Flashback 2006: Sometimes with the heroism comes the horror

 

Northbrook Memorial Day parade, 2024

     I almost hit you with a "Happy Memorial Day." Then thought about what the holiday represents — a day to honor fallen American military men and women —  and pulled back. I'm on vacation this week, so will instead wish you a restful, reflective day. And hope that, in between the barbecues and baseball games, you think of the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice so we could enjoy the freedom we still possess, despite the best efforts of the vandals who have seized our government to destroy it. 

      I have no sense of security or confidence that this freedom will last to Memorial Day 2026. But here's hoping. This ran in 2006, when the column filled a page, and I've kept the original subheadings. Three officers were reprimanded after the Haditha massacre, and of the eight Marines charged, seven had their cases dismissed; one had most of the charges against him dropped, pleaded guilty to a single count of dereliction of duty, and given a reduction in rank and a pay cut.

OPENING SHOT

     Details of the atrocity the military believes occurred last November — the murder of two dozen Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha by U.S. Marines — have been trickling out over the last few days.
     Just in time for Memorial Day; another bitter irony in an increasingly bitter war.
     Needless to say, this alarming crime will thrill our enemies, while providing grist for those who would decamp from Iraq immediately, no matter what effect our leaving might have on this unfortunate nation we have placed under our care.
     The rest of us, Americans who are proud of our country, or try to be, will be left confused, puzzled and sad. We are the good guys. Aren't we? How did Marines — the Few, the Proud — end up shooting babies?

'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS'

     "Everybody feels fear," the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Manual states. "The occurrences of war will not unfold like clockwork."
     Anyone expecting a gung-ho guide to the sweet smell of victory is in for a surprise, reading the book. Words such as "chaos," "uncertainty" "disorder" and "horror" stand out.
     I read it eight years ago, on a plane heading to California, when the Marines invited me out to Camp Pendleton to observe their amphibious invasion maneuvers. I went there laden with the standard civilian's bias against the military as a bunch of lunkheads shooting things, and came away deeply impressed, with both the intelligence and the rigor of the training, and the discipline and integrity of the men and women of the Corps.
     The Haditha massacre will be big news in the weeks and months to come, as the investigation concludes and the prosecution and punishment of those involved unfolds. It will be put to all sorts of purposes by all sorts of people.
     But we need to remember that this lone horror is not a general indictment of our country or of our military. Put hundreds of thousands of troops in a swirling, confused, murderous chaos such as Iraq, kill off 2,700 of them in endless surprise attacks sprung in the midst of often-hostile civilian populations, and this kind of breakdown is inevitable. I am not justifying it, just saying that it almost had to happen, eventually.
     Nobody joins the U.S. Marine Corps because they want to slaughter little girls in desolate desert towns. The training is designed to avoid needless brutality. That does not mean we have tamed war. It is awful, and it does awful things to people. Right or wrong, we sent our fellow citizens over there to do a job, and something bad happened to a few of them.
     "Support Our Troops" doesn't mean applaud when the sun shines and turn your face away when it rains. They were ours when they rolled into Baghdad. They are ours now, even those who are snapped and broken and shamed and facing the justice they were supposedly fighting to protect.

MEMORIAL DAY, 2006

     The old flag was torn. It had blown against a sharp section of aluminum downspout and ripped. So we took it along with us to the Friday fish dinner at the local VFW Hall and dropped it off to be respectfully burned.
     That was after last Fourth of July. Which meant that in advance of today, Memorial Day, I had to buy a new flag. I was glad for the chance. The old flag had come with our house and was small and polyester and cheap. I took the opportunity to get something bigger and better-made — 3 by 5 feet, nylon, with embroidered stars.
      I love the American flag. I find it beautiful, not only in the harmony of red and white stripes, of stars on a blue background, but for what it represents: freedom and liberty, courage and honor and justice. I see the flag, and think of Rangers climbing up a cliff at Normandy Beach into the teeth of German machine-gunners. And the Statue of Liberty. And baseball.
      I remember, after 10 days in stinking Haitian slums and dusty back roads, talking to people born under life's boot with no hope and no chance, finally catching a glimpse of that red, white and blue banner snapping on a tall flagpole in front of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. The heart swells in a way you never forget.
      That said, I find it odious and frightening that Congress, in one of its periodic spasms of cowardice, is contemplating an amendment to the Constitution mandating respect for the flag. The flag-burning bill passed in the House and is a toss-up in the Senate.
      As much as I love the flag, and what it represents, I also understand there are people who see that flag and think of every wrong ever committed in its name, from the slaughter of the Indians to My Lai to, apparently, Haditha. Those are also facts, as real as Normandy Beach, and while I would disagree with such a viewpoint, I can't honestly say it's unjustifiable. It's their right to think that way.
      So far. I'll tell you this. No foreign dictator ever put the fear of losing our freedom into the heart of so many Americans as Congress is doing now. If you can't burn a flag today, tomorrow you might be forced to salute it.
      This morning, I'll put out my new flag — it really glows in the sun — drag my boys away from the Xbox and march them to the front porch, where we'll put our hands over our hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Not because anyone is compelling us. Because I want to; because I think it is important to teach them patriotism.
     But if the Senate passes that ban . . . well, I like to think that I'll stand in the middle of the intersection of Madison and State at high noon, hold a flaming flag over my head and go to jail to protest the erosion of our freedom. I don't know if I'd have the guts. But I do know I'd never be able to fly the flag with the same pride. I might not be able to fly it at all. Because it wouldn't mean the same thing. It would be a banner of coerced respect, of the majority, misled by their craven leaders, muzzling the shrill and discontented few among us.
     It wouldn't be my flag anymore.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     A military joke seems in order today:
     As a group of soldiers stood in formation at an Army base, the drill sergeant said, "All right! All you idiots fall out."
     As the rest of the squad wandered away, one soldier remained at attention.
     The drill instructor walked over until he was eye-to-eye with him, and then raised a single eyebrow. The soldier smiled and said, "Sure was a lot of 'em, huh, sir?"
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 29, 2006

