The threat of an American king

Reception of the Grand Condé at Versailles by Jean-Léon Gérôme (Musée d'Orsay)

     A regular reader in Norway writes:
     "I’m trying to understand the phrase 'no kings' in modern discourse. Given that constitutional monarchs in Europe today hold no real political power and function largely as symbolic figures within democratic systems, it’s unclear to me why monarchy is still viewed as a threat. Could you clarify this perspective?"

     It is not monarchy itself that is a threat — nobody is worried that Donald Trump will start wearing a crown and an ermine robe; though, at this point, I wouldn't put anything past him. Nor are we talking about quaint modern European royalty. We aren't worried about Queen Beatrix on a bicycle. Rather it is the absolute power, unquestioned obedience, mandatory worship and grotesque abuses once associated with kings that are a growing concern for many Americans.

     Better late than never.

     We are used to a government that tries to address the needs of its citizens. Or at least pretends to. Remember why our nation was created. If we read the Declaration of Independence, the very first thing it declares — with considerable hypocrisy, given that slavery would be legal for most of the next century — that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
     Respecting those rights is the purpose of having a government in the first place.

     "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men," it continues, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." 

     Kings don't derive their power from the consent of the governed — it is given by God. It cannot be taken away, in their own estimation. 

     Sound familiar?
     Look at the actions of the second Trump administration. Immediately stripping away the government, diverting money that once went to help citizens to his rich pals. Elon Musk basically bought unfettered access to the United State government for a $278 million bribe to the Trump campaign, and his minions raged through the government, firing workers and mining our data.
     Trump's central values seem to be revenge — the Justice Department, purged of its ethical employees, now pursues sham cases among all who opposed Trump. Who tried and — alas — failed to bring him to account for his continual crimes. Democratic states get budget cuts and masked thugs plucking brown people off the street. Red states get factories spurred by Trump's random and autocratic tariffs.
     This is where the "No Kings" phrase comes from. There is no government anymore, just Trump. He makes the decisions, or his handpicked lackeys and lick-splittles. We were a nation founded on division of power — Congress had an important role, passing laws, approving budgets, a role it has abandoned. It took an extended summer recess and, with the government shut down, barely functions and when it did was busy salaaming before Trump, treating the bare Republican majority as a mandate from God.
     The courts, meanwhile, are a funnel up to the Supreme Court, which Trump managed to pack with three partisan toadies during his first term, and now has a solid MAGA majority whose primary function is to clap like seals at whatever he does.
      Thus we find ourselves with a king, in all practical terms, if not in name. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded horror, reflecting his own tin-plated superficiality and lack of substance. He has unveiled plans to deform the White House with an enormous ballroom, and to construct an enormous imperial triumphal Roman arch worthy of Hadrian to mark the 250th birthday of the United States and its transition into an oligarchy. 

     But it feels trivial to focus on aesthetic lapses when the structural, fundamental damage he does is so great. The hornet's nest of conspiracy theories, lies and calumnies buzzing in his brain has become national policy. Truly, had the Russians conquered us militarily, and set out to dismantle and cripple the country, they could hardly have struck upon a campaign as destructive as the one we've seen over the past nine months.

     The public who aren't dancing around the Golden Calf of Trump have few options at this point. We can pine for the 2026 election to restore a Democratic majority in Congress, but Republican gerrymandering has decreased the odds of that, and the election might not happen anyway or, if it does, the government might not respect the results. Kings don't have to, and Trump has been very clear that the only elections he recognizes are those that go his way.
     Thus the "No Kings" protests, the desperate act of desperate people who see the country they love slipping away or, more accurately, being handed on a platter to a would-be tyrant who encompasses literally every negative quality that can be found in a person. It's a very sad, dangerous state of affairs.

     Does that answer your question?

Do 'No Kings' protesters hate America? Or love it?

