Coffee with the senator

     Sen. Dick Durbin announced Wednesday that he won't run for re-election. Of course he did. In an era when politicians leap to look out for themselves, first, last and always, clinging to power until it's pried away, Durbin is a man out-of-time, cleaving to the old standards of service to country before service to self. Who knows where we'd be today if Joe Biden had done the same in a timely fashion, although Durbin had the benefit of learning from Biden's bad example. I'll miss Sen. Durbin, for the good he did for our country, our state, and for how accessible he was — the kind of guy you could sit down with and share a cup of coffee.

OPENING SHOT

      Had a cup of java with my old pal Dick Durbin at a Madison Street coffee shop Thursday morning.
     "So you don't think Alito is so bad?" said Illinois' senior senator, alluding to a column I wrote suggesting that President Bush's current nominee to the Supreme Court wasn't the kind of towel-gnawing conservative crazy who would justify the Democrats kicking out the stops to block him. I assumed a filibuster was a flat-out political impossibility but Durbin — who is on the Judiciary Committee, and thus should know — disagrees.
     "I would have told you that last week," he said. "But after meeting with my colleagues, I'm not sure. We can't rule it out. I was surprised at the intensity of feeling."
     They are convinced that Alito will not only pitch Roe vs. Wade, but lead us into a world of excessive governmental power and reduced individual rights — a dark new Alito's America.
     Not that they got that across. A murderer's row of Democratic senatorial powerhouses, led by Ted Kennedy, had hours of choice TV time to tar Alito, and came off looking verbose and ineffective.
     "It wasn't an easy week, I'll tell you," Durbin said, with a laugh.
     To be fair, the Dems were in a bind -—anything resembling tough questioning would be seen as bullying a respected jurist, which doesn't poll well. So they were left speechifying and focusing on minutia.
     None of it added up to the impression that Alito was too conservative to serve.
     "We look back and say, 'What went wrong?' " said Durbin, who insists that the American people feel Bush won the election and therefore gets to pick his court nominee, but they didn't realize they would also be getting Alito's America.
     "Did he win the election saying he would appoint a justice to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade?" said Durbin. "This isn't what we bargained for."
     Durbin said Democratic senators will decide over the next several days whether they want to take the dramatic step of filibustering the nomination. It's still a long shot but, I'll tell you this: It would make great theater.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 20, 2006

     Had breakfast the other morning with Sen. Dick Durbin and Dan Seals, the young Democrat who just might unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District next week. We were discussing that age-old question of whether the current election really is the most mean-spirited in history or only feels that way. Conversation naturally moved to George Allen, the Virginia senator who, having pretty much dug his own political grave with his mouth, is desperately lashing out at his opponent, Jim Webb, by pointing shrilly to salty lines culled from Webb's war novels as if they were evidence of perversion. Durbin used a phrase I hadn't heard before.
     "George Allen is a spit tobacco senator," he said. "One of four in the Senate." Meaning that he dips and chews tobacco, a vile habit better left in the barn. But Allen doesn't leave it in the barn. Durbin entertainingly described a flight down to Guantanamo he and Allen shared on a military airplane, and the cringing revulsion the clean-cut, dignified and ramrod straight military hosts extended toward Allen, a drooling nicotine addict dribbling brown saliva into a plastic cup. That's a grosser image than anything in Webb's novels.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 1, 2006

     For many years, my column took up a page and ended with a joke, often sent in by readers. Sen. Durbin shared what had to be a real occurrence

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Normally, you couldn't pry me off the couch on a Sunday afternoon. But this Sunday, Jan. 20, the first-ever 10th District Democratic Convention ... The public is invited, and the keynote address is by my old pal and regular reader, Sen. Dick Durbin who — completely unrelated to Sunday's convention — sent in this joke:
     The senior senator from Illinois was visiting an elementary school in Caseyville. Always eager to impart the importance of understanding our democratic system, the senator asked the children in a third-grade class whether anyone could name the vice president of the United States.
     There was a silence. Finally, a small voice from the back of the room ventured: "Judge Judy?"

