Flashback 2012: Classical stars surprise Thompson lunch crowd

     Wednesday's column on the Department of Motor Vehicles made me wonder what other DMV columns I've run. And while this only mentions the DMV in passing, I'm sharing it anyway, as a reminder that while working at home is convenient as heck, we do miss out by not going downtown.

    Mike Koetting, a deputy director at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, had just gotten off the L at the Thompson Center on Monday and was heading toward the elevators to go to a meeting when the haunting strains of "Vocalise" by Rachmaninoff snapped his head hard to the side.

      He moved toward the center of the lower level food court like a man in a trance, his battered leather briefcase held limply at his side.
     "I’m a music fan," he said.
     A few feet away from Koetting were two of the great musicians of our era, soprano Renee Fleming and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, performing a brief unannounced recital for the lunch crowd, passersby, jurors on their break and a select group who had been tipped off ahead of time, including Gov. Pat Quinn.
     Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra backed the pair, making their debut performance together.
     Some came without exactly knowing what to expect. Judy Kaufman had heard from a friend who volunteers at the CSO that something musical and noteworthy would be happening, and so brought her daughter, Vered, and grandson Jonah, 3, who just started studying the violin.
     "She told us to make sure we didn’t miss this," said Judy Kaufman, who lives downtown. They were delighted to learn who they had come to hear. "We had no idea. We are tremendous music lovers, and are so impressed with Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma, the giants of opera and classical music."
     A few minutes before the performance began, people going down the escalators were handed programs explaining that the event was a joint production of the CSO and the Lyric Opera, and is part of programs at both institutions designed to encourage music in community settings and foster a greater public appreciation for the arts.
     "Awesome," said Fanny Clonch, a French teacher from Curie High School, taking a program. She was giving a tour to 17 students from France, and steered them over to listen.
     Three students from the Tribeca Flashpoint digital vocational school happened by to patronize the Panda Express when they noticed the commotion.
     "Who is it?" asked Jack Whelan, 18, sipping a Mountain Dew. Told Yo-Yo Ma was playing, Whelan, a musical recording arts student, replied, "he’s sick," a slang term of approval meaning "cool" or "awesome."
     Choruses from Lake View High School, the Chicago High School for the Arts and Merit School of Music began the three-song program about 12:40 p.m. with a traditional South African folk song, and it was ended with a rendition of "America the Beautiful." It was to have been a sing-along, but few in the crowd of several hundred tried to compete with one of America’s premiere vocalists.
     While some patrons stood on chairs or crowded for a closer look, others blithely talked on their cell phones or continued their full-throated conversations or listened to their own music on earbuds. The door to the Department of Motor Vehicles office was open, but the music heard inside was very soft, nearly drowned out by booming announcements such as "Now serving B291 at counter No. 6."
     Fleming, the creative consultant for the Lyric, said that she and Ma, creative consultant to the CSO, had spent the morning talking with students, and that, coupled with their performance, had buoyed the artists.
     "It’s inspiring to us and gives us a lot," she said.
     The entire performance lasted less than 15 minutes and Mike Koetting headed to his meeting. What did he think of the music?
     "It was great," he said, and then laughed. "They’re good."

        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2012

Farcical Real ID regulations swamp Illinois DMV centers

 

     While much of the country reels from the federal government being torn apart — jobs slashed, agencies gutted, funding withdrawn — Alexi Giannoulias is facing the opposite problem: a mass of new federal requirements crushing his agency.
     "I haven't been this frustrated, professionally, maybe ever," the Illinois secretary of state said Monday. "Because we've done so much work to create efficiencies, and they're all being unraveled by this unprecedented demand."
     Real ID is a ticking time bomb of security theater, signed into law by President George W. Bush on May 11, 2005. A law designed, basically, to keep the Sept. 11 hijackers off those planes, ex post facto, by ensuring that people given special driver's licenses really, truly are who they say they are, making them jump through documentation hoops.
     "We have zero control," said Giannoulias. "We're required to scan and send this information, this crazy paperwork and documentation requirements. It's not something we put in. We have to take it. We have to put it in a scanner. It's brutal."
     Years of prepping the public, begging them not to wait until the last minute, proved insufficient, and now collective lifetimes evaporate in blocklong lines as frustrated Illinoisans battle to DMV windows only to find their paperwork not in order.
     "I had carefully reviewed the Real ID checklist on the website and believed I had the required documentation," wrote my neighbor, an insurance executive who often travels by air. Normally the most placid person, I bumped into her, irate, coming back from another failed attempt to get her Real ID, thwarted because she changed her name when she got married.
     "The need for a marriage certificate to verify a name change should be called out more explicitly — especially as it often applies to women," she wrote in a complaint I nudged in Giannoulias' direction, prompting our conversation. "It’s an easy detail to miss, and not something people carry daily. Yet it can derail the entire process."

     Nor is this a local problem. From coast to coast, DMV offices are swamped.
     "This is national. It's literally chaos and mayhem around the country," said Giannoulias. "In Florida, they're sleeping in their cars, in tents, in front of the DMV. Other states are shutting down their systems."
     And for what? To create reams of data that former staffers who are no longer at decimated federal bureaus won't ever look at.

     "I'm not a national security expert," said Giannoulias. "But to me, it seems an enormous waste of time and resources for this little star on your license."

To continue reading, click here.

And they got rid of all those historic "Whites only" signs!

Columbus monument, Madrid.

       Sometimes I despair at answering readers — what's the point? If they haven't figured it out by now, they never will. But often I can't help myself. And there is a value, for me if not for my correspondent, as I sometimes discover arguments and hone language by preaching to deaf ears.

