Trayvon Martin was a distraction from the real issues

     It's late, I know. All the pundits were opining on Trayvon Martin LAST week. But I don't like to jump in and yabber on cue. You're allowed to think about things, and if race was an issue last week, it's still an issue this week. It hasn't gone away yet.  I was looking at the after echoes of the case, and realized I had said nothing, and that maybe I should try to say what's on my mind.

     OK, I’ll bite.

     After reading the umpteenth post-verdict piece of punditry calling for a national conversation about race in America in the wake of vigilante George Zimmerman being exonerated for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, I began to wonder if maybe it’s time to stop pressing my lips together and join in.

     After all, it has been well over a year since I’ve written about the case. And it’s been two weeks since the verdict. Time enough for passions to cool, maybe a little bit.

     No mystery as to the reluctance — race is not only the third rail in American politics, but in journalism too. Touch it at your peril.

     At least for white folks — say the wrong thing and you’re a racist. Time was, you used to have to actually spew racial hate to be a racist; nowadays, any opinion that somebody doesn’t like will do.

     When black pundits call for a conversation about race in America — and it seems to be primarily black pundits, plus, of course, the president — they seem to mean themselves. Whenever the rare white guy is emboldened enough to chime in, such as Roger Simon, or, I guess, now me, we’re invariably told it’s a Black Thing and we just wouldn’t understand. At least that’s what I hear from many quarters whenever I address race: You just don’t get it.
     Which seems a self-defeating notion, because if whites, by definition, can't under­stand and shouldn't express what they believe is true, because they'll never understand, then we're sort of off the hook, aren't we? Isn't that a formula for whites to shrug their shoulders and ignore the whole thing? Which is kinda what most of us want to do anyway. But that's too easy.
     So let's talk about race and Trayvon Martin, and why the case has become such a focal point and rallying cry. President Barack Obama, in his moving speech, talked of the experience of black men being followed in stores, of having white women cling more tightly to their purses in elevators.
     The implication is that white fear—or in Zimmerman's case, Hispanic fear—as reflected in the case, is an important problem in the black experience today.
     No question it is a problem. And not to diminish the badness of it. But being followed in stores is not really the crux of the challenge that blacks face, is it? Because if it is, we're already in the Promised Land. That's why the Trayvon Martin case puzzled whites, when we saw the emotion wrung over it. "We are at war!" a black Florida pastor declared. Well, yeah, a war being conducted by other young black men, not by white bigots or armed Hispanic vigilantes. Blacks make up 13 percent of the American population yet constitute 55 percent of the murder victims. They're killed 93 percent of the time by other blacks.
     To me, the Trayvon Martin case is so popular because it's a distraction from the hard truth, a chance to cast the problem not as something blacks must take the lead in fixing—to stop killing each other—but as something being done to them. The case is being clung to not because it represents something crucial, but because it's a chance to offload responsibility elsewhere.
     Last time I looked, the major problem facing African Americans was not white bigotry—not anymore—but the enormous zones of poverty, crime, drug use, despair and dysfunction that ring every city. Not totally; there's a struggling black middle class with its own concerns. But if we're talking about key black issues, we're talking about the inner city. Blacks didn't create the situation they're in; that's the undeniable product of several centuries of slavery plus 100 years of Jim Crow repression that ended last week, assuming it's actually ended. But that's that situation they have to come to grips with.
     What fixes it? Education, jobs, anti-drug programs, strengthening families, a complete overhaul of the criminal justice system, which wasn't designed as a Gulag to destroy the lives of young black men, but essentially functions that way.
     That's a tall order. It's easier to focus on Trayvon Martin than face the fact the average white family has six times the wealth of the average black family. Or that for every $1 earned by blacks, whites earn $2.
     Bigots tried to slur Trayvon Martin into some kind of thug, freely fictionalizing his image. Blacks erred in the other direction, trying to make him into a saint, an Emmett Till figure in an era when the kind of gross physical repression that Till suffered has all but vanished. Now racism is much more silent and subtle, much more worked into the entire system, which is rigged against a wide swath of black youth who aren't killed, but still never have a chance in life. It has nothing to do with racial profiling or Stand Your Ground laws or Trayvon Martin, but is something uglier and tougher to confront. I'm sorry to be the one who has to say it.

This machine...