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 2008

'How can we help?' Go to 26th Street and chow down

 

Susana Mendoza

     Don't bite off more than you can chew.
     If something is overwhelming — whether today's news, or the $39.95 Carne a La Tampiqueña platter at Nuevo Leon Restaurant, 3657 W. 26th Street — just cut it down to manageable size. That works for both ceaseless national turmoil and dinner. I got the half order.
     I was there last week at the invitation of Susana Mendoza, the Illinois comptroller. Not a personal invitation, mind you — we don't know each other — but a general plea, delivered by one of her now trademark slick videos, complete with aerial drone shots and Illinois farmer Dick Bigger Jr.
     Seeing the fun Mendoza has with Bigger's name — which got her campaign video on Stephen Colbert — reminded me that there are two types of politicians: the stiff, robot from Mars sort — no names, please, you know who I mean — and easygoing, Judy Baar Topinka types. Proud possessors of quirks, like Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, twirling her baton at the Pride Parade. Public servants I bestow with the ultimate compliment: "actual human beings."
     Into that fold goes Mendoza, whose official portfolio includes neither dining with the press, nor plumping the neighborhood where she was born.
     But one of the countless negative results of the Trump administration's war on America has been ICE raids deadening business in ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Village.
     "It was tremendous," Mendoza said, noting traffic at Nuevo Leon fell by three-quarters. "They went from 280 tickets a day to 67."
     "Locals are not coming out," confirmed Nuevo Leon owner Laura Gutierrez. "We did have a couple incidents, people picked up, right down the block. When people from the neighborhood see that, they stay inside the house."
     I initially wondered whether Mendoza worries she is urging immigrants into harm's way. But I'd misunderstood the target audience: folks like me.
     "We're encouraging people who are not from the community to come to the community," she said. "That's why we did it in English."
     It works. I arrived an hour early and happily wandered 26th Street, an area I'd never visited before.

Ginger pigs

     I did have a goal: El Nopal Bakery, 3648 W. 26th St. Having lived on Logan Boulevard for several years, I developed a deep affection for treats I think of as "ginger pigs," actually called marranitos or cochinitos — "little pigs" — big, thick, soft gingerbread cookies, roughly porcine in shape.
     The idea, Mendoza said, is "to have people maybe venture out of their comfort zone. So many people are talking about this issue, [wondering], 'How can we help?' The best way is lifting up the businesses by coming into these communities, where people are afraid to come, and spend money."
     I did my best, buying two ginger pigs, and would have spent more, except many stores are geared toward princesses — well,15-year-old girls on their quinceañeras. Though some aimed at a younger crowd, and my eye was caught by an attractive green number in the window of Pink & Blue Kids Wear, 3437 W. 26th St., that seems perfect for a certain as-yet-unborn girl.
     I went inside. The dress seemed reasonably priced for such elegance, at $120, but as one unaccustomed to this kind of purchase, I snapped a photo and sent it to her due-in-June mother, who, while uncertain of what occasion would call for it, pronounced the garment "very adorable." I decided to put off the purchase, for now, but to return soon to collect it, and more ginger pigs.
    "All of us can help by coming here and patronizing these businesses," said Mendoza, who doesn't plan to stop her efforts at Little Village. Chinatown is next, and then other affected Chicago communities.

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Bird of prey

Photo by Dan Abraham

     Much reader reaction to Monday's column on birding.
     "You can't go wrong with birds," I told my wife. Not only for their beauty, their energy, the way they slip the bonds of earth and fly. But their independence —  they carry on quite well without us; better, in fact. They are not often domesticated. People do keep birds, but in cages. Not like dogs and cats and goldfish. They are free, which is more than we can say, particularly at the present moment. 
    Among the many sharing their thoughts was Dan Abraham, who writes:
    "I’ve never written to you before, but after reading the column on birding, I thought you might like this photo. I don’t intend to go birding, but this guy showed up in my backyard in Evanston the same day your column came out.  Google says it’s a Cooper’s hawk. "
    He is right, I do like it, and his photo prompted an investigation and a confession.
    First, for all the times I've referred to a Cooper's hawk, I never asked the obvious question which is ... anybody? ... that's right: who's Cooper?

