Mesmee-rized

 

  
     Is AI writing advertising now too? I saw the above over Wordle, and instantly thought that, then decided, no, it sounds more like a translation issue.
     Which actually was fairly perceptive, and a reminder that social media means it is you and whatever native intelligence you've managed to develop and retain against the world. Spoiler alert: the world is winning. Then again, it usually does.
     Click on "LEARN MORE" you go to an enormous page, with many pictures of the shoe contorting, and a countdown timer urging you to buy now ("Hurry up!" is what they actually say) while this fabulous sale is going on.
     "Buy now!" is always a good indication that you should stop, think and most likely buy never.
     What they don't say is the name of the shoe — well, eventually, yes, way down the page, in a photo caption: Mesmee. Looking for an actual company, I found a review page with remarks like this:
     "0 Star Rating For Cheap China Crap Falsely Advertised As MADE IN USA!"
     "Complete rip-off and "got cheated" and "9 weeks and no shoes. 2 emails no response. these 
people are crooks of the worst ilk. do not order a thing from them." So we have consensus. The message is: always know what you're buying and who you are buying from. Cave canem.
     Oh wait. That's "beware of dog." I mean Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
Since I never criticize someone's headline without offering an improvement, even a paltry scam, let's throw "Walking shoes for elderly with poor balance" on the cutting board and see what we can do with it.
     Hmmm...how about "Stable shoes for striding seniors"? Or "You won't wobble walking in these floor-grippers." Or "Shoes for walking, not falling."
     A reminder that the problem with artificial intelligence is that it's heavy on the former and light on the latter.

Works in progress: Jack Clark on drugs

Sign, San Ignacio, Belize.

     Turns out Jack Clark and I have more in common than I thought. Back in the day, we both took a dim view of drugs. He favored beer. To me, beer was a temperance beverage; make mine Jack-on-the-rocks. That was enough.

     Like him, my stumbling block was that if I bought drugs, then I'd be a person buying drugs, and that struck me as loathsome. So while I'd partake for free, now and then, I didn't particularly like the effects, and never sought it out. Thank heaven for small favors.

     Anyway, I'm taking up space that should go to EGD's favorite pinch hitter, with a memory of the altered life. Take it away, Jack:

