Labor Day, 2013

     Work is hard. You can't find a profession so well paid and fun that it is without its difficult elements, whether jetting to Paris to pose for fashion photos, tasting beer at a brewery, or watching movies for a living. Or as the great James Thurber put it: "Even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pall a little as the days ran on."
      Work is also a joy. The flip side of the difficulty is that no task, however menial, repetitious and humble is without its pleasures—I don't think a person could stay at a job they completely hated. That is the realm of slaves and prisoners.  I've done my share of menial work, early on—loading boxes in a warehouse, baking biscuits in a restaurant, putting numbered tags on machinery at a large laboratory, and each had its particular joys. The worker-bee-in-the-hive satisfaction of moving through the warehouse bringing the right box to the right bin, the perfect ranks of raw biscuits, like fat beige soldiers, lined up on trays, slid into the oven and off to war. Reaching down for the drill on my belt to affix one more of the 11,000 tags I was charged with applying, like a gunfighter on the draw, or so I imagined.
     Perhaps I'm imagining too much—maybe work is an ordeal for many, a necessary grind, the price of living. Maybe lots of people despise working. Though I don't see that. I've talked to countless employees in factories around Chicago, and am always impressed by how glad they are to have their jobs, their sense of dignity, their frequent satisfaction and pride in belonging to something bigger than themselves, and in doing their jobs well.
     Labor Day is about more than work, of course, about more than jobs, which sag in Illinois, our unemployment rate well above the national average. It is about the organizations that working men and women had to build to drag themselves up away from the most basic and miserable existence. Unions are on hard times now, almost a dirty word, thanks in part to their own corruption, thanks in larger part to a Big Lie concocted and used against them, slurs that focus only on their shortcomings. The Reagan era calumny that owners all deserve whatever they can grab, no matter how they get it, while workers are lucky to be given whatever crumbs fall to them for their labors.
     People forget—and Labor Day is the perfect time to remind them, perhaps the most important government holiday of them all, because its reason for being truly does slip from mind—about all that organized labor has wrought over the years.
     An eight hour day. An end to child labor. Safe working conditions. Sick pay. Paid vacations. Maternity leave. All in their time controversial, all in their time a chance for business owners to harrumph and scoff and predict that treating their workers decently will drive them out of business. It didn't.
     It's the unions that risk going out of business. They continue on, albeit in weakened form, trying to protect workers from the whims of their employers. I've been a member of a union for 26 years, the Chicago Newspaper Guild unit of the Communications Workers of America. In that time, I've seen its power shrivel, the guild at the Sun-Times dealt a severe, perhaps mortal blow in 2009, when it gave up seniority, defunded its pension system, and took a 15 percent across the board pay-cut so the Sun-Times could be purchased. The sacrifice was made to keep the paper from going out of business, and it worked. The paper continued, while the union kept getting squeezed into a smaller and smaller box. Now we approach a system where the Arianna Huffingtons of the world make millions while shepherding a flock of free labor sheep. How long is that supposed to go on?
     We slide gradually back to the system of 100 years ago, where workers fend for themselves, grateful for whatever employers decide to give them and—surprise surprise—employers give them as little as possible. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has 3/4 of the buying value it did 45 years ago. In 1968 the minimum wage was $1.60, or $10.70 in 2013 dollars.
     Yes, realities have changed, the two great gears grinding American jobs are technology and internationalization. There are few industries that computers haven't revolutionized—read cost workers their jobs—from banking to law, manufacturing to music, and of course, my own industry, journalism. We don't need people to answer phones, pump gas, write stories.
     And competition from abroad grows stronger every year—the phone bank jobs that used to be down the street are now in Mumbai.
     You can't fight technology. Technology wins. If history teaches us anything, it is the Luddites attacking the looms are wrong and doomed. But workers can still use technology to their benefit, accept their losses, reassemble, and come out stronger, the piecework weavers becoming the United Garment Workers.
     Those trends can't be fought, they must be coped with. It helps if workers don't lay down, don't accept the notion that they don't deserve the fruits of their efforts. It helps to remember the joy of work, to try to adapt and to attempt new things, even if it means, oh, writing a free blog for a while, to see where it goes.  
     These economic trends run in cycles, the economy strays in one direction until people here can't stand it any more and agitate for change, then it slowly swings back in another direction. The American middle class lopes along, suffering indignity after indignity, while their bosses grow richer and more distant and politics becomes more petty and paralyzed.
     I have no idea what's ahead for labor in America–nobody does. But I do know there is a proud tradition of union organization, that it had a central role in providing us with the decent society we enjoy and are trying to hold onto, and that organization will be crucial if America is to remain a place where regular people can work and be rewarded. Working men and women are all too aware of how steadily the hard won victories of the past are being lost. We have to do what we can to remain strong, keep our spirits up, and remember both where we came from and where we want to go.

