconstruction, then rose again after its members violently defeated America’s first taste of multiracial democracy.
     "During the Great Depression, that coalition’s partners were routed by mass working-class movements and new federal policy, only to resurge with the Red Scare after World War II, then be beaten back by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, despite what was proudly called 'massive resistance.'
     "Out of that 'massive resistance' came much more intentional coalition building over the last 50 years, building toward today’s bloody-minded determination and unified national power not seen since the 1850s.
     "Why so venomous and hell-bent now on revolutionizing America, no matter the toll? Because all three coalition partners are desperate. They see this as their last chance to impose their agenda. They know they won’t have another. Hence, the frenzy to act fast and break things.
     "Since the 1990s, predatory capitalists — above all from the fossil fuel sector — have seen their trillions in investments and expected future profits imperiled by social movements and international government action. So they have cultivated partners.
     "White supremacists who had never accepted civil rights victories then panicked at the election of Barack Obama in 2008, because they rightly saw the imminent end of white numerical and cultural dominance in a multiracial democracy.

To continue reading, click here. 

An apology

   So ... you may know I wrote a book about my dad. "Don't Give Up the Ship." Twenty years ago. I thought it was a loving book, but after it was published, he didn't talk to me for six months. Maybe closer to a year.
     It was not my intent to hurt my dad. I love my dad, and was glad we went on our adventure together.
     But hurt he was.
     And I had begged him, "Don't be too dumb to be proud, dad. Can't you say 'My son wrote a book about me. He took me to Venice. He put me up in the Gritti Palace'? Do you have to focus on me calling you a prick on page 203?"
    And the answer was yes, in fact, he did.
     That is the downside of being a writer who isn't simply rhapsodizing birds or explaining the Treaty of Ghent, but regularly shares his own interior life, such as it is. Sometimes you string your wet laundry out to dry and other people run into it and get tangled. You dampen their spirits, even deliver injuries, when you don't mean to.
     I thought Sunday's blog post was about an obscure, neurotic writer, aka me, at the American Organization of Historians conference, reeling from booth to booth, publisher to publisher, trying to be noticed. I did not consider what I wrote a misogynistic screed mocking powerless publishing employees, nor a sincere complaint about any particular organization.
     Particularly hurtful, I am told, were some reader comments which, honestly, I hadn't read, but waved in because they were from regular contributors. Had I read them — and I should have — I would never have posted them. 

      I don't have many writing rules, but one important rule is: don't shit where you live. Which I have done here, big time. So I have deleted the offending comments, and. trimmed the original post to excise elements that the prudent man — not me, obviously —would have never included in the first place.     

     Plus, I'd like to apologize to all university press employees everywhere who were hurt by my words. This is a difficult business in the best of years, and now, with ignorance triumphant and a carnival of cruelty being played out globally, it is even more so. We who care about words and meanings and facts and knowledge ought to stick together, not claw at one another. I know how painful life can be on the sunniest day, and don't want to be the cause of anyone feeling badly about themselves or what we do. Academic publishing has been good to me, and I did not mean to seem either critical or ungrateful. I always thought I was too careful to stumble into one of these pits. Clearly I was mistaken.

'Grandma, were you afraid to die?'

Maida Mangiameli with granddaughter Sloane in 2020.

