The uneasy man at the banquet

      On Sunday I never left the hotel, except to dash onto the sidewalk to pose for wedding photographs, protected from the drizzle by the marquee of the Pfister, a sort of mini-Palmer House in the heart of downtown Milwaukee.
     Otherwise, from putting in an hour on the treadmill in the basement gym at 7 a.m., through a flurry of duties and deliveries, conversations and formalities, leading up to the big event itself at 4:30 p.m. — well, shortly after 5 p.m., once the inevitable crisis, a misplaced grandmother, was sorted out — to dinner and speeches and dancing at a party that didn't wind down until near midnight, all transpired in the same place, opened in 1893, "The Grand Hotel of the West."
     At this point some readers are no doubt wondering, "Didn't his kid already get married?" Yes, Son No.1 in July in Michigan. But through that lack of coordination at which boys excel, Son No. 2 arranged to get married four months later. In Milwaukee.
     Beforehand, I worried that a wedding on Nov. 10 might be negatively affected by events of the previous Tuesday. That a dark cloud might hang over the festivities, the faint sound of lumber being hammered, detention camps built, locomotives assembled, clanking in railyards as the cattle cars are hooked together, readying for their long procession south.
     But I worried for nothing. Little of that got through the soundproof walls of the Pfister. The groom and I sat in a small executive dining room, waiting. While we did talk of the political situation, we might as well have been a pair of toga-clad Greek philosophers in a cave, speculating whether all existence traces to a store of apeiron, the boundless chaos from which the universe is wrought.
     An hour passed. I almost blurted out, "This is going to be my favorite part of the wedding!" But that seemed a diminishment of the expensive celebration to come, and I manfully resisted. Hopping up, I studied a framed photo, taken in the same Imperial Ballroom where he'd wed in a few hours, on Oct. 16, 1899, when the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Milwaukee threw a banquet for President William McKinley and his cabinet.
     All men, naturally, all white. The beloved past that some seem so desperate to claw their way back to.
     But even then, change was afoot, if you examine the evidence carefully. Most men wear white tie, because that was what a guest who had to be a white man had to wear on such occasions. But a few wore black ties — more casual, the vanguard of the tattooed, T-shirted, multi-colored men crowding the bar in the lobby below. Given their druthers, most people want to be less formal, less restricted by rules. They want to be free.
     Change is always there, if you look for it. You can gauge the age of men in the photo just by noting their facial hair. The oldest men have full beards. The middle-aged men, just mustaches.  And the youngest are clean-shaven — there is not a clean-shaven old man, nor a bearded young one.
     The Pfister cocooned me. But if I'm honest, I carry that cocoon with me. Like the men in the photo, I've got mine. I have my place. And yet ...

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Meet Virginia

 

     Regular readers are familiar with Kitty, our half-Bichon, half Shih Tzu mix for the past, ulp, 14 years. I'm happy to report she's as spry and adorable as ever, her coat glossy, her eyes clear.  

     Yes, there is a slight ticking that grows louder, more insistent at times. Prompting me to kneel down, stroke her fur, say, "Kitty, you're here," to underscore our good fortune. Though at times that haunting Mary Oliver line, "How many summers does a little dog have?" sounds like a muted bell tolling softly far away. Off in the distance, still. But not as far away as before.
     For a day last week, she was joined by Virginia, our son's rescue dog, en route to his wedding in Milwaukee. She is, according to a DNA test, a poodle, chihuahua, a bunch of other things mix, though I don't see it. I think of her as a coiled knot of muscle, practically levitating at the end of the leash as I try to walk her and Kitty.
     "I wish they could bottle some of that so I could have it," I say, an older gentleman's phrase if ever there were. My store of summers is also running down.
     She is rarely still a moment, which is why I immediately shot the photo above, when Virginia paused to soak up the sun in our living room. Ordinarily she is racing around the furniture, her beloved stuffed mallard duck — well, actually Kitty's — clamped in her jaws. Better the duck than the key fob to my Mazda, which also found its way into her mouth. She made short  work of it, a wet clump of masticated electronics. 

