Donald Trump is an evil man and his idiocy gets good people killed

"Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump," by Jean-Michel Basquiat 

     No one will ever know how many deaths can be directly attributed to Donald Trump.
     Hundreds of thousands perished of COVID needlessly because of his footdragging and minimizing the illness (and yes, he pushed for a vaccine, trying to make up for lost time, which was good. But then he went undercut his own vaccine, blunting its effect).

     Plus tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza from the wrong that his buddy, Benjamin Netanyahu, caused by prolonging the war for his own political benefit. Plus more in Ukraine from his pivoting American policy toward his other pal, the butcher Vladimir Putin.
      Deaths caused by brutal ICE arrests and deportations, of people kept in horrid conditions, in the United States and abroad, truths that may not become known for years, if ever.
      Not to forget the deaths due to making a crazed science denier named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of health and human services, an almost perversely destructive act.  Pulling the plug on research. Undermining vaccines. When measles begins scything through babies, I wonder if Trump fans will notice? Probably not.
     I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting. Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments.
     Because right now I am thinking, hard, about Off. David Rose, of the DeKalb County, Georgia police department. Killed Friday. Not familiar? No reason you should be. There is so much going on, so much news to process. Things get missed. 

     Off. Rose was slain by Patrick Joseph White, who opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta from the second floor of a CVS across the street. He was found shot dead, along with five long guns — because one just wouldn't be enough.  

     The new barely made a ripple. To me, it seems a big deal.

     The New York Times story about the crime didn't name Off. Rose until the 14th paragraph. An odd news choice. He was 33,  an ex-Marine, who had two children, a 1-year-old son and 6-year-old from a previous relationship, with a third on the way with his wife.

     I suppose you could add White's name to the count. He was fixated on the coronavirus vaccine, blaming it for his own medical woes. So a murderer, but a victim, too, of the poison spewed by Fox News. At the behest of Donald Trump. Another life snuffed out. With more to come. Will we keep tab? The way the Washington Post tallied his lies, for years, until it realized that nobody actually gave a fuck. Not true. Some people do still care. For all the good it does.

    That's it. No pithy summary or straining toward hope. I just thought Off. Rose's death should not go unnoticed here. We may never miss him. But his kids certainly will. 

Flashback 1998: Day at the beach is no day at the beach

     Are you having a good summer? Me too. Outdoor concerts, picnics, travel, hiking. One thing I'm not doing, because I never do it, is go to the beach. The reason is ... well, once I took a crack at trying to explain why. 