     Happy birthday Sloane! Eight years old, tomorrow. Sorry about being early, but my column doesn't run on Tuesdays, and in my profession — newspapering; ask your grandmother about it — a day early is far better than a day late.
     We've never met. But your grandmother is a reader. She contacted me in October, wanting me to write something, and after patiently waiting for ... gee ... six months, told me the story about how your birth saved her life and how you inspire her every day.
     Which struck me as the sort of story a little girl should hear: how she saved a life, just by showing up. Because if you can do that, without even trying, imagine what else you may do someday.
     Your grandmother, Maida Mangiameli, lives — thanks to you — in Hawthorn Woods. When your mom, Kate, was pregnant with you, she did something many new mothers do — try to make the world as welcoming a place as she could for you.
     There isn't much that can be done about, say, the nation sliding toward totalitarianism. But she could make sure her daughter's grandmother wasn't smoking like a chimney.
     "I was a heavy smoker my entire adult life," Mangiameli said. "When my daughter and son-in-law told us we're going to be grandparents, they asked one thing: Could I please quit smoking?"
     Smoking is a terrible addiction — an addiction is when something is very bad for you, but you do it anyway, because you can't stop. Mangiameli had attempted quitting before.
     "I tried for my own two girls," she said. "But for that baby ..."
     It took a full year. But Mangiameli, now 75, gave up smoking. Which is when her troubles really started.
     "Within a day of that last cigarette, incessant coughing began," she said. "I went to Immediate Care for a chest x-ray. The doctor called me the next day and told me it was lung cancer."
     Around 90% of people who get lung cancer are smokers. Making the bad news worse: the thought that she'd brought it on herself.

To continue reading, click here.

Assembling the IKEA cabinet of happiness

 

 
     So I went to the opening plenary at the Organization of American Historians at the Sheraton Thursday. It was a brisk walk across the Loop from Madison Street to North Water and Columbus Drive, and it put me in, shall we say, maximum high spirits, seeing the people, the buildings parallaxing by.
     I got there about 4:10 p.m., checked in for my press credentials.
    "I'm from the Chicago Sun-Times," I said. "Or what's left of it."
     Which is very on-brand for me — acknowledge the elephant in the room, say the unsaid thing, spill more of my business than is purely necessary. Shutting up, as I often also say, is an art form I struggle to master. Still.
     There was 20 minutes before I was supposed to meet a reader who is a member of the organization — her email lured me there — and there was a concourse filled with booths from book publishers. Why not plunge in?
     Here I did an unthinking thing. Regular readers know that in 2009 I took a trip out west with the boys, then 12 and 13. When it was over, I wrote a book about it, pieces of which pop up here from time to time, like dead fish floating to the surface of a poisoned pond. It was supposed to be a keepsake for them, but for that to happen someone would have to publish the thing. So I'd have something tangible to hand them someday. Otherwise its a bunch of electrons that could wink out of existence with a hard drive crash. And look, here were these publishers, all around me.
     So I blundered up to one after another who might in theory be interested. There was the University of Illinois Press, which I'd actually sent the manuscript to, years ago. They rejected it with a sniff of "Not an Illinois book," ("But it begins in Illinois!" I'd objected. "And ends there! And involves three Illinoisans on an adventure!" No dice).   
      To my credit, I did try to browse the spreads of new books — but honestly, while the covers were well-designed and they were all in English, the subjects didn't interest me. If I'd been encouraged to take whatever volumes I wanted home with me, I don't think I'd have snagged one.  The subjects were obscure, rococo and uninviting. 
     The only book I actually flipped through was "Food Autonomy in Chicago" by Pancho McFarland, published by the University of Georgia Press. Years ago I'd been to the The 70th Street Farm in East Englewood with Sarah Stegner, then chef at the Ritz, to check on her tomato plants, and somehow imagined that a book with that title might connect me to similar stories related to food autonomy. Stuff I could put in the paper.

     But honestly, I couldn't make sense of the table of contents — the words slid off the page. I didn't take notes on the chapters, and the media at the University of Georgia Press didn't respond to a request for the table of contents. But two paragraphs describing the book from the publisher might give a sense of the thing:

     This examination of a sector of the food autonomy movement in Chicago provides important new ways of understanding race relations, gender, sexuality, spirituality, pedagogy, identity, and their importance to the dynamics of social movements. Additionally, the book explores how revolutionary culture, principles, and organization of American Indigenous, diasporan Africans, anarchist Mexicans and others have been adopted, adapted, or rejected in our food movement.
     In this autoethnography of the food movement, McFarland argues that at our best we work to establish a new society like that theorized and enacted by Indigenous and Black anarchists. However, the forces of Wetiko (colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy) make the work of BIPOC food warriors difficult. Wetiko’s conceptual categories—including race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship—influence our worldviews and affect our behaviors.