     A new fob was acquired, expensively, the dog immediately forgiven. My fault for leaving it on a coffee table. Now she's a welcome albeit periodic and temporary addition to our home — the fob secured safely in a drawer beforehand. I admire her boundless energy, though do breath a sigh of relief on those rare occasions when she goes into relaxation mode and just exists for a while, we two together.

     "Thus we sit myself," Oliver writes. "Thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich it is to love the world."
     How rich it is to love the world. That, I believe will be a useful yardstick in the years to come. We measure wealth in billions, lately, but that seems the wrong metric. We should really ask: how much do they love the world? Quite poorly, based on their words and deeds. My sense is many supposed wealthy people are not really well-off at all. Not in the way that I, and I hope you, are, on our better days.

Flashback 2011: Tiny Tim versus the Republicans.

     The election past, we can now peer through weary eyes at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Well I can't — my younger son got married over the weekend, so I've been on vacation, and went looking for columns involving him, and found this, from 2011. A reminder that our once and future president — I'm trying not to say the name, it gets said too much already — is not a cause, but a symptom. The groundwork was laid, and he was summoned, like a demon.

     This season, I avoid most trappings of Christmas; no tree in the living room, no wreath on the door, no caroling. I do this, not out of any liberal media “war against Christmas” — are they really going to ride that hobbyhorse again? — but merely because I’m Jewish; it’s not our holiday, and so failing to observe it is done out of respect for myself, and for the Christians to whom Christmas has actual meaning, and isn’t just a twinkly time of generic wintry celebration.      There are exceptions. I’m not a zealot. I will, for instance accept a well-wrought Christmas cookie, if offered. I do own a rock-stars-sing-Christmas-carols CD, and have been known to play it — I’m a particular fan of Tevin Campbell’s "O Holy Night."
     And Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol," which I used to read to the boys when they were small. To skip "A Christmas Carol" because it’s about Christmas is like avoiding Moby-Dick because you don’t support whaling. Art transcends politics.
     Thus my younger son and I went to the premiere Sunday of the stage version of "A Christmas Carol" at the Goodman Theatre. I’d never seen it, because of my aforementioned Christmas aversion. The production is a holiday favorite and now I see why: It’s great. Lovely sets, generous helpings of music and — best of all — Larry Yando as Scrooge. A seasoned Shakespearean actor, Yando plays Scrooge for the fourth time and is simply perfect — his long elastic face going through the gyrations of greed, fear and amazement Scrooge exhibits in a night of ghostly visits.

       "A Christmas Carol," as you probably know, is a story of personal redemption. The lonely miser — who confronts a request for charity with his famous retort "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" — is forced to see the chances for love he enjoyed then squandered in his Christmases past; the brave forbearance of poor but joyous Bob Cratchit family at Christmas present; and the specter of his own death on a future Christmas, an occasion for joy among his debtors and the pawning of his bed curtains.
     Is this fate certain? Or can Scrooge change, become a better man, in time to save himself and, of course, Tiny Tim?
     The story was written in 1843, but watching it in 2011, in this time of political turmoil, it felt ripped from the headlines.
     The national debate — to the extent that it can be considered a debate and not merely each side firing up their supporters and damning their opponents — is about the same question that "A Christmas Carol" hinges on: Do we live for ourselves alone, for our own greed and profit, or do we try to help the poor boy huddled in the doorway?
     Republicans will no doubt say: "Aha, but Scrooge is an individual! We encourage people such as himself to bear the entire burden of helping the less fortunate, while the government is reserved for creating an environment where the Scrooges of the world can earn the biggest fortune possible to spend — or withhold — as they please."
     That, basically, was the status quo in Scrooge’s time, when debtors went to jail, children were executed for theft, and society was built along lines that would have brought joy to Ron Paul’s anthracite heart (in debates, the Libertarian candidate seems like he’s auditioning for the Scrooge role, patiently re-stating his firm commitment to an indifferent, almost inhuman worldview to those who can’t quite believe he’s serious. "Why yes, I would step over the sick baby.")
     What those who want to strip millions of Americans of the hope of health care, to abandon the elderly, and bury the idea that government should police the excesses of commerce overlook is that we’ve already tried all that, back in the 19th century, and every law, regulation and agency today was created, over years, by a society aghast at the result — though not too aghast. Aghast eventually. Never forget that we created organizations to prevent cruelty to animals, first, and then, out of embarrassment, took the legal protections established for horses and extended them, grudgingly, to children.
     Spoiler alert! Scrooge goes through his wondrous transformation, and basks in the joy that generosity and kindness can bring. Alas, such epiphanies are generally confined to the realm of holiday fiction. Don’t expect those from a certain political party to realize how far they’re strayed from what they once were.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 1, 2011