     I have not gone to the beach this summer. Nor last summer. Nor the summer before that. Or before that. Didn't go in 1994. Or the previous summer. Or in 1992. Summer of '91? Nope.
     In fact, I haven't gone to the beach at all in the entire decade of the 1990s, though I live a brief stroll away from a rather popular one.
     Not only have I never gone to the beach; I never considered going to the beach. Why would I? The beach is a crowded desert ending abruptly in a flood.
     First, think of sand. Sand is an awful substance. Sand is used to make glass. In a sense, a beach is just an expanse of crushed glass. Sand sure feels that way, in your shoes.
     And sand gets everywhere. Try this experiment. Take a teaspoon of sand and put it in one of those double-seal plastic sandwich bags. Then put the bag in a coffee can and wrap tape around the lid. Place the coffee can in the basement. Now go run your hand over your sheets — sandy, right? That's how sand is.
     Second, people. Lots of people, spread out everywhere. Nearly naked people. Nearly naked, fabulously unattractive people who, in their public state of undress, are a profound, silent argument for the importance of clothing.
     Finally, there's water. Lake Michigan is frigid slush except for about an hour on the last day in August. I went in once, one July day, long ago. It was like jumping into liquid nitrogen.
      Despite all these strong feelings, I was prepared to go to the beach, as an experiment, influenced by reading Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker's new book, The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth.
      While of course disagreeing with their premise that the beach is important, historically, I found enough fun trivia to reward my chewing through the book's dense thicket of academic babble. (And boy, is it thick. For instance, the idea "going to the beach" is rendered, I kid you not, as "the inspirational pilgrimage to the ephemeral boundary of land and sea.")
      Where else could one learn that, in the summer of 1936, the country agonized over whether men should be allowed to go topless on public beaches.
     "No gorillas on our beaches," Atlantic City declared, banning topless bathing. Cleveland passed an ordinance requiring that men's bathing trunks cover the navel. Galveston went further, legislating tops for men's suits.
     The authors trace the lure of the beach back to Greek times and, swept up in the history of it, I resolved to head to the beach and see if, perhaps, I had been neglecting it unfairly.
     "Don't expect me tomorrow," I told the city desk, breezing out the door Monday evening. "I'll be at the beach."
     That night, I cataloged everything I would need. Pail and shovel, of course, for digging. Sun block. A cooler of some sort. Drinks and snacks. A towel. A thick beach book. (Having finished The Beach, I thought I'd bring along my current project, A History of Private Life from Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Talk about interesting trivia. Did you know that the Roman emperor Justinian created a scandal by marrying a stripper, Theodora, famous in Constantinople for her act involving geese peckinggrain from, well, a place where geese do not normally peck grain?)
      Everything was ready. It was a ton of stuff to schlep — my wife suggested taking a wagon — but, hey, inconvenience is what going to the beach is all about, at least in my mind.
     Then — and those whose long-term memories go back 48 hours may have seen this coming — Tuesday broke, all gray and rainy, and my careful plans were abandoned. So I stayed home, made progress in A History of Private Life, and happily postponed going to the beach for another year, or another century, or never.
     Just as well.


—Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 9, 1998

Footsteps of Klan march in the nation's capital 100 years ago echo today

Library of Congress

      Shorter is better. As much as I grumble, hitting my 790 word landing to be on page two of the Sun-Times is a good thing. Although I often lose things that are superfluous but fun. Such as the intro to this column. After I wrote it, it was just over a thousand words — 33 percent too long.

     So the first thing I did was lop off the top two paragraphs. I can make my point without the tiger. But I really like the tigers. So I'll retain it here. If time is of the essence, you can go straight to the Sun-Times version, linked at the bottom.

     I savor logical fallacies the way some men collect fine wines. One of my favorite vintages is known as a "category error" —when you allow a set of qualities to convince you that something belongs to one particular group when other, more germane, qualities suggest it really belongs somewhere very different.
     Take Bengal tigers. If I decide, based on their feline nature, soft fur and beautiful appearance to consider them among "animals children should be allowed to play with," I am making a category error. Because other tiger qualities — razor sharp teeth and claws, carnivorous habits, general unpredictability — should really place them in the realm of "animals best confined to story books."
       Consider U.S. history. In his "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order, Donald Trump claims that anything reflecting "racist, sexist, oppressive" aspects of the American past is "a distorted narrative" that "fosters a sense of national shame."
     For him maybe. Not to this cowboy.  I consider his executive order a category error. History, even regarding fraught topics, is always fascinating and often useful. The history of our country is a tale of casting off bigotries toward a spectrum of groups, and that hatred returning in new forms. Learning about that doesn't bring shame unless you're rooting for the bad guys. Rather, it fosters a sense of perspective, even relief.
     For instance, Friday is the 100th anniversary of 30,000 or so members of the Ku Klux Klan marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, a high-water mark in a decade that saw the post-Civil War hate group reborn and enjoying unprecedented public acceptance. They marched unmasked, as demanded by D.C. ordinance — which also, police decided, forbade anti-Klan groups from gathering, noting "the law strictly forbids any political demonstrations on public property in the nation's capital."
     The Klan, remember, did not fancy itself a political group, but a religious and patriotic organization — hence all the crosses and flags. The Klan made this argument to President Calvin Coolidge, urging him to welcome them, noting that he had spoken before the Holy Name Society, a Catholic group, and therefore "he should be willing to greet an organization of Protestants."
     He wasn't. Coolidge was no racist — he privately despised the Klan, and the year before addressed the commencement at all-Black Howard University. I have a difficult time imagining the current president doing that.
     But Coolidge's response to the 1925 march (there would be others) was not a profile in courage, either. While Klansmen (and women; a third were female) were marching around the Washington Monument, Coolidge was on vacation in Swampscott, Massachusetts. He said nothing, good to his "Silent Cal" nickname. Pressed on the issue, the White House revealed that Coolidge "was not a member of the order and not in sympathy with the aims and purposes."
     The Klan was seen more as a Democratic problem anyway — it was the major issue overshadowing the 1924 Democratic National Convention. Liberals wanted a condemnation of the Klan written in the party platform. But lots of Southerners were Democrats, and they argued that most Blacks voted Republican — in the areas where they were allowed to vote — out of residual loyalty to Abraham Lincoln. The Democrats punted.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2003: Coming clean on Royko, NASA and other tall tales