William Cooper

     The bird was named — nearly two centuries ago, in 1828 — after naturalist William Cooper, one of the founders of the New York Lyceum of Natural History, now the New York Academy of Sciences, and what is extra nice is that it was not done so by Cooper puffing himself, as often happens, but by his friend, Charles Lucien Bonaparte. 

     Among his other interests, Cooper was a conchologist, a word I had not encountered before, which means exactly what it sounds like: a zoologist of shells.

     The confession is simple: I tend to call every hawk I see a "Cooper's hawk," even if they are a sharp-shinned hawk, which indeed look very similar, or a rough-legged hawk, or any of the eight species of hawks found in Illinois. 

     Now that I admit the sin, the practice of lumping all hawks under that one variety sounds pretty lame. I'm going to have to try to do better and improve my hawk-identification skills. Hawks deserve no less.

     

What can you do? Go birding.

Bob Dolgan looks for woodcocks at the Glenview Park District's Kent Fuller Air Station Prairie. 

     Usually, birds come to me. To my backyard feeder: robins, sparrows, wrens — little brown birds, mostly, with the occasional red cardinal, gray dove or blue warbler offering variety.
     I'm generally content with that setup, though chasing off squirrels is a constant challenge. They adapt.
     Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, however. So when Bob Dolgan, publicist for the Newberry Library, said he is a regular birder and invited me along, I could not refuse the opportunity to seek out birds. Anything is better than sitting in the kitchen, staring gape-mouthed at the newspaper.
     We met in the parking lot of the Sheraton Northbrook and, to my amazement, took just a few steps and might as well have been on Egdon Heath. We were on a grassy bluff above a body of water carrying the lyrical name Techny 32B inline reservoir. A strong, steady wind ruffled our clothes. He carried with him a tripod and a 60x Bushnell spotter scope.
     A few dozen European starlings vectored past.
     "Europeans starlings — we kinda hate them, right?" I said, tucking myself into the fold of birders. An invasive species, introduced in Central Park by some fool who wanted every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to be found in America, crowding out native birds. A reminder of how much lasting damage one idiot can cause.
     "Today, I'm feeling very generous, so I'm not going to say that," Dolgan replied. "They were introduced more than a century ago. They just take up a lot of habitat from other species. They're not a great bird."
     Great birds came fast and furious. Three mallards on the water. A killdeer — a large plover on long legs.
     "You have a life list, right?" I asked.
     "I have been a little bit less focused on my list and more focused on the experience," he said, not offering the number of distinct species he's seen in the wild in his birding career. I deliberately didn't ask for the figure. Guys have a way of turning every pursuit into baseball, every activity into a batting average, a numbers game.
     "If you look at birds just to check a name off a list, a lot gets lost," Dolgan said. "There is less a connection to nature and joy of discovery. At the same time, I am keeping up with it. Looking at how many I've seen in Illinois, how many in Cook County. I report it on ebird.org."
     Ebird.org is an engaging, well-crafted website. There Dolgan listed the 22 birds we saw over the next hour — well, birds he saw. I sorta squinted in the direction he pointed, though the geese were my contribution; hard to miss geese.
     For those keeping score at home, in addition to my Canada geese, we noted examples of: blue-winged teal, northern shoveler, mallard, green-winged teal, killdeer, Wilson's snipe, lesser yellowlegs, greater yellowlegs, pectoral sandpiper, ring-billed gull, American herring gull, great egret, great blue heron, barn swallow, European starling, American robin, house finch, song sparrow, eastern meadowlark, red-winged blackbird and common grackle.

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Bob Dolgan spying a noteworthy bird on a watery mud flat in Northbrook.

Flashback 2013: Egg salad (eww) delicious for many

     Passover ends Sunday, and with it my annual stiff-arm refusal of hard-boiled eggs and all their manifestations.

