Stray photo

 

     This is weird. So my wife and I have dinner on Wednesday. We light candles for Hanukah. We watch a little TV, endure the president's pathetic rant. About 10 p.m., I walk the dog.
     Back at home, I go to post my photo of the four candles on the blog — I figure, this is a year to be Jewish a little more prominently. Show we're not afraid. I'm not afraid, anyway. Not yet.
     I look at my photos, and there's the black and white photo above, the most recent photo. I didn't take it, didn't download it, don't know the person in the photo or how it got there.
     I asked Prof. Google to explain. The possibilities ranged across the board. Shared by somebody with access. Hacked somehow. I had a hard time believing it was something done intentionally. What would be the point? A test? Next time it'll be something vile. The cops will bust in, and the incriminating evidence will be spattered across my phone. 

     Nah. That can't be. Maybe the photo was transmitted years ago and somehow, through some alignment of the planets, congealed on my phone. Strange stuff happens.
      Several times in recent months, a random Facebook video was sent by me to my son. Only I didn't send it. This seems something like that. An artifact, a glitch. When you consider how pervasive these networks are, how omnipresent the phones, in our hands for hours, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. I am using an iPhone 12, and have been poised to get a new phone —the 16 or the 17, anybody notice a difference? They cost about the same.

     My wife urged me not to post the photo — it's not a kid we know, but someone's kid, unless it's an AI composite, and children should be kept offline as much as possible, lest their images be seized and put to unspeakable purposes. I made a pouty face, and she then suggested I do an image search, which I did. Turns out the photo was posted to X the day before I saw it, by the Paris Review, along with a quote from the poet Alice Oswald. A blip from a network I signed up for years ago but now seldom visit. 

     Oswald is an English poet of considerable renown. Of course I looked at her oeuvre, starting with "Severed head floating downriver," which seemed apt for this occasion. It begins:

It is said that after losing his wife, Orpheus was torn to
pieces by Maenads, who threw his head into the River
Hebron. The head went on singing and forgetting,
filling up with water and floating way.

And ends: 

    this is how the wind works hard at thinking
    this is what speaks when no one speaks

   I deleted the photo from my phone. But the unease lingers. These devices, they're cracks in our lives. Our light shines out, wanly and is largely ignored. Meanwhile, all sorts of stuff seeps in. 

600 percent more bullshit

     Yeah, I watched the speech Wednesday night. Switched away from a very satisfying "American Masters" program about Dick Van Dyke on PBS to do so. I had no idea Van Dyke's road to success was so rocky — the number of blind alleys he went down, the failed shows, the misfires, and then "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was cancelled at the end of its first season, and only an extraordinary effort by its producer saved the program at the last moment. Life is struggle.
     But I was curious. Of course I hoped for some kind of Captain Queeg quality gibbering breakdown. Icing on the cake of a generally lousy few weeks for the Orange Enormity, not that his base is paying attention or cares at this point. Maybe a few are feeling a flash of unease that something might not be perfect. But that ain't no revolution. Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, as I always say, the precise nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     I distracted myself by sending out quips on Bluesky. He launched into his diatribe, and I thought of a train. "All aboard …. for Crazytown!"
     Though it wasn't even that terrible, not by our sub-gutter standards. Just the usual lies. His greatest hits. I'll grant him this — his skin tone looked almost normal. That's something new.
     My wife couldn't stand it, and fled the room. Me, I marveled that he was reading — had someone written down a rambling rant, and he was repeating it? There wasn't an artful sentence in the whole spiel. It was like watching a baby cry from a script.
     What struck me was how expected, unsurprising, and dull it all was, more of the same, in the standard spirit that everything he says is a confession.
     “One year ago our country was dead, absolutely dead,” said the animate corpse, his soul a suppurating slab of putrefaction.
     “We are respected again,” said the international laughingstock.
     Prescription prices were falling “400, 500, even 600 percent,” said the innumerate moron. Math doesn’t work like that.
     I think I'll end here. But we shouldn't hurry past that math gaffe. He's done it before. A 10-year-old can grasp the reality: If an apple costs a dollar, and I give you a 90 percent discount, then the apple costs you a dime. If I give you a 100 percent discount, then it's free. I'm not sure a 500 percent discount even makes sense, in this context, but it could mean that I'm paying you $4 to take it.
     The pharmaceutical companies aren't paying you to take their drugs. And I'm not going to bother flagging all the other lies in the speech, except to note the media still does not call the lies. "Untruths" or "fabrications" or whatever. Which itself is idiotic. We descend to his level, or toward it anyway. 
     The whole thing left me sad — this is the man who is destroying America? This? This? Who might yet upend democracy? This thing? We shouldn't skate by the $1,776 payment to each soldier. Of course it might never be delivered — he said the checks were on the way, which means nothing. And it seems that the payments might be real, but have nothing to do with him. He's just taking credit for them, which is par for the course.

