So now being the GOAT is all caps and a good thing...

     Summer's over?! And I never got the chance to lie under a cherry tree, a la Sydney J. Harris, and just muse. About the small mysteries of life. About writing and language. That's so unfair. 

     I blame the 24/7 news cycle. You just can't get in the proper musing fashion with your ex-president vigorously manifesting himself as a traitor, continually ramping up to tear the country apart violently to return himself to undeserved high office.     

     But you can try.
     I watched Serena Williams play in the U.S. Open — my wife is a tennis fan. And while it was thrilling and dramatic, one small aspects of her monumental success kept tripping me up. 

     Just look at it. 
     She's the goat. And not because Williams lost her bid for a 24th major title. Everyone was intensely gratified by how well she played, at 40, against opponents who sometimes weren't yet born when she began her professional career.
     No, Williams is the GOAT because that stands for "Greatest of All Time."
     You know that. I know that.
     And yet. It just doesn't feel right.

     To me. 
     Decades of habit cannot be abandoned in a moment. Up until fairly recently, a goat, in sports, was someone who failed in spectacular fashion. Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner was perhaps the archetypical goat for letting Mookie Wilson's grounder go between his legs in the sixth game of the World Series. Charlie Brown was a goat. 

     (Note that, in this strip, Charlie despairs at being "the goat," which strikes me as unusual, since the definite article seems more used in the greatest sense. Blow a play and you risk becoming a goat, part of a braying herd. Rise to the summit and you achieve the rare distinction of becoming the GOAT.)

     Yes, I'm always the one, when some other old coots complain about changes in the language, who points out that language is supposed to be plastic. That's something of an in-joke, as plastic today refers to the artificial substance, while previously it evoked the ability to be formed, taken from the Greek word plastikos, to mold or sculpt (hence "plastic surgery.")

     Goat as a metaphorical term, and not just a barnyard animal, is traced all the way back to 1530, when William Tyndale translated the Bible from Hebrew and offered up "And Aaron cast lottes outer the gootes; one lotte for the Lorde, and another or a scape-goote."

      Hence "scapegoat," or animal upon which the people of Israel's sins were imposed upon, came into the language. "Scape" was coined in the 1300s as a shortened term to describe the act of escaping. Thus a "scapegoat" is literally an escaped goat, as opposed to the one that gets its throat cut. 

Metropolitan Museum

     The new meaning, "Greatest Of All Time," starts with Muhammad Ali, who used the term to refer to himself. It was abbreviated by LL Cool J, who put out an album, "G.O.A.T.," in 2000.

     This was all sorted out a couple years back by Sports Illustrated and others. I'm late to the party, I know.

      I wonder. Will the Charlie Brown sense be effaced by the Serena sense? I could say I hope not, because the Bill Buckner goat is such a useful term. What would its replacement be? A ... what? Loser? Clod? Blunderer? Nothing comes close. While GOAT, as in Greatest Of All Time, still has a whiff of the barnyard. At least to me, though that has to be my age, since few seem hesitant. "The most fierce GOAT = Serena Williams," former presidential press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted this week. The language changes, and time reminds us of the fact. When the Hindenburg zeppelin blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, Herb Morrison, broadcasting its arrival on WLS, described the disaster as "terrific," meaning "full of terror." It isn't terrific anymore.

In defense of John Kass

     Back in my Medill days, professors would sometimes pose a trick question: What is the main purpose of a newspaper?
     Apple polishers and future do-gooders would wave their arms, eager to rhapsodize about reporting the news and speaking truth to power, penning the first draft of history, blah blah blah. We worldlier sorts would let them embarrass themselves for a while, then float our hands up.
    "To make money and stay in business," one of us would drawl, with a half smirk, knowing even before we were told that this is the only correct answer. Because a paper that has gone out of business can't do anything good, bad or indifferent. The Chicago Daily News was a fantastic newspaper, the best in the city, right up until March 4, 1978. Then it was nothing but a painful memory.
     One way newspapers try to avoid this fate is by casting a very wide net. A newspaper is a universe, or should be. Like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. There isn't a section titled, "Airy nonsense for dupes"—we call it the horoscope, and the Sun-Times ran two last time I checked because apparently one just isn't enough. We run three pages of mostly undistinguished comics. Why? When I once asked why we didn't dial the comics back to make room for actual journalism, the features editor shot me a withering look that said, "Because readers would show up here carrying gas cans and solemnly set themselves on fire in front of the paper, that's why." Half of the people who tell me they read the Sun-Times only for my column then add, "...and Sudoku." Which is fine. You can read the Sun-Times for me and the tide tables. Or just for the legal notices. All good, so long as you read.
     That is why John Greenfield's Jan. 11 piece in the Chicago Reader, "John Kass washing his hands of responsibility for last week's riot was a bridge too far" demanding that the Tribune columnist be fired for his supposed role fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks evoked an unfamiliar emotion, one that I have never felt nor could have imagined it possible to feel: a need to defend John Kass.
    Not the material, God knows. I concede that Kass's writing is that of a monotonic right-wing troll, with all the hysterical self-pitying whine that has pervaded our nation like stink in a bus station bathroom for the past four years. At least to my recollection. It's been a while since I've actually read him. So maybe he got better. I try to extend the benefit of the doubt, even to those of whom I disapprove, which is one of the many differences between us. (For instance, I've had colleagues tell me that he is a nice guy, in person, and I have no reason to doubt them. Though, if true, that only deepens the mystery of how avuncular right wingers can smile and nod at passersby while neck deep in a sewer of hateful ideology). But when I did read him, or try to, he was reliably repetitive, dull, tone deaf, mean-spirited and shrill. And that most fatal flaw, incurious. Remember that John Kass column where he eagerly explores some unusual topic just because it is fascinating? Yeah, me neither. For a while, I would test myself by reading the first three paragraphs of his column and then stopping, just to see if I had any problem bailing out at that point. I never did. Then I gave up doing even that. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there was no there there.
     Which is okay, because he isn't for me. Part of the trick of not being John Kass or writers like him is to realize that not everything is supposed to be for you. There are other people in the world who believe other things. They have a right to exist and passionately believe all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. They get to read stuff they like too.  
     From time to time readers would challenge me, since I had written "BobWatch" in the Reader for two years in the mid-1990s, to reprise the column with Kass as my material. I'd patiently explain that doing so would be physically impossible. Bob Greene was deeply weird in a captivating way—you almost had to read his column, excuse me, skein of related columns, celebrating scab baseball players or mourning the passing of soda fountains or keening over Baby Richard, whatever fragile hobbyhorse he had firmly mounted between his monstrous thighs and was now riding into splinters. Bob Greene was like a patient in an Oliver Sacks book, damaged in a creepy, fascinating way. Sure, you might read through latticed fingers, pausing to choke back a half ounce of hot vomit, or turn to an imaginary audience to say "can you believe this shit?" which is actually how BobWatch started.
     But Kass? I'd have great difficulty reading an entire column. Not if you paid me $1 a word. Not if you put a gun to my head and cocked the hammer back and told me I had to get to the end and summarize it or you'd pull the trigger and splatter my brains against a white wall. I mean, I would try, particularly for that buck a word. And maybe, probably, I could do it, but it would take intense concentration, fingers raking my cheeks, eyes whirling to track the pale little moths of thought as they slide off the page and flap silently away, casting strange shadows, circling around me like butterflies around Alice's head. 