     I’m probably one of the last guys who should be writing about cocaine. I tried it once — or who knows? Maybe two or three times. But the night of the Super Bowl is the only time that stays in memory, that night, and the morning after.
     When cocaine came on the scene at the Lincoln Park bar where I was hanging out in the ‘70s, I’d already heard how expensive it was, so I was too cheap to even give it a try. What if I ended up liking it? I was a domestic beer drinker. That was my price level. Every so often, I’d splurge and get a bourbon on the rocks. I would never do shots of anything. I could go out with $20, drink the night away, feed the jukebox, leave a reasonable tip, flag a taxi, and still have enough left to pick up a morning newspaper on the way home.
     When people would say, “You want to take a walk around the block?” That was shorthand for Let’s go smoke a joint. I usually shook my head unless it was a pretty girl, and then I’d take the walk just to keep her company. I wouldn’t partake or at least not much. I liked that simple beer buzz so much better.
     The first time someone invited me to meet them in the washroom, I didn’t get it at all.
     My friend must have seen my confused look. He opened his hand to show me the vial in his palm. “A little blow?” he said.
     “Thanks,” I said. “But no.”
     Before long, I seemed to be in the minority. At least, in this particular bar. On my birthday in 1979, Harry invited me to the washroom. I shook my head. “I don’t do that stuff.”
     “Yeah. But it’s your birthday.”
     A few weeks later on New Year’s Day, he tried again. “I already told you, I don’t do that stuff,” I said.
     “But it’s the ‘80s now,” he said and predicted the flavor of the new era.
     Some call the ‘80s the decade of decadence but where I hung out it was definitely the cocaine decade. It started with the thought that this was not an addictive drug and ended with the realization that if you used it frequently, when you stopped, you found yourself depressed for no apparent reason.
     I believe, given enough time and a large enough grant, I could figure out the missing link.
     Before the ‘80s were over, Harry had lost his business, home, and marriage. But he never lost his sense of humor. When I reminded him about what he’d said on the first day of the decade, he didn’t remember saying it, but he was proud of himself and found it quite amusing.
     I was in my own little bubble half the time and didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on around me. I’d stopped listening to the radio around the time of Grand Funk Railroad. But I didn’t mind pumping quarters into the jukebox and getting lost in the music. Three plays for a quarter or seven for a half dollar. That seemed pretty reasonable compared to what some of my friends were spending to keep themselves amused.
     A good bar is like a decent church. It needs music, lighting, comfortable seats, an interesting congregation, and something to drink. Oh, and a religion, of course. I decided that my druggy friends thought they were outlaws. That was their religion. All that sneaking around, whispering, money changing hands or being tightly rolled, those were their rites.
     But what was I doing there? That’s probably a question that anyone who’s spent too much time in a saloon asks.
     It was a comfortable room. Everyone looks better under amber bar lights. The jukebox was great. I don’t remember most of the songs anymore and they changed records regularly, which is one sign of a good box. It was the first place I ever heard Merle Haggard’s "Rambling Fever." The B side was his great rendition of "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.' Mink DeVille's, "Just to Walk That Little Girl Home," was another favorite. The opening line: “It’s closing time in this nowhere café.”
     It’s a great song but it doesn’t explain what I was doing in a bar where I was becoming an outsider. I was there for the moments when it all came together, the light and the music. The buzz. If you could just hold it there, right there, you might finally understand something important. This feels so good, you think. This is how it should always be. I almost feel normal.
     It never holds, of course. The room tilts, the lights get too bright, someone’s playing mediocre songs on the jukebox, it all slips away, and you’re back to being you.
     The mix of clientele at the bar reminded me of the West Side block where I’d grown up. There were doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, cops, mechanics, salesmen, waiters and waitresses, carpenters, janitors, and everything in between. A wannabe writer, moving furniture to pay the bills, fit right in. People talked about books, music, politics, anything you could think of. There were always new, interesting people stopping by.
     As the years went on, much of that diversity went away and it became, more and more, a cocaine bar. Some of the old regulars disappeared, others rarely came in. The level of the conversations dropped considerably (along with my IQ, I’ve always figured). Often, they weren’t conversations at all but a series of monologues. It was no longer a very inviting place for new people. "What’s he doing here?" was the typical feeling. Is he a narc?
     I didn’t do cocaine but I found myself being suspicious of strangers all the same. It was no longer such a comfortable place.
     One night one of my non-druggy friends invited me to the washroom. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re buying that stuff now.” I’d always thought he was a fairly intelligent guy.
     “You know, if you don’t buy now and then,” he’d said, in a very serious tone, and changed my opinion with a single sentence, “people stop inviting you in.”
     I started to expand my horizons. But if I was out and about, I’d sometimes try to make it to my old home for one last drink at closing time. One bartender liked to joke that she laid out milk and cookies for me.
     One year, I came in on Super Bowl night. I hadn’t seen the game or heard the score. “Who won the Super Bowl?” I asked.
      “Bruce and Gary,” the milk-and-cookies bartender said. These were two regulars. (I’ve changed names here to protect the living and the dead.)
     “No really?” I said.
     “Really,” she said. “Hang around. They’ll be back.”
     It wasn’t long before they were back with a cast of thousands. Well, maybe it was only twenty. I finally found out the answer to my question. Bruce and Gary had won the Super Bowl. They’d gone to some high-end bar for a big-time Super Bowl party. They’d split a $1,000 square, putting up $500 each. With 100 squares on the grid that meant the total pool was $100,000. I don’t remember how the payout worked but they’d ended up winning two of the four quarters and walked away with something like $37,000 and a TV.
     So I joined the hangers-on as we went from one late-night bar to another. I refused all invitations to the toilet but was happy to take free drinks when they were offered.
     We eventually ended up in someone’s living room, all sitting around a huge coffee table with a pile of cocaine in the middle. To me, it looked like someone had upended a 2-pound bag of flour.
      Oh, what the hell? I thought. This was a special occasion, which meant I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for never offering them some of mine.
     At dawn, there weren’t that many of us left, so I finally got to do a bit of talking. But every time I said something, a guy I didn’t know very well said, “That’s a given, Jack.”
     I’d always heard that cocaine made you feel smart. It was having the opposite effect on me.
     After a while, I’d had enough, not of the cocaine but of that guy. I left the survivors still around the coffee table. The sun had been up for a while when I made the long walk home. It was a pleasant spring-like morning and all the birds were singing the same damn song: “That’s a given, Jack. That’s a given.”
     Later, as I recounted the night to a friend, I said I’d never felt so stupid.
     “Oh, you idiot, don’t pay any attention to him,” she’d said. “He says that to everyone.”
      I probably should have thanked him. If nothing else, it had cured me of any further interest in the drug. All these years later, I don’t remember his name or even what he looked like. But I still hear those birds now and then.