"Oh please Brer Congress, don't tie my hands in Syria..."

 
     "Credible," in my dictionary, is defined as "believable, worthy of belief or support." And for a while last week it seemed America would go to war against Syria, at least briefly, in order for President Barack Obama to maintain his credibility. We were going to battle because he had said we would.
    "To do nothing in the face of images of children killed by poison gas," David Sanger wrote in the New York Times, "would cripple his credibility in the last three years of his presidency."
     Can't have that. Though in Sanger's argument the deaths seem secondary to the robust presidency. And raises the question of exactly who we're trying to maintain our credibility for—it's the Iranians, right? Though they aren't either supporting or believing us as it is, and few seem to really imagine that an air strike or two will make them start. Maybe we're trying to uphold our believability in our own eyes, to convince ourselves that we really are still a trustworthy people who do what we say we're going to do. I would have thought the ship had sailed on that one. We say we're going to fix the budget. Every year.
    This situation came about because President Obama said, over a year ago, that if "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" were "moving around or being utilized" in the Syrian civil war, why, that would be "a red line for us" and he'd have to do something. Not exactly a binding contract. And we probably should be grateful he didn't hide behind a Clintonian professorial parsing of just what "a whole bunch" constitutes.
    A whole bunch of chemical weapons, more or less, rained down upon a rebel-held section of Damascus Aug. 21, killing some 1,400 people, 400 of them children, fired—we're absolutely, positively sure, almost—by the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Why that bothers us a lot while the 100,000 Syrians who have already been killed in the conflict by conventional means bothers us hardly at all—a bit of finger wagging, some empty talk, as if reading off a script, and we're done—is a question for historians, or psychiatrists, because on its surface, it's kind of crazy. Chemical weapons are horrible. But so are bullets and bombs and rockets. You're dead or maimed either way.
    But chemical weapons are a step too far, long-held tradition dictates, so something has to be done, by us, by default, because we're the world's policeman, apparently, despite all our bad experiences trying to fill that role. The president seemed poised to do something—in the standard limited, undefined, wham bam thank you ma'am death-from-above way he summed up as "no boots on the ground."  My theory is that he was eager to call in a few air strikes, not because doing so would be an important, meaningful action, but the opposite: any passing military strike a tiny, symbolic insignificant act, the sort of thing we've become so good at. The Americans, arriving on the scene late to blow something up. The kind of ass-covering half measure we like to take, telling ourselves something dynamic is being done, just as we said it would be. Our promises are being kept! 
      "I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets," Obama announced. Which sounded determined, until you remembered that he had also said he was determined to close Gitmo. Things change.
      If Obama expected a cheer to go up and the boys to kiss their sweethearts, then toss their hats into the air and rally behind him, he was mistaken. Instead, Obama was Daffy Duck in the immensity of the Hollywood Bowl, down on one knee, arms spread a la Al Jolson, staring blindly into the footlights, listening to the silence punctuated by crickets. At that moment, the British Parliament let out a low muted trumpet of "wa-wa-waaaaaa" stage right, taking a pass on the whole lark, despite Prime Minister David Cameron having been the head cheerleader for military action. "Sorry mates, maybe next time." Then the American people, emboldened and perhaps embarrassed by seeing democracy in action across the pond, decided to try it here, and started whining, like tired children dragged through one too many museum of horrors. "Aww, do we hafta?"
     I figured at this point, the Obama administration would quickly fire off a few Tomahawk missiles, accomplishing, by universal acclamation, nothing. Then, clutching this bold military action to his naked ineptitude like a strategically-placed gym towel—"See? I did what I said I'd do. I'm credible, totally credible. Bye!"—declared success, wave off questions and scoot dripping with sweat and shame back into the Oval Office, to not be seen again until it came time to pardon the Thanksgiving turkey.
     Instead the president did something unexpected. Like the dad who, threatening to turn the car around and go back home if the kids don't behave, shocks everybody by doing exactly that, Obama said, in essence, "Fine. Have it your way," and tossed the smoldering potato to Congress. "Here, you guys decide then." Which is the equivalent of deciding to do nothing, because Congress, unable to do almost anything of importance, unable to manage the nation's helium supply, certainly won't authorize the doing of anything at all in Syria, particularly if Republicans think Obama wants them to which, in his secret heart, if he's as smart as he's supposed to be, he most certainly doesn't. (If he was truly devious, he'd have planned this all along, as a Brer Rabbit ploy. "Oh please Brer Congress, authorize my  wrist -slap for Syria, and whatever you do, please, PLEASE don't tie my hands so I can't drop-kick our military into the middle of some hall-of-mirrors Middle Eastern bloodbath....")
     Besides, Congress won't return from summer break for more than a week, and by then the moment of American military madness will have, hopefully, passed.
     So five points taken from Obama for public dithering. And five points added for finding a creative escape—or, more likely, as befitting the luckiest man in American politics, blundering upon a solution. Either way, he squirmed out of the locked box he had sealed himself into and stood on Saturday, Houdini-like, hands raised above his head in triumph, fingers spread, the open manacles at his feet, while the audience gaped, too amazed to clap.
     Although, in my biased view, his Syrian performance still represents a kind of credibility. Because there is the credibility of doing what you say you're doing to do, no matter how dumb an idea it might have been from the start. And then there is the credibility, perhaps even a higher credibility, of instead being as nimble as you are supposed to be, and dodging the disaster you promised to swan dive into. It's such a neat escape, you can almost overlook that the slaughter in Syria continues, unabated.   