      This would never run in the newspaper today. Our shrunken news hole means that frivolity is shown the gate. No one wants to indulge a weisenheimer anyway, not with the planet on fire and the United States in the grip of a nationalist madman and his army of quislings and credulous dupes performing their tarantella of naked illegality and epic failure, ceaseless mendacity and unashamed self-dealing.

      I enjoyed re-reading this — then again, I'm biased, I wrote it. But maybe you will too.
     The Rick Bragg mentioned in the first paragraph was a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who resigned after it was revealed that a story he presented as being written by himself was actually reported by an uncredited stringer. There seems to be a lot of that kind of thing in the thin-air of the mountaintop. Makes me glad to have spent my career quietly planting my tomatoes in this obscure midwest patch of earth. At least I never felt the need to lie trying keep my job.

     As the New York Times scandal festered, I withheld comment, telling myself there was no need to jump atop such an enormous pile-up. But as the days wore on, and Rick Bragg joined Jayson Blair, I realized this was self-deception — a lie, really, the latest in a career of lying, a sham world built on falsehood. Guilt kept me mute, but no more. Time to come clean, to fling open the doors of deceit and let in the bracing air of truth. All too often I have taken a kernel of fact, then stretched and embellished it to my benefit. Apologies to everyone I misled, but:
     1. Mike Royko was never my "best friend." When I said we used to drink together at the Billy Goat, that was literally true, but he was at the bar with his cronies and I was 10 feet away, alone, sneaking glances in his direction. We never went fishing together in Key Biscayne. While he did in fact once threaten to "break my legs," it was not in a joking, avuncular fashion, as I have hinted, but in a genuine, mean, menacing way that left me skittish for weeks. The Sun-Times regrets the error.
     2. I never served in the U. S. Marines. Any implication that I did is based on a photograph of myself standing in the hatch of an Amphibious Assault Vehicle, grinning like an idiot. My oblique comments about "when I was with the Marines" refer to three days at Camp Pendleton, researching a story. I regret suggesting otherwise, particularly to my sons, whom I plan to eventually inform that I was not a general and did not win World War II.
     3. On that note, I also vow to tell my boys I am not the strongest man in the world, and I regret ever agreeing that I was. Being in the newspaper does not make me "famous." We are not rich.
     Never left Earth
     4. Nor did I walk on the moon. That was another Neil. I was never an astronaut. Whenever I mention "my work with NASA," I am really referring to the summer I spent writing PR for their Cleveland lab. The shoulder patches I have from the various moon missions were purchased in the gift shop there, not given to me by my astronaut buddies. I have never been inside a space shuttle, much less piloted one. I regret any misunderstanding.
     5. While I was indeed in Washington, D.C., this spring, my claims to have "visited George and Laura Bush at the White House" were in error. We did not chat by the fire. What actually happened was I stood on the South Lawn and watched the first family take off in Marine One. The president did not wave and wink at me, in particular, but rather at the group of 50 people of which I was a member. I did, however, wave back, a shy flutter of the hand at shoulder level, and I apologize for that, too.
     6. Speaking of hands, the stiff pinkie finger on my left hand is "an old football injury" only in the sense it was caused by a football thrown, not by Jim McMahon during a casual pickup game, but by Mike Bailey, back when we were both young reporters at the Barrington Courier-Review. The pinkie got bent back and I neglected to wear the brace and it healed wrong. Nor, I should point out, did Walter Payton and I keep in shape by running up sand dunes together. The "and I" in that story was included because of a typographical error. Mea culpa.
     7. I did not attend Richard Roeper's secret wedding to Cameron Diaz in Las Vegas in 1996. Nor did we grow up together in Dolton. When I say he is "my closest friend in the world" I am actually commenting on my paucity of friends and regret implying there is any kind of relationship between us. I did once throw up in his brand new kitchen sink, but that was years ago.
     8. I did not run with the Weathermen during the riots in 1968. At the time I was in second grade and thought hippies were pirates. When I said that I "hung out with Abbie Hoffman, Abe Peck and the Chicago Seed crowd," I was referring to the fact that I took a class from Peck in 1982. That class was at Northwestern, not Oxford.
     9. I never "traded licks" with Dizzy Gillespie. While we did have dinner together, it was in Joliet, not Paris. Any suggestion that he called me "Mister Cool Himself, my main man, hip Neil-daddio" or coaxed me onstage to jam on "Night in Tunisia" is a fiction.
     10. In countless phone conversations, I have referred to myself as "the star Sun-Times columnist" or mentioned "the million readers hanging on my every word." This was a gross overstatement. The artist Saul Steinberg was not my father, nor was Grace Kelly my mother, nor does my family own the Steinberg food store chain in Canada. For making these claims I have suffered and repent. God has forgiven me; why can't you?
     11. The last sentence in the above was lifted verbatim from an old "Bloom County" comic strip.
     12. This column was inspired by a recent New Yorker piece, which I cynically decided to rework. I'm sorry for that as well.
     Sorry for past, future misdeeds
     Space permits me to address only the dozen most egregious lies and exaggerations, but believe me, I apologize for all the others, both in the past and yet to come. Human beings will do almost anything to look better, and journalists — believe it or not — are human beings, for the most part.
     There. So now that that's over, where's my big, fat book deal?
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2003