'That's human nature'

National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

     "What makes a young, educated person from Chicago do this?" my wife said at breakfast Saturday morning, not needing to explain that the person in question is accused murderer Elias Rodriguez, and the "this" is the killing of two young Jews, Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, both Israeli embassy staffers, in front of the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. on Wednesday night.
     "Because he's worked up over the Palestinian situation," I replied. "He's so upset about innocent people being killed that he kills innocent people. That's human nature."

No law for some is no law for all

Musee d'Orsay

  

     The Trump administration is "actively looking at suspending habeas corpus," according to Stephen Miller.
     The most important thing to understand is, if an immigrant can be snatched off the street without legal process, so can you. Because the same protection being stripped from him is also being stripped from you. Because nobody can be certain who is being bundled into that van by the masked federal police force. Because there will no longer be law to answer to. Immigrants — illegal, legal, that's just a fig leaf, for now — are the start, the test, the toe tipped into the waters of unchecked fascism. If we can't stop it now, we won't be able to stop it later.
    That's all I have to say. Enjoy the day.

AI genie out of the bottle, and that granted wish always brings trouble

     Lunch had been a handful of cashews, munched in the car on my way to Pullman to listen to sixth grade girls talk about their lives.
     Now it was 2 p.m., heading home, and glory be, a White Castle ahead on 111th Street. I pulled into the drive-thru line.
     Should I order two cheese sliders or three? I have my svelte figure to consider, so called up whatever AI helpmate crouches on my iPhone, like a troll under a bridge, and asked: How many calories in a White Castle cheese slider? Answer: 340.
     Hmm. I thought. That isn't right. The true figure had to be fewer — a McDonald's cheeseburger is about 300 — and ordered two. Which, later exploration determined, was what AI had in mind. White Castle considers a pair of sliders to be one serving. Hence the mistake. It was as if I asked AI for the price of a single shoe.
     The "this isn't right" reflex is hard to teach a computer, apparently, given the glaring wrongness artificial intelligence routinely serves up — the six-fingered hands and uncanny valley fake people who are somehow off, a little or a lot.
     That reflex should have kicked in for anyone reading the "Heat Wave" section jammed into the Sunday paper. The special section was produced by an outside vendor, King Features, and handled by the Sun-Times circulation department. Someone missed the AI-generated imaginary book titles in the summer reading list on Page 62.
     Not AI, but human failure. Someone apparently read the section's painfully generic listicles without thinking, "This is embarrassing."
     Or maybe no one read it at all. That's being investigated. Someone dropped the ball. And when trusted people don't do their jobs in newspapering, catastrophe can result, as happened here. The good name of the Chicago Sun-Times, dragged backward through the mud, coast to coast.
     Sunday I had missed the section entirely. Wrapped in the funnies, it went unseen directly to our recycling pile. Monday passed without remark.
     On Tuesday morning, Bluesky started snickering, with trolls joining hands and dancing in a gleeful circle, chanting. The Sun-Times was damned for cutbacks, damned for laying off staffers. I'm surprised nobody mentioned Wingo.

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Flashback 1987: IIT simulator puts budding engineers on right track

     I wrote a reaction to the Heat Index embarrassment for today. But finishing it, I thought, "This should be in the paper." My bosses agreed. So you'll have to wait until tomorrow for that, though it is on the Sun-Times web site now if you want to read it sooner.