     Maybe he's trying to spin the payments into a bribe of some kind, to buy the soldiers' loyalty. Cheap, to sell out our country. But then Trump sold the entire United State government to Elon Musk for $274 million. Trump probably thought it was a lot, but it was selling us out for very little. I've seen a lot of corrupt officials in my day at the paper, and it's always shocking how little they get for their betrayals. America sold its soul for nothing.

Flashback 2013: Is Sandy Hook a shrine or a school?

9/11  Memorial, New York City.

    The slaughter in Australia and the murders at Brown meant that the faces of the first graders slain at Sandy Hook were popping up on social media again. I suppose that passes for reflection. This column ran a dozen years ago, an artifact when such killings sparked national conversation. With our democracy imperiled, musing on the uses of memory seems almost antique.

    "Cursed shall be the ground because of you.”
     Strong words, particularly coming from God, who utters them when he condemns Adam and Eve for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
     The idea that the ground itself can be poisoned by the acts committed upon it is very old, and slumbers in a dark antechamber of the human heart, waiting for atrocities like the Newtown shootings to re-awaken.
     More than a month after 20 first-graders and six staffers were killed at Sandy Hook school, the question is: should the school be made into a memorial or returned to its intended use? The community has had several meetings, with more debate to come.
     You would think that the answer would break down along lines of impact — that the most affected, the devastated parents and loved ones, would push for a memorial, while the lesser-impacted town folk would pause over the cost of replacing an entire school.
     But it is more complicated. Some parents want their kids to go back, while outsiders insist they never be asked to return.
     In a way, they’re playing out, on a large scale, what individuals who suffer tragedies go through. They are torn between focusing on the bad thing and forgetting about it, or trying to. To forget too quickly feels wrong. As does lingering too long.
     Sadly, we have had enough atrocities that we can look to the past for guidance, although they offer a mixed bag. The scope of the bloodletting isn’t the issue — Columbine went back to being a high school, its name unchanged, after a dozen students were killed, while Brown’s Chicken pulled down the restaurant in Palatine where seven died. Gacy’s house was bulldozed but the apartment where Richard Speck killed eight student nurses in 1966 was later rented out.
     Cinemark reopened the Aurora, Colo., movie theater where 12 died, renaming and reconfiguring it. If you go to the Oriental Theater* on Randolph Street, you are at the exact site of the Iroquois Theater, where the worst theater fire in American history occurred, killing 600 people, many children.
     To me, the Iroquois offers up the key to the what-to-do puzzle, one people overlook during these discussions. Newtown gives every thinking person a visceral shudder, while the Iroquois Theater doesn’t, because the fire happened a long time ago — 100 years exactly, later this year. Time heals. Pearl Harbor still means something jarring to us but the Argonne doesn’t, even though 2,000 Americans died at the former and 26,000 died at the latter, a battle in World War I.
     All this talk of remembering the Newtown massacre forever shows that people don’t realize what forever means. Ford’s Theatre was seized by the United States government after Lincoln’s assassination, announcing that no public amusements would be held there, forever. But in the late 1960s, Ford’s was restored and returned to a theater — “Our Town” is playing there now.
     What do I think? Every time I hear someone say, “No child should be asked to go back to Sandy Hook Elementary School,” I reply, “Because you wouldn’t want to ask anyone to confront something terrible?”
     Our nation fails that way. From the symbolic fiddling we’re considering, briefly, regarding gun control, to our habit of kicking the economic can down the road, we are a people too hot to build memorials for tragedies and too timid to address their causes.
     Is the ground cursed because of the killings or sanctified because of the deaths? If it’s cursed, tear the school down and put up a granite monolith; if it’s sanctified, what better memorial to slain students than a school?
     I don’t believe in curses. The whole debate has a tinge of the irrational. How does the impulse to raze the school square with the common sentiment that mass killers’ names shouldn’t even be put in the papers, in the flimsy theory that doing so rewards their desire for fame? (People always assume these murders are done for notoriety, based on nothing but their own desire for glory).
     I will admit my bias. Londoners kept going about their routine during the Blitz, to shake their fists at the Nazi bombers. The Israelis, at the height of the Intifada, when suicide bombs were going off in coffee shops and at falafel stands, would quickly hose away the gore, replace the windows, right the overturned chairs and reopen for business.
     That seems the path of the hero. To say that kids will be traumatized re-entering the school both insults the kids and implies that people should simply avoid their fears — that is a bad lesson. If one of my children were killed at that school, I’d vastly prefer his tribute to be a ban on high-capacity clips over any marble megalith. The best honor for the kids who died is to do whatever we can to keep the kids we still have alive. But that won’t happen, because it’s easier to light an eternal flame than to take daring action.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 25, 2013