Lori Cannon, tireless 'AIDS angel,' dead at 74: 'She took care of the whole universe'

Lori Cannon at GroceryLand in December, 2024.

     Understand the terror of the times. To be a gay man in the mid-1980s: young, just figuring yourself out, suddenly sick with HIV, dying from a dread disease, AIDS — a death sentence that tortures you first with nausea, exhaustion, lesions, emaciation, diarrhea, confusion, blindness.
     Your family flees, revolted at your orientation and what many view as God's just punishment. Nurses are afraid to touch you. Then into your room strides Lori Cannon, a big woman with flame red hair and long red fingernails, here to bring you dinner, cook it, then wipe up your vomit afterward. She might be the only human contact you have that day.
     "During the early dark days of HIV, when there were no resources for people — it was the Reagan years — the government was turning its back on people," remembered retired majority leader of the Illinois House, Greg Harris. "Lori was one of the people who stepped up and provided every kind of care you could imagine, mostly love, support and kindness. Over the last 40 years, she has done that every day."

Photo by Rex Wockner
(Windy City Times)

     Cannon, "Chicago's AIDS Angel," co-founded Open Hand/Chicago in 1988, shepherding it through a variety of incarnations, all devoted to feeding those with HIV. Recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and lung cancer, she died at home Sunday of heart failure at 74.
     "Lori Cannon was a true ally in Illinois from her organizing days to founding Open Hand/Chicago," Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement. "She led the way with chutzpah and humor."
     Cannon helped create the NAMES Project, bringing the massive AIDS Memorial Quilt to Chicago in 1988, 1990 and 1994. She co-founded ACT UP/Chicago, the guerrilla protest group demanding the government not ignore AIDS simply because it was killing gay men.
     "People know her over generations," said Tracy Baim, co-founder of Windy City Times. "She really helped on a visceral basis. She was there in the trenches, the hospital rooms, taking care of people's animals, feeding people's souls and bellies for decades. The impact Lori had on individuals and on the movement is almost unmatched. Lori did it all."
     She was born in West Rogers Park in 1951. Her father, Lee Cannon, was involved with cartoon syndication and later became a champion of Native-American rights. Her mother, Bluma, was a homemaker. She had an older brother Jules and a younger brother everyone called J.H., who was a "blue baby," — born with a defective heart, leading to lifelong disability.