     

Time to stick a fork in Charlie Trotter.

     When Charlie Trotter's restaurant was named "the best restaurant in the world," or something close to that, we were still living in the city, not far away. I told my wife, "I'm not living within walking distance of  'the best restaurant in the world' and never going there." So we went. The place was so pretentious it was disorienting: it felt like the floor was a few degrees off kilter. All the other diners were languid Eurotrash, like the background characters in a James Bond movie. My central memory of the evening was counting 18 $20 bills onto the table and wondering what had possessed me. 
      That informs a bit of this column, which is slated to run in the paper Monday but got posted Friday. I've met Charlie on a few occasions, and to be honest always got along well with him. The me-me-me closing last year set my teeth on edge. I've had a number of high profile chef friends who chose another route. Not just Sarah, but Gale Gand, the mastermind of Tru, who steps away from the restaurant to explore other options, teaching classes, working on  a farm, without making a huge deal of it. You can be great without believing yourself the font of all greatness. 
    That isn't to say I'm not without sympathy. I have an ego myself, and it gets inflamed at times, and I feel neglected, and have to re-calibrate myself. I hope this episode leads Trotter to perhaps do the same, though it probably won't. If not, he told another reporter he was going to go the Yukon. I guess we were all supposed to blanch and shout, "No, Charlie, no!"  Me, I thought that might be a good idea, and wished him Godspeed to Alaska. We'll get on fine here without him. We already are. 