    Until then, the column mentions this story, written for the school guide 38 years ago, shortly before I was hired on staff. I think it's still interesting. IIT still trains railroad engineers and operators, but I couldn't find evidence that the simulator is still around.

     Tim Reed, Wes Maness and Tom Joyce took a diesel locomotivfe through the Powder River Basin last month without leaving Chicago. 
     They pulled out of Gillette, Wyoming, and steered five locomotives and 110 railroad cars through the region's coal country. The 15,000-ton load, said Maness, in a deep Texas drawl, was "almost a mile and a quarter of train."
    It wasn't what they were used to in Chicago.
     The cabin rattled and shook. The clackety-clack from the wheels alternated with the shriek of steel against steel as the train rounded a curve. A whistle blast wailed mournfully.
     Reed, Maness and Joyce were taking a trip toward becoming railroad engineers. The locomotive they were driving is the Research and Locomotive Evaluator/Simulator, know as RALES, at the IIT Research Institute on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
     Learning to become an engineer at IIT means more than just riding the RALES. Huge trains need to be handled delicately, "like driving a car without your shoe," said Maness. "One nudge can tear the train in half."
     Reed, sitting at the controls, kept one hand on the throttle, the other on the dynamic brake. He gazed steadily at the view ahead of him, trying to find the right combination of throttle and brake that would keep the train from either stopping cold or gaining so much speed tha tit would go out of control down a steep incline.
     "It's very realistic," said Maness, who has been with the railroad 13 years, five as a brakeman and eight as a conductor. "I wish we had more time with this thing. It's scary."
     The hills of the Powder River Basin are from a film, projected on a white wall in a darkened room. At the center of the room is the upper part of a diesel locomotive, mounted on six large hydraulic pistons that gently shake the cabin back and forth. Out of sight is a brightly lighted control room, loaded with monitors, color data readouts and dials.
     A computer directs the hydraulics, the film and the sound effects to simulate real situations.   
     As Tim Reed moved the throttle, the film sped up. If the locomotive slowed down too suddenly, the computer delivered a persuasive "thud" that lurched the cabin in the same way the trailing cars would bump into a slowing locomotive.
     Reed, Manes and Joyce, all from Wichita Falls, Texas, are in the final stages of their training to become engineers. They were practicing on the RALES for their examination, which will determine whether they will be permitted to make the step from conductor to engineer.
     In the old days, they would have been tested by a human road foreman sitting in the cab next to them. Now aspiring engineers are graded by the unflinching eye of the computer.
     "The machine doesn't care how big you are, how much you talk, or don't talk," said Laurence Rohter, a senior engineers at the institute.
     The engineers are required to perform a variety of maneuvers. They go up and down steep grades, execute unplanned stops and read signal sequences.
     "It's a lot more difficult than I imagined," said Maness. "A lot more than just tooting the whistle. An engineer has to think two miles ahead and a mile and a half behind."
     RALES cost $8 million to build, and went into operation in 1983. When it isn't being rented to railroads (at $250 an hour) to train engineers, it is used to test new equipment and "human stress factors."
     For example, instead of incapacitating a working locomotive to install a new type of control panel, the panel can be tested under laboratory conditions on the RALES. The cabin can also be made to reproduce challenging situations, such as 120 degree temperatures, to see how crews operate.
     "This is as close to real as you can get," said Maness, studying the map of his route's slope. He tapped the top of a hill with his finger.
     "A 15-second wait right there might take me four miles to correct. it's possible at any point to fail this test in 15 to 20 seconds."
     Meanwhile, Tom Joyce studied the same map, giving instruction to Tim Reed, driving the RALES train.
     "The minute you get off this hill, going 21, you set your brakes up," he said.
     A graph on the computer shifted as the air brake clicked in on each car.
     "If you don't set up the brakes right, the cars will bunch into you," said Joyce. "There's 100 feet of slack [in the train]."
     Reed points to the various controls and describes what, in driving a train, he has to be aware of.
     "You're looking at your amp, to see how much power you have, looking at the air flow indicator, to see how much air you have to stop with. This is just like sitting in an engine."