     Like Greene, Kass could write at one point. To read his sharp 1996 profile of Richard Daley, with its priceless opening vignette of Daley running home to his mommy with a fever, is to mourn the ruin that can come bundled with a column. I distinctly remember his first one, a riveting. two-parter about a Chicago public school teacher being beaten with a metal bar. Then, as often happens, success and ego and laziness got to him, and soon he was doing a bad parody of Mike Royko, haunting the Billy Goat, sharing recipes for beer can chicken, coining fake insidery lingo and adopting a bully's swagger he passes off as a style. A colleague summed him up far more succinctly than I'm doing here with: "He sees people who aren't there," adding a few lines about how Kass can drive down an empty block and see wise guys in loud plaid jackets picking their teeth under street lamps while grannies in babushkas kneel in front of their bungalows, scrubbing the front stoops with Comet.

     I suppose that's imagination of a sort.
     But after enough years of that passed Kass, like Greene, became a mere parody of himself, as the sentient wandered off, fanning the air. By now he has to be the least consequential columnist on the Tribune's roster, in all of Chicago, if not the world, if not in the history of the world. Nobody I know has ever said, "Did you read John Kass today?" Though, again to be fair, this must be due to my being in a self-selective group. I don't hang out with people who read John Kass. They certainly exist. I'm sure when his column is published on, er, whenever it runs, a cheer goes up in Mount Greenwood. 
     Here's where John Greenfield goes astray. I don't know Greenfield, but I imagine he's not down at Dugans holding up the bar with the guys from Second City Cop, shaking his head about how fuckin' Obama was given every break in the world by the pansy liberal press while poor old Donald Trump never was given a chance. Hated because he was so good and decent and American. Those who see the world as a vast conspiracy of the semitic and the pigmented arrayed against them, and Kass as a brave cry in the wilderness giving voice to their deep existential pain at hearing Spanish spoken by a kid running the fryer at McDonald's.
     In our world, Kass, like Louis Farrakhan, never comes on the radar unless there are hoots of outrage over his occasional lurches into anti-Semitism. But that doesn't make him responsible, just one tiny piping voice in the great Right Wing chorus harmonizing fear of globalism and religions not their own. He's in the back, warbling, he isn't conducting the choir. It's not his fault. Heck, I wouldn't blame Kass for a fist-fight between neighbors over chairs set out in dibs in Gage Park, never mind large-scale mob action in Washington. There isn't a justification for Greenfield's claim that "it's time for Tribune leadership to get rid of Kass's column for good." 
     First, the request is naive. I don't have many rules for myself as a columnist, but one is: never advocate the impossible. One thing Bob Greene taught us is the Tribune never gets rid of anybody over issues of quality. Once in the club, always in the club, no matter how stunted or sporadic their work has become. I can't tell you how many Tribune writers I've met over the years where I had to swallow the reply, "Good to see you; I thought you were dead." Bruce Dold wasn't in the business of cashiering mediocrities; he would have had to start with himself. Granted, that will change under Alden Capital, and this whole conversation might be like debating whether a man who is condemned to hang next week should be shot today instead. I used to feel competitive with the Tribune. Now I just feel sorry for them. They used to have office aeries with semi-circular windows looking out of the Gothic horror show of Tribune Tower at Michigan Avenue, far below. Now they're going to be tucked behind the presses at the giant windowless bulk of Freedom Center. I assume they got rid of the chap in livery handing out warm towels in the executive washroom long ago.
     Second, until Alden pulls the plug and runs the whole place off an algorithm and four workers in Kashmir, Kass will have a valid function. To be the blithering nincompoop that Greenfield decries. That's his job. Half of the Tribune readership laps up that kind of garbage. Why not keep them happy? The Sun-Times used to run Dennis Byrne, who though not quite as sphincterific as Kass, still wrote a column that was similarly a head-shaking mystery to those of us not locked in the grip of right-wing batshittery, I never thought the man should be drummed out because of it. Just the opposite. I was glad he was there. He gave me cover. Whenever someone would accuse the paper of being merely a liberal rag, I could murmur, "But we run Dennis Byrne. Read him instead of me."
     Remember, nobody forces you to read any particular columnist. That's what the photos are for. As a subtle hint of what you'll be getting below. Which, to be honest, still flies past many readers, who will write in to inform me, "A-HA, I'm onto you, Steinberg. You are in the LIBERAL camp!!!" Figured that out, huh? All by yourself! Thank you for writing.
     So maybe that's just me, with the superpower to nimbly jeté over the John Kasses of the world, and hoo-boy, there are a lot of them. I have never watched a moment of Sean Hannity. Why would I do that? You have to keep the poison out, and if I seem irked, it's because the Reader made me think more about John Kass over the past hour than I have in the previous decade. I hope none of this is seen as an indictment of John Greenfield, who has been around the block himself, often on a bicycle, and is editor of Streetsblog. He seems a solid guy, this an understandable lapse and I am not criticizing him for it, personally. Think of it more brotherly advice. I'm only telling him what I would tell a friend who left the dead mouse of a John Kass column on my pillow, as sometimes happens: don't be a vector, don't be the dim cat sharing your limp prize. If you didn't bring Kass up, I'd never think of him at all, and isn't that a happy place to be? Even as a Tribune subscriber. I can look at a page he is on and his column doesn't even register. My eyes dance over him without perceiving one word, the way you step over a turd on the sidewalk without needing to study its topography. I don't even realize he's there. Originally, I grabbed his headshot to illustrate this page, but I had to remove it, because otherwise my eyes couldn't focus on the words underneath. 
      Yes, it galls that the Tribune would keep Kass while showing the gate to such luminaries as architecture critic Blair Kamin, arts maven Howard Reich, and restaurant reviewer Phil Vettel. It is what I used to call, in the years that David Radler ran the Sun-Times, the Bean Soup Theory of Journalism, where occasionally you look into the bowls of soup you're selling and think, "You know ... I could pluck out a few beans, and it would still be bean soup." Until you find yourself with a bowl of broth and three beans.
     I'm glad that the Sun-Times seems on the way to becoming the preeminent newspaper in Chicago, but sad it had to happen this way. This is like winning a 100-yard dash then, as you cross the finish line, turning to see your opponent 30 yards back, writhing in the cinders, clutching his calf. It's good to win. But not like that.
     So if keeping Kass means that Eric Zorn will have a job a little longer, I am all for that. Remember, Fox News didn't turn rural America into gobsmacked haters who will buy any lie provided it's idiotic enough. Rather, Fox found them that way, and printed money by parroting their stunted biases back at them. The right wing media is like those vibrating mattresses once found at seedy motels. The Magic Fingers don't give you a bad back, and they don't make it better. They just provide the illusion of soothing your damage while charging you a quarter a minute. John Kass didn't lead that mob, he followed it. They're all followers, sheep beseechingly bleating for a shepherd, cattle in a chute. That's the problem.    
      Okay, you get the point. No mas. I do prattle on, and I apologize for that. One of the central if unspoken tenets in journalism is, "You have to put the slop where the pigs can get at it." You have to empty the bucket within reach of the readers.  So if the swine snuffling around the Trib are hungering for a big trough full of John Kass's musings then, soo-EEE, come and get it. If Fox News can keep Sean Hannity on the payroll, a truly evil man, a traitor and genuine abetter of terrorists who should probably be on trial in the Hague, then the Tribune should have no worry about its moaning Hannity homunculus, its wan Tucker Carlson wannabe, who does no harm to anybody but himself, and probably fattens the Tribune's thinning bottom line while he's at it.
     So I throw my full and enthusiastic support behind John Kass, for all it's worth. Besides, when I have doubts about myself as a columnist, as often happens, all I need do is think of Kass, his brow uncreased by doubt of any kind, and suddenly I find serenity and pride, confidence and satisfaction. I might not be much, but I sure ain't that. So for selfish reasons alone, I hope that the Tribune ignores calls for his firing, and keeps the man for as long as Chicago can stomach him.