     There are two types of chefs. There is what I think of as the "Sarah Stegner Chef," so named after my first glance of Stegner, in a tall white toque, standing dignified in her kitchen at the Ritz-Carlton, arranging the artisanal cheeses she championed, quiet as beauty, still as a river, entirely focused on those gorgeous orbs of fromage, as if they were land mines she was defusing.
     And then there's the "Charlie Trotter Chef"—think of the chefs in Bugs Bunny cartoons, snarling, screaming, flailing, an inflamed, overcooked ego in chef's whites. Those chefs do well on the Food Network. They become stars. The reality, however.
     "He's gone off . . . it's weird," said an associate of Trotter, who knows him well.
     On Thursday, Trotter had some kind of ugly encounter with a group of high school students participating in After School Matters. Trotter allowed them to use his now shuttered namesake restaurant at 814 W. Armitage as a gallery to display their photographs, but became offended, it was reported, when the instructor supervising the students refused to order them to sweep floors and plunge toilets. Trotter also made inappropriate comments to a female student, suggesting she get a Charlie Trotter tattoo.
     So has Trotter gone around the bend?
     "He is . . . a . . . difficult person," said the associate, who didn't want to be named so as to not endanger their relationship. "He comes across like, 'Once you get to know me, I'm a good guy, a funny guy, but everybody hates me, I don't know why.' "
     I do, Charlie, so let me explain it to you.
     People hate egomaniacs. They see the self-regard flowing like wine and naturally want to stop it up. When you closed your restaurant—one year ago; time drags when you're doing nothing, huh?—with maximum drama, it was a curtain-clutching death scene worthy of "Tristan und Isolde," complete massive, three-part hagiography in the Tribune. The observation I bit back—why rain on the man's victory lap?—was: Closing your restaurant was self-immolation, tossing your whole staff out of work in a recession, and why? New chefs were rising, being lauded in the Chicago scene.
     Attention was straying from the only chef worthy of attention—Charlie Trotter. If other restaurants are going to be praised, then you were just going to close yours down, take your ball and go home. You said you were going to read philosophy, which made me laugh. I almost sent you the passages of Seneca where he tells us to welcome loss, because someday life will snatch back every single thing it gave to us, and so the smaller deprivations before then are reminders and practice. But I figured it would be lost on you.
     Charlie took his ball but wouldn't go home. There you were, stomping around the auction of your restaurant's effects, shutting the thing down a third of the way through. A man with any grace wouldn't even have been in the room. If you're going to close, then close.
     And Trotter's still there, rattling around your empty, shuttered restaurant, terrorizing schoolchildren. It's a scene from a tragedy.
     OK, Charlie, you and I are about the same age. And at this point, you're saying: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich, like I am?" To which I'll retort, "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" It's never too late.
     You might want to use this embarrassing public spectacle as a wake-up call; if not, there are more down the road. Trust me on that one. If you can control yourself, do it.
     A little humility might help. I asked your friend: Would you call Charlie a humble man?
     "No, not humble," the friend said. "He knows he's not a humble person. At the end of his run his perception was, 'Where did the respect go? I was the one who brought Chicago fine dining, gave it its reputation.' He kinda started a lot of it, and at the end he felt, 'What the hell, where did the love go?' "
     It goes where everything goes, Charlie. Into the Bonfire of Time. Everything ends.
     It's a shame you never read that philosophy, because it may have helped you now. "A generation of men is like a generation of leaves," Homer writes. We have spring, shine greenly for a summer. It feels like forever. Then autumn comes, Charlie, and we wither, even great chefs like you, and fall off the tree or, in your case, jump—there's a drawback of being rich, you forget that there's a purpose to work beyond making money. Work is joy, if you're lucky. You may have forgotten that.
     But never too late to remember. When Sarah Stegner tired of the Ritz, she quietly re-invented herself and opened the excellent Prairie Grass with husband Rohit Nambiar and partner George Bumbaris. Time to reinvent yourself, too, Charlie, if you can. Grab a spoon, stop talking and start cooking. The respect you seek is waiting for you there.
  
