D-Day is a reminder — we have to fight for freedom

     Friday is June 6. Those of a certain vintage will mentally add, "D-Day."
     It's not an official holiday; rather a solemn anniversary, like Dec. 7 or Sept. 11 or Jan. 6. One of the momentous events that shaped our world. If you're unfamiliar — and some are — June 6, 1944, was when the Allied Expeditionary Force hit the beaches in Normandy, France, beginning to push the Nazis out of Europe.
      Normally I'd put out the flag. But it's been displayed in front of my house since Memorial Day. Some shrink from patriotism, given the hard right turn into darkness our country is taking. Me, I lean into it with the fervor of a fight trainer urging his boxer, flat on his back on the canvas: "C'mon, get up, you mug! Get up!"
     So I keep the flag flying. I'll say the pledge and conduct my other little June 6 tradition — posting the opening clip of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." The surging ocean and steel tank traps. The little landing craft, motoring up to the beach, bristling with German machine-gun emplacements. The Americans, led by Tom Hanks, chewing tobacco, praying, joking, puking. The raw courage of the moment.
     You have to wonder if Americans would hit the beaches today. Why not leave the Nazis controlling Europe? We certainly seem willing to let the Russians have Ukraine.
     Were we different people back then? Not really. After the Germans invaded Poland and war broke out — Sept. 1, 1939, to throw another date you — a Gallup Poll showed 88% of Americans were against fighting to free Europe. Two-thirds didn't want to even provide arms to Great Britain, since doing so risked antagonizing Mr. Hitler.
     That changed, after the Wehrmacht rolled over France. Belgium. Norway, the Netherlands, Greece — 11 nations in all. We could see where this was headed. Totalitarianism always grasps for more. It never stops until it's stopped.
      America is slow to rouse. Two years after World War II broke out, we were happy to sit on our hands. Until Imperial Japan did us, and the world, an enormous favor by bombing Pearl Harbor. Even then, while prodded to declare war on Japan, we didn't include their allies, the Germans. Rather, the Nazis declared war on us. We didn't jump; we were pushed.
      Would we wade ashore into a blood red tide at Normandy Beach again? During COVID, millions of Americans rebelled from doing anything for the common good, no matter how small. Sacrifice infringed upon their personal liberties. How could anyone imagined we'd climb ropes up the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, into the teeth of the German machine guns, when we won't wear a cotton mask?
      We grew to hate the Nazis — vicious sheep following a murderous madman, who made these rambling speeches, raging against his enemies — Jews and just about any nationality that wasn't German. They had no freedom of speech, no redress in the courts. The Gestapo showed up and took you away, and you were never heard from again. We didn't want to live in a country where secret police pluck people off the street in broad daylight and drag them off to nightmarish prisons.

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'Better I should know'

 

     You know what I value? A really good salad. Such as this festival of food served Wednesday at Taco Diablo in Evanston. I've written about Taco Diablo before, when I first visited in 2017, focusing on its first-rate, welcome-to-hell interior design. And I used to really enjoy their bespoke tacos. But then I settled in on this grilled shrimp salad, with orange vinaigrette dressing, and now never order anything else.
     It's the rare salad that I can't even finish, though that may be a function of my talking too much when I'm with the buddy I always meet at Taco Diablo.
     But that isn't why I'm writing this.
     I'm writing this because when the salad arrived, I apologized to my tablemate — saying, "I hope this isn't a bush league move" or words to that effect — as I snapped a photo of my meal.
     I know. Photographing your food is very 2010. And I like to think of myself as a sophisticated person, someone who knows which little fork goes with which amuse-bouche. So documenting lunch ... is it de trop? Bad form? I like to think there is a certain gee whiz innocence about it. I hate to imagine there are people thinking, "Gosh, I'd love to have lunch with Neil Steinberg, but I know that when the food arrives he's going to whip out his damn phone and take a picture and I just want to SINK INTO THE FLOOR AND DIE!!!"
     Which is not the sort of thing people will tell you to your face. But they will think it.
     So I'm asking you, the great reading public. Should I cease doing it? Is having this blog enough mitigation to justify the practice? If I hadn't taken the picture, I couldn't be writing this now. Is that an argument for taking it? Or against? Obviously, I'm rooting for you to say, "No Neil, it's fine, you've slipped far enough into your decrepitude that this is one of your more forgivable habits." But if it isn't really acceptable then I'll at least try to stop. Nobody else seems to do it anymore. As Sarah McLachlan sings, "Better I should know."

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.