The $46.95 pizza.

     I write a lot. Every goddamn day, in fact. Okay, some days on EGD I don't write more than a brief intro to go atop something I've hauled out of the vault because my brain is just too spent to do anything else. Though usually that's because I've been working on some massive project that drained away all my energies. For instance, Tuesday's post — I thought of writing something new, but had just polished off a 3,000-word history project for the paper. I was fried.
     Trying to fill that void, I pretty much touch on anything. Yet there are things I don't say. For instance, our older son was with us for a few days last week, and that required pizza from Lou Malnati's — "the Prodigal Pie" as I call it. My wife and I always get the same thing — deep dish, buttercrust, spinach and mushroom. Though his wishes had to be considered, and he voted for sausage and onions. So half one, half the other.
     Do you see what's coming? I didn't.
     Place the order. Wait 25 minutes. Get in the car and drive the minute to Lou Malnati's — I can walk, and have. But something about the five-minute quickstep with a hot pizza in your hands. I figure, speed is my friend.
     I go into the empty store. Give the youth at the counter my name. He consults the register and says, "That'll be $46.95."
     Forty-six dollars. And ninety-five cents. For a large pizza. I don't understand how that's possible. The pizza wasn't quite ready — I like to come a few minutes early, to maximize hotness when it hits the table. So I pulled out my phone and consulted the menu. A large pizza is $28.89.  Realization dawned. The toppings. The toppings were the culprit. Four toppings — spinach, mushroom, onion, sausage — at $3.70 per, and no break for just covering half the pizza. "Full price charged for 1/2 portions." it says, right there. So 4 x 3.70, or $14.80. Plus the 99 cents for butter crust. That comes to $44.68. Plus tax.
     I've heard of this inflation business, but never had it struck home in quite this way before. Yowza. This pricy pie seemed worth sharing. A near 50 buck pizza seems a milestone (though not, I hasten to add, one that makes me even a tiny bit inclined toward electing a liar, bully, fraud and traitor as president. As bad as people who support Trump because he echoes their biases and fears, even worse are the guys who claim to be ready to shred their country's core values because gas costs $4).
    I took the pizza home, shared the news, put in a plug for two toppings next time, and we dug in. I never wrote any of this because ... well, a person as blessed as I am should not complain about trivialities. I'd have forgotten all about it. 

     But the same day, David Brooks, the conservative troll living under the bridge of the New York Times, tweeted a photo of a cheeseburger and a double whiskey, complaining of their price. I thought my pizza was expensive....
     “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport,” Brooks wrote  on the social media site some still call Twitter. “This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”
     The tweet blew up the Internet — as of Wednesday it had 38.5 million views, as readers piled on. Why? Somebody was ignoring the booze aspect. The restaurant itself pointed out that $17 was for the burger and the rest was Brooks' bar bill (I often wonder how he can live with himself; now I have a clue).

     Suddenly my expensive pizza conclusion (order fewer toppings) seemed like solid Midwestern good sense compared to Brooks' East Coast faux economic insight,  "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." (No, they think the economy is terrible because publications like the New York Times keep telling them it is). 

     And perhaps because a pizza can push fifty bucks if it has a few extra toppings. Though at least with Lou Malnati's, it's worth it.

"Island of garbage"

     Of course I watched Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday night. Well, part of it anyway. A bit. The thing lasted six hours. I didn't camp out in front of the television and tune in CNN or MSNBC. No need for that. Rather I lay on the sofa in the living room and scrolled X.
     It was easy. Trump's rally was highlighted on a hot pink bar at the top of the screen. Tapping that took me to Trump, live, doing what he has done since June 16, 2015, when he rode that escalator down the salmon-tinted excrescence of a lobby at Trump Tower: malign immigrants.

     "Take our country back," he said. The "...from brown people" is unvoiced. He isn't saying that Norwegian immigrants are ruining our country just by being here. Because of all the crimes they commit. 