    

"Real good for free."

     I admire anybody who has the gumption to take their talent out on the street. Because there, you are unfiltered. You see the indifferent people hurrying past, grasp just how few pause, how easily the skill you've devoted your entire life to can be ignored. It's hard enough when you have a screen -- I write for a newspaper, and they pay me, and the people who read it either pay the newspaper or gaze upon its advertisements. But they're far away, generally. I'm shielded from their reactions, for the most part. I don't know if I'd have the balls to take a stack of photocopied columns and stand on the street corner and wave them at passersby trying to entice one to give me a buck. Actually, that's a lie; I do know -- I wouldn't, I couldn't do it. I suppose because no one would pause, never mind give money, or just a few would, out of confusion and pity. It would seem not bold on my part, but sad, even pathetic.
     Somehow, this mother and daughter, playing beautifully on Michigan Avenue, did not seem sad or pathetic. There was something artistic, pure, even noble about it. I'm not the first one to notice the brave dignity of the street performer. There's a beautiful, though obscure Joni Mitchell song, "Real Good for Free," (okay, I guess they're all obscure now) dedicated to a guy who played clarinet on the street in New York while the crowd hurries by. Mitchell sums it up with the line, "They knew he had never been on their TV, so they passed his music by," a succinct way of saying that most people need someone to tell them what is good. They have a hard time figuring it out themselves.
     In its raw public form creativity, no matter how well-wrought, is "art without a frame," as my pal Gene Weingarten put it in his brilliant article, "Fiddler in the Subway," where he coaxes star violinist Joshua Bell to play in the Washington Metro. Bell plays for 43 minutes on his $3.5 million Stradivarius, more than a thousand people walk by, "cups of coffee in their hands, cell phones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia, and the dingy, gray rush of modernity," as Weingarten describes it.
    Just seven out of the thousand stop to listen to Bell, and Weingarten's story becomes a meditation on time, and beauty, and busyness. (Speaking of not rushing by, you can read Weingarten's piece, plus other unforgettable classics, in his collection The Fiddler in the Subway, and if you don't own the book, you should buy it immediately, here.)
     So give the next musician you see in the street a dollar or two. You'll be taking part in something very old. Because before there were orchestras, before there were concert halls or recordings or contracts or scholarships, there were musicians and their instruments, or singers and their songs, on a street corner, and the people passing by, either pausing or, more likely, not.

      Playing in the street isn't always a matter of need. This cellist was at the Northbrook train station earlier in the summer. He's in my younger son's class at Glenbrook North High School. I only had a minute to listen, before the train came, and didn't get a chance to ask. I wish I had; I assume he was there on a lark, because he only came that morning and never returned. But still, kudos to him. If I taught teenagers, I would insist that they master something and spend an hour doing it in public for change. It would be a challenge—maybe too much of a challenge. Even Joshua Bell, who played in the great concert halls of the world for queens and presidents, admitted he was scared to stand at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro stop and play for commuters. Scary, but also liberating, freeing us from our fears, from that inhibition, that chain, the almost physical dread of embarrassment that holds so many people back from doing what they want to do. Four years ago I found myself in London, at Hyde Park's famous Speaker's Corner. Recognizing an opportunity that would never come again and that I would hate myself for missing, I stiff-armed my reluctance and hopped up on a milk crate to harangue the passing crowd. Only briefly, a little impromptu speech about America. But when I stepped down off the crate, grateful and grinning, I was thrilled, as if I had done something incredible, and I suppose, for me, I had.

Addendum:

Gene Weingarten sent me this amazing coda, how his Joshua Bell piece had been done decades before,  in Chicago coincidentally enough. It also contains a link to the Pulitzer-Prize winning story. You can read it by clicking here.