Flashback 2009: For his pride & joy, dad Bears down

View from our seats

     My younger son is getting married this weekend, so I thought I would look at a few of his cameos from past columns. Such as this, when I figured, heck, let's go to a Bears game. This was written before the fact, which begs the question: so how was it? Honestly, I don't recall. Let's put it this way: we never went to another. 

     When a professional sports franchise has a season as spectacularly lousy as the Bears are having this year, its fans begin searching for occult explanations. The Cubs have their famous goat curse, athletes on the cover of Sports Illustrated face the cover jinx. But what have the Bears done to invite this doom?
     While fans scratch their heads and puzzle — what could be different about this season? — I feel like Jonah, sleeping below deck on the storm-tossed ship, shifting uneasily in my hammock as my fellow sailors clasp their hands over their heads, pleading with their gods in despair. What have we done, O Enki, to displease you so? Who among us is unworthy in thine eyes?
     Ummmm, sorry Bears fans, but that would be me. You see, I did something a few weeks back completely out of character, something I have never done before, nor has my father, nor his father, nor any Steinberg in an unbroken chain going back to Creation. Something that, I'm beginning to suspect, was so far out of keeping with the cosmic order that it has upset the laws of nature, rended the time/space continuum and drawn doom down upon our hapless home team.
     I bought Bears tickets.
     My younger son started lobbying for them last year, pointing out that I'm always taking his older brother to the opera, which the younger boy is cool toward. Yes, I took him instead to baseball, basketball and hockey games, and even indoor arena football. But we had never gone to Soldier Field to see the mighty Bears, for the simple reason that everything I find interesting about football — the commercials, being able to see the action, having someone explain what is happening — is found on TV and lost attending a live game.
     I'd rather clean the garage.
     But I am nothing if not a doting father, so last year I logged onto StubHub, figuring I'd score a pair of ducats to the Packers game and endure the enforced boredom.
     Great Caesar's Ghost! Have you ever tried to buy football tickets? They were $175 apiece, or more. As much as I love my boys, both Primus and Secundus, I couldn't see shelling out $400 by the time we got done with parking and hot cocoa and souvenirs just to watch 22 big guys slam into each other.
     For that kind of money, you want somebody to sing.
     But my younger lad kept dropping hints, and the sentence, "My dad never took me to a Bears game; I hated him for that," formed in my mind. So this season, I gritted my teeth, dug in my pocket for $136 and bought a pair of tickets — lousy tickets, I assume, given the hoots of ridicule I've received when I tried to gripe about the expense to people who actually attend games.
     "A hundred and thirty-six dollars for both?" a co-worker snorted in the tone a neighbor would use if you said that you just bought a new car for $250.
     The game is against the Philadelphia Eagles Nov. 22 — again, more bad ju-ju, the anniversary of that dark day in Dallas. To get into the football mode, I've watched nearly an hour, spread out over several weeks of course, of staggeringly inept Bears football the way football's supposed to be watched — on TV.
     I've also read sports reporters as they struggle to convey the magnitude of the weekly civic shame and compound professional disaster. Read Mike Mulligan's column Friday about Thursday night's five-interception humiliation in San Francisco and pick out the adjectives: "painful," "frozen," "self-destructive," "blown out," "shocking," "flat-out idiotic," "wretched". . . well, you get the idea.
     Of course winning isn't everything ("It's the ONLY thing!" said, ah, some famous coach).
     No matter how blundering the action on the field, the important part is the father/son dynamic, right? To sit in Soldier Field, which I imagine will be draped in black bunting by that point, and join in the desolate, hopeless keening of the fans as they tear their hair and wail and shake their fists at the sky as the PA blares a slow funeral dirge.
     "So you like this sort of stuff, eh?" I'll say or, one hopes, not say.
     Or heck, maybe our presence will be just the offering the Great Wheel of Sports Karma demands, and the Bears will do great. My brother went to one game once and Nathan Vasher ran 108 yards for a touchdown. But he's always been lucky.
     Either way, the boy wants to go, so we're going. And if it hails frozen frogs that evening, and Jay Cutler gets spun around, runs the ball into the wrong end zone for an Eagles touchdown then smacks into the goal post and shatters like glass, well, you'll know who to blame.