     I can't remember a day when I didn't check the computer. There must have been one. Many such days, five or 10 years ago. But not recently. Not one I specifically remember. Not one where I woke up and told myself, "No, I think I'll pass on Facebook today." Never happens. Not at home. I have a big honking iMac in my home office, another one in the living room -- the living room! -- on its own little corner desk, a special piece of triangular computer furniture that I finished myself, hand-buffing it with super fine steel wool, as if preparing a shrine. I'm surprised I don't have a few sticks of incense burning next to it,  flower garlands draped about and maybe a small plate of fruit, as an offering to the godhead.
     And of course I check it at work. It's the first thing I do when I arrive at my office downtown—flop my fingers onto the keyboard as soon as my butt hits the chair, see what has changed in the hour I've been commuting. Some days I rarely seem to lift my fingers off the keys. And don't forget the smart phone — is that term still current? — the plain-old phone then, a mini-computer itself, and I can surf and text and post to my heart's content, which means continually. And the laptop....
     I could, of course, just take a day off and not do it. Set the phone aside. Power down the iMacs. Interact with people the old-fashioned way, face-to-face. I could do that. Easily. But I've never even considered trying, never mind done it. Why? I guess the honest answer is, I want to be online. It fills the place where something else used to be. "It's like having friends," to quote Luna Lovegood's chirpy, infinitely sad phrase.
     Though I still haven't decided: does the Internet really make you feel less alone? Or more? Does it fulfill you or only distract you? 
     That's a toughie.
     Maybe it really is an addiction. Shit. Another addiction. Just what I need. I try to resist thinking that way. Not everything you like is necessarily an addiction. Just the things you do all the time and want to stop, but don't stop, because the truth, which you try to ignore, is that you can't stop. Though I can. At least I think I can, I wouldn't know, I haven't tried.
     Hmmmm....that does ring familiar, doesn't it?
     No question, I can stop. Surely. At least for a day. Certainly I can. Now that I've had the idea, I am going to do it. Once. See what it's like. Some Saturday. Some day soon. Just wake up, walk straight into the garden and start weeding. Read a book, the kind with covers and pages. Get in the car, wander somewhere. Off to the Chicago Botanic Garden, to stroll around nature, which was here long before all these machines, and will be here long after. We are only on this earth for a short while. And we are spending our time playing Angry Birds -- well, I'm not. No, I'm too sophisticated for that. I'm spending my time playing Facebook Scrabble. One thousand three hundred and eighty-eight games, so far. And counting. Surely I can miss a day.  One day. One.

   

Carol Cook works for her citizenship

  

     They each stood as the name of their homelands were read aloud.
     Argentina. Austria. Bangladesh. Belize. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Brazil. Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China. Colombia. Croatia. Czech Republic . . . 53 nations in all.
     When they got to the United Kingdom, Carol Cook, a native of Forres, in the Highlands of Scotland, stood.
     In most regards, Cook was no different from the 144 other immigrants being sworn in as new American citizens last Monday in the third-floor auditorium of the federal building at 101 W. Congress Pkwy. Like many, she is younger, in her 30s. Like many, she came for an education and decided to stay.
     Though Cook was different in one important aspect: what she held in her hands. Many people, in their best suits, in dresses that looked hand-sewn, held something they had brought with them — bouquets of flowers, cameras. Some held babies, others the hands of children or other loved ones. Cook held a sheet of music and her 1810 Samuel Gilkes viola, studying the notes and repeatedly running the fingers of her left hand over the frets of the instrument to keep them limber.
     She is the principal violist at Lyric Opera of Chicago, where she has played for the past nine years. When immigration officials found that out, they asked if she would consider playing at her swearing-in ceremony; usually the music is a recording at the ceremonies, held about three times a week. She said she would love to. Having performed at the Lyric, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with the London Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, in gilded concert halls around the world, she happily agreed to play for free in a windowless room in a government office.
     Cook picked up the violin at 3, won her first competition at 8, but at 16 shifted to the viola, and came to this country to go to school, first at Oberlin Conservatory, and then the Julliard School of Music. She decided to stay in the United States for a simple reason.
     "I just loved it," she said. "I loved the sense of optimism, the work ethic."
     Becoming a citizen certainly took work on her part. Our broken immigration system works no better for top professional musicians than for anyone else. Cook estimates the process took "the last 15 years."
     Her performance at the ceremony involved work as well. While "The Star-Spangled Banner" is notoriously difficult to sing, it is not easy to play either.
     Nor was the anthem part of her repertoire. "I learned it specially for this," she said. Just finding an arrangement for viola took some doing - she mentioned her upcoming gig to Max Raimi, a violist at the CSO, which Cook performs with at Ravinia in the summer. Raimi had written an arrangement for the national anthem performed by three violas that the CSO viola section has played prior to White Sox and Bulls games. He adapted that for Cook, and cut no corners for her, but gave her a version punctuated with difficult musical flourishes.
     "Virtuosic," she said. "He said I would have to work hard for my citizenship."
     And she did. She was introduced, climbed the steps to the podium. Those gathered stood, and Cook took a long breath, her bow poised over the strings, then began to play: swaying slightly, a look of concentration that almost seemed like pain on her face.
     Violists are given a hard time—violinists get all the glamor, the fame, and have access to many more great works than violists do.
     "Brahms, Tchaikovsky—that's what we really lack," she said before performing, comparing the viola to the violin, praising its "rich, much more mellow, smoky sound," which in recent years has had better pieces written for it. "It's a changed world for violists now."
     For new immigrants, the world is both changed and still the same, the latest chapter in a very old story.
     "Throughout our history, the lasting contributions of immigrants have shaped our national identity, formed the ideal of the American dream and built upon the foundation of freedom and equality established by our founders," Michelle Wong, an immigration officer at the Department of Homeland Security, told the room. "Millions of men and women just like you have come to the United States of American seeking freedom, liberty and the opportunity for a better life."
     Wong talked about the responsibilities of citizenship, but she also mentioned something that current citizens sometimes have a hard time wrapping their minds around.
     "The bonds of citizenship are unrestricted," she said. "Every citizen is an equal member of the American family."
      Later, Cook said that when she played, she thought about all that brought her here."To be playing the national anthem—so much feeling behind it," she said. "I was thinking of my whole journey as a musician, from starting as a kid to where it's got me now, It's quite emotional, to get to play that."
     Or to get to listen to it.