欢迎美国博客的好运气欢乐与和谐关系的中国读者 (Welcome Chinese Readers to the Joyous American Blog of Good Luck and Harmonious Relations)

      Blogger breaks down your audience into all sorts of statistics -- how many people are looking at your blog over the past day, week, month, what specifically they've looked at and even where they're from. It's sort of cool to email a pal in Paris about a post and then see the readership from France click upward by one.
     Last month, I noticed a sudden surge in readership in China—maybe 50 in a day. It seemed inexplicable, and I tweeted about it. "It means you're about to be hacked," said a tech-savvy co-worker. If so, it must have been a hack so subtle I haven't noticed it. Since then, I get a regular daily readership in China. Not many -- Wednesday it was 16—and I imagine those are homesick Chicagoans nursing their hangovers in Beijing and Shanghai, trolling the web, looking for something familiar.
      And while I fervently believe that one shouldn't skew one's writing toward any particular individuals or groups, nor flatter trying to appeal to a certain audience, I couldn't help assume there must be some Chinese citizens who somehow crack through their government's Great Wall of Cyber Security and read this, and wonder what they must think of it. 

     I also sense opportunity. Lots of people in China. One point three billion, last time I checked. It might be worth one day's post to throw a bone their way. Not by resorting to toadying, of course. No surge in readership is worth that! Maybe just a slight moderation of my actual opinions, in the hope they'll share this with their multitudinous friends. Maybe I could become one of those international anomalies, the obscure American well-known abroad, like that singer who for a couple of decades was the Elvis of France, though unknown here. It's worth a try (one of the advantages of writing a blog every single day is that just about anything is worth a try). So here goes:



问候中国人！感谢您抽出时间从繁忙的工作日程，抬起你的国家，出身卑微，成为21世纪的经济和政治强国，为了读此消息来自芝加哥市的放荡和著名暴力。尽管我们有非常不同的价值体系 - 你正确地强调和谐，尊重，艰苦的工作和自我牺牲精神，而我们美国人喜欢不和谐，粗鲁，懒惰和自私的路径，但当然，我们称其为自由，自由，舒适性和个性。
    虽然我从来没有去过中国，其实，我已经看到了，在我访问期间台湾的叛离的一省。试图为了讨好西方腐朽，妄图推迟其必然与中国母亲和解，台湾集团邀请我，以满足他们的叛逆帮汉奸。作为一个球迷的尼克松和肯尼迪的辩论，我要求看金门，现在被称为大金门岛2,000码中国大陆外海，所以能够通过望远镜在你可爱的土地渴望凝视。
      我的大儿子，但是，谁在学校学习普通话（他的小兄弟一样，美国学生通常学习中文，更好地服务于我们的最终霸主）访问了您的伟大民族，在今年夏天，和其庞大的故事回来难怪，以及高品质的商品，如$ 3腕表在各方面都好，西方耗资一千倍以上的原稿，虽然一些不太重要的手画上。实际上他们无法保持时间，而是转达了空的状态，我们渴望代替有一个和谐的道德哲学在西方。
     你都在忙，所以我不会占用更多的时间，除了感谢您阅读这篇博客，希望您与您的朋友分享，让他们更好地了解这个伟大的城市生活是什么样子。这个博客的名字，“每一个该死的一天，”可能是一个有点令人费解 - 这意味着，“面带微笑迎接每天早晨幸福的生产力，它是一个美国的成语。”我希望你能这样做，并欢迎您来到我的世界高品质的美国新闻业。

     Oh, okay. For our non-Chinese readers, a translation:

