Blooming blossoms

 

April 6
 

     Long week. Lots of running around, reporting stories that will be in the paper next week. Trying to keep myself distracted. As the national shame reaches the end of its third month — Sunday — the weight of what our country is going through, with worse sure to come, has begun to press upon those with the strength to keep tabs on what's happening. 
     I won't outline it for you here — either you already know, or never will. Best to keep busy.
     The good news is the blossoms on the saucer magnolia in front of my house have been unusually splendid and long lasting. Friday they were going strong, a dozen days after I first snapped them. This despite one day where the temperature dipped into the 20s for a few hours — usually that's enough to change them to the color and shape of scorched marshmallows.
     Yet they survived.

     "Notice the magnolia blossoms as you go out the door," I'll tell my wife, seeing her off to work.

     I wondered why the blossoms would be so hearty and full this year, whether it might be that we had the tree trimmed last fall. Cutting back the deadwood — the tree is 50 years old if not older — might have encouraged new growth. Which was enough to make me think that the tragedy — well, one of the many tragedies — about our current situation is that pruning the government, had it been done with deliberation, humanity and care, and not with wild abandon, targeting the most vulnerable, might not have been a bad thing. But the reckless, wholesale, sloppy way that the richest-man-in-the-world-and-palpable-force-for-evil did it was not a good thing. Just the opposite. A bad, terrible thing. 

     All the news is not bad. Opposition builds, let by Harvard of all places...
     Sorry, saucer magnolia blooms, some six inches wide, on naked branches awaiting their leaves. The moment I had the thought, "They're really lingering this year," at that very second, I looked down and saw the first fat petal on the front steps, a vanguard for the general surrender liable to arrive any day. Nothing lasts forever. Not the good. Or the bad.

April 18

Blowing up the government, again

 

     Timothy McVeigh was so upset that the government used tear gas on children during the Waco siege that he killed 19 kids in a day care center. Agitated by the deaths of 76 Americans at the hands of federal law enforcement in 1993, he killed 168 more, lighting a two-minute fuse on a rental truck and walking away. The bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exploded at 9:02 a.m., April 19, 1995, 30 years ago Saturday.
     Toxic hate against American government did not die when McVeigh was put to death by lethal injection in 2001. Instead it grew and spread, so that our national infrastructure can be blown apart before our eyes — a sort of slow-motion, nationwide, institutional destruction — and reaction ranges from numbness to joy.
     Just as Britons in areas that most relied on trade with the European Union pushed hardest for Brexit, so red state Americans who lean most heavily on the government cheer its wholesale destruction since Jan. 20.
     People seem only dimly aware that services they depend on are being scrapped so that money once used for their benefit can be given in tax breaks to billionaires.
     The government isn't even keeping track of who's being fired. News organizations estimate that about 12% of the 2.4 million strong federal workforce have lost their jobs in the last three months, with more layoffs every day, and no end in sight.
     To add insult to injury, the fired workers are being told it's their fault. Even though, clearly, no assessments were done by the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's youthful wrecking crew created by executive order and given free rein.
     Again and again, offices are eliminated, only to be reinstated when an adult realizes that, oh, hey, they've let go people they need to keep nuclear reactors safe, or to check food for contamination.
     Not to forget the billions of dollars in research grants being eliminated, wholesale. Not in any connection to the merit of the work being done, but as retribution for institutions that do not adjust their programs to the government's liking. Harvard resisted, and not only are $2 billion in federal grants being withheld, but its tax- exempt status is immediately challenged, a clear violation of the First Amendment. Americans are not taxed more because of what they teach. Well they weren't, up to now.

To continue reading, click here.

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.