"Chicago is totally jealous of us..."

I guess this is how Fox pundits and Washington beltway sorts spend their entire careers, sniping at each other, squeezing off potshots and volleys, hobbyhorsing away their lives. On Wednesday morning, I wrote a piece chiding the International Olympic Committee for picking riot-ravaged Rio de Janeiro over Chicago. It was supposed to be funny, and it seemed to be, to Chicagoans. Brazilians on the other hand, who take themselves very seriously, judging from my mail, at least when it comes to uninvited observations from abroad, responded with a howl, which turned into a column Thursday. On Friday, when it was time for the whole thing to fade, in my estimation, the mayor of Rio went on the radio and stirred the pot again, which caused my bosses to invite me to write yet another column about it all in Saturday's paper. This, I hope, marks the end of the episode.

     If you are a rugby fan, you’re probably familiar with the New Zealand All Blacks, a squad famous for its "Haka,” a taunting pre-game ritual they perform to intimidate opponents. It’s a Maori warrior dance, origins lost in antiquity, where they beat their chests and slap their thighs while shouting about their masculinity and fierceness.
     I thought of that, reading Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes’ remarks, spoken to Radio CBN RJ in Rio Friday, in reaction to my Wednesday column chiding the International Olympic Committee for picking strife-torn Rio over relatively placid Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games.
     “Chicago is totally jealous of us,” he said, in Portuguese, according to the genius of Google Translate. “It’s a horror, cold, full of racial conflict, ghettos, where blacks and whites do not mix.”
     A bit contradictory—full of racial conflict or lack of mixing? Pick one; it can't really be both. That sent me trotting back to my original column to remind myself what it was I said that was so terrible about Rio.
     "The protests rocking Brazil—hundreds of thousands of people, in 100 cities last month, the streets of Rio in flames this week—could ebb, and everything could somehow be fine in 2016."
     That's about it. And all true. While I didn't get into the intense politics of the protests—the mayor blamed troublemakers—they do bear potential significance for the 2016 Olympics. I didn't make that up.
     Nor, given the general Canadian-like cry of outrage wafting up from South America—from stark insults to Chicago, general condemnations of America, demands that we master the tangled nuances of Brazilian politics, and now Rio's mayor—can I say I'm very broken up about upsetting them, much as I don't like to gratuitously insult anyone. They seem kind of touchy, based on my email.
     This has happened before, with Toronto's mayor, Rob Ford, who has been accused of smoking crack cocaine and looks like Chris Farley at the end of his life. He got worked up because I suggested Chicago is a more exciting city than Toronto, which is like saying that steak tastes better than hamburger. Again, an accident. I wish I were smart enough to intentionally irk distant cities, and then revel in the illusion of significance their reaction brings. But I'm not. It just happens.
     The late, great Warren Zevon, in "Boom Boom Mancini," sings "The name of the game is be hit and hit back," and I suppose one could spend his career doing so. But to me, as soon as hordes of sincere, argumentative, unpleasant folk start raising their voices in sincere chorus, it's time for me to unlace my gloves and leave the ring.
     I ruthlessly mocked Mayor Richard M. Daley for nearly 20 years, from my very first column, writing in this newspaper that he had lost his mind, that he had gone insane. Never a word from him. That showed a certain confidence. After reading the Rio mayor's lengthy remarks, I went and checked the city's population: 6.3 million. More than twice that of Chicago. Geez, didn't anyone ever tell them that you punch up, you don't punch down? If you're a big city, act like it. Or to return to Warren Zevon: "If you can't take the punches, it don't mean a thing."