Americans, once 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water,' face return to bad old days

Protesting pollution on LaSalle Street, 1970.

     In 1889, the American correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan and was momentarily impressed.
     “I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago,” Rudyard Kipling, 23, informed his readers in northern India. "The other places do not count."
     But initial approval evaporated as he looked around, noting: "Its water is the water of the Hughli," — a branch of the Ganges in West Bengal famous for its pollution, "and its air is dirt."
     Unregulated industry — enormous stockyards dumping into the canals, making them, in Kipling's words, "black as ink, and filled with untold abominations," smokestacks belching filth — will do that. Today when we call Chicagoans "gritty" we are speaking about toughness; 137 years ago, it meant they were coated in coal dust.
     What changed? Well, conscientious businesses, concerned about the effect pollution was having on the quality of life of their neighbors, took it upon themselves to clean up their acts and ...
     Ha-ha, just kidding. Early April Fool's. No, of course, business, then and now, cares only about short-term profits. But government forced them to act in a socially-responsible fashion, setting health standards and limiting pollution. Only then did city dwellers breathe easier, and "grit" could fade into colorful metaphor.
     I was reminded of this flipping open the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine and coming upon "The Dismantling of Environmental Protections — A Grave Threat to America’s Health" by a pair of Harvard doctors, Adam W. Gaffney and David Himmelstein, joined by three other health experts.
     They start with another once notoriously dirty city — Cleveland — and the 1969 combustion of its Cuyahoga River, so polluted it caught fire, "sparking national attention to environmental degradation."
     A president not famous for his selflessness, but Cincinnatus compared to our current commander-in-chief, took decisive action:
     "In his State of the Union address seven months later, President Richard Nixon lamented that Americans were being 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water' and proclaimed that clean air and water should 'be the birthright of every American.' At Nixon’s urging, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act (CAA) with bipartisan support. Air-quality upgrades mandated by that act and enforced by the EPA are among the most effective health interventions of the past half-century, having reduced air pollution by 75% in the United States and saved at least 200,000 lives per year."
     Now our birthright is being taken away — it isn't just voting. Our country is in full retreat regarding the environment.

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Sparrows

    
     If you're not careful, trying to solve one problem, you end up creating a worse problem.

