Why should Illinois medical laws be expected to fall in line with Catholic doctrine?

    What? The Illinois Legislature is out of session? Already? And here I want them to consider my Respect the Dead Act, requiring all male residents whose parent has died within the past 30 days to show up at a synagogue and recite the Mourner's Kaddish.
     Not familiar? You'll have to be, if my law passes. "Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra..." Or for those who don't understand Aramaic, which is everybody: "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world..." followed by similar sentiments.
     What's that? Jews forcing their end-of-life practices upon a gentile world just won't fly? One of the many downsides of being an extreme minority. Along with people feeling less inhibited about setting you on fire based on their own festering moral confusion.

     As someone who has hung out on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, site of Sunday's attack, at regular intervals since he was 13, the specter of Jews participating in a peaceful protest, drawing attention to the plight of the hostages in Gaza, being doused with fire, has rattled me more than my usual shiver at the horrors daily assaulting our senses. That could have been me, pausing by the protest to chat up the participants, on my way to the Ku Cha House of Tea, where I bought a pair of cute little tea pigs — round porcine objects intended to keep you company so you don't drink your tea alone...
     Then again, odds of my being there are slight lately. My parents don't live in Boulder anymore. We moved them here nearby three years ago, so we could take a more direct hand in their care.
     It's a job. My brother handles the endless paperwork. I do my share. There are continual decisions, and not easy ones. For instance, after my father's last check-up, the doctor said he should really see a cardiologist. He's 40 pounds overweight, and should be exercising regularly. This sedentary lifestyle is bad for his heart.
     My father is 92 years old and lost in a fog of dementia. I'm not going to force him to do hot yoga. Getting from the bed to the sofa is an excruciating process requiring a walker and close supervision. He's fallen in the past. He's not doing Pilates. Besides, we've tried to make him exercise and it doesn't work. He won't do it.
     So nix on diet, exercise, heart procedures. Right decision? Wrong decision? You can discuss — I consulted my brother, my mother and would have consulted my father, too, but he thinks he's still living in Boulder. As it is, he doesn't remember that he just ate lunch and wants to eat it again 10 minutes after he finished.
      You know who we didn't consult? Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich. Because we're not Catholic, and thus are not bound to Catholic religious doctrines— at least not those that the Supreme Court hasn't already converted into U.S. law.
      Nevertheless, there was the cardinal, lobbying the Illinois legislature to stall a bill that would allow the terminally ill to end their own lives. It's a complex issue, with the possibility of abuse. It's not personal to me, because it could never apply to my father: he has no rational discernment, no volition, and would agree to anything for a cookie. So he could never make a life-ending choice, beyond his refusal to exercise.
      Another Jewish superpower, however, is knowing that it's not all about me. You might have a fully-lucid parent dying in agony. And they, and you, and all that is moral and decent, might cry out for a way to shorten this pointless suffering.

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Check out Back When Books

     Monday I finally finished marching through Irwing Howe's "World of Our Fathers: The Journey of Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made." A long title but then, at 784 pages, it's a hefty book. Reading it took a while. But I was inspired to persevere, drawn through the volume, about the immigrant Jewish experience in the United States over the past century and a half, because of the wealth of detail, Howe's deft writing and relevancy, to me. It was filled with interest and poignancy, then again, it told the story of my family, more or less. And nothing spices up a work than when it reflects your own precious self.

     No sooner did I get to the end when the mail brought a new volume, "Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America 1890-1940," by Ewa Morawska. Okay, not just for general reading, but research for a project I'm working on.

    Not your cup of tea? That's okay, and the beauty of reading. You get to curate it for your own passions and taste.  You have a different personal story, and different interests, which is why I would direct your attention to the new advertisement running along the left side of everygoddamnday.com's home page that appeared Sunday and will run for the foreseeable future.

     It is from Back When Books, an online bookstore that specializes in laser-focused titles about everything from Chicago communities — Park Ridge, Maywood, Lake Bluff, and more — to specific celebrities: Dinah Shore, Robert Young, Jack Benny. There is much old time radio, much that I would call nostalgia. And nowadays who isn't looking back to the past with fondness, if not desperate yearning? Even if that past is the Great Depression and World War II. At least then, the enemy was across the ocean. Not in the house. Not in the seat of power, destroying us from within.