Other people, other places....

     To say the world has shrunk is a cliche. Better to say there are rows in the audience you don’t see, distant rows, far back, countless rooms of people you don't know who are nevertheless watching, or will be. That video you shot of your third grader playing chopsticks can circle the world forever, bringing smiles or sneers in China, or India, or Sweden.
     Or Brazil, to take a more recent, specific example. Consider Wednesday, when I entertained readers in Chicago with a thumb-to-nose-and-waggle-fingers column mocking the International Olympic Committee for selecting riot-torn Rio de Janeiro over Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. The paper ran it on the front page. I was pleased, heard many appreciative chuckles from our readership, and only vaguely wondered if anyone in Brazil would care. Nah, how could they?
     Wednesday came and went, laughs were had, fist-bumps exchanged and no harm done. That, I figured, is the end of that.
     Then came Thursday.
     “You could just stay shut,” wrote Felipe Anderson, which I had to think about a moment before I realized the “fuetbol” fan was saying, “shut up.” Actually one of the nicer messages, the opening salvo of a Twitterstorm of abuse. Dozens and dozens of messages, in both English and Portuguese. “Se estamos preparados ou não, não é problema seu,” wrote Renan Goes, of Londrina, Brazil. “If we are prepared or not, it’s not your problem.” Some needed no translation. “Coluna idiota” wrote Pedro H.

     There were several references to the Boston Marathon bombing. Numerous allusions to shooting, some cryptic (“Rotten gun children,” wrote someone calling himself Senor Sebastian). A variety of obscene suggestions, plus several sincere invitations, or demands, that I come to Rio to investigate the situation myself (an idea which I wholeheartedly embraced, and passed on to my boss who said, in essence, “Forget it.”) Even a mention of the 1968 Democratic Convention riots, which struck me as reaching into the hazy past.

     Some implied that we Americans are arrogant. “You are not the owners of the world,” wrote Johnny Machado. “Just don’t try writing about things you don’t know about, Mister Steinberg,” wrote Aline Harbs. “And stop being so American.”

    Some were quite intense. Dimitris Meimardis wrote five times. “It seems every clear to me that you have absolutely no clue about the protests here.” Yes, well, probably. It was more a lighthearted bit of fun for Chicagoans on the train than an attempt at serious international cultural analysis. It may be that Brazil doesn’t have the tradition of journalists rendering their own opinions, because a number of writers seemed aghast at that.

     While there was a good deal of insult delivering, many seemed quite Canadian in their sincerity, and I reminded myself I had vowed to stop taunting distant places after sparring with the hurt denizens of Toronto.

     Honestly, I forgot. The fire bell rang and I stirred on my straw, got to my feet and had bolted out the door before I knew what had happened.

    Eventually Thursday afternoon I had to go to a meeting over at the Aon Center. It was fine weather and I had meant to walk, but I had spent so long chewing over these tweets of Brazilian outrage, time was running out, so hopped in a cab. My eyes locked on the flag hanging from the rear view mirror.        

     Oh my. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

     “Is that the Brazilian flag?” I asked. The driver said it was.

     “I’ve just been absorbing abuse from Brazil…” I said. That remark flew by, so I asked how Chicago compares to Brazil.

     “It’s a lot colder here,” he said. “I bet it is,” I said. I asked him where in Brazil he is from, and he said Sao Paulo, so I asked how Chicago compares to Sao Paulo, and he said, “There are a lot fewer residents.”

     “Right,” I said, “Sao Paulo has, what, 10 million people.”

     “Twenty million,” he said.

      Wow, I thought. Twenty million people. That’s a big city. A lot bigger than Chicago. It’s easy to feel you are the greatest thing in the world when you don’t know any better. Suddenly I was reminded of the time I went to the top of the Willis Tower with a pair of Yanomami Indians visiting from the Brazilian rain forest, brought here by some missionary group. We gazed over the vast expanse of Chicago in silence, a 25-mile view on a clear day, and I asked the obvious question — what are you going to tell your fellow Yanomami about this when you get back to Brazil?

     They thought for a moment.