     Are you beginning to see what a book on three guys getting lost in Yellowstone Park might not find an eager publisher? I am. 
     Though not on the spot. I presented myself to several editors at several publishers, whose reaction could be best described as a sort of numb disinterest. Being with the Sun-Times meant nothing. Being a published author meant nothing.  I meant nothing.

     What did I expect? Them to leap up and embrace me. "Comrade!" 

     Eventually it came time to go upstairs for the talk — I plan to write about that Wednesday. Afterward, still not grasping the situation, I returned to the publishers' concourse to resume raking my fingers against the brick wall. 

     "We're looking for books about Native-Americans," said an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, when I finally paused for breath and could register the plea in her eyes, which said, in essence, "Please go away now."

      Suddenly I saw myself as if from afar. A gray-haired man, spewing nonsense. Really, had I been a bum, whoops, unhoused person, living on Lower Wacker Drive, and wandered up, with my layers of jackets and shiny pants and red ruined face and went from booth to booth, asking for a chaw of tobacco, I don't think my reception would have been much different. 

     Feeling quite eviscerated I collected what little remained of my pride the way a person who had actually been slashed across the abdomen by the razor of book publishing circa 2025 might collect his guts in both hands, and waddled out the door, trying not to step on his dragging entrails.

     I rode the train home, grim, and came home. grim, my mouth set, my wife's attempts to boost the mood water off a duck's ass. I grimly made myself  a plain dinner. Cashews. Cheese. A simple salad. Stuff that wouldn't boost my blood sugar. 

     Sometimes the only thing to do is go to bed and hope it makes sense in the morning. 

     And you know what? It did make sense in the morning. I blinked into the world, had one taste of stale grimness, a kind of mental drymouth, spat that out, and starting thinking, belatedly. 

     Looking back on the night before, I realized my mistake. Not right away. For maybe an hour I puzzled over it, like a guy trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet, holding a sheet of instructions in one hand and pawing through an unpromising mess of shiny metal screws and wooden dowels and plastic spacers in the other.

     But eventually an idea took shape, an that idea was this:

     It was my fault. 

     I should have parked my ego at the door. Shut up about the damned book already. I should have asked each publisher what their favorite new book was. Should have asked them about their visit to Chicago. Asked them anything. It's not all about me, obviously. I went in there hot, talking about myself, and should have resisted that and done my damn job. I had set myself up, dropped my guard. 

     How many times have I quoted that damn T.S. Eliot line about humility? It doesn't mean jack shit if you are not yourself humble. Which I'm not. But can be. With work. I've done. On occasion. It takes effort. You can sure as hell try. Harder than I thought to try Wednesday night.

     Not just try, as Yoda says. Do.  There is no try.

     But no shame there either. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you — that isn't T.S. Eliot, but also true. Realizing that it was my fault was very liberating, oddly. The world is the world. Every loser and headcase has a grievance. Certainly a better takeaway than, "You're a loser who can't get his books published." Today is a new chance, a bright shiny span of hours to use as I please. Learn from yesterday's sorrow then fling it away.

     There is an expression in Norwegian, "Du er din egen lykkesmed," which Google Translate puts into English as "You are the master of your own luck." Though my Norwegian friend Gry says it scans to locals as, "You are your own source of happiness." It's too easy, when something makes you unhappy to let it sit in your craw, festering, to accept it on face value, blame others — "Wah, those publishers were indifferent to me!" — when you can also spit it out, rinse, learn something. You have X days to live, and then you wink out forever. How many days, how many hours, are you willing to lose to unhappiness based on things beyond your control? Are you going to be happy? Or not? Your call. Don't look for outside validation. Your own happiness is always within you, though often hiding. You need to flush it out.