No Kings rally, Des Plaines, June 14, 2025

     Protest is as American as apple pie and baseball. Our nation began with colonists decrying an oppressive tyranny from across the sea. As soon as our Founding Fathers broke away and formed a government, they protected protest in the First Amendment. A nod to freedom of religion, speech and the press, then boom: Congress will make no law prohibiting "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
     That doesn't mean our current leaders aren't blasting contempt at this most enshrined of American traditions.
     Saturday, Oct. 18 is the second "No Kings" protest, which has been receiving volleys of condemnation. House Speaker Mike Johnson, doing his special mind-reading trick, looked into the hearts of millions of people, many who haven't yet decided whether to go or not, and called it a "hate America rally" sponsored by the hidden hand of terrorists.
     "They have a 'hate America' rally that's scheduled for Oct. 18," Johnson told Fox News. "It's all the pro-Hamas wing and the Antifa people."
     And he knows that ... how?
     Oh right. He doesn't. He's just making stuff up. There's a lot of that going around.
     "This will be a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protesters show up," said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
     George Soros is a 95-year-old Hungarian-American philanthropist whose name has become a dog whistle for "Jewish money."
     The "No Kings" organizers deny they are in the grip of the flailing tentacles of octopoid globalists.
     "I am a volunteer," said Kathy Tholin, on the board of Indivisible Chicago and an organizer of the local protest. "We are all volunteers. Every single individual; none of us are paid by anybody."
     Why would people venture out for a "No Kings" protest?
     "One of the clear goals of the Trump regime is to isolate and depress us," said Tholin [begin italicsMission accomplished!end italics I thought], "and make us think there is nothing we can do to make a difference. It is incredibly energizing to spend time with the many, many people who refuse to submit quietly and are willing to speak out. That kind of solidarity, that kind of working together with friends and neighbors, is what is going to save us from this authoritarian suppression."
     While I haven't attended a protest, as a protester, since the Northwestern University anti-draft registration protest in the spring of 1979, I can vouch for the accuracy of that statement. Rather like Mike Johnson, I also tend to take a dim view of demonstrations. Maybe because, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were so many of them. For civil rights. Against the war. Some of them were stupid — yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon.
     And what did they accomplish? Really?
     Sixty-two years after Dr. King's March on Washington, civil rights have been rebranded "wokeness" and are in full retreat.
     But I blundered onto the first "No Kings" last June 14. We were driving through Des Plaines, saw hundreds of people gathered on street corners, and pulled over. I donned my figurative reporter's hat, grabbed a pen and notebook and went to investigate.
     Maybe because it was in Des Plaines. Regular, open, salt-of-the-earth people. No pretense, no showing off. Des Plaines is home to the Choo Choo Restaurant. They bring your basket of a cheeseburger and fries aboard a little model train. How can you not love the community supporting that?

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'Solace in time of woes'

 

     The interview at the Pittsfield Building on Wednesday ran a little over 90 minutes, from 9:30 a.m to just after 11. I didn't have to be at Siena Tavern for lunch until noon. That gave me almost an hour. 
       I walked a couple blocks south to Iwan Ries at 19 S. Wabash, on the second floor of the Adler & Sullivan-designed Jeweler's Building. Run by the fifth generation to own the company since its founding in 1857, Ries is the second oldest family-owned business in Chicago (the first being, surprisingly, Baird & Warner, founded in 1855).
      Iwan Ries has a fancy BYOB cigar lounge, but that costs money to use. As it was, the stogie put me back $16 and change. It also has a little side room with a few chairs and ashtrays. That was good enough for me to sit and relax and read the newspaper for 20 minutes. They didn't have my go-to smoke, a Rocky Patel 1990 Vintage toro, so I took the recommendation of the clerk, Harry, and tried the Rocky Patel Number Six, which was delightfully smooth, so much so I bought a second for another day. I'm a creature of habit, so it's good to have an occasional reminder that being forced out of your rut sometimes has advantages.
     The place is exactly as it always was. I tried to remember when I first came here, and couldn't. Over 30 years ago. As I left, I told Harry that it was nice to come across something that hasn't been ruined, yet. 
     "We never change," he said.    

The title is line from the Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Betrothed." 

What part of 'autism is genetic' doesn't RFK Jr. understand?