     House sparrows, such as these black-throated specimens above, were an English bird, introduced to the United States in 1851 as a way to combat caterpillars. Over the next 50 years, sparrows spread across the continental United States.
     That's an oversimplification — there were continuing efforts to bring the bird to this country through the 1870s, on both coasts.
     By the 1880s, sparrows were seen as pests, and an effort was made to undo the folly — bounties were put on them. Books were written on how to hunt sparrows. Regret set in.
     “Without question the most deplorable event in the history of American ornithology was the introduction of the English Sparrow.” W.L. Dawson wrote 1903 in "The Birds of Ohio."
     To add insult to injury, it was discovered, too late, that sparrows do not eat insects. They eat seeds, and grain.
     This sparked what was called "The Sparrow War" in the late 19th century, with some advocating their destruction, and whether they could be considered "American" birds — a designation which was not grudgingly given until 1931, according Diana Wells' essential "100 Birds and How They Got Their Names."
     At first, Wells writes, "sparrow" described any small bird. The word itself is old, from Old English spearw, , meaning "a flutterer." The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word deep into the mists of time, well over a thousand years old, offering numerous cognates, including the useful "sparrow-blasting," deployed with jocular or contemptuous force" and meaning, "The fact of being blasted or blighted by some mysterious power, skeptically regarded as unimportant or non-existent," popular around the late 1500s.
     Another useful variant is found in Wentworth and Flexner's "Dictionary of American Slang" — "sparrow cop," defined as "a policeman in disfavor with his superiors and assigned to a park to guard the grass," dismissed as "not common," though perhaps it should be.
     I expected Noah Webster, writing his 1828 dictionary, to view them as English birds, but he does no such thing, calling them, "a small bird of the genus Fringilla and order of Passers. These birds are frequently seen around houses," which certainly meshes with my experience.   

     Working backward in time, to Samuel Johnson's great 1755 dictionary, a sparrow is merely "a small bird." He quotes a line from Macbeth that at first seems bland, almost meaningless: "As sparrows, eagles, or the hare, the lion." Until you check the context — the Captain is answering a question whether Macbeth and Banquo are frightened by an attack from the Norwegians, and declares they are as little concerned as eagles and lions are when confronting sparrows and rabbits.
     Johnson wrote his dictionary practically alone — an accomplishment that was to be of great pride to his countrymen, especially compared to French team who spent decades compiling their nation's dictionary — so can be forgiven for overlooking a much stronger appearance in Shakespeare. Horatio tells his friend Hamlet that if his mind isn't in his duel with Laertes, he will find a way to delay it.
     "Not a whit, we defy augury," the melancholy Dane insists. "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all."
     That sounds like a plan but — spoiler alert — the duel will be the death of Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude and Claudius.
     In other word, thinking you are ready for what you suppose is coming, and actually being prepared for the mean trick fate actually has in store for you, can be two very different things.

Donald Trump mounts a Chicago hobbyhorse — Christopher Columbus

Columbus monument, Barcelona, Spain.

     Certain issues just seem to belong to Chicago. Dibs, for instance. That peculiar tradition of trying to claim a parking space with a few scattered chairs, or dinette tables, or whatever, just because you took the trouble of shoveling it out. A weird blend of private effort and public display, these fragile monuments to selfishness. "I went to the trouble to clear the public way, so the space now belongs to me." There's something tragic about dibs; I sometimes snowblow the sidewalks of my entire block; I don't then try to stop people from walking there.
     So it stood out, from the general wrongness of everything happening in Washington, D.C., to see Donald Trump's White House leap into the Christopher Columbus fight, erecting a statue of the great explorer near the grounds of the White House early Sunday morning. Truly, it was as if the president had issued an executive order banning ketchup on hot dogs, not to give him any ideas.
     “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero," a spokesman declared.
     I bet he is. Columbus's heroism has curdled in some quarters, particularly after the 2020 George Floyd protests, when the exact degree that our government values the lives of people who didn't have the good sense to be born white came into sharp relief. Suddenly, deifying Confederate traitors and rampaging colonizers couldn't be shrugged off quite so easily.
     Columbus statues were taken down in other cities across the country, such as Boston, Richmond and Pittsburgh. Baltimore's was broken into pieces and tossed into the Inner Harbor. The statue erected on the White House grounds, in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, was created by an artist — to stretch the term — working from the shattered Baltimore statue, fished out of the water.
     Still, Columbus seems a uniquely Chicago concern. Maybe because the city yanked three Columbus statues off the street in 2020. Maybe just from watching close up the day-to-day gyrations of old-school Italian pride groups trying to make the case that once someone is honored in a public space he therefore must be honored forever, no matter how tastes change. The issue resembles school prayer, where specific groups insist their own private devotions become mandatory public ritual.
     Maybe because Columbus, while known around the world, has been a particular fixation in Chicago, where the city's monumental 1893 fair was dubbed "The World's Columbian Exposition," part of the 19th century trend of celebrating Columbus for discovering the continent. An effort picked up enthusiastically by Italian immigrants, who at the time played then playing the despised outsider role now forced upon Venezuelans. Columbus became demonized in the 21st century for his rough handling of the discovered — raping and torturing and murdering them more than many like to see in our public heroes. Except for the president, of course, who has made a career of slathering plaudits over the most loathsome personalities,  particularly himself. 