        Every single reader who wrote in disagreeing with Monday's column about censoring history did so with what they considered the same a-ha-gotcha! argument: what about those statues of Robert E. Lee, those Confederate flags, cancelled by anti-historical liberals?  

     This, from Brian M., will stand in for all:

     I hope that your Passover was a fulfilling one for you and your family. I enjoy your articles
     Even when we don’t align in our thoughts.
     Todays article on history I find interesting. You mention several times that basically history with all of its warts needs to be ‘out there’.
     Why then is the Columbus statuaries still missing from our local landscape? Only the history that the liberal position must be saved?

    I'd ignored others. But he was polite enough. And like Anne Frank, I like to think people are good at heart, so tried to help his reader by explaining the situation as clearly as I could. I replied:

     Good question. Because statues aren't history — they're honor. Let me try to explain the difference. I would demand that Nazism be fully addressed in any 20th century high school history textbook. That does not mean I want a Nazi flag flying in front of the school. Do you see the difference?
     That's a sincere question: do you?
     Thanks for writing.

     I did not expect an answer, but he surprised me.

Good point! Keep writing. Have to keep newspapers viable!

   

     See? That alone is reason to keep communicating. "Good point" is not "Let's move boldly into the future together." But it's a start.

Americans face history in all its messy complexity

     Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War. His brother George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The poet rushed from Brooklyn to a Washington, D.C., hospital and found a "new world" of horror and hope.
     He wrote a very readable diary about it, "Memoranda During the War," that includes gut-turning descriptions of piles of amputated limbs and loving portraits of wounded soldiers.
     He'd give them chaws of tobacco and pocket money, write their letters home. And, being Walt, check them out in the process. "He looks so handsome as he sleeps."
     That last detail might be creepy. But it's also interesting and worth noting of the man who once wrote, "What is more beautiful than candor?"
     In his travels around Washington, D.C., Whitman sometimes saw Abraham Lincoln — they'd nod to each other in passing.
     I admit to noticing Lincoln in my own wanderings around the city — not in the flesh, thank goodness, not yet. But in places associated with him, particularly at Lake and Wacker, the original site of the Wigwam, where Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860.
     Though Lincoln wasn't there; his handlers kept him safely in Springfield so as not to screw up their crude deal-making. Another messy detail.

     And of course the building wouldn't have been there, at street level today, but about 30 feet straight down, the streetscape having risen considerably since 1860.
     Lincoln is always here, always relevant, because we're still fighting the Civil War. There's no other way to put it. Thousands of books have been written about the 16th president, but my favorite is "Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President," edited by Harold Holzer.
     Like online comments today, many of the letters are sharp, telegraphic bursts.
     "Equal rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever," urges John McMahon of Hambrook, Pennsylvania on Aug. 5, 1864. "White men is in class number one & black men in class number two & must be governed by white men forever."
     That sounds like something found on X today. At least McMahon expresses his hateful thoughts directly, as opposed to our current passion for insinuation and cant, such as President Donald Trump's recent executive order to tamp down government portrayal of the struggle for equal rights in this country under the Orwellian title, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."
     Official websites are scrubbed, museum displays censored, books banned.
     All of it is done under the flawed notion that including the difficult, unpleasant aspects of history is dispiriting and must be suppressed. I suppose most of the Civil War could fall into that category, as does Lincoln being assassinated, April 14, 1865, 160 years ago Monday, by a fanatical Southerner — and this is the sort of detail cut out —incensed at the idea that Black people would gain the right to vote. Now their vote is being suppressed more cannily, though the motive is the same. "White men is in class number one."

     The past has to be prettied up because the intention is to drag our nation back there. They pretend to be applying intellectual rigor or healthy skepticism, when what they are actually doing is whitewashing anything that gives away the game they are playing. Holocaust deniers do the same thing: pluck at inconsistencies in the enormous mass of German record-keeping and pretend to raise legitimate doubts.

To continue reading, click here.

Are we having fun yet?

     

The Apple store in Northbrook, which recently closed.

     So last week the president announces these insane tariffs. Which he immediately rescinds — no, puts on a 90-day hold. Before announcing other, equally insane, economy-killing tariffs on China, the source of most of our electronics, particularly iPhones. Which he also immediately scraps — well, makes exceptions for the phones and electronics.

     Which I guess is a relief. Reversing folly is good. The tanking stock market clawed back some of its losses. Though we're still in a situation of total uncertainty, and nobody wants to build a factory or invest when the market can be — will be, judging from the recent past — whipsawed again and again by the whims of an idiot. 

     This almost prompts me to wonder why anybody cares at all what he says or does, given how little weight those pronouncements and decisions carry? The man is a chronic, habitual liar. We can't we accept it, assume it? Should we not have reached that point a long time ago?

     But that too is an illusion, the belief that nothing is significant, nothing true. Mistakes are not being reversed. Real damage is being inflicted — lasting damage, to decades-old relationships, to the American reputation as a world leader. We're becoming a pariah nation, half-feared, half ridiculed. And even "becoming" is optimistic. We're there, right now, our closest allies talking among themselves about how to best carry on without us.
     Every 20th of the month is another anniversary of his administration. A week from today it will be three months. A quarter of a year. One-sixteenth of his second administration, assuming he doesn't maneuver himself into a third, which, like most suppositions that a particular tradition will somehow endure, is no longer a safe assumption. Fifteen-sixteenths left to go. A very long time. As a certain program says: one day at a time.

"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.