     My father has blue eyes, but I do not. Mine are a lovely green. My older son nevertheless has blue eyes, as does his daughter, my granddaughter.
     The reason is obvious. The winter and spring of 1932, when my grandmother was pregnant with my father, were particularly chilly in New York City. While 1960 was exceptionally warm in Ohio. Cool weather, as you know, breeds eyes that are blue, a color associated with cold. While warmth sprouts green. This year was quite balmy, but my son keeps the air conditioning cranked up — his apartment is like a meat locker — and so we can assume that had a significant role in their daughter's ice blue eyes.
     If you're nodding in agreement, here's bad news. The above paragraph is nonsense, cooked up for illustrative purposes. Eye color has nothing to do with environment. It's genetically determined. Nothing that occurs after the moment of conception has any influence on eye color at birth (afterward, it can shift. Most white newborns have blue or gray eyes — Black newborns generally have brown eyes — but that often changes as the melanin pigment in the iris manifests itself).
     How then can someone with captivating green eyes, such as myself, and a classic Van Morrison brown-eyed girl, such as my wife, have a child with blue eyes? Genes are paired, one from each parent. The gene for blue is recessive, meaning it gets overshadowed by a dominant brown gene. If your mom gives you a brown gene, and your dad provides a blue, your eyes will be brown. But you can still turn around and pass that thwarted blue gene along to your child, which, matched with your mate's recessive blue gene, is why a baby born of two non-blue-eyed parents like my wife and myself can still have blue eyes.
     Are you following this? Accepting it? Good, because it is true. It's not controversial. So why run this little genetics lesson in a busy metropolitan newspaper? Here, take my hand, and let's take the leap together. One, two, three, go!
     Autism is genetically determined. Like eye color. I could have mentioned this when U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump held their press conference three weeks back to blame Tylenol for causing autism. But honestly, I was so gobsmacked by their dangerous suggestion that babies not be vaccinated against hepatitis B, I focused on that.
     Last Thursday — it seems a century ago — the secretary of HHS and the president drove this particular crazy bus into the spotlight at a Cabinet meeting, claiming that boys who receive circumcisions at birth get autism at twice the rate as the noncircumcised, citing a 2015 Danish study (doubling it into two studies, perhaps out of habit) that suggests the pain of circumcision could be related to autism. RFK Jr. made the leap to conclude that wee snipped bairns are often given Tylenol, aka acetaminophen, aka autism juice. QED, more proof!

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'The annual wreckage'

 

     "What's that?" my wife asked, pointing to a plant poking out of my sage, a scarlet-stemmed intruder with oval light green leaves and deep blue, almost black, berries.
     Heck if I know. We had gone over to the late-October garden to admire an unexpected tomato. Spherical, bright red, rare enough that I'm surprised I recognized it on sight.
     I took a photo — the phone, I discovered, will tell you what a plant is if you press your finger on a photo of its leaves, the "LOOK UP" function. Only it didn't work. Sometimes it doesn't work.
     Google Image Search did the trick. "Common pokeweed," a web site called Gardening Know How sniffed. Native Americans used them in medicine and Southerners sometimes bake the fruit into pies, but you have to handle it gingerly: "A native plant that grows in disturbed soils, such as fields and pastures. It's a tenacious grower that can grow up to ten feet (3 m). The plant is hazardous to livestock and all parts of the plant are considered toxic."
     "Disturbed soils." I'll have to tuck that one away for when the National Guard hits downstate. Oh, right, they're never going there. 
     The web site encouraged people who find them to dig them out, getting all the roots, as they come raging back, and produce 48,000 seeds, distributing more pokeweeds.
     Have to do that ASAP. Until then, I did some poking myself, and came up with Amy Clampitt's poem, "Vacant Lot with Pokeweed."
     "Tufts, follicles, grubstake biennial rosettes," she begins, none too promisingly, "a low- life beach-blond scruff of couch grass."
     The poem picks up in the second stanza, observing "weeds do not hesitate," another useful phrase to slip into the literary toolbox.
     The third stanza has "magenta-girded bower," also good. In the fourth and last, she compares the fruit to a garnet — not perfect, but not bad — and ends strong, with: "salvage from the season's frittering, the annual wreckage."
     It's going to be difficult, from now on, not to refer to my garden as "the annual wreckage." Amy Clampitt, by the way, was born in Iowa, attended Grinnell College, and did not publish her first collection of Poetry until she was 63. She received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1992, and used the money for her first major purchase: a neat little gray clapboard house in Lennox, Massachusetts, chosen for its proximity to Edith Wharton's "first real home."
     Clampitt died of ovarian cancer two years later, and preserved the home through a writer's residency program — you get to live in the Berkshires with your spouse and children, if you have them, but no pets, for six months, and the Amy Clampitt Fund pays you $4,000, which is not bad for a poet. You have until June 15 ,2026 to apply here. Good luck.