* The name of the theater was changed to Nederlander in 2019.

Two tales of the federal government

    An example is not proof. At best, a hint, an indication. One example does not settle the argument, though bigots —and always remember that prejudice is a form of ignorance —offer up their instance or two. Or make them up, when they can't be bothered to find a fact. And pretend that the matter is settled. 

     When it is certainly not settled. An episode may illustrate a greater truth. Or might be deceptive, an outlier. 

    Last week, two stories related to the federal government caught my attention, and though neither represents a vastly complex situation, they do neatly bookend the range of possibility.       

     The first is from me:      

   Wow. Give it up for the United States government. It takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin.'

    I'm serious, or semi-serious anyway. Given that Cheetolini and his henchman Elon and whoever else is in a position to grab a fistful of wires and pull have been tearing at the federal bureaucracy for almost a year now, well, you'd expect the whole thing to grind to a sheering halt. 

     And yet.

     So we're planning an overseas trip for the spring. Airplane tickets. Hotel rooms. Tickets to the palace. And I noticed that my passport will expire six months, minus a few days, after the trip is set to end. Which is technically fine, and would probably get shrugged off, most likely. Although: if your passport isn't valid for six months, in some places it isn't accepted. There are stories.

     I am what they call "a worrier." You probably already figured that out. And I knew as the cab pulled away from my house, heading off to our big trip, in addition to my worrying about the toaster coming to life and setting fire to the drapes which we don't have, and the refrigerator door hanging open, and everything else I conjure up to mock the idea that I am Conradian wanderer out of Lord Jim, I'll also worry until we get back that every checkpoint we pass would snag me on my passport. "Oh sorry Mr., ah, Steinberg, your whole trip is ruined because your passport expires five months and 27 days after this trip is scheduled to end..."

     So I did something uncharacteristic. I took action, took care of it. I went online, filled out the form. My wife took my photo against a white wall —the first one was rejected, so we took another, and that was fine, except for the aging. I filled out the forms, checked the boxes, plugged in the credit card number, and was done at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 10.

     The passport arrived — mirabile dictu —  in the mail Saturday. Three days and change later. About 76 hour after we applied. Yes, I paid an extra $22 for quick delivery —in the money bonfire that is a vacation, it seemed a minor expense.  

    So the government works, right. Not necessarily. Consider this second tale, from reader Elaine Sniegowski:

      After a reunion of old nurser friends at a local restaurant today, I headed home with only one stop along the way — the post office in Tinley Park. Who would ever believe what happened next? Waiting in a short line in front of the service counter in the post office I noticed a small handwritten sign. “No stamps. Sorry!”
     Unbelievable ! How could a post office not have stamps?
     Raising my voice a little, I called to the lone worker at the counter and asked “When will you have stamps?” Not until Monday he replied. Two whole days from now.
     My Tinley Park Post office had failed me. And at Christmas time. Another lady in line called to me, “Try Jewel” I didn’t want to try Jewel. I wanted my stamps from the post office . So, I headed home stampless. Cards lingering on my desk, impossible to mail. Maybe on Monday….maybe.