     I don’t like egg salad.
     That’s it, end of column. Thank you very much for reading, please exit to your left and enjoy your visit with the other fine features in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.
     Still, here?
     Oh all right then. We are bound by the limits of the form, aren’t we? Ann Landers once left the last quarter of her column blank, when writing about her divorce, as a tribute to a marriage that ended prematurely. Very dramatic, though it was an extraordinary circumstance. Someone who made her living telling others how to manage their lives couldn’t just shrug when something so vital in her own life went off the rails. Smart.
     My marriage is fine, as far as I know. The egg salad though . . . I don’t like eggs hard-boiled, either. Which makes for an awkward moment at Passover, when my wife passes me the bowl of hard-boiled eggs, taking one for herself with a flourish of anticipatory joy. She really loves hard-boiled eggs.
     I shudder with visceral revulsion and quickly pass the bowl, averting my gaze as if it held kitty entrails. I do not, however, say, “I avoid these eggs because hard-boiled eggs are gross — bland white goo surrounding a yellow sphere of chalky disgust.”
     I don’t, in fact, say anything at all. Because I have learned a vital truth that, judging from my email, many adults have not mastered. One I would like to pass it on to you. Ready?
     You are not the final arbitrator of all things. No one is. I’m certainly not. While an educated person, proud holder of a degree from Northwestern University, my tastes are nevertheless not the template quality can be measured against. What I like, and what is good on some objective scale, assuming such a scale exists, are two separate things.
     This shouldn’t be a revelation. Yet so many just assume that what they like, and what is indeed good, bear more than an accidental relationship. So leap they do, aided by God, whom I’m beginning to define as: “the imaginary cosmic force that people conjure up to add weight to their own personal biases.”
     I wish more people understood this. On Sunday, I wrote about the utter greatness of “The Book of Mormon” musical, laying out, necessarily in abbreviated, canyon-floor-rushing-up-at me form, why I think it’s a superior work of art. This prompted a number of readers to write back along the lines of, “I saw ‘Book of Mormon’ the other day and it was the worst thing I have seen in years.”
     Period. Well, stop the presses. I’ll go tell the producers and they’ll close the show. Some writers, perhaps aware that something more is required, offer up rationale — it was “sophomoric,” which I take as the five-dollar word meaning it has swears in it. Or “racist,” which, thanks in part to the vigorous efforts of the Rev. Jesse Jacksons of the world, has gone from meaning “an unacceptable, even illegal act of racial hatred” to “anything that involves race that I don’t like.”
     Now, a solid case could be made for either complaint — that obscenity ruins a work by jarring tender sensibilities. Or that stating frank truths about any particular people — such as suggesting that Uganda is a poor and violent place where many people suffer from AIDS — is unacceptable racism in a world gone mad to flatter everyone at all times.
     But my correspondents didn’t say that — they just said categorically they didn’t like it, often that they didn’t like it because it wasn’t good. And I’m not embarrassing them by name, because to do so seems mean, since they are guilty of such a common lapse.
     As the years grind on, I’m starting to see we are all ego junkies, so busy shooting up our own opinions that, as junkies will do, we ignore the rest of the big blue world. I’m as guilty as anyone. I can’t tell you how many times, talking about opera, I’ll be whining about seeing Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1994, and what a soul-shattering experience of badness it was, only to be truly surprised when the person I’m talking to juts out his lower lip and says, in a small voice,“But I love Berg.”
     You lose friends that way. And boldly thundering your opinion, without any sort of explanation, assumes people care, and they do not, particularly if they don’t know you. That’s important enough to write a column about, I think, because if society is a continuum, where on one side is a hive of selfless bees all laboring mightily to make the communal honey, and on the other is Robinson Crusoe, padding along his island alone, we have swung about as far toward Crusoe as you can get and still occasionally catch sight of another person. Our politics are a disaster, our schools in crisis, faith a shambles, in large part — I believe . . . in my opinion — because each of us has become so enamored with ourselves, our tastes, our sensibilities, our lives, that we forget there are other people on this trip too. So enjoy your egg salad. I’m sure it’s wonderful stuff.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2013

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.

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