Tony Fitzpatrick, a Chicago treasure: 'You notice how lucky you are'

Tony Fitzpatrick examining a newly-completed painting at his Wicker Park studio in 2024. 

     "I'm playing with house money, pal," Tony Fitzpatrick told one of the conga line of well-wishers who visited his hospital room last week. "If this winds up being it, I got way farther than anybody ever thought I would, including me."
     That he did.
     Tony, who died of heart failure at Rush University Medical Center on Saturday, was a renowned artist, writer and actor. His work is in the collections of The Art Institute, the Museum Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and others. He published books of stories and poetry, and starred in the television series "Patriot," in Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" and on stage at Steppenwolf. He had a relentless work ethic.
     "I got more to do; I ain't done yet," he said, three days before he died. If "you see me out there fighting a bear, help the bear."
     Tony was guiltlessly commercial, his art appearing on album covers, puzzles and beer cans. Despite being gravely ill with lung disease, he was pushing boxes of holiday cards on Facebook. Why bother?
     "What are we going to do?" he replied, "Sit around and go, 'Poor me!'"
     Not Tony's way. He needed a new pair of lungs. Yet he was still working on a screenplay with his children, Max and Gaby.
     Tony adored birds, which figure prominently in his work, colorful renditions surrounded by wild collages of ephemera.
     "They are miraculous," wrote Helen Macdonald, author of "H is for Hawk." "In their frames they perch amongst the symbolic and material detritus of our lives: constellations, jewels, staves, flowers, logos, cartoon figures crossword squares. Eyes, faces, hands, and stars flicker and burn around them. So do epigrams and notions and scrolls of fiercest poetry. The more you look at these pictures, the more things change and speak inside them. ... They are pictures of birds. But they are also lessons in nostalgia, history, love and hurt."
     Tony was fearlessly political, always outspoken, a generous patron and unshakable friend. Countless times he lent encouragement, support and gallery space to new artists. In the weeks before his death, he shared a chain of photographs on social media praising the kindness of the medical staff at Rush.
     "They've been amazing," he said. "I feel so good being around them. These are the best people in the world. This calm sort of extra expanded humanity."
     That was Tony, too.
     "The generosity," marveled Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern. "He spoke to my Chicago Way class at NU one year, and one of my students was in the program and struggling. He sat with that kid after class for a good long time, talking sobriety. The student told me later it made a huge difference for him."
     Tony has recently been cheering on Ted Kooser, an 86-year-old Great Plains poet. For Tony, that meant being driven to Nebraska last month to visit Kooser for 90 minutes.
     I asked Kooser, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was the U.S. poet laureate, to assess Tony's writing. Kooser wrote: "His poetry made me think of those circus acts where somebody rides a bicycle through a flaming hoop and rides on with streamers flying behind him. His poems had that sort of raw energy."
     "He is a Chicago legend who belongs next to all the names we say, like Royko and Studs and Sandburg and Algren," said historian Thomas Dyja. "And now Fitzpatrick."
     Days from death, Tony spoke of gratitude.

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Flashback 2012: You always cut the one you love

"The circumcision," by Giovani Bellini (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     With RFK Jr. drawing circumcision into his pantheon of boogie procedures, along with vaccines (because snipping leads to Tylenol) I couldn't resist disinterring a pair of past columns on the topic, leading up to what I expected would be Monday's swan dive. Note the prominent reference to vaccines, a reminder that Trump didn't create the current crop of American crazy, he merely monetized it.

    Although, as my late mother-in-law used to say, we plan and God laughs. The genetics column was pushed to Wednesday, as I want to pay tribute to my friend of 25 years, Tony Fitzpatrick, who died Saturday. I passed the news on to the paper, but could not write about it. We are allowed to pause, think, grieve. That'll be tomorrow.