             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 10, 1987

      

NYC statue shows our limitations

"Grounded in the Stars," by Thomas J. Price (Photo courtesy of Times Square Alliance)

     At lunchtime Monday I walked a Rocky Patel cigar from the Iwan Ries cigar shop on Wabash to Gibsons on Rush, pausing to smile at the Irving Kupcinet statue south of Trump Tower.
     I knew Kup. He enjoyed a good cigar, and I considered walking over and blowing a puff in his direction, as a benediction. But time was short, so I kept going, wishing, once again, that his left hand, currently extended in a sort of "I give you the city" wave, could somehow be rearranged into a gesture more fitting to the namesake of the building that replaced his newspaper home.
     The Kup statue did not cause a lot of controversy, which is a shame because the Sun-Times columnist liked nothing more than to stir the pot. He loved to call out racists, and sprang out of the blocks early — in the 1940s he would catalog the snubs suffered by Black soldiers and entertainers, and scolded the Chicago Bar Association for refusing membership to Blacks, claiming to be a social club and not a professional organization. Kup pointed out that social club dues are not tax-deductible. Suddenly the CBA saw the light.
     He'd have a field day with the outcry after "Grounded in the Stars," the realistic statue of a 12-foot tall Black woman unveiled in Times Square April 29. The New York Times called the reaction a "roiling debate," though it's really part of the frenzied purge of Black people from American institutions, government and history. The howl of hurt over the statue, the work of London sculptor Thomas J. Price, is not a discussion, but the typical self-own that racists do when confronted with people unlike themselves doing otherwise ordinary activities — riding a bus, sitting a lunch counter, being represented as a statue — while in the process of being Black.
     “This is what they want us to aspire to be?” the Times quoted Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, gasping. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He called it, “a DEI statue."
The overweight crack is unjustified — I'd say she's of standard heft found in most people in this country and looks like she could snap Jesse Watters like a breadstick.
     As for anonymous, honoring symbolic women is something this country excels at, from the 19-foot "Statue of Freedom" atop the Capitol building that Watters' pals recently got off the hook for invading and defiling on Jan. 6, 2021, to a certain large gal in a spiked hat standing at the entrance of New York Harbor, given to the United States by France back in the day when we were smart enough to welcome people who want to be Americans.
     Chicago is peppered with statues of imaginary women, from the golden "Statue of the Republic" in Hyde Park to the way cool art deco Ceres atop the Board of Trade.
     The city has an anonymous woman at its heart — the Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza — a woman's head, rendered in the same COR-TEN steel as the building behind it. Yes, when it was unveiled in 1967, Chicagoans boggled. Confronted with the female face Picasso had been drawing and painting for half a century, they saw everything from a praying mantis to a baboon.
     But that's par for the course. Bigotry makes people see what isn't there. David Marcus, a Fox News digital columnist, looked at the placid visage of "Grounded in the Stars" and saw "an angry Black lady." I'd call her expression somewhere between serene and bored.

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Irv Kupcinet, by Preston Jackson

"Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris"

     The "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" show at the Art Institute is small. Not Caravaggio small — that 2023 offering had just two of the master's paintings, plus three works influenced by him. 

     The Kahlo show is a handful of her paintings over three rooms, well larded with ephemera — a love letter from Kahlo, in English, not particularly poetic ("I love you my Nick. I am so happy to think I love you, to think you wait for me..."), Kahlo's Parisian address book. Too many examples of books assembled by Reynolds, an American bookbinder who had a salon in Paris, supercharged by her partner, Marcel Duchamp, and his work, along with surrealist pals like Salvador Dali, and various pals such as Alexander Calder and Jean Cocteau, are included.

      The Reynolds collection is owned by the Art Institute, and kudos to them for realizing they could generate far more interest than it ever could garner alone by strapping the trove to the rocket of Kahlo, her houseguest for 32 days in 1939. Without Kahlo, you couldn't prod museum goers into the "Mary Reynolds, Bookbinder" show if you used bayonettes. 
     We took in the show Sunday — the place was packed, Kahlo having exploded over the past few decades into a cultural icon for her general badassery — the unflinching gaze at herself in all her broken strangeness, her unstoppable back story. Salma Hayek's smoking portrayal in a 2002 biop didn't hurt.
    To me, she's folk art — too inexpert to be anything else, but making up in color and panache what she lacks in technical skill. You can't but admire someone willing to paint themselves as an arrow-ridden stag, even if the stag isn't quite standing in the forest so much as floating above it.

     Enough. I'm not going to be the guy dissing Frida Kahlo. She made the most of the talents she had, which is all any of us can do. And I cared enough about her to make a point to go see the show. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the show is expressed in the museum's web page about it, which opens: "Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s work for the first time in the Art Institute galleries, this exhibition..." Really? The first time? Kinda late to the party, are they not? The Art Institute has been taking pains to be more inclusive, to try to proactively avoid the lash of the cultural warriors, and Kahlo checks a lot of boxes: female, Mexican, struggling with disabilities. 

     Not to transgress against art by reducing her to her specific qualities, which is the original sin of identity politics. To be a great artist, you need to combine image and impact, to transcend your materials and your limitations and become something more than what you are. Kahlo clears that bar with room to spare.

      "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" runs until July 13.