     It isn't true — immigrants are actually more law-abiding than citizens, which makes perfect sense, when you think about it — someone should. If you could be deported for a speeding ticket, you'd keep your head down too. No matter. The lying is baked into the Trumpian worldview. I think that's the most repellent part, for me. Prejudice I understand — everybody harbors prejudice to some degree or another. But to create a counterfactual hothouse within your own soul in order for your biases to grow as lush and bountiful as they can. That's nuts.
     The rally got boring quickly — listening to the same old shit — and I skipped down through X to see what others were posting. I was struck by the number of pro-Trump clips, from Joe Rogan's show, from supporters. Suddenly the world was lovin' Trump. At least here. There were also clips of women flashing their breasts — you don't normally see that on the former Twitter. Must be bait to draw in the important young man vote. That was the only explanation I could think of.
     No doubt Elon Musk was putting his thumb on the scales for Trump. He was at the rally, leading chants of "USA! USA!" in his James Bond villain accent. His hat reading "Make America Great Again" in a font popular in Nazi Germany. The devil is in the details. Musk has lately gone all in for Trump, the two open-wound egos locked in a mutual admiration society. Musk bought Twitter — exactly two years ago, on Oct. 28, 2022 — for $44 billion. He decimated its value by turning it into a haven for haters and loons. So he's trying to claw some value back by turning it into a megaphone for Trump — the world's richest man ballyhooing America's greatest traitor. He's counting on a prime place at the trough when Trump is re-elected. Like all who sell their souls to Trump, he forgot to read the fine print. 

     For now, it's working, with nearly half the country. Trump and Musk, presenting themselves a champions of the little guy. Boy, people really are stupid. Maybe our politics is as simple as that.
     Other opinions still came through. Shocked shares of heretofore anonymous, now forever notorious, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe slurring Hispanics:
     "These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There's no pulling out. They don't do that. They cum inside. Just like they did to our country."
     I tried to think of another instance of the word "cum" appearing in presidential politics and came up empty. Some outlets spelled it "come" which is silly. Another day.
     Then the alleged comedian bored in on Puerto Rico. “I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now," he said. " I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
     Since laughter was sparse, he provided his own. "Ha ha ha ha." Four harsh syllables.
     There's more. He pretended to see a Black friend in the crowd. "We carved watermelons together, it was awesome." He mused on the war in Ukraine. "Who even cares?
     You get the idea. You can watch it yourself, if you're interested — the "love making babies" part is at 2:37. The "floating island of garbage" is at 3:38.
     I have a pretty broad sense of humor, but it doesn't seem remotely funny. Someone on X observed that satire is mocking the powerful; bullying is mocking the weak. Dismissing an island of 3.2 million people as garbage is bullying.     

     A week before the election, we are nothing if not numb. I can't say I was offended so much as puzzled. This is Donald Trump's message in the home stretch? Delivered at the home of the infamous 1939 Nazi Rally. In for a dime, in for a dollar, I suppose. But still...
     It had the effect of supercharging support for Kamala Harris. Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny tweeted Harris's supportive statement on Puerto Rico to his 45 million followers four times in the next hour. Not enough for anyone to feel optimistic about the outcome. But the guttering flame of hope flickered in its cave, trying to push back the darkness all around.
      I didn't tweet anything myself during the rally — what's the point? But just before bed a thought came to me, and I composed a message: "I watched the rally, but missed the part at the end where they open the Ark of the Covenant." The kind of sly remark that does well on X.

The Era of Contempt

     People try to soften the sting of whatever humiliation Donald Trump is inflicting upon the nation today by pronouncing it "the bottom," but that is based on the giddiest kind of optimism, the faulty logic that just because our leadership has sunk to a startling new low, it can't get worse. 
     When in fact, if a stone is sinking, experience tells us it'll keep going deeper and deeper. Yes, there's a hoped-for bottom, somewhere, in theory. But merely being deep underwater doesn't mean we're there. Stones don't bob back up to the surface just because they've sunk a long way.
     With a new low every day, or nearly, there is no reason to even suspect that today's depth will not be exceeded by worse tomorrow. I would be sincerely delighted if I believed this is as bad as it is going to get.
    But I don't. Rather, it will go on for years and years and get worse and worse and this country will be severely damaged. We're damaged already, in ways we haven't begun to consider.
     That said, I am human too, and like to comfort myself, when I can. Not by saying that today is as bad as it'll get, but by remembering that it must end. It has to. Not now, alas, not even soon, but someday. 
     Someday it'll be over and we'll have the luxury of looking back and wondering what it meant. Someday there will be history books, I hope, and one chapter in those as-yet-unlived histories will be about now. And as is common with such texts, the chapter will begin with a descriptive phrase. "A Nation Sundered" for the Civil War, and such.
     For our current betrayal of American values and norms, I'd like to nominate "The Era of Contempt." Because that is the basic operating principle here: yes, there is ignorance, and vanity, and greed. But those are specifics, related to a particular situation or three. Contempt — visceral disregard and scorn—is the overarching principle, the general theme. It's what Donald Trump appeals to and has always appealed to. It's why he was elected. He touched Americans in a certain spot and they reacted with a purr. He stroked the meanest, basest, most scornful and scoffing core of many Americans, and told them it was okay be like that. In fact, it was great.
     And they believed him. Believe him. Always will believe him. Why would they not?
     His followers manifest this sneering disdain like tuning forks. It's really all they ever say. I hear it every day. They do not write to argue, or observe, or reflect. They write to mock, to ridicule, not realizing that, to an outside observer, since the ridicule is coming from a person such as themselves, really, how much weight can their thoughts be given? Not only don't I write back, but I'm not even tempted to write back anymore. And say what? "You know, the low opinion of someone going hog wild for a bully, fraud, liar and most likely traitor just doesn't carry the heft you seem to think it does."
     In their defense, their opinion certainly counted in November, 2016. It's counting now, on an international scale. 
     Why bother talking back? Even if you would score points—and you can't, even if you could defeat them rhetorically—and you won't—well, congratulations: you bested a moron.
     So I silently put such people in the filter, where they gibber to each other, sometimes for years. Every few days I look in the spam filter, like a man looking at eels swimming around a watery pit. Letters still arrive, and I tend to throw them away unopened if they don't have a return address, and most don't. Maybe open them and read I line or two if I'm bored.
    But this one had a pre-printed sticker, with name and street address—Alan Leonard of Tinley Park. So I started reading, maybe because the handwriting is so neat. And that purple stationery. I read to the end, and decided it is in some ways an epitome, a classic example of its genre. It should be presented for your shock and edification. I originally said, "for your entertainment" but it really isn't funny. Rather, it is funny, but it shouldn't be. That future history will not be kind to us, and this is why. Should we survive this era and anyone bother to write fact-based histories, which is not the certainty it was two years ago. 
     No comment is really necessary, though you are free to remark upon its various wonders. It wasn't the only letter he sent me this week. Once they start, they seem to have trouble stopping.