Tragedy at an early age

     "At an early age I experienced tragedy," Cannon told the Chicago Gay History project. "Prior to J.H. passing away in 1970, my big brother Jules was injured in a horrific motorcycle accident — a city bus went through a stop sign and dragged him for several blocks."

Lori and Jon-Henri Damski

     Caring for her brothers set the tone for her life.
     "It might have prepared me for something," she said. "From what I remember of the 1960s, a lot of it was spent caregiving."
     She went to Columbia College and studied filmmaking, then drove a private bus for Winkle Transportation.
     "I met Lori when I working at Limelight in 1985," said Richard Knight Jr., the club's art director. "She was feisty, funny, always the big red hair. She was known as the 'Bus Driver to the Stars.' She would go to McCormick Place — big Broadway shows, 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Cats.' She would go get the chorus kids, drive them to and from their hotel. Of course they always came to Limelight."
     The AIDS crisis was deepening, and Cannon's experience with her family led her to do the same with her community. She joined AIDS hospice Chicago House in 1985, then founded OpenHand with Harris and others.
     "We had one thing in common," Cannon told the Sun-Times in 2019. "Everyone we knew was either dead, dying or struggling to help someone who was heading there. We were tired. We were scared. We were angry. And we needed to do something other than sew AIDS quilt panels.”

To continue reading, click here.

Gustave Caillebotte: Painting MEN, goddammit!

"Man Drying His Leg"

        If you read this stuff and think, "Man, that Steinberg, he's a genius. He knows everything!" I would like, right here and now, to disabuse you of that notion. I am now, and have always been, a flawed, limited man, blundering about his business in a shambolic fashion, filing oddball reports in order to make a sort of living. I've never pretended to be anything else.

    And yet, some people must consider me the all-seeing-eye. Any omission must be a deliberate part of my master plan, such as failing to address a certain controversy related to the Caillebotte show mentioned in Monday's column. 

     "You left out the whole issue of the Art Institute changing the name of the exhibit from its name at the other two institutions hosting the exhibit," writes John S. "Seems the Art Institute whitewashed the issue of Caillebotte’s being gay. [At] Musee d'Orsay and Getty museums, it’s titled 'Painting Men' That’s the major story here and you missed it completely. Ask the Art Institute why they changed the title of the exhibition?"

     No need to quiz the Art Institute as to their motives, as the Trib already did that in a comprehensive story on the issue last week, the spark that, I assume, ignited John's outrage. The museum said that a) there's a lot of pictures of other subjects besides men in the exhibit and b) "Painting His World" tested better.

     I missed that story, so didn't know about the controversy. Had I known, I still would have not joined in the chorus of condemnation over the name change. To be honest, I considered slicing the top of my story, the part about Caillebotte, off  — focusing entirely on Raqib Shaw's "Paradise Lost," the painting taking up the last two-thirds of the column. Ignoring Caillebotte would give me more room to stretch my legs.

     But I liked the bit about my never before considering what Caillebotte had painted beyond "Paris Street; Rainy Day." Part of my comic, ostensibly befuddled, in-print persona that happens to correspond exactly with my not-all-that-funny, actually befuddled, real life persona. 

     The Trib story said the change "has led some to accuse the Art Institute of queer erasure."

     I bet it did. I had fancied that the silver lining of the Trump monstrosity was that finely-tuned liberal sensitivities might not be quite so hair trigger, given the general scuppering of democracy, the free press, personal bodily autonomy, LGBTQ rights, and such.  I'm amazed some people have the psychic energy to parse such fine points. They changed the exhibit title? Oh, the humanity...