     “We call ourselves, ‘The People,’” one finally answered, through a translator. “And we call where we live, ‘The Place.’ But I will tell them there are other people, and other places.”

     That’s a good message for all of us to bear in mind.

 

New additions to the Great American Family

     No part of the ceremony suggested that new immigrants sworn in as American citizens should go pose by the flag. Yet many did, lining up, waiting their turn—and after all the years they've waited, what was a few minutes more? 
     Not all of the 145 sworn in Monday had their pictures taken. Some went straight to register to vote. But many did, dozens, proudly showing off their certificates of citizenship. They posed for photos by the flag in the third floor auditorium of the government building at 101 W. Congress, and downstairs in the lobby, next to the big photo of Barack Obama. Their friends and loved ones took the shots, but sometimes they called upon strangers. A family from Mongolia, whose 22-year-old wore a uniform of a U.S. Marshall cadet, pressed an iPhone into the hands of a Chicago Tribune photographer and he gamely snapped their picture.
      They had just heard Carol Cook, an immigrant from Scotland and the principal violist at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, play the Star Spangled Banner on her 200-year-old viola — I'll have more about her in the Sun-Times later this week. Then they stood, held their hands over their hearts for the anthem, then later raised their right hands and renounced "all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate or sovereignty."
     If any were conflicted about disowning their former homes, the lands of the birth, they didn't show it. They beamed. They held bouquets of flowers, or the hands of their children. They wore their best suits, or dresses that looked hand-sewn.
     The people who are conflicted about this are not the immigrants, but longtime Americans, many of them, who often forget that every last one of us, if we follow the thread of our ancestry back long enough, arrived here from somewhere, filled with hope, strangers in a strange land, trying to begin their lives anew. Not the Native Americans, of course, who were always here — though even they, if you dial back the millennia, are thought to have migrated over across the Bering Strait at some point in pre-history, though long enough ago to count as being here forever.
      You would think that, sharing this common bit of family history, there would be fewer Americans agitated about immigrants. You would think they would see the fate of nations that resist immigration, such as Japan, and the terrible demographic price they're paying, their sinking population, whole towns emptied out, and would celebrate immigration as the lifesaver it is for the United States. A nation built by immigrants, now saved by immigrants. But prejudice blinds, or rather, is clung to by the blind, the philosophy of the stupid, and they look around and see only the murky haze of their myopic fears, and not the reality in front of them. When you actually see what's here, on the third floor of 101 W. Congress, the joy and readiness, you want to cry,  a little, at the beauty of it.
    The United States of American became a great country because our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers came and made it great. It's a great country still because we came and helped it continue to be great. It will go on being a great country in the future because ... is this really such a hard sentence to finish? ... people coming now and in years to come will make it great. They will continue to come, and the prejudice they often find will be just one more obstacle to triumph over, and not the largest obstacle either.
      "Throughout our history, the lasting contributions of immigrants have shaped our national identity, formed the idea of the American dream and built upon the foundation of freedom and equality established by our founders," Michelle Wong, an immigration officer at the Department of Homeland Security, told the newest Americans. "The bonds of citizenship are unrestricted. Every citizen is an equal member in the American family."
    The people who most need to hear and understand that message, alas, were not in the room on Monday. 

And it's still here...

     Whenever I drive by the stretch of North Sheridan Road where the Granada Theatre used to be, I flash back on its Venetian splendor and, if the traffic is moving slowly, take a moment to note the echo of the round window — tribute? mockery? — cut into the charmless strip mall that replaced it.
     You can't shake your fist too much at the philistines who demolished it, not remembering the struggle to figure out what to do with the Granada. A building needs a use, or most buildings do. There are only so many empty shells we can keep in tribute to years gone by.  It's always a judgment call. Some people think Prentice hospital should have been kept forever — to me it was an eyesore, and thus expendable. As was the Granada, ultimately, a ruin torn down in 1990.
    Sometimes a building can survive and find a use. In the early 1980s, the Chicago Theatre was seen as a similar white elephant to the Granada or Prentice. Pretty, yes, but what to do with the thing? After a long battle, it was saved in 1985, to civic rejoicing, and soon was hosting concerts from Frank Sinatra to Tom Waits. If you haven't been there, you're really missing something. It's worth the price of admission just to walk through the lobby; the fact that somebody also puts on a show is an added bonus.
     To me, the marque of the Chicago Theatre, like the Bean, like the Picasso, is one of the images that define life in the city. Catching sight of it is like glimpsing the face of an old friend, made all the more precious by the knowledge of how close we came to losing it forever. Almost a miracle.

Plus!

A rare midweek column, thumbing my nose at the IOC.