When "batshit" just won't suffice.

  

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     

     Molly Jong-Fast first registered on my radar about a decade ago, when collecting quotes for "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the literary companion to recovery I was writing with Sara Bader. Jong-Fast had told the New York Times something typically concise and piquant about secrecy and recovery that fit right into our chapter about Alcoholics Anonymous.
     "It seems crazy that we can't just be out with it, in this day and age,"she said. "I don't want to have to hide my sobriety; it's the best thing about me."
     After the book came out, we started to occasionally communicate through Twitter. I saw her as a Manhattan wit ("loud, arch and snappishly funny" as the Guardian recently described her), heir to Dorothy Parker. I called her a couple times, when I needed a particularly incisive quote. She never let me down.
     Then Jong-Fast upped her game by joining forces with The Lincoln Project folks, a band of Republicans who never got the memo about the entire party groveling before the great orange godling, and decided to resist the liar, bully, fraud and traitor, no matter how completely their confreres submitted. After COVID locked everyone down, Jong-Fast started a Tuesday and Friday podcast with Rick Wilson, "The New Abnormal," which I recommend highly. It allows me to generally ignore the endless jaw-dropping mouse shriek of the post-Jan. 6, 2021 Republican Party, and instead keep tabs indirectly on important developments via the podcast, at a remove, second hand, filtered through smart, humane people who condense the ocean of bile and deliver it to me in significant drops. The New Abnormal is like the special smoked goggles used to view a solar eclipse: a way to contemplate a fiery phenomenon without burning your retinae or going blind.
     One challenge facing Jong-Fast as she boldly considers the current political hellscape is that it beggars language. If "crazy" seems apt to her when describing a culture where people are embarrassed to admit they're in recovery, what word could she use to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene? "Crazy" still fits, but it also seems a little inadequate without some kind of intensifier, and one of Jong-Fast's favorites is "batshit." "Batshit crazy"—she used the phrase three or four times in a single program last week.
     Which got me pondering about how Chiroptera guano got associated with madness. Etymology, like the GOP, is a nexus for mistaken amateurism, and online there is a common theory that "batshit" somehow devolved from the "bats in the belfry," an early 20th century trope to jocularly refer to lunacy.
     That strikes me as fanciful. Even "batty" only refers to batlike qualities in my Oxford English Dictionary. I would sooner lump "batshit" in with other "-shit" terms: apeshit, bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit. "Batshit," like much evocative slang, is thought to stem from the military. There's a wink at it in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 with the character "Col. 'Bat' Guano."
     As with "apeshit," (or the current GOP, for that matter) in its original usage, the "crazy" is implied. "Most of America's males were in Korea or World War II or I. They killed, and they aren't all going batshit," Lt. William Calley is quoted saying in the 1971 "Lieutenant Calley."
     I found the term as far back as the Fall, 1953 Carolina Quarterly, of all places, in Gabriel Boney's "Epiphany in E Flat." "A coarse voice answered sharply, 'Batshit!'"
     So "batshit crazy" is really a pleonasm—using more words than necessary, for effect. Like "cash money" or "tuna fish." So when did the redundancy, "batshit crazy," begin to be used? It seems to be a creature of the mid-1980s. I found it in the 1985 novel "Night Moves," by Walter Jon Williams:

     "I thought Harvey, the guy who was helping me, was batshit crazy."

      For an even older usage, all I have to do is look at the wall in my office closet, at a cartoon that I've long admired by P.S. Mueller that ran in The Chicago Reader in 1983. 

     "Full blown batshit crazy and still holding down a productive job." It spoke to me (and thanks to Jim Mueller, Pete Mueller's brother, a long ago regular reader who got me a signed print). 

     Allow me to offer Mueller's "full blown batshit crazy" as my thank-you gift to Molly Jong-Fast, to tuck away for when things in our country go from bad to worse, as they very well might. In a few years, when Matt Gaetz becomes the 2024 Republican nominee for president and Evangelicals guiltlessly dance around golden idols of Donald Trump, beating timbrels and buffing it with their long hair, when "batshit crazy" begins to seem, well, tepid, she'll be able to remember this and deploy the more powerful "full blown batshit crazy." What a sad day that will be.

     

Damn you, J.B., for trying to save our lives!

      When pausing to photograph this distinctive sign in generally pleasant, rustic Channahon Monday. I did not consider the juxtaposition with the nostalgic tableau next to it: the classic Schwinn bicycle, its basket full of flowers, the sweet little girl statue.
    And then "J.B. PRITZKER SUCKS." In case you can't read the fine print, it continues, "THE LIFE OUT OF ILLINOIS SMALL BUSINESS."
     It was only later, looking at the picture, that the disconnect between folksy and hateful jumped out. Which is rather like what often happens when you meet people downstate—lovely folks, on the surface, but with a few odious beliefs jingling around their pockets like loose ammunition. 
     The sign doesn't go on to explain exactly how the governor is hoovering vitality from mom and pop establishments. No room and, besides, it's a given. It's assumed you know the problem is his closing down the state, more or less, trying to keep residents from dying of COVID-19.
     Can't the guy who posted the sign see what happens when you don't? 52,000 new cases. Tuesday. Isn't trying to tamp down that curve—surging up again—the kind of effort that even residents of this small community, 60 miles southwest of Chicago, can wrap their heads around. It's not like you need a Ph.D. to figure it out.
      Then again, I have a job, and my wife has a job. Maybe if we were sitting on our hands, day after day, watching our livelihoods shrivel and die and our life savings dwindle away, we might have a very different take on the matter. I don't want to be one of those guys sitting warm and dry in the boat, raising my hot tea and lemon to my lips, tut-tutting at how unseemly are all those thrashing about in the water, splashing in such an unseemly fashion. And those awful cries! Really. Can't they sink wordlessly? That's what I'd do in their position. Blow a few kisses at the governor as I expire.
     Or am I succumbing to that Democratic folk disease, empathy? Wear your fuckin' mask, Jethro.
     If I had presence of mind, I'd have pulled over and knock on the door (and no doubt been shot through it by someone in fear for his life; it isn't only the Right who can traffic in stereotypes). But I was already 20 minutes late—construction traffic on the Stevenson—heading down, and after I had been biking for three hours and just wanted to get home and eat dinner.
    Then again, I don't need to quiz the sign owner. This week the Sun-Times ran a story on the dozen or so death threats against the governor. The Illinoisans making the threats seem to be mostly the mentally ill, or the incarcerated, and not beleaguered small businessmen whose cupcake shops are languishing due to social distancing. The true nature of people come out in a crisis, for good and ill, and it is to be expected that along with the selfless acts of nurses and social service types there are bitter red staters just itchin' to shoot sumptin'.  Not to tell the governor his business, or make my colleague's work any more difficult, but myself, I'd squelch reports of death threats, just so as not to give anybody any ideas. 
     Think about how much you have to hate somebody to condemn him on a sign in your front yard. I like to think, no matter how extreme a situation I'd find myself in, I wouldn't do that. In fact, I don't have to assume. I know. For three years I've watched a liar, bully, fraud and traitor ripping at the foundations of my beloved country, which is worse than driving your bar into receivership. And yet not once found myself condemning him to passing cars. 
    Although, now that I think of it, I have put up a sign.  A neighbor had them printed up, and I eagerly bought one and placed it at the strip of forest along the edge of our yard. Here it is.