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2009

Flashback 2011: Forget something?

Kitty in Colorado in 2011

     The house is busy with people again — two sons, one new daughter-in-law and a soon-to-be daughter-in-law. My younger son is getting married. So I hope you will forgive me for slipping my EGD duty and sharing something from our mutual past. This is when our dog Kitty — now a spry 14 — was new to the household, which back then was always abuzz. Though reading it now, it occurs to me that one sad day I will no doubt do exactly what the last sentence suggests.

     Routine is wonderful — I am of an age when I savor the small quotidian consistencies of life, perhaps too much, simply because they’re so expected, so manageable.
     Every morning, I’m the first one awake. If I were to open my eyes and hear someone downstairs, I’d be alarmed — I’d think, "intruders!" — because no one in my family ever gets up until long after I do.
     I throw on some clothes, go downstairs, put on the coffee, go out and fetch the papers, read them a bit, maybe do a little work, maybe eat some breakfast. Frankly, I enjoy having the house to myself before the commotion starts. It’s like I own the place.
     At some point, it occurs to me that we have a dog. Maybe I’ll hear the softest yelp — she sleeps in the younger boy’s room. So I pad upstairs and peek in on her. Sometimes the pup is a flattened blonde mop of dozing canine cuteness. Sometimes she is up, in her little crate where we keep her at night to prevent her from getting into trouble. She looks at me, her bright little shoe button black eyes aglitter, her entire mien expectant, tail awag, all dressed up and ready to go out.
     I suppose a harder man than myself would shake my son’s shoulder and growl, "Up on yer feet yah worthless sack of supine laziness and walk yer galdurn mutt." But I don’t even think that (well, except occasionally, and even then it’s more of a weary "And why am I doing this?"). What I typically think is: Sleep is good. I wish I were asleep. But I’m not so I might as well walk the dog.
     And frankly, having been up for a while, the thought of walking the dog in the great outdoors seems pleasant, another manageable routine task that I can accomplish without screwing up.
     Usually.
     So I go downstairs, toss on a jacket, gloves, a wool cap, grab the leash, a plastic newspaper bag, a couple of dog treats.
     On this particular day, having gathered those necessities, I plunged briskly out the front door, leash in hand, and into the frosty morn and was bounding down the snow-covered front steps when I stopped, laughed, looked around, then said aloud, to no one in particular, pronouncing each word slowly and clearly:
     "The dog."
     Then I spun around and went back inside to bring her along too, thinking: This is why airplanes crash. This is why surgeons leave scalpels in patients. This is why skydivers leap from planes without their parachutes. Because if you do the same thing every single day, day in and day out, eventually you’re going to forget the most important part. If you do it enough times, then one fine day you’ll find yourself trying to walk the dog without a dog.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 19, 2011

Does second Trump term put our republic at risk?

 

Benjamin Franklin, by Joseph Siffred Duplessis
 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