     As a historically minded person, I generally don't like to see statues pulled down. It smacks of the Taliban blowing up Buddhas. There is an enormous monument to Stephen Douglas at 35th Street, just west of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Douglas was not only a slaveholder, but a notoriously neglectful slaveholder. Yet the edifice remains, and rightly so, because it's historic and in a part of the city not otherwise bristling with tourist sites. Besides, it's also Douglas' tomb, and it could be argued that everyone, no matter how vile, gets to slumber in his own grave.

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Flashback 2012: If they go to school, kids will know who Pulaski was

     There are so many tragedies manifesting themselves right now — a deepening war, a shuddering economy, a corrupt and cruel American government bent on its own enrichment and establishing permanence in power, for starters — this one might seem far down the tree of disaster.

     But seeing how vibrant young immigrants come to America and become the same hidebound haters and status-starved revanchists found among the native born, the subject is important enough to merit a reminder. The Italian old-guard claws at the vanished majesty of Columbus, and embraces stone cold haters like Trump when he supports them in their self-destructive folly. 

    It is natural that both strands would come together, as Trump placed a statue of Columbus on the White House grounds Sunday, to show his hand. You'd think it would chill the bones of any conscientious immigrant. No doubt they dug it. As for Poles...

    This ran when Rahm Emanuel suggested that Chicago Public School children go to school on two make-believe ethnic holidays. Spoiler alert: CPS dropped Pulaski Day as a holiday in 2012.  Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day in Illinois in 2017, and CPS decided not to make it a school holiday in 2019. Now if we could only work on summer...

 

    On the base of the Dante Award that the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans gave to me at a lovely luncheon two years ago is the inscription, “Never be a timid friend to truth.”
     Those words appear, more or less, in the 17th canto of Paradiso, the middle of the third book of the Divine Comedy, a particularly beautiful chapter containing Dante’s famous lines about exile: “Bitter is the taste of another man’s bread, and hard is the way going up and down another man’s stairs.”
     The motto on the award ­— a life-size bust of Dante — isn’t exactly what Dante wrote. He is torn whether to speak the truth and risk angering his friends or keep quiet and risk oblivion. “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth,” he tells his patron Cangrande, “I fear that I shall not live on.”
     Which is a fair summation of the thought that went through my head when I saw that representatives of Chicago’s proud Italians and equally proud Poles were objecting to Rahm Emanuel’s plan to send kids to school on Columbus Day and Pulaski Day.
     “Part of an ongoing campaign to diminish ethnic recognition in the city,” said my pal and lunchmate Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee.
     “A slap in the face,” said Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Polish American Association, whom I don’t know but I’m sure I would like if I did.
     The polite thing to do would be to cough into a fist and ignore them, confident the mayor will not cave under pressure. If he can frog-march the teachers union, he can handle the old guard ethnic guilds too. In the delicate kabuki of ethnic and racial politics, caring is best left to those with credentials.
     “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth. . . . ” A "timido amico." Dante doesn’t add “regarding my own people,” does he? Besides, I’m sort of an honorary Italian already, due to the award, and my ancestors came from Poland; my grandfather was born in Bialystok, and even though some Polish readers seem to be unwilling to accept that a Jew can be Polish, I don’t see the conflict.
     So here goes . . .
     Our school system betrays the children it’s supposed to teach in many ways, but the worst is the abuse of low expectations. It’s always easier for a teacher to show a film.
     All sorts of secondary side values undermine education, from our state’s messed up finances to meddling parents to antique customs that should have been scrapped long ago. Why do we kick kids out of school every summer for nearly three months? So they can go into the fields and help bring in the crops. Only guess what? They don’t do that anymore. We dismiss them anyway, for a summer of Nintendo. Not all bad, of course; there’s also Little League and family vacations. But it isn’t a rational system.
     Columbus Day and Pulaski Day are similar relics, inserted into the calendar as a sop to large ethnic communities that craved honor and belonging. And that’s fine. Human nature. Have a parade, close the Recorder of Deeds office, put on a hat with a feather and go enjoy a glass of grappa or Slivovitz.
     But school is serious. Poor education is both a major cause and serious symptom of half of our problems. If you want to put a finger on why America lags further and further behind the rest of the world, you’d have a smorgasbord of reasons: broken health care, crumbling infrastructure, knee-buckling debt. But a wheezing, feeble education system designed to babysit the lowest achievers would be the ice sculpture in the center.
     We’re not supposed to make ethnic generalizations anymore, though everybody does. But if I had to use one word to describe what I consider being Italian means, its essence, I would say, “boldness.” I wish my pals at the Joint Civic Committee would have asked themselves: What would Galileo have done? Add a day of school or keep the day off so kids can hang around the mall? How about Columbus? Would he let the crew sit on deck playing cards because it’s a saint’s day, or would he have them hoist the sails and get moving toward the New World?
     And for Poles, the word I use is “hard-working.” We get up in the morning and plow. If you’d told my grandpa it was Pulaski Day and so he should sit on his butt, he’d have laughed and said, “No work, no pay.”
     Dante is advised — spoiler alert! — to “forswear all falsehood,” vex the shameful, and “then let him who itches scratch.”
     Good advice. So if you want my Dante Award back, I’ll box it up. But kids aren’t going to learn about Columbus or Pulaski or much of anything else while on vacation. Send them to school, and let the adults slake their thirst for honors somewhere else.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 19, 2012