   

Things That Christianity Was Okay With

The Orator, by Magnus Zeller (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

     Like you, I am shocked, shocked at Evangelical Christianity's continued support of Donald Trump, in apparent contravention of almost every bedrock belief they otherwise claim to hold dear and demand other, non-Trump individuals rigorously adhere to. A puzzling departure from their supposed values, which the sharply-worded condemnation of Trump by Christianity Today last week is more the exception that proves the rule. A yelp of dissent interrupts the steady ululating of praise for the beloved leader, himself Christlike in their eyes. "The chosen one," as Rick Perry called Trump, half Peter, half Obi-Wan Kenobi.
     Although. I can't help but wonder: how much of a surprise should this really be? Is Christian support of our craven, cruel corrupt, criminal—and those are just the Cs—president really such a departure? Not when we think of American history, which does serve as a reality check to those who pause to consult it. Look at history, and suddenly this becomes, not an exception, but par for the course.
     The liar, bully, fraud and newly-impeached traitor who leads our country is not the first shameful enormity that official Christendom has given its enthusiastic approval. 
     A partial, utterly deniable list of Things that Christianity Was Okay With, culled from American history:

      The slaughter of Native-Americans.
      The enslavement of black people. 
      The subjugation of women.
      Irrational hatred toward immigrants.
      Anti-Semitism in all forms.
      Colonialist conquest of weaker nations.
      Indifference in the face of suffering of non-white groups.
      Denial of science.
      Ridicule of religions other than Christianity. 
      Censorship of literature.
      Suppression of the arts.
      Sexual ignorance.
      Thwarting efforts of black people to achieve civil rights.
      Fighting their attempts to live in white communities.
      Denying them the chance to work at good jobs.
      Squelching of advances in medicine.
      Control of women's reproductive rights.
      A grim, joyless view of sex, often for themselves but especially for others. 
      Aversion to dancing, and many kinds of music.
      Hostility toward gays.
      And toward lesbians, transgender folks, and anyone straying from rigid gender norms.
      Hostility toward any non-Christian religion, particularly Islam.
      Rejection of anything that smacks of magic, spiritualism, or any myth other than Christian myth. 
       America as an inclusive society. 

     I'm sure I've left a few out. Since I can hear the howl before it goes up, I should point out that a) there always was, like Christianity Today, a small element of dissent, like the abolitionist movement, that shouldn't be forgotten, and b) my own team, Judaism, certainly has its share of stunning moral lapses, lack of sympathy toward the plight of the Palestinians leaping to mind. 
     Neither of which, however, alters my main point one iota, so don't pretend they do. 
    
    

GTFO

     I can't imagine hating someone so much that I'd advertise it on the bumper of my car.
     Sadly, I didn't have to imagine it. All I had to do was walk by. There's a lot of that in contemporary American life: grotesqueries that grab you by the sleeve as you go about your business, or try to, and snarl out a low, wet, mean "Hi!"
     Thanks pal, thanks for sharing your cramped little world with me. Proud, are you? 
      The car was sitting in the parking lot of a moderately upscale restaurant in Northbrook where my wife and I went for lunch. So its owner isn't suffering so much he couldn't pop twenty bucks for lunch. I noticed the bumper sticker walking back to our car. Here, I'll blow it up for you. 
     If the acronym's meaning doesn't immediately leap out at you, don't feel bad. It eluded Edie too; I take that as a sign of purity of spirit. When you are immersed in this stuff, as I am, a certain sixth sense emerges.
      As a clue, notice the "O" contains the sunrise symbol used in Barack Obama's campaigns.
      Another hint. On the left bumper of the car, almost unnecessarily, is a yellow sticker, a version of the Revolutionary War "Don't Tread on Me" flag that Tea Partiers have embraced, representing their delusion that they are fighting for freedom, and not fighting against the freedoms of their fellow Americans and against their own country's success as a whole. Trying to hold back changes which are going to steamroll them, the way way the ignorant and the fearful and the prejudiced are always steamrolled by history, sooner or later.
      I've obscured the license plate, not because I worry someone would use it to track the car owner down and harass him—you just know it's a man—but, well, as as kindness. I don't anticipate the driver of the Durango will ever see this, but you never know, and I wouldn't want him to be made afraid. Or rather, more afraid. These people live on fear, clearly, and if real threats don't present themselves, they make them up. They need to justify their anger, to create villains, the way a slasher movie needs to establish the evil of its maniac before he can be subjected to the cruelties the audience is eager to enjoy.
     Fear and malice are the driving factors in their lives, and I don't want to add to it, because I'm a nice guy, and don't want to be like them. "When battling monsters," as my pal Nietschze said, "make sure that you do not in the process become a monster."
     Oh, GTFO stands for, "Get the Fuck Out." 
     Because Jan. 20, 2017, can't come around quick enough for these people. They have to cheer it along, to yearn for it, to celebrate and anticipate it. Because they have suffered ... um, oh let's come out and say it ... seeing a black man in the White House. That has to be reason because there's no possible explanation otherwise. Really, what has Barack Obama done to these folks that they would hate him so? What is the horror they're reacting to? Certainly not gun control. Or immigration reform. Just the contrary. Obama stepped up deportations, dramatically, trying to please those who would never be pleased (I assume; it certainly wasn't the right thing to do). The Affordable Care Act? It's affecting five percent of the country. Is that why there is a GTFO page online counting down the seconds? An entire line of GTFO products, bumper stickers and t-shirts and such? On a page offering t-shirts, I noticed this particular revealing design: "HOPE HE FAILS." 
    That's like the joke about the man drilling a hole under his seat in the row boat. I guess they don't realize that the president failing means the country failing, and them too. Which shows the difference between Obama scorn and Bush scorn, which Obama haters immediately bring up when attention is directed to their overarching hatred, as if Bush haters were suddenly their moral compass, as if the two were comparable, and they're not. This t-shirt illustrates why. People hated Bush because he was failing; people hate Obama so want him to fail. That might be a subtle difference to some, but to me seems clear and significant.
     For six years, the Republican right has hurt the country, and themselves with their insane rear guard action against anything Barack Obama has done. Our nation is frozen, largely. We can't do what we need to do, what the rest of the world has done long ago. In the next two years we'll no doubt see more of that, emboldened by their electoral win earlier this month. 
     Me, when it comes to Obama, I vacillate. Part of the time I want to fault him for not pushing harder, for not standing up more for his ideals more, whether by closing Guantanamo Bay, coming out earlier for gay marriage, trying harder for immigration reform, crafting a more comprehensive national health care laws.
    That view is based on his promises and his potential.
     But he is nothing if not a politician, and given the roadblocks he's run into, you can't fault him for not sprinting faster into the brick wall.
     When you hold his accomplishments up to the doorjamb-gnawing vehemence of his enemies, it's amazing he's done anything at all, from the Affordable Health Care Act, to this week's agreement with the Chinese to establish curbs on greenhouse emissions. Lack of participation of the Chinese always made international agreements trying to stem global warming somewhat pointless, as the Republicans liked to crow. Bringing them on board is hugely important in mitigating the disaster we can no longer avoid.
     Of course the Republicans, who don't recognize global warming as a real, man-made phenomenon, will find a reason to hoot him down on this too—they can't claim it doesn't go far enough, since they don't recognize the problem is within our control to begin with. Maybe they'll claim he's a traitor, for working out a secret deal with the Chinese. As with "amnesty," the actual situation doesn't really matter, they just need to find the right negative term they latch onto. Maybe they'll call it "accommodation." 
     And no, I did not key the car with the GTFO bumper sticker. Though the thought did cross my mind. When battling monsters....
       