     When Benjamin Franklin was asked whether this new Constitution being hashed out was establishing a monarchy or a republic, he famously replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
     And since that day in 1787, the United States of America has continued to be a representative republic, its leaders chosen by democratic ballot, despite a number of existential threats.
     Sometimes, the enemy was foreign. The British, trying to claw their rebellious colony back, burned the White House in 1814. The Japanese destroyed our fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Soviets aimed their nuclear missiles at us from 150 miles away in Cuba 20 years later.
     Though the gravest threats were always from within. It was the United States, not Japan, that rounded up blameless American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II and put them in internment camps. It was the United States, not the Soviet Union, that imposed loyalty oaths and restricted freedom of expression during the years of McCarthyism in the 1950s. It was the United States, not some foreign oppressor, that let the voting rights of Black citizens be voided by terror in the South for a century.
     Some of these lapses were uncharacteristic. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, was also the man who suspended habeas corpus. Under his watch, federal troops occupied the Chicago Times — no relation, alas — because a local general didn't like the tone of its editorials.
     But that was a time of extreme crisis. The ultimate self-inflicted wound to our republic was the Civil War, cracking the country in half for four full years of bloody conflict. More Americans died in the Civil War than in any other war.
     What can we expect in a Trump presidency? Where to begin?
     Goodbye, Ukraine — they're toast, their resistance to Russia in vain. Open season on immigrants — Trump said he'd begin deporting them on Day One, though he also said he'd build a wall, and Mexico would pay for it, and that didn't happen.
     In a weird way, Trump's proven proclivity for untruth now becomes a source of comfort: Is this policy or just palaver to entertain the base?

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All the news except the most important part

 

     The Sun-Times has excellent headline writers. The first thing I noticed Wednesday when I unbagged my paper was the perfect way the front page headline, "HEAVY WAIT" encapsulated the long evening before.
     That said, the second thing I and every other reader immediately saw was that the paper had gone to press before the outcome of the election was settled. The edition contained all sorts of information except the one thing that everyone most wanted to know: who won? 

     Same with the New York Times. A drawback of print journalism — yes, you can spread it over the kitchen table. But it lags. A print newspaper is a relic, immediately outdated. An increasingly unacceptable flaw.

     The paper went to press about midnight. The last thing I added to my column was that the result wasn't looking good for Kamala Harris. She had all but lost, but there was still a very narrow path to victory, and if we declared Trump the winner, there was the risk that the outcome would somehow flip. As satisfying as that outcome would be for the future of our starcrossed country, it would still be bad journalism to blow the call. Or as my mantra goes: "Better vague than wrong."
     I'd prepped for Election Day writing three columns — one I called "Trump wins," one I called "Kamala wins" and "No decision." I assumed the last would be the one to run and worked hardest on that. What I didn't realize is that it would be chosen at 9 p.m. and mooted about 5:30 a.m., when the election was called for Trump. I like to think I added perspective to the situation — but still, a less-than-ideal work around. On my blog, I could quickly adapt the piece to reflect current, grim reality, starting with the headline, which was "The coin has been tossed and is now spinning" in the paper, and "The tossed coin lands" in the blog
     Looking at the papers, and thinking about the long four years ahead, I couldn't help but sadly speculate that by the 2028 election  — if we're still having elections that is — whether there will also be print newspapers, or newspapers of any kind for that matter.  
    That's probably alarmist, and there is too much alarmism going around already. Newspapers were circling the drain whether Trump got elected or not. Sure, he might stamp on their fingers as they dangle from the cliff. Or he might supercharge their importance. Someone has to oppose the tyrant. 

     That last sentiment sounds overly optimistic. Trump is about ignoring reality, not confronting it. Accepting his toxic fantasyland, his dismal Disney World, and living in it. 

      Still, surrender is premature. I had a relative call me and announce that the nation is dead. I disagreed, explaining that even if all of Trump's threatened changes take place, from deporting immigrants to banning trans athletes from high school sports, that won't quite undo democracy. The thing is tenacious and just won't die.

    Yes, he's against fair elections — except the most recent one. Not a murmur of complaint, oddly. 

    Yes, he's against the media, an independent justice system and fair courts. But those won't unravel quite so easily, and from what we saw of Trump's mental deterioration during the campaign, he isn't exactly Mr. Peak Efficiency at this point, not that he ever was. 

     Yes, his minions will be busy. But at some point they are going to bark against an American public that still expects their Social Security checks to arrive. Many bad things will happen — I figure China will strike a deal with Trump, give him a box of baubles and a state dinner, then invade Taiwan. I tend to hold out faith in the country I love, but I don't want that belief to render me dim-witted. Times change.

      Still. I just don't believe the American dream will die that easily. It's too valuable, too cherished, at least by those of us not on our knees welcoming the Great Yam God. 

      Print newspapers, on the other hand ... well, we'll see.