     In welcoming their patronage, I'd invite you to click on their ad and take a look around. I don't charge a subscription fee, or rattle the Go Fund Me cup. But just as, at the holidays, I encourage you to patronize Eli's Cheesecake as a way to make their advertising a viable business decision as opposed to mere charity, if you are looking for some diverting reading, I'd ask that you at least give the Back When Books web site two minutes of your time and attention, and see if you can't find a volume that catches your interest. Thank you.

Fight fiercely Harvard

      The president is venting his fury — a sentence I could embroider on a pillow and use to begin every column from now until 2029, since off-gassing his bottomless magisterial displeasure is the spoon stirring our national existence, now and for the foreseeable future.
     His vendetta against Harvard University, our nation's preeminent institution of higher learning, has raged for weeks: barring it from accepting foreign students, yanking back its tax exempt status, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support. I'm expecting the Army Corps of Engineers to fill Harvard Yard with coils of concertina wire next.

John Harvard

     My first thought was sympathy for Harvard's international students. Thousands of young people, a full quarter of the student body. Sure, many are no doubt scions of wealth, pampered and privileged and shipped off to lay the foundations for a life of same. Somebody has to pay full tuition.
     But some must have scrabbled their way there. Imagine studying in a wretched Third World slum. Hard work and smiling fate contrive to get you into Harvard, and then, while you're proudly wearing your new maroon sweatshirt around your shantytown, the president this buffoon blocks your way because ... because ... remind me, what does Trump have against Harvard?
     Oh right, they didn't bend their knee fast enough, didn't provide enough dirt on foreign-born students so he could choreograph their removal to Salvadoran El Salvadorian prisons.
     Not that I have a particular fondness for Harvard — though the boys at the Lampoon were indulgent to me when I was writing my college pranks book, allowing me the run of their library and archives. We shouldn't focus too long on one harm, because there are so many.
     The president is a whirling dervish of destruction, undermining our National Park Service here, our public health system there. It's hard to keep up.
     On Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for the crime of hanging pictures of Black folk. That hurt, because under her tenure, the gallery became perhaps the most vibrant wing of the Smithsonian. I love visiting it.
     This is a war on history — a literal white-washing — and all of us have a part to play, by being diligent stewards of the past.
     For instance, discussing the current assault, I told my wife: "Harvard was occupied by the British."
     What I meant was the place is very old, has been through a lot and will get through this, too.
     The very old part is true — founded in 1636, our nation's first university.
     But as often happens when you fire history from the hip, I missed. Plug "Did the British occupy Harvard?" into Google, and its AI chatbot pipes up with, "Yes, Harvard buildings were occupied by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War. In 1775, the Provincial Congress commandeered Harvard's buildings, and they were used to house 1,600 British soldiers, according to the Harvard Gazette."
     Being a trained professional, I then read the Harvard Gazette article Google AI linked to. Which did not say that. Sixteen hundred British troops weren't housed at Harvard; it was 1,600 American troops. An important distinction.
     How can everyone keep going on about how AI will eat our lunch, take our jobs and become our overlords? It can't even read a lucid article and differentiate between the British, who occupied nearby Boston, and the colonials, who settled in Cambridge, waiting for George Washington to assemble his Continental Army.

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Google AI learns fast. On Sunday it was this.

On Monday it was this.

The nation won't go to hell any faster if you pause to admire butterflies

 

     Let's see. On Saturday we looked at a certain president who's name long ago began to taste like vomit in our mouths, and his vigorous efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history because ... well, I really have no idea why, exactly. Perhaps a legal way to kick people he hates without committing actual atrocities. Or maybe he feels it'll make haters like himself look better, generally, and perhaps instill a habit of casting a soft glow of nostalgic faux patriotism over the harshness of reality, an obscuring pink fog that might linger to when history finally, please God, has a chance to finally look back on our current epoch of national shame.

     So that means today we can shift to some beautiful butterflies I saw Saturday at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Because I think it's smart to alternate. Because we've got ... 44 months left in his second term, assuming the Constitution isn't entirely scrapped by then.