Or would they just steal faster?

     An amateur is prone to oblivious mistakes. Chief among them is laboring under the illusion that the skill yet to be mastered is easy. Or, if not easy, then something that he, the neophyte, has an inborn, nay, God-given ability to achieve without the usual investment of hard work, time and talent. 
     Thus Republican Bruce Rauner, with no experience in politics and no qualifications beyond an excess of self-regard and the ability to buy expensive TV time claiming he would make a fine governor, issues the alarming claim that people who have experience with government should be banned by law from participating in it. He snaps the whip, and urges the feeble idea of term limits, like an exhausted circus pony, out into the hissing limelight for one more prance around the miserable ring. 
     Term limits imply that, unlike every other career—where years of work makes a professional better able to meet challenges—politics is so uniquely corrupting that anyone venal enough to want to serve in office must be given the heave ho, by legislation, after a certain brief span of time. Rauner thinks eight years is as much as any human being can be trusted to serve as governor. 
     This was a topic I addressed — good God! — 17 years ago, on Feb. 16, 1997. I don't know if this is any worse than what I would write now, it's certainly no better, and I hope doesn't suggest I should have been compelled to resign. No one should. The American way is that we work hard, rise or fall on our merits, and stay there for the same reasons, not be declared rotten by the whim of people who don't know what they're talking about and given the gate. The Clinton reference is a reminder that we libs were never the drooling partisans that the Right Wing fanatics would paint us to be. 

     Whenever I lend a book to someone, I make certain they never forget about it. Feigning curiosity, I ask for frequent updates— "How's that book going? Enjoying that book?" The goal, of course, is to get the volume back someday.

The great H.L. Mencken

     I do this with the same care that a pickpocket extends toward his own wallet. Because other people's books have a habit of straying into my library and never straying out again.

     Thus I was astounded to find myself, unprompted, actually preparing to return a book. And not just any book, but H.L. Mencken's A Carnival of Buncombe. An out-of-print gem lent to me a year or so ago by my friend Cate, blinded by kindness.

     Faced with the daunting prospect of losing such a treasure, I began browsing over the master's ruminations from long-lost days.

     The sentences sizzled and popped, as always, and there were flashes of recognition so personal that it was disconcerting. Almost like picking up a 1921 yearbook at a flea market, flipping it open, and seeing your own senior photograph, smiling in sepia from among the rows of high collars and pomaded hair.

     "I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time," Mencken writes, in a 1924 essay.

     Here is a credo if ever there was one—I might have it needlepointed and framed and hung over my bathroom mirror, so I can recite it each morning, with my hand over my heart.

     That single sentence explains why there isn't a lot of intense debate about the nation's politics in this column. Any given senator can hardly affect policy, despite the fact that he or she is working like a ferret 20 hours a day trying to do so. What hope have I?

     Anyway, politics at every level is hypocrisy in action. I voted for Bill Clinton while sincerely believing he is the worst president to hold office since his predecessor, with a record of bumbling and insincerity that will go unmatched in history until whoever succeeds him is sworn in.

     This does not mean, however, that I would keep an important observation to myself just out of the belief that sharing it won't make a lick of difference.

     The notion of congressional term limits is heating up. Last week, the House voted them down, again, but more than 70 percent of Americans say they are in favor of them and the idea isn't going away. Even normally sensible observers such as George Will sing their praises. In Newsweek, he writes, "Term limits can produce deliberative bodies disposed to think of the next generation rather than the next election."

     In Utopia, maybe. Term limits are a stupid idea, holding the peril of all sorts of horrible, unexpected consequences. I knew this in that half-formed, unspoken way that most people know things. Not in a way I could articulate.

     As luck would have it, just as I was mulling how to express the problem with term limits, the answer—eloquent and convincing—popped out of a most unexpected place . . .

     First, I must acknowledge that the following confession will tar me as a freakish anomaly, as out of step with the times as if I said I dipped candles or took snuff. But the future of the Republic is at stake, and I can't let embarrassment hold me back.

 

Josephus

   I was reading Antiquities by the ancient Roman historian and traitor Josephus. (We don't have cable; I have to spend my time doing something). He was going on about Tiberius' policy toward colonial governors (you have to wade through a lot of tedium to get to the good stuff) when he pointed out that, unlike other emperors, Tiberius never replaced the governors of Rome's colonies "unless they died at their posts."