    And the truth lies ... no doubt somewhere in between. If it helps, Tuesday I was at the Northbrook post office substation on Church Street, sending a couple packages. They had plenty of stamps, and I bought a booklet, just in case. 

Why does Israel keep defending itself?

Street protest, 2014

   

     There was a lot of reaction to Monday's column. Most of it positive, from people glad to see that attitude in the newspaper. But there was one puzzled response. I'm sharing it because it reflects a common attitude:

     Yes, another comment on today's column regarding the murders on Bondi Beach.
     No one deserves to die this way. Or, to die because some other doesn't agree with them.
     Not being Jewish, I perhaps will never understand why the debacle in Gaza as a response to October 7th was necessary. I also most likely will never understand why Israel insists on treating Palestinians living there and in the West Bank the way they do. I will never understand why Israel feels a constant need to defend itself, and, in the process, create an excess of hate among those outside who see that said "defense" as genocide, It's almost as if constant war and fighting is the lifeblood of Israel. And cruelty to people with impunity is somehow fair. Why is it that a Jewish life is worth more than a Palestinian one?
     You wrote, "once you view them not as individuals, but as faceless members of groups, you're capable of anything." And so, it is. Deaths due to genocide are not worse because of the ethnicity of the victims. Or even the number.
     I read the book "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza", by Peter Bienart. You are probably familiar with it. It outlines the historical sins of the Jewish people, who are hardly a non-violent population. I ended up with more understanding of the history, but I still do not have a good answer to why it can't stop itself from continuing its' poor treatment of others. Is there no forgiveness to be had ever? Will the Palestinians ever be allowed to live in the small area of land that is supposed to be theirs without constant illegal encroachment by Israel?
     I'm an outsider to all this. Make it make sense. Make it stop.
     I wish you could explain to people like me. Just a person trying to live my life.
     Barb O.
     Cedar Lake, IN

     A lot to unpack. But anything in particular stand out for you? It did for me. I replied:

     I doubt I could explain it to you. "I will never understand why Israel feels a constant need to defend itself" seems to suggest that you can't even perceive that Israel is constantly being attacked. Or maybe just don't care. Maybe you should ask yourself why Palestinian suffering so moves you, while you can't even see Jewish suffering. I have an idea, but I'd rather you think about it. There might be some insight to be found there. Maybe not.
     NS

     I didn't expect a response, but I got one — criticizing me for being "to close to the issue" to share her indifference to Jewish life and shifting the topic. A reminder why response is fairly pointless.

     I appreciate your taking the time to respond.
     I was hoping perhaps to gain some insight into this issue from someone who surely has spent more than his share of time on it.
     I can see from your response that you are too close to the issue. That is understandable.
     You are incorrect that only Palestinian suffering moves me. I see it all over the world. Every day.

     What I do not see is a capacity for forgiveness. I was hoping you could tell me forgiveness is possible. I believe that unless one can forgive one's transgressor, the wound will never heal. Without forgiveness, without justice, there will be no peace.
     So, I guess there will be no peace there. The killing will continue.
     I'm sorry.

     I didn't quite know what to make of that, and decided it was time to move on. I replied:

     I actually agree with you about the forgiveness part. I think we saw that in the solution to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
     NS

You can party on a beach in Australia, but you're still a Jew

                     "A people still, whose common ties are gone;
                      Who, mix'd with every race, are lost in none."

                                                          — George Crabbe

     You can shave your beard, move to Australia — or your grandparents could, permitting you to party on a New South Wales beach in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
     Even with an Australian accent, putting shrimp on the barbie by the Tasman Sea, you're still a Jew.
     Not held personally responsible for the death of Christ so much anymore. Generally, that particular deathless sin, one horror used to justify a million others, now plays second fiddle to a more recent wrong that can be laid at the feet of any random Jew, anywhere in the world.
     Now, all Jews carry the stain of recent Israeli policy in Gaza, and no joyous gathering anywhere on earth can be free from the risk of blame showing up, uninvited. Punishment delivered by those whose hearts are so big they agonize over the sufferings of a people they may have never met. And so small they can vent the resultant fury on the most marginally-connected victims. 