     Greetings Chinese persons! Thank you for taking time away from your busy work schedules of lifting your nation out of its humble origins to become the economic and political powerhouse of the 21st century in order to read this message from the debauched and famously violent city of Chicago. Even though we have very different value systems — you rightly emphasize harmony, respect, hard work and self-sacrifice, while we Americans prefer the path of discord, rudeness, sloth and selfishness, though of course we refer to it as freedom, liberty, comfort and individuality. 
    While I have never visited China, I actually have seen it, during my visit to the renegade province of Taiwan. Trying to curry favor with the decadent West in a futile attempt to postpone its inevitable reconciliation with Mother China, the Taiwanese clique invited me to meet with their rebellious gang of traitors. Being a fan of the Nixon-Kennedy debates, I asked to see Quemoy, now known as Kinman, an island 2,000 yards off the coast of mainland China, so was able to stare longingly through binoculars at your lovely land. 
      My oldest son, however, who studies Mandarin in school (as does his little brother; American students commonly learn Chinese, the better to serve our eventual overlords) has visited your great nation, over the summer, and came back with tales of its vast wonder, as well as high quality merchandise such as $3 wrist watches that were in every way as good as the Western originals costing a thousand times more, though some of the less important hands were painted on.  They could not actually keep time, but rather conveyed the empty status that we in the West crave in lieu of having a harmonious moral philosophy.
     You are busy, so I will not take up any more of your time, except to thank you for reading this blog, and hope that you share it with your friends so that they may better understand what life is like in this great city.  This blog's name, "Every goddamn day," might be a bit puzzling — it is an American idiom that means, "Greet each morning with a smile of happy productivity." I hope you will do so, and welcome you to my world of high quality American journalism.

Photos by Ross Steinberg

     

     

"Because life brings our misfortunes to the bees."

 
     When the various forms of human communications are discussed—Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and the like—you must go well down the list, past human speech, past newspapers, lower than billboards, to just above semaphore flags, in order to find, "the sides of buses."
     I can't remember ever learning anything from the side of a bus. But there was the 125 Water Tower Express --I think the "express" part of the name is a bit of wry CTA humor, because it was lumbering slowly along Wacker Drive, at about the same speed pedestrians were walking; truly, I noticed the bus well north of Lake, and it tagged alongside me, panting at my elbow like a faithful pup, all the way until Randolph. 
     "SAVE the BEES" a sign bannered on its side said, in bold blue letters against a honeycomb yellow background. "Say NO to NEONICS." 
    I like bees. Not so much as individuals, thanks to a few nasty encounters over the years (they sting). But as a class. I like bees generally. Part of this has to do with a favorite author of mine, Virgil, who elaborately praises bees in his small book on farming, Georgics, describing them as stout-hearted warriors busily making honey "in their waxen kingdoms" until it comes time to take to the air and defend the hive.
      The author of The Aeneid observes bees fighting like ancient heroes, "their large souls pulsing in very small breasts:"

     If they have flown forth to battle... from a distance, you may discern the mob's temper and the feelings stirred by war, for that martial call, from hoarse-resonating brass blares to those that dally, and a tone like the broken blurting of trumpets is heard; then, restless, they come together, their wings vibrate and flash, they sharpen their stings with their mouthparts and ready their strength; around the king and to his royal tent itself, they swarm densely, summoning the enemy with a great clamor; therefore, when they've gained a bright spring day and an open field, they burst from the gates to join battle, high in the air the sound buzzes...