    Butterflies. How could I spot so many? Easy, a highly trained naturalist such as myself can induce a kind of spiritual self-hypnosis where I can look out over an expense of field and flower and just see a single butterfly, resting on a leaf 50 yards away, and sense its presence through deep spiritual bond with the natural universe ...  
     Kidding. Though I see the value of these lies — they're easy and fun too!. No, we went to "Butterflies & Blooms," the enclosed butterfly space at the Garden (writing the self-aggrandizing fabrication above, my first thought was, "Geez, how come libs don't get to just make shit up." My second was, "If the self-inflating brag you're tossing out isn't true, how stupid do you have to be to feel enhanced by saying it?")
     Sorry, butterflies. My wife's idea to go. Can't very well object to that. "No way, dear, I'm not wasting my time ... well, fuck butterflies!" 

     Not my brand. To enter the Butterflies & Blooms pavilion, you go through what is in essence an airlock, a set of double doors, with the interior door having an extra barrier of plastic strips, like in a warehouse freezer, to thwart a butterfly jailbreak. On the way out, you're checked twice, once by a staffer, then by looking in a mirror yourself, to make sure no butterflies are piggybacking on you, escaping into the greater world. It's like visiting Stateville.

Common morpho

     Having a sympathetic heart, my wife noticed a number of butterflies clinging to the mesh, as if gazing wistfully at the unfettered blue, yearning to breath free, and expressed words to that effect. I pointed out that there are plenty of hungry birds out there and, for all we know, we were projecting our love of freedom onto the butterflies. Perhaps they're thinking, "Thank God I'm safe in here!" 

    Our "love of freedom." Ah, hahahahaha. I crack myself up sometime. For a supposedly freedom loving people, we sure grabbed the boot of totalitarianism and pulled it down firmly upon our own necks. The hideous thing is ...

    Butterflies! See how hard this can be? Have we done the etymological (as opposed to the entymological) dissection of "butterfly" yet? Whence the "butter"? That's a stumper. I'm going to guess the color — those little pale yellow butterflies you see, when not in exhibits like "Butterflies & Blooms," but flitting about fields in the greater world.

     Pretty to think so. Especially compared to the theory floated by the Oxford English Dictionary, which tosses up its hands: "The reason of the name is unknown; Wedgwood points out a Du. synonym botershchijte..., which suggests that the inset was so called from the appearance of its excrement."

    Of course it does. Botershchijte. My Dutch isn't so hot, but that word looks like "butter shit" and ... indeed it is. That's perfect. Hopeful me, thinking the insect is named for its modest butter yellow denizens, when in reality the insect was named after its own shit. How au courant. Can you think of another animal named after its excrement?

     Actually, circling back to politics, which return tomorrow: "Trump's America." It does fit, and if that logic works for butterflies, then, well, why not?

White peacock

Out with the experts, in with the flunkies

 

LL Cool J, by Kehinde Wiley (National Portait Gallery)

     As a child, my favorite part of the Smithsonian was the Air & Space Museum. How could you not love all those planes? The delicate wood and fabric 1903 Wright Flyer. The indefatigable gray Ryan monoplane The Spirit of St. Louis. The orange Grumman Gulfhawk, which I had a personal fondness for because I had constructed a model of it — twirl the propeller and wheels retracted.
     But I grew up, and began to really appreciate the National Portrait Gallery. For the hall of presidents, the gorgeous August St. Gaudens bronzes. But also the way its collection strained to embrace all America. It wasn't mired in the dusty past, but alive with the vibrancy of today.
     You learned stuff at the National Portrait Gallery. The museum didn't just hang rapper LL Cool J, but juxtaposed it with John Singer Sargent's portrait of John D. Rockefeller, inviting visitors to notice how artist Kehinde Wiley, asked by VHI to paint the singer, used the oil titan's pose to convey power and authority.