     No matter that Jews tend to take up the cause of their adversaries with a zeal seldom found elsewhere. They still count as Jews, and die just the same. Also par for the course. In the 1940s, you could convert to Catholicism, but if your grandmother was Jewish, into the pit you go. They call it "blind hatred" for a reason — it neither sees, nor assesses, nor stands on ceremony.
     A thousand people on a beach in Sydney, celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, which arrived in Australia 15 hours ahead of Chicago. Two shooters. At least 15 dead and 42 wounded, including two police officers.
     About 117,000 Jews live in Australia, out of a population of 28 million, most in the cities. The shooting was on Bondi Beach, on the east side of Sydney.
     If that number seems vanishingly small, it is 0.35%, or nearly double the percentage Jews make up of the world population. Our numbers dwindle through assimilation and intermarriage in a way that murder could never contemplate.
     That doesn't mean people don't still try.
     Like most groups, Jews feel a kinship with each other. I've never been to Australia, but if I did, I might slide by a synagogue, the way I did from Bridgetown to London to Taipei. Check out the locals, catch a bagel and a whiff of home.
     So their deaths still hurt. The odd thing about such attacks is, they're really an eloquent argument for the importance of a secure Jewish state. Because if you're Jewish, and feel you're safe where you are and let your vigilance ebb, you might be caught in an enfilade from two gunmen on a pedestrian bridge.
     You either empathize with other people or you don't. And once you view them not as individuals but as faceless members of groups, you're capable of anything.
     We have a president damning Americans for the crime of coming from Somalia. A federal government sweeping people off the street for being brown-skinned. And as if the war in Gaza hasn't been blood-soaked enough over the past two years, we have no shortage of self-appointed avengers keen to mow down a few more innocents. In Australia.
     One horror begets the next, and the rising tide of nationalism reaps the bounty. Along with funeral directors and granite monument salespeople.

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Pay to the Order of ...

 

     You can look at something all your life and never quite see it. Then suddenly, one fine day, it snaps into focus and makes you wonder.
     I was updating my wife's checkbook — we pay bills online like the rest of the modern world, but still send checks sometimes, plus balancing a check book ensures we actually look at where the money is going — and noticed the standard phrase beside where the recipient's name goes: "Pay to the Order of." 

     We know what "pay" means —give 'em the money . But why "order"? What does order mean in this context? What is a person's order that we can pay it?

    AI is a little helpful, tending to consider the whole phrase and not wanting to pull "order" out. Though it does contrast "order" with "bearer," which is helpful. A financial instrument paid to the order has to be cashed by a specific person, as opposed to pay to the bearer, which is good for whoever has it in hand.

    Still, an old school investigation seemed in, ah, order.

    A reminder that "order" is like "set," one of those words with oodles of definitions. Off the top of my head: a sequence of events. A state free from disturbance. A request for goods, in a restaurant or a business. A military command.  

    Samuel Johnson offers 14 meanings in his 1755 dictionary, quite succinctly stated, starting with, "1. Method, regular disposition. 2. Established process. 3. Proper state" and including a few I hadn't considered, such as "8. A society of dignified persons, distinguished by marks of honour" and "12. Means to an end," which fits with my "seems in order" usage above.

    None quite fit the bill for our check, however.
    Noah Webster serves up 15 definitions in his 1828 dictionary, some clearly lifted, such as "15. In architecture, a system of several members, ornaments and proportions of columns and pilasters" which is Johnson, word for word.
     The Oxford English Dictionary has more than two full pages of definitions, and a semi-careful reading didn't find anything that would explain my check. 

     It struck me that this was a situation where you needed the right tool for the job. We are a household that is nothing if not rich in dictionaries, and I borrowed my wife's old Black's Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition. There the second definition is what we're looking for: "A designation of the person to whom a bill of exchange or negotiable promissory note is to be paid. An 'order' is a direction to pay and must be more than an authorization or request. It must identify the person to pay with reasonable certainty."
      So why is it still on checks? Why not just say, "Pay..." and the person's name? 
     Black's explains that too, in its definition of "Check, n. A draft drawn upon a bank and payable on demand." It continues later with the Federal Reserve Board's definition of a check, ending: "It must contain the phrase 'pay to the order of.'"
    And so they do. "Order" is on checks, part of a phrase that is an obligatory legalism. As to why we're still using checks ... it aids record keeping, and is useful under certain circumstances: handing some money to someone without resorting to Zelle or Venmo or whatever the e-banker of the moment happens to be.