     I mean, the Art Institute did put on the show, did they not? And if their intention was to obscure gayness, they did a pretty poor job of it. Any reasonable intelligent person, such as myself, spending a moderate amount of time strolling the exhibit, as I did, would come away with the impression that Caillebotte was probably gay — it's not like he left a statement — and, freed by his family wealth, felt no disinclination about reflecting that perspective, at least when it came to celebrating men with a gaze that mostly, then and now, was reserved for women.

     Had I known about the issue, I might have given it a nod, to show that I was in the loop. That not being the case, I'm not interested in joining the mob beating up a fine Chicago institution for not perfectly celebrating an often neglected segment of the population. 

     This is a strange cultural moment — I guess they all are. But in 2025, while the government struggles to return to the 1950s, high culture institutions such as museums and theater companies fall to angels-dancing-on-a-pin debates over fine points of inclusions. They seem to think we're in the 2050s, or at least often get ahead of their skis, regarding the public they ostensibly serve. That the Art Institute might not have checked the right box, in this instance, well, that is their brand, going for the artistic over the political. Institutions, like people, have a right to be who they are.

'Paradise Lost' is a sprawling artwork defying description. You just have to see it.

“Interior, Woman Reading,” an 1880 painting by Gustave Caillebotte

     For a smart guy, I can be pretty thick.
     Let me explain.
     For decades, I've been admiring Gustave Caillebotte's "Paris Street; Rainy Day" at the Art Institute. It's hard not to.  

      A huge painting of pedestrians hurrying through Place de Dublin, it's got the realism I like, softened by the stirrings of Impressionism, circa 1877. You can stand far away and absorb the whole scene, or swoop in to notice the woman's delicate black veil.

     Yet never, in all the years I gazed at it, did I ever pause to think, "Heyyyy ... this guy's pretty good. I wonder what ELSE he's painted?" Not once.
     That lapse was made painfully clear seeing the Caillebotte show — a sprawling, comprehensive exhibit, shifting Caillebotte from one-trick-pony to significant, complete artist, introducing a world that you — OK, me — never imaged.
     I won't review the whole show — my colleague Kyle MacMillan did that marvelously. Just go.
     Be sure to study the placards. Otherwise, you'll miss what's going on. Look at the picture above, "Interior, Woman Reading."
     What's striking is the woman is the dominant figure, in the foreground, studying a newspaper, then a typically masculine activity. While the man is sprawled on the sofa, holding a novel, considered at the time a feminine vice. Caillebotte is playing with us, toying with our expectations.
     The more things change ...
     The Caillebotte exhibit, "Painting His World," is reason aplenty to visit the Art Institute. But there's an additional surprise that hasn't gotten the publicity it deserves.
     I'm tempted to leave it at that. Stop reading now, go as a blank slate and then return after you've encountered it ...
     I'll play the "Jeopardy" music:
     Doo doo doo, doo-dah, doo doo doo...
     You're back? Already?

     On your way to the Caillebotte show, you usually pass through the Asian gallery. And there, along 100 feet of the south wall, is Raqib Shaw's "Paradise Lost." You stopped in your tracks and gaped. Don't feel bad. Everybody does.
     How to describe it for those who cheated and kept reading? The life's journey of the Calcutta-born, Kashmir-raised, London-based artist. Conveyed in a wild allegorical explosion that defies description. The museum tries: "An epic and tumultuous journey that represents the very nature and breadth of human existence ..."
     Raging seas, collapsing palaces, a horse wrestling a zebra, leopards, bears, placid baboons in a cherry tree — well, placid except the one strangling a fawn. Bejeweled, painted in automobile enamel using syringes and porcupine quills.
     Dozens of visitors crowd around, stepping back, drawing in close. I'm deliberately not publishing photos.

     "You have to see it," said Madhuvanti Ghose, associate curator of arts of Asia at the Art Institute. "Because no amount of photography actually captures the kind of details that your eye picks up."

To continue reading, click here.