Iran War won't be so absentee

 

     What was America's longest war?
     Not the Civil War — that was the bloodiest, 620,000 dead, with Americans falling on both sides. That ended three days shy of exactly four years.
     Not World War II — four months shorter. Not the Vietnam War. Good guess, but no. Nearly 20 years, from the first military advisers in November, 1955 to the fall of Saigon in April, 1975.

    A long time. But topped, by a couple months, by the Afghanistan War — how quickly we forget. Also nearly 20 years, from 2001 to 2021, 2,400 American military died, not to forget maybe 150,000 Afghan civilians and fighters.
     And for what? The country is under the thumb of the Taliban. Just like when we started.
     We should think hard about these past conflicts as we go sailing off into a new one. Well, we should have thought about them before we went sailing off into a new one. But thinking hard wasn't on the table, apparently. No consultation with Congress before going to war, as required by law. No communication with the American people — the opposite, we were told the job was done last year. No huddling with our allies — our former allies, fallen away after a year of Donald Trumps global charm offensive.
     Trump says the war will be Iran will be over "very soon. But Trump says a lot of things — the war is won, no, it continues. Five thousand Marines are on their way. The Strait of Hormuz will be easy to open — no, we must have the help of NATO to do it.
     The only thing happening very soon is the war's one month anniversary — on Saturday, the 28th. A good time to consider where we're heading.
     Wars take on a momentum, a weight of their own. After the first six Americans died, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth dragooned their grieving families into an imaginary chorus, urging our country deeper down the hole. Using initial to justify feeding an unknown number of soldiers into a grinder for an undetermined span of time.
     “What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family," Hegseth said. "They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done.’”
     Finish what? What is this exactly? We seem to be making the goal up as we go.
     Not to be outdone, Trump conjured former presidents expressing envy at his triumph. All four living ex-presidents deny saying that.
     If the war lasts a year, or 10, we'll want to look back and see what we were thinking when it started. The Republicans were thinking, "Whatever Donny wants, Donny gets." While Democrats gnashed their teeth and wailed, quietly.
     Afghanistan could go on for 20 years because the war was so removed from our everyday existence. Pain was felt, but not by us.

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