     You have to love that.
     And "neonics"—that was new to me. One doesn't typically learn words off the sides of buses. But I did, and later discovered that neonics is short for "neonicotinoids," a class of pesticides currently being blamed, on the sides of buses and elsewhere, for the collapse of Americ's bee population (in case you're not paying attention to the world around you, almost a third of America's bees have disappeared over the past five years. This is bad not only for people who like honey, but for people who like to eat, as bees are responsible for pollinating many of our fruit, vegetable and nut crops. Other animals pollinate too--non-bee insects, birds, even bats—but bees do the heavy lifting).
      Neonics were introduced in the early 1990s to replace phosphate pesticides in the production of corn, cotton, soybeans and other major crops. They were considered less hard on nature than the phosphates. The bee population began to dwindle in 2004, though at first it was blamed on a certain kind of mite, and then, on genetically altered plants.  Where science is vague at explaining bad new developments, people tend to blame what they don't like already. 
     I can't tell if that is the case with neonics. The science is still controversial. On one hand, bees are doing fine in Australia and Canada and other countries that use neonics. On the other, bees in labs tend to react poorly to being doused with neonic pesticide. Then again, bee colonies collapsed periodically in the century before neonics were introduced, for reasons that are, as yet, mysterious.
     Looking over the evidence, it does seem that neonics are the bogeyman du jour, and just as hysteria against, oh, vaccines caused harm needlessly, so banning neonics would disrupt agriculture, hurting people—the one species environmentalists don't seem to care much about—while perhaps not helping our friend, the honeybee. It seems premature.
     Though to be honest, I'm less concerned with the politics of the situation than the fact that I first heard of it on the side of a bus, despite the fact that the New York Times has run a front page story on the issue. Easy to overlook a story on the crowded front page of the Times. Harder to miss a big honking yellow billboard lumbering alongside you at a walking pace, shadowing you down Wacker Drive, practically begging to be read. "I learned about the problem on the side of a bus." I don't why, but that has a nice ring to it.
    Virgil, by the way, noted 2,000 years ago that bees sometimes mysteriously die off. "Because life brings our misfortunes to the bees," he wrote, which sounds about right. "If their bodies languish from severe sickness, this you can know from the first by undoubted symptoms: their color changes at once with disease."
     He suggests that the bees' woes be addressed by burning aromatic gum and bringing the bees honey in hollow reeds, thus "cheering them." If that doesn't work, try raisin wine, or scattering starwort and lavender petals. If all else fails, slaughter an ox in the Egyptian fashion, and in time its  carcass will miraculously issue bees. 
     If banning neonics doesn't work, we can consider those measures next. 

     
     

Americans are good at punishment, bad at rehabilitation

      We either have to make all crimes capital crimes, and kill everybody convicted of an offense, or adjust ourselves to the idea that most criminals get out of jail again, and will have to get on with their lives in the outside world, or try to. You'd think that the Millikin professor in this column would be the poster boy for mercy, since he obviously has lived a productive life. You'd be surprised at the number of people who registered their ire after this ran in the Sun-Times Monday. I think they'd sincerely like to see those blanket executions, in the public square at noon, not only to rid the world of criminals, but for entertainment. 

     Like you, I had never heard of Millikin University in Decatur; heck, I’ve barely heard of Decatur. If you asked me to speculate what kind of place Decatur might be, I’d imagine it a smaller, less flashy version of Peoria, were such a thing possible. If it’s actually Golden-Age-Athens-in-Modern-Day-Illinois, my apologies. I didn’t know.

     After a Texas newspaper revealed that a longtime psychology professor at Millikin murdered his family in 1967, my reaction was, it had to be a shock for the school. But not knowing the professor, the school, nor the town, I shrugged and skimmed the story.

     Initially.

     Last week, however, I carefully read Becky Schlikerman’s piece about it, start to finish, because the headline, “School standing by prof who killed family in 1967,” conveyed something unexpected. I’m not sure if we live in a particularly timid time, or it’s just me growing older and even more cynical, but that seemed unusual. Organizations tend to take the path of least resistance, and do whatever necessary to make bad publicity go away. While this is less true in academia, where the illusions of intellectual freedom breed latitude, that indulgence doesn’t extend to self-confessed killers.

     Yet the school backed its employee.

     My gut reaction was “Good for them.” Part of the reason why people are so afraid to admit they have mental illness is that too many of us still view psychiatric disorders as some kind of scam. Forget that a court found James St. James not guilty by reason of insanity for killing his father, mother and older sister. We also easily dismiss what juries decide. Gullible dupes. We forget that lots of people get ill and some get better and are entitled to a second chance at life.

    Not everyone agrees, of course. Toward the end of the article, a comment by Macon County Sheriff Thomas Schneider stood out: “If you kill your family, you deserve to never walk free in our society.” I tracked down his full statement, which continues: “Although I believe in redemption I can’t find redemption or rehabilitation when it involves killing three innocent people.”

    Hard to argue that. But argue it I will.

To read the rest of the column, click here.