     Quizzed as to why, Tiberius replied that, first, it was a bother to keep dismissing and replacing people, and besides, "it was a law of nature that governors are prone to engage in extortion."

     Given that law, Tiberius said, governors with permanent positions "would be gorged with their robberies and would by the very bulk of them be more sluggish in pursuit of further gain."

     Constantly cycling in new governors, on the other hand, would only make them grab for all they could during their brief reign. As Tiberius so artfully put it, "Their natural appetite for plunder would be reinforced by their expectation of being speedily deprived of that pleasure."

     Wiser, truer words—or a more ringing indictment against term limits—I cannot imagine. The idea intended to reduce crookedness would only accelerate it. But that's the risk with gimmicky ideas.     
     Returning to Mencken: "The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant."

     What politicians need instead of faddish ideas, Mencken concludes, is "character." If they had character, we wouldn't need a constitutional amendment to periodically expel them from the government.

     We can always vote them out of office—an exercise that even Mencken recognized carries some satisfaction, if scant practical result:

     "Turning out such gross incompetents, to be sure, does very little practical good, for they are commonly followed by successors who are almost as bad, but it at least gives the voters a chance to register their disgust, and so it keeps them reasonably contented, and turned their thoughts away from the barricade and the bomb."

"Plague? We don't need no stinkin' plague!" The State of the Blog, 2021

Clown with Drum, by Walter Kuhn
Art Institute of Chicago

     Credit where due: 2021 wasn't worse than 2020. We could be almost a year into Donald Trump's second term. Think about that.
     An infamy that might still be coming. Which is the tone that pretty much continued through the year. Bad, but not worse, unless that's on deck. Yes, the plague, surging with omicron yet not quite as lethal (unless that's coming). The orange traitor separated from his Twitter bullhorn. For now. Still, hundreds of thousands more dying of COVID. And the former Liar in Chief's followers baying for his return, while inveighing our current president, Joe Biden, who at times seems maddeningly inert.
     Honestly, I won't blame Republicans if they corrupt and subvert our electoral system and place Trump on the throne, I mean in the White House, in 2024. Because they certainly telegraphed their intentions. Clear. As. Day. And the Democrats are doing that Three Stooges thing they do, dragging their hands over their faces and hee-bee-bee-beeing and bumping into each other in a roiling ball of confusion.

      In some ways 2021 was worse, beginning as it did with the Jan. 6 insurrection, a rock nadir in American history (unless it's just the warm-up). One I came close to predicting in my column that day, "The South shall fall again. And again. And again." At least I set the stage:

The Lost Cause marches on, as we will see Wednesday, when Congress faces another ego-stoked rebellion: Donald Trump’s insistence that his clearly losing the 2020 presidential election in the chill world of fact can be set aside, since he won the race in the steamy delta swampland between his ears.

     Of course, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to see that coming. Then and now. January also saw my most well-read post, "In Defense of John Kass," which got nearly 10,000 hits. Again, not setting the internet on fire. But not bad, though I think it's more a reflection of just how many people fuckin' hate John Kass. The blog overall got almost a million hits in 2020, though I estimate that between a quarter and a third of that are robots. Bad? Good? Who knows? As the poet said, work is its own reward.
     In February, we bade farewell to Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis. March began by joining the Night Ministry as they treated homeless 'L' riders. In April, we glimpsed one of the earliest movies in existence, police on parade in 1896, and saw how a newsreel caught them attacking protesters then lying about it in 1937.

     In May, EGD chowed down with a hockey billet family. June we said goodbye to our cat, Gizmo. July saw three columns, out of four, about picking up after dogs, including one on how blind people do it, which might be the archetypical Steinberg theme. I was proud of that.

     In August, we visited the S. Rosen hot dog bun factory. In September, it was two visits with top sound engineer Steve Albini. October marked the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.  In November, we marked autumn by pedaling around Elmwood Park, looking at trees. And December, heck, I don't know, the continuing time-suck that is the Jussie Smollett case stole a few more minutes from my life, and yours.

     What does it add up to? Hell if I know. 

     Thanks as always to our Saturday star, Caren Jeskey, who stuck 52 landings, every single week, without fail, without ever being late or making me sweat, even while moving to Chicago and enduring all sorts of adventures here. Deep gratitude to Marc Schulman, of Eli's cheesecake, who blessed me with cheesecake, with advertising, and the pleasure of his insights. Thank you for everyone who read, and who wrote in, particularly those with corrections. 

     On Wednesday, I turned in the final edited manuscript of the book I was asked to write, based on this blog, by the University of Chicago Press. It was enormously fun to write, and I can't wait for he book to come out in the fall. So something to look forward to. Which is about all anybody can ask nowadays. Stay safe. Thanks for reading. See you all every goddamn day in 2022. 

The problems of 2021 are still here

     Why do they call this a “new” year? There’s nothing new about it. We’re still the same old people, dragging the same old problems after us.
     A flash of fresh energy and hope, as if the clockwork arrival of a new digit — a 2 instead of a 1 — is going to make it all somehow work, and the world become better, kinder, thinner.
     Yes, that’s what the problem was: 2021, the numeral. Changing to “2022” will fix everything!
     Then a few hours pass, maybe a day or two. We get hungry, and our old selves come loping back, like extras in a low-rent zombie movie. “Hi! Didja miss us?”
     The COVID we grappled with all through 2021 is right where we left it, in its supercharged Omicron form. Filling the hospitals with those who won’t take the free vaccine, for the same reason a toddler won’t eat his pureed peas. “I don’t want to! You can’t make me!”
     Yet they still show up at the hospital when they can’t breathe. So the same doctors whose advice they mocked a week earlier can stick a tube down their throats.
     And the same old Jan. 6 insurrection, whose first anniversary is Thursday, sits there and ticks. I guess it’s my job to Explain What It All Means, though, honestly, my heart isn’t in it.
     Really, for whom is explanation necessary? Either you understood all too well long ago or you never will. Among the many myths that liberals embrace — we can delude ourselves, too — a key delusion is that reason will prevail, truth reign triumphant, and at some point Trumpsters will slap their foreheads and go, “Ohhh, wait. We’re dupes swallowing lies spewed by a traitor! That’s so embarrassing!”
     It’ll never happen. Seventy percent of Russians today think Stalin was good for their country (Sigh, historians consider him responsible for the deaths of 20 million Russians, between his forced collectivization and gulags. Not to forget his non-aggression pact with Hitler).

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