William "Kyle" Carpenter by Mike McGregor

  

     The sort of "divisive narrative," apparently, that inspired our president, as part of his war on history, at least history that includes Black folk, to fire National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet on Friday, even though Sajet does not work for him and the president doesn't have the authority to do so. What cares a dictator for such niceties?
     What Donald Trump does care about — not that he ever visited the gallery nor saw the art — is the vexing display of works like Mike McGregor's photo of Lance Corporal William Carpenter, who used his body as a shield to protect his fellow Marines from an exploding grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. 
    Such a photo makes a viewer think, about many things really, including the way government policies have real effects on real people. We have no idea how the damage to the government, even of the Trump administration's first four months, will affect the people of the United States.

    And if the administration has its way, we never will.
    A thinking population, alive to he possibility of personal courage, the meaning of sacrifice for a higher ideal, would never tolerate a liar, bully, fraud and traitor like Donald Trump. So sweep away the dynamic director, whom Trump called "a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position."

    In with another fawning toady, though I imagine Fox News is running out of second string hosts by now.  No matter. There is no shortage of groveling cowards ready to betray their nation and everything it represents for a steady salary. When the concentration camps move from El Salvador to downstate Illinois, there will be no trouble hiring guards.

     Next we'll see a purge of the artworks. I'm already planning to be in Washington in July, to rendezvous with a certain young lady I'll be eager to meet. I was looking forward, should a spare moment present itself, to hurry over to the National Portrait Gallery to enjoy its riches. That visit will be tinged with melancholy, knowing that the edgier material will be heading to storage, replaced by 19th century patriotic tableaus and Rogers Groups of Lincoln consulting his generals and boys fishing.

     I assume the portrait of Trump can stay. Heck, they'll probably add more. A National Portrait Gallery filled with portraits of Donald Trump — that would be a moving musem-going experience.

Flashback 2008: Who's on first? Hillary hailed as Everest conqueror, but it was Tenzing

     When I wrote my book on failure, I wanted to consider a vast, arduous undertaking where the achievement of the goal and the non-achievement of it are very similar, very close. I knew that mountaineers had gotten within a couple hundred feet of the summit of Mount Everest and then been forced back.

    So I wrote a chapter, "Were the Mountain Smaller," about all the expeditions that DIDN'T make it to the top of Everest before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary — in that order — first reached the mountain's zenith.

     That still eludes most people commenting on the event ("History," Napoleon supposedly said, "is a lie agreed upon.") And since it is Mount Everest climbing season, again. And we are treated to photos of mobs of climbing reaching the summit. And are reminded, again, that Edmund Hillary reached the summit on May 29, 1953. I thought I would mention, again, that he wasn't the first.

     This is from when the column filled a page, and I've retained the very spot-on complaint of a downstate reader.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Perhaps it is the expected haziness after more than half a century. Perhaps it is the respect afforded to the newly dead. But most obituaries of New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary, 88, who joined the choir invisible Friday, ignored one salient and significant point.
     He may not have been the first man on the summit of Mt. Everest.
     Yes, the Associated Press calls him "the first person to stand atop the world's highest mountain" and credits modesty for his initial reluctance to claim he got there ahead of his climbing partner, Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay.
     "He was humble to the point that he only acknowledged being the first man atop Everest long after the death of Tenzing."
     That's one way to look at it.
     Another is that Tenzing was really the first man there, a fact initially disregarded by Hillary and his team, since Tenzing was the porter, the valet, one of countless human pack animals who had been humping crates of champagne up the side of Everest for British expeditions for decades. In their view, Tenzing couldn't be the first man atop Everest, whether he beat Hillary there or not, because he wasn't quite a man, and they were shocked when, after the ascent, the joyous Nepalese greeted Tenzing as the conqueror of Everest.
     There isn't room here to lay out the whole controversy, but suffice it to say that I believe Tenzing got there ahead of Hillary, despite Hillary's claims after his partner was safely dead. Tenzing had to be first because otherwise the Brits would never have been coy about this for so long. You could feel their frustration at this unexpected equal appearing before them, as if materializing out of the thin mountain air.

AND I DID IT ALL BY MYSELF!!!

     Who else missed the big asterisk by Edmund Hillary's name? The Washington Post missed it, as did the Los Angles Times, the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune ("the first person to reach the summit.") The Sun-Times obituary was vague, though the headline overstated the case -- "First to scale Everest" -- as headlines will do.
     Besides this column, the only paper to remember the controversy was the New York Times. Which is why, let me remind you, we need more than one newspaper.