     New parents are sinkholes of concern. Some of their worries are indeed valid — should I let the baby play with tigers? Is the house on fire? — but not all parental dilemmas pass the rationality test.
     Exhibit A is the New Age reluctance to have your kids vaccinated, a particularly selfish and ignorant decision. Selfish because your kids will probably be OK anyway, since most other kids are still immunized, and so your children benefit without being exposed to the minuscule risks associated with getting a shot. And ignorant because it reflects lack of knowledge of just how wide a swath of illness and death that plagues like diphtheria and whooping cough and meningitis once cut through the youth of the world.
     Exhibit B for over-inflated parental concern is reflected in circumcision rates, which have dropped — from nearly 80 percent in the 1970s, to a little more than half today — in part because parents get all squishy at the thought of altering their supposedly perfect babies, and don’t realize that not being circumcised makes men more prone to all sorts of horrific venereal diseases and bacteriological infections, including a greatly increased chance of contracting HIV.
      While the issue waxes and wanes, the cost in ill health of being uncircumcised has long been known. Now a paper in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine has put a figure on the cost in dollars — $2 billion, so far, with billions more to be spent if rates in this country continue to slide toward rates in Europe, where only about 10 percent of men are circumcised.
     Being Jewish and the father of boys, of course I’m biased. The tribe has definite views on circumcision — we sort of came up with the idea, a reminder of the ancient importance placed on Not Being Like Them.
     To be honest, the health factor didn’t motivate me, back in the mid 1990s-when it came time to have the deed done to my boys. Nor did I see myself as bending to the will of the Lord God Almighty. That isn’t my table. Frankly, it was a matter of tradition, of having to take it upon myself to end an unbroken chain of ritual stretching from me to every man in my family back to Moses. That didn’t seem like a break I was willing to make, and my wife, in many ways a traditional gal herself, was right with me on that one.
     So each of our boys had a bris, as the ceremony is called, where your friends and relatives gather at your place to eat babka cake and drink Crown Royal and witness — sort of, through latticed fingers, if a woman, or out of the corner of one eye, while whistling and staring at the ceiling with your hands folded over your midsection, if you’re a man — the specially trained rabbi, called a mohel, make the skillful cut which most guys never think about again, yet someone must, since it keeps popping up in the headlines.
     Is circumcision a strange ritual imposed on innocent babes by musty tradition? You betcha. But guess what? Society inflicts all sorts of strange stuff on us, sooner or later, including — sometimes — asking young men to go off and die in distant places for obscure causes. At least with circumcision you are allowed to suck some sweet wine off a piece of gauze first, to calm your nerves.
     As a newspaper reporter, I’m aware that some people feel circumcision is not just wrong, but a huge, quivering wrong — perhaps the greatest wrong inflicted on humanity, ever. For years I got the NO-CIRC newsletter, the house organ of a California group filled with tales of botched circumcisions and men who do not feel “complete.” The publication always struck me as one of the more curious artifacts of zealotry, right up there with UFO enthusiasts and vocal opponents of fluoridated water. Some people feel circumcision is the original sin that has destroyed their lives — some men actually undergo reconstructive surgery, to get the bit put back — and while, in my view, they are cases to be analyzed in a psychiatric rather than a journalistic setting, it’s a free country, and you may obsess upon what you wish.
      Or it was a free country. Much of the declining rates are due, not to parental scruple, but to Medicaid cuts: Low-income parents tend to have the procedure done, if it’s paid for, and tend to skip it if its not. Budget minded states have been scaling back on paying for circumcisions, because they’re not medically essential. A false economy, we now discover, and a reminder that state funding for health care also avoids more expensive procedures down the road — with circumcision, a simple five-second procedure helps avoid, for instance, treating someone for AIDS for years.
     But sticking my arm into the circumcision fanatic cage is bad enough without also sticking the other arm into the ObamaCare cage, so let’s wind up, and what better way than with a joke? The only joke I recall my grandfather ever telling. Question: Why do rabbis get paid better salaries than mohels? Answer: Because mohels get all the tips.

      — Published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 23, 2012