DOWNSTATERS GRAB THEIR PITCHFORKS

     I don't print many letters because to do so seems coasting. But I knew, after tossing a sharp word like "hick" at my readers in the hinterlands, that I was then morally obligated to let them have a whack at me in print.
     This response from Ralph Moses, though a tad long, seemed the most printable, both because it wasn't mean-spirited and because he hails from the grandly named, if distant, town of Golden Eagle, Ill.

     Mr. Moses writes:

     After reading your January 9th column, The Buck Stops Here, three times to make sure I understood what you were saying, I started to write a letter to the editor about how self-centered, ill-informed, arrogant and boorish your statements were.
     But then I decided I had much more to say than could be fit into a Letter To The Editor and decided to go directly to the source.
     So, let me offer you a different perspective on a few things.
     First. Chicago is not the economic engine that drives Illinois, much less the entire Midwest. Rather, it rides on the back of those people. Let me remind you that the Chicago Board of Trade made its fame and fortune trading corn, soybeans, wheat and other grains. Likewise, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange started by trading butter and eggs, then later moved into cattle, hogs, pork bellies and other livestock. Those traders didn't even handle the products; just took a cut of the profits!
     Those same exchanges handle lots(!) of money(!) which, in turn, drives the banking system with names like Bank One and LaSalle National Bank. The brokerage firms employ thousands of runners, phone clerks, accountants and lawyers. In the past, the Stockyards used to employ thousands of immigrant workers handling the cattle, hogs and grain that came through Chicago.
     None of those people would have a job had it not been for the people in the hinterlands.
      Second. It is called the Chicago Transit Authority, not the Illinois Transit Authority! The last time I checked, the CTA didn't even cross the boundaries of Cook County! The CTA doesn't come within 300 miles of where I currently live. Why, it didn't even come within 10 miles of where I lived when I lived in Oak Lawn.
     So I ask you this. Why is your problem my responsibility? Why should the City of Chicago, with a population approaching 3 million, be looking to residents of Golden Eagle, population about 200, for a handout?
      Finally, if Chicago is indeed the economic engine of the Midwest, then it is us hicks that should be looking to Chicago for a handout!
     Now, regarding our representatives at the State Capital: Their pork barrel projects, political bickering, and other bull are things that you and I can agree on.
     So I invite you to come visit me and we can discuss the state of the State while I slop the hogs and feed the chickens. We can sit on the front porch swing, sip some cider and commiserate about the graft among aldermen at City Hall (yours and mine).

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     A joke at the expense of city slickers seems in order. Calvin Trillin wrote the following of New York and, despite his claim of uniqueness, it is also true of Chicago:
     Ask yourself why the New York subway system, alone of all the mass transit systems of the world, has maps inside rather than outside the trains. It's to force you to get on the wrong train in order to find out where you're going. You decipher the map to discover that the first step in reaching your destination is to get off the wrong train at the next stop.
         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 13, 2008

I'll park my feathery ass wherever I please!

      "Anthropomorphize" is the five-dollar word of the day.
     I'm assuming regular readers of this blog already know what it means. But for the benefit of newcomers, who seem to arrive daily in platoons, we'll crack open the Oxford English Dictionary:
     "To attribute a human form or personality to." 
     Hmmm. Not quite a satisfying definition. I didn't consider the "form" part — if you look at the headlights and grill of a car and see a face, you are anthropomorphizing the car. 
    And "personality" seems too broad. I would define it as "ascribing human qualities to objects or animals not in possession of them." Like detecting a note of defiance in this bird parking himself where he may, the sign be damned.
    That's ridiculous, of course, because birds can't read. What I am doing is projecting my own sense of "fuck you" defiance, which you'd think would be softening after a few days of vacation — spent busily working, of course, just not at newspaper stuff. Except for the ... ah ... important obit that I recast on my first day off. Just worried that the guy would die while the older, not-so-sharp-or-good version was kneeling in the on-deck circle. You can't say, "Whoops, I was taking time off, so let the inferior obit slip by..."

     Well you can. I suppose I'm worried about being yelled at by people who left years ago